California Calling

by Natalie Singer

The year before you move to California you read The Scarlet Letter in English class. The book is a hot potato in your backpack, a shiny red apple on your night table. You begin to imagine there is a mini letter A (stitched in red fabric but also aflame) sewn onto you: the Daughter A, burning all the time, reappearing on every shirt no matter how often you change your outfit in search for a more flattering one.

  Who is Jason?

  We met the summer before I left for California. We were both sixteen, counselors-in-training at an overnight camp in the Laurentians. I first saw him when I came out of the shower house one morning, on the dirt trail to my bunk. My violet bra straps peeked out from my towel. Drumsticks poked out the back of his worn jeans pocket. For the first time a question etched itself onto my brain.

  Saturday night camp dance. A startled pulling toward each other, like fireflies. Bottomless ideas / smoky campfire / legion of stars / lips worn raw with not-going-all-the-way-but-there’s-so-much-else. Our tongues salted tributaries meeting, branching, meeting. And soon: the new sensation of speeding toward an objective I was not even aware existed only to arrive there as if at a cliff, precipitously, and achieve an absolute loss of control. Slip over the waterfall, a first spilling into myself that reclassified everything.

  What is waiting for you?

  1993

  Right away I feel it as I step outside of the airport and inhale. Something is different here, something I can barely define but that I already know to the very core of my teenage body must be the essence of “Californian.” The landscape is generous compared to back east: The streets are wide, this dry valley we seem to have landed in is wide, the trees are not so hefty or sentinel as to crowd us in or block anything out. Palm fronds wave languidly from two stories up and make a little ffffwwppp sound in the breeze. The air smells like sea salt and nectar and oranges, even here beside the inland freeway that rims the airport. There is nothing staid or weighty or static about this place, I conclude after only my first five minutes. It is giving, not taking. I close my eyes, and I feel it—her, the state—touch my skin with the cool palm of an open hand. I part my lips. I’ve been waiting for you, California whispers.

  Hold it, not so fast—

  “Crossing a border is not a simple thing. Getting anywhere . . . now requires a constant producing of proof of identity. Who are you? You can’t cross till we’re sure,” Ali Smith writes.

  “Assimilation is a process of interpenetration and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons or groups, and, by sharing their experiences and history, are incorporated with them in a common cultural life,” write sociologists Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess.

  A cultural commons. Fusion.

  Interpenetration.

  What about impenetration?

  Yes, yes. Surely the effort to assimilate must be necessarily marked by failures. As all impossible things are.

  Unlikely things happening.

  Unbearable things borne.

  A place or a state of being can be impenetrable. When do I really cross over? It could happen any time: a drive alone through artichoke fields, spiky bulbs winking in the night; sex in the bed of an old Mazda pickup; the decline of a boy’s letters in a mailbox; the question mark of a mountain; amidst fathers who come and go, who dissipate like fog; at the soft, charred bite of my first burrito; at the yielding.

  Where will I belong? To whom?

  This is what I want to know.

  PART THREE

  Interaction

  Interaction

  This is the main body of the interrogation, when the interrogator interacts with the respondent. This generally appears as a series of questions and responses.

  All responses should be recorded for later analysis of body language.

  This interaction may take place over a number of days and sessions, which may be limited or open ended in duration.

  Rules1 of the game

  The rules cover both the interrogator (the proponent) and the person being interrogated (the respondent).

  1.The respondent needs to take care not to inadvertently say something that might give out the information she wants to conceal or allow the proponent to infer it.

  2.The proponent may coerce the respondent to reveal information through threats or sanctions, but only by the means allowed.

  3.The proponent needs to pose questions to the respondent, and these questions can, and often should be, leading, loaded, and deceptive.

  4.The respondent should answer in formulations that are vague, ambiguous, misleading, or confusing, if that will help serve her ends.

  5.The proponent should probe critically into the respondent’s prior replies and try to use them to extract information.

  6.The respondent should take care to try to be consistent in her replies and in the commitments that can be inferred from them. Or she can wander.

  7.If the proponent finds inconsistencies in the respondent’s commitments, or implausible statements, or statements that are inconsistent with information from other sources, she should ask questions that critically examine them.

  8.If the proponent extracts the information she wants from the respondent, then she has achieved her goal and the exercise concludes in her favor.

  9.If the proponent terminates the interrogation without getting the information she wants, the exercise concludes in the respondent’s favor. Unless the respondent had wanted to confess . . .

  10.The two parties can use any arguments, even ones considered irrelevant or fallacious from the viewpoint of a critical discussion or outside audience, to achieve their ends.

  1This is a normative set of rules indicating what should happen, which is not necessarily what does happen in every case.

  Where are you going?

  After we landed in California, we made our way to our new house in a Bay Area suburb, half an hour from San Francisco. It came complete with top-of-the-line appliances, master soaking tub with skylight, bonus game room, palm-lined patio, and anti-allergen dusty rose pile rug. The house had a saccharine serviceableness in the form of Spanish / ranch / Mediterranean (an architecturally pasted-together mash, just like us).

  I hoped it could absorb us the way we want to be absorbed.

  I watched the movers carry in our things and set up my new room, the only bedroom downstairs and away from the others. So lucky, my mother whispered to me, glancing enviously at this separate space, far from the boys and her husband. I thought she was already out of love with Josef, or out of the idea of being in love. I didn’t think he loved her either. But, I thought, probably lots of people in the world marry for convenience, salvage love for security’s sake.

  I gave her a hug. The walk-in closet and soaker tub would have to satisfy her.

  You obviously knew where this was heading

  Well.

  The house itself probably gave us a clue.

  Nothing that suburban, that pink and tiled and neatly subdivided, inside and out, could possibly contain anything real.

  You know what happens when you want too much, don’t you?

  Frank Norris wrote the novel McTeague (1899), set in the San Francisco’s Polk Gulch. It is considered an outstanding early example of American Naturalism, which used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. McTeague is the tale of a dentist from a poor miner’s family who meets and marries Trina, the cousin of his best friend, Marcus. The couple wants the opportunity to build a certain type of life they aspire to: they have a vision. But from the start they are missing an essential ingredient, some alchemy needed for transmuting the baser metals of strategic companionship and social reaching into gold. Also, they just don’t communicate very well. When the desire for opportunity and the struggle to survive life in the city overwhelms the couple and jealousy engulfs Marcus, they lose their moral way. Fate takes its course. The story might end in handcuffs in the most desperately un-over
comeable predicament you’ve ever read. What does this tell us?

  There is no manner by which a person can control the destiny of their desires, whether or not they voice them.

  Is it enough to just live?

  No. You have to have your living go on record.

  For example: The summer I was five my parents sent me to a day camp on the grounds of my school, adjacent to a large park with an elephant slide, a swing set, and a deep field of dry, honeydew-colored grass. My counselors were teenage girls with teeny shorts and their eyes on the boy counselors. They ignored us. They smacked their gum. On days when it poured a summer rain they crowded us into the chalet and made us watch Rocky on VHS, visions of dripping boxer blood mixing with rivulets of mud on the filthy chalet floor. One day I roamed the field farther and farther until I got lost, stumbling finally through the butter-scented heat into the shade of a weeping willow tree, where I put my head between my scabby knees and waited behind the braided green curtain to be found.

  Another time we fingerpainted large posters outside. My best friend, Randi, and I, our little palms inked indigo, were sent into the cool, deserted school building to wash our hands. On the way in, I spotted the round concrete pillars in the school’s entryway. Smooth and cylindrical. A deserted school. Two unsupervised five-year-olds. Of course I pressed my pudgy hand onto that pillar, spreading the purple paint, defacing, demarcating. The painted print of my hand sponged where it shouldn’t be was my own oration, a claiming.

  I was questioned by the counselors, given the opportunity to speak. Did you put paint prints on the school? It’s fine, just tell us the truth.

  At the moment of the asking I had to make a choice. To give a person who questions you the answer they want to hear is to cede your power, to hand over dominion of your own experience. Even five-year-olds know this. I silently shook my head no.

  What did your friends and family say to you, a girl of sixteen, when you moved away?

  Once in a lifetime opportunity!

  Make the best of it.

  So many doors will open.

  Aren’t you afraid of the gangs?

  You must be excited.

  Ah, to be young again.

  Whole life ahead of you.

  Hit the immigration jackpot, eh?

  We all have to make choices now don’t we?

  Headed to the Promised Land.

  U. S. of A.!

  Going stateside?

  State your side

  Why do I have to take sides?

  What exactly were you (and your mother) running from?

  “Seventy-three percent of those who identified [California] in this way used adventure and opportunity as code words for ‘escape from community.’ In the towns and rural neighborhoods . . . in which they lived, community was created through cooperation and judgment. In essence, both were used to measure who was a part of the group and who was not,” writes California historian Denise S. Spooner. “Some migrants found this aspects of community repressive.”

  Did you want to go, or not?

  In the months leading up to our move, while my mother and step-father consulted real estate agents, lawyers, immigration agencies, and school districts, I prepared for California from the bathroom. My method of indoctrination was simple. After dinner, when the various factions of our step-family would retreat to their bunkers, I locked myself in the downstairs bathroom and spread out my cache: fashion magazines; brochures for American universities with glossy pictures of grinning, soft-haired freshman lounging on fresh green quads; a real-estate guide picturing Spanish-tiled homes with blazing pink bougainvillea and the sparkling, kidney-shaped swimming pools of perpetual summer. And, of course, my journal, where I listed all the things that could be great about California and all the accouterments (new clothes, a carefully engineered popularity increase achieved by starting fresh in a place where no one knew me) that would help me assimilate quickly.

  To assimilate in California would mean to live. To not assimilate, I knew before I even left the invisible walls of my home town, would be to fail to live.

  Would that mean to die?

  It might have. Some things I don’t remember.

  It sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it too

  The author long having had an anxious desire to visit those wild regions upon the great Pacific, which had now become the topic of conversation in every circle, and in reference to which speculations both rational and irrational were everywhere in vogue, now determined to accomplish her desired object.

  So your testimony is one of willingness?

  There are always things left behind, and new tactics we need to accommodate them (tactics may be readied). Left behind: people; badges of shame; yellow tickets; friends; fathers, minefields of fathers.

  Certainties are left behind.

  And perfect boys in ratty jeans who read Dostoyevsky and climb on top of you and make you come.

  Are we detecting a backdrop of sadness?

  Our new step-father, Josef, was a brilliant engineer. If we were to believe his stories, which we did, he was also a former elite Israeli soldier in the Six-Day War. He was stiff, analytical, awkward with emotion. Corny and good-natured until you got on his bad side.

  Most importantly, Josef’s first wife and youngest son, their third child, were run over by a taxi as they crossed a street while on vacation in New York City a few years before he met my mother. Horrified, just out of the frame of the picture of ultimate devastation, Josef, Asher, and Ric had watched the crash from the sidewalk. This is something you don’t ever travel back from.

  Leverage emotional relationships

  They met on a blind date when my mother was thirty-seven. I was gone at sleepaway camp, so Suzanne, my best friend, babysat my little brothers during the date. As soon as I got back from camp a couple weeks later, before my duffel bag was even emptied of its stinky socks and long underwear, Suzanne cornered me.

  Holy fuck no! she said. Her dark eyes narrowed, her straight black bangs gleaming like a fourteen-year-old version of Uma Thurman from Pulp Fiction. He showed up at the door with a fruitcake! First date and he brings your mother a fucking fruitcake! It can’t happen. Sorry. Like. No.

  Just over a year later, the night before their wedding, they had a huge fight. Maybe he felt the threat of my mother’s outwardly projected sexiness, her less-than-100-percent affection for him. Maybe she knew that trading financial uncertainty, single parenting, and tater tot dinners for what he brought to the table would silence a part of her soul. Ghosts roamed among us. Even before we became a family we all wondered whether there would be enough elastic to actually hold us together. For how long could it stretch.

  That night they screamed. It was an interrogation, him of her. Do you still love him? You had better never say that sonofabitch’s name again in this house.

  My mother’s loyalty (her body?) was on trial.

  Doors slammed. I “ran away” up the street in the dark for a few hours—to protest, I guess. Later, my mother sat with me on my bed, her brown eyes red, while the rest of the household, exhausted, folded back into quiet. It’s going to be fine, do you hear me? I’m going to make this work. I promise, she said, reaching to embrace me. We’ll be okay. Don’t you believe in me?

  Yes. I believed her. More than anyone. There was a reason for all of this, there had to be. Something that, in the end, would make it all worthwhile. We were still in Montreal then; California was not yet on my step-father’s radar. But under my sheets that night before their wedding, I confessed to myself my yearning for a drastic change in my own topography, a pull outward, like ocean waves.

  Can we agree on a final version here?

  I wanted to be reconstituted.

  What did your family do for fun?

  We went on outings to better soak in our surroundings, like to the mineral-scented hot pools of a Marin County spa, and also to better immerse ourselves in one another.

  There is a lot to see, Josef told us, wiel
ding the new minivan into mint-scented redwood forests and guiding the awed clump of us beneath the skylight enclosures of soaring, movie-set malls.

  We had been in the States for a month. My mother and step-father had been married just over a year. It was still summer but edging close to fall, which I learned made no difference in the suburbs of East Bay. While San Francisco was often shrouded in cool, misty fog, rising before us like a mythological kingdom as we emerged from the cabled shadows of the Bay Bridge, it was still hot and dry out here, just fifteen miles east of the Pacific. The mounds and knolls rippled away from the city’s earthquaked hills like gentle aftershocks, yellow and bare. The sky was a naked blue, broken only by the loop of a hawk hunting over the white and peach subdivisions.

  The furnace of late August was making us grouchy; we were used to intense bouts of East Coast sweat rewarded by blasts of air conditioning, but not this. Each time we piled into the van we bickered over how high to turn up the air, how soon it felt cool enough to breathe again. That bickering led to other bickering: which Californian food to eat for lunch (In-N-Out burgers, the ubiquitous soup-and-salad bars where you could get almost anything you wanted together on one plate, the new-tous world of burritos); when to stop for a bathroom break; which direction to the national historic monument; who lost the colorful state map complete with glossy pictorials of California’s state animal (grizzly bear), state flower (golden poppy), and state bird (valley quail).

  One morning while the five of us kids and our parents drove north toward Gold-Rush-era Sacramento, a new song I liked, Salt-N-Pepa’s “Shoop,” came on the radio.