California Calling

by Natalie Singer

  Turn this up, I called to my mother, who obediently adjusted the dial.

  Asher did not like pop music.

  Change the station, he grumbled from the minivan’s third row as we barreled down the highway and I launched my off-pitch sing-along, grinding my ass in my seat to what I recognized even then as a feminist sex anthem.

  No, don’t change it, this is good! I shouted.

  I knew it was a tease even as I belted it, the coded lyrics giving way to the line about licking the hot guy like a lollipop should be licked.

  SHUT IT OFF, roared Asher, his insta-rage like the suddenly flicked-on siren of an ambulance. And before anyone in the car knew what hit us, he unclicked his seatbelt, torpedoed from the far back of the van through the middle seats all the way to the front console, and slammed his fist into the off button of the radio tuner.

  As we barreled down the highway, all was quiet on our western front.

  How do we know this is true?

  Geography is a never-ending dialogue between the real and the imagined.

  For approximately two hundred years, between the sixteenth century and the year 1747, when King Ferdinand VI of Spain issued a decree to the contrary, Europeans believed California was an island, cut off from the mainland by a liminal oceanic channel and depicted on hand-drawn maps as a kind of mystical floating member (“the large and goodly island of California” one 1625 map by Englishman Henry Briggs labeled it).

  According to a study of the myth by essayist Rebecca Solnit, who uncovers the following information with the help of G. Salim Mohammed, a digital and rare maps librarian at Stanford, the first mention of the island of California comes in 1510 from Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo’s Las Sergas de Esplandián. Maps, like many artistic creations, are referential, so this first mention, fully imagined by Montalvo, became de rigueur on maps that followed. Even when Father Eusebio Kino’s travels from 1698 to 1701 confirmed the firm attachment of California to the mainland and documented that attachment on a map entitled “A Passage by Land to California,” it took another half century for the island to find itself reattached in other North American atlases.

  Dreams have a way of inking themselves onto history the way a cartographer’s colors seep brightly into parchment.

  Do you solemnly swear you did not have improper thoughts about your step-brother Asher?

  In my bed in California I tried to learn how to masturbate. I wanted to return to the feeling of slipping over the waterfall, of the world spun into oblivion. But I could not get it right. At sixteen I did not know how to navigate myself, how to circle something in a way that does not return you to the same beginning. Quietly I groped at the threshold between one thing and something else, trying to map my territory, trying to fall off the edge of the world.

  What can you reveal about that time?

  We covered much ground that first month: a tortuously hot family hike up Mt. Tamalpais; the hellishly hotter Six Flags amusement park in the flat, fast-food-littered North Bay, where the blacktop of infinite parking lots smelled like burned rubber and threatened to reach up and choke us before we made it to the front ticket booth; the San Francisco Aquarium; the breezy Monterey boardwalk, where the clam chowder was so sweet and rich that I wanted to slide into a bowl of it and drink until I drowned.

  We hit malls, trekked trails, rode clanging trolleys, and as we went we shed things. The heavier clothes we’d brought from the northern climate of our home country were folded and stuffed into the pink house’s many closets (but not donated or thrown away, because the threads that tied us to whence we came were not something any of us were ready to cut just yet—on this we all silently agreed).

  As we shed the heavier things, slowly, we bought new, lightweight items. Hair was cut and highlighted. My mother and I, following the lead of the smiling, sunny women and teenage girls we saw everywhere, traded in our plain fingernails for the long, glossy acrylics tipped with glowing white French manicures that are part of the California female dress code.

  We collected small souvenirs on our outings, tokens to remind us where we’d been. At each stop we browsed the trinket stores for seashells that may have come up out of the surf or from a Chinese factory that pressed them into believably smooth, pink, and speckled orbs; shot glasses; postcards; houndstooth candy in small drawstring bags; gold panning sets, Mystery Spot magnets; crystal-filled geodes you could crack open with a sharp blow, like the heart.

  In one of these interchangeable stores I picked out a California license plate key chain imprinted with my name, conveniently seven letters long, across the palm-tree-bordered plate. Though I’d turned sixteen back in the spring, I wasn’t driving yet. The license plate key chain reminded me that I would be soon and that whatever car I would end up driving would actually have the word California scrawled on its plate. I hung the key chain on the bulletin board in my bedroom, crowded already with the ephemera of my existence thus far—concert tickets, invites to the parties of my Canadian friends, love letters from Jason—tangible evidence that I was collecting a life.

  While we toured, Josef was imprinting the social and geographical structures of California onto his memory, analyzing maps and downloading the facts and history of our new surroundings like an undercover special-forces agent who must store all his information in his mind.

  There are missions every eighty miles, universities every forty, he lectured. Just look at these freeway on-ramps! The sound walls are capable of blocking out . . .

  My mother, meanwhile, operated on cruise control, admiring the shops and views. Like a sound wall, she blocked out Josef and the family disharmony.

  On one of our last tourist trips, just before Labor Day, we wandered the quaint streets of Petaluma, the poppy-colored Golden Gate Bridge arching into the mist behind us. There is a picture of us, taken by a well-meaning fellow tourist. We are sitting in a row on a brick wall: Josef’s long, ropy arm is thrown over Asher’s sagging shoulder; my mother sits almost a full body-width away from Josef, squeezed up against my smiling little brother Zachary, his golden hair haloed like an angel in the never-ending sun. The two middle boys ignore the camera and punch each other off the edge of the wall. I am at the end of the line, one leg crossed over the other knee, hair in a ponytail and new sunglasses shielding my eyes, looking down, examining my new pedicure.

  Later I will try to recall the names of all the places I went in California, the spaces I passed through and passed through me, their location, their feel, like a gouge in the granite of some northern mountain. But I remember few details, so much feeling and so few facts. Gouge, the word, is so close to gauge, as in measure, as in witness, as in all the minutes and hours and days spent silently gauging my own level of comfort, or discomfort. My belonging. Gauging the likelihood of my voice catching in my throat.

  What is the relationship between confession and extinction?

  This is the second instance of interrogation, the second memory.

  Before we could settle into the new house and our new schools we had to make a family pilgrimage to San Francisco to the United States Naturalization and Immigration Office for our interview. We had arrived in the USA on special lottery visas, which would, if we were well-behaved and productive immigrants, eventually lead to green cards and permission to stay forever.

  But first we had to prove that we were who we claimed to be. In our family this could be harder than it sounded.

  As our new seven-seater minivan glided west over the East Bay freeways, passing other clean-shaven suburbs, Josef counseled us: They are going to want to know that we are a real family, that we are not just together to get green cards, okay? So they might ask you questions about our habits. Try to answer well.

  We all nodded. Maybe, I thought to myself, the immigration agents would ask me about the wedding, about the night before, how our families joined. About what came before that.

  This filled me with dread.

  When we arrived across the swooping steel of the Bay Bridge, the immig
ration office, inside the belly of a San Francisco tower, teemed with people from every corner of the world. We crowded into rows of plastic seats, thighs and shoulders pressing, babies squealing and languages flying, inhaling each other’s lunch meat, hair products, breast milk.

  Finally, we were called to be separately interviewed. I went into a room with a broad-shouldered female agent who closed the door and motioned for me to sit in a chair across a small desk from the chair she sat in.

  Why did you come to California? she asked.

  State your purpose. Confess your longing or be expelled.

  I thought about Jason on top of me, moving in a slowly circular motion. I thought about Dara C. in my Canadian high school, with the perfect red hair and the popular friends and the cold blue eyes that stared right through me, evidence of my invisibility. I thought about my mother and father and me, on the Florida beach, digging and lounging, a lost world before everything else.

  What does your step-father do for work?

  On the table was a manila folder, many of the details of my sixteen years of life no doubt inside. What did they know about my mother and father? About me, us? Suddenly this interview seemed to be a minefield.

  I sensed that my future hinged on these slow-motion minutes inside a windowless room with a uniformed American immigration officer. I had entered on a plane a couple of months ago, but this was my plea for passage.

  I could throw this whole interview on purpose right now by telling the truth, I thought, and maybe—likely—we’d all be riding another jet back home to Canada before my pale skin even took on a tan. My mother didn’t marry Josef for a green card, but we certainly were not a family with the promise of succeeding.

  Instead, I tried my best to be lovingly convincing.

  What is your step-father’s favorite food? The officer asked, leaning in, her hands clasped on the metal table.

  Tabbouleh, I answered, thinking of the lemony grit of the Israeli cilantro-bulgur salad.

  What do you do for fun as a family?

  Watch movies. Go shopping. Go to movies. We, um, we go on outings.

  I smiled like a good girl who adored her family. It was true, we occasionally went to the grocery store all together, if only to make sure everyone got food they were willing to eat, because none of us liked the same things.

  The questions remain strangely random: How is your parents’ bedroom decorated? What do they like to do together? What music does your step-brother like best?

  When did your mother and step-father get married?

  Last winter. I made a gesture with my hands toward my heart, indicating how precious the wedding memories were to me.

  What was the wedding like?

  It was pretty small, just in the synagogue. We dressed up. Our grandparents were there, they were so overjoyed, I raved, the answers rough on my tongue. We ate tabbouleh.

  I must have passed, I understood, because soon I was delivered back to my family, where we signed papers with our lawyer, who described to us the laws we must obey and warned us to never, ever get involved with drugs, the one thing America might not tolerate from people like us.

  We emerged with our matching manila folders from the concrete and steel of the high-rise onto honking, color-smeared Market Street in downtown San Francisco. The thick palms waved at us and the sun was a big, warmth-giving ball moving toward the flat west of the Sunset District and the Pacific Ocean beyond.

  It felt like we survived an elimination round in an epic challenge, a near-death experience in a blockbuster action movie. Like we won something. Warriors, we had proved that we were not scammers, that we knew and loved each other well and were not the product of a fraudulently crafted green-card marriage.

  Funny, though, I thought to myself as I inhaled the salty sea air as far into my lungs as it would come, that we barely knew each other. Compared to the lure and potential of a new American life, each side of our family seemed expendable to the other.

  I was starting to suspect, squinting into the giant orange sun, that we were all just degrees of throwaway.

  What proof do you have?

  The above application for change of nonimmigrant status is approved. The new status, and length of authorized temporary stay in this status, for the named applicant(s) is indicated above.

  The nonimmigrant status of the applicant(s) is based on the separate nonimmigrant status held by a principal alien based on authorized employment in the United States.

  Make a copy of this notice for each applicant. She must keep the copy with her Form I-94, Nonimmigrant Arrival-Departure Document and must present it when requested by INS. However, the copy does not need to be turned into INS when she leaves the U. S.

  However, each applicant must turn in her Form I-94 when leaving the U. S.

  What is a suburban American high school?

  It is white and spiraling outward from itself like a nautilus, appearing to unfurl but in fact always tightly knotted, tethered to what it knows.

  It is white.

  It is the laboratory of American assimilation.

  It is bouncy cheerleaders and rock-hard jocks. It is everyone else moving out of their way.

  It is an inborn American spirit nurtured since babyhood. It is something unknowable called a pep rally. It is terror in the halls. It is hiding in the library. It is bulimia in the girls’ bathrooms, which makes you vow, Never.

  It is walking fast, staring straight ahead to look very busy as though you cannot be interrupted at any cost.

  It is blond to your brunette, ripe for picking to your still-clinging-scared-to-the-vine.

  It is a parking lot of shiny big trucks jacked into the air on wheels as large as the egos and wished-for dicks of the boys who drive them.

  It is alien, but much less so than you.

  Did you have any friends?

  As the weeks progressed I kept to myself and made no real Californian friends. Every night, I cradled my phone receiver to my ear while 3,000 miles away my best friend in Montreal, Suzanne, did the same.

  No! Are they fucking for real? she asked about the lustrous cheerleaders I described and the kids who came to school from out in Danville and beyond, the far eastern, still semi-rural reaches of the Bay Area, with cowboy hats and horseshit-caked leather boots. And then she’d tell me about what all my old friends were doing and update me on life in her house, where she lived miserably with her docile mother and drunk grandfather. She kept a running tally of the next time we would see each other—106 days, 94 days, 68 days. On days that had been hard for either one of us we lay in our beds and drifted off to sleep with our phones, the sound of the other’s breathing over the line.

  What else did you learn in the American school?

  The Donner Party is the wagon train of eighty-seven American pioneers who, inspired by the philosophy of Manifest Destiny, found themselves trapped by snow late in the fall of 1846 while trying to cross the Sierra Nevadas on their journey to California. Part of the problem was the party tried to save time by taking a new route, a shortcut called Hastings Cutoff, which they were led to believe would be an easy crossing but in fact delayed them dangerously. Thirty-nine members of the party died from starvation, exposure, disease and trauma. Famously, some of the survivors resorted to cannibalism, turning a relatively unimportant pioneer party into one of the most spectacular tragedies in California history and the story of western migration.

  Western migration. Those words rolled off my newly Californian tongue with a sense of sanction. A historical endorsement that placed me into a diorama of comings-and-goings. I was with pioneers. I was with buffalo. I was with computer-minded Indian families in saris, and geese coming south before the snows. Swept along in a great wave, I could fade into the background until I found footing. Despite the gruesome details, the Donner story comforted me. There were others before me, a caravan of them, who left their pasts and overcame their presents in a quest for the thing called home. Reinvention was possible. You just had to be willing
to consume anything.

  List the things in the American mall

  Hot Topic, where you can buy knee-high black lace-up boots, black lipstick, Wicked Witch of the West striped tights, and dresses that look like Morticia Addams nighties. You dabble only, effecting a fumbling mix of suburban prep with a dash of the gothic.

  The Gap. They did not have this store, along with so many other American touchstones, in the Canada you came from. Inside, the rows of baggy jeans and brand-emblazoned hoodies make you swoon. You find a mustard-colored, knee-length cable knit sweater and are only slightly surprised to realize you suddenly believe that owning it would change your life.

  The food court. This is not the shopworn food court of the Cavendish Mall, that dismal neighborhood mall of your youth, where Yoda-like bubbies ambled about collecting gefilte fish and halvah in plastic bags and the popular girls from the private Jewish day school up the road from your disintegrating public high school gathered around chiseled-jaw boys in letter jackets and nibbled hand-cut steak fries out of paper cups. No. This is every global food group under the sun, co-opted into simple softness and Americanized meal deals, available beneath soaring mall skylights. The only difficulty is making the choice.

  American mall smell. You smelled it a few times on trips, and when you lived in the South when you were small. But now you can sniff any time you like, and you do: You inhale that scent as deeply as you can, Eau de Possibility. Odor of freshly uncrated product. Of unlimited new identities. You want to ask the woman at the Macy’s perfume counter (but you don’t), Do you have this, maybe in a cologne? This smell of American Mall?

  Victoria’s Secret. Her secret, it turns out, is that she knows how to transform average American breasts into glitter-dusted pillows of silken-cupped femininity, and that this transformation is compulsory. You quickly obtain a selection of underthings in breathy colors, studded with tiny faux crystals so your body, when the time (surely, soon) comes, can be pleasing to your viewing public.