California Calling

by Natalie Singer

  At the mall frequently, my mother and I were disciples. The East Bay housewives and their teenage daughters were our unwitting deities.

  Do we need this? my mother would ask casually but a little loudly, holding aloft a breezy Donna Karan wrap dress on a Wednesday morning when I should have been sitting in statistics class. My mother came alive in the American mall, shining and happy and optimistic as if on display. Here we could keep each other company, comfortably, and work hard on what mattered most: acculturating.

  Yes, I would confirm, scouring the MAC counter for a new color I had seen Erin, a popular cheerleader in my homeroom, wearing. A few swipes of Josef’s American Express Premier card and we’d head to the California Pizza Kitchen, settle in on the patio by a burbling simulated river, order Thai crunch salads, and carefully study the schools of bleached hair and shopping bags floating by.

  Where do you think you’re going?

  The road ribbons out. Endless lanes forward, back, adjacent, a concrete football field undulating in every direction. I have a car. Someone has handed me the keys. At first I cannot make it move smoothly. I haven’t learned stick shift, but to spread out stipulates stick shifting, so I get up to speed; soon I move beyond jerk and stall to a place of mastery.

  I coast, over under over. Pass palms, houses, hills, buildings of each decade, sun on factory walls. Pink, jade, softest mauves.

  I am beginning to love her, California. Every direction is a new part of her mapped body, wild grasses like silky hair. Kidney swimming pools; flower-bud breath; warm-arteried highways. From my driver’s seat I look out at her, speeding by, left behind, always reappearing up ahead, with the wish for reflection: were these windows mirrors they might show a navigable self back to me, bright and busy, traveling toward purpose.

  State of awe: I am touching this curve of beautiful earth.

  A dream I’ve had takes many forms. Sometimes I am plowing along an elevated speedway, in a place that feels like a version of Berkeley or Stanford but Seussian. And right at the outermost arc my car flies off the road, soars through the air quietly, and calmly in my subconscious I anticipate the head-heart-stomach drop that is about to jettison me from this life. The way you prepare for a massive dip on the roller coaster. Not a yielding but a bracing.

  Someone has handed me the keys. The roads stretch out ahead. The highway of California snakes everywhere: spellbinding esssssssses. Now all I need to do is navigate, stick to the curves, shift the stick, lean into the bend of the smooth S shapes. Press. Swell. Release. Slope. Adhere to the shifts. Stay the course.

  We have the letters your boyfriend Jason wrote to you

  September 2

  Too many things to say on paper, so listen to the tape again. I got your letter. So you liked the mountains from the plane? I’m happy to hear you arrived at your destination safely. I’ve looked hard to find it on a map, but I haven’t. I will continue to look at our picture. To think about that thunderstorm.

  September 19

  Somehow I knew I would hear from you today. Sucks the other letter was returned. Tim the football player with the I.Q. less than his shoe size probably has a relative working at the post office who could not find Canada on a map. You are my last thought when I go to sleep. Hope you like the picture of Hendrix.

  January 22

  Because when I look into your eyes our love shines like a diamond mine.

  February 2

  We’re so perfect together.

  I’m nearing my sexual peak in a year.

  I don’t believe it will be possible to co-exist without each other.

  February 5

  Today I found a piece of writing. It is gospel in a sense:

  You might say I’m catagoraphobic. I hate getting stuffed into pigeonholes. I run the other way when people try to tell me who I am. So don’t try to figure me out. Just enjoy me. Or maybe I should say just enjoy us. There are so many different facets to my personality that monogamy with me will feel like a promiscuous feast to you. I can teach you secrets you didn’t even know existed. I can take you on a tour of the ultimate taboos without your even guessing we’ve sailed off the edge of the known world.

  February 17

  I am going crazy over you.

  February 27

  I dream of you. Months of frustration and longing.

  What aren’t you telling us?

  I dreamed of Jason. I imagined that after that first year in California, after the state transformed me into whatever she would, made me better—cleansed me—I would go back to Montreal. I would attend college there, a different person, Californian now. In my dream Jason waited for me, turning out his prolific letters on white school looseleaf, ready to receive me back just in time for his sexual peak.

  I dreamed of us lying in a field beneath starred ribbons of galaxy.

  I dreamed of the way he was in love with books and the way he whispered words into my mouth.

  I dreamed of him exploring even the insides of me, of filling a need California had so far been unable to satisfy.

  I dreamed of a centrifugal force.

  Go back into the unknown

  Once in the year I was ten I saw a canary standing outside our front door in the snow. It was Montreal’s November, the first storm of the season, and the white mounds had piled up overnight on the street, the stoop, the boughs of every tree, sparkly and unsullied. I spied the patch of yellow through the window in our vestibule and yelled for my mother to come. She opened the heavy black door with the Twenty-Four scrawled in cursive above, scooped up the bird in surprise and slammed the door.

  Can we keep it, can we? I asked, reaching on tip-toe to see the thing, which seemed to shiver down to its miniature bones. How had it survived? Where had it come from?

  She frowned, shook her feathered hair, and went to the kitchen for a warm towel.

  My mother was busy, with laundry and diaper changes and scrubbing the upstairs bathroom, where white mold mushrooms grew from the caulking of the mint green tub no matter how often she tore them away and scorched it with bleach. In between batches of broiled hamburgers and vacuuming, she loved us. Yet at the edges of my girl mind I could not completely ignore the bouts of personality shift—snapping or swatting at us kids, sinking utterly into her afternoon episode of Days of Our Lives where the women were always fancily made-up and embroiled in passionate melees, even the housewives—an ennui I can only now begin to understand.

  Can we please, please, please keep it? I begged, gazing at the canary, improbable yet here, confined in an upside-down colander our square wood table.

  I’ll talk to your father when he gets home, she said. Which wasn’t good. We were dog people. A bird, I knew, was not in the family handbook.

  By morning, the bird was gone. I wasn’t sure where but I hoped to a generous bird-loving granny in the neighborhood or, at least, a pet store. Why did the bird come if I couldn’t keep it? Things felt like they should go one way but instead always seemed to go another. Maybe that is being ten, I thought.

  What is it like in the wilderness?

  Soon after the canary arrived it was Hanukkah, and my grandparents bought me a book called Into the Unknown, a guide to UFOs, aliens, clairvoyance, telepathy, animal ESP, mind-over-matter, reincarnation, ghosts and poltergeists, earth shrines, Atlantis, witchcraft, and more. I read the book daily, wearing the pages soft, committing the facts and rumors to memory.

  Do you want to hear about the Bermuda Triangle or Stonehenge? I asked my mother one afternoon over the school’s holiday break. She was folding laundry in the winter sunlight streaming through the window.

  Why do you want to know about all of that? she asked, holding up my father’s white underwear. She looked at me, the wrinkle on her forehead like a fissure in time.

  It’s cool, I ventured. They’re like these mysteries and everybody is trying to figure out the answers.

  I thought I could make her see what was so important about these unexplained phenomena, that I could sell her o
n the value of probing the unknown, of poking until we could maybe uncover what lay concealed.

  But she had already turned away.

  We know you know what a whore is

  I know that the year I was ten my mind was heightened to the signs of romance. When the movie Dirty Dancing came out, with its posters of Jennifer Grey in metallic shoes mamboing in the muscled arms of Patrick Swayze, I pleaded with my mother to take me. I have to go! I begged, waving my own pink ballet shoes in her face. I’m a dancer! I did feel the movie would improve my jazz steps, but there was another, unnamable pull, too, the little lurch my lower stomach made when I thought about a man and woman dancing closely, when I thought about Darell/Daryl at school with their mix of rough boyishness and still-downy cheeks ruddy from the playground.

  She agreed to take me. But she went first with her friend Lisa, and that night when she came home from the theater she shook her head at me definitively—I was not old enough to see Dirty Dancing. Sorry, but it’s final. Her hips seemed loose as she glided to her bedroom.

  As the heavy northern winter settled in that year, my Barbies began doing strange things with each other down in our basement rec room. Sometimes one of the girls and Ken would go out to a ball and then afterward they’d drive home in Malibu Barbie’s pink convertible, Ken would come inside, they would have a snack in the Dream Kitchen and then Barbie and Ken would lie down in her glow-in the-dark canopy bed with Ken on top. I wasn’t sure what they were doing or why, but If I heard anyone’s footsteps coming downstairs I would quickly rearrange Barbie and Ken back in the car or in the Dream Pool outside, my mouth pressed into silence, my heart pounding in my slight chest.

  We are going to need you to stop looking away

  I spent a lot of time with my brothers. Steven five years younger than me, Zachary ten years younger, almost like a little son of my own. On dark autumn afternoons while the wind stripped the maple trees outside, I played the Disney movies on a loop and rocked the baby in my lap. His pale, soap-scented hair curled softly beneath my chin. While Cinderella sang to her mice and Alice fell down, down, down, I buttered toast and poured milk. I read book after book, sounding out stories slowly, eventually teaching them both to read, to be open to the wonder of words formed of letters that could be assembled to mean anything, anything in the world.

  “I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always,” I read from the beloved words of Robert Munsch. “As long as I’m living, my baby you’ll be.”

  So you caught them red-handed?

  The year I turned eleven the spring sun glinted brightly off the melting snowdrifts outside when I plodded into the kitchen early one afternoon.

  What, my mother exclaimed. She seemed surprised to see me. My father was at work.

  Had I come upstairs unexpectedly from playing with my Barbies in the basement? Was I home sick that day from the fifth grade with the flu? Something was out of sorts for me to be home in pajamas in the middle of a weekday. I wore my frilly Smurfette nightgown and bare feet. Upstairs, my new baby brother slept softly in the old yellow crib.

  My mother’s apple cake was in the oven, its blossomy smell filling the house. And there was a strange man in our kitchen, leaning at an angle against the butcher-block topped dishwasher, his shaggy blond hair swooped casually to the side. My mother took a small step away from him as I entered. Her red nails disappeared behind her back, a smile at the corner of her lips.

  I ignored a ripple in my stomach.

  Go back and play, my mother said quickly, and I’ll bring you some cake.

  I turned away from them, unable to shake the feeling that the man looked too comfortable in our kitchen with its funny white-and-maroon checked wallpaper and chocolate brown appliances, too at ease in the space where we sat every night, my parents, brothers and I, eating Shake ’n Bake chicken and Shepherd’s pie.

  As I left the kitchen I heard my mother whisper, The baby will be up soon—then I’ll bring him down.

  Why would a strange blond man want to see our baby? I wondered.

  What does it mean to be good?

  Be a good girl, my grandmother would urge me. What a good girl, they would say when I kept my hands in my lap and sat still at the symphony and ballet or stepped lightly at the art museum. Such a good girl, my mother and the women around me would praise when I had slipped quietly into the background, was helpful when asked, when I flashed a good report card, or tossed out a wry quip to a group of adults. That favorite small triumph I liked best of all because it was adults’ attention I wanted most. Good was silent, except when, able to impress or delight, it wasn’t. What’s the matter with you? My mother would ask, annoyed, when I prodded, poked, challenged, asked too many questions or inserted myself too much. Shut your mouth, she’d say to me. Watch yourself.

  What are the conditions under which confession is possible?

  The third interrogation:

  It was not a dream. At least not to begin with. I did go to court.

  In the spring of our first year in California, my youngest brother Zachary’s father sued my mother for full custody so he could bring Zachary, seven, back to Montreal.

  A new outfit was purchased for me: short black skirt with narrow pleats, form-fitting multicolored sweater, low patent leather heels, the nicest clothes I owned.

  I understood my role without anyone spelling it out for me. My family wanted me to testify, to tell the truth—that my mother was a good mother and that we, my brothers and I and our mother, needed to stay together as a family. That being torn apart would be bad. My role was to fix this situation, to tell the truth, the truer truth that would overpower the other truth, that my mother had cheated on her husband and ended up pregnant and had a child and loved that child and the man who fathered him even though he later turned away from her. My role was to speak for us all, to save us. I took it on willingly. I knew I could correct everything.

  But is this version of events believable?

  I can testify to what I remember happening. I flew to Montreal with my mother. I dressed in the fancy outfit. My grandparents and mother and aunt and uncle and lawyers spoke in hushed voices in a room off the courthouse hallway. Then I was led into the courtroom, to a polished wooden witness box in the corner.

  I had to open the low door in the box, step up to the inside, then close it behind me. My junior miss heels went click click click.

  State your name for the record, said the judge from his bench.

  When your voice disappears, I would later learn, there is always an instigating sorrow. A censure you quickly adopt as your own.

  In the box my heart began to throb, my skin to burn. I ached to become invisible. A fear I had not prepared for—they had not prepared me for—that I could now not get away from.

  Silence is a disappearance.

  STATE YOUR NAME FOR THE RECORD HE SAID.

  Disappearance is an erasure.

  STATE HE RE SAD.

  In the end, I could not speak.

  Is form a response to silence?

  I have read about form as a response to doubt, which leads me to ask whether I should interrogate the way this testimony is set up (this testimony).

  Doubt > 1175-1225; (v.) Middle English douten < Anglo-French, Old French douter < Latin dubitāre to waver, hesitate, be uncertain (frequentative of OL dubāre), equivalent to dub- doubt + -it- frequentative suffix + āre infinitive suffix; (noun) Middle English doute < Anglo-French, Old French, derivative of the v.

  Doubt > Disbelieve > Not believable > Unbelievable > Disbelieving > Disbelief > State of Disbelief > State.

  In literature an unsympathetic character is one who is not believable. Even if she is realistic, your character might not be believed, or liked, by your readers. Like when you are on the stand and you are asked to state your name to save your family and you say . . . nothing.

  Try a tactic of resistance

  If you don’t want the interrogator to know anything you know, say the following:

  I am
invoking my right to silence and decline further comment without the presence of legal counsel.

  In the vast majority of cases, interview over, period.

  Or? If you want the interrogator to know what you want them to know, simply say the following:

  I am invoking my right to speech and decline further silence in the presence of legal counsel.

  If you fail at this: In the vast majority of cases, interview over, period.

  What else do you know?

  I can tell you what I know happened but do not remember because later others told me it did.

  Before the courtroom, an attorney for the other side (Witness deposition? Checking for bad? A clumsy probe into the epigenetics of ‘slut’?) asked me, in preparation for my testimony about my family life, about the love and affection my siblings and I had for each other, about the importance of a safe and unbroken home: Are you sexually active?

  Are you sexually active, he asked me in the moments just before I took the witness stand in open court.

  I was sixteen.

  Outline for us your sexual history

  My first real kiss was with David R. He was in my social circle but more popular than me. His grandmother lived on the same street as mine did, and every Friday night for Shabbos both of us would sit inside those steamy, onion-scented houses with our families while the white moon rose over the Jewish suburbs of Montreal and all the other people doing the same rehearsed customs.