California Calling

by Natalie Singer

  One fall night after dinner, I walked to David’s grandmother’s house and rang the doorbell. I do not know what gave me the courage to do this. At fourteen, though, a timer in me had been turned on, an urge was ticking toward fulfillment.

  We went for a walk to the baseball field, talking about things I don’t remember. A sense of predetermination followed us; we both knew without saying it what was intended. At home plate we stopped and turned toward each other. My bobbed hair, straightened mercilessly and shiny in the cold night air, grazed my check. He leaned in and our lips touched, then our tongues. I know I was wearing a silky ivory shirt, and his large boy’s hand slipped up the side of it, rotating expertly to cup my left breast.

  Later I giggled on the phone with my friend Carole and thought about the warmth from his hand over the silk of my shirt. What did it mean that we had kissed like that? Would we date? Would he tell people I was his girlfriend?

  But later that month, while I was returning my clarinet in its black box to the shelf after band, David slipped into the small instrument room and thrust his mouth on mine, his hand to my chest. We made out for a minute, furtively, roughly, among the trombones and French horns. When he pulled away, he spoke before I could. Don’t tell anyone about this, he said, and I didn’t.

  What evidence would you present?

  EXHIBIT 1: Here I am, frozen in front of her locked bedroom door. Picture, ladies and gentlemen, that window of time when a girl is at her most awkward. Breast buds protruding, braces gnashing into mouth flesh, smile like Goofy (I don’t know yet not to smile), always looking, looking, looking at everyone, in their eyes, trying to Make. A. Connection.

  After my mother finally confessed her affair and the pregnancy that came of it, when my youngest brother was just beginning to toddle, the suburban house with the cursive Twenty-Four scrawled above the garage door was sold and the three of us children moved into the city with my mother (now called a “single mother”). She was madly in love with her lover and wanted him to marry her. Once or twice a week he would visit, in between runs down the ski slopes and adventure trips to the Amazon; he would hold his toddler, cradle him, bring him gifts.

  I took care of my brothers while she made her case to him. I tried not to listen, but sometimes I stopped in front of her locked bedroom door, unable to move or to reconcile the sounds of the body that, at twelve, I knew but didn’t want to think I did. A testimony of sorts: That she had what he wanted, what it would take to make him happy. That she, all of us, were good enough. That our first family had disintegrated for a reason, so that this family could work. She plead her case behind a closed bedroom door, and I bore witness.

  When you are asked to state We are a family, why don’t you?

  I sometimes find it helpful to think of Angerona, or Angeronia, a Roman divinity with seemingly conflicting identities. According to some evidence she is the goddess of pain and sorrow, anguish and fear, the one who could relieve men of these states. Other accounts frame Angerona as the goddess of silence, whose role in Rome was to prevent the sacred name of the city from being uttered and thus made known to enemies. Some describe her as the one who was tasked with helping sustain men through the dark, hard days of winter. Her statue stood in the temple of Volupia, near the porta Romanula and the Forum, and she was represented with her mouth bound and sealed up, which according to Massurius Sabinus indicated that those who hid their anxiety in patience would attain the greatest joy. A festival, Angeronalia, was celebrated in Rome in honor of Angerona every year on December 21, when the pontiffs offered sacrifices to her in the temple of Volupia.

  Did you hear that? The goddess of silence was placed inside the temple of the goddess of pleasure.

  Where does their failure end and yours begin?

  What are you asking for, an imaginary redo?

  STATE YOUR NAME FOR THE RECORD.

  Fuck. You.

  Some witnesses feel it helps to reimagine their experience as another’s

  I think about Pearl, whose mother, Hester, invited the devil himself into her body when she pursued earthly pleasures instead of obeying and truly fearing the Lord. Did Hester envision the plucky, bawling Pearl when she spread her creamy thighs for the Reverend Dimmesdale?

  Regardless of intent, Pearl took shape, microscopic scarlet letter-A cells arising from the secret matter of life.

  Would the child Pearl be able to take the stand and testify, convincingly and for all her decriers to witness, We are a family?

  We have as yet hardly spoken of the infant.

  JUDGE: State your name for the record.

  PEARL: Pearl Prynne.

  JUDGE, frowning: Is thou as whorish as thy mother?

  PEARL: Why dost thou smile at me so?

  JUDGE: Thy spirit pleaseth me, child. I will see you now in my chambers.

  WITNESSES, whispering: If the hussy stood up for judgment before us five, that are now here in a knot together, would she come off with such a sentence?

  Would you prefer we call character witnesses?

  JUDGE: Did any of you engage in any sexual acts with this girl, the daughter of an adulteress?

  JAY K.: When we were eleven Natalie said she would be my girlfriend. At a party in December in Cara’s basement we slow danced to Berlin and I kissed her but the bitch wouldn’t let me put my tongue in. Then she broke up with me and I told her she lost her chance, I would never go out with her ever again.

  DAVID R.: I think we made out a few times in the band room. I actually had a girlfriend at the time, so this wasn’t, like, a thing. It was never going to lead anywhere. Sweet girl, though. Great legs.

  JONATHAN C.: I love that kid, she’s just cool, you know? Once we hung out and she gave me a hand job. At first I was confused because she was like really rubbing up and down frantically. I thought maybe it was her first time. But I helped her along and it was all good.

  OLDER STAFF COUNSELOR AT SLEEPAWAY CAMP: I never rubbed my hands up under a camper’s shirt while we sat by the fire on a five-day canoe trip, whatareyoufuckingtalkingabout?

  JEFF, OLDER COUNSELOR OF HER YOUNGER BROTHER: I thought she had some balls for sneaking out that night. We went on a short walk. Another night I took her downtown on the metro. We kissed. I definitely fingered her pussy, just really gave it to her no holds barred. After a few minutes she said, Okay, that’s all you get and actually just walked herself home. And I was like, That’s all I get?! Bitches are crazy.

  ADAM G.: I thought about dating her every day of my life for two years. I wanted to marry her. I knew I’d eventually become prime minister of Canada and I thought she would make the perfect wife. I loved everything about her. But she always saw me as only a friend, I guess. One summer when I confessed to her I was in love with her, she gasped in disbelief.

  JASON: Her mind is like a diamond mine. I could kiss her forever. We went to half of third base, I guess you would say. I held her in my arms. I licked her nipples like they were warm maple syrup drizzled on a bank of February snow. Once we were making out in the closet at a friend’s house and she started moaning and I knew she wanted me to, um, go down on her. And I did for like a minute or two but I don’t think I was ready. She seemed a little frustrated after that. But later I gave her her first orgasm and I think I saw tears in her eyes.

  What evidence would you present?

  EXHIBIT 2: When my mother became a single mother, she went to work. My baby brother went to daycare. In the mornings when I was eleven, I helped bundle up my middle brother, Steven, and walk with him to the corner of the street where we would wait for the school bus to take us to first and sixth grades.

  One January morning the Montreal sky was a smutty gray and the cold bit through our woolen mittens. My brother dug the tip of his boot into a sticky snowdrift at the edge of the icy sidewalk. I looked across the road and saw a man standing alone near the side yard of a neighbor’s house. He was dressed in a brown trench coat and boots. Our eyes met in gaps between the traffic of cars and slush-covered c
ity buses. He looked at me with one hand in his pocket. I watched silently as he opened his trench coat with his other hand, reached down, opened the fly of his pants, and brought out his penis.

  Of course, he didn’t tell me not to tell anyone. But I didn’t.

  What does this have to do with anything?

  Because I could not speak, because I could not say, when interrogated in that courtroom, We are a family—because women have bodies that can lead to the unraveling of everything—we lost my little brother. He was put on a plane and flown away from the sunset, back to Montreal and the smug safety of his father who had, rather suddenly, forfeited the Amazon trips for a new wife. The happy couple—better than us, more whole than us, a fresh slate—was quickly working to manufacture even more babies of their own.

  My mother’s reaction to this tear in the space-time continuum was an unrelenting howl that made the palm trees behind our California dream home shudder in the night.

  When do things unravel?

  As fall gave way to a mild and sunny winter, shiny shopping bags piled up and things became uncomfortable inside the California house. Our parents fought more, and I knew from my mother’s whispered confessions that, whereas before she had tolerated it, she now couldn’t stand having sex with Josef. At least twice a week my mother slipped into my bed instead of going to sleep in the master suite. This did not sit well with my step-father, who barked more and pulled the previously loose purse strings tighter. When she wasn’t sobbing, my mother grew defiant, taking passive-aggressive actions like cooking every meal with cheese when Asher could not stand cheese.

  I forgot, she said, as she set down another oozing casserole or four-cheese pizza.

  But mainly, the proxy targets for the growing disharmony were the pets. We (my mother and brothers) were not cat people. You are or you aren’t—these things go back generations. Loyalty and allegiance must lie with one species only. We were dog people, always had been, always would be. Any ownership of cats was accidental and non-memorable.

  Josef and his sons were cat. Into the marriage they brought Perky, a tiny gray thing. Often Asher could be found stretched out on the carpet, limbs akimbo, communing with Perky.

  Into the marriage we brought Brandy, a neurotic poodle that my mother especially adored. Sometimes my mother thought Brandy looked so cute that she cooed at him like a baby, applying her favorite love name, Shmushy. At first Josef just teasingly disliked Brandy, who used to sleep snuggled into my mother’s bed every night, until they married and he was relocated to my bed. Josef joked that maybe Brandy would get accidentally thrown out with the trash or run over by the car, then wink at my mother. It was the early days of polite step-family tolerance; we laughed nervously.

  But then, the jokes became violent.

  Stupid little fucking shit! sneered Josef as he walked by Brandy on his way to the kitchen.

  Sometimes, he’d jut his leg out toward the dog or make a thick fist and punch the air a few feet above the dog’s curly white head. Brandy took to cowering any time Josef walked past, and despite elaborate security measures taken by my mother and me to lock Brandy in my bedroom when we both left the house, we worried what danger he might be in when we weren’t around. We had never actually seen Josef hit anyone or anything, but we weren’t stupid: he had boasted about being in the Six-Day War.

  In retaliation we did what we could to publicly dislike the innocent, non-memorable Perky. Weird animal, my mother or I would snort as we passed by the soft, gray lump sitting on the couch. We tried, but the insults came out half-hearted, deflated of any real animosity. It was hard to peg your frustrations on an indifferent, seven-pound cat that minds its own business.

  What does the end look like?

  Just after the new year, when tension in the house was at its height, we got a call from my Uncle Jon.

  So, I’m gay, he revealed, his voice shaky. I don’t want to live a lie anymore. I’m moving to California.

  My mother and I were overjoyed. She asked all kinds of inappropriate, weirdly probing questions (How do you know who goes on top?). Then we waited impatiently to have company out West. Jon arrived in early spring, with a new job as a financial executive, to sleep on our couch until he found a place of his own.

  All of a sudden, Josef could leave Brandy the dog alone because there was a new target in town.

  What is this fucking shit? Josef muttered as we strolled, on another family outing, down the sidewalks of San Francisco’s Castro District. We had traveled there to visit the city’s historic gay neighborhood, which had been, up until now, overlooked in the family tourism oeuvre. We had promised to help Jon find somewhere to live.

  Men were everywhere: thick, burly bearded men; tiny, tidy men; many-tattooed men; tall, golden airbrushed men; men in boots, heels, nerdy white knee socks with royal blue athletic stripes, and no clothes at all. They strolled unhurriedly in pairs, hands squeezed into each other’s back pockets; sported gold lamé shorts and nipple rings; kissed each other hello and goodbye in covered doorways; popped in and out of the sex-toy shops and book stores; laughed from patio tables underneath the lush vegetation of outdoor cafés.

  Rainbow flags rippled from the ice-cream-hued Victorian homes that snaked up the hills. The local theater marquis announced an upcoming live drag tribute to Elizabeth Taylor, Get Your Tickets Now! The antique emerald streetcar squeaked and sighed to a stop on corner of Market and Castro, letting off more men and picking up others. A few women dotted the landscape, hanging with the gay guys or wrapped up in each other. Everyone seemed chill, convivial, friendly, familial.

  Who knew, my mother exclaimed.

  Jon looked nervous but happy. I was fascinated. Here was a whole population of people saying Screw It to outside expectations, creating a world of their own. People living the way they wanted to, anything and everything for the taking, fuck convention. This was the essence of the California I’d been hoping for, I realized, even if I hadn’t exactly been able to envision it before. We could all use more freedom like this. Let freedom reign!

  We are leaving right now, Josef ordered us just then. He looked, for once, despite his thick, six-foot-four frame, like he was shrinking. Get back to the car, he snarled, apparently pushed over the edge by one pair of gold butt cheeks too many. Jon, he barked, you can find somewhere to live on your own.

  How ugly will it get?

  Would you shut up? my mother hisses at Josef one night in March, while Jon is in the bathroom washing up. Josef had wondered aloud whether he should warn the neighbors that we have a “pretty boy” in our house who might be trying to spy on their naked husbands through the nighttime windows.

  Hey, he barks at all of us, this is my house. He reaches for the control and switches the TV from a documentary on whales to his favorite show, Home Improvement, where the maligned father with a penchant for tools makes stupid man jokes over a fence.

  I was watching that, I snip, and grab the controller back.

  Fuck off! shrieks Asher from the armchair in the corner of the den, banging the channel up button directly on the TV box back to Home Improvement.

  Freak!

  Bitch!

  You’re all crazy, Ric mutters from inside his video game.

  ALL OF YOU SHUT UP! bellows Josef, just as Jon walks in holding his toothbrush, facial moisturizer, and a New Yorker.

  Don’t talk to them like that, my uncle says in a very cool way.

  I WILL SPEAK HOWEVER I WANT TO IN MY HOUSE AND IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT YOU CAN LEAVE!

  Duly noted, Jon says, almost cattily, and the room clears, all units retreating to their safe zones.

  By the time Jon does leave our couch, no one is speaking to anyone not related to them by blood. My mother is stashing grocery money “for a rainy day.” Meals are silent. Ridiculous gripes float to the surface: Can whoever opens the goddamn mailbox close it after themselves, Josef demands; Who left that bathroom fan on, screeches my mother.

  I give her the best advice I can: get us t
he hell out of here.

  I am drifting like a dinghy from my former life. Jason and I are not together anymore, but my acrylic nails shine, my hair has taken on a sun-tinted golden hue, and though I am lonely I imagine that intelligent and fun future friends and boyfriends are just around the corner.

  I’m seventeen. I will be able to move out on my own soon. All I have to do right now is hang on until something shakes us fully loose into our real American dream.

  Sometimes a polygraph or other forensic test is used to detect lies

  One afternoon can look just like all the others except when you come home and find Perky the cat curled up on the carpet in your room. Strange because she never comes into your room—she knows you’re dog.

  You pick up a clean ball of socks from the laundry pile and toss it at her. The balled-up socks hit her coat and bounce right off, but Perky doesn’t budge.

  You tiptoe closer and slowly reach out your pointer finger toward her downy charcoal head. When you touch it, you shriek and pull back. Stiff! This cat is very, very stiff.

  You have never touched a dead body before, but you know that is what Perky is. Dead in your bedroom. A weird panic overtakes you, your mouth flies open and you are mute for a moment before you start to scream. You scream and scream and scream until, finally, people come running.

  The step-family thinks you killed her. There are grim, closed-door consultations and looks of death from Asher to you. Your step-father orders an actual cat autopsy to make sure there has been no foul play. All members of the house take sides, aligning themselves cleanly by clan.

  A week later the autopsy report shows death by natural causes, but your transformation is already underway. Really, it began a long time ago, when you first filed onto that westbound plane.