California Calling

by Natalie Singer

  The seams had already begun to pop, and now the threads rip fast. The for sale sign, the same one that awaited you all when you first came to California, is hammered back into the pink house’s manicured lawn. Moving boxes are pulled out of the barely unpacked garage and packed again. Family advisors are consulted, go-aheads given, accounts divided. Two separate apartments are leased, one for them and one for you. No one seems surprised.

  By late spring, a year and a half after you first arrive, the two sides of your makeshift family are divided so permanently that none of you will ever see the other side again.

  Blood, it turns out, is thicker than water. Cut the chaff, move ahead.

  The truth is already becoming clear to you: To fully assimilate, you need to dissolve. In order to let California absorb you, you can no longer pretend to belong to each other. There is room for only one master. You have only to fracture, to let go of one façade in exchange for another. Some things must be lost so that you may achieve higher gains. And anyway, you did this one thing together—you redirected your fates.

  You have chosen your allegiances. None are to each other. But that’s okay.

  California calls.

  PART FOUR

  XXX

  What happens after everything has been washed away?

  With the step-family and my little brother gone, I was clear to lead an emotionless life. Nothing could be turned around, so I would have to find a home inside nothing and make it something.

  What could you not let go of?

  That something was wrong with me. That I harbored in me deficiencies, some inborn broken thing that would stop me from everything. That would stop me from looking up and around, from asking how this is done. That burned my neck and cheeks red when it was my turn to speak in a college class or on the street, in a checkout line, ordering a sandwich, anywhere I was not with only myself. That grabbed my breath, hauled the breathing right out of me like some kind of phantom riding a dark horse in a children’s fairy tale. That stood between me and the man I wanted to touch, the ones I wanted to touch—there were more than one. An obstruction to integrating. I could not let go of the fault of my shortcomings, failed opportunities, silent conversations and missed connections. Anxiety that never ended, a roller coaster stuck in the on position. I could not coerce myself into believing this wasn’t because of something wrong with me from the start, or something I carried with me.

  Be careful what you wish for

  I remember something else about the burden of silence. Once when I was seven or eight and living in the Twenty-Four house, I grew angry at my mother. Maybe she had yelled at me for some disobedience—possibly I talked back to her or did not pick up my toys, or had taken too long getting into my pajamas after supper and bath time, when she must have been out of her mind to get children to bed and for an hour or two be able to breathe. Maybe she had spanked me, a normal spanking or one where the boundary between punishment and fury blurred into a dangerous static like some of the far-flung television stations past channel 58, where I had to click, click, click, click to find The Twilight Zone.

  In my bedroom, where I might have sequestered myself or been sent, I felt terrible for myself and thought furious thoughts about my mother, and as I settled into this preoccupation my mind began to wander more loosely, faster and faster into uncharted territory. I recalled a recent episode of The Twilight Zone I had seen on a Saturday morning while the sky was still dark and I snuck down into the living room for the types of shows like this that aired before cartoons began. The episode was titled “The Children’s Zoo,” and in it a little girl has parents who fight a lot and yell at her. Fed up, the girl gives her parents an invitation she receives that reads: “As bearer of this special invitation, you are entitled to one child’s admission to the CHILDREN’S ZOO. You will be offered all the special privileges described by the other girl who passed this.” As the girl begins to tour the zoo herself, we, the TV viewers, see that it is not animals inside the cages but parents, and the children who visit are being given the chance to choose a new set of parents to leave with.

  In the episode, the girl soon spots her own parents, outraged and horrible, trapped behind observation glass. Though she has the power, in the end she refuses to save them, choosing another mother and father instead. Snuggled under a blanket on our couch, my eyes had widened as the story came to its climax: Relinquish your parents? I thought. Was that done?

  Now banished to my bedroom, I imagined the zoo with my mother behind her own slab of thick glass, and before I could stop my brain a brand new word I had never even flirted with surfaced: fuck. Two words, actually. Fuck you, I spat silently in my head, to my mother. Fuck. You. And though the words did not emerge from my lips, they had been in the room. They had been conjured, meaning, I believed, that I spoke them all the same. Immediately, a panic seeped through me. What have I done? How could I have even thought it? What terrible thing will happen now?

  I could live with the guilt for all of five minutes. I opened my bedroom door, raced down the carpeted stairs two at a time and planted myself in front of my mother, who sat next to my father watching Dallas on TV. She looked at me, mildly annoyed. What is it? she asked.

  I said something, I stuttered, Something about you. In my head, I said . . . I said . . . a bad thing . . . fff . . . it was, I didn’t, I’m sorry . . .

  The tears began to come and I squinted my eyes, trying to decide whether she had received the message I was trying to convey.

  Okay, honey, she said, her eyes flickering back to the screen, where J. R. was raging. My father snorted.

  Go to bed now, my mother offered evenly, in finality, unconcerned, or still ignorant, or benevolent about the transgression I had just attempted to confess.

  What did I learn from this confession, I ask myself.

  A story is yours alone until it is spoken. When words are secret, it is you who decides if they exist.

  But why are you silenced?

  I have an attraction to escape stories, to reinvention narratives, tales of Amish, Orthodox, and polygamist girls, of girls locked in attics, ushering in their own freedom, heisting it. What am I trying to escape from, to hasten?

  I am afraid of not belonging, of there being no place right for me.

  I am afraid of becoming attached to things that go away. To people who are reassigned.

  I am afraid of it being discovered that I do not belong. The writer Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore calls it the search for things that don’t unravel in the end.

  Silence is a disappearance. Disappearance is an erasure.

  The response to my exploitation is a self-erasure.

  The response to interrogation is a question returned.

  At college what will you be afraid to say?

  Excuse me—

  What’s your major?

  Where is the humanities building?

  A side of salsa, please.

  What are your office hours?

  Do you want to study together?

  I don’t want to fuck you.

  I’m lost.

  (I’m lonely.)

  I’m failing biology.

  I’m failing history.

  I miss my brother.

  I’m failing.

  Sometimes I almost fall asleep driving down the highway.

  I want you to fuck me.

  I’m falling.

  Tell us the truth

  Longing is embedded in belonging, hidden in plain sight. To desire openly—to desire after a silencing—is to strip to the skin and lie in the street for the crowd, rocks in hand, to see.

  Later, when I am a young student journalist covering city council meetings about building permits and parking fees, I will dream about placing myself in real danger. I consider doing the work it would take to become a foreign correspondent. I long to embed myself with a military troupe—it would not be that hard to arrange—to disguise myself poorly and head into the heart of enemy territory, surrounded by bodies of tension, by
ranks of unsecured need.

  Tell us the real truth

  I am afraid to do this in front of everyone.

  Are you Californian yet?

  I have a boyfriend now. I meet him at the end of my senior year in high school. I am in need of a group or, really, any human connection, but I have entered the realm of American high school far too late to form deep and selective friendships. So I allow myself to drift along with a somewhat welcoming cluster of kids who are generally interested in privation: They are members of DARE, making pledges in AA-like group circles not to drink alcohol or do drugs. Some of the girls flash a gold band on their right ring finger, slipped on them by their fathers in a special ceremony and representing their pledge to remain virgins until marriage. The rings repulse me and also force me to think of my own father, whom I haven’t spoken with since I left for California. Our relationship has been strained since I was fourteen, when he remarried to a woman who disliked me and took on a seven-year-old step-daughter. It feels like I am always on the outside, the daughter who reminds everyone of her mother (and so what?). Tainted.

  I don’t know what it is that draws me to Jim—he’s a generally kind person but we are not well matched. His interest in me is probably what determines our courtship, because I am inept at deciphering my own desires or preferences. He’s a member of DARE, too, but he is learning to manage the guilt of indulgences like beer and shooting fuel-tank levels of Jagermeister. His family is Episcopalian; a reference to the Lord or Jesus could pop any time from his mother’s mouth or from some longtime friend in Jim’s clean-cut, Nascar-loving circle of boyhood friends, though Jim himself is moving into a loosening. In April, before we begin dating, I am invited to the family’s Easter dinner. Sitting before the first glazed ham I have ever seen up close, I mention that because I am Jewish the finer points of Easter are unfamiliar to me. Jim’s mother, Anne, who I will soon learn maintains a special room in their home just for storing her abundant collection of decorations for Christmas, Easter, St. Patrick’s Day, St. Valentine’s Day, and other such holidays, looks worriedly at Jim as her eyes tear up. I’m not sure I can have someone at my Easter table who doesn’t believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, she says softly.

  This reminds me of a cowboy at my high school, a senior with a palm-sized belt buckle and a chipped front tooth named Sean who earlier this winter took me for a couple of rides in his gray pickup truck. After the last ride, we parked in front of my house and I bumped my head as we kissed chastely on the lips. While pulling away he noticed the tiny gold Jewish star dangling around my neck. What is that, he wanted to know. I told him. The cowboy never asked me out again. Later, away from the cramped chamber of that cab, I wished I had had the chance to run my tongue one time along the tooth’s sharp edge.

  But now I’m with Jim, and Jim has a car, a Mustang he diligently saved for by mowing summer lawns, and with him I begin to see the California beyond our suburbs. It will become a hallmark of our relationship, perhaps the very purpose of it: a joint desire, though possibly for different reasons, to venture out, trace our fingers along a paper map and then together move our bodies to that place. To constellate ourselves by crossing over to somewhere new, to bear witness to what is there.

  Draw a map of your heart

  MONTEREY

  Witness: Air that is shampoo of wet salt, lathers my long hair into a sea sponge, foamy spa scrub, weapon to whip the cheeks.

  Witness: Sand is not sand is the gentlest burial.

  Witness: You take a spoon to your lips. A warm sweet sidles in, molten clam cream.

  Witness: Motel 6, sodden towel crumple, sheets that smell of . . . sea.

  Draw a map of your body

  Jim’s parents owned a small yacht. Every couple of weekends we went aboard, small bags of essentials packed, for a short cruising trip through the California Delta or along the Sacramento River. Jim’s older sister, LeeAnne, who went to a nearby community college and struggled with a mild failure-to-launch problem, came with her thirty-something boyfriend, Nick, and for a couple of days we grilled burgers, played cards and watched for herons. Sometimes Jim’s father spread out his nautical charts, traced his finger along their hair-thin green and blue lines, cryptic numbers, keys and curves, and tried to show me how to navigate.

  At night LeeAnne and I slept in the pilot house bed, while Jim and Nick crashed in the main cabin, on the dining table and couch that transformed, with the sigh of a hydraulic lever, into beds, because Jim’s parents wanted to ensure no sex outside of wedlock happened on their watch.

  One Saturday, we planned to motor up to a place called Snug Harbor. The boat, Chug, was slow, and once we navigated out of the marina, the quiet swallows of the engine and the slight waves of the jungle-like water could lull you into a sort of awake meditation. Jim, Nick, and Jim’s dad discussed sports. His mother and LeeAnne began to prepare a spaghetti dinner in the tiny galley. Outside, the autumn sun was bleeding closer to the glassy edge of bobbing horizon. I quietly excused myself to the bathroom.

  In the tiny head, I shut the thin levered door, leaned against the circular sink mounted into its polished teak cabinet and lifted my leg onto the toilet seat. I rubbed myself softly at first, then harder, trying not to make a sound, trying not to laugh, not to cry, until after a few minutes the swell of relief I was desperate for came through me like a flood and I closed my eyes and bit my lip not to scream. Through the bathroom’s porthole the California sunset poured like ruby.

  You seem to enjoy pushing the envelope

  Once Suzanne dared me to read the book Twilight. I had been making fun of her obsession with it. We both knew it wasn’t real literature. I know, she said, but you’ll see, once you start reading it you are hooked. She offered to give me $10, all I had to do was read the book. In Twilight, werewolf Jacob Black is subjected to a process known as imprinting, the involuntary mechanism by which Quileute shapeshifters find their mates. It is a gravitational pull; an unconditional binding.

  It’s not like love at first sight, really. It’s more like . . . gravity moves . . . suddenly. It’s not the earth holding you here anymore, she does . . . You become whatever she needs you to be, whether that’s a protector, or a lover, or a friend.

  —JACOB BLACK, explaining to Bella Swan about imprinting

  In psychology and ethology, imprinting is any kind of phase-sensitive learning that is rapid and apparently independent of the consequences of behavior. Imprinting is hypothesized to have a critical period—a maturational stage in the lifespan of an organism during which the nervous system is especially sensitive to certain environmental stimuli.

  This explains everything about my relationship with California as I assimilated into myself.

  I was falling in love.

  I was being cut loose.

  I was floating away.

  Who were your friends?

  While we still lived in the house with Josef, some people I knew from Montreal came to visit me, two counselors who had taken care of me while I was a teenager at sleepaway camp, both named Warren, and two girls they were traveling with. The Warrens had been my counselors when I was fifteen and sixteen. I was seventeen now and they were in their early twenties. They were all on a road trip across the West and they needed to find free places to stay as often as possible. My mother was out of town, and Josef did not disguise how irritated he was by four slightly dirty young people camped out on our living room floor’s pink carpet.

  I wanted badly to make a good impression on the Warrens, to connect to them on this special stopover of theirs that was reuniting us three thousand miles from where we had known each other. They had both guided me through many little dramas during camp summers, and for a while I had also believed I was in love with one of them. For two summers and the year in between while I still lived in Montreal, I had thrown myself at this particular Warren, trying all my girly wiles to get him to cross a line between mentor/friend into something more that I thought I was dying for. Steadfastly, often grinning
and groaning at my pleas for a kiss, he gently rebuffed me, slinging an arm in a counselor-like way around my shoulders and feeding me facts about his band idols—The Cure, Pink Floyd, Phish—so I could at least be filled by his musical knowledge.

  The other Warren had written me dependably that past year, my first in California, responding to my sometimes-panicked letters worrying over the perfect high school girls and my longing for Jason back home, delivering brotherly advice in upper case block script.

  In California, though, the foursome was already knotted tightly from their weeks traveling together, united by inside jokes from the uninhibited freedom of crisscrossing countries of their own wills. As I toured them down San Francisco’s Haight Street, pointing out the historic head shops and larger-than-life corners that had stood sentinel over hippies and flower children during the Summer of Love, I felt more childlike than ever, on the outside. With their patched backpacks and relaxed postures, they strode the San Francisco sidewalks with a comfort I never could settle into. If I couldn’t feel at home in a group or with my family, at least I wanted to be enmeshed in a place, in this city, my state; I yearned for an ease and facility I could show off and be possessed by, as though California herself were living up to all of my expectations and anticipations, my most intimate partner, the prize that bears out.

  Instead I functioned awkwardly for a few days, the kid sister, tagging along to narrate and point the Warrens and their traveling companions to fog-shrouded beaches and cheap burritos, and then we parted ways with hugs as they drove off into their futures and I stood in my place on the sidewalk waving and squinting into the sky.

  What did you see in him?