California Calling

by Natalie Singer

  It’s a startling little box that can tether you hook, line, and sinker to a person. Through the vibrating plastic you feel the elastic tendons of connection alight with energy. Numbers now mean letters; secret messages are cloaked in mathematical upside-downness. Later you will be forced to strain, not unlike the elastic of your attachment, to remember which numbers meant what message: 666 is I want to fuck, yes? Or is it just the devil as it has always been? Some inverted numbers buzz through to say h-E-L-L-O. There is a code for How’s your day? One, maybe, for I love you—something to do with an E? 69 is frequently employed, the thrill of sending these particular numbers across this invisible new message highway more arousing than any real live act that might in fact result from the signal. How capable you think men with pagers attached prominently to their waists, to their leather belts, look, ready for absolutely anything that could arise, able to synch with you no matter the distance, to speak to you independent of voice. A tool, too, to regulate power: a page from someone else, other than “your” man, might come in while you two are together. A silent glance at your hot pink or oxide gray box in its hard, matching shell—the one he in fact bought for you—can say so much: your receptors are open for any and all incoming messages; the airwaves are crackling with competition; your signal is on and strong. Later, many years later, decades, you will occasionally bolt awake at night in panic. Soaked in sweat, even. Your fear, taking shape in a dream, slamming into the state of waking, is this: you want to page him, you must page him right now, but no matter what you do you cannot remember his number.

  What if your relationship with Jim was presented as flash fiction?

  We are going to the Applebee’s. We are taking his truck, the gray Mazda pickup. Or is it the white Mustang with maroon leather seats and a tail fin? “The 5-Oh,” he calls it, often with baby at the end. “5-Oh, BABY!” He picks me up at the curb and we cruise, windows down, past the four-bedroom two-and-a-half-bath plus master soaking tubs and the five-bedroom chef’s kitchen custom closet plus bonus game rooms. The roads are pretty clear tonight, even with all the V8 leather seat 20” alloy wheels heading home from work. I lean in across the bench to deliver a kiss to his smooth cheek. He has a new pair of Nikes on. “WHAT’S GOIN DOWN, GIRL? LET’S GET THIS PARTY STARTED!” Applebee’s is not far from our houses, just a few minutes on Camino Ramon past the Target Greatland, Caspers Hot Dogs, Ross Dress for Less, T.J. Maxx where you never miss a designer deal, two Taco Bells featuring for a limited time ninety-nine-cent flavor-blasted chalupas, Bishop Ranch Business Park I, Bishop Ranch Business Park II, Bishop Ranch Business Park III, and Bishop Ranch Business Park IV.

  there’s going to be a

  heartache

  tonight

  He works undercover security at the Target, hiding in the clothing racks and spying on bored housewives who steal lingerie. His favorite thing is when they cry in his office. “I take them down and the first thing every single one does is start blubbering. DANG, it’s hilarious!” he tells me and his parents and sister over burger barbecues on the weekends, lifting another Mountain Dew from the cooler. “All they care about is that I don’t call their husbands. ‘My husband’s going to divorce me, please, I’ll do anything, I’m begging you.’ Shoulda thought of that before, KLEPTO!”

  cut that out, or

  I’ll really give you something

  to cry about

  We pull into the parking lot and walk into the Applebee’s. Some of his friends are already there at the table, the dude who’s also in the junior volunteer police officer training academy; the guy who went to the high school and now does . . . something; that one guy who country line dances. Plus some of their girlfriends, big eyelashes on the menu. Also on the menu, a glossy brochure with detailed close-ups: green bean crispers, crosscut double glazed wonton riblets, Inca fusion nachos, and supersized Bahama Mama with commemorative take-home Big Fister™ cup. I order a chef salad. I think tonight will be the night. His parents are away for the weekend on their boat, Chug. I’ve been waiting but it feels like the time to do it. His bedroom is the same as when he was a kid, with a mini Nerf basketball hoop on the back of the door and cowboy sheets. Except now he keeps his Beretta under the bed, in a locked box. For academy training. But maybe, since his parents are away, we would do it in the living room on the floor in front of the fireplace. His mom is a quilter; she makes huge artistic scenes hand-pieced together, tugboats jostling with the sea in a storm; kittens pawing yarn; fresh, dewy tulips. The quilts hang on the wall by the fireplace and his father’s collection of beer and firefighting memorabilia. It does seem like tonight is the time to do it. It would be weird to hold off any longer. “RIGHT ON, GIRL!” Anyway, here come the riblets.

  stop while you’re ahead, no

  regrets

  You had wanted Jason to do it?

  I had loved him in a way that I will always be able to slip into. On a trip back to Montreal ten months after moving to California, just after I turned seventeen and as our romance-in-letters was winding down, I asked him directly. I want it to be you, is what I said. He held me in his arms, slipped his tongue around mine, sent a torrent of need straight to the splitting middle of me, and told me, that sweet boy, No. He thought we weren’t ready.

  What would the Prynne girl do?

  Sometimes, suspended in a state of longing, you can only refer to the characters who have been presented to you, whom you appropriate—perhaps from the pages of texts that help you navigate California and yourself in it, perhaps from the topography around you—in hopes that a mirror, however distorted, could lead to a sense of satiety.

  I often think about Pearl, birthed by her author in the year of California’s Gold Rush. As a toddler and young girl she believes fiercely, without any public evidence to support the notion, that she should be adored. Later, she asks Dimmesdale and her mother when she will be acknowledged fully and, given no certainties, demands it. Against all conventions, Pearl exposes her own longing, does not shy from insisting that she be seen and therefore written into existence. Asking questions, then, is a kind of granting of permission to oneself, an entering into a state of permissiveness. Interrogation is a taking possession of one’s being. A (re) claiming of voice.

  I think Pearl would want to tour the shit out of California and, for a little while, bide her time.

  What is this difficulty you have with the word alien?

  During the summer after my first year in California, I rode around in Jim’s Mustang and climbed grassy suburban hills above winking subdivisions, where I sat with other teenage couples and my boyfriend’s fingers tickling my crotch to watch the night moon suspended in the scattered haze of urban lights. Above a ridge in Livermore, a town that functioned as a boundary between the easternmost reaches of the San Francisco Bay Area’s urbanish core and the farther East Bay’s still rural carpet of ranches and hillocks rolling toward the Sierras, I squinted in the direction of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Before our family exploded, my step-father Josef had told us of this lab, where American nuclear warheads had been designed and guarded since the Cold War.

  These places of hard science, where equations and formulas held the secrets of life, felt both unknowable and entrancing. In nearby Mountain View, I knew that people paid to believe in extraterrestrial life babysat interstellar message machinery at the SETI Institute (SETI standing for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence). For years they waited patiently, the scientists, watching for a sign that something was out there, beyond our known human sphere. Two decades later I would read that, no longer satisfied with just waiting and listening to their equipment for a message from beyond to finally arrive from its years-long galactic journey, scientists had decided to mobilize into “active SETI,” beaming out intentional messages for aliens through radar and, they soon hoped, lasers. The scientists, finally, found their voice.

  I thought about the documents in my manila folder, all stamped “alien.” About the Montreal I once knew so well that I could sme
ll the year’s first snow on the air hours before it fell. About my father and his new family driving to a Sunday-night, Chinese-food dinner on Queen Mary Avenue, traveling now on a separate trajectory. About Jason, the way his drumsticks rocketed across the surface of his drums; the mysterious blue mark hidden on a soft, inside part of his skin. I believed other versions of life existed, besides these, a belief buoyed by the stories I had read as a child in my Into the Unknown book about spaceship sightings, powerful fetish objects, and other unexplained phenomena. Was someone, something, watching me right now from some other dimension, I puzzled, as Jim’s fingers paused their orbiting to slip beneath the waistband of my leggings.

  What would Mary Ann do?

  I skipped a year of high school when we arrived in California, so even though I just barely turned seventeen, I attend San Francisco State University now. I am still living with my mother and Steven in the suburbs, forty-five minutes east. I don’t know why I don’t leave, go live in the city in a crumbly, grand Victorian with seven roommates, ride Muni and trolleys around instead of commuting hours in my car over bridges and across the bay to get to my classes; why I don’t move to where I could walk every night to loud dark clubs and swallow the bright liquids that would make me forget my schoolwork, the fear that I carry around during the day but don’t understand, that would permit me to get lost. I want to leave, maybe I want to, but I am scared. Maybe I am tethered to Jim, who lives around the corner with his parents and goes to community college, who represents playing it safe. Or tethered to my mother, who dates bad matches and works in the front office of a mortgage company and tallies her checkbook worriedly at the dining table. One morning I wake up and move toward the kitchen of our small apartment, where I find a man I have never seen before, shirtless, black hair matted, rummaging through our fridge. Got any orange juice? he asks me. Hello, I say slowly, I live here—who are you? I let my annoyance infect my words (my mother later apologizes—You’re right, you’re right, she says, that wasn’t safe), but inside I am conducting a panicked self-inquiry: am I pissed because there’s a stranger in our house or because I’m jealous? Maybe I want to be the one waking with a strange man in my bed.

  At college I am required to take History of San Francisco. We read the works of Norris and Ferlinghetti and Armistead Maupin’s Tales of The City, books that, while being absent of female voices like mine, nevertheless permit me to situate myself in the parade of characters who have come to California and this city searching for something.

  At first I am excited about Mary Ann Singleton, the twenty-something secretary in Tales who arrives in San Francisco from Cleveland for a vacation and decides on impulse to stay. Mary Ann is naïve, sheltered, but she knows this and wants to break out of her shell. She finds an apartment at 28 Barbary Lane, where she becomes enmeshed with a cast of archetypes—a pot-growing landlady; a bisexual patchouli-oil-spritzing hippie; a sweet, girl’s-best-friend gay guy; a dysfunctional chauvinist businessman; etc.

  Eventually, by the end of the book, Mary Ann is annoying. She picks the wrong guys. She underestimates her career potential. She’s timid. She gets very stuck, at least in this first of Maupin’s many soap operaish installments. It worries me.

  So what again is the issue?

  Most of the hours I spend at my thirty thousand-student college I am silent. I am afraid to speak. My skin prickles when I walk into the cafeteria. I only go there, among all the strangers, because I need to eat. I want to make friends, but when my body moves into a public space I become aware that everyone is watching me. It is difficult to breathe most days. Illogically, I feel sixty thousand eyes on me. I don’t tell a single person about this dull terror that hardly ever leaves me, and for a long time I never will.

  How can I put this more simply? In public I cannot open my mouth.

  Every time I have to open my mouth in public to speak, it feels like I am on a witness stand. My chest tightens and a heat crawls up my neck. Even when I am asked something as simple as my name, it seems like I am being asked to account for everything that is.

  Silence, examined

  EXHIBIT 1A: Qualities of sound and color

  Once on a night after I was fully grown I walked home from a dinner party through the dark, quiet streets of my neighborhood. My family was far up ahead and I went forth slowly, noticing the way the naked poppies swayed in the shadows and watching for cracks in the sidewalk. Suddenly I looked up to see a tree, its trunk, branches, and leaves illuminated silver white by the moon frozen behind it in the ink sky. Immediately my mind flipped, like a channel changing, to a holiday fair in the dark of a Florida winter evening when I was three years old, a fifty-foot tree decorated with tinsel and beach-ball-sized pearly globes—the first Christmas tree I had ever seen, blazing as if struck by lightning; the distant churning of the ocean; the smell of cotton candy; the heavy damp weather; the wonder of the tree and the fair competing with prickly fear on the back of my neck from the specter of the KKK, which regularly marched in bright white robes down our streets.

  Can you state what it is like to lose many things?

  It is disorienting, yes?

  Would you say it is, not to put words in your mouth, but, would you say it is perhaps discomposing?

  Stinging, gloomy? Exposing?

  Exposed is the only real.

  This book is not about . . .

  Sand castles

  A pleasure boat

  Masturbation

  Country line dancing

  (I’m trying to say something but it’s hard to breathe.)

  Silence, cross-examined

  Maybe it is not my silence at all. I could blame it on the fog. The fog that in this city is so near constantly present it creates a blue-hued permission to isolate oneself, a folding into. Not a permission, maybe, but a floating command. It forms a world of its own, a cocoon. A quiet burying. Shhhhhhhhh.

  But then I would just be weak.

  A lot of kids in the eighties had broken homes—do you think you could be exaggerating your response?

  Pioneering female astronomer Vera Rubin discovered that spiral galaxies—characterized by a flat, rotating disc of stars, gas, dust, and a central cluster of stars known as the bulge—are composed primarily of dark matter: matter we know is there but cannot see. Sometimes I picture Vera sitting alone in the hushed hours of night, her eye pressed up against a scope, scanning the interstellar for signs beyond luminosity. Matter is all around us, she knew. Dark matter teases and haunts us from the inside.

  What is the matter with you, my mother would ask, annoyed, when I posed too many questions or spoke of something that the adults in my family all agreed—all agree—without it being expressly stated, should remain obscured.

  In the vital statistics compilation of Canadian families’ marital unions and unravelings that goes back to 1926, just after my ancestors docked on the western continent, there is an observable bulge in the year 1987, a point on the graph where the slowly climbing line peaks. This bulge is the single year when the most divorces occurred—96,200—the year my baby brother was born, the year my parents’ marital union was fraying obediently, right on track with the demographic trend.

  In the central bulge of a spiral galaxy, the stars are in orbits that are random compared to the flat plane of the galaxy. Classical bulges happen when smaller structures collide, sending the stars everywhere. It seems obvious but is easy to forget: shock disrupts the paths of stars.

  What is the matter?

  Even if you determine to be a traitor, at first it is difficult to speak of one’s own aching when that aching belongs, too, to everyone else of the same generation. Is your pain common, or unique? This might be a question of emotional parallax. The experiences of the many have a way of depersonalizing the suffering of one.

  What would Hester do?

  Not what my mother is doing. She is working at an office job she likes but not really making ends meet for us. She is dating a man named Chip. Chip has his own company and a lar
ge fancy home. Chip will see her on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Chip will take her but never us to nice places to eat. Chip’s wife died. Chip will take her back to our house afterward but not his. Chip will sleep over on the appointed days. Chip will go to the country club. Chip will play golf. Chip will be a racist. Chip will give my mother the extra money she needs to make ends meet.

  Maybe Hester would do this.

  How does one relate to the land?

  Sometimes my mother and I just drive around together. We make an ersatz itinerary and we get in the car and get on those highways and just go. We cruise the suburban neighborhoods with their rolling seas of Spanish tiled roofs and their cafes and their gardening acts in progress. We stop in at the biggest bed-and-bath store we have ever seen just to find out what they fill the aisles with. We get iced cappuccinos. We roll the windows down or crank up the air, we slide our sunglasses on, we giggle and we declare with every action we take, Yes! This is the dream! And we wonder again how we got here, shaking our heads and sometimes actually saying out loud, How did we get here? Our favorite song, by Beck, comes on the radio and we make it loud and tip our heads back and yell-sing along. We’re losers, babyyyyy, so why don’t you kill us.

  Map for us your heart

  ISLANDS

  Yerba Buena, means “good herb.”

  Alcatraz, known as “The Rock.”

  Treasure, man-made for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exhibition, which opened San Francisco to the world.

  The Farallons, thirty miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge, they look misty in the impossible gold of the sunset and sound like “far-along,” which means if you reach them you have gone far along enough to believe that you can get to the edge of the world.