California Calling

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California Calling Page 9

by Natalie Singer


  Catalina Island, an enclave of billion-dollar ice-cream-colored homes and quaintly crusting boardwalks where one sunny afternoon, a few years from now, I and a man who furnishes me a startling canon of intimacy will have one of a series of fights that will force me to disassemble my life and then put it back together like a child’s fairy castle.

  San Nicolas Island, of Island of the Blue Dolphins fame. There, in the book, dwelled Karana, a composite of Juana Maria, the last of the Nicoleño, who was abandoned on the island after a party of otter hunters killed many of her tribe and the Spanish missionaries evacuated the rest. Rumor had it Juana Maria was trying to save her little brother, who had been left behind, when she wandered off and missed the boat.

  She went after her brother.

  Juana Maria survived alone on the island for eighteen years in a home she built of whale bones.

  Often I feel I am gazing upon California from the vantage point of an atoll, poking up off the coast, studying her the way I see the boys in sagging pants and the university professors in pleated slacks sometimes looking my body up and down.

  Do you understand? I feel her. While I am trying not to drown, I can smell her long, westward flank—artichoke musk, garlic skins—her almond crevices and salty bays. They puddle at my feet.

  Who I am kidding?

  “California is often compared to a lodestone, or a magnet, or the moon drawing the tides,” wrote Dora Polk. “On occasion, California is fancifully described as an enchantress—Circe, or one of the Sirens or the Lorelei. Every utopian name imaginable has been applied at some time—Atlantis, Arcadia, Avalon, the Garden of Eden, El Dorado, the Elysian Fields, the Garden of the Golden Apples, the Happy Valley, the Isle of the Blest, the Land of Milk and Honey, the Land of Prester John, Mecca, the New Jerusalem, the Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan, the Promised Land, the Terrestrial Paradise, and Treasure Island.”

  A chimera.

  Listen to an hour of radio, scroll through any list of movies. Gather a pile of common dreams. California is everywhere. California is everyone’s.

  It has never been only mine.

  PART FIVE

  Allegory of a Caretakıng

  1.

  When I fall in love with the Taylors, I am a semester away from turning eighteen. Two of my own families have already exploded. Nuclear family has not proved successful, but still I am drawn to it.

  I find the Taylors through their job posting, which reads something like:

  Energetic, fun Mary Poppins-type sought for three teenage girls for afterschool pickup, homework, and supervision. Excellent pay, benefits. Experience preferred. Warm, pet-free family just waiting for the perfect nanny.

  At first I’m not sure about working in somebody’s home. I would be seeing and touching other people’s stuff, inhabiting their space, I realize, overhearing their intimate family moments. I would be a witness to the things that people don’t want anyone outside a family to see, things bad enough to have to witness in one’s own family.

  But I need money. The Taylors sound nice enough, and nannying would fit with my class schedule.

  As I walk up to their front door one Saturday in October, I begin to feel hopeful. Their North Bay town of Concord is known for being rough and hot, the sun always beating down hard on the blacktop outside graffiti-coated mini-marts. But the Taylors’ subdivision is nicely shaded, with orderly homes, long driveways, and tall trees that indicate, along with the architecture, that this suburb has been successfully turning out perfectly average families for a while now.

  I notice matching flowerbeds flanking the front door, protected for the mild winter already under mounds of cedar chips. The curved bay window is dressed in flowing ivory drapes. A good family home, I think, tiny jealousies firing like subconscious cannons.

  Sharon Taylor swings open the heavy wood door just as my hand reaches for the doorbell.

  Welcome! she exclaims, ushering me into a formal living room. She reaches out her tanned hand, tipped with pointy, pearlescent pink nails. I’m Sharon, and this is Michael, she says, passing me to a short, buff, goateed man wearing pleated slacks even though it is Saturday morning. They invite me to sit on the couch.

  I love that you speak French, gushes Sharon during my job interview. You can help Kacee with hers . . . if she only studied more I think we’d see a huge improvement. A tutor is exactly what she needs!

  We just want a good influence on our daughters, confides Michael, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his slack-covered knees, barely glancing down at my hastily thrown-together teenage resume. Someone to get them home, help them study, make sure they do their chores, and keep them out of trouble until we get back around six. And keep the boys away.

  I can absolutely do that, I say as I nod, trying to seem mature even though I am still seventeen and this will be my first job. I have experience, though. A reel of memory intrudes—the hours and years beside my brothers with their pudgy, grasping hands, storybooks, soft cheeks needing to be wiped, before we all split away like trains to opposite stations.

  Immediately I feel the desire to work for the Taylors. I want to help them, these earnest parents so concerned for their daughters’ wellbeing. I believe I alone am meant to be their nanny. I have instant visions of a long-lasting connection: I will work for them, helping to bring up the girls while I get through college, and in the process I will become a de facto daughter, an adopted member of their family. Even after the Taylor girls are grown, I’ll come back here on holidays. There will be gifts for me under the tree.

  And they want me, offering me the job on the spot for more money a week than I have ever had in my bank account.

  I saunter back down the pebbled walkway, rosy afterglow flushing my face. Our affair, mine and the Taylors’, has begun. Like all romances, at first ours will be perfect.

  2.

  Every weekday morning, I wake up at dawn and get myself to college, where I’ve registered for all morning and midday classes. After my last one, I get into my car and drive through five freeways and three interchanges to get to Concord.

  We get into a routine: I pick the girls up at their schools, get home and give them snacks, supervise them while they protest about homework and then, with some prodding, do homework, and then we have free time.

  There are three of them: Kayla, tall with braces, is fifteen and a tenth-grader at the high school; delicate and reserved Kacee is thirteen and in her last year of middle school; and Kennedy is twelve, sassy, and pulsing with still-childish energy.

  The girls are friendly and happy that I’m here. They want to style their own hair, have me style their hair (but not style my hair because they quickly realize the long ropes of dark curls will never look smooth and polished no matter how much sparkly gel and plastic hair clips they apply), gossip, read magazines, fight with each other, paw through my college backpack, and practice cheerleading moves. Look! they call deferentially to me, whenever they are doing something cool or silly, look!

  They’re sporty and athletic like many of the teenage girls I have seen in the Bay Area, which fascinates me because the girls I grew up with before we moved west were lots of things—stylish, worldly, slender—but not like this.

  I worry that I stare at them too much, these native specimens to whom easy, happy, girl life seems to come so naturally, but I can’t force my gaze away. I have not yet been so close, and allowed such access, to Californian girls. Their bronze, lean little muscles radiate, frosted with barely perceptible blond hairs. They wear layers of thin, colorful tank tops; sloping basketball shorts or Daisy Dukes with their tiny, sun-goldened asses and toothpick legs popping out; stacks of beaded friendship bracelets up their arms. They play volleyball and soccer. They swim competitively. They eat like weightlifters.

  I’m surprised that, though the weather is warm for fall, they never want to use the pool out back. They don’t seem excited about it, don’t seem to even notice, but I can’t stop looking out at it. Every few minutes I peek at the backyard,
just checking that the big, private pool is still there, sparkly and embryonic.

  One afternoon they want me to dance with them. Kacee loads a CD into their parents’ prized stereo equipment in the formal living room so she can blare it louder than her cheap boombox will go. A song called “Tootsee Roll” by 69 Boyz booms out from the floor speakers.

  Dad’s gonna kill you, Kayla snarls to Kacee, but the music’s already thumping and all three girls pull me onto their carpeted dance floor.

  Come on, let’s see your moves! Kennedy shouts, swishing her tiny twelve-year-old behind back and forth as she drops it to the ground. Kacee reaches her hands up over her head and then arches her back as she lowers her hands back down behind her in a backbend, then kicks her legs up and over her body in a full flip like the ones that I have seen in USA gymnastics competitions. I know I should get them moving toward their homework and chores, but I am mesmerized.

  Kayla launches into some breakdancey moves. Grind it, grind it! the other two cheer, laughing hysterically as I show them what must seem like my very lame, rusty old-girl moves. Let me see your tootsie rolls. I am still seventeen, just a few years older than them, barely six months out of high school, but I feel ages beyond them, yet also somehow younger than them. Like in their sisterliness and Californianess, they know something I never will.

  3.

  The Taylor adults usually come home around six, arriving simultaneously in their separate cars, swinging through the garage door into the kitchen, and quizzing the girls about homework and school and friends and, always, the progress made on their long list of household chores.

  One night in the late fall it is dark when the Taylors sweep in, as dark as when I wake up before dawn to make it to my early classes and be done in time to pick up the girls in time for their school bell.

  How was the afternoon? asks Sharon, dropping her bulging suede day planner on the counter. Did they get their homework done?

  We had too many chores, Kayla tosses out, before I can tell them that the girls had told me they had no homework that day.

  Michael kicks the fridge door closed and cracks a beer and says to me, We really need you to get a handle on their schedules.

  Yeah, pipes Kennedy.

  What?

  No dinner started? Sharon gasps suddenly, glaring at Kacee, who has been chopping mushrooms at a furious pace since the parents pulled in.

  I’m confused. It seems like we’ve been busy since four—we did some French conversation; we cleaned the bathroom and folded laundry; and then there was that dance breakout session . . . I open my mouth to tell Sharon and Michael more about our afternoon, but they have turned their backs and are huddled now over the mail, murmuring together. The girls have united in kitchen duty, drawers are banging, a gas burner clicks. The family has folded in. I’m not needed here anymore, I realize, my day abruptly done.

  I wave bye and close the front door behind me, leaving the Taylors together in their steaming-up kitchen. As I slide into my car and turn my key, a feeling falls over me. I might have had a family like this, I think. Not the step-family that was destined to dissolve before it even formed; not my dad’s new family playing out without me; but my real family. My “family of origin,” I mouth, trying out the new term I picked up at school in Sociology 101.

  In an alternate life, I would be driving home now to my own parents, to a family like the Taylors.

  I curve tiredly around the dark on-ramp onto the wide belt of the southbound 680. Stop it, I tell myself. Why shouldn’t they have a nice family?

  I pick up speed. I had a house like theirs once.

  The last time I saw it was seven years ago, the white brick house with black shutters and the address, Twenty-Four, spelled out elegantly in cursive above the black garage door. Like Alice, I can slip back there through a secret hole, down a tunnel and into a flip-flopped land where the now transforms into the then, where the seemingly magical is still happening as ordinarily as ever.

  There was a square yard in the back, with a swing set and a thick maple tree in the center. It took all day, every Sunday each fall, for our father to keep up with that tree. It shed relentlessly, red and yellow and orange and brown leaves bigger than my head, crunchy floaters that sailed down like slow-motion patches of quilt. Maybe there was an long summer one year or an early winter another, but that silent shower of fat fall leaves was as predictable as our father’s hands wrapped around the rake handle. There we are: me, my brother Steven, in our mittens, scrambling around the piles as our dad formed them, belly-flopping into the leaves when he turns his head in the other direction, laughing, wiping noses on our sleeves.

  They told us they were getting divorced in spring, just as the lilac tree was coming into bloom underneath their bedroom window. I sat on my parents’ bed, my treasured collection of neon jelly bracelets sticking to my arm. This is the detail to which my mind affixes itself (not her crying or his crying or the strange, gelatinous quality of my own tears): That upcoming summer, after years of my pleading and cajoling, we were finally supposed to become members of the community swim club. Our parents had promised. At last, it was going to be the summer of cabana chairs and hot dogs and days splashing on pool noodles with the Haltons, my best friend Erika’s family, who had been pool members for two years already.

  Instead, my father moved out and our house went up for sale.

  Who lives in that house now? I wonder, the Taylors’ neighborhood receding fast behind me. If I squeeze my eyes tightly, I am sure I could picture myself there still, in front of my big bedroom window, reading Judy Blume, watching for snow.

  4.

  Christmas is huge in the Taylor household. The girls start their lists early, and I help them. Kacee, always one to butter up her parents, works unusually hard to write her list in French. For winter break they are going to Hawaii, where they go every year to lounge on the beach and cram in as many wild water sports as they can.

  Leading up to their vacation, I hear from the kids about what they’ll do—snorkel, water ski, tan until they’re even more golden—but I hear Sharon and Michael arguing beforehand, too.

  They can’t afford it, the credit cards are nearly maxed, something’s got to change. I don’t know why, but this knowledge makes me uncomfortable, almost queasy. I think about the $300 they pay me every week, how big of a chunk of their budget that might or might not be.

  It’s obvious that the Taylors aren’t wealthy in the way the families who live in nearby suburbs are, in Danville, Walnut Creek, Blackhawk, near where I used to live in an even-nicer-than-the-Taylors’ house, exclusive communities with gates and circular driveways that shelter the beneficiaries of Silicon Valley’s crazy growth. Sharon works as a mid-level bank manager; Michael does something mysterious—I can’t remember what job description I was given when they interviewed me. All I know is he wears a suit and carries a black leather briefcase and drives a Corvette. And the girls seem to have all the short shorts and basketball shorts and tankinis and hair accessories they need.

  I don’t want to know about financial stressors. I only want to be able to afford my own guzzling gas tank and college textbooks. I want things to be all good at the Taylor house.

  But lately, more and more, I’m sensing that they’re not.

  The girls often whisper, crowd into the bathroom, block me out of their bedrooms. At first I figure these are normal grabs at privacy, ways to hide their obsession with boys and the cheap cosmetics they somehow emerge from the mall with.

  But something more feels off.

  Do you have any brothers or sisters? Kacee asks me one day while I am trying to get them to sit still and do some homework. The three have been bickering all afternoon and I’m panicked about the lengthy chore list.

  I have two siblings, like you, but they’re brothers, I say, keeping it simple and not mentioning that one brother actually has a different father, that our family came apart after he was born. I also don’t mention the step-family I had for two years, the o
ne I came to California with.

  Kacee glances knowingly at Kayla, who grimaces. Shut up, she orders.

  Actually, I have a half-sister, Kacee says anyway, with a quick little grin. The girls are now looking at each other with narrowed blue eyes.

  You’re going to get it, warns Kennedy, smirking and shoving a handful of chips into her mouth.

  Ho! Kayla hisses at Kacee.

  What’s going on here? I ask in as commanding a voice as I can muster. But my alarm seems suddenly to unite them, and they all clam up and pretend to be doing what they’re supposed to, as if to say, It’s private, you can’t know because you aren’t one of us.

  Just before Hawaii, I am invited to a family concert at the younger kids’ school. Sharon gets a head start with the girls while I tidy up the kitchen.

  You’ll drive with me, Michael says, coming downstairs in a fresh shirt.

  Michael’s black Corvette is parked inside the Taylors’ three-car garage, and I open the door and curve myself into the front passenger seat. I’ve never been in a car like this before. He pauses before turning the key in the ignition, making this quiet moment before I feel the deep rumble of his sports car through the lower half of my body seem almost sacred. The automatic garage door is still closed, holding us inside.

  Hot machine, isn’t it? Michael says, leaning across the front seat to give the caramel leather that wraps the dashboard a stroke. How fast do you think it goes? he asks, looking at me.

  The Corvette is tiny inside; we are only a few inches from each other. It smells faintly of cigar and cologne. In the low bucket seat I am half reclining.

  I don’t know? I ask, trying a smile.

  You’re about to find out, Michael says. He looks at me and then he puts his hand on my stockinged knee.

 

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