California Calling

by Natalie Singer

  I should have seen it coming, is what I will think much later. Now I think, I don’t want to be alone in this car with him.

  But I am still in love with the Taylors, with being their babysitter. I’m not ready yet for it to end.

  I think we should get going, I say, hoping to sound casual. Sharon and the girls will be waiting. He cocks his head and holds my gaze for a second that feels like a minute. His hand lifts off my knee.

  Yeah, he says. And the engine roars.

  5.

  In February Sharon and Michael are invited away overnight to a wedding. They ask if I can spend the whole weekend taking care of the girls, and then they tell me to bring my boyfriend, Jim. Like we are a full-grown adult couple. Like we are married. This shocks me because I feel so young. I am so young. Neither Jim’s parents nor even my own distracted mother allows sleepovers in their houses.

  No, that’s really okay, I say, almost embarrassed, to Sharon. I can just do it.

  We really welcome Jim, Michael pushes, pulling a beer out of the fridge one day just after they breeze through the garage door after work. Please, we want you to feel free to bring him. Absolutely. You’ll stay in our room. He winks at me.

  That weekend Jim and I take the girls to a movie and out for burgers. It’s fun; we are a band of young people doing just fine on our own. I make sure the girls behave, that their shorts aren’t too short when we go to the mall, that between shrieking giggles they say excuse me after belching loudly and don’t call each other hos or bitches in public. I feel safe in the suburbs that night with Jim and his cop career aspirations in the house.

  But the following Monday afternoon when we get home after school, Kacee saunters over, holding out a pair of panties. With a hollow feeling in my stomach I realize they are my red panties, lacy ones I picked specifically for the occasion of sharing a bed all night with my boyfriend. I must have left them in Sharon and Michael’s master bathroom by accident.

  My parents thought this was dis.gus.ting, she informs me. All the girls have funny grins on their faces.

  I am mortified, afraid the Taylors don’t like me anymore. That they will want to be done with me. I shove the panties in my bag. That afternoon I let the girls goof off while I stare out at the empty aquamarine pool. It feels like they won something and I lost.

  No one mentions it again, but I can’t let go of what happened with the panties. Whereas before I felt like a grown adult, suddenly I feel like a poser. Like I’ve been exposed for what I am, too young, not ready, not a kid anymore but a pathetic excuse for an adult.

  6.

  After the panties, it feels like something has changed at the Taylors’. There are offhand comments about me not cooking dinner, for instance. I have no idea how to approach this. It’s true that when they hired me there was casual mention of supervising the girls while they started dinner, and I have done this on nights when the girls are cooperative. I manage at least to help them chop and prep. But I’m secretly embarrassed because I don’t really know how to cook, not real full, hot meals that can be ready and waiting, delicious, by the time the Taylor parents get home. My mom never taught me and I can’t ask her now, not when most nights she is wringing her hands over late bills, sobbing into her pillow, or out on dates with Chip.

  I’m spending less and less time at home. It sometimes feels impossible, college, the uneventful but steady continuation of dating Jim, the endless concrete commute, and managing life at the Taylors’, where I need to belong but feel my welcome slipping.

  Our mom and dad are really unhappy with you because our homework isn’t organized enough, I sometimes hear from the girls. Their rules seem to be getting stricter, they’re grounded for what seem to me like minor infractions, and their chore list grows longer. I can’t muster the courage to ask the parents directly if they are unhappy with me. I have no idea how to ask, and I’m afraid of the answer. Are they waiting for me to hand in my resignation? Why? Am I like the string of bad governesses in The Sound of Music or whatever shitty nanny had come before Mary Poppins? I’ve thought back to the Corvette incident, the panties. I’ve racked my brain to think of anything I might have done really wrong. Besides not being a chef, I can’t come up with much.

  Things between the girls and me feel different, too. Before it seemed they were as infatuated with me as I was with them. But lately they seem bored, jaded, even irritated. Do you want to talk about what’s going on? I ask Kayla gently one day when she seems particularly grumpy after school.

  Kiss my ass, she shoots back.

  Hey! I’m going to have to tell your parents, I stammer. All three girls laugh. You can probably kiss their asses too, Kayla calls lightly as she saunters off. I darken a million shades of red.

  7.

  In spring, the girls’ uncle arrives. I’m not sure whether he is the brother of Michael or Sharon. I ask, but my questions are brushed aside. He’s staying indefinitely, I’m told, and will keep to himself around the house.

  Uncle Scott stays in his room most of the time, wandering down to the kitchen only to joke for a minute with the girls or get a snack. He’s youngish looking, with dirty blond hair and a bit of a beer belly. His facial scruff is overgrown; he wears sweats and flannel shirts and bare feet. He hardly speaks to me. Though he does nothing obviously wrong, something about him feels odd.

  What’s his deal? I ask the girls one day while they are rollerblading around the cul-de-sac. Kayla stops and fixes her blue eyes on me. He did something, she says in a low voice. Something we are never, ever allowed to talk about. Sorry, you can’t know.

  Between work, commuting, classes, and studying, I am operating on very little sleep. Sometimes on the way to school I nearly doze off behind the wheel. I learn to roll down the windows to the ocean air and slap my face to stay awake. That, plus coffee and packs of M&M’s, keeps me going.

  One Friday, the week before spring break, I forget to leave campus an hour sooner than usual so I can pick the girls up for an early release day at their schools.

  I realize my mistake in the student union, stuffing a falafel sandwich into my mouth as I glance at the wall clock. It’s impossible, I realize. They’ll be released in twenty minutes; it will probably take me that long just to get to my car in the student parking garage.

  Freaking out, I remind myself that they are not babies. I know they won’t wander into traffic and die without me being there on time, but I cannot keep my hysteria at bay. You messed up, you made the biggest mistake, I keep repeating to myself. I bang my steering wheel the whole way to Concord and yell at the windshield, over and over again, shaking my head. I feel like throwing up. Nonononono.

  When I get there, an hour later than when I should have arrived, the uncle opens the door. He doesn’t let me in; I just stand there on the front step.

  I got them, he says casually. I called Sharon. She said you can just go home. She’s not working the rest of the week, either, so you don’t need to be here.

  I return the next afternoon anyway, the usually long drive on the highways, the route past the 7-11, the weird scented candle shop, and the gas station where I buy gas with a gas card the Taylors gave me all passing by in a blur.

  Sharon opens the door and holds it ajar as I stand again on the stoop. She arches her eyebrows.

  I’m so sorry, so sorry . . . I begin. I really wish I hadn’t missed the pickup.

  And then something uncontrollable happens that I will never fully understand.

  I’m really sorry I missed the pickup, I say to Sharon. But I was stuck at the hospital. I’m pregnant.

  My words just hang in the air there between us.

  Why do I say this?

  Why would I say this?

  It is a lie that does not even make sense. I must think, in the moment, on this afternoon on this stoop when I am seventeen trying to be all grown up, that if you are pregnant, which I am not, you are tested for it at the hospital. Do I think this entails a clutch of worried nurses and doctors hovering around you w
ith clipboards? I have no idea that a pregnancy test from a drugstore is all it takes.

  I do not know why I say this. But suddenly it is like the grenade has landed at my feet and I can either wait for implosion or pull the pin myself. Something in me makes me pull the pin.

  Later, a long time later, I will make the connection, about pregnancy as an eject button, a release valve. About my mom and dad and the one sure thing I discovered, as a child, could force a family to burst open.

  I will know that this moment on a suburban stoop is the one when everything really comes undone. When I finally come undone.

  But that is not what I know right now, on the Taylor family’s front step, starting to cry for shame, for so many reasons and none at all.

  Sharon’s face is fixed, her streaked blond hair tucked behind her ear. Time seems to have stopped, hovering around this thing I’ve just said, creating an awful space for it to breathe and expand.

  Well, she says, her face still steady. That is hard. I have been there, believe me (and here she emphasizes her words, gives them a weight that somehow in the moment makes everything more confusing to me). But life is full of responsibilities, she goes on, and you did not follow through on yours. We won’t be needing you as a nanny here anymore.

  I nod and step backward from the big, carved door as it shuts, past the spring flowers in their beds, some already in bloom.

  I won’t ever see the girls again, will not say goodbye, will not be paid for my last two weeks of work, even after I return their house key to them in a white envelope in the mail and gather the courage to ask in the apologetic note for my wages.

  As I walk away from the house for the last time, I realize that we are really through, the Taylors and I. We are over.

  Something is wrong with me. Maybe I will never be normal.

  This, too—my perfect, made-in-California family—has fallen apart.

  Sequester:

  To separate.

  Sometimes juries are sequestered from outside influences during their deliberations.

  After testifying, or failing to, a witness may feel spent.

  Sometimes you don’t get to where you want to go directly. Sometimes it is silence/eucalyptus fog/looping conversations in your dreams and you drift, hoping, toward belonging.

  Self-questioning becomes painful.

  You seem emptied.

  Everything now moves into an eddying of the elements, a process of connection more visceral: liquid, mineral, animal.

  PART SIX

  Ex Parte Examination of the Elements

  Ex Parte:

  A PROCEEDING BROUGHT BEFORE A COURT BY ONE PARTY ONLY, without notice to or challenge by the other side.

  The truth:

  Even though it feels like everyone is watching me, in fact no one is.

  Water

  Hot springs geyser out from the earth like a howl. Pool of green sulfuric water takes a body in whole, laps shoulders, wets heels, infiltrates all your caves. Oxidization: mineral, salt, bromide. On the east side of the Sierra, at the edge of the Great Basin Province, submerged in Grover Hot Springs State Park (an obvious mark in a clearing of pine forest and sagebrush) your loneliness finds corroboration in nature.

  When the pool is viewed from some distance, rather than from directly overhead, the light that is reflected from the bottom loses certain wavelengths that are absorbed by the various color patterns on the bottom. The remaining light waves then pass back up through the water and are reflected at the surface. This reflected light is in the yellow-green wavelengths of the spectrum.

  Because of the transitional topography of northern California’s Sierra slope, a full range of seasons can occur at any time, from major blizzards to dry scorchers, warm clear nights to intense, blasting thunderstorms. Winds of great speeds are capable of whipping through the region causing damage during any month of the year. Pristine warm days can be followed by cold stormy nights. You like this idea of a transition zone.

  Later in the bed of a cheap motel on the outskirts of Markleeville, you sniff your sulfur-softened skin. The Great Basin, you learn from your boyfriend, is where rivers do not flow to the sea. This makes you consider your own hydrographic patterns. You know of your own rivers: they must flow out somewhere.

  Water

  We’ve come to the wedding of his friends, cowboy types—there are still some of these in the Bay Area, out east, despite the creep of Silicon Valley yuppies. I fret over what to wear, deciding finally on a clingy flowered dress. Jim has a pickup truck now, and it bumps along a rutted road to the venue, a half-covered barn-like structure and an open circular field that looks like a vacated equestrian ring. We are in a canyon, Crow Canyon, bordered on all sides by rolling hills; leaning, wild-rooted oak trees; dusty creek beds; the occasional ranch. The bride, I see when I step out of the cab, is hugely pregnant, and for the rest of the wedding I fixate on this. How can these people our ages, Jim’s and mine, nineteen, twenty-one, be near-parents? The whole of it—the cowboy hats and corral of trucks and homemade plates of deviled eggs fogging under Saran Wrap—makes me want to both stare and look away. The groom is in pressed black jeans and gleaming black boots. The bride’s girlfriends and mother and aunts and sisters adjust her veil under the cover of the faded red barn roof (and this, despite partly wanting to run, I am envious of) just as heavy drops begin to coax the corral dirt into mud. A preacher appears and opens a book. The California air smells of hay, rose hip, Earl Grey tea. In the rain as she marries, the bride’s dripping dress clings to her belly like a fresh, new skin.

  Gold

  Jim and I have been together almost four years. Because I haven’t moved out of the suburbs into San Francisco, what I see around me of the kids who remain are pregnant twenty-year-olds, grocery checkout careers, girls with coiffed blond hair and quarter-carat diamond rings flashing proudly from their left hands (engaged) or right hands (promise ring).

  A promise ring is what I have convinced myself I want. I think it will solve the stagnancy I feel with Jim. A promise ring, I understand, is a vague commitment to get married someday, a pledge of love somewhere between dating and marriage. Junior varsity commitment. Nevermind that Jim and I do not like many of the same things. That he watches Nascar while I read Nabokov. That his plans for his future, from what I can tell, involve becoming a police officer and buying a suburban tract home just like the one his parents have lived in for twenty-five years, while I fantasize traveling the world and maybe joining the Peace Corps before settling in a big city.

  To ward off the insecurity of being twenty with the same steady boyfriend, of feeling stuck and small, I convince myself I want the ring. My imagination has been co-opted. The longer I spend in the suburbs dating Jim, the less I can imagine anything else.

  I always spend Christmas with Jim’s family, eating his mother’s cinnamon buns, unwrapping Santa and reindeer paper to reveal the gifts they get for me, trying to delight everyone in his family with the gifts I find for them scouring the malls for hours. This year, against the tableau of a crackling fireplace, Jim hands me a small wrapped box and I inhale sharply. This is it, I think, the gold ring I know will set me more firmly on a life course, even if it’s the blandest course. I pull the ribbon, peel back the St. Nick paper, and reveal a box, which, when I pry it open, hands trembling, contains not a gold band flecked with tiny diamonds or rubies revealing, in their sparkling facets, Jim’s permanent allegiance, but a new Motorola pager.

  Fire

  Jim told me that once his family could have been caught and killed in a fire. They were vacationing near Yosemite National Park. For a week or more there had been intense thunderstorm activity because of warm, humid air from the Gulf of Mexico piping over California. During that period, according to a California Division of Forestry estimate, lightning hit the ground at least 16,701 times, torching tinder-dry trees experiencing their sixth year of drought. Jays screamed and sixty thousand acres were blackened. When it became obvious that they would need to leave
the area, Jim’s family hurriedly packed up the car and raced out on the highway before flames would close it down. I have the image, I don’t know why, of not only cars pouring out of the valley and mountains, but trains, too, in queues, threading away from the fire on hot rails, of animals—mule deer, Sierra Nevada red fox, black bears, and bobcats—bolting. None of this should come as a surprise, even if your life is moving along its track seemingly uninterrupted. Firestorm, dust storm, flood, quake: all are at home in the state of California.

  Fire

  I go for the summer to live in Gold Country and intern as a reporter at a newspaper that still operates out of a small-town frontier building so that when I leave college with a degree in a year I will be employable somewhere. Gold Country: a part of the central California map that time forgot, where miners appeared 150 years ago to make their fortunes or die or both, 130 miles east of San Francisco, adjacent to Yosemite National Park. I will cover county fairs, Main Street candy shops, police logs, and fires.

  Earth

  In the calm before, I am sitting inside an historic Berkeley theater at midnight watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show. My costume of platform shoes and tight black everything makes it hard to scramble out of a place fast. The one thing I will remember about earthquakes is how you hear them before you feel them. In the epicenter, above the campy whine of Rocky lyrics, I sense it, far at first, then rolling toward me, loose and wild, a low rumble that grows into a living growl, a roar, a thunder in the earth.

  Liquid

  Aftershock, it is called. He feeds it to you from a frosted bottle. It is red, right? Flavored cinnamon, the liquor has a viscosity unlike water. Thicker, a hooded water, spiced ejaculate. It burns going down, and it goes down many times. You think you remember. Time passes more quickly when you are swimming in the cinnamon river. Also more slowly. Your limbs tingle, but this internal kinesthesia does not lead to actual movement. Your arms and legs and head are fixed in their positions, mudded. A morning rolls around, light filters dully into a room. Your body is in a semi-folded position, limbs swathed in the poisonous smell of cinnamon, but you do wake up. For the next three months the tips of your fingers and toes stay completely numb.