California Calling

by Natalie Singer

  What’s the problem now?

  Jim and I did watch some movies together, mostly the action stories he preferred. But once I made him watch Schindler’s List.

  The scene that haunted me the most was that of the young girl in the rose-red coat wandering around the black, gray, and dirty-white ghetto. The richness of the color in the bleakest of backdrops, life at the knife edge of death. As I watched with tears falling down my face I wondered who we had left in our wake, my family who was questioned and then granted passage across borders.

  It can break you open, to detach from everything you come from. To be cut or cut yourself loose. It is the heart of loneliness inherited; an emptiness. The impediment to assimilation even as our hunger for it devours us.

  I think after the movie Jim understood this a bit more—one thing I could leave him with.

  Some of them wrote testaments

  Some of our people were from Smolensk, which lay outside the Pale of Settlement and where the Jewish population rose dangerously to 10 percent in the years leading up to pogroms and violence. For a while it seemed they could live, and then the hoax was over.

  She might have known the boy, the soldier, while the family lived still in Russia. A boy maybe from her hometown. Or, no, perhaps a man, not a boy, whom she really did meet for the first time on the ship. Did they lock eyes in the bread shop of a small village in the western palm of the Russian empire as fires and smoke rolled silently toward them? Or did he press hard up against her, she arched in receipt, gasping down the rancid hot choke of terrorized bodies packed into a hull and a thin cold current of Atlantic air spraying through the rusted porthole in relief, like a holy blessing?

  Did it matter, by the time my great-great-aunt invited him to invade her, that he was a soldier? We must assume, in any case, that he was Jewish, or he would not have found himself an emigrant to the other side of the world, aching to slough off violence, daring to hope for reinvention.

  In any case, they both would have been primed for a becoming.

  How does one split oneself off?

  Jewish soldiers were the first among Jews of Eastern Europe to develop dual identities. Separated from their families and communities, lower ranks of Jews, especially those who served beyond the Pale, were neither fully observant nor fully assimilated into the Russian Orthodox, predominantly peasant-origin milieu. Most Jewish soldiers kept together, helping one another preserve traces of communal identity. In 1891, some twenty thousand Jews—mostly reserve soldiers and their families—were banished from Moscow. By the 1890s—attacked for being less than Russian patriots, cunning draft dodgers, and useless soldiers unfit for combat—Jews in the army found themselves segregated. They had one foot in each world, indefinitely in a kind of paralyzed, embedded exile.

  My great-great-aunt, like Chava, daughter of Tevye1, would have spent her young years divided in a different way: inside her parents’ home, writing letters, stirring soup, milking cows, laundering beds, caring for younger siblings, and looking out the wooden shutters toward the forest and whatever could be beyond. When he came, he was worth the loss of everything that was left behind.

  What, I wondered, would love like that feel like?

  1Question from Scott the copy editor: Will readers know this reference?

  I just want to be visible.

  Is this the denouement?

  FADE IN:

  EXT. TWO SUBURBAN HOUSES – NIGHT

  As the winter sun fades behind the strip malls, lights flip on inside the tract houses of California’s quintessential bedroom community, San Ramon.

  INT. SUBURBAN HOUSES – BEDROOMS – NIGHT

  Each on their telephones inside their bedrooms, the young man and young woman hold their breaths as a difficult conversation ensues.

  NATALIE, in her last year of college, tired of the claustrophobic limitations of the suburbs and her boyfriend of five years but afraid to cut herself loose into the unknown—unable to see the life ahead—cradles the phone like a beige bulwark.

  NATALIE

  I’m graduating soon. I want us to talk about what’s going to happen.

  JIM, two years older than Natalie but still inching along in community college, cocks his ear to the receiver and casually lifts his foot, clad in a white and neon green Nike sneaker, up onto his bedpost.

  JIM

  Like what?

  NATALIE

  (Twirls phone cord around finger and puts a coil of her hair in her mouth)

  I’m probably going to need to get a reporter job wherever I can find one. That might mean moving to another part of California. They have schools everywhere, so maybe you could transfer or . . .

  JIM

  Yeah . . .

  NATALIE

  It might be hard but what I am saying I guess is that there is a way for us to stay together and I am willing to put in, like, 110 percent. How much can you put in?

  JIM

  (After a long silent pause, over phone)

  Zero, I guess.

  NATALIE

  Zero?

  JIM

  Yeah.

  NATALIE

  I guess this is decided then.

  In Natalie’s bedroom the phone CLICKS into its base and a DIAL TONE SOUNDS.

  DISSOLVE TO:

  EXT. SUBURBAN STREET

  The moon slides up over lawns.

  I meet a girl named Cindi

  I meet a girl named Cindi who starts inviting me out to go dancing with her. The first night, I pick her up from her apartment and she flops down into my passenger seat. She looks over my outfit—boot-cut jeans, fitted black top, dark curly hair long and loose down my back—and nods in approval.

  What’s up girl? Are you ready to get fucking crazy? she asks, stuffing a cotton bag under the seat.

  Change of clothes, toothbrush, she explains.

  I raise my eyebrows: we’re supposed to be coming back to her place tonight, but I don’t say anything.

  I’m taking you to Rick’s. I hope you have your drinking bra on. Turn right here, Cindi jabs her thumb toward the window.

  I force a grin. What exactly does she mean by fucking crazy? I wonder, kicking up a cloud of dry leaves as I peel out of the apartment’s parking lot.

  Not that I’m worried about impressing her. Cindi isn’t cool in the way truly cool girls are; she isn’t untouchable. We met last spring working at a coffee shop; Cindi still works there and doesn’t have any career ambitions beyond pulling espresso shots. She doesn’t intimidate me, I decide, taking in her apple-scented hair and lip shine.

  Inside the club there’s a long bar along the side and a dance floor at the back, where techno-pop music is playing. Cindi goes straight for the bar and orders for both of us. The drink she passes me is laced with a limey syrup and strong. Cheers! she says, clinking hers to mine and then gulping. We edge into a little bar table and survey the scene, which is mostly guys in their twenties parked blankly with their beers, looking punky in their saggy jeans and white collared shirts. At the back some girls in tight skirts grind with each other on the uneven floor tiles; one in a lacy bustier is climbing into a wire cage at the top of a few steps. What a skank, Cindi tells me, nodding at the cage girl, who has invited her friend in with her. The two are now gyrating against each other behind the bars, and a couple of the guys up front have noticed and start moving toward the back.

  Come on, Cindi yanks my sleeve and we go to the bar.

  What’s next, ladies? the bartender asks us. He’s wiry, with a blue bandana hanging out of his jeans pocket.

  What’s your name? she demands.

  Jack, he answers. He’s wiping down the bar with a towel, slowly.

  Is that your real name, or the bar name you give all the women who ask? Cindi cracks her gum. I wonder where she put it while she downed her lime drink.

  Jack stops wiping and looks up. Real name, he says, as if he has a million times before. The bored eyes are pale, like river ice. He’s beautiful.

  What do you thi
nk would be good for me? Cindi asks this while leaning forward, so that her stretchy tube top gapes, revealing an almost imperceptible amount of cleavage.

  Bartender Jack looks at her, then me, then back at Cindi. Beer for you, he says to her, and something fruity for you, flicking the ice eyes back to rest on me. Huh, Cindi says, leaning back onto the barstool, Yeah, whatever.

  The night fast-forwards fuzzily. At some point, we end up on the dance floor, which has gotten crowded, tripping over each other and shouting into the ears of a couple of guys who are trying, I think, to pick us up. Finally, when the metal cage empties out, Cindi grabs my hand and drags me up the three metal steps and into it. She clangs the door shut and begins to dance with her arms in the air. I close my eyes, tip my head back, and start to sway.

  By one a.m. I realize Cindi is way more drunk than I am. Her voice has gone to a high-pitched shriek and she’s wobbly. I leave her near the front of the club to find some water at the other end of the long bar. When I come back, Cindi is standing on top of a barstool with one black spiked boot on the bar. A middle-aged guy with a gold watch is holding her hands and balancing her weight while she lifts her other foot up onto the bar. I think my jaw drops. Once up on the bar, Cindi swigs the last of her drink and then, faster than I really understand what is happening, wriggles out of her tube top and flings it out to the gathering crowd.

  She’s now up on the bar in her jeans and a transparent black bra, grinding her hips and laughing.

  I’m frozen to the grungy floor, but my mind is moving fast, fumbling through my options. Should I pull her down? I can imagine how much all these men would love to “help” Cindi out right now. I am thinking there’s no way I am going to convince her to leave when Bartender Jack, who’s come down from the other end of the bar and noticed a tall blond girl with AA tits and no shirt stomping his work surface, leans toward me. You gonna get your friend off my bar? he says, low, into my ear. I sway a little myself. I don’t know if it’s the alcohol or the problem of my naked acquaintance/friend on the bar or Bartender Jack’s mouth this close to mine.

  Just then, Cindi seems to crumple. She reaches down for the bar top with her hands but one slips off. Two of the guys catch her and lift her down. She mumbles something in my direction, laughs, then passes out. Get her some air, I hear someone say. And then we are outside.

  We stay out here, Cindi lying on the sidewalk, me sitting on the curb. She’s still in just her bra, so I drape my sweater over her. The crowd has floated back inside after someone determines Cindi is fine, just really drunk. After a while she wakes up. We hobble to my car, and I drive us home.

  Some things are hard to qualify

  I’m in love with my editor at the newspaper. Fallen into obsession, or at least a prolonged state of wanting. I sit at my desk outside his office crossing and uncrossing my legs, bouncing my knee, typing my film reviews into the computer while one eye slides to the right every thirty seconds to look for his thick head of black hair poking out of the doorway.

  I think about him at night until I can fall asleep and then I dream about him. Zev. He is ten years older than I am. He lives with his parents in his house on a hill in San Francisco. He drives a Volkswagen. He loves baseball. Sometimes I need to go into his tiny office, something that causes me to sweat and fantasize incessantly. He always invites me to sit. He gives me plum reporting assignments when I should be doing calendar entries. He praises my work. After six months he offers me a full-time job. You have to come work for me, he says, leaning over his desk. Those dark eyebrows. I fight the urge to drop out of college the next day.

  For the first half of the year, Zev is single. His girlfriend has broken up with him. This is my window: I could ask to buy him a drink after work under the auspices of getting some mentorly advice. I could ask for career guidance. I could—

  Instead I stay quiet.

  How should I categorize our balance of power?

  I met you in Hunters Point when I was a student at San Francisco State, where the nation’s first ethnic studies department was birthed out of anger and unrest. I was the only white girl walking through the neighborhood on my way into the building where you supervised the innards of an independent newspaper in its twilight, where thirty-two years before, not far away, a white police officer killed an unarmed black boy, sparking a riot that surged through the city like a seiche; it was just afterward across the bay that the Black Panthers came up. You sent me to the Fillmore, where I found my voice enough to talk to the surviving mothers and fathers of a movement, the barber-shop owners, the jazz entrepreneurs, the grandmothers, the youth activists working with the kids. To hear their voices and write down the important things they had to say. I brought back to you the stories I could find of the old San Francisco and the new, your news assistant, your time traveler, your willing servant, and I lay those stories, breathless, at your ironically adorable Vans-clad feet.

  This went on until it was time for me to graduate from college and go away and start my life.

  Draw a map of your heart

  In my movie life you and I are together. We are both characters for the screen, people who wander from the Sunset District to the mouth of the bay, who are wide open and uncluttered and as empty as the freshly unloaded vessels sitting in the port’s dark waters. Via telescoping cameras I am seen pushing my fingers through your black hair. In the climactic scene we are shirtless and facing each other (close-up, please) and the space between the parts of our skin that are most nearly touching is only the width of two vintage copper pennies and when we open our mouths to breathe in the fog that space disappears. Your lips pull my nipple in softly, but what comes next is an eruption.

  What do I keep on replay?

  In another scene I am Mary Ann from Tales of the City except it’s not the 70s it’s 2000 and everyone is in business suits with big shoulders and I live in Coit Tower, the one they erected at the top of Telegraph Hill in 1933 and named after Lillie Hitchcock Coit, the wealthy eccentric and patron of the city’s firefighters. Coit Tower is shaped like a cock, the head of which I live inside. Every day I/Mary Ann let down my fire-engine hair and you climb up it, your black hair rustling in the breeze off the San Francisco Bay, and you come inside the open window at the top of the tower and we sit at a table for two and have espresso and share the New York Times.

  Why can’t I just confess my desire for him?

  Weak-kneed, I do ask myself this.

  “Every woman has known the torment of getting up to speak,” wrote Hélène Cixous. “Her heart racing, at times entirely lost for words, ground and language slipping away—that’s how daring a feat, how great a transgression it is for a woman to speak—even just open her mouth—in public.”

  I could not confess it to him. But I could confess it to myself, and silently I sunk into it, absorbing the desire, massaging it, taking it into my cavities and factions for storage, for use afterward. This desire, in waves. It would come in handy.

  How can I explain this better?

  I’d be speechless before you even now, and that is something I can never ever change.

  Remember what knowledge is needed

  It’s Thanksgiving. We’re Canadian, so turkey day is nothing big for us, and my mother plans to go with her boyfriend to his country club. Normally I would be at Jim’s, helping his mother arrange little black-hatted Pilgrim placeholders along the freshly polished dining table. Instead, I accept Cindi’s invitation to her place.

  When I walk into the tiny studio, steam is wafting into every corner.

  I started dessert already, since the oven won’t fit more than the turkey. Hope you like apple pie, Cindi tells me, wiping a knife off on the apron she is wearing.

  And because I know your fancy ass doesn’t like beer, she goes on, I bought you a bottle of wine.

  She twists off the cap and pours me a glass, smiling at herself. I take it, distracted—my brain is still stuck on the fact that Cindi is dressed in an apron, and not a racy French maid apron y
ou’d find in a costume shop but the real kitchen kind, with little cornucopia fruit baskets all over it. With her blond hair in a loose bun and her glasses on, which I’ve never seen, she looks shockingly domestic.

  The apartment is tiny, even for a studio. Cindi’s bed is almost in the kitchen; you can sit on the edge of the bed and grab a drink from the fridge. On the kitchen counter, a small raw turkey sits in a roasting pan, and Cindi is working it over with a basting stick. Ingredients for stuffing are spread out.

  How do you know how to do all this? I ask.

  Do what? Cindi sprinkles chopped-up herbs.

  Cook a turkey and bake a pie.

  Cindi snorts and smiles at me with the arched eyebrow she sometimes uses when I say something that shows my age. At twenty-two, I’m a few years younger but, I’ve deduced, eons away in life experience.

  You’re so funny, she tells me. Do you know how to bake a chicken? A cake? Can you even make mac and cheese? Your mom probably still does all that for you, right? Does she do your laundry, too?

  I can make macaroni and cheese, I snap back. But Cindi’s right. I can’t cook a chicken, much less a turkey.

  You need to learn how to take care of yourself, Cindi says, looking at me over her steamy eyeglasses, baster poised mid-air. No one’s going to look out for you your whole life, that’s for shit sure. You need to get on with it.