I look into my wine glass.
Here, mix this up with some thyme and a splash of wine, she tells me, handing over a stick of cold butter. It’s hard as a rock, and I just look at it. Cindi shakes her head at me. Stick it in the microwave for a few seconds, babe.
Right.
While the turkey starts to roast, I look around Cindi’s place. The furniture is minimal, but the worn couch has a hand-knit afghan folded over the back. Fashion magazines are stacked on the trunk being used as a coffee table; a couple of bras in Caribbean colors are hanging out to dry.
My family, she says, handing me a framed photo of herself in shorts and a tank top flanked by two large men in white tank tops and ball caps. They are standing together in front of a river. My brother and my dad, Cindi explains. We go to the Russian River every summer.
Who’s this? I ask, picking up a photo of a dark-haired man in a navy T and aviator sunglasses. He’s leaning against a stone wall, tanned arms crossed, grinning widely at the photographer.
That’s Michael, my friend from L.A. He’s a cop down there, a narc, Cindi says.
Are you guys, like, special friends or something? I ask, making quotation marks in the air with my fingers.
I wonder about Cindi’s desires for relationships. So far from the stories she’s told me, she likes fuzzy one-night stands with guys she meets in bars. While my entire existence is proscribed, static, Cindi’s has a frantic, unplanned aspect to it that both alarms and fascinates me.
We’re just friends, she says, wiping the photo frame glass with her apron and setting it back on the small fireplace mantle. He’s the best, but we’d be horrible together. He says I need to take care of myself more, clean up my shit. He’s right. Actually, you kind of sound like him sometimes.
I wander back to the kitchen. It’s cozy in the warm, small space. The mushroomy smell of gravy makes my tongue water. I watch Cindi move from the fridge to the oven in her apron, humming to herself, assembling what I’ve now realized is probably going to be the best home-cooked meal I’ve had in months. Out the window, rain spits against the concrete buildings. I think of the strangeness of being here, a Canadian on American Thanksgiving, making my family meal with a girl I hardly know, a domestic goddess who dances drunk on tables and seems to see right into me.
I’m going to make you a recipe box, she announces.
What?
A recipe box. Like mine. She touches a small pine box with a hinged lid on the counter.
Roasted chicken with cream sauce, kick-ass meatloaf, my Granny’s shortbread. Whenever the hell you do finally get out on your own, you’re going need it. Trust me, she says.
After dinner, we watch TV and then crash for the night. In the morning I shower for a long time in her bathroom, letting the steam swirl around my head and imagining what it would be like to have my own bathroom, my own tiny apartment like this, my own tiny life.
How will I feed myself?
A couple of weeks after Thanksgiving Cindi hands me a wood box. Under the hinged lid dozens of white cards are lined up, filed by type of dish—Appetizers, Main Courses, Holiday Delights, Soups and Salads, Desserts. I flip through the cards and run my finger across the recipes, all copied out by hand in slightly slanted script.
I read through each index card, Broiled Shrimp to Yam Casserole, forward and back, then pull the whole stack of them out and search the rest of the box. I’m looking for additional instructions, something beyond “mix until all ingredients are combined and bake at 350”; some secret message that can tell me how to do the rest of what I need to do. But that’s it; there’s nothing more in here.
Who will look out for me now?
At twenty-two I don’t know how to become a woman who is my mother and also not my mother. This whole time she has been here, in the background, trying to make her own life in California, her back sore from receptionist chairs, helping me, trying to rear up from her own disappointment, the reality of the myth, of things not panning out. Her body, like mine, has absorbed these molecules of sun and ocean and survival, has mingled these molecules with those already circulating in her body since before either of us were born, the cells formed from the snow and forests and cities and villages and ships, cells replicated in longing and dreaming of California since it was the romantic rumor of an island the believers could not let go of. I see there is sadness in her body, and I wonder if that sadness has been invited and by whom—is this what women’s bodies are fated to bring? If I listen to my body, if I follow my desires, will it leave me sad, too?
And yet
Something sits on top of the sadness, making space for something else. One night a few months before I leave I hear my mother yelling hysterically from outside the front door of the townhome complex we live in now. Oh my god! Oh my god! she screams.
What, what, I cry, panicked there is a heart attack, an intruder. I see my mother is shaking as she comes through the door, frothy with excitement, not fear.
A penis, she cries, her bleached hair sticking out every which way, our poodle Brandy at her feet crunching a tiny dog treat with his vampire teeth. I saw a penis in the bushes! Hurry up, put your shoes on, find a flashlight. You have to come with me, you have to! She waves her hands frantically in the air and I can tell she is ready for whatever is going to come next—the 911 call, the police cars and television news teams, the CNN interviews and our five minutes of fame as the closest witnesses to a Lorena Bobbitt-level scandal.
I take a flashlight from the drawer and hold my mother’s hand. I am surprisingly calm. Take me to it, I tell her.
We walk outside and follow the pathway through the complex. Around a bend not far from our stall in the carport, she stops and points.
I shine the light and there it is, flesh colored, curled, lying halfcocked in the underbrush of some holly-looking plant. My mother opens her mouth but this time all that comes out is a kind of squawk. We kneel, peering deep into the greenery until I grab a stick from the ground nearby and start nudging.
Far from rigor-mortis stiff, it jiggles in its supposed life-like rubberiness, not a live penis after all but a convincing imitation, we both realize as I roll it out from under the bush. Maybe it was tossed by some scorned lover or teenager or maybe a disgusted housecleaner. My mother’s hysterics explode and quickly contagion their way to me and now we are both laughing, grabbing each other’s arms, bending over, shrieking, and wiping tears from our eyes. We crouch over the dildo. Should we just leave it here in the center of the walkway for the next unsuspecting person to trip over on their way home from buying groceries at Safeway? In the end we decide that would be funniest and laugh-cry our way back inside, leaving the lost penis to find its own way.
Where will I be from?
When I graduate from college with a journalism degree, out of the blue, my father arrives. Suddenly it is like all these years of separateness, of us almost never speaking, have not passed. The embarrassment, the devastation, its silencing, is swept away somewhere. It’s May, I’ve just turned twenty-three. It took me six years to get through, but I don’t care. A bluebird sky frames the snapshot of us, him in a beige sport coat, his arm around me in my royal purple graduation gown and a lei of lilies he buys me. As though my breaking away and setting out into my own life is the switch that had to be flipped for him to appear.
During this visit my parents get along. My grandparents are here too, and we celebrate my crossing a threshold by eating at a fancy restaurant. Then my father comes to our house and walks into my bedroom, where I have assembled moving boxes.
I am great at packing, he says, did you know that about me? He works swiftly, organizing items, layering boxes, pulling books and objects right off the shelves of this room he has never seen before. He is very concerned about the apartment I have rented in Palm Springs, 450 miles south, where I have accepted a job as a newspaper reporter covering government and immigration, because there is a sliding glass door in the bedroom that opens right onto the parking lot and street.
We are buying you an extra lock for that door, he says, an edge to his voice. A lock and a bar. You wedge the bar along the bottom of the track and no one will be able to pry it open, he says. We’re getting you one of those. An alarm maybe, too. Then he finishes the boxes, taping them tight. Packing, he says, is one of my talents.
What comes next?
She is not sure if she thinks of growing up as a beginning, or as beginning again. Beginning is, in a way, comforting; it means everything that comes before is just the prologue. The groundwork. Something to get you situated, but not the life itself. But beginning again, that to her seems more real. It allows a state of revision, an opportunity to respond to what has come before and to reorient. To correct the record. If our childhood truths were really fictions, to begin again all we must do to grow up is make more space for myth.
What do we take with us?
My father packs my boxes, and my mother buys me a wooden chest, which I fill with all the most important things until the hinged lid will barely close: pictures of my family when I was small, letters from Jason, the shark report Suzanne and I did in the sixth grade, my dolls and teddy bears, sweaters knit by my grandmother, Christmas cards from Jim, my journals and notebooks. I take all this with me and I promise myself that I will try to pack away my fear, too, the silence that filled the spaces between the things.
How does desire finish?
In the end of San Francisco, outside the theater of my mind, after my feature stories and movie reviews are filed and edited by you and you find a new girlfriend and get her pregnant and start looking for wedding venues, after the credits roll, I can’t have you. When the time came I missed my lines and that is it. I have to settle for the state herself, my substitute lover who gathers me in deeply to the tribe of her, a coterie of ghostly characters who float around these borderlands, a psychic orgy of Californian kin who did or didn’t get what and who they wanted but regardless possess a place for all eternity among the very real dripping eucalyptus and wet sand and palms. I am left with the specters of my desires, the things not really, and that is all I have in truth, all that goes before the aperture. Every day as I gulp down my last moments in the city I want both to run away somewhere new and to throw myself in the middle of her streets, right down there where the trolleys clang, and beg her one more time, fill me, fill me, someone please just fill me.
What will I do?
When you are twenty-three this is what you can do. You can drive all night to a job interview down a long, dark coast. To your right is the vast ocean, to your left inky fields of garlic and artichoke. You can move from San Francisco to the desert, from the cool breast of a state to the dry soles of its feet. You will be on your own for the first time, though you have felt lonely for years.
You have gone to school, gotten a degree like you were supposed to, written papers and served coffee and mopped floors, offered your body to some men and all the while investigated your desires closely enough that now you have come to know something about them. But you still have no idea what you are doing. You are afraid of where you’re going and what you will find. What if you find nothing?
To keep you company on the road, and to stay awake, you spin the radio dial. Some station out of somewhere comes in, playing a song you remember but haven’t heard for a long while, and suddenly you love a rainy night.
You roll down the window, let the moist in and the music out. For a few minutes you are five again: thick pigtails, marrying Barbie to Ken, waking up early to sneak an episode of Twilight Zone, everywhere you turn the safe boundaries of the mother-father-you triangle, that Eden, that far, far place.
How we say goodbye
I drive by Jim’s house early on the morning I leave. I don’t know if he’s home. I don’t get out of my car, just stop a few yards away and look for a minute.
The spring grass has come in nicely, and it’s all sparkly from the dew. When I first met him he had just finished a whole summer manicuring that lawn and others in order to earn money to buy the “5-Oh.” I can still feel the stiff maroon leather of the Mustang’s springy seats beneath me. I can smell the burning when I ground the clutch too hard trying to learn how to drive it.
The lace front curtains are drawn; this probably means his parents are away at the boat for the weekend. I peer around the side of the house toward the backyard. I roll down my window so I can hear the gurgling of the fish pond.
I see the oil stain in the driveway that Jim left while fixing my car, and the spot where I posed on the front walkway in a bright blue lace prom dress six years ago, holding his arm.
His bedroom window is cracked open. The shaggy brown carpet, the narrow bed where I left a part of myself, his cross-country trophies, the part of his heart he gave me, all occupy a corner of space in my mind.
The dampness in the air is burning quickly. The June sun already feels hot through my windshield. Soon the neighbors will be out, scrubbing their cars in the driveway, planting summer daisies and begonias, racing tricycles around the cul-de-sac. Later the barbecues will fire up, cold beers will crack.
I take my foot off the brake and roll slowly around the quiet corner like you do when you’re sneaking out.
And then I’m pressing the gas, merging onto the freeway, watching the gated developments and car lots and shopping centers blur by. In an hour I’m cruising along the coast, salt whipping through my hair. I glance up into my rearview mirror, over my stacked belongings, out the little rectangular window behind me and up into the cloudless California sky, where I see my heart floating silently out of its suburban settlement, up, up, and away.
PART EIGHT
Completion
Completion
IN THIS STAGE, THE INTERROGATION IS COMPLETED AND THE body of information collected is analyzed. As appropriate and feasible, the interrogator may return to the previous stages to gather more information if she needs.
What comes from inside the alone
I’ve been sprung. I’ve sprung myself and now I’m going somewhere that I’ve heard is a perfect fit for old people, for resort-dwelling gay guys. It used to be a fit for partying spring break kids but that’s old news now, the party’s moved to Havasu.
Traveling across the base of my state’s spine, snaking through impossibly brown, dry canyons, I panic that I am going not to my new life but to another planet, an uninhabitable one, all gray and camel-colored rock and heat mirages rising in 110 degrees. I will be more alone here than ever and what have I done? Then I see it, the patch of green, palm fronds reaching up like yellow-tipped feathers toward chalky mountains, and also grass that I know shouldn’t be indulged in a water-depleted West, but I don’t care. Sting is singing on the radio about rain and desert rose and with my eyes open I drive into a dream that this is where I will find something, where I will declare myself, in this oasis ahead in the cradle of the state.
What legacies were bequeathed
They are familiars from long ago. It is hard not to believe all these palm trees are for me. They are always there as a location device, to locate yourself, to anchor yourself like them: not too deeply, needing only a little water, shallow roots strong enough to hold on but not be taken for granted. Maybe to be brought in from somewhere else but then to make yourself belong. To lodge firmly in a loamy base. To be comfortable in sands that shift and blow. To be here for now. To be here.
What is this California?
Desert is sharp angles and softly rippled dunes.
Desert is a secret between myself and myself.
Desert is the contour of exoticism.
Desert is ordinary apocalypse.
Desert is a form of liberation.
Desert is scorched hideout.
Desert is a heart storm.
Desert is a fault line.
Desert is a scouring.
Begin again
Everything dry is scorched. Scoured.
In the desert I am dry-cleansed to the bone. Bones picked clean. Expectations picked clean. Fear purged.
In a landscape of vast silence it does not matter how silent you are. Every quiet breath you take matters. No one questions. I ask the questions now. Of others but also of myself, questions I will be asking always. For survival. It is important to the building of something.
One day soon after I arrive here I go out into the real desert, past the fancy resorts and golf courses and casinos and sidewalk cool-water misters, and I see that the sandy edges of it bleed out. The borders of this state, its boundaries, are at this end dissipated, the brink blown to the wind. The borders emit particles, like aliens and our messages to them. Messages echoing back to ourselves, to the aliens we are, I am.
The construction of a life. Think of Joshua Tree National Park, Black Rock Canyon, boulders balanced impossibly in goliath handfuls, all soft, rounded edges, piled high next to spiked Joshua bodies to construct a response to the landscape. Part of the landscape but also the answer to it. Here is what I have to say in return. See? See, we are talking to one another, sharp to smooth, bayonet to monzogranite, yucca to magma, drought saga to flash flood. I am speaking to the landscape, it is answering me. It answers everything I say.
Terry Tempest Williams calls Mary Austin’s obsession with white “the soul heat.”
What am I doing here?
“Unbounded by time or space, the California dream is transcendent, creating a unity, a whole, a merging of past, present, and future in the total California experience,” writes historian James J. Rawls. “It’s quite impossibly everything—and quite possibly nothing at all.”
California Calling Page 14