Also she was angry at herself for being so rude to Oscar Baldarramma, that night in the hills. It had been a transference, and she knew it. He hadn’t deserved it.
That was the important part. If people deserved it, Doris felt no compunction about being rude to them. That was the way she was. Her mother Ann had brought her up otherwise, teaching politeness as a cardinal virtue—just as Ann’s mother had taught her, and her mother her, and so on and so forth back to the Nisei and Japan itself. But it hadn’t taken with Doris, it went against the grain of her nature. Doris was not patient, she was not kind; she was sharp-tongued, and hard on people slower than she was. She had been hard on Kevin, perhaps—she had needled him, and he never appeared to mind, but who knew? No doubt she had hurt him. Yes, her mother’s lessons still held, somewhere inside her—transformed to something like, People should not be subjected to anger they don’t deserve. She had blown that one many a time. And never so spectacularly as with Oscar, up in the hills.
Which was galling. That night … two sights stuck in her mind, afterimages from looking into the sun of her own emotions. One, Kevin and Ramona, embracing on a moonlit ridge, kissing—okay, enough of that, nothing she could do about it. The other, though: Oscar’s big round face, as she lashed out at him and ran. Shocked, baffled, hurt. She’d never seen him with an expression remotely like it. His face was usually a mask—over-solemn impassivity, grotesque mugging, all masks. What she had seen that night had been under the mask.
So, vastly irritated with herself and the apparently genetic imperative to be polite, she got on her bike after work one evening and rode over to Oscar’s house. The front door was missing, as the whole southern exposure of the house was all torn up by Kevin’s renovation. She went around to the side door, which led through a laundry room to the kitchen, and knocked.
Oscar opened the door. When he saw her his eyebrows drew together. Otherwise his face remained blank. The mask.
She saw the other face, moonstruck, distraught.
“Listen, Oscar, I’m really sorry about that night in the hills,” she snapped. “I wasn’t myself—”
Oscar raised a hand, stopping her. “Come in,” he said. “I’m on the TV with my Armenian family.”
She followed him in. On his TV screen was a courtyard, lit by some bare light bulbs hanging in a tree. A white table was crowded with bottles and glasses, and around it sat a gang of moustachioed men and black-haired women, all staring at the screen. Suddenly self-conscious, Doris said, “It must be the middle of the night there.”
She heard her remarks spoken in the computer’s Armenian. The crowd at the table laughed, and one said something. Oscar’s TV then said, “In the summer we sleep in the day and live at night, to avoid the heat.”
Doris nodded.
Oscar said, “It’s been a pleasure as always, friends, but I should leave now. See you again next month.”
And all the grinning faces on the screen said, “Good-bye, Oscar!” and waved. Oscar turned down the sound.
“I like that crowd,” he said, moving off to the kitchen. “They’re always inviting me to visit in person. If I did I’d have to stay a year to be sure I stayed in everyone’s house.”
Doris nodded. “I’ve got some families like that myself. The good ones make it worth the ones who never even look at the screen.”
She decided to start again. “Listen, I’m really sorry about the other night—”
“I heard you the first time,” he said brusquely. “Apology accepted. Really there’s no need. I had a wonderful night, as it turned out.”
“Really? Can’t say I did. What happened to you?”
Oscar merely eyed her with his impassive stare. Ah ha, she thought. Maybe he is angry at me. Behind the mask.
She said, “Listen, can I take you out to dinner?”
“No.” He blinked. “Not tonight anyway. I was just about to leave for the races.”
“The races?”
“Yes. If you’d like to come along, perhaps afterwards we could get something. And there are hot dogs there.”
“Hot dogs.”
“Little beef sausages—”
“I know what hot dogs are,” she snapped.
“Then you know enough to decide.”
She didn’t, actually, but she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of appearing curious. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s go.”
* * *
He insisted they take a car, so they wouldn’t be late. They tracked down to southern Irvine and parked at the edge of an almost full parking lot, next to a long stadium. Inside was a low rumbling.
“Sounds like a factory,” Doris said. “What kind of racing is that?”
“Drag racing.”
“Cars?”
“Exactly.”
“But are they using gas?”
Roars from inside smothered Oscar’s answer. Shit, Doris thought, he is mad at me. He’s brought me here because he knows I won’t like it. “Alcohol!” Oscar said in a sudden silence.
“Fueling cars or people?”
“Both.”
“But they aren’t even going anywhere!” Road races at least had destinations.
Oscar stared at her. “But they go nowhere so fast.”
All right, Doris said to herself. Calm down. Don’t let him get to you. If you walk away then he’ll just think you’re a stuffy moralistic bitch like he already does, and he’ll have won. To hell with that. He wasn’t going to win, not tonight.
Oscar bought tickets and they walked into the stadium. People were crammed into bleachers, shouting conversations and drinking beer from dumpies and paper cups. Peanuts were flying around. Lots of dirty blue jeans, and blue-jean vests or jackets. Black leather was popular. And a lot of people were fat. Or very solid. Maybe that’s why Oscar liked it.
They sat in the top bleachers, on numbered spots. Oscar got beers from a vendor. Suddenly he stood and bellowed, in a great rising baritone:
Race-way!”
national,
In-ter-
County,
“Orange,
By the time he got to “In-ter-national,” the whole crowd was bellowing along. Some kind of anthem. People turned to yell at Oscar, and one said bluntly “Who’s that you got with you!” Oscar pointed down at Doris. “Dor-is Nak-ayama!” he roared, as if announcing a professional wrestler. “First timer!”
About thirty people yelled “Hi, Dor-is!”
She waved weakly.
Then cars rolled onto the long strip of blackened concrete below them. They were so loud that conversation was impossible. “Rail cars!” Oscar shouted in her ear. Immense thick back tires; long bodies, dominated by giant black and silver engines. Spindly rails extended forward to wheels that wouldn’t have been out of place on a bicycle. Drivers were tucked down into a little slot behind the engine. They were big cars, something Doris realized when she saw the drivers’ heads, little dot helmets. Even idling, the engines were loud, but when the drivers revved them they let out an explosive stutter of blasts, and almost clear flames burst from the big exhaust pipes on the sides. Bad vibrations in her stomach.
“Quarter miles,” Oscar shouted. “Get up to two hundred miles an hour! Tremendous acceleration!”
His bleacher friends leaned in to shout more bits of information at her. Doris nodded rapidly, trying to look studious.
The two cars practiced starts, sending back wheels into smoking, screeching rotation, swerving alarmingly from side to side as the wheels caught at the concrete. The stink of burnt rubber joined the smell of incompletely burned grain alcohol.
“Burning rubber!” Oscar’s friends shouted at her. “Heats the tires, and—” blattt blattt screech! “—traction!”
“Oscar’s bike tires do that when he brakes,” Doris shouted.
Laughter.
The two cars rumbled to the starting line, spitting fire. A pole with a vertical strip of lights separated them, and when the cars were set and roaring furiously, the light
s lit in a quick sequence from top to bottom, and the cars leaped forward screeching, the crowd on its feet screaming, the cars flying over the blackened concrete toward the finish line in front of the grandstand. They flashed by and roared down the track, trailing little parachutes.
“They help them slow down,” Oscar said, pointing.
“No, really?” Doris shouted loudly.
Two more cars trundled toward the starting line.
So the evening passed: an earsplitting race, an interval in which Oscar and his friends explained things to Doris, who made her commentary. The raw power of the cars was impressive, but still. “This is really silly!” Doris said at one point. Oscar smiled his little smile.
“Oscar should be driving one of those!” she said at another point.
“They’d never fit him in.”
“Funny cars you could.”
“You’d just need a bigger car,” Doris said. “An Oscar-mobile.”
Oscar put his hands before him, drove pop-eyed, then cross-eyed.
“That’s it,” Doris said. “Most of those cars appear to need a bit more weight on the back wheels anyway, don’t they?”
Immediately several of them began to explain to her that this wasn’t necessarily true.
“It’s a tough sport,” Oscar said. “You have to change gears without using the clutch, and the timing of it has to be really fine. Then the cars tend to sideslip, so one has to concentrate on steering and changing gears at the same time.”
“Two things at once?” Doris said.
“Hey, drag racing is a very stripped-down sport. But that means they really get to concentrate on things. Purify them, so to speak.”
Then what looked like freeway cars appeared, lurching and spitting their way to the starting line. These were funny cars, fiberglass shells over huge engines. When two of them took off Doris finally got a good feeling for how fast these machines were. The two little blue things zipped by, moving four times as fast as she had ever seen a freeway car move. “My!”
They loved her for that little exclamation.
When the races were over the spectators stood and mingled, and Oscar became the center of a group. Doris was introduced to more names than she could remember. There was a ringing in her ears. Oscar joined a long discussion of various cars’ chances in the championships next month. Some of his friends kidded him about the Oscarmobile, and Doris spent some time with a pencil sketching the design on a scrap of paper: rail car with a ballooning egg-shape at the rear end, between two widely separated wheels.
“The three-balled Penismobile, you should call it.”
“That was my plan.”
“Oh, so you and Oscar know each other pretty good, eh?”
“Not that good!”
Laughter.
Ordinary clothes, “Americana” outfits, blue jeans and cowboy boots, automotive types in one-piece mechanics’ jumpers … Oscar’s recreations seemed to involve costuming pretty often, Doris thought. Masks of all kinds. In fact some of the spectators called him “Rhino,” so perhaps his worlds overlapped a bit. Professional wrestling, drag car racing—yes, it made sense. Stupid anachronistic nostalgia sports, basically. Oscar’s kind of thing! She had to laugh.
As they left the stadium and returned to their car they passed a group wearing black leather or intricately patched blue-jean vests, grease-blackened cowboy boots, and so on. The women wore chains. Doris watched the group approach the part of the parking lot filled with motorbikes. Many of the men were fatter than Oscar, and their long hair and beards fell in greasy strands. Their arms were marked with black tattoos, although she noticed that spilled beer seemed to have washed most of one armful of tattoos away. The apparent leader of the group, a giant man with a long ponytail, pulled back a standard motorbike and unlocked it from the metal stand. He sat on the bike, dwarfing it; he had to draw up his legs so that his knees stuck out to the sides. His girlfriend squeezed on behind him, and the little frame sank almost to the ground. The back tire was squashed flat. The leader nodded at his followers, shouted something, kicked his bike’s motor to life. The two-cylinder ten-horsepower engine sputtered, caught like a sewing machine. The whole gang started their bikes up, rn rn rnn, then puttered out of the parking lot together, riding down Sand Canyon Road at about five miles an hour.
“Who are they?” Doris asked.
“Hell’s Angels.”
“The Hell’s Angels?”
“Yes,” Oscar said, pursing his lips. “Current restrictions on motorcycle engine size have somewhat, uh…”
He snorted. Doris cracked up. Oscar tilted his head to the sky, laughed out loud. The two of them stood there and laughed themselves silly.
* * *
Tom and Nadezhda spent the days together, sometimes in El Modena talking to Tom’s old friends in town. They went out to look at Susan Mayer’s chicken ranch, and worked in the house’s groves with Rafael and Andrea and Donna, and lunched at the city hall restaurant with Fran and Yoshi and Bob and a whole crew of people doing their week’s work in the city offices. People seemed so pleased to see Tom, to talk with him. He understood that in isolating himself he had hurt their feelings, perhaps. Or damaged the fabric of the social world he had been part of, in the years before his withdrawal. Strange perception, to see yourself from the outside, as if you were just another person. The pleasure on Fran’s face: “Oh, Tom, it’s just so nice to be talking to you again!” Sounds of agreement from the others at that end of the table.
“And here I am trying to take him away,” Nadezhda said.
Embarrassed, Tom told them about her proposal that he join her. But that was not the same thing as holing up in his cabin, apparently. They thought it was a wonderful idea. “You should do it, Tom!”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
One day he and Nadezhda cycled around Orange County together, using little mountain bikes with high handlebars and super-low gears to help them up the hills. Tom showed her the various haunts of his youth, now completely transformed, so that he spoke like an archeologist. They went down to Newport Harbor and looked around the ship. It really was a beautiful thing. Up close it seemed very large. It did not have exactly the classical shape of the old clipper ships, as its bow was broad, and the whole shape of the hull bulky, built for a large crew and maximum cargo space. But modern materials made it possible to carry a lot more sail, so that it had a clipper’s speed. In many ways it looked very like paintings and photos of the sailing ships of the nineteenth century; then a gleam of titanium, or a computer console, or the airfoil shape of a spar, would transform the image, make it new and strange.
Again Nadezhda asked Tom to join them when they embarked, and he said “Show me more,” looking and feeling dubious. “I’d be useless as a sailor,” he said, looking up into the network of wire and xylon rigging.
“So am I, but that’s not what we’d be here for. We’d be teachers.” Ganesh was a campus of the University of Calcutta, offering degrees in marine biology, ecology, economics, and history. Most of the instructors were back in Calcutta, but there were several aboard in each discipline. Nadezhda was a Distinguished Guest Lecturer in the history department.
“I don’t know if I’d want to teach,” Tom said.
“Nonsense. You teach every day in El Modena.”
“I don’t know if I like that either.”
She sighed. Tom looked down and massaged his neck, feeling dizzy. The geriatric drugs had that effect sometimes, especially when over-used. He stared at the control board for the rigging. Power winches, automatic controls, computer to determine the most efficient settings. He nodded, listening to Nadezhda’s explanations, imagining small figures spidering out a spar to take in a reef in high seas. Sailing.
“Our captain can consistently beat the computer for speed.”
“At any given moment, or over the course of a voyage?”
“Both.”
“Good to hear about people like that. There are too few left.”
; “Not at sea.”
* * *
Biking through the Irvine Hills, past the university and inland. Sun hot on his back, a breath of the Santa Ana wind again. Tom listed the reasons he couldn’t leave, Nadezhda rebutted them. Kevin could tend the bees. The fight for Rattlesnake Hill was a screen fight for him, it could be done from the ship. The feeling he should stay was a kind of fear. They pedaled into a traffic circle and Tom said “Be careful, these circles are dangerous, a guy was killed in this one last month.”
Nadezhda ignored him. “I want to have you along with me on this voyage.”
“Well, I’d love to have you stay here, too.”
She grimaced, and he laughed at her.
* * *
At the inland edge of Irvine he stopped, leaned the bike against the curb. “One time my wife and I flew in to visit my parents, and the freeways were jammed, so my dad drove us home by back roads, which at that time meant right through this area. I think he meant it to be a scenic drive, or else he wanted to tell me something. Because it just so happened that at that time this area was the interface between city and country. It had been orange groves and strawberry fields, broken up by eucalyptus windbreaks—now all that was being torn out and replaced by the worst kind of cheap-shot crackerjack condominiums. Everywhere we looked there were giant projects being thrown up, bulldozers in the streets, earth-movers, cranes, fields of raw dirt. Whole streets were closed down, we kept having to make detours. I remember feeling sick. I knew for certain that Orange County was doomed.”
He laughed.
She said, “I guess we never know anything for certain.”
“No.”
They biked on, between industrial parks filled with long buildings covered in glass tinted blue, copper, bronze, gold, green, crystal. Topiary figures stood clustered on the grass around them.
“It looks like Disneyland,” Nadezhda said.
He led her through residential neighborhoods where neat houses were painted in pastels and earth tones. “Irvine’s neighborhood associations make the rules for how the individual homes look. To make it pretty. Like a museum exhibit or an architect’s model, or like Disneyland, yes.”
Pacific Edge: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) Page 23