The Ruins of California

by Martha Sherrill

  Robbie and I liked to talk on the phone after dinner—usually about our third-grade teacher, Mrs. Craig, who was very strict and had a wooden leg. (A story had been passed down, through generations of Van Dale public-school children: A boy had once thrown a dart at that leg.) We discussed other girls in Bluebirds, focusing our critical attention on Julie Brownlee, who was stuck up and “acted big.” (Her father ran a barbecue pit.) We talked about Davy Mitchell or Pat McClarty—a natural athlete, tall, strong, funny, a couple of devastating moles on his neck. I liked how everybody’s phone number in Van Dale started with the same three numbers: 2 4 6. My mind tended to dwell on unifying features of things and gravitated toward symmetry and pairs—patterns never seemed random to me. I liked harmony and sameness. I felt good with even numbers, not odd, and although sometimes my heart quickened when I saw doubles, like 33 and 66 and 88, I didn’t dwell on the fact that there were no pairs in Abuelita’s house or that my mother wasn’t dancing anymore or that everybody in Van Dale seemed born with a religion except me.

  On Sundays, Robbie was all busy with church. On Saturdays she was allowed to ride the bus into downtown and shop. This seemed to terrify my mother. It had taken an endless amount of time, weeks, before she consented to let me go downtown, too. My mother hated the bus, or seemed to, and said the word with the same tones of disapproval with which she said “bar” or “Las Vegas,” as though public transportation were a magnet for perverts and criminals and God’s castoffs, or the grown man in a garter belt whom the Van Dale police were trying to catch. But I finally ground my mother down. She was halfway ground down to begin with, so it didn’t take much.

  The business district of Van Dale was a stretch of several long blocks. There was Webb’s, a family-owned department store where my mother bought her huge bras and girdles and other lingerie. There was Skiffington’s Shoe Shop, where my shoes were special-ordered twice a year from a skinny shoe salesman with a big Adam’s apple that made him look like Super Chicken. There was an ancient Woolworth’s and two old-time movie theaters with big marquees that played strange pairings in the midday. (Planet of the Apes / Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.) When I came home, my fingernails dirty and my breath smelling like hot tamales, I showed my mother and Abuelita all my purchases, things like a yellow rabbit’s foot key chain, a bamboo back scratcher, Chapstick.

  Abuelita asked about the bus in nostalgic tones. She knew all the lines, the stops, was eager to hear about the new fares. She drove to work in her own car now, a white Corvair, but she still kept bus schedules in her head. Sometimes when I was alone, like today when I was riding the plane, I thought about Abuelita traveling by herself to America all those years ago from her father’s house in Peru and then traveling to work all those years—she was a housekeeper for David Feinman, a recording-industry executive, in Los Feliz Hills—moving from one dimension to another, from her small one-story house with its turquoise linoleum and beat-up toaster and handmade Peruvian place mats and flimsy paper napkins into another world of swimming pools and heavy linen and large glass windows, a land of views, of canyons, of expansive space and a sense that horizons were unlimited and not daunting, just an open stretch of blue sky that you could soar into and eat.

  Inez Garcia Ruin. I was traveling through that sky. I was gliding from one zone of life to another. I was passing from mother to father, a baton of a girl flying in the distance between hands. I felt unburdened of my pink bedroom and my ceiling-tall stuffed giraffe, my Midge doll with its smooth nippleless breasts, the warm-biscuit smell of Dr. Guinea Pig and his cozy cage, the aquarium of translucent baby guppies, my diary with entries about the boys I had crushes on. I’d gotten engaged to Davy Mitchell in second grade. But when he used the word “ain’t” in class, I buried the engagement ring he gave me in the side yard under Abuelita’s avocado tree and near the fish graveyard area. I said it broke. He said he’d buy me another one. And I said, “Don’t bother.”

  I felt unburdened of that ring now, and of Davy, and of the complications of living in a household of women where my mother was lost and loud, where my grandmother worked all the time, and where I was always wishing to stay forever and, at the same time, to be somewhere else. And alone on that small plane as it headed northward, I had a feeling I was on my way.

  At the bottom of the jetway, I was ejected into a red-carpeted area of San Francisco Airport with its distant ceiling and cavernous spaces. A herd of fellow travelers was clumping near my arrival gate. They were untidy and un–Van Dale looking—wore beards, muttonchops, Afros, ethnic fabrics, shawls, beads, and bright colors. The smell of BO was everywhere, and people were pressing up against each other for incredibly long hugs and gazing into each other’s eyes. I kept wondered if these ragtag figures were hippies who hated the war and went to love-ins and were still consoling each other about the Kennedys or Martin Luther King Jr., like all those crying people I’d seen on TV.

  I scanned the horizon of heads. Where was he? Then I heard a gentle voice that didn’t seem much older than my own.

  “Inez?”

  A girl bent down before me. She smelled like vanilla and cinnamon, like a bakery. Her straight, dark hair was parted in the middle and her face was flat like an Indian’s. When she smiled, her large mouth revealed two wide front teeth and a gap between them.

  “Inez,” the girl said again. Her teeth were like a rabbit’s. The lashes of her brown eyes were coated in mascara. I stared at them for what seemed a long time, in silence, and then I realized there was a blue dot under each eye. A dot of blue eye paint. Almost like a clown.

  Cookies, I thought. The girl smells like cookies, like vanilla wafers.

  “I’m Cary,” she said, pausing for a moment. “I’m your father’s friend. He’s waiting downstairs. How was your trip?”

  “Okay.”

  “Did you sit at the window?”

  I nodded.

  “I love the window,” she cooed. “Did you look down and see all the tiny swimming pools? Were the farms like squares of a checkerboard?”

  I nodded again, marveling at the girl’s face. The blue dots. The gap in her teeth. Her nose was so tiny.

  “That’s so far out.” Cary took an inhalation of breath, as though she were captivated completely by the thought of my amazing journey through space. I looked at her mouth. She had an overbite, but there was something else about the angles, the curve of her tongue, and something about her lips that seemed familiar.

  “Did you fly through puffy clouds and watch the wings of the plane disappear and then reappear, clear and shiny?”

  I nodded again.

  “Your cheeks are so pink, Inez,” Cary said, reaching to touch my face with the tip of a finger. “And you look so much like your father. He said you were very beautiful.”

  I must have blushed, because Cary paused again. “Hey. I have something for you,” she said.

  She pushed away the fringe of a beige macramé shawl and reached into the front pocket of her jeans to pull out small envelopes of white paper, each about two inches square. There were five or six of them, all labeled diagonally in tiny red letters: KER JACK CRACKER JACK CRACKER JACK CRACKER JACK CRACKER JACK CRACKER JA

  “Prizes,” I said, a flood of excitement in my voice.

  “Prizes,” Cary repeated in a voice so gentle that it was almost a whisper. “I’ve been collecting them all week. Prizes that I didn’t open. They’re all for you.”

  TWO

  Telegraph Hill

  He always did this embarrassing thing at the airport. It was one of his routines. “Inez!” he’d cry out theatrically, as though I were an old flame from whom he’d been separated at great emotional cost.

  “Inez!”

  His head shook in torment. His hands slapped down on his chest and throbbed above his heart. And then, when he wouldn’t stop the bad dramatics, I conjured a look that had taken me a couple of years to master: abject disapproval. It was a game we played. He overdid. I downplayed. I just stared at him—deadpan—and ti
ghtened my lips until they became a knife edge across my face. He advanced, seemingly oblivious, a complete fool, his arms stretched out wide for a hug. Oh, no. That’s when my lack of enthusiasm wasn’t feigned. My father didn’t bend down—he never bent, due to a bad back or possibly just something else inflexible about him—but threw his arms around the top of my head. My face pressed into his heavy belt buckle and just a couple inches above the crotch of his low-cut jeans.

  After what seemed an eternity, he pulled away.

  “What’s this outrageous bag?” he asked, pointing down at the large pink suitcase. “Jesus, what a color!”

  “The zipper broke on the one you—”

  “All you need is a duffel,” he interrupted. He’d given me a camping duffel and inflatable lifeboat from Abercrombie & Fitch the summer before, hoping to encourage a sense of rugged self-reliance. “It looks like a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, Inez. Or like something you’d take on a charter-bus trip of the Hawaiian Islands.”

  I forced a smile.

  Cary shrugged. “Gee, Paul. I think it’s really neat.” She tried to catch my father’s eye. “Where’d you get that groovy bag, Inez?”

  “Is it neat?” He faltered, temporarily at a loss. “Perhaps so. Gee, what do I know, right? I’m so out of it. Hey, Inez, you’re looking swell. Swell.”

  I didn’t say anything for a while, just watched him lift the suitcase to the hatch of the small car and felt an old dread returning. He acted so glad to see me but at the same time seemed sorry I’d ever been born.

  “Let’s go!” he called out. And in one fluid motion, he jackknifed his long, lean body and dropped into the driver’s seat of the MG. Cary waited beside her open door so I could climb in the backseat. Except it wasn’t a backseat, really, just a narrow ledge. When he’d first gotten the car, the year before, I was able to crawl right in. But now some gymnastics were required. I stepped backward through the door and positioned my bottom on the ledge before squeezing the rest of my body inside. As we rode along, my head bent down to avoid painful contact with the roof, my clodhoppers were wedged up against the back of the front seats and one elbow was positioned on the ledge to steady me during my father’s great bursts of speed and frequent lane changes. Once, the year before, during a particularly exciting stretch of road, he swiveled his head all the way around to tell me that sometimes he wished he’d become a race-car driver, but now it was too late.

  Cary smiled at me sympathetically. “How’s it going back there?”

  She seemed a little younger than Marisa, as far as I could tell. Or maybe just softer and more vibrantly sweet, if that was possible. But, just like Marisa, she generated an atmosphere of intelligent passivity, of being a good-natured passenger in a Paul and Inez Ruin Weekend. The only other noticeable pattern as far as I could tell was that both women had dark hair, large eyes, small noses, and an overbite. But then, my mother had all those things, too.

  “How is Mrs. Craig?” my father asked. “Any goose-stepping in the classroom?”

  “Mrs. Craig”—he turned to Cary—“is really uptight. Right, Inez?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s an angry John Bircher who’s got Inez in her grips for third grade. She hobbles around on a wooden leg like Captain Ahab and has one of those bird’s-nest hairdos. And according to Inez she’s made the class memorize the names of Richard Nixon’s cabinet.”

  “Oh, God!” Cary shrieked. “You’re kidding!”

  My father watched me in the rearview mirror. “Inez, who is the secretary of health, education and welfare?”

  “Robert Finch.”

  “Hey!”

  “Secretary of state?”

  “Henry Kissinger.”

  “Herr Doctor Strangelove, you mean.”

  Cary giggled.

  “Mrs. Craig is totally paranoid and always raving on about the commies. Right, Inez? Completely hysterical. Just like my mother. I don’t get it,” he went on. “It’s hard for me to get that worked up. Who needs more labels? Right, Inez? To me, hawks and doves are all birds, and politics is just a lot of wing flapping.”

  My neck wasn’t in a position to nod, but I tried—strangely enthralled by his charm, almost hypnotized. My chin moved up and down a bit, and I hoped that he could see it in the mirror.

  “Don’t vote,” he said. “It only encourages them. Right, Inez?” Then he lowered his voice to paternal tones. “Memorizing isn’t such a bad thing anyway. It’s how we learn stuff—”

  Behind the MG an explosive rumbling quieted all conversation. From the slanted hatch window, I saw a dark cluster of motorcycles getting bigger, enveloping our car on all sides. There was a group of eight or ten men in denim and leather and World War II helmets spray-painted black.

  “Harleys,” my father said.

  “Far out!” said Cary. “The Hells Angels.”

  At the very end of the pack, a skinny girl was wearing a crocheted halter top and black leather pants. She was sitting on the back of a bike, slightly elevated, hugging a guy with a skull on the back of his jacket. My father traced her with his eyes, then sped up—seeming to want a closer look.

  “She must be freezing,” he said.

  “Wow.” Cary squinted. “That bike is so beautiful. So are they.” My father kept his eyes on the girl. In the middle of her back, a thin ridge of spine disappeared under the halter band and strings, then rose out again.

  “What do you think, Inez?”

  A Harley was a kind of motorcycle. I’d guessed that much. The girl on the back must be the angel. But where was hell?

  I opened my eyes. The light was bright and sharp and fell in blazing shapes around me. My father’s studio apartment on Telegraph Hill was an airy white room, decorated sparely and simply. There was a brown corduroy sofa where I always slept, a couple of low white tables, a flamenco poster, and two guitars leaning against a redbrick wall. Another wall, floor-to-ceiling windows, looked out over San Francisco Bay and the island of Alcatraz. Bisecting the room was a deep red folding screen, and behind that, the vast expanse of Dad’s king-size bed.

  Unlike Abuelita’s house in Van Dale, which was a forest of artifacts and souvenirs and yellowing snapshots collected over the years and never pared down, my father’s place was devoid of sentiment. No clutter. No framed pictures of family members. No treasured remains of boyhood or school days. No signs of his former life as a suburban dad or evidence of me or my mysterious half brother, Whitman, who lived in England. It took a little getting used to—the sterility of my father’s surroundings. While Abuelita kept things forever, as if, like a magic lamp, they might contain a genie of good feeling inside them, my father’s things carried no such hope. Objects were set out to be admired for beauty and contemplation: a single lily in a glass cylinder, a Japanese Go board, an ancient bird carved from marble. But when I looked at them, I felt sort of empty.

  “Inez, you’re awake!” He loomed over me with a smile. His hair was drier and looser than when I had seen him three months before on Christmas Day at my Grandmother Ruin’s house. And rather than the strained expression and three-piece suit he had worn for the holiday in San Benito, he was in jeans and a collarless white shirt and seemed in a cheery mood.

  “Great music last night, wasn’t it?”

  We’d gone to Alegrías, a flamenco club in North Beach. He went there every Friday night, whether I was visiting or not.

  “Antonio is amazing. A real manitas de plata.” He mimicked playing the guitar, hunched over.

  “Silver hands?”

  “Yes! But if you say somebody’s a manitas de plata, it means he’s a terrible show-off. Like, ‘Antonio, you egomaniac!’ What a cat. He’s just amazing. Hey, listen, if I could play like that, I’d be a show-off, too.”

  My father did play, but not like that. He’d lived in Spain after college and again when he was in the air force. He’d been stationed there and stayed—studying guitar in some dusty town called Morón de la Frontera that he still talked about. He’d been an outs
ider in a dark world that he never quite returned from. Flamenco captured his attention completely, struck him in a place the rest of us couldn’t reach.

  “Pancakes?” he asked. “Or what about waffles? I have a cool new waffle iron. It’s German and makes these perfect waffles—crunchy on the edges and top, a bit softer inside. What are you in the mood for?”

  During my previous visit, Marisa had spent the night and disappeared behind the folding screen in the living room, turning up the next morning in a white robe and wet hair. But this morning I saw no sign of Cary. She’d come to El Bodega for paella, the three of us waiting forever for our big bowls of saffron rice baked with clams and spicy sausage and chicken. It must have been ten-thirty—way beyond my Van Dale bedtime—when we left the restaurant and ambled into the bizarre nighttime world of North Beach. In my purple windbreaker and knee socks, I passed men wearing baggy velvet caps, women in witch’s coats, panhandlers, winos, an array of beckoning shops selling army surplus, candles, posters, and incense. (Van Dale offered nothing like this.) One place had a storefront window featuring an enormous stuffed tiger with a cigar coming out of its mouth. An old amusement-park ride was displayed in another storefront—a large clown face with a deranged smile. “Hey, Cary, look!” my father called out, pointing to the black-light posters and long glass cases. “A new head shop. Check it out!”