The Ruins of California

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The Ruins of California Page 3

by Martha Sherrill


  At the corner of Grant and Green, we’d turned uphill and soon arrived at Alegrías, hidden behind a plain factory façade—no advertisement, no sign indicating it was an establishment of any kind. A man in a priest’s long jacket and white collar was standing out front.

  “Richard!” my father called out. The two men talked for a minute or so, exchanging observations and jokes about Chairman Mao that I didn’t understand. My father handed him some folded-over bills, and we went inside.

  Down a flight of stairs and around a dozen or more crowded café tables, we arrived at a corner table in the back where my father always sat. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I noticed that the room had been painted red since my last visit in the fall—walls, ceiling, stage, chairs, tables, floor. A waitress appeared instantly, greeting us with husky good humor, almost excitement, as if she’d been waiting all night to come and get my father’s drink order.

  “There’s a table of women over there”—she nodded in one direction near the stairs—“who asked me if you were Gregory Peck.”

  “A poor man’s Peck,” my father said, looking up at the table of women with a smile. One of the women raised her hand—the way Indians do in old westerns. How. Another bent her head coyly toward her straw.

  Cary squinted in their direction and produced a contented smile.

  A few moments later, all the chairs onstage were removed but one. A man carrying a yellow guitar came on. He was young, not quite twenty. He wore a white shirt and black pants and walked to the chair with a casual, untheatrical manner, as if he were arriving at a doctor’s waiting room.

  “Antonio!” a male voice yelled out.

  “Ay-ay-ay!” cried another man, with expectancy.

  “Hombre!” my father called out, half serious, then laughing.

  The guitarist didn’t acknowledge the calls—no bow or even eye contact. His pale face looked only at the floor. His hair was long and thick, swept back from his forehead. He rested the bottom of the guitar on his thigh so the instrument stood up from his lap. A few seconds later, he shifted the position of the instrument so it sat more diagonally against him, then hugged it closer, almost squeezing, and began to play.

  The tune was slow, hesitant, mournful. It was called a soleares. The mother chant. The song of loneliness. My father had played them for years, as far back as I could remember. He’d sit for hours in our Menlo Park house on a black bentwood chair in the middle of our living room. A guitar was in his lap. His eyes were distant, almost as though he were in a trance. Sometimes, when he seemed less miserable and wasn’t playing guitar, he’d take me on the back of his motorcycle if I promised not to tell my mother. I must have been five or six, clinging to him like a little ape. We’d drive to the water, to a harbor of some kind, and get off the bike and walk around. He’d point out different boats with different rigging and teach me how to tell them apart. A ketch, a yawl, a ketch-rigged yawl, a sloop. He explained where wind came from or how gravity held things to the earth, or how an airplane overhead could fly.

  I remembered him sitting on the floor of the Menlo house playing with puzzles. He loved any kind of puzzle—dots and boxes, hex, rolling balls that dropped into holes, knots that needed unknotting, and iron chains that fit together perfectly into shapes that, once separated, seemed impossible to form again. In the mornings I’d sit in his lap while he read the newspaper aloud to me—Lee Harvey Oswald, Vietnam body counts, the Buddhist monk who poured gasoline all over himself and burst into flames. My father whispered and ran his fingers along the lines of the sentences until, one day, the letters on the page began to repeat in patterns that I could recognize.

  He did card tricks for me, magic tricks that he’d been practicing since he was a boy, making aces materialize and disappear. Then one fall afternoon—it was late in the day and the sun was streaming in the window behind him—he was sitting on the carpet in my bedroom and wiping his face. He was trying to explain why he wasn’t coming to Abuelita’s with us and trying to explain something else, but he drifted off into words that I didn’t understand, patterns I couldn’t follow, and then no words at all. After that, he wore his wraparound sunglasses in the house, and the next morning, like a pair of aces, my mother and I disappeared.

  I must have fallen asleep at Alegrías—and been carried home—because I had no memory beyond Antonio’s first song. The next thing I heard was the terrible whine of my father’s coffee-bean grinder. Why couldn’t he buy cans of ground coffee like everybody else?

  “Hey, I’ve got some plans for the morning,” he said, handing me a mug of coffee and hot milk, a tradition begun the previous year. As far as his plans, I could have guessed what they were. Friday nights we went to Alegrías. Saturday always began with pancakes and a few errands—the grocery store, the laundry, sometimes Design Research or a new jeans store on Leavenworth called the Gap. Later on we might walk into Chinatown for dinner. Squeezed into the day—or Sunday morning—we went to Fort Point. We drove along the Marina and into the foresty Presidio, an old naval base, and parked at a crumbling nineteenth-century stronghold underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. We walked around the old fort, which was cool and dark and smelled of mold, and then we walked to the rocks and felt the sea spray on our faces and looked up at the orange-red bridge rising dramatically before us.

  But this Saturday was different. After the usual errands, my father didn’t descend into the Presidio. He turned right and took the car over the Golden Gate Bridge, across the bay, and into a long tunnel on the other side. We left Highway 101 for a street that weaved through hills with grass so new it looked wet with green paint. I had never been in the Marin Headlands before, and it was jarring, after so much commotion and traffic, to find myself in a wild, uninhabited place. We bumped up and down on a rutted dirt road, nearly got stuck twice. My father pulled the car over and put on a denim jacket.

  He walked ahead, leading me to the crest of a rolling hill with slopes of purple lupines. Beyond that, I could see an empty beach. The sand was brown, the color of honey. The ocean stretched before us, gray and turbulent. Clouds were gathering overhead.

  “Moody day,” he said. “Isn’t it great?”

  I’d never seen a beach like that—so inhospitable, so cold. Why were we there? My father was still looking at me, waiting for some enthusiasm.

  “Great,” I ventured, a little hesitantly. “Really great.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  The sand grew harder as we got closer to the water. The curving, elegant tide line had left seaweed—little pods of air that I picked up and popped between my fingers. I drew a pod to my mouth, wanting to bite it.

  “Inez?”

  It was about the pod, I thought. He didn’t want me to eat it. But then he smiled. “Hey. Do you know what those little seaweed balloons are for?”

  “Floating?”

  “Right! For thousands of miles. Across the sea.”

  He took the little pod from my hand—and drew it to his mouth. His front teeth crunched into the seaweed like biting a dill pickle. He made a face and spit out the flesh. “Blecch.” He chuckled, patted my back. He walked ahead. After a minute or two, he turned to me again.

  “Hey, Inez. I was wondering something.”

  “What?”

  “Do you know what I do?”

  “I’m not sure.” I was suddenly nervous. World population, statistics, predictions about the future. I should have known, yet whenever he tried to talk about his work, I tried to follow along but the words got ahead of me, out of sight. “I just think for a living,” he’d once told me, but I knew he used a big computer—the size of a garage—so who did the thinking, my father or the machine?

  “I guess what I meant to ask,” he said, “is whether you feel like you know me.”

  “Yes.”

  He waited a moment but seemed disappointed by my brevity. “I’m glad that you feel you do,” he said. “Because it’s very hard not to feel known—or understood. I never thought your mother understood me
. So it was sometimes hard. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  He paused again. “Have you ever felt misunderstood and lonely—or not appreciated? Do you know that feeling?”

  I was preparing what I might say when he continued, “If you were feeling that way now, would you tell me?”

  “I guess so,” I said, “but I don’t.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked at me with a mix of sympathy and disbelief. “It’s not so much fun to be a kid,” he said. “I remember what it’s like. I really do. Sometimes I look at you, and even though you’re very quiet, I can guess how you are. Do you think I can?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. As we walked closer to the surf, it suddenly seemed too rough, the water going in too many directions.

  He bent down to pick up a stick from the ground, a piece of driftwood that had been smoothed by years of water and sand and turbulence. I stopped with him. “You’re smart,” he said. “You notice things, don’t you? And you’re careful what you say. Those are good qualities to have. There’s nothing wrong with keeping your feelings to yourself if you want to. Or keeping your thoughts to yourself, if something inside is telling you to keep quiet. Do you have that sometimes?”

  “I know what you mean,” I said.

  “I think you have all kinds of thoughts about things that are really interesting,” he said. “But you aren’t sharing them with me. That’s okay. It really is. But someday I hope you will.”

  “I have something to ask,” I said after a while.

  “What?” He smiled.

  “How do you know what you want to do when you get big?”

  “You don’t,” he said, seeming thrilled to tackle a question. “You never really do. Maybe your mother did. But most people don’t. It’s like musical chairs, really. At some point the music stops and you have to sit down. You know that game? The music stops and it’s time to settle on something to do with your life. Mostly it’s a big accident. Some people—your mother—it’s different for them. They have a kind of genius or talent for something. It drives them toward things and to a certain kind of life. But most people, the rest of us, probably you and me, just end up with more choices. Maybe that’s what your mother didn’t like. She felt she never had a choice. She was born to dance, that’s all. Everything else was secondary. But don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about your future. Are you worried?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, don’t be. Just find something you love doing—and then do it as well as you can. That way it will never feel like working.”

  “Okay.”

  I looked down at my clodhoppers—and the little holes on the surface of them, the decoration that formed a swooping band across the middle, were filling up with grains of sand. And my socks, which were too small, had begun to disappear inside the heels of my shoes like they were being eaten. I looked up at my father. His brows were knit, and his face was achingly handsome.

  “I don’t mean to heavy you out. Am I, Inez?” He reached for my hand, and I took his. We walked while the clouds gathered and the mist accumulated, until it became a thick fog. By the time we headed back, I could barely see the hills.

  At the top of the crest, he stopped and turned around.

  “What a beautiful spot.”

  I nodded.

  “Isn’t this a beautiful place?” There was something fragile in his eyes, almost afraid.

  I nodded again.

  “Wouldn’t it be great to build a house here? Right here. Right on this spot?”

  “Yeah.”

  “God, I’d really dig that. Maybe I could. Or maybe we could. And you’d come live with me. How’d you like that?”

  “Oh,” I said, startled. “That’d be great.” But I didn’t think so, not really.

  THREE

  Thanksgiving

  During the lull between his calls and letters, it’s not that my father was dead in my mind, exactly. He was kept on hold, cinematic freeze frame—the pause button not released until I picked up the phone or stepped off the plane. Maybe it was painful to think of him, or maybe his unpredictability and aloof nature made it impossible to project him into material existence. He lived so separately from me, and in such different circumstances and climate and culture—except for our mutual devotion to Laugh-In—that thinking about him was like trying to ponder what a character in a movie might be doing long after the movie ended.

  Over the spring we’d seen each other twice. Over the summer only once. Cary greeted me at the airport gate each time with her foggy sweetness and vanilla-wafer smell and hung around all weekend. She taught me how to dog-whistle—and how to make loud shrieking sounds by blowing on a grass blade. She took me to the university where she studied music and played Bach’s Goldberg Variations for me on a huge black piano. She always told me how beautiful I was and how much fun I was. My father was working on a research project at a computer lab in Berkeley and was busier than usual in those days. He talked about “microchips” and “mainframes.” His work was “uncertain and new,” as he cryptically put it in a letter, “and therefore exciting to me.” This only created an additional layer of haze around him and his life.

  I was caught up in Van Dale and its various offerings that summer anyway. There were piano lessons with Mrs. Zacutti, pottery classes at Logo Park, and day camp at Verdugo Hills Recreational Center, where Robbie and I liked to dive for sunken Band-Aids at the bottom of a vast swimming pool. A family with three boys, all older—Alan, Steven, and J.P.—had moved into the house next door and invited me to play war with them or, to be more precise, to play a nurse who tended their battle wounds. More often there were long afternoons in Robbie’s backyard, where she and I played badminton and tetherball or just rolled on the grass and looked up at clouds. By the end of July, my feet were hardened by shoelessness and my body was tan and lean from swimming.

  He sent two letters a month. These were typewritten perfectly on blinding-white paper with a discreet but painstakingly considered letterhead, PAUL N. RUIN, that was always engraved, never printed. There was one for my mother with a child-support check and another for me with ten dollars. There was always a note, with a vaguely conspiratorial air.

  Darling Inez,

  Money has a funny power on people. The ones who really care about it, and devote their lives to making lots of it, have always seemed like crazy, misguided people to me. Somebody once said to me (a bit meanly), “If you’re so smart, how come you aren’t rich?” But intelligence has nothing to do with making money. You just have to care a lot about money. (Which requires, actually, a kind of stupidity.) I’ve never cared about money. In fact, I care so little that it borders on shameful disregard.

  I’m saying all this because I want to give you an allowance. (You see, I can’t wait to give some of my money away!) You can spend the allowance or save it, whatever you choose. But it comes without the need to do chores and duties, etc. It will be a way for you to practice having money. Your mother does not agree with my methods. But I trust that you will do the chores she asks of you whether money is your reward or not. (Otherwise you’ll make me look bad, okay?)

  Love,

  Daddy

  He called every week or so—asked about my classes and friends and made suggestions that I tended to ignore. “When you’re playing war, why don’t you ask the boys for your own gun, Inez?” he said. “Forget being a nurse.” He didn’t mention building a house in the headlands again—or me coming to live with him. Dreading the latter prospect, I never raised it.

  I asked about Cary instead. He always chirped up. “Oh, she’s great,” he’d say. “She misses you! And always asks how you’re doing. She was in Italy for a few weeks—in Tuscany. And now she’s busy working on a dissertation. It’s very interesting. It’s about how music travels among cultures the way language does, and follows the same rhythmic tendencies. Do you know what a dissertation is?”

&nbs
p; “No,” I asked. “What?”

  I’d become more confident, more outgoing. I asked more questions. I laughed more easily and smiled with my mouth open. A certain formality was dissolving. When I looked back on my life at six or seven, it was as though I had been only half awake, or slumbering in a coma. Now a veil had been lifted, a Halloween costume pulled off my head, and the colors of the world seemed greater in number and more subtle, and sounds more complex and mysterious. In late August, when I turned nine and threw a slumber party with the few girls who weren’t away on trips, I felt so alive, so awake, and so happy that my mother’s pleas for us to “get some sleep” seemed an awful prospect—the death of a consciousness that I’d only just discovered. The world seemed new and in need of reconsideration.

  Birthday packages arrived, as they always did, but this year they seemed larger and grander than ever. My grandmother in San Benito, Marguerite Ruin, sent a tiny convertible sports car driven by a Barbie doll with a dark ponytail. She sent a copy of Anne of Green Gables, a book that I wouldn’t read until years later, and a wooden keepsake box that spelled out INEZ on the lid with inlaid mother-of-pearl shadowed by bits of ebony. Two packages came from San Francisco, a small one from Cary Knowles—“Who’s that?” my mother asked—with a set of blue-and-green beaded coin purses of varying sizes, each bulging with rings and unopened Cracker Jack prizes and tiny bottles of frosted nail polish. In a larger box, my father had sent a ball-shaped white transistor radio, an envelope with a birthday check for ninety dollars (for turning nine, he said), and, underneath, two sleeveless dresses in bright colors with bold swirling patterns and jagged stripes. The label said MARIMEKKO, FINLAND.

 

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