The Ruins of California

by Martha Sherrill

“These couldn’t be Dad’s,” he said. Digging deeper into the box of buttons, Whitman picked out two more. One button said, NO MORE FIRESIDE CHATS. Another said, WE DON’T WANT ELEANOR EITHER.

  “Who’s Eleanor?” I asked.

  “Eleanor Roosevelt. You’ve never heard of her? N.C. hated the Roosevelts so much that he used to collect Roosevelt dimes to keep them out of circulation. My mother told me that. The Ruins are all knee-jerk.”

  “What?”

  He pulled out the drawer farther and reached deep into it, extracting a circle of small, dark, brassy keys and shaking them like a baby rattle. “Not Dad, though. You know what he says. ‘Don’t vote—’”

  “‘It only encourages them,’” I said. We both laughed.

  “Look here,” Whitman said, reaching down to the back of the closet. Some framed pictures were stacked and leaning against the wall—a few diplomas, an award of some kind. Behind these were two hand-tinted photographs of a nude girl. She was standing in a pond or lake, kind of hunched over. Her breasts were small, almost flat. The water was so blue. Her skin was so pink. “I discovered this last night,” Whitman said.

  “Who is it?”

  “Nobody,” Whitman said. “That’s the whole point. She’s a nude. Doesn’t matter who she is. Isn’t that funny?”

  I wasn’t sure why it was funny—and there was something familiar about the girl. Who was she? But after a long look, my eyes left the naked girl and traveled around the bedroom. I studied the soft brown carpet, the heavy wooden blinds, the dark, solid feeling. Until that moment, as I stood there with Whitman, it had never occurred to me that my father had been a boy once. He’d been a boy in this very place. But aside from the shelves of books about card tricks and magic, the picture of Einstein, the diplomas, a few swimming medals I wasn’t even sure were his, and maybe the nude girl, there was no trace of that boy anymore. Only Whitman, and his scattered clothes, and his open, empty duffel.

  “Do you know how your mother met him?” he asked.

  “How?”

  “Oh, I have no idea,” Whitman said. “Just wondering.”

  “She was dancing in New York. He came backstage.”

  “Oh,” he said with a strange distance, or insincerity, as if he didn’t believe anything I said. “Marguerite says your mother doesn’t dance anymore.”

  “She does,” I said.

  “She does?”

  “She’s teaching.”

  “That must be fun.”

  “I lied,” I said, sinking down on a twin bed against the wall. “She tried teaching but didn’t like it. She couldn’t stand all the girls who weren’t any good, who didn’t have any talent. She hated that. Sometimes I think she hates my father—our father—too.”

  “She’s still in love with him,” Whitman said.

  “Really?”

  “Mine, too. She told me.”

  “Oh.” He understood everything. I could see that.

  “Have you met Cary?” I asked, wanting to change the subject to something easier. “She’s neat.”

  Whitman said nothing.

  “Don’t you think she’s neat?”

  He sat down on the bed and threw a gangly arm around my shoulders. “I think you’re neat, Little Mexican. I thought I wouldn’t like having a sister. But maybe I do. Now, come on, let’s go find everybody.”

  My mother was standing by her blue Mustang, poised to climb inside. A small crowd of us were gathered around her. We’d already said good-bye, wished her well—Come again, come again, like she was still part of the family. And suddenly he appeared out of nowhere, bounding up the sidewalk of El Molino Avenue in a blousy shirt and a pair of paisley bell-bottoms. “Connie! Connie!” my father cried out. His hair looked long and shaggy. His mouth was open in a big, cunning smile.

  “Where have you been?” Marguerite called, not too loudly. Her party voice.

  My mother winced and then managed a courageous smile. It was hard to tell whether it was completely artificial or something pulled out from the depths. It was hopeful, that smile, and crumbling into a tremor. My father put his hand on her bare arm. Would they kiss hello?

  “How can you stand it?” Whitman whispered in my ear. He grabbed my hand and we tore off down the service driveway, pulling at each other’s hands and yelling out, comically, “Good-bye, everybody! Good-bye, good-bye!”

  “Good-bye!”

  “Good-bye!”

  There was a burst of laughter behind us, the Ruins all waving and shouting, a wild release of tension, almost uncontrollable hysteria, and our father’s booming theatrical laugh. When we got to the garage, Whitman stopped—out of breath.

  “Wow! Your mother,” he said, gasping. “She’s so much prettier than mine.”

  FOUR

  Seventh Grade

  Dear Inez,

  How are things in ol’ Van Dale? Is it really the home of the American Nazi Party? (I read that somewhere.) I hear reports from your mother, the ever-popular Consuela Garcia, that you attended a father-daughter dinner on the arm of somebody else’s dad. Was that okay? Did I blow it again? Please air any complaints, large or medium or small. I can handle it. I really can, my dear.

  Is Robbie’s dad nice? Just wondering. He couldn’t be as wonderful and charming as I am. Please don’t tell me. I’ll be devastated….

  Enclosed please find a postcard of Richard Nixon’s birthplace. Ha! See you soon! And then what larks we’ll have!

  Love,

  Dad

  Robbie lived at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac on Valley View Road. No matter how hard I pedaled my orange ten-speed, it was a seven-minute ride from Abuelita’s—uphill all the way, near Van Dale’s illustrious mountains, where the houses were glassy and quiet, except for the yowling of coyotes at night. The Morrison house wasn’t one of those, though. It was a cookie-cutter ranch with folksy Dutch flourishes—shiny white Dutch door, scalloped trim, a funny gambrel roof that looked as if a barn had fallen out of the sky and landed on some pimply stucco walls. Out front, where the cement sidewalk curved into a semicircle, dichondra grass grew in islands surrounded by a sea of white stones, and small sculpted topiaries sprang up from nowhere. All this was the creation of Dr. Morrison, an unassuming chiropractor with big bones and a gentle comb-over, who spent his Saturdays tenderly pruning and edging and mowing his enormous rectangle of lush lawn out back.

  All together, there were seven Morrisons who varied in small degrees of blondness and ruddiness and girth. Boo and Bradford Morrison had spawned two sleepy-eyed boys who couldn’t run very fast and three cherubic girls who were destined to spend adolescence and adulthood swinging from one fad diet to the next. Brad Jr. was the oldest offspring at nineteen, a romantic figure to me, particularly as his mission neared and he spent the summer immersed in the study of Japanese. I wasn’t really sure what that meant—“Brad’s mission”—or what he was supposed to be doing in Hiroshima, but by the rules of the Mormon Church, he was allowed to call home only twice a year now, on Christmas and his mother’s birthday. All other contact was by mail.

  Next in line of Morrison offspring was Brenda, a lumbering strawberry blonde with a machine-gun laugh and so many freckles that if you stood far away from her, she almost looked tan. Like Brad Jr., at summer’s end she had departed the house on Valley View Road—been packed up and driven across the deserts of California and Nevada to Brigham Young University in Utah, where she had begun college.

  After Brenda there’d been a lull in fertility, a span of five or six years during which Dr. and Mrs. Morrison prayed a great deal, consulted a specialist, and were on the verge of adopting—they’d always wanted a big family—when they discovered that another baby was on the way. A miracle. A godsend. That story about Robbie, which was recounted many times to me, always fit with the rest of her. She brought surprise and relief wherever she wandered. Not that Brad was sullen or Brenda disagreeable. But in a family of seemingly good-natured and uncomplicated pleasers, Robbie was, by far, the most exuberant. She shouted
herself hoarse at football games, had trouble staying seated during spelling bee, and managed to avoid being mean to anybody but, at the same time, never seemed fake. And if she’d been troubled by anything in her life—her chubbiness, her paltry allowance, her wardrobe of clothes made from McCall’s and Butterick patterns, or her irritating younger brother and sister, whom she was forced to baby-sit weekday afternoons—no one but God could have known. She was upbeat, almost pathologically so.

  Mornings we walked to school together, Robbie descending into the flats of Van Dale and ringing our doorbell. In the afternoons we were shuttled home by her mother, who routinely pulled up to Eleanor J. Trupple Junior High between twenty and thirty minutes late, a harried figure behind the wheel of a dented gold Impala.

  “Hola!” Mrs. Morrison shouted, the window of the Impala rolled down. She and Dr. Morrison had met in Guadalajara, on a church trip, and they continued to be great lovers of Mexico—and thrilled to inflict their bad Spanish on me. “Nos tienes arretos ahora! Dos o tres solamente.”

  “Just a few stops today,” I whispered to Robbie.

  “Oh, Mommmm,” Robbie whined as she got into the car, but even her adolescent moans had a joyful, half-serious sound. “Are we going to miss our show?”

  There were always stops. And there were always a few more than Mrs. Morrison said there’d be. Pulling up to the no-parking zone of retail shops and craft stores, she was always in need of posterboard, some colored yarn, or collage glue. She drove crazily and made dangerous U-turns. She never seemed entirely in control of her destiny, as if some higher power were guiding her. Sometimes Robbie and I were squeezed in the back along with painted sets for an upcoming musical or cakes in wobbling Tupperware containers. Sometimes we were asked to pitch in—otherwise we might not get home in time for General Hospital, our obsession since midsummer.

  “Oh, it’ll be just a few seconds, Robbie doll,” Mrs. Morrison said. “Inny, you don’t mind, do you?”

  On this particular September day, there were quilting squares to pick up and plaster leaves for a “giving tree,” whatever that was. On other days there were “it’ll be just a second, Robbie doll” visits to convalescent homes, rehabilitation centers, the Y, and several other Mormon churches. Boo Morrison was always on the road in her dented Impala, spreading herself too thin and making deliveries—spaghetti and meatballs to somebody who’d been ill, lemon chews and chocolate chop suey cookies for a bake sale, hand-sewn costumes for a play. No religious organization put on more Broadway musicals than the Mormons in L.A. But while the rest of the world was belting out new tunes from Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar, Robbie’s church was regaling Van Dale with reprises of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

  Robbie and I disappeared quickly inside the Morrison house once the errands were done—tearing straight for the den, where Resa and Ron, the younger Morrisons, were already planted in front of the television. Wrenching them away and gaining control of the appliance was an ugly struggle that Robbie won on a regular basis, even though “the little guys,” as they were always called, had dibs because they’d gotten home first.

  “Our show is on,” Robbie said.

  “Who cares?” said one of the littles.

  “Me, I care,” said Robbie.

  “We were here first.”

  “But I’m in charge, you little guys!”

  “We were home first.”

  “But I’m in charge!” Robbie hollered. “Mooooommm! Aren’t I in charge?”

  With Brad and Brenda away and Mrs. Morrison constantly on the go, it sometimes seemed that Robbie was running the house. Or she and I were. I was a fixture on Valley View Road. Aside from the afternoons when Robbie and I had volleyball practice, almost every weekday afternoon, rain or shine, we’d linger inside the Morrison house until four-thirty, when Dark Shadows ended, and then wander into Boo Morrison’s bathroom to experiment with her impressive selection of cosmetics and ash blond hairpieces.

  I knew my way around Mrs. Morrison’s closet. She favored turquoise and aqua dresses with short jackets, polka-dot blouses, peach-colored scarves. In her shower stall, there were pieces of white knit underwear draped over the curtain bars. These mysterious Mormon “garments,” as they were called, looked frontierish, something a cowboy would wear under his jeans in Bonanza or Gunsmoke. As for the Morrison kitchen, I knew my way around that, too. The chocolate chips were kept in a cabinet over the electric cooktop. Peanut butter cookies, when they existed, were stashed in an aluminum canister with penguins on it. The jar was lined with white porcelain, like an ice bucket. It probably was an ice bucket, too. But since the Morrisons never drank alcohol or served cocktails, I’m not sure they’d have known.

  Near the pass-through to the breakfast nook, there was a ledge or countertop piled with church directories, newsletters, Ensign magazines, book bags, keys, sunglasses, nail polish. The cleaning and straightening of the house was the responsibility of Robbie and her busy mother, and therefore the place was always in total disarray. On a juice can with the label peeled off, the word “tithing” had been written in black marker. Ten percent of all the Morrison kids’ allowances, birthday cash, baby-sitting money, or any other income that they might bring in went into the can—and was sent to the church in monthly increments.

  Most nights Dr. Morrison arrived home in time for a late dinner, sometimes eaten all by himself—reheated casseroles, hamburgers, tacos, never a production—and afterward, to relax, he played an electric organ in the Morrisons’ sunken aqua-blue living room and fell asleep to his own music. Robbie and I would hear the organ throbbing on one chord for a very long time, then discover that Dr. Morrison had drifted off in the middle of “Fever” or “Look at Me.”

  After dinner that night, Robbie and I asked permission to go to 31 Flavors. It was a warm Friday, and the crickets were chirping, and the air on the Morrisons’ cinder-block patio had a wonderful, free, end-of-summer feeling that seemed to call for an ice cream sundae. I remember that we kept it quiet—so the littles wouldn’t beg to tag along. Dr. Morrison gave us a few dollars and told us to come home before dark.

  Robbie and I headed off—down Valley View Road and our old route to elementary school. It seemed like another lifetime ago that we’d graduated from sixth grade. I half wondered if Mrs. Craig and Mrs. Shockley and all the rest of them were still alive. Robbie and I trooped along in our after-school duds—cutoffs with long denim strings hanging down and tickling our thighs, little T-shirts that sometimes revealed bits of tummy, and flip-flop sandals. We’d grown our hair out—it was long and unbrushed and fell down our backs like clumps of dead seaweed. We were always looking for cures for split ends, among other things.

  “What’s that stuff your cousin tried for greasy hair?” Robbie asked.

  “Pissed,” I said.

  “That’s right. Psssssst,” Robbie said. “Dry shampoo.”

  “It comes in a can. You spray it on. It’s white, like that fake snow you spray on Christmas trees,” I said. “Flocking. You get a blast of white foam on your head.”

  “Oh, gosh!” Robbie squealed.

  “And then it dries clear, and you brush your hair, and it’s not greasy anymore. Lisa says it really works. You know, like, in an emergency.”

  Nothing had come between Robbie and me for five years, since we’d been the two best readers in Mrs. Kinney’s second-grade class. No boy had driven us apart. No other girlfriends—and we shared many—had threatened our bond either. For two summers in a row, we’d survived Camp Ka-u-la, a dilapidated campground near Frasier National Park with torn canvas tents and no flush toilets, run by the Camp Fire Girls. More recently we’d spent two weeks in a stuffy cabin at Camp Fox, in a remote corner of Catalina Island with wild pigs, where Robbie and I had been urged to accept Jesus into our hearts during a secret hilltop ceremony next to a huge white cross, and we did. We were urged to read Good News for Modern Man, a tepid adaptation of the New Testament for young readers, and we did that, too.

  Robbi
e and I never needed to pledge our devotion to each other, though. That was a given. We spoke in squeaky voices to each other, did impressions of Mr. Shroeder, our super tall French teacher, shared a four-year crush on Dr. Mark Toland of One Life to Live (played by Tommy Lee Jones), and indulged each other with reminiscences about dead pets. Robbie told the story, over and over, of finding her parrot Lolita dead at the bottom of her cage—how scary Lolita’s eyes looked—but it took several years before she revealed that Dr. Morrison had backed over Ruffy, the old spaniel that predated me, in his Cadillac DeVille.

  I never talked much about my father. He and Cary seemed a world away from Van Dale, and their lives indescribable. Robbie had never met my father. Would she have liked him? Would she have seen his charm or just his weirdness? He was busier than ever in those days—his computer project in Berkeley had become a full-blown company. He had a partner, Don Harrison, and an office near our old house in Menlo Park. He rarely ventured into Van Dale in any case. We met up in San Benito or at Marguerite’s beach house in Laguna. As for his personal life, I wasn’t sure that Robbie would understand that either.

  My mother became a focus of fascination instead. The previous year she had begun dating Rod Weeger, the coach of the eighth-grade boys’ basketball team at E. J. Truppel. It was funny how awkward my mother was about the whole thing at first. She could barely say his name out loud. They saw each other on weekends, but later on, as the romance endured, he came around on weekdays, too. Coach Weeger was a pleasant guy, and even-tempered. He was a bit taller than my mother, had light brown hair, a waistless athletic build, a perpetual tan, and pants that rode so high on his body that they seemed belted under his armpits. On weekends, when he wasn’t playing golf or tennis or watching sports on TV, he’d arrive in his ancient VW wagon for dinner. It was always the same: a Spencer steak with A.1. steak sauce, a baked potato drowning in butter and sour cream, an iceberg lettuce salad splashed with Good Seasonings dressing that my mother made in a special “Good Seasonings” cruet. He and my mother drank Coors beer in tiny cans and sometimes daiquiris, which made my mother laugh really loud. When she did that—laughed so loud—Coach Weeger looked at her in a haze of love, like he couldn’t believe his luck, and I always left the room.