The Ruins of California

by Martha Sherrill

  FIVE

  Justine

  The baby fat had vanished, and my body was as shapeless as my stork legs: I was a long tube of a girl. And I was always pulling on my bangs, to make them grow faster. And if you massaged olive oil and mayonnaise into your scalp, your hair really grew fast. That’s what Amanda said anyway.

  How does a girl grow up? Does she imagine herself a woman—and simply direct herself there? I nurtured opposing selves in those days, as though I were two people, or three, each of them incubating in separate honeycombs. One girl—the visible one—was settled innocently in Van Dale with Robbie and our shared collection of Nancy Drew mysteries. Another girl made trips to San Francisco in her knee socks and jumpers and saw The Godfather and Bullitt and sat in North Beach cafés drinking dark espresso with three packets of sugar. But there was a third girl, a nymph secluded in the deepest interior of me—in the same place where I prayed, made wishes on pennies, yearned for a boyfriend, and fantasized that I was living in a high-rise apartment with mirrored walls and track lighting and silver trays of decanted liquor. In that part of me, I resembled Emma Peel in The Avengers and was often a secret agent on a vague mission to save the country. Usually I was in the company of a male colleague, a fellow spy who looked like one of the men on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. I was frequently forced to spend the night in the same hotel room with this male colleague and share a bed—on a mission we pretended to be married, for the good of the country—where we would comically argue and fight for the sheets and then wind up rubbing up against each other and kissing. I was always clever and amusing. I wore catsuits or low-cut dresses and sometimes even had breasts. (The importance of them was just beginning to dawn on me.) If I happened to find myself alone in the afternoon, not at Robbie’s, and I wasn’t in the mood for breaking the house rules and watching Dark Shadows (it gave me nightmares), I sometimes crept into my mother’s bedroom and tried on her gigantic bras. I stuffed them with knee socks and tights, three or four pairs in each cup. Then I gravitated to the back of her closet, where the flamenco dresses were stiff from neglect and the dance shoes were stacked in dust-covered boxes. I tried them on, too.

  I prepared—as though for a long journey. I had grown tired of dolls and tea parties with my stuffed animals. I often forgot to bring Coco into my bed at night or felt too lazy to reach down and find the spot where the blanket had fallen on the floor. I contemplated dropping out of Camp Fire Girls. The uniform was so dorky I’d stopped wearing it to school on meeting days.

  The mirror beckoned. And the open closet door. I was always standing slack-jawed in front of the closet in those days. Rays of sunlight came in from a tiny window, and I’d watch the dust motes settling on all the things that I didn’t want to wear anymore. My hair was long and center-parted. My teeth were cinched by metal bands and wires. In my baggy cotton underwear, I looked into the void. What could I wear? Who would I be?

  A large suitcase was sitting open on my bed. It was orange and made of soft rubbery pleather. It was creased to look like real leather, but it was stretchy and pliant and took the shape of the contents of the bag. I’d packed a pair of white corduroy bell-bottoms, a clingy striped top with a long, pointy collar and the two Marimekko dresses from my father, which I now loved—even though they were a little tight and short and beat up, because I’d been in them all summer. I was still deciding about a navy blue polyester double-knit pea coat with gold buttons and matching miniskirt that were lying on the bed.

  It was only October, but it would be freezing in San Francisco. It always was. San Francisco had the coldest, windiest, most inhospitable climate that I could imagine. (I visited in July once, and from Fort Point my father and I watched a yacht sail under the bridge. Everybody on deck was wearing a ski mask.) Inside a waterproof side compartment of the orange suitcase, I had packed all the toiletries and cosmetics that I would require for a weekend: a clear green Oral-B toothbrush, a small tube of new mint-flavored Crest, a tube of Blistex.

  In a zippered compartment in the ceiling of the bag, I’d carefully stuffed Coco, a pack of tarot cards and a paperback copy of Great Expectations that I’d been reading for so long, since June, that the edges were worn and fuzzy.

  Merlin was sitting on the bed next to the suitcase. He was gray and longhaired, with vibrant golden eyes. He was an outdoor cat—he had a penchant for catching lizards in the backyard, blue jays in the front—but I liked to sneak him into my pink bedroom at night and hide him under the bedsheets until he fell asleep. I liked the feeling of his soft fur on my newly shaven legs. I liked the vibration of his purring against my stomach. And even though Merlin was only slightly more domesticated than my old pet, Dr. Guinea Pig, who was buried in a shoe box under the avocado tree in the side yard, when I looked at Merlin, I felt an almost human connection with him. He was the first cat I’d ever known, really. He’d arrived, a stray, yowling out by the street. When Abuelita and I rushed out to the curb of Ardmore Road to investigate, Merlin was just standing there, imperious, and staring at us with hypnotic eyes.

  The walls of my room were covered in striped pink wallpaper—the same paper that my mother had put up during our first summer in Van Dale—but it was pocked by stickers, ripped off in places, particularly near the twin bed where I slept. Posters had been tacked up: a large black-and-white image of Robert Redford in mustache and black cowboy hat from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a picture of James Taylor in a blue work shirt from the album cover of Sweet Baby James, and a very tall and narrow poster of Wilt Chamberlain holding a basketball. Coach Weeger had given that poster to me—and made me into an L.A. Lakers fan.

  On the desk where I did my homework and sometimes pretended to be a secretary working in a Manhattan office building was a pink Princess phone, three copies of Mad magazine with the sticker pages torn out, my copy of Good News for Modern Man, and buried below all that rubble, a photograph of Barnabas Collins, the lead vampire in Dark Shadows, torn from an old TV Guide. I had a slight thing for him.

  The Princess phone rang. I jumped and shrieked. I didn’t have time for a phone call—and I was always overreacting to things in those days, constantly edgy and spasmodic and shrieking at things that didn’t need to be shrieked at.

  “Pronto,” I said, assuming it was my father on the line. He loved the gag greeting, the “I. P. Freely” and “County Morgue” stuff.

  “Hey.”

  “Whitman?” I shrieked again.

  “God, don’t have a cow.”

  “What’s up?” I asked. “Have you packed yet? You better be packed by now.”

  “Not quite. I still have to put my board inside a sleeping bag and then duct-tape it really tight,” he said. “It’ll look like a big silver mummy.”

  “You’re bringing your surfboard?”

  “Yup. I’m going to surf Rippers.”

  “Rippers?”

  “Down by Half Moon Bay. A spot called Ripper Lane.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “That’s why I’m calling,” he said. “Looks like I’m not flying up until Saturday morning. The waves are too good here.”

  “Hey, no fair,” I said, and then produced a loud moan. “No fair. No fair. I’ll have to go to Alegrías without you.”

  “You’ll live.”

  I huffed.

  “Dad say anything to you about Justine?”

  “Who?”

  “His neighbor.”

  “Does she work at Harrison-Ruin?” I was confused—and feeling distracted, hurried. I was always frantic and distracted in those days, and thrown off. A terrible listener, too.

  “No,” Whitman said impatiently. “Forget it. I’ll see you when I see you.”

  I walked through the stuffy airplane and into the cold air of the tubular jetway and emerged into the soaring spaces of the San Francisco International Airport. Beyond a rope and stanchion, I saw my father. What was he doing there? He never met me at the gate—ever.

  His hand was up. It wasn’t a tired wave exactly, but slowe
r and much less theatrical than usual. A moody wave, a laid-back, philosophical wave, his right arm drifting ambivalently over his head.

  Our eyes met, and he mouthed my name.

  “What are you doing here?” I called out. I hadn’t yet noticed his air of restraint, the mellow thing. He wasn’t offering our oft-rehearsed greeting—the hands over the heart, the lovesick facial expression. He was just there, himself. In those days it was called “being real.”

  His hair was longer than the last time I’d seen him, and it covered his ears and was pushed back off his face by a pair of large aviator sunglasses on top of his head. He was wearing a collarless linen shirt starched very smooth, almost stiff—not tucked into his jeans but hanging straight down. Over that there was a long, black motorcycle jacket. We hugged for a while, and my cheek felt the crunch of hair under his partially unbuttoned shirt. When I rose on my tiptoes to kiss him, I smelled something very fresh—clean and herbal and powdery. I turned my face toward the regal figure nearby, a very tall woman with perfect posture and a taut, full-lipped smile. Her creamy linen dress was only a bit darker than her skin, which was so pale it looked almost blue. Her blond hair was twisted into a topknot that stood straight up from her skull.

  “Inez,” my father said, “I want you to meet my friend Justine.”

  She gave me a formal greeting while holding her smile—“How do you do?” in a gentle but halting voice. She didn’t crouch or stoop when she talked to me. It was more of a bow. After she said hello, she said nothing—just searched my eyes as if waiting for a connection to form, or perhaps simply hoping to glimpse the real me, the unguarded me. After a few moments of failure, she stood erect again and stared into the depths of the airport lounge.

  “Hi,” I said finally. Usually when I met somebody new, it didn’t take much to relax me. A joke. A shrug. A shared sense of something. But this seemed to be the kind of gesture Justine didn’t know how to accomplish. She looked across the vast spaces as though hoping to find an exit door.

  “Come on,” my father said anxiously. He led the way to an escalator, and I followed up in the rear. I found myself staring at Justine’s back—studying the weave of linen, the nape of slender neck, her absurd hairdo. My father became a blur in the background, a nonevent compared to the compelling mystery of this new person who was so fey and fragile and otherworldly. Stepping off the escalator and following my father to the grungy baggage-claim area, where the conveyor belt of bags was already streaming by, she moved with a bizarre combination of grace and stiffness, like a tragic queen.

  She spoke to me again. This time trying a new approach—informal, almost countrified.

  “You’re only twelve and, gosh, so tall! You’re a weed! You’ll be tall as me someday. Pretty soon.”

  I smiled but kept my mouth closed to hide the braces, which probably made my smile as awkward as hers.

  “You’re both so tall—you and your brother,” she said. “He was here a couple weeks ago. We had a great time. He’s incredible, isn’t he?”

  I nodded, felt a twinge—a new feeling burbling up. Whitman had been trying to tell me about Justine, hadn’t he? Staring at the black rubber baggage belt, I was hit by a sudden bolt of terror.

  “He’s coming, isn’t he?” I said. “He’s still coming tomorrow, isn’t he?”

  Justine paused, waiting for my father to answer that question, but when it was obvious that he’d been too far away to hear it, she spoke up. “Tomorrow. He’s coming in the morning. And he’s bringing his surfboard. Can you believe—”

  “His surfboard?” I played dumb.

  “There’s a swell or a storm,” Justine said. “The waves are supposed to be great all weekend. He didn’t want to miss out. So we told him to bring his board and we’d all take him. Isn’t that cool? It’s so great that he digs surfing so much.” She paused. “I can’t wait to watch him—can you? Paul tells me you guys get along like gangbusters.”

  I mumbled some acknowledgment of this that Justine couldn’t make out and that I didn’t bother to repeat. Over the loudspeaker the baggage-claim number was announced in a startlingly loud and indistinct voice, and Justine jumped at the sound of it. She was skittish, even more skittish than I was. And she was shy, and a bit awkward. There was something wounded about her pale blue eyes. I smiled at her, finally, and wished more than ever that Whitman were arriving now with all his good cheer and asides and funny nicknames. His enormous surfboard would amuse and dominate and somehow put everybody at ease. Who was Justine anyway? Where was Cary?

  “Hey, Dad! That’s mine,” I yelled out. The orange pleather bag was at the top of the conveyor belt, just about to drop down. I’d been planning this moment in my head all week. Obsessed with luggage and good taste, he’d hate the bag—really hate it—but then he’d laugh. Wouldn’t he? It would be a great joke between us. We’d be laughing about it for years, I imagined. But just as the ugly orange case descended the belt, Justine swept her hand up, apparently to wipe a hair from her eyes—it seemed involuntary, like the shooing away of a fly or moth—and when her hand came down, it caught a string of grayish beads she was wearing around her neck. With another sweep of her hand, beads began dropping to the floor, scattering over the linoleum and rolling under the baggage claim and next to people’s shoes.

  “Oh, no!” she cried out, but only in a half whisper, as though she weren’t capable of anything more forceful. “My beads.” She bent over and faced the scuffed linoleum floor, picking up the tiny balls with long, slender fingers. But they kept rolling and scattering beyond her grasp. “Oh, I need to…Please…Could somebody help? The beads. They’re Peruvian. Pre-Columbian…” She was on all fours, her thin arms reaching in every direction. As the passengers from the PSA flight gathered to collect their luggage, a crowd began to form around her. People bent over, people on their knees—people who previously, at the arrival gate and on the escalator, had been gaping at her in a kind of baffled amazement, as though she weren’t quite real. Now, with a chance to help her or speak to her, men and women and children dropped to the floor—just as Justine herself rose—and they were searching the surface of the linoleum, the thin channels between tiles and the space under the conveyor belt of luggage, which was now moving, for any sight of her dull gray beads, which were, unfortunately, the very shade of the airport floor.

  Justine stared down at all the people, and the dirty linoleum, and the beads, and held out her hands. She cupped them as though she were feeding pigeons, but instead of birdseed flying out of them, the strangers in the airport were dropping beads in.

  My father took up a collection of them, withdrawing a large white pocket handkerchief from his motorcycle jacket—a perfectly laundered and pressed square of the thinnest linen imaginable—and unfolded it. He made a pouch with his fingers and then carefully poured in the beads. When he had finished gathering up all the rest, taken them from me and Justine and from the crowd of good citizens who were still discovering them in tiny cracks and crevices, he twisted the pouch into a ball and meticulously tied a knot to keep the beads from falling out.

  Without one word of complaint about my hideous new suitcase, which had now circled the belt twice—or grousing that I continued to check my luggage instead of traveling with a small carry-on, as he had long advised—he led Justine and me out to the airport garage. There the tan MG was parked beside another sports car, a very long, silver, bullet-shaped Lotus Elan. Justine’s slender hand pulled out a key.

  “Your father claims you don’t mind being squashed into the back of his car,” she said to me. “But, Inez, how can you possibly fit? You’ve got to stop being such a good sport.”

  She opened the thin door of the Lotus, and a cloud of powdery patchouli wafted out. “I was hoping you might drive back to the city with me.”

  I’d have preferred sitting with my father—no question—or even being scrunched into the back of the MG. But it seemed impossible to turn down Justine’s offer when, suddenly, so much seemed to depend on our
getting acquainted. Inside, the Lotus had a glossy wooden dashboard and an alluring array of dials. It was even lower to the ground than the MG, if that were possible. I stretched out my legs, now dotted in goose bumps, and pulled down on my navy blue polyester double-knit pea coat and skirt.

  Justine positioned herself in front of the small steering wheel and drew a soft black leather driving glove over one hand. With the other she pulled out a hard red pack of cigarettes from the tiny glove box, removed one skinny brown cigarette, and twisted it into an ivory holder, which she held in her bare hand. “Do you mind?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “I probably shouldn’t,” Justine said. “I only wanted one because I guess I was feeling nervous to meet you.”

  I looked over at the MG, where my father was putting on a pair of black driving gloves, too. And then, together, the cars growled and drove off, first in single file—my father ahead—and then parallel in adjoining lanes of Highway 101. Once we were under way, my father began to run through his various driving gags and got us laughing. They were reliable, and funny—even after he’d done them dozens of times. He accelerated quickly, so the engine would explode with sound. He pretended to be having a heart attack—something he did almost every time I rode in the car with him—and fell over into the passenger seat as though dead. After resuming a normal driving position for a few minutes, he tried another tireless routine: He sank so low in his seat that his eyes were barely able to see over the dashboard, and it looked, to anyone else on the road, as if a child or, better still, a dwarf were driving the car.