The Ruins of California

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The Ruins of California Page 9

by Martha Sherrill


  To Justine, though, my brother was like a young god—and capable of unleashing her most unguarded, enthusiastic self. At the baggage claim, when a handler emerged from a back room with Whitman’s surfboard encased in the sleeping bag and wrapped in duct tape, Justine rushed over to the sleeping bag, threw her thin arms in the air, and exclaimed, “Far out!”

  “It looks like a mummy!” I called out, excited.

  “Whitman,” my father said, a little sourly. “What’s with all that duct tape? Don’t you think you might have overdone it? How are we going to get the board unpacked?”

  We walked to the airport parking lot, where the two sports cars were parked together again. The men discussed wind resistance and aerodynamics—then attached four Styrofoam blocks to the roof of the MG. The mummy was carefully laid to rest on top and strapped on.

  Justine and I rode in the Lotus—and I watched my father and Whitman talking in the MG as it moved along in traffic, a lane away. They seemed cheerful and buoyant. After a few minutes, a lit joint was passing between them.

  Ripper Lane was a forbidding surf spot, called “Ripper Jacks” or simply “Rippers” by locals, and even then with an intonation of awe and wonder. There was no sand, no beach—only rocks, and most of them very pointy. The nonpointy ones were dotted here and there with sea lions that snarled and snapped at the air, when they woke up. Fog or morning haze hung over the spot, and waves seemed to loom out of nowhere and crash on the base of a low cliff. The kelp beds were so thick—an unusual variety with large pods the size of cannonballs—that when the waves rolled in, the pods rose up, too, and the surface of the swells looked like a seething tangle of snakes.

  Aside from our pilgrimages to Fort Point—or the day my father took me across the bridge to the Marin Headlands—I had never been to the beach in Northern California. It was always too cold, too windy, and nothing like the beaches of the south, where the sand was toasty and the ocean warm enough for bathing in the spring and summer and sometimes into October. In the south, getting in the water didn’t require much courage or planning. In the north it seemed to require both.

  It was freezing at Rippers and damp inside the shadows of a eucalyptus grove where my father and Justine parked the MG and the Lotus. The eucalyptus trees smelled like mint, but a bitter mint, so strong that it almost burned your eyes. How did Whitman stand the cold? This ran through my mind as he stood by the side of the MG and unfastened the mummy from its blocks on top of the car. He unzipped the top of the sleeping bag and easily slipped the glistening green-and-blue board out of its casing, like a smooth bug emerging from a chrysalis, and leaned the board against a tree. He pulled off his army fatigues and wool sweater and slowly stretched into his long wetsuit.

  Justine stood off by herself—not wanting to see Whitman changing, I suppose. She was wearing a black leather jacket, blue jeans, and a pair of high-heeled black boots. Her bracelets were heavy and abundant. Her hair was up in the topknot—but lots of tendrils were cascading down in the wind. To keep warm, my father wore a turtleneck under a heavy shearling jacket, and I’d put on three layers of clothes—all the tops that I’d brought for the weekend. When Justine saw me shivering, she opened the hatch of the Lotus and pulled out an enormous fur coat. “You better wear this,” she said. Her face was pink from the cold, and her eyes were very blue and insistent.

  “Chinchilla,” Justine said, holding open the thick coat. It seemed like a huge dead animal with all its bones removed, and I stepped into the coat as if I were entering an entire room of fur. As soon as I got inside, I felt enveloped in warmth and the scent of patchouli.

  The sky was gray and murky overhead—the color of the coat—and Whitman led us beyond the grove toward the open sky and where a narrow pathway ran along an edge of a cliff. There was something wild in the air, a kind of electricity and freshness from the sea spray and wind, and suddenly we were giddy, almost jubilant. We were all surfers now, as if Whitman had taken us into a new world and transformed us at the same time.

  “Whitman, this is so exciting!” Justine cried out.

  “Way out!” my father shouted. I’d never seen him look so happy to be anywhere—or so expectant of a good time.

  As we drew closer to the water, the wind got stronger and whistled in my ears. I saw the gray ocean water far off. I heard Whitman say, “Whoa,” but it wasn’t until we arrived at the bluff that I saw what he meant. There were huge waves, coming one after another and breaking onto the rocky cliff. There was only one other surfer in the water, as far as I could tell—neither male nor female, old or young. Just a dark speck, way out, with a long white board.

  “Maybe this isn’t a good idea,” my father said to nobody in particular.

  Whitman was silent.

  “Whaddya think?” my father said. He was treading lightly, I could tell—not wanting to spoil things.

  Whitman was undeterred. He walked past us with his shiny board under his arm, the leash dangling on the ground behind him.

  I looked for a comfortable place on the cliff to sit down and watch—but at the same time I worried about the borrowed coat. Justine and my father remained standing, so I did, too. Whitman climbed down a pathway in the cliff that led to the rocks below and disappeared for a minute below us, and then reappeared as he made his way across the rocks. He moved slowly, gingerly. By the time he reached the water, he was a small figure in the distance. He strode through five yards of shore break, then carefully lowered himself to the board and paddled out.

  This seemed to take forever. He was on his belly. He paddled and paddled. When he arrived at the place in the water where the waves first rose to break, he stopped paddling and repositioned himself on the board. Then, after another long wait, he swerved his board around to face the shore and began paddling quickly, sometimes looking back at the wave forming over his shoulder. He stretched out, flattened himself against the board, paddled harder and faster, and tried to catch the wave as it began to curl. The wave was thick and moved slowly at first, then more and more quickly, and finally, as it collapsed, Whitman disappeared inside a cascade of white water and foam.

  I waited to see his brown head bounce up to the top of the water again, but it didn’t. I looked for shadows, for the darkness of his wetsuit.

  “Jesus, where’d he go?” my father called out. The wind was strong, and it was hard to hear him.

  “I don’t—”

  “Do you see…?”

  “I don’t—”

  My father looked at me kind of funny. He was trying not to get worked up. “Goddamn it, where is he?”

  Down the beach we saw a dark head in the water. Whitman raised his arm over his head. We waved back.

  Whitman tried to catch a few more waves, but his timing was off. Opportunities rose up, then were somehow never seized. Bored, I began to make circles in the dirt with my tennis shoes and practiced curling my tongue into a long tube and whistling through it. I pulled on my hair and wondered where we’d go for dinner and what movie we’d see, as I watched the gulls swooping down near the shoreline, felt the buffeting of wind on my numb face, and then became almost mesmerized, as though, surrendering to boredom, I had fallen into a kind of walking coma.

  Whitman tried another wave—the quick turnaround, the rapid paddling, his body flattening down on the board. But in the glare of the morning sunlight, I lost sight of him. No sign of a head or dark wetsuit. My father must have lost sight, too, because he began pacing, back and forth, very close to the edge of the cliff. After another second or two—how much time, I don’t know—he began to scramble down the bluff to the rocks.

  “Paul!” Justine called out. Was she trying to stop him? The wild sage scratched my father’s face and his zip-up boots were sliding on the dirt. He disappeared for a minute under the cliff face and then reappeared on the rocks below us. He stopped momentarily and studied the horizon, covering his brows with his hands and looking for Whitman. And then he began to wade into cold ocean water in his jeans and big brown j
acket with a kind of unsteady panic that I had never seen, in him or anybody else. His head was swiveling back and forth, almost crazily, scanning the water’s surface. His feet slipped on rocks. Why didn’t he take his boots off? By the time he was nearly up to his waist, the thick waves were breaking on him and the shearling coat looked heavy, so heavy, so cumbersome, that it seemed impossible he could swim.

  Just then I heard a voice far away. It’s possible that I didn’t really hear anything. But I had a feeling of something—I knew something—and I turned to look down the beach and saw Whitman’s silhouette on a jetty. The glare was shimmering, almost blinding, but he was motionless—just standing and looking at the sea. The wind must have changed direction suddenly, for I thought I could hear him calling out, “Paul! Paul! Dad! Dad!”

  “It’s Whitman!” I yelled, kind of hysterically, and I began scrambling down the cliff. The fur coat kept catching on things and dragging on the ground, slowing me. I couldn’t bear to look over my shoulder at Justine—just imagining her horror. “He’s gone in!” I screamed in Whitman’s direction, as if he would be able to hear me. “Dad’s gone in!”

  Whitman couldn’t have heard me but must have seen me crawling down the cliff. He bent to set his board on the jetty, and then he ran toward the water again, yelling—sounds that barely registered against the surges of wind and falling waves. All I could see was his mouth opening, again and again, as he called my father’s name, just as Paul was probably calling his.

  My father was waist deep in the sea when there must have been another momentary ceasing of wind, a miraculous few seconds of quiet when he heard Whitman. He turned around suddenly, twisting to look back. Then his shoulders sank—an instant of relief, perhaps. A shrug. Then he threw his hands up in the air. Disbelief? Exasperation? Which was it? I remember studying every breath, every gesture and expression intently. He seemed to be acting as if a joke had been played on him, a cruel joke, on purpose.

  The waves were breaking against his back as he approached the shore and fell to his knees a few times. He looked down at the water with disgust, as though he were angry at it, hating it. And he was still looking down at the ground of rocks when he reached Whitman and me on the jetty. He just kept going. He trudged, almost an overstated trudging. Like one of his gag walks.

  “Wasn’t that weird?” I called out as he passed by. But he didn’t look up, just kept going—making his way up the cliff. And when he got to the top, he disappeared.

  “He must be really mad,” I said.

  Whitman shook his head. “Asshole.”

  “Hey, it was really scary. He thought you were drowning, Whitman. He totally lost it.”

  I imagined that my father had stopped at the top of the cliff—that he’d gone to Justine. But when Whitman and I reached the bluff, she was standing alone, too. “Where’d he go?” Whitman said.

  Justine had a defeated look on her face, and pointed to the eucalyptus grove, making no sound except for an exhalation of breath. He’d gone to the car. I remember wanting to run to him—to see how he was—but I hesitated, not wanting to face him either.

  “What do we do now?” I said.

  “This is ridiculous,” said Whitman. “He’s stoned. And he’s acting like a child.”

  Justine had a look of disagreement on her face, but instead of saying anything, she began walking toward the grove. Whitman and I waited a few moments, then followed. About halfway, we heard Justine’s shriek and quickened our pace. She was bent over next to the car—at first I thought she was screaming, or swooning, or hysterical. But it wasn’t that. We drew closer and saw my father sitting in the driver’s seat of the MG. He was smoking one of Justine’s brown cigarettes in a long ivory holder. And he was completely nude, but for a road map over his lap.

  “Hey, Whitman,” he said, with a witheringly dry delivery, “nice bit of surfing.”

  Later on, after hot showers and lunch—and a special trip to Perignon Laundry to see if my father’s shearling coat could be saved—we all sat through a matinee of Lawrence of Arabia at the Bay Theatre on Stockton and ate so much popcorn we decided to skip dinner. By sunset Whitman and I were left alone in the apartment. My father had slipped next door to spend the night.

  “So what do you think?” Whitman said, sitting down on the arm of the brown corduroy sofa.

  “Of what?”

  “How the weekend’s going so far.”

  We both laughed.

  “Complete disaster,” I said.

  Whitman said nothing.

  “Don’t you think?”

  He shrugged. The goal in those days—or maybe it was just a California thing—was not to make a big deal out of anything.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “It is what it is.”

  “It is what it isn’t,” I said.

  “You sound like a Zen monk.”

  “You’re the hippie, not me.”

  “I’m a hippie? Who says?”

  “Dad.”

  “Shit, he’s wearing the love beads, not me.”

  I pulled at Whitman’s necklace.

  “These are rhino horn,” he said, “for sexual power.”

  “You went to that war protest,” I said, uneasy with the rhino-horn idea. “And you live on a commune.”

  “I live on a commune?” he said, a little mockingly. “I guess you’re right, then. You’re always right, Mexicali Rose. I’m a hippie. Just don’t tell Marguerite.” He picked up an issue of Playboy magazine that was sitting on the low white table and began flipping the pages. He looked at a cartoon, chuckled, then flipped the pages again. He found the centerfold and turned the magazine on end.

  “So how do you like Justine?” he asked, his eyes not looking away from the page. “She seems to have a big effect on him.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Like, what’s with the driving gloves?”

  “Oh, God,” he groaned, closing the magazine. “I know. And Lawrence of Arabia again. Do you think every time he gets a new girlfriend he’ll make us watch it with her? I suppose it could be worse.”

  “What happened to Cary?” I asked.

  “That’s what I’m talking about. Cary.” Whitman rubbed his face, then sighed in a bored way. “Good riddance.”

  I thought of Cary’s voice as she read aloud to us over the summer, or her smile, or the tarot cards in my suitcase that I’d brought for her to read in her kooky, amateurish way. Whitman had never liked her, I could see that now. But he and Justine—they had something. Hard to say what.

  “Justine’s so old,” I said finally. “So grown up. So serious.”

  “It’s about time,” Whitman said.

  My father and Justine did seem like a pair—their lanky frames and handsomeness, their strange, unearthly elegance. They had the same pervasive feeling of gloom, the same silliness. Their motorcycles. Their ultraspare taste in décor. Even their cars were about the same size. And even though Justine had tried to be kind to me, and open, she made me uncomfortable. Instead of bringing me closer to my father, as Cary had done, she made me feel like a suburban rube with cheap clothes and a weird best friend. (“She’s really a Mormon?” Justine had asked in a breathy, incredulous voice. “Like ten wives sort of thing?”) Since meeting her, I’d felt further and further away from my father, as if he had drifted to sea and become an island that I couldn’t swim to anymore.

  “Hey, don’t get glum,” Whitman said to me. “He’s really in love. I’ve never seen him like this before.”

  Somehow I knew that—felt that—and it made everything worse.

  “And anyway,” he went on, “she’s so rich, you know, and that might be fun.”

  “Money isn’t fun,” I said.

  “No?” he said. “Well, you’re wrong.”

  SEVEN

  Laguna Beach

  This is my prevailing memory of Abuelita in my childhood: She made hot cereal in the morning and would leave the top of a double boiler full of congealing Roman Meal or Cream
of Wheat for me when she left for work. I was supposed to have a bowl before school—no exceptions. Abuelita wasn’t that fussy about anything else. She made few demands, had very few edges. I made jokes about “cold gruel” and “mush,” but I ate it. Her belief in cooked cereal was something like my mother’s belief in Jack La Lanne or, later, Werner Erhard. Cooked cereal was a way of life, like exercise or awareness, that would fortify me for the perils ahead. I never really questioned this, the same way that I didn’t really think about who Abuelita was. Her existence seemed humdrum and practical to me, about working and saving money. I knew Abuelita—the smell of her hair, the smoothness of her hands, her round belly underneath her slick rayon dresses, the sound of her soft, muddled English—but my real knowledge of her, aside from her role as my caretaker and all the Roman Meal she cooked over the years, was profoundly incomplete.

 

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