Later on, in Van Dale, I tried but couldn’t find a way to tell Robbie about the grass—or much else of what happened that night. She wouldn’t have understood or approved or anything close to that. Maybe if Whitman had been around, instead of halfway across the world, I might have told him. “I can’t believe you waited so long to get stoned,” he’d have said. “What did you think would happen—you’d lose your mind and jump out a window?”
I suppose I wanted to join the party, become part of the fun—and dwell in the grown-up world of Justine and my father and Ooee. It seemed new and sophisticated and brought me a few inches closer to being a girl who could wear a brown cashmere poncho. But when I thought about Robbie, I hated the mounting list of secrets that I was keeping from my best friend. The three beers I drank with Antonio, then another two with Ooee, and the glass of incredibly good wine he’d insisted that I try. And what about the grad-night party at Kim LaVelle’s house? Right after Tad Brown told me that I had beautiful feet and that he loved me, Kenny Frank threw me into the swimming pool and ran his hands along my thighs and underneath my stretchy bra cup. He was a baseball player—and oh, my, his calluses felt good. I hadn’t told Robbie about that either.
Mostly that summer Robbie and I talked about drill team at Van Dale Senior High School and whether we were going to try out. Drill team girls wore purple uniforms and silver cowboy boots and paraded around the Van Dale field, almost militarily, during the halftime of football games. While the marching band played, they danced in rows, like a big cornfield of girls. During tryouts you were given some kind of routine to learn in a couple hours and then perform. Everybody from my Camp Fire Girls group was trying out—as well as almost every other girl I could think of. But something felt funny about it to me. Just thinking about being on the grounds of Van Dale High made me skittish, for one thing. Terra incognita. But thinking about memorizing some kind of prance and arm waving, or attempting a cartwheel on the football field, filled me with panic beyond measure. The tryouts were approaching, and I just couldn’t decide.
“Drill team?” my father asked on the phone. “What’s that? Sounds like a dental procedure.”
“Come on,” I said. “You know what a drill team is. They do routines at halftime, like a spirit squad. And you can’t be a cheerleader if you aren’t on the drill team.”
“You can’t?”
“No.”
There was a long pause.
“You mean,” he said, “you wouldn’t get to be like your cousin Lizzie at Newport High, doing all those kicks and arm gestures—and the splits? Shouting out, ‘Go, team, go! We’re going to win! Win-win-win! Kill! Kill!’”
“Nobody says, ‘Kill! Kill!’”
“And you wouldn’t have to practice those routines all summer?”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
Another pause. Then: “What a shame.”
“I knew you were going to say that.”
“Why bother asking, then?”
“Because—”
“Kill! Kill!”
“Dad.”
“What?”
“So you think it sounds really lame?”
“Jesus, don’t you?”
TEN
The Ojala Valley
I thought it was funny that Whitman didn’t want to go to college—and that nobody made a stink about it. He went off on a yearlong adventure instead. I’d gotten a couple postcards from Baja, where he was surfing down the coast. From Hawaii he sent a whole green coconut with my address burned into the skin—and a stamp affixed—but after that, nothing came. He was in Fiji and Tahiti, we heard, then Sydney for the winter and New Zealand for the spring. My mother and Abuelita were flabbergasted that he’d been allowed to just wander like that. Marguerite was furious. Did Whitman have a plan? But my father believed that nobody should be “made to go to college,” as he put it—and, indeed, he felt forcing Whitman to do much of anything was unwise.
“He’s got to come to all big decisions on his own,” my father said. “Or else he’ll just blame me, or blame his mother, or, worse, he’ll never learn how to make a big decision at all.”
My father railed against any talk of the future—his future or ours—that seemed too practical or conventional. Whitman and I were supposed to have freer and more creative young lives than he’d been allowed. Independence and honesty were emphasized, not “selling out” and following the herd. Hard work was admirable, along with accomplishment, but only if unencumbered by mindless ambition. Success was overrated, my father preached, and of dubious long-term importance. Success stole one’s freedom and required too much compromise—and too much concern for the whims of the masses. I suppose this philosophy, which he tried hard to instill in us, communicated a sense of futility and, perhaps, my father’s own regrets. He had employed his brains and energy to build a company that now only made encroachments on him. Why should Whitman and I bother trying too hard? Where would it get us? Besides, what was more of a turnoff than somebody who tried too hard? In California the point was to not try.
If there was a center of the not-trying universe, it would have been the Ojala Valley. I’d never been here—only heard stories and gotten whiffs of the valley’s zeitgeist from Whitman. He made it sound like a Shangri-la of experimental thinking, sophistication, and phenomenal creative energy. According to Marguerite, Ojala was only a few slippery steps away from Sodom and Gomorrah. People ran wild and took acid in Ojala, even had orgies. Nobody had a real job—they grew their own vegetables or bartered or lived off trust funds or food stamps. To make matters worse, there was a long tradition of mysticism in the valley. The Theosophical Society had a center in Ojala, and Whitman had told us all about its nineteenth-century founder, a con artist and visionary named Madam Blavatsky, who talked to the dead. Whitman had stories about Krishnamurti, too, an Indian lord who gave lectures about the meaning of life and drew crowds of thousands of people. Whitman was my only contact with this intriguing world, and whenever he arrived at Van Dale and San Benito, he smelled a little like incense and fruity massage oils and carried around lots of new and faintly reckless ideas in his head. I’d missed seeing him over the year—missed all his bulletins from the counterculture frontier. So when he finally returned from his mysterious travels among the coconuts and natives and invited me to visit him at home that summer, I was excited almost beyond words. And I was even more thrilled when my mother and Abuelita deemed that I was old enough, at nearly fifteen, to go. It felt like I’d been trying to get to Ojala for years.
Whitman pulled up our driveway in his old van with its spray-painted Rust-Oleum spots and faded bumper stickers supporting Shirley Chisholm for president and a ban on green grapes. The sky is usually blue and the weather predictably good in Los Angeles by July. But this year the June clouds were still with us—overcast, gloomy days that didn’t turn sunny until just before dinner. I remember the rush of excitement that afternoon and the sense of adventure as I waited for the fog to clear and for Whitman to arrive. My mother and I watched from the living room windows and saw him hop out of his van.
He’d been gone nine or ten months. It had been that long since I’d seen him anyway. Not that he’d visibly changed. He seemed more or less the same old Whitman, wearing the same old wrinkled work shirt and army fatigues. He was a little thinner and stringier, and very tan—almost muddy—the color you get when you’ve been in the sun year-round. He walked with a slight trudge, although maybe that’s hindsight. But I remember sensing something a bit tired and world-weary about him. He was smiling and in good cheer, but somehow diminished in his general level of enthusiasm. He wore a pair of small gold wire-rimmed glasses, which gave him a studious, introverted look.
We waved him inside, and he gravitated to Abuelita’s dining room table. He was wearing sandals, and I noticed as he crossed the room that his feet looked banged up. He had acquired a number of small bluish wounds and cuts that had healed but turned dark. One of his big toenails had come off—and was just growing
back, a flaky stump of hardened skin. Sitting down at the table, he picked out small oranges from a ceramic bowl, juggled three of them for us, and then peeled and ate one piece of fruit after another with his long, tan fingers. It was always jarring to see Whitman at Abuelita’s house. His colorful stories—and bigness—made the rooms seem small and the old upholstery dingy. I saw the house through his eyes—or tried to—and imagined what he might be noticing. Rather than books in the bookcases, there were odds and ends, magazines and junk and useless clutter. There was an old brown TV console in the corner of the living room, something that would have horrified Marguerite. And the dining room table wasn’t off by itself, secluded in its own separate room, but in the middle of the floor plan, at the intersection of all activity. Sliding glass doors opened to a view of an unremarkable shady garden and a cement patio where I used to skip rope as a girl but that went neglected now.
It’s not that I worried, really, what Whitman would think. He was a hippie—that’s how I thought of him—and not judgmental, or not supposed to be. But somehow I couldn’t help being conscious that somewhere, surely, there was a place where he made note of these things. He was my father’s son, after all, and Marguerite’s grandson.
“Where’s Mrs. G?” he asked.
“Feinman’s,” I said.
Whitman clucked sounds of disappointment.
“She never stops,” I said.
“Feinman had bypass surgery,” my mother offered.
“Well,” Whitman said with a smile, “tell Mrs. G that I was asking for her—and give her my love.”
Only my mother and I had flexible days that summer. In fact, since school had gotten out and I’d been to San Francisco, there’d been nothing but a long, free, and too-flexible stretch of weeks that I’d filled up with television, lots of television, and by playing a Paco Peña record over and over and daydreaming about marrying Antonio, except when I played Boz Scaggs and daydreamed of marrying him. In the afternoon sometimes, I went to Robbie’s. When she wasn’t busy with drill-team practice or doing Mormon stuff.
“So, Connie Mama, are you ready for the weekend before you?” Whitman asked.
My mother laughed her loud, panicky laugh—and changed the subject. While I was in Ojala with Whitman, she and Coach Weeger had arranged to take a four-day seminar at a hotel in Westwood. I wasn’t sure what “sensitivity training” was supposed to do for them, but my mother had become very loud again and super laughy. She seemed to be dreading this thing called “est” like it was a treatment for cancer.
The drive north to Ojala required traveling on old highways with two lanes of cracked cement. We passed farms with yellow fields. We passed strange small towns with dusty streets lined with palms, and people living on the outskirts in trailers. It grew dustier and dustier, and very hot, until we entered a shady, narrow pass between rolling hills. On the other end was a lush, green valley.
Ojala was an old spa town—with hot springs and a few big rancheros and fat farms—that had become, in the last ten or twenty years, a magnet for artists and bohemians. From all I’d heard, I wasn’t sure that I was going to like Ojala or feel comfortable there. I was apprehensive—but excited to be alone with Whitman. Wherever he was, I knew I’d be okay.
He was considering what to do next, whether he’d go to college or get a job, but he never talked about it. And after regaling me with a few stories of his travels—a school of hammerhead sharks in Fiji, a wipeout on the barrier reef where he lost his surfboard, taking mushrooms on a beach in New Zealand—it was hard to imagine him doing much else except more travel. He was still living with his mother in those days. I’d never met Patricia, or even seen a photograph. Marguerite had removed all images of her (and my mother) from the family albums that sat on top of the piano in her living room. But I’d heard a few things from my aunts. Patricia had grown up in Boston, the daughter of a surgeon. She’d studied art at a fancy private school—the East seemed full of those—then lived in Paris and worked as a sculptor’s assistant. After marrying my father, she’d become interested in gardens and gardening—Marguerite was an influence, apparently—and then, after her divorce, she’d worked on the grounds of an old estate in England as an apprentice until becoming a landscape designer and master gardener in her own right. Whitman had told me she’d been involved with an English architect while living abroad, and when things fell apart, she’d moved to California to get over him. In Ojala there’d been a brief flirtation with a lute player and a longer romance with a street mime called “Nado,” but she was now alone, or seemed to be. Whitman hadn’t mentioned anybody in a while.
“She’s very beautiful,” Aunt Ann said, “and intellectual,” as if that might be a little questionable. My mother had always been vague on the subject of Patricia, as though my father’s first marriage hadn’t really counted. “He complained that she was difficult,” she’d once told me. “Impossible to get along with.” Those shards of information, combined with the fact that Patricia had never made an appearance in San Benito since moving to California five years before, helped to form an impression in my mind: She was brooding and strange—as well as antisocial.
I was surprised, then, to be greeted by a tall, blond, heavyset woman at the door of an elegant farmhouse. This woman who called herself “Pat” wasn’t at all the severe, difficult bohemian that I had pictured, but bright and cheerful. She wore a shift with a tropical print, big gold earrings, and a pair of white slip-on sandals. Her light, chin-length hair was tied back in a small, neat ponytail. Her handshake was firm, a huge squeeze.
“I’m so thrilled to finally meet you! My gosh, you look like Whitman!” she said in a robust, throaty voice. She seemed to have Whitman’s exuberance and outgoing spirit—but along with warmth there was a polite distance. Something about her blue eyes and freckles and white-blond hair reminded me of Doris Day.
The farmhouse was cozy but not small, by any means. It was cleaner and more traditionally decorated than I’d expected. White cotton sofas and chairs were placed about the living room along with round tables with batik cloths over them and glass tops. Lamps dotted the room, spreading circles of yellow light upon collections of things arranged beneath them—beach shells, driftwood, the corpses of a few beautiful moths and butterflies. Around the large fireplace, there was a design of blue-and-white Dutch tiles. And on the mantel, and scattered throughout the room, there were framed pictures of dogs and people—none of whom I recognized, except Whitman. Tall bookcases stretched to the ceiling, loaded with hundreds of oversize picture books, art books, gardening books, and essays on photography. On the walls there were more photographs—Whitman pointed out a few by Edward Weston and some nude torsos by Edward Steichen. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever seen photographs like that before, except in a museum. I’d never really been in a house like Patricia’s before either. In her kitchen there was a deep bain-marie on the stove and another pot of boiling potatoes. “I hope you like vichyssoise,” she said. I nodded enthusiastically. Whatever vichyssoise was, I was going to like it.
Whitman took me to the guest room. Rather than a bunk in some barn or on a moldy futon on the floor—I can’t stress how dingy I’d always imagined Whitman’s and Patricia’s daily lives must have been—he led me to a spacious room with a bright, handmade quilt thrown over the bed, pressed linens, a high ceiling, and its own airy bathroom. There was a bouquet of lavender next to the sink and, on a chest of drawers, a vase of pink flowers with sunny yellow centers. “Those are cosmos,” Whitman said, setting down my duffel on a bamboo luggage rack. I marveled over the flowers—was it the room, or the ceiling, or the sunlight, or my low expectations that suddenly made everything look so perfect?
Cheered by my enthusiasm, Whitman insisted I see the garden. The house was set on what appeared to be a large piece of property. It seemed like a park to me—with no apparent fencing or walls, except for an outdoor eating area with a brick-and-stucco fireplace. Farther back, a large vegetable garden spanned thirty or forty sq
uare feet. Had I ever thought about how vegetables were grown or what the plants looked like before the fruit was picked?
Patricia grew everything in raised mounds of earth, more than a foot across and separated by channels where the garden could be watered easily. Whitman explained that there were sections in the garden for different types of plants, which were rotated from year to year to keep the soil healthy. There was an area for melons and squashes and pumpkins, another for beans. There were potato vines and onion stalks. There were shiny purple eggplants and furry okra. The row of tomato plants went on and on. I’m sure I’d never seen a tomato plant before that afternoon. The only edible things that Abuelita grew were avocados. And Marguerite, besides her arbor of sour grapes, had only trees: kumquats and grapefruit and Meyer lemons.
Whitman began collecting ripe tomatoes in a wicker hamper that had been left hanging on a post. Patricia’s plants were almost as tall as he was, over six feet high, and when I touched a leaf, it was sticky and damp and left an intoxicating smell on my fingers. He filled up half of the basket with tomatoes, some yellow, some red, and then stopped to pluck a handful of tiny round ones. “Sweet One Hundreds,” he said, popping one into my mouth. The marble-size tomato exploded between my teeth—warm, sweet—and seemed like eating sunshine itself.
He straddled a raised bed of lettuce and other things—what was rocket?—clipping some leaves for a salad. Then he walked across the garden to a composting area where piles of brownish leaves and yard cuttings and citrus peels were stacked between hay bales. Whitman placed my hand near the bottom of the pile to feel how warm it was. “The organic matter breaks down,” he said, “and when it’s rotting and decomposing, the chemical changes cause it to give off heat.”
“Is this the fertilizer for the farm?” I asked.
“What farm?”
“Your commune.”
“What commune?”
“This. Aren’t we…isn’t this a commune?”
The Ruins of California Page 14