The Ruins of California

by Martha Sherrill

  She was on her knees and found the black boots behind pairs of old Earth Shoes, Indian moccasins, and Stan Smiths. She grabbed a Dr. Scholl’s sandal and lifted it with a pinched look on her face. “My mom says that only peasants wear these in Europe.” Then she found my black riding boots. “God, they’re so heavy and huge. What size foot do you have?”

  “Nine.”

  “Right. Same as me.” She rose up, her face red from squatting, and hauled the boots over to the twin bed. “What are these wood things?”

  I pulled out the boot trees for her. Marguerite had ordered them, along with the boots, from a riding-apparel shop in New York City. Shelley yanked off her white Adidas and was trying to slide her bare foot into the boot. “It’s not going to work that way,” I said. “You need socks. And you need boot pulls.”

  “What?”

  “Boot pulls. Oh, forget it,” I said, walking away. “I need breakfast. I’m dying.” I snapped on a stretchy bra, then got into a green crewneck T-shirt and a pair of waist-high jeans, zipping them with a certain amount of effort and strain until the thin denim became a second skin. I couldn’t imagine lying in bed at night and thinking about what I’d wear the next day—couldn’t imagine anybody doing that.

  Shelley was staring at me. “Forget the bra,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re wearing a bra. You’re better off without one.”

  “But what about my Neeplus erectus?”

  “You think that bra hides it?” She laughed. “I can see your NE right now.” She reached up and tried to pinch my boob. “Tweak!”

  “Get your hands off me!”

  “Hey, when’s your mom coming home?”

  “No idea,” I said. “And it doesn’t matter. We’re not getting stoned. It’s only nine o’clock in the morning.”

  Marguerite wore a pair of canary yellow breeches when she rode. They were immaculate and puffed out at the hips, came in tight at her bony knees, and descended, with a patch of golden suede, along the inside of her skinny calves. Her legs looked impossibly thin—like little twigs—and she was standing at the door to the lower barn and waving at me. I hunched over and gave her a hug. She seemed so small, just bones and fabric. As always, she wore a powder blue Lacoste shirt tucked inside her breeches. On her hands was a pair of soft kidskin gloves, a pale yellow that matched her pants. When we first started riding together, she bought me a pair of the gloves, too, along with jodhpurs and paddock boots. Last year I’d graduated to field boots.

  “Your eyes are bloodshot,” Marguerite said, picking some lint out of my ponytail. The sunlight was intense, and my eyes felt very small, like pin dots. And dry. “You must have hay fever,” she said.

  “Hay fever?” I smiled foggily, grateful for the alibi. “Maybe I do. Doesn’t that make your nose run?”

  “Well, sure it does,” Marguerite said, turning toward the barn.

  I sniffed as if my nose were running, which it wasn’t, and rubbed my nose as if it were itchy. And maybe it was. Just thinking about hay fever had made me feel itchy suddenly. It hadn’t hit me—how totally high I was—until I’d gotten in the car with Carlos. I’d waved good-bye to Shelley as she stood in the driveway with that smirk on her face that said, Ha, ha, go see Grandma now, and I was hit by a sense of dislocation. Where was I? Where was Jose? He usually picked me up. By the time Carlos rounded the corner of Ardmore and passed Casa Adobe, an old historic hacienda with stucco walls, I began to fret that he might want to make small talk. And I wasn’t sure I could.

  Carlos was the pool man at Marguerite’s. I didn’t know him well, had just seen him around, a tall, angular guy with a crisp white shirt. After pulling into the driveway of Abuelita’s, he didn’t get out of the car or come to the door. He just waited for me. He seemed freaked out, actually, but maybe that was just me. When I got inside the car, there were beads of sweat all over his forehead.

  The drive took forever. Carlos went on surface streets instead of using the new highway that linked Van Dale and Eagle Rock and a few other nondescript suburban towns to Pasadena—and Marguerite’s 1963 brown Oldsmobile made its way slowly, passing the bald hills and new housing developments. My mind kept jumping to paranoid thoughts about how Carlos might be kidnapping me or wanting to rape me. He spooked me out because his eyes were always lingering on me in a Boris Karloff kind of way. But then I saw Suicide Bridge in the distance and San Benito, where the grand Vista del Arroyo Club hung over the dry gulch like some kind of temple.

  The Arroyo was a resort hotel in the twenties when Marguerite and N.C. lived there, before buying land on El Molino and building the house. The hotel was full of easterners and midwesterners in those days, transplants, rich people, entrepreneurs, tuberculosis patients and asthmatics, as well as anybody else who needed sunshine and dry air and wanted to spend winter days playing golf and tennis or betting on the horses at Santa Anita Racetrack. During World War II, the hotel became an army hospital and after that a training center for the U.S. Cavalry—when the stables were built—until 1949, when a consortium of investors, including N.C., purchased the building and grounds for a private club. The name stayed the same—the Vista del Arroyo—but over time it was also known as the Arroyo Hunt, or simply the Arroyo. When somebody mentioned having been to “the Vista,” you knew they didn’t belong.

  Carlos took the ancient car through the club gates and along a driveway that was lined with art nouveau lampposts with globes. He drove behind the main building, a Mission-style fortress with a red tile roof, and then along a smaller drive that led downhill to the lower club, where the riding rings and barns were. Marguerite kept two horses there, Picasso and Chameleon. As the car descended the hill, I cranked the window down for air. The palms of my hands were sweating, and I was overcome by a wave of regret. I was sorry I’d gone along with Shelley. It was just supposed to be a few drags—just to make the afternoon more interesting.

  We’d stood in the backyard, in the shadow of a ripped awning, and watched the alley for signs of my mother’s car.

  “Hey, be on the lookout,” Shelley kept saying, “for Connie’s low-rider.”

  Shelley seemed to have an edge in her voice whenever she talked about my mother, a mocking tone. She struck a wooden match, bent her head down, and took a long hit. She passed the joint to me.

  “Hey, that’s Thai stick. You’re going feel it,” Shelley said. But it was too late. I already felt lighter, kind of airy—giddy. Wow, it made me laugh. Shelley returned to her cracks about my mother’s Lincoln.

  “It’s not a low-rider,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re right,” Shelley laughed. “It’s a Jew canoe. Nobody drives those big cars anymore but Jews.”

  Did I know any Jews? There weren’t any in Van Dale or San Benito, as far as I knew. They all lived in Beverly Hills and Brentwood—in West Los Angeles, where the movie people were, and the New Yorkers. I wasn’t sure what that meant anyway—being Jewish. David Feinman seemed mostly old and single and artsy—he lived in a modern house with a view of the whole city and ethnic tapestries hanging on the walls and Indian pottery on the shelves, and he had lots of black friends, musicians who took over the piano. We’d gone to a few parties at the house—I got the feeling that Mr. Feinman liked throwing parties—and my mother was always fawned over and told that she looked like Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren. I also got the impression that Jews and blacks all worked in the music business and hung out together. Did Jews really drive Cadillacs and Lincolns? David Feinman had a giant black Mercedes-Benz—he’d loaned it to Abuelita when she forgot to set the emergency brake on her new Nova and it fell into the canyon next to his house. Anyway, I never thought about people’s cars. People drove whatever cars they wanted. Didn’t they? A car was a car. But to Shelley a Cadillac was a Jew canoe and any Chevy was a low-rider.

  “You’re reminding me of somebody from San Benito,” I had said to Shelley. “One of those cotillion people.”

  My performance at the Arroyo Cotillio
n was always a source of amusement and ridicule to Shelley, but this time she didn’t laugh. She was staring down at my riding boots with great intensity. “God,” I said to her. “I’m so stoned. Are you?”

  She shrugged, raised the joint to her mouth, but the cinder was dead. “My mom can’t believe you’re a beaner,” she said pulling out the matches again and firing up the joint with a suck of her lips. She held the smoke in. “She’s definitely got a thing about it. She says you don’t look like a beaner at all. Want another toke?”

  “I’m half.”

  “I know. You’re half. I told her. But she claims that beaner genes are dominant. They take over whatever they’re mixed with. You do have dark eyes and dark hair.”

  “So does my father,” I said quickly, holding in a toke and trying to talk without letting any smoke escape.

  Shelley was still staring down at my riding boots, which seemed very shiny suddenly. Marguerite had spent an afternoon showing me how to polish them.

  I handed Shelley the joint.

  “You look Venezuelan, my mom said.”

  “Oh, thanks.” I was light-headed, almost dizzy. Venezuelan. Was that a compliment or not? Shelley’s mother was even harsher and more critical than Shelley. Her husband had gone out for a carton of cigarettes one morning and never came back, the sort of story that made more sense the longer you knew her. And then she’d gotten a nose job and something else, Shelley said, and her whole face looked strained and tight.

  “What does a beaner look like anyway?” I asked Shelley. “My mom doesn’t look like a beaner.”

  “Your mom is definitely something,” Shelley said.

  “Everybody’s something.” It just slipped out of my mouth. “We’re all something, aren’t we?”

  Shelley and I both laughed. Then we had trouble stopping.

  “What’s your mom’s story anyway?” Her voice had that edge again.

  “I told you.”

  “She’s so into est. It’s her whole life.”

  “She goes whole hog, that’s all.”

  “Then loses interest. Like tennis and her flamingo.”

  “Flamenco.”

  “Uh-oh,” Shelley said, watching the Lincoln Continental float into the open garage. “Here comes Mamacita. Think she saw us?”

  I looked inside the dark barn and saw Picasso’s head sticking out of his stall—and was filled with dread. I had groomed and tacked him dozens of times, could do it in my sleep, but not like this, with my mind noticing every single second as it ticked by.

  I walked down to his stall and said hello to the old bay. I patted the side of his head and stroked his soft nose. Then I opened the wooden door to the stall and put a blue lead line around the horse’s neck and took him out to the center of the barn. I put a halter around his head and attached it to the crossties on the wall—to keep him from going anywhere. Usually I didn’t bother with crossties. But today I thought I should play it safe.

  Marguerite was walking Chameleon, an eight-year-old palomino, out of his stall at the far side of the barn. He was younger and not beat up like Picasso, who was one stumble from being retired completely. Chameleon’s coat was lighter and finer than Picasso’s, a golden honey color, and his mane and tail were pale blond. Marguerite had gotten him just the year before, thinking that I would ride him, but he had a few quirks—he spooked easily—so Marguerite was working with him. For now I rode him only in the ring, not out on the trail.

  “Sure you don’t want to try Chameleon?” Marguerite said in a loud voice. She always offered the finer horse but seemed glad that I had some sense.

  “I’m sure,” I called out. My voice seemed loud to me, and it seemed like another lifetime ago that I’d been standing with Shelley in the backyard and watching my mother get out of the white Lincoln in her navy blue warm-up suit. She was carrying an armload of open-house materials and looked at us with a dead face. She didn’t really greet Shelley or even smile.

  “Inez,” she had said in a certain tone. “Aren’t you riding with your grandmother this morning?”

  I carried a basket of grooming stuff and set it down by the barn wall. I took out the hoof pick, a small, pointed tool to pick mud and hay from the bottom of the horse’s feet. When I was done, I ran the curry over Picasso’s coat to loosen up the baked mud. Then I got two long, hard-bristle dandy brushes from the basket and went over Picasso’s whole body, from head to tail, from the depression of his spine and then down each of this legs to the hoof. When I was done, I put a clean saddle pad on him—shifting it several times to make sure that it wasn’t too far back—then returned to the tack room for the cross-country saddle that Marguerite had given me a few months earlier for my fifteenth birthday. I lifted the saddle high, brought it down on the center of Picasso’s back, and then I took the girth, a leather-and-elastic belt that wrapped underneath the horse just behind his front legs, and buckled it to keep the saddle tight around his chest.

  “Land sakes.” Marguerite was waiting by the back door, already up on Chameleon. “He must have been coated in mud. Was he? It’s taken you forever.”

  “I’m done,” I called out, slipping on the bridle and fastening the throat latch. I walked around Picasso, pulled each stirrup down into position, and then returned to his left side to mount him. I put my left foot in the dangling stirrup, hopped up and down several times, and threw my weight skyward and my right leg over him.

  The trail went down into the arroyo, a gulch of open land below Suicide Bridge. Marguerite trotted ahead on Chameleon and kicked up a fine golden brown dust that seemed to fly against gravity, as though drawn to the sun. I smelled the sage in the warm sunlight, and in the shadows there was a rich, heavier scent, not quite mold, not quite earth, as if the darkness contained teeming worlds of life, secret and unavailable.

  I felt the presence of something. What? A kind of energy—almost buzzing and alive—as if every tree and shrub and every cloud, all parts of the visible landscape, were expanding at the same time, getting bigger reaching up, and if I were able to become calm and quiet enough, I would see things getting bigger and eventually growing so big that they connected and touched. I noticed patterns of sunlight and shade, the shapes of leaves, the way that Chameleon’s hooves left upside-down U’s in the path before me——as he went along. As a mental exercise, I tried to remember the whole day, chronologically, hour by hour, as though it were a long mathematical equation that I challenged myself to review in my mind. If I could do that, a treasure of self-knowledge and understanding would be unleashed. I’d seen on a Zen calendar the saying, “The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.” And I remember feeling very strongly that this day was important—this one day—and how I lived it was going to reveal a small but essential detail that would be the key to everything.

  I went back to the beginning. I woke up and began a pleasant daydream about Antonio. Shelley knocked on the door in her cutoffs and T-shirt. Then she lounged on my bed as if she owned it. She was always probing—asking rude questions. She asked me once if I masturbated, like it was a perfectly ordinary question. She asked if my mother was going to marry Bob Lasso, the dentist she’d met at an est event, or was she going to “string him along like she did Weeger.” Was I going to inherit Marguerite’s money someday? Shelley wanted to know that, too. “My father told me to expect nothing,” I had answered. “Why?” Shelley snapped. “Is he planning to spend it all on himself?”

  Shelley was too curious—gobbling up everything in life like a pig. Since moving to Van Dale, it hadn’t taken long before she was having sex with Gary Kloss, a jock at Van Dale High who never talked to her during the day, just called her at night. She went out to see him, met him places or climbed in his bedroom window. She told me everything, all the details, as if it weren’t humiliating to be on call for sex—just arriving inside a guy’s bedroom window like that, like popping out of a cake. Shelley acted as though the whole thing with Gary Kloss were a huge adventure. He wasn’t using her. She was
using him.

  The horses crossed a dry creek bed. Farther along there was a meadow where the ground was soft and even. The year before, Marguerite had brought me to the meadow to practice cantering on an open flat, the kind of unrestricted space that can sometimes excite a horse to race or come undone. But Picasso never lost control or raced. He was steady and predictable, an old horse who rarely got excited. After that, I always cantered in the meadow. Marguerite sat on Chameleon in the shade, by a small grove of eucalyptus trees.

  “Don’t let your legs grip him!” she called out. “Get your weight down into the stirrups! Get him collected! That’s it. That’s it. Good girl.”

  After eight or ten laps, I brought Picasso down to a trot, then a walk. And I joined Marguerite by the trees. “You’re looking good today,” she said. But she looked pale, tired, and one of her eyes kept filling up with tears. “Shall we head for the woods?” she asked. “Are you up for some jumping?” Her enthusiasm seemed forced, the way a kindergarten teacher sounds at the end of the day.

  Marguerite led us to a path in the woods where we always jumped over fallen trees. It was shadowy and dark, and the smell of earth and secret worlds rose up again from the ground. A feeling of fullness. The world seemed cozy and full and perfect. The horses broke into a trot, as they always did in the woods, and, seeing a jump ahead, Marguerite brought Chameleon into a canter. I watched the horse sink down and change to a three-beat gait, then easily take a small jump over a log. Marguerite seemed to have lost her balance, though, and slid to one side, almost as if her girth weren’t tight enough and the saddle was loose. I began to yell out—then I remembered how much Marguerite hated yelling, hated being shouted at—and I hesitated just long enough to lose my chance to be heard.