Golden State: A Novel

by Richmond, Michelle

  Of course, I said none of this to Dr. Wu. Instead, I asked, “Can you help me?”

  He prescribed twice-weekly massage therapy and weekly acupuncture, in addition to a bitter concoction of red clover, raspberry leaf, lady’s mantle, and something called false unicorn root, “to restore hormonal balance and encourage ovulation,” he said. I choked down the concoction twice a day for several months, all the while keeping close tabs on the calendar, my temperature, and the rest. This, like everything, led nowhere.

  28

  “Did I ever tell you what my parents said when I joined the National Guard?” Dennis asks.

  His voice sounds tired.

  “They said the military wasn’t right for you.”

  “Their exact words were ‘The military isn’t for people like us.’ Meaning, it’s the poor people’s job to go fight the wars. That’s part of why I joined; I knew that wasn’t fair. I’d gotten everything I wanted all my life, but my friend Jeremy, this kid who worked at the stables where my mom kept her horses, joined the National Guard to pay for school. He does great, top of his class, but he gets pulled out of college senior year and sent to Dhahran. He’s a week from coming home when he gets killed by fucking friendly fire. Friendly fire! What asshole came up with that term?”

  “I’m really sorry,” I say.

  “They had it right in Vietnam. Not the war itself, but the draft. A draft makes everybody equal. You had guys like Elvis going to war. That would never happen now. Can you imagine Justin Timberlake stuck in a bunker in Afghanistan? Every time I see one of those fucking CALIFORNIA IS MY COUNTRY bumper stickers, I think of Jeremy. And all these guys who came back from Iraq and Afghanistan missing legs and arms, or worse. All that sacrifice amounts to shit if any state can just say, Guess what, we don’t want to be Americans anymore.”

  I can hear him breathing heavily on the other end of the line. “Hell, I don’t have to tell you any of this. I’m sure you’ve already heard it from your sister.”

  “Yes,” I say. I understand why he’s so angry. Most of my patients feel the same way. Not Heather. She’s always been starry-eyed about California.

  I don’t tell him about the sweatpants she gave me a few weeks ago, bearing the slogan REPUBLIC OF CALIFORNIA right across the derriere. I’ve yet to wear them, but I’ve been tempted. It’s startling, really, how enamored the good citizens of California have suddenly become with the symbolism of our tottering statehood.

  Children in schools across the state, from Eureka to Riverside, have begun saluting the California state flag. I’d be willing to bet that, until recently, most Californians didn’t know what has, in recent weeks, become common knowledge: the flag was first raised in Sonoma in 1846, by a group of thirty-three American settlers revolting against Mexican rule. In coming years, the handmade burlap flag would be the subject of much derision, on account of the fact that the beast in the center of it looked more like a hog than a bear. The commander of the short-lived California Republic was William B. Ide, a farmer and sometime teacher from Massachusetts who had arrived on the scene less than a year before. When U.S. Army captain John C. Frémont showed up and claimed the area for the United States just twenty-five days after the revolt began, Ide enlisted in the U.S. Army. A historic state park in Red Bluff still bears his name.

  Revolt. Protest. That’s something San Franciscans are good at, for better or worse. You can’t walk past the Federal Building without running into a group of activists decrying global warming, animal cruelty, the World Trade Organization, the government in general. It makes sense that the flag grew out of an impulse for independence, a thrusting of the middle finger at the powers that be.

  A few days ago, the evening news played footage of boys and girls standing at attention, hands over their hearts, gazing up at that lunky, half-grinning grizzly bear heavy-footing it across a white background, a single red star in the sky to the west of his head, a red band across the bottom. CALIFORNIA REPUBLIC, it declares, as if we’d joined the Union reluctantly in the first place, as if that grizzly bear always had one foot out the door.

  Earlier this week on Channel 4, I saw a classroom full of third-grade children singing the state song, a rather odd little tune called “I Love You, California”:

  It is here nature gives of her rarest.

  It is Home Sweet Home to me,

  And I know when I die I shall breathe my last sigh

  For my sunny California.

  A radio station in Sacramento is running a contest for the best state pledge, because we don’t have one. Apparently, only six states do. It’s news to me. This whole process has been a crash course in civics. As it turns out, most states require public school students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag; California doesn’t. The California constitution does, however, require that public schools provide “patriotic exercises” on a daily basis. The phrasing smacks of a different era. I picture rosy children in red, white, and blue doing calisthenics on a golden lawn—a bit of Communist-style group exercise for the democracy set.

  Growing up, we had to recite two pledges each morning in school, one to the American flag, the other to the Christian flag—white, with a blue square in the upper left corner and, in the square, a red cross. Although it was a public school, no one took the separation of church and state seriously. I recited both pledges with passion. It did not occur to me that allegiances could shift, that the things I believed in as absolutes would fade. The things I learned in Sunday school now seem absurd to me—multiplying loaves of bread, tongues of fire, Jonah in the belly of the whale, a day when believers will be whisked up into the sky. Back then, it was not necessary to think about these outlandish stories, to analyze them. They simply were, just as America simply is my country. I did nothing to earn my citizenship. I was born into it, the laziest form of patriotism.

  If the ballot initiative passes, a million things we take for granted will suddenly be turned on end. When the San Francisco Giants play at AT&T Park, will the fans stand and hold their hands over their hearts while someone sings the new California anthem? And who will get to write it? Tom tells me that invitations have already gone out from the secessionist faction of the state legislature to several California-based acts, from Oakland’s own Green Day and Counting Crows to Don Henley and Glenn Frey.

  On a more personal level, will everyone at the VA be out of a job? The VA has been my home for my entire medical career. The staff and residents and patients are my extended family. It’s impossible to imagine packing up and moving to a different hospital, navigating the unfamiliar corridors and labyrinthine politics of a new facility.

  And of course, the biggest question: Which flag will we salute? Last night, I did a test, just to see what it would feel like to say it: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the Republic of California …” It sort of sounded right. It sort of didn’t.

  My first allegiance: my mother. In the foyer of the church on the day of my father’s funeral, I am standing at her side, so close I can feel the soft fabric of her dress brushing against my face. She’s wearing dark plum instead of black, my father’s favorite dress. The eyelet hem hits high above her knees. Into the slots of her penny loafers—she is flat-footed and can’t abide heels—she has tucked two shiny nickels to match her silver necklace, earrings, and bracelets. People are coming in, saying things to her in hushed voices, looking down at me as though I’m a poor lost puppy. They touch my hair, and their voices shake when they tell me what a sweet girl I am, how much they adored my father. Enormous Myrtle May says, “Girl, I remember when you brought the weather. Your daddy couldn’t have been prouder.”

  I am five years old, and I don’t understand why we’re putting my father in a box deep in the ground. I’ve been told this is a funeral, “to say goodbye to Daddy,” but I don’t know where he’s going, or how long he’ll be gone.

  “That old oak out in front of First Federal,” whispers a lady from the church, fanning herself with an ugly pocketbook. “That
branch just fell clean off like an act of God. Bless Tudy’s heart, she’ll be bankrupt come Sunday.”

  I don’t know what “bankrupt” means, but hearing my mother’s name, I feel fiercely protective.

  The cemetery is next to a pasture, and it has been raining all week. The air smells of hay, manure, rainwater, and trees—a sweet, familiar smell. As we’re walking to the grave site, our shoes stick in the mud. Mine are white with kitten heels, my first “big girl” shoes, bought special for Easter Sunday, and I’m upset that they’re getting ruined. My mother and I sit in folding chairs right in front of the casket, so close, I think, I could reach out, open it, and climb in next to Daddy. He always lies in bed with me until I fall asleep, but last night he wasn’t there. The pastor talks and talks; my mother cries and grips my hand, then pulls me into her plum-colored dress so close I can hardly breathe. At last the pastor says, “And herein we conclude this service.” At precisely that moment a cow in the pasture lets out a long, solitary moo. I laugh out loud, certain it is my daddy, come to wish us well.

  “Hush up,” my mother says gently.

  Then we’re walking back to the car. Our shoes make soft sucking sounds in the mud.

  “What’s ‘bankrupt’?” I say, too loud.

  My mother squeezes my hand and looks down at me, so serious, and she says just as loudly, for the whole world to hear, “Don’t you worry. I have two hands and a brain. I can work. No one in this family is going bankrupt.”

  In the car, she pulls me close to her and buries her face in my hair, all her bravery gone. I can feel her tears on my scalp. “Don’t you ever leave me,” she says.

  Neither of us could have known that, only ten years later, I would be plotting a permanent escape.

  Of course, we still talk every other Sunday, in the afternoon, after she gets home from church. I haven’t told her about my divorce, and am at a loss as to how to go about it. What would she make of the notion that a marriage can simply be discarded, so essential an allegiance betrayed? This is a woman who still wears her wedding ring, thirty-five years after her husband died. I imagine she’d advise me to make things right, to take Tom back, to do whatever’s necessary to hold the family together. She would likely say something about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. But this is where the domestic equation breaks down: Without a child, are we even a family?

  29

  8:57 a.m.

  The cable car moves slowly but steadily for a few blocks, then screeches to a stop. A crowd has gathered at the intersection of California and Hyde. It’s not the usual swarm of people in a hurry, heading to work. The helicopter circles overhead, its white bundles of propaganda falling like snow. There’s that sense of restlessness, as if, at any moment, this whole thing might erupt.

  Teenagers in school uniforms are chanting, “Let us go!” Several middle-aged women with pro-union signs have gathered around the students. A confrontation appears to be imminent.

  “Let them go” has become the rallying cry of a particularly virulent right-wing movement that views California as an affront to the values of the country. Their disciples, who camp out at public parks and churches and even schools, shouting angry insults, point gleefully to the fact that California is on the verge of bankruptcy.

  The governor has used this slogan to his benefit. “We grow more than half of their fruits and vegetables, and yet they say, ‘Let them go,’ ” he wrote in his most recent open letter to California voters. “We send hundreds of billions of dollars to the federal government each year, and the welfare states receive our gifts without complaint, and yet they say, ‘Let them go.’ We’ve sent more than fifty thousand soldiers to fight their wars, and yet they say, ‘Let them go.’ We create the technology that builds their computers and their smartphones, and they say, ‘Let them go.’ The finest medical minds in the world are at work in our institutions of higher learning, developing biotechnology that will save their children’s lives, and they say, ‘Let them go.’ Well, we agree. Let us go!”

  The conductor clangs the bell and shouts into the crowd, trying to clear a path, but it’s obvious they’re not going anywhere. From here I can see the tower of St. Francis hospital three blocks away. Three long blocks, but still.

  I push my way off the cable car, down into the crowd. Leaning against a newspaper kiosk, I send a text to my old med school friend Kim, who’s a general internist at St. Francis. Are you at the hospital? Need help.

  I’m counting steps to keep my mind off the pain—one and two and three and four. My ankle is on fire. Halfway there, a man thrusts a pink pamphlet toward me. As I dodge him, he calls out, “Dr. Walker?”

  I search his face, trying to find the connection.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  Blue eyes, dark hair, mid-thirties. Medium height. Denim jacket. I’ve seen thousands of patients over the years. He could be any one of them—except, of course, he can really only be one of them. When he turns his head, I see the scar on his neck. A long, red welt, stretching from just below his right ear nearly to his Adam’s apple. I was twenty-six years old and just out of medical school, doing my first year of residency, on rotation at San Francisco General, when he stumbled into the ER at three A.M., bleeding all over the floor.

  The sight of the scar makes me uncomfortable, guilty. I remember how petrified I felt as I punctured his skin with the needle and pulled the thread. I remember worrying that he would bleed to death on my watch.

  Gradually, the details come into focus. It was the girlfriend who did it, with a serrated kitchen knife. When they came into the ER, he was calm, but she was screaming and hysterical. Only when security took her out of the room did the man say under his breath, “Crazy bitch. I’m not taking her back, I don’t care if the bitch begs on her knees.”

  Half an hour later, she returned with vanilla ice cream from the cafeteria, touching his cheek and sobbing that she was sorry. He smiled at her through the haze of the anesthesia and said, “I love you, baby.” Watching him eat the ice cream with the tiny wooden spoon, it occurred to me that there was so much I didn’t know, so much I had to learn.

  “Right,” I say. “You had the girlfriend with the knife skills.”

  “Bingo,” he says, running his fingers along the scar. “Your hands were shaking. When the stitches came out and I saw what was left, I cried like a baby. What can I say? I was young and vain. Want to touch it?”

  “What?” I say, startled. I glance impatiently at my phone. No text from Kim.

  “Your handiwork here.” He points at the scar.

  I’m not sure what compels me to reach out and run my fingers over the jagged edges. The skin is slick and tight. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It’s my good-luck charm. I’ll be sitting in a bar, minding my own business, and some woman comes up and asks me what happened to my neck. They think I’ve been inside.” He smiles. “One thing leads to another.”

  “Whatever happened to the girlfriend?”

  He laughs. “I married her. Didn’t last.”

  My phone buzzes, a text from Kim. I’m here.

  “Where you headed?” he asks. “Looks like you’re in pain.”

  “Down to St. Francis. I tore up my ankle this morning. I need to get it wrapped so I can go deliver a baby. Long story.”

  He stuffs his stack of pamphlets into his messenger bag. “Let me help.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s what I’m all about these days!” His enthusiasm feels oddly off, as if he’s following a script.

  I drape my arm around his shoulder. He puts an arm around my waist, I lift my bad ankle off the ground, and like this we proceed down the sidewalk.

  “No offense, but maybe you ought to watch where you’re going next time.”

  “And maybe you ought not marry girls who try to kill you.”

  “Right, Doctor Lady.”

  At the hospital, he insists on escorting me into the ER waiting room. “You ever find yourself in
need of anything, call me,” he says. He pulls a pamphlet out of his messenger bag, scribbles his phone number on the bottom, and presses it into my palm.

  It’s always the same. I see someone out in public, someone who appears to know me. They look at me as though our relations have been intimate, as though there is some secret in our past tying us together. Even after all these years, it takes me a few moments to realize that it’s not someone I know, really, just a former patient. But the strange thing is that I do eventually remember. Not names, but faces. I have an uncanny ability to put a face with an ailment or injury, to remember where I saw the patient and what I treated him or her for. It’s a strange way to go through the world, knowing so much about other people’s lives when they know so little about mine. Yet the imbalance has always suited me—always better to be the observer, not the observed.

  As he turns to leave, I read the bold print on the pamphlet, surprised to discover that it has nothing to do with the vote. So, why can’t you achieve your goals? You can! Below that exhortation, the image of a fleshy, balding man stares back at me. Under that, in a smaller font, is the message: Dianetics reveals the source of all your unhappiness and self-doubt, and shows you how to get rid of it.

  I toss the flyer into the trash and try, for the umpteenth time, to get through to Heather.

  30

  “I met him in Kabul,” Heather said that night at my house while the pot roast simmered in the oven. All this time, I’d been waiting for her to identify the father, and now that she had done so, it was even more outrageous than I’d expected. She was smiling mischievously—as if to admit, almost, that she was pulling my leg.