Golden State

by Stephanie Kegan

  I told him what I’d heard on the news.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “Julia was there.”

  He took my hand. “She’s okay,” he said.

  We weren’t talking about a terrible crime anymore. We were talking about Julia, our high-strung daughter, who wailed day and night as an infant, who later couldn’t tolerate a broken crayon, a wrinkled paper, or the seam on the toe of her socks. Our firstborn read by three, played chess at six, and began writing a novel at seven. Even now, we had to limit the hours she studied, enforce days off. Another mother might have bragged. I worried, and Eric reassured.

  We got in bed, listening to the water dripping in Lilly’s room. “You know what this means,” he said. “We can’t put off getting a new roof another year.”

  I nodded supportively but I didn’t agree. All the roof needed—all I needed—was for it to stop raining.

  Eric reached out his arm. I moved next to him, patted down the hair on his chest, and laid my head there. He was asleep immediately. I don’t know how he did that, awake to dead asleep in an instant, no drifting off.

  I didn’t want to go to sleep. I wanted to stay here, this hair pressing my cheek, the rhythm of this strong heart at my ear, the sound of rain on the window, punctuated by the night groans of an old house leaking at the seams.

  chapter three

  THANKSGIVING loomed and I still hadn’t made a single plan. The simplest and the hardest thing would be to start with Sara. Although my sister and I lived less than a hundred and fifty miles apart, we hadn’t seen each other in two years. Sara didn’t do holidays. She hated driving to the city from her place in Potter Valley. She hadn’t much liked my husband since he put on a suit sixteen years ago to go work as a lawyer. She’d say no, but I’d feel good about inviting her, as if the gulf between us were not wide, as if one day she might join us, and Bobby, too.

  I called from the wall phone in the kitchen while the kids and Eric watched TV in the family room. My sister and I had both been playing our parts for years. Sara did the aging hippie on her plot of land miles from anywhere, rewashing plastic baggies. I was the corporate lawyer’s wife with the evidence of our careless consumption overflowing the bins at the side of the house.

  A few minutes into our conversation, though, Sara threw me a curve. “I thought I’d go down to Mom’s this weekend for her birthday. It’s her eightieth. You should come, Natalie. Mom would like that. The three of us together.”

  “Mother isn’t turning eighty,” I corrected. “She was born in 1916. She’s going to be seventy-nine.”

  We argued for a few minutes, but the number was hardly the point. Seventy-nine, eighty-four, a million. What did it matter? We both knew that all Mother really wanted for her birthday was to hear from Bobby.

  *

  ERIC INSISTED I drive his Lexus to my mother’s even though I was more comfortable in my old Honda. There was something about his car, the padding of the seats, the quiet climate control of the ride, the way the windows demanded to be rolled up, that made me feel not quite present. I was driving from Berkeley to Sacramento, but I was in no way connected to the road.

  I pulled off on Stockton Street, the exit for the house I’d grown up in, swearing when I realized my mistake. I’d have to drive through traffic and turn around to get back on the freeway. But, really, what was the rush? There wasn’t any set time for us to gather in the gated community where my mother now lived.

  Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to drive by the old house, I thought, wondering if that had been my aim all along. I turned off the air conditioner, rolled down the windows, and headed toward Forty-Sixth Street. In a car that was not my own, parked in front of the house where my mother no longer lived, I remembered the summer heat of my childhood. Valley heat so intense it burned the grass and shimmered the air, sweat dripping onto my cotton top, my father coming up the walk, his white shirt stuck to his back, his fingers hooked into a jacket thrown over his shoulder, my mother behind drapes drawn to keep out the sun.

  When the heat became unbearable, I’d go across the hall to Bobby’s room in the coolest corner of the house. He had a Boys’ Life room with brown-on-brown-striped bedspreads, shelves crammed with books, a built-in desk stretching under the window, and a small, shady sun porch stacked with more books. He never seemed to mind it when I showed up in his space. He’d let me read from his collection of Superman and Batman comics. I’d sit on the floor between the second twin bed and the wall, a tall metal glass of icy Kool-Aid at my side, my back against the bed, my bare feet resting on the cool plaster wall. I remembered the smell of those comics, the feel of them on my fingers, my big brother building his model planes or playing a solo game of chess, the two of us quietly together.

  A car horn sounded up the street. I snapped to attention, as if the honk had been directed at me. Then I started my own car, and headed to where I was supposed to be.

  *

  THE GUARD at my mother’s complex waved me through. He wasn’t doing much of a job guarding, but then I didn’t look like much of a robber, a middle-aged woman in her husband’s shiny car, a present for her mother gift-wrapped on the seat beside her.

  Even though my mother had lived here four years, I still struggled to find her condo among all the other pale-colored units surrounded by artificially green lawn.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” she said at the door. “I told Sara not to, but she had a bee in her bonnet.” My mother had graduated first in her class from Berkeley, traveled the world, and danced at the White House, but at heart she was still a girl from the Sacramento Valley. She looked like an advertisement for the golden years—tall, broad shouldered, and smooth faced, her once-salt-and-pepper hair now a stylishly cut white. She wore expensive slacks, a crisp white blouse, and a red cardigan with gold buttons. A pair of heavy gold bracelets jangled on her wrist.

  I felt suddenly sloppy in my jeans and T-shirt and the unbuttoned, flowing blouse I’d grabbed at the last minute. I lacked what my mother had always had, the ability to dress well without thinking about it. She waved me toward the bone-colored couch. “Sit, I’ve made iced tea.” She refused to let me help her, and I felt like what I was, a visitor in my mother’s house.

  When she went for the tea, I circled the living room. I still couldn’t get over her new place, the white walls, the sterile rooms, the absence of family history. My mother had taken almost no furniture from the house where she had lived with and without my father for forty years. She’d put the photographs away, the framed black-and-whites of my parents’ life in politics: my mother and father with Governor and Mrs. Brown, with Adlai Stevenson, with John F. Kennedy. My father a young man beside Eleanor Roosevelt, who is smiling at him instead of the camera.

  “I miss the old stuff,” I said when my mother returned.

  “God, I don’t,” she replied, putting our iced tea on coasters on the pristine coffee table.

  I looked at my mother. She could have stepped out of a 1940s movie. She was never like the other mothers, nagging, waiting for you to come home. She spoke to five-year-olds as if they were college graduates. As usual, I didn’t know what to say.

  When Sara barged through the door a moment later, I was actually relieved.

  “Man, I don’t know how you do it,” she said to me. “I just can’t do traffic anymore.” She waved her fingers. “All those people in their miniature tanks.” She knitted her brows. “That’s not your car parked outside, is it, Nat?”

  “It’s Eric’s,” I said, repressing the urge to curry favor with her by adding that I still had my same old Honda.

  She looked older than when I’d last seen her. The long, wavy hair she tied behind her neck was now more gray than brown. The lines around her eyes were deeper, the flesh on her neck looser, but her body looked as lithe as it had been in her high school cheerleading days. She wore a short, khaki-colored cotton shift, her legs tanned and muscled, a T-shirt, a bulky sweater, and flip-flops. Only Sara could drive for two and a half
hours working the stiff clutch of an old Volvo in those floppy rubber sandals.

  My sister had started college as a sorority girl and finished as an earth mother dishing up brown rice to a houseful of hippies. She graduated, bought a skirt and blouse, and the next thing I knew, she was a social worker with a car and her own apartment overlooking Lake Merritt. Her new life had seemed so glamorous to me that I fantasized about getting a county job of my own when I got out of college.

  After a few years, Sara moved north for a succession of jobs in ever more remote towns, until she settled in Potter Valley. I wasn’t even sure how she lived anymore—whether she worked or not. Sara didn’t like explaining herself any more than she liked getting mired in the quotidian activities that burdened the rest of us.

  “You look good, Natalie,” she said after our embrace. “Prosperous.”

  It was her way of saying I’d gained a few pounds. I tried not to feel hurt. Sara was Sara. She had her nightgown stuffed in a brown paper bag to spend the weekend with our mother.

  We had lunch in the dining room on my mother’s new blond-oak table. She’d divided the contents of the old house among her three children according to a plan that was hers alone. The Oriental rugs, Stickley dining table, and the china went to me, the matching sideboard, the glassware, and Roseville pottery to Sara, the framed etchings to Bobby, who lived alone in a one-room shack without electricity or plumbing.

  Out of old habit, I pressed my thumb against the handle of my fork, but there was no embossed flower to imprint into my flesh. This wasn’t my great-grandmother’s silver, I suddenly realized, the silver my mother had taught me to polish because Sara always refused. She said it was a waste of time. But I loved watching the tarnish go away, working next to my mother as she passed on the family stories: how my great-great-great-grandmother Kristin had crossed the Sierras in a covered wagon carrying a silver spoon from her mother. How years later, her granddaughter Lillian had swept into Gump’s in San Francisco with the same spoon and ordered the pattern remade in a service for sixteen. One day, my mother used to tell me, the set would be mine to pass on to my own daughter.

  Until that moment, I hadn’t understood it was gone.

  I took a bite of salad, but I couldn’t swallow. Four years after the fact, the cold logic of what my mother had done choked me. She might have bequeathed me the story of Kristin and Lillian, but she’d handed over their sterling to Bobby. She’d given him what he could easily sell.

  “You’re not eating,” my mother said.

  I was forty-eight years old. There was nothing to say. I took another bite.

  We had coffee and cookies for dessert. Neither Sara nor I had thought to pick up cake—not that my mother would have cared about one. She hated fuss.

  I kissed my mother good-bye at the door, and Sara walked me to the car. “Did you ever think Mother would choose to live in a place with a little guard and an up-down thing?” Sara waved her arm like a crossing bar.

  “I never thought she’d move from the old house,” I said. “I never thought she’d do a lot of things.”

  Sara squinted at me. “What’s up with you today? Where’d you stash your usual Chatty Cathy self?”

  Her remark caught me off guard. Sara wasn’t particularly attuned to other people’s emotions. If I ever had to survive the crash of a small plane in the Alaskan tundra, there’s no one I’d rather have at my side. But I wasn’t bleeding, freezing, or starving. I was standing beside Eric’s Lexus parked behind a bed of perfectly maintained pansies.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I doubted that Sara would understand. I’d believed my mother when she told me the story of the spoon that Kristin brought with her into California from a home and a family that she would never see again, a spoon remade into a set that passed from daughter to daughter. I’d believed it meant something about family and the history we pass on. Maybe I’d confused it with love.

  Sara gave me a quizzical look as she pulled a small purple pipe and lighter from her shift pocket and cupped them in her hand. She checked behind her. Then she lit her pipe and took a deep, pungent drag.

  I stepped back from the pot smoke, agitated, aggrieved. “Did you know Mother gave Bobby the family silver?”

  “Maybe she wanted him to set a lovely table,” she said when her lungs had cleared.

  My laugh was dry. I wished I hadn’t said anything.

  “You need to let it go,” she said. “They’re just knives and forks. And Mom will never accept that Bobby is what he is.”

  “What he is, is a monumental loser,” I said, surprising myself. I never spoke about Bobby that way.

  “He’s not a big-time lawyer. I’ll give you that.”

  I let that go. “Don’t you think about him?”

  She shrugged. “He’s just some person out there. I cultivate my own garden.”

  I pictured her in a straw hat, holding a hoe. It made me smile. But neither one of us was being truthful. There was a vanishing at the center of our lives, a brother gone so far from us that he had all but disappeared. Not just some person out there. Not a loser, but painfully, inexplicably lost.

  chapter four

  I WAS TEN YEARS OLD, and my world was about to end. I had one brother and Princeton was taking him from me. They were going to pay his way. They’d even pay for his toothpaste. A professor from the math department called our house in Sacramento to tell Bobby he’d have a ball there.

  At another house, the invitation might have been a bigger deal. At ours, going to Princeton meant you couldn’t go to Berkeley.

  Berkeley was an idea to my family as much as a university, the summit of a statewide system second to none, a place where kids arriving on Greyhound buses with thirty dollars in their pockets could get the finest education the country had to offer. It was an idea my father, as a political strategist and a top aide to Governor Pat Brown, had helped make real. The proposal he shepherded had a dull name, the Master Plan for Higher Education, but there was nothing dull about the outcome: the best in public higher education, accessible to all Californians tuition-free, four new state colleges, three new university campuses, Berkeley rated first in the country. But my brother chose Princeton. “Smaller classes,” he said.

  “You’ll hate the snobbery,” my father said.

  “He’s only sixteen. I worry about him going so far away,” I overheard my mother tell my father. But neither parent said he couldn’t go.

  Since they weren’t going to stop my brother, the job fell to me. When I wandered casually into his room, Bobby was at his built-in desk under the window, constructing one of his model planes. He made his models from scratch with balsa wood, using the instructions printed in a book with minuscule type. He hung the finished planes from the ceiling, even the one that Mother hated. It was a red-nosed Japanese Zero. He’d constructed the cockpit from tiny bits of plastic, and I’d been in his room for the argument. “Those planes attacked us at Pearl Harbor,” my mother said. “I don’t want to see one displayed.”

  “It’s not the plane’s fault it belonged to the enemy,” Bobby had said.

  The Zero with the bright rising suns stayed. Bobby was the only person in the family who could ever win an argument with Mother.

  I readied my case as I sat crossed-legged on his bed in shorts, the raised stripes of the bedspread pressing against my bare legs.

  “What’s up, chipmunk?” he asked, his pale, steady hands affixing one tiny sliver of balsa to another.

  “It’s about Dad,” I said.

  “What?” Bobby sounded surprised, as if I might know something he didn’t.

  “He’s going to be really hurt if you don’t go to Berkeley.”

  “Dad will be fine,” Bobby said, turning back to his plane.

  I arranged the pillow behind my back, lifted my head to the planes suspended from the ceiling. Bobby was right. Dad never seemed anything but fine. Aiming for nonchalance, I watched the models on their slender wires float slowly in the breeze. “I heard that at Pr
inceton the rich kids smash the model planes of the poor kids.”

  His head bent over his work, Bobby nodded. “Thanks for telling me. I’ll leave them here.”

  I recognized the tone. It was my father’s: kindly, amused, a tone used exclusively on me, the permanent youngest. If my brother moved far away, I wouldn’t be able to bear it, but I suddenly hated him the way I hated Sara, who never let me near her room, her friends, or her things.

  “Mom says you’re too young to go to Princeton, and nobody there will be your friend.”

  I spoke like that to my sister every day. I’d use anything on her, stuff I’d overheard, made up. But Bobby wasn’t Sara. My chest heaved from the weight of what I’d said, the truth at the heart of my lie.

  “I was thinking you could visit me sometime,” he said. He didn’t seem angry about what I’d just said. He sounded the way he always did, serious, thoughtful, and easy. “Fly out alone when you’re twelve or thirteen.”

  You could build a nation on Bobby’s promises. I pictured it: me flying across the country by myself, sitting by the window, eating lunch off a tray, carrying my suitcase off the plane. I’d wear nylons and straighten them on the tarmac.

  I let Princeton have him. When he came home at Christmas, my mother said he was too thin. I asked him if we could move up my visit by a year. He said he’d think about it.

  When Bobby returned for the summer, I went with my parents to the airport. He didn’t look like himself anymore. His hair was scraggly, his neck so scrawny that his Adam’s apple looked enormous, his skin gray in the fluorescent light of the terminal. When I rushed to throw my arms around him, he didn’t laugh or call me chipmunk or squirt. At home, he slept late into the day, and I no longer read comic books in his room.

  “Bobby’s different,” I complained to my mother.