by Ilie Ruby
I hesitated, wondering if she would do this to me again. Why was it always me? She lit a cigarette and blew smoke out the window.
“Out. Get out,” she said, hitting the steering wheel with the heel of her hand. I opened the door and got out. Standing in the rain, I watched her drive off, my hands balled into fists. My cheeks flushed, though I refused to cry, letting the rain soak my jean shorts and yellow tank top. I refused to bite my fingernails to the quick again. I looked around in the silence, wiping my glasses with the hem of my shirt. There was nothing but darkness and an occasional flicker of moonlight on the wet pavement. I stopped breathing, if only for a moment. I reached into my pocket and took out one of the smooth stones my mother had given me earlier. It felt warm in my palm. Somehow it anchored me.
There was that howling again.
I shivered, counting my heartbeats as I had learned to do. I wondered what it was about me that made her do this to me but never to Dolly. I stayed there for a minute, certain that my sister, who didn’t care about being loved and who could look a person in the eye without flinching and tell them how it was, scared my mother a little. Dolly had said “motherfucker” to a park ranger once, when he ousted us from an illegal camping spot. My mother had pretended not to smile and told her to swear only in Yiddish.
My mother liked it, her courage.
Just keep breathing, I told myself. I imagined the fairies and gnomes that we had been talking about the day before, the ones in our books. The thought of them helped. I guided my breath, and I imagined a huge gnome reaching down to find me. There he was, grasping me with his big hands underneath my armpits. I stood on my tiptoes, my face held to the rain, lifting my arms up, imagining him pulling me up and out of danger. I opened my eyes once, staring into the spray of stars I imagined were there.
PEOPLE LIKE US, with no home to speak of, fell into the category of “in-betweeners,” forced to weather the uncertainty of unknown lands, and thus, we were members of the community of eclipsed folk—fairies, gnomes, Finmen, water sprites, waterhorses, and other creatures that made themselves known only in shadows and could be found in our books, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and folklore dictionaries, stories she collected.
“There could be gnomes under the bridges of the 405 in Los Angeles,” Dolly liked to tell me.
“That’s magical thinking,” I would reply, as if our entire lives weren’t already guided by it.
My mother repeatedly adjusted the rearview mirror as we cased the Southern California back roads in search of work. Our Country Squire housed everything we needed—rolls of toilet paper, cans of soda, pieces of fruit, and the last frozen TV dinner, which we’d split, unheated.
Wherever we went, burning down one highway after another, she’d take us to job sites where we were expected to work. Strawberry picker. Housemaid. Envelope stuffer. Bread baker. Personal aide to the sick and infirm.
“There’s nothing wrong with a fairy tale or two. Everything is useful. You need to know how to navigate, to see roads before they are built. Be creative. Girls, just keep your eyes open to the possibilities.”
We memorized lines from great writers as my mother drove—Shakespeare, Thoreau, the Brothers Grimm, Judy Blume, Betty Friedan, all from the compartment of the station wagon as the windows filled with dust spun by the Santa Ana winds, or fogged up with morning dew.
There were too many possibilities, I thought, and yet never enough. We had no map. My mother navigated our life along the grid of intersecting weather patterns, moon names, and catastrophic events on General Hospital. The eclipsed folk, we speculated, liked to appear in the white spaces of the grids during the shifting times of twilight and daybreak, within the place between life and death, and most often, we would soon find, during the threshold years of adolescence, between child and adult.
It was reasonable to imagine that now and again, to make things bearable, Dolly and I would play our games, calling out fairies on the cliffs near the ocean and climbing in the canyons near the roads. My mother thought us clever when we spoke of gnome families and of waterhorses kneeling under Belmont Veterans Memorial Pier, after they’d swim out from their beds near the pilings. “Brava!” our mother would shout as we narrated the drive. She applauded us for adding some magic to our day and making sure that there was a bit of fun amid it all, our hunger, the moon, and its white empty skies.
THE ONLY THING I knew for sure from the backseat of our car was that if I pressed a can of Coke between my knees, I would not dwell on food. If this didn’t work, the only thing left was to picture streams of light flashing across the stones where a waterhorse rested, licking the salt from its legs. Sometimes it helped; my mother was right.
“Who else watches the full moon like we do?” Dolly once asked my mother.
“Farmers do. Sailors and fishermen who need to rely on the ocean,” said my mother. She said you had to know that which could save you, for it could probably also kill you. You had to know it better than anyone else, every inch of it.
I STOOD THERE in the rain, my arm muscles trembling under my yellow shirt as I kept my arms lifted high, waiting, promising myself I would stay like this until my mother came back for me.
Out of the ink spot in the distance, I saw two lights.
As they grew bigger, I knew I was being saved. My mother was coming back for me. She always came back eventually. The front lights glowed like two moons. I noticed the goose bumps on my arms for the first time.
“That’ll teach you to be so proud,” she said, as she opened the car door. “No, Ruthie. Stop looking at me like that. Do you think I could really forget you?”
The front headlights illuminated the tiny threads of rain that slanted toward what I could now identify as cliffs. My stomach lurched. I climbed inside, and we drove back onto the highway, following the moonlight. I did not dare look at Dolly through my tears, nor she at me, as the wind spun bits of rock from the cliffs and the machinations of young girls into the waves.
“I have a secret,” she said.
“What is it?”
“You’ll have to wait. It’s a surprise.”
The deeply hidden flaw about me, the one that made my mother leave me and not Dolly, had not been found. But it was irrelevant now. It stopped mattering as soon as my sister reached over and squeezed my hand. We pushed on through the rain, driving against traffic, heading for the ocean, where my mother said no one in their right mind would be going, which meant there would be a place for people like us. No, no, no, I thought. You said we wouldn’t sleep near the ocean. You promised. For years, I dreamed of drowning.
I dug my nails into my palms. I squeezed my eyes shut, but the sound of the ocean filled me and forced my eyes open. As she pulled off Pacific Coast Highway and onto Ocean Boulevard, I could see the waves spilling over the Long Beach–San Pedro breakwaters, crashing against the coast. I searched for land, grateful for the oncoming curb as we neared the seaside community of Belmont Shore.
We sought refuge at the first place we saw, the Twin Palms Motel, a salmon-colored stucco building right on the sand, flooded in seawater and mud. There was a public parking lot to the right.
The sign out front swung from two thin chains. The black vinyl lettering said FREE AIR CONDITIONING.
The parking lot was a pool, with a few abandoned cars as islands. The first floor had been flooded, forcing a woman in a shiny red raincoat to the second floor to wait for help.
She stood on the balcony, trying to shut a window, the wind catching her short gray curls as she held a green plastic tarp over her head. She waved to us with her free hand. My mother rolled down her window and called out through the rain, begging her for a room.
“We’ve been evacuated!” the woman called back. “I’m closing up.”
“I have two hungry little girls in my car!” my mother yelled, a statement she repeated whenever she was caught speeding or we needed to be gifted food.
I looked out the window, my knees already shaking. Out of the corner of my ey
e I spotted something moving, something massive and brown in my peripheral vision. Then it faded. When I looked up again I saw the shadow shuffling across the parking lot. I said nothing, wondering whether I was dreaming. It appeared as a boulder near a parked car. A few seconds later it moved again, but it disappeared under a cloud. No one else saw. I’m not sure why I didn’t tell my sister. She would have already been out of the car, perhaps, and a few steps ahead of me. Or maybe I just wanted it all for myself, my quiet rebellion. My silence should have never been mistaken for compliance or naiveté. It had protected me, at least from those who threatened me. But I was more worried about my mother’s rage than about something unknown, something I felt was just as scared as I was.
“Come on, then,” the woman called, her green tarp letting go like a candy wrapper in the wind. “That’s no place for those girls. Get out of danger!”
As we bumped against the submerged curb in the parking spot, my mother turned off the ignition and looked over at me. “Ruthie,” she said. “I said I’d never forget you. One day you’ll have a daughter of your own and you’ll understand why I did all of this.”
MANY YEARS LATER, my mother would tell me, after her first week of sobriety, that both Dolly and I had been her first love; that a person could, in fact, have two beginnings. She told me she had doubted it was possible. You never know how little or how much time the heart will take, she said.
I would feel guilty that I’d doubted her. I’d see that perhaps she had been telling the truth about her love for me, and about the moon, too. This made me ache for her.
For years, I would keep my mother’s photograph in a frame above her guitar case in my living room in Long Beach. In the photograph she is sitting on our balcony overlooking the Pacific Ocean, playing her guitar and staring up at the moon. Her Farmer’s Almanac is open, one page dog-eared at her feet.
It was the only photograph I kept from my old life.
A life before my Naida.
Chapter Two
MY MOTHER , DIANA , ruled the universe. Steeped in her belief that the full moons were portentous, she liked to sit on the roof of our car at a parking lot, campsite, desert, beach, or wherever we had landed, paging through her annual Farmer’s Almanac for clues to our future. She said if I was very good, the full moon would protect me, too.
The small paperback with the yellow cover was a yearly calendar of the heavens, created to help farmers with weather forecasts, those who planted by the moon, and those who lived and worked by the sea. For people like us, who lived free, sometimes under trees, we, too, would do best guided by the moon’s calendar, she said. May was the Planting Moon. July’s Hay Moon provided extra light to bring in the crops from the fields before the fatigue of nightfall. The Harvest Moon was closest to the autumn equinox. The Hunter’s Moon followed, when the fields were cleared and prey could be spotted. My mother believed this could be applied to our lives as well. In January, the Wolf Moon, also called the Hunger Moon, would lead us back to her ex-boyfriend, a farmer she said still wanted her. The Hay Moon in July could appear red and would provide extra moonlight so we could trash-pick late into the night. The Hunter’s Moon would push the sweet flesh of tiny red strawberries into our hands, as if our fingers were white petals. Each full moon had several different names, she said, depending on who named them. She’d mostly use names from the almanac, from people called the Algonquin. But there were other names, those used by the English, or from medieval times or Celtic folks, that could come in handy if she needed to adjust things to fit our lives, she said.
Night after night, my face pressed against the half-opened window of our station wagon. I listened to the warm Santa Anas howling through the canyons and passes, letting dust burn my eyes, settling on my cheeks like embers. My skin burned. Still, I forced my gaze on the full moon, daring it to tell me its stories.
“I know you’re afraid of the ocean, Ruthie. The women in our family have fears when they’re young. But this teaches them how to become strong. Your fears will go away in time, and you’ll be just fine. Besides, we have this,” she said, holding up the almanac. “Truth in books.”
As we cased the dusty Southern California back roads in search of work, my mother’s ideas formed a highly charged circuit of intersecting stories of the moon, reports on the weather, her love life of travesties, and tales of deception on General Hospital. I grew up figuring that relationships were always like those in the scenes I watched. Didn’t people shoot those who threatened their love? Didn’t rape victims fall in love with their attackers, as Laura had done with Luke? Weren’t love triangles a normal part of life? Wasn’t someone always faking her own death, impersonating a twin, having an affair, getting murdered with a paperweight, and then coming back years later with a secret that could ruin everyone?
I pretended to believe this was a good enough plan for us. This was part of the deal I made with God. As long as we didn’t have to sleep near the ocean, I would be okay.
Now, here we were at the Twin Palms, doing the very thing she promised not to. I didn’t want to question her. One day, within the thick clusters of waxy bougainvillea, I would hear women’s voices rising from the blossoms, and I’d remember.
On nights of the full moon, their chorus would wake me from sleep, wailing, weeping, speaking for me because my own voice was lost.
THE COAST OF Long Beach, had been flooded with animals—herons and parrots, stingrays and sharks. Marine animals, like sea turtles, liked the warm waters created by the power plant and had crowded into the harbor and the bay. Dolphins could also be seen there, jumping in the waves. A plethora of fish, sardines and white croaker, made their homes among the pilings of the pier, which had been filled in with concrete to create an artificial reef. At the end of the pier were piranha and stingrays. Sand sharks swam just beyond the harbor. Seals could get lost or caught in the canals. The Long Beach Breakwater, though it had its openings, kept out most of the larger sea mammals, like whales and big sharks, and created a safe haven for mammals like sea lions and seals, and other large fish. Sea lions, in particular, had become strangely assertive in the last few years, leaving the rookery at the southwest end of Catalina Island and crowding the marina and the oil rig platforms. Sometimes they would crawl right up on the docks, especially if they were used to being fed by people. They were noisy and would defecate all over the pier and sometimes the boats, ruining equipment and eating the fishermen’s catches. Fishermen struggled with them; in this place, everyone and everything crowded and competed for space and food.
THE STORM WAS just getting started.
The Twin Palms’ parking lot was just beyond E. Ocean Boulevard. Belmont Shore, developed in the 1920s, had been almost entirely underwater at one time. Developers had built up the land and filled the canals with sand. Bordered by Naples Island and Seal Beach in the south, and Redondo Beach to the north, it was now a thriving beachside community and a popular spot for boaters and beachgoers, with quaint shops, restaurants, and stores on popular Second Street. But the motel was blocks away from all that.
Most days at the motel, it was so quiet that all you heard were the gentle waves lapping at the shoreline and the rustle of branches of the palm trees. Now, there was nothing but rain. My knees shook as I sat in the car, trying not to look at the ocean as the windows vibrated from its roar. My heart pounded and sweat crept up my neck. I pressed my hands over my ears, trying to drown out the noise of the waves crashing against the coast. The latest El Niño, a warming climate pattern, which tended to come on in the winter months once every several years, had formed over the Pacific and caused flooding and heavy rains along the California coast. Though the breakwater kept out the biggest waves, the year Dolly and I were eight and six, the coastal neighborhood of Belmont Shore saw floods.
“What is it, Ruthie?” my mother asked, tucking me under the sleeping bag the night before.
“You didn’t say good night last night,” I lied.
“I know you’re afraid. I’m here no
w.”
“You left us alone last night.”
“I’m here now. Don’t be silly.”
THE TWIN PALMS Motel was a Spanish-style stucco with a red barrel tile roof. The walls outside had been touched up so many times with peach paint that they looked as if there were shadowy blooms, though there was nothing but sand around. The clay roof had been salted white with sea spray. Outside, the window boxes, painted turquoise to match the front door, were filled with dried cacti atop an inch of sand. The shutters were turquoise, too, and askew. I couldn’t take my eyes off the bougainvillea that seemed to be crawling before me.
Cascading from the roof and creeping down around the front door were huge succulent blossoms—the deep purple Brasiliensis, the pale pink Easter Parade and Rosa Preciosa; the brilliant pink Temple Fire, Texas King, and La Joya; the deep red Mahara Magic; the orange petals of Rosenka; and the yellow of California Gold and Golden Glow, all of which I would learn to identify from a tattered magazine, Ocean’s Green Thumb, which I found in the bookshelf of the motel lobby, and which Dr. Brownstein, the owner, had slipped into the front seat of my mother’s station wagon as a gift.
“No, Mom, we can’t stay,” Dolly whispered on my behalf.
“Now, Ruthie, I know you’re afraid, but we don’t have a choice.”
Seagulls cried out from hunger, circling the parking lot in search of food, making noises that sounded like a baby’s cry.