by Ilie Ruby
“It’s haunted,” Sasha said.
“Don’t tell the ghosts that,” Sam said. Dolly rolled her eyes when I shot her a look. If he only knew.
“Well, that’s what I believe, anyway,” Sasha said, and winked at me.
I stared out at the looming ship, and then at the huge floating skyscrapers, and felt my stomach resisting the buttery lobster that I had just eaten for the first time. I tried to keep my eyes focused on the Breakwater. The huge rock wall made me feel safe, an end point that abutted the waves, the only thing that was solid enough to stop them when nothing else could.
MY MOTHER SEEMED anxious to get us into the car. I relaxed in the warm breeze, listening to James Taylor on the radio. I almost didn’t notice that she had pulled right up to the Twin Palms Motel parking lot.
“What in God’s name are we doing back here?” Dolly asked.
“The sea lion,” I said.
“You keep quiet and do as I say,” my mother said. I stumbled along, nauseous and dismayed that I wasn’t going to see my beloved campsite. Sleeping under trees on a back road seemed infinitely better to me than any other place. Even sleeping in the parking lot near the pier seemed doable.
We followed my mother into the lobby of the peach stucco building. I hid behind her. Dolly stood, feet apart, hands behind her head. It was dark, and even if the sea lion’s blood had stained the oyster-shell floor, it had washed away by now.
Dr. Brownstein eyed us suspiciously from behind the counter and straightened a pile of vacation brochures by the cash register.
“Well, if it isn’t the hurricane of 1939,” she said. “What can I do for you ladies?”
My mother smoothed her red patchwork skirt. I knew Dr. Brownstein was right. I felt exactly like that, a natural disaster that had returned after decimating a landscape. “Really, what are you doing here?” she said.
I glanced at the two six-foot plastic palm trees in wooden basket-weave planters filled with fake soil on either side of the room. Though we had spent two days in room 21, I had never seen the motel lobby. I would have remembered this.
“Shall we talk in your office? Best to speak privately,” my mother said. I glanced at the rack of miniature paperback copies of the Gospels by the window.
After hesitating, Dr. Brownstein motioned for my mother to follow her. The sign on the office door read ENTER IF DISTURBED.
The room was dimly lit. Large leather-bound books filled the shelves on the wall, and a cat calendar faced us on the desk. The month of December featured a hairless kitten with wrinkled pink skin and a large wedge-shaped head with bulging eyes. The cat hung from a tree branch, looking terrified, I thought. The caption read, “Just Hangin’ Around.” My mother cleared her throat. “I’m here to see about a room.”
“I’m sorry,” said Dr. Brownstein. “See the sign? NO OCCUPANCY.” She pointed out the window to the wooden sign hanging from a chain.
“It’s just that I’ve been thinking about that terrible night. About that poor animal. Worried, I guess is a better way to describe it. Worried about my girls,” said my mother. “I know you wouldn’t want me to file a complaint. Or get a lawyer. About my girls being put in danger when that poor animal was killed. And the broken air-conditioning system. This place is a hazard, let’s face it.”
Dr. Brownstein’s eyes widened. “Suits me fine. But truly, go on. I’m all ears.”
“I had the idea that it might not be safe for children. My girls were somewhat traumatized by the shooting.”
She peered over her glasses. “And yet you want to stay here with your traumatized children. Darling, I’ve been around the block once or twice. What exactly do you want?”
My mother folded her arms. Her eyes fastened on the room keys dangling from the key rack on the wall. “A key.”
“This is the end of my workday. I am drowning in paperwork.”
“What I want is one of your rooms,” my mother said.
“I told you we don’t have any. Listen, Mrs. Gold.”
“Diana. Miz. There is no mister. Name belongs to me exclusively.”
“Fine. You should get one of the nice apartments around here. I’ll make a phone call for you. I’ve got a friend over at the Queen’s Bay Apartments. How about that? Try to find you a nice place for cheap. Nothing wrong with needing a little help.” She picked up the receiver.
“No, I want to stay here,” my mother said. “And not just for the night.”
“Mrs. Gold, we don’t—”
“For a little longer. Maybe three nights. Maybe seven. Maybe longer. I really don’t know.”
“We don’t take long-term residents at the Twin Palms. We never have, and I’m not about to start now. How about the Long Beach Rescue Mission? They’ve just opened. Nice folks, they’ve been out here a few times to collect old bedding. I think they do a good job. Food, shelter, spiritual guidance for the homeless and less fortunate.” She glanced at my mother’s necklaces, her silver medallion beside a gold Jewish star.
My cheeks burned. “We don’t take charity,” Dolly said, moving her hands so as to cover the hole in the elbow of her striped T-shirt.
My mother shook her head. “We’re all set with the spiritual aspect of things.”
“Clearly,” said Dr. Brownstein, looking at my mother’s bitten-down fingernails, something she was always embarrassed about.
My mother slid into a vinyl folding chair. Dolly ran her fingers across the kitten calendar. She looked at Dr. Brownstein and held up two dusty fingers. My mother tried not to smile, pulling down Dolly’s arm. “We won’t be going anywhere. You need a housekeeper, and I can clean. I’m your woman. You need me.”
“I would help you. I can hardly afford to keep up with repairs, let alone lose money on a room that is not being filled by paying customers.”
I watched my mother swallow hard. She was desperate. “I’ll register a complaint. I swear I will,” she whispered. Moonlight fanned the half-drawn window shade. “I’ll make sure to tell my friend Sam Jackson all about what happened to us here. That my daughters were nearly attacked on your property, and that this place should be shut down because of the disrepair and inhumane treatment of animals. I’m sure he’d be very interested to hear what went on.”
“You know Sam Jackson?”
“Known him for years.”
Dr. Brownstein sat back in her chair and folded her arms. “You want to see the Twin Palms shut down?”
“I really don’t want to report anyone. Only if you force me to.”
“So, it’s money, is that it?”
“No. I don’t want anything for free. I want to work. You don’t have to pay me a lot. The girls and I, we’ll stay in that same room. Room 21. It’s our lucky room. And I’ll work hard. God knows, you need someone to help keep this place clean and manage what’s all going on here. I’m good with people, and my girls are hard workers, too. They won’t bother anyone. They are good girls. Not like some girls.”
Dr. Brownstein offered Dolly and me a dusty bowl of miniature chocolate Easter eggs, each wrapped in tinfoil. Dolly took one, and my mother shot her a warning glance. “No, Dolly. Chocolate makes you crazy hyper. Put it back, please.”
My sister unwrapped it anyway and popped it in her mouth with a smile.
Dolly’s act of defiance turned the tide, somehow creating a bond between Dr. Brownstein and my mother. Most women understood what mothers went through with their daughters. No one, it seemed, would have wished herself on anyone else during her teenage years. When a mother was struggling with her daughter, it was an act of universal healing to help out. It somehow absolved one of one’s own sins during girlhood.
Dr. Brownstein, taking pity on my mother, leaned forward. “I had one of my own. Raised her alone. Made it through by the skin of my teeth, and it got dicey. I know what’s coming around the bend for you. That is why I’m going to help you. Not because of your threat.”
My mother pulled her purse strap tight over her shoulder and got up. “I�
��d never call Sam about this place. You were very nice to us last time. It’s just, the girls and I, sleeping in the back of the car. They’re still so young.”
“This is the luckiest day of your life, Diana,” said Dr. Brownstein. The Twin Palms Motel was ours.
B’shert, meant to be.
“We really have to stay here again?” asked Dolly.
Dr. Brownstein leaned in. “I know you probably don’t have the best memories of this place. But that sea lion didn’t die. He was rescued and let back out into the ocean.”
My sister smiled at me, and I threw my arms around her.
“What did the police say about the shooting?” said my mother.
“I simply told them that the woman who shot the sea lion got away in a green station wagon.”
The Twin Palms Motel would be our home for a while, one of the happiest times in my young life.
Chapter Seven
THE TWIN PALMS was a fine place to start a new life.
Over the next two years, my mother worked her way up from housekeeper to manager.
By 1977, Dolly and I, at thirteen and eleven, were in middle school, happily accelerating. We loved going to a real school and having a dependable schedule. We walked home from school and kissed our books, just as we had seen our mother do with her almanac. We did our homework without anyone telling us to, and we cooked our own meals. My mother felt buoyed up, too. While she was out, we snuck down to Second Street at night and practiced smoking cigarettes. She never knew. Dr. Brownstein kept a watch over us all. One morning, she put a blue, almost translucent moonstone in my pocket before school, for luck, she said.
In 1979, the first full moon of the year, the Wolf Moon, loomed over the Pacific. My mother said it signaled a time of reaping. This meant that all her hard work would pay off. She bought a new Farmer’s Almanac at the garden shop, just as she did every year. She slipped the leather cover off of her old almanac and put it in a cardboard box in the storage room.
The motel had been revived. Dolly and I had helped plant flowers and cacti around the small patch of grass in the front, and we bought new plastic cups, candles, and sachets for the drawers from the Long Beach Drive-in Theater Swap Meet. The motel regained some of its popularity and started bringing in enough money to let Dr. Brownstein think about retiring. As a thank-you gift, she gave my mother the key to the one-bedroom “master” suite, a signal of a fortuitous time to come. My mother now had her own bedroom, and Dolly and I slept on the large pullout couch.
Now that we had a stable home and my mother had become financially and emotionally independent, the next step was to find her a good man for companionship. She had always enjoyed the company of men, she explained.
We deemed it the year of the Dating Moons, a time when all the full moons throughout the year would conspire to help my mother in her quest for love. As if she had scripted it, in no time, she had a fan club of older gentlemen who frequented the motel, engineers and oil executives. At night, before she left the house for a date with a man in town, I’d roll her thick black hair into a bun and then coil a few tendrils, taking special care to wrap them around my pinky just as I had seen my mother do.
“Wish me luck!” she’d call, before leaving.
“Luck,” we’d answer, our words fluttering into the warm night air.
We’d microwave TV dinners and do our homework, spilling our books around us on the gray carpet in front of the television. When our homework was finished, we’d play General Hospital and act out scenes starring our new heroine, Genie Francis, who played a teenager named Laura Baldwin. Laura was beautiful and had suffered in her young life. Everyone loved her, including her heartthrob boyfriend Scotty Baldwin, despite the fact that she had already murdered someone, her former lover, who was secretly in love with her mother.
We were called “latchkey kids,” for the strand of colored yarn we wore around our necks that held a house key. We arrived home at 3:00 PM, just in time for General Hospital. After school, while our mother worked at the front desk, kept the books, welcomed new guests, and did the laundry, Dolly and I watched the lives of the people in Port Charles unfold, keeping alive our mother’s ritual.
We wanted to help her, but she wouldn’t let us, now intent on giving us a childhood filled only with schoolwork and beaches. She had lost interest in soap operas, claiming her own life was full enough. Ours, however, was not.
October 1979 marked a time on the show unlike anything we had seen before. Dolly and I raced home to watch the romance between Luke and Laura play out. Luke Spencer was a bad boy who owned the Campus Disco, where Laura worked. Luke had blond curly hair and wore pants that pulled at the groin and flared at the bottom. He was from the wrong side of the tracks but was easily soft-spoken; plus, he owned the coolest dance spot in town. Dolly was bewitched.
I much preferred the shaggy Scotty Baldwin to Luke, even though they both were in love with Laura. We sat, transfixed, in front of the television each day, eating popcorn and drinking Dr Pepper. There was a problem brewing between Luke and Laura. He’d had a crush on her for a while now. But she wasn’t having it. She was in love with Scotty.
But Luke would have her. We watched the red strobe lights flicker as he pulled her down.
By the time my mother returned that night of the Hunter’s Moon, we were half asleep on the pullout couch, wrapped in each other’s arms. I woke up in the middle of the night panicked, not remembering who I was.
“Dolly, will we always be together?” I asked.
She patted my back. “The moon is right there in the window. You can see my face in it, can’t you? Count your heartbeats backward from one hundred and go to sleep.”
As Dolly counted backward, I squinted into the dark corners of the room, heavy with guilt for a reason I could not name, and full of sadness for all of us—Laura, myself, and Dolly, at the same time.
MONTHS PASSED AND we were happy, watching the lovers stroll down the pier, arm in arm. Dolly and I always celebrated our birthdays with Dr. Brownstein and my mother. Though I still had not learned to swim, I grew accustomed to the sights and smells of the beach, absorbing it all just as I imagined my great-grandmother had done. Belmont Shore in the ’70s had been rife with activity. We learned to skateboard, to do tricks on our bicycles, and to play the drums on tin cans. We roamed around in terry-cloth jumpers and flip-flops. At night, we’d bike down to Second Street, where we’d get pizza and ice cream, with as many toppings as we wanted. We’d sit on a bench on the sidewalk and watch the lovers walk by, and we’d talk about how lucky we were to be living in such a wonderful place.
We spent afternoons kicking around in the sand, picking through the seaweed for shells, making headdresses of washed-up fishing ropes and hats from Styrofoam cups. Beach rats, we were called. We stopped brushing our hair, and it hung in tangles spun by the salt air. We sprayed Sun-In across our heads and let it turn our hair orange in patches. Our skin peeled, and we didn’t much care. We woke up to the feel of sand in our sheets. We covered ourselves in baby oil and iodine and let the sun bake our skin. We smelled like Love’s Baby Soft perfume, like summer all year long. We were tanned, with freckles across our noses. I still carried a moonstone in my pocket. My hair streaked with blond. Dolly’s breasts grew, seemingly overnight.
DOLLY AND I had time on our hands to fantasize and create, to conjure and compose, to experiment and dramatize, to create a world experienced wholly in the imagination. We’d frequent the pier, our bare feet slapping the wood slats as we played chasing games we were far too old for, while anglers let droplights fall into the water, plugged into the electrical outlets on the pier’s overhead lights, in order to capture the attention of small fish that swarmed near the top, led to their destruction by their need for the bright light.
When I returned to Belmont Shore years later, the outlets had been removed. They encouraged fires, I learned, set by itinerant campers who had no other choice when trying to stay warm. I would always look for those who were home
less, boundless, and in chains. There would always be a piece of me there.
One evening at dusk, Dolly and I were walking through the hexagonal midpoint of Veterans Memorial Pier, aiming for the canteen at the T-shaped end. Dolly, who wasn’t afraid to talk to anybody, was spotted by a fisherman sitting on an overturned bucket, watching us girls. She had begun to draw male attention, I noticed, already wearing a bra and possessing a sort of approachable dreaminess. Her features had become more defined, making her appear older than even her fast-talking mouth did.
“Can you girls help me try this out?” the fisherman asked. Dolly nodded courageously. He let her share his light and use his fishing wire, and she caught a small white croaker within minutes.
Afterward, he took us to dinner, pepperoni pizza at Salento’s. He asked if we’d like to see the new movie people were talking about, Saturday Night Fever. We loved the Bee Gees, and the song “Stayin’ Alive” played on the radio constantly. Dolly and I knew we shouldn’t be going to an R-rated movie. But we went anyway, thrilled by the promise of buttered popcorn and the excitement of rebellion, no matter how trivial.
There we were, sitting next to a fisherman whose name we didn’t know, watching a movie that we’d only ever heard about. We watched John Travolta, Tony, try to fool around with the woman he liked, Stephanie. Why was he so pushy with her? Luke had done the same with Laura, only Tony let his love interest go. We watched Annette, the woman who liked Tony, get so drugged up that she did things with two men. When she realized what was happening, she started screaming. It reminded me of Dolly when she’d woken up to the mudslide years before.
As we drove home, I noticed the glowing blue-capped waves. The stranger told me that the bioluminescence was a trick caused by poison blooms. When we got back that night, my mother was on the balcony, smoking a Winston Light, paging through her almanac.