Malibu Rising

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

After it became official, the four of them went to Riva’s Seafood to celebrate. They were hanging out in the break room while Nina made them the Sandwich for the first time.

  “What is this?” Kit said, looking at it as she sat down.

  “I put a bunch of stuff in the kitchen onto a roll,” Nina said.

  “It looks delicious,” Jay said, taking a bite.

  Hud picked up his sandwich and before he took a bite, he looked at his older sister, who, in becoming his legal guardian, had settled the stress that lived in him on an almost daily basis. Their day-to-day life would be no different now. It would be full of the same loss, the same challenges. But he no longer had to worry the state would come and take Kit.

  “Thank you,” Hud said.

  Nina looked up at him. She could feel the weight of his gratitude. She had to keep herself from crying. The world seemed no more manageable to her today than it had yesterday. Only a little less unpredictable.

  “Yeah,” Jay said, nodding. And Kit piped in, too. “Seriously.”

  Nina smiled a small, slight smile. She didn’t say, “You’re welcome.” She didn’t think she could get the words out. And so, instead, she nodded toward their sandwiches and said, “All right, eat up.”

  6:00 P.M.

  Kit opened the front door without knocking. Nina’s expansive home was already filling with people.

  There were cater waiters dressed in black pants and white button-downs with black ties. There were bartenders in black vests organizing bottle after bottle, punctuating the air with the sound of glass stinging glass as they moved.

  A cocktail waitress with red hair and green eyes walked by Kit, and Kit stopped her. “Is Nina upstairs?”

  “Oh,” the waitress said, getting her bearings. “Nina Riva? Yes, I believe she went to get dressed.”

  Kit studied the waitress and wondered how she managed to be so pretty while being so plain. She wasn’t wearing much makeup that Kit could see and her vibrant hair was pulled back into a low ponytail. And yet, it was undeniable, her allure.

  “Thanks,” Kit said. “I’m Kit, by the way.”

  The waitress smiled. “Caroline,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”

  With her shoes in her hand, Kit ran up the stairs to Nina’s bedroom. She gathered her breath and knocked on the door.

  “Oh, hey,” Nina said, seeing her.

  “Hi,” Kit said. She moved through the doorway into the warmth of the room.

  Nina was wearing a black suede miniskirt and a silver-sequined sleeveless shirt, which hung effortlessly off her shoulders, showing her bare back.

  Kit’s beautiful sister. Whose calendar was on everyone’s wall. Just standing next to her, Kit felt childish. In some ways, Nina made Kit feel loved and cared for and safe. In other ways, just looking at Nina made Kit feel desperately lonely, as if she was the only person in the world with her specific problems.

  “What’s up?” Nina asked.

  Kit’s shoulders fell. “I look like shit.”

  Nina frowned. “What are you talking about? You look great,” she said, shuffling through her jewelry box, considering earrings for herself.

  “No, I don’t.”

  Nina turned to her sister, taking her in. “Of course you do. Stop saying that.”

  “Stop saying I look great when I don’t,” Kit said, losing her patience. “What good does it do to lie to me?”

  Nina cocked her head in the other direction, put her arms behind her, rested on the edge of the vanity. She gazed at Kit, expressionless, for what felt like ninety million minutes. It was four seconds. “You don’t dress very sexy, is that what you mean?” she finally said.

  Kit started to feel ill, curling in on herself like a poked porcupine. It felt terrible, simply terrible, to have the most vulnerable thing about you pointed out and given a name.

  “Yes,” she said, moving through the angst. “That’s what I mean.” And then she added, “But I want to. And I don’t know what to do about it. I … I need your help.”

  “OK,” Nina said.

  “And I don’t want to wear a tight dress,” Kit spit out. “Or high heels or any of that. That’s not me.”

  Nina considered her little sister. What a gift it was to know so clearly what you were not, who you did not want to be. Nina wasn’t sure she’d ever asked herself that question.

  “Well, OK. What do you want to wear? Is there a particular way you want to look?”

  Kit mulled it over. She thought of the girls she’d been drawn to in high school. Julianna Thompson, the captain of the soccer team, who wore bell-bottoms and plaid shirts. Or Katie Callahan, the valedictorian, who always wore that headband and ribbons in her hair. Or Viv Lambros or Irene Bromberg or Cheryl Nilsson. But she never wanted to be those girls. She could never really see herself wearing their dresses or their skirts or anything. She just liked them, admired them. She didn’t see herself in them. Maybe that was part of the problem. That she could never really see this side of herself in anyone yet.

  “I don’t know,” Kit said. “I don’t even know where to start.”

  “All right, never fear, my dear,” Nina said. “I know exactly what to do.” She opened the top drawer of her vanity and pulled out a pair of scissors.

  “Give me your jeans,” Nina said.

  “Excuse me?” Kit said.

  “Your jeans,” Nina said, reaching her hand out. “Hand ’em over. Trust me.”

  Kit unbuttoned her pants and slipped out of them. She gave them to her sister and stood there in her underwear.

  “I’m basically naked now,” Kit said, uncomfortable.

  “There’s no difference between standing there in your underwear and standing there in a bathing suit, which you do every day,” Nina said as she got to work. “Relax. I have this under control.”

  With two swift cuts, Kit’s favorite jeans were now her favorite shorts. Nina had created an angled edge to them, shorter in the back, a bit longer in the front. The pockets hung lower than the hemlines. Nina pulled at the newly shorn edges, fraying them.

  “There you go,” she said, handing them back to Kit.

  Kit stepped into the shorts and buttoned the fly. She looked at herself in the mirror. Her long, tanned, muscular legs looked good.

  “Give me your shirt, too,” Nina said.

  “You’re gonna cut my shirt?” Kit asked.

  “Not if you don’t want me to,” Nina said.

  “No,” Kit said, intrigued. “Go ahead.”

  Kit lifted her shirt off and handed it over. She was standing in just her bra and the shorts. Kit could feel herself narrowing, curving her back, trying to hide her chest from her sister. Nina looked over at her.

  “Don’t stand like that. Stand like this.” Nina stood behind Kit and grabbed her shoulders, pulled them wide. Kit’s chest popped out.

  “You’ve got a great rack,” Nina said. And Kit laughed because she’d never heard her sister talk like that before.

  “It’s true,” Nina said. “Us Riva women have great boobs. Mom had great boobs. I have great boobs. You have great boobs. Own your birthright.”

  Kit started blushing and Nina felt both gleeful and sad. Kit had never been willing to let Nina in in this way. Nina had always hit a wall trying to talk to Kit about boys and sex and her body. But she should have pushed her further earlier. They should have had this conversation earlier. It was Nina’s job to make sure Kit learned how to be herself, all sides of herself.

  Nina had been so worried about making sure Kit was safe and protected, making sure Kit never felt like an orphan, that she’d babied her. Nina knew that. She was trying to stop. It just … wasn’t that easy. To let go.

  But Kit was an adult now. There wasn’t much left for Nina to do. In fact, maybe the only true parenting left was to make sure Kit understood this very thing: how to be whatever type of woman she wanted.

  Nina took the T-shirt and considered cutting the neckline, chopping one of the shoulders off. But no. “Are you OK show
ing your stomach?” Nina said.

  Kit looked down, assessing.

  “I think you would look good showing it off,” Nina clarified.

  “I guess,” Kit said, going along. “Sure.”

  Nina took her scissors to the bottom half of the shirt, cutting it straight off. She handed the T-shirt back to Kit, now as a loose crop top.

  Kit put it on and could feel the air on her abdomen. You could see the very bottom of her baby blue bra from certain angles.

  “Wow,” Kit said, looking down at herself. She liked that she looked both different and the same. She was herself, only with cooler clothes.

  “All right,” Nina said with a ponytail holder between her teeth. “One more step.” She took Kit’s long, wild hair into her hands and gathered it on the top of her head, creating a high pony. She then put mascara on Kit’s lashes, blush on her cheeks, and handed her a tube of clear lip gloss.

  “As for shoes, I think your huaraches are perfect,” Nina said. And Kit felt a tiny flutter of joy, that she owned something that was actually OK as is. She turned and looked at herself in the mirror.

  She thought she looked cool. Like, actually cool. She could feel herself starting to well up.

  Nina came up behind her, put her arms around her, and said, “You look like a million bucks, babe.”

  This outfit made her feel like there were parts of herself she was just meeting for the first time. Kit could barely contain the smile on her face. She hung her own arms around her sister’s and said, “Thank you.”

  Nina always knew just the thing, didn’t she? Kit wished she could be that for someone, be that for Nina, the person who knows just the thing.

  “Are you feeling all right?” Kit said. “About the party tonight? And, you know, people asking about Brandon?”

  Nina waved her off. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

  “You know …” Kit began, unsure exactly how to convey just how much she cared. “It’s OK if you aren’t OK. If you … need to talk or just want to cry about it. Or anything, really. I could listen.”

  Nina turned to Kit and smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “You are the best. I’m OK, though. Really. I’ll be fine.”

  Kit frowned. “All right, well … if you ever change your mind.” But Nina wouldn’t. They both knew that.

  Too much self-sufficiency was sort of mean to the people who loved you, Kit thought. You robbed them of how good it feels to give, of their sense of value.

  But Kit put all of that out of her head. Because she was determined that this be the night she finally cut loose.

  1978

  Nina kept their family afloat week to week on the restaurant’s income, one ill-timed emergency away from total disaster. They lived that way for three years.

  Three Christmases trying to find a way to afford presents. Three years of birthdays, all celebrated with each of their favorite cakes, recipes re-created from memory because June never wrote them down. Three first days of school, three last days of school, for all of her siblings but her.

  When a cute guy buying a hamburger at the restaurant asked her out on a date one afternoon, Nina froze, as if her brain had short-circuited. “Uh …” she said, dumbfounded that this guy thought she was normal, could be normal.

  “I just mean …” the young man said, backtracking. He was tall and blond and had a humble smile. “That you are maybe the prettiest girl I’ve seen in my entire life and I thought, you know, if you’re single and free, maybe we could … I don’t know. See a movie.”

  She’d had two boyfriends before her mother died. She’d even called a guy friend or two since then when she was feeling particularly lonely. But a date? This guy wanted to take her out to do something … for fun?

  “No, thank you,” she said. She breathed it out with a sigh like a helium balloon. “I can’t,” she added, but she found no words to explain it further. And so she moved on to the next customer, trying, as she did every day, to sell more fries and sodas than they had the day before.

  At the end of the day, that’s what everything came down to: money. She could approximate her mother’s German chocolate cake recipe. She could tell Hud the same things June had told her when she was having a bad day. She could sleep three hours in a night in order to fix Kit’s science fair project. But money was the one thing she couldn’t will into existence.

  She had to run the car near empty so often she twice ran out of gas. She started postdating checks, taking out credit cards she couldn’t pay back, and turning off all the lights in the house when no one else was home to save electricity.

  When Jay’s wisdom teeth needed to be taken out, Nina spent three weeks trading calls with insurance companies to get dental insurance through the restaurant. When Hud fractured his wrist after slipping off the roof of the car, he’d refused to go to the hospital because he knew they couldn’t afford it. And so Nina, knowing the cost might break her, had to convince him to go regardless of the cost. She negotiated the bill to a sum she could not attain and then went to bed every night for weeks with a clenched jaw, thinking of what would happen when the late penalties added up.

  Nina made them lemon roasted chicken when they missed June. She stayed up late watching TV with Kit even though she had to get up early the next morning. Nina encouraged Jay and Hud to get out there in the waves and practice, even if it meant the bathrooms didn’t get cleaned or she had to do the laundry herself.

  And every time Hud or Jay offered to drop out of school, too, in order to pick up shifts at the restaurant and help pay the bills, Nina forbade them. “Absolutely not,” she said, with a seriousness that consistently disarmed them. “You quit school, I’ll kick you out of the house.”

  They all knew she never would. But if she was serious enough to bluff that hard, then they felt they had no choice but to listen to her.

  In the spring of 1978, Nina and Kit sat side by side on the bleachers as Hud and then Jay walked across the stage and accepted their diplomas.

  Kit hooted and hollered. Nina clapped so hard she stung her hands.

  When Jay and Hud pulled their tassels from one side of their caps to the other, Nina knew that the war wasn’t over. But she let herself rejoice for a brief moment. A battle had been won.

  • • •

  After graduation, Jay worked at Riva’s Seafood and a local surf shop. Hud got a financial aid package that made it feasible for him to go to college nearby at Loyola Marymount, by taking some side jobs and accepting some help from Nina.

  On the weekends when they could, Jay and Hud would ride up the coast, chasing swells. Hud had already bought a used camera by then. The two of them had decided that Hud taking photos of Jay would help both of their portfolios.

  And so, it was often just Nina and Kit at the house. Kit, nearing sixteen, did not want to be under her sister’s thumb. She did not want to be told what to do or when to hold back. She no longer wanted to be reminded to be careful.

  So, instead of hanging out at home, Kit went over to Vanessa’s. Kit went to parties. Kit joined a club of girls who liked to surf in the early morning hours before school. She took a job assisting a housepainter up in Ventura and begged rides off her co-workers to get to job sites and back.

  All of which meant that by the end of 1978 there were moments—finally—when Nina came home from working twelve hours and had no one to take care of.

  It unsettled her, having these quiet evenings in the house, when all she could hear were the waves crashing beneath her and the wind blowing past the windows. She would sit down and balance the checkbook, nervously subtracting each sum, continually finding they were still overdrawn. She would go through Kit’s report cards, trying to figure out a way, despite everything, to afford a tutor.

  In the rare moments that she truly did not have anything she had to do, Nina would sometimes read Jay and Hud’s old comics, trying not to think of her mother.

  And then, one day, in February 1979, three and a half years after June died, Nin
a sat by herself on the rocks down the shore from her home and caught her breath.

  It was just before the break of dawn. The air was chilly, the wind was running onshore. The waves were coming in fast and cold, foam claiming more and more of the dry sand.

  Nina was in a wet suit, her long hair fluttering in the breeze. The sun started to rise over the horizon, peeking ever so slightly. She had gone down to the shore to surf before the start of the day.

  But as she stood looking at the water, she saw a family of dolphins. At first, it looked like just one dolphin jumping. And then one more. And then two more. And then another. And soon the five of them were in a pack, together.

  Nina sat down and began to weep. She was not crying out of stress or frustration or fear, although she had so much of those still in her bones. She was crying because she missed her mother. She missed her perfume, her meatloaf, missed the way she made impossible things happen. Nina missed lying in her mother’s arms on the sofa, watching television late at night, missed the way her mother would always tell her everything would be OK, the way her mother could make everything OK.

  She mourned the things that would never happen. The weddings her mother would never attend, the meals her mother would never make, the sunsets her mother would never see.

  And she thought, for a moment, that maybe she could let herself be angry at her mother, too. Angry at her mother for the burnt dinners and lit cigarettes, for the Sea Breezes and Cape Codders. Angry at her mother for getting in that bathtub in the first place.

  But she couldn’t quite get there.

  On the beach that early morning, Nina watched the tiny crabs digging deeper into the sand, she watched the purple sea urchins and pearl starfish holding steady in their tide pools, and she let herself cry. She allowed herself to grieve every tiny thing—every hair roller, every housedress, every smile, every promise. She wanted to empty herself of heartbreak, a task both possible and impossible. And when Nina dove deep into her own sorrow, shoveling it out like digging to the bottom of a hole, she found that this pain, which had seemed bottomless, did, in fact, have a bottom for now.