The Ruins of California (24 page)

“Sure you don’t want to try Chameleon?” Marguerite said in a loud voice. She always offered the finer horse but seemed glad that I had some sense.

“I’m sure,” I called out. My voice seemed loud to me, and it seemed like another lifetime ago that I’d been standing with Shelley in the backyard and watching my mother get out of the white Lincoln in her navy blue warm-up suit. She was carrying an armload of open-house materials and looked at us with a dead face. She didn’t really greet Shelley or even smile.

“Inez,” she had said in a certain tone. “Aren’t you riding with your grandmother this morning?”

I carried a basket of grooming stuff and set it down by the barn wall. I took out the hoof pick, a small, pointed tool to pick mud and hay from the bottom of the horse’s feet. When I was done, I ran the curry over Picasso’s coat to loosen up the baked mud. Then I got two long, hard-bristle dandy brushes from the basket and went over Picasso’s whole body, from head to tail, from the depression of his spine and then down each of this legs to the hoof. When I was done, I put a clean saddle pad on him—shifting it several times to make sure that it wasn’t too far back—then returned to the tack room for the cross-country saddle that Marguerite had given me a few months earlier for my fifteenth birthday. I lifted the saddle high, brought it down on the center of Picasso’s back, and then I took the girth, a leather-and-elastic belt that wrapped underneath the horse just behind his front legs, and buckled it to keep the saddle tight around his chest.

“Land sakes.” Marguerite was waiting by the back door, already up on Chameleon. “He must have been coated in mud. Was he? It’s taken you forever.”

“I’m done,” I called out, slipping on the bridle and fastening the throat latch. I walked around Picasso, pulled each stirrup down into position, and then returned to his left side to mount him. I put my left foot in the dangling stirrup, hopped up and down several times, and threw my weight skyward and my right leg over him.

T
he trail went down into the arroyo, a gulch of open land below Suicide Bridge. Marguerite trotted ahead on Chameleon and kicked up a fine golden brown dust that seemed to fly against gravity, as though drawn to the sun. I smelled the sage in the warm sunlight, and in the shadows there was a rich, heavier scent, not quite mold, not quite earth, as if the darkness contained teeming worlds of life, secret and unavailable.

I felt the presence of something. What? A kind of energy—almost buzzing and alive—as if every tree and shrub and every cloud, all parts of the visible landscape, were expanding at the same time, getting bigger reaching up, and if I were able to become calm and quiet enough, I would see things getting bigger and eventually growing so big that they connected and touched. I noticed patterns of sunlight and shade, the shapes of leaves, the way that Chameleon’s hooves left upside-down U’s in the path before me—
—as he went along. As a mental exercise, I tried to remember the whole day, chronologically, hour by hour, as though it were a long mathematical equation that I challenged myself to review in my mind. If I could do that, a treasure of self-knowledge and understanding would be unleashed. I’d seen on a Zen calendar the
saying, “The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.” And I remember feeling very strongly that this day was important—this one day—and how I lived it was going to reveal a small but essential detail that would be the key to everything.

I went back to the beginning. I woke up and began a pleasant daydream about Antonio. Shelley knocked on the door in her cutoffs and T-shirt. Then she lounged on my bed as if she owned it. She was always probing—asking rude questions. She asked me once if I masturbated, like it was a perfectly ordinary question. She asked if my mother was going to marry Bob Lasso, the dentist she’d met at an est event, or was she going to “string him along like she did Weeger.” Was I going to inherit Marguerite’s money someday? Shelley wanted to know that, too. “My father told me to expect nothing,” I had answered. “Why?” Shelley snapped. “Is he planning to spend it all on himself?”

Shelley was too curious—gobbling up everything in life like a pig. Since moving to Van Dale, it hadn’t taken long before she was having sex with Gary Kloss, a jock at Van Dale High who never talked to her during the day, just called her at night. She went out to see him, met him places or climbed in his bedroom window. She told me everything, all the details, as if it weren’t humiliating to be on call for sex—just arriving inside a guy’s bedroom window like that, like popping out of a cake. Shelley acted as though the whole thing with Gary Kloss were a huge adventure. He wasn’t using her. She was using him.

The horses crossed a dry creek bed. Farther along there was a meadow where the ground was soft and even. The year before, Marguerite had brought me to the meadow to practice cantering on an open flat, the kind of unrestricted space that can sometimes excite a horse to race or come undone. But Picasso never lost control
or raced. He was steady and predictable, an old horse who rarely got excited. After that, I always cantered in the meadow. Marguerite sat on Chameleon in the shade, by a small grove of eucalyptus trees.

“Don’t let your legs grip him!” she called out. “Get your weight down into the stirrups! Get him collected! That’s it. That’s it. Good girl.”

After eight or ten laps, I brought Picasso down to a trot, then a walk. And I joined Marguerite by the trees. “You’re looking good today,” she said. But she looked pale, tired, and one of her eyes kept filling up with tears. “Shall we head for the woods?” she asked. “Are you up for some jumping?” Her enthusiasm seemed forced, the way a kindergarten teacher sounds at the end of the day.

Marguerite led us to a path in the woods where we always jumped over fallen trees. It was shadowy and dark, and the smell of earth and secret worlds rose up again from the ground. A feeling of fullness. The world seemed cozy and full and perfect. The horses broke into a trot, as they always did in the woods, and, seeing a jump ahead, Marguerite brought Chameleon into a canter. I watched the horse sink down and change to a three-beat gait, then easily take a small jump over a log. Marguerite seemed to have lost her balance, though, and slid to one side, almost as if her girth weren’t tight enough and the saddle was loose. I began to yell out—then I remembered how much Marguerite hated yelling, hated being shouted at—and I hesitated just long enough to lose my chance to be heard.

But then she must have felt herself listing and off balance, because she steadied herself with a firm push of her boots, dropping her weight into her stirrups and sinking into the saddle as if she
were settling into one of those overstuffed down sofas in front of her fireplace.

I made a clucking sound with my tongue and got Picasso to canter, then made the small jump. When his nose was behind Chameleon’s tail, I got a chance to say, “I think your girth might need adjusting, Marguerite. It looks loose from behind.”

Marguerite said nothing. When she turned around, her face was shockingly white, almost yellow. And her eyes looked dizzy.

“Your girth—” I began to repeat. But my voice was drowned out by a sharp cracking sound overhead, a huge branch breaking off a tree. Was it a real sound? At first I wasn’t sure.

“Marguerite!” I shouted in a kind of hysteria. Chameleon swerved to the right and then reared. By the time he bolted and Marguerite had flown off him, I realized that her boot was caught in the stirrup. He dragged her for fifteen feet or so. When she slammed into a tree stump and came loose, suddenly it was so quiet.

S
ometimes in the past when I was riding with Marguerite, we’d come upon other equestrians. Marguerite would greet club members with a nod of her helmet, and sometimes, if she was in the mood, linger and chat. I had learned to nod my helmet when I was greeting a new person. It wasn’t something Marguerite had taught me specifically, but more of a response to the notion, as Marguerite had presented it, that a greeting required some kind of physical acknowledgment. You didn’t have to bow, exactly. You didn’t have to shake hands. But you just needed to do something. A nod of the helmet. A smile. A lingering of eye contact. If you were in a chair, you stood.

I tried to keep myself alert to these things, particularly at the club. It was partly to please Marguerite—and also to erase certain impressions, and memories…. like the time I was sent to the Arroyo Cotillion.

The dress I wore that night was my first mistake. Lacking any direction, except that I needed to wear “a long gown,” I arrived in a purple cotton-knit dress with thin straps—not realizing that cotton knit was a daytime fabric and too informal. I was thinking of the trend for old Hollywood-style glamour when I bought a small boa at a thrift store to wear over my shoulders. It wasn’t a big, fluffy boa—I couldn’t afford one of those—but what it lacked in fullness, it made up for in length. And I was thinking of my father and his cotillion days when I imagined that the young male members of the Arroyo would be rich sophisticates who’d appreciate my urbanity and my cotton dress, even though it kept gathering in a strange way under my armpits. Along with the boa, I carried a beaded bag, borrowed from my mother and smelling powdery and rancid, like old makeup. And, after great indecision and hand-wringing, I had decided to wear a pair of real dancer’s shoes, with a high, heavy sole and ankle straps. They weren’t flamenco shoes exactly, but like something you might see on the stage of a Broadway musical. Along with the boa, they were white.

I wasn’t aware of my unusual appearance until, in the ballroom of the Arroyo, I noticed three boys staring at me.

“Man,” one of them said. “Get a load of—”

“Va-va-va-voom.”

“What’s she got on her feet?”

“Beaner boats.”

“Mexican jumping shoes.”

I didn’t realize that it might be intimidating to boys that I was several inches taller than any of them or that the absence of a bra might cause unrest. I didn’t realize that the other cotillion participants, all from the staid towns of San Benito and South Pasadena, might know each other—and be dressed according to the customs of those places, not in an eclectic mix of Van Dale and Telegraph Hill.

Embarrassed but not defeated, I made small talk with a girl standing nearby in a romantic dress with a high Victorian neck. She had limp brown hair and large glasses and instantly began discussing the boys in the room—where they lived, how rich their families were, and what kinds of cars their older brothers drove.

“Hanson’s got a Porsche. Can you imagine? That’s really too much for an eighteen-year-old boy. It’s so Marina del Rey, if you know what I mean. San Benito isn’t flashy like that. Even the richest people here drive old station wagons.”

I saw no contribution that I could make to this conversation, and I gazed out at the other cotillion kids, none of whom seemed particularly happy to be there.

“What about you?” the girl asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What kind of car are you getting?”

Mrs. Musio, the cotillion directress, had strawberry hair that was swept and sprayed into a meringue. She greeted each young woman and man by name and with a nod of the head. She introduced “Inez Ruin, a new participant,” and then began searching for a suitably tall partner for me to dance with—a humiliatingly public effort. She finally located Donny Martin, a gangly blond youth with Germanic lips and crust in his eyelashes. He was the tallest boy in the ballroom. Even so, with my high heels, I looked out over
the top of Donny’s pale hair and could see his glistening scalp. He had terrible flop sweats. And later, when we began dancing, I got a blast of sour earwax smell by the side of his face.

The lesson for the day was the fox-trot. I could feel Donny’s hot, damp hand on my back.

“One-two-three-four,” Mrs. Musio was saying. “One-two. Make a box with your feet. That’s it. That’s it. Donny Martin and Inez Ruin, please step to the edge!”

My partner and I stopped dancing and walked to an X that had been created on the floor of the ballroom with beige masking tape. The music continued, another bouncy fox-trot. The other kids gathered along the wall.

“Mr. Martin, please ask Miss Ruin for a dance!”

He turned to me, pretending that we hadn’t just been dancing. And then he froze.

“Speak, Marteen!” a boy called out.

“Ask her, buddy.”

Donny grimaced, and I looked at the ground. When I looked at his face again, his mouth was open but no words were coming out. Overcome with compassion, I smiled as hugely as I could, hoping it might give him confidence.

“Go, Mar-ti-ni!” a boy shouted from the back of the ballroom. Mrs. Musio seemed not to care about the kibitzing, and when the boys realized this, their cries escalated.

“Martini!”

“Martini!”

I kept smiling and nodding my head to provide more encouragement. Donny opened his fleshy lips. “Miss Ruin—”

“Ask the Mexican jumping bean to dance, will ya?”

A huge laugh broke out. Mrs. Musio was finally provoked into
scowling, which seemed to make the outburst so much funnier. She walked over to me and Donny. “I’m awfully sorry,” she said. “I guess everybody’s impatient. Now let’s see if we can’t try a little dancing. Can you manage, Mr. Martin?”