The Ruins of California (38 page)

Getting off the plane at LAX, I looked around for Abuelita and my mother and remembered they were meeting me in baggage claim. I gathered up my things, wondered if my breath smelled like gin and how cold it was outside. I was wearing a pair of baggy white shorts with a red-wine stain that I couldn’t get out, flip-flops, a skinny camisole that said
DA KINE
across my breasts, and a string of water-buffalo beads that Tomas had gotten me in Indonesia. My hair was loose, not brushed, and almost blond at the ends. My mother had said it was going to be sixty-two degrees in Los Angeles, but that number was meaningless to me. It felt like years since I’d been in weather that cold.

I entered an underground tunnel that was paved in turquoise-blue tile and lit by a long tube of fluorescent light. I felt a little drunk, and sad. Most of me was still in Hawaii, I suppose, or wishing I were. In an odd, dreamlike moment, I looked at the far end of the blue tunnel and saw Robbie and Mrs. Morrison coming toward me. They were talking to each other and walking quickly. Robbie was wearing something very wintry and collegiate, almost eastern—a plaid skirt and a hunter green sweater. She was wearing a pair of brown loafers, too, the kind of shoes I hadn’t seen or thought about in ten months. They looked very leathery and strange and
old-fashioned. Like shoes from another century. The whole getup was like a costume.

Her hair was still long, but darker and held back by an Alice in Wonderland headband. Then she saw me.

“Oh, my gosh!” Robbie called out. “Is that you, Inny??”

“It’s me.”

“Oh, my gosh! You’re so tan.
Where have you been?
”

She was excited and almost hollering. I’d forgotten all about that—how people could be enthusiastic and jump around.

“Hawaii,” I said, trying very hard to show a little spirit, too. “I’ve been living there—since summer.”

“You have?”

“At the University of Hawaii?” Mrs. Morrison asked. And then I remembered that there were lots of Mormons in Hawaii—not that I met any. They ran a big tourist site called the Polynesian Cultural Center. The whole Morrison family had visited it years ago, way back in days of Mrs. Shockley and Camp Fire Girls.

I shook my head. A burst of good feeling was running through me, though, because I’d suddenly come up with a way to say everything I needed about the last ten months of my life—how to couch my experience in a nutshell. “I wish I’d been getting some school credit,” I said to Mrs. Morrison. “But I’m afraid I’ve just been a degenerate instead.”

Boo laughed very hard—exactly like she always did. Robbie was laughing, too. “Oh, Inny,” they kept saying. “You’re so funny.
You’re so funny.
”

The next day, when I tried the old number, Boo answered. She seeming thrilled to talk to me again. “Hawaii! Oh, Inny, that must have been so wonderful.”

I played up the photography thing, made it sound like I was verging on professional. “My mom got married,” I said.

“Wasn’t that a while ago?” Mrs. Morrison asked. “Last year? But I didn’t know you were in Hawaii all this time. You clever girl—a year off. And all that healthy sunshine. I thought it might be too cold for Robbie at BYU, but she’s learning to ski instead. Just shows you.”

Boo made out like I’d been on a Mormon mission or something, like I’d been saving souls and making the world a better place, not culminating a sad, years-long descent into indolence and self-deception. She acted as if Robbie and I were still in touch, too, as if nothing were different, but I could tell she was wondering why I’d called. She acted happy about it, but curious. Boo liked me; she always had. No matter what I did. When Marguerite died, she’d sent a small basket of carnations and daisies that got lost in the grandeur of the tall lilies and topiary azalea of the San Benito types. (“Who are
the Morrisons
?” Aunt Julia wanted to know. “It’s hard to write a thank-you to people in Van Dale you’ve never heard of.”) Boo had a kind of faith in me, and high expectations. And I wondered why I’d thrown all that away so easily—a whole family of nice people, who knew me, who liked me.

“I was really sorry to hear about Dr. Morrison,” I said finally. “That’s the reason I’m calling, really. I meant to call last summer, Mrs. Morrison, but—”

“Oh, Inny, goodness gracious don’t apologize. Gosh, I can’t wait to tell Robbie that you called—do you need her number in Provo?”

NINETEEN

Big Bang

I
wish I could say that everything was smooth sailing after that, that I went to college and became a better person. That life stopped being confusing and I knew who I was, every day, and what the point of things was. But maybe nobody feels that way.

I’d been back in California almost nine months when all hell broke loose. It was after New Year’s and my second quarter at Berkeley was starting. I missed the first week of classes and then wobbled for the next three. I suppose I might have dropped out, except I’d struggle home in the car traffic at night and climb the stairs from my apartment underneath Wolfback, and Dad would have all my textbooks out on the kitchen table, and he’d be reading them.

“Have you considered looking at some other explanations of the big bang—because this astronomy book isn’t particularly well written. The book makes things more confusing than they need to be. The theory’s very simple, actually, one of the reasons for its great success.”

“We did the big bang. We did it the first week.”

“I see that from your syllabus. But you were gone, and I worry that you didn’t nail it in your mind. I don’t care about your grade on the midterms, or any of your grades. I’m talking about the rest of your life, and when will you ever revisit the big bang? I’ve found a better chapter—over here, see? One of my books dwells mostly on the flaws of the theory but does a very nice job of explaining it, too, and how the planets were formed.”

“All from the same matter. After a billion-year explosion.”

“You’ve reduced it to a cartoon.”

“I thought that was the point.”

He was wearing beautiful dark pinstripe suits in those days, and always on the way to a museum board meeting, or the opera board, or some artificial-intelligence symposium, or to discuss investing in a new software company. He was busy, busier than he’d been in a long time, and always folding himself into the back of his restored Cadillac limousine (I was not allowed to call it a “limo”) with Hector in front and looking less like a chauffeur than anybody on earth. A couple of hours later, he’d unfold himself and appear at Wolfback again. He was never gone for long. The house was his epicenter, his HQ, and he hung around the place like the fog. He’d set up quite a nice life there. He baked and cooked. He played piano—after a few years back at the instrument, he’d gotten quite good, playing Beethoven’s
Pathétique
again and again, perfecting it the way he used to perfect a
soleares
on the guitar. Most evenings, if Evie was tied up, he was following the presidential campaign on TV with an intense interest that I’d never seen in him before. (“I’m ready for a whole new decade, Inez, aren’t you?”)

Mornings he spent an enormous amount of time in preparation for the day. The steam from his shower carried the smell of fancy
unguents about the house, and Dad would stand before the tall mirror in his spacious master bath, combing his hair straight back like Count Dracula’s or putting on one of his impeccable shirts. They were special-ordered—after a long debate over whether French cuffs were gauche or not, and then he’d succumbed. He was wearing handmade Belgian slippers from a small store in New York, something Evie had turned him on to, and I didn’t mind the slippers or the fact that he wore them without socks like some kind of fraudulent prince. But the black velvet ones, with the monogrammed
PNR
in gold cord and a little gold crown, were way too much for me.

He was loyal to Wolfback, despite Evie’s occasional outcries that it was too small or too cold or too remote. And he’d remained loyal to me, of course. That second quarter at Berkeley, when things were tough, he read the complete textbook of my ab-psych class in a night and highlighted all essential terminology. (Next to a paragraph on autism, he wrote in the margin, “This sounds like me, doesn’t it?” Next to narcissism: “Me, too.”) Although he wasn’t pleased to learn that I’d declared psychology as my major. News of this, in fact, provoked a rare tantrum. “Oh, God,” he cried out, “how awful to be draining emotional bedpans for a living!”

I’d been busy draining
his
emotional bedpan most of the year already. The previous spring, when I’d come back from Hawaii, he had entered a state of emergency. Evie—or Madam X, as she was still called then—was on the brink of leaving her husband, then not on the brink, and then brinking again, a roller-coaster ride that my father did not enjoy or ever get used to, in spite of all his advice to me about what fun love was. For my part I’d grown very tired of Evie and the special grip she seemed to have on him.

“She wants to meet you,” he said.

“Sorry,” I replied. “I know too much already.” She graced the entire back jacket of her books, a super-close-up portrait with heavy airbrushing. The perfect, swept-back hair. The big eyes. The big half smile and overbite hanging there like a theater balcony.

It was probably infantile regression, but I found myself wishing Dad were with Justine again. When she’d heard that I was living with Dad and starting college nearby, she called the house and left a message for me.

“Justine?”

“We’re still friends,” Dad said. “You knew that. She’d like to see you.”

She was living on a horse farm in Carmel Valley, a place Whitman had told me about the year before. He’d kept in touch with Justine in a way that I never had. They shared something—a bond of some kind. It seemed to have something to do with Dad.

“Won’t you come for a weekend, and we can ride?” she asked me. I wasn’t so sure—did I want to get started up with Justine again? Every memory of being with her seemed so intense. And did I want to sacrifice a college weekend? Soon enough I discovered that most of my Berkeley classmates, who lived in campus dorms or sororities, were reveling all weekend—smoking and drinking and staying up all night, exercising the assortment of freedoms that I’d already grown tired of. So one Friday afternoon, I packed the hatch of the MG with an overnight bag, riding boots, breeches, and a new helmet with a chin guard. It was nice to get away. And to leave college, and Wolfback, and to let my father be alone with Evie.

Justine was waving at the door of a small shingled cottage when I pulled up. The sight of Dad’s old car brought nice memories, she said. Her house was one story and very modest—just three rooms
and one bath, a tiny room with warped linoleum and a rusty sink where the porcelain had been eaten away.

“Conspicuous nonconsumption” Dad called it, but I could see right away that Justine was a different person, healthier and happier and more confident. Her gaze was steady—not confused or uncertain—and her daughter, Lara, who’d been almost invisible in the old days, taken up with a nanny, had grown into a tall teenager with an extravagant head of wavy hair. She and Justine wore blue jeans and sweaters and beat-up cowboy boots. Gone were the furs and rare beads. As Whitman had reported, Justine had even quit smoking.

Her old habit of honesty was still intact. “I never really left your father,” she said, thirty minutes into our first hello. “I just decided to leave him alone. That’s what he seemed to want—from everybody. But when I heard you were living with him, I thought it incredible. And it made me wonder if he has changed.”

“He has,” I said. “But it’s hard to say exactly how.”

It was a weekend of long rides through eucalyptus groves and along hilltops, a dinner by the fire in a nearby inn, and quiet talks—city life versus country life, my impressions of Hawaii, how school was coming. I went back to Carmel Valley fairly often after that. It was nice to be with Justine and Lara, and nice to share their peaceful, thoughtful life. I had a funny feeling, too, that I was meant to be there and that Justine was supposed to be in our lives again. Maybe I hoped to bring her back to my father, that she’d marry him. They were so alike—or so unlike anybody else, two rare fruit trees sprung up in the California soil. But I worried she had outgrown him. She seemed wiser, and calmer, and not fooled by things. Newness held little power or attraction for her. Was it all the time she spent alone? Was it Buddhism? In the past her
religion had seemed an affectation to me, almost silly, but I was beginning to suspect that I’d been wrong about that. Somewhere along the way, parts of Justine had been brought forward, others erased or smoothed over. Her shyness and awkwardness weren’t an obstacle to knowing her anymore, but an opening where you could see her heart. And when the Whitman thing happened, it was Justine who led us onward and seemed to know a great deal about how to rescue somebody—even yourself.

That’s the funny thing. You think you’re rescuing your brother, and in the end you’re the one who’s suddenly walking on solid ground. It wasn’t brave or anything like that. Marguerite had more to do with it than anybody else. I did for Whitman what I hadn’t done for her.