The Ruins of California (4 page)

He did card tricks for me, magic tricks that he’d been practicing since he was a boy, making aces materialize and disappear. Then one fall afternoon—it was late in the day and the sun was streaming in the window behind him—he was sitting on the carpet in my bedroom and wiping his face. He was trying to explain why he wasn’t coming to Abuelita’s with us and trying to explain something else, but he drifted off into words that I didn’t understand, patterns I couldn’t follow, and then no words at all. After that, he wore his wraparound sunglasses in the house, and the next morning, like a pair of aces, my mother and I disappeared.

I must have fallen asleep at Alegrías—and been carried home—because I had no memory beyond Antonio’s first song. The next thing
I heard was the terrible whine of my father’s coffee-bean grinder. Why couldn’t he buy cans of ground coffee like everybody else?

“Hey, I’ve got some plans for the morning,” he said, handing me a mug of coffee and hot milk, a tradition begun the previous year. As far as his plans, I could have guessed what they were. Friday nights we went to Alegrías. Saturday always began with pancakes and a few errands—the grocery store, the laundry, sometimes Design Research or a new jeans store on Leavenworth called the Gap. Later on we might walk into Chinatown for dinner. Squeezed into the day—or Sunday morning—we went to Fort Point. We drove along the Marina and into the foresty Presidio, an old naval base, and parked at a crumbling nineteenth-century stronghold underneath the Golden Gate Bridge. We walked around the old fort, which was cool and dark and smelled of mold, and then we walked to the rocks and felt the sea spray on our faces and looked up at the orange-red bridge rising dramatically before us.

But this Saturday was different. After the usual errands, my father didn’t descend into the Presidio. He turned right and took the car over the Golden Gate Bridge, across the bay, and into a long tunnel on the other side. We left Highway 101 for a street that weaved through hills with grass so new it looked wet with green paint. I had never been in the Marin Headlands before, and it was jarring, after so much commotion and traffic, to find myself in a wild, uninhabited place. We bumped up and down on a rutted dirt road, nearly got stuck twice. My father pulled the car over and put on a denim jacket.

He walked ahead, leading me to the crest of a rolling hill with slopes of purple lupines. Beyond that, I could see an empty beach. The
sand was brown, the color of honey. The ocean stretched before us, gray and turbulent. Clouds were gathering overhead.

“Moody day,” he said. “Isn’t it great?”

I’d never seen a beach like that—so inhospitable, so cold. Why were we there? My father was still looking at me, waiting for some enthusiasm.

“Great,” I ventured, a little hesitantly. “Really great.”

“Isn’t it?”

The sand grew harder as we got closer to the water. The curving, elegant tide line had left seaweed—little pods of air that I picked up and popped between my fingers. I drew a pod to my mouth, wanting to bite it.

“Inez?”

It was about the pod, I thought. He didn’t want me to eat it. But then he smiled. “Hey. Do you know what those little seaweed balloons are for?”

“Floating?”

“Right! For thousands of miles. Across the sea.”

He took the little pod from my hand—and drew it to his mouth. His front teeth crunched into the seaweed like biting a dill pickle. He made a face and spit out the flesh. “Blecch.” He chuckled, patted my back. He walked ahead. After a minute or two, he turned to me again.

“Hey, Inez. I was wondering something.”

“What?”

“Do you know what I do?”

“I’m not sure.” I was suddenly nervous. World population, statistics, predictions about the future. I should have known, yet whenever he tried to talk about his work, I tried to follow along but the
words got ahead of me, out of sight. “I just think for a living,” he’d once told me, but I knew he used a big computer—the size of a garage—so who did the thinking, my father or the machine?

“I guess what I meant to ask,” he said, “is whether you feel like you know me.”

“Yes.”

He waited a moment but seemed disappointed by my brevity. “I’m glad that you feel you do,” he said. “Because it’s very hard not to feel known—or understood. I never thought your mother understood me. So it was sometimes hard. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Yes,” I lied.

He paused again. “Have you ever felt misunderstood and lonely—or not appreciated? Do you know that feeling?”

I was preparing what I might say when he continued, “If you were feeling that way now, would you tell me?”

“I guess so,” I said, “but I don’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

He looked at me with a mix of sympathy and disbelief. “It’s not so much fun to be a kid,” he said. “I remember what it’s like. I really do. Sometimes I look at you, and even though you’re very quiet, I can guess how you are. Do you think I can?”

“I don’t know,” I said. As we walked closer to the surf, it suddenly seemed too rough, the water going in too many directions.

He bent down to pick up a stick from the ground, a piece of driftwood that had been smoothed by years of water and sand and turbulence. I stopped with him. “You’re smart,” he said. “You notice things, don’t you? And you’re careful what you say. Those are good qualities to have. There’s nothing wrong with keeping your feelings to
yourself if you want to. Or keeping your thoughts to yourself, if something inside is telling you to keep quiet. Do you have that sometimes?”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“I think you have all kinds of thoughts about things that are really interesting,” he said. “But you aren’t sharing them with me. That’s okay. It really is. But someday I hope you will.”

“I have something to ask,” I said after a while.

“What?” He smiled.

“How do you know what you want to do when you get big?”

“You don’t,” he said, seeming thrilled to tackle a question. “You never really do. Maybe your mother did. But most people don’t. It’s like musical chairs, really. At some point the music stops and you have to sit down. You know that game? The music stops and it’s time to settle on something to do with your life. Mostly it’s a big accident. Some people—your mother—it’s different for them. They have a kind of genius or talent for something. It drives them toward things and to a certain kind of life. But most people, the rest of us, probably you and me, just end up with more choices. Maybe that’s what your mother didn’t like. She felt she never had a choice. She was born to dance, that’s all. Everything else was secondary. But don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about your future. Are you worried?”

I shook my head.

“Well, don’t be. Just find something you love doing—and then do it as well as you can. That way it will never feel like working.”

“Okay.”

I looked down at my clodhoppers—and the little holes on the surface of them, the decoration that formed a swooping band across the middle, were filling up with grains of sand. And my socks,
which were too small, had begun to disappear inside the heels of my shoes like they were being eaten. I looked up at my father. His brows were knit, and his face was achingly handsome.

“I don’t mean to heavy you out. Am I, Inez?” He reached for my hand, and I took his. We walked while the clouds gathered and the mist accumulated, until it became a thick fog. By the time we headed back, I could barely see the hills.

At the top of the crest, he stopped and turned around.

“What a beautiful spot.”

I nodded.

“Isn’t this a beautiful place?” There was something fragile in his eyes, almost afraid.

I nodded again.

“Wouldn’t it be great to build a house here? Right here. Right on this spot?”

“Yeah.”

“God, I’d really dig that. Maybe I could. Or maybe we could. And you’d come live with me. How’d you like that?”

“Oh,” I said, startled. “That’d be great.” But I didn’t think so, not really.

THREE

Thanksgiving

D
uring the lull between his calls and letters, it’s not that my father was dead in my mind, exactly. He was kept on hold, cinematic freeze frame—the pause button not released until I picked up the phone or stepped off the plane. Maybe it was painful to think of him, or maybe his unpredictability and aloof nature made it impossible to project him into material existence. He lived so separately from me, and in such different circumstances and climate and culture—except for our mutual devotion to
Laugh-In
—that thinking about him was like trying to ponder what a character in a movie might be doing long after the movie ended.

Over the spring we’d seen each other twice. Over the summer only once. Cary greeted me at the airport gate each time with her foggy sweetness and vanilla-wafer smell and hung around all weekend. She taught me how to dog-whistle—and how to make loud shrieking sounds by blowing on a grass blade. She took me to the university where she studied music and played Bach’s
Goldberg Variations
for me on a huge black piano. She always told me how beautiful
I was and how much fun I was. My father was working on a research project at a computer lab in Berkeley and was busier than usual in those days. He talked about “microchips” and “mainframes.” His work was “uncertain and new,” as he cryptically put it in a letter, “and therefore exciting to me.” This only created an additional layer of haze around him and his life.

I was caught up in Van Dale and its various offerings that summer anyway. There were piano lessons with Mrs. Zacutti, pottery classes at Logo Park, and day camp at Verdugo Hills Recreational Center, where Robbie and I liked to dive for sunken Band-Aids at the bottom of a vast swimming pool. A family with three boys, all older—Alan, Steven, and J.P.—had moved into the house next door and invited me to play war with them or, to be more precise, to play a nurse who tended their battle wounds. More often there were long afternoons in Robbie’s backyard, where she and I played badminton and tetherball or just rolled on the grass and looked up at clouds. By the end of July, my feet were hardened by shoelessness and my body was tan and lean from swimming.

He sent two letters a month. These were typewritten perfectly on blinding-white paper with a discreet but painstakingly considered letterhead,
PAUL N. RUIN,
that was always engraved, never printed. There was one for my mother with a child-support check and another for me with ten dollars. There was always a note, with a vaguely conspiratorial air.

He called every week or so—asked about my classes and friends and made suggestions that I tended to ignore. “When you’re playing war, why don’t you ask the boys for your own gun, Inez?” he said. “Forget being a nurse.” He didn’t mention building a house in the headlands again—or me coming to live with him. Dreading the latter prospect, I never raised it.

I asked about Cary instead. He always chirped up. “Oh, she’s great,” he’d say. “She misses you! And always asks how you’re doing. She was in Italy for a few weeks—in Tuscany. And now she’s busy working on a dissertation. It’s very interesting. It’s about how music travels among cultures the way language does, and follows the same rhythmic tendencies. Do you know what a dissertation is?”

“No,” I asked. “What?”

I’d become more confident, more outgoing. I asked more questions. I laughed more easily and smiled with my mouth open. A certain formality was dissolving. When I looked back on my life at six or seven, it was as though I had been only half awake, or slumbering in a coma. Now a veil had been lifted, a Halloween costume pulled off my head, and the colors of the world seemed greater in number and more subtle, and sounds more complex and mysterious. In late August, when I turned nine and threw a slumber party with the few girls who weren’t away on trips, I felt so alive, so awake, and so happy that my mother’s pleas for us to “get some sleep” seemed an awful prospect—the death of a consciousness that I’d only just discovered. The world seemed new and in need of reconsideration.

Birthday packages arrived, as they always did, but this year they seemed larger and grander than ever. My grandmother in San Benito, Marguerite Ruin, sent a tiny convertible sports car driven by a Barbie doll with a dark ponytail. She sent a copy of
Anne of Green Gables
, a book that I wouldn’t read until years later, and a wooden keepsake box that spelled out
INEZ
on the lid with inlaid mother-of-pearl shadowed by bits of ebony. Two packages came from San Francisco, a small one from Cary Knowles—“Who’s that?” my mother asked—with a set of blue-and-green beaded coin purses of varying sizes, each bulging with rings and unopened Cracker Jack prizes and tiny bottles of frosted nail polish. In a larger box, my father had sent a ball-shaped white transistor radio, an envelope with a birthday check for ninety dollars (for turning nine, he said), and, underneath, two sleeveless dresses in bright colors with bold swirling patterns and jagged stripes. The label said
MARIMEKKO, FINLAND.