California Calling Read online

  This is a work of nonfiction. These stories are told the way I remember them, not necessarily how others do. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

  Copyright © 2017 Natalie Singer

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage-and-retrieval systems, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher, except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts

  2201 Northeast 23rd Avenue 3rd Floor

  Portland, Oregon 97212

  hawthornebooks.com

  Form:

  Sibley House

  Set in Kingfisher

  98765432

  For Lukas

  Contents

  Prologue

  ONEFormation

  TWOPreparation

  THREEInteraction

  FOURXXX

  FIVEAllegory of a Caretaking

  SIXEx Parte Examination of the Elements

  SEVENIn Which New Breaks Away from Old

  EIGHTCompletion

  Acknowledgments

  The people who stayed behind and had their settled ways—those people were not the people who got the prize. The prize was California.

  —JOAN DIDION

  Prologue

  I AM IN A COURTROOM. THE COLOR PALETTE IS CREAMY SHELLS and brass, cold emerald lawyers’ lamps and spit-polished mahoganies. I am in the corner in a witness box. The audience stares at me hard. I have been put here to testify about what it is to be female, a sister, a mother (though I am not a mother, I am a sixteen-year-old girl). To testify about adultery. I am asked who I am. What I am. Who we have allowed inside of us. I must defend the women in my family, all the way back, and every girl and woman who ever was. Something fundamental is breaking and I will be responsible. The black veins of the marble floor look like cheese mold, cords of rot. I open my lips and out comes . . . vapor.

  PART ONE

  Formation

  Formation

  THERE ARE FOUR STAGES OF INTERROGATION; THE FIRST IS CALLED Formation. Before the interrogation comes the need for it to occur and the mandate to undertake it. At this stage, the framework is established for how the interrogation may be determined, including the level of coercion that is permitted or not allowed.

  What happened in the library?

  My affair with California begins long before we meet.

  I am nine, tucked between stacks in the school library on the second floor. For years after, decades, I will have dreams about the second floor of this school. I will wrestle in my sleep to remember what the hallway looked like as it hooked a sharp right, to the farthest reaches of the building where only the sixth-graders went. I will smell the disinfectant wafting off the floors and hear the squeak of untied sneakers. I will remember, without knowing if it is real, a tide of anxiety about the girls’ bathroom—dirty stalls, cold tile, donut-shaped communal drinking fountain into which one could easily fall, or be pushed.

  But the library is safe. I run my hand over the familiar rows of soft weathered spines, some torn fuzzily. The books have a certain smell: musty, the way I think the insides of the ancient mummy sarcophagi we learned about in class would smell if they were pried open.

  I have a research project, assigned by Madame Sebag, who hates me and forces me to copy French dictionary pages when I forget to have my parents sign my homework, which is all the time. The research project must be on a country in the world, any country other than Canada, our own. It is due in three weeks. I am pulsing with excitement. I am in the fourth grade. I want to pick a rad country, one no one else will have. Madame Sebag will see how good I am.

  The geography section is pretty decent, six shelves. The winter sun glints from the high-up rectangle windows, lighting the dust flakes in the air that look like goldfish food and the shiny plants our librarian, who wears stiff brown pantsuits and orange-flowered blouses, keeps on the top shelves. I see a book, All About California.

  I open it.

  As part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, California is subject to tsunamis, floods, drought, Santa Ana winds, landslides, wildfires, and has several volcanoes. It has numerous earthquakes, in particular along the San Andreas Fault. . . .

  Death Valley, a desert with large expanses below sea level, is the hottest place in North America; the highest temperature in the Western Hemisphere, 134° F (57° C), was recorded there July 10, 1913. . . .

  The name California is believed to have derived from a fictional paradise populated by black women warriors and ruled by Queen Calafia . . . a remote land also inhabited by man-eating griffins and other strange mythical beasts, and rich in gold.

  I try to mentally X-ray the pictures of spiky palm trees, bloodred underground faults, nuggets of gold, soaring ocean waves and sidewalk stars engraved with famous actresses’ names. I stare these pages down, bear into them. Hollywood stars on the sidewalk—ohmygod maybe Molly Ringwald is there, and Alyssa Milano, and Drew Barrymore from E.T.

  Already my mind is engulfed by California. Forget the project for horrible Madame Sebag. Forget Lake Placid, where my parents take us to stay in my grandparents’ vacation cabin every summer—I want to go to California.

  How can I get there? Maybe if I do a totally awesome project my parents will decide we can go to California for a visit. Maybe they will know immediately that we all belong there; maybe they will love it as much as I do. Maybe California will help them love each other.

  I look back at All About California, hungry for more inspiration.

  “California is the 3rd largest state in the United States in size, after Alaska and Texas.”

  A state? A state? Like New York, where we drive once a year across the border to do our school shopping, hiding new clothes and shoes deep in our Jeep’s trunk on our way back, away from the customs officials so we don’t have to pay extra taxes?

  Slowly I put the book back on its shelf. The library wall clock reads 3:58. In two minutes my mom will be outside in the car to pick me up.

  I skim the shelves again and see All About Italy. Fine, whatever. I scrawl my name at the bottom of the card on the inside of the cover to check it out. Hitching my heavy winter coat tightly around me, I step down the stairs and out into the snow.

  Affair might be too strong a word

  Not too strong. Too strange? I am writing about becoming obsessed with a state. A state of the U. S. Can you stalk a state? A state of being, yes. A state of becoming. A state of belonging, of trying to belong. The thirty-first state. First state I love. The state of love.

  State your purpose

  I’m trying.

  So this is a love story?

  It is about how we search for things we don’t know are there, bringing myths to life. It is about longing. The taste of it and the shame of it. It is about mapping one’s way out of the silence of girlhood.

  It is not a love story about California. It is a love story with California.

  We should talk about form

  I have a relationship with interrogation. A trio of memories, a history bequeathed. This has everything to do with searching. The first memory of interrogation, the foundation of my form of inquiry, went down long before I was born.

  My family’s roots reach back to Russia, to days of overwhelming love and fear. In the early twentieth century, they planned their escape from the shtetls, their small Jewish towns where the pillagers came again and again and the parents hid their beautiful daughters beneath the floorboards. Steam trunks were packed: hand-sewn linens; precious dishes; the books that held their past and futures; the babies—always such care w
ith the babies. Enough money saved to afford second-class passage, then maybe a hard end of bread when they landed.

  When they arrived from the shtetl to the city of Odessa, their turn at interrogation neared. They had readied their aging parents, studied the documents, rehearsed what to say. Know enough about where you want to go, but not too much. Respect your oppressors, but never sarcastically. Admit that the only home you have ever known is for the others, or if necessary (and it will be necessary) that you are the other. Speak but do not speak. Say the right thing. Reshape your story into a version attested to, a version to satisfy those in power—this is what it takes to obtain passage, to be given a chance at life. To avoid, now and later, the butts of guns, the bullets of guns, the pits, the gas, the ovens. To be allowed to continue the family. Such an essential thing: to continue to unspool one’s thread.

  The day came, a long line of waiting, worrying. Fold, open, read, refold your papers. Hush your children. Wring hands. Think hate; hurriedly subdue it. When my family arrived at the front of the line, the inquisition moved swiftly, faster than they’d thought, catching them in its current, steering their stories away from them. Where are you going? Why are you going? What will you do what have you done who do you know?

  How they answered, it turned out, mattered not much at all. After all that rehearsing, it turned out one of them, the grandmother, had an eye infection. Passage out of the place that did not want them was refused. Their declaration denied, their requests silenced. File closed.

  Until

  If

  Just maybe . . .

  Tickets for second-class passage, it turned out, could be sold to pay for a year of life-or-death survival in Odessa.

  It turned out, after one year of uncertainty, of squeaking by, of keeping quiet, of trying again, giving the right answers, brightening that old eye, being happy with steerage, miracle of miracles, they got out.

  What other legacy was bequeathed?

  One branch bore five siblings, four brothers and a girl. They were given passage, would survive the boat. On board the sister was often missing, alone in her dreams they figured. Thinking her stories. They disembarked to a new white north, cobbled streets and crowded walkups, a blank page on which to write their destinies. But before they even settled, before the boys had forged business from their guts and gumption, before they made love to a new language with their tongues, she was gone. It was rumored she had run off with a Russian soldier, the objective correlative for their instigating sorrow. Everyone talks. Instantly they released her, my mother’s scandalous ancestor. She was dead to them, having chosen pleasure over duty, never to be seen or spoken of again.

  But they did speak of her, some of the brothers, and tried later to find her. They could not, which left some of the men with a bothersome sentiment, and all the girls who came after a tremor in their cells.

  Will I always remember California?

  You can trace the spine of a state. Trace a line south from the hollow of her neck down along her vertebrae, from wet hills to rough mountains to reckless caverns dripping in the middle heady like verdant jungles, like the misted tropics they are, course along vertiginous roads that are cliffs to milkshake rivers below, gush with fossil-mud, with leftover dreamedof gold, with rockslides crowned in fog, dodge prehistoric pinecones the size of footballs and the weight of watermelons, seed-sodden and slimy, alive in your hands.

  You can trace this spine along sandy banks and red-and-black mineral-striped earth, knolls like the rolling hips of women through freeway knots and pastel beach towns and strip malls that blur into one another and low-slung fruit-packing plants and Art Deco marquees on main streets dead and gasping and queues of orange trees heavy with reward. You can push your way through the tip of the desert, blurry at the edges, past dusty antique shops, shell-shocked desert huts and counterculture dome homes, matchstick palms leaning into each other for company and anchoring you always to the here even as it changes and changes and changes.

  I do not need coercing

  PART TWO

  Preparation

  Preparation

  BEFORE THE INTERROGATOR MOVES INTO ACTION, A FURTHER preparation is often appropriate in which he will learn the facts of the case, the desired outcome, and the constraints of the permitted process.

  This then leads to appropriate research and preparation of methods and techniques that the interrogator will use. As the person being questioned may successfully resist some approaches, multiple strategies and tactics may be readied.

  Identify the point of departure

  1993

  The beginning of the end of this family was the moment we all filed down the accordion walkway and onto the crammed, sunset-bound 747. By boarding this plane, we sealed our fate.

  We sat hip to hip in one long row, the seven of us unbroken in line but barely believable as a family unit. For one thing, we didn’t look at all like each other, which makes sense: among the five kids, we sprung from three different fathers and two different mothers.

  In case of an emergency, please secure the air mask to yourself before helping others, instructed the Air Canada flight attendant.

  In case of an emergency, which family members would I rush to save and which would I not bother with?

  Steven, my still-cherubic eleven-year-old brother, slipped on his headphones and punched at a video game. Zachary, six, adjusted his baseball cap over his golden head and launched a pair of plastic Ninja Turtles into battle. They were okay, I thought. Sometimes annoying, but, still, my real siblings, the blood relations, worth keeping.

  Next sat my mother, then me, joined together by nerves. We were leaving our hometown, possibly forever. We were going somewhere inconceivably big, and it still seemed so impossible that occasionally we whispered the word to ourselves under our gum-freshened breath: California. Land of sunshine and Hollywood mansions, palm trees and rippling American flags. We were going to the West, the farthest west we could go from where we were—the unpredictable rim of the continent and the edge of what our imaginations could conjure. All we had for reference were Cosmo and Vogue magazines, which told us what we’d need to wear and buy and consume to become American women, and our memorized episodes of Beverly Hills 90210.

  If there was a soundtrack for our leaving, it was Zeppelin’s “Going to California.” I ran it in a loop through my head. I was going to California, an aching in my heart.

  I tried not to think of what was being left.

  I looked out the airplane window: gray industrial buildings, the smoggy Montreal summer air hanging in a thick yellow belt, and, obscured by the drabness, the stultified suburbs of both my childhood and my mother’s.

  Are you okay, my mom asked me. She wrung her hands in her lap, those slender fingers, gold bracelets clicking. I nodded, drawing down a veil with my long hair, and swallowed the puddle in my throat.

  From the end of the airplane row came Josef’s booming voice, his thick Israeli accent curling the Rs at the beginning of words and dropping them in the middle, turning the heads of strangers compelled to investigate Middle Eastern-sounding foreigners in their midst.

  Rrrready? my step-father asked us. Ready for the adventure of a lifetime? California here we come! He sounded like Arnold Schwarzenegger in a tourist board commercial, years before the Terminator would be reborn into a politician. By then California would have written its story all over us.

  None of the boys looked up from their toys. I rolled my eyes, and my mother and I both nodded quickly. Please, I knew she was thinking, like I was, stop talking to us.

  The airplane lurched and roared. I glanced sideways at the others. Josef’s shiny head was now bent over the science and engineering magazines in his lap. Next to him was Ric, my thirteen-year-old step-brother, his dark brow furrowed, thumbs racing over the buttons of a handheld game.

  Beside Ric was Asher, bony with skin so pale it was an otherworldly milk-glass bluish. Josef’s other son, sixteen—my age. Most likely it was Nirvana in his ear
phones. He refused to look up at anyone; later, when the stewardess asked if he’d like a drink, he answered with his eyes to the ground.

  I understood that tragedy had rendered Asher broken with uncertain hope of repair. I stared for a second before glancing away. Eye contact with Asher had to be avoided at all costs. We were all sad, but he was the saddest.

  The seven of us were a hastily and sloppily assembled family, like a project for the school science fair. From afar we might have looked fine, natural, but up close globs of glue seeped out from misaligned corners, popsicle sticks were crooked; the whole thing could topple with the flick of a finger or a puff of wind. The materials used to construct our family were off-brand, heavy with the industrial scent of after-market problems: death, betrayal, shame, abandonment.

  We were the Brady Bunch minus the upbeat tempo, conspicuously second-chance, step-family awkward. We were all searching for something, but we didn’t quite know what. If we had known, I don’t think we’d have told each other.

  But I didn’t care. None of us did. What we were heading toward was bigger than a natural, perfect family. In that plane, over the next six hours, I would cross over into what I hoped would be my own version of freedom. By the time the plane touched down at the San Jose International Airport, I would be unburdened of the pressures of my old high school, the weight of family secrets that burned like a brand, and the loneliness of my existence in the nowhere of the North.

  Something was calling to me.

  California.

  What do you think California will be like?