California Calling Read online

  It will be like a secret society.

  Like pineapple Jell-O.

  Frangelico cream.

  It will be like a woman in a silver Speedo and an alligator mask.

  Shaving her legs in a public fountain.

  A jar of marmalade.

  A pink tattoo.

  A Barbie doll with hair you can braid.

  It will be like a silk nightgown a baby bear tongue-tied nightingale a wet nurse laurel shrine sugar pine larkspur revolt a quiet scream.

  It will be like a dream.

  Begin in the solace

  1980

  There are other childhood images in my mind, from before the school library, when I am three and four. My parents and I live, for a brief opening, in Florida. Carefree. An exodus from the claustrophobic island of Montreal to which our families had been anchored for about seventy-five years, since that escape from Russia. We are imposters, not really Floridians or Americans. But we pass, or we divert ourselves with the pleasure of trying.

  The memories are all set to music, a dreamy, hazy seventies sitcom-scape. We are Three’s Company but the family version. The palette is golden, dusty oranges, brown plaids, many sun-fractured yellows. The things that are most important to us are fresh orange juice, sunbathing, going to Red Lobster to suck buttered crustaceans, cruising town in our wood-paneled station wagon, and my father’s record player. It is just the three of us, and three is a magic number. On hot nights I shimmy out of my bed and my father and mother lounge around the living room on the brown nubby couch in their terry cloth shorts drinking Coca-Cola. They place my father’s giant black headphones comically over my frizzy hair and eager ears and hand me a microphone. I belt out Beach Boys or Bee Gees and twirl in my Strawberry Shortcake nightgown while the skinny palms sweat the night away outside.

  We listen to whatever my father has in his collection, which includes Stevie Wonder just calling to say he loves you; Bruce Springsteen calling everybody out for having a hungry heart; the Eagles forecasting a heartache tonight; and Gloria Gaynor promising she will survive. The Mamas & the Papas; Sonny & Cher; Jefferson Airplane; Fleetwood Mac: we sing along even though none of us can carry a tune. We speak against the backdrop of this music, this California sound, this fantasy.

  The music sounds like summer nights, cotton candy, roller skates on blacktop; it reminds me of when the tide is high and that we are family, and it also makes me wonder what exactly is a hot child in the city? It is balck afros and white afros and sunglasses and disco balls and chocolate milkshakes and drive-ins and my once-fifteen-year-old mother’s dried school-dance corsage preserved in her special memory trunk and rounded-block fonts and tight-ass Sassons and my dad’s baby blue wedding tuxedo and triangle bikinis and trips to my favorite place on Earth, Disney World, where at the petting zoo I touch a deer and in the sepia-toned picture that results and forms the memory forever, the bright white of my jeans is mirrored in the spots on the deer’s tail.

  Music sings through car speakers: my mom’s long, low, wood-paneled station wagon as we cruise the Publix parking lot; my dad’s doorless, bird-blue Jeep CJ, bumping my tiny butt to nursery school.

  Saturday is American Bandstand, and we’re free of any responsibilities. My parents are only in their twenties; their parents and siblings and most of their friends are back in the cold North. We all gather around the TV with our OJ, Daddy in his Jew ’fro and brown Top-Siders and pink Lacoste polo and Mummy in a long, mustard-colored jersey dress, slender and sunburned. Dick Clark comes on in his own pink shirt, and the dancers, young and cool like my parents, crowd the California stage. They boogie on and on.

  Which things last?

  Memory is funny that way. One sniff, one note, and the whole lost world opens up again.

  Later, much later and no matter where I am, but especially as I cruise the California highways with the radio blaring, I will always be able to conjure the packed dance floor of American Bandstand on our TV screen. I will remember the embers of my parents’ Marlboros tapped into tiger’s eye ashtrays; the spray of surf; my mother’s Chanel perfume and pink Bubblicious chewing gum and lemony Mr. Clean and her hidden, hungry heart.

  Tell a story about night

  It was hot and sticky. From the east, a swamp wind wafted, carrying the pucker of alligator sweat. The moon was full and high outside the open window, and the little girl watched it from her narrow bed, a thin coverlet pulled up to her nose. Each night her parents would tuck her in.

  “Sleep tight, don’t let anything bite,” said her mother, her shiny red nails sweeping the dark curls aside so she could kiss the child’s soft white cheek.

  “Sleep tight, don’t let anything bite,” said her father, pinching her playfully on the derriere.

  “Tomorrow is Saturday,” the mother added. “Your father doesn’t have to go off to work. Don’t wake us up early.”

  The door was closed behind the parents. Tonight was the night for her plan. The girl was four. She shivered in her thin eyelet nightgown despite the day’s heat rising from the cul-de-sac’s blacktop and from deep inside the creases of the palm trees. Outside a bullfrog let go its rubber croak; another answered it.

  The girl closed her eyes. First the black of her eyelids was all there was, empty, not what she wanted. Under the coverlet she balled her tiny fists and began to chant as she had practiced. “I want to see you, I want to see you, I want to see you,” she mumbled, her lips moving softly.

  Nothing. The girl squeezed harder, and let her mind wander to the original source of her obsession. She had seen her many times, the last of which was a few days ago, projected on the TV screen in the hours of a sultry afternoon after she had returned home from preschool. And again before that, turning the well-worn pages of her faithful picture book. It took a long time for her to appear in the story—Snow White had to be mistreated, then flee, befriend the small forest men, and spy her beloved from afar. It was worth the wait, though, the girl thought, another shiver slipping underneath her gown like ice on the back of her sweaty knees.

  She would conjure her, she would. “I want to see you, I want to see you, I want to see you,” she whispered, louder this time. She stilled her body in wait. “I’m not afraid.” Come on. Come on.

  Nothing. She turned and opened her heavy eyes to the window. A silver tendril floated across the moon. A cricket shifted its wings. The toads sang their chorus. The girl looked back across her room and her eyes caught on something in her vanity mirror. Slowly, a wicked dark shape came into focus. The little girl sucked in her breath. It was the reflection of something, someone, up high in the corner near the ceiling. She arched her neck off the sheet to look.

  A most wretched face stared down at her, more horrid than the pages of her book, than the Disney movie, than anything in her imagination. Crumpled gray skin, a sharply hooked nose, a crone’s body draped in blanket rags and bent over a dead staff. Eyes that reached out and shook her to her bones, a wide, glassy stare, a band of red burning around the stone-black pupil. The warty mouth stretched slowly into a toothless grin, and a cackle came up from deep inside her body.

  I will not scream, I will not scream, the little girl thought. I made her come. I’m not afraid.

  But she was afraid. The old witch’s arm reached out from the corner of the ceiling where she floated. She will snatch me, she will snatch me away. Yet the girl was frozen there, unable to move, unable to conjure her voice now that she wanted it most of all. Caught in the throat of herself. The witch dislodged from the ceiling, grew larger and larger, moved closer and closer, her cackle now a shriek that made the turtles turn over in the slough. The girl squeezed her eyelids shut, her mouth stuck, as a bony hand encircled her waist. I should never have asked, I should never have asked.

  And another one

  On a steamy Florida evening as I lie in bed in my cotton nightgown, I catch sight out the window of my father, sitting in the backyard, cigarette smoke rising in the dusk. His head bobs up and down the way it does when
he listens to the Beach Boys. I creep to my window.

  My blue and white metal swing set, aglow now in the early night, is my favorite thing. Every day I ride its slide and seats and climb its bars. I have never thought about what its cool poles and rocking motions might be like in the mystery of nighttime, beyond my usual bounds of play.

  My father calls me softly by my nickname, Nou, like a question. And suddenly he is lifting me carefully, magically, through the open window and into the yard. My mother, probably washing dishes or reading Danielle Steel, would never let me out so late, and the shock of this fast-evolving secret—me flying through a nighttime window and into the familiar yet strange yardelectrifies me.

  Lifted. Blades of grass caress my feet. I can smell the ocean. My curly hair, thick and moist and too heavy for a four-year-old’s head, frizzes extra at the wall of heat outside. Frogs that suction to the side of our stucco house on hot nights burp their low croaks. My dad’s face is lobster red, the flush of my parents’ sun worship; it radiates against his dark curls and white polo, tight on his lanky frame.

  My father, winking at me, lowers me onto the swing, pulls back, then releases me. I pump my skinny legs higher against the sky and watch the twinkling stars slide out from behind the swirls of smoke.

  You’re not saying anything about your mother

  Right. Oversight, sorry. Because she is everywhere, everything, rule arbiter and family concierge and friend of my days, every minute of them. Every couple of mornings we go together to get a jug of orange juice from a store with flat blue carpet that also sells, of all things, rotisserie chicken. Sweet juice and chicken, enough to live off indefinitely on a peninsula all our own. She needlepoints, flowered pillows and slightly psychedelic abstracts. She went to art school for a little while. We feed ducks at a pond: in the picture she is crouched, her tanned skinny legs folded easily beneath her, a brown terry cloth jumper with short shorts, Farah Fawcett hair flipped brightly. White teeth, claret lips, the aura of her directed watchfully out of the frame toward a toddling me, chasing feathers.

  Do men look at her? I don’t know. Yes. My father does, smacks her ass, teasingly calls her mieskeit, Yiddish for ugly, which is the opposite.

  Where are you really from?

  1987

  I’m ten now. We’re back from Florida, settled in our Canadian suburb. We are still a normal family, with a tine-marked kitchen table, maple leaves piled in the backyard, car washes on the weekend. Dinners with grandparents, aunts, uncles. My parents have a set of rainbow sheets, so soft after a thousand washes their cotton against my cheek feels like silk.

  There are five people now in my family: my parents, my five-year-old brother, our newborn baby brother, and me. We hang in a portrait on the wall. My father, dark hair and a camel-hair suit; my mother, pretty in chiffon; me, angelically gap-toothed in a dress that twirls wildly when I dance; my brother, in dimples; and the baby, perched in my mother’s arms—the only blond except for her (but hers is from a box). The picture is from a wedding we attended, but we dance at home, too, to the new records my father buys sometimes, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, Eurhythmics.

  I like two boys at school, both named Darrell but one is spelled Daryl. Sometimes on the weekend I come up with the idea for a self-improvement project. For instance, organizing my wardrobe, in which I try to match new outfits that will make me look extra pretty, grown up, popular. I haven’t started to develop yet, but this summer my mother has given me a tube of white powdery balm and told me I need to apply it to my armpits every morning. So insulting, I think. But this pointed, specific shame eventually blends in with my overall suspicions about growing up. Sometimes I sniff myself or examine the crevices, new tender curves, and old bicycle-bruised planes of my girl’s body in the bathtub, searching for any betrayal, clues of what is to come. It feels as if, at any moment, some change will occur that I will not be able to undo.

  At night I pretend my canopy bed is a ship out to sea and that my stuffed animals and I are the only ones aboard. The risk is pirates but they never come near, though sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night on my carpeted floor. One night I leave my room in a walking sleep; my father catches me just as I place my foot at the top of the stairs. Another night from my bed I hear my parents, who are just on the other side of the wall: The same goddamn thing all the time, not like I’ve ever had a choice, watch it.

  My school is nearby. This year we discover how to dye the snow with drops of fruit punch we conserve from our lunches and mix with water from the drinking fountain. Overnight the tinted snow freezes and the next day we find glittering ice castles in its place, magenta, persimmon, amethyst. In our mittens and hats we build up our castles and watch from the schoolyard for black vans that might lead to our kidnapping. We have learned from TV news reports about children swiped off sidewalks, sold, locked away, buried. We have heard from our parents about six-year-old Etan Patz, who disappeared from his Manhattan neighborhood while walking the few blocks to the bus stop. Strangers mean danger. Any van turning the corner creates ripples of panic among the children behind the playground’s chain-link fence. Sometimes I think about what happens to you in a kidnapping, news headlines of CHILD SEX RINGS and TEEN PREGNANCY EPIDEMIC and SERIAL RAPIST LOOSE in my mind. In my irridescent pink Hello Kitty journal I write about how I hope I will never be grabbed and stolen and bound and worse, whatever worse is; I pray I will never need to kick out the brake light from the inside of a darkened trunk to save myself from a fat man in a leather motorcycle vest. I rehearse the investigative and escape skills I have gleaned from reading Nancy Drew and watching Penny, the intrepid junior girl detective in my favorite American cartoon, Inspector Gadget, which I only get to watch now while on vacations across the border.

  One afternoon I walk home alone from school, arrive at my house, and realize I have no recollection of getting here. Nancy and Penny would never be so careless, I know. Pay more attention, I chide myself, as I search my mind for a memory of stepping through the leaves, or waiting at the corner for the crossing guard in the bright vest. What if someone tries to take you?

  What is at risk?

  Children are taken inexplicably; this is a proven fact. But other terrible things happen to them, too. One fall we all crowd around the television to see the emergency scene playing out in Midland, Texas, where a toddler named Jessica has fallen into an abandoned well. Baby Jessica is wedged in the well shaft twenty-two feet underground, and for fifty-eight hours the stations play every minute of her rescue effort, an unprecedented format for network news. When we leave for school, Baby Jessica is cooing and parched in the well but not dangerously dehydrated, her parents singing down to her; when we come back home in the afternoon the talking heads are giving her mere hours to live.

  That night with the season’s first snow a whisper in the sky, we eat dinner around the television. They must have even more KKK in Texas than they have in Florida, my mother muses, invoking one of the chilling reasons—men in white hats occasionally marching down our streets—that we eventually left the South to return to Canada. We watch the dust of the Lone Star State, a place we have never been and can’t even imagine, swirl under media and construction lights inside our little TV box.

  It’s now or never, says the CBS News Special Report, and suddenly at 6:54 p.m. we understand that the long hours of waiting and tension and not knowing, which maybe have disturbed us more than we realize, are about to end.

  People are moving in very close to the hole, the news announcer says. It looks like something is coming up.

  We lean in toward the TV screen, stop chewing, hold our breath. And up she comes, battered but alive, a little girl strapped to a board, scraped and mud-caked. A miracle, people are saying. The crowd cheers, cameras snap and click, and soon, as our chicken wings grow cold, the search lights dim.

  We would forget about that miracle and the nations of people who rooted for Jessica for two and a half days straight. But we would remember, us kids, how eas
y it is for someone you love to slip away.

  The mother is the heart of the home

  In our little suburb, our house address is 24, the same number, I learn at school, as the highest home in the land, 24 Sussex Drive, the White House of Canada. Where through much of my childhood Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau lives. Pierre’s beautiful wife, Margaret, is much younger than her husband and unbeknownst to us is combatting the demons in her head even as she bears the leader of our great country three cherubic children. She has an affair and, when her youngest son is two, absconds, leaving Pierre (who later battles for and wins custody of the three kids) so she can study photography with Richard Avedon in New York and become a film star. This is scandal writ large. As I grow up, the name Margaret Trudeau slips off the tongues of adults, accompanied by a soft shake of the head. One time I hear the phrase She dropped her basket and I know what it means without knowing how I do.

  What’s really the problem here?

  There’s a certain kind of stare you get when your mother is an adulteress. It’s an out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye stare, a wary look, a little pitying and more than a little angry. Adults in your hometown (and their daughters, to whom everything has been told or intimated) will give this look to you even when you’re not standing next to your mother. Lately you get it more and more. Maybe it’s because you look like her? Because now you’re not ten, you’re fourteen, you’re fifteen, you have, more and more, the shape of a woman, the shape and maybe the face of women who dare to have sex with men other than their husbands.

  You don’t know why they are looking at you suspiciously.

  Guilty by genetics and luck of the draw.

  The truth can’t be ignored forever