Golden State: A Novel (27 page)

Walking to Bi-Rite Creamery, we didn’t talk about the photograph. I wasn’t sure what questions to ask. I was still processing it, still trying to figure out which part of her story was true, which part was false.

“Cat got your tongue?” Heather asked.

“Sorry. I was kind of lost in thought.”

I wondered if it was out of graciousness that she pretended I’d never seen the photo or if, instead, she simply enjoyed the fact that I was so dumbstruck.

The next morning, a strange thing happened. I was driving to UCSF to give a lecture, and as I turned up Cole, I caught sight of the orange Avanti, sitting in front of Reverie Café—the very car, bought with lottery winnings, that had inspired Tom’s show all those years before. I might not have noticed the Avanti, were it not for the fact that the meter maid’s vehicle was at that moment partially blocking my path, and the meter maid was in the process of slipping a ticket under the windshield wiper of the Avanti. Just then, a man hurried out of the café. It was my husband’s friend Wiggins. My windows were down, and I could hear him arguing.

I maneuvered around the meter vehicle and drove on, thinking of the Avanti, a car that was a symbol of all that was possible. I thought of recent items from the news, a whole slew of seemingly impossible things that had in fact come to pass. Scientists had discovered that the universe is crowded with Earth-like planets, many of which had evidence of flowing water. A graduate student in Arizona, meanwhile, had proved theoretically that life could begin with arsenic, a substance that was previously believed to destroy it, thus exploding our notions of what conditions needed to exist in order for life to form. A sixty-six-year-old woman in India had just given birth to triplets. There was a hole in the ozone over Antarctica the size of North America, the glaciers were disappearing more rapidly than anyone had ever imagined, and the rainbow toad, believed for nearly a century to be extinct, had been found alive and well in the Ecuadoran rain forest. And then there was California, the thirty-first state, suddenly hell-bent on independence.

I had to wonder: Was Heather the irrational one, or was I? Which was more willfully blind: To believe it was possible to win the lottery? Or to insist, despite firm evidence to the contrary, that it wasn’t?

12:02 p.m
.

The first block—Fulton to Cabrillo—is manageable. With each painful step I’m grateful that the street’s incline is slight. The white buildings of the VA hospital tower at the top of the hill, the large American flag snapping back and forth in the wind.

These days, I work fairly regular hours. But during my residency and in the first few years of my practice, there would be a point in every double shift when the work became purely mental, when the body, left to its own devices, would simply give out. When that happened I would picture the end of my shift as a finish line and repeat to myself, over and over, “Almost there, almost there, almost there.” For the last couple of hours, these two simple words would keep me going. The next few blocks are no different, the finish line so near I can taste it.

I pass a ramshackle playground where a group of teenagers sit on the swings, smoking and laughing. A woman in a long skirt, hair covered with a black net, chases two little girls up the slide. On the other side of the playground, half a dozen men are shooting hoops. While the rest of the city deteriorates into chaos, in this quiet neighborhood built on sand dunes, it almost feels like an ordinary day.

I turn left on Balboa and make my way down to Forty-third Avenue. Balboa to Anza is more difficult. It’s all uphill, and the
block seems to go on forever. Every few steps I look up at the Stars and Stripes flapping over the VA—my finish line. I’m moving as fast as I can: step with the right foot, swing on the crutches, step, swing, step, past the tall, narrow houses.

And then, suddenly, I’m on the ground, cheek to the pavement, flat on my stomach on the sidewalk, staring into an open garage that’s packed with cases of bottles, stacked all the way to the ceiling. I curse, startled by the volume of my own voice on the quiet avenue.

An older woman is standing inside the garage. She looks at me, surprised, before rushing to my side. Warm blood gushes from my nose. I taste salt, iron. I reach up and touch my face; my forehead is bleeding too. The woman tugs at my arm, her grip surprisingly strong, and with her help I am able to push myself up on my palms. Then, with a few excruciating movements, I manage to get to a standing position.

“Come inside,” she orders, picking my messenger bag up off the ground.

“I can’t,” I say, wiping blood from my face. My hands are covered with it. I’m dizzy, light-headed.

“You must.”

My nose keeps gushing. The cut in my forehead is pumping blood so fast, it’s difficult to see.

“Come!” she says again, and this time she is dragging me toward her house. I stumble after her, trying to see through the blood. I follow her through the garage, to the side stairs. She sets down my bag and props my crutches against the wall. “I will help you,” she says.

I put one arm around her shoulders, clutch the banister with the other hand, and together we proceed slowly up the stairs. Then she leads me through a door into a warm kitchen. Something is cooking on the stove, the lid of the pot noisily lifting and lowering, sending out puffs of steam. From another room comes the sound of children’s voices.

She takes several paper towels from a roll and hands them to me.

“Thank you,” I murmur, pressing the towels to my nose, my forehead. I pinch the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger. It takes minutes for the bleeding to stop. What is happening to Heather? I have to get out of here.

The woman takes an unlabeled bottle from the freezer and pours a bit into a small blue glass. “Drink this,” she orders. “You will feel better.”

I shake my head, but then she’s pressing the glass to my lips. The cold vodka stings going down.

“I will show you the bathroom,” she says.

I follow her out of her kitchen, past a large living room, where seven children are standing in a line, waiting their turn. In the middle of the room is a balance beam, and at one end of it stands a man of about sixty, giving orders in Russian to a boy no more than five, who is making his way along the beam. The boy looks up, sees me, and falls off. Then all of the children are staring at me, wide-eyed. The man glances up too, and on his face is a look of shock. The woman says something to him in Russian, he claps his hands, and the children stand at attention.

“Day care,” she tells me. “Please excuse the children for staring.”

In the bathroom, one glance in the mirror explains their reaction; there’s so much blood, I look like a crime scene. My lip is cut and has already started swelling.

The woman wets a washcloth with warm water and cleans my face.

“Oh!” she says, smiling, when the blood is gone. “This way you are much prettier.”

Then she opens the medicine cabinet and pulls out a box of Band-Aids and a spray can of Bactine. “Close your eyes,” she says. She sprays the cut on my forehead. It stings. She covers the cut with a large Band-Aid. “Much better.”

I thank her for her kindness.

“With pleasure,” she says, leading me back down the stairs and
into the fog. She hands me my crutches and puts the bag over my shoulder. “Sorry I don’t have car,” she says. “If I have, I give you ride.”

Now I go more slowly.
Step, swing, step, swing, step, swing
. This city never ceases to amaze me. Behind every door, it’s as if there’s another, secret country. In many ways, San Francisco already is what California wants to be: a world unto itself.

My foot feels like a dead weight dangling from my leg. Every sensation in my body is concentrated there. I sing to myself to try to get up the hill. It’s a song Tom’s been playing on the radio lately, so insanely catchy I haven’t been able to get it out of my head—“Save Me, San Francisco,” by Train. I don’t care who hears me. I don’t care who sees me. All I care about is getting to Heather.

I keep hobbling uphill, the song keeps playing in my head, and when I come to the last line I remember what Tom said this morning: “You never needed me to carry you anywhere.” He couldn’t be more wrong.

And then I’m at Anza, looking up the impossibly steep hill toward Geary, the clock ticking with each step. The waves pound the shore in the distance, the foghorns bellow. It takes me a good ten minutes to get up the hill. Finally, I set off across the wide, empty road. Ahead, at the top of the hill, the flag above the VA keeps flapping in the wind. By the time I reach the other side, my heart is beating wildly, and I have to catch my breath.

The next block, Geary to Clement, is a blur of pain and exhaustion, and then I’m standing at the foot of the VA campus—one last, steep flight of steps between me and the finish line.

“Almost there,” I chant under my breath. “Almost there.”

The Father of Mississippi Secession, according to my childhood textbooks, was a native New Yorker with a strangely apropos name: John Anthony Quitman. At the age of twenty-one, Quitman moved from Ohio to Natchez, where he practiced law and married well. A few years after his arrival, he purchased a large plantation called Monmouth. He would go on to a career in the state senate and the U.S. Congress, abandon politics briefly to command U.S. troops in Mexico, and eventually serve a year as governor of Mississippi. During his decades in politics, he was a fierce proponent of Mississippi’s independence. But before Quitman was a secessionist, he was an expansionist. If he had had his way, Cuba would have joined the union as a slave-holding state.

The Monmouth Plantation, which remained in the Quitman family for nearly a century, is now a luxury bed-and-breakfast with twenty-six acres of lushly maintained grounds. I know, because Tom and I have been there. Years ago, he insisted on taking a driving tour of the Southeast. He wanted to see where I’d come from—not just the town but the region. Plus, he wanted to taste grits and butter beans and fried okra in the land that had made them famous. So we flew down to New Orleans, rented a car, and made our way up I-59, through Slidell and Picayune, Poplarville and Hattiesburg. We
spent two nights with my mother and Heather in Laurel before setting off through the driving rain for Natchez.

We arrived at Monmouth just as the thunderclouds were clearing. We stayed in the main house, which is said to have been saved from the torches of the Union troops by two of Quitman’s daughters. It is an essential element of the southern belle mythology: grand old plantation homes salvaged from Union savagery by acts of female bravery, while the loyal slaves looked on in admiration at their proud and fearless mistresses. During the time of our stay, the owners were renovating the old slave quarters—windowless two-story brick buildings built on the edge of a mosquito-infested pond. Each year I receive a newsletter about goings-on at the former plantation. The most recent one included photos of the old slave quarters, now called Garden Cottages, frilled up with antique dressers, goose down comforters, and gleaming hardwood floors.

“It’s all been scrubbed clean,” Tom remarked that night in bed. “Like it never happened.”

“We southerners are good at that,” I said. “Erasing the past, sweeping everything under the rug for outsiders, while obsessing over it in private.”

I, too, had wiped the slate of my own history clean. No one in my current life could look at me and know I’d gone whole weeks as a kid eating sandwiches of Wonder bread and ketchup, or that I’d had a second cousin, an angry sheriff’s deputy with a stunning resemblance to Elvis, who’d served seven years at the Mississippi State Penitentiary for beating a black teenager to within an inch of his life. An important part of creating a new identity was gradually erasing the old one. You plant new stories like seeds, water them, tend them, until they take root.

History is made not of facts set in stone but of the stories we tell. As a child in Mississippi, I read textbooks that referred to the War for Southern Independence. In my teachers’ telling, the heroes of that war were Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Of Abraham Lincoln, we learned only that he was a
brilliant but misguided man who sought to force his own views on an unwilling people by way of violence.

A few decades from now, how will the rest of the country construe this moment in history? Will California be remembered as a sovereign state exercising its constitutional right of secession? Or as a rogue and foolish populace bent on destroying the union? What stories will have to be erased to make way for our new narrative?

Our state history—a mere 160 years old, almost laughable in its brevity—is no match for the long history of this land. We keep building and renaming, erecting our buildings and batteries, our signposts and flags, clearing paths and reimagining the landscape: new trees to replace the old ones, new plants to fight off the never-ending erosion.

It would be tempting to say that we’ve been stupid all along, that we just keep making the same old mistakes disguised as new ones. One might argue we don’t deserve what we’ve been given, and that the moment the planet burns or freezes or hurtles into some black hole is the moment we’ve been driving toward since the first man crawled out of a cave. But I’m reluctant to ascribe this endless pattern of starting over to human folly or mere hubris. There is more to it than that. We are always looking to do better. The fact that we fail, again and again, the fact that so many of our efforts are deeply misguided, does nothing to diminish the significance of the impulse itself. It is human to start over. It is human to begin again.

Will California secede? Nothing seems outlandish anymore. I think of Tom peeing side by side with Václav Havel. I think of the orange Avanti. I think of the Prague Spring, which tried and failed to overcome communism in the Czech Republic. Twenty-one years later, Berliners brought down the wall. Twelve years after that, horrifyingly, the Twin Towers fell. Nearly another decade passed before the Arab Spring erupted. History seems slow until you’re in the middle of it, watching the world come apart at the seams, restitch itself country by country, continent by continent, until the map you once took for granted no longer applies.