The Ruins of California (25 page)

Donny nodded.

“Miss Ruin?”

“Yes.”

Who knows what Marguerite was told, how it was described to her, but I came to believe that she knew everything—the white shoes, the purple dress, the droopy boa, the way I towered over poor Donny Martin and smelled his earwax but felt so much pity for him that it was almost like love. The ballroom broke into chants. The lonely fox-trot played with sour notes and false charm, and Donny and I clung to each other like shipwreck survivors, our limbs loose and gangly, drowning in shame. Marguerite never once mentioned it, never uttered the word “cotillion” again or talked about the importance of learning to dance or pouring tea or writing thank-you notes, except to say, once, after she’d seen me talking with Jose at the barn, a few weeks before our last ride together, “You know what, Inez? You have the best manners anybody can have. Because they aren’t manners—that’s why. It’s just who you are.”

THIRTEEN

If a Tree Fell

I
woke up when the grandfather clock tolled once.
Saturday Night Live
had ended. My father turned off the television and left the room, and I opened my eyes and saw him wander out into the dark hallway and vanish. A few minutes later, I followed after him. A dim light was coming from Aunt Julia’s room, and the door was ajar. I went in—he’d set up camp in there, since he had no bedroom of his own anymore—but her room was empty, somehow emptier than it had ever been.

Tomorrow everybody would turn up—Aunt Ann, Uncle Drew, Lisa and Lizzie and Amanda and Newell. Aunt Julia would stay for weeks and weeks, looking after the house, hiring and firing appraisers, attorneys, and real estate brokers. But the night of the accident, it was just me and my father. He’d flown down late that afternoon in his three-piece San Benito suit. It was too heavy for Southern California, and the vest gave it a Gold Rush feeling. The doctors spoke to my father with an alert but casual feeling—he’d gone to high school with the surgeon—almost as if they were talking
to another doctor. There was an impersonal familiarity between them, a levity that lacked any emotion. And afterward my father seemed relaxed, almost jolly. He flirted with a hospital nurse, Renee, by grilling her. He made a joke about how it was the first time he’d seen his mother in public without gloves. He disappeared down a corridor and returned in a wheelchair with a blanket over his lap, pretending to be an invalid. The nurses loved that one. He stood by Marguerite’s bedside and talked to her, like he’d just dropped in for tea. Of course her eyes never opened, or even fluttered. I can’t remember what he said, really. He was mostly being reassuring to her.
Don’t worry, Mother.
That kind of thing.
I’m here. I’m here, and Inez is still here.
I think he said, “We love you, and we’re looking after you,” but his voice never cracked, didn’t carry one hint of sadness or stress. Then we took his boxy rental car to dinner at the Pie ’n Burger on California Boulevard.

Back at the San Benito house, I showered and found a pair of old flannel pajamas to change into. (“Hey,” my father said, “I think those used to be mine.”) I called my mother and Abuelita, both of them overwrought and reaching out, like they wanted to hug me and be emotional, but it was so unlike the tone that my father had established that I did my best to freeze them out. No Trespassing. That kind of freeze-out. Then my father called Whitman in Madagascar, where it was half a day later—and morning, or close—but got no answer. We settled into a night of TV watching upstairs, in my father’s old bedroom.

“What’s this show about?” he asked when I put on
The Jeffersons.
“All these people do is yell.” We watched
Mary Tyler Moore.
“I’ve always had a crush on her,” he whispered. He seemed largely unfamiliar with the shows and what was popular, except a new program that somebody, a new friend, had told him about. It was called
Saturday Night Live.
“Gretchen says it’s great,” my father enthused. Obviously, it was live—and that seemed hard to fathom at first. Improvisational. Seat of the pants. My father was in heaven. An actor named Chevy Chase opened with a fireside chat from the Ford White House. John Belushi skated in Rockefeller Center dressed as a huge bee. Gilda Radner talked about how she’d overeaten the previous Christmas. (“Isn’t she incredible?” my father said.) The Stylistics performed, and I fell asleep—until the grandfather clock began to toll.

I stood in Aunt Julia’s mirrored dressing room and looked at my father’s stuff. His black leather dop kit was opened: a small red can of shaving cream, a silver razor that opened with a twist of the handle, a white styptic pencil, a nail file, a tiny bottle of Listerine, a clear green GUM toothbrush. Everything so ordinary and yet imbued with a special kind of magic because they were his. I picked up his black address book and flipped around the pages. The names were written in tiny, perfect handwriting, mostly names I didn’t know. I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes weren’t bloodshot anymore, not really. But I still felt groggy and a little hesitant, as if each moment were so fascinating that I didn’t want to leave it for the next.

That Marguerite might not come back—unimaginable. The house without her felt pointless. Aunt Julia’s room seemed like a storage area now, like a big faux-Chippendale set piece. The desk with its ink blotter and crystal inkwell and cabinet full of leather-bound books that were too small and precious to read. And the curtains—just the right heaviness of chintz, the right transparency of sheers, venetian blinds underneath. Marguerite had made every decision—the length of the bed skirts, the width of piping on the coverlets, exactly where to hang the
Godey’s Lady’s Book
prints.
She’d worked to get everything
just so
. When she was a girl in New Bedford, she’d watched the contents of her family house being carried out and put onto carts—she’d seen her bedroom furniture taken away, and her mother’s dining room table and chairs. All sold, all gone. A family left destitute, taken in by relatives. She’d learned to do housework. She’d gotten jobs, later on, in New York. And once she’d married N.C., she spent the next fifty years accumulating things back, putting her house in order again, surrounding herself with all the things she’d lost. But in that moment, as I stood in Aunt Julia’s pristine bedroom, all Marguerite’s care and her meticulousness seemed absurd to me. What had she accomplished? What had it mattered?

She lingered in Crocker Hospital with her smashed body. She didn’t really “linger,” I guess. It was just a matter of one night. There was brief talk about the possible removal of her leg and how it had been “ground to powder,” which had made me think of cigarette ash and body talc and Marguerite’s powdery world. A trauma specialist with a beard offered a theory as to why an expert equestrian would fall from her horse—not the falling branch, the bolting horse, or that her granddaughter was too stoned to say anything when she noticed the loose girth and slipping saddle. Perhaps Marguerite had had a stroke. Not uncommon, he said. Quite possible, really. Tests were being done—although they’d eventually yield inconclusive results. It was only uncertainty that lingered and, I guess, guilt and questions, all of which I kept to myself.

I drifted into the back hallway, where the sconces on the wall were unlit, just chains of crystals dripping without purpose, and into the old nursery and maids’ rooms, which had been left institutional on purpose. Marguerite had thought it all out. The maids would come and go. The daughters-in-law would come and go, too,
wouldn’t they? I imagined my mother—young, shining, still dancing, and happy to be a part of a fancy house and new world—bending over my crib or drawing my bath. And then I went down the back staircase, hoping to avoid the grandfather clock, which would be tolling on the half hour soon.

The dark kitchen was cold—a window had been left open—and I heard crickets in the garden and smelled fresh cigarette smoke. It was coming from the veranda. My father was sitting there in an old heavy coat of N.C.’s that he must have found in the front hall closet. Everybody had always wondered when Marguerite was going to get rid of it.

“What’s going on?” he said.

He looked a little bizarre in the coat, like a Depression-era hobo. His face was drawn. “God, it’s freezing,” I said, slipping back into the house, finding a lined Burberry raincoat of Marguerite’s, and squeezing my arms through the narrow sleeves until my forearms stuck out.

On the veranda my father was lighting up another cigarette. There was a wooden box on the table, a carved cigarette box that was usually in the library. Marguerite was smoking Dorals now, a low-tar and -nicotine brand with a weird plastic filter that her regular GP had encouraged her to try when she refused to quit.

I sat down in a squeaky wicker chair.

“Hell-o,” my father said. He was cheerful in a strange way. It seemed fake. There was something going on. I could almost hear it, like background noise, and it made me wary.

“Hello.”

“I talked to Whitman,” he said. “Tried him again—and got him.”

“Oh. How was he?”

“He seemed fine. His usual laid-back self. Happy but, you know,
exhibiting that surfed-out response toward life. The waves are lousy in Madagascar, apparently, so I can’t really figure out what he’s doing there. But it’s summer there now, and he has that summery sound. You know what I mean? Beyond that, I can’t really tell how he’s doing.

“Um.”

“Marguerite thought he should have gone to college. That I blew it. Do you think I blew it?”

I shrugged.

“I wonder myself. Quite a lot.”

He studied me while we talked, as though he were thinking about me in the future, imagining what he’d say when I didn’t want to go to college either. But Abuelita and my mother would make me, wouldn’t they?

“What did he say about Marguerite?” I asked. “He must have been worried.”

“Oh, yes. Sad, sorry. All that. But he seemed more worried about you.”

“He did?”

“He asked lots of questions. Many of them I couldn’t answer.”

“Um.”

“He thought it must have been hard for you. A tough day. Was it?”

“I guess it was. Is he coming home?”

“For this? No.”

“He’s not?” I remember feeling shocked—or maybe just awfully sad, almost sick in my stomach. When people were ill, Marguerite was always getting on trains to see them. When people got married or died, she bought presents, wrote notes, sent flowers, called, made an appearance.

“Twenty hours on a plane?” my father said. “He didn’t want to come. And I don’t really see the point.”

“But didn’t the doctor say—”

“Thirty hours of traveling so he can come to a funeral?”

“You said twenty.”

I couldn’t believe he’d said the word “funeral”—snapped it out, killing her off already. Like he didn’t care. He’d never cared about her, or anything she stood for, had he? His life had been a carefully planned rejection. When N.C. died, she’d made my father come back from Morón de la Frontera, where he’d been studying guitar and God-only-knows-what. She made everybody come to the funeral. She’d been proud of that. You were supposed to do that when somebody you loved died, weren’t you? You came home.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

“What?”

“Today. What happened.”

“Oh…” I said, sort of startled.

“Whitman had questions. I guess she just fell, and that’s all. No more. I suppose that Drew and Ann will arrive at dawn and be asking questions, too.”

“Yeah. It was pretty awful.”

“Tell me.”

“Scary. Hard to know what to do—” I stopped, realizing that I needed to begin all over again. “We were riding in that meadow below the club. I was cantering, and Marguerite was telling me what I was doing wrong.”

He nodded. “Ah, yes. How very like her.”

I shook my head—it wasn’t like
that.
Why did he always have to turn everything into
that
? “Well, no,” I said. “I mean, she was just giving me a lesson. That’s what we always do. I ride in the meadow, and she makes suggestions. It’s not bad. I like it.”

“I see. She was helping you.”

“Yes. And then we trotted into the woods, where we take jumps over fallen trees. It’s not a big deal. I mean”—I gestured a distance of two to three feet with my hands—“trees that have fallen over. Just a few feet at the most. Nothing, really. It’s not like we were jumping over fences and hedges.”

“The woods beyond the meadow?” he asked. “I know that place. We used to set off cherry bombs there, so nobody could see us. When it was still a hotel. The old Arroyo. You set up jumps?”

“No. We jump over whatever’s there.”

He nodded. I looked at the carved wooden box on the table. The cigarettes were sitting inside, all lined up, cool and dry. I longed to open the box just to smell the sharp, unsmoked tobacco.

“And then?” he asked. “A tree fell?”

“No, it was a branch. Just a limb. I don’t know. And, really, I never saw it fall. We just heard a loud cracking sound over our heads, way, way up, and then a branch started to fall—and hit other branches—but I never saw it land. It might have gotten stuck in the tree. I’m not sure. But there was a loud snapping sound, and Chameleon bolted.”

“And Mother was thrown. Did you see that?”

“I think the girth was loose.”

“You said that at the hospital.”

“Did I?” I was looking down at the iron tabletop with its swirling pattern of leaves. The carved box had a different swirling-leaf pattern. My hand reached forward. “I’m going to have a cigarette now,” I said. “Okay?”

“Really? A cigarette?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure that’s what you want to do?”

I nodded and began talking again, partly as a distraction. “It was
really so scary.” I lifted the lid off the box and set it down on the table.

“What was so scary?” my father asked. “Do you want me to light that?”

I nodded and bent my head with a cigarette in my lips as he struck a match. “She was just lying there next to a tree stump,” I said. It was easier to tell the story now—but I wasn’t sure why. “Chameleon dragged her, not that long, really. Her boot was stuck in the stirrup. And then she got slammed into this stump, and— All of a sudden it was so quiet. Everything was so quiet. And I could hear Chameleon galloping and galloping and getting farther away. And I looked down, and Marguerite was just a crumpled pile on the ground. She looked so tiny, just like a little girl. Except for her white hair. I could see her white hair against the dark earth.”