The Ruins of California (7 page)

“Oh, it’ll be just a few seconds, Robbie doll,” Mrs. Morrison said. “Inny, you don’t mind, do you?”

On this particular September day, there were quilting squares to pick up and plaster leaves for a “giving tree,” whatever that was. On other days there were “it’ll be just a second, Robbie doll” visits to convalescent homes, rehabilitation centers, the Y, and several other Mormon churches. Boo Morrison was always on the road in her dented Impala, spreading herself too thin and making deliveries—spaghetti and meatballs to somebody who’d been ill, lemon chews and chocolate chop suey cookies for a bake sale, hand-sewn costumes for a play. No religious organization put on more Broadway musicals than the Mormons in L.A. But while the rest of the world was belting out new tunes from
Hair
and
Jesus Christ
Superstar
, Robbie’s church was regaling Van Dale with reprises of
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

Robbie and I disappeared quickly inside the Morrison house once the errands were done—tearing straight for the den, where Resa and Ron, the younger Morrisons, were already planted in front of the television. Wrenching them away and gaining control of the appliance was an ugly struggle that Robbie won on a regular basis, even though “the little guys,” as they were always called, had dibs because they’d gotten home first.

“Our show is on,” Robbie said.

“Who cares?” said one of the littles.

“Me, I care,” said Robbie.

“We were here first.”

“But I’m in charge, you little guys!”

“We were home first.”

“But I’m in charge!” Robbie hollered. “
Mooooommm!
Aren’t I in charge?”

With Brad and Brenda away and Mrs. Morrison constantly on the go, it sometimes seemed that Robbie was running the house. Or she and I were. I was a fixture on Valley View Road. Aside from the afternoons when Robbie and I had volleyball practice, almost every weekday afternoon, rain or shine, we’d linger inside the Morrison house until four-thirty, when
Dark Shadows
ended, and then wander into Boo Morrison’s bathroom to experiment with her impressive selection of cosmetics and ash blond hairpieces.

I knew my way around Mrs. Morrison’s closet. She favored turquoise and aqua dresses with short jackets, polka-dot blouses, peach-colored scarves. In her shower stall, there were pieces of white knit underwear draped over the curtain bars. These mysterious Mormon “garments,” as they were called, looked frontierish, something
a cowboy would wear under his jeans in
Bonanza
or
Gunsmoke.
As for the Morrison kitchen, I knew my way around that, too. The chocolate chips were kept in a cabinet over the electric cooktop. Peanut butter cookies, when they existed, were stashed in an aluminum canister with penguins on it. The jar was lined with white porcelain, like an ice bucket. It probably was an ice bucket, too. But since the Morrisons never drank alcohol or served cocktails, I’m not sure they’d have known.

Near the pass-through to the breakfast nook, there was a ledge or countertop piled with church directories, newsletters,
Ensign
magazines, book bags, keys, sunglasses, nail polish. The cleaning and straightening of the house was the responsibility of Robbie and her busy mother, and therefore the place was always in total disarray. On a juice can with the label peeled off, the word “tithing” had been written in black marker. Ten percent of all the Morrison kids’ allowances, birthday cash, baby-sitting money, or any other income that they might bring in went into the can—and was sent to the church in monthly increments.

Most nights Dr. Morrison arrived home in time for a late dinner, sometimes eaten all by himself—reheated casseroles, hamburgers, tacos, never a production—and afterward, to relax, he played an electric organ in the Morrisons’ sunken aqua-blue living room and fell asleep to his own music. Robbie and I would hear the organ throbbing on one chord for a very long time, then discover that Dr. Morrison had drifted off in the middle of “Fever” or “Look at Me.”

After dinner that night, Robbie and I asked permission to go to 31 Flavors. It was a warm Friday, and the crickets were chirping, and the air on the Morrisons’ cinder-block patio had a wonderful, free, end-of-summer feeling that seemed to call for an ice cream sundae. I remember that we kept it quiet—so the littles wouldn’t beg
to tag along. Dr. Morrison gave us a few dollars and told us to come home before dark.

Robbie and I headed off—down Valley View Road and our old route to elementary school. It seemed like another lifetime ago that we’d graduated from sixth grade. I half wondered if Mrs. Craig and Mrs. Shockley and all the rest of them were still alive. Robbie and I trooped along in our after-school duds—cutoffs with long denim strings hanging down and tickling our thighs, little T-shirts that sometimes revealed bits of tummy, and flip-flop sandals. We’d grown our hair out—it was long and unbrushed and fell down our backs like clumps of dead seaweed. We were always looking for cures for split ends, among other things.

“What’s that stuff your cousin tried for greasy hair?” Robbie asked.

“Pissed,” I said.

“That’s right. Psssssst,” Robbie said. “Dry shampoo.”

“It comes in a can. You spray it on. It’s white, like that fake snow you spray on Christmas trees,” I said. “Flocking. You get a blast of white foam on your head.”

“Oh, gosh!” Robbie squealed.

“And then it dries clear, and you brush your hair, and it’s not greasy anymore. Lisa says it really works. You know, like, in an emergency.”

Nothing had come between Robbie and me for five years, since we’d been the two best readers in Mrs. Kinney’s second-grade class. No boy had driven us apart. No other girlfriends—and we shared many—had threatened our bond either. For two summers in a row, we’d survived Camp Ka-u-la, a dilapidated campground near Frasier National Park with torn canvas tents and no flush toilets, run by the Camp Fire Girls. More recently we’d spent two weeks
in a stuffy cabin at Camp Fox, in a remote corner of Catalina Island with wild pigs, where Robbie and I had been urged to accept Jesus into our hearts during a secret hilltop ceremony next to a huge white cross, and we did. We were urged to read
Good News for Modern Man
, a tepid adaptation of the New Testament for young readers, and we did that, too.

Robbie and I never needed to pledge our devotion to each other, though. That was a given. We spoke in squeaky voices to each other, did impressions of Mr. Shroeder, our super tall French teacher, shared a four-year crush on Dr. Mark Toland of
One Life to Live
(played by Tommy Lee Jones), and indulged each other with reminiscences about dead pets. Robbie told the story, over and over, of finding her parrot Lolita dead at the bottom of her cage—how scary Lolita’s eyes looked—but it took several years before she revealed that Dr. Morrison had backed over Ruffy, the old spaniel that predated me, in his Cadillac DeVille.

I never talked much about my father. He and Cary seemed a world away from Van Dale, and their lives indescribable. Robbie had never met my father. Would she have liked him? Would she have seen his charm or just his weirdness? He was busier than ever in those days—his computer project in Berkeley had become a full-blown company. He had a partner, Don Harrison, and an office near our old house in Menlo Park. He rarely ventured into Van Dale in any case. We met up in San Benito or at Marguerite’s beach house in Laguna. As for his personal life, I wasn’t sure that Robbie would understand that either.

My mother became a focus of fascination instead. The previous year she had begun dating Rod Weeger, the coach of the eighth-grade boys’ basketball team at E. J. Truppel. It was funny how awkward my mother was about the whole thing at first. She could barely
say his name out loud. They saw each other on weekends, but later on, as the romance endured, he came around on weekdays, too. Coach Weeger was a pleasant guy, and even-tempered. He was a bit taller than my mother, had light brown hair, a waistless athletic build, a perpetual tan, and pants that rode so high on his body that they seemed belted under his armpits. On weekends, when he wasn’t playing golf or tennis or watching sports on TV, he’d arrive in his ancient VW wagon for dinner. It was always the same: a Spencer steak with A.1. steak sauce, a baked potato drowning in butter and sour cream, an iceberg lettuce salad splashed with Good Seasonings dressing that my mother made in a special “Good Seasonings” cruet. He and my mother drank Coors beer in tiny cans and sometimes daiquiris, which made my mother laugh really loud. When she did that—laughed so loud—Coach Weeger looked at her in a haze of love, like he couldn’t believe his luck, and I always left the room.

Robbie acted as if the thing between my mother and Coach Weeger were as fantastic as something transpiring on
All My Children
, like when super aged Dr. Joe Martin fell in love with Ruth, the nurse with dentures on the seventh floor. It was interesting, as far as I was concerned, but not all that romantic. And when Robbie grew tired of asking me about it, she sometimes asked me about Whitman.

“How’s your brother?” She asked nonchalantly as we walked to 31 Flavors, like it didn’t matter. But I knew it did. “Have you heard from him?”

“Next weekend I’m seeing him. We’re flying up to San Francisco together.”

My brother loomed over our universe, mine and Robbie’s, like a figure of fantasy who might float in from HippieWorld at any moment.
He and his mother lived in Santa Barbara for a couple years, in the guest cottage on some estate, before moving to a communal farm in Ojala. Patricia kept to herself, never came to San Benito, but Whitman liked to describe how she was overhauling the grounds and gardens of the Theosophical Society and attending teachings by Krishnamurti, an Indian mystic who drew crowds of followers—but not anybody in Van Dale from what I could tell. Whitman liked to play the mystic, too, in those days. He was always making predictions, like when another earthquake was supposed to strike California and make it fall into the ocean. He’d grown taller and darker, and his hair fell in a great shaggy disarray about his shoulders. It went perfectly with his ratty clothes, Jesus sandals, vegetarian diet, and a feminine-seeming Guatemalan pouch worn across his chest that drove Marguerite totally nuts. But you had to love him. Everybody did. He was friendly and liked people. He’d stayed at our house twice—just came and happily hung out, calling Abuelita “Mrs. G,” and my mother “Connie Mama.” Everybody got a nickname. I was always “Little Mexican” and Robbie was “The Latter-Day Morrison.”

Whitman brought something exciting into our lives—and made us feel, for a time anyway, like we were living in HippieWorld with him. One summer night, after he and Robbie and I had gone swimming up the street, at Christa Nixon’s house, we came back to Abuelita’s and turned off all the lights in the house. Whitman lit some incense. Then he brought my little portable stereo into the living room, put a Joni Mitchell album on the turntable, and made us listen to the songs in the dark.

Mostly, though, Whitman talked about surfing: the shape of waves, the direction of the wind, weather patterns, the creation of tropical
storms, the pull of currents and riptides. I’m not sure why, but Robbie and I were enthralled. He laughed at our jokes, I guess, and told us we were cute. Despite what we must have looked like then—the acne flare-ups, the oily hair, and the unwanted budding of our breasts—whatever Whitman said, we believed.

“What are you getting?” Robbie asked when we were about a block away from the ice cream store. “Hot fudge sundae?”

“Hot fudge,” I said, “with two scoops of chocolate mint.”

W
hitman had all kinds of surfboards—and equipment. Wax, wetsuits, racks for the car. He had stories about his surf heroes and famous surfing spots around the world. Over the summer I’d gotten a complete indoctrination to this world when we’d met up with our father for two weeks at Marguerite’s shingled house on Moss Cove. The house was crowded with cousins and other relatives who had also chosen the second half of June for a sandy and somewhat alcoholic Ruin family holiday. There were rounds of gin and tonics. Rounds of cribbage and bridge. There were packs of cigarettes smoked. There were dozens of ruby red grapefruit halves consumed at breakfast and bowls and bowls of cereal consumed with table cream before bed at night.

Whitman vanished early in the morning to surf at Big Corona or Salt Creek or sometimes the Wedge in Newport and didn’t reappear until late afternoon—the sleeves and top half of his wetsuit peeled off and curling below his skinny waist. My father spent his days philosophizing with an Irvine physics professor who lived nearby or locked in ugly debates about the war with his sister Ann, whose car was plastered with
RE-ELECT NIXON
bumper stickers. And
I, who had long ago decided that my cousin Lisa was far better company than my gloomy and complicated father, spent mornings and afternoons with my body planted on the sand beside hers, greased up before the sun like a roasting chicken.

Each night I was torn away from Lisa and the family bridge game to attend the movies with my father and Whitman—made more bearable when a system for picking the films was established. We took turns choosing a movie, and no matter what it was, all three of us had to attend. For my father’s first two turns, he’d taken us to see an incredibly bloody movie,
The French Connection
, which I wasn’t allowed to tell Abuelita or my mother about, and three days later a documentary about Woodstock, which introduced me to full frontal nudity and frequent use of the word “balling.” When Whitman’s turns came, he picked a smattering of low-budget surf films—they looked like home movies and had no audio but for the dull strumming of a guitar. The soggy old cinema where they played was near the pier in Huntington Beach and had a distinct beach smell: mold, urine, and sour wine mingled with freshly lit marijuana.

When my nights came, I was excited to exercise my power. I took my father and Whitman to see
The Sound of Music
, a movie that rendered them speechless. (I assumed this was a positive sign.) Three nights later, during a hot spell, I chose a movie that I’d been longing to see:
Gone with the Wind.