California: A Novel (4 page)

“The phases of the moon,” Sandy said behind her, and Frida raised an eyebrow. She hoped Sandy wasn’t inviting her into a coven.

“You can’t just run to the store for tampons,” Sandy said, and Frida understood what this calendar kept track of.

“I figured that out pretty quickly,” Frida said. She didn’t bother to tell Sandy that most stores in L.A. had found the needs of women harder and harder to meet.

“You can’t be teenagers forever,” Sandy said. “Cal should give you a child.”

“Excuse me?” Frida said. No wonder Sandy had made Jane stay outside. “I don’t think I understand what you mean.”

“Yes, you do,” Sandy said. “Lovebirds. Eventually there’s a cloacal kiss.”

How close had the Millers been watching them? Close enough. They had seen Cal move off of her, just before he came. She and Cal liked to do it outside, if the weather was nice. Frida wanted to sew this strange woman’s mouth shut—or, better, her eyes.

“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” Frida said.

Their birth control of choice was common back home. She didn’t know anyone who did it otherwise; it wasn’t foolproof, but no one she’d known had ever had an accident. And, thank God: Who wanted to bring children into this world? Who could find a doctor, who could afford condoms, let alone the Pill?

When Frida was in high school, she’d taken it to help ease her cramps. She’d loved the little pink clamshell they came in and the way the tiny tablets popped out of their plastic sheaths. But before her senior year began, Dada started having trouble finding work, and gas prices were rising every week, and the family began its Great Austerity Measures, as Hilda put it. Goodbye clamshell and a menstrual cycle Frida actually kept track of. Goodbye almost everything frivolous and easy.

By the time she and Cal had agreed to leave L.A., it seemed like no one had access to meds; only the deranged would buy a handful of drugs from a guy on the street corner. Was that really Xanax wrapped in tinfoil? Prescriptions, like doctors, were for the rich. The lucky ones, the people with money, had long fled L.A.

“I apologize if I’m embarrassing you,” Sandy said then. “I didn’t mean to see.”

“Don’t you believe in privacy?”

“Not really, I guess.”

Frida didn’t know what to do with Sandy’s candor. She finally asked: “Why are you showing me this?”

“Because it’s your responsibility. It’s everything,” Sandy said.

In the doorway, the sun caught the lightness of her hair, and it seemed for a moment as if she wore a halo.

“Don’t tell me you came out here to die.”

Frida was about to ask Sandy if she was nuts. She wanted to say it was too risky to have a kid, that it was selfish. What if they got sick? What if there wasn’t enough food? What if, what if. But Sandy was already turning around. She left Frida alone in the dark house.

Cal admitted he’d been wrong, that—after spending the afternoon at the Millers’ place—he trusted them. “They have small children,” he said that night, once they’d finally reached the shed, just before sunset, thank goodness. As if he hadn’t known about Jane and Garrett before he’d met them. As if people with small children couldn’t cause harm. Frida decided not to tell him what Sandy had said. They would be seeing the family fairly regularly, and as weird as they were, Frida was relieved they existed.

“But I do wonder where they get the salt to cure their meat,” Cal had added. Frida didn’t have an answer, and, anyway, it was the farthest thing from her mind, and she didn’t press Cal to go on. She couldn’t stop thinking about what Sandy had told her in the house. It changed things. Frida felt her perspective shifting, tilting the world, blurring the colors, brightening them.

The next time they had sex, when Cal said, “I’m close,” Frida held him to her, wouldn’t let him go. “Good,” she’d whispered into his ear.

They didn’t talk about what had happened, not at first. When they did, they both admitted it felt right. Having the Millers nearby, just the very idea of them, gave them both solace. The hopelessness lifted right off of Frida.

Three weeks later, the Millers arrived at the shed. Already Garrett looked older, taller, and someone had given Jane a bob.

“You look like a flapper,” Frida had told her that day. The girl frowned. Of course she had no idea what that was.

“It’s a kind of lady, from a long time ago.” Jane waited, as if expecting more, and Frida kept talking. “From like a hundred years ago…actually longer, maybe close to a hundred and thirty. A long time.” Frida paused. “She liked to dance.”

At this Jane beamed, but a moment later, as if startled by her own joy, she turned away from Frida, hiding her face in her mother’s thighs. Sandy said, “Sometimes Garrett bangs on the drum we have, and Janey dances.”

Frida laughed, and so did Sandy.

“Do you mind showing me the shed?” Sandy asked. “I’m curious to see what you’ve done with the place.” Frida agreed, and Sandy grabbed Jane’s hand. The three headed to the shed.

When they reached the open doorway, Sandy looked up, her eyes on the dark interior. Suddenly, she stepped back into the sunlight and pulled Jane’s hand so roughly her daughter crashed against her thigh. What was it? Cal’s bandanna wasn’t in sight, but then Frida saw it: her sleeping bag was a bright red.

“You okay?” Frida asked.

Sandy said nothing, only stepped farther away from the shed, dragging Jane with her.

“Sandy,” Frida called out, but Sandy was already halfway to the garden, where Bo, Garrett, and Cal were bending over something in the dirt.

Frida followed them. When Sandy saw Frida behind her, she forced a smile and said, “Oh! I almost forgot. We brought you some stuff.”

The Millers had come bearing gifts. A rabbit, already skinned and ready to roast. Also some chanterelles. “Sandy will show you how to find those,” Bo said to Frida. The subtext being:
I hunt. You, Woman, shall gather.

The third gift was the most surprising. Sandy smiled at her, as if to say,
Let’s forget about what happened in the shed,
and pulled from their bag a box of Band-Aids. Frida yanked it out of her hand.

“Where the fuck did you get this?” she asked.

“Frida, calm down,” Cal said, but Bo was laughing. In another minute, Sandy was, too; she seemed totally relaxed now. Frida felt relieved.

“It’s okay,” Sandy said. “They are exotic, aren’t they.”

Frida flipped open the tin’s lid. Inside, the Band-Aids behaved so well, lined up like schoolchildren. Already she was imagining plucking one out. Its white wrapper thin as rice paper, and those tiny blue arrows at the top. Open here. How it would peel back so easily to reveal the Band-Aid itself, nestled flat inside. Frida’s stomach fluttered. She could have sucked on it. The salty, pretzel taste of wounds.

“Thank you,” Frida said finally. “How long have you had these?”

“A few weeks,” Bo said. “We traded for them.”

That’s how they learned about August.

“He travels widely,” Bo said. “He won’t tell us how many others are out there, but there are a few.”

“Is that so?” Cal said. “I guess this is the place to be. Who knew that—”

“Don’t,” Bo said, holding up his hand.

“Don’t what?” Frida asked.

Sandy smiled weakly. “Never say where we are.”

“It’s something we decided on,” Bo said. “The state. Place-names. Keep all that out.”

Sandy added, “It feels more private this way.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in privacy,” Frida said.

“You got me there.”

The men didn’t catch their little joke. They were clueless. Some things didn’t change.

“Think of it as a place of mystery,” Bo said.

Later, Cal said the Millers were a little nuts. But he liked the rule. “This place of mystery,” he said. “It’s got a ring to it, don’t you think?”

Yes, Frida had to admit. It did.

C
al had to hold himself back from touching Frida’s hair as she slept. It lay dark and wavy across the pillow, shinier than the creek at midday. She sighed and turned over, pushing her heel into his calf so hard it almost hurt. Asleep, her mouth a flat thin line, she looked plainer than she was; without her big soulful eyes—how they lit up when she smiled or pried into him when she was serious or upset—her beauty was evident but unremarkable. She looked older than twenty-nine.

The sun hadn’t yet risen, and here he was, staring at his wife, wide awake. He’d give his left nut for a new book or the chatter of a sports-radio jackass. Anything to get through this almost-dawn. At least it wasn’t that cold; someday they might be trapped in here because of a freak snowstorm. And then what?

There was bound to be some bad weather down the line: a drought or relentless, heavy rains. They’d wanted to avoid the kind of storms that had battered the Northwest the year before they left L.A.; those states had barely recovered, and he and Frida had settled here because the climate was milder. So far, they’d been spared really bad weather. But for how long? He turned the question over and over in his mind.

This was one of things he loved about life out here. The space to consider questions. Even if he sometimes longed for mindless diversions, mostly he was grateful for the silence, the time. It reminded him of college, where thinking itself was considered noble, and where there had been nothing to distract from that endeavor. For most of his fellow students, it had been the first break from Devices, but Cal had never owned such things. There were too many links to cancer, his mother said, and she wanted him to feel lost once in a while. Everyone else was dependent on instant answers, on satellites, and this was turning them stupid. He’d written papers about how painful the shift to digital had been, about people’s addiction to the Internet, about how the batteries in dead laptops were leaking into the earth. That last one had been for the Politics of Geography course his mom had designed. Cal had been homeschooled. His mother had taught him everything he knew, until he took the train to a tiny town in California and started college at Plank.

There, they’d stay up all night, considering the nature of being, of meaning. In retrospect, they seemed like such stoners, holding up a flashlight and questioning their perception of it. If they weren’t Americans, they asked, how would they see it? If they weren’t men, if they weren’t privileged…the questions were endless. Most of the time they weren’t high, just serious. Too serious, probably. But they had joked around a lot, too. Especially Micah.

The first thing Cal remembered about Micah was how he sat on the edge of the bare mattress in their dorm room, slumped over like an old man sleeping on the bus. But he wasn’t sleeping, he was reading a small worn paperback. A few years prior, the student body had voted against allowing e-readers on campus—previously the only electronics allowed—which made it almost impossible to access contemporary books. Not that it mattered. On their first date, Cal had told Frida that Plank loved D.W.M.:
dead white men.

Cal never caught the name of the book Micah was reading that first day, because as soon as Cal said hello, tentatively, lugging his suitcase into the high-ceilinged room, Micah had jumped from his pose and tossed the book aside. It fell between the bed and the wall.

“You’re here!” Micah said. He rushed forward to help Cal with his bags. He was taller than Cal and almost burly. He had a beard, which was rust colored in places, though his hair was dark. He looked older than eighteen. Cal figured he must be from a place like Montana or Maine. Definitely not a city.

“Micah Ellis,” he said, offering his hand.

“Cal. Cal Friedman.”

“You’re Jewish?”

“My mother is. Was. She’s an atheist.”

“You took her last name?”

Cal nodded. “But I see my father, all the time.”

“No judgment.” Micah held up his hands. “My parents are married, and we don’t practice any religion. Where you from? Did you say? Are you eighteen?” He smiled, almost sheepishly. “I apologize for the questions, I’m somewhat of a taxonomist.”

At first, Cal thought he’d said “taxidermist.” He pictured this bearded kid in a basement in Maine, stuffing bobcats and bears and, then, Cal himself.

“I like to classify things,” Micah was saying now, and Cal understood that he had misheard his new roommate. “Where you from?”

“Cleveland.”

Micah grinned. “I could have guessed from your accent. Flat, nasal.”

Cal knew he should be offended, but he wasn’t. “And you?”

“L.A.”

“Really? That’s hard to believe.”

“Why? ’Cause my tits are real?”

They both laughed.

Micah had arrived a couple of hours before. The room was large, and at that hour sunlight pooled through the circular window between their dressers. Even now, Cal remembered how golden the light had been at Plank. In the morning, the sun spread across the floor and his desk—he kept his neat, almost bare, whereas Micah’s was always covered with books and pens and dirty dishes. In Cleveland, Cal and his mother used blackout curtains, but at Plank the windows were naked, and he often woke at dawn even if he didn’t have to get up then to work the school’s small farm. A previous generation of Plankers had probably voted against drapes, in the same way they had rejected the Internet and the coed question, the gingham curtains burned in a bonfire one crisp winter night, the boys howling.

“I like the room,” Cal said, after they’d agreed who would sleep where. “I feel like I’m in a time machine.” What he meant to say was: Plank felt lost in the past. Not stuck, but suspended there, in its beauty and slowness.

“We’re encased in amber,” Micah had said, and smiled.

Plank’s student body was made up of thirty male students. All of them lived in a converted farmhouse, though two second-years got to board in the house’s former kitchen, coveted for its wood-burning stove. Cal was the only first-year from the Midwest, and one of the few kids who hadn’t gone to a prep school. Micah hadn’t either, but he’d attended an intense public high school in L.A. where you had to test highly gifted to get in. It closed from lack of funding a year after he graduated. Micah couldn’t milk a cow, as Cal could, but he had already read Plato and Derrida. “The jugness of the jug” was how he explained Heidegger to Cal, as if that explained anything at all.

It made him laugh now, thinking about the way Plankers used to talk. They’d farm in the mornings, bring the goats out to pasture, and then, with dirt under their fingernails and smelling of animal shit, they’d head into seminar to toss big words back and forth at one another.

Out here, in the middle of nowhere, the real middle of nowhere, those big ideas offered him solace but not much else. Cal glanced once more at Frida, whose eyes were shut tight against the world, and he wondered what she might say about all the books he and her brother had once devoured.
Like any of it could rescue you,
she might say.

There were only two years at Plank. If you were admitted, it was free, but there was no real degree at the end. Most of the boys transferred to one of the Ivy Leagues, went traveling, or fell off the map. Cal’s dad had been the one to show him the application. He ran his small organic farm holistically, which meant the cows were moved often, so as not to wreck the land, and the chickens followed, pecking at the manure, and the vegetables were grown without pesticides. Cal’s dad had always urged his son to learn his trade. “You have skills that this school will nurture.” But did his dad know that beyond working the school’s alfalfa farm, milking its cows, and learning to slaughter the occasional goat, Plank’s students trafficked in the abstract?

Many Plankers wanted to fight injustice and poverty throughout the world, though certainly not with religion; it seemed like everyone was an atheist or headed there. They’d use their brilliance and tenacity, not God, to make a difference. His first week, Cal heard another student talking about his plans after graduation; the guy had a whole business plan already written, but he wanted to get everyone’s opinions on environmental tariffs and microloans. Cal had never met anyone like that before, a person so open about his ambitions, but at Plank it was common for someone to announce his lofty ideals over a meal or in class or in the lounge at 3:00 a.m. Plankers would change the world. A lot of other colleges had closed in recent years, but Plank was cheap to run, and its endowment was solid because its alumni believed their small but mighty network of graduates would solve the crises that blighted the present. He hadn’t realized it when he was accepted, but after he’d arrived, it was clear: Plank expected something of him. He was not to take his education in vain.

Cal remembered how, on that first night, the older students cooked and served dinner to the new ones. The second-years had baked bread and cooked a spicy vegetable soup. They wore aprons and belched with abandon. On the walls of the large dining room hung old farming equipment: a hoe, a rusted pickax. Otherwise, the large room was bare and dingy. Already, the older students had made it known that nobody much cared for how things looked. For instance, one of the windows had been shattered in a pickup football game, and instead of replacing the glass, as the president wanted, the boys had voted to duct-tape the damage.

All of it had been a lesson, Cal thought now. He’d taken none of it for granted. His time at Plank had prepared him for the devastation in L.A. and their life out here. He knew not only how to skin an animal and how to irrigate a field but also how to forgive a room for its ugliness. Frida was sensitive to space; she said the Millers’ place—their place now—was so utilitarian it was like living in a police station. He hadn’t even noticed how ugly the shelves were until she’d pointed them out. Frida probably thought this blindness a flaw, but he considered it a skill.

Like right now, Cal thought. Frida found the house depressing and dank, and she hated their practical yet dumpy couches. But what he saw, what he felt, was different. Here he was, lying next to Frida, whose body was warm and solid next to his own, and they were okay, they had shelter, they had each other. The other particulars, the lack of windows, the slanting shelves, didn’t matter.

Frida pushed once more into his calf. She muttered something—it almost sounded like another language, harsh, with a lot of consonants—and then she fell back into a silent sleep. She looked calm and comfortable in this bed, in this life.

Cal remembered that first dinner at Plank, how the other boys used words he’d never heard of:
enframed, signifier, telos,
and
phronesis.
What he’d learned about the world so far was baby food compared with what these guys knew, and that night he took to nodding at the things his classmates said while inside his brain, a tumbleweed skipped. At orientation before the meal, the second-years had taught them to show agreement by raising their fists and knocking on an invisible door. Cal couldn’t see himself ever doing this, not without laughing, at least, but at dinner, there was Micah with his fist up, knocking. As if he’d always known the gesture.

Micah and another first-year were discussing a German film they both liked. It was about terrorists from the 1970s. Micah’s great-grandmother remembered the nightly news reporting their violence when she was young, although she couldn’t keep track of what they’d opposed. “She couldn’t even remember what war everyone had protested back then,” Micah said. “I told her, ‘Vietnam, Grammie,’ and her eyes lit up, like she’d won a prize. No joke.” Then he mentioned some artist’s rendering of the German terrorists. “The portraits hit me in my core with a hot poker,” he said.

“How so?” Cal had asked. He supposed he wanted to try to participate in the conversation, in this weird little world; it had to happen eventually, or he’d go nuts. But afterward he wished he had left Micah be, that he hadn’t said anything. Or he wished he didn’t remember the moment now, almost a decade later.

The sun was about to rise, Cal could feel it. Maybe Frida felt it, too; maybe in her sleep, the day was calling her forth. But Micah’s answer was still there, in Cal’s head.

“‘How so’?” Micah echoed. “The pictures are fucking brilliant. Those terrorists are rendered mysterious and grim. That dark gray blurriness…they’re painted from actual photographs, you know that, right? Part of me always wishes they weren’t blurry, but that’s what makes them magnetic. And even as I’m magnetized, I feel a dispassion. Sure, that’s a dead body, you might say, but unless you know the history, the context, does it even matter?”

Cal was too embarrassed to admit that he’d never heard of the artist or seen the paintings, so he just nodded and waited for someone else to say something.

In that space, Micah spoke again. This time, his voice was gentle, softer, almost like he was waking a sleeping child. “Violence is beautiful, in a way.”

He smiled a big lusty grin, and Cal felt like he’d been socked in the stomach.

“What is it, California?” Micah said. “Don’t you agree with me?”

Cal had been so stunned by Micah’s answer he barely registered the nickname.

“That’s your full name?” a kid across the table said. “California?”

“Awesome!” someone else said.

“Isn’t it though?” Micah said. “His mother’s a hippie.”

“Hippies don’t exist anymore,” another Planker said.

“Apparently they do,” Micah said.

“No,” Cal heard himself say. “It’s Calvin. My name is Calvin.”

At this, Micah groaned. “God, Cal, we almost had them! Couldn’t you go along with it?” Then he roared with laughter, and someone else said, “Fuck off, man, fuck off,” laughing, too, knocking his fist. Cal didn’t say a thing. Back home, he’d never been the talkative type, but he wasn’t shy. At Plank, he was quickly earning a reputation for being reticent and thoughtful. What a fraud.

After that, people sometimes called him California. It was a female name, it seemed, for the guys said it to him sweetly, like they were talking to a beautiful woman in a dark jukebox bar. Someone needed to be the girl, if only for a moment.