Page 19 of The California Dreamers

18

Empty ocean, secret ocean

1985

El Zafiro, California

Fifteen years old

After the underground party and Charlie’s departure, we drive south. But the Gull crawls instead of soaring. Gas money is scarce since Cap insisted on replacing the twins’ boards immediately. One dawn I wake and we’re on that weedy utility road again, the one next to the Sapphire Resort.

Outside Mama, not Cap, stirs our cereal. “Cap is earning a little money at that garage in town,” she says. “May I braid your hair, Little Seal?”

This means she’s leaving soon for a ramble, and it will be a long one since we’re nested on the bare road we both hate. And Cap will be inexplicably tense, like he always is here by the hotel, with no Bass to cheer him up.

I nod at Mama, gulping back disappointment. And my questions: If we do have to stay here, can’t we park in the trees, at least? Why is this the only town where we park on a road? Why can’t I come with you?

I sit on a stump while she smooths my wild white hair, working out knots. She talks to every wayward curl. “Aren’t you the sweetest little troublemaker?” Her closeness, her hands fluttering by my neck and ears, aren’t enough to block the thunks of hotel tennis balls beyond the trees.

Mama kisses us goodbye, and I turn my back so I don’t have to watch her go. “‘My sweetheart is fleet in the trees,’” Cap says of her, a quote from a poem, and I picture her now, graceful as she flees us. The twins, resigned, head off to surf, but I don’t have the heart to join them.

First Charlie, then Mama. A few days ago I was soaring on that borrowed skateboard, confident and brave and in control, but now I’m a powerless child again.

I want to crawl under the covers of the empty Gull.

But when Dyl asks, “Mama will be gone a long time, won’t she?” I know I have to distract us both.

“We’re going on a secret ramble of our own today,” I say impulsively.

I remove the ever-present leaf bits from Dyl’s hair, comb and part it, and dress us in our only shirts with collars, pulling them up high like the rich citizens I’ve seen.

We’re going to the hotel at last.

***

Ahead of us, the resort’s buildings and pools and gardens are divided by walls, miles of white-painted adobe with a flower shape cut into each block.

I say with gentle certainty, as if I’m Mama, “That’s called a breeze block and the design is a chocolate cosmos flower, and it brings good luck. Isn’t it pretty?”

Dyl shakes his head; I’m trying too hard. He’s not keen on this ramble, and I don’t blame him.

Poor Dyl; I’ve tugged him along without explaining my motives. But even I don’t understand why I feel compelled to come here. After surviving the underground party, I’m no longer intimidated by the hotel, and maybe I needed to prove to myself I’m not completely at the mercy of Cap and Mama’s whims? But I’m doing to Dyl exactly what Cap does to us. Leaving him in the dark. He’s dying to ask Why are we here? but he’s too loyal.

“Well, okay,” I admit to Dyl. “It’s not as nice as a real flower. But you can still diagram it in your field journal. You can write about all of this.” And this seems to calm him.

We pass a pool. Slick, still bodies surround it, but no one swimming—it’s an empty ocean. A gross waste of water, like Charlie said. Over-the-top . Waiters in blue shirts trot around, delivering slushy drinks and tacos that must cost ten times what they do at food trucks. The bodies draped on the long chairs sign room numbers on their bills without looking, some too lazy to sit up so the waiters have to kneel. A girl and her mother lie side by side in lemon-yellow swimsuits that seem like they’ve never touched water, a tall stack of magazines between them.

I square my shoulders and try to look like I have a room number to sign. What would the girl in the sundress think if she observed me?

The way we slept, the six of us, “a six-pack in a cooler,” as a kid in Santa Cruz called us once. The sighs coming from Cap and Mama’s bunk, the grunts from my big brothers’.

But she wouldn’t see everything. A mother who tilts her head at the sun and says it is too fine a day to pin down, and I should go make my own classroom . She’s just another Kelly Cul-de-Sac, another squealing girl at an underground party, nothing to envy.

Dyl looks up at me, ready to move on. “Ro?”

“That pool might as well be dry for all they’re using it. Don’t you feel sorry for them?”

I hurry on, along the path, toward the hotel’s front entrance. “A sapphire is bluer than the water in that cove where we saw the sea turtle when you were six. Remember, Dylly?”

What I mean is never mind these flat rich citizens .

Our path slopes uphill, and then we’re under a white roof like an open tunnel, breathing mist. Click. I take a mental picture of it. A chute of clouds between manicured greenery.

Dyl whispers, “Miracle fog.”

To the right of the hotel’s lobby door there’s an aviary with glass walls, birds of every color trapped inside. Next to it a doorman in a uniform says, “Good morning.”

I make my voice bored; I’m a rich girl. “Good morning.”

Dyl looks up at me in awe, at the aviary birds in pity.

“I know,” I say, of the poor stuck birds. I lead him across the cool marble lobby, taking in its high cream ceilings, its murals and palms in pots, and the people. Everywhere—too many, too close for Dyl’s liking.

“Cap doesn’t like us going to hotel lobbies,” Dyl whispers.

“It’s not against the rules,” I whisper back. “Just taking coins from the fountains.” I comfort him, explaining the hotel’s wonders like I have known them all my life. I tell him a mixture of true things I’m reading on plaques, and words in our library, and things I just like the sound of.

“That fountain is called Fleet Sweethearts,” I say of a trickling blue-tiled bowl with stone statues of two girls in the center. There are no coins on the bottom. Has someone taken them, or do these people have everything they wish for?

Dyl pulls an M penny from his pocket and places it on the fountain’s southernmost edge, recalling the games we used to play, the signal that meant one of us was near. He smiles up at me.

“We won’t get it back,” I say of the coin. “Are you sure?”

“They need it more than I do. Someone can make a wish with it.”

***

On the way back we take a different path, between tennis courts. Two men smoke cigars on one, watching a boy my age hit ball after ball from a red machine called a Lob-ster.

Mesmerized, we observe them through the white adobe walls with the flower cutouts.

“That’s your prescription!” one of the men yells at the boy. “A thousand balls from the Lob-ster dispenser, so you won’t collapse again next weekend!” He crosses the court to a bench near us, coming so close I can smell his sickly sweet cigar smoke.

“Enjoying that Partagas?” he calls to his friend. “Make Cohibas taste like garbage…” He trails off. Stares straight at me and Dyl; he’s seen us through the breeze-block wall.

Dyl’s confusion and fear pulse through our clasped hands.

“Get,” the man says coldly, like he’s shooing an animal.

“We won’t hurry for him,” I say quietly, and keep my shoulders back proudly, like Charlie’s, as we walk away. Only when we’re safely on the dunes north of the hotel’s beachfront, and the thunks and pings of the tennis courts have quieted, does Dyl let go of my hand.

“Skunk,” I say, of the cigar man, laughing to show Dyl it was nothing to worry about.

It is nothing to worry about. But it was an ugly, unsettling moment, and I won’t ever go back to that grotesque hotel.

Taking my lead, Dyl says, “Birds and skunks and a lobster. A zoo.” He says it bravely, but without conviction. And his voice sounds young again when he continues, “I wish we could tell Mama…” He trails off, his attention diverted by something up the dunes from us, in the weeds. “What’s over there?”

I see what’s caught his eye—a bit of chain-link behind the weeds.

“I don’t know.”

I’m drained, but can’t disappoint Dyl after what I just put him through. There’s a little split in the bottom of the chain-link fence, just enough for one person to bend it up and belly-crawl through the triangular opening. We crawl in to explore, and the stillness is a balm after the hotel, and I’m glad I indulged him. Just a weedy patch of land, but it hasn’t been touched by people for a long time, and Dyl finds insects, birds, flowers that have taken over. He’s safe here.

When the sun dips low, we find a tile-lined pond and climb into it. We lie back and stare up at the clouds. From down here, we can’t hear any hotel sounds. It reminds me of lying back in the empty hot tub with Charlie.

“Do you think this was a pool?” Dyl asks.

“Maybe a fish pond.”

“I like it better than that hotel pool.”

“Me, too.”

“Will you name this place, Ro?”

Mama told me long ago that giving places new names makes them ours. I learned to swim near Santa Barbara, in her Floating Forest. I collected poppies for pressing in San Francisco, in her Goldest Glade. The old well by the abandoned farmhouse in Fort Bragg is called the Sunken Mirror, and the trail through the aster bushes in Santa Ynez is Constellation Walk. She named the Gull.

And she named me. Even my middle name, Avery. Ruler of elves . The twins used to tease me about this due to my height—or lack of it compared with them. But then Mama said, “My mother had a storybook about it.”

It was the only thing she’d ever said to us about her parents, about her life before us, and Mama’s explanation hushed everyone.

Now I think hard, because this place needs the perfect name. A strong, enchanted name that alliterates , like lines in our Hopkins poetry book.

“The Secret Sea.”

Dyl smiles up at the sky. “And it’s ours. Only ours, left here just for us, for when we have to nest by the hotel? And it will always be here for us?”

I hesitate. It may only be a grown-over vacant lot, but the fence means it’s an owned place.

Though what harm is there in making Dyl happy?

“Yes, Dyl. It will always be here for us.”

***

The fenced lot between us and the hotel becomes our refuge for the next week. Dyl wanders around happily in it for hours, distracted from Mama’s absence.

And I discover a new hobby here. It starts late one afternoon, unexpectedly, when I notice a heron taking flight. Its peach-colored legs are elegant and alien both, and it just happens. I ache to photograph it. Not in my head—for real. It’s like my craving for water—all-consuming.

Late that night, when all three boys are asleep and Cap’s working yet another late shift at the all-night mechanic in town, I fish the camera out of its hiding place in the Gull’s rear door, and I creep out, sneak into Dyl’s Secret Sea.

Moonlight welling in the pond— click .

A baby rabbit up on its haunches, throwing a long, elegant shadow across the crumbled stone path— click . The rabbit spots me, freezes. Twitches its nose, vanishes.

I experiment with the camera’s timer, to take pictures of myself in moonlight. I set the camera high and low, using what’s on hand. Crumbled tiles, a log.

I don’t know if or how I will ever develop the photographs, and I have only the film remaining inside it, so I must conserve it. I capture a hundred mental pictures for every one that’s on film.

I begin taking pictures outside the Secret Sea, too.

One morning, one mild, beautiful morning just north of the Secret Sea, all of us family surf together for once, even Mama. When no one’s looking, I prop the camera inside an overturned garbage can on the beach. I set the timer to take pictures of us through the drainage opening shaped like a wave.

After everyone else goes in, Cap and I surf close to each other for a while, something that rarely happens. A precious, rare ending to a perfect day.

That week I spot a one-hour photo-developing booth in a Carlsbad parking lot as we drive past it looking for our next nest, but I don’t have enough money for even their smallest roll of film or cheapest developing.

Anyway, maybe it would destroy the magic of keeping my memory undeveloped, hidden in the dark. Who could I show my prints to, anyway?

Maybe they’re better kept in my imagination.

***

Late one night, I creep home after taking pictures in the Secret Sea, and the twins are waiting for me outside the Gull. They look so stern I reach back for the now-familiar weight of the Leica camera in my backpack, assuring myself that I remembered to hide it, wrapping it in socks and a knit hat and zipping my pack completely.

“Where’ve you been?” Griff whispers.

“Just walking.”

“She’s been to the hotel again,” Mag whispers. “We have to tell her.”

“I haven’t, not tonight. But what if I had? Why are you—”

“Shhh.” Griff tugs me away from the van, down the gravel utility road, up to the dunes.

Only there, under the rattle of an old date palm, does anyone speak.

Mag says, “Let’s tell her. It’s no big deal.”

Griff gazes south down the sand, off toward the Sapphire’s blue roofs. In the moonlight, they’re still black rectangles among the waving palms. “Cap’s working at the hotel tonight. He works there sometimes. But you can’t tell anyone.”

“He works in the garage?” I ask, confused. “He fixes golf carts?”

Mag snorts, laughs.

Griff says, “Just don’t go near that hotel again. Cap wouldn’t like it. Even the two of us don’t go there.”

This infuriates me. The “even the two of us,” as if he and Mag are superior beings.

But now everything bubbles over. How they hadn’t told me about Cap working at the Sapphire. How we’re stuck here while Cap earns money, most of it to pay for the twins’ new boards, when I know somehow I will get no new board at sixteen. How Mama rambles while only I must watch Dyl and keep him content.

How I’ll always be separate. And lesser. Part of the smaller half.

I stalk off back toward the hotel, Griff hurrying after me, Mag following more leisurely. When we hit the breeze-block wall that separates the path from the hotel garage where the golf carts are parked, Griff whispers in resignation, “Just be quiet, at least.”

Then, I smell it—cigar smoke. Sickly sweet.

“Spectacular night,” a man says. It’s the hotel man, the skunk that Dyl and I laughed about. The man who made his son hit a thousand tennis balls from the Lob-ster machine. “You know I only do this for you, come here personally.”

“And you know I appreciate that,” Cap replies.

“How’s the family manse? Add a hot tub yet?” Another slow intake of breath as the hotel man must be dragging on his cigar. Then puffs it out, huuuuuuhhhhh .

“Stop being cute, Julian.”

“You really do like things the way they are, don’t you? I’ll never understand it, but chacun son go?t , as the frogs say.”

What a strange conversation, what a foreign language. Not chacun son go?t , which I know from our French primer means to each his own . But everything else they’re saying.

Centimeter by centimeter, I edge toward the wall to peek through a petal. Through a chocolate cosmos flower cutout, I watch Cap kneel near a golf cart. He holds a long stick with a mirror, to view its undercarriage. He finds what he’s searching for, reaches in. Pulls out a flat white package, exactly like the ones I’ve seen holding money in the Gull’s drainpipe.

Pieces come together. So this is his garage gig.

Suck, puff. “How many thank-yous can you deliver on this run?”

“These three. No more. And this is the last time.”

“You say that every time.”

A soft weight on my shoulder—Griff’s warm hand, comforting me, or holding me back from doing something stupid. Both.

Cap retrieves two more flat white plastic packages from under carts.

“Bollinger’ll get you the badge names tomorrow, usual place.”

“Business is good, then.”

“We’re blessed, friend.”

“Are we?”

This is their goodbye.

Cap tucks the white packages into the back waistband of his baggies and walks away toward the dunes.

The cigar man stays, looking up at the moon. A little business taken care of, a nothing man under his thumb for money, and he’s earned every last drag of his cigar. Inhale, sigh. A cloud in a ring, drifting up.

Inhale, sigh. The cigar man blocks more stars with each exhale. Finally, he leaves.

I close my eyes and rest my cheek against the cold stone wall until Griff tugs me away.

***

I lead the twins to the Secret Sea; I can’t bear to go back to the Gull, to pretend, to smell cigar smoke on Cap. Not yet.

I show Mag and Griff the little opening in the fence, and the dry fish pond, but there’s no comfort or beauty here right now. The three of us sit on the edge of the pond, dangling our legs in the emptiness.

“Cool place,” Mag says. “We thought you were going to the hotel whenever you snuck out, sorry.” Nonchalant as ever. As if we’d spied on Cap fixing a carburetor or flushing an oil line.

“I’ve seen packets like that before,” I say. “In the van stovepipe, with cash in them. I’m so stupid.”

I’d thought Cap just had a way with cops. He’s so charming with cops. Everyone says so. Cap has always claimed it’s because they wish for our lives but don’t know it; their despair is just a grain of sand inside their uniform, but if you can find it they treat you okay.

But, Mag explains, most of those encounters are just ways to hand off thank-yous up and down the coast from the hotel’s owner to dirty cops…thank-yous in the form of white packets filled with money.

“He delivers cash from the hotel man so police officers will look the other way…from what?”

No answer—it’s bad.

“Drugs,” I say. “It’s drugs, isn’t it? The hotel is a…a…” A conduit? A waystation? The word eludes me.

“You don’t need to worry about it,” Griff says. “Cap knows what he’s doing.”

“He told you that?” I ask.

“Not exactly,” Griff admits.

“The two of us followed him one night when we first came here,” Mag says. “We’ve never talked about it.”

“Does Mama know?”

No answer for a long time. Then Griff says, “I think she understands.”

“But she doesn’t like when we come here. She always leaves on a ramble.” I cling to this. Mama doesn’t know, or doesn’t approve. “What kind of drugs?” I ask. “Coke?”

Griff looks up at the sky, Mag scowls. That’s a yes.

“And they tape the money under the carts to move it around or hide it until they need it…”

Mag nods.

A front , that was the word. I’d read it in some story long ago. The owner of the resort, for all his property’s splendor, needed or wanted even more money than he could make from rooms and golf games and manicures. Who’d suspect Cap? Just a surf bum, van trash. I think of everything he says about staying separate. The times we have extra food—fish and abalone stew and glistening honey tarts, not like the lean days when it’s only rice or windfall oranges. The money for the twins’ boards.

Cap acts like it’s just chance. Like the world will right itself and fill your belly if you’re patient. His speeches about pathetic citizens grubbing for money. How they choose to be trapped, and if only they knew there was a better way…

“It’s just something he does,” Griff says. “For us. He only does it when we really need money.”

“Don’t let on that you know.” Mag points at me.

The next day, we soar north, but I wish I didn’t know that our gas money comes not just from Cap’s late nights working on cars, but from helping to move poison around. Because that’s what he’s always called drugs. Poison , worse than alcohol.

I wish Charlie was here, so I could say to just one person, We hurt people so we can live apart from them.

I write this to her, in a letter I may or may not send. Charlie… Every morning I rub a shard of her Plumeria surf wax on my wrist. I smell it now, as I toss and turn in my bunk. I close my eyes and picture her agile turn, the last morning we surfed together. With my index finger on the inside of my arm, I trace the arc of her back, the exact line of it over the water.

The next day, all afternoon, miles north, I attack waves, throwing myself on anything with possibility. It’s a perfect day, a beautiful chest-high swell, not too crowded. Cap joins us and I feel him watching me with approval, but I can’t look at him. I need the water to work its magic. It always helps.

But in a spent moment when I’m on my stomach, idly paddling while I catch my breath, memories come on me suddenly. A girl we once saw OD under the pier in Monterey. She lived, but I can still see her twitching, a skin-and-bones rag doll.

Or I see Cap kneeling on that greasy garage floor while the hotel owner looms over him. That rich man, who could surely hand Cap the white packets instead of making him scrabble on the ground.

I look at Cap—godlike, meant to live like this—and place the image of him surfing over the other ones. That is what I will do , I tell myself, until it’s the only picture I remember.

But it’s not enough.

The next day, on the same afternoon that Cap looks out the front window at a bunch of skateboarders crossing the street and tells the twins “You two would be good at that” and no one even glances at me, not Griff or Mag, who saw me drop in on a borrowed skateboard, we happen to park in La Jolla. We’re well concealed in the shade of eucalypti, but walking distance from the UC San Diego campus.

I remember what I saw on the bottom of that newspaper page used for kindling at that skateboarding party. Got a photo to share with the Triton ?

By now I’ve been taking pictures, but not developing them or sharing my habit with a soul, for months.

And what comes next all happens very quickly. While the others nap, I venture to a one-hour photo kiosk with four dollars in scrimped coins and a single roll of film hidden in my pocket. The roll holds eight of that Triton reporter’s shots—

And fourteen of mine, taken months ago. Some of them from inside an upturned garbage can, using the longest setting on the timer. And to my surprise, the photographs look pretty good, at least to my untrained eyes.

There’s one taken in El Zafiro where all six of us are clear, spread out in a pleasing symmetry, the light dancing on the water as we rush straight toward it. I remember the day well, because Mama surfed with us after returning from a long ramble. And Cap and I stayed out longest, just the two of us. Both rare events, especially in that place. But the water and our closeness brought peace.

I name the picture privately— Perfect Day . Not knowing that my perfect day will continue forever, on T-shirts and towels, and, long since titled The California Dreamers by someone I’ll never meet, that it will be blown up larger than life-size to loom high over museum visitors.

Late at night at a rest-stop picnic table, I clip out that negative with Mama’s sewing shears. Two days after, I take a bus to the UC San Diego campus, find the newspaper office address on my camera’s label, and push my photo submission through the mail slot.

It’s shocking, how little time it takes. How quickly the pent-up anger and resentment of a lifetime can boil over.

It’s like that narrow mail slot cut into the newspaper office door was waiting for me. Pushing the picture through it is like mailing a protest letter to myself.

I don’t know that the whole world will see it.

And I feel better. Like I’ve balanced things out, somehow. Declared that Cap doesn’t have all the answers.

Later, after the picture runs, and spreads, and gets bigger, and is put on objects for sale, bigger, in full color, bigger, and bigger still, and when it pursues all of us in a way I’d never intended or craved, I won’t remember what made me do it.

Three days after I submitted the photograph

Dyl and Mag and I are sitting on the roof of the Gull reading when Griff pounds up the ladder in back. His movements are so loud and hurried, so unlike his usual steady demeanor, I know something has upset him before I turn and see his grimace. He skirts our board rack and in seconds he’s looming above us, holding a newspaper. He hands it to Mag without a word, stabs the back page with his finger.

I look over Mag’s shoulder: It’s the UC San Diego Triton . There’s a picture of the six of us running toward the water with our boards. It’s barely three inches wide, on the fifth page, and it’s in a collage-thing with a bunch of other beach photos. It’s not the biggest one in the collage. There’s a man eating a chocolate-dipped frozen banana who’s four times our size.

Above the group of photos it says, “SunDays.”

Dyl asks, “Is that really me?”

I shake my head, the only reassurance I can muster. I’m too shocked at the sight. I swallow. I’d forgotten how I looked in the picture. My hair’s flying out in a cloud, taking up so much space. I’m gazing off to the side with this look on my face, like…like I have all the answers.

When right now, I can’t even make sense of one simple fact: I did this.

The twins debate whether we should show the newspaper to Cap, their words barely audible, there’s such a roar in my head. A roar like a thirty-foot-wave at Mavericks in November.

“…kid must’ve come back. As revenge…” Mag says.

“…should tell him…know how he is about pictures, and now…”

“It’s just our backs, Griff. You can only make out Ro’s hair, that’s all. No one but us’d recognize it…a tiny college paper, forgotten tomorrow. We should just throw it away.”

“…might see it himself, though.”

“Lighten up,” Mag says. “You only saw it because you were at the board shop, near campus, you said? Well, Cap’d never venture near UCSD. Or read a newspaper.”

There is no name on the picture, not even the silly pseudonym I’d used on the note I’d pushed through the Triton office with the negative and print. As I’d observed in the hot tub at the party, when Triton pages had been used as kindling, there’s no detailed credit for any of the shots on the collage page. Just “Triton Contributors.”

No one will ever know I took it.

I’d been so angry the day I’d submitted it. At Cap for his hypocrisy. At the twins for ignoring me, after I’d felt so close to them, conspiring to cover for Mag’s fight with Jaws.

At least that’s what I’d told myself. My anger at Cap, at least, had seemed…noble. But the second I’d pushed the envelope holding my photograph through the office mail slot at nine at night, I’d regretted it. If the Triton ’s door hadn’t been locked, I’d have opened it and retrieved my little envelope holding the print and negative from the rubber mat inside. I could still spot it through the slim, rectangular opening, atop the other mail strewed around. I’d written on the outside with my left hand, “Local candids for the Triton , Kelly Culsac. Sophomore.” While writing the cheerful note and the pseudonym, I’d thought, This is either the most or least mature thing I’ve ever done. But they won’t run it, not when they look up their student rolls and find there is no such student attending their fancy college…

At last, with the twins and Dyl still huddled around me, I speak. I say it to the newspaper page with us on it, not raising my eyes to meet theirs: “I agree with Mag. Cap doesn’t need to know.”

“I vote with Ro,” Dyl says.

“Looks like you’re outvoted again, Professor,” Mag says. “C’mon, the swell’s picking up.”

Griff hesitates, then sighs and hands me the newspaper. “Throw this trash out, will you, Ro?”

He and Mag take off to surf away the problem.

A college paper, forgotten tomorrow.

What is that expression I’ve read? “Lining birdcages tomorrow.” The silly photograph of us will line birdcages tomorrow.

But I can’t bring myself to throw it out. The negative I submitted to the Triton was the only one—and it means something to me. Like the coins Cap makes in garages. It’s a tiny piece of defiance.

In the public restroom I tear out the picture, roll it into a black-and-white curl the size of my pinkie finger, and hide it behind a beam so I can return for it later.