Page 30 of The California Dreamers

29

The smaller half

1986

Malibu, California

Sixteen years old

It’s a ramble for the smaller half. Dyl and Mama and I will be on our own for a month.

The three of us pack very little. I bring Island and some clothes, Rontu-dog, a bit of Plumeria surf wax in an envelope. After much inner debate I bring my camera and film, secreted inside Rontu. I want to take pictures on this trip. And anyway, it must be safer than leaving them in the unattended Gull, which Cap plans to park behind the bait shop, hidden under a tarp. Our friends there agreed to shelter her until what Cap calls “the fuss” over the photograph dies down.

Mama slings her worn green canvas travel bag across her chest, Dyl straps on his dun-colored backpack, and we hug the others goodbye.

“One month,” Cap says to us all. “Just until the fuss is over.” Because he’s certain it will not last long. Hugging Mama tight, he whispers something into her ear that the rest of us can’t hear, and then we split into thirds.

The twins head southeast, toward the mountains and snowboards of Big Bear. Cap drives the Gull north to the bait shop in Monterey.

And Mama and Dyl and I will go northeast. She has a destination in mind, but wants to surprise us.

We hitch up, hopping onto an orange truck on I-5 north.

“Open fruit trucks are always the safest,” Mama says, explaining that there’s a whole community of pickers who use them, families with kids, grandmas, even, and the drivers can be trusted. She says never to hitch with only men. “Truckers and pickers, that’s the way, will you remember that?” she asks.

For when? I think. Then I imagine I know why she’s sharing her knowledge; she thinks that when I’m older, I’ll want to go on rambles of my own, like she does. I’ve never craved them before. They sound lonely. But I like that she’s passing this knowledge on to me before the twins.

Atop fragrant crates of oranges, we travel with two large families of pickers, farther inland than I ever remember going.

The first night we camp, stringing our hammocks in three almond trees, in the center of an orchard. “Blossoms not buds,” Mama says, meaning the picking season for almonds is over, and we will be left in peace.

Mama and I speak in hushed voices while Dyl lingers on the soft ground below us next to his lantern, writing page after page in his field journal.

“What do you suppose he’s noting in there with it so dark?” Mama whispers. “The sounds of the night animals and stars, or something he observed when it was light out?”

“Maybe neither,” I whisper back. “He doesn’t only write about nature. He writes about people, too.”

“Sweet boy. Of course he does. Did he tell you?”

I explain how I glimpsed my name over his shoulder once and have resisted the temptation to peek at what he’d written about me, or anything else in Dyl world.

“You two have a special bond, don’t you?”

I grab a branch above my head to swing my hammock back and forth. It’s a cloudy night, and bands of stars vanish and reappear, so the sky changes every moment.

Dyl and I do have a special bond. Mama and I have one, too. The first seven years of my life, before Dyl was born, we spent so much more time together.

Now it’s rarely just the two of us. She got busy with Dyl, and then I was, and she went on more rambles every year.

“Will you give me a hint about where we’re going tomorrow?” I ask.

“Hmmmm. Water.”

“A lake?”

“No. One more guess?”

“River.”

“So it stays a surprise,” she says, laughing. “Good night, Little Seal.”

“Good night, Mama.”

She rustles and shifts, and soon her breathing steadies into sleep.

Water, but I know it’s not the ocean because we’ve gone east. I wonder if it will be a pond like the one she secretly taught me to swim in when I was three, a warm swimming hole, her Floating Forest, way up a hill hidden by thick trees. We always left early in the morning, before the twins rose to surf with Cap. I hadn’t learned to surf yet.

She’d touch my cheek in the dark and I’d smell her, oranges and cloves. Open my eyes to see her there hovering over me, her finger to her lips. She’d help me down from my bunk, lead me past my sleeping brothers. Just the two of us holding hands on the cold sand, barefoot, in the shadows. On the way to her pond, she pointed out the best shells. And this is called a liswe, and this is a tiger nassa … She was my first and favorite teacher. She knew the names for everything.

“You have all the time in the world,” she said, at the beginning of each lesson.

But only a few mornings later I swam on my own, paddling across the small swimming hole to where her red hair flashed in the sun.

“Aren’t your little seal flippers amazing?” she had whispered. “How did that feel?” I remember being so happy I could only nod. A nod that meant Good, easy. Thank you.

I wish I had taken longer to learn. Cap might have let us park near the pond longer, if I hadn’t. I shouldn’t have let those early mornings with Mama end so soon. Just us, the boys in the van asleep, like we’d made an extra hour in the day that only we knew about.

I yawn now, listen to Dyl switching off his light below us, stowing his things, climbing up to his hammock. We have this month together now, and I love the smaller half. Only when I’m dropping off, half dreaming of running on the sand out to a beautiful morning swell, am I reminded again that I’m the reason the Merricks had to split up. A trip with Mama seems a small price to pay for what I’ve done. It’s no price at all, in fact. It’s a reward. Guilt jolts me fully awake, but only long enough to look for a few constellations. Orion, Ursa Major. I remember that forlorn college boy, and how he gazed up at the stars that night when I was fourteen. But despite everything, I can’t be totally sorry for what his interest in us set in motion. His camera is deep in my backpack, hidden inside two socks and my knit hat. I will have so many opportunities to take pictures on this trip… That thought eclipses my guilt and I fall asleep.

***

The next day, Mama brings us to a creek, and we picnic near an open field. When a woman leads a white horse to drink from it, Mama admires the animal, asking its owner about her saddle, calls the animal “a beautiful roan, a blue roan, isn’t he?” clearly impressing the owner as a fellow equestrian.

“When did you learn so much about horses, Mama?” Dyl beats me to the question, equally impressed.

“Oh. Long ago, as a girl.”

“You rode one?” I ask.

“Hmmmm. I had lessons.”

“Did you wear jeans, like that lady?” Dyl asks.

It sounds like a silly question, but I know Dyl, too, is trying to picture Mama on horseback, and we’ve never seen her in jeans. Only her swimsuits and fluttery skirts.

“We wore something called jodhpurs.” For a moment her expression shows she’s far away. Then she comes back to us. “Now let’s explore those falls I told you about before it’s too dark, does that sound nice?”

Mama rode horses. I’d write that in my field journal if I had one, and I’d bet anything Dyl will, later.

The trip yields other fragments of information. Mama has been to New York and France. Mama went to church and always sat in the same pew, which her family had bought. Mama had singing lessons every week. And dancing lessons, and a maid.

The fragments aren’t enough, they could never be enough. But they form a picture, however hole-filled. They tell us one thing she never says directly: Mama grew up rich.

“We,” she’d said. “ We wore jodhpurs. We attended church.” Where is this mysterious we now?

And why did they let her go?

***

The rhythm of our time inland has a different feel from Gull time. Partially because Mama eschews routine of any kind, unlike Cap. Partially because there are no waves to surf. The three of us wake at different hours, and after I get used to this, I fill my long stretches of time alone in the early morning with my stolen camera—hours when my body is usually in the ocean. I take pictures of animals, and new east-west roads, and the families traveling on them.

One morning, I wander to a cul-de-sac. There’s a broken sprinkler in front of one yellow house, a family visible past it through their open double door. When I kneel, the water gushing from the sprinkler looks like a bright morning swell. Like I’m surfing, viewing a citizen family from far out at sea. We’re an ocean apart. As I stand, hastily hiding my camera, I can hear them laughing together. Not so far away, really.

A few nights later, a girl dumps her ESPRIT sweatshirt in a restroom trash can by Lake Elsinore, because she got red Sno-Cone stains on it. After she and her laughing friends leave, I emerge from the stall where I’d spied on them and, impulsively, rescue it. I pull it on, wandering the lakeshore alone. No Cap to disapprove. But I don’t feel like myself, and an hour later, I stuff the sweatshirt down the same restroom trash bin.

I miss the Gull.

On our last night, swaying in our hammocks not far from where we’ll meet the others tomorrow, the three of us discuss how we’re so excited to reunite with them we probably won’t be able to sleep. We can’t wait to tell them of our adventures, but we’ve missed them.

I can’t help asking Mama, “Do you miss that other family, Mama?”

She sounds genuinely confused, swinging next to me in the dark. “What other family?”

“The one you grew up in.”

She shifts, rustles. I’m worried that I’ve upset her. She’s given us a treasure of facts about her girlhood, and I was greedy to dig for more. I’m worried that I’ve even made her cry—something I’ve never seen, although she says she cried when each of us was born on the floor of the Gull.

At last she says, sounding composed and as if she’s weighed her answer carefully, “I don’t think of them as another family. But it was another lifetime. And this lifetime is…” Petals rain down on me. “As sweet as almond blossoms. Good night, Little Seal. Good night, Dylly.”

On our return hitch, we ride on a truck carrying lavender. The purple boughs are fragrant and velvety.

“ Lavare means to wash in Latin,” Mama says as the three of us inhale the sweet, clean smell of the purple buds.

We’re reuniting; the trouble’s over. I’ve been washed clean.