The Myth of Perpetual Summer Page 25

  “It sounds like you didn’t leave all that behind when you left Lamoyne.”

  “Oh, Lamoyne was just kindergarten. I earned a graduate degree.” I get up, unwilling to end the night talking about things that will give me nightmares. “Thanks for the wine. I’m going to bed while I can still navigate the stairs.”

  He stands and grabs my hand before I can walk away. His eyes are so intense on mine that I take a small step toward him.

  “Our bond has stuck, hasn’t it, Lulie? Years apart and still . . .”

  “And still.” I leave the understatement hanging. Smiling softly, I touch his cheek.

  Then I walk away, my head slightly dizzy, knowing, thanks to Ross, tonight there will be no nightmares.

  23

  December 16, 1963

  My first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean nearly makes me cry. Not because of its sapphire beauty or its violent, crashing majesty, but because I always imagined this moment with Griff by my side. But Griff chose the easier path as soon as it opened up for him, leaving me with only the unfulfilled dream he planted and left to wither in the drought.

  Standing on a rocky prominence, facing a cold wind, I am alone and bone weary. I drop my Wickham College duffel, now showing the scars and stains of a long journey. From my pocket, I dig out my arrowhead. Wrapping my heavy sweater tightly around me, I clutch that piece of flint over my heart and breathe in the salt air.

  Everything I know of California beaches comes from the movie Gidget, Coppertone ads, and the images the Beach Boys created with their lyrics: palm trees and beach volleyball, blond-haired surfers and blazing sunsets. But gray clouds hang over my head. The crescent spit of beach below is empty, surrounded by dark, craggy rocks, the water dotted with the same. The palm trees, at least, are as advertised.

  As I shiver, it comes to me that the myth of perpetual summer is as true about California as it is the South. Is there anywhere in the world that can live up to that golden expectation?

  I wonder about the twins. Are they experiencing their first snow, snug inside their safe, clean new home in Michigan? Are they finally getting tucked in at night by a grown-up? A deep-down part of me—beneath feeling betrayed and discarded—is jealous.

  For the first few days of my journey, my feet pounded the earth with anger. Then reality elbowed past the fury, and sadness weighed my steps. There would be no more Griff. No more Daddy. No more Maisie. No more orchard. Before those thoughts could take me down, I refocused. No more Grayson Collie. No more looks of pity. No more whispers.

  Still, I miss Dad so much it hurts, feeling particularly forlorn when I use the more obscure vocabulary words he assigned. And I miss Walden’s boy-puppy smell after he comes in from playing, his sweet thoughtfulness, and the way he looked at me as if I had special powers to protect him. I might even miss Dharma’s constant demand for an audience.

  None of those things are in Lamoyne anymore.

  These past weeks, the flags at half-staff for our president reminded me that I’m not the only one who is sorrow-filled. That shared mourning probably opened many a car door as I hitchhiked west.

  To conserve my money, I limited my bus ride to the miles through the desert. And motels were out of the question. After camping with Griff, I know how to pick a good spot and am okay sleeping in the open.

  After living in Lamoyne, I know how to read people; my two-thousand-mile trip has been uneventful because of it. Well, I did have a bit of a close moment at a gas station in Louisiana with a couple of alligator poachers. Once I noticed the way they were looking at me, I locked myself in the bathroom until they left.

  Gas station sponge baths broken by the occasional camp ground shower has left me in a state that would send Gran into apoplexy. But then, I don’t care what Gran would say anymore. My new life is going to be about living free.

  I’m still about seventy miles north of Huntington Beach, a place Griff picked out for us after listening to the forty-five of Surfin’ Safari last summer. I tuck the arrowhead back in my pocket, pick up my duffel, and walk toward the southbound lane of the Pacific Coast Highway, where I raise a thumb to finish my trek.

  An odd-looking little orange convertible with its top sensibly up stops. A blonde wearing sunglasses, even though there’s no sun in sight, dips her head to look across the car as I open the passenger door. Although I’ve been lucky, I adhere to caution, taking a step back to assess before I accept the ride.

  “Where are you headed?” she asks with a smile accentuated by a friendly dimple.

  “Huntington Beach.” I try to sound as if the name is not unfamiliar on my tongue.

  “I’ll get you a good part of the way there. Just put your bag in the trunk.”

  The name on the trunk says Karmann Ghia. Foreign. Exotic. Like my new life.

  She calls out, “Not back there. It’s in the front.”

  Stopping, I begin to reassess my impression that she’s a nice, friendly girl.

  “Really,” she says. “It’s a Volkswagen thing.”

  It does sound like the clattery-hum of the engine is coming from the rear, so I turn around. Sure enough, when I open the hood, there’s a spare tire and empty space. I put my duffel inside and climb into the passenger seat.

  “I’m Barbara,” she says. “Barbara Hurst. But everybody calls me Bobbi—i, no e.”

  “Tallulah.”

  “Hello, Tallulah.” She lets out the clutch and off we go. “I’m headed back to Hollywood—spent a disappointing weekend in Santa Barbara fending off a disingenuous producer.” She makes it sound trivial and commonplace. “I’d take you on down to Huntington Beach, but I have a drama class this afternoon.”

  “You’re an actress?”

  “I am.” Then she shrugs. “Although unknown and mostly unemployed. Where are you from—wait, let me guess. Georgia . . . no, Mississippi.”

  “Good guess.”

  “I’m an East Texas girl, myself.”

  “You don’t sound like it.”

  “Years of practice and countless diction lessons.”

  “I didn’t know a person could get rid of an accent.” I’m quite intrigued by the idea—stripping away everything that makes you easy to decipher, anything that might give a hint of your vulnerable underbelly.

  “You’d be surprised what you can leave behind.” After a pause, she says, “Please tell me you’re not here to become an actress. Don’t get me wrong—you’re pretty enough. There’s something too . . . sweet and soft about you. This town will eat you alive.”

  “You don’t know anything about me.” I don’t want to be sweet. And I certainly am not soft.

  “Do you have family in Huntington Beach?”

  “I don’t have any family anywhere.” I use the tone that usually puts an end to questions.

  “Staying with friends?”

  “Does it matter?”

  She turns on both her headlights and windshield wipers, and her head tilts to the side as the gray sky begins to shed its tears. “Listen, I know what it’s like to land in this town with no place to stay. The weather is ridiculous. I don’t want to dump you in Santa Monica and have you catch pneumonia.”

  “I’m sure I can get a lift for the last few miles easy enough.”

  “It’s forty miles. And the beach traffic is nonexistent today. Why don’t you come home with me? I have a double at the Hollywood Studio Club, and my roommate is away for the week. Have some hot food and a shower. The weather is supposed to clear tomorrow. You shouldn’t have trouble getting a ride the rest of the way.”

  I open my mouth to refuse, then think of a real shower with shampoo and soap. I’ll have a better chance of finding a job if I don’t smell like a gymnasium. “I don’t want to be an imposition.”

  “If you were an imposition, I wouldn’t have invited you.”

  There’s something nice about how direct this girl is. “Okay, then. Thanks.”

  “Good!” She turns left, away from the ocean. “There’s a washing machine, too—i
f you need it.”

  I wonder just how bad I smell. At least she hasn’t rolled down the window yet.

  * * *

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but the Hollywood Studio Club, a stuccoed, tile-roofed YWCA with tall wooden doors, is like a college sorority house, girls and drying stockings draped everywhere. Bobbi explains it was created for aspiring actresses in the twenties. There’s a reception lobby, a dining hall, and huge living room with a massive fireplace and a stage, even the air holds the promise of stardom. Dharma would love it here.

  As we leave the living room, I overhear someone make a comment about Bobbi finding another stray, but they sound admiring, not judgmental.

  Bobbi’s room has two twin beds with mismatched bedspreads and a sink. One side is bare and tidy, the only decoration a stuffed autograph hound on the bed. The other is piled with clothes, curlers, and a bonnet hair dryer like I wanted last Christmas.

  “Don’t worry, the messy side is mine.” Bobbi chuckles. “Karen is a saint for putting up with me. She’s at a modeling job at a trade show in Vegas.” She hooks a thumb over her shoulder. “Showers are down the hall, on the left. Feel free to take my shower caddy—oh, where is that thing?” She reaches under her bed. “There!” She pulls out a wire basket with a sticky bottle of Breck shampoo, matching cream rinse, and a squishy-looking bar of Dove soap. “All of the face stuff is strictly off-limits due to budget constraints.” She plucks out a couple of bottles. “There’s a robe hanging on the closet door you can use. The yellow one.” Bobbi smiles and heads toward the door. “I should be back around six. Make yourself at home.”

  I’d been considering taking a shower and then leaving while Bobbi is at class. But after seeing the security of this woman-filled place, I decide to sleep in that clean, crisp-looking bed.

  After my blissfully hot shower, my clothes are all too nasty to put back on, so I stay in Bobbi’s robe. I pick up the autograph hound and read the signatures: Doris Day, Jerry Lewis, Cary Grant, Sandra Dee. Wow. Just silvery images in Mississippi, all real flesh and blood here in California. I set the dog gently back in place.

  I pull out my sketch pad and sit on the roommate’s bed, leaning against the wall. The first drawings are people and places I don’t want to forget from home: Maisie and all the tiny details that make her face special; the orchard barn; my pecan tree. Then my drawings move west: the twin ironwork bridges in Natchez that took me across the Mississippi River; the motel in Oklahoma with an office shaped like a wigwam; miles of waving prairie grass; different kinds of cactus; the gaping maw of the Grand Canyon (out of my way, but one of my rides was headed there, and I thought, What the heck); a roadrunner; the scrubby pines on the mountains between the desert and the coast.

  I pull out my pastels and begin what will be the last two sketches: the place I first saw the Pacific Ocean and the Studio Club. The end of my journey and the beginning of my new life.

  As soon as I get a job, I’ll buy a new, California pad.

  The next thing I know, Bobbi is shaking me by the shoulder.

  “Time for dinner,” she says. From the pile on her bed, she tosses me a sweatshirt and a pair of wrinkled navy slacks. From a drawer, she pulls a pair of panties. “You can wear these until we get your clothes washed. Don’t think my bra will fit you, but it’s just girls. Half of them go braless anyway, so don’t sweat it.”

  Braless? Where people can see you?

  And then, I realize, anything that would make Gran shudder qualifies as a step toward my plan for unconventional freedom.

  Bobbi and I sit down at a table for six with two swanlike girls—Wendy and Ginger, “because of the hair, not my real name.” As soon as I take my first bite (prolonged and frequent hunger has a way of making every bite ecstasy), I forget all about being self-conscious. Wendy and Ginger are friendly enough, but I catch a whiff of jealous competition hiding just under the surface as they eat tiny bites of broccoli and poached chicken.

  As the room fills, the noise rises and the talk and laughter at the table make me forget I’m a plain-Jane outsider. This inclusiveness is foreign, as foreign to me as the Grand Canyon. I keep my forays into the conversation brief and banal, trying to figure out the rhythm and rules. As much as I hate to admit it to myself, I’m afraid of making a misstep, becoming an outcast here, too.

  I remind myself, I am reborn. I will move through the world according to my judgment alone. I will not form myself to fit someone else’s mold. I sit up a little straighter and project my pride at being homeless and braless.

  It feels right. It feels good.

  I feared I’d feel regretful once my journey west was over. But my heart is not full of longing or loneliness. I have closed the door on the past, my family.

  And all I feel is relief.

  24

  It began with Bobbi saying, “You don’t want to spend your first Christmas in California alone. Karen is heading back east for the holidays as soon as she’s finished with the trade show, so the bed is free—at least until she comes back and you need your own. Then it’s fifty dollars a month.” She ended with a wink.

  Back when California was just a dream spun by Griff, I let him do all the planning and problem-solving for me. Now I had to set my own future. Bobbi’s friendship made me see that a life of self-imposed isolation holds no more appeal than one lived as an involuntary outcast.

  So I stayed.

  We decorated Bobbi’s bedroom with silver tinsel from the drugstore, and made hot chocolate and Jiffy Pop on a hot plate. There were no presents, but there were also no arguments or bitter undercurrents. It was the kind of holiday I’d always dreamed of.

  Even so, at the end of Christmas Day, when the sound of Bing Crosby’s “Silver Bells” had faded, I found myself slipping into a grayness, missing Dad, thinking of his tortured last days and what I might have done to help him. I spent a little time doing tiny sketches of the things that I wanted to remember most about him; James Hall, his briefcase, him standing on that carousel horse with his arms wide, the pecan sheller he invented, the thick old dictionary from which he assigned our vocabulary words. As always, drawing made me feel better, but I still wondered how my three scattered siblings had fared in their first Christmas away from Lamoyne.

  Bobbi and I rang in 1964 at a party in a Hollywood Hills apartment on Franklin Avenue. Hot and crammed with people, the air blue with cigarette smoke, the booze flowed like water, but food was skimpy—definitely not run by a Southern hostess. People clustered in little knots, laughing and talking loudly to be heard over the hi-fi. Couples filled the corners and, I discovered shockingly, the unlocked bathroom, making out like they were in guarded privacy. Once I discovered the peculiar smell was marijuana, I was so worried about getting arrested that I spent most of the chilly evening skulking near the bushes outside in case I needed a quick hiding spot. I did slip back in for the stroke of midnight and was grabbed by a guy and suffocated with a beer-tasting kiss. My first. Memorable, but not in the way I’d always imagined.

  Now that the New Year is under way—and Karen’s on a bus back to Hollywood—it’s time to find a job and my own place. Bobbi is the first to give voice to my inner fear: I am too young and inexperienced to get much of a job at all.

  She taps her chin. “Let’s capitalize on the fact that you’re not an actress using this job as a temporary fix against hunger—a job to be jettisoned as soon as a part comes along. That should give you an edge.” She moves to the door of her closet, then reaches in and pulls out a dress that looks like something Jacqueline Kennedy or Audrey Hepburn would wear. Turquoise with black embroidered vines rising from the hemline, it has elbow-length sleeves, a black patent leather belt, and a wide, rolled neckline. “With proper makeup and a sophisticated hairdo, I’m sure you can get something at one of the high-end department stores. Oh, and when you fudge your age, don’t say eighteen. Nineteen sounds less like a lie. And play up that Southern genteel accent of yours. Let’s say you’re from a prominent, but overly tra
ditional, family. You came west to become a modern, independent woman. Dazzle them with that vocabulary of yours.” She sounds like she’s creating a part. I suppose she is: a new, reinvented me.

  “I don’t know anything about being a sales clerk.”

  “Smile and tell ladies they look fabulous. Couldn’t be easier.” She begins to tease my hair.

  When Bobbi’s finished, I don’t even recognize myself. I lean close to the mirror and examine the expert stroke of eyeliner, the startling fullness of my mouth under a bright coral lipstick. My hair is upswept. I do look nineteen.

  “Stop batting your eyes, for goodness’ sake.”

  “I can’t help it. These false eyelashes are heavy, and they itch.”

  “Well, don’t scratch!” She grins like a proud sister. “Now dress and shoes.”

  I give the black heels a wary glance. I’ve never worn heels.

  “They’re perfect,” she offers. “Low enough you won’t break your neck, yet high enough you don’t look like a grandma. You’re sophisticated, yet not showy. Perfect for Saks.”

  “Saks? Tell me you’re kidding.” I’ve been in the Studio Club long enough to learn the department store pecking order, even if I haven’t set foot inside one.

  “Of course, that won’t be your first application. We’ll work up to it. Practice applications first. Then you’ll have a job to fall back on if you don’t get on at Saks.”

  “You sound like this is no big deal.”

  “It isn’t.” She points to the shoes. “Now step into those and I’ll drive you.”

  * * *

  The job interview process isn’t nearly as awful as I expected. And it quickly reaffirms what I’ve learned about the value of hazily shaded truth. It’s all about reading people to gauge what they want to hear. And even as angry as I am with Gran, I must admit she prepared me well when it comes to etiquette and manners. Now I understand what she meant by, “A moment of empty silence always works in your favor. Don’t be in a rush to speak.” Most times people move on out of either respect or their own discomfort.