09.24.2001
It's traumatic as a kid to be from a place that all of your cousins expect to sink into the sea any day. On the rare occasion of a family reunion, we always had to drive a day and a half to my aunts and uncles future ocean front property where there were picnic tables set out on what would one day be the beach of only that big one would finally hit. As a small boy, my Uncle Jim once drove me to tears with explanations of how all of my toys and the swing set that had taken my dad six months to build would be deep under water. They lived in Oceanside, Arizona and it was named that for a reason, that reason was just not yet a reality. They were family and because of that they didn't want us to go down when the rest of the state of California did. My Uncle Frank always gave my dad the hard sell for him to buy half of his property. There were good schools in Arizona, good people, we could be closer to the family, and best of it, it was all on firm ground. Ground that didn't move. Ground that the good lord didn't send rumbling every time he was upset about the pot smoking hippy heathens that lived in my dad's chosen state. I asked if our family had always been religious once and Dad leaned down and said, "No son. Your aunts and uncles are born-agains." I couldn't ever tell if he was being condescending or if he just didn't want to have to explain god to a seven year-old but I forever associated the term with a group of people in Arizona who added god to a sentence like some people add exclamation points.
As I grew up and a noticeable rift grew between my dad and his brothers and sisters it became difficult to tell whether it was that California never did sink into the sea or that he just never bought into the idea that it would. I doubt that if he ever did believe in their crazy ideas that he would have moved anyway. By the time he had his house payments in San Diego under control and would have been able to afford some beach front property in Arizona he was laid off from General Dynamics, the defense contractor that had employed him and through which he met my mother and eventually started the life that after a certain point came to include me. Perhaps the only thing worse than being told you would eventually die because of where you live and a wrathful god is not knowing what was your dad did all day long. In the grand scheme of things it seemed like a smaller ticket item but was much more relevant to an only child who wanted someone to look up to but could never quite be sure that his father wasn't involved in something bad. Even after his layoff he could say because of confidentiality agreements he'd been forced to sign and military clearance but I knew that he didn't go to school for bombs or engineering of any kind so the best I could figure was that he was a manager of some type.
Things quickly got worse when I was seventeen and a cousin of mine left the safety of Arizona and came to and live with my dad and I. One day after school I came home from school on my bike to find a pretty black haired girl of about twenty with thick black rimmed glassed sitting on my porch next to a large duffle bag. It'd been five years since our last trip out and at first I didn't recognize her, I thought that fortune had merely begun to smile on a skinny kid. I knew that something was up though when she called my name and waved at me with a little grin. I coasted up the driveway and let the bike fall on the grass as I stepped over it and onto the cement block porch next to her bag.
"Emily," I asked remembering her as a brunette. "What are you doing here?"
"Hey Rol," she said as she stood up and dusted off her red knee length skirt. "It's been a long time. You've gotten big."
"It's been a few years," I agreed. In fact, had she seen me the year before I probably would have looked exactly like the twelve year-old boy she had been expecting to see. The recent height that I'd gained was still new to me and it showed with the ungainly steps I took, like I was learning to walk again. "What are you doing here," I asked her again.
"I'm moving out here," she said. The smile she added was forced and it became clear that something was wrong.
"Does Dad know," I asked sensing trouble.
"I doubt it," she said and started to kick the step of the porch with her boots. "But I was hoping that I might be able to stay with you guys for a little while if that's okay."
I eyed her suspiciously and nodded thinking that it might be all right. Because she was part of the Arizona clan though, I was worried that she would start telling me about the power of god like I had come home to find a Mormon missionary lingering on my lawn. "Let's go inside," I said and fished my key out of my jeans and let the two of us in. I noticed that I was slightly taller than she was and could feel something inside of me well up with hopes that the rest of her family were a bunch of dwarfs, not that I was that big myself.
"I can't believe how tall you are," she said again clearly looking for something to say.
"I'm not that tall," I told her and handed her a glass of water that I poured for her from a bottle my dad kept cold in the fridge. "I'm only five ten."
"Well, you're taller than me," she emphasized. I watched her look around the house from patch of linoleum she seemed reluctant to leave in the dining room and felt as though I was on display also. Since my mother had left, the house had a distinctly male look to it with my dad's weight bench in the living room where most people put their fine furniture on display and a large wood-paneled television that was picked up at a garage sale for a bargain price as the centerpiece of the family room. Thinking about it then, I realized that all of our furniture was second hand and lacked the uniformity of most other people's houses. Being only my dad and I, we didn't have that many visitors so the entire place had become something of a rec room for the two of us. It bothered me having an outsider in our inner sanctum and I became the one to fidget even though she looked around with a smile. "So I guess the big one never hit, huh," she asked looked at me over the rim of her water glass, one of a set my dad came home with a Saturday not to long ago.
"No," I said grinning with spite. "We're still here."
"Well, that's good," she said and the two of us seemed to share the same feeling for a moment.
"So why are you out here," I asked unable to bend my mind around it.
"I couldn't live in Arizona anymore," she said. "I wasn't going to college and was tired of my parents. I was tired of my... our whole family," and grinned again. "Anyway," she said shaking her hair back and forth, "After being told for so long that I couldn't ever live in California I just knew that this was where I had to come and since you and your dad are the coolest relatives I've got, I thought I'd see if I couldn't stay with you for a little while."
"Your 'coolest' relatives," I asked in disbelief.
"Sure," she said and set down the glass with a thump. "I mean, it was a long time ago, but I remember that the last reunion we had that you guys came for, I was stuck in bible camp the whole summer."
"Ouch," I said not remembering it but feeling her pain anyway.
"Yeah. And you were telling us about the skateboard your dad had bought you and how you spent the whole summer learning to ride it. That's pretty cool." She kicked her bag which took the punishment but was apparently so heavy that it didn't move. "So that's why I'm here, I guess. Do you want to show me around?"
The first place I showed her was my dad's den and the place where she would be staying while she was with us. Trying to be a good host I carried her bag but instead of looking gentlemanly I felt more like a sherpa struggling with the weight. I dropped it with relief onto the brown couch my dad bought from a friend at work that contained the foldout bed and proceeded to show her the rest of the house. It wasn't a big place but it was near the beach and had three bedrooms which gave us plenty of space to bang around without getting in each other's hair. I wondered how that would change with a new addition to the household. After the tour I lugged my box radio out onto the back patio and qued up some music to entertain us while we waited for my dad to get home.
The weather in San Diego wasn't all that different in the summer than it was in the winter but Dad had a thing about barbeques and wanting to get in as many as he could during the "warm" months. Apparently he and my Aunts and Uncles hadn't always been residents of the West because every time September started to loom on the calendar he would start to say how it might be our last barbeque of the season and near December would begin to wonder why snow hadn't fallen. Emily and I were out in the back yard taking turns with tapes in the player when my dad called to ask me to start the grill in an hour mentioning that we didn't have much time left. Emily asked me not to mention anything about her being there but I knew that he was going to be going to the store after work and that if I didn't say something she wouldn't have anything to eat.
"Dad," I asked.
"What," he responded, clearly thinking that the conversation should have been over already and wanting to get off the phone.
"Is it okay if someone else eats over tonight," I asked.
"Sure," he said. "Anything else?"
"Nope."
"Alright. I'll see you when I get home," he said and hung up before I had the chance to ask anything else.
"Is it okay," Emily asked with concern.
"Yeah," I said. "He said I could have someone over for diner but I still think he might freak out when he finds out that it's you."
Over the course of the next hour and after getting the coals going I pestered her about what she was doing in Arizona before deciding to leave and though it took a little while, she eventually opened up and told me about the coffee shop that had opened up in town and for which she worked. "In the course of two months," she explained. "It became the cool place to be." The staff picked the music that played during the days. Garage bands came out of the woodwork and started to play there on Friday and Saturday nights that the owner organized. For a while she thought that Oceanside was going to be a cool place to live after all but then the town cracked down on it bringing out noise ordnances and passing a youth curfew that did everything but shut it down. "After a while, it was just another boring job," she said. The only thing good about it in the end was the money that she saved up and allowed her to catch a Greyhound out to San Diego. "And so now I'm here," she said holding out her arms with flair.
"Well, San Diego's not exactly the capitol of excitement," I told her. I couldn't even think of a coffee shop like the one she described.
"Don't be so down on it, Rol," she said. "It's not Arizona so that gives this place at least one leg up. Besides, I'm not going to stay here forever. Eventually, I'm going to make it up to San Francisco."
"Now I know you've gone crazy," I laughed. "If there's any place that's going to sink into the sea first, it's going to be there. The town's burned down once already because of one."
"I know, I know," Emily said smiling. "But I figured there were only two places that I wanted to go: Boston or San Francisco and since San Francisco is easier for a girl from Arizona to get to, I figure that's where I'll end up."
When dad got home from work, he was not pleased with what he saw. He came out onto the patio with a large brown grocery bag of the night's dinner and nearly dropped it at the sight of Emily. Emily, for her part, tried to act as though nothing was wrong and leapt out of her plastic patio chair crying, "Uncle Phil, Uncle Phil! It's so good to see you!" but my dad just stood there with his open jaw silently trying to figure out in his head how it was possible that she was in his back yard.
"Emily," he finally managed. "It's good to see you. Did you just get into town? Your dad didn't call me to tell me that you were coming," he said trying to cover all the bases so as to better defend himself from accusing phone calls that were going to come. I turned down the radio to hear what they were saying.
"Yeah, I just got in today. I was hanging out on the porch but Roland let me in when he got home from school," she said as peppy as possible but totally side-stepping the issue. Everyone knew but at the same time avoided confronting it directly. "You guys have a great house!"
"Thanks," my dad said looking around to see that nothing was out of place. His only pride around the place was the freshly cut lawn and I was the one who was charged with mowing it for five bucks a week. "So is your dad going to be coming?"
She started kicking her boots together with a clack-clack sound and watched them intently as she did it. "I doubt it," she mumbled. I could barely hear her even with the radio turned down but I knew Dad did by his reaction. Even when he heard something but didn't like the answer he always replied:
"What's that?"
"I don't think so Uncle Phil. You know how dad feels about California."
He turned around and around looking for the plastic shopping bags before realizing that he still held them and placed them beside the grill. "Yeah. Yeah I do," he said as he started poking the coals I'd started twenty minutes earlier. After mulling over the orange and red briquettes he turned around and said, "So I guess Roland showed you the guest bedroom?"
"Yeah. It's great. Thanks a lot Uncle Phil," she said relieved but it didn't stop her from kicking one boot into another. Dad threw the meat on the barbeque, I turned up the radio, and things started to feel less on edge. Eventually Emily returned her seat next to me but not much was said between then and dinner except rarity preferences.
It was two days after her arrival when the family finally figured out where Emily might have gone to. We were beginning to fall into a kind of routine with dad watching his usual McNeil-Lehrer News Hour on PBS and she and I sitting around my room taking turns to play each other assorted selections of music from our respective tape collections. We were in the middle of a Guns 'n Roses song when the phone rang. Dad was always too involved in the night's top story to hear it so I picked up the extension I wired into my room.
"Roland," the voice asked. "Is your father there?"
I signaled to Emily to cut the music. "Yeah, Uncle Frank. Let me get him." Emily looked like her cat had just been backed over and sat very still as though her father could sense her motion in the room. I walked out into the living room. "Dad?"
"Huh," he grunted. "What?"
"Uncle Frank's on the phone."
"What," he asked again finally looking away from the television.
"Uncle Frank's on the phone," I repeated.
"Christ," he mumbled as he got up and went to turn off the news. "Here we go."
I ran back to my room and picked up my the phone, holding it slightly turned away from my ear so Emily could listen in also. We heard the click of the line as my dad joined in. "Frank," he said nonchalantly to his brother. "How are things going?"
"Don't give me that Phil, you know how things are. Is my daughter there?"
"Emily," he responded as though it wasn't the big deal it was. "Yeah, she's here. She's a good girl Frank."
"Damn it," Emily's father exploded. "I want you to put her on a bus back here tonight. You may be crazy enough to live in that god forsaken state, but I'll be damned if any daughter of mine will." Emily turned a shade of white I'd never seen before.
"Well now, Frank, just a minute," Dad answered in return with his usual detached calm. "Emily's a big girl and if she wants to stay here with me, I'm not going to turn her out into the street." I put my arm around my cousin and gave her a reassuring squeeze.
"I didn't say to turn her out. I said to put her on a bus back here Phil. Now are you going to do it or not?"
My dad paused for a few moments of cool thought before responding. I knew what was going through his mind. Part of him wished that she had never appeared at his door so he could continue with the routine he was so comfortable with, but another part of him liked having her around. The house in which we lived felt much more like a home with her in it and such a feeling had been sorely missing since my mom left. "Frank," my dad said, measuring his words. "If she doesn't want to leave, I'm not going to force her."
Uncle Frank exploded with rage.
"Now wait and hear me out. Emily is an adult and if she wants to come to California, that's her decision to make Frank. I know how you feel about it but I think we should respect her choice."
"Respect her choice," his brother responded with an eerie calm as though that option had never before entered his mind. "I'll tell you what Phil. I'll respect her choice but you tell her that as far as her father is concerned she's now just another doomed sinner like you and your son and not welcome back home."
My dad paused again, thinking out his words. "Frank," he said with another pause. Something was bothering him. "Frank, I don't ever want you to talk like that about my son again. Do you understand me? I hope you do because I know you won't ever come here, but if you say something like that again, you can bet your ass I'll go there and we'll settle it."
Emily and I looked at each other in shock. I'd never heard my dad talk like that before but it was clear that he'd had enough of his brother's ranting. Uncle Frank was silent, not in thought, but in clear shock. I was sure that the image of my father appearing at his house in anger was not one that would rock him to sleep at night. Finally he spoke. "Okay Phil. Okay. You just pass my message on to my daughter."
"I will," he said and the two brothers hung up. Emily was smiling but also close to tears. She was now cut off from all of her family in Arizona and had only my dad and me. Inside, she and I both hoped that she'd made the right decision.
In the living room I could hear Dad turning on the television again to watch the end of his program.