for girls in the Big Bear Mountains.
* * *
One morning before I went off to school, I had just sat down on the edge of my bed to put on my shoes when the house shuddered, tipped forward and backward, and pitched me to the floor. At that instant, Mrs. Cummings called out, her voice sounding like a cat’s cry of distress. I crawled to the front door. It had been wrenched from its hinges and lay upon the narrow wooden porch. In the middle of the street, in front of the house, smoking with clouds of dust, a deep crevice had opened. No one was out of doors. I stood up and ran to the kitchen, where I found Mrs. Cummings crouching beneath the kitchen table, looking straight ahead with a crazed glare. “Get under here,” she muttered.
We sat beneath the table, our knees touching, the closest we’d been in all the months preceding the earthquake. There was another great shake of the house; for a few seconds the walls undulated like cloth.
Gradually, as the silence deepened around us, her expression grew focused. It conveyed that there was no language to describe what had just occurred. For moments, the world’s heart had stopped.
After minutes—it could have been hours—she crept out from under the table, revealing her pink bloomers to me as the skirt of her dress tangled with her legs. Human cries began to reach us from the street. I went again to the porch. Families, solitary people, dogs, stood in front of their houses staring down at the great wound in the street from which now issued several muddy, slow-moving streams of water.
I wondered if the chameleon Mrs. Cummings had given me a week earlier had survived. The last time I had seen it, a few days before, it was pausing in front of a mousehole in the kitchen baseboard, staring at it with its right eye. When I looked back a minute later, it had vanished.
Since then, I had thought about it constantly, its sudden stillnesses, its skittering about, its tiny clawed feet on my skin, the way it turned the color of what it was placed upon. “I hope it finds something to eat,” I said to Mrs. Cummings. “It’s fine,” she replied. “Living in the cellar … eating flies.” I didn’t believe her but didn’t say so.
* * *
A terror of leprosy leapt into my soul. I looked under my bed every night in case there was a leper sleeping there. Leprosy was the most awful thing in the world. Tidal waves ran a close second.
* * *
I sat on a high stool in front of the kitchen sink, staring down at an egg I had broken to find out how its inside got inside. The orange yolk bled into the drain; a gelatinous white mass followed the yoke sluggishly. Mrs. Cummings entered the kitchen and began to reproach me for wasting an egg. I wasn’t listening. I was recalling the way I had cracked open stones on the long driveway that led up to the minister’s house on the hill. I grew weak with longing to be in the downstairs hall where we had all gathered during storms, to see old Mrs. Corning; even Auntie; most of all, Uncle Elwood.
* * *
Sophie was director of a camp in the mountains called Tamarack Lodge. One weekend morning in early spring—though I couldn’t tell the months apart in that country without seasons—Sophie and Jay, the man who did the maintenance work in the camp, drove to the lodge and took me along. Jay was heavy-set and looked unshaven by midmorning. When I saw him, he was always wearing a plaid shirt drawn tightly over his big belly.
The campgrounds were silent. The shuttered main house, the swimming pool emptied of water, its bottom covered with evergreen needles, a line of boarded-up cabins, and the boulder- and rock-strewn thickly treed hills that rose all around had a thrilling look of desolation. Jay and Sophie talked in low voices as they walked about, pausing in front of various buildings, their faces serious.
A decade later when I returned to California from the East, one of the first things I did was to take a
* * *
One morning before I went off to school, I had just sat down on the edge of my bed to put on my shoes when the house shuddered, tipped forward and backward, and pitched me to the floor. At that instant, Mrs. Cummings called out, her voice sounding like a cat’s cry of distress. I crawled to the front door. It had been wrenched from its hinges and lay upon the narrow wooden porch. In the middle of the street, in front of the house, smoking with clouds of dust, a deep crevice had opened. No one was out of doors. I stood up and ran to the kitchen, where I found Mrs. Cummings crouching beneath the kitchen table, looking straight ahead with a crazed glare. “Get under here,” she muttered.
We sat beneath the table, our knees touching, the closest we’d been in all the months preceding the earthquake. There was another great shake of the house; for a few seconds the walls undulated like cloth.
Gradually, as the silence deepened around us, her expression grew focused. It conveyed that there was no language to describe what had just occurred. For moments, the world’s heart had stopped.
After minutes—it could have been hours—she crept out from under the table, revealing her pink bloomers to me as the skirt of her dress tangled with her legs. Human cries began to reach us from the street. I went again to the porch. Families, solitary people, dogs, stood in front of their houses staring down at the great wound in the street from which now issued several muddy, slow-moving streams of water.
I wondered if the chameleon Mrs. Cummings had given me a week earlier had survived. The last time I had seen it, a few days before, it was pausing in front of a mousehole in the kitchen baseboard, staring at it with its right eye. When I looked back a minute later, it had vanished.
Since then, I had thought about it constantly, its sudden stillnesses, its skittering about, its tiny clawed feet on my skin, the way it turned the color of what it was placed upon. “I hope it finds something to eat,” I said to Mrs. Cummings. “It’s fine,” she replied. “Living in the cellar … eating flies.” I didn’t believe her but didn’t say so.
* * *
A terror of leprosy leapt into my soul. I looked under my bed every night in case there was a leper sleeping there. Leprosy was the most awful thing in the world. Tidal waves ran a close second.
* * *
I sat on a high stool in front of the kitchen sink, staring down at an egg I had broken to find out how its inside got inside. The orange yolk bled into the drain; a gelatinous white mass followed the yoke sluggishly. Mrs. Cummings entered the kitchen and began to reproach me for wasting an egg. I wasn’t listening. I was recalling the way I had cracked open stones on the long driveway that led up to the minister’s house on the hill. I grew weak with longing to be in the downstairs hall where we had all gathered during storms, to see old Mrs. Corning; even Auntie; most of all, Uncle Elwood.
* * *
Sophie was director of a camp in the mountains called Tamarack Lodge. One weekend morning in early spring—though I couldn’t tell the months apart in that country without seasons—Sophie and Jay, the man who did the maintenance work in the camp, drove to the lodge and took me along. Jay was heavy-set and looked unshaven by midmorning. When I saw him, he was always wearing a plaid shirt drawn tightly over his big belly.
The campgrounds were silent. The shuttered main house, the swimming pool emptied of water, its bottom covered with evergreen needles, a line of boarded-up cabins, and the boulder- and rock-strewn thickly treed hills that rose all around had a thrilling look of desolation. Jay and Sophie talked in low voices as they walked about, pausing in front of various buildings, their faces serious.
A decade later when I returned to California from the East, one of the first things I did was to take a
Similar Books
