Read Online The Ruins of California by Martha Sherrill - Free Book Online
Authors: Martha Sherrill
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Me.”
After dinner that night, Robbie and I asked permission to go to 31 Flavors. It was a warm Friday, and the crickets were chirping, and the air on the Morrisons’ cinder-block patio had a wonderful, free, end-of-summer feeling that seemed to call for an ice cream sundae. I remember that we kept it quiet—so the littles wouldn’t begto tag along. Dr. Morrison gave us a few dollars and told us to come home before dark.
Robbie and I headed off—down Valley View Road and our old route to elementary school. It seemed like another lifetime ago that we’d graduated from sixth grade. I half wondered if Mrs. Craig and Mrs. Shockley and all the rest of them were still alive. Robbie and I trooped along in our after-school duds—cutoffs with long denim strings hanging down and tickling our thighs, little T-shirts that sometimes revealed bits of tummy, and flip-flop sandals. We’d grown our hair out—it was long and unbrushed and fell down our backs like clumps of dead seaweed. We were always looking for cures for split ends, among other things.
“What’s that stuff your cousin tried for greasy hair?” Robbie asked.
“Pissed,” I said.
“That’s right. Psssssst,” Robbie said. “Dry shampoo.”
“It comes in a can. You spray it on. It’s white, like that fake snow you spray on Christmas trees,” I said. “Flocking. You get a blast of white foam on your head.”
“Oh, gosh!” Robbie squealed.
“And then it dries clear, and you brush your hair, and it’s not greasy anymore. Lisa says it really works. You know, like, in an emergency.”
Nothing had come between Robbie and me for five years, since we’d been the two best readers in Mrs. Kinney’s second-grade class. No boy had driven us apart. No other girlfriends—and we shared many—had threatened our bond either. For two summers in a row, we’d survived Camp Ka-u-la, a dilapidated campground near Frasier National Park with torn canvas tents and no flush toilets, run by the Camp Fire Girls. More recently we’d spent two weeksin a stuffy cabin at Camp Fox, in a remote corner of Catalina Island with wild pigs, where Robbie and I had been urged to accept Jesus into our hearts during a secret hilltop ceremony next to a huge white cross, and we did. We were urged to read
Good News for Modern Man
, a tepid adaptation of the New Testament for young readers, and we did that, too.
Robbie and I never needed to pledge our devotion to each other, though. That was a given. We spoke in squeaky voices to each other, did impressions of Mr. Shroeder, our super tall French teacher, shared a four-year crush on Dr. Mark Toland of
One Life to Live
(played by Tommy Lee Jones), and indulged each other with reminiscences about dead pets. Robbie told the story, over and over, of finding her parrot Lolita dead at the bottom of her cage—how scary Lolita’s eyes looked—but it took several years before she revealed that Dr. Morrison had backed over Ruffy, the old spaniel that predated me, in his Cadillac DeVille.
I never talked much about my father. He and Cary seemed a world away from Van Dale, and their lives indescribable. Robbie had never met my father. Would she have liked him? Would she have seen his charm or just his weirdness? He was busier than ever in those days—his computer project in Berkeley had become a full-blown company. He had a partner, Don Harrison, and an office near our old house in Menlo Park. He rarely ventured into Van Dale in any case. We met up in San Benito or at Marguerite’s beach house in Laguna. As for his personal life, I wasn’t sure that Robbie would understand that either.
My mother became a focus of fascination instead. The previous year she had begun dating Rod Weeger, the coach of the eighth-grade boys’ basketball team at E. J. Truppel. It was funny how awkward my mother was about the whole thing at first. She could barelysay his name out loud. They saw each other on weekends, but later on, as the romance endured, he came
After dinner that night, Robbie and I asked permission to go to 31 Flavors. It was a warm Friday, and the crickets were chirping, and the air on the Morrisons’ cinder-block patio had a wonderful, free, end-of-summer feeling that seemed to call for an ice cream sundae. I remember that we kept it quiet—so the littles wouldn’t begto tag along. Dr. Morrison gave us a few dollars and told us to come home before dark.
Robbie and I headed off—down Valley View Road and our old route to elementary school. It seemed like another lifetime ago that we’d graduated from sixth grade. I half wondered if Mrs. Craig and Mrs. Shockley and all the rest of them were still alive. Robbie and I trooped along in our after-school duds—cutoffs with long denim strings hanging down and tickling our thighs, little T-shirts that sometimes revealed bits of tummy, and flip-flop sandals. We’d grown our hair out—it was long and unbrushed and fell down our backs like clumps of dead seaweed. We were always looking for cures for split ends, among other things.
“What’s that stuff your cousin tried for greasy hair?” Robbie asked.
“Pissed,” I said.
“That’s right. Psssssst,” Robbie said. “Dry shampoo.”
“It comes in a can. You spray it on. It’s white, like that fake snow you spray on Christmas trees,” I said. “Flocking. You get a blast of white foam on your head.”
“Oh, gosh!” Robbie squealed.
“And then it dries clear, and you brush your hair, and it’s not greasy anymore. Lisa says it really works. You know, like, in an emergency.”
Nothing had come between Robbie and me for five years, since we’d been the two best readers in Mrs. Kinney’s second-grade class. No boy had driven us apart. No other girlfriends—and we shared many—had threatened our bond either. For two summers in a row, we’d survived Camp Ka-u-la, a dilapidated campground near Frasier National Park with torn canvas tents and no flush toilets, run by the Camp Fire Girls. More recently we’d spent two weeksin a stuffy cabin at Camp Fox, in a remote corner of Catalina Island with wild pigs, where Robbie and I had been urged to accept Jesus into our hearts during a secret hilltop ceremony next to a huge white cross, and we did. We were urged to read
Good News for Modern Man
, a tepid adaptation of the New Testament for young readers, and we did that, too.
Robbie and I never needed to pledge our devotion to each other, though. That was a given. We spoke in squeaky voices to each other, did impressions of Mr. Shroeder, our super tall French teacher, shared a four-year crush on Dr. Mark Toland of
One Life to Live
(played by Tommy Lee Jones), and indulged each other with reminiscences about dead pets. Robbie told the story, over and over, of finding her parrot Lolita dead at the bottom of her cage—how scary Lolita’s eyes looked—but it took several years before she revealed that Dr. Morrison had backed over Ruffy, the old spaniel that predated me, in his Cadillac DeVille.
I never talked much about my father. He and Cary seemed a world away from Van Dale, and their lives indescribable. Robbie had never met my father. Would she have liked him? Would she have seen his charm or just his weirdness? He was busier than ever in those days—his computer project in Berkeley had become a full-blown company. He had a partner, Don Harrison, and an office near our old house in Menlo Park. He rarely ventured into Van Dale in any case. We met up in San Benito or at Marguerite’s beach house in Laguna. As for his personal life, I wasn’t sure that Robbie would understand that either.
My mother became a focus of fascination instead. The previous year she had begun dating Rod Weeger, the coach of the eighth-grade boys’ basketball team at E. J. Truppel. It was funny how awkward my mother was about the whole thing at first. She could barelysay his name out loud. They saw each other on weekends, but later on, as the romance endured, he came
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