come. I wondered what Dad was doing at that moment, if he was walking through the empty rooms of our house, changing his mind and deciding to come to California after all. I hoped that whatever had just happened to our family was temporary, but I didn’t understand what had broken, so I couldn’t imagine how to fix it. I had a new uneasiness in the pit of my stomach because I now knew the injustice of random bad luck, that it was possible to have a family one day and lose it the next. I wanted to know why I was being singled out for punishment, and tried to retrace my steps to pinpoint what I had done wrong to have my life upended this way. It was baffling, but I had the sense that going forward, I had to choose my words, and my steps, more carefully, so I could do my part to comfort my mother and slowly, craftily, coax her happiness back. I had to be good, and patient, and maybe my luck would turn around.
Mom’s and Matthew’s snores settled into a syncopated rhythm, and I tried to match my breathing to theirs so I could relax into sleep. I lay motionless and fell into a self-induced trance, humming “Yellow Submarine” quietly until I receded somewhere deep inside my skull and blinked out.
Over the next few weeks, Mom remained bedridden. Granny tried various strategies to cheer her up and brought her all sorts of bedside meals, trying to find something she could stomach. But Mom refused most of it, accepting only sugary coffee, canned soda and the occasional bowl of cottage cheese. Granny fetched hot pads for her back, cold compresses for her forehead and murder mysteries from the library. Still Mom’s migraines wouldn’t go away. When she complained of sore muscles, Granny dug around in the hall closet and produced a gadget that looked like a handheld electric mixer; only this thing had one stem protruding from it that ended in a flat metal disc. Granny plugged it in and the disc heated up and vibrated. She sat on the bed and moved the vibrator across Mom’s back in lazy arcs, loosening the tension while Mom sighed with relief.
My brother and I were not allowed in the bedroom during daytime because Mom needed to recuperate, but Granny would sit at her bedside for hours in deep conversation, and despite my eavesdropping I caught only snatches of it. Mostly I heard Granny reassuring Mom that it wasn’t her fault, that she could put this behind her, that men were worthless when you really get right down to it, and not worth this much fussing over. I’d hear Mom sniffling and asking wounded questions. Why me? What am I supposed to do now? What did I ever do to deserve this? Her questions were similar to my own, and I strained to hear an answer from Granny that would explain. One never came, and eventually I grew weary of spying and gave up.
Spring came, and the almond tree in the front yard erupted in white flowers. Mom entered her third month of bed rest, yet her despondency only grew. Mom’s bad luck invoked in Granny an inexhaustible pity. While Granny gave Mom a safe haven and unlimited time to regain her strength, she worked double-time to hold up appearances that my younger brother and I weren’t really semiorphans. She never spoke to us about what was happening to our mother, instead forging ahead as if nothing was amiss. Granny bought and washed our clothes, took us to the doctor for checkups, made us brush our teeth before bed and wrote scathing letters to our father demanding he send more money to support us. Granny adapted to her second motherhood with a sense of family duty, which gave Mom permission to carve out a new identity as a woman scorned. Granny looked after Matthew and me in an obligatory way, without the affection she reserved for her daughter. Mom was her child, and we were more like unexpected foster kids. In her most frustrated moments, she blamed Matthew and me for ruining her life plans, letting us know that if it weren’t for that no-good father of ours, she could have been enjoying her retirement.
Her suggestion to go outside and play became a refrain. Granny now had more laundry to do, more food to make, more dirt tracked in the house to clean up and she couldn’t keep up with it if we were constantly underfoot.
Outside there was plenty to mess with, and as we were loosely supervised by our grandparents, we were free to roam the yard as long as I kept an eye on my little brother. That first summer Matthew and I gorged on Grandpa’s blackberry vines until our lips and fingertips were purple. We climbed into two hollowed-out army jeeps rusting in the yard and drove them through dozens of imaginary wars. We unearthed plastic soldiers and old glass marbles that someone had buried in “olden times,” and we came upon an enormous pruning pile that Grandpa had been contributing to since before we were born—a colossal hill of fruit tree branches—and scaled it on all fours like lizards climbing a wall. We discovered that if we jumped up and down on the heap, we got excellent bounce, just like a trampoline. We fell off and bruised ourselves only a few times.
We quickly adjusted to the outdoor sounds of Carmel Valley, no longer jumping in terror when one of the peacocks on the hilltops let out a squeal like a woman being throttled, and learned to differentiate between the ambulance and fire sirens coming from the volunteer fire station down the block. We much preferred outside to inside, which felt more like a library than a home with everyone talking in hushed voices and being careful not to slam cupboards or clang dishes that might disturb Mom.
My brother and I ran loose and were becoming slightly feral, wearing the same jeans so many days in a row that the denim became more brown than blue, and bathing only when we remembered, which didn’t seem to bother anyone because it was right and good to save water in drought-prone California. Which is why Matthew and I got in supremely big trouble when we got caught hiding behind the oak trees at the top of the driveway with the garden hose going full blast, dousing unsuspecting drivers with sudden rainstorms. It was bad enough we’d pulled a dangerous prank, but it was even worse that we wasted precious water with a looming drought. Grandpa was letting his fruit trees die, and he was worried that there wouldn’t be enough flowers for his bees to make honey. Neighbors were rescuing gasping steelhead trout from what was left of the Carmel River, transferring them into water tanks in the back beds of their pickups and driving the fish to the mouth of the river, closer to the ocean, to release them.
I tried arguing that we had crimped the hose in between cars, but it didn’t win any points. Granny ordered Grandpa to spank us anyway. But he did it in a way that was more symbolic than painful, making a big showy swing with his arm and slowing to a pat by the time his hand reached our bums. But we yowled from the shame of it all.
The real lesson we learned from the spanking was that our grandparents were exact opposites. She was the disciplinarian, and he was the softie. When they shared the newspaper in the morning, she fretted over the political news and he laughed at the comics. She worried about reputation and appearances; he wore tattered undershirts dribbled with coffee stains and never bothered to clean the black grime from under his fingernails. She was tidy; he never threw anything away, collecting his possessions into indoor and outdoor piles that grew taller and thicker by the year, which in a certain light matched the professional definition of hoarding. She detested the outdoors; he had to be coaxed inside.
When Granny met Grandpa during a square dance at the elementary school in Carmel Valley, she was a forty-year-old single mother living in the little red house with Mom, who was then nineteen. Barely a few months divorced, Granny was trying to socialize again, and Grandpa, three years younger, was perfectly satisfied being single. When Grandpa twirled Granny around, she noticed the strength in his upper body, the care he took to get the steps correct. It didn’t hurt that she’d read about him already in Big Sur’s monthly newsletter, The Roundup, which dubbed him Big Sur’s Handsome Bachelor.
Grandpa wasn’t looking for a mate; he was just fine with his bees, and he earned a steady income as a plumber, learning from friends how to make water flow to remote cabins where there was no centralized water system; digging wells and climbing the steep Santa Lucia Mountains to divert natural springs and creeks to homes below.
Ruth and Franklin were an odd couple but a good dancing pair, and began attending square dances together, even traveling to the faraway ones in Salinas and Sacramento. On their third date, at a square dance in South Lake Tahoe, Granny asked him what his intentions were, and when he tried to dodge her question, she literally told him to “fish or cut bait.” No one had ever confronted him so directly, and he was impressed. He agreed to marry her, and she convinced him right then and there to drive across the border into Nevada so they could tie the knot immediately, giving him no time to change his mind. They drove until they located a Carson City courthouse that offered around-the-clock weddings, summoned a janitor