Real Life. Marsha Hunt

front lawns on quiet tree-lined streets with the splash of a freshly painted ranch-style house with a garage that had a basketball net conveniently attached to an overhead wall so that the kids could play.

      I wasn’t an avid moviegoer, but I had enough beforehand knowledge of California to be wrong about it. In my head was the clichéd vision – blazing yellow sun, picturesque orange groves, palm trees against a blue sky. I could see a swimming pool and the languid masses of draped bodies slung across deck chairs as they browned like toast under the sun. An unspoken wealth supported the whole canvas.

      California might just as well have been in another country. Our only connection to it was that each Christmas, Uncle Henry used to send Edna a voluptuous basket of fruit from California where he’d been living since he’d retired from the navy. The fruit was always a glamorous array of wrapped citrus with something exotic like a pineapple on top in coloured cellophane with a big bow around it. (Once a basket arrived with a dark green thing in it which I had never seen before. Edna claimed that she had in Florida, but I didn’t believe her. I was sure she was just saying this to impress us and that the avocado pear wasn’t a pear at all and was poison.)

      The journey to San Francisco airport took about sixteen hours and we had to stop off once to refuel. At one point during the flight, the pilot told us to look at the Grand Canyon. I did so reluctantly. I’d never been on an airplane before, but I can’t say that I appreciated my first experience, because I was too caught up in sombre remorse: I was sick from the ache of leaving friends behind and believed that the only reason destiny was pulling me westwards was to help Ikey interfere with a budding romance between me and an eighteen-year-old boy. It was July 1960 and I was not a bit happy about the prospect of a future in California.

      That first afternoon we drove through Oakland was sunny – too sunny for my liking. A heat of light burned the sidewalk. There was no imposing residential monument of history to interest me and no orderly strips of red brick houses with dark-green hedges to match. In fact, brick must have been at a premium, because every house and building seemed to be made of stucco.

      I’d only been out of the North once, when the Bivins family took me on a weekend jaunt to visit some of their relatives in North Carolina. The flat dullness of the small nameless Southern towns we drove through left me with the same depressed feeling that I had when I looked at Oakland for the first time.

      There wasn’t one lawn or ranch-style house to be seen as we drove down Grove Street. It looked like an architectural free-for-all. No building seemed planted in the sidewalk with solid old East Coast permanence. Instead the ticky-tacky greyish boxes with storm windows looked as if they’d been thrown on the pavement and designed with less imagination than my first Lego attempts.

      More sky than I’d ever noticed before hung down. It was barely the palest blue and was dipped in dry heat. The air seemed no cleaner than the sidewalk.

      I wanted to cry and probably would have if I’d thought that it would do any good. But the truth was that I was there to stay. I knew my grandmother had had the right idea when she ground her heels in and refused to join us for the move west. I longed to be back there with her, lounging around in big-city civilization.

      I also felt Ikey’s disappointment and could see it registering in the dull glaze of her eyes as she stared from the car window listening to her brother explain how she, Thelma, Pam and I could temporarily cope with a one-bedroom apartment above some shops at the corner of 55th and Grove. He wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t so temporary.