a revelation at Jack in the Box

I wrote this back in February of 2012, after we knew Craig was dying but before he did. I never published it, I think because I couldn't get that description right about the fish hills and couldn't figure out how to end the piece. It just seemed to hang, rather like life was doing at the time. Anyway, I'm heading north again in a couple days, though in an airplane, and it felt right to let Rosie claim this.

Multitasking is what I do best in a car. Is it that the very act of driving is a lesson in doing lots of things at once – pressing the pedals, listening for engine sounds and squealing brakes and sirens, watching other cars and trucks and, god-help-us, motorcycles, what’s ahead and behind, blinking lights, freeway signs – that nudges me to add a few more, like putting on lipstick and eating lunch? Maybe. Or maybe it’s that it's just how I learned, how we all did it back when, in the days of four-on-the-floor and left-foot clutching and turn signals that you had to turn on and off.  The days of the first drive-thru fast food and hard-to-tune radios, just after the Beatles first U.S. tour and before The Beachboys. In Southern California, where everything connects to a car.

I only live in SoCal now because of Mr. North’s insistence that it’s paradise. If I’d grown up in freeze-your-ass Chicago winters, I might think so too. But my heart is in greener, cooler Northern California where many people I love moved long ago, so I drive from San Diego to San Francisco like some people drive to the beach for a weekend. Depending on the route and whether I’m going to Carmel or San Francisco, it’s between 425 and 550 miles, doable in half a day if you time it right getting through L.A. 

I’ve made the trip six or eight times a year for forty years, so it’s as familiar as going to the grocery store. I know the climbs and descents, the weirdness of the seasonal weather in a few places, some shortcuts and a couple longcuts, traffic chokepoints and why not to drive behind the tomato trucks. I know to stay on the interstate for speed, the state highway for better scenery, where the clean bathrooms are and the cops hide (in the shade of the overpasses).

Some people dislike the monotony of the freeways, but I like to drive fast and there are pockets of beauty along the way. The San Joaquin Valley in the center of California is massive, all ag land from north of Los Angeles almost to Oregon, nut tree orchards that run for miles, pink and white blooms as pretty as those in D.C.’s Tidal Basin, vast fields of cotton, grape vines and orange trees; its sister is the black-soil Salinas Valley one wide ridge of hills west, what we call the salad bowl: lettuce, cauliflower, spinach, broccoli, a rotating, year-long harvest. Many cities and towns have Spanish names: Paso Robles, Soledad, San Juan Bautista, Chualar, Gonzales. Templeton is a tiny place near Nacimiento; as I scoot by, I think of the rat in Charlotte’s Web whose voice in the movie was Paul Lynde’s. There are rolling hills all the way, odd smooth bumps covered in native short grass and sprinkled with oaks in the south that give way to pines at the coast near Monterey. The grass is green when the rains come in winter and spring, gold in the summer, platinum in the fall; it grows solidly and covers the hills like a lion’s coat; slumbering creatures, faces hidden, velvet pelts that darken in the creases, the folds.

Turning west at Tracy toward Oakland and the Bay Bridge takes you through the Altamont pass, very steep, very tall hills with lines of enormous freaky-modern, bright-white wind turbines planted in rows upon their shoulders, spaced as carefully as buttons on a shirt, their vanes turning slower than you’d think. It always feels like I’m driving through a Cristos installation: kinetic art for art’s sake on a huge scale, plus livestock. One wet April the grass was long, the green of Columbian emeralds, and standing in it up to their bellies were what we call Oreo cows, the black and white a contrast so high it looked impossible, fake; tiny bovine dominos below the huge white cylinders with their long, sharp spokes.

I’ve tried a hundred times to take pictures – at Altamont and many other places – without stopping (because I don’t stop except for gas or to pee), and it’s always a fail. That moment when a faraway thing in the landscape had the light perfectly on it clicks the shutter in your eyes, in your brain, but not in the camera. The car is moving too fast. Life moves too fast.

I was driving home, south on the interstate, last Sunday, up out of the bottom end of the San Joaquin on the switchback incline called the grapevine, into the Santa Clarita mountains that top out at a barely-mountainous 4,000 feet. In the springtime near a gas-stop town named Gorman the California poppies, orange as a Nehi soda, cover the south- and west-facing hillsides for a month as far as you can see in every direction. The most spectacular year was April 2001; I was driving to my daughter’s wedding, thinking about my dad who would have loved knowing they chose his birthday for the big day.

But last Sunday wasn’t spring, it was late January. The weather has been bizarre – 80 degree days since before Christmas – and plants and trees and the world seem confused, but it definitely isn’t spring at 4,000 feet yet: cold and still, fog and low milky clouds hung between the big peaks, the grass tussocks were the dirty yellow of sour straw, stiff as chopsticks.

I never stop in Gorman going south, only going north and only if too much coffee is making me squirm. Going south it’s safe to say I never even slow down in Gorman. But I saw a sign for a new Jack in the Box, figured crap, I’m heading into Los Angeles on a Sunday that’s not a holiday, the traffic should be light and I want two for 99 cents. It’s a curse from junior high school that I will not outlive, so I’ve given up. Once or twice a year it’s me and the crunchy fried-everything with extra hot sauce tacos with Jack.

The new Box is on a funny offramp and has a weird parking lot that you have to cross this unpaved dirt thing to get to, kind of like fording a little muddy stream. The new VW turbo-diesel Golf wobbled gamely to a spot where I stopped and opened the bag like it was full of Benjamins and stuck a straw in the lid of my Coke. After a few fantastic bites, I looked up. Across the freeway and east of a long curve where the lanes disappear toward the rollercoasters at Magic Mountain were some low hills, out of place at the feet of their craggy, shrouded parents. The sun shone through a gap in the weeping clouds onto the hills, only there, from edge to edge, like a light on a painting that doesn’t extend past the frame. I swear I gasped.

Have you seen a trout like a golden or a rainbow with skin that’s speckled, little dark dots on a background of olive green under pale scales near its backbone that lightens to that sea green and platinum that circles its belly? And there’s a pink or, really, coral on the sides but it’s underneath the other colors, almost like it’s the salmon-colored flesh of the fish glowing through where the skin is thinnest. I don’t fish and only rarely cook them so I can’t say I love fish, but I love the way that fish looks with its colors that make me blink and wonder how it can be so beautiful, that combination, so clean and gleaming, those flickering, perfect cellophane scales.

Those hillsides were those colors - glowing coral dotted with dark green and black, blue-green in the swales, iridescence painted over top - but only in the odd rectangle of the sun patch, as if the UV rays had flipped a switch that stopped winter and revealed spring, a quarter mile of hope, a few acres of pretty beneath the grim.

As I sat there, eating lunch in a parking lot instead of while driving hellbent for Valencia, I knew reaching for my camera would be useless, even at a standstill. The light was leaving and the fish skin disappearing as surely as my taco was growing cold. I couldn't capture it, couldn't even believe I'd seen it with my own eyes, tearing up now in the sharp wind pushing down the pass, showing no mercy.

Remodeling

shhh! It's not me.

I mean, it is, but my name here is Rosie North, traveler and teller of truths, woman of history and mystery, former stealer of kisses, steeler of backbone, hater of flying insects except the pretty ones.

Here I may still look like that woman with the bared arms and blue headscarf in the cartoon avatar. Here, if I've a mind to, I can print that in color and tape it to every mirror. Or I, as Rosie, can be wizened, learning scratched deep in my skin, every cigarette and snort recorded. I can cry and choke on sobs, wipe my hot, snotty face with my shirt. Rosie will take a deep breath and fix those blue eyes on you and tell what happened, who's guilty and who's not. 

Not some smudged version of the story, details erased and names changed because -- shhh! -- someone might read it and tell You-Know-Who or because some-one-or-more is taking notes and keeping score or someone's jealous or a Big L for Lifelong loser or is wearing the Can't Get Over It hat. 

Besides my brief but bad Husband #1 sliming my lovely website, there were Watchers. And Tattlers, like in first grade. Even Nora Ephron, who said her mother taught her that life is copy, had to stop telling stories about a family member who saw them as humiliating instead of funny. Some of my step-relatives were mightily offended by subjects I wrote about, and there were so effing many of them - step-relatives and Subjects Now Off Limits - that the walls of the box I was writing in started chafing my elbows and pressing down on the top of my head. It got so bad that one person bitched that I wrote too glowingly about my own kid and her kid, claiming I did it just to make Complainer look bad by comparison. As if Complainer needs help in that endeavor.

I started writing four years ago to say what needed saying, to put what I had lived and what I knew and how it felt into words for people to read, because it feels great to write, to tell stories, to get it off my chest, whatever. Because I wanted to. I didn't do it to find myself in a cell, certainly not one made by people I'd cross off my Contacts list in a nanosecond if it weren't for the unhappy accident of their births.

The New York Times had a long, lovely article in yesterday's Sunday edition about Linda Ronstadt. She has written a book that will be out soon, and in it she talks about the recent news that she has Parkinson's and can't sing, her musical career from beginning to end, the things she did along the way. She lives in San Francisco and has two kids, 19 and 22 years old who, one presumes, can read. About drugs, she admits to trying everything and using so much cocaine that she had to have her nose cauterized twice. Ms. Ronstadt is only a few years older than a white-haired writer I once knew, who was afraid to tell stories like that because doing so would have cost her dearly.

Whatever story Rosie tells, she's gonna own it.

My Bad Choice

There is this guy.

Who couldn't be more useless or forgettable, a crumpled gum wrapper of a guy. Who has oozed through a longish life, outliving better relatives, leaving behind debts and mildly annoyed women, who is oblivious in the most opaque way to his dishonesty and unpleasantness.

His middle name could be Shallow. Or Trite. Or if there were a word that meant ballsy with an overcoating of inadequacy.

He has left no mark on places or communities, done exactly nothing notably good or awful in his life, is so insipidly less-than that people don't remember his name except its barely odd spelling. It's hard to hate him; it takes more energy than his bad acts gin up.

I know him because he contributed half the genes to my child; I was married to him for a brief, smudged two years in my very early twenties. I was confused, on the rebound, and naive. I had not yet learned that hurting someone was sometimes unavoidable (and self-preservative), hadn't learned to say no. He was a salesman, his one middling talent. When my daughter was barely walking, I took back my old job in a law firm, her father hit on our teenage babysitter, and in 1974 we were free.

There is a long list of mildly crappy things he's done. His mother was a nice woman to me and to her granddaughter; she died suddenly three states away when AER was a teenager, and he didn't bother to tell us until after the funeral. He tried the same trick when his father died, but we saw the obituary and AER, home from law school, got dressed in a black suit and heels and walked into the church, surprising him. The trade for his never sending birthday cards was that we didn't have to invite him to parties or graduations or awards. He disappeared from our lives without protest or regret, either his or ours. AER is almost 41 now. Except for that once at Bob's funeral, she hasn't seen or spoken on the phone to her father since she was 12. He has never met or spoken to C, her husband, or their child, the fabulous S.

Except that he has, in recent years, via email, asked her for money, many times. I know. There is no word shameful enough to describe it. She and her husband decided how to handle things, and she told me what was happening, in broad strokes. I understand he is somewhat pitiful and vaguely ill. I still feel guilty - if I had somehow entered the Witness Protection Program, he wouldn't ever have found her. If I hadn't married him, ditto, but, of course, then she wouldn't exist. Since she is one of the finest people anyone knows, I stop short of wishing for that. AER and C manage him with grace, like they do the rest of their lives.

My Bad Choice has recently moved halfway around the world to marry yet again, this time some Pacific Island woman he met through a Christian dating site. Groan. AER loaned/gave him most of the one-way airfare, and we're pretty sure he can't possibly save enough to ever fly back. This last year has felt, finally, like he is gone. He still has AER's email address, but the contacts are rare, the fleecing seems to be over. She and C and I even joked about it, and then joked about knocking on wood. And then discreetly knocked. Whew.

And then.

Last week my website - the other one, the one that uses not my legal name but my first and family names, a name I haven't used since 1972 - the website I had designed two years ago and that I love, where I have written about the people who are the jewels in my life; about the deaths of my father and M, my mother, my brother's terrible, sad story; about my husband and our lives and our long, long love - that website, behind its public pages, showed that My Bad Choice had somehow found it. He wrote a very public comment (that I deleted) on my latest piece. It was smarmy; it presumed; it insinuated that he knows me and people in my life on a level that wasn't even true 40 years ago.
The IP address of the computer he uses to go online has left footprints all over my site, on nearly all of the dozens of essays, 10 or 20 times on several of the pieces. It feels like he is drooling on my words, has invaded my life. It feels obsessive and slimy, like stalking. Now I know why people write under fictitious names online, and maybe I will have to shut my site down and start over, become Rosie North for real.

I don't know. There are other options that I haven't discounted yet. Bold ones, even. I'll talk to AER and figure out what we're going to do that won't make anything worse. But I to write this because this feels like I've been locked out of my home, and I'm sad and furious and alone. First, though, I need to take a shower.