Sneak Previews of Forthcoming Books : That Southern California Clime

‘ “Nice weather,” they’d say, looking up, squinting. “Yup, another nice day.” ’

From the novel “Failure to Zigzag,” by Jane Vandenburgh, to be published in April by North Point Press, Berkeley.

THE CLIMATE OF Southern California, Charlotte had read somewhere, was half wind and half water. Having never been to any other place, however, she had no way of knowing what it would feel like to be in real weather. Here, people all congratulated themselves and one another over all the sunniness, as if they were corporately responsible. “Nice weather,” they’d say, looking up, squinting. “Yup, another nice day.”

Because so many topics had been excluded as suitable subjects of conversation, Lionel, in public, at the barbershop, talked of only two things: the weather and the Dodgers. “Nice weather, Mr. Ainsworth,” Rico would say. Lionel then would smack his lips over it and tell him, “You bet your life!” Charlotte would flip the slick pages of the magazine she was looking at, wondering why he didn’t get a headache from saying the exact same thing.

Upon hearing this, the fellow in the chair next to Lionel put in, “S’why we come here from Des Moines.”

“Des Moines?” Lionel asked, with his green eyes wide. “Why, I was born and raised in South English! An Iowan, through and through!”

The man in the next chair grunted but didn’t answer. Lionel went on. “We came here in 1923. My wife had family here. Her grandfather settled the town of Orange. We’ve been here all these years. Still, I miss it. I miss those hot summers, sleeping in the sheets we’d wet in a tin tub. And the corn, the sweet taste of it. How we’d walk out, my brothers and I, with all those stars pressing down upon us, up and over the little hillocks and out into the fields, where we could hear it, the actual rustle of the corn as it was growing.”

“Been here 10 years,” the new man said. “Don’t miss it.”

Charlotte chewed hard on the flat slab of bubble gum that Rico had given her, waiting for the weather joke. “Know what they say about the seasons here?” Lionel asked him. The man stuck his lower lip out: He didn’t know and he didn’t necessarily need to know. “That there are only two? The dry one, when it never rains?” The man looked up with mean blue eyes. “And the wet one,” Lionel said, “when it never rains, but might?”

The man from Des Moines thought about this for a moment, then gave a grunt as he got it. That was good enough for Lionel.

Copyright 1989 by Jane Vandenburgh.