Science of Navigation

Michael and Sherry Kaufman drive me through Los Angeles where it’s never supposed to rain and it’s raining. The sky is a breeding ground for harvest fields and plateaus of clouds above patches of derelict palms. Stretches of freeways look abandoned, curving slabs of concrete simply stop as if contaminated.

“They call this the new tropics,” Sherry Kaufman says. She sounds enthusiastic.

Mrs. Kaufman doesn’t have any more eggs. She’s too old to bear children. She told the social worker she liked my photograph. My face resonated and seemed familiar. And my IQ test scores impressed her. My grades are dismal. But that can be explained by circumstances.

I don’t say anything. I only see the tops of trees as the car speeds, and frontiers of cloud above wind-washed, sunburned beige, straightjacketed streets.

I know the drill. I’m an officially troubled adolescent. I used to be a problem child, but I’ve been elevated by age. At 16, I was automatically upgraded. Now I’m supposed to behave appropriately and not appear frightened, confused or displaced. That disturbs prospective foster parents. Michael and Sherry Kaufman are taking me on probation, trying me out like a car, making sure I have the necessary acceleration and steering before they sign the contract.

Words stay shut in my mouth. I’m attempting to decipher landscapes hurtled through and flown over, trying to reconstruct history through branches, through attics and spires and chimney smoke and who knows why they lit this fire, who sits there to take tea? I’m passing wires, peaks of buildings and trees in pieces so high they might be severed and floating.

“They call California the Golden State,” Michael Kaufman offers, like he’s planning to open a treasure chest when we get to their house.

He’s going to give me a gold necklace, earrings and a few 14-karat amulets, just to give me that welcoming feeling.

“They call every state something.” I keep my voice soft and words evenly spaced.

Now we’re going to San Diego County. It’s for six months. If Michael and Sherry Kaufman decide I perform to specifications, and am not irreparably damaged, they can renew their contract. But it’s just another sentence. Six months here, two years in Las Vegas, two years in Denver, a year in Cleveland, three in Buffalo and four in Atlanta. I’m in an experimental placement program, based on my religious affiliation and verbal test scores. They call it special status. In truth, my life is like a prison term for a minor offense, something I did without a gun and got assigned a lawyer on drugs who didn’t do the right paperwork.

“What do you think?” Mrs. Kaufman asks.

I say, “Great.” I’m practicing my monosyllables.

I’m really thinking that the sentences of my life accumulate and define me. The Silbersteins in Ohio, and the problem with their son. Las Vegas with Dr. Green, who retired early, and Mrs. Green, who was lonely. Then Mrs. Green started taking hormones and Prozac and playing golf. They decided a child wasn’t necessary after all. One desk became another, and it was three years in a blizzard zone where I didn’t get adopted either. They detected personality problems that made them uncomfortable with the legal commitment. Then four years outside Atlanta and the unfortunate situation with the Kaplans. They got divorced.

Now these sleek block cities that might have been constructed overnight, assembled by malevolent children. There’s nothing playful in this composition of steel and glass. Such rooms could shatter and sever their limbs in an earthquake. People must work with their lives in danger, in mines, in labs with chemicals, on freeways with drive-by shootings. Before, the baron just put an arrow through your chest if he didn’t like your appearance or demeanor.

The California clusters offer miniature skylines like rows of broken teeth beside the coast, near flat spaces that once contained cows and orange groves. Perhaps they’re still growing and grazing beneath the overpasses, under the clouds and networks of communications designed for somebody else.

I’ll be expected to do more than school in the Kaufmans’ house. Perhaps piano classes. Or aerobics. Yoga. Sherry Kaufman has mentioned this, twice. And tennis.

“It’s not just physical discipline,” Mr. Kaufman says. He’s talking about tennis.

“It’s social, too,” Mrs. Kaufman adds. “A tool to meet the right people.”

We drive south into just-risen reptilian California towns with sides of mirrored scales. They crawled out from a rock when it got hot enough. The sun comes out in Orange County, but I don’t see oranges, just ragged palms, shabby and limp, like somebody tried to shred their branches with their fingernails. Or they were sprayed with bullets. Everything is transplanted from Africa or South America, aberrant manifestations. Colorado was willows, salt cedars, cottonwoods, aspens and blue spruce. In the East, maples and oaks. But I’m tired of the names of trees, and which Indian tribes used to live there and who slaughtered them. I don’t consider that information personally relevant.

Mr. Kaufman says, “Look, this is beautiful.” And later, “Look, this is California.” He sounds eager and excited, as if he discovered or invented it.

“This is Irvine,” Mrs. Kaufman tells me. “It’s the prototype.”

This town looks like it was built by pathological children with a history of parental abuse. Their foster families forced them to be naked in garages and stuck pins into their skin and burned them with cigarettes. Those architects should see social workers to examine their problems. Then we pass John Wayne Airport.

Buildings are the beiges and sandy oranges that look like an early phase of melanoma. Hills are a uniformly bleached green and pale muddy ochre. Southern California is draped in combat camouflage. Then I am taken to my new room. Bed and desk. Curtains with a small floral print and ruffles. They match the bedspread and pillows.

“Get settled in,” Mrs. Kaufman begins, “then take a walk. Just follow the Coast Highway.”

It’s Christmas week in this town called Del Mar. Dyed Styrofoam wreaths with red plastic ribbons are tied on the lampposts and parking meters lining the Pacific Coast Highway. Red plastic balls the size of clenched fists meant to simulate berries are embedded in pretend pine needles. This is how Christmas comes to Southern California. You order it, and someone sends you props in a box.

This year my almost-legal parents in Atlanta sent me $600. A paltry payoff for a mutual recognition of defeat. We had all failed: the bureaucracy, their marriage and me. When the social worker in Los Angeles gave me my Hanukkah envelope, with my various foster families’ tax-deductible remembrances, I knew it would never end. My cycles of exile, sequences of migration, the new Indian tribes and local vegetation I’d have to memorize.

I’m perpetually negotiating boulevards I can’t pronounce and remembering the side streets they birth and the suggestions of neighborhoods they suddenly abort. Restaurants are called Baja Grill and Mayan Fiesta. Shops offer alternative healing supplies. Then I see the ocean for the first time. It’s vivid after storms, a punched-awake cobalt that seems alpine and rained on and reminds me of the Rocky Mountains, larkspur and monkshood above a lake I probably won’t see again.

I notice the Chamber of Commerce and think it’s a peculiar, fraudulent relic. They have nothing to sell here, only tainted oranges, beachfront lots, bathing suits and cocaine. And I’m through going in such buildings, collecting brochures listing the Apple Festival, rodeo, Pumpkin Harvest Day, Magnolia Gala and parades for symbolically important state crops and local battles.

Across the highway, a hotel with a swimming pool is an arctic blue stung by Christmas lights. Neon bulbs surround the pool like a disguised electric fence. A low embankment is filled with pumpkins on stakes. Red and green lights flicker.

Then I see miniature mannequins. It’s a nativity scene just behind the diving board and striped chaise lounges. Mary and Joseph stare down at the baby god lying on plastic straw. They’re too ignorant to recognize mutation. I sit beside the replica monster and breathe California in. It’s a subtle winter. You can relax; you’re not going to freeze.

In the morning, Sherry Kaufman makes the traditional auditioning-the-foster-child pancake breakfast. It’s buried under peaches and strawberries. “We have fresh fruit all year here,” she says. “And we don’t use butter.”

I say, “Great.”

After Michael and Sherry Kaufman go to the university, I walk into town. The variety store is T-shirts with waves smeared by suns of neon pink, blazing yellows and reds suggesting radiation. Coffee mugs have fish fins for handles. I’ll probably have to demonstrate proficiency with categories of marine species here.

There are seashell earrings, seashell-rimmed picture frames and jewelry boxes. Straw baskets, hats and beach mats. The back alcove is stacks of environmental books and discs of music simulating wind and storms and waterfalls in forests. Magazines are about arranging furniture along karmic principles and how meditation cures cancer.

So this is California. It has retained its shape and climate, but the ideas are gone, gutted. The air is static, lazy, almost drugged. This is how people talk, their California accents like sun and dust coagulated deep in their throats. It might have been a slow-release poison, and now there’s no reason to hurry. There’s a spiced and elevated citrus in the way they speak, a sense of tampered-with lemons and oranges.

I follow a side street to a cliff above the beach. I climb down to a field of manicured lawn with pines oddly bent, limbs abruptly severed. I don’t want to know what they’re called or how they came to stand here above the colossus of the Pacific. And I don’t want to learn how to pronounce boulevards and restaurants in Spanish. I’ve moved too often for another temporary vocabulary.

California is living posthumously, masquerading as a land of acupressure and magic tea, Hopi bracelets and Mexican blankets with patterns I suspect mean nothing. State lines don’t mean anything. No one believes in borders.

I look in windows of boutiques I can’t afford to enter, and restaurants where I only read the menus. I’ve found a way to remain a little girl forever. I’m too young to comprehend complicated public buildings and decipher currency. My hands are too small. My social worker said this is dangerously unhealthy thinking. If I don’t improve, I’ll graduate to a category called seriously disturbed.

Vista del Sol. Vista del Mar. Calle Lago. Calle Rio. Camino Real. Couples pass with infants strapped in sacks on their backs. Galleries display lithographs of golf courses and sculptures employing seashells and pieces of ocean debris.

Who craves lamps resembling glass starfish and crustacean platters that glow?

I’m dull and numb in aisles of dried herbs and crystals, and how-to-dress-for-karmic-impact manuals. My senses are shutting down or I’m slowly suffocating. No air enters the locked cavity of my head. This is not how Michael and Sherry Kaufman expect me to excel in calculus.

Del Mar is a Santa Fe theme like a collective flu, virulent and epidemic. Clocks with minute hands like saguaro spines, and absurdly vivid cactus embroidered on aprons. I study gulls above waves curling like lips in an infinitely infected mouth. It’s a dental abscess and it should be drained.

Alleys wind past backyards embossed by wood slat fences overgrown with bougainvillea and trumpet vines. Poinsettia trees mimic flame and smooth fire. The edge is sequences of trial-and-error accidents, juxtapositions stumbled upon, and you discover they are repeatable. You can construct myths this way, continents and planets.

I wake with a sense that a necessary element for my survival has been removed and corrupted. It was not lost but stolen and desecrated. Michael and Sherry Kaufman have left bowls of fruit on the table. Tonight we’re going to analyze my classes for the impending semester. They have catalogs and lists of tutors and tennis teachers stacked next to the berries and sliced melons.

I walk into town past a defunct middle school with nests of tan bungalows beside an overgrown playing field with gaps in the wire fences. Then I remember it’s a holiday. When you don’t have a permanent family, believe in god or religion, and are always new in the region, the town, the state, it’s easy to stop celebrating.

I’m standing at a stoplight in the early morning in Del Mar, aware of tourists snapping photographs nearby. I’m permanently on the periphery, watching strangers taking pictures. They’re photographing a building with a computer repair and dry cleaner. What do they see that I’m obviously missing? And why are they commemorating in celluloid a marine supply store and floral shop? Is there an unusual confederation of birds in the sky, a flock of malformed seagulls, perhaps? What have they deciphered in the scuba shop that eludes me?

“Do you mind?” The woman tourist asks, aiming her camera at me. “You just look so California.”

Suddenly I realize what I need is near the ocean. I find a path in rocks toward the bay, a channel between cliffs of wood and glass houses. Stalks are inflamed and remind me of blood and plague. Below, sand is its own temporary edge, beach damp and disappointingly flat. The hieroglyphics of California are imprinted in patterns that tennis shoes engrave, treads resembling scales.

Couples pass dressed in iridescent purple and neon-orange jogging suits. They’re prepared not only to live through the apocalypse, but also to continue their regular vitamin, supplement and exercise schedule while particles of radiation fall.

There are many surfers in the water today. I’m interested in the process, how you actually begin. A boy carries his board to the water’s lip, examines the surface, his face determined. He’s belly down and paddling out into foam between the third and fourth set of waves. Water breaks at his chest.

I recognize this is a ritual that must be enacted with absolute tenderness. The air smells of sharp citrus, overripe tangerines, perhaps, with a pulp that’s been set on fire from within, like cancer or spontaneous combustion.

I know why I’m watching him. He is my surfer and this is my one California wave. We posit cause and effect. There is sound in the forest when a tree falls, whether a person hears it or not. There is always sound in the forest. But it’s different when no one is listening. The tone expands into bells, shrieks, metal feathers and flames, things the ear would find too subtle, complicated, discordant and repulsive. They’d call it disturbing and send it to a social worker.

I’m going to watch him find the right wave and he will be riding it for me. I am being initiated below rocky bluffs with signs that say caution, stay back, unstable, walk at your own risk. And don’t we all walk at our risk every moment, on stubble and frass in our unique and not-quite-deliberate cul-de-sacs, everything trembling, two sizes too small and seasons out of style?

There, he’s standing up. His name is Jeffrey or Austin, Josh or Dylan. He wouldn’t talk to me at school or ask me to a prom. He speaks with the anointed California dust in his throat, the powder from succulents on cliffs that have broken off. He’s the one with the parents who will play tennis during the apocalypse. The ones with their collection of dried herbs installed for maximum karma, standing at windows of houses facing the ocean. They are listening to the sound of one hand clapping and still they are bored.

Now he’s pushing himself out from the rising aqua swell, the fluid avenue, he senses her beneath him, that’s what makes him stand. He is riding a legion of women into the shore near my feet.

I realize all ships christened with just one name actually represent multitudes. Each Christina and Margaret, Elizabeth and Diana are emblematic of entire dynasties of women. If that’s true, then I’ve already crossed oceans and rivers. I’ve finally decoded the precise coordinates of where and who I am. I am what staggered from the shipwreck.

All shipwreck survivors are orphans, husbands and children drowned. Their suitcases and passports are gone, their wedding rings and appointment books. They look like wet ghosts, but they know. When you’ve washed ashore from a sunken vessel, when you’ve touched the sea floor and known reefs with an intimacy that’s indelible, there’s a distillation. It’s a pause like an infant landmass rising. Maybe that’s called revelation.

Suddenly, I remember the nearly one thousand dollars in my purse. A shipwrecked woman could cross continents with that cash, fly to Honolulu, say, and still have crisp bills left. There’s a travel agency on the corner and the hotel runs a shuttle to the airport. I’ve seen the ocean and she’s seen me. Perhaps such occurrences are not purely random, the fantastic surprise of an unscratched conch on a public beach, the intriguing indentation of a fin in dusk sand, or the ambiguous footprints of one shivering woman. Who explains these things? Perhaps some are released in recognition of their navigational intuitions. It’s a science some are destined to develop.

I’m not going to learn Spanish, tennis or calculus. And I already know what the conquistadors did. The social worker is right. I’m not a little girl with small hands anymore.