Do note: not “if the fire comes.”
When the fire comes.
No one at the Topanga — Las Virgenes Fire District was talking about what most people see when they hear the words “brush fire,” a few traces of smoke and an occasional lick of flame: at the Topanga — Las Virgenes Fire District they were talking about fires that burned on twenty-mile fronts and spotted ahead twelve-foot flames as they moved.
This was not forgiving territory: consider finding the driveway.
Also consider “The World” itself, its eccentric strip of construction paper and careful printing obscuring one side of the mimeographed notice from the Topanga — Las Virgenes Fire District. Since the choices made by the careful printer may or may not have meaning, I give you the text of “The World” with her spacing, her single misspelling:
THE
WORLD
The world
Has nothing
But morning
And night
It has no
Day or lunch
So this world
Is poor and desertid.
This is some
Kind of an
Island with
Only three
Houses on it
In these
Families are
2,1,2, people
In each house
So 2,1,2 make
Only 5 people
On this
Island.
In point of fact the beach on which we lived, our personal “some Kind of an Island,” did have “Only three Houses on it,” or, more correctly, it had only three houses that were occupied year-round. One of these three houses was owned by Dick Moore, a cinematographer who, when he was not on a location, lived there with his two daughters, Marina and Tita. It was Tita Moore who started the club with Quintana that entailed posting “Mom’s Sayings” in our garage. Tita and Quintana also had an entrepreneurial enterprise, “the soap factory,” the business mission of which was to melt down and reshape all remaining bars of the gardenia-scented I. Magnin soap I used to order by the box and sell the result to passers-by on the beach. Since both ends of this beach were submerged by the tide, no more than two or three passers-by would actually materialize during the soap factory’s operating hours, enabling me to buy back my own I. Magnin soap, reconfigured from pristine ivory ovals into gray blobs. I have no memory of the other “Families” in these houses, but in our own I would have said that there were not “2, 1, 2, people” but “3 people.”
Possibly Quintana saw our personal “some Kind of an Island” differently.
Possibly she had reason to.
Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working.
Once when we were living in the beach house we came home to find that she had placed a call to what was known familiarly on our stretch of the coast as “Camarillo.” Camarillo was at that time a state psychiatric facility twenty-some miles north of us in Ventura County, the hospital in which Charlie Parker once detoxed and then memorialized in “Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” the institution sometimes said to have provided inspiration to the Eagles for “Hotel California.”
She had called Camarillo, she advised us, to find out what she needed to do if she was going crazy.
She was five years old.
On another occasion we came home to the beach house and found that she had placed a call to Twentieth Century — Fox.
She had called Twentieth Century — Fox, she explained, to find out what she needed to do to be a star.
Again, she was five years old, maybe six.
Tita Moore is dead now, she died before Quintana did.
Dick Moore is dead now too, he died last year.
Marina called me recently.
I do not remember what Marina and I talked about but I know we did not talk about the club with “Mom’s Sayings” in the garage and I know we did not talk about the soap factory and I know we did not talk about how the ends of the beach got submerged by the tide.
I say this because I do not believe that either Marina or I could have managed such a conversation.
Relax, said the night man—
We are programmed to receive—
You can check out any time you like—
But you can never leave—
So goes the lyric to “Hotel California.”
Depths and shallows, quicksilver changes.
She was already a person. I could never afford to see that.
6
What about the “Craftsman” dinner knife of my mother’s?
The “Craftsman” dinner knife on Aunt Kate’s table, the one I recognize in the photographs? Was it the same “Craftsman” dinner knife that dropped through the redwood slats of the deck into the iceplant on the slope? The same “Craftsman” dinner knife that stayed lost in the iceplant until the blade was pitted and the handle scratched? The knife we found only when we were correcting the drainage on the slope in order to pass the geological inspection required to sell the house and move to Brentwood Park? The knife I saved to pass on to her, a memento of the beach, of her grandmother, of her childhood?
I still have the knife.
Still pitted, still scratched.
I also still have the baby tooth her cousin Tony pulled, saved in a satin-lined jeweler’s box, along with the baby teeth she herself eventually pulled and three loose pearls.
The baby teeth were to have been hers as well.
7
In fact I no longer value this kind of memento.
I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted.
There was a period, a long period, dating from my childhood until quite recently, when I thought I did.
A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep them with me, by preserving their mementos, their “things,” their totems.
The detritus of this misplaced belief now fills the drawers and closets of my apartment in New York. There is no drawer I can open without seeing something I do not want, on reflection, to see. There is no closet I can open with room left for the clothes I might actually want to wear. In one closet that might otherwise be put to such use I see, instead, three old Burberry raincoats of John’s, a suede jacket given to Quintana by the mother of her first boyfriend, and an angora cape, long since moth-eaten, given to my mother by my father not long after World War Two. In another closet I find a chest of drawers and perilously stacked assortment of boxes. I open one of the boxes. I find photographs taken by my grandfather when he was a mining engineer in the Sierra Nevada in the early years of the twentieth century. In another of the boxes I find the scraps of lace and embroidery that my mother had salvaged from her own mother’s boxes of mementos.
The jet beads.
The ivory rosaries.
The objects for which there is no satisfactory resolution.
In the third of the boxes I find skein after skein of needlepoint yarn, saved in the eventuality that remedial stitches might ever be required on a canvas completed and given away in 2001. In the chest of drawers I find papers written by Quintana when she was still at the Westlake School for Girls: the research study on stress, the analysis of Angel Clare’s role in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. I find her Westlake summer uniforms, I find her navy-blue gym shorts. I find the blue-and-white pinafore she wore for volunteering at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. I find the black wool challis dress I bought her when she was four at Bendel’s on West Fifty-seventh Street. When I bought that black wool challis dress Bendel’s was still on West Fifty-seventh Street. It was that long ago. Bendel’s became after Geraldine Stutz stopped running it just another store but when it was still on West Fifty-seventh Street and I bought that dress it was special, it was everything I wanted either one of us to wear, it was all Holly’s Harp chiffon and lettuce edges and sizes zero and two.