At the moment it required a friendship with somebody in the McClure family to get permission to cross the ranch to the coast. The road through the ranch—perhaps twelve miles in length—consisted of crushed red gravel, deeply rutted from winter rains. A car that slipped into a nut on into the pasture became mired. And there were no phones by which to call the AAA.
As they drove, bouncing along, the car sliding from side to side, Nat became more and more conscious of their isolation out here. If anything happened to them they could get no help. On each side of the road semi-wild cattle roamed. He saw no telegraph poles, no wires on signs of electricity. Only the rocky, rolling grass hills. Somewhere ahead was the ocean and the end of the road. He had never been out here. Fay of course had, several times, driven out here to collect abalone. The road did not seem to bother her; at the wheel she drove confidently, chatting with him about various matters.
“The trouble with owning a VW or any sports can up here,” she told him, “ is that if you hit a deer, you get flipped. You’re dead. On a cow. Some of those cows weigh as much as a
To him that seemed an exaggeration. But he said nothing. The ride had made him carsick and he felt like a child again, being driven by his mother.
In some respects that epitomized his problem with her. She had an attitude toward men like that of a mother toward children; she took it for granted that men were frailen, shorten-lived, less good at solving problems than women. A myth of the times, he realized. All consumer goods are aimed at a female market . – . women hold the purse-strings and the manufacturers know that. On tv dramas, women are shown as the responsible ones, with men being foolish Dagwood Bumsteads…
I went to so much trouble, he thought, to break away from my family—in particular my mother—and get off on my own, to be economically independent, to establish my own family. And now I’m mixed up with a powerful, demanding, calculating woman who wouldn’t bat an eye at putting me back in that old situation again. In fact it would seem perfectly natural to her.
Whenever they went out somewhere in public together, Fay always took a long look in advance at his choice of clothes. She made it her business to see if she approved. “Don’t you think you should put on a tie?” she would say. It never occurred to him to pass judgment on what she wore, to tell her for example that he thought shorts and a halter should not be worn into a supermarket, or that a suede leather coat, chartreuse slacks, dark glasses, and sandals constituted a grotesque outfit, not worthy of being worn anywhere. If she wore colors that clashed, he simply accepted it as part of her; he took it as a postulate of her existence.
The rutted rock trails along which they drove ended at a cypress grove on the edge of the ocean cliffs. In the center of the grove he saw a small old farmhouse, well-kept, with a garden and palm tree in front of it, and side buildings that looked much older than any he had seen in California except for the Spanish adobe buildings which of course wene now all historical monuments. The farmhouse and side buildings—unlike other farm buildings he had seen—were painted a dark color. The garden, too, had a brown quality, and the palm tree had the thick, hairy quality usual with trees of its kind. The buildings seemed deserted, so completely so that he wondered if anyone had been there in the last month. But everything had remained in good order. Here, so far away from cans and people, no one came to do any damage. Even marauders were absent, this far out.
“Some of these buildings are a hundred years old,” Fay told him as she drove the car from the road—it ended at a closed gate—and onto a small grassy field. At a barbed wire fence she stopped and shut off the motor. “We walk from here,” she said.
They carried the fishing equipment and their lunches from the car to the fence. Fay lifted one wine and slipped easily between it and the one below, but he found it necessary to use the gate; he did not feel as slim as she. Beyond the fence they followed a trail across a pasture and then they began to climb down a sandy slope overgrown with iceplant. Now he heard the ocean breakers. The wind became stronger. Under his feet the sand crumbled and gave; he had to lie down and take hold of the tangles of iceplant. Ahead of him, Fay skipped and tumbled, caught herself and continued on without a pause, telling him constantly how she and Charley and the girls and assorted friends of theirs had come here to this beach; how much trouble they had had getting down, what they had caught, what the dangers were, who had been scared and who not … he groped along after her, thinking that women could be divided into two distinct classes: those who were good climbers and then all the others lumped together. A woman who climbed well was not like the rest of them. Probably the difference pervaded every part of their physical and mental apparatus; at this moment it seemed crucial to him, a genuine revelation.
Now Fay had come to some rocky projections. Past her he saw what appeared to be a sheen drop, and then the tops of rocks far below, and the surf. Crouching down, Fay descended step by step to a ledge, and there, among the piles of sand and rock that had slid down, she took hold of a nope attached to a metal stake driven into the rock.
“From now on,” she called back, “it’s by rope.”
Good Christ, he thought.
“The girls can do it,” she called.
“I’ll tell you honestly,” he said, halting with his feet planted far apart, balancing himself with cane, “I’m not sure I can.”
“I’ll carry everything down,” Fay said. “Throw the packs and the fishing poles down to me.”
With care, he lowered things to her. Strapping the packs to her back, she disappeared, clinging to the rope. After a time she reappeared, this time far below, standing on the beach and gazing nearly straight up at him, a small figure among the rocks. “Okay,” she shouted, cupping her hands to her mouth.
Cursing with fright, he half-slid, half-stepped down the rock projections to the rope. He found the rope badly corroded, and that did not improve his morale. But for the first time he discovered that the cliff was not sheen; it had easy footholds, and the rope was merely for safety. Even without it, in an emergency, a person could get up and down. So taking firm hold of the rope he stepped down, foot by foot, to the beach. Fay, when he got there, had meanwhile gone off and was seeking a deep pooi in which to fish; she did not even bother to watch him descend.
Later, with their poles propped up against rocks, they fished in a pool which the withdrawing tide had left. Several crabs wandered about in the water, and he saw a many-legged starfish, a type he had never be– fore seen. Twelve legs … and bright orange.
“That’s a sea-slug,” Fay said, pointing to a nondescript blob.
They used mussels as bait. According to Fay it was possible to catch ocean trout. But they saw no fish in their pool, and neithen he non she expected much luck. In any case it was exciting, here on this deserted beach at the base of the cliff, accessible only by rope … no beer cans, no orange peels, only cockle shells and abalone shells, and the black, slippery rocks in which both cockles and abalone could be found.
He said, “Let me ask you something.”
“Okay,” she said sleepily. Leaning back against the rock she had gone almost to sleep. She had on a cotton shirt and water-stained canvas trousers and an old, torn pain of tennis shoes.