Pasadena Page 6
Years later, Dieter would tell her about her infant gray eyes. “Gray as gull,” he’d say, in his accent that Sieglinde thought of as iron and rust. “And we couldn’t tell what color they would end up. One day they looked like they’d fire up and turn permanently blue, and the next day they seemed as if they’d turn as black and slick as a moray. Back and forth, blue and black, black and blue, your eyes changing like a witch’s, as if there were a fire smoldering in you. Blue, like the belly of one of your lobsters, black as that old tooth of mine that one of these days I’m going to ask you to yank out.” Eventually baby Sieglinde’s eyes simmered permanently black, and Dieter, who was well past fifty now and somehow at last suited for his small, wrinkled Erdgeist body, attached the plow to his burro Beatrice and cleared the land for the third cottage of Condor’s Nest.
He built it for the children with his mallet, a one-roomer with diamond-paned windows and a tin-and-tar-paper roof and a porch where chilies and laundry dried in the sun. Sieglinde’s bed sat beneath the window that faced the ocean; Siegmund’s pitted-iron bedstead pushed beneath the window that surveyed the fields. Before she was six, Sieglinde had caught a puma pup in her claw-mouthed trap. She spread the cat-skin cozily between their beds, ignoring Siegmund’s complaints that it was like sleeping with a feline ghost. Electricity had yet to reach the farms surrounding the village. The lone kerosene lamp was nailed to the wall above his bed, its circle of light failing to reach Sieglinde’s pillow. At night Siegmund would stay up reading, the lamp reflecting off his spectacles, while Sieglinde would roll into her nightly heaving slumber. She didn’t understand where her brother’s reading appetite came from, but there it was—a longing that was foreign to her. Dieter made Siegmund read certain books: A Guide to the Soils of the West; The Gentleman and His Ranch; The Benevolent and Proper Thinking of Today’s Young Farmer. But whenever he could, Siegmund would open a volume of history or literature. “You’ll die with a book in your face,” Sieglinde would declare, yawning, pushing her hair into her sleeping cap. Siegmund wouldn’t respond, his body and his books huddled together. And Sieglinde—who even at age six had visions of the world beyond Condor’s Nest and Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea—would pull the quilt to her chin and shut her eyes.
Her brother didn’t see well, and she’d always say he had damaged his eyes reading in the weak light. Though his wire spectacles were expensive, he was careless with them—or so it seemed to Sieglinde—the arms snapping or the lenses popping out in the ocean or Siegmund simply forgetting where he’d left them, even if they were propped atop his head. “You’ll go blind from reading,” she’d say, unaware of her maternal tone. His lips would move as he read, and sometimes a whole word would emerge from his throat, as if he were testing out its meaning and how it might apply to the Stumpfs of Condor’s Nest. Sieglinde could see that it was a struggle for him to comprehend the books—it would take him many months to finish one, sometimes even a year—and she wondered what made Siegmund try. “I want to learn for myself. I want to become an educated man,” Siegmund would say shyly, as if such an utterance would expose his soul too rawly. And maybe it did: for already people said things like Sieglinde’s the bright one or I don’t know why he even bothers or What on earth can he learn from a little History? Sieglinde too possessed a vague notion that Siegmund was fighting his destiny, a battle that inevitably he would lose. Even at a young age, she had enough sense of the way things worked in the world to understand that he was meant to be an onion farmer, nothing more and nothing less, and that any attempt to climb out of the hole of his fate would prove futile—and, perhaps, even dangerous.
But Sieglinde also believed that certain people—like herself, like her father—could leave behind the world they came from. Certain people lived off the blood of free will.
She was an early riser, up with the coydogs, their blood flooded with spaniel and shepherd and retriever and rufous-eared coyote; up with the tide, up with the sun yawning above Siegmund’s shallot field, where it reflected against the white bulbs peering through the soil. In many ways young Sieglinde was like her mother: dark-haired, strong in arm, long in throat, possessing a general loathing of idleness and imposition. The one difference—and this Sieglinde realized only gradually—was the color of their flesh: she had inherited her father’s Teutonic paleness, while Siegmund’s skin was a muted version of their mother’s, like cinnamon atop a bun. When Sieglinde asked about it—Why would we end up as if we’re from different litters?—no one could answer, nor did they try. Instead, Valencia would read Sieglinde the Bible—There was a man in the land of Uz—and she’d sit in her mother’s lap both frightened and angry about the improbability of the stories: pillars of salt and a man in the belly of a whale. From the beach Sieglinde had seen the short-fin pilots and the migrating grays, and she knew that were one of them to swallow her she wouldn’t survive; the yellowish baleen would end it for her, and maybe the only memorial would be the bunting of whalebone strung above the door. Did her mother believe that all this was true? Valencia revealed nothing, only hinted at what she believed by wrapping her arms around her daughter. Because Sieglinde always felt a tiny chip of pity for her mother, she decided to believe the tales. Did Sieglinde have a choice? She didn’t think so: no, instead it was a matter of demonstrating to her mother the purity of her love. And so she believed what Valencia read, especially the story of Delilah and old Samson. That one was easy to understand, and Sieglinde thought of Siegmund. She realized, maybe for the first time, how simple it was for some people to transform themselves, to invent their lives.
There were other things, too, that separated Valencia and Sieglinde from Dieter and Siegmund. Their love of water, for instance. “Why do you suppose Siegmund hates to swim?” Sieglinde would ask. As a fishergirl she believed that wealth would come from the waves and the murky ocean floor, not from a fistful of seeds planted in a row. Early on she had learned to cast and catch, scale and gut, flay and ice, pound after pound of fish: sharp-snouted halibut, black-speckled sea bass, righteye starry flounder, lateral-keel bluefin, swell shark, mako, butterfly ray, priest, the loud black croaker, scaleless marbled cabezone, rubberlip seaperch, steep-profiled sargo, blunt-headed blacksmith, thrice-striped shiner, white-bellied opaleye, yellow-orange señorita, half-moon, turbot, skipjack, and the spiny clawless rock lobster pulled from the pots she built herself, their antennae tapping her wrist as if to remind Sieglinde that the world was hers to snare.
“Why do you suppose at supper Papa blesses only the earth?” Her mother would say that Dieter and Siegmund would never know certain things. “It has to do with where you come from.” De donde … and Valencia would set to plaiting Sieglinde’s hair and tell her the stories of her own youth.
Sieglinde loved her mother for many reasons, but especially because Valencia had survived misfortune—or had survived it thus far. After all, Valencia had arrived in Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea not by train or wagon but on an iron-hulled freighter, the Santa Susana. The ship had flown a Royal Hawaiian flag, and it smuggled Spencer pump shotguns with damascus-twist barrels between Los Angeles and Mazatlán; and Valencia, in 1896, first saw Condor’s Nest from the ocean, from five hundred yards out, on a run up the coast. She was seventeen at the time, indentured to the ship’s owner, a man named Moya, forced, along with a flat-chested girl four years younger than she, to comfort the captain and his crew through the roll of the night sea. It was dusk when Valencia first saw the sunset shimmering on the cottage’s tin roof. Before she could talk herself out of it, she slipped over the Susana’s gull-caked rail. It never occurred to her that she wouldn’t make shore; her arms, thin but muscled from years of shoving men away, brown from the sun, soft with a pale fur, turned again and again, propelling her toward the bluff. When she emerged from the tide—her blouse clinging, her skirt lost to the waves, kelp braided through her hair—she began to sob.
By now it was dark and the full moon had become Valencia’s torch, and from the beach the sea cliff appeared too steep to sca
le. It loomed—seventy feet, she guessed—craggy friable rock and eroding sand and vines of ice plant and beach morning glory and evening primrose, their blossoms open demurely for the night. She walked up the beach, from one cove to the next, balancing herself with extended arms as she stepped through the pools of the splash zone, slipping on a loose stone, turning her ankle in a sinkhole. Each cove was more difficult to reach than the previous: rocks slick with the rising tide and red sea urchins, with skittering hermit crabs, with the greasy Pacific laver, with sea cucumbers like banana peels on her path. One cove had a secret cave in its wall, a dark room in the stone that looked like a nave, Valencia thought, frightened and moving on. Ramparts of rock isolated each cove, loose scree obstructing her. Eventually she became trapped by an impassable cliff that thrust itself up from the sea. Her attempt to scale it ended in a pair of bloody palms. Valencia turned around.
The tide was rising quickly, the waves exploding, so much louder than the Spencer shotguns the captain had shot off the starboard rail when showing his crew what he would do if a customs agent tried to board his ship. She worked her way back, past the cliff where she had seen the cottage, and beyond, hoping to find a beach where the bluffs turned to hills and a crevice or a chimney would announce itself as her exit. But she only stumbled into more coves—coves, she imagined, where on a fine summer afternoon a man and a woman might retreat, in fear of nothing, their pasts washed away and their futures undetermined. But on this early spring night, with the tide shoving forward, with her bloodied blouse, Valencia found herself once again a captive. She might as well have stayed on the Santa Susana and got herself shot on the bow, she was now thinking, perched on the sole dry rock she could find, her knees pulled to her chest, blinking back the tears. They tasted no different than the ocean, and to her the Pacific became an endless bowl of crying, filled by girls like herself, crow-haired girls who would do anything to escape their lives. How had she come to this? It was just like her, to leap into the ocean without any sort of plan. The moon was fat above the water, guiding the Santa Susana into port, Valencia imagined; guiding Valencia nowhere at all. She didn’t know what she wanted—rescue or death—and she was too young, on that first night on the shore of Condor’s Nest, to imagine anything else. The water pushed closer, splashing and shattering, crashing and battering, the reach of each wave an inch farther up the sand than the preceding one, so that before long rounds of water shot her in the face.
Then at once, as if from nowhere, a snowy plover pattered by her feet, happily singing chu wee, chu wee. Next followed its mate, nearly hopping over Valencia’s foot: a soft white ball, legs orange and thin as candy-sticks. The two birds, gleaming in the night, scurried together as if in love. Where were they going? They hurried to the back of the cove, where a log of driftwood wobbled with each shove of the tide. Then the plovers disappeared. Aloft, Valencia assumed, although she couldn’t see them above her, and something told her to check where they had gone. The sand was soft, swallowing her ankles. The water flushed around her shins. Ledges in the walls of the cove looked to Valencia like balconies, and she wondered if the plovers were up there, watching her like a pair of white-haired patrons in a horseshoe-shape theater.
Then she saw it. It was more of a chute than a path, erosion-carved, a long trough through the soft-stoned bluff. From its base, littered with the froth of tide, Valencia could tell that it would lead her out of the cove and up off the disappearing beach: a narrow gash in the bluff that would rise and widen and spill into a dry arroyo next to the cottage. The path would save her; she knew this the moment the pebbles pressed into her feet. And she would rise to the top of the bluff where Condor’s Nest huddled, then a lone cottage aglow with the light of the coil-handled stove. She wouldn’t meet her future husband that night. No, that night she would pass in the barn with Beatrice’s serape and steaming dung warming her. Her meeting with Dieter would come the following morning, when her blouse had dried stiffly and a burlap sack, split open and tied with rope, revealed her long legs, and that meeting would prove fateful: nine months later Margarita Sprengkraft would be calling Valencia “Frau Stumpf,” and Siegmund, with his poor eyesight, would be born.
And Sieglinde would always assume that because her mother had come from the ocean, she herself was in some way its child—a statement Siegmund found excessively dramatic. “Only a girl would say such a stupid thing,” he’d sniff, the red tail of his sleeping cap snaking across his shoulder and his spectacles slipping down his nose.
“Only a boy would care about what a girl had to say,” Sieglinde would reply.
She was thinking of this one afternoon in the late summer of 1914. Dieter had asked Sieglinde and her brother to sit down to the kitchen table. She knew something had happened because it wasn’t suppertime and it wasn’t anyone’s birthday. She was eleven, already a busy lobstergirl, and she said, “Will it take long? I haven’t much time.” She’d been on her way to the beach when Dieter and Valencia called her inside. Sieglinde was planning to swim out to her pots before high tide.
“Sit down and be quiet for once,” said Siegmund, pinching her arm. At the table, she could hardly sit still in her bathing dress, which revealed her shoulders—much to Dieter’s, and Siegmund’s, concern. That very minute the tide was so low that she could have, had she been out on the beach instead of trapped in the dark cottage, snatched up purple sea urchins by the dozen, to say nothing of her potential lobster haul. She had struck a deal with her father—one that only years later would come to seem unfair—that for every dollar’s worth of fish and lobster she sold at market, Sieglinde could keep a penny; she was no more greedy than most children, but a penny gleamed perhaps just a little more brightly in Sieglinde’s eye.
The shuttered window in the alcove left the kitchen dim while the day outside the split-gate door pulsed brightly. Waiting at the long table where every night she ate her papas locas, their red skins bitter in lime juice, Sieglinde—possessed of a fearlessness she doubted she would ever outgrow—impatiently swung her legs from the bench.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” Dieter said at last. “Something quite serious.”
“Now what?” said Sieglinde, dreading September, which meant the return to the schoolhouse at the edge of the stinky salt lagoon where Miss Winterbourne, pinned up in blouse and bun, patrolled the aisle with a flyswatter that would land on any young student’s hand whenever a stray chirp flew from a mouth. Swat, swat, swat, Miss Winterbourne had snapped the flat of the swatter against Sieglinde’s hand so many times that it no longer hurt; once during the previous school year Miss Winterbourne had struck Sieglinde all day and the girl had never flinched. Sieglinde had sat tall and extended a hand for another swat, like a princess waiting for a kiss. And oh! did she think she was smart, certainly smarter than sour Miss Winterbourne, smarter than anyone else in that mouse-guarded school, especially Charlotte Moss, who sucked on the end of her hair curls and asked for extra-credit homework in expository writing. Sieglinde thought this until the last day of school, until a minute before Miss Winterbourne rang her handbell for the final time that term and moved to Sieglinde with the flyswatter and smacked her across the cheek. Then Miss Winterbourne rang her bell, and Sieglinde, against her will, broke into tears. Siegmund had to carry her home, her legs wrapped around his waist.
Now, in August, with Miss Winterbourne waiting around the corner of month’s end, Sieglinde couldn’t guess what could be more serious than what lay ahead for her.
“A war has broken out,” Dieter began.
“In Europe,” Valencia added.
“And Germany’s at the center of it.”
“What does this mean?” asked Siegmund. A grim seriousness had overtaken him.
“It means that the world has changed before our very eyes. In one long day, everything has changed. We’ll have to change too.”
“What does this have to do with us?” Sieglinde asked.
“Germany has become the enemy,” her father said.
She wasn’t listening to him; she was thinking about her lobster haul: she could expect six in each pot at this time of year. Already she counted the coins those would bring at the gutting house, and the palmful of pennies she would keep. She’d been saving for a felt hat with a snowy eagle feather she’d seen at Margarita’s; it would take her more than a year, but she had set the trap of her mind upon that hat. Once a month she would visit Margarita’s to try it on, cocking her head in the mirror and announcing that one day she’d return for the chapeau.
“How can you be sure this business in Europe has anything to do with us?” she asked her father.
“Sieglinde, jovencita,” said Valencia. “It’s the world we’re talking about. The world’s in trouble.”
“I don’t care.”
“Would you shut up for once?” snapped Siegmund. “You wouldn’t know anything serious if it hit you over the head.” And despite how much she teased Siegmund, it stung her worse than anything, certainly worse than Miss Winterbourne’s swatter, when he scolded her. At eleven she was in love with her brother, the way other girls were in love with their horses, or their fathers.