Pasadena Page 7
“We’re going to have to change some things around here,” said Dieter. “Starting with our names. People will begin to blame us.”
It made no sense to Sieglinde that just because some Germans wanted to kill some Belgians on a mustard field she’d have to change her name. Her German name meant everything to her—because it was hers and no one else had it and it sounded pretty on the tongue, like a command. She nearly asked, “Just where is Germany, anyway?” But she knew this much: she knew it was much farther than her mother’s Mexico.
“What are we going to change it to?” asked Siegmund.
“We can’t call ourselves Stumpf anymore. We’re going to change our name to Stamp.”
“Stamp?” Sieglinde cried. “You mean like a postage stamp?”
Valencia took her hand and reassured her that most girls dreamed of growing up and taking another name. “It’s only happening to you earlier than the rest.”
But Sieglinde hadn’t dreamed about this, and she said, “You mean like stamp out your brains? I’m going to jump on top of you and stamp, stamp, stamp you to death?”
“Please shut up.” Gently, Siegmund’s hand fell on hers.
“And, Siegmund. From now on we’re going to call you Edmund.”
“That sounds all right.” He was seventeen, and recently a downy mustache had pushed forth upon his lip, and a creep of hair up his thigh, and a wet-soil scent, musky from his body’s coves.
“Edmund?” Sieglinde cried. “Look at Edmund. Master Edmund! Ha ha ha on you!”
Then they turned to her, and she saw herself in all of them. The Stumpfs of Condor’s Nest weren’t Mexicans or Germans, she realized. They were Californians, a jumble of history that had become their own.
“And for you,” Dieter began. “We’ll call you Linda.”
Her legs stopped swinging from the bench. “Linda? Do I look like a Linda to you?”
Her mother said she did.
“But that’s silly. My name’s Sieglinde. You can’t change my name just like that.” She hesitated. “Can you?” She sat motionless. Their eyes fell on her; she felt something move beneath her—was it the bench, or something else? Then she knew, in the late afternoon in the late summer—with the Euphilotes butterflies fluttering above the bluff, with her buoy bobbing in the ocean—that something in her life, something beyond her name, was changing today. The sunlight pressed through the crack in the split-gate door. Something waited for her outside in the yellow light. And before she knew what she was doing, Sieglinde Stumpf, now Linda Stamp—eleven years old and already with a history of improbably surviving scarlet fever, a spooked horse’s hoof, and a baby stingray—ran from the table, bursting into the dooryard where the bantams preened and the hinny grazed, running down the arroyo to the beach, screaming, not aloud but in her head, “Linda Stamp! Linda Stamp! What kind of girl will be Linda Stamp?”
2
Not long after the Kaiser rolled across the hillocks of Belgium in the lavender-skyed summer of 1914, Dieter Stumpf, who now introduced himself as David Stamp, packed a roll of canvas trousers, a Catalina-wool sweater, his little cap with the earflaps, a rifle, and a pair of pliers. “I’m off to war.” It seemed like an impossible outing for the old onion farmer: gray in the beard, freckled over, knuckle swollen like a mutton joint. As he set off, his rucksack was stooping him, the rifle oversize in his hands. “Are you sure you should go?” Linda asked. But her father saluted farewell, and Linda watched him move over the ridge, his roll strapped to his shoulders, whistling “Born in the Ocean, Died in the Sea.” Charlotte Moss, whom by default Linda considered her best friend, came to witness the departure, scribbling notes about it in a little pad. “Where do you think he’s headed?” asked Charlotte, the daughter of a seal hunter, her head spun with woolly hair. When he returned an hour later because he’d forgotten his lucky mallet, she asked him. “To the front with the boys. Don’t worry, I’ll be back.” With the mallet swinging from his belt, Dieter departed again, this time for good.
Four letters arrived in four years, each at Christmas, each from a town along the front: Rheims, Soissons, Vimy, Ypres. Linda would watch Valencia read the letters over and over during the following winter months, pulling the pages from her work dress and tucking them back in until eventually, usually by Easter, the paper had flaked apart. Linda didn’t understand it—how her mother had come to miss him so—and she was vaguely certain that such longing would never occur in her own life. Linda promised herself that she’d never miss anyone more than he missed her. She’d study her mother and wonder precisely when Valencia had become the woman she was now: bent at the washtub, lye-scrubbing the floor planks, prodding Linda to her chores. “Back to work,” Valencia would say, steering Edmund to the fields and Linda into the ocean. Sold at market, Linda’s winter catch of the kelp-colored tidepool johnny and the long-nosed baby shark would bring more money than Edmund’s sweet onions. He always stored a hundred-pound sack beneath his bed, and in the dark morning, when Valencia called them to rise, they would look at each other in that stunned moment of waking, and each would find the eyes of the other red and slick with tears.
With their father gone, Linda proposed that they revert to their old names.
“Sieglinde Stumpf is dead. Why can’t you get used to Linda Stamp?” Edmund would say this seriously, with a touch of pride in his cocked chin. Sometimes, Linda hardly believed they were of the same blood. She thought this more and more as time went on, late at night while the kerosene lamp burned. With the quilt taut at her chin, she’d try to sleep while Edmund read. In Dieter’s absence he tried to teach himself to read German, borrowing the three books Dieter had brought over in the same crate as the coal stove: the three volumes of Gibbon, nearly three thousand pages, all in a language that felt to Linda as foreign as Chinese. What was he thinking, staying up late with a little dictionary and a pencil, wasting all that kerosene? “What could you possibly learn from the Romans?” she asked, only to receive a hurt frown in reply. Once she stole one of the books and wrote her name on the inside cover and a message to deter a potential thief. She hid it within her sheets, sleeping with it, its hard spine pressed against her thigh. In the morning, Edmund’s eyes were redder than usual, as if he had whimpered for the missing volume through the night, and when she pulled back her bedclothes he cautiously removed the book from her sheets, his head turned and his lips pursed, as if he were performing an unbearable task.
But often at night Linda couldn’t sleep, what with the lamp shedding its light past midnight and Siegmund perpetually turning pages in their quiet cottage. She tried to focus on the waves breaking against the bluff, counting their intervals, always surprised when one crashed stronger than the rest. She’d lie awake, her fingers threaded behind her head, and she’d listen to the ocean and to her brother clear his throat or produce a tiny, gentle hmmmm, and even after he at last extinguished the lamp her eyes would remain open and her ears would register the farm’s every sound, her brother’s every soft dream-groan. When the moon was full, she could make out his face across from her, the way he sucked his lip in his sleep or brought a curled fist to his eye. He’d grown sturdier in recent months, transforming in an almost secretive manner: his short arms thickened with muscle, and as if out of nowhere, a tiny tomahawk of an Adam’s apple had appeared in his throat. In the dark, the hours passed more slowly, and Linda had time to think of another world, where the fields didn’t reek of onions and they didn’t have to go to school and Edmund and she could live together. She’d imagined a house on a hill somewhere, overlooking a valley, and this imprecise but gleaming notion of the future would keep Linda up through the night. No matter how tired she was, she’d rise before dawn and wrap herself in the rusted-button sweater knit by the Alsatian who lived next to Margarita’s and pull on her rubber boots. Edmund would turn his back to her and step into his trousers, balancing clumsily on a single foot. She couldn’t help looking, and she’d notice the fine hair on his legs, like the thin fur on the dogs’
bellies. It occurred to Linda that her brother was leaping ahead without her, physically becoming someone else. She wanted to whisper across the narrow gap that separated their beds: “Edmund, what’s happening to you?” She wanted to ask Valencia as well: What had happened to the girl Linda had heard about? The one who boldly fled the Santa Susana? Why had she changed when she took the name Stumpf? And changed even more when she called herself Mrs. Stamp? Linda didn’t understand that one misstep could determine the outcome of a girl’s life; despite the evidence, she didn’t want to believe that a life, her life, was a scaffold of fragile constructions, flimsy and easily toppled. If Dieter had been around, she’d have asked him too: Do you remember anything about your youth in the Black Forest? Tell me about Schwarzwald! But she doubted that Dieter recalled anything more than how to hammer a sheet of tin and bend back the lip of a cup. And this was one of the first things Linda would profoundly misunderstand: she was wrong to think a man could cleanly shed his past when trying on a new identity. No, it was more like the silt at the bottom of a swamp, a new layer churning over the previous, sifting into a mucky stew, black and moist and eventually becoming deep enough to swallow a girl alive. And so each morning, after a night of sleepless sleep, Linda would pick her way down the arroyo’s path to the beach and cast her rod. As the sun rose, her snelled hook and gut line would haul in red-tail surfperch and three-finned tomcod, she’d struggle with a wandering baby barracuda and throw back an undersize green opaleye, and Linda would cast and reel until her sack was full and writhing with life.
3
By the time she was sixteen, Linda was known as the best lobster-catcher in Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea—acclaim she welcomed but would later regret. It wasn’t because she had a dozen buoys; in fact, she had floated only one, yellow with a red stripe. It wasn’t because she had strung dozens of pots along the pot warp; no, in fact she had lowered only eight to the ocean floor, hooking them to the line and laying the traps in the silty sand like a family of coffins. “Only eight!” one fisherman declared. “My buoy has fifty!” Truth to tell, Linda was known as the best lobstergirl on this part of the coast because of a customized lobster pot that she never discussed, not because she thought of it as a secret but because there was no one to tell—except Edmund, and he said he wasn’t interested. If he had been, she would have told him that her pots were longer than most and were made up of slender live-oak slats with gaps between them so wide that the pots looked incapable of trapping anything. Were you to stand one of her pots on its side on a dark night, you might not see anything but a box of air. Inside the pot, though, was a fatal lair. There were two rooms separated by a gut-line netting that Linda, lying awake in the middle of the night, knitted on her needle. The netting too was almost invisible, and more than once Edmund had tripped over a pile of it coiled between their beds. The lobster would pass through the entrance into the first room—the parlor, Linda called it. Then it would slip into the second room, the kitchen, where the bait waited. The bait was another secret: Off Condor’s Nest floated a dense kelp forest, and at its roots lived both the rock lobster and the sheep crab. Over the years, Linda had tried herring, sardines, pogies, mackerel, the head and backbone of a redfish, even a jelly. But more than anything else, Linda had learned, lobsters devoured crabs. So as part of her daily work, Linda would catch eight large sheep crabs and give the lobsters a hand by cracking their saucer-shaped shells. There wasn’t a day, except in the blackest winter storm, when Linda didn’t swim through the kelp forest to catch the crabs and lay them in the kitchens.
One day in the spring of 1918, she caught the biggest lobster anyone could recall: it weighed in at almost thirty pounds on the scale at the gutting house and measured nearly three feet in length. Mr. Fleisher called it Lottie, and sold it on Linda’s behalf to someone in Pasadena who was throwing a banquet for the governor. Charlotte Moss came to see Linda to ask about the lobster. She told Charlotte everything, proudly revealing the secret of the sparsely slatted pots and the sheep crabs. Charlotte was compact and walked with an awkward gait, as if something had fallen on her hip and left it dented. In an attempt to bring her wiry curls under control she often employed a blue satin bow and palmfuls of Seroco Princess hair tonic, but nothing worked better than scissors and a baseball cap. Charlotte liked to wear trousers with a matching epaulette jacket, and if anyone ever said anything to her she’d answer, “This is just the way it’s going to be.” Linda liked this about Charlotte—not the somber uniform itself, but Charlotte’s vision of herself, the sense of her already having transformed herself into the person she wanted to become.
It was Lottie the lobster that revealed Charlotte’s ambition to become a newspapergirl; for Charlotte, who had sat in the yard biting her lip while Linda went on about the netting and the sheep crabs, left Condor’s Nest and walked directly to the weekly Baden-Baden Bee, where she handed in her first thousand-word article. Not five days after Linda’s greatest catch, the story ran on the front page, proclaiming Linda the best lobstergirl around. The article also informed the lonely-eyed fishermen who lived in the blackies of her secret pots and the sheep crab. Within a year, Linda, who had thought of the kelp forest off Condor’s Nest as her very own, could count twenty-three buoys, each painted a different color, floating around hers. And it didn’t even take twelve months for her to have trouble catching eight sheep crabs in an afternoon; and the crabs she managed to haul were smaller, almost imperceptibly at first, but narrower across the shell nonetheless. And soon thereafter the lobsters too, although always waiting in the kitchens, had less heft in their tails, less reach in their antennae. Linda’s lobsters now left little impression on Margarita’s great fat face as she weighed them and gave Linda, in exchange, an increasingly meager stack of coins, all of which Linda had to hand over to Valencia, everything but the promised penny on the dollar.
It was because of this diminished stack of coins that in March of 1919, as Edmund’s birthday approached, Linda found herself short of the necessary funds to buy her brother the gift she knew he wanted most: an atlas of California, two feet tall by two feet wide, with accordion maps and a red ribbon marker and gold lettering stamped on the morocco spine. For months she had eyed it behind Margarita’s counter, and when she finally asked to see it Margarita’s eyebrows rose. “I’m afraid that’s twelve dollars.” And then, “Linda, you and I both know your lobster haul isn’t what it used to be.” Linda proposed paying for it on layaway, but Margarita never sold to the Stamps on credit. “They’re good enough people,” she’d say at her counter to anyone who would listen. “But a little too close to the edge to extend a loan. It would take only a fire or a flood for everything to collapse around them.” Instead, Linda decided, she would throw Edmund a picnic, although it wouldn’t be much of a party: just herself and Edmund and Valencia and Charlotte Moss, who by now wrote a weekly column for the Bee called “The Whisper of the Sea.”
Linda read in Rob Wagner’s California Almanack that at sunset on Edmund’s birthday the tide would be low and the beach wide. She spent the day at Valencia’s stove, stirring the pot of chicken à la Providence, frying the oysters and the salsify fritters. On the beach, she secured an old blanket in the sand and pitched an awning over it with four fishing rods and the sheet from her bed. From above, the fluttering white sheet looked like the sail of a grounded schooner—a shipwreck on the beach.
She spent the afternoon hiking up and down the bluff, carrying the sandwiches and the jug of lemonade and collecting driftwood for a bonfire. How much easier things would be if there was a staircase leading to the beach, and not for the first time she thought of cutting the lumber and buying the two thousand wagon-box nails and erecting the one hundred steps herself; she had tried to interest Edmund in the project late one night but he had only turned away and told her to go to sleep.
She felt that some sort of ritual should commemorate Edmund’s advancement into adulthood. She thought of a Maypole, but didn’t know how she could get a big-enough pole down t
o the beach. She thought perhaps they should sacrifice something in the bonfire, something horrible like a leopard shark, but she had never caught a leopard shark in her life. Maybe she should prepare songbooks for singing around the fire, but what would they sing? “Born in the Ocean, Died in the Sea”? “The Farmer from France”? “True Love in the Afternoon”? None of those sounded right, but as she shoveled out the bonfire pit she sang to herself:
O, she was born in the Ocean
And died in the Sea
A girl of emotion
In love with me
With each thrust of the shovel, Linda feared more and more that the party would disappoint her brother. Edmund would hike down to the beach and they would look at one another and have nothing to say or do. He might say, “I’m too busy for all this.” She imagined his voice: “Linda, please leave me alone.” He would climb back up the sea cliff, and Charlotte might whisper, “That Linda. She lives in her own world, doesn’t she?” Linda overheard Margarita say just that once down at the store, as Linda was off in a corner of the shop trying on the little felt hat with the bald-eagle feather. Over the years, the hat had become known as “Linda’s sombrero,” and Linda knew, even if no one believed her, that one day it would be hers. “I wonder sometimes why Linda just can’t keep her feet on the ground,” Edmund once said to Valencia. “Who on earth taught her to reach for the stars?” And Charlotte Moss once wrote in her breezy column: Guess which Baden-Baden fishergirl dreams of one day leaving us behind? What was wrong with them?, Linda asked herself, her shovel sinking into the sand and then flipping each spadeful over her shoulder. Sink and flip, sink and flip, and Linda’s bonfire pit deepened, and only when she struck water did Linda turn and see that for the last several minutes each spadeful of sand had landed on her box of oyster sandwiches and chicken à la Providence.