By Natalie Singer

Prologue

I am in a courtroom. The color palette is creamy shells and brass, cold emerald lawyers’ lamps and spit-polished mahoganies. I am in the corner in a witness box. The audience stares at me hard. I have been put here to testify about what it is to be female, a sister, a mother (though I am not a mother, I am a sixteen-year-old girl). To testify about adultery. I am asked who I am. What I am. Who we have allowed inside of us. I must defend the women in my family, all the way back, and every girl and woman who ever was. Something fundamental is breaking and I will be responsible. The black veins of the marble floor look like cheese mold, cords of rot. I open my lips and out comes . . . vapor.

Formation

There are four stages of interrogation; the first is called Formation. Before the interrogation comes the need for it to occur and the mandate to undertake it. At this stage, the framework is established for how the interrogation may be determined, including the level of coercion that is permitted or not allowed.

Affair might be too strong a word

Not too strong. Too strange? I am writing about becoming obsessed with a state. A state of the U. S. Can you stalk a state? A state of being, yes. A state of becoming. A state of belonging, of trying to belong. The thirty-first state. First state I love. The state of love.

Will I always remember California?

You can trace the spine of a state. Trace a line south from the hollow of her neck down along her vertebrae, from wet hills to rough mountains to reckless caverns dripping in the middle heady like verdant jungles, like the misted tropics they are, course along vertiginous roads that are cliffs to milkshake rivers below, gush with fossil-mud, with leftover dreamed of gold, with rockslides crowned in fog, dodge prehistoric pinecones the size of footballs and the weight of watermelons, seed-sodden and slimy, alive in your hands.

You can trace this spine along sandy banks and red-and-black mineral-striped earth, knolls like the rolling hips of women through freeway knots and pastel beach towns and strip malls that blur into one another and low-slung fruit-packing plants and Art Deco marquees on main streets dead and gasping and queues of orange trees heavy with reward. You can push your way through the tip of the desert, blurry at the edges, past dusty antique shops, shell-shocked desert huts and counterculture dome homes, matchstick palms leaning into each other for company and anchoring you always to the here even as it changes and changes and changes.

How do we know this is true?

Geography is a never-ending dialogue between the real and the imagined.

For approximately two hundred years, between the sixteenth century and the year 1747, when King Ferdinand VI of Spain issued a decree to the contrary, Europeans believed California was an island, cut off from the mainland by a liminal oceanic channel and depicted on hand-drawn maps as a kind of mystical floating member (“the large and goodly island of California” one 1625 map by Englishman Henry Briggs labeled it).

According to a study of the myth by essayist Rebecca Solnit, who uncovers the following information with the help of G. Salim Mohammed, a digital and rare maps librarian at Stanford, the first mention of the island of California comes in 1510 from Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo’s Las Sergas de Esplandián. Maps, like many artistic creations, are referential, so this first mention, fully imagined by Montalvo, became de rigueur on maps that followed. Even when Father Eusebio Kino’s travels from 1698 to 1701 confirmed the firm attachment of California to the mainland and documented that attachment on a map entitled “A Passage by Land to California,” it took another half century for the island to find itself reattached in other North American atlases.

Dreams have a way of inking themselves onto history the way a cartographer’s colors seep brightly into parchment.

PART THREE

Interaction

The Taylor adults usually come home around six, arriving simultaneously in their separate cars, swinging through the garage door into the kitchen, and quizzing the girls about homework and school and friends and, always, the progress made on their long list of household chores.

One night in the late fall it is dark when the Taylors sweep in, as dark as when I wake up before dawn to make it to my early classes and be done in time to pick up the girls in time for their school bell.

How was the afternoon? asks Sharon, dropping her bulging suede day planner on the counter. Did they get their homework done?

We had too many chores, Kayla tosses out, before I can tell them that the girls had told me they had no homework that day.

Michael kicks the fridge door closed and cracks a beer and says to me, We really need you to get a handle on their schedules.

Yeah, pipes Kennedy.

What?

No dinner started? Sharon gasps suddenly, glaring at Kacee, who has been chopping mushrooms at a furious pace since the parents pulled in.

I’m confused. It seems like we’ve been busy since four — we did some French conversation; we cleaned the bathroom and folded laundry; and then there was that dance breakout session . . . I open my mouth to tell Sharon and Michael more about our afternoon, but they have turned their backs and are huddled now over the mail, murmuring together. The girls have united in kitchen duty, drawers are banging, a gas burner clicks. The family has folded in. I’m not needed here anymore, I realize, my day abruptly done.

I wave bye and close the front door behind me, leaving the Taylors together in their steaming-up kitchen. As I slide into my car and turn my key, a feeling falls over me. I might have had a family like this, I think. Not the step-family that was destined to dissolve before it even formed; not my dad’s new family playing out without me; but my real family. My “family of origin,” I mouth, trying out the new term I picked up at school in Sociology 101.

In an alternate life, I would be driving home now to my own parents, to a family like the Taylors.

I curve tiredly around the dark on-ramp onto the wide belt of the southbound 680. Stop it, I tell myself. Why shouldn’t they have a nice family?

I pick up speed. I had a house like theirs once.

The last time I saw it was seven years ago, the white brick house with black shutters and the address, Twenty-Four, spelled out elegantly in cursive above the black garage door. Like Alice, I can slip back there through a secret hole, down a tunnel and into a flip-flopped land where the now transforms into the then, where the seemingly magical is still happening as ordinarily as ever.

There was a square yard in the back, with a swing set and a thick maple tree in the center. It took all day, every Sunday each fall, for our father to keep up with that tree. It shed relentlessly, red and yellow and orange and brown leaves bigger than my head, crunchy floaters that sailed down like slow-motion patches of quilt. Maybe there was an long summer one year or an early winter another, but that silent shower of fat fall leaves was as predictable as our father’s hands wrapped around the rake handle. There we are: me, my brother Steven, in our mittens, scrambling around the piles as our dad formed them, belly-flopping into the leaves when he turns his head in the other direction, laughing, wiping noses on our sleeves.

They told us they were getting divorced in spring, just as the lilac tree was coming into bloom underneath their bedroom window. I sat on my parents’ bed, my treasured collection of neon jelly bracelets sticking to my arm. This is the detail to which my mind affixes itself (not her crying or his crying or the strange, gelatinous quality of my own tears): That upcoming summer, after years of my pleading and cajoling, we were finally supposed to become members of the community swim club. Our parents had promised. At last, it was going to be the summer of cabana chairs and hot dogs and days splashing on pool noodles with the Haltons, my best friend Erika’s family, who had been pool members for two years already.

Instead, my father moved out and our house went up for sale.

Who lives in that house now? I wonder, the Taylors’ neighborhood receding fast behind me. If I squeeze my eyes tightly, I am sure I could picture myself there still, in front of my big bedroom window, reading Judy Blume, watching for snow.

Am I an island?

When I return to San Francisco for my last year of college, Gold Country feels like a complicated dream that had placed me several Thomas Guide pages from horror but which helped to blow out some of the fog from my mind. I am still afraid of trying to make connections with new people, and I talk very little with my family about my life or what I am thinking about my future.

But I am thinking about it, and I find the idea of outmaneuvering silence hopeful. In Gold Country I had quietly moved my body all over a landscape like a chess board, while a killer had quietly moved his body across the very same scene. But I had also interviewed everyday people, teenagers with their high school diplomas fresh in hand, farmers eyeing the creep of Bay Area subdivisions, a hairdresser who dreamed of saving enough so she could afford a trip to Hawaii. As a journalist, I will be able to facilitate other people telling their stories, to exercise their own voices. Maybe if I can help other people speak, I can become brave enough to speak in my own life. I will have to forge a new way of being in my mind and in my body without concern for who is watching me, or not watching. This scares me. I doubt that I deserve this unapologetic pleasure.

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Natalie Singer is the author of the new memoir California Calling: A Self-Interrogation (Hawthorne Books, March 2018). Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in journals, magazines, and newspapers including Proximity, Literary Mama, The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, Alligator Juniper, Brain, Child and Full Grown People. She has taught writing inside Washington State’s psychiatric facility for youth and Seattle’s juvenile detention center, and she has worked as a reporter at newspapers around the West. Natalie earned her MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from the University of Washington. Originally from Montreal, she lives in Seattle. You can find more of her writing plus events and updates at nataliesingerwrites.com, at @Natalie_Writes, and at on Facebook.

Pick up your own copy of Natalie Singer’s California Calling: A Self-Interrogation HERE.