which the builder could-n’t sell because of the housing project. She watched it from the time construction started through the year a big real estate agency had it listed until a homemade “for sale” sign appeared. Then she had Dad call and make an offer, which couldn’t have been much more than the construction costs.
Like I said, I was eight then, and my brothers were thirteen, fifteen, seventeen, and twenty. I had my own room and the boys shared two bedrooms. There was a patio in back and a big kitchen and a living room with pale carpet that my mother really loved. The only thing wrong with the house was both an advantage and a disadvantage: it sat just across the road from a stretch of cliffs about twenty feet high. To look out the picture window you would think you were right on the water. The cliffs dropped off steeply, with red sandstone terraces spreading out at the bottom. The whole stretch along there is a park now, but then it didn’t belong to anybody and we were free to scramble up and down and play in the tide pools and race the waves when they roared in from the middle of the Pacific.
Nothing ever happened to me and my friends, we were old enough to have a little sense, I guess. But the place is not as safe for little kids, and when Will and I moved back in when I started the LVN program, one of the things I tried to teach him was that he wasn’t supposed to cross the road unless he had a grownup with him. Didn’t take, obviously, but I guess what matters is all’s well that ends well. Aside from the limp, he was okay. He even surfed for a long time.
I say that like surfing was a badge of accomplishment, as if it was some sort of ultimate proof of fitness or skill or well-being or rank. Silly ideas left over from when I was in high school, I suppose; it’s strange how they stick to you. Lord knows I’ve put a lot of that stuff behind me, but there are things that are still there.
Girls didn’t surf back then. No, that’s not completely true. There were a handful who did: all thin, strong, blonde girls who could handle the big boards, which hadn’t yet been replaced by balsa and fibreglass ones. But I wasn’t one of them. Girls like me didn’t surf, partly because it was too expensive and partly because it just wasn’t done. A lot of energy went into avoiding things that weren’t done back then.
Chuck says that high schools are all alike—you have the ins and the outs, and the rich and the poor. He says that at his high school the football and basketball players were the stars. He says he knows all about it. Well, maybe, I say, but he is from eastern Kentucky, from a little town on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He never took me back there, so I can’t say firsthand, but it sounds less like Point Loma than like Alpine or Julian in the Cuyamaca Mountains where Danny and Will and I lived for a while. What I do know is that for a long time the rest of the world looked to the California Coast to find out what was going on, like we were golden kids who cast golden shadows. Precursors, foreshadowers of what would happen elsewhere, as Mrs. Rutherford would have said—maybe did say—in English class.
We went to Point Loma High School, which at that time was full to overflowing with kids born in the years following World War II. There were 547 kids in my graduating class, and about that many in both tenth and eleventh grades too. A pretty big school, housed partly in an old building built back in the 1920s when San Diego started to expand. The original building was torn down a few years ago when everyone got so worried about earthquakes, but back then it sat on the top of the range of hills that formed the Point and protected San Diego Bay. No other building was as tall, and the jet fighters taking off from the naval air station at North Island just skimmed over the top. Teachers had to stop talking when they roared by, and once I remember looking out the windows of Mrs. Rutherford’s third-floor class to see a plane level with us. You could actually see the pilot in the cockpit.
This was not the time of a shooting war, of course. Vietnam was just around the corner, and Korea was in the past. But the Cold War was always in the background. Every once in a while as we were growing up there’d be something in the papers about the targets the Soviets would go for in the event of nuclear war, and we were surrounded by them. North Island, the fleet in the Bay, the airport, the aerospace plants, the research facilities: where we lived and went to school always showed up in those “circles of maximum destruction” that surrounded the targets on the maps the Civil Defense folks put out.
And the town was full of military personnel. When we were thirteen or fourteen, and just beginning to look grown-up, it was kind of fun to have sailors try to pick us up when we were waiting for a ride downtown or something like that. But later we got wary. Not that they were dangerous, they were just outsiders, and we weren’t.
When you’re sixteen or seventeen or eighteen what matters is what is happening then. Kids like me don’t think too far in the future. I expected to have some good times in high school and then go to San Diego City College and then work for a while. I’d get married, I’d be happy. Mrs. Rutherford changed that, though, when she saw that I took physics in my senior year.
Gus Fraser said that he and I were her “equal opportunity” kids. Not equal opportunity as in “civil rights,” because we were white as they come, but as in “encouraging some poor kids.” My mother would have caterpillared if she heard that, because we definitely weren’t poor, we had this nice house and several cars and always more than enough to eat. And Gus’s dad did even better than my dad. He was a skilled tool and die maker at Convair, he was the one all the engineers wanted to get when they were making a prototype for a missile or a jet plane, he was at the top of the wage scale, and he worked lots of overtime.
But Point Loma was a school designed for the children of doctors and lawyers and navy officers and corporate executives and rocket scientists. They all expected their kids to go to college, they wanted advanced placement this and enriched that, and they saw that their kids were signed up for all of them, whereas my folks didn’t see the point. Office practice and business math, maybe a little Spanish because that way you could talk to customers from Tijuana: yes. But doing three years of a foreign language and biology, chemistry, physics, and math beyond geometry wasn’t necessary. For a girl it might not even be desirable.
Gus didn’t care what he took as long as he could go surfing when the surf was up. That’s why he liked classes on the third floor, because you could see out across the low buildings to the beach. On days when the surf was up, he and his friends left at lunchtime. That meant that he missed a lot of labs and got sent to the vice-principal’s office often and just barely got by on the exams.
But he got by, he never flunked flat out, which says a lot about just how smart he was, so I guess it’s not so surprising that Mrs. Rutherford pushed him. She pushed me, too, which means that she must have seen something in me that I didn’t see myself.
So there I was in physics senior year, on a lab team with Gus and R.J. and some girl who was already talking about going back east to school. I felt out of place, but Gus took it all in stride.
“Hey, man, my mom said you’d be back here this year, but I didn’t think we’d have any classes together,” Gus said to R.J. as soon as we were told to go over and check out the equipment. “How’s your mom doing?”
I didn’t know it then, but Gus’s mother and R.J.’s mother had been friends for a long time. That was unusual in a stuck-up place like Point Loma where a doctor’s wife and a skilled mechanic’s wouldn’t know each other ordinarily unless they were on the same PTA committee or something like that. But somehow they’d discovered that they both hated housework and liked to drink martinis on the beach in the afternoon, so there was a long period when R.J.’s mother would paint while Gus’s mother did horoscopes and the boys would play together.
“She’s better,” R.J. said. I remembered hearing something about her having breast cancer, and from the way he looked around quickly at me and the other girl, I guessed he didn’t want to talk about that. It was bad enough to have cancer, but the very term “breast cancer” was embarrassing.
Our
