First Ride

People will think I’m the worst daughter in the world for wanting to get out of my house the moment I gave my statement to paramedics and my brother arrived. I saw no reason for sticking around. I knew the gloom that hung over houses in the days after a death: Everything becomes a thick liquid everyone walks through, all through the motions of an afternoon, the arrival of relatives, the meals before the chapel visitation, the preparations before the funeral, the hours back at the house after the funeral, the morning hours the next day before the relatives begin scattering. And the phone calls. The explaining over and over again, to the exact word, what happened. The truth is, I didn’t know what happened. I had found my mother dead on the floor.

So I stayed all day at Joyce’s. There on the beach, with Kiki listening, I told her what had happened that morning. She had met my mother once or twice, and she knew a little about the drinking, the disappointment, but otherwise she only knew of her through me. Joyce hugged me then, and Kiki put her hand on my shoulder at the same time, and we stood there a moment like that, Jade tugging at the bottom of my shorts. No one suggested I go home. They seemed to know I wanted to stay.

I did call my brother, though, after we got back from our walk. He’d been contacting everyone in Mom’s address book, and others he thought should know, including our dad. That’s when I said I wouldn’t live with him. Just like that, not that anyone had suggested it, not that I had anything against my dad: I just wanted to get that out in case anyone got any ideas.

“There’s plenty of time to figure that out,” he said. “For the time being, you live here. I’ll be moving back in for a while.”

“I’ll be home by dinnertime,” I told him.

As you might expect, there was some awkwardness that morning and afternoon at Joyce’s. She and Kiki had let me stay through whatever they had planned for the day, and I was at least a mild interruption of that, but they would have probably gone back to The Local Grind or out to lunch if they really cared about being alone. I made myself useful by keeping Jade entertained. The two of them seemed to have an endless dialogue going, one that followed them from room to room and that I could only hear phrases of, not that they tried to shut me out. Certain words kept coming back into the conversation I was able to hear, and they reached me like ricochets off doors to other parts of the house: Molecular. Mother. Spiral. Consequence.

After lunch, I put Jade down for her nap and ended up falling asleep myself before the end of the book we were reading. When I woke up, I went to the big window on the ocean and saw Joyce and Kiki in the shallow water. Joyce was showing Kiki how to sit upright on a surfboard, legs dangling, about two-thirds of the length back from the nose. Kiki paddled gently to keep herself balanced. Then Joyce had her lay on her stomach on the board, as if a wave were coming her way. Kiki paddled fast in parallel to the shore, and when the last of a crashed wave approached her, she turned the board’s nose into it and rode up over the foam. After more simulations, the two of them moved out to deeper water, Kiki on her stomach paddling and Joyce swimming alongside, her hand on the rail of the board.

I get a feeling low in my stomach sometimes, a tightness, that doesn’t really have a name. It’s not hunger. It’s not fear. All I can say is that it appears at the saddest and happiest moments in my life. In a strange way, it’s how I know I’m in the middle of something really important. Some people will think this is stupid.

I watched them from the window, Kiki’s first tries on the two-foot waves, and her and Joyce’s laughter when she fell off. I laughed along with them. And I was crying too.

Then Kiki was running up the beach while Joyce stayed with the board in the shallow water. She was looking at me. She took two steps at a time up to the patio and stood there for a moment, out of breath.

“Joyce says to get a swimsuit from her dresser. I’ll watch Jade. She wants to give you a lesson.”

Since I always wear my bikini under my clothes, I was nearly undressed before Kiki finished talking. I did and did not think of my mom’s feelings about surfing. Which is to say I remembered them, and I thought about her when I chose to go down to the water anyway. Kiki kissed my forehead before I passed by her and out the door.

“Nice and easy. Relax,” Joyce was telling me as I sat on the board.

She had brought out her long board for our lessons, over nine feet. While I wouldn’t have wanted to lift it to the roof of a car—I’d get better at this in time—I loved its buoyancy, its solid balance. When I lay down on it, I felt the grit of sand trapped in layers and layers of wax floating above the Hobie logo, the grit that would chafe my stomach but keep my feet from slipping. In shallow water, I practiced paddling as Kiki had, and I brought myself up abruptly to a kneeling position, as if I were already carried by a developing wall and ready to stand on my feet. The board got wobbly. When a rush of foam came my way, I turned over on the board, disappearing under it, holding on, to see what it was like to have to force such a buoyant piece of fiberglass under a tumble of wave.

“Are you ready?” Joyce finally asked me.

The marine layer was probably three miles out over the water now, and the sun over that beach on my August birthday was hotter than it had been in weeks. Kiki and Jade waved to us from the big window. I felt the wonderful fatigue of muscles I had never quite used the way I had been using them. I felt that tightness near my waist. There was no way I was not going out to deeper water.

"Yes."

Kiki in California

That morning we walked on the beach was overcast, more like a morning in June than one in August. By afternoon, the marine layer would retreat miles off shore and the sun would come out. It was low tide, so we had a steep pitch of packed sand to ourselves, and piles of brown kelp the size of dinghies we had to walk around every few hundred feet. Sea birds dug for tiny crabs until we got too close, then they ran away. I held three-year-old Jade’s hand and lifted her in the air by both arms whenever the last creep of a wave slid under us.

“Back home,” Kiki said, “my office fills up with sun, and a lot of the detail around me dissolves, and I know I’m right here. I can smell it.”

“Better watch out for those waking dreams,” Joyce said. The two smiled.

Kiki was in town for her 20th high school reunion. Kiki’s friend Tony had known his sister would want to meet her once he found out about her line of work. He introduced them to each other at The Local Grind the morning before, and the two had hit it off. Whatever they had begun talking about the day before, I thought, they seemed to be picking up right then and continuing.

“All I ask of my clients is twenty minutes. Twenty minutes before you take the aspirin to cure the headache. Twenty minutes before you jump off the building. It doesn’t matter.” Kiki picked up a piece of driftwood.

Joyce held a feather. “I’m not saying I never had stress in my life. My marriage. My kids. They all seem perfect now, but for a long time I was just making it up, and no one could tell me I was doing the right thing.”

“When was the first time you thought something big was working in you?”

“You don’t think of it that way at the time, of course. Maybe when I was ten.”

Kiki tossed the piece of wood back on a pile of kelp. “Not the hand of something pushing you, like God. Not an angel whispering in your ear. More like a wind in a sail. Like tide under your boat.”

“A swell under your board.”

“Right.”

How can I convince you the most natural thing for me to do on the morning my mother died was to ride my bike to Joyce Hoffman’s house? To not mention what had happened? To pick up Jade when she ran to meet me at the door, to kiss her cheek and smell her lovely blonde hair? Joyce would be ready to go out for the morning, I thought, and I would be keeping my babysitting appointment, and something about the normalness of that appealed to me. Jade and I would lie on the floor next to the big window looking out on the ocean, and the two of us would read the book about shells or horses, and after a snack, if the fog was lifting, we would go outside and play the game about who could see the farthest. We would pick the most prominent piece of land to the south or north, usually Point Loma or Catalina, and give it a name like a new country.

“I see all the way to Flabbergast,” I would say.

“I see farther,” she would say.

“I see the island of Thorny Fish. No, it’s the Republic of Whale.”

Joyce was not going out after all, and Kiki was there at her house, and after they finished their coffee we all headed out for the walk I’ve been telling you about. I would have to tell Joyce at some point what had happened, but I probably wouldn’t be able to explain why I hadn’t stayed home.

When waves weren’t chasing us up the beach, I let go of Jade’s hand and let her run from one curiosity to another. As young as she was, she’d still been on enough of these walks not to be shocked by a jellyfish stranded too high up the beach, beyond the rescue of a wave. A dead gull did not faze her.

Keeping track of Jade, I could only keep track of snatches of what Joyce and Kiki talked about.

Joyce looked in the direction of San Clemente Island. “It’s never just medical or spiritual…” she said before her voice trailed off and I lost it

I couldn’t hear Kiki’s answer, then “…and that would mean more than anything else just relaxing, just allowing the inside to loosen its grip on you. The old book says, ‘The truth is at the bottom of the well.’”

I found out later they had both, over many years, taken different routes to similar conclusions. It was about believing in the body to restore itself and others. It was about believing in the invisible. It was about listening to the feel of the sand between your fingers or the taste of lemon or the sight of an jet threading the sky like a language being spoken to you at that very moment.

“I see all the way to that beach in Eel City,” Jade said.

When the two women turned in our direction, I said, “Joyce, I have to tell you about my mom.”

How My Mother Left Us

My mother didn’t always play it safe. When she was my age, she skated on the Venice boardwalk, miles north toward Santa Monica and miles back on wooden wheels whose bearings would pick up sand and need disassembly and cleaning. She and her friends were so talented—weaving in and out of crowds, forming high-speed chains that jumped over milk crates and children’s wagons along the way—they got auditions for “Roller Derby” at the Olympic Auditorium downtown. She was invited to skate for the L.A. Thunderbirds, she always told us, and almost did. And Ralph Valladares, the reigning male skater for the team, she almost married. “Then you would be named Abril,” she told me.

As it turned out, she married much later, to a man she didn’t talk about much, and I was the third and last child she had, at 42. Every month since the divorce, she’d get a check for $90, $30 for each of us, and that was about how much my dad counted in the house. Many years later, my older brother passed on what Mom had told him, that he was not abusive or violent, just thoughtless: The family would be out of money, eking it out until the next check, barely enough money in the house for milk, but come payday Dad would run off to Tijuana to bet on the bulls. Not a clue, was how my brother put it. I don’t know if those were Mom’s words.

Maybe she knew she didn’t have much time left. And maybe I was too dramatic earlier, to say she left us. The truth is, on my fourteenth birthday, I went to wake up Mom before I left the house for my ritual morning walk to the palisades to watch surfers. She was usually up before me, listening to loud AM radio in the bathroom, half-dressed in bra and panties, putting on make-up. But that morning I entered Mom’s bedroom and found her dead on the floor. A circle of red the size of a quarter was on her pillow. She lay on the floor next to her bed, as if she had gotten up but then decided abruptly to lay back down. A little crust of blood had formed below one of her nostrils. She looked asleep.

It was her heart, of course. I don’t know what I did at the very moment I realized this, only that I shook her a little, knowing it would change nothing, would not wake her up. Then I called my oldest brother. Then I called 911.

In the week that followed I learned from my grandparents about other relatives with tricky hearts, meaning those who did not smoke cigarettes all their lives and then die reluctantly in their mid-90’s. The autopsy found Mom had a bad kidney, and when doctors opened up her chest they found signs of previously undetected heart attacks. To this day, I know my mother’s death left a hole in me the exact size of that red quarter. What scares me is how deep the hole might go.

I don’t think it’s overstating to say my mother was not a happy woman. She had many happy moments, I’m sure. Every time they were together, she traded loving insults with my grandfather, often over their shared love of scotch. Slathered in baby oil, she was happy baking herself in the sun on our back patio, lost in a Harold Robbins novel. But she had three kids and no husband, and she must have been lonesome. She was a divorced Catholic, and must have felt disapproval coming at her from many directions. “What’s next?” she would say to us sometimes, apropos of nothing. Now I think she must have asked herself that, and maybe didn’t have an answer.


I saw her skate once, at one of those pole barns next to the strip mall where parents drop their kids for three hours while they go to Herberger's or Home Depot. My friends and I were surprised to find her parking the car where we thought she was only going to be dropping us off. To pulling a bag like a bowling bag from the trunk. To lacing up the skates on the bench inside, then launching herself forward on the long boards of the floor, as if that wall at the other end was just a curtain, an inconvenience, as if on the other side was an ocean, and a pier two miles in the distance, the one with the Ferris wheel, and all the day left for roaming.