“My agent is going to get me a part on that movie,” Tracy said. We were sitting in the tiny kitchen-slash-living-room on her Chris-Craft. It was warm and stuffy in the cabin and smelled of bilges and urine, but it was clean. The only dust was in the ledges of the portholes, and even though the ashtray on the kitchen counter was full, the dishes were put away; there was no clutter on the floor. Her mother, Sharon, was sunbathing on the deck. I could see her long, tanned legs through the cabin door, her short denim shorts tight on her thighs, a sprinkle of cellulite just by the hem, a heart and blue thorns melted into the freckles above her ankle.
I wanted to say something like, “Yeah, right,” or “Don’t you think they already have the actors picked out?” but I didn’t. More than anything, I just wanted to go home. I hadn’t been able to get out of playing with her. I was bored.
We were talking about The Hunt for the Red October. The submarine was now completed. It was the Russian sub, the star of the show, a red hammer and sickle having been painted on the side of the conning tower. Every morning that week, she’d been towed out of the basin by a tug for filming, and every night she returned. When she went by, people gathered on the dock or stuck their heads out of hatches to watch. It was the closest any of us had gotten to Hollywood, except, of course, my grandfather, who had pointedly ignored the proceedings.
“You see that deep fat fryer?” Tracy pointed to the galley counter. “My mom got it for her birthday. It’s really expensive. It makes french fries.”
“Cool,” I said. “We have one too.” We used it almost every night.
There was a thump, and the boat rocked suddenly; someone was coming on board. Our boat didn’t move as much when people came on board because it was big.
“Nice ass,” a booming voice said. Sharon shushed it. “Oh, sorry. Pardon my French.”
Al came into the cabin. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his skin glinted. Tattoos ran all along his muscled chest, and a faint line of curly, gray hair plunged down his tight stomach to the waist of his jeans. Tracy got up as he came in and swished her long hair back behind her shoulder. She kissed him on his stubbly cheek.
“Hey, sweetheart,” he said and slapped her butt. I jumped a little at the sound. His hand rested on the embroidery of her back pocket. I watched as his fingers pressed a little harder, testing something. Tracy swayed away from his hand, leading with her hips, as if they’d been dancing.
That’s when I saw it, when I understood why my parents wanted me to be nice to her. Tracy’s long legs and tight shorts, her halter tops; her mother’s even tighter shorts and lower-cut tops, as if she were competing; the way this man’s hand rested on her ass; all of them together, stuck on that tiny, stuffy boat that smelled vaguely of pee.
And then the moment was over. Al grabbed beers for Sharon and himself. In a second, their laughter carried from the deck into the cabin.
“You wanna go fish?” Tracy asked.
“Sure.”
When we were done playing cards, I walked slowly back to our boat, trying to make sense of the kiss, the hand, the way she swayed away from him. In the evening, my grandfather wanted to watch a war movie, but I didn’t feel like it. Besides, he often cried during war movies—great sobs that demanded attention but which he refused to explain. I sat on the dock instead, facing the west end of the basin, the boat behind me, and watched the sun set behind the marsh and the peninsula in the distance. One by one, the lights in San Pedro and Palos Verdes twinkled on. The dip and rise of the reeds in the wind made the marsh seem like a breathing creature. The evening star appeared, the only star we could see at night.
Sometimes in the evenings, I folded paper boats and set them loose to see how far they’d go. Or I’d make sailing ships from empty milk cartons and plastic bags. Sometimes I tried to catch fish with a piece of twine and a bent paper clip. But that evening, I dangled my feet over the edge of the dock, careful not to let my toes touch the dirty surface, and crumpled two heels of bread into the water.
First the minnows came, as I knew they would, darting just beneath the surface, glistening silver and copper beneath the water. They nosed the bread, spinning it around as they took tiny bites. Then a big fish raced up from below, his body tracing a smooth arc to the surface. He was the advance scout for the school, because just after he vanished, hundreds of his kind swarmed around the bread. The water quickened with their shadowy movements, their dark bodies squirming beneath the green surface, the glints of their silver scales like shooting stars. I was mesmerized by their movement, still staring at the water long after they were gone. I heard the whir of a bilge pump coming on, then the trickle of water into water.
The marina was an ugly place, but it was also the first place I’d really noticed beauty: The glint of swarming minnows, the way a full moon hung suspended in a cargo crane, a great blue heron standing like a ghost outside our kitchen window, his yellow eye staring through me. The way the sickly brown of a red tide could be beautiful at night, when fish darted through the water, setting off phosphorescent arcs and trails through the dark.
That year on Tracy’s birthday, in September, I willingly went to her party: cake and punch in the marina’s dim office, streamers hanging limply from the ceiling, very few friends. I bought her her own set of Chinese checkers and made her a card. I’d bound it with a pink ribbon, and on its cover, I’d carefully drawn a graceful ballerina because that summer she’d told me how much she loved ballet and how badly she wished she could take lessons and didn’t once brag to me about how well she could dance.
• • •
Perry was right; Todd’s did close that summer. The Red October’s services also were no longer needed, and she sat abandoned at the crane barge, weeping orange rust through flat, black paint. An eerie quiet descended over the West Basin, the only noises now coming from the APL terminal behind us, the faint roar from the 110.
Summer faded into fall. The beginning of eighth grade was uneventful, except that my class at Le Lyçée had gotten smaller; almost everyone had moved on to other schools. There were only three boys and me, and I was only friends with Ernesto. The other two weren’t mean, exactly; they just preferred talking to the seventh-grade girls, who were cute and who, during recess, hiked up their uniform skirts and rolled down their knee socks. I, on the other hand, spent most lunches hitting a tennis ball into a wall or reading or staring at the ocean from the playground, watching for whales.
It wasn’t just my lack of interest in boys that made me not fit in at school. I didn’t really understand the world I was supposed to belong to, the world of people my own age, my schoolmates and friends. We never listened to music at home, except for the occasional “lite classics” CD or the easy listening Marilyn put on late at night. Not only did I not know the music my classmates had grown up with—Madonna, Prince, Michael Jackson—I didn’t know generations of music before them. I didn’t really know who the Beatles were, except that they had appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, or anything about Sonny and Cher or The Doors or Sting. I’d heard of Janis Joplin because Marilyn told me that Michele had liked Janis Joplin, that she was “really into her.” She said it in a disapproving way that made it seem as if Michele had gotten into trouble because of Janis Joplin—that somehow, Janis Joplin was responsible for Michele being dead. I decided I didn’t ever want to listen to Janis Joplin.
I didn’t watch very many new movies, either. Most of the new movies I watched were at the occasional sleepover: Pretty in Pink, Dirty Dancing, The Princess Bride. Instead, I was more familiar with old radio shows from the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, shows made before some of my friends’ parents were born. I listened to them on KNX 1070 at nine every night while I washed dishes, staring out the galley’s window. My favorites were mysteries and thrillers like Dragnet, Suspense, and The Green Hornet, but I also liked Jack Benny, The Lone Ranger, and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. I liked them better than TV—the way a voice told you a story in the dark of your imagination, how your mind brought the characters to life. I imagined that Sergeant Preston looked something like Nelson Eddy. I could see his crisp, red coat and dashing hat, hear King’s galloping footfalls in the snow. At night, while I rinsed cups, I stared out the window at Le Pirate and the white schooner that had once won the Transpac Race and the tugboat Ready, but my mind’s eye watched Detectives Friday and Romero walking quickly down the steps of city hall, off to break an important case. I felt an affinity for those shows, something I didn’t feel for the sitcoms my schoolmates watched. Radio took me out of a world I didn’t quite understand to one that was familiar and comforting: the world of old movies, a world of black and white and innumerable shades of gray.
That fall, I watched my first real sex scene. It wasn’t porn, but Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy, about a serial killer who rapes then strangles his victims in order to climax. I watched it on a Saturday in my room. The murderer, handsome in his 1970s corduroy sports jacket and brown pants, locks a business woman in her office, beats her, then forces himself on her. It turned me on—I knew that that was what I was feeling for the way it tingled from my nipples to between my legs, even the soles of my feet. It was the way he straddled her, the way her breast lolled from her bra, the way the camera seemed crammed in the small space between their bodies, the way it moved with his thrusts. It was the first time I’d seen a sex act in motion. I was aroused, but I was also scared—and I wasn’t exactly sure where the line between the two was. The way he choked the very life out of her, the way she screamed and gasped and gurgled, the way her tongue extruded from her mouth. In the midst of everything, I remembered my strangled mother, and I was ashamed of my body, my desire. I thought I must be some kind of pervert. Her picture was right under the shelf that my TV was on. I thought I was dishonoring her memory, that she must be ashamed of me, wherever she was.
• • •
I still thought a lot about Michele. She was my own private mystery. I wanted badly to know more about her. I imagined myself the Sherlock Holmes, the Joe Friday, on our case—our case, because in finding out something about her, I believed I’d find something out about me.
Sometimes when Marilyn was out, I’d go to her office and open her oak filing cabinet. No one had said I couldn’t go looking through the files, but I still clicked the tab gently, pulled the drawers out quietly.
Marilyn liked to keep files on almost everything—instruction manuals, articles from Consumer Reports, letters from friends, taxes filed and taxes pending, recipes from her past fad diets, interesting articles from back when we still took the LA Times. We’d stopped subscribing to the paper after we moved on to the boat because someone kept stealing our copy from the marina parking lot. There were four folders I liked to look through best, their labels typed neatly by Marilyn: Michele Grey, Richard Grey, Yvonne Spencer, Kelly.
In my grandfather’s folder, there was a copy of his record of birth, November 19, 1917, in Marylebone, London. I remembered when he’d sent away for it to try to get a green card during the 1986 amnesty for illegal immigrants. In the end, he’d decided not to apply. It was one of the reasons he wanted to live on a boat; if he ever got caught and deported, he reasoned, he could take his home and family with him.
In my folder, there was my birth certificate, which listed my real name, Kelly Michelle Archibald, and listed my father as William Earle Archibald. It said he was from Pennsylvania.
In Spence’s file, I found my grandmother’s state-issued birth certificate, which spelled out her full name, Yvonne Kaia Spencer, and said she was born at the French Hospital in LA. Her father, James Spencer, was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. It listed his “race or color” as “white”—but the “w” was fuzzy, as if it was typed over some other letter. He was supposed to be my cliff-diving, Hawaiian great-grandfather, but when his daughter was born, he listed his occupation as “movie director.”
In Michele’s file, I found my mother’s birth certificate and, finally, her death certificate: purple ink on shiny paper that listed her cause of death as “manual strangulation” in thick, bold caps. I read and reread her death certificate—looking for what, exactly, I didn’t know. I just wanted to know more. Under “day of death” someone had typed “found,” then “November 29, 1976.” Her death certificate said she was found in an empty lot at 610 N. Hill Place. It said her last occupation had been as a student at Hollywood High, even though she was twenty-three when she died.
Something about those documents made me feel connected to myself, as if they held clues about the real me, the person I really was but didn’t know. They were artifacts from some other country, the place where I’d come from but could not remember.
“Where you come from is important,” my grandfather used to say. “It’s who you are.”
I still sometimes stared at my little altar, tucked into a corner of my bookshelves, safe behind the pin rail: that picture of Michele with her half smile, the picture of Spence and her badge, the picture of Marilyn. I’d light an illegal candle and watch as the light flickered over their faces. I’d wonder what my life would be like if they’d lived. If Spence had lived, would we still be living in the mountains with Dee? If Michele had lived, would I know my biological father? Would we live in a house? I had a strong imagination, but for the life of me, I couldn’t imagine any other life than the one I had.