Twenty feet away, on the cove’s rocky beach, cold waves rolled onto shore with a roar, then receded with the grumble of round stones clunking together in the foam’s pull. Farther out in the cove, the Pacific broke against the bottom of the cliffs, exploding into white spray. But the water in the tide pools by my feet was glassy smooth, still. I squatted beside one while Marilyn kept walking, the wind whipping her hair this way and that. It was a big pool—two yards long—its own world of color and gentle movement: a drab fish darting through tufts of rockweed and sea lettuce, a purple urchin adjusting its spines contentedly. Tiny green anemones carpeted the middle of the pool, their tentacles almost imperceptibly swaying.
I stroked a chiton at the pool’s edge, running my nail along the segmented chinks of its thick armor. The chiton looked prehistoric, a bit like a lobster’s tail without the lobster, or like an overgrown, flat roly-poly. On the cliffs and hills behind me were hundreds of its fossilized relatives, frozen in similar rocks in similar positions as the live one beside me, their tide pools long vanished.
We lived in Rolling Hills Estates, one of the communities on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, which jutted south and west of Los Angeles, forming the southern border of Santa Monica Bay. Our side of the peninsula was built up with houses and malls, but the southwest side, overlooking the ocean, still had wide-open spaces, places where mustard and wild fennel grew tall. This was especially true along Portuguese Bend, where the edge of the peninsula was slowly slipping back into the ocean, taking with it chunks of land and abandoned houses. This was where we were now, at Abalone Cove, where the sea flowed in between Inspiration and Portuguese points.
Millions of years ago, the peninsula had been covered by the ocean; then, as it was uplifted out of the sea, it became an island, separate from Southern California. I knew a little about these things because of the books Marilyn read to me at night and the rock-hound hikes she took me on with the parks and rec department. All over the peninsula, it was easy to find geodes lying on the ground, rocks bearing the fossils of plants and fish. Even the stone benches at the Lutheran church Marilyn and my grandfather had sent me to briefly when I was four had fish swimming across their faces. No one else at the church seemed to notice them but me. Neither Marilyn nor my grandfather attended church themselves; she was a former hippie who objected to organized religion, and he was a bitter, lapsed Catholic. Instead they would drop me off for Sunday school, and when it was over, I’d wait for them on those benches, one hand clutching a coloring page of Jesus and the other fingering the articulations of vertebrae, the curves of ribs and eye sockets, the miracles of fish and time.
The water in the tide pool was warm from the afternoon sun. A solitary anemone looked like a green flower penned by Dr. Seuss. I leaned over and ran my finger along its crown of tentacles, as Marilyn had shown me how to do when I was little. I felt the gentle tug of the tentacles’ sting, then watched as they collapsed into its mouth. Satisfied that the trick still worked, I dried my hand on my shorts and walked in the same direction Marilyn had, stepping carefully between pools, trying not to crush barnacles and exposed anemones. As I walked, I gathered tiny clam and turban shells, spent limpets, pieces of mammal bone, bits of frosted, smoothed glass, and interesting shards of plastic. The waves roared in my ears. Once in a while I came across a fragment of an abalone shell, but never a whole one. Marilyn had a whole one she used as an ashtray. When it was clean, its inside looked as if it has been painted with quicksilver and sapphire. Archaeologists had found piles of abalone shells near Indian sites, but I’d never seen one at the beach. Marilyn said they were rare now.
It was always Marilyn who took me on adventures: trips along the Camino Real to see the California missions, weekends in Berkeley and Marin County to visit her old hippie friends, and closer places like the La Brea Tar Pits in downtown LA and the Getty Museum in Malibu. My grandfather never came with us, preferring to stay home. I’m not sure I would have wanted him to come anyway.
But some of my favorite adventures were only ten minutes from home, here at Abalone Cove or down at Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro, where they also had a marine museum. We never went swimming, because Marilyn didn’t like how she looked in a suit, but that was all right. I could stay at the beach for hours looking at animals and collecting bits of flotsam. After the boat couple’s visit, my grandfather had started looking for boats in earnest, visiting marinas and looking in shipyards, reading the classifieds and circling prospects. One of the reasons he said he wanted a boat was because he loved the ocean, but the part of the sea I liked was here, at the shore, where you didn’t need a boat and there was so much to look at.
And when I got bored of looking, I’d find a patch of warm sand between the rocks to sit on and stare at the shining water until I could see the light like a stain when I closed my eyes. I’d daydream stories from the books Marilyn read to me at night, imagine the ships of Spanish explorers and Portuguese whalers anchored in the cove, Indians collecting fish and mussels in their reed baskets, smugglers landing at night, the tide pools in front of me stocked with abalone. The land behind me had once been farmed by Japanese Americans before they were taken away to internment camps. Sometime before that, it had been covered with Californio ranches and adobes, like in Zorro, and before that, it had been the home of Indians. There were no historical markers or signs, but everywhere you walked on the peninsula, you were walking in someone else’s footprints. You’d never know it, though, without a Marilyn or a library book to tell you.
My other favorite trips with Marilyn were to the library. Together we’d browse for books by the d’Aulaires, Norse Myths or Abraham Lincoln, books of California history, illustrated stories about the Underground Railroad. Sometime in August, we’d check out costume books and begin the long planning process for Halloween. Every year, Marilyn and her friend Josette made me a Halloween costume: hand-sewn, elaborate affairs like Pallas Athena, Cleopatra, and Joan of Arc, characters I loved from books.
Marilyn didn’t read as much as my grandfather, but she still checked out books and stayed up until one or two in the morning to read them—books of philosophy I couldn’t understand, history that bored me, or, worse, books about how to make yourself a better or thinner person.
Marilyn’s taste in books leaned toward the practical and sensible, but when I went to the bookstore with my grandfather, I picked whatever caught my imagination. Every few weeks, he and I went to B. Dalton at Peninsula Center. First we went for dinner at the Jolly Roger, where we wore pirate hats and dueled with plastic garnish swords, drank Shirley Temples, and finished with ice cream sundaes. At the bookstore, I wandered the aisles freely while my grandfather perused the latest in biography and spy fiction. He bought us each one book, and I could pick any book I wanted; he barely glanced at the covers before he paid. Sometimes my choices didn’t work out so well, titles like 100 Coupons for Romance or The Journals of Lewis and Clark, but fiction never disappointed. I had dozens of Nancy Drews; illustrated versions of classics like Pride and Prejudice, Robinson Crusoe, and Heidi; books on tape of Sherlock Holmes, James Herriot, and T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, which I didn’t understand but listened to over and over again because I liked the way the words sounded—the elegant cadences of the English actors, the chant of the monks, the mournful choruses of women.
In the evenings, Marilyn would read me the books we got at the bookstore or the library, long after I knew how to read myself. These, too, were my favorite adventures with her. We’d lie together in my twin bed, propped up next to each other against my pillows, her arm cool against mine, a book laid open on her lap. Lamplight surrounded us in a circle. Marilyn’s whispery alto incanted the author’s words, and suddenly, within the confines of the light, another world was conjured, and for an hour, we could live in it: the lush garden behind a wall, the Palace of Knossos, Jo March’s attic, the sinister House of Shaws. For an hour, we were together—hearing the same words, seeing the same landscape, caring about the same people—as close as an adult and a child can be.
Sometimes after we read books about the Underground Railroad or slavery, I made her tell me stories from Mississippi, when she was a volunteer during the 1964 Freedom Summer. Marilyn wasn’t like my grandfather; it took a lot of effort to get her to talk about herself, asking her question after question to get to the best parts: About the time in Jackson, Mississippi, when she was arrested and spent the night in a crowded jail cell. About the countryside—the flat cotton fields with their spiky stalks and white tufts, the red earth beneath the big sky. About the black sharecropper’s family with whom she stayed while registering people to vote, and how they had had to douse the lights and huddle on the ground while white men took potshots at the house.
“Weren’t you scared?” I wondered.
“Well, yeah. But I could go home at the end of the summer. They had to stay.”
My grandfather’s stories were the ones I told to classmates or adults I wanted to impress, but it was Marilyn I wanted most to be like, whose stories made me glow with a warm light.
Our days at the tide pools always ended too early for my taste. The cliffs’ cool shadows overtook the south-facing cove, or the tide rolled in, and Marilyn called to me to pack up, worried we’d be late getting home. We climbed the steep, dusty hill back to the parking lot, passing sagebrush, lemon berry, and mustard plants taller than me. The sound of the crashing breakers got softer and softer as we got higher, their susurrations pierced by the seagulls’ shrill cries. We always stopped at the top of the cliffs and looked back at the ocean spread out before us, sometimes sapphire blue and sometimes steel gray, its vast surface a mirror of the sky, impossible to see through.