California Calling Natalie Singer-Velush A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts University of Washington 2016 Committee: Sarah Dowling Rebecca Brown Program authorized to offer degree: Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, Bothell ©Copyright 2016 Natalie Singer-Velush University of Washington Abstract California Calling Natalie Singer-Velush Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Assistant Professor Sarah Dowling Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Creative Writing & Poetics California Calling is a literary memoir that traces the narrator’s story of crossing over into California from Canada at sixteen and her desire to assimilate into both a place and herself. By asking what it means to be possessed by an American state and a by state of longing, the story is both a yielding to and a challenging of the power that personal and cultural myths hold over us. Chapter and section titles draw upon the language of police investigations and other authoritative structures of questioning and construct intimate and sometimes intrusive examinations of the narrator’s troubled history with interrogation, both ancestral and personal. California Calling is an interrogation into the silencing of girlhood, and an attempt to navigate out of that silencing. The people who stayed behind and had their settled ways—those people were not the people who got the prize. The prize was California. ― Joan Didion 1 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). 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 and child who ever was. The black veins of the marble floor look like cheese mold, cords of rot. I open my lips and out comes … vapor. 2 Part One Formation 3 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. 4 What happened in the library? My affair with California begins long before we meet. I am eight, tucked between stacks in the library on the second floor. For years later, decades, I will have dreams about the second floor of this school. I will wrestle in my sleep to remember what the hallway looked like as it hooked a sharp right, to the farthest reaches of the building where only the sixth- graders went. I smell the disinfectant wafting off the floors and hear the squeak of untied sneakers. I remember, without knowing if it is real, a tide of anxiety about the girls’ bathroom―dirty stalls, cold tile, donut-shaped communal drinking fountain one could easily fall into, or be pushed. But the library is safe. I run my hand over the familiar rows of soft weathered spines, some torn fuzzily. The books have a certain smell: musty, the way I think the inside of the ancient mummy sarcophagi we learned about in class would smell if they were pried open. I have a research project, assigned by Madame Sebag, who hates me and forces me to copy French dictionary pages when I forget to have my parents sign my homework, which is all the time. The research project must be on a country in the world, any country other than Canada, our own, and it is due in three weeks. I am pulsing with excitement about this. I am in the fourth grade. I want to pick a rad country, one no one else will have. Madame Sebag will see how good I am. The geography section is pretty decent, six shelves. The winter sun glints in from the high-up rectangle windows, lighting up the dust flakes in the air and the shiny plants our librarian, who wears stiff brown pantsuits and orange-flowered blouses, keeps on the top shelves. I see a book, All About California. I open it. “As part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, California is subject to tsunamis, floods, droughts, Santa Ana winds, landslides, wildfires, and has several volcanoes. It has numerous earthquakes, in particular along the San Andreas Fault … “Death Valley, a desert with large expanses below sea level, is the hottest place in North America; the highest temperature in the Western Hemisphere, 134 °F (57 °C), was recorded there July 10, 1913.” 5 “The name California is believed to have derived from a fictional paradise populated by black women warriors and ruled by Queen Calafia … a remote land inhabited by man-eating griffins and other strange mythical beasts, and rich in gold.” I try to mentally X-ray the pictures of spiky palm trees, blood-red underground faults, nuggets of gold, soaring ocean waves and sidewalk stars with famous actresses’ names engraved in them. I stare these pages down, I bore into them. Hollywood stars on the sidewalk―ohmygod maybe Molly Ringwald is there, and Corey Feldman and Drew Barrymore from E.T. Already my mind engulfs with California. Forget the project for horrible Madame Sebag, forget Lake Placid where my parents take us to stay in my grandparents’ vacation cabin every summer—I want to go to California. How can I get here? Maybe if I do a totally awesome project, my parents will decide we can go to California for a visit. Maybe they will know immediately that we all belong there, and love it as much as I do. Maybe California will help them love each other. I look back at All About California for more inspiration. “California is the 3rd largest state in the United States in size, after Alaska and Texas.” A state? A state? Like New York, where we drive once a year across the border to do our school shopping, hiding new clothes and shoes deep in the Jeep’s trunk, away from the customs officials, so we don’t have to pay duty tax? Slowly I put the book back on its shelf. The library wall clock reads 3:58. In two minutes my mom will be outside in the car to pick me up. I scan the shelves again and see All About Italy. Fine, whatever. I scrawl my name at the bottom of the card on the inside of the cover and check it out. Hitching my heavy winter coat tightly around me, I step downstairs and out into the snow. 6 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. State your purpose. I’m trying. 7 So this is a love story? It is about how we search for things we don’t know are there. It is about bringing myths to life. It is about longing, and the shame of it. It is about mapping one’s way out of the silence of girlhood. It is not a love story about California. It is a love story with California. 8 We should talk about form I have a relationship with interrogation. A trio of memories, a history bequeathed. This has everything to do with searching. The first memory of interrogation, the foundation of my form of inquiry, went down before I was born: My family goes back to Russia in the days of overwhelming love and fear. As the dangers gathered they planned their escape from the shtetls, their small Jewish towns, where pillagers came again and again and parents hid their beautiful daughters beneath the floorboards. In the early 20th century, the plan came together. Steam trunks packed. Hand-sewn linens, precious dishes. The books that held their past and futures; the babies—always such care with the babies. Enough money saved to afford second-class passage, then maybe a hard end of bread when they landed. When they arrived from the shtetl to the city of Odessa, their turn at interrogation neared. They had readied their aging parents, studied the documents, rehearsed what to say. Know enough about where you want to go, but not too much. Respect your oppressors but never sarcastically. Admit that your home is for the others, or if necessary (and it will be necessary) that you are the other. Speak but do not speak. Speak by not speaking. Say the right thing. Reshape your story into a version attested to, a version to satisfy those in power—this is what it takes to obtain passage, to be given a chance at life. To avoid, now and later, the butts of guns, the bullets of guns, the pits, the gas, the ovens. To be allowed to continue the family. Such an essential thing: to continue to unspool one’s thread. The day came, a long line of waiting, worrying. Fold, open, read, refold your papers. Hush your children. Wring hands. Think hate; hurriedly subdue it. When my family arrived at the front of the line, the inquisition moved swiftly, faster than they’d thought, catching them in its current, steering their stories away from them.