We Run the Tides(3)
After a business scandal that was on the front page of the Chronicle, Julia’s family had to move to a small house on the other side of California Street, beyond the border of Sea Cliff. They said they were only living there while doing construction on their main house, but I haven’t seen any workers at their old house and I overheard my father tell my mother that he read in a real-estate report that it had been sold. Now they have no view of the ocean. Now they use their garage for a spare room and park their cars on the street. Between the scandal and having to move, we all feel bad for Julia, but we mostly feel bad for her because nobody would want a half sister like Gentle. My mom says she respects Julia’s mom because it must be incredibly challenging to be a stepmother to such a lost girl. All the music Gentle likes is about drugs. Or the bands do drugs, or look like they do drugs. Everything about Gentle is grubby and unwashed but this is the eighties and the eighties are clean, and the colors are bright and separated.
Then there’s Faith. She’s one of us. Faith moved to San Francisco last year in seventh grade, and lives in a house that extends an entire block on Sea View. She has long red hair that on some days makes her look like Anne of Green Gables, and on other days like Pippi Longstocking. She plays goalie on the soccer team and is always diving for the ball, her hair streaming behind her like a flag. She has this air about her like she knows she’s special, and maybe it’s because she resembles famous literary characters or maybe it’s because she’s adopted. Her father is a lot younger than her mother. They had a daughter but she died and so they adopted Faith to replace her. The dead daughter’s name was Faith, too, which I think is strange and Julia thinks is horrendous because her favorite word is “horrendous.” But Faith doesn’t mind that she was named after the dead daughter. In fact, sometimes she says she feels like she’s twenty because the original Faith lived to be seven and Faith is now thirteen. I don’t know what Faith’s mom was like before the original Faith died, but she now acts like life is a large broken car she’s pushing down the road. She walks diagonally, as though she’s making her way through a rainstorm, even on the fairest of days.
The four of us—Maria Fabiola, Faith, Julia, and I—own these streets of Sea Cliff, but it’s Maria Fabiola and I who know the beaches the best. Maybe it’s because our houses are closest to the shore. Her house is situated above China Beach and mine is just up the street—a four-minute walk.
We take the boys from Sea View to the beach and under their gaze we see how agile we are. We can feel our power as we race on all fours over the cliffs—we know their crevices and footholds, their smooth inclines and their rugged patches. If there were an Olympic category for climbing these cliffs, we would enter it; we scale them as though we are in training. After an afternoon at the beach, the pads of our fingers are rough, and our palms smell of damp rock, and the boys are dazzled.
China Beach is adjacent to a bigger beach, Baker Beach, and they’re separated by a promontory, but Maria Fabiola and I know how to traverse between the two beaches at low tide. We know how to read the ocean, how to navigate the slippery rocks so that if we time it perfectly we can wait until the ocean starts to inhale its waves and, through a combination of climbing and scurrying, make our way to Baker Beach. Once, on a class outing to China Beach, we knew the tide was right to make a mad dash around the bluff and end up at Baker. Other classmates followed us. When our teachers yelled for us to come back, Maria Fabiola and I timed the waves and ran. Our classmates didn’t know the beach the way we did, hesitated, and got stuck on the other side. The teachers panicked. We assured them it would be okay. We climbed over the bluff and held our classmates’ hands, watched the ocean, and guided our classmates back to China Beach. We tried to remain humble but we were heroes.
2
Maria Fabiola and I have been best friends since we were in kindergarten at Spragg, and we have been placed in different homerooms almost every year. Separately we are good girls. We behave. Together, some strange alchemy occurs and we are trouble. This happens at school, and it happens when we’re not at school. Last year I got into trouble with my parents and with my neighbors for telling a lie that involved her. Maria Fabiola and I were selling lemonade. We weren’t getting many customers in front of my house, so we moved our stand in front of a bigger one on a corner. A Chevy full of teenage boys pulled up, and the boy in the passenger seat leaned out the window to talk to us. “If that’s your house, can we marry you when you’re older?”
Maria Fabiola and I looked at each other and laughed. We didn’t correct their assumption.
“We’ll take that as a yes,” the boy said. As the car drove off, he yelled out the window, “We’ll be back!” To some, that might sound like a threat, but to us it was a promise.
Mrs. Sheridan, a neighbor I’d known most of my life, was our first customer. “What do we have here today, Eulabee?”
“Lemonade,” I said, pointing to the sign that said “Lemonade.”
She bought one cup, which she drank on the spot, and then bought a second. “And what’s your name?” she said to Maria Fabiola.
“Maria Fabiola.”
I would have thought Mrs. Sheridan might recognize her from all the times she’d been at my house, but apparently not. Her non-recognition of Maria Fabiola made me look at my friend differently. And for the first time I saw what everyone else must be seeing: she was no longer who she used to be. Her hair, once straight, had become wavy. Her body had swelled, stretching the fabric of her shirt and the back pockets of her jeans, so now the pockets tilted inward toward each other at an angle. The lie flew out of my mouth, a fabrication intended to collapse the distance spreading between us. “Maria Fabiola’s not just my friend,” I said to Mrs. Sheridan. “My parents recently adopted her. She’s my new sister.”