Are we all just the antithesis of where we come from?
The phone rings, startling her away from this repetitive argument. Lauren is calling.
“Hi, Laur.”
Marcella picks up on the first ring, aware that this seems slightly desperate, and then annoyed that she is able to clock such things, that she still wants to seem cool and busy to her daughter—is still trying to convince Lauren that she has her own life, her own priorities. Anything that might remind her daughter that she is more than her mother and Dave’s wife.
“I’m going to come out tonight,” Lauren says.
She doesn’t ask, which bothers Marcella, but not for the reasons you’d think. It bothers her because she sees the house as the ocean, not as home, and Marcella wants her to feel this is her home, still. To not just visit Broad Beach for the waves—a weekend, stay over and surf on Saturday—but for her, for their family.
“Great,” Marcella says. “Sylvia is cooking.”
“It’s Friday,” Lauren says, when she might as well say,Obviously.
Marcella can hear Lauren rattling around with some papers and assumes she is busy, so she pretends she is. “I have to run. I’m setting up for cards.”
“Have fun. See you later.”
In another moment, silence.
Her card game hasn’t met in almost two months because Cindy Miller got Covid and then no one wanted to get together, even after the five days had passed, and then schedules were conflicting, and now she wonders if she has a weekly game at all.
The front door opens, and Dave comes through.
“Sweetheart,” he says. “How about some breakfast?”
It’s past nine in the morning, and she knows he has been up for hours. She assumes he went surfing, and then to coffee, because that’s his usual, although sometimes it’s the other way around. She does not think about the possibility that he has been to Lauren’s, that they have shared their version of family before Marcella even awakens.
“Sure!” she says. She goes upstairs to get her sun hat. When she comes back down he’s asleep on the couch. She covers him with a blanket, noting the oatmeal stain on his shirt.
CHAPTER SIX
The drive to Broad Beach down the Pacific Coast Highway is one of my favorite stretches of land in the world. Not that I’ve seen them all, or even that many in my thirty-seven years. I’ve been to Europe once, never South America or Africa—or even Morocco. There were a few trips to Hawaii, and one to Mexico, both over a decade ago. I used to travel with my parents, but lately they don’t get on planes as much, and neither do I. There was never a huge need to leave, either. Malibu has the ocean—and I was happy to spend whatever vacations we got in the water.
Today it’s still bright sun as I make my way out, and the salt air hits as soon as I turn off Entrada and onto the highway. Even in traffic the sea breeze is clear. You don’t have to be moving fast to feel it. It’s just there. It’ll greet you at a standstill.
It’s this landscape that I love. The familiar bend of the road, the way as soon as the ocean comes into view I feel like I could drive with my eyes closed. There’s a downshift that happens on this drive, the drive home.
I leave Pea home when I come to the beach. We put out extra food, and the neighbor comes and checks on her—the one stranger she actually seems to like. So it’s just me in the car.
I pass Dad’s office, the same place he has worked since the eighties, and then Cross Creek—the country mart with all the high-end shopping centers and restaurants. On my left a little way up is the Colony—an exclusive enclave of Malibu complete with a gated community and at least four A-list movie stars. And then Pepperdine University up past the hill.
I take the highway farther, past Geoffrey’s, to where the land starts to split. I pass Paradise Cove and Point Dume and then I turn off Pacific Coast Highway at Broad Beach and take the road all the way down.
31382 Broad Beach greets you shyly. The house doesn’t look like much from the car—an old, shingled, crumpling pile of wood—but once you’re through the driveway and up to the front door, you start to get a sense of her splendor. It has peeling paint, a roof that is flat in places and angled in others, out-of-style bay windows, and a wood door stained with sun spots. But none of that matters because the house is right on the ocean.
The house is old, but that’s less of an anomaly in Broad Beach than it is in other spots in Malibu. Still, we are surrounded by mega mansions and multimillion-dollar renovations. My parents have never really touched the place. For one, they never could have afforded it, construction costs being what they are, but for another, they love this house—we all do. It’s like a living piece of history, our history. They’ve done small things—repainted and regrouted—but the windows are the same bays from the eighties, there’s pottery painted red with turquoise on the inside, and the granite in the bathroom is a pink geometric shape running up and down the walls. The house leaks when it rains and heats up to ninety-three degrees in the summer when the glass windows magnify whatever light is outside. But to me, it’s perfect.
They could sell it for millions, it’s true, but every time someone knocks on the door with an offer—and they do often—Sylvia always gives them the same answer:I’m not going anywhere.
The house sits directly on Broad Beach—a public beach and a great surf spot. The plot of land is also the largest on the strip, so while the house is modest, there is space for a small back cottage—a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchenette—where most of the houses are mere feet apart. This is where Sylvia lives now. It has easy access to the garden and is all one level.
I park behind my dad’s silver Volvo station wagon, and as soon as I open my door, I’m immediately struck by the ocean air. It’s heady, dense, mixed with the florals that creep up the shingled walls.
The same roses have grown out here my whole life—hearty ones, big and pink and plump. There were two years when they didn’t bloom because of the drought, and we thought maybe they were gone for good, but they came back with the rain—more Technicolor than ever before. The garden is properly weeded but grapevines crowd out passion fruit in a tangled ballet against the side of the house. There are overgrown bushes, and a pile of a fig tree that’s been trying to die for the past eighteen months. There’s a terra-cotta pot directly outside the door with an olive tree inside that’s just beginning to fruit, and above it hang some wind chimes that are dancing in the sea breeze.
I don’t knock, just open the door. It’s unlocked, of course. It’s always unlocked, to Marcella’s dismay. But this is the beach. There’s an inherent trust to the coastline houses that persists.
