Summer 2018, Los Altos, California
For the first eighteen years of my life, I thought my family was the happiest one in the world. Dad was a senior marketing executive at Apple, which meant every year, at least one of us would find a brand-new iPhone underneath the Christmas tree, and he and Mom always had the latest Macbooks, while each of us girls got our very own iMacs, upgraded every two years. Mom stayed at home, making us elaborate bento lunches to take to school and driving us everywhere we needed to go – me to Girl Scouts and art class, Marianne to piano lessons and cheer practice, and little Margaret to ballet and gymnastics. Every Halloween, we only had to name what we wanted to be, and she'd design and sew our costumes herself. I got a new Prius to drive when I turned sixteen and went to a wonderful school where there were no nerds, jocks, or goths because with less than twenty kids in each grade, everybody got to know everyone else as people, which meant we didn't have to slap labels on each other. Everyone's parents were working at either Apple or Google or some other techy company, so it was never weird to be smart, and everyone's parents kept an eye on them so there were no stoners too. All the girls in my class ate kale and quinoa salads for lunch, hung out over gourmet coffee or acai bowls after school, shopped at Hollister and Anthropologie, militantly ensured our parents put the right stuff in the recycle and compost bins, crusaded for #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and #OccupyWallStreet on social media, and wished we had the power to get Bernie Sanders into the 2016 presidential election. We went to Yosemite in the summer and Tahoe in the winter whenever Dad didn't have a business trip, and when he did, we and our friends hung out at each other's houses, where everybody had Netflix, HBO, and all the latest video games, and everyone's moms baked cookies or brownies whenever they had friends over.
Well, it turned out, Dad's business trips weren't only for business after all. When I asked Mom whether she ever felt betrayed, she admitted she'd known for a very long time, but for the sake of us girls, she never wanted to leave Dad so we could grow up in a regular family. But as we grew older, Dad got bolder. This time, he wanted to move to LA to live with his girlfriend Tina, and that was the last straw for Mom. When she filed for divorce, he didn't put up a fight at all; he just signed the papers and cleared out the very next day. He didn't even bother to pack and bring any of his clothes, which meant he already had a fully stocked closet in Tina's house, or wherever he was going to live with her.
With the child support money coming from Dad, we continued living in our four-bedroom ranch home in Los Altos and going to the same private K-12 school we'd been at since I started kindergarten. For a year, long enough for me to graduate from high school, our lives went on pretty much the same, just without Dad in the house. He texted and FaceTimed us from LA, in true Hollywood style – which meant he always smiled and never wanted to talk about the real stuff (because that would destroy the image of him as a picture-perfect father). I applied to UC Berkeley and got accepted, but because Dad was still giving us child support, I didn't see the need to get financial aid. After all, he'd been paying our fees for private school, nearly three times the cost of in-state tuition and fees at Berkeley, so I'd actually be saving him money by graduating and going to college. Dad sent money for my dream prom dress, with Tina picking out a Prada purse and my first pair of Manolo Blahniks as a graduation present.
The week after graduation, the bomb dropped – Dad was marrying Tina. He invited all of us down for the wedding, where we hung out in the receiving line with Tina's son Jonathan, his live-in girlfriend Frances, and their bratty little four-year-old Harry, who was the ring bearer and actually dropped the ring, sending it rolling in the middle of the aisle and forcing me to crawl under pews in my constrictively slinky bridesmaid dress (picked by Tina, of course) to retrieve it. Luckily, mine was in a deep mauve colour, unlike the pretty pastels she picked for Marianne and Margaret, so none of the dirt showed. But still – even Marianne, who never fake-smiles, did it for Dad's sake even though he was marrying a woman with no obvious merits except being ten years younger than Mom and walking around in a perpetual cloud of Chanel No. 5, and Tina's dear little Jon couldn't even be bothered to shave off his five o' clock shadow or remove his nose piercing for the occasion. At twenty, Jon would be starting freshman year in UCLA for the third time running in the fall, and just as Tina had spent her life trying and failing to become the next Hollywood starlet, he and Frances were convinced that college was just a secondary safety net because sooner or later, they'd get their names on the Billboard Hot 100.
Jon took Dad's last name right after the wedding because he was convinced that with the stage name of Jonny Dash, he'd become just as successful as Johnny Cash. And it was Jonny and Frances' aspiration of future superstardom that took our futures, at least as we knew them, away.
"Daddy," Frances said, even though she had no right to call him that since she and Jonny refused to get married, "you know Jonny and I were born to be stars. We even have the right names for it – I was named after Frances Bean Cobain, and my brothers were named after Edward Norton and Robert de Niro. Hollywood's been our destiny for generations. Now you've given Jonny Dash the perfect name, and the next thing we need is our own recording studio, because the only reason why we haven't been signed yet is the shitty background noise from recording all our demos in Mom's ratty garage. If you do that for us, Daddy dear, it'll be a great investment for the future, because we'll be able to create generations of Hollywood superstars. Think of the head start it'd give Harry! We could get him signed to a major label before he's even in kindergarten!"
I'm not really sure if Dad gave in because he really believed he was cultivating generations of superstars, or just because he got tired of being able to hear Jonny and Frances singing in the house all day. Some of Jonny's tunes were pretty good, I must say, but he had no concept of lyrics at all. How many "wo-ohs", "do-wops" and "sha-la-las" could you possibly put into a song before everyone got sick of it? Well, whatever the limit was, Jonny and Frances were certainly pushing it, apparently because they thought up their songs faster than they acquired the life experience to put good words into them.
I tried suggesting to Jonny that he could get a writer to do the words, not so much because I was invested in his future in showbiz, but to get myself out of having to listen to his empty nonsense now that Dad had asked Mom and the three of us to stay in LA all summer with him.
"Johnny Cash was a singer-songwriter, so why shouldn't Jonny Dash be able to do it all too?" he said. "I want all the hyphens because it'll show everyone just how versatile I am. That's how you last long in show business."
Anyways, the end of that story came with Dad having to rustle up the dough to build that recording studio, with just the right amount of soundproofing and a full set of professional equipment spec-ed out by Frances Bean Ferrars, the self-anointed future queen of grunge rock. His eyes almost popped out of his head when he totted up the costs.
"I'm a salaried man, not a Hollywood multibillionaire," he said to Mom. "This studio might just about ruin me, if Jonny and Frances don't double down on that song writing and start giving me some return on this investment. I hope you understand, Audrey, that I won't be able to afford child support for the girls now with all the extra cost of supporting my new family. Of course, the house is yours, and that means if you want, you and the girls can stay put in Los Altos and take advantage of the amazing public school system there for the young ones. I've done so much for us and launched the girls so well – Elinor's done with school and going into college, and even our little Maggie is a teenager now – so it's time for me to get caught up with launching Jonny and Harry and getting them set up just the same way I set up our girls. Tell them I'm proud of them and I think they've got the brightest futures in the world, because that's the truth."
I only knew he'd said that because I was eavesdropping on them through the door, because Mom completely missed out the bit about Dad saying he thought we had bright futures when she passed on the news to us.
"How could he ditch us for such tomfoolery?" said Mom. "I'll have you girls know, in our time we were named for famous movie stars too – your Dad was named for Henry Fonda, and I was named after Audrey Hepburn – but when we turned out ordinary, we had the sense to stop all that silly dreamin' and get on with real life."
"Now you girls will have to go to public school and make new friends all over again," continued Mom. "But Mari, you've always been a very pretty girl, and everybody loves cheerleaders, so I'm sure you'll do fine. And Maggie, don't cry; if you get a head start making new friends in eighth grade, it'll be better than starting high school with a whole new bunch of kids. We'll still have our house, so your friends still know where to find you, and I promise you I'll bake my signature chocolate chip cookies anytime you have them over."
"Mom, do you know what this means for me?" I pointed out. "I never applied for aid, so if Dad doesn't pay my tuition, I won't be able to start freshman year this fall. My place at UCB is gone, and my year is totally ruined."
"Oh, don't you worry, Ellie dear," blustered Mom. "There's still your Grandma's old house in Colorado, the one I haven't been able to get anyone to rent for years. If I sold it, that could still pay for four years of tuition and dorms and have some left over."
"What about Mari and Maggie, then?" I asked. "That little house won't pay for three college funds in the Bay Area, and they deserve to go to college just as much as I do. Tell you what – why don't we sell our house, and go live in Colorado instead? That way, you could pay for Mari and Maggie's college out of the money from the house, and I'll put off college for a year to work and save some money."
"You know, honey, that might not be such a bad idea after all," acknowledged Mom. "Remember Mrs. Jennings, your Grandma's best friend? She's been calling me lately, telling me she's gettin' old, too old to keep up with those three grandkids of hers. Said I should come visit before she passes on, though I did tell her she's got many good years on her yet. If we went there, we could help her out, and you girls will need to change schools anyway, so there isn't that much of a difference there. And with some of the money from selling our house, maybe we could get rid of that old linoleum in the kitchen and make it nice and cozy; won't that be great?"
"Can I bring my piano?" asked Mari. "Los Altos is home, and I'm going to miss everything – my friends, the weather, the hills, and Tahoe, everything we'll be leaving behind. Could anyone ever love sunny California the way I do?"
"Colorado Springs has much better snow than Tahoe," I pointed out. "We could start a new family thing out there doing the slopes on the weekends, and it'll cost less than going to Tahoe too. And in the summer, we could go hiking anytime we want, without needing to wait for Dad to take us like we used to. We'll still be the happiest family in the world, Mom and you and me and Maggie. I promise you."
"Can I FaceTime my friends anytime I want?" asked Maggie. "Mom, if you make my costume so I can go trick-or-treating one last time as Meg Murry from A Wrinkle In Time, like you promised, and we keep our Disney+ subscription, and I get unlimited FaceTime hours so I don't lose all my friends, I think I'd be OK with us moving house."
"Anything you want, Maggie dear," said Mom. "And now we're decided, I'll tell Henry we're going right away."
"Mom?" I said, "Can I stay for the rest of the summer? Frances told me her brother Edward's getting me set up with a job at the surf rental shop, and I need to get a head start earning some money."
"Sure," said Mom, "we'll have that house all set up when you come join us." And just like that, our California dream was ground to dust.