West Coast Weather

Abstract

West Coast Weather Grace Kearney (bio) We had not spoken in months when you invited me to your baptism—your "bapti-Zoom"—and I heard myself saying, "Yes, of course," as I have to all your rebirths. The ceremony took place in a backyard pool in Berkeley, befitting, to my mind, the ill-defined character of the church to which you now belonged. ("When a church has a podcast and a professionally designed website but no denomination listed, it's Evangelical," my sister in divinity school told me, foretelling your repeated attempts to bring me into its fold.) The video quality was poor, which was too bad, as I wanted to hear which Bible verse you had chosen to read. I heard only the splash, and the faint sound of applause. I had angled my camera so that you could see, though you did not look, the wall behind me, where the painting you made me five years ago still hangs. Inspired by The Phantom Tollbooth, it shows a little boy driving an open-roofed car down a road lined with palms, their trunks wavy and distorted, like driving in a dream. ________ When we found the Enterprise on Escondido Road closed on Sundays, we downloaded a car-sharing app and with a few taps secured a shiny red car, available immediately on the other side of campus. It was our junior year of college and we were prone to shortcuts. Plus, it was a convertible, and nothing is more Spring Break or Road Trip or Route 1 than a red convertible. Prone, too, to the idea of Platonic forms. We had both been reading Plato's Republic when we met, high on our own intellect like so many college freshmen before us. While the trappings of reality surrounded us—the election of a Dorm President, the mad scramble for friend groups—we closed the door and sat cross-legged on my thin mattress and decided the Real lay elsewhere. We answered each other's questions with questions. You drew diagrams. Whenever a third party entered the room, the difference was obvious: men spoke at us, and we spoke to each other. There was only one solution, we joked, platonically. We went to parties only to observe and debrief on the stumbling walk home. On Halloween, we went to Sig Ki with everyone else but [End Page 45] wore white bedsheets over our heads, sexless and bodiless, eyes and ears only. As we peeled onto 280 North, the wind was merciless. For the sake of Spring Break we kept the roof down, but it was too cold when night fell and we realized the roof was stuck. The wind blew our voices back into our mouths, wiped the sheen from our faces. Not long after, the front left tire blew out. You were driving and I was annoyed by your carelessness, though of course it was not your fault. But hadn't this happened to your own car last month? You didn't answer. You were annoyed, too, because now Angelo would be asleep by the time we got there. He was, and so was everyone else, laid out in sleeping bags on the wooden deck. You crawled into his, and I lay out my own. Harbin Hot Springs, according to the website, was a hot spring retreat and workshop center. According to its patrons, it was a nudist camp. This was something your Angelo was into, and you were talked into, and I accepted as a detour on our trip. There was a recommended order for the array of heated pools: tepid bathtub water, standard hot tub water, icy pool water, and a boiling pot with clay walls, where I sat and let blackness hover on the edges of my vision. Time passed in a dizzy blur of bodies. I didn't see you for most of the day, until I wandered into the communal pantry and there you were, eating chocolate chips and raspberries. "Have you ever done this?" I asked, and pressed a chocolate chip into the pocket of a raspberry. "No, but it's perfect," you said. You shared my food kleptomania. That first year together...