Monarch Ridge

My mom still believes a homeless person lived in the basement of my childhood house. "Caitlin, we didn't want to scare you when you were a child, but we found a chicken bone down there." Her explanation is terse and defensive, as if it would be impolite for me to inquire further about how a chicken bone is evidence of a homeless person in our basement. She now claims the chicken bone/homeless man was one of the reasons we needed to move out of our house on Lee Avenue when I was ten years old.

Her decision to move our family is supposed to be the reason I'm now in a private college on the East coast instead of living in a trailer park with some drug dealer boyfriend and a three-year old daughter. But no matter where we were living it was inevitable that my mom would not deal well with the start of my adolescence.

My mom told me that when she was thirteen, she thought she would never grow breasts so she began stuffing her bra with her brother's socks. Then when she turned fourteen, they just popped up. When I turned ten, my mother bought me a dark blue cotton bra from a discount store. I protested, but by sixth grade, I had grown large enough to fill her C cup. I asked if it was the hormones in food that made me look like a teenage girl even though I was only eleven. My mother shrugged her shoulders and said, with little conviction, "Maybe. I mean, I guess this is normal."

On Lee Avenue, I obsessively read a girls manual from the 1980's on beauty, boys, and growing up, while her sighs filled the house. "Lane, we can't let her start middle school here. She can't even walk down the street to school without being hassled and she's only ten years old for God's sake." Now that we are finally middle class, she has become afraid for my safety around the ever-growing lower class in La Mesa. In the comfort of our home, she calls my friend's mothers "apartment dwellers." She is sickened by the smell of cigarettes on their breath as they laugh hoarsely about what we did last night, using improper English ("me and her" instead of "she and I"). She thinks the solution is as easy as moving. She is dead wrong and deep down she knows it.

MONARCH RIDGE

The new house was in a gate-guarded community called Monarch Ridge. Monarch Ridge was equipped with its own private pool, spa, tennis courts, and trails. The idea of a gate-guarded community is that there are44 45 no wandering homeless men with nicknames like Jesus or unwelcome, horn-honking truck drivers. To get through the gates, they'd need a fourdigit code. The truth is that the four-digit code stays the same for nearly a year and most people who live in the area know it. Even if you don't know it you can always wait for a car that does to let you in.

The houses of Monarch Ridge either looked out to a canyon or a mountain. They were laid-out along two rings; an inside ring around the trails that went up the canyon, and an outside ring divided by the street that surrounded one side of a mountain. There were a few houses that simply connected to another person's yard but this was rare and unfortunate. There were five models of houses, from smallest to largest. For the first two years I lived there, the newer models hadn't been put on the market yet, so my neighborhood friends, Lauren and Megan and I, would sneak into them and play hide and go seek. The homes were built like dollhouses, made carelessly in the span of a week for fake people who didn't stomp or slam or scream. From a first look, the house was magnificent‹it was the new Southern California style, full of useless, vast space and sky-lights hiding on the ceiling. But the walls were so cheap a ten year old could punch a hole through them, and by the time we moved out they were riddled with puncture wounds. The walls were painted a sterile white and the cupboards were made of bleached wood, reminiscent of the year 1993. The skylights soon grew fogged and stained from dirty rainwater. Our whole house seemed to have been built for the sake of voyeurs. The windows were square and oddly placed, impossible to cover with curtains. My parents never even bothered to cover the sliding glass doors and windows in the back of the house.

Sometimes, when I couldn't sleep I would sneak downstairs and turn the TV on, desperately searching for a sex scene from a late-night movie. Through late night television I had discovered a new kind of aching, a pounding heart giddiness that throbbed inside of me when a ten year old Lucas Haas felt up an older Laura Dern in Rambling Rose or when Baby declared "I have never met anyone who makes me feel the way I do when I'm with you!" in Dirty Dancing and they make love underneath a Chinese lantern to "Don't You Feel Like Crying."

My eyes would compulsively shift from the image on the screen to the image of myself in the glass door with my little brown glasses and hair pulled tightly against my head. I would redo my ponytail and straighten my sweatshirt for a cuter lounging position. I'd try to imagine the boy to whom I'd lose my virginity. What would he think of me at this moment if he had the capability to see me now, as an eleven year old? I imagined him, not so far away, sitting up in his parent's family room, watching TV, wondering about what he would eat for lunch the next day and having no idea that four years into the future, I was going to change his life forever. That we would then taste each other's sweat and say things like "Is this okay? Is this good?" as we fumbled in the darkness.

Watching the TV screen, I felt a presence, someone hiding beyond those glass doors, standing on the peak of the mountain or crouching behind the Jacuzzi, watching me flip my hair and pout my lips to my reflection, someone who was confounded by my purity and able to see the potential beauty that no one else seemed to notice. That "someone" was my only, faint, idea of God.

DESIREE

On the first day of middle school, Desiree whispered in my ear "Do you stuff?" during computer class. I looked down at my breasts and shook my head. She was the sixth grade slut, french kissing football players in the hallways and even pursuing high school boys. She claimed to have lost her virginity to an eighteen year old in fifth grade. She told me stories of being on Œshrooms with her older sister in Berkeley and eating acid during the one lunch break I missed. She had her lip pierced, her butt-length hair dyed several colors, and black eyeliner smeared around her entire eye. The first time her dad drove her to my house, he remarked, "Whoa, this is like a scene out of Edward Scissorhands." Throughout our friendship, she kept repeating his line. "Monarch Ridge is weird," she'd say, "It's like a scene out of Edward Scissorhands."

One early morning when my mom was driving Desiree and me to the middle school where we were going to take a bus to Six Flags with the drug-free club, my mom humiliated me in a way I had never been before. As she pulled me close to her to tell me to be careful and not walk off with some random man, she noticed the dark eyeliner I had drawn around my eyes.

"Caitlin, do you realize that you look like a raccoon?"

"Mom! Everybody wears eyeliner!"

"Well, you girls should know you look like harlots and you are not getting out of this car until you take that gunk off your face."

"Mom! The bus is going to leave! This is so stupid!"

She wet her finger with her tongue and grabbed my face.

"This is for your own good, Caitlin, you are too young to be a sex object."

She rubbed the eyeliner off my eyes with her spit-soaked finger. "And Desiree you're a very pretty girl, it's a shame you have to ruin it by looking like a raccoon."

When we got onto the bus, I reapplied the makeup while profusely apologizing to Desiree for my mother's unusual behavior.

When the amount of eyeliner I was wearing made my mom turn the car around and drop me off at home exclaiming, "Fine, look like a harlot and suck your future away but I'm not going to let you go to school looking like that!" she decided we needed to see the middle school counselor.

"So, Caitlin, I hear you have made a new friend."

Lipstick stuck to the corners of her mouth.

"Yeah."

"Do you think she's influencing you to do bad things?"

"What? No. God, it's not like I'm doing drugs, or anything. My mom's just freaking out."

My mom chimed in, "Oh, Caitlin, give me a break."

"Are you in any social groups on campus?"

"No."

"Well, what I'm going to suggest is that maybe it would be good for you to become part of a positive group, I know of a few Christian youth groups in the area that have plenty of students from Montgomery in them. And in the meantime, if your makeup is really an issue, maybe your mother could buy more natural looking makeup from Clinique or somewhere like that."

The first youth group meeting I attended was at Skyline Church; it was one of the biggest born-again congregations in San Diego. On the car ride over, I sat on the lap of a thirteen-year old girl reeking of cigarette smoke, with two skater boys in the back seat. One of the girls in carpool yelled "Give me a fucking break, dad!" as she climbed into the car. It was obvious that this youth group was meant for kids who had every reason to want to be born again, twelve-year old non-virgins and reformed drug addicts.

There were 150 kids at the meeting, sitting cross-legged on the floor in mini-cliques.

"How is everybody feeling today?" yelled a man standing on a platform.

"Good!" exclaimed the crowd.

"Does anybody have anyone they especially want to pray for today?"

The first girl to speak was sandy blonde, thin and very appealing. Her friends wrapped their arms around her for support "My friend is going through some really bad stuff. And I just want to make sure she makes it through okay. So I really want to pray for her." I couldn't pinpoint what it was that made her so appealing. Her outfit was non-descript, a tight white shirt with jeans, her hair in a ponytail. Then I figured it out. She was wearing a thick mask of foundation, which I found contrasted very prettily with her black eyelids. I went home, excited about my new discovery, ready to open my world to this whole new type of look.

My mom was so busy worrying about Desiree's influence on me, she never realized what I was doing with the other Monarch Ridge kids. In my whole friendship with Desiree, I never once tried any sort of drug with her, not even alcohol. In fact, Desiree disapproved of me getting drunk or smoking pot because she was afraid of losing her bad-assness in our friendship. In the meantime, in Monarch Ridge, I was playing truth or dare and running down the street in my bra and underwear, losing at games of strip poker with the boys, and trying out different types of expensive liquor that a mother of a boy who lived up the street from me kept in a glass case.

THE RECLUSE

When I was in eighth grade, a middle school was built much closer to Monarch Ridge than Montgomery. It furthered the division between those with money and those without: those with money now went to Hillsdale; those without stayed at Montgomery. Against my will, I had to leave Desiree behind. On Halloween, she hung up on me because I wanted to go trick-or-treating in my neighborhood rather than go to a party in hers. We didn't speak again for years.

I hated Hillsdale. I couldn't understand why anyone would want to paint a middle school blue and shape it like a jail cell. Everything in its view had been built in the last twenty years and painted an unnatural shade of peach. At first I rebelled by smoking pot with a friend who lived in Monarch Ridge, but then she overdosed on a heavier drug and was sent to a mental hospital. That's when I decided I wanted to go back to my roots, rediscover the outcast in me. I sat in my room for hours by myself, writing in journals, creating music videos for Cure songs in my head, where I was the girl who is "lost and lonely." I imagined myself sitting on a rock in the open field across the street: it is raining, mascara is running down my cheeks and I am ready to give up all hope of a better life, and then he appears, that boy who I dreamed of years earlier, to cover me with a blanket and rescue me from my loneliness.

My mom and I started going on long, aimless drives to the country. On the way once, we stopped at Dudley's Bakery and ate warm gingerbread cookies in the car. She played her Natalie Merchant tape and nearly got tears in her eyes when "Wonder" came on:

"I believe fate smiled and destiny laughed as she came to my cradle Œknow this child will be able'laughed as my body she lifted Œknow this child will be gifted with love, with patience and with faith she'll make her way'"

"You know, Caitlin, you've been hideous to deal with the last two years, but I have so much faith in you. It's the only thing that kept me going when you and I weren't getting along."

"Yeah mom."

"And I see you now and you're really coming into your own, you're really finding yourself."

"Yeah, but I have no friends."

"I'll be your friend."

"Mom! Don't talk like that!"

"What? God!"

"I don't know, that's just sort of depressing."

"The most interesting people in the world were introverted."

"Yeah, but at least they had people besides their mothers to talk to."

"I'm not so bad. What about your friends in Monarch Ridge?"

"I hate Monarch Ridge."

She laughed, "Me too. I don't know what I was thinking."

- Caitlin Rider