California Transit: Stories

by Diane Lefer

Synopsis

“From the world that could not be saved, the storyteller salvages small, strange stuff and assembles it into a narrative of alarming beauty and mystery and sadness.”—from the introduction by Carole Maso

Southern California: land of dislocation and assimilation, a place Diane Lefer knows well. In California Transit, she uses conversational prose and macabre wit to zero-in on a Mexican woman detained indefinitely by immigration officials, isolating her from her American family; a zoo employee considering what to do with a euthanized antelope’s head; and, in the title novella, a lonely woman, riding buses all day, who cannot avert the violence building within her. This collection explores the difference between justice and law through a lens unfiltered by moralistic or didactic intention. Like a surveillance camera meant to record crime, not stop it, Lefer presents a world gone wrong, not because of people’s hatred for one another but because of their impossible, unfulfilled yearning to connect.

Diane Lefer is the author of two previous collections, The Circles I Move In and Very Much Like Desire, and the novel Radiant Hunger. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is an artistic associate of Playwrights’ Arena, volunteers with the Program for Torture Victims, and serves on the animal behavior observation team of the research department at the Los Angeles Zoo. She teaches in the MFA writing program at Vermont College of the Union Institute & University.

 

Read more

Release date: April 1, 2007

Publisher: Sarabande Books

Print pages: 256

Sample

The sea lions stopped barking after the last feeding. It was quiet there at night except for the occasional sneeze and the constant sound of water moved by wind. I stood at the fence in the dark and sometimes a patrol car came by and I'd turn and wave as if I were one of the volunteers who belonged there.

The female I came to watch slept peacefully but sometimes there was a tremor through her light-colored fur and her flippers trembled against the pavement.

This is where I got to know Burton. Even when you're most alone, there's bound to be someone.

This is what happened in Los Angeles, the land of reinvention.

I didn't come West to reinvent myself. What I didn’t expect: after I arrived, I had to reinvent my desire to go on living. I found myself in a bare room with a shared bathroom down the hall. Utilities were included so I got no mail. It sounds a defeat to say I found myself there. I chose it.

I turned down an apartment with a balcony overlooking the Pacific and the sandy beach beneath the bluff. From the living room window, the view was of the working harbor, the gantry cranes and offshore rigs, and in the distance the forty-foot containers piled on railbeds all along the flats. Even the kitchen had a view: the other side of the point, where the shore was rocky and wild. I could have had a place with carpets and ceiling fans, the second floor of a pretty little stucco house with ring-necked doves cooing on the flat roof, with rose bushes, with bougainvillea spilling over the stucco wall. Then I saw what I needed: the room to let over a line of boarded-up stores and scaffolding somewhere in-between the homeless Feeding Station and the spruced-up block that people called Yuppie Gulch.

The room reminded me of the past. In 1968, after the assassinations, when I was twenty-two years old, I'd run off and lived in San Andrés, an industrial port on Mexico's east coast. It was a new city, modern, open and so different from the other Mexican towns I'd seen with their adobe walls that gave the street a human scale and hugged you. San Andrés was not a city that could love. I rented an ugly room in someone's apartment. I knew no one, I never got enough to eat, I was very much alone and very happy.

When I arrived in L.A., I was two years past fifty. I'd left New York at the end of my rope and en route to California I lost everything.

Empty hands are unencumbered hands. That's what I believed when I lived in the port of San Andrés and I thought, I can be that woman again. I thought, Don't despair. Revel in your freedom.

It was only natural to take the bus down to San Pedro, the city L.A. annexed in order to have a harbor. I moved into my little room. Emptiness is conducive to the meditative state. There was no reason I couldn't be happy.

My room near the L.A. Harbor contained a sink and a two-burner hot plate. There was a mirror over the sink. There were no blinds or curtains, but the windows were so filthy, when I lowered them, no one could see in.

I undressed. It was the middle of July and I was covered with sweat before I could get my clothes off.

There were two hangers in the closet. I had one change of underwear. I washed my bra and panties in the sink and hung them up to dry. Then I pulled the string to kill the light and opened the windows.

That first night, I slept on the floor and enjoyed the strong breeze off the ocean.