Alex, Approximately
Page 3LUMIÈRE FILM FANATICS COMMUNITY PRIVATE MESSAGES>ALEX>ARCHIVED
@alex: Busy tonight?
@mink: Just homework.
@alex: Wanna do a watch-along of The Big Lebowski? You can stream it.
@mink: *blink* Who is this? Did some random frat boy take over your account?
@alex: It’s a GOOD MOVIE. It’s classic Coen Brothers, and you loved O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Come on . . . it’ll be fun. Don’t be a movie snob.
@mink: I’m not a movie snob. I’m a FILM snob.
@alex: And yet I still like you. . . . Don’t leave me hanging here, all bored and lonely, while I’m waiting for you to get up the courage to beg your parents for plane tickets to fly out to California so that you can watch North by Northwest on the beach with a lovable fellow film geek. I’m giving you puppy eyes right now.
@mink: Gee, drop hints, much?
@alex: You noticed? *grin* Come on. Watch it with me. I have to work late tonight.
@mink: You watch movies at work?
@mink: Oh, you deviant Californians. *shakes head*
@alex: Do we have a date? You can do your homework while we watch. I’ll even help. What other excuses do you have? Let me shoot them down now: you can wash your hair during the opening credits, we can hit play after you eat dinner, and if your boyfriend doesn’t like the idea of you watching a movie with someone online, he’s an idiot, and you should break up with him, pronto. Now, what do you say?
@mink: Well, you’re in luck, if you pick another movie. My hair is clean, I usually eat dinner around eight, and I’m currently single. Not that it matters.
@alex: Huh. Me too. Not that it matters. . . .
“I shut everybody out. Don’t take it personally.”
—Anna Kendrick, Pitch Perfect (2012)
2
I’d seen my dad’s new digs during our video chats, but it was strange to experience in person. Tucked away on a quiet, shady street that bordered a redwood forest, it was more cabin than house, with a stone fireplace downstairs and two small bedrooms upstairs. It used to be a vacation rental, so luckily I had my own bathroom.
The collest part about the house was the screened-in back porch, which not only had a hammock, but was also built around a redwood tree that grew in the middle of it, straight through the roof. However, it was what sat outside that porch in the driveway that jangled my nerves every time I looked at it: a bright turquoise, vintage Vespa scooter with a leopard-print seat.
Scooter.
Me on a scooter.
Whaaa?
Its small engine and tiny whitewall tires could only get up to forty mph, but its 1960s bones had been fully restored.
“It’s your getaway vehicle,” Dad had said proudly when he brought me out back to show it to me the first time. “I knew you had to have something to get to work this summer. And you can drive yourself to school in the fall. You don’t even need a special license.”
“It’s crazy,” I’d told him. And gorgeous. But crazy. I worried I’d stand out.
“There are hundreds of these things in town,” he argued. “It was either this or a van, but since you won’t need to haul around surfboards, I thought this was better.”
“It’s very Artful Dodger,” I admitted.
“You can pretend you’re Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday.”
God, he really knew how to sell me. I’d seen that movie a dozen times, and he knew it. “I do like the retro leopard-print seat.”
And matching helmet. I therefore christened the scooter Baby, as a nod to one of my all-time favorite films, Bringing Up Baby—a 1930s screwball comedy starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn as a mismatched pair who become entangled by a pet leopard, Baby. Once I’d decided on the name, I committed. No going back now. It was mine. Dad taught me how to use it—I rode it up and down his street a million times after dinner—and I would eventually find the nerve to ride it around town, come hell or high water or drugged-out jaywalking surfers.
After my day of rest and a night with Dad playing The Settlers of Catan, our favorite board game, I’m forced to put my newfound independence to the test. Finding a summer job was one of my misgivings about coming out here, but Dad pulled some strings. That sounded fine enough when I was back in DC. Now that I’m here, I’m sort of regretting that I agreed to it. Too late to back out, though. “The summer tourist season waits for no one,” my father cheerfully tells me when I complain.
Dad wakes me up super early when he goes to work, but I accidentally fall back asleep. When I wake again, I’m running late, so I get dressed in a tizzy and rush out the door. One thing I didn’t expect when I moved out here is all the morning coastal fog. It clings to the redwoods like a lacy gray blanket, keeping things cool until midmorning, when the sun burns it away. Sure, the fog has a certain quiet allure, but now that I have to navigate a scooter through my dad’s wooded neighborhood, where it’s occasionally hanging low and reaching through branches like fingers, it’s not my favorite thing in the world.
Armed with a map and a knot in my stomach the size of Russia, I face the fog and drive Baby into town. Dad already showed me the way in his car, but I still repeat the directions in my head over and over at every stop sign. It isn’t even nine a.m. yet, so most of the streets are clear until I get to the dreaded Gold Avenue. Where I’m going is only a few blocks down this curvy, traffic-clogged road, but I have to drive past the boardwalk (Ferris wheel, loud music, miniature golf ), watch out for tourists crossing the road to get to the beach after blimping out at the Pancake Shack for breakfast—which smells a-m-a-z-i-n-g, by the way—and OH MY GOD, where did all these skaters come from?
Just when I’m about to die of some kind of stress-related brain strain, I see the cliffs rising up along the coast at the end of the boardwalk and a sign: THE CAVERN PALACE.
My summer job.
I slow Baby with a squeeze of the hand brakes and turn into the employee driveway. To the right is the main road that leads up the cliff to the guest parking lot, which is empty today. “The Cave,” as Dad tells me the locals call it, is closed for training and some sort of outdoor fumigation, which I can smell from here, because it stinks to high heaven. Tomorrow is the official start of the summer tourist season, so today is orientation for new seasonal employees. This includes me.
Dad did some accounting work for the Cave, and he knows the general manager. That’s how he got me the job. Otherwise, I doubt they would have been impressed with my limited résumé, which includes exactly one summer of babysitting and several months of after-school law paperwork filing in New Jersey.
But that’s all in the past. Because even though I’m so nervous I could upchuck all over Baby’s pretty 1960s speedometer right now, I’m actually sort of excited to work here. I like museums. A lot.
This is what I’ve learned about the Cave online: Vivian and Jay Davenport got rich during the first world war when they came down from San Francisco to purchase this property for a beach getaway and found thirteen million dollars in gold coins hidden inside a cave in the cliffs. The eccentric couple used their found fortune to build a hundred-room sprawling mansion on the beach, right over the entrance to the cave, and filled it with exotic antiques, curios, and oddities collected on trips around the world. They threw crazy booze-filled parties in the 1920s and ’30s, inviting rich people from San Francisco to mingle with Hollywood starlets. In the early 1950s, everything ended in tragedy when Vivian shot and killed Jay before committing suicide. After the mansion sat vacant for twenty years, their kids decided they could put the house to better use by opening it up to the public as a tourist attraction.