We meet at the Santa Monica pier at irregular intervals, a birth, a death, a daughter’s medical-school graduation, or a chance airline confusion. Our forty-year friendships are secondary. Memory is not static. It’s in flux, mutating through time and accumulation. There’s a give, the way cliffs above the Pacific Coast Highway shed themselves across the decades. We are left with too few artifacts. Proof is elusive. Sea breezes embrace seductive star jasmine while the Santa Anas blow salt through the dusk like stray bullets. But our lives are not fictions. We meet and remember. We bear witness for one another. This is our central function.

There were no simple lines between natural and artificial in our shared youth, though we were aware of these distinctions and how they confused and stained. We were poor and hungry in the mean hard-scrabble town that moved with the slow lull of a fishing village. It was the end of the frontier. We had to hang on, inches from the sea. Los Angeles was the last step before drowning or China or having to learn a new language. It was a gulag with palm trees.

School taught us the value of water, and our precarious position, perched on fault lines and surrounded by desert. We existed by a technological sleight of hand and should be grateful. Of course, our educational opportunities were determined by sociological status. We lived in the already faltering apartments of what would soon be officially recognized and designated tenements. We wore second-hand clothing. Our mothers worked. The college track was not an option. We were automatically relegated to vocational classes, expected to sew, type, and cook. We were to make curtains, sew hems and seams, and demonstrate proficiency with meat loaf. This was the collective construct of adequate female adult preparation.

No one considered the possibility that we might discipline our minds for endeavors other than serving as wives and secretaries, waitresses and file clerks. Mastery of mathematics and foreign languages was not suggested. We were not expected to transcend our circumstances.

School taught us our mere presence was proof of some version of Manifest Destiny and the demonstration of American scientific prowess. But we did not find our economic, emotional, or physical geography in our assigned English-class novels. Nature was exclusively for the wealthy inhabitants of pastel houses with lawns enclosed by white picket fences, mothers who were full-time housewives, who baked and pruned roses, and family trees that could be traced for generations. Nature was seasons; museums, ballet, stone architecture, rivers, bridges, and last names you recognized instinctively, syllables that when spoken seemed to form church steeples and town squares on your lips.

We had aberrant names like Nakamura and Valdez, Hernandez and Chin. We came from the dust-ruined interiors, spoke with drawls, rented trailers, and it was still the Depression. Neighbors had partial families where blurred photographs attested to the father or daughter still in a wretched Asian port or mud and goat-strewn fetid mountain pueblo. We celebrated the Day of the Dead and the Birth of Buddha. We ate with chopsticks and rolled vegetables into tortillas. We did not realize silverware was a regular feature of daily life until we went to college.

Later, we would be labeled latchkey children of dysfunctional families in a still coalescing experiment called Los Angeles. It was the late ’50s and our town was stucco tenements planted in rows like the citrus trees we learned not to eat from. The lemons loitered beside gashes of asphalt alley, the fist-sized oranges like a string of lanterns at eye level and so bitter they burned your mouth.

Los Angeles, the destination city, capital of film and media, did not exist yet. This was an era before the image became holy and ineffable. Our Los Angeles was where you went after divorce and scandal, bankruptcy, foreclosure, imminent starvation, bad health, and personal exile. There was nothing glamorous about it. One came from calamity, lured by the promise of a winter in permanent remission where you could have asthma and heart attacks with a minimum heating bill. It was a plain of divorcees and single mothers. We knew because we babysat for them, observing their covert rites of elaborate preparation for dates where they shed their secretary clothing and wore lipstick, mascara, and tight dresses that sparkled.

From Frantic Transmissions to and From Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir. Copyright 2006 by Kate Braverman. All rights reserved.