California Romantics by Becky Peterson

This small town, the place where I grew up and occasionally return to, is beautiful, but dull. When I am away, I long for the town’s routines, which, as a teenager, bored me: the boats lowing in the morning; the fog settled in all day; the rot smell of seaweed on the sand.

People seek utopia in this part of California. They had an idea of nature. Reverential. 

When I think of this place I feel stuck and caught—in my head and in the house on the jutting land. In the sea I find a mirror.

*

Clash by Night, a 1952 film based on Clifford Odets’s 1941 play, was filmed in Monterey, California, my hometown. Barbara Stanwyk plays Mae, who has moved back after some vague heartbreak. There she meets and marries Jerry. 

Jerry is a fisherman; he works the surface of the ocean. When its mysteries cannot be conquered, he gives way to them.

Jerry’s friend Earl has a terrible personality but at least he’s someone new. Earl works in the projection booth at the local movie theater. Jerry says Earl is in the movie business. 

Earl says while he cuts a film strip: Didn’t you ever want to cut up a beautiful dame?

Earl says someday he’ll stick his wife with pins, just to see if blood runs out.

Odets’s play took place on Staten Island; Hollywood moved the setting to California’s coastal fishing industry. At the start of the film we see sardines move through a factory. Marilyn Monroe picks through fish in the cannery. She is a beautiful woman who has been cut up, segmented, something Earl might say. 

To be a projectionist is to be a machine. Earl is an imitation and an imitator, a projection—Mae’s projection—and a projector. 

Mae is choked by her projections of Earl. In the end, Jerry chokes Earl—not quite to death—in the projection room.

*

Clash by Night takes its title from Matthew Arnold’s 1867 poem Dover Beach, in which the waves “bring/The eternal note of sadness in.”

Water pushes thought forward. 

Water pushes sadness forward.

The background fades in places as we look out a window/gaze at the sea/stare at the film. Details come into full relief. Landscape is untouchable, like a screen. It’s uncomfortable, the length of time I stare. I am disconnected from what I see and what I project. When the landscape is stunning you can’t drown yourself in it. It’s always apart from you. It’s always a photograph.

*

A scene outside the bar, in which she and Earl quarrel against the backdrop of the beach: it streams on a loop in Mae’s head. She looks to the sea again and again for answers, loving and despising the sea’s uncertainty.  

Mae says Jerry is “a man who isn’t mean, and doesn’t hate women.” She returns, relieved, to Jerry on his boat. Despair links Earl to Mae, makes her lust for him. They share something bad: it bonds them. Earl insists that he and Mae are made of the same material (restlessness). 

Earl watches Mae dance. 

Jerry watches Earl watch Mae dance. 

Desire drives the watching.

*

Jerry’s father once caught 200 tons of sardines from the bay; within a generation the ocean has been depleted. Now the water is revived and protected. At night you can see the squid boat lanterns from the beach.

Romanticizing as a kind of lighting. Romanticizing as a kind of squid boat lantern, but instead of squid there’s Earl. Earl is the only one who comes to the surface. Mae dislikes him openly, but by now her mind has bent and telescoped so that he takes on new appeal.

It’s dangerous when everything reminds you of yourself, when your life hinges on what the lantern reveals. Mae no longer sees the wind-roughened wood of her house, she does not notice the ocean out her window, beyond the canneries, she can “only hear/ Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,/ Retreating to the breath/ Of the night-wind.”

*

Mae says she wants a new head. She returned home brokenhearted, something about a man who worked in politics, it didn’t work out. I watch Mae and I also look through her eyes at the wharf and the bay.

Once as a passenger on a car ride up the California coast I sat for eight hours. I looked at the sea and the road and thought of how much I loved a man who did not exist outside of my mind. I alternately laughed at my delusion and cried at the loss of him. 

This man had told me: dancers must break the arch to fit the shoe.

Identification beyond reason draws Mae to Earl. Mae watches Earl and she also looks at herself though his eyes. 

Each day the fog comes in, burns off for a few hours, then returns.

The town ends where it meets the ocean, but it can’t keep the people out.

*

Mae’s house rots from moisture. Her house with no foundation slowly sinks into the sod. The wood of the house is warped and breaking from a hundred years of wind and wet sea air. Fog moved into the house’s moss-covered wooden beams and softened and wrecked them. In the winter the fog comes in through metal windows. 

Fog forms the rhythm of the day. Deer move through cemeteries and vacant lots. Hilly streets lead down to the sea.

When I walk I study plants and rocks. Weeds twist into more weeds. Water pulls the slick green plants back and over the tide pool rocks. Occasionally I fall over something, wood underneath the sand or a large rock covered in algae. 

Forgetting is a relief. Immersed in her own melodrama, Mae can’t forget. Wandering can be a kind of forgetting, but now she’s home. Wandering through cycles of idealization and disappointment. Home is a sanctuary and also a site of extinction. Mae says, “Home is where you come when you run out of places.”

I am numb when I return. Home is a blind spot. 

The thing about utopia, Mae tells me, is we will never get there. 

*

Mae marries Jerry and has a baby girl. Mae’s interior life is implied by her looking out at the sea. We do not know what she is thinking. She has just kissed Earl, embarking on an ill-fated affair with him.

Mae stands by the window, looking to the waves crashing on rocks, the dramatic and disconnected beauty “where the sea meets the moon-blanched land.” 

I say to Mae, I know this bored lonely restlessness. After life’s inevitable disappointments, rejections and humiliations in work and love, I placed my hopes in the sea’s crashing and in the tide pool water. 

Exterior becomes interior; the lens distorts. I look for a way out, but then I come back.

Cars on the freeway sound like the ocean.

Wind in the desert feels like beach wind.

*

Dear Mae,

Sometimes it feels like the only thing I know how to do is work in a cannery.

It feels like the only men around are men who hate women.

I had some ideas but they were proven wrong. 

The squid boats are a terrible labor. 

Mae, your house needs fixing.

This is a movie that used to be a play.

This is a town that used to be wild.

I understand the past sticks in you like a pin. 

Reality is at times unbearable and at other times transcendent.

Becky Peterson’s writing has appeared in various publications, including Indiana Review, Hyperallergic, and The Rumpus. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks; her full-length book, Textiles on Film, was published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts in 2024. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

19 June 2025