Moving to Paradise by Courtney Kersten

I’d been living in Santa Cruz all of seventy-two hours when I witnessed the brawl. Two squirrels thrashed about in the campus parking lot as I was looking for a spot. At first, I thought they were mating. But as I drove past, I realized this was something else. They were fighting. When I walked by fifteen minutes later, there was one decapitated squirrel and one squirrel nibbling on the detached head. The squirrel paused its gnawing and seemed to look up at me as I walked past. I stared back; my gaze caught. Blood pooled on the asphalt. A crow cawed from an above power line. The squirrel’s nose twitched with blood.

I ran back to my car. 

I threw myself into the driver’s seat, turned the engine over, and blew past the stop sign flanking the exit. The scene unfolded over and over within me for the rest of the day. Squirrel tails taught. Little fists grabbing. One headless body. Raw flesh on the blacktop . . . 

I thought it was an omen.

In California, I am in love and terrified. I am in love with a man who will join me, and I am terrified of this place I have moved to—the traffic, the mountain lion rumored to visit the campus where I study, the palpable chasm between wealth and poverty in this city. In California, I have never felt more like a bumpkin, a girl who fell off the potato truck, a woman sheltered and soft. I fear I am not hearty enough for this place. The Midwestern niceties and manners drilled into me as a child find no respite here.

When I told my beau that the squirrels were a premonition, a warning that I could not survive here, that California would metaphorically kill me, he told me it was a coincidence. “The squirrels are just squirrels. It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. When I told my colleagues, they spoke of the drought, of wildlife competing for limited resources. A wildlife biologist told me that Western grey squirrels are cannibalistic. Apparently, it’s a widely observed behavior. He said, “They’re just doing what squirrels do.” 

After speaking with him, I walked past the homeless encampment next to a shopping plaza and read the signs put up by protestors shaming them—You can sleep in jail! —and wondered if the wildlife biologist would say the same thing about humans. 

In California, I think of my childhood fantasies about this place. In the depths of a Wisconsin winter, California seemed to be a paradise. My mother and I would listen to Al Hammond’s “It Never Rains in Southern California” on repeat. We’d daydream aloud about hot sand, palm trees, and seagulls. We expressed delight at our imagined sunburns. The seagulls were in Santa Cruz, but it never occurred to me that our fantasy was of southern California, not the northern Redwoods where I reside.  

I sometimes watch the waves crash below the cliffs and contemplate what my mother, dead now for five years, would think of this craggy, cold place. I imagine her wrapping her arms around herself and shuddering. I hear her voice, This isn’t how it’s supposed to be! Where’s the warmth? 

As my beau and I marry and settle into our new space in California, I think of the fantasies I held of marriage and watch day-by-day as they tarnish. Some nights, I lie in bed and wonder if my mother would wrap her arms around me and whisper the same thing in my ear if she knew the man sleeping next to me.

In California, we are peasants, and our housemates are the children of American aristocrats. They lament their experience being “poor” in Cincinnati as graduate students. Poverty is a token of lived experience they feel they can wave around—it gives them false hardship in a life with none. As I stand in the kitchen and wait to use the stove, I want to ask, Have you ever applied for food stamps? Have you lived without running water or electricity? I do not ask because they do not speak to us. They have a brand-new car in the driveway and purebred pets.

Meanwhile, my car dies a slow death. First, the water pump goes. Then the struts. Then a mysterious noise that cannot be fixed for less than two grand. I cannot afford to keep it. I sell it for $75 to someone on Craigslist and take the bus. 

In California, there’s a woman who lives in a trailer at the end of our driveway. Her name is Starling, like the bird. All limbs and long fairy-like hair, she looks as though she could float through the Redwoods if the right breeze came along and swept her away. She was bitten by a tiger shark while freediving in Maui in 1999. She almost lost her leg, and it remains wrapped in a brace today.

Despite her injury, she would later testify in congress in support of the Shark Conservation Act of 2009 to curb the rapid decline in world shark populations. When she first told me the story, we sat on the bed in her trailer, our backs against the window, legs outstretched before us. A Nag Champa cone was burning in a bowl, clouding the air. I thought I didn’t hear her at first. 

           “You testified in support of shark conservation?” I asked. 

           “Yes. Of course, in support,” she said, jiggling her legs.  

In California, our housemates’ German Shepard accosts Starling each day so regularly I come to think of it as a ritual. First, the dog ambles down the driveway, greets Starling with a bark, and hops on her haunches before Starling, as if courting her to dance. Unmet, the shepard then careens into Starling like a sack of potatoes falling over. Dense and unyielding. I watch from my room, horrified, anticipating that Starling will fold under the dog’s weight; expecting that Starling’s leg will buckle, and the brace will snap off. It never does. Eventually, Starling pushes her away, and as the dog retreats down the driveway, Starling yells, “I forgive you! I forgive you every day!” 

In California, the term is “houseless” not “homeless.” In Santa Cruz, those who do not have homes are called “houseless” because most of them are from Santa Cruz County. This is their home. Nearly sixty percent have lived in Santa Cruz for more than ten years, but they have been priced out of their houses and spaces. I meet them on the bus. They are from Boulder Creek or Felton. They went to Santa Cruz High School or Harbor High. They live on the beach in Scott Creek or Shark Fin cove. I meet Richard, who was in Hurricane Katrina, and drove back out here after that. He tells me one day he’s trying not to drink, but he’s drinking now. He tells me another day he’s thinking of going to Mexico when he gets paid next Thursday, but when I see him next Thursday, we both board the bus headed north. Alberto wears a cowboy hat and wishes everyone a Happy New Year until March. Keith was born in Kentucky and tells me one day while we wait at the bus stop about his friends who live on the beach in Pescadero and about the touring musical he was in after high school. They tell me about their families and dinner plans. We bemoan the winter rain. 

Often, when I arrive home, my housemates are cooking a dinner delivered to them in cardboard packaging they leave in a heap on the deck. As I walk up the stairs to our room and smell their food, I think of Richard telling me about cooking filet mignon on the beach with a stick. I think of Keith’s delight at the grapes he found in the dumpster behind Safeway. They don’t even have seeds! 

In California, my husband and I enumerate. We calculate how our lives would change if he made fourteen dollars an hour instead of thirteen. If I get a third job. How long it will take to get a new car. We look at apartments on Craigslist and let our jaws hang loose. $2400 for a one-bedroom. $1600 for a studio. We fantasize about what it would feel like to be able to afford that.

I have my own set of calculations. How many beers he drinks. How many days he doesn’t go to work. How often he mentions leaving California altogether and going to live with his parents in North Dakota. How many ways I thought this would be different. How much I love him and how long I am willing to wait for things to change. How long I can handle such discontent. 

In California, our housemates tell us we have to leave. Their friends from Brooklyn are moving in and taking our space. Our housemates sleep mere feet away from us, but, instead, choose to write to us and say that they hope we’ll understand. 

My husband smokes an entire package of Camels at the news, and I find myself thinking about Anton Chekhov’s 1903 play The Cherry Orchard. It’s not a direct parallel to anything happening to us, but I think of Yermolai Alexevitch Lopakhin’s speech after he has betrayed the Gayev family. A man from a lower-class who has come into wealth, his peasant upbringing is the fuel for his betrayal against the aristocracy. I’m not sure why I think about it. Maybe it’s a subconscious fantasy. Or maybe it’s because I feel betrayed and foolish for being so trusting. Maybe it means nothing. Maybe it’s just like the squirrels. There’s no grand metaphor. As we wordlessly pack our boxes and scrounge for somewhere to live, my husband and I say it to one another and point our fingers to the room adjacent to ours, I forgive you, I forgive you every day. 

In California, I sit among aspiring scholars and listen as they talk about the theories of Karl Marx, Theodor Adorno, and Judith Butler. We define precarity. We think about systems of power and apparatuses of oppression. We talk about the people sleeping in the park and the “No on Measure M” posters around the city that declare their opposition to rent control in Santa Cruz. We drink from the drinking fountain during break and ask one another if our conversations do anything. 

As we come back and sit in the seminar room, I fear that the ever-present blank chalkboard is our answer. Its response to our conversations? 

Nothing worth recording. 

In California, I clean the room where my husband and I now live. As I pick up my husband’s stray cigar wrappers outside our dwelling, I muse on the squirrels again and consider that I feared them not because they fought to the death but because they so precisely expressed their rage. They articulated their feelings in a way that I fear I cannot do—even to the person I love the most. 

But, in California, the things I fear are the things I cannot avoid. 

That evening, I dream of my mother. In the dream, she and I sit in a hotel room bed together. We’re giggling under the covers. Then, she whips the covers off us and grabs my left hand. She points to my wedding ring, which was her wedding ring, and says, There’s a chip in your ring. I look at the ring. There is a massive crater in the stone, as though someone had scooped it like ice cream. I tilt my hand back and forth and watch the darkness of the hole grow deeper and recede and back again. I look at my mother. She gapes at me. 

I wake up. 

I flip over and look at the vacant sheets next to me, my husband gone to work. I fling my left hand out from under the covers and stare. My ring is whole. 

Her words ring through me for days. 

In California, I think of Starling, of being bitten, of having thirteen inches of your flesh ripped away, of blood blossoming in turquoise water. I think of her standing before congress imploring them to protect the creature that bit her. I wonder about forgiveness. I wonder how she forgave the shark and if she had to forgive herself for going into those waters. I wonder if she had to forgive her partner, who took her to those waters. 

I go to the library and look up “forgiveness.” I read from Jacque Derrida’s On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. In the middle of the essay on forgiveness, Derrida poses a series of Socratic-style questions, what he calls “‘immense questions” that are “left open.” With each question, he deepens the paradox of forgiveness. What do we forgive? Who asks for forgiveness? Must it be asked for? Must forgiveness be face-to-face? 

The questions turbid within me, I close the book. 

I walk home and pause at the political signs of the impending Statewide November election and wonder if we can forgive the systems of power that have oppressed the poor and the marginalized. What would an apology look like from an entity that is both made of human consciousness and so inhumane? Is it possible? 

I open the door to our rented studio, look at the mound of crushed beer cans next to the garbage can, and wonder if some things are unforgivable. 

In California, it is now not the traffic or the mountain lions that scare me, but the choice I must make and the conversation I must have. It is the marriage I must break. I must embody everything that frightens me about this place. I must pretend I am a woman of something more durable than what I feel. Now, I am vacant of my Midwestern niceties but full of another rural axiom. I hear it in my mother’s voice, Fish or cut bait, girl. 

*

In California, I pack my boxes one more time to move to a new space that I have not yet found. I go to the ocean, sit in the sand, and watch huskies catch frisbees. I think of my husband, now miles away, and I whisper it, I forgive you, I forgive you every day. I imagine the words floating above me and heading north towards him. I fantasize that if he were to catch them, he would send them back to me. I hope that one day he will. In his essay, Derrida spoke of forgiveness as a kind of secret—something that we must risk but is ultimately unknowable, unspeakable. I take this to mean that I cannot know if my husband will forgive me. Nonetheless, I stick my hands into the sand and imagine what it would feel like to have those words wash over me. 

I feel it as a kind of paradise. 

Courtney Kersten is the author of Daughter in Retrograde (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). She is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature at UC-Santa Cruz and is currently at work on a biography about the late astrologer Linda Goodman. 

1 September 2021