Making Peace with Paradise: an autobiography of a california girl, by Tania Runyan, is being gifted to book lovers in June, as a poetic start to summer. (Paid subscribers.)
Here’s a peek of the book, below, from the section “Earthquakes,” plus a downloadable excerpt of the discussion questions. We hope you enjoy. :)
Earthquakes [excerpt]
It felt like one of our big Afghan dogs had bumped into the couch, but the dogs remained snoozing in the grass outside, and the crystal pendants of the chandelier, which hung on the other side of the living room, clinked like tines on a plate.
I froze, Ramona the Brave in hand.
Had a spirit entered the house? My mother collected antiques, many of which haunted me in the small Orange Country ranch. Trembling, I glanced at the Viking faces that jutted out from the mahogany arms of the brown velvet couch. The stern faces of ceramic Pekingese dogs on the brick mantel. The faces of hand-painted cats on decorative plates that spotted the walls.
She had accumulated most of these items years before I was born, even years before my sister’s birth fourteen years prior to mine. My mother and her treasures had their own relationship. The chair she bought from an estate sale while she attended art school. (“I went without food for that one.”) The tiny French perfume bottles she dug out of a dumpster, cleaned, and displayed in the bathroom, a glass menagerie filled with ancient amber liquids. It would be years before I’d realize that one of dozens of figures in the small curios cabinets in the entryway, a small black figure jutting from an alligator’s mouth, was a slave in the process of being devoured.
For at least ten minutes after the jolt I sat, afraid to move, straining to hear the fading echoes of the big brass pendulum of the grandfather clock. Finally, my mother pulled into the driveway, home from her job at the interior decorating store.
“Mom, what was that?” I asked when she walked in, red hair bobbing. The front door jingled with vintage bells and tassels tied to the brass handle, and I folded my arms as she passed.
“It was weird, Mom. It felt like someone hit the house.”
“Probably a little earthquake. I didn’t feel anything in the car.”
“The earth moved?” I twisted the end of my braid. “Why?”
She started to get Polish sausage, my dad’s favorite meal, out of the fridge, moving about the kitchen briskly, her hair skimming the antique ladles and flour sifters that dangled from the ceiling. Soon my dad would come home demanding dinner. At two hundred and ten pounds, and over six feet tall, he downright knocked stuff off the walls.
“It has to let out the pressure.”
“Why does the earth have pressure?”
“It’s the way the land’s formed, something like that,” she said. “Don’t stew about it.”
And that was where we left it.
The pressure on the earth had been released through a right-lateral strike-slip fault some one hundred miles away near the town of Anza. A small, 4.8 quake, it was unlikely many other people in my town felt it. But alone in the house, I had shaken alongside the breaking earth, 1920s carnival glass looking on.
Sure, summer latchkeyism had its perks. Other kids had to play dodgeball in day camp. I spent the days eating as many popsicles as I could, watching Wheel of Fortune, writing plays, and reading. In the weeks following the quake, though, I padded across the marble and parquet floors, afraid I would somehow trigger another lurch.
“You’re home alone because you’re more mature than the other kids,” my mom would say, and I’d let those words roll through my mind. Being smart and mature was a burden I carried with both pride and shame. In second grade, my teacher had kept me in during lunch to tutor other students. I loved and dreaded it at the same time. Tall, quiet and studious, I tried to pass myself off as older, and the teacher had been complicit in the ruse.
But suddenly, at age 9, I felt the need to hold up the house. I wasn’t ready.
Photo by Dominik Scythe. Creative commons, via Unsplash.
I’d almost forgotten about those Ramona books! Tania’s style is so engaging!