This is a serialization of short story collection, Staring into the Sun. Start here for more info and the full index.
Previous installment: Hearts on Fire, Part 3 / Magic, Part 1
Moss Beach, August 1995
Poa-Poa added a glug of half-and-half and a heaped teaspoon of demerara sugar to her coffee. I copied her, so I could taste the same concoction. It was her nectar; she ran on sugar, like a hummingbird. Sugar and cream, as well as peach pie, ribs, and Häagen-Dazs. In the freezer, next to the ice cream, were Ziploc bags of undated, unidentifiable meals. Scattered around in the white freezer gasket were black dots which looked like ground coffee. On closer inspection, they revealed themselves to be immobilized, very cold ants.
She also loved dim sum, including cheung fun: steamed sheets of rice (fun) flour rolled up like crepes and served with sweet pork, thinly sliced scallions, and soy sauce. She wasn’t above a pun, which she’d deliver with a grin: “I like fun.”
We smeared strawberry jam in our popovers and savored them as the waves rolled in hypnotically.
She got up and brought over a well-worn, stained index card, a pen, and a sheet of paper. “Here’s my recipe. They’re really easy. Or you can make a copy in the fax machine?”
“It’s OK, I’ll write it down,” I said. As I was reading her familiar cursive, I heard a thud at the front door. A bundle of catalogs and letters had hit the ground near a large yin and yang symbol inlaid in the same slate as the rest of the floor. The yin-yang was of about the same diameter as the tires of my grandparents’ car which was parked in the pine-needle-strewn dirt uphill from the house. I glimpsed the postman walking away, climbing the slope paved with wooden railroad sleepers.
A pair of marble lions was visible through the windows on either side of the door. They were on chunky pedestals which brought their heads up to eye level. Atop each lion sat a woman, straddling it as if she were riding on a horse. The statues were perfectly mirrored, with the women’s and lions’ heads turned toward each other. As a child, I was never allowed to sit on these mythical-looking sculptures—anyway, there would have only been room squeezed behind a woman and a lion’s tail, or on a lion’s head. It was one of the few restrictions in my grandmother’s house.
The lions had an impressive history but I couldn’t remember the details. I put my pen down and asked Poa-Poa, “Tell me about the lions again?”
“They were given to Joe Shoong by Chiang Kai-shek. It was because he gave so much money to China in the ‘30s and ‘40s. They’re Buddha lions but they’re called fu dogs, I don’t know why. The woman is Kuan Yin, the goddess of mercy.”
I didn’t have anything to grasp onto to continue the conversation. I knew nothing about Chiang Kai-shek or that era—or really, any era—of Chinese history, and very little about Buddhist gods and beliefs. Everything was too big for me, so I feared that any follow-on questions would seem trite. I glanced down at the paper and said, “Thanks for the recipe. I can’t wait to make them when I’m back in Bologna.” Thankfully, the ingredients—eggs, milk, flour, butter—were simple and readily available in Italy. Using such staples, I had already learned to make foods from scratch which I had previously taken for granted, like tortillas.
My grandparents’ house was as open as their minds. One area breathed into the next: kitchen, dining, living, sewing room, entrance, piano nook. The kitchen sink sat between the dining area and the guest room, and it also faced the Pacific. After eating our popovers, I put on Poa-Poa’s bright yellow rubber gloves and scrubbed the muffin tray. The setting was so spectacular that I couldn’t imagine ever getting bored of washing dishes there. Following the house habits (the same I had adopted in Italy), I left the tray to drip dry, letting nature do its work rather than using any extra energy to dry it myself.
Pink-robed Poa-Poa, now wearing oversized reading glasses, perched on a high stool at the further away of two long kitchen islands. Along with being open-plan, the house had few sharp corners. Everything was sinuous and organic. The islands were curved, like two ten-foot-long closing parentheses, spooning toward the rest of the kitchen.
Twenty-two years old and living in a rented apartment in Italy, I hadn’t yet developed my own taste for architecture and interiors, but this Moss Beach house demanded appreciation. I called over to my grandmother, “How did you design this place? It’s so magical.”
She looked up from some papers and said, “You’ve heard of the house that Jack built. I call this the house that grass built. We’d all sit around and smoke and come up with ideas like this,” she pointed at the pyramid skylight overhead, “and then our two workmen would build it. Pyramids concentrate energy, you know.”
I raised my eyebrows with an “oh, that’s interesting” expression. I didn’t agree about the pyramid, but the skylight was beautiful, so what harm did it bring her to believe that?
Poa-Poa had always smoked grass, for many more years than I did. I first smoked pot with friends in high school and by that visit to Moss Beach, had pretty much stopped. I wouldn’t even know where to procure it in Bologna. Weed made me more nervous than mellow. I’d be withdrawn, lost in thought, for some reason worrying that I’d pee my pants. I’d have to remind myself, “You’ve never peed your pants while high, right? So it won’t happen this time.”
Yesterday, we had driven into San Francisco to pick up some dim sum at her favorite spot, Ho & Ho, in the Richmond District. She insisted that I drive because she loved sitting in the back seat, pretending she had a chauffeur. That was a link between her and Grandpa Milt: they both preferred fairy tales—a carriage, a beautiful princess, a magician, a white stallion—over harsh reality.
The sun had warmed the Lincoln Town Car, releasing a perfume of leather which mixed with the humid air laden with the scent of ocean and evergreens. If that essence could be bottled into an air freshener, the inventor would make millions. The car was luxurious, white inside and out, a special Cartier Edition with maple wood interior trim and interlocked double-C monograms embroidered tone-on-tone on the driver and passenger seats and floor mats.
Like many Americans, I’d had my license since I was sixteen. However, I had very little experience driving since I’d never owned a car and had been away at high school and college where I didn’t need one. So I felt nervous as I guided the long vehicle out of the drive and past the driftwood sign which said 1 Reef Point Road written loopily in rope by Poa-Poa.
I crept along the narrow road bordered by fiery orange nasturtiums and tall, dry grass. One street away, near an unremarkable, modern (everything in California was new compared to Italy) Mormon church cleaned and landscaped to sterility, I had to make a hairpin left turn onto Highway 1. Swiveling my neck, I waited for a break in the traffic. When my opportunity arrived, I gunned the gas, making the tires screech.
“Oh,” my grandmother remarked placidly from the back seat. “Be careful.”
We passed the Moss Beach sign which faced the other direction, to be read by oncoming cars. I had seen it many times; it showed a population number in the low thousands, maybe seven-thousand-something. That would be fitting, since seven was Poa-Poa’s favorite number.
“Do you want to put some music on?” Poa-Poa asked.
“I don’t think I can figure out the stereo while I’m driving, sorry,” I said.
She didn’t respond. Soon, I could hear rustling noises. I knew that her hands were busy inside a paper bag, cleaning marijuana from its stems and seeds. When that stopped, she would be rolling five or ten skinny joints which would last her a few days, taking only three or four puffs at a time. She had a little rolling machine which she had demonstrated to me a few years earlier while we were waiting for my cousin to finish a Little League game.
As we headed north toward Devil’s Slide, windswept cypresses flicked past us and I started to relax. We floated, rising and falling like a boat on gentle swells.
“Hmm.” Poa-Poa sounded concerned.
I was done with the dishes and went over to her, curious, hoping I didn’t seem nosy. She was writing into an oversized ledger. Next to it lay a block of gold-color resin the size of a chocolate bar. But instead of being divided into flat squares, it was made up of small pyramids in a three-by-five grid. A checkbook sat on the pyramids’ points like someone lying on a bed of nails. She was no doubt concentrating energy into the checkbook, maybe resetting its karma, detoxifying the wealth that came from her in-laws, the Shoongs.
She said wearily, “I might have to evict them.”
I noticed that her reading glasses could use a clean. “Evict who?”
“The tenants, at the Worm Farm.”
She owned some land in San Gregorio, a half-hour drive down the coast, past Half Moon Bay. A seemingly infinite number of worms lived in long wooden boxes at the Worm Farm. Local organic farms would buy their poo, which a newspaper article called “the fertilizer of the Nile.”
The farm was the site of one of my earliest memories. My mother was there, so it was before I was four. It was a two-part memory, like two snapshots. In one, I was on top of a horse as big as an elephant. The ground was miles away. In the other, I was inside a smoke-filled yurt. The grown-ups were probably smoking weed, or maybe it was a smudging ceremony, or both. There was a vague sense of “she shouldn’t be here,” and I don’t think I was inside the yurt for very long.
“Why do you have to evict them?” I asked.
“They haven’t paid their rent in months. I just don’t have the heart to ask them. I don’t think they have the money.”
Like with the fu dogs, I didn’t know what to think. I had no idea how much she depended on the rent for her income. There would certainly be money from her former in-laws and probably from my step-grandfather as well, from his career as a magician. I didn’t know how much the tenants paid, or if they were working on the farm or taking care of maintenance in lieu of rent. And she wasn’t asking me for advice anyway. All I knew is that she was too kind to demand the rent, and now she was forced to evict them. She had become an invisible landlady who had backed herself—and therefore her tenants—into a corner.
I promised myself that I’d never get into a similar situation. I would protect my financial interests, even if it meant being tough. This was all hypothetical, something to bookmark for later: I was still in the era of renting rooms and hadn’t had to deal with any complicated contracts or large sums of money, either as a tenant or a landlord. A few years later, I would have mixed feelings about finding a loophole in a rental contract that meant—after taking the landlord to court—that my boyfriend and I could keep our rent ridiculously low. We told ourselves that he had enough money already, and that he shouldn’t have offered such a badly-formulated contract. Maybe the landlord had a granddaughter who thought he should have been more careful.
To be continued on 22 November 2025.