The Cheese Test

by Bonna Newman Read

We were living on the mountain then, far up a remote canyon, past where the pavement ends. Our dirt road was rutted and slick in winter, washboard in summer—a mile and a half of four-wheeling across a barren ridge over a narrow, rocky shelf cut from sheer cliff face. We were perched on the last east-facing slope, near where the up-thrust bedrock of the Santa Monica Mountains finally tumbles out onto the alluvial Oxnard plain. The white-knuckle view was dramatic: 180 degrees of Pacific Ocean, rippled and metallic to the horizon or hidden beneath a quilted fog advancing on the coastline like an invading army.

It was a wild and renegade place to live at a time when we felt that way about ourselves, out of step with all things Reagan and satisfied to remain outlaws, forever if necessary, until everyone else came to their senses.

Los Angeles was just 50 miles away, back in the other direction, though it might have been 500 for how little contact we had with that endless, distracted city. According to Walter, this was, “as far away as you can go without coming back.”

Officially, he and I were caretakers, living by the grace of a friend who suggested, when speculators bulldozed our squatter’s beach shack, that we move up onto his land and keep an eye on things. Cast out for lack of funds from the paradisiacal oceanside micro-climate, we settled, just the two of us, in a 20-foot Airstream.

At first, our little homestead had no water, electricity, or telephone. We hauled water and burned candles for light. Romantic and scary, over time it became ours: the dusty chaparral, the kangaroo rats, and that incredible field of stars at night.

Walter’s daughter, Rae, had visited us at the beach the previous year. She was youngest of his three girls, a tough and weary veteran of her parents’ decades-old divorce who wore her psychic scars defiantly, like corrosive tattoos. Having arm-wrestled her way around the world, she appeared unannounced on our splintery doorstep one fine morning, clad in rags and flip-flops, a backpack full of pirate swag slung over her shoulder—several hundred bootleg tapes purchased in the street markets of Singapore and Bangkok.

Not just a reconnaissance raid, she arrived fully intent on battle, but finding herself welcome, she decided to stay a few days and go surfing. I embraced the role of stepmother: borrowed a soft-top board for her use, prepared three meals a day, and kept the ice chest stocked with Diet Coke. At first, Walter and his daughter moved cautiously around one another, avoided eye contact, spoke softly—as polite as strangers. One night after dinner, Walter gathered the collection of school craft-projects Rae had sent him over the years, and they examined each one together.

From Rae, I learned the poignancy of visits by grown-up children.

We took her out to the movies, bought a pair of marbled high-top sneakers and a couple of new T-shirts. A stretchy black mini-skirt pulled from the back of my closet completed her new wardrobe, and finally, reluctantly, we returned her to the airport so she might complete her circumnavigation of the planet before turning 21....

Bonna Newman Read lives in Malibu. This is her first time in print. E-mail: bnewread@yahoo.com