Lesley

240

When I call memories to mind, this is what surfaces: her voice on the answering machine, “You have reached the Faltus-Meltesen residence”. An image of her, smirking at us over glasses (am I inventing this?) as she read the paper in the afternoon sun. I remember being intimidated by her sarcastic insight, her refusal to bullshit the way other parents did.  I remember the delicate touches she made to their home, like the tiny statue of a frog that perfectly matched the colors of the bathroom, or the collection of souvenir and vintage teacups in the dining room, each one a tiny, perfect world.

Indeed, that house on Richland Avenue is perhaps the perfect example of what I think Julia might mean by the “geography of memory”. Julia’s family no longer lives there though the house itself still exists. All the rooms are clearly defined in my head—the locations of the record player, the organized dry foods closet, the Christmas tree in the living room, and the little wallpapered antechamber all unchanging, fixed in time and space. Although some of those items have moved along with Julia’s family, they are still somehow bound to that location. Although I can’t recall many details about Susan, I can see her reflected through my memories of her beautiful home.

When I work to remember, I see some of these aspects of Susan in Julia and her sister as well: Julia’s attention to detail and eye for decorating, her love for small tokens, patterns, and books. The way Simone’s outward dislike of sentimentality can be turned upside-down by the carefully crafted art she creates, in particular, a series of three-dimensional felt models of their childhood home.  

Like the house, Susan no longer exists in a tangible way, but is pinpointed to a certain place in my mind. If you visited 240 Richland now you wouldn’t find her. Imagine instead a map, where little pinpoints track the travels of Julia, Simone and Jay. Those small red dots, moving locations that follow the hearts and minds of those that loved her, are where she can now be found.

Zoe

The first time Julia caught my eye was on the 23 Monterey bus (a route I will always associate with exhaustion, smelly raincoats, and insecurity) on the way home from school. I was 14 and a newly minted freshman at Lowell High School. My recent decision to chop off my hair, which felt extremely momentous to me, had been unfairly obscured by some planes destroying the World Trade Center. Later I would see Julia at a bake sale to raise money for  firemen injured on 9/11. I didn't give a shit about them though, I just wanted to hang out with people who dropped offhanded references to acid and told me to get a sitar becauseeveryone plays the guitar [hahaha Julia I bet you know who this is].

Now that the scene is set, back to Julia. She was wearing a sushi-printed skirt--actually just a sheet held together with safety pins--that dragged on the ground, she had apparently hacked off her hair too, and the detail that sealed the deal: she was engrossed Giant Robot magazine, the read of choice for nascent hipsters and street style enthusiasts. Now that we're adults and we've moved beyond subcultures it's hard to explain how much these small signifiers of nonconformity meant to me, but we went to a high-pressure public college prep school and spent our days shoving past hordes of Ivy League-sweatshirt clad drones, sitting in dilapidated, mildewed bungalows, and passively absorbing monotone lectures on World War II, again and again, in a class that masqueraded as World History. Thinking of my fellow students as sheep actually felt insightful, that's how bad it was. Julia's weirdness gave me hope for the next four years.

That day on the bus we realized we were almost neighbors, and I started hanging out at Julia's after school. We were friends at school too, but I found her somewhat intimidating in that context--she had older friends and drank vodka and judged people harshly. I was just as judgmental, of course, but in the warmth and comfort of Julia's house I felt protected from such judgment turning against me. I remember her house as a series of cozy nooks filled with interesting knick knacks and souvenirs; almost like a dollhouse. Wrapped in fleece blankets, propped on pillows, snuggling with Willy, Julia's massive black and white cat, I felt safe and accepted. Her house was a sanctuary not only from the swirling tendrils of fog in Holly Park, or the wind roaring through the eucalyptus trees, but also from the tedious, angst-inducing realities of high school. 

Much of this soothing atmosphere was created by Julia's mom. Her presence in my memories is low-key, always amused and encouraging. She sat with us while we made tea, endless bowls of popcorn, and popovers, listening to our complaints and mockeries and offering insightful commentary. 

Maud

I remember Susan's smile. It was sincere, I shone, and would light up her face. She laughed encouragingly. I remember she was bothered by her weight, and was continuously cycling through diet plans. I remember she and her husband slept in separate beds. She bought things, even things she didn't mean to buy, like a bejeweled demin jacket which Julia and I doted over in amusement. She was a great caftsperson who would sew her daughters' ensembles. She made fabulous halloween costumes that I was endlessly jealous of. She had an eye for the homoerotic yet was outwardly prudish. She was an excellent and dedicated teacher. She wore makeup that was brown in tone. She had pop-tarts in her pantry one time. She loved to swim. She mowed the lawn after cancer treatments. She was relentless.
I remember many stories about her.

I remember her towing me a Julia across the waters of Heart's Desire beach while we lay on a flotation device. We were wholly relaxed, yet perplexed as she dredged us through jelly-fish infested waters, receiving many stings. She once took us to the Hearst Castle. We stayed at a motel by the water. Before bed we watched a program about tsunamis. I fell asleep listening to Susan's breathing and the crashes of the waves, fearful that the gentle laps against the shore could at any moment transform into a gaping mouth, and throw us into the stomach of the ocean.

Susan never believed that Julia and I were being naughty. Even when we were stealing chocolates from the grocery store by shoving them down our shirts, or when we won scrabble by cheating with an extra bag of letters hidden in our laps. 

Susan would surprise you with were stories from the past. She would conclude these stories with a shrug and a sigh, as if to let you know that it was youth and naivete that brought them about. She would let you know that Art Garfunkle had asked her for rolling papers (after which she had to explain the significance of rolling papers to me), that she had been threatened by Bob Marley's posse when traveling in Jamaica, that she was visiting by the traveling Noel Cowards' ghost, that she had hitch hiked across Europe, earning money by dancing in the street accompanied by a friend on the flute (while in Ireland, she had passed out one evening on a friendly enough looking lawn, only to be awoken by a kindly old lady. Seeing that she had guests, the lady immediately took to milking her goat to offer to the young travelers. Being polite, Susan and her friend did the best they could to drink the warm goats milk, but could not bring herself to do it. Once the lady had turned her back, Susan forced her friend to drink it).

Susan was a dancer.

These are some things I remember about Susan which immortalize her in my mind.

Simone

When I think of my sister and my mother together, especially when we were little kids, my initial gut feeling is jealousy. When Julia and I were small, it always seemed like they were sharing some special secret that I was almost a part of...but not quite. The photo I've attached illustrates this pretty well, Mom and Julia are engrossed in a starfish pulled from a tidepool, and there I am mostly cut out of the shot. Thinking back, this feeling of jealousy is pretty normal sibling-rivalry stuff: they shared their own special world, and that made me feel like an outsider. I'm sure in the same way, my mother and I shared our own world, and Julia was left out. My sister and I had our own secret world too. There were times, it seemed, that we had extended shimmering moments of the worlds fusing together, particularly when we were away from our home and having "adventures" - especially when those adventures involved tidepools. When our family would take our once or twice yearly trips to Mendocino, our mother would try to plan it so we would be there for a minus tide, when the water is even further out than usual and it was possible to explore the further reaches of our tidal territory. She would wake us up in the early early morning and hustle us down the stairs that hugged the cliffs under the cabin we stayed in. Once we were down on the rocks, our mother always managed to scare me because she was the risk-taker, feeling her way farther and farther into the tidal zone searching for the elusive 18-legged sunstar or cluster of abalones. I was far too much of a scaredy-cat for that sort of thing, and stuck to the tidal pools closer to shore. Julie always seemed to me to occupy the middle ground between our mother's adventurous spirit and my more pragmatic attitude. She was willing to follow our mother to the outer edges of the tide pools, but not without trying to get me to come along, too. Sometimes, with her encouragement, I would actually find the courage to make the leap into the unknown.

Mary

Susan went to the same high school we had, Lowell, and she had gone to college at SF State, which, like Lowell, is close to the ocean and probably only a five-minute drive away. I read this blog and it’s funny I thought about writing about the coast too, because I always felt like it was a big link to the Meltesens. Susan drove us up and down the coast, too, to Mendocino to go the cabin, to Monterey, to Heart’s Desire Beach in Tomales Bay, to USA Restaurant in North Beach for cioppino and calamari, to Pescadero to go to Duarte’s to get artichoke soup. 

When I think about it, San Francisco really is like the West, it is open and rangy in a way that the East Coast isn’t. Lowell and SF state are clustered around Lake Merced, a man-made lake wind whips around like crazy. In high school, I would wait sometimes two hours for MUNI to come along, as the winds whipped off of Lake Merced and I cursed the world.

Julia had Susan’s diary from high school, and she read it to us. It could have been ours, with its teenage frustration, complaints of walking down the same streets day after day, sick of the mind-numbing effects of high school.

Susan understood us, as teenagers who hated our school, because she was a public school teacher and a creative person and she had gone to Lowell too. You could tell she was a great teacher, the way she would talk about her students was both practical and kind. Unlike the teachers I was used to, she seemed to have chosen a profession she really valued. She was angry at the wealthy parents of San Francisco who insisted on sending their kids to private school, creating a class division which was certainly apparent at the school she taught at in Visitacion Valley (Viz Valley for those in the know.) She had even arranged a special trip for her students, on the “tall ships” where they could be sailors. Another link to the coast, and they were lucky to have her as a teacher.

Driving along the coast, Susan told stories of growing up in San Francisco, a smart, creative, angsty teen girl like us. Like us, her friends would cut school to run to the beach, passing the same Doggie Diner, the same zoo. The Great Highway, which is really just a little highway, runs along the coast, separating the beach. She told a story about being stoned on acid as a teenager, standing on one side of the Great Highway and being too unsure of when the light changed to go across.

I remember driving to Mendocino, we read the ElleGirl featuring Kelly Osbourne, who we were interested in because she was chubby and had dyed pink hair and looked like us. We were obsessed with her video, Papa Don’t Preach, they’d play on the local video channel, hosted by local DJ Chuey Gomez. Like my family, the Meltesens did not have cable. I would hang out there a lot, watching hours of CMC and then eating dinner at their house. They always had salad as a last course, the Italian way.

Susan drove us up and down the coast, on the twisting, tiny roads of 101. When we went to Monterey, Julia and her talked a lot about the chicken, a chicken that was supposed to play tic-tac-toe. Susan had seen the chicken in person, but when we went to the building where it was supposed to be, it was all boarded up.

I feel lucky I got to go on these trips, too, and see the coast the way Julia and Simone always had, the way Susan taught them to, because she’d grown up the same way. We saw an orange octopus scuttle away in the Mendocino tide pools, descending a narrow staircase that hugged the cliff to get there. San Francisco, the beach, the limpets in the tide pools, the Great Highway, Tomales Bay, artichoke soup; these are all memories I have, tied together in the northern California coastline.