New Heaven and Earth

Golden Days
Carolyn See
University of California Press

Dana Lea Marterella
Special to the Mirror

   “Wherever you were then — in Indiana, lining up at the Dairy Queen; in Beloit, Wisconsin, driving out to watch the lights of the A&W Root Beer stand reflected on the river. If you were in New York City, in that genital softness of May and June, didn’t you know in your heart that we were safe? Except...”
   After the devastation caused by a nuclear attack on the United States, Edith, the narrator of Carolyn See’s Golden Days reflects on a time when people felt safe.
   On September 11, just after 6 a.m., I tried to ignore the telephone. Mornings are chaotic in my house and I wasn’t ready for this one to begin. But the phone rang again. And again. I suppose, at that moment, with a pillow over my head, assuming the call was from a neighborhood kid wanting a ride to school, I felt safe. Except, on the twentieth ring, I answered, just in case something had happened.
Something had.
   And then, either three hours before the East Coast or three hours after (depending how you look at it), September 11th became September 11th in California. New Yorkers had already felt the first impact of the terrorist attacks, but Californians were still in bed. We had the time-delayed opportunity to relive a day that had been destroyed for others. Watching television. Making phone calls. Kissing kids before school. Making love. After all, isn’t Los Angeles the city of second chances?
   Carolyn See addresses this Los Angles in Golden Days. In it, Edith returns from New York to the West Coast, realizing she had been “going in the wrong direction” by heading east. Edith gives her frenetic account of daily life as a self-employed single mother, and emerges as a modern survivor. Due to a measured combination of fate and intelligence (a hybrid of West Coast values), Edith achieves financial success and has a great time finding her place on the fringes of paradise, a Topanga Canyon hilltop. Whether participating in abundance workshops, roller skating on the Santa Monica bike path, or eating lunch at Michael’s, Edith becomes the observant voice of someone who has insight those around her lack.
   “I’ve often thought since, that intellectuals pick their slant in life in the same way that psychiatrists used to pick their profession because they were crazy.”
   Golden Days was first published in 1987, but See began writing it in 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan inspired a pundit to exclaim on national television, “This means war!” My initial fascination, though, was with Carolyn See’s inventive satire of eighties’ consumerism, unapologetic feminism, and stark observations of local idiosyncrasies. Edith collects gems as the only flawless investments and teaches the UCLA extension housewives her financial strategies by giving her own seminars, “Wealth! To me it began to seem like the only constant...No one offered courses with that belief system at UCLA: no stand firm, keep the house in case of a divorce, avoid credit cards like the plague, hold that money close to your vest and buy stones.”
   She blames men for inventing nuclear bombs, accuses herself of dealing with them “unfairly,” and then justifies her position by letting a man speak for himself,
   “And one night there was an art historian there, red-haired, white-faced, flabby, repulsive. He ate boiled rice and vanilla ice cream and he said he didn’t think there were any good women writers. But, I said, what about Carson McCullers? He said he didn’t think of Carson McCullers as a writer. But, I said, what about Virginia Woolf? And he said he didn’t think of Virginia Woolf as a woman.”
   Any of Edith’s comments could be true (the novel fits firmly between the boundaries of fact and fiction), but perhaps See’s closest bridge between prophesy and reality is in her treatment of Los Angeles, a series of questions and inside jokes about the city. Edith wonders why they’ve never removed the BIKES ONLY signs from the Santa Monica path, when it’s clearly been taken over by skaters. She asks what the people at the RAND Corporation are so busy thinking about (she guesses sex). Golden Days is filled with astute observations of Los Angeles:
   “There were very few regular what you’d call businesses...What was really out here was the intangible. When you drove you saw buildings often windowless. They were either television stations or movie studios (or ingenious, semi-successful combinations of the two) or death factories where they made missiles, or think tanks where they thought them up, or ingenious combinations of those two.” and;
   “I drove with the kids one dreadful morning into the San Fernando Valley and felt that if there had to be a nuclear war, certainly it might do some good in this area.”
   As Edith is busy living her typical L.A. life with the fate of her future in mind, she begins to realize that the times she lived without fear were good ones. Is it possible that a too-hot summer, the 101 freeway at 5 p.m., a lovers’ breakup, financial dilemmas and Frappacinos are Paradise? But paradise is where you find it, See insists – no matter how bad things get — and boy, does she put her money where her mouth is.
   On September 11, I called Los Angeles City College to see if I had the day off (certainly an “Attack on America” would warrant it). I didn’t. I faced a typically over-enrolled English 101 class with a syllabus that I no longer found inspiring or relevant. Staring at a group of students. Them staring at me. Like Edith, who moved from property to practicality in the face of a crisis, I presented my students with a new reading list. Golden Days was at the top, not because it is a novel about war, but because it’s a novel about life. A survival narrative.
   We should take another look at Golden Days because it is about a sudden tragedy changing what we call reality, storytelling as a way of coping with reality, and creating a new Paradise after the old ones have been flattened. Why should we read and believe one woman’s weird vision of a happy ending? As See says of her heroine, “If a Caspar can destroy a world, why is it so strange that an Edith should preserve it?”