When the World Didn't End

When the World Didn't End

Chapter 1

“We have not gathered here to isolate ourselves from the rest of the world but rather to establish a greater order within that order, an order born of willing cooperation and necessary discipline.”

—Melvin Lyman, 1969

On January 5, 1975, the world was going to end. All the World People were going to be wiped off the face of the earth, but not us, because a spaceship was going to come and take us to Venus, where we would live. This seemed completely plausible to my six-year-old self—exciting, even. We were going to live on the planet of love!

I spent the day dreamily wandering the grounds of our Los Angeles property, knowing I would never see this place again. I was feeling sentimental and melancholy, but not really. Really I was humming Billie Holiday’s “Sentimental and Melancholy” to myself and enjoying the idea of feeling the “sugar coated misery” she sang about. I started upstairs in the Big House, where most of the adults stayed, and where our Lord, Melvin, lived sequestered away. The house was full of people; I could hear murmurs and muted footsteps from its corners, but it was always in a hush during the day—Melvin slept from sunrise to sundown and was rarely seen by anyone but Jessie. Jessie, our Queen, had her own elegant bedroom on that floor, with a four-poster bed and windows that looked out onto the giant lawn. Upstairs from this was the Studio, where kids weren’t allowed unless we were listening to a “tape,” which is what we called the semiannual curated recordings Melvin released to us—the communities—complete with liner notes for each compilation.

Passing a framed photograph of Melvin looking intensely into the camera, his eyes kind, wise, and a little haunted, I tiptoed down the stairs and felt happy that I would never have to vacuum them again. The smell of coffee and cigarettes wafted from the kitchen, and the twelve-seat dining room table gleamed, reflecting the sparkling chandelier that hung above it. Everything was, as always, perfectly in its place and very still.

Outside, I wandered to the swimming pool, crouching to run my fingers through the turquoise water, the smell of chlorine mixing with the fragrance of the jasmine vines that clung to the twelve-foot fence surrounding our property. To my left, the tennis court, where I’d first learned to ride a bike. Behind me, Melvin’s pyramid, high on stilts and looming against the sky, the ladder leading up to its entrance three times as tall as me. I’d never been inside, but I knew it was where he went to meditate for hours on end. If you stood underneath it and looked up, you could see the slats that formed its floor and, through them, the deep-blue velvet cushions that were made for him to sit on.

On the way to the Kids’ House, I passed the koi pond and stopped to watch their white-and-orange bodies glide around under the water. I wondered if animals were going to be taken to Venus too or if these fish would just boil inside their little habitat. But I didn’t dwell—we’d all been looking forward to this day for weeks, and there was much to do before sundown.

Now I hurried down the narrow path, past our own pyramid—a much bigger one than Melvin’s, and only a few feet off the ground—and into the Kids’ House, where Carolee hovered over a counter covered with twenty thick slices of homemade bread, slathering each with peanut butter. Frida was at another counter, spreading jelly on slices and handing them to Jackie, who wielded a bread knife, putting the two sides together and cutting each in half. They were singing “Going Home,” Jackie and Frida harmonizing beautifully, with Carolee humming along, distracted. “Going home . . . ​I’m just going home . . . ​It’s not far, just close by, through an open door.”

Over our heads was the soft thud of kids’ feet running down the hall. Someone was playing the harmonica in the living room, and I could faintly hear an eruption of girls’ laughter trickling down from one of the upstairs bedrooms. I stood there in the kitchen—I loved “Going Home,” and it was the perfect song for the moment. I joined in for the end. “All the friends we knew . . .” imitating an emotional Olivia de Havilland at the end of the film The Snake Pit.

Carolee pushed her long brown hair out of her face with the side of her arm, her hands otherwise occupied, and noticed me for the first time.

“Where have you been, you little space cadet?” she asked affectionately. “Go round up the kids and tell them it’s lunchtime and after that it’s baths and get your spaceship clothes on.” I loved Carolee. She was the only adult who slept here in the Kids’ House with us and one of the only adults who rarely raised her voice and was generous with hugs and lenient with rules. “And take that laundry basket upstairs—you girls get it all folded up before we eat.”

I could barely carry the basket overflowing with clean clothes, but I hoisted it onto my hip and made my way up the curved staircase. The strip of carpet that ran along the middle of the terra-cotta steps was worn in a way that only twenty-five kids running up and down it daily could do, and the curved wall bore the smudges of our grubby hands. Samantha and Corrina hurried past me down the stairs, each holding several dolls, in deep conversation about which they would choose to bring to Venus.

I stopped on the second-floor landing to rest, putting the laundry basket down, and decided I wanted to spend one last moment in the beloved room on the third floor, which was a turret—a circular single room—and a place where mostly just the girls hung out. Up its skinny staircase with the basket once again, I dumped all the clothes on the floor and sat on top of the pile, contemplating my favorite thing in the house: a dollhouse we’d made out of three tiers of curved shelves, which took up most of one wall. We’d created an elaborate tiny world, spending hours on the most minute of details—a bedspread made of a fabric scrap but finished around the edges with intricate stitches; a dining room rug made from yarn, braided and carefully looped into an oval that could rest perfectly in the palm of your hand. I was especially proud of the toilet-paper roll I’d made, no bigger than my pinky nail, crafted by slicing ever so cautiously up the side of a regular roll of toilet paper and rolling it around a toothpick; I’d turned the three-ply into one-ply, realizing that the life-sized thickness just wouldn’t do. I stood up and began to fold the laundry into two piles—girls’ clothes and boys’ clothes—vaguely wondering why this task was necessary, given that the world was ending.

All of us had been told to choose our favorite toy and put on our favorite clothes and then wait for the spaceship to come. I decided on my party dress, light blue with red flowers, and a black-and-white stuffed dog that was made of rabbit fur. After dinner, we all sat in the living room and waited.

I of course did not know that Venus is a place with no water and that its surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, but the adults around me, many of them college-educated, must have known this. Years later I asked my mother, “Mom—you must have known humans can’t live on Venus. How did you reconcile that in your head?”

She took a deep breath and let out an epic sigh. “It’s complicated,” she said, and walked out of the room.

I don’t know what it was like for her in the San Francisco community, where she lived at the time, but here in L.A. we were giddy, barely able to sit still in our seats. This lasted for the first few hours, and then the kids got so squirrelly that we decided to go into the backyard and sit in the pyramid for a while. The smell of blooming jasmine surrounded us as we crouched through the small doorway of the pyramid one by one, sat cross-legged in a circle, and sang one note all together. We had practiced calling spaceships before, for hours on end, but tonight we really needed them to hear us. Our faces were pointed upward to the skylights where the four walls of the pyramid came to a point, and we stared at the stars as we sang. We would each hold on to the note until it felt like our lungs would burst, then take a deep breath and start again. The note we were singing would morph and mutate into a different note, but the sound never stopped. We took this very seriously, a solemn duty. There was no laughter and no joking around, but the sound was beautiful to me, like we could be one person. I wondered if Faedra, the only spirit we kids were allowed to talk to on the Ouija board, could hear us.