Bright Precious Thing

by Gail Caldwell

  “Yes,” I said, and then, without thinking, “I was nineteen.”

  “Good choice,” she said, without looking up, and we moved on down the page.

  It was an unguarded moment, and later I thought about what it had taken for us to have that exchange—the straightforward ease of it. Without her warmth and our initial connection, I wouldn’t have bothered to say what I did (“I was nineteen”). Had I been more reserved, I expect she’d have stayed silent. Instead we had reached across decades and generations, and agreed, without any fuss, to agree on this one thing. Good choice.

  That afternoon I went for a row on the Charles. I left the boathouse tired and happy, and, pulling out of the parking lot, I saw a group of girls from the high school on their way into the club for crew practice. A main thoroughfare runs alongside the river, and they were wending their way through stopped traffic, laughing together, indifferent to the cars around them. They were seniors, probably, and watching them I thought about the heedless beauty that horses have when they move—all that energy possessing space. These young almost-women had the same grace. They deserved this world; they were moving through it unaware, and soon they would be on the river, taking a thousand-pound boat across flat water. I loved their arrogance. I loved what they didn’t yet know.

  Cambridge, 2016

  TYLER IS BRUSHING THE DOG’S teeth, a task that Tula cheerfully endures, while I stand at the sink washing dishes. It’s a late-summer day, the weeks between her camp and the start of school, and all our conversations have the laze of uninterrupted dialogue. Out of the blue she says, over my shoulder, “So—did you vow never to marry?”

  I stifle a laugh. Where did she get this bodice-ripper phrase? She is too young for Jane Eyre. But her questions are always serious and I meet this one head-on. “Well, I didn’t find the one absolutely right person,” I tell her. “So I spread my love around. I’ve loved a lot of people, and animals.”

  She seems to accept this as a good enough answer, as do I, on most days. I don’t say, as she often does, “Well, it’s complicated.”

  I do not say, When you are a young revolutionary who believes marriage is a bourgeois institution that enslaves women and empowers the state, it’s tricky finding the right guy to hang out with. I don’t say, Oh, well, there was him, and then him, and then her, and then him, and then I left Texas and it all started again. Him, and him, and her, and then, eventually…just…me.

  I don’t tell her about the letters I found this week, between me and a lover, written thirty-five years ago. “I would destroy you,” R. wrote me, fearing, I think, that the darkness he saw in himself would overshadow us both. And later, in the same letter, “Go write the Great American Novel.” He didn’t, and I didn’t either, though some part of me knew to leave—to get away from him and Texas and every toxic element there, including me, that was trying to take me out. More than a decade later, off his meds and wandering Europe in despair, he checked into a hotel in Copenhagen and took an overdose of pills. There was no note.

  I don’t tell her about the time he asked me to be a drug mule from Lima to Miami so we could make our fortune, and that I nearly said yes but changed my mind at the last minute—that some deep core part of me said Don’t be this stupid—it’s a nosedive from twenty thousand feet. And he went anyway and someone else got arrested. He called me three weeks later, in Taos, and cried and said he loved me and begged me to come back to Texas. By then I was living in a yurt with a woman I thought would get me over men. I didn’t go home, and later, when I did, we pretended the phone call hadn’t happened.

  I don’t say, Oh, Tyler, life is so long and so complicated and sometimes it’s just biology. And there are tragedies and pratfalls and blind alleys around every corner.

  I don’t say, Well, honey, I had a tendency to fall for the bad ones. Sometimes I left and sometimes they did. Oh yes and also, I was married to Johnnie Walker Red for a couple of decades, and when you’re in love with a bottle it tends to crowd the room.

  But all of those omissions are just facts, unorganized, so the most important thing I do not tell her, not yet, is that the mistakes, if you’re lucky, can become tributaries to somewhere else. You look up and all the choices you made and the U-turns and the wanderlust—they settle into a life with its own metronome and internal logic. We wed ourselves to whatever narrative we have. This is called acceptance, or denial, and is a central underpinning of most world religions.

  When I found that letter from R. this week I cried, but a part of me was skeptical even as I watched my young heart pining. Why that particular letter, read on that day? It was one of a hundred, saved and forgotten. This is a problem of material culture, or memory, or the junction between the two: Whatever makes it through thirty or forty years into the archive can supersede the memory, can take on the sometimes unearned weight of being The Past. When in fact it’s only a bit of the past, a scribbled-on matchbook cover in the scheme of things, one photo saved instead of the four lost or discarded, one more lover who went the way of the dustbin of history. The collision of time and space: Presto, the story of the universe. Of one ordinary woman.

  What Tyler is too young to understand, what I believe but forget most of the time, is that the heart is a dowsing tool and finds where it needs to go. However much I can feel trapped by self-inflicted isolation, I have to acknowledge that I walked straight into this life, half trotted, arms swinging and eyes open. I made decisions that got me here. I sought and seem to require a house with an enormous chair, with dogs and an open-door policy but no full-time humans, not so far, and I’m in my seventh decade so that’s a pretty long so-far. This awareness can be a crushing burden in the dead of winter, or when I am injured, say, or forgot to buy broccoli, or don’t want to go to a party meant to be fun but that seems onerous. It’s a problem of the soul and psyche, not food or shelter, and when I remember that, I must also remember that no one is protected from consciousness itself, the ability to want and dream and suffer and regret. Nobody gets a cakewalk.

  I think about this when the dog and I walk the winter streets at night and I see the amber glow from inside the houses, where the other people’s stories, the perfect ones, are being lived. There is so much we cannot see.

  The book Tyler and I are supposedly writing is a fantasy that wafts in and out of consciousness, depending upon the summer days and basketball at the park and whether or not, say, we have decided to run hurdles or make pie. For a couple of years we’ve invented a multitude of stories involving hundred-pound cats in the basement, magic potions made from cinnamon, horses that can fly. But the older she gets, the more realism rears its head. One day she appears with a thick spiral notebook, climbs onto the stool at the kitchen counter, and writes on the first page: “TYLER AND GAIL: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS.”

  8

  Joan had gone her own way in Dallas. The ride we’d picked up in Albuquerque had taken us that far south and dropped us where the highways diverged, and now it was late on a Sunday night and cold for a Texas winter and I still had two hundred miles to go. I was trying to get to Austin, where I lived in a house with five adults and four dogs and where things were so lax that nobody would notice if I went missing for a day or even a week. We were all hippies and musicians and vegetarians; no one had any money or a car that worked, and hitchhiking was the preferred mode of travel: spontaneous and free.

  Texas was known for spending more money on its highways than on education, but I remember that stretch of road as dark and uninviting. I was wearing jeans and a rough-out jacket with a high sheepskin collar, and after I’d found a good hitching spot and unloaded my pack, I pulled my hair into a ponytail and tucked it inside my jacket. Then I stuck out my thumb, the classic half-semaphore wave with a backward half-jog. I was hoping that I looked like a young guy.

  The first car I waved on because I didn’t like the look of the driver. Another twenty minutes passed before anyone stoppe
d. Then an old Chevy pulled up. The driver was about thirty, with slicked-back hair. He looked startled when I opened the door. “Oh hey!” he said, “I thought you were a dude. Where are you headed?”

  Our trip had started a couple of weeks earlier, when Joan and I had set out from Austin for Aspen, Colorado, a thousand miles northwest, and made it almost straight through with a harrowing midnight ride over Independence Pass. We had gone to visit an old boyfriend of mine who had turned ski bum, and when we got to Aspen at one A.M. he didn’t even seem surprised. Such was the mañana culture of those days, when everything mattered but not for long, and we all thought we were Neal Cassady or Rosalie Sorrels, when really we were just young and daredevil-dumb and lucky to get through it all alive.

  We had come back through Taos and hung out for a few days and dodged a couple of weirdos and laughed our way through to central Texas on our way home. That was the thing about time-space travel: If you could stay on the bull, keep riding the light beam, the mind and heart were so full that you didn’t have to think about the crash.

  The man who stopped for me on the road outside Dallas was James Dean cool, probably hip before hippies existed, and I liked his looks and the fact that he’d thought I was male. I threw my pack in the back seat and got in.

  He was going all the way to Austin. By now it was late, maybe nine or ten P.M., and we had four hours ahead of us and I was glad to have gotten a ride straight through. He asked me a couple of questions about where I’d been but was mostly quiet. Those first few minutes of a ride were always crucial, when the driver and the hitchhiker made tacit assessments of each other. And hitching solo was a game changer, which is why I’d gone camouflage before putting my thumb out. You might get a ranter who doesn’t think you should be hitching, or another hippie who has grass to share. This man was mellow and respectful, and after a few minutes I settled in. Then he glanced over at me and started to reach under the seat.

  My heart clenched and I don’t think I thought anything at all except that I was helpless and had no idea what was about to happen. He pulled a long butcher or hunting knife out from under his right foot and showed me the blade, his face expressionless. He paused for a second, then said, “I keep this with me when I pick up hitchhikers so that I can protect myself.” Then he placed it back where it had been.

  I had broken out in a sweat when he reached under the seat. Now I sat back and looked ahead and waited for my heart to slow, and he turned on the radio, low. “You like country?” He spoke with a hint of apology in his voice.

  “I do,” I said, nodding. We drove.

  I knew from the tone of his voice and his careful gesture that he was not threatening me—he was drawing a line in the sand. Watching out for any kind of crazy that might be on the road, and telling them at the start of the ride not to mess with him. I doubt he ever used that knife. And it turned out to be one of the easier rides I ever had. Maybe he softened because he hadn’t wanted to scare me, just alert me, but we talked, on and off, all the way to Austin. He told me he had a young daughter with Down syndrome whom he loved more than anything. We shared a couple of beers, when drinking behind the wheel was still legal in Texas. I wasn’t in trouble with alcohol yet, could still have a beer and not have it turn into ten. By the time we saw the lights of Austin it was after one A.M. He was going across town, but he drove me to my door.

  A block from home I remember thinking Oh shit, is this where the payoff comes? because he’d been so kind, and now he had driven me home and would probably try to cop a feel, even with his beautiful daughter and beautiful story. But no, I got none of that. He shook my hand and wished me luck and said to be careful. Before he drove away, he told me that his name was Tony.

  I like remembering that story, because it didn’t always end so well and because the world is full of so much meanness and posturing and people pretending to be somebody else. But Tony had not a shred of pretense about him. He was exactly who he seemed to be from the moment he pulled over on that Texas night.

  * * *

  —

  The time it didn’t end so well was a couple of years later, another lonely stretch from Austin to Taos. I had been living in San Francisco and had left there in early autumn, traveling with a friend from California. We’d been on the road a long time. Katie was a small, wiry car mechanic who’d grown up in New York; she had a black belt in kung fu and was sensible and strong. Now we were trying to get a ride through the bleaker reaches of the Texas Panhandle, near Muleshoe and Dimmitt, on our way to the interstate. We were tired by then and we broke a rule of the women hitchhiker’s code: Never get in a car that passes you, hesitates, and turns around to come back and get you. A bad sign.

  Second rule we broke: Don’t get in a car with a lone man who doesn’t remove his sunglasses to talk to you. (Who made these rules? They seem brilliant, in retrospect.)

  It was cold and getting late. We wanted to cross the Texas border and make it to Albuquerque. The man was around thirty, white, all smiles, and when he learned we were going to New Mexico said he could get us to the highway.

  I got in the front seat and began another strategic piece of the hitchhiker’s convention: Draw out the driver. Be friendly. Ask a lot of questions. He told me he was stationed at a nearby air force base, and I relaxed a little. He mentioned his fiancée and where they had spent a holiday. It seemed like it was going to be OK.

  About ten minutes later he put on his left-turn signal and abruptly turned onto a farm-to-market road.

  “You’re going the wrong way,” I said.

  “I know a shortcut,” he said.

  Farm-to-market roads are what they sound like: rural routes, usually paved two-lane roads that allow farmers and ranchers to get to town. They can be desolate stretches, particularly out where we were, territory where I had gone dove hunting with my dad when I was a girl. Jesus. This time we were the doves.

  Probably because of the cardboard-flat terrain in north Texas, most farm roads have a deep, sharply angled bank as the only pullover. The pitch of the bank allows runoff from rain, but it’s more like a ditch than a road lane, less visible than a normal breakdown lane and a lot less friendly.

  What happened next happened fast, and all of it on my part was instinct and adrenaline.

  He sped up once he was on the farm-to-market road, and had gotten a mile or so from the highway. By the time he pulled over into the ditch I had my door open and one foot out. And now he took off his sunglasses and smiled at me. “I’ve paid my deposit,” he said. “Now it’s time for you to pay your dues.”

  In the braggadocio of crisis, I remember thinking Oh God, what a stupid thing to say. He said it awkwardly, as though he had rehearsed this moment and his role in it, rehearsed being menacing and convincing. A punk on a dirt road who could ruin it all.

  I have no recollection of getting out of the car, though I remember yelling to Katie, Get the packs. And somehow I am standing at the rear of his car, shaking with fury, shouting out the numbers on his license plate. He is out of the car, too, by his door, arguing with me, sounding both whiny and ominous. Katie is frozen by the side of the road.

  “I have your license plate,” I yell. “I know where you’re stationed, and who your commanding officer is. I know your fiancée’s name, and where your parents live. Your life is over if you do this.” I speak with the certainty of Atticus Finch, when in fact I am crazy with fear, a slight twenty-two-year-old in the middle of nowhere, with a friend even smaller than I who has yet to say a word.

  He is pleading with me not to tell. He is a monster, unmasked. He offers to drive us back to the main road.

  I’m sorry, he says. I didn’t—please get in the car. I thought—

  Katie looks at me confused. “Maybe we should get a ride to the highway,” she says, in a timid, foggy voice, and I realize then that she is no help at all, that she has gone still like a trapped bird, and I s
tart to yell at the man again. “If you’re not out of sight in thirty seconds I’m calling your CO. GET BACK IN YOUR CAR AND GO.”

  And then he is gone. That dry Panhandle road catching the last dust and whorls of his tires, spinning as he takes off.

  My heart is pounding and I have the energy of a firefighter. I have been a first responder to my own catastrophe. We walk in silence, lugging packs, about twenty minutes to the highway. I keep thinking that throughout my tirade, I had in mind the notion that Katie was a martial arts master. That beyond my anger was her muscle. Finally I say, “So—do you think you could have taken him?”

  She stops walking and looks at me and I see it in her eyes: It has not occurred to her until now that she could have done anything. She has forgotten all about the black belt, prowess eclipsed by fear, years of effort undone by one asshole on an empty Texas road. She looks ashamed, and her pain is enraging; now I want to kill him even more. He robbed something from her that day, and I hope she got it back. But I don’t know that she did.

  This story should end with my saying I never hitched again, I learned my lesson, I took kung fu, I got a gun. None of which happened, though I did learn to fire a gun, and have an old copy of The Women’s Gun Pamphlet, published by an underground press in 1975, that’s a rough-hewn documentation of how pissed off and desperate a lot of women were in those days. But over the next few years I stopped hitching and started giving women rides, usually straight to wherever they were going, and I told them I’d nearly been raped or maybe killed and to be careful and please stop getting into cars with strangers.

  My orbit of rebellion had begun as a moody, alienated teenager, found a home for a while as an anti-war hippie girl, and somewhere in there a streak of wildness and rage emerged. Now I think wildness is a cover for all kinds of pain, though I hadn’t a hint of the connection then. Everyone I knew was flirting with some kind of disaster; between hallucinogens and Vietnam and riots in the street, the decade offered a smorgasbord of ways to fuck you up. I was making my way through some dark tunnels. That’s the piece of it now, nearly a half century later, that puzzles and intrigues me. The overlap between the personal story and the social mores. The normal boundary tests of adolescence, gone over the cliff.