“Do you know the old Indian legends about people’s spirits being captured by their enemies?”
“Sure. Everyone knows that.”
“Well, I’m going to tell you something, Olivia. Your spirit has been captured. Because your mother died. Your need for bonding is so strong that you’ll sacrifice yourself for it. But it does no good. Grown people can’t get the stuff that little babies have. All you do is trade in your adult life for something that is doomed to failure. No one can complete you and make you happy but yourself. Is this making sense?”
“Oh, God, that’s what Georgia says. That’s all she talks about. She keeps saying the same thing over and over. Don’t ante the self for the relationship. She’s got this big sign on her refrigerator. She’s always talking about that.”
“What’s the main thing that’s worrying you today?”
“Telling Dad about Bobby. Yeah, and what he’ll say when I don’t pass a thing in summer school, which is where I’m heading.”
“Then call him up and talk to him and tell him what’s on your mind.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You can try. Then you could go on to the big stuff. This business of worrying about what your father will think of Bobby is just a cover for your real problem. The anxiety arises from the intimacy. Put that on your refrigerator. It’s what you feel for Bobby that’s driving you crazy. You think if you bond with someone, they will disappear. Until you understand that, all your relationships will be doomed. It’s the intimacy you fear.”
“I didn’t have any intimacy at Chapel Hill and I was worse off than I am now. What am I going to do, Doctor Coder? How am I supposed to know what to do?”
“Start by understanding. Watching, thinking, finding out how you tick. Think of your life as a broad field. If there are holes, fill them in. If there are dangerous weeds, cut them out. Patrol your fences. Until it is time to pull them down.” He suppressed a sigh, thinking of how long it took to begin to plant the hope that became the will that made real independence and health. He thought of a painter in Colorado he had cured of a neurosis. Now her brilliant lighthearted paintings were being bought by museums. He lavished the memory upon the room and dug into the problem of Olivia.
“You sound like this nutritionist from Washington they had come talk to the Zetas last year. She said, Get up every morning and pull the weeds out of the garden of your life. We were all cracking up listening to her.”
“She was right.”
“That’s all you’re going to tell me?” Olivia was sitting up now, thinking what a waste of money Doctor Coder was.
“Lie back down, Olivia. Close your eyes. Tell me what you see.”
Olivia lay back down on the couch. She pulled off her sandals and lay down and tried to be still. She closed her eyes. “Okay, the first thing I see is colors, red like blood, shot through with lightning. Gold and so forth. Then Dad’s sitting in the kitchen waiting to get mad at me. My waist feels fat. I’m fat. Spook says something. Except it’s the kitchen here, in Tahlequah. Grandmomma and Grandaddy are up to something. I can’t figure out what. Grandmother’s buying a washing machine for my aunt May Frost. I don’t get it. Well, Aunt Mary Lily slept in town twice last week. I think she’s having an affair with the assistant manager at Bonanza. Bobby’s coming out to dinner tonight. I don’t know when to start taking these pills. I’m afraid to take them. I might get cancer if I do. I don’t feel like getting laid anyway right now. It’s too complicated. I’ve got too much on my mind. I just want to get Bobby and run away. Only I don’t even have my car. I have Dad’s car. Nothing I have belongs to me. It’s all someone else’s stuff. So what do you think? Am I worth fooling with? What do you want me to do?”
“Take the pills.” Doctor Coder sat up and put his elbows on his desk. He had done his first training analysis with a strict Freudian and still was able to shock himself by his methods. “You won’t get cancer. What’s the dosage?”
“Three point six milligrams.”
“You’ll be okay. Take the pills. Start with that.”
“You want me to go on with what I’m thinking?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be in a coffin in a wide place beneath some trees but the top’s still off and they haven’t put dirt on me. I’m just lying there and there’s a big cross by the tree. Three crosses. But it’s nice in the woods and I’m not scared. Then I get up and walk away. It’s hard to walk through the mud by the coffin but I make it. I say, I’m not doing this. I’m not getting in this grave.”
“The dream of death is not about real death. It’s about dying to one life and finding another. It’s about growing up.”
“You’ve got an answer for everything, don’t you?” She sat up again, mad at him for belittling her dream. “What time is it, anyway?”
“You have a few more minutes.”
“This is the longest hour I’ve ever spent in my life. Okay, I’ll try some more.” She lay back down and got back into the open coffin and tried to think about what it meant. In the fantasy a bluebird landed on the cross. It picked a few bugs from under its wing. Then it began to sing, a crazy, larky little melody.
Chapter 34
WHEN Olivia got home the family was gathered. Five of Little Sun and Crow’s children were there. Sam, Roper, Creek, Mary Lily, and May Frost. Plus Roper’s wife, JoDean, and their teenage sons, Tree and Jimbo, plus May Frost’s children, May Light, May Morning, and the baby, Field. Plus Sam’s wife, Little Sugar. Creek’s wife had stayed at home because she had a stomachache.
There were cars all over the yard and along the side of the road. Mary Lily’s Pontiac was parked underneath the maple tree. Roper’s jeep was beside it. Sam’s pickup was in the driveway and his wife’s El Dorado and Creek’s Chevrolet. Roper and Creek were standing by the steps smoking. Little Sun was on the top step with Mary Lily. May Frost and two of her children were in the glider. Crow was holding May Frost’s baby.
“What is going on?” Olivia asked. She had parked the Mercedes by the El Dorado. She walked over to her grandmother and May Frost. “We’re rich, honey,” May Frost answered. “They found oil in the Craylies’ pasture and it runs under ours. We’re rich as Croesus. Come here and speak to Olivia, May Light, come show her your new dress.” A little black-haired girl wearing a pink denim dress came over to her mother and hid her face in her legs.
“It’s okay, May Light,” Olivia said. “I won’t look at it if you don’t want me to.”
“It’s because we went for the washer,” Crow added. “The clerk told May Frost he heard they’d found oil and were fixing to start drilling. Your granddaddy’s known about it for weeks. He wouldn’t tell them. So now they know.”
“Come have a beer,” Roper called from the steps. “Come celebrate with us.” He threw his arm around his brother’s shoulders and waved a beer bottle in Olivia’s direction. He was the oldest of the Wagoner children, almost forty-seven years old. In those forty-seven years he had never known a day he liked as much as he liked today. The only thing wrong with it was that he had to wait until eight o’clock tomorrow morning to quit his job. “I’ll tell that little son-of-a-bitch to stuff it,” he kept saying. “Stuff it, you little bastard.”
“Get your severance pay,” Creek kept saying. “Don’t be a fool, Roper. Make him fire you and collect severance pay and get some unemployment. Goddamn, it might be weeks or months before Daddy gets money from the well. It might be a year.”
“Stuff it,” Roper kept saying. “Stuff it up your goddamn ass.” He waved his longneck in the air. His wife, JoDean, was inside the house watching television with their teenage son. She came to the back door several times to see what Roper was doing. Then she’d go back in without saying anything.
“Momma and I were going to cook fish and vegetables,” Mary Lily kept saying. “But Denise and Arleen and them want to order pizza. What do you want to do, Olivia?”
“Bobby’s coming to dinner,” she answered. “Did everyone forget
that?”
“Let them order the pizza,” Little Sun decreed. “We might as well spend some of the money.” He held out his hands to Olivia. “Come here by me. Don’t be afraid of this. It will not change the world. Only Roper gets to quit his job and now he’s getting drunk.”
“I’m not getting drunk, Dad.” Roper took his arms from off his brother’s shoulders and turned to his father. “I don’t have to put up with crap from you. This land belongs to all of us. It’s a trust. We all get to share whatever comes of it. You can’t be in charge of it.”
“It is for all of us. Good and bad. Go help them order pizza, Olivia. Go around and ask everyone what they want.”
“I’ll drink all the goddamn beer I want.” Roper walked up the steps and called to his wife and son. “Come on, JoDean. Goddammit. I’m leaving. If you want a ride home, come on out.”
“We’ll stay here.” His wife came to meet him. Everyone in the yard had grown very still. It was the same thing that always happened if they got together. Roper got drunk and left. So what, they were probably all saying. Who gives a damn.
Bobby drove up and parked behind Olivia’s car and got out and came walking toward them. Roper passed him without speaking and got into his truck and backed out of the yard and drove off down the road.
“What’s going on?” Bobby said. “Is all this for me?”
“We’re rich,” May Frost said. “They found oil in the pasture.”
Chapter 35
ON Friday Olivia packed a bag and drove to Tulsa. She saw Doctor Coder, then went straight to the airport and caught the plane to Charlotte.
“Just be careful,” Doctor Coder had told her. “Watch what happens and don’t judge it and have a good time with your father. If he asks you what you’ve been doing, tell him. Try treating him like a friend. He wants to be your friend, Olivia. He doesn’t want to be your enemy.”
“He wants to tell me what to do, but he knows he can’t do it. Now he really can’t do it.”
“Then why are you going to see him?”
“Because I love him. He’s my dad. I didn’t have him and now I do. I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m going there. Bobby won’t have anyone to go out with on the Fourth. Maybe I shouldn’t go.” She sat up on the couch, turned around. Thought perhaps she would just walk out the door and go get Bobby and head for Montana.
“You can go to Charlotte and come back here. You don’t have to choose between the people that you love. You have to find your own center. Then you are safe anywhere.”
“That’s easy for you to say. Where did you come from?”
“Let’s stick with you.”
“No. I mean it. I want to know about you. Where did you live when you were little? Tell me. I want to know.”
“Are you going to get mad at me? Did I create your confusion?”
“You make it worse. You bring it up. You make me think about it. I was doing just fine about this weekend. You’re the one that said I had to know why I was going.”
“Why are you going?”
“I don’t know. To tell Dad about our oil, I guess. I want him to know that. So he can stop looking down on my mother for the first time in her life.”
“Your mother’s dead, Olivia. What is going on, right now, this moment, in this room? Tell me the first thing you think of, quick.”
“Georgia says it’s all energy, electromagnetic fields, all swirling particles and light and we are held together, God knows how, by some sort of pattern we call the genes. Also, we are thinking and talking and thinking has weight. Dad’s thinking about me right now, I bet you he is. And if Jessie knows about it she’s jealous we’re together. And you’re making a hundred dollars an hour by letting me talk about myself. And what else? I think I’m going to miss the plane.”
“Very good. Anything else?”
“Blood and nutrients and all sorts of chemicals and messages and God knows what all are going in and out of the cells of your body and my body. Georgia says the cell wall alone is worth weeks of meditation. She said she shouldn’t have been a doctor because she can’t stand the sight of blood running out. She likes it all inside. She’s in love with this physicist and she won’t live with him. She thinks being in love with him is some dangerous mission she’s on. God, I hope I don’t end up like that. I hope I know how to love Bobby.”
“You’re doing a pretty good job.”
“What time is it?”
“Almost time for you to go. I hope you have a good time with your father, Olivia. Just love him and watch him and tell him about your life.”
“I don’t want to tell him about Bobby.”
“But it’s the most important thing to tell.” He got up from behind his desk. He looked at her, in all her fabulous health and youth and dark brooding sensibility and confused dreams. Focus, he was thinking. Keep your head in the game. “Olivia, tell your father the truth. If you suffer for it, call me up. I’ll be on call all weekend. If you suffer one real pang for talking to him as you would to a friend, I want you to call me up and report it to me. Will you do that for me? Will you try it my way?”
“You’re the worst psychiatrist in the world.” She stood up, starting to laugh. “You’re not supposed to be bossing me around. You’re supposed to be making me cry and remember bad things that happened to me.”
“I want good things to happen to you. I want to see you really start to use that mass of ganglia we call the brain. I want to see it running on all its cylinders in some direction that makes you happy.”
“Then why am I flying to Charlotte, North Carolina?” She stopped at the door.
“Maybe you are going to find out. Then you can tell me.”
“Maybe I already know. Maybe we know the future. Maybe we read each other’s minds. Maybe there’ll be a plane wreck and you’ll be sorry you were mean to me.” She smiled her widest smile and left the room and closed the door. Doctor Coder looked down at his deskful of papers. A small carved bear a patient had given him was on a stack of magazines. He picked it up and began to stroke its small, cold, round, marble back.
Olivia slept on the plane to Charlotte. She was still half asleep when the plane landed and she gathered up her things and walked down the ramp and into her father’s arms. He seemed so tall and strong and perfect. He seemed the father any girl would dream of in any world and she hugged him fiercely and loved him too much for any words or any sense. “I missed you so much,” she said. “Oh, Dad, I’ve got so much to tell you. They found oil on our place. We’re rich. All my aunts and uncles. And guess what, I’m in love.” Daniel looked down into this strange daughter’s face. In many ways there was no way he could ever love her as he loved Jessie, whom he had always known and never feared, and who resembled him. This lost and found child, this child with his sister Anna’s power and will, this dangerous child, had a different hold upon his heart, half guilt, half fascination. Fascination with the idea that he could have helped create something so interesting and uncontrollable and unique. Sometimes he looked at Olivia and saw only trouble, trouble brewing, trouble in the making, trouble to come. Other times he looked at her and saw possibility. She might grow up to be anything, might be like Anna and amaze them all. Already she had the power to make the other children in the family jealous and to draw them near. She had imagination, the most seductive of all gifts. She used it in her own life and she had the power to evoke it in other people. It was this gift that reminded the Hand family of their lost Anna. In her generation it had been Anna who dreamed up and proposed the games the Hand children played. In this generation it was Olivia, who had dropped into their lives through a series of events the stodgier children in the family found fabulous and exotic. They whispered about her among themselves and repeated things she said.
“Let’s get your bags, honey,” Daniel said. “Grandmother and Granddaddy are waiting for you at their house. I promised I’d bring you by the minute you got here.”
They drove down into the beautiful manicured neighb
orhoods where the Hand family lived. Olivia was sitting primly in the passenger’s seat. She had dressed in a white linen suit for the trip, a suit she had bought on sale in Tulsa one afternoon when she went to see Doctor Coder. It was the only money she had spent all summer that was in any way frivolous. “‘Beware all enterprises that require new clothes,’” Georgia had quoted when she saw the suit, then added, “On the other hand, it looks divine.”
Now it was wrinkled from being worn all day and the new white shoes had black stripes on the heels from being kicked around on the plane. Still, Olivia looked like a lady; she was even wearing panty hose.
“Jessie couldn’t come,” Daniel said, “but she sent some pictures of the boy. They’re on the dash in that envelope if you want to look at them. I should have bought you a camera to take to Oklahoma. You got any pictures of your folks back there?”
“Well, not with me. I have a lot of pictures of Bobby, that’s my boyfriend, from when his picture used to be in the paper. He used to always be in the paper when he was in high school.”
“Well, you remind me and I’ll get you a camera to take back when you go. How long can you stay?”
“Until Monday. I’m really liking using your good car. That was so nice of you.” This isn’t talking, Olivia thought. We aren’t really talking. I don’t know what to say to him that would be real. I don’t know where to begin. “Dad, did I ever tell you I had a picture of you when I was little. It was in a box of Momma’s things they kept for me in Granddaddy’s safe. Listen, it was a photograph of the two of you in San Francisco. I used to look at it for a long time. I treasured that. It was the only thing I had that meant I wasn’t just an orphan.”
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