Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture

by Chelsea Cain

  She tilted her head back and began to bend, until she was staring at us upside down. I remember the way her black braid slithered down her blue leotard and down her legs and finally hit the floor. And I remember seeing her teeth appear, bright and unexpected, to bite the stem of the rose.

  On Palm Sunday Shelly and I wore our new dresses to watch the procession of the Virgin around the village. The women wore flowered hats; the men’s white shirts shone in the sun. Shelly and I followed the crowd to church. The church was at the other end of the village, a long, whitewashed building with a wooden roof. Palm fronds and flowers lined the path to the door. Inside, the church was hushed and cool, lit by the high windows and the candles on the floor where Jesus Christ lay, nailed to the cross. His wooden body was gruesomely pale, except where blood darkened his wounds. Shelly and I waited in the doorway, holding hands. We watched Balbina, and then we approached together and placed our sweaty coins in the collection tray, and bent to kiss his cold feet.

  My mother had been working in the cane fields for about a month when she turned yellow. This was just after the dead man turned up in the Rio Hondo; people teased her, saying he must have been a relative. Her arms were yellow, her legs, her belly, her face, even the whites of her eyes. She crawled into her hammock and stayed there. Shelly and I brought her bottles of fresh water. Balbina placed steaming bowls of chicken broth into our hands and we carried them carefully down the hill to our house. ‘It’s hepatitis,’ our mother told us. But though neither Shelly nor I said a word, we were thinking the same thing: She had turned the color of the only dead person we’d ever seen.

  Eventually, my grandmother in New York found out that my mother was sick. There were no telephones in San Antonio and no real way to reach someone in an emergency. My grandmother got on a plane, flew to Miami, changed to another plane. She flew into Belize back when the landing strip for an international flight was a clearing in the jungle. The airport was a two-room building where customs officers in khaki uniforms opened her bags and poked through them, then nodded. My grandmother rode in the back of an army truck over bumpy dirt roads, past trees hung with vines. She arrived at San Antonio in one of the cane trucks and took the ferry across the river. A group of people stood at the ferry dock, waiting to cross, and my grandmother accosted them. ‘I’m looking for my daughter, Jennifer. Where is Jennifer?’ They smiled back at her. ‘Ah, su hija! Yeni!’ They pointed up the Rio Hondo. ‘She’s out swimming in the river.’

  Nostalgia is a funny thing. I remember vividly the very air of San Antonio, the warm, sweet, almost rotten smell of the river and the jungle, the feel of green clay between my fingers. I remember the taste of ripe guava and the taste of guava not quite ripe but eaten anyway. I remember all the words to ‘Springtime in the Rockies,’ a sentimental song our friend Lohinos played, the light of the kerosene lantern shining on his polished guitar. Everything from the language to the air was new to me, and so I noticed everything, without knowing I noticed it. I learned to see the way I learned Spanish, unaware, and it was in Belize that I learned it.

  Now, twenty-two years later, I travel when I can, looking for amazement, for a girl in a blue leotard who seems to have no bones, for plants that wilt at the touch of a finger and then come back to life. Those months in Belize were among the most vivid in my life and I remember them with an ache of longing. But at the time it was a world too raw, too strong for me. And when my mother announced the following year that we were returning to San Antonio, I shook my eight-year-old head and refused to go.

  Paola Bilbrough

  Canvastown

  That spring we lived in Canvastown there were mushrooms the size of dinner plates in the fields, frayed at the gills with lice.

  My mother wore a feather in her hair, naked in profile, always painting.

  My father, stringy ponytail, pink shirt, threw pots in a cow shed.

  I wanted to be the neighbour’s child.

  She, fat and breathless, would seat me on top of their enormous freezer, a mortuary of animal carcasses, feed me bright yellow pickle, doughy bread.

  The odour of basset hounds, mutton gristle and hot vinyl.

  She created nothing, sat indoors eating melted cheese from a dented frying pan.

  Furrows on her husband’s brow plowed deep, skin red as raw beef.

  He could listen with the trees, make a willow stick dance to the song of an underground stream.

  The flick of my mother’s brush on canvas, buzz of mason bees building clay houses, the dull roar of my father’s kiln.

  Across the road, the weaver at his loom, weaving a poltergeist’s footfalls into a vermilion carpet.

  Sound gradually drinking in all its listeners.

  The fat woman and I didn’t listen.

  She was bored with the water diviner.

  Resplendent in a green chenille housecoat, she turned afternoon into evening by watching Bewitched on TV.

  I liked to lie in her overgrown garden, watch crab apples pull malevolent faces from the tree, poke out their wormy tongues at passersby.

  Appetites

  Sara said her father had been a thief; she remembered other people’s fruit lighting up the bushes, oranges like planets, old sweet apples falling into her father’s flour-bag shirt. She ate nasturtiums, waxy honey. Sugar was forbidden.

  Dan would gut Sunday loaves, the colour and texture of kapok. After school, mouth stained green; jelly crystals straight from the packet. Every night chocolate pudding thick and dark as estuary mud flats.

  He had a milk run, drank from scratched glass bottles, cream coating his throat when he swallowed.

  Sara was allowed goat’s milk, thistle milk, any milk but cow’s. That’s what separated them, she said, his complacent suburban appetites.

  She thought of milk from the top of the bottle as she fingered the satin skin of his inside wrist.

  Kanji

  My father and I slept in a Japanese car case, kanji printed on the wall in place of family portraits.

  Nights I lay awake, the black characters assumed flesh.

  Clothes rustling as they changed posture.

  Every morning a walk through macrocarpa to a household of stained armrests, chapatis and chipped enamel mugs.

  Only chopsticks lay in our drawers, Hand-whittled and oiled.

  In spring we made elderflower lemonade, white star flowers fizzing to the surface.

  The elderflower a witch among trees, its character more disturbing than the kanji on our walls.

  A tree whose shadow could make the mind curdle like milk.

  In summer, cherry wine: each of us scrubbed calloused heels, crushed fruit in the belly of the bath, feet beating out a warlike rhythm.

  A dense, sweet, almost rotten smell. Legs covered with red-black juice, the blood of summer.

  Membrane 1

  I was a festival child.

  Cherry picking season we endured unwashed hair, scant meals.

  My father was a puppeteer,

  I remember sunken eyes, bruised cheeks, empty glove bodies.

  In the front row of Punch and Judy

  I held a stranger’s baby, its heartbeat filling the whole head.

  The fontanel before the bones knit: a frog’s throat as it swallows.

  Dancers knotted up baling twine hair. Rain.

  And mud warm between the toes.

  Seven-year-old skin gossamer between myself and the world.

  In Dublin, your mother cooked Sunday roast, her stretch-suit vivid hydrangea pink.

  Your father argued about the Pope over tea. All I knew of Ireland was our plow horse, Connemara.

  Membrane 2

  Rain, pale Irish skin, the band screaming

  ‘Insane in the membrane…’

  You call me ‘Homegirl’ America spread over you like fake tan.

  I want to take your head, smooth it off with impatient thumb.

  Later, the sheet curls from a stained mattress. Your bones move apart sounding of a forest.

>   Trying to sleep in a fluorescent-lit garage, each of us consumed by separate pasts.

  Tepee

  I wore only a tight necklace, shoes the colour of a rabbit’s inside ear, buttoned over instep.

  Sometimes a painted apron with flowers unfurling, spark-eyed heads in profile.

  I carried my father’s offerings: pallid, hasty omelets my mother would not touch,

  lemon and mint she drank in noisy gulps, painting in the midday sun.

  Clay-smudged,

  I sat in a manuka tepee.

  Voices in my skull, boats bobbing on a river.

  When my father left, we made gingerbread people, molasses-dark and crumbling, ate them slowly; an arm or leg, week by week.

  I wore my shoes to bed, fell asleep to the noise of hens roosting in the pear tree.

  I dreamt my mother was a statue, that I followed her to all the world’s cities, watched her in piazzas,

  pigeons pecking grain from her naked shoulders.

  Nearby, an old violinist whose music I couldn’t hear.

  Rain Grimes

  Fear of a Bagged Lunch

  I was born on the kitchen table. A midwife and my dad comprised the entire birthing team. My pacifist, Joni-Mitchell-singing, vegetarian-to-the-core, ‘who needs shampoo?’ parents did not even briefly consider the sterile experience of a hospital birth. When I finally let go of the embarrassment of that beginning enough to admit it to people, the story always elicited the same response: a wrinkle of the nose and the inevitable question ‘And you still ate on the table?’ It was a glorious moment for my parents, that Octo-.ber day in 1972, when they gave birth to their very own flower child. That kitchen table stood in a tiny cabin with no bathroom in rural Pennsylvania. My parents were both twenty-five and growing most of their own food, raising goats and making their own dairy products. I slept with my parents until I was five, drank goat’s milk and peed in an outhouse, blissfully unaware that the rest of the country didn’t live that way. Every photo of me shows a naked girl-child, sometimes with diaper, sometimes without, smudged with dirt and smiling like crazy. There are photos of me naked in tire swings, naked and spread-eagle in old stuffed chairs, naked and sitting on the dirty floor of our little house. One baby photo in particular was so embarrassing later that I went to great pains to hide it from my friends: I’m sitting on a pile of hay, one of my ears pierced, my smiling face exceptionally dirty, my hair a victim to home haircuts, and my cloth diaper so full it’s falling off my body. No pink velvet dresses and K-Mart balloon backdrops for my family.

  When I was a year and a half, my parents loaded everything we owned, which wasn’t much, into a green 1952 Chevy truck and moved across the country to Washington State. My dad had built a miniature house on the back of the truck, and into this they packed our meager possessions, our two dogs and our goat Polly. (After a great deal of arguing my dad finally convinced my mom that there wasn’t room for her beloved chickens.) This picking up’ and moving across the country was a trend that was to continue throughout my young girlhood-a family tradition, of sorts.

  Moving is easy when you own almost nothing, and even easier if the things you own are so battered that they become impervious to damage. Everything we possessed had been made by one of my parents or bought secondhand from Goodwill. When I wanted something we couldn’t afford (which was most of the time), my parents would do their best to build or sew it. I lusted after pinstriped jeans in third grade, and my mom valiantly sewed me stiff, ill-fitting pink denim jeans (which proceeded to fall off during a ferocious game of Red Rover). The year that Care Bears were in vogue, my brother and I received the homemade version. My mom was at a loss, luckily, when Cabbage Patch dolls hit the scene. My brother and I wanted bunk beds, and my dad promptly built them. My first bike was a hot pink number with a banana boat seat purchased at the local flea market. We got our first TV from a junk shop when I was twelve. It took me a long time to figure out that we were one step removed from the ‘normal’ consumer chain-and that it was both a financial necessity and a conscious ideological choice for my parents.

  We lived my parents’ hippie dream in various New Age communities in Washington ’s Skagit Valley and, later, in Sedona, Arizona. When I was six, we traveled across the country again, this time to Ithaca, New York, in a red Dodge van. Yet again my dad had masterminded his version of a hippie U-Haul camper and built a wooden sleeping platform in the back of the van. We spent our nights snuggled together on the platform under our one goose-down sleeping bag, looking at the stars out the van window and reading The Chronicles ofNarnia over and over again.

  Life progressed in a similar fashion-traveling cross-country, sleeping with my parents, being naked much of the time. In Ithaca we lived in another cabin in the woods with no running water. I played in the creek, dodged the mice in our cabin, and passed countless hours melting crayons onto our wood stove. When I entered school in Ithaca, I went to an ‘alternative’ one called Hickory Hollow three bus rides away from our home. My parents subscribed to a theory of education that did not involve being forced to learn things that I wasn’t ‘ready’ to learn-an interesting, if at times impractical, concept. When I expressed my aversion to math to my first-grade teacher, she replied that I didn’t have to do my math homework if I didn’t want to-instead, why didn’t I go play in the corner in the fake tepee? Years later my seventh-grade teacher would wonder why I still didn’t know my multiplication tables.

  Being a hippie kid always marked me as different. My family’s food choices were no exception. I was on the bus to Hickory Hollow with the kids from the local high school when it happened: my first public embarrassment over hippie food. My lunch box collapsed and out exploded oh-horrible-hippie-world-nonfat-plain-organic-goat’s-milk yogurt, covering the aisle of the bus, splashing onto the seats and me. And as I stood there, in my puffy green Goodwill coat and holey tights and little patchwork skirt, yogurt all over my shoes, the faces of horrified high schoolers gaped at me like I was an exotic bug. Perhaps other kids didn’t get yogurt in their lunch boxes-and if they did, it came in neat little plastic containers with cute foil lids and fruit on the bottom. This is the first time I can recall being conscious of my differences from other kids-and the moment when the protective bubble surrounding my idealized hippie kid existence first burst. I had been living in a sort of Utopian reality, with total, guileless freedom from worry about what other people thought of me. I realized in that moment that mine was not to be a mainstream existence.

  My isolation blossomed to epic proportions when we moved to Beantown, Wisconsin. My parents had two folk musician friends there-and they wanted to start a band. We drove into Beantown in 1979 in a rusty blue Datsun wagon with, yes, duct tape holding on one of the fenders. We parked it in front of our friends’ house and camped out with them for some time. It seemed like months to my seven-year-old mind, and perhaps it was. However long, it was enough to bring the Beantown police to the door of the house, asking about the strange, vagrant car parked on the street. That visit from the police is cemented in my memory as my family’s initiation into our brand new identity as the town freaks. Did ‘normal’ people have the police coming to their door because their car looked so dilapidated? Somehow, I didn’t think so.

  The vortex of the small-town Midwest sucked us in and held us captive for thirteen long years. There in the vortex, all the things about us that hadn’t seemed that strange before took on a whole new meaning. We were a complete anomaly to the residents of this tiny town. The people of Beantown must have been vaguely aware that the hippie culture existed, but it rarely, if ever, infiltrated their stable community. Other than my parents’ band mates, we stood alone on an island of hippie weirdness, or at least so it seemed to me at that young age when every difference is magnified. We were almost the only vegetarians in town. My parents were folk musicians, a virtually unheard of and severely misunderstood profession. My mom still made most of our clothes, and a wood stove was still our only source of heat. My mom wor
e colorful ethnic fabrics and knee-high leather boots instead of polyester pantsuits and flats. My dad bought all his clothes at the local Salvation Army, including the series of corduroy and leather vests that he remained strangely attached to even into the mid-eighties, much to my dismay. My parents weren’t Christians-they were pagans, and our ‘bible’ was a combination of the l-Ching, Tarot cards and the channelings of Seth. We drove a succession of rusty cars that always looked as if they couldn’t make it another mile, including one of our more embarrassing vehicles, a 1965 red Plymouth Valiant. The Valiant would swing into the school parking lot to pick me up after school, looking grossly out of place next to the Ford Escorts and minivans. When viewed through the lens of mainstream culture, our hippie ways were incomprehensible. Obscure lifestyles, or any sort of difference, can seem threatening in a small town-and we were misjudged accordingly. People saw my parents and immediately assumed (incorrectly) that they did drugs. I was taunted in eighth grade, asked if my parents had seen all of the Cheech and Chong movies. There was a vaguely dangerous mystique surrounding our difference.