Their funky handmade cabin in the woods off the 609 was temporary—its most potent charm. Even the outbuilding Babe used as a bedroom had torn slightly away from the hillside. One wall angled obliquely from the floor—six degrees, gauged Harald, a precise and mathematical person. The doors rattled like loose teeth, but Babe slept well here, at first, when she knew her son slept nearby, drugged and safe.
She felt almost happy this way, without anything she wanted. Then she began to have visual hallucinations. Once she thought she awakened to find a Japanese man dressed in a yellow wet suit holding out a mirror. When she looked at her reflection, she found her head covered with eggs—big white chicken eggs. She tried to pull the eggs off her head before they hatched, but they clung to her hair with glue they’d secreted. The Japanese man returned; this time, he wore a blue wet suit. He spoke urgently to Babe in a bubbly, submerged voice she could not understand, but he pulled the eggs from her hair with a tiny red plunger.
Babe believed in work. She’d always worked toward things she wanted. She’d worked on her house, the toy store, her relationship with Bug—all lost now. She used to stay up at night after the children went to bed and paint rooms, work on taxes, read the grand jury report. Even making love with Bug, she’d tick off items on an imaginary list: relieve stress, reconnect, keep balanced. She served her famous marrow jellies to the children, and felt she was building something—bones, muscles, nerve.
Now she lived with Harald, her depressed son, in a whacked cabin whose water smelled of sulfur and stained all the porcelain black. But the morning fog felt clean. She had a job in town where the owners told her every day how indispensable she was—so indispensable, they didn’t give her a day off for four months. Finally, Babe quit, and Aisha, the female partner, responded furiously and refused to pay Babe’s back wages.
“How could you do this to us? We depended on you. We trusted you,” Aisha said. “Now you’re stealing the most valuable property we have: our trade secrets.”
Aisha glanced at the heavy kerosene ball of the fire lighter by the stone hearth. “If I hear of any other B and B using my cardamom-cinnamon bun recipe, you’ll never work in this county again.”
Babe said, “If you hit me over the head with that iron ball, I’ll come back and haunt you. I’ll interfere with the bookings and terrify the guests.”
Aisha’s gaze wavered. Her weakness: ADHD.
“Call the police, get a restraining order,” Aisha told her husband. “Write down the threats she just made.” Babe realized that Aisha always took this peremptory tone with him, and wondered what was wrong with the husband, why he stood it.
“Don’t bother,” Babe said. “I’ll go.”
She drove home feeling virtuous and free. On the hill outside town, a new couple had brought in African animals—gazelles, elands and zebras. Babe almost hit another car head-on from craning her neck to look at their rare beauty. The antlers on the elands looked hand-carved. Somebody else must have been distracted, too, because just a few hundred yards up the road, three turkey vultures rose reluctantly from the parallel yellow lines, hovered heavily before her windshield and then moved to the side, revealing the carcass of a fox whose face they’d licked clean as a spoon. She smelled rain and eucalyptus on the air, and rushed home. Maybe she’d bake those cardamom-cinnamon buns for Harald, fill the house with a rich, comforting atmosphere. When she arrived, though, she found—literally—a dark cloud over her house. Sometimes life’s perverse, Babe thought. You find yourself, which means someone else gets lost.
HARALD WROTE his name in blood on his arm, then drank three-quarters of a bottle of white rum and e-mailed his ex-girlfriend Psycho a long, guilt-tripping letter about his meaningless life. Although he didn’t confess exactly what he’d done, the letter was so long and rambling, she put two and two together and called the sheriff, and an hour later the deputy came. Harald, unconscious, did not respond. The deputy opened the front door (unlocked) and found Harald lying quietly on his back, bleeding hard from both arms into the bedding. The deputy said it looked like a murder scene.
The paramedics bandaged Harald’s arms and head. (He’d fallen and gouged his temple; at first, the gouge seemed more serious than the slashed arms and the alcohol poisoning.) The ambulance drove him two and a half hours to a psychiatric hospital, which someone called “the Bug House.” Babe almost laughed when she heard that—“the Bug House.” Not that it was funny.
She felt afraid to visit her son there, afraid of seeing him for what he was—a scar. His arms were marked so that he would never again have real privacy around his body; any stranger could read on his arms what he’d done. He didn’t want to see her anyway. He felt, the head nurse said stiffly, “quite violent about it.” So Babe drove home. A black widow spider lived in the jamb of the front door; she had to open the door carefully or she would kill it.
Her eyes wouldn’t close when she lay down, so she had a lot of time to clean. The cabin sparkled pointlessly. She hung up kitschy stuff, Madonna night-lights, a portrait Harald had done in high school of Christ represented as a gopher on a cross. She carried wood and kindling, split logs, swept pine needles off the little decks, made altars out of pinecones and broken necklaces. When she finished this work, she started on the stones. She moved one up from the ravine onto the deck. It was an unusual stone—larger than most, smoother, whiter. It had holes bored into it that certain mollusks make. Then she found another stone, and then another; it was like finding mushrooms—once you knew how to look, you saw them everywhere.
She brought stones inside and put them away. Moving stones made her tired, and after she worked she slept.
* * *
IN ONE OF her vivid reveries, Babe met a rock star as he drove toward the highway in a low-slung sports car, a vintage Corvette. Babe walked along the road, gathering stones, and the rock star pulled up alongside her and rolled his window down. “I have a cabin,” he told her. “I hardly ever use it. Go down there whenever you want and hang loose.”
Babe walked farther down the road. Immediately the landscape changed and became wild. Vultures circled overhead. Sharp rocks jutted up fifty feet into a sky that glowed yellow, like the moon. A small reptilian animal chased her, baring its sharp teeth. Babe knew that the animal would attack, and it did: It charged and bit her hand. The wound left a trail of blood behind her, but now the terrible thing Babe had known would happen had happened, and she could relax. The mad animal seemed calmer, too. They walked down the road together like old friends, but no cabin waited at the end where Babe could hang loose.
SOME EVENINGS, she carried only three or four stones up the ravine. She piled them on the fireplace or used one to hold down a stack of bills on a table. Other times, she gathered more and stored them around the house. One day, she filled the whole fireplace with stones. Then—because she could use the outdoor shower—she filled the bathtub. Sometimes she couldn’t help herself. Sometimes she felt ashamed. She carried stones into her house the way people drank or did junk. She thought about not doing it; sometimes she stopped for a few hours or a day and began to feel calm and free. But then the day darkened and she went outside, imagining herself simply going out to gather firewood, knowing that a fire was impossible. Just the weight of the stones in her hands, in her house, comforted her. From the void of black space where she lived (in her body), they brought her, even, to the edge of bliss.
AS A LITTLE BOY, Harald used to climb into her bed in the evenings to read. Once, when she asked him why, he said, “Because it’s warm.” Babe said, “We haven’t been in bed for fifteen hours!” And Harald shrugged and said, “It’s still warm.”
More recently, Babe remembered his brown eyes looking up at her from over the top of some book—Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre, or The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Goethe, or Pain, Sex and Time, by Gerald Heard, or Astrophysics of Gaseous Nebulae, by whomever—the humor there, the bit of perversity. He said, “Mom, you should smile more.”
Babe yelled, “Are you
kidding? I am the only person in this family who smiles every single day! I smile at customers! I smile at you!”
Harald said, “No, I mean you should smile—for fun.” And he smiled his dazzling rare smile, because he’d caught her shouting, at the end of her rope.
* * *
ONE AFTERNOON, Georgie called and asked how Harald was doing in the hospital. “About as badly as possible,” said Babe. “What else is new?”
Georgie said, “I found out this morning that I have breast cancer.” When Georgie said the words breast cancer, Babe looked at the stone in her hand—a five-pounder. A window closed, leaving just a tiny aperture through which Babe saw her hand and the stone in her hand.
“Left-handed women are more likely to get it,” Georgie went on in a clinical voice. “Something to do with asymmetry in the female, more hormones gathering in vessels on the left side, near the spleen. The left arm acts as a kind of hormone switch, turning the estrogen off and on.”
“Who told you that?” asked Babe.
“I was up all night, reading.”
Babe thought of Georgie’s left hand always in motion, setting type, scissoring a chicken up its back, stirring up a pitcher of caipirinhas. Writing a list, Georgie held her pen in that protective way lefties do. Chopping an onion or writing a letter or deadheading her roses, Georgie switched the chemical sauna on and off.
“What are you going to do?” Babe asked.
“What else can I do? Raw foods, single-malt scotch, surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. I’m going to do it all.” Georgie laughed a gutsy, throaty laugh, like an old lounge singer. “Oh, but wait, do you want to hear the best part?”
“Hit me,” said Babe.
“They create the new one while you’re still on the operating table. They use your own love handles, can you believe it? The larger your love handles, the bigger the boobs.”
Georgie sounded tough over the phone, and Babe, scared and horrified, laughed with her. She remembered later how hard and loudly they laughed at how tough they were going to be.
THE BOUNDARY
Scarface was obnoxious, but he had charisma. The first time I met him, he showed me a coffee can with dead tadpoles in the bottom. He offered to sell them—with the coffee can—for ten dollars. I drove him home from Madrigal to the rez. He asked if, when I bought my car, it came with the engine. I said the car came with the engine. Then he asked whether it came with the key.
I admired his directness. “Listen, you’re a hippie,” he said. “Can you get me some weed?”
“You want me to get you some weed.”
“If you get me some weed, I can get you commodities. Peanut butter, apple juice, powdered eggs—whatever you want.”
“Dream on,” I said.
“If you get me weed, I’ll make you breakfast, you know what I mean?” Scarface smiled benignly.
I didn’t answer. How could I? He was only twelve. Just outside town, I turned up a stretch of road that ran through hills and gullies that bloomed with wild mustard and fennel and cow parsnip and the carcasses of American-made cars named after wild horses. One end of this road opened at the rez, with its HUD houses and rosebushes, where Scarface lived. On the other end stood the Assembly of God. In between, we passed a ranch where a wealthy couple from Los Angeles had brought hundreds of rare wild birds. Immediately the turkey farm across the road sued them for bringing in exotic bird diseases, and someone shot their dogs.
“You saying I’m ugly?” Scarface shouted suddenly. “Huh? ’Cause I’m packing heat!” He pointed to his penis.
This was a test. Sure, Scarface was ugly, as enormous and threatening as possible for a person his age, not yet full-grown. His face looked like a knife wound. But beautiful, too.
“I have to keep my eyes on the road,” I lied.
“If you get me some weed, I’ll forgive white people for all the injustices done to Indians,” he said.
“Scarface,” I said, “how can you forgive white people?”
He looked out the window at the dusty plain of the turkey farm and said, “If I didn’t know how to forgive people, I wouldn’t have no family or friends.”
It was true. Scarface’s own father had shot and killed two men in a state of such profound drunkenness that at the trial he could not recall the crime, the men or his reasons. He lived in prison—the worst one. Scarface’s mother did odd jobs with men.
Scarface couldn’t really read—he spelled his own name “Scrafac” on a piece of paper he gave me with his telephone number on it. I don’t know what they did with him in fifth grade; he still held the pencil in his fist. I would have liked to take Scarface away and make him mine—but you can’t do that. Whatever my reasons were for wanting Scarface, they were the wrong reasons. I bought him pickles and jerky and doughnut holes at the gas station, and loved him the way you might love someone for his money or his beauty.
AROUND THE TIME I started my gig with Artists in the Schools and got to know Scarface—the year of my messy and depressing separation—my sister, Carrie, called from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where she’d been teaching in a private school. Her life, she said, had become worthwhile and exciting. She’d forgiven me for being one of the neglectful figures from her childhood. In fact, she invited me to come and visit. She spoke of the political situation; after the most recent eruptions, the State Department began to worry about all her “kids”—diplomats’ children and children of the ruling families—being sitting ducks, but all they did, at the school, was to postpone a field trip to the capital, where rape and machetes were “of concern.”
“That sounds dangerous,” I said.
“We went to see the bonobos instead,” said Carrie.
A few weeks later, Carrie called again to say she’d been evacuated and had moved to another country in Africa, where she was doing important work with Doctors Without Borders, treating girls and women with fistulas, ruptures and internal damage from rape, long labors in childbirth, or babies too big for the child-size birth canals of the youngest or most malnourished girls. This damage had rendered many incontinent; they’d lost the wall between vagina and anus, and lived in shame.
“You should come,” Carrie said. “Then you’d see.”
SCARFACE KNEW about bonobos from watching the Discovery Channel. Bonobos were his favorite kind of ape. They could pick up a teacup with their toes and drink from it. They didn’t force the females to have sex with them—they fucked equally and by agreement. Scarface put a bonobo in the mural even though we’d agreed not to deviate too much from the sketches we’d made, or from our local history theme. We’d agreed to depict salmon and kelp, redwoods and round houses, Pomo women weaving baskets from redbud and willow and men dressed for dancing in flicker headbands and feather skirts. Painting the mural was supposed to help kids like Scarface reclaim their own narratives. (I’d written these words myself in several successful grant proposals.) The city had agreed that we could use the wall of the Lions Club for the mural, but then it immediately granted a permit for the medical center next door to expand into the parking lot.
A truck brought in three modular buildings in one day, creating an alley between the medical center and the mural. The public would never see our work; on the other hand, we had a county grant and artistic freedom.
I wanted to bring the mural into the present tense, break down some of the old romanticized imagery. There weren’t even any redwoods on the rez; it was a floodplain. Scarface had probably seen more bonobos on the Discovery Channel than salmon in the Rez River. I told the kids, “Paint what you see around you, not what people tell you is there.” One of the kids put in his grandma on kidney dialysis, smoking a pipe. Another contributed a kitchen sink with brown water running out of it. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, we painted in the shadows. At night, kids sold drugs and drank beer around the mural. I think they were drawn by the liminal quality of the space, and by the mural itself, which every day became more complicated, beautiful and hard to read.
<
br /> Scarface didn’t like to take the late bus—kids teased him about the men who climbed in through his mother’s bedroom window—so after we worked on the mural, I drove him home. One time, we talked about the mural and the bonobos; then Scarface shared some letters he said his girlfriend, Maria, had written to him. I probably shouldn’t have let him go on, but his confidence and expression amazed me. Wasn’t Scarface supposed to be illiterate?
“You read those well,” I said finally, and he said, “Well, I already know what they say.”
I pulled into his driveway. A dog stood on a car’s roof in the yard, barking. A girl also stood in the yard, staring up into a pine tree. She had a round face and a round body and very long black hair that had been oiled for lice and pulled back into a bun. Her eyes were brown and deep. “My cousin,” Scarface explained. “Maria.”
“Scarface,” the girl shouted, “your big brother threw my thong up in that tree.”
“Why don’t you climb up and get it?” he asked.
“You don’t know what’s been in that tree,” Maria said, and grinned.
Scarface flashed me a beautiful smile from his ugly mug and slammed the car door behind him.
THE LAST TIME my sister came to visit, she rode my bicycle into town every day and leaned it up against a tree behind the coffeehouse where she spent her mornings writing e-mail and opening up her heart to the regulars. Carrie has always impressed people with her stories and with her résumé, which she can recite like a villanelle. She suffered damage as a child from having been kissed and fondled by an uncle, which led to her radical identification with the oppressed. She worked at a rape crisis center and a suicide hot line, then put herself through nursing and business school, overcame asthma and anorexia, studied French, and became the crusader she is today. Carrie’s lived and worked in seven countries, four of them in Africa. We’ve had different experiences, different lives, Carrie and I. Carrie says no, we just have different versions of reality.
Amor and Psycho: Stories Page 6