♦
“Kate?” Mom said. “Do you still have the twenty dollars?” We were at a service station in Junction City. It was early and we had just woken up. Mom’s head was bent over her purse and she was thumbing through her wallet frantically.
My face twitched. “Yeah,” I said. I wanted to wash my hands. Julia and Jane were in the bathroom.
“I think I’m going to have to borrow a little bit of it. I’m running low. Is that okay, sweetie? I’ll pay you back when we get there.” She didn’t look at me. She just continued to fumble through her wallet as if hoping to find something hidden.
I paid for the gas all by myself. It cost $6.75. We got lots of Green Stamps and Mom took the change. I remember what I was wearing, a long beige dress with eyelet trim and blue satin ribbons. I was always wearing pretty dresses. It was dirty, though, filthy actually.
There was a lot of candy by the cash register, displayed on racks, colorful and infinite, but I didn’t want any of it. I thought I’d never eat candy again. The woman at the counter was spindly thin with blue-powdered eyelids. She had stringy black hair. I can still remember, signing away that check to her, how it felt. The sharp point of the ballpoint almost ripping the waxy paper of my American Express cheque. My one and only, my first travelers’ traveling check, a beautiful purple blue with elegantly swirling script. Even ‘cheque’ was spelled more gloriously, with a q. It was like signing up for something big. I was almost nine. I felt large then. Swollen. Grown up. Better than my sisters.
♦
Just outside Junction City. The land was flat, a blanket of yellow wheat and corn. Enormous sprinklers fanned water, and silver puddles collected big as ponds. A strong wind beat against our car, nearly visible, making it sway back and forth. It was early, six-thirty. The road was empty.
“This wind is giving me a headache. How can people live out here?” Mom asked. A farm popped up by the side of the road, unprotected by trees, a big white house near a barn with a red silo. An island in wheat fields. Behind it in the distance a black cloud exploded into the sky like a giant mushroom. Smoke flooded the horizon, streaming high into the air in one violent rush.
“What do you think that is?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” Mom answered.
“It’s an oil refinery gone up,” Julia suggested.
“There are no oil refineries here,” Jane said.
“It’s probably a dump in some town.”
“Do you think we’ll be able to see it from the road?” I asked.
“No,” Mom said.
We were silent. The fire cloud burst again.
“It’s a bomb,” I said. “A nuclear bomb.” And I laughed.
“Kate!” Mom said.
“They test them out here. I saw it on a postcard.”
“That’s Nevada, not Kansas.”
“It’s a creepy postcard.”
“If it’s a nuclear bomb,” Julia said, “everything around will remain the same except us. We’ll disintegrate.”
“Julia,” Mom said.
“I’m glad there’s no war going on,” I said.
“There is a war going on,” Jane said.
“I know, but not here,” I snapped. I’d forgotten about the other war that we saw on TV at school.
We drove for nearly an hour before we got to the explosion. The black cloud grew bigger and denser the closer we came, taking on colors: orange, red, yellow, even blue.
“Do you feel your bodies disintegrating?” Julia asked.
“Oh, God, it’s an accident,” Mom said. She pushed her thumbnail into her lip and the wind snarled her hair.
Traffic appeared out of nowhere. For a few miles we crept along until we saw it: an eighteen-wheeler was lying on its side in the median, charred. People had pulled their cars over to the shoulder and were taking pictures. Ambulances and police cars swirled their blue and red lights and their sirens hollered on the wind. Around the truck the grass had turned charcoal and amber.
“Do you think he’s dead?” I asked.
“I think he’s fried,” Julia said, lifting her left eyebrow.
“Julia,” Mom said. But we were laughing, a nervous kind of laughter. Then Jane stopped and started to cry. “It’s so sad,” she said. I thought about the shirtless man in the middle of the night.
“Look, look,” Mom said. “He’s all right.” She pointed to a man squatting near an ambulance. A nondescript man, head in hands, blue jeans, T-shirt, baseball cap. He could have been anyone.
Then Mom looked back at us, a thin quivering smile parting her pinkened lips. My stomach turned hollow.
We were in the middle of Kansas, halfway between Esalen and home, halfway between Anton and Dad, on my irrelevant red line, suspended in Mom’s hopes and beliefs, suspended in the promise of Anton.
“The guy’s dead,” I said. I knew it. Absolutely.
The traffic thinned and the car picked up speed. Home vanished beneath the pavement, crumbling into the heap of debris that was our past. A part of me wished I could have remained suspended in Mom’s dreams, cradled, anonymous, high above two worlds.
∨ Bright Angel Time ∧
The Larger Scheme of Things
Dad had told me that in the larger scheme of things he wasn’t much older than 1.1 was eight. He was thirty-eight. Age spots spotted his hands. His hair was graying. Thirty years was a universe of time. When I thought about getting big, I thought about being Julia’s age or Jane’s age. I thought about middle school, being twelve or thirteen. I thought about clothes belonging to Jane and Julia that would someday belong to me. Julia’s white cardigan with the embroidered strawberries. Jane’s silk brocade shirt with silk-covered buttons from China.
When my father was eight, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He was given a colorful armband with wings sewn on it by the U.S. Air Warning Service so that he could go along with female volunteers to a field near our town to keep on the lookout for German aircraft. The field was on a hill with miles of visibility, and while the women monitored telephones, relaying information, my father stared at the sky reporting to them what he saw. He knew all the names of the aircraft of the day. He’d recite them to me proudly, remembering them still. Fokker-Wulf 200; Ju-87; Messerschmitt ME 109 – the best of the German fighter planes – and the Heinkel bomber.
Twenty-four years earlier, during World War I, Dad’s father lost his left hand in combat. Lost, I was told, lost as if somehow that hand could be found. Thirty years before that, Grandpa’s father came to America from Scotland, leaving behind his father and family – farmers who used the letter X to sign their name.
Dad said the universe was 15 billion years old. When Dad left Mom, they’d been married for twelve years. Jane was now twelve years old. Dad said a star could die the day you were born, but its light was so many years away from earth your lifetime would pass long before that star’s light went out. He said my children’s and their children’s lives could come and go before that star’s light vanished. I wondered how many dead stars were still giving off light. Mom’s father died the summer before Dad left, at the age of sixty-five. As an eight-year-old, he was the model for the Buster Brown Shoe boy. His family owned the company, but lost it in the stock-market crash of 1929. At eight, my mother’s mother had been a cowgirl on the Montana plains, while my father’s mother, at the same age, had been an Italian princess. Four hundred years could pass before a star’s light went out.
Mom said she was only ten years older than Jane was now when she had given birth to Jane, as if that made her somehow Jane’s age. Only four years older than Jane was now when she had met Dad. Sixteen years was twice as many years as I had. My oldest cousin was sixteen, so far away from me in age he scared me. When Mom was eight it was discovered that she had a split vertebra and her mother told her she would never have children.
Dad said that 4.6 billion years ago the earth was formed out of the sun, and not long thereafter came the moon. He said that at first the earth was lifeless an
d may have become a globe-girdling sea, and that 3.2 billion years ago bacteria began to form in the seas. The first signs of life fossilized in rock of that same age, and much later calcium carbonate formed. “Hard stuff,” he said, tapping his teeth. “Teeth are made of calcium carbonate. The Empire State Building is made of calcium carbonate.” I thought about his teeth, a little bit crooked, a little bit yellow from coffee and the cigarettes he used to smoke, and I thought about the Empire State Building shooting into the sky like hope and I thought of all those billions of years and then thought again of my oldest cousin, trying to distinguish the difference. Dad said that 570 million years ago life was abundant for the first time, and that 65 million years ago for some unexplained reason most life on earth was destroyed, killing the dinosaurs, wiping the slate of nature clean. I thought of those big machines that clean ice-skating rinks, slowly, rhythmically gliding over the ice, smoothing out the incisions that skate blades make. He said that nature takes care of itself, coming back bigger and better than before. I thought of a wet sponge running over a chalked-up blackboard, cleaning up the mess of numerals my math teacher could make. Dad said that the blue whale was bigger than a house, and had, in the Eocene Age, surpassed the dinosaurs in size.
One hundred thousand years ago came the first Homo sapiens. Man Wise. Wise Man. Fifty million years from now the earth will be unrecognizable. One billion years from now the sun will devour the earth with heat, and both will be extinguished. One year our father was married to our mother. We ate dinner at the same table at six sharp. The next year he was gone.
Dad said man works so hard to be immortal, creating his arts and his monuments, developing his technologies, worrying about making his mark when actually he is insignificant, simply a guest on earth, here for a moment. He spoke as if he weren’t man. He said that children are our only immortality. I thought of my sisters and myself standing alone in a desert at the end of time, but I didn’t understand, since at any moment we could all be wiped clean.
∨ Bright Angel Time ∧
Esalen, the New Life
I wanted a new name. We were beginning a new life. Actually I only wanted a new nickname. My father had given me a hundred nicknames. For my seventh birthday he’d had a birthday cake made for me with my nicknames scrawled all over it. Minky. Minky Pibulous. Flea. Flea Flea. Fleabert. Kitty. Kitty Kat. Missy. Missy Mort. Kay. KK. Katydid. Kandy. Tita. Titatoad. Toad. I wanted to be called Toad.
“Toad. Call me Toad,” I had said to my sisters and Mom, as we drove across the country. I had had a baby-sitter nicknamed Booger, and she was so beautiful, with aqua eyes, a sharp nose and a southern accent, that it made even her name the most beautiful name in the world. “Call me Booger,” she had said, the words sliding out gracefully in that soft accent.
“Call me Toad,” I repeated. On that road anything seemed possible. The slate was clean.
“All right, Toad,” Mom had said. “Toad Kitty is.” Toad made me feel pretty, like Booger. I had thought about Scarlett and had considered Cinderella, but chose Toad because I only wanted a nickname. Kitty was Mom’s nickname for me. Kate and Katy were Dad’s. Mom said he called me Kate after an old girlfriend.
“I think you should be called Mongoloid,” Jane said. Julia agreed with a nod. They were always making up names for me. Anything I said could become my name. If I said I wanted Green Stamps they’d call me Green Stamps. “Okay, Green Stamps.”
“Okay, Nickname.”
“All right, Gas Pump.”
I didn’t know what a mongoloid was. Julia explained. Know-it-all, I thought. She’d recently read the entire dictionary.
“I’m not a mongoloid,” I said.
“Little Mongy,” Jane teased, looking back at me from the front seat.
“Big-bosom-blood-balls-early-period-nipples,” I shouted. The words came involuntarily and fast like bullets and I was proud of the nickname. “That’s your nickname, Jane.” Jane had just gotten her period. Julia had shown her how to use tampons. Julia hadn’t gotten her period yet, but she’d been practicing for it for years.
“Toad!” Mom gasped and smiled. There was road in front of us. Road behind us. Slick black road as far as the eye could see.
♦
After five days in the car we finally got to Anton. We met at Esalen in the late afternoon of a perfectly clear blue day. He waited next to his camper – a turquoise Chevrolet Del Rey perched on the back of a pickup truck. A Honda 70 hung from the front grille and a Honda 50 from the back.
Over a month had passed since we’d seen Anton. He was smaller than I remembered, though still large and handsome, with his sideburns striping his cheeks and his sparkling blue eyes. He was shirtless, and wearing lime-green Bermudas that didn’t match my image of him. On his head was a fraying leather cowboy hat. The air was fresh and briny and in it I felt suddenly stunned after having been in the car so long.
A new session was beginning and people swarmed the parking lot, arriving in expensive cars. They were hippie people with long hair and bell-bottoms and pins that declared PEACE and LIBERATION. Some of them whistled hellos to Anton, telling him they looked forward to his workshop: “Romantic Love and Sexual Equality.”
Redwood and eucalyptus rose tall into the sky and sun sliced down in tubes, thick with pollen and dust. In the distance, through the trees, I could see a garden, and beyond the garden a sliver of the Pacific. Julia, Jane and I stood next to the camper feeling awkward, adjusting to that strange sense of the new, worried that things would be different here than they had been with Anton at home; it was clear that this was no camp for kids. Music rained down from invisible speakers, welcoming us, it seemed, to this new world.
Anton hugged Mom. She stood tall and thin, her hair a mat of tangled curls, in a flower-print shirt and new blue jeans. Anton hugged her and she disappeared. Her arms drooped by her sides. She could give up, finally. She’d arrived. His big hands fanned out across her back and he kissed her hard and she kissed him hard and they claimed each other. He claimed her.
“Jesus,” Jane said. And all the belief in Anton that Mom had encouraged in Jane died again and I worried she’d be in trouble soon.
“It’ll be all right,” Julia said, and she darted into Anton’s arms. Her shirt lifted up her back as he hugged her. Flirt, I thought. Then I wanted her to flirt, I thought all she’d have to do was flirt and things would be as they had been before.
“Hello, babes,” he said with a wide grin. For an instant his gold fillings flashed.
I wanted a kiss. And then I wanted my twenty dollars. I wondered if I should ask him for it now. But I didn’t. I’d wait. We’d arrived.
Two foreigners came to drive our green station wagon back across the country and when Jane protested, saying we’d have less freedom, Mom just sighed. She had surrendered and the camper was to become our new home. We were to fit in with Anton’s children and, since we would all love and trust each other, there would be no need for another car. I looked at the tiny camper and thought of our big white home in the woods and wanted to protest too. But Mom was happy and I thought of all that distance we had come and I was tired and I wanted then to be happy.
With the car went my maps and my solid red line and I knew that things would never be the same as before. It was Anton’s world that we were entering now.
♦
Anton’s children were hippie children and strange, different from us. They drank beer and wine and smoked cigarettes. They listened to Bob Dylan, Neil Young, The Rolling Stones. For them the Beatles (our music) were passe, over, unhip. They were sophisticated kids who spoke about grown-up things – abortion, Vietnam and Nixon. Exotic and cool, confident kids – millionaires with airs, a certain way they looked at you, a certain strength in their eyes that made it seem they thought they owned the world.
We met them at the Esalen baths on the day that we arrived. A thin mist veiled them, their legs dangled in the water. Four were blond and one, the youngest, Finny, was dark. He had olive skin and t
hick, black curly hair that was long like a girl’s and you would have thought him a girl, but he wore no clothes. The only thing connecting him to his brothers and sisters were his eyes. They all had magnificent blue eyes, cornflower blue like a late-day sky. Anton’s eyes.
“Try to love them as if they were your own sisters and brothers,” Mom had said to us on the long drive across the country. “They need you to.” She had told us they were suffering since the nun went to the ashram. We were to love them as we loved each other. Love them instantly. I wondered if they had been instructed to love us too.
The tubs were perched on a wooden platform halfway down a bluff, suspended in midair, it seemed, above the jagged rocks below. Waves crashed against the rocks, foaming and swelling, then receding into an instant of calm. The baths oozed hot, sul-furous steam and its gaseous smell mixed with the spray of the ocean. The sun was low, behind thin clouds; peach and violet ribbons spread across the sky. The ocean was red.
My sisters and I stood dully at the edge of the Esalen baths. Our clothes alone revealed the differences between them and us. The others were sloppy in fraying cutoffs and bikinis and lots of silver jewelry; we were neat, my sisters in some matching outfit or other, I in a red velvet dress. Jane and I had our hair in braids and Julia’s was tied back in the pink ribbon. Mom had brushed our hair before we’d arrived, dragged the comb through it for the first time since we’d left home, yanking it nervously as she leaned over us from the driver’s seat. We were parked on the shoulder of the Pacific Coast Highway, all of us a little giddy and eager to arrive. The ocean was fifty feet below, and cars were rushing by, rocking us each time they passed. Mom wet her fingertips with spit and rubbed our faces clean.
“It’ll be fun. We’re doing the right thing,” she said, gnawing on her lip. She spoke fast, trying to convince herself. “You’re going to get on with Anton’s kids. They’re good kids. Loving and religious.” It scared me that she was trying to convince herself, as if somewhere she really didn’t believe. I thought of the children in the Sunday school classes we attended before Dad left, all nicely dressed with pink faces and straw bonnets, and wondered if Anton’s kids would be like that. Religious kids went to parochial schools and we always thought there was something strange about them. They thought a lot about death and God and Jesus, and in the word parochial alone there was something strange, like a disability. If they were like that I wouldn’t be scared; I’d be able to boss them around. I thought I’d be able to love and trust them.
Bright Angel Time Page 6