“What’s on my baby’s mind?” Mom asked suddenly, noticing me. “Are you having fun? Isn’t this wonderful? Does my little girl love me?” I hated when she asked what I was thinking. It was as if she could see inside my brain. I was afraid to lie because I was afraid she’d know I was lying.
“My twenty dollars,” I said with fixed, determined eyes.
“Kate,” she reprimanded, “you’re not still thinking about that, are you? You’ve got to learn to be generous. Think of all we’re doing for you. You should learn to contribute, Kate. You can’t keep count of every penny.”
“Do you forgive easily, Eve?” Helmut asked. I hated Mom. She hadn’t been listening, too busy glaring at me, so she didn’t know what to say. “Forgiveness,” Helmut offered. “For example, do you forgive your husband?” He could tell Mom was blushing, feeling uncomfortable. She looked down at the table and then up at him – shy, like a child. He and Anton were now arguing about forgiveness and again they didn’t agree. I could tell Anton liked to argue. He hadn’t been like that at home. Dad hated people who argued for no real reason. He hated Brian Cain because at parties Brian Cain got drunk and argued just to argue.
“We’re all friends. We can be honest. There are certain things that can’t be forgiven,” Helmut said.
“That’s bullshit,” Anton said vehemently. He sat forward in his chair, determined to prove his point. “Forgiveness is the beauty of Christianity.” Finny gave me another look. I saw his mother standing alone in a field.
“Would you forgive Eve if she were unfaithful?” Helmut asked, trying to provoke Anton further.
“He left me in a very difficult situation,” Mom cut in quickly, to turn the conversation away from Helmut’s question. I didn’t care if Anton were jealous or if Helmut were provoking him; I was worried about what Mom would say next. I shut my eyes and tried to stop listening, knowing what would come with the chance to talk about Dad leaving. The way she’d describe it, I’d see her standing alone in the world. The world empty of everything. Helmut’s hand gently touched Mom’s shoulder. Then I heard Mom say she forgave Dad, and at first I was happy and then I hated her even more because I knew she was telling an absolute lie.
♦
“Insane!” I heard someone scream through the night. It was Helmut’s voice. I sat up in bed, waking abruptly, wondering at first where I was. “You’re too fucked up to be doing therapy!” This was Anton’s voice, coming in through the camper window. I couldn’t see anything at first, it was so dark. All us kids had been asleep. Two-thirty, three in the morning. The night was lit by the thin light of the full moon. Helmut had led a midnight workshop on a hike to the Tessajara hot springs, and Mom had gone along. They’d probably just returned.
Anton’s voice was screaming something unintelligible, a monstrous voice. Then Helmut’s voice again. “You always need to be the leader! You’re afraid of the world. It’s a good thing you have your tribe of kids to lead around. You can rule your own kingdom, Anton! You can preach about love and jealousy and forgiveness. What about forgiveness, Anton!”
“Insane!” Anton screamed again.
I lay with Julia on a single bunk. Her feet were at my head. My feet at her head. The sheets were gritty. I rubbed my eyes. She turned around to be close to me and wrapped her arm around my waist. Out the window I could see Mom in her jeans and floral shirt coming from the cottages. She clutched her bag and shoes and other clothes close to her chest, scampering toward the camper. “Get going, Eve,” Anton said, appearing behind her. Large. “We’re leaving this place.” We sat up in our beds, half-bodies, vague and indistinguishable. Julia felt warm. Anton and Mom got in the front of the camper. The doors slammed, and the engine started with a jerk and a cough.
“Admit it, Helmut. Just admit it. You’re not above it all. Just admit it. You’re as weak as the rest of us,” Anton screamed back toward the cottages. And then we roared away, up the long steep drive out of Esalen. The refrigerator door sprang open and the milk and a bottle of Coke toppled out, spilling over the floor. Bubbles of soda sighed, swelling and then settling. Dishes rattled in the sink and in the cupboard. We were gone.
The intercom connecting the cab to the camper was on in the front so we could hear what they were saying. Anton asked Mom why she’d taken so long to get back from the hike.
“Where were you?” he snapped.
“Don’t be ridiculous. You knew where I was,” she answered. “Where were you?” Their voices crackled with speaker static. “You’ve been drinking,” I heard Mom say. I heard the name Heda and then they were screaming, loud piercing screams. I heard the words kill Helmut and I was afraid for Mom. I thought of Brian Cain coming to our house to kill our father. The camper jerked to a stop and Mom jumped out, Anton right after her. All I could hear now was the high pitch of their voices. The summer moon hung in the sky full and bright like a surprise. The distant lights of a plane became confused with planets and for a moment I thought it was a slow falling star.
We were parked on the edge of the highway at the top of a towering bluff. I could hear the ocean and their shouting and I tried to remember things. Anything. Dinner with my mother and my father at the same table. But I couldn’t. A hundred million years had gone by. All the sense I’d tried to make of things made no sense at all. I thought about the ice-skating rinks with the incisions that skate blades make and I thought about chalkboards messed up with numerals. I couldn’t keep track anymore. There was so much I didn’t know. Inside I felt dirty, rotten actually. I thought about my sisters and I trying so hard to fit in. I didn’t understand anything of how I felt. I thought, love or no love, we belong to Anton now. I wondered what it would mean if he were afraid of the world. I wondered a lot of things: if my sisters and I would become hippies; if we’d go to Erehwon in Dallas. What would happen to Dad, our home, our lives. Suddenly I felt very awake and this new life felt for the first time very real.
“You can’t always know what’s going to happen,” Mom would say whenever one of us worried now. “That would be no fun. That wouldn’t be being alive. Live in the present, be here now.”
But I didn’t care about all that. I wished we had our car, so we could get away. I thought about my father – I saw him walking down our driveway to get the mail, and he kept walking, walking away.
“Dad thinks your mom was sleeping with Helmut,” Sofia said into the dark. “That’s crazy,” she added. I loved her just then, since she was standing up for Mom.
Then there was silence. Mom and Anton were back up front. The camper swayed and picked up speed and moved more deeply into night.
“It’s a good thing we’re out of there,” Anton said, his voice warm and tender now. “They don’t like children and they’re all Buddhists.”
“What’s a Buddhist?” I whispered.
“Someone good,” Jane said from the bunk above.
∨ Bright Angel Time ∧
Plans
With my father we always had had plans. When we traveled we had typed itineraries with the names and addresses of the hotels we would be staying in, their phone numbers and the time of our dinner reservation. Every night we ate at six with washed hands and clean faces. Jane, Julia and I in our matching Liberty print dresses. My mother and father with their nip of bourbon. After a trip to Scotland, the summer before my father left, he prided himself on the successful outcome of all of our plans: three months and not one plan fouled up. He didn’t include the fight with Mom. Our days ticked by, marked by meals and sights and the relief that spread over my father’s face as each day passed without incident. Beneath an oak tree at the edge of the Culbin Forest on the banks of the Findhorn, they fought. Mom wanted to lie in the sun and pass the afternoon in leisure. He wanted to move on, make our dinner reservation. It was a clear blue day spiked with the rumbling of the river’s strong current. Mom lay long, with her dress pushed up her thighs and the sleeves rolled to her shoulders. Dark glasses covered her eyes. Dad stood over her impatiently. A breeze lift
ed his curly black hair. Panic electrified his face. He was terrified of falling, of falling off course.
“Why can’t we be spontaneous just this once?” my mother asked. “There’s no need to be so rigid about everything. My father wasn’t like this. He knew how to live…”
While Dad shoved the remains of our lunch back into the wicker basket, he screamed at Jane, Julia and me. About Mom’s laziness, her self-centeredness, her childishness. Each condemnation a slap on our faces, until we shattered into tears. But Mom didn’t respond anymore, and that made him madder. She stood up, straightened her dress and disappeared into the forest.
“Your mother’s a child,” Dad screamed. “She had to ruin a perfect day. She’s no older than any of you.”
Mom stayed away until our dinner reservation had long passed and stars overwhelmed the sky. We drove around in our black Peugeot searching for her. The glare of the headlights made black skeletons of the trees. Dad’s hands were cold and unsoothing on our scalps.
For two days they spoke to each other through us, slipping slowly into polite nods and respectful exchanges. It took five days for things to get back to normal.
With Dad, Mom didn’t realize that husbands weren’t like children, that they didn’t have to need and love you always. That they could go away.
∨ Bright Angel Time ∧
Union
Our real life together with the Fureys began on the road, after we left Esalen. Anton wanted a following. Mom wanted a family. They both wanted a Utopia. A traveling Utopia, that’s what Julia said. I liked the word. Utopia. I was like my father in that way, I could repeat words over and over just for their sound. U toe pee a. Anton wanted to teach us about the world – about love and trust and forgiveness and generosity – and Mom wanted us to learn.
♦
Road stretched on for miles. Nothing and then a town rising in a hurry of corrugated metal and cement. A boom town, advertising airplane parts and GOOD EATS restaurants in big block letters and a whole lot of stucco forming row upon row of identical houses. Windblown towns with plastic clinging like withered flowers to the dried and prickly branches of Joshua trees. Then the town disintegrated into land. Orange, yellow, a dappling of fiery red, platinum, depending on where the sun hung. Peach. Clean whites exploded into reds smothered in the rippling beige of sand. Then burst endless, clear blue. Mountains emerged haphazardly, shooting up to snow-covered peaks, flowing down gracefully into canyons, swallowed up by the brown expanse of land. At dusk and dawn an orange haze settled on the earth.
“Isn’t this beautiful,” Mom’s voice sang through the intercom. “I just feel like stopping all the time and screaming, ‘Isn’t this beautiful!’” I could see her head through the cab glass, bouncing up and down. We were alone out there. She had said that was a good sign. It meant we were smarter and better than the rest. “Just think of your schoolfriends,” Mom would say. “Going to camp, renting the same house as always on Fire Island, doing all those ordinary things. You’re a lucky little girl, being with all these kids, seeing all these things.” And for a short while I’d inflate, believing her, believing we were extraordinary. It was our own private world, and though there was nothing out there it seemed like there was a lot that was ours.
“Don’t you all think it’s magnificent?” Mom asked.
“You know, there’re Hell’s Angels in these parts,” Sofia said, flicking off the intercom and bracing herself against the sink. The rest of us were lying all over the place, bumping into each other. It was crowded in the back of the camper. Sofia’s curly hair was tied back with a large pink bow. “They’ll get us at night.” She lifted her eyes. “They come in packs on motorcycles and chop off women’s breasts and fry them up like eggs. They like big breasts like Eve’s.”
♦
After Esalen we searched the Mojave Desert for undiscovered ghost towns and isolated hot springs and a place to celebrate Finny’s sixth birthday. Somewhere special, so that Anton could tell Finny he was adopted, and give the rest of us our first lesson on forgiveness.
We traveled from place to place on the whim of Anton’s curiosity and on ideas picked up from strangers. Anton had a vast imagination and a knack for meeting strangers with fascinating ideas. Mom sat up front encouraging Anton’s imagination, in love with all the possibility that spread out before us. The eight of us in the back made bets, guessing where we’d end up next.
Panamint Springs. The Chocolate Mountains and Mono Lake.
In San Francisco the big kids saw Hair and the little kids saw a Chinese film in which all the good people died. We were mad, though, about missing Hair. We’d wanted to see the naked people dancing onstage. Rancho Mirage to Funeral Creek and Dead Man Creek. Convict Lake. Oasis. Anton and Mom liked going places just for their names. Devils Playground. Tecopa.
“She had a splendid bosom and a nice wide behind,” Anton said after meeting a Russian in the tiny town of Tecopa, a landmark because of its hot springs. Anton stood on the dirt road that cut through town. His accent intensified and his words drew out long. I looked around for where a Russian would be. I saw the Gila bar with its rickety porch and the Casa del Sol mobile-home park, a blue stucco structure concealing the baths, and not a soul in sight except us standing around Anton.
In every town it was the same. We emptied from the camper, spreading over the town, and the people seemed to disappear. Maybe they were afraid because we looked so strange. All scruffy, some of us in long dresses, some in raggedy tuxedo tails, halter tops and bell-bottoms, bare feet and polyester plaid. Some of us played stretch, throwing a jackknife between our feet. Nicholas carried his guitar and his movie camera. Timothy carried a .45 caliber pistol from the First World War that had belonged to his grandfather. Our hair was unbrushed. Layers of dried sweat slicked our skin. Everyone disappeared and the town was ours. –
We took baths and washed up in the hot springs, scrubbing ourselves in the steamy water, and there was nothing in the world that felt so good as being wet and chilled and clean in that heat. Until I was told to shut up, I explained to anyone who would listen about the geology of the West and the formation of hot springs.
Dust swirled at our feet and heat drummed into our scalps. “There’s a town she told me about not too far from here where they don’t mind if children play the slot machines. Just over the state line in Nevada.” Anton’s cowboy hat shaded his face and he pulled his pants up by the belt loops. “She says there’s a vineyard with an active winery and tastings. Even kids can taste. And in the hills above, a ghost town. Says it’s the best in the area. Tonopah, Nye. Said she even saw a ghost.” Anton gave us a wink and pinched Mom’s behind.
Mom gazed at him lovingly, and then at us, Jane, Julia and me, her daughters. The gentle closing and opening of her eyes said, love him.
At first I wanted an itinerary, something to hold on to like a cane. I didn’t believe that we would find ghost towns without knowing where to look. I didn’t trust, Anton included. Mom promised it would all work out, smiling down on me with that smile full of hope. “The Big Sur fight was just a little misunderstanding,” she said. “Anton loves us and is giving us a lot.” Even the gap between her teeth was somehow promising, encouraging me to believe. Her curly golden hair blew away from her face. She said she would explain about Finny. She knew how much I loved Finny. I was a good sister to him now, protecting him always, never mean. I showered affection all over him. We were together everywhere, trying to figure out if our paths had ever crossed before. He was my one true love, my first love, and I wasn’t ever going to let anything bad happen to him.
“Be here now, Kate,” Mom would remind me. I still wanted to pinpoint on maps where we were going, but Anton didn’t like plans. Plans left no room for spontaneity. Often we didn’t eat dinner before ten.
♦
Anton gave us five dollars apiece to buy birthday presents for Finny. We rode off on the Hondas to the nearest town. Anton had the idea of getting Finny a pet iguana, but he hadn’t found
one by the time Finny’s birthday came around, so he gave Finny a piece of white paper with an IOU written on it. I bought a chunk of turquoise from an Indian – a nugget to hold on to like I held on to my rock of gold.
In the evenings we played football. Tackle, not touch. It was a big deal if Anton chose you for his team. It meant he thought you were good. On his palm he drew imaginary strategies which I always got backward. Julia was always chosen to be on his team. She had to be the best at everything. She even claimed she could shoot her pee farther than the boys and would engage them in pissing competitions, lining them up at the edge of a field. Their pants down, her dress hiked up, hips thrust forward. And she would win. She’d never have done this around Dad. But things were different now. I thought maybe things were better.
♦
At dusk the whole world turned red and the few cottonwoods that were out there changed from green to brown to black. We left the road for unmarked lanes, and parked at the edge of someone’s field. Mom and Anton propped up an orange tent that claimed the land as ours. We’d play a game of football and then Anton would open a bottle of wine and have a smoke. The rest of us would do our jobs. The girls did the cooking, except for Julia, acting more like a boy. Anton didn’t think it was right that the girls did all the cooking. He was a feminist, he said. He believed that girls should be more like boys. But when we cooked we ate earlier than if the boys did it. Mom set up the aluminum card table and draped it with a cloth. It was the one moment all day when I knew what to expect.
We cooked baked beans and hot dogs, adding brown sugar to the beans. “It makes them more gourmet,” Sofia said. When she was nice, you felt special. It could be a smile or a touch or a simple comment that included you with her against the rest and you’d want her to be on your side all the time. We made Chicken Surprise, which meant you put whatever you could find into it, and hash browns and hamburgers and grilled chicken marinated in mayonnaise and mayonnaise brownies. There was nothing quite like the smile you’d get from Anton when you cooked something he liked.
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