“See, we got Figgy Newtons, your favorites,” he said. There was a note of triumph in his voice, as if he were amazed at his new domesticity. Those bready cookies with the grit in each bite: I ate them by the package, and as soon as they were gone, my father bought more. There would come a time when I could barely stand to look at another Fig Newton, but I never had the heart to let him know.
That night, we went to the movies. We had just settled in with our sodas when, in the dimness before the curtain rose, I looked up to see my mother and Jim in the aisle.
“Mom,” I blurted out. I saw her stiffen for a moment, surprised to hear my voice. She squinted into the seats, then made me out, and waved. There was nothing she could do but come over and suffer through more stilted banter.
“Hey, there,” my father said, looking tight.
“Well, here we are, following you around,” my mother said, giving Leslie a nod. Jim flashed a chilly smile.
“You must have read the same review we did,” Leslie said, doing her best to put them at ease.
Mother and Jim stood there for a moment, as if held by surface tension. There were empty seats beside us, but we all tried not to look at them.
“Well … I guess we’ll see you on Sunday,” Mother said to me. Then they moved off down the aisle.
I had been grinning stupidly through the whole business, and now I watched them take a seat down front, right in my line of vision. I didn’t have the heart to leave my father, but it made my shoulders cinch up to have my mother so near, lost in a sea of strangers. When the trailers came on, I kept an eye on her head, rimmed by the shifting light from the screen.
The feature was Barry Lyndon, and for several hours I sat in a darkened room with my four parents—the longest patch of time I would spend with all assembled for the next twenty years, and the strangest—while a bunch of men in ruffled shirts rode horses and dueled and strolled through formal gardens. The movie was filled from its first frames with all kinds of sexual innuendo, and though I missed most of the meaning, it opened my eyes to certain things. In an early scene, Ryan O’Neal pulls a ribbon out of a woman’s squished-up bosom, then leans toward the cleft where he has found it and wobbles like a man with a fever. Below him, in what seemed to be miniature, I saw my mother lean her head toward Jim’s in the shadows, in a way that was utterly private and opaque. They were on a date. I could barely get my mind around it. They had a life between them in my absence. At home, they shared an easy affection. Mother would slide her arms around Jim and call him her “handsome devil.” He would do an “aw, shucks” number, grinning and rubbing a flat palm over her back. These gestures were playful, fond; they had no heat, and I paid them little mind. Now a door swung open in my head, and through it, at a distance, I saw them joined by private passion.
I whispered to my father that I was stepping out to the lobby for a drink and spent most of the first reel out at the snack bar, eating licorice and talking to the clerk. The carpeting in the lobby was red with black diamonds, and I passed the time by hopping from one diamond to another, mouthing a schoolyard chant under my breath: “Eenie, meenie, minie, moe. Catch a tiger by its toe.” I remember this oddment, and only now does it make sense: it was a rhyme for picking teams. If someone had asked me why it popped into my head on that particular evening, I couldn’t have answered.
When I snuck back in and took my seat, someone was killed in a duel, and later, Ryan O’Neal gave his stepson ten whacks with a switch, while the boy winced and cried very convincingly. I looked over at Leslie to see if she was hardened to the boy’s pain.
Other scenes are seared into my head: the flippant son with limp blond hair, who is thrown from a horse and dies slowly, his head bundled up with gauze; or his mother’s beautiful masklike face, topped by a towering pile of hair. Over and over the camera began on a hand or breast and swooped out to a landscape, framing the people against the background like figures in a diorama.
Years later, I saw the film on cable TV and discovered it was a farce. At eight, I took it for tragedy. The duels made me gasp and cover my eyes, and the sex was filled with ominous portents. When it proved too much, I backed out into the lobby again.
“Are you here with your parents?” the clerk asked as he handed over my third box of red whips.
I considered this for a moment. “Yes,” I told him. “All four of them.”
Back at school, two of my classmates and I were excused from school one afternoon a week and bused into the nearby town to the Mentally Gifted Minors Program, coyly called MGM to spare the feelings of the students in the lower percentiles. Genevieve and Scott and I met in a trailer, which was equipped with all the special learning gadgets that the rest of the district couldn’t afford. We made pinhole cameras and dissected sheep’s eyes, and after a few hours we were bused back.
When it became clear to our classmates that we were being singled out for special treatment—though what that treatment was, no one much knew—Harry Peck, the boy whose mother used to baby-sit me, fell into a funk. “I don’t see why you get to go to this thing,” he said to me. “I’ve lived in this valley my whole life.”
I was fairly sure this wasn’t one of the criteria. But to be frank, I wasn’t sure what the real ones were. From the program’s title, I knew someone had deemed us “gifted,” but I didn’t see what I had done to merit that assessment. I was an average student, often forgetting my homework, quick to raise my hand and blurt out answers, but slow to get them down on paper and turn them in. Year after year, my report cards bore the same note: Lisa isn’t working up to her potential.
One day at MGM an art teacher came in and had us lie down on the rug. “Close your eyes and imagine a blue field,” she said. She sounded just like a stewardess. “Now let images enter the field. What do you see?”
I was desperate to see something original and lovely, some Tolkienesque creation that would make the art teacher pleased. My head and neck went stiff with the effort. If only the school psychologist who deemed me gifted could have seen what I came up with that day: a teardrop with stick legs and whiskers. No intentional use of white space, no baroque fantasia or careful rendering, no representation of perspective or scale. Even I could see I was wasting the taxpayers’ money.
When we got back to school, our classmates were bent over pages and pages of long division, the room suffused with the pinched smell of mimeograph fluid.
Alison Rider flashed me a tired smile when I came in, one cheek on her fist as she labored over her exercises. A few years before, she had transferred over from Mountain Meadow. No more learning math by baking double batches of molasses cookies. She was reading a year behind grade level and was up to her ears in catch-up work.
“What do you guys do when you’re gone?” she asked me as I slid into the seat beside her.
I shrugged and feigned boredom. “Oh, stupid stuff.”
On those bus rides back and forth to MGM, I soon learned that Genevieve and I had much in common, and I began going to her house for sleepovers. Her father used to sell insurance in Orange County. Then when she was six, her family packed up and moved to an A-frame on a seventy-acre parcel above town, a half mile from the nearest power line. Genevieve’s room was in the loft, up high under the steeply pitched roof. Out the tiny windows were green draperies of pine. It was pleasant and warm up there, and we spent countless afternoons reading Mad magazine and making puppets out of clay and yarn.
The grownups were often down by the river, skinny-dipping in what my mother admired as the best swimming hole in the valley: deep, clear pools, with rocks to dive from. I was shy around the nude men, and whenever we went down there I went through a quandary: should I wear my bathing suit and come off like a prude, or strip down and spend most of the afternoon trying to bury myself in the sand? The idea back then was that grownups shouldn’t communicate hang-ups about their bodies by bundling up and hiding behind doors. In fact, I had my own hang-ups. Long before adolescence, I had begun to adopt a nunlike modesty.
Since the swimming hole presented liabilities, Genevieve and I often spent our days playing “tiddlywinks,” our term for a collection of tiny ceramic animals that we bought at the Rexall in town. They were sold glued to a tab of cardboard, posed in the trite attitudes of lawn sculpture, but irresistible to us because of their size: a chocolate Labrador no bigger than a thumbnail, a big-eared mouse frozen in a moment of perpetual fright.
We carried our collections around in brass-hinged wooden boxes, looking for a spot that had, from our grand aerial view, the cohesiveness of a miniature landscape: a ledge of moss with a dirt slope below that could serve as a split-level house, rafts of baby’s tears that we laid carpets on, making Moroccan-style open-air palaces.
Our furnishings were cribbed from the junk drawer and from our mothers’ rag bags: squares of carpet and flannel to line the rooms, dime-sized seashells for chairs. My mouse bedded down at night in a cotton-stuffed walnut shell—always, because of her given posture, an insomniac—and woke to survey her garden from the severe backless perch of a blue kitchen tile.
Early on, we brought our tiddlywinks to school—a terrific social blunder. While we set up in the nooks between tree roots at the edge of the play yard, a handful of freckle-faced boys raced by in V-formation and chucked sour cherries at our heads, restocking their ammo from a tree out by the fence. It was better, we learned, to leave fantasy at home.
Once we had set up the houses, the game fell flat. Genevieve sent her dog over and insulted my decorating. My mouse huffed at his insolence and kicked him out, but neither of us could summon much interest in the action. We only loved the arranging: the ordering, I think now, of a bonsai universe. Dialogue, trying to imagine what happened next—that was beyond us.
Genevieve’s house didn’t have a septic tank, and thus no indoor toilet. There was a wooden outhouse some yards off from the back door, and it was understood that we could pee wherever we pleased. This was fine during the day, but at night, when we were tucked into our sleeping bags in the loft, I dreaded my body’s call. It was a long road to relief: down the narrow wooden ladder, through the shadowy clutter of the living room, and out the back door into the dark.
One night, when I had lain awake for a half-hour and couldn’t stand it any longer, I made the trek, nearly slipping off the edge of the loft, then going down the ladder facing out, which was all wrong and gave me vertigo, then cracking my shin on the sofa in the dark. By the time I reached the back door, every muscle and tendon was stiff.
I stepped out into the bracing air, and waited a moment for my eyes to adjust. It was a moonless night. Stars were scattered like sugar across the sky. Down in the valley, Alan Sarkissian was most likely peering up at them through his telescope. I waited and waited, but the darkness refused to divide into meaningful shapes. I opened my eyes wider, trying to take in what stray light was around, but there was nothing before me but blackness, shot now and then with strange noises. I thought I heard footfalls crackling the twigs, then a low moaning, which I told myself was the wind. I took a few hesitant steps, then froze, paralyzed by a nearby hoot and rustle. After standing there for a few moments in mortal terror, I began to weep, squeezing out fat tears in hopes that the beast out there, with its keen night vision, would take pity on me. I would never make it to the outhouse. I had no idea in which direction it lay, and even if I found it I wouldn’t have the courage to pry back the hinged door on that box of gloom. Someone could be waiting in there for me. A hobo. A deranged mountain man.
Still, I knew I couldn’t sleep until I finished my mission, so I forced myself into the dark, my hands held out in front of me. The ground rose slightly and I staggered against the slope, then struck a small bush. I still couldn’t see a thing—even the house had disappeared behind me—and finally I lost my patience. What kind of family didn’t have a toilet? This had gone far enough. If they ever found the evidence out there in the brush, they’d probably take it for bear scat.
I woke in the morning to Genevieve’s mother calling from the bottom of the stairs, “Lisa, can you come here a second?” There was a note of irritation in her voice, which worried me, but I shuffled down the stairs, backward this time, and followed her out the door.
There, not more than five feet from the house, were my leavings, distinctly human.
Barbara pointed with her forefinger. “This is not okay,” she said. Then she went off to get a shovel and stood by while I dug a hole and buried the stuff.
When I got home on Sunday, our scruffy old house looked like a palace. I went into the bathroom and flushed the toilet a few times, just to reassure myself. Back out on the sidewalk, it seemed that we lived in a metropolis. I counted five houses in plain view, and above them, the power poles and telephone wires, stringing us all together. There at the curb were our neighbors the Chapmans, loaded into their blue Chevy Nova, their heads bowed in prayer. They were on their way to church, but that wasn’t why they were behaving so devoutly. Seven days a week Mrs. Chapman insisted the family make a small prayer for God’s protection before she would start the car.
I didn’t think I could stand to have to ask for a blessing before every meal, every turn of the road, every night’s sleep. Still, when I studied their bent heads through the windshield I had to admit they looked at peace, packed together tightly on the white vinyl seats. Perhaps it was the glimpse of their contentment that made me game when my mother began waking me up on Sundays to take in the services at the Methodist church. She encouraged me to dress up, which was a tall order for me in those days, when I lived in Toughskin jeans and Tshirts. I came out for our first service in wooden platform shoes, a pair of knee socks silkscreened with Shaun Cassidy’s face, and a white polyester tennis dress. My mother looked me over and shrugged. She wore a long paisley sheath, culled from a thrift store in Boston, and Dr. Scholl’s sandals. We may have stood out among the girls in hand-sewn dresses and their mothers, who favored country florals, but the parishioners slid over in the pew and made room for us.
My mother’s churchgoing was motivated chiefly by a sense of community. She hoped to get a job teaching at my elementary school, and going to church was a way to meet people—the rural equivalent of networking. She would have described this in metaphysical terms: you need to put positive energy into the system if you want positive outcomes. Jim, who would have called this good karma, had had enough churchgoing in his early Baptist days and spent his Sunday mornings at home.
At first we went sporadically, because Mother had a hard time sitting through the sermons. Reverend Pauling, a stooped, balding man, gave the Bible a close reading and seemed to focus on how the parishioners had failed, in their daily travails, to live up to the teachings of Jesus. The older women in the valley who had survived their various husbands—killed by logging accidents or by cancer after smoking Lucky Strikes and working in a cloud of backhoe dust for twenty years—were the mainstay of the church. They brought armloads of daffodils in the spring, tins of cookies in the winter months. If they did not love Reverend Pauling, he seemed to satisfy their sense of life’s failed opportunities; they left the church chastened but sated, nodding their fleecy heads by the road.
Not long after we started going to church, Reverend Pauling retired and was replaced by Jerry Cliff, a bearded young man who drove into town in a battered pickup truck and turned the congregation on its ear. There is no doubt that Reverend Cliff took spiritual matters seriously; he just didn’t mind the trimmings. He wore bell-bottom corduroys and Frye boots and opened his service with some rollicking acoustic guitar while the bewildered organist tried to follow along. Soon “Michael (Row the Boat Ashore)” crept into the Sunday repertoire, then “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and finally a tune that caused an exodus of the blue-rinse set from the congregation, called “Me Oh My, I Love That Methodist Pie,” sung to the tune of another Dylan song.
My mother became a Sunday regular, going back for the daffodils, for the light sifting through stained glass onto familiar upturned fa
ces, and for Jerry’s sermons, because they seemed to pertain to the here and now. He talked about the gospel in concrete ways (sharing a few ears of ripe corn with a neighbor, say), and this dovetailed with the values hailed in Jim’s copy of the Whole Earth Catalog: live simply so others may simply live, let’s get back to the barter system—that sort of thing. If I know my mother, I imagine she must have liked the poetical lightness of one theme being sounded from different voices: Stewart Brand and this bearded preacher with the velvety voice.
Soon Jerry would become a frequent dinner guest—along with Alan Sarkissian and Grant, the logger—and after the table was cleared we would all retire to the living room, where Jim would stoke up the potbelly stove until the metal pinged and our cheeks flushed. I would lie with my head in Mother’s lap while Jerry strummed and sang his secular repertoire—Jim Croce, Woody Guthrie—grittier tunes than the ones he played at the pulpit. I heard a note of sorrow in his voice when he sang, a whiff of loneliness in the empty pauses at the ends of songs.
Much as I loved Jerry, I found the sermons long and the pews hard, and soon migrated down the street toward the Evangelical church, where I joined an evening youth group. I even went so far as to take Jesus as my personal savior—helped in this by the preacher’s wife, who treated the conversion of my soul as casually as a bank deposit—and spent most of my free time memorizing Scripture.
On the day when I asked my mother point-blank if she believed in God, she faltered for a moment. I registered this hesitation, because my mother always seemed to know precisely what she thought. Opinions spilled from her lips as easily as water from a tap—firm, strong, clear, the pressure of her thinking on the world. But that day in the kitchen she kept silent, and while she composed an answer, she wiped the counter with a sponge. Jim and a friend had made this counter out of two-by-four scraps, fastened them with hand-whittled pegs, and finished the patchwork of end grain to a high gloss. It was the kind of marriage of beauty and function that my mother most admired. Now she studied the expanse of rough rectangles as if they held some kind of answer.
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