Have you met Mom’s new boyfriend Gene? He looks so cool! He has a scar on him from his chest to his back. Far out!
I hope David picks you. If you ever see Nick tell him I said “Hi.” The last day of school was cool. Everybody had squirt guns. I squirted Milan Pompa and he poured a hat full of water over my head! Then I hit him.
There is a boy at our school named David that everybody likes but he likes a girl I know (Cynthia Scott). I don’t try to take him away because Cynthia is one of my best friends.
Guess what? It has been raining for three days!
Tell Aunt Nancy that if she thinks all I talk about is boys she should read some of your letters. Sending two pictures. The one that says “the gang” is the gang. The other one is Milan Pompa. (It’s a bad picture of him.)
Say “Hi” to Nick, Ronnie, every boy, and Aunt Nancy.
Love,
Martha
Dear Denise,
School starts Tuesday and everyone is kind of depressed. 7th grade, blah. Went shopping today and got a suede skirt, a pair of boots, a pair of moccasins that come to my knee, a pair of red shoes, a pair of light blue shoes, and a purse.
Mom and Gene got married in a drive-thru. I couldn’t go but they showed me pictures. Got to go. Say hi to everyone.
Love and peace,
Martha
Dear Denise,
I’ve got to tell you what we’ll do at the river. (We is Ronnie, David, you, and me.) The first day there we’ll go down to the pool hall and the pool. When we’re at the pool Ronnie picks me up and throws me in. Then you come over to the edge and David pushes you in and you take Ronnie and David with you. The next day, just the four of us go on a boat ride. We are half way across the river when a storm hits. We get through that then we go water skiing and skinny dipping. After that, you and David go into a cove and Ronnie and I walk along the shore, holding hands (among other things). On the last day me and you sit around and cry while the boys are depressed. That night we leave. Pretty good, eh?
Why am I so ugly? Debbie and Cynthia are so much cuter it’s not even funny.
Debbie is conceited. She acts like she’s the greatest. I’m hardly ever around Cynthia, so I don’t know about her. Debbie says she is but I don’t think so. Say hi to everyone. I wish I was there.
Miss ya,
Martha
Dear Denise,
How are you? I am fine. Lots happening here. We are having race riots. A boy in English got killed on the Westside last night. Even as I write this there are things on the radio about it. Just now they’re saying two more kids were killed at Rancho (black boys).
Today my boyfriend (Tony de Bonio) came to class with a big bandage on his head. When I asked him what happened he said he was walking home from school and some colored kid hit him with a chain. I almost cried. Then at lunch he came up to me and Eddie (Garcia), put his arm around me and said, “I’m not going to have you walking home alone. Wait for me after school.” Then he walked me to class.
Love and peace!!!
Martha
Tecopa
Christmas morning. A feast had been prepared by the internet volunteers (a pair of sunburnt British girls and Garrison, a nineteen-year-old Sigma Chi freshly dropped out of UNC Chapel Hill) under the supervision of Carlotta’s niece, Mari, a recovering addict with Jesse eyes and six months sober. Over a perfectly sludgy pour-over I gathered that Mari had been a contractor in another life. She was the only one at Villa with any building expertise, but that wasn’t why she was here. Her habit had almost cost them the family business. Digging holes at Villa Anita was part atonement, part ersatz rehab.
Lise was antsy, in no way down for coffee, breakfast, a spiked nog or two, watching the family (Family?) open their presents, learning more about the cane grass and tamarisk overtaking Villa’s early sculptures. Improving them, Erin insisted, emphatically and at length. Finally, sopping with nog and mimosa and stuffed French toast and sausage and orange chocolate from someone’s stocking, I followed my sister down the hill to the Tecopa house.
Once, our dogs found a rattlesnake in the garden here. My dad cut the snake’s head off with a shovel then brought us out to see. Lise was crawling. She was as curious then as Ruth is now. She took the dead snake in her hand. I’ve heard the story so many times I’d swear the memory was my own. She took the severed end into her mouth and began to suck.
Where our house once was, only a stone chimney rose from a pile of rubble, rat shit and trash. Shredded insulation and shattered glass. Much had been stolen or scavenged, yet strange dioramas sat preserved. The spice rack. A box of warped records, a box of crumbling books and magazines. Stunning rocks everywhere. Lise and I trudged through the debris awhile in silence, risking exposure to hantavirus to gather the special ones.
I wanted to say: You and I have loved each other and her and been loved by each other and by her, them, in all these houses, through all these memories which were once moments, real and felt even if forgotten. We have loved and loved and been loved despite the fissures and losses, violence, cruelty, smallness, deficits in money and time and attention, despite the betrayals and indifferences, the distance and weather, despite developing different definitions of certain words. Death, expensive, cold. How? I wondered. Because the skinny twin was kind, pliant with forgiveness. Because she absorbed the fat one’s failings, made them her grace. I thought, There was not enough to go around. Such a handy phrase to describe such mean circumstances. Here came another: I was born at a good time.
We made no ceremony, had no ritual. I stepped on a sheet of corrugated tin that had once been a wall of the darkroom and a rattlesnake went berserk underneath. Lise and I screamed and scrambled up the far ridge with our rocks.
Catching my breath, I said, “I think I’m gonna stay here.”
She tossed a tired glance down at the trash heap that had been our first home. “And do what?”
“Bear witness?” I said. “Grieve?” In truth I was thinking of Mari, the little orb I already felt athrob between us.
Lise shrugged. “I guess that’s what this place is for.”
After a time, I told her, “I saw the redwoods.”
“With what’s-his-face?” she said, squinting into the canyon. “Were they huge?”
“So huge. They grow in a circle.”
“What circle?”
“The big ones shoot up babies all around, from their roots I guess, and then when the big one dies—gets killed, in the redwood’s case, cut down for extractive—”
“Keep it moving.”
“Right. When it dies all its family is there, circled around the empty space. Grieving in a circle. The parent tree, it’s called.”
Lise said, “Too much.”
“We put our tent right in there. Me and what’s-his-face. I thought it would feel cozy but to be honest I felt kinda trapped. I kept thinking how they’re stuck there, the redwoods.”
“They’re stuck there,” Lise said. “But we’re not.” She gathered her specimens to herself and stood up, as if to illustrate. “Your shit does not scan.” She set off down the ridge.
“Where are you going?” I called out after her.
“Home,” she called back. It took me a moment to grasp that she used this word to mean Las Vegas. “I have to get G-ma her truck back and I have to go to work. I don’t want to live here anymore.”
She walked up the hill past Villa Anita to the truck still decorated with stars and stripes G-ma had painted on there after 9/11, and drove away. Though it was midday, a crown of coyotes appeared on the opposite ridge. Together, we watched her go.
That night I heard them howling. I got up to record them and discovered I’d left my phone in the truck. I lay in the bottle cottage and listened. At first I’d mistaken the howling for sirens. I remembered how many times in how many cities I had heard sirens and wi
shed them coyotes. The yipping howls became sobs. They really were sobs, I realized, and very near, not coyotes or sirens but a woman crying close by. She might have been sitting with her back to the bottle cottage, thinking she was alone.
It was Mari.
The next day after breakfast, Garrison introduced me to a bong he kept hidden in a work boot in his trailer. He’d built it out of a water bottle, a lug nut and an empty tennis ball canister. He was a natural teacher, offering extensive instructions for the device’s care and use, with demonstrations. “Technically it’s a gravity bong,” he said. “You can call it a gravity bong but we”—Garrison spoke in the first-person plural a lot, like he had a few of his Sigma Chi brothers rolling with him at all times—“we just call it the geeb.”
“The geeb,” I coughed, having cleared it.
Garrison nodded in admiration. There was some worry on his face, too. Perhaps he was reckoning with the fact that I was someone’s mother. Maybe I was imagining that.
Just then the softest knock came at the trailer door. Mari. Garrison silently offered her the geeb and Mari silently obliged, an oft and intimate ritual, I could tell. I revised: Mari was Garrison’s we. And now, thanks to the life-changing magic of cannabinoids, we three were the we. Together we took to hitting the geeb before and after breakfast, working all day digging holes for we knew not what or sorting junk for Erin’s sculptures, then soaking at sunset. At night we’d hit the geeb once more before bed at a picnic table on the back forty before Garrison inevitably drifted off in the direction of the Brits, leaving Mari and me alone.
Mostly Mari and I talked about Villa Anita. It was like living in a very big fort, we decided, playful, ecstatic, chaotic, mysterious to me still. Where the Watkins ranch was open to the desert, fenceless, embracing the canyon, Villa Anita was fortified against it. Inside, Villa (as the volunteers called it) was a bonkers honeycomb of paths and secret rooms. Actually, a word like rooms was not especially useful here, given how difficult it was to tell if you were indoors or out. Someone somewhere had a lot of money. Priceless oriental rugs lay atop ripped-up casino carpet lay atop dirt. The bathroom I used had a poor man’s Chihuly skylight and a gravel floor, its walls a collage of tarp, billboard panels, beer bottles and cane grass, which Erin called the new adobe. I said cane grass was an invasive. J said there was no such thing as an invasive and if there were we’d be one and I should try not to garden like a fascist.
The place felt exuberant and illicit, like a brothel in a ghost town. Nothing was where I expected it to be, especially not light switches, doors, floors and doorknobs. It slowed me down, made me a beginner again. Reaching, I discovered architectural orthodoxies deep in my muscles, felt how often my body honored someone else’s code. I regretted spending so much of my life in buildings designed by banks. Sometimes it felt like being in the built-out imagination of my most alive self, and sometimes honestly it felt a lot like a cult. Carlotta made me cry a bunch. Sometimes I was naked a long while before I realized it was no longer the time to be naked, that naked time had come and gone. Needless to say, I was high the entire time.
There was no such thing as trash at Villa Anita. The family had not thrown trash in the county dumpster for more than twelve years. Erin and Mari showed me how they insulated the trailers and cottages with plastic, Styrofoam and other eternal materials. I felt my standard objections start to flare—ants, cancer—and then fade away. They didn’t make sense here. Erin taught me to make adobe bricks and bottle walls. J taught me to heal stressed plants with my root chakra. A visiting shaman named Skandar did a crystal sweep and got my levels right.
Two other important rules at Villa Anita: objects were sentient, and there was no such thing as being lost. Garrison, who had lived in Villa for nine months, discovered a chamber he’d never been in before, its walls made of mattress coils and car parts turned into planters now poking up cactus. If you put something down it might run away from home to be part of the art. This happened with Mari’s things a lot. But she’d come into things as well. The universe provided. For example, her park ranger boyfriend had found some mushrooms while picking up trash at a backcountry site and Mari was safekeeping them. “Psychedelics tend to find me when I need them,” she said, sending a rush of blood to my vulva.
I told her Foucault did psychedelics in Death Valley. “His trip had a big impact on his thinking.”
No wildflowers this year, Mari said her boyfriend said. No rain. I said I missed the smell. It came from creosote, she said her boyfriend said. Creosote is ancient, I said. Creosote survived the nuclear blasts, she said her boyfriend said. I said none of us survived the nuclear blasts, that her boyfriend sounded like a dud, that we should eat his mushrooms at the hot springs without him.
At the hot springs Mari said she missed pills. I got very DARE, did my Sackler rant about growing up in the blast zone. I said, “My mom died from that shit.”
She said, “For real?”
“So that’s how that ends. If you’re wondering.”
“Wise words from someone who’s been clearing the geeb on the regular.” She floated on her back, nipples rising to the sky. “Anyway, that’s how all this ends, isn’t it?”
“It’s different when you choose it. You leave all these people behind on purpose, you reject them, abandon them, then they’re stuck here, alone. It’s the worst kind of loneliness.”
“Shit is selfish,” she admitted.
“And you can’t know how final it is. It’s like I think on some level, in some warped way, I thought they would be out here. Down there.” In the water, I guess I meant. “But they’re not. She is never anywhere. They never say what I need them to say.”
“I think the worst kind of loneliness isn’t when you’re alone but when you’re with the wrong person.” She raised the joint pinched in her fingers—rolled of fluffy dank buds Garrison had procured from the Timbisha dispensary. “All that was in another life. I’m clean now. No hard stuff, no pills, no needles. Just mushrooms, flower, water and sky.”
I floated beside her, watched the stars overhead. Grateful. Wantless, I promise. I wanted only my baby, and if not her then for the waters to urge me to Mari, and for Mari to please please please touch me.
* * *
—
About a hundred people lived in Tecopa, and every one of them, it seemed, took the waters at sunset, whether at the public baths, the private baths, or the wild springs Mari and I preferred. There was no cell service in Tecopa, and I never heard anyone wishing there were. Spaces without cell service were like wildlife refuges for idiosyncratic thoughts, I opined stonedly as we rode bikes past the public baths to where a sun-cracked sign began, “These ancient hills . . .”
We picked our way along the path to where the water rose from the rock, hot and healing. Mari said, “The path is not the route to the springs but a part of the springs.”
Ideal soaking began before sunset and continued into nightfall, obeying no clock but the sky. Wind rippled through the marsh grass and blew steam from the water. We dropped our clothes in the dirt.
“Hot springs can cause abortion and are thought to have served this function in the past,” Mari said.
“Also in the present,” I added.
I watched her big black bush surface toward purple mountains ancient and indifferent. I floated on my back, felt my nipples harden against the wind.
She taught me where the vents were, that they always moved, to feel to find them. I did, pressing my feet to the hottest rocks I could bear. I thought about how rarely we let pleasure lead the way. For most of my life it seemed my body had been molded by various structures—tight waistbands, bras, foot-binding high heels. How often had I invited—paid for—some wire to dig into me, and for what? If it was buoyancy I was after, all I had to do was come to the hot springs and float free, for once, and do it daily. I let myself be held by the fossil water.
Mari pul
led my hand into a hole. She pressed my fingers and hers into the silky mud there. It frightened me a little. She instructed me to pull up a fistful of it. Gently, Mari and I smeared the green-gray mud on each other’s faces.
It seemed essential to become accustomed to drift. It seemed the wild springs were an inoculation against the oppressive beauty standards of patriarchy. Maybe they were practice for death. I know that in the water we were the opposite of deathless. We floated naked and vulnerable as manatees. Our skin tautened as the mud dried. My mother had put it on our dogs’ noses when they were bitten by snakes. My father had hoped it might cure his cancer. I have a photo of him slathered with it, cross-legged on a blanket in the sun, waiting. I wanted a God like that, some way of knowing this place that evaded the internet, the park rangers, the anthologists, a wordless knowledge. The feeling would be intense, Mari warned. “It’s the empathic extraction of any number of invisible venoms.”
A long, long time ago, I said, all of this was Lake Tecopa. Then Lake Tecopa leaked through the canyon and into Lake Manly, which we now call Death Valley. A story my mother had told me many times. With the help of the park ranger’s psilocybin, long-gone memories returned to me. “They taught me to swim here.” I remembered stretching my whole body toward them, my parents. I saw the stars and felt their hands beneath me. From the bottom of a vanished inland sea, nothingness tightened in me. A sensation of sublime insignificance, of almost orgasmic loss. Fellow bathers came and went. They whispered, gossiped, stroked each other in secret.
In a secluded eddy I asked Mari, “Do you feel that?”
She said she did.
I said, “We should probably kiss.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I just couldn’t.”
Then we did.
When exiting the wild springs, I took care to observe not merely the ecstatic cold, but that this ecstasy lived at the intersection of the wind and my own perfect, dying body. I practiced not wanting more but my teeth always did.
I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness Page 22