Stranger, Father, Beloved

by Taylor Larsen

  At the start of high school, they tried to keep a friendly rapport going, even occasionally going out to a movie together at the local theater, but over the last year, as they had both turned sixteen, all attempts at connecting felt entirely forced, and they had stopped spending time together completely.

  Now Carol was always staying after school for sports, field hockey, basketball, softball, so Ryan continued her habit of going over to her house to spend time with Carol’s mother, Jill, instead of returning to her own home. It would be just the two of them for hours, and when Carol finally did come home, she would take her tray of food up to her room and shut herself up there for most of the night. Ryan, unsure why she kept going back there, knew only that she found Jill’s presence soothing.

  * * *

  The next day, in the late afternoon, Ryan spread her biology books over Jill’s kitchen table. The kitchen smelled of lemon, as Jill had cleaned it just before Ryan arrived. Ryan knew that Jill loved having her over and she was the reason the kitchen counters gleamed under the bright, cheery lights. Jill stood across the kitchen, making egg salad and, as usual, was completely caught up in her own world. She seemed to expect nothing from Ryan, and Ryan appreciated that more than she could express. Jill had a nature CD playing on the stereo. It was called Distant Thunder, and the rumbling noises and cricket sounds made the stereo speakers vibrate and hum as the waves of sound emerged and took over the room.

  “Jill, I think the CD is meant to be played quietly to have a relaxing effect.”

  Jill smiled and poured some herbs into the egg salad. “I like it like this. It blasts through your system. Really stirs you up. Anything that stirs you up is good.” But she went over and lowered the volume a little.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Ryan sighed and looked back down at her books. She noticed that this new Jill was freer with her speech and seemed to have adopted an “it’s all good” motto. Maybe all the self-help books she had read were finally making an impact. The old Jill had been shy and hesitating. There were only traces left of that insecure creature, Ryan felt. When just she and Jill were together, she felt the two of them had the ease that close friends share.

  Until recently, she and Carol had always laughed at Jill, who had never married and so had raised her daughter by herself. They found it funny that she refused to dye her graying hair or shave her armpits and that she always seemed to be one step behind the times. She had a collection of glass mushrooms that was housed in a rickety wooden case in the corner of the living room. She always seemed to be embarking on some new, strange project that embarrassed the girls, such as growing sprouts in a little machine she kept in her bedroom, studying tai chi, or learning Portuguese from cassette tapes while she cooked meals in the kitchen. Back then, Jill hadn’t seemed to mind that the girls were always giggling at her or rolling their eyes. She had taken it all in with generous patience and usually even laughed at herself or made a self-deprecating comment such as “I got to stay busy somehow, guys.”

  Jill had had a string of boyfriends, each of whom lasted for a few months. They would appear at the house, each of them slightly older than Jill, and hesitantly walk past the two girls playing in the yard on their way to the front steps of the porch. Three years ago, the procession of big-bellied men had stopped for some reason, and Jill had, without explanation, found herself permanently single. It was clear that she was somehow unlikely to date again—all three of them felt it intuitively, although each was unsure why.

  The last beau, Robbie, had been the most likable of the bunch, although by the time he came around, Jill and her daughter were for the most part disillusioned with the idea of having a permanent man in their lives. Robbie had the bad luck of arriving in the aftermath of Andy, who had been the most hurtful of all. Andy’s unpredictability had taken them all by surprise. Ryan had memories of Andy, who had been mild-mannered in his initial persistent pursuit of Jill, settling into a comfortable routine of having dinner with Jill and Carol and Ryan, and spending the night. But then, one summer morning, he had awakened to find that Jill was not in bed with him. She had just gone to get some groceries, and he had become enraged at her for not leaving him a note. When she returned forty minutes later, he had confronted her by screaming and throwing a chair against the wall, waking both Carol and Ryan.

  Before Andy there had been Peter, whose main attribute had been his mind-numbing dullness. He had always seemed uncomfortable around Carol and, after getting drunk, would call her “little uggs.” The only reason he’d gotten away with saying that for the first few weeks was that it was impossible to make out what he was actually saying. Jill and Carol had both thought he was saying “little one” until one night Carol had overhead him talking to one of his buddies on the phone.

  “The little ugly one’s in bed, so come on over and drink some beer with me,” he had said and laughed. Ryan had seen clearly that Carol’s heart had broken a little bit upon hearing that description of herself; her face had flushed and her eyes had gone wild with helplessness. Ryan had never thought of Carol as ugly before Peter said that, but now she saw it in her friend.

  Later Robbie had entered the picture. He had been kind and a little boring but eager to give love to Jill and Carol, but the exhaustion that hung in the air had quickly dampened his romantic attempts. Jill was indeed exhausted and unable to take him seriously. The relationship had fizzled out until he had finally stopped coming around altogether.

  As she sat in the kitchen with Jill, Ryan was distracted, as the house was full of memories; it was hard for her not to recall little moments that always involved Carol, as if their two happy little child ghosts were still roaming the corridors somewhere in the house.

  On the page in front of Ryan, there was a drawing of a spinal cord and its little elephant-eared vertebrae stacked one atop the other. Taking a deep breath, she tried to focus on what the writing said and to block out the crashing thunder sounds coming from the speakers perched on the cabinet above her. Last time she had been there doing homework at the kitchen table, Carol had stood at the edge of the kitchen and watched the two of them, a quizzical look on her face. She had not come into the kitchen. Ryan wondered if she would do the same tonight.

  Spinal reflex: involuntary, fast, predictable, unlearned, automatic, inherited response to stimulus.

  She scanned the definition in confusion.

  Withdraw reflex: withdraw from a painful stimulus.

  “Jill, do you get this stuff?”

  “What?”

  “Do you understand the spinal cord and nerve reflexes? Can you help me with this?”

  Jill put down her spoon and came around the counter. She leaned over next to Ryan, who could smell Jill’s faint body odor and see the outline of her huge, soft breasts leaning her way.

  The CD switched to bird sounds, and Jill said, “Oh, I love this part.”

  It was soothing to have a break from the thunder, and the birds’ singing matched the sunny weather outside.

  Jill ran her finger over the definition. Ryan noticed that her fingers were a little greasy. They left a tiny smear on the print. Ryan remembered Jill hadn’t even been to college. Of course she wouldn’t know.

  “Yeah, I get it.” She stood up straight and stretched her arms overhead. Her armpit odor was severe.

  “Well, will you explain it to me?” Ryan said in exasperation.

  “Here.” Jill lunged at her chair, causing Ryan to gasp and fall out of it.

  “That’s the withdraw response.”

  Ryan laughed good-naturedly, though she felt mildly angry. She went up behind Jill and pulled on her bra strap, slowly letting it snap, because she knew Jill was embarrassed and helpless at the largeness of her breasts.

  Jill laughed uncertainly and slowly looked over her left shoulder, keeping the rest of her body perfectly still. They stood there awkwardly; Jill had her back to her, while Ryan held the fab
ric of the shirt in her hands and with her index finger traced a small line along the edge of Jill’s shoulder blade. She could feel heat dance under the cloth in her hand. Jill walked abruptly out of the room.

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she called from the stairway, and Ryan could tell she was trying to sound casual.

  Ryan settled down again at her spot at the table and turned down the volume on the stereo, reducing the sounds of the birds, whose calls now sounded panicky. She felt a strange mixture of excitement, disgust, and power surge through her. At sixteen, she was blossoming and was coming to learn that there was nothing older people loved more than seeing beauty in its purest form, bursting forth in a newly sexual body. It was likely that she sensed a shift in others’ behavior toward her, and it made her uncomfortable. Her body looked just like the bodies of the women in films. She now inhabited a space where boys and men became restless around her, and she was aware that she was entering a lifelong joke that she would never fully get but would always vaguely sense.

  She thought of the kids at school and knew she was called a bitch behind her back. She was unsure who her friends were these days—she had been skipped over this year as the other kids had been forming their groups. She was sure people thought of her as the girl who couldn’t take a joke, and that made her even quieter and more somber. But she was growing more beautiful daily; she could see the popular girls eyeing her with alarm and perhaps interest. If she wanted to, she could make nice and be asked into their group. All she had to do was smile and play along, but she couldn’t do it, couldn’t stand to be groped by the jocks, to listen to the cheerleaders’ gossip. The senior class two years above her was a particularly good-looking class, with so many brunettes with pale blue eyes and blondes with aquamarine green eyes, that just to walk down the hall was like seeing a wall of jewels against the lockers. Despite their being so pretty a group, the older kids still looked at her as if she might be one of them, should be one of them. If she smiled back, she would be obliged to go to parties, drink, and have sex with the mindless country club boys. So she stayed guarded and saw others’ admiration for her pale face and long brown hair and thin, pretty body, an admiration that quickly turned to anger at her lack of effort to fit into the social hierarchy. The goth kids also looked at her with interest—she listened to their music, but she didn’t want to go with them either. Eventually they, too, regarded her with disdain and she remained alone.

  The school year was almost over, she kept telling herself. The summer would be easier. Until then, at least she could come here. She had this. There had been times, though, when something about Jill scared her, when she looked at Jill and felt she was viewing an alien—her long, gray braid, her slapdash grin, her skin speckled from too many hours in the sun.

  She remembered one Saturday morning a month ago when they had driven out to the cliffs, a place, Ryan knew, where Jill used to do her partying when she was younger, and there had been a heavy expectancy and pressure for the two to connect. Since they had left before Carol had gotten up, their departure on this trip had felt illicit. It was still chilly, as it was April, so they had taken along jackets and hats to protect themselves from the cold wind that whipped around the rocks so close to the ocean. At the cliffs, they had had a moment of elation as they stepped to the ledge—the two of them grinning, bracing their hands against the rocks. Jill was being pulled around by the wind. Her loose-fitting shirt flapped around her body like a flag. She turned to Ryan and said, “You don’t even have to inhale out here, the air just slams into you.”

  Ryan had laughed and closed her eyes as she lay on a long, smooth rock. The day was so bright and the wind so insistent. Nothing seemed permanent out there. The wind, the light, the water rushing over the shore and then sliding back into itself. She felt that the very rocks they were sitting on wouldn’t remain long where they were. She could see herself and Jill crumbling into the ocean, an image that somehow didn’t disturb her that much. In fact, it felt strangely right.

  Jill had pointed at the water and said, “Look at it. It’s like it’s saying to me ‘Come on in, I’ll take care of you, I’ll return you back to the shore.’ ”

  Ryan had looked at the churning water and the way it swelled and then made little explosions of spray against the rocks and tide pools. “I don’t see that,” she had responded. “What happened to that tube of water you used to wear around your neck?” Jill had been wearing the tube necklace for weeks and this was the first time Ryan had noticed she was without it. It had mysteriously disappeared.

  “I have a secret,” Jill said. She was smiling too big, Ryan felt, and her overwhelming happiness had been unnerving. “I’ll tell you what it is.” Ryan suddenly knew she would not like hearing the secret.

  Jill explained that she had ordered vials of spring water brought up from the depths of caves in New Zealand. This water, considered the purest of all the water on earth, had never seen the light of day nor been exposed to the air. It was completely unpolluted. It was flown over to the United States already sealed in the vials and sold at high prices in New Age stores and spiritual centers.

  Jill told her she had inserted the vial into her vagina to purify that part of her body and was now keeping it in there until she felt cleansed. She said it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Ryan smiled and looked away, trying to be polite, but she felt a painful clenching in her stomach, as if all the tectonic plates had just aligned in the worst possible positions for their little bit of land and the earth would soon start grumbling and offer up waves of hot lava. She’d had no idea that the vial had been nestled in there, in Jill’s graying anatomy, and it bothered her enormously both that it had been there all this time without her knowledge and that she now knew of its presence. She imagined the poor little tube of sealed water, having to account for the purification of all that scarred female tissue, having to clean out an old passageway and erase confusion and disappointment. That was a big job for such a little vial, and it struck Ryan as blatantly unfair.

  Jill’s body seemed to Ryan a blueprint for failure—her sad eyes, graying strawlike hair, her feminine parts, which had been used and abandoned, the heaviness that coated all the curves of her body. Jill had that shocked look of one who has witnessed an awful accident and on whom the catastrophic image has imprinted itself indelibly. All the early years of drinking with her wild friends and the later years of disappointment had caused her organs to sit heavy inside. But Ryan had to admit that she loved her nonetheless.

  Jill seemed to respect Ryan, and when Ryan was in Jill’s house, she felt as though she could finally take a full breath and relax. In her own home, after her brother was put to bed, her mother usually went up to her bedroom alone with a romance novel or to watch a movie in bed before falling asleep early, while her father secluded himself in his study for the entire night. The house was segregated and joyless.

  * * *

  When it got late and the yard fully darkened, Ryan knew she would have to leave Jill’s and return to her own house. As she walked out of the door, she heard the muffled sounds of the TV that Carol watched in her bedroom. She kept it on from the time she walked into her room until she went to bed, completing her homework over the course of a series of shows. Carol liked the volume on high, and little bits of light from the TV danced over the upstairs hallway walls in strange patterns. Ryan heard the laugh of the audiences of the game show and then the perky voices of the people in commercials as she shut the front door behind her.

  When she got home, she entered her house quietly, so as not to attract any attention. She had been playing this odd cat-and-mouse game with her parents for weeks—they would not acknowledge that she did not come in on time, and she would not bring it up either. At this stage, her mother didn’t even leave a plate of dinner for her on the counter as she had in previous weeks. In the initial phases of the game, her mother had tried to ground her for missing three dinners in a row. Bu
t when Ryan didn’t come home the next night, there were no real consequences, such as taking away her car keys. Her mother had had harsh words about it a second time a week later, and Ryan had apologized to her, but the next night she found that she just didn’t want to stay home and even she didn’t know why. The plate was now in the refrigerator if she wanted it. It was her mother’s feeble attempt at saying she had noticed that Ryan no longer came home for dinner.

  They had no authority whatsoever, Ryan mused. Well, if they weren’t going to trust her enough to tell her what was wrong with her dad, why he needed pills and looked miserable all the time, then she wouldn’t tell them when she was coming and when she was going—simple as that. She was not a child anymore. She could handle whatever it was, but they didn’t trust her with the information, and being in the house not knowing was unbearable. She ate half of the plate, enjoying the sharply cold, dry meat of the chicken.

  Ryan went up to her room, sat there for a couple of hours reading a book, and then attempted to get some sleep, but without success. Often when she couldn’t sleep, she’d bring her books into her brother Max’s room and read in there while he slept. He didn’t stir when she walked in, nor while she sat in there. His room had been decorated very carefully, as if the soothing lavender walls, the nurturing pictures of animals sleeping under the moon and children curled in their beds would somehow cancel out the chaos within his troubled body.

  She had a passage to read about the Vietnam War for history class the next day, and she set into the task of getting through the dull series of paragraphs.

  Max lay on his side facing away from where Ryan sat reading on the floor by the night-light. Every now and then, she looked up from her book to watch him. He hummed like a motor, waking himself with little wheezes. She was flipping through pictures of men wearing camouflage outfits with their arms around each other in the Vietnamese jungle. Her high school was making efforts to have the students read “diverse” books about various wars, though this book seemed much more focused upon featuring the US soldiers than it was on portraying the lives of the Vietnamese people, which would have made it more diverse. She was taken with one photo of a soldier slumped against a tree who had a particularly boyish face and a thin, almost effeminate body. He stood a few feet away from the others.