My mom makes it to AA at least twice a week. I play dolls in the church while she smokes in the basement with a cast of others who look like us, like they have some crazy story to tell involving recklessly driven cars and the early hours of the morning. That's 90 percent of the fun of AA, my mom says, hearing other people's wild-ass tales. Sometimes I sit hidden from view on the steps to the meeting space, or press my ear against a heating grate to eavesdrop. There was the man who backed over his dog in the driveway. A guy who drank lighter fluid. A woman who woke up naked on a ferris wheel.
One night a priest finds me curled up, asleep on a pew. He kneels and quietly says, Psst. He seems younger than any adult I know and wears glasses that make him look sort of like Buddy Holly. He says his name is Father Roth and asks if I want to see his study. I say okay and follow him to a room at the back of the church. He asks if I go to church and I tell him my mother and I only go to church for AA. He has a wind-up frog in his desk that he lets me play with and his breath smells like orange liqueur. He tells me stories from the Bible and when AA is finished tells my mother how well-behaved and smart I am.
Over several months, I spend hours playing with my second-hand, artificial-fruit-smelling Strawberry Shortcake dolls on the floor of Father Roth's study as he prepares his sermons. My mother apologizes for my bothering him but he tells her it is a pleasure to have me around. Sometimes he flicks jelly beans from his desk and I race to find them behind the furniture and in his bookcases. He tells me about a friend of his named Dennis and all the things they do together. Waterskiing, hiking in the mountains. I ask if Dennis is a priest, too. No, Father Roth laughs, Dennis owns a store that sells kitchen cabinets and sinks. He tells me that Dennis is the kindest person he has ever met, that Dennis is full of compliments and jokes. I tell Father Roth I want to meet Dennis. Oh, you can never meet Dennis, not at church anyway. I am confused. Father Roth explains that Dennis is not a member of the Catholic faith. I am perplexed. Dennis has not felt a need for Jesus in his life, Father Roth explains, but Father Roth loves him nonetheless.
I say "I thought love was for boyfriends and girlfriends." Father Roth laughs again and says that to know Jesus is to know love for all people. In fact, Father Roth says, he loves me, Kat, too.
"Me?" I say.
"Yes, you," Father Roth laughs, and picks me up to give me a hug.
Sometimes I see Father Roth at the grocery store or downtown. He always greets my mother and me warmly and has something upbeat to say. It amazes me to see him in street clothes, knowing that he is actually an undercover man of God. When I ask my mom if she would ever consider marrying Father Roth, she explains that priests never get married. Later, I ask Father Roth if he ever wants to have a wife. He shrugs and explains that the life of the priesthood suits him, that he has Jesus and his congregation and friends and that is enough.
One night at AA I find Father Roth in his study with all the lights off, weeping. When I approach him he quickly turns on a lamp and dabs his eyes with a tissue. I ask what's wrong.
Father Roth says, "Well last night I was watching Miami Vice and usually Dennis and I like to watch Miami Vice together, but this time Dennis said he wanted to stay home. So I didn't think anything of it, and watched Miami Vice by myself. A little while later Dennis called and said he had taken a bunch of sleeping pills and that he didn't want to live anymore. So I called 911 and rushed over to his condo and got there about the same time as the paramedics. Oh, Katie, you don't need to be hearing this."
"It's okay, I say, you can tell me."
"All right," Father Roth says, then cries some more. "So I spent last night at the hospital after they pumped his stomach and I haven't slept since. I've been praying for Dennis all day. I haven't eaten, I'm just a wreck. Oh it's awful, so awful."
"It's not your fault," I say, putting my arms around Father Roth's neck. He weeps for a full minute then holds me out at arms length.
"Oh Katie, will you do something for me? Will you do Father Roth a special favor?"
"Okay," I say.
"Okay, I am going to kneel here and confess that I am a sinner. And when I say it, could you hug me and say, I love you Father Roth? Can you do that for me? Please?"
Father Roth falls to his knees and raises his arms and his red, teary face. "Dear Lord I am a sinner!" he blubbers. Responding to my cue, I embrace him and said, "I love you, Father Roth," then step back.
"I am a sinner!"
"I love you, Father Roth."
"A sinner!"
"I love you, Father Roth!"
After the fifth time I wonder when he is going to stop. After about ten more times I start to panic. His lamentations grow more intense and harder to understand through his crying.
"I Ali a sssnnn!"
"I! Love! You! Father! Roth!"
My mother appears in the doorway and Father Roth mutters, "oh dear," and quickly rises to his feet.
"What the fuck is going on here?" my mother says.
"Please, ma'am, this is a church," Father Roth says.
"I don't care what the fuck this is. I put fifteen stitches in her father's head when he tried this kind of shit on her."
I say, "His friend wouldn't watch Miami Vice with him. He took a bunch of pills and had his stomach pumped."
In the car, my mother grabs my arms and squeezes them tightly. "Did he touch you? Did he touch your privates? Oh Katty, did he do anything naughty to you? Expose his weiner to you?"
"No," I say, "he just wanted a hug."
"You would tell me if he touched you, right? You would tell me without me having to ask. Because you know I would never never never be mad at you if you told. I would never be mad."
"I know," I say. And I do. She opens the glove compartment and rummages through road maps and cassette tapes to produce the cap to the perfume bottle she broke over my dad's head. "See this?" she says, putting it in my hand and squeezing my fingers around it into a fist. "This is to remind you what happens to wicked men who mess with little girls."
School. Long waxed-floor hallways with constructionpaper art tacked to cork boards. A cracked porcelain drinking fountain with a rust stain that reminds me of dirty underpants. A sack lunch growing room temperature and yeasty smelling in a closet.
I am small for my age, which provides me the advantage of speed during recess and PE. Speed is especially important during fire drills in sixth grade. My homeroom teacher that year is a binding enthusiast named Mrs. Holmstead. She has worked here long enough to teach some of her former students' children. She walks with a cane inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphics, wears thick woolen suit coats and bell bottoms, drinks mint tea from an ancient mug the same putrid color as her teeth, and militantly enforces the rules of diagramming sentences. Another school building of our district burned down in 1956, a tragedy in which three children died. Mrs. Holmstead was there at the time, and takes fire drills very seriously. No one challenges her on her method. While other teachers ask that their classes exit the building in an orderly fashion and form single-file lines in the soccer field, Mrs. Holmstead, upon hearing the bell, waves her cane and yells, "Run! Run by golly! Run for your precious young lives!"
Soccer fields are provided so that children can ostensibly partake in games. The games I partake in on the field consist of pretending I am a horse, letting my friend Margot Henry lead me around by a jump rope and command me to sit or eat grass.
Margot at age eleven is an incipient version of the Vespariding lesbian she later becomes. She will be the aunt who collects snow globes and Elvis paraphernalia, wears leopardprint stretch pants and cat glasses. Her tribe will drive Volvos, maintain extensive jazz vinyl collections, eat organic, maintain a pot stash, and have a kind of magical free pass to use profanity in front of children. But in the sixth grade, she purposely wears sweatshirts inside out, has the most elaborate sticker book of anyone I know, and is friends with the boys who would rather play with the girls than with the sporty boys. We trade friendship pins and stick them to t
he laces of our shoes. We choreograph bedroom musicals to Hall and Oates songs.
"I want to show you something in my brother's bedroom," Margot says one afternoon after school. Her brother is named Neil and he floats stoned through the impossibly mature realm of high school. He isn't home when we get to Margot's house and neither are her parents. Entering Neil's room is like stepping into the temple of a foreign and terrifying religion. KISS posters decorate most of the walls, and covering the inside of the door is a poster of a gigantic hand with an upraised middle finger. As we roll on the floor laughing at the poster, we hear Neil's station wagon pull up outside. Margot grabs my hand and pulls me into Neil's closet where we crouch in a pile of smoke-smelling clothing and empty beer bottles. We hear the front door, laughter, then Neil talking to somebody. Through a crack in the closet door we see Neil and his girlfriend, a stringy-haired girl named Tia who wears the coolest embroidered jeans I have ever seen.
"We don't have much time," Neil says. "They'll be home in half an hour."
"What about your sister?"
"She's probably off playing dolls somewhere. Fuck, my cock's already so hard."
We watch the teenagers quickly undress like it's no big deal, this otherworldly comfort they share with each other's hairy bodies. So that's what a boner looks like. Tia climbs on the bed and Neil moves toward her head. Something slippery sounding is happening that we can't quite see. After a few minutes of this, Neil fiddles with something he retrieves from under his mattress, then climbs between Tia's legs. There are four or five minutes of humorous butt movement. Then Neil releases a loud grunt and Tia frowns, pulls him closer, ruffles his hair. The gesture sticks in my head for years, lodged in memory as something that perhaps I will one day understand. Finding myself beneath men years later I remember the gesture and recognize it as belonging to the carnal repertoire of the disappointed, the resigned pantomime of an uneventful fuck. Neil kisses his girlfriend and says, "So how many times did you come?"
The socially collaborative mating rituals of junior high school. The careful deployment of friends to spread word of your crushes. Angry reprisals on behalf of a friend wronged. I purposely tell Margot to keep my crush on Peter Berring a secret and she faithfully alerts Peter's best friend Ben. A rendezvous is arranged behind the playground rope wall after sixth period. Peter shows up slouchy, sleepy after a day of hitting his inhaler too much, wearing a Ratt T-shirt. A small contingent of fourth graders sit eagerly on the log benches, anxious to see if we'll really go through with it. We try to shoo them away but they won't budge. We only have about ten minutes before the buses leave, it's either kiss in public or not at all. Peter and I press the squishy, wet parts of our faces together. One of the kids exclaims, scandalized at the sight of tongues.
Over the phone, Margot and I collaborate on our concept of boys, as if we are responsible for inventing them. What they would do to us, what we would do to them, what we would do together. Margot reads aloud to me from her parents' The Joy of Sex and when I'm at her house we study the illustrations of the hirsute couple as if we're deciphering a strange set of technical instructions on how to put together an end table, how to construct a bird house.
Cedar Rivers is a boy in my class who we call the Mad Scientist. The nickname grows from his reputation for acing science tests, but it also fits his tendency to apparently cut his mind free from whatever curricula is being hashed out on the blackboard and drift through the window into constructs Margot and I have little patience to care about. If he were decorated with acne or doughy or slack-jawed, he would join the small group of nerds who recite Dr. Who dialogue to each other in the back of classguys destined to become fuckable and fabulously wealthy in software decades later. Margot and I watch Cedar play left wing in soccer and occasionally he seems to forget there's a game going on, so we yell at him to wake up. I ask Cedar for help on my science report, flick wadded pieces of paper at him in algebra class, even walk up to him on one of Margot's dares and tell him I'm ovulating. None of this appears to impress him.
One morning Cedar brings a sample of his own semen to examine under a microscope in science class. Most of the other kids bring muddy water, rotten leaves, or dead insects. After the initial excitement of looking at undulating blobs wears off, word spreads that there is something especially interesting happening at Cedar's work station. I peer into the microscope, squinting, focusing, and see hundreds of backlit, dead spermatozoa. I cannot summon the imagination required to connect a Joy of Sex act to the production of these cells. When I look up from the instrument Cedar wears an expression of dreadful expectation.
"Sick," I say.
As soon as our teacher Mrs. Wheeler discovers what Cedar has brought to class, she banishes him to the principal's office. I concur with the other girls in the restroom that Cedar has revolted us with his perverted, grody-to-the-max transgression. But when nobody is looking, I return to the science room to take the slide from the microscope and slip it into my pencil case.
My mother brings home Ed, the truck driver who tells me that three billion Chinese can't be wrong about acupunc- tune. She brings home Russell, who breeds dogs. Barry, a keyboard player in a cover band. Sam, who's missing a finger. Three guys named Matt in a row. These auditions seem to come to an end with George, who is tall and old and has the word manager in his job title. He tells me he has a daughter of his own, nine years older than me, who lives in California. He shows me pictures he has in his wallet, of them sledding together, bundled on an overcast morning at a ski resort, arms thrown out in defiance of aerodynamics. There's a picture of Anne, that's her nameas in of Green Gables, as in Frank-playing flute in a marching band. Anne's first communion. Anne's studio portrait from Olan Mills, in which she's wearing the most hellish fuchsia velour I have ever seen. George drinks and compliments my mother's coffee as we sit at the dining-nook table. He shows me a picture of Anne dressed as a ballerina and tells me it was from Halloween. I watch the veins in George's hands roll around like night crawlers underneath his skin as he reaches for a carton of milk. Later, my mother makes him asparagus quiche but I do not hear the corresponding smack of the headboard. Strangely, this delights my mother.
George pulls into the driveway in a rented RV and announces he's taking us on a trip across the mountains. I hide in my bedroom until my mother extracts me with a combination of threats and promises. I brace myself for a return to the brown part of the state.
The RV smells of mildew and Pine-Sol and bears signs of the retired couple who own it. George calls them the Coopers, and in the framed photo on the wall of the bathroom they have caught a large bass and are holding it proudly between them. Mostly I sit at the back table by the window, eating Whoppers from a paper cup, watching droplets of rain bloat as they slide past the plastic fish-eye lens adhered to the window to enhance the range of the rear-view mirror up front. George and my mother sing Burt Bacharach songs in the cab of the vehicle, my mother's practiced soprano curled protectively around George's tone-deaf growl. First I let the chocolate layer of the Whopper dissolve in my mouth, then enjoy the structural breakdown of the malt ball, a disintegrating, petrified foam. My period makes an appearance in my panties. One gas station and a wrecked pair of jeans later, we're back on the road, George making pronouncements from the driver's seat that I have nothing to be embarrassed about, that God made women a certain way, like with really deluxe plumbing, and even if it seems gross it's all according to His plan. My mother slips me two of her Tylenols with codeine she bought in bulk in Canada.
We pull off the road somewhere on the eastern side of the pass, the RV tilting a bit to the passenger side as we come to a halt. I let a lone Whopper roll off the Formica table onto the floor. George curses under his breath. A semi roars past, its wake of air rocking our vehicle. A deck of cards on the side table slides against the wall. Bottles jostle one another in the pantry. My mother holds onto the wall as she climbs from the cab and makes her way back toward me.
"Something's wrong with the engi
ne," she says.
George gets out. With a great creaking the trailer lurches starboard. This time bottles and boxes of cereal fly out of the pantry. The bathroom door opens and smacks my mother in the forehead. All remaining Whoppers quickly migrate off the table. I can't hear what George is saying over our screaming, but I know it's something about getting out. I climb over containers of food, paperbacks, cassette tapes, and bottles of soda, following my mom to the cab. We're almost sideways. The door to the residence portion of the RV is facing down. Fir boughs obscure the right-side window. Mom's legs disappear out through the open driver's-side window. As I crawl to the front, the RV slowly tilts even more. George's sweaty face pokes in, yells at me to hurry up. I make it to the cab. He circles my wrists with his hands and, in what seems like a single motion, yanks me out. It takes me a minute to understand what has happened to the vehicle. George has pulled over onto a soft gravel shoulder on an embankment, which is quickly starting to erode under the vehicle's weight. The RV leans against two young fir trees, the only things preventing it from tumbling into a ravine. As the three of us stand perplexed and shaken, a truck pulls up. A Burt Reynoldslooking logger joins us to assess the situation.
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