When my parents told us we were moving to France toward the end of my freshman year of high school, I was thrilled. Sure, it meant I wouldn’t be able to play competitive basketball any more, but I’d have the farmhouse, the garden, Henri and Madeleine, maybe even a French boyfriend who rode a moped to school. I told everyone I wouldn’t be back for sophomore year and felt a swell of pride when I told them where we were going, France, the word so elegant and full of promise.
But we never made it to Brenthonne. At the last minute, my mother nixed the plan after her therapist convinced her it was madness, just another example of my father’s faulty decision-making. In the fall, I re-enrolled at Lake Travis High School, slightly embarrassed to be back. A couple of years later, my parents divorced, and I went to college. My memories of Brenthonne grew gauzy. When I did finally make it back, I went alone on spring vacation during my junior year abroad in Scotland. While the farm was just as beautiful – the roses obscenely large and fragrant, the birch trees by the creek shimmering silver – it had a haunted quality about it now, my family moved permanently from the present to the past tense. At dinner, Henri pressed me to explain why my parents had divorced. C’est fou! He admonished them from afar. At night, I lay alone in the upstairs bedroom I had previously shared with my sister, listening to a passing train sound its whistle. The magic, I realized, wasn’t just the place.
KEIJA PARSSINEN is the author of The Ruins of Us, which was longlisted for the Chautauqua Prize and won a Michener-Copernicus Award, and The Unraveling of Mercy Louis, which was named a 2015 Must-Read by Ploughshares, Bustle, Bookish, Pop Sugar, Style Bistro, and more. Her work has appeared in Lonely Planet’s Better Than Fiction, as well as in Five Chapters, the New Delta Review, Salon, Marie Claire and elsewhere. An Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tulsa, she lives in Oklahoma with her husband and son.
American Daughter
MARIE-HELENE BERTINO
We had been driving around America for a year because we were tired of 9 to 5, though we had no right to be tired. Four and three years out of college respectively, Dana quit a marketing job to do the trip, and I quit theatre. The whole thing was my idea. The reason I gave her was an ambiguous choking feeling I had in Philadelphia. I have always read too many stories whose main characters say fuck this, and leave. I was ready to say fuck this, though I had no right. But I did, and then Dana did, and then her grandfather said the eternal fuck this and left her a Buick Regal in his will. We would leave on September 13, 2001. We made a list of who we knew where and Dana bought bags and bags of dried fruit. Two days before our scheduled departure, a group of religious zealots flew two planes into the World Trade Center.
Dana called me in the middle of the night to ask if we should still go. Now more than ever, I said, it was now or never.
Kristi was Dana’s childhood friend whose family had moved to Tetonia, Idaho, when they were 12. All Kristi retained from Philadelphia was the return address on Dana’s regular letters. When Dana went to college, Kristi married a dry farmer named Kirt. Now she had a four-year-old daughter named Alyssa and a newborn named Wyatt.
Tetonia (population 247) was settled in the stubble of the Grand Tetons on the eastern border of Idaho. On the other side of the mountains, celebrities vacation in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. However, Tetonians aren’t star-watchers. Their finicky mountain passes stay closed for most of the year, so their valley remains untouched except for the trailers that move with the weather, and the occasional flourish of small native rodents called pikas, darting under the thrush. The valley had been sucked airless the day we drove up. Alyssa was the only human moving, streaming through her yard to meet our car. Kristi swayed on birth fat in the doorway. She and Dana exchanged a hug that Dana appeared to think would be longer. Kristi gave me a hard rap on the shoulder and introduced us to Alyssa.
Alyssa had a pudgy face and a mop of orange hair. She wore a shirt with a rainbow ribbon she could tie by herself. She was tying and untying it when she asked me if I liked my eyebrows. My eyebrows are bushy, and if I let them have their way, they’d connect. People used to mention them to my mother constantly when I was growing up. I love them, though, and I told her this.
We went inside and watched television. From the car, Dana brought in her photo album that detailed the first six months of our trip. We had worked as housekeepers in Montpelier, Vermont, for foliage season, then had spent five weeks driving out to the West Coast. In San Francisco, we found an apartment and jobs – me as a barista and Dana as a babysitter for a famous musician’s children. Dana is an only child, and good with kids. I’m the baby of the family. I’ve had to fight for food and attention, so what’s mine is mine.
Dana meticulously maintained the scrapbook and expected people to look through it and be wowed. Kristi seemed uninterested, and brought Wyatt to her chest apologetically. Dana held up the book, turning the pages as Kristi nursed.
Later, we heard the loud aluminum sneeze of the screen door as Kristi’s husband, Kirt, slammed in. ‘Too fuckin’ hot out there, Mom.’ He cracked a beer. ‘Lo, Dana.’ He took a long swallow and looked Dana up and down. Then he said hello to me.
He told us the other dry farmers called him ‘short pants’ because he rode the baler every day wearing them. Every day, the ground rebelled by throwing up jags of stones and dirt as he roared by. He propped his leg onto the counter and showed us his scars. Over the years, aided by the sun, these stones and dirt had caked themselves into a second skin. Kirt’s original skin color could be seen only on the palms of his hands and thighs.
After dinner, we gave Alyssa the kite we bought her in New Orleans. It was a purple butterfly that, supine amidst the ashtrays and magazine on the coffee table, seemed exotic. It looked up as if to say, where the hell am I? Alyssa wanted to fly it right away. Kristi consulted the small window above the couch.
‘No wind, Alyssa.’
Later, Kirt’s father arrived and we sat on the prairie scorching marshmallows over a fire. Alyssa called him Pappy and sat on his lap as he worked a marshmallow over the flames. The stars were as bright as people tell you about when you’re not listening. We pulled blankets around us.
‘Everybody in this valley at some point worked for my grandfather,’ Pappy said. ‘He and his brothers made moonshine. They’d hide it along the posts of the old road. Someone would come into the store wanting moonshine, and they’d tell ’em what post they could find it behind. That way, no one could track it to them.’ He hacked up a dusty giggle and shook his head.
‘Yep,’ Kirt said.
‘One day, a couple agents from the FBI came looking for my grandfather and found one of his brothers. He wouldn’t tell them where he was. They said they’d pay him a lot of money. “Give it to me now,” he said, “cause if I tell you where he is and you find him, you ain’t coming back.” ’ Pappy and Kirt hacked up more laughter.
Father and son were long and lean and buckled in the middle by a similar brass set of initials. In fact, Pappy and Kirt differed only in that Pappy wore oversized glasses. When he told stories, they reflected the entire prairie: its horizon, the rough bushes that outlined the yard, our bonfire. It was as if each of his eyes was burning from the middle.
I allowed myself to think sloppy thoughts about America. I thought I could do worse than live a life of moonshine and hay bales. I likened Pappy to Woody Guthrie and sang old songs in my head.
Later, Alyssa slept in his lap as he told stories about a hell ride he had through Niggertown in Chicago. They had to lock their doors. Those people are nothing but animals, he said, and handed his marshmallow tenderly to his granddaughter.
Alyssa’s life unspooled in front of me. I saw her outgrow the cuteness of being six to the ruddy toughness of the teen years. She’d be on a softball team, holding up a wooden bat to a camera’s flash. She wouldn’t leave the prairie but would slam out of the screen door over and over to whatever truck awaited, as all of her relatives’ opinions solidified into walls inside her thinkin
g, as much a part of her as the brick-red hair. I felt sorry for her in advance and wanted to take her with us when we left. Then just as quickly, I didn’t care about her or her future. I yearned to leave and forget these people, who had tricked me into thinking we were in it together. It would be up to her to think beyond the mountains.
The next day Kirt announced it was time for us to meet his dry farmer friends. They’d been chomping at the bit to take a look at ‘his city girls.’
‘I told ‘em you were fat,’ he said. ‘But they didn’t believe me. They want to see for themselves.’ He sipped from a can, legs propped over the side of the couch. It was noon and, he said, too hot to work.
The dry farmers arrived as the prairie darkened on our third night. Each man drove up in a blaze of gravel, already consuming a six pack. They leaned against their pick-ups, kicking at their tires until they were invited in by Kristi.
They sat on the counters, folding chairs, and the floor of the kitchen. One of them, a thick-fingered farmer named Meaty, listed every reason he thought we should live in Tetonia. The prairie was quiet, for one. No one would bother us, except maybe the environmentalists, who were trying to lower the hunting quota to one moose per person. But they were fighting that. He drank mud from a jug with a faded label. By midnight, Dana and I were the only ones sober. Alyssa’s door squeaked open and she stood in the doorway rubbing sleep out of her eyes. We had woken her up.
Smiling, she dragged her car seat between Meaty and a young farmer they called Face. She came up to their elbows and a couple times Meaty barely missed her head with his swinging jug.
‘What’s in there?’ she said.
‘Don’t know, little lady, but they told me it’s not what the label says.’
I went into the other room where Kristi sat in a recliner, nursing Wyatt. Her eyes were red from exhaustion. ‘Having fun?’ she said.
Kristi and Kirt’s house was a tetris of three connected trailers. We slept in a fourth that stood detached in the backyard where laundry sagged on ropes. There were no other houses on the prairie. When I walked to our trailer at dawn, the sun was an orange flap, clinging to the horizon. The prairie was dark except for a stubborn rainbow pinwheel, in conversation with the sun.
In the trailer, I used our shared cell phone to dial a number in Philadelphia, though I knew he wouldn’t pick up. The way I knew the waitress in Austin would launch the pot of coffee across the counter into the man sitting next to me, and that he would, flinging himself from his chair, upset my newspaper and corn muffin. The way I knew when we entered a bar in New Orleans, tired and broke and the whole city booked, we’d leave with a place to stay. The way I knew the man at the Grand Canyon would turn to his son and not his wife when he let out a low whistle and said, ‘Would you believe a river did all that?’ Somewhere I had acquired a kind of road psychic ability. I had theories as to why that I worked on as we traveled. It had to do with shearing the distractions of one’s life until all that remained was the act of following a line on a map.
In my message I said I was scared, that I felt pressed to hang out with a bunch of seedy farmers, that there was no lock on the trailer’s flimsy door. These things were true, though I thought these men were most likely harmless. I was still young enough to exaggerate fear to cop a cheap call back from a boy I liked.
It was early 2002, and some kind of scrim had been yanked away from the country, revealing how vulnerable we had been. Yet as the East Coast receded in our mirrors, so did the immediacy of the impact. For some, the devastation was a faraway idea, yielding nothing more disruptive than pinning a ribbon to a sweater or buying a patriotic bumper sticker. The footage played in the background indifferently – in the homes of acquaintances, in town squares, on banks of televisions hanging over empty bars. But most of us understood that there were probably other ways in which we were still vulnerable. We were polite, confused, and prepared to flinch.
I was a city girl who had never heard a coyote. At night, their calls filled that Idaho prairie. They sounded like women screaming.
Where we were before Idaho was Eugene, Oregon, where we stayed with a couple named Don and Julio. Julio spent the week working in San Francisco. Every Friday he took the same plane home, with the same pilot. Their house was built by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright with breezeways and a fireplace in the center of the open floor plan like an exposed heart. It was a house with important windows, on a hill beneath the flight path of Eugene’s only airport.
Every Friday at 6.35pm, a shadow crossed the house as Julio’s plane flew over. This was Don’s signal. He’d save his work, close his laptop, and start dinner.
Julio’s HIV had not yet progressed to full-blown AIDS, but it was already cruelly tagging his everyday activities. He paused during conversations to catch his breath.
The fact of that plane, its shadow bleating over the house, triggering the thrill of expectancy: Back when I had no home or romantic partner, it was the most beautiful way I’d ever heard to know your love was near. Now, years later, I have both, and I feel the same.
On our last morning in Idaho we awoke to find Alyssa standing over us, holding her butterfly kite. We had promised her we’d fly it before we left, but there was still no air.
Dana thought of a plan to trick Alyssa into thinking it was flying. Alyssa would hold the butterfly’s string, as Dana held it aloft by its belly. They counted to three and then took off, Alyssa first, hollering and making wild circles on the dead lawn. Alyssa’s job was to keep enough slack in the string while behind her, Dana yelled updates on how high the kite was. ‘It’s really going, Lys! It’s really high, now!’
When they took a break after a few rounds, Alyssa told Dana that she couldn’t actually see the kite flying. ‘Really?’ Dana said. ‘Well, it certainly is. Maybe you’ll see it this time.’
Again they lined up on the grass, Alyssa in front. In a clear voice, the little girl counted to three, then yelled go! They exploded across the yard. Alyssa tried several times to turn around while she ran, but couldn’t as long as she did her job holding the string.
‘Is it flying, Dana?’ she yelled. She was singing, hopeful. ‘Is it flying?’
MARIE-HELENE BERTINO is the author of the novel 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas and the collection Safe as Houses. She is at work on several projects, including essays about the year she spent working and traveling around America in the wake of 9/11. She teaches at New York University and in the low-residency MFA program at IAIA (Institute of American Indian Arts) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For more information, please visit: www.mariehelenebertino.com.
Rocky Point
LYDIA MILLET
My husband and I had a honeymoon handed to us. We didn’t like the wedding industry, and we didn’t like the honeymoon industry much either, so our general plan had been to put off a trip until the 105° summer heat descended on southern Arizona, where we live.
Our wedding was his second, and a fairly casual event – a ceremony and party outside our house in the desert, surrounded by towering saguaro cacti and blooming prickly pears. The planning had focused mostly on food and drink; we didn’t spend much time on traditional wedding details. I don’t enjoy shopping, for instance, and I almost never wear dresses, so a friend of the family who did like shopping and dresses just picked out one and mailed it to me. I accepted this favor gratefully and tried on the outfit only once, briefly, before the day of the ceremony. And the marriage vows didn’t get much attention either. Both K and I tend to have strong opinions about words, yet our vows were a standard template used by the officiating minister – one of no specific faith that K had found through a quick google. She’d handed the page to us in a crowded, faintly unpleasant coffee shop in a mall and told us to look over it quickly. And look quickly we did, anxious to get away from the latte-drinking hordes.
Friends told me after the ceremony that when I was asked to repeat the line “I will honor you with my body,” I looked quite surprised. I seemed to be hearing it for the fi
rst time, they said. Apparently I grimaced and pronounced the words as though they were in air quotes.
But at the reception a generous guest surprised us, gifting us two nights in her condo in a small tourist town named Puerto Peñasco on the Sea of Cortez (‘Rocky Point’ is what the Tucson frat boys call it when they drive down there to party). It was just four hours’ road trip from where we lived, so we thanked her and decided we’d nip down and back in K’s beater truck – feel the ocean breeze on our faces, hear the waves crash on the shore.
We got to the seaside in the afternoon, dumped our overnight bags in the apartment, and drove to the town’s beachside strip, where we promptly found an open-air patio and ordered a couple of margaritas. It was a hotel bar beside the hotel’s swimming pool; its floor was colorful tile and the tables were wrought iron. We sat at a two-top along a wall, peering over the stucco edge at the rocks far below, splattered white by seagulls and awash with sea foam and floating plastic litter. For a minute, with our margaritas on the table between us and the gulls drifting nearby in hopes of table scraps, we had that curious feeling of suspended time you get in the resting stops in travel – the confusion of leisure, the limbo of an empty day. What should we do with it?
We never had to make a choice. We’d taken only a sip of our drinks when there was a muffled boom and the place was rocked by an explosion. The floor seemed to shudder beneath our feet; a huge mirror shattered behind the bar. We heard screams and jumped up, staring at each other wide-eyed. This was early 2003, and the attacks of September 11 were still fresh in our minds. When it came to explosions, everyone’s nerves were raw. We abandoned our table and ran for the restaurant next door to the hotel, from which smoke was billowing. The restaurant building was on fire – people, injured, were already tottering dazedly in the streets like zombies, their faces shocked and immobile. On the second floor, we saw two elderly ladies trapped on a balcony.
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