by Gin Phillips
“I told you that I wanted to ask you a question,” Silas said, head back, either resting his eyes or looking at stars.
She straightened in her chair. “Sure.”
“I’ve seen your map of the site. That room where you found the bowls was way off from the center. It looks like the room itself wouldn’t even have been visible from the surface. What made you dig there?”
She looked at the sky herself, away from his face. A falling star streaked down.
“I was lucky.”
The bed was not comfortable. She could feel a broken spring gouging her back whenever she rolled over. The pillow was thin foam, and she had to fold it in half to make it acceptable. She tried moving the pillow altogether, lying flat on nothing but mattress. She dropped the pillow over her face, huffing into its bleached cotton. She thought about the dead, about the Mimbreños’ burials with a single black-and-white bowl over the faces. Everyone equal in death. Such fair-minded grave diggers—not like those in Chaco, where the rich were showered with trinkets and the common laborers earned nothing but stooped spines and brittle bones. She wondered if her artist had been loved and celebrated when she was put into the dirt. She wondered who had laid her in the ground and if she was out there in this canyon somewhere, the dust of dead flowers mixed with her bones.
She slept in bursts and dreamed in disjointed fragments that she wouldn’t remember in the morning. Once she woke to the moonlight streaming in the window and the sound of wings hitting the screens. Probably a moth. She blinked and rolled onto her back. She could hear the night sounds clearly—wind through the trees and against the tin roof, chirping tree frogs, a single owl.
She heard humming and, still not quite awake, tried to place the song. The humming was slightly off-key, as usual, and she wished he would sing the words. One phrase floated past, and she snagged it: With her hands on her hips and that smile on her lips.
Springsteen. But the name of the song wasn’t coming to her. She frowned, not opening her eyes. He only did this to her to wake her up in the middle of the night.
A rattle and clank outside. Probably raccoons in the recycling. Wait, she nearly had it. She hummed under her breath, tapping a rhythm on the sheets with one finger. And her eyes that shine like a midnight sun . . .
“She’s the one,” she sang aloud, softly, opening her eyes.
She could see a silhouette at the foot of her bed. Hands clasped behind his head, face tilted toward the ceiling, knee bobbing up and down furiously to his humming. His arms were thin and boyish, more elbows than biceps.
The bed was perfectly still.
From where she sat, feet tucked under the sofa cushions, Ren watched her mother struggle with the pie in the fireplace. Ren’s brother—sprawled across the green recliner—tried to balance a battery on his knee. The battery wobbled, and her brother slammed his hand down, trapping it.
Ren’s stomach itched, and she reached under the leg of her leotard. It was hot pink and she loved it. With a few good swipes she could feel the scabs peel away from her belly—quick and satisfying.
“Stop scratching,” Ren’s mother said. She faced the fire, but she could hear the scratching. “You’ll make them scar.”
Her mother, Anna, kept her hair pulled back, safe from sparks. This was a new thing: The front of her Levi’s stayed hot to the touch, and her face was always slick because it was too hot, really, for a fire in early fall, but she still needed to practice.
Frontier women used to bake pies in the embers. Those women fluffed eggs in iron skillets and browned biscuits and crisped fatty bacon in the fireplace, and Ren’s mother needed to be one of those women by the end of the week. She knew all the history—the people at Litchfield Farm had given her thick books and thin pamphlets—and she’d ordered her muslin dress and leather lace-up boots, but she still had to master the cooking before she could start playing her part as an innkeeper. It amazed Ren that someone would pay her mother money to pretend.
“I’m hot, Mommy,” Ren said.
Her mother wiped the sweat from her own forehead before running her hand along her jeans and then resting the back of her hand on Ren’s forehead. “You really should go upstairs where you can feel the air-conditioning,” she said. “You probably still have some fever.”
“I don’t want to be by myself.”
Anna studied her daughter’s face. “Leave that one on your forehead alone. It’s bleeding you’ve scratched it so much. I’m going to tape mittens around your hands.”
Ren sat on her hands. She had tiny flakes of skin and scab under her fingernails.
The embers on top of the pie pan were orange and bright, and Ren wanted to string them on a necklace. She watched the fire and her mother’s sweat-shiny face. She was waiting for the pie to come out, to see if this one would be liquid as milk or gloppy like pudding or maybe perfect and solid. She liked the pie required by this new job of her mother’s. She liked the fire and the wide dress.
Her brother, Scott, did not watch the fire or their mother. He had fit the new battery into place. He watched the blink-blink of red, green, yellow, blue on his new game. The game would flash a color, and Scott would have to press that same color. Then two flashes of color to remember, then three. Then it got harder. Blue. Blue green. Blue green yellow. Blue green yellow yellow. Blue green yellow yellow red green blue. Scott’s memory was not good, and the toy squawked at him every few seconds when he remembered wrong. He let Ren play only when their parents made him, because he was nine and she was four and he could pin her arms behind her back with one hand. So she watched the colors and memorized them, pushing imaginary buttons on the sofa cushion. Red blue yellow green green yellow red.
The room was too warm, but she sort of liked it. Not too close to the fire, Ren. Don’t scratch, Ren. Don’t spill your juice, Ren. Don’t run around, Ren. She did not move. She watched. Mommy bending and head tilted and looking back at her and smiling. Scott, his back to her, muttering under his breath because the toy was smarter than him. This was her first clear memory.
She liked songs that told a story. Scott would teach her good new ones sometimes.
“Repeat after me,” Scott said. “Young teacher/the subject/of schoolgirl fantasy.”
He sang it almost in tune with his average-but-pleasant voice, and Ren mimicked him. Her voice was pretty and much better than his—he told her that sometimes. He specifically called it “pretty.”
“Young teacher/the subject/of schoolgirl fantasy,” she sang. She included the strange pauses.
Their mother’s voice rang from the kitchen: “Don’t teach her that one.”
“It’s got literature in it,” Scott called back.
“Shut up, Scott,” said their mother.
It was two days before Ren’s eighth birthday, and she had been promised a Wonder Woman birthday party, complete with a costume. Her mother loved parties. She liked to do research. She had spent time with comic books and had even gone to the library, and she now knew that Wonder Woman’s mother was named Hippolyta. She was going to wear a white toga and a gold laurel crown to Ren’s party. And a name tag that said, “Hi: My name is Hippolyta.”
Ren was already wearing her Wonder Woman costume, which her grandmother had sewn. (She was disappointed because her costume was not a leotard like the real Wonder Woman’s—it had a blue skirt down to her knees.) Ren was pulling at the elastic waistband as she swept up raisins from the kitchen floor. The raisins were there because Sunday was pancake day, when her father tossed interesting things into a massive bowl of batter. Sometimes blueberries and chocolate chips and bananas and marshmallows, but today it had been raisins. Ren and Scott had ladled the batter onto the griddle, and it had dripped everywhere and then they both complained about having to clean up.
Neither actually minded cleaning, but each was convinced that the other one was managing to clean less. They
demanded equity.
Scott threw a raisin at her, and she deflected it with her magic bracelets.
“You don’t have on magic bracelets,” said Scott.
“They’re invisible,” she said.
“No, her plane is invisible,” he said. “You don’t even know that?”
“Keep sweeping, Ren,” said her mother. “Scott, you’re supposed to be wiping the counters. I am confident that Ren is wearing magic bracelets.”
“They can be invisible if I want them to be,” Ren said. “And also I can fly without the invisible jet.” She had never thought it was fair that Wonder Woman couldn’t fly. There were no rules to this. She would be whatever Wonder Woman she wanted. She would swoop down on Scott as he threw the football in the backyard, and she would lift him up by his T-shirt and drag him over the treetops, where his feet would scrape the branches. He might cry. She would let him fly, too, if he cried. They could do the backstroke through the air and maybe have a pet bird they would put on a leash like a dog. They would need to avoid telephone wires.
She looked down at her wrists, and this time she could see the magic bracelets shimmering like glass.
She sat in her own room, her back to the door, listening to murmurs of conversation from downstairs. Her cheeks felt dirty and sticky from tears, and her lips were salty and her eyes were swollen, but she wasn’t ready to go wash her face yet. They would feel so guilty if they opened her door and saw how hard she had been crying. She considered that scenario, then stood and walked over to her bed. She lay on her belly and pointed herself toward the door, face in her hands. It was a better pose.
She had called Scott a jerk, and her mother told her to apologize. But she didn’t apologize: She said she hated him—he’d been saying her feet were too big for her body and she would grow up to be seven feet tall, and his delivery was so good that she believed him—and her mother told her to apologize for saying that, and then Ren had said, “You always pick his side. You’re a bad mother.”
She had not meant for those words to come out, and she didn’t even mean them. But her mother’s hand came down with a smack on the countertop, and she said, “You will go to your room. Right. This. Minute. I don’t want to look at you right now, Aurenthia Leigh Taylor. And you will not come down until you apologize to me and to Scott.”
And Ren had raced up the stairs, happy to escape. Now she felt a niggle of guilt and shoved it down. She and Scott always had to apologize if they called each other a jerk. Or an idiot or a moron or a butt. But now she had decided to wait out her mother. She would stay in her room until her mother or father came to check on her. Then they would see her puffy face and feel terrible. She could see it all like a movie in her head. She would pack her red overnight bag and put on her coat, and she would head out the front door and down the street. Mommy and Dad and Scott would stand at the door, begging her to come back. But she would leave and head to downtown Indianapolis. She would stand on a street corner and play the drums, and people would give her money so she could buy an apartment and groceries. She would learn to play the drums. Or she would live in the branches of a tree where she would build a nest like a bird. She would eat fruit and nuts and the free mints they gave you at restaurants.
She was hungry. She could hear everyone talking at the kitchen table—she heard Scott’s snorting laugh—and she hated them all.
Aurenthia Leigh Taylor. She hated her stupid, hard-to-say name. They all called her Ren, which sounded like “hen” or “pen” and made her think of barnyards. Scott called her Ren-tin-tin and barked at her. Her mother insisted she should be proud of her name, because she was named after her great-grandmother. Ren wished her great-grandmother had been named Danielle. She hated her great-grandmother. She hated them all. She hated herself for hating them. She watched the splatter-paint patterns her tears made on the pillowcase.
She heard Scott’s footsteps outside her door. Before he even knocked, she slid under her bed, buried her face in the carpet smell. He opened the door, and she could see his Tretorns.
“Marco,” he called to her, even though he surely knew where she was. “Marco.”
She kept silent.
“Marco Marco Marco Marco Marco Marco Marco Marco,” he said, like a ball bouncing against the gym floor. Super-annoying.
She gave in. “Polo.”
His head appeared under the bedspread. “Come downstairs with me.”
“No.”
He held out his hand, palm out. He smiled, and she could hear nothing but sweetness in his tone when he said it again: “Come downstairs with me. There’s cookies.”
She held out her hand and followed him.
two
* * *
[We] argue for the reconceptualization of frontiers as socially charged places where innovative cultural constructs are created. . . . Some archaeologists are beginning to consider frontiers as interaction zones where encounters take place between people from diverse homelands.
—From “Frontiers and Boundaries in Archaeological Perspective” by Kent G. Lightfoot and Antoinette Martinez, Annual Review of Anthropology, October 1995
* * *
In the still-dark morning, Ren woke to the creak of Silas’s bedsprings and his feet hitting the floor. She heard him pad into the bathroom, then the sound of running water. When she stepped into the kitchen a few minutes later, still smoothing her ponytail, he was there. He offered her a coffee mug before she said a word. He apparently made a habit of handling breakfast—he heated up the electric griddle, and Ed and Paul called out their requests for fried eggs as they walked in through the screen door. Ren forced herself to eat one egg scrambled on toast, knowing she’d need the fuel for the rest of the morning. She was aware of the others chatting, scooting chairs back for coffee refills, checking backpacks. Her mind and her stomach were too unsettled to enjoy the food or conversation.
Ed and Paul were taking forever to finish their last bites of runny yolks. The sun was over the horizon, the pink streaks in the sky already fading.
“Go on and take Ren up, Silas,” Ed said suddenly. Or maybe not suddenly—she hadn’t been paying attention. “She’s been twitching to get up there.”
Silas was drying his hands as he turned to her. “Suits me. You ready?”
She was. They walked down the main road, passed a flattened scorpion, rubbed Zorro on the head when he came running, then rock-hopped over the creek Ren had driven through the day before. After one more creek crossing, they reached a wide-open stretch of dead grass to their left, which gave way to a steep, rocky incline. A thin path zigzagged up the hill, past stones and cactus and occasional bushy juniper.
“Elk trail,” Silas said, starting toward it. “Watch the poop.”
They walked steadily, Silas setting a quick pace that Ren matched. The air was still cool, but the sun was bright and her thighs felt a pleasant pull with each step. It had been a year since she had last done real fieldwork. She’d spent a month near Farmington the previous summer, and since then she’d spent only a day here and there at various sites, checking and authenticating ceramic finds. She’d missed the physicality of a dig. She’d missed the intense awareness that came from being outdoors, the consciousness of your own body and its specific place in the broader surroundings. A lack of attention in the office meant a missed deadline or a late meeting. But here there were cactus spikes and sidewinders, dehydration and spiders and gorges and uneven ground ripe for turned ankles and lost footing. There were scorpions and coyotes and bobcats and the boarlike javelinas. When she first met Ed, he spent an entire lunch insisting there was such a creature as a vinegaroon, a type of what he called whip scorpion that sprayed acetic acid. She didn’t believe him for days: That was before she learned that his encyclopedic insect knowledge rivaled his talent for straight-faced fibs. Now she’d seen vinegaroons—not actually toxic—along with black widows and
giant centipedes and one bark scorpion. It made you feel more real, the nearness of disaster. There was an intimacy created with the ground around you, with the sounds in the air, with your own skin and muscles and hands and feet. It made you see things more clearly. And, really, if you kept your eyes open, if you saw the right things—the snake sunning on the rock, the slick spot of gravel in the middle of the path—you were safe. But you had to know how to let it all seep into you until you could feel a nearby snake in your fingertips, without even looking.
Silas paused, looked back over his shoulder as he stopped. She shuffle-stepped to keep from running into him. Her hand landed on his shoulder blade.
“You’re fast,” he said. They resumed the pace. “Paul and Ed are always bitching at me about racing to the top.”
“I like to get where I’m going,” Ren said.
They hit a plateau, then the path curved around the edge of an overhang. Rocks shifted under Silas’s foot as he stepped, and a sprinkle of stones fell into an arroyo below.
“When I see a hill, I want to run up it,” he said.
She waited for the rest.
“There was this hill way behind our house when I was growing up, back behind my dad’s tool shed,” he explained. “It seemed huge at the time—Mount Everest. This was when I was really small, before I’d started school. My dad could jog up to the top without even breathing heavy. Every chance I got I’d slip away from Mom and head to that hill so I could stare up at it, kind of study it, and then take off as fast as I could to the top. It was more dirt than grass, and sometimes I’d slip and slide all the way back to the bottom. Even when I made it, I’d get my hands and knees bloody. But I was fascinated by the thing.”