And I can’t believe that two weeks from now I’ll be in Oregon with my bro and adopted sis.
Pausing the scratch of my pen on the paper, I hear the silence again. But it’s not scary—only the shushing of wind in the firs and fluttering of aspen leaves, until I hear, blending in at first, then rising into a hateful wail at the sound barrier: a squadron of fighter jets on a midnight cruise.
For all we know, oblivious up here, another war could have already begun. A surprise attack on Iraq, or against us—how would we know?
September 15
Morning in the mountains. I stumble out of bed and throw the door open to the sun, then flop back onto my cot. Mom is practicing, playing her cello, just warming up from the sound of it. She knows I won’t be wanting to rush back home, so she’s getting her work done here.
I feel okay today. Last night’s emptiness and fear are like bad dreams vanished in the brightness of the morning, and they’re not as powerful as the good dreams I wrote. I think I’ll lie here and enjoy the present for a while, the mellow sounds of Mom’s music weaving itself into the warm, fragrant air of the morning, then I’ll wash up, get some breakfast, and settle into a little writing, weaving my own music into the day.
When Ally and I were working on the tipi, she wanted some tunes for our painting and suggested we drag a couple of extension cords out here and crank some CDs on the boom box. Beautiful, I thought, pollute the mountains with tech-noise. But what could I say? Already Ally’s opinion mattered to me enough that I was apprehensive about sharing all my weird ideas about digital music.
So I tried to keep it fairly normal—explaining that I didn’t think CDs were really worth listening to. I preferred the warmth of vinyl, and besides, who needed music with the sounds of nature all around us?
She wanted to compromise, alternate between a CD and an hour of silence.
“We’ll start with silence,” she said. “Then you pick—anything you want.”
“I want nothing.”
“Why not?” she said.
“I just can’t stand it,” I said. “It’s not even music—it’s digitally sampled sound.”
“It sounds like music to me.”
“That’s because,” I said, “you’ve been brainwashed into thinking so.”
So much for sounding normal. I hate getting all emotional and going off, but that’s what I did: “You listen to it long enough and you can’t tell the difference, and all the time it’s filling your head with machinery.”
I continued to spout off, saying that this place is as free of pollution as any place I knew. It was bad enough that we had to pollute it by bringing cars up here, by bringing ourselves even, and I couldn’t stand to have it polluted by digital music.
The amazing thing was that she didn’t look at me like I was insane, didn’t patronize me or get sarcastic, didn’t say something like, “Tell me how you really feel.” And it wasn’t that she was afraid to call me on it, because she had called me on other things like being a perfectionist about my first tipi-mural. I don’t know why, she just laid off.
It seemed as if she forgot about it, but I didn’t, and it bugged me all day. I kept wondering how I could explain what I felt so it would make sense to her, but I never came up with anything. The next day, while she was getting the paints together, I found the extension cords and brought them out.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“I was just being stupid yesterday. Or crazy. Or both. I shouldn’t hold you to my weird ideas when you’re doing all this work for me.”
“First of all, I’m doing this ‘work’ because it’s a cool project—for me, not just you.”
“But still,” I said. “Alternating is fair—”
“The other thing is that yesterday, once I gave up wanting to hear music, I began to hear a lot of other things. All the little things that make up the silence: bugs, wind, brushes on canvas, your breath, my breath, my thoughts, your thoughts.”
“Get out.”
“Well, not your thoughts, but maybe I was more in tune to you without the distraction of music.”
“Really?”
“Ever get the feeling that everything people do is just to distract themselves from something else? School, work, entertainment?”
“Yeah—but I never thought of it that way. I just hate everyone and everything they do.”
“No you don’t.”
“Pretty much. I mean, if people just didn’t do all the things they do—even things that are supposed to be good—maybe everybody would be better off.”
She was mixing blue, yellow, and white in a gallon jug with the top cut out.
“Even art?”
“Nobody does art—except for kids until they find out they’re no good.”
“Bitter, are we?” She laughed.
“Well, almost nobody.”
“At least everyone consumes art. I have a professor who has these maxims on what is not art: If you can consume it, it’s not art. If it goes with your couch, it’s not art.”
“So what is art?”
“There is no art.” She thrust the jug and a brush at me. “Shut up and paint.”
Could any friend be cooler? We painted the whole tipi with no artificial music. Late that day, though, we decided that singing would be okay. Trouble was, we didn’t know any of the same stuff. Freakish Cassie had only been listening to her stack of record albums for the last three years, so we started out just singing to each other. I sang her my favorite Burl Ives from an old kiddy tape I still have:
Oh, beat the drum slowly,
And play the fife lowly,
Sing the death march as they bear me away,
Put bunches of roses all over my coffin,
Roses to deaden the clods as they fall.
Kind of morbid, maybe, but pretty.
Mostly we sang old camp songs that we both knew. “Boombiada,” “Sarasponda,” “Wayfaring Stranger”—we did them all. Some of the spirituals were really good for singing—surprising to you, Di, since I’ve been raging against the religion machine, but some of those are good songs.
The only time we listened to canned music was in the car, on a couple of runs we made to the store. It was hard for me to get beyond the skin-crawly feeling of the CDs, but I guess the music was pretty cool behind it.
“This doesn’t sound good to you?” she said.
“I don’t know, not really. The music might be okay—I just have a hard time hearing it.”
“I’ll turn it up.”
The CD was some live Nirvana, but not as head-bangy as what I’d heard blasting out of Sean’s room. Before we got back, Ally skipped ahead to a very cool song that she said was her favorite. My record stack has some good blues, and I like the acoustic stuff: John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins. This sounded like that, a little, and it reminded me of the pine woods between home and school—which everyone calls “the pines”— because that’s what it said in the song:
In the pines, the pines,
where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through.
It was very bluesy and deep and at the end Kurdt just screams:
Pines!
Pines!
Sun!
Shine
I’d Shiverrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
The whole.
Night
Throooough!
Sounds awful to describe it, but it was amazing. I forgot I was listening to a CD.
Back on the job—we were up to the blue now, both on ladders, covering the canvas with sky—we talked music a little more.
“If digital music is just samples of real sound,” Ally said, “why is analog any better? Isn’t it all just pseudo-music?”
“Yes and no,” I said, and explained the difference between sampled bits and full frequency recording, trying to sound scientific as opposed to wacky.
She painted silently for a minute. She had speckles of sky all over her face, arms, and chest from when I’d got too much paint on the roller.
“But basically, you just draw the line between analog and digital—if you were a true purist, you wouldn’t listen to any recorded music.”
“Well … ”
“Well, what? It’s all fake—it doesn’t really exist. Your brother, the philosopher, told me about this guy in one of his books who loves listening to a certain record. This was like a hundred years ago when recording was new, and—it’s some existential thing—he loves it because it doesn’t exist.”
She came down and we moved the ladder.
“But the sound waves do exist,” I said. “The group played, a machine picked up the vibrations and cut grooves into a piece of acetate, then copies were made from that, and the needle of the record player touches the grooves, which makes a sound that is amplified and played on the speakers. So the song does exist.”
“But the sounds from my CDs exist too.”
“I guess.”
“Don’t guess—they do. I hear them, and if I trust my senses at all, I have to believe that the music exists, if anything does, if it’s not all illusion. Take this blue paint—what is blue? Blue exists only in the mind—the pigment scatters light and we see blue—there is light that looks blue, but there is no blue. You can look for blue, but you can’t find blue. All you can find is stuff that looks blue. And isn’t music and art just the next level of illusion—sound waves or photons ordered and arranged just to fuck with your senses and send your mind on a trip?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
Ally was good at getting me to talk about things like my weird ideas on music. She thought that the machinery thing sounded “a little paranoid” but admitted that the brain could be trained to see and hear some things and ignore others.
Another thing she got me to talk about was Sean, which was a little awkward. What was he like as a kid? Was he a good big brother? Was it true that he’d never had a steady girlfriend before her?
I affirmed the last piece of information, saying that he went out some, but never had anything serious that I knew of, though he’d had friends who were girls—especially Charlie’s girlfriend, Jane.
“Was he in love with her?”
“I don’t think so—I couldn’t see Sean doing anything—”
“I don’t mean doing anything,” she said. “I just wondered if he had feelings for her. My last boyfriend’s best friend had a crush on me—you can just tell, you know?”
Not really, I thought.
“I just wondered,” Ally went on. “He seems like he’d be quiet—watching and enjoying being with both of them. Inside, it would probably be killing him.”
I remembered a time when we were up here fishing the ponds. Jane was just learning how to cast a fly-rod, and Charlie’s teaching method was to tie on a fly, give her the old Norman MacLean spiel about the clock, and then ditch her for another pond that wasn’t being flailed by a greenhorn.
It was Sean—followed by a tagalong little sister—who stayed with Jane and untangled her line. I remember him watching her cast. He said something to her that I didn’t hear, and she turned to him with a puzzled look. He said something else, and she reeled in all her line. Then he took her arm, straightened her wrist, and moved her arm back and forth. She concentrated on her cast, gazing out at the water of the pond, but he was concentrating on her face and—it seemed to me—admiring the freckles cast across her cheeks and nose.
“Maybe so,” I said to Ally, but the memory seemed too intimate to share. I think Ally liked the idea of him as the platonic admirer, and also of herself as his first love, the one who discovered him.
“Maybe so,” I repeated, slopping some paint onto the tipi. “I never really saw it.”
“Wait,” she said and showed me how to apply the paint in smooth even strokes, blending it into the earlier part, and then smoothing it out onto the bare canvas. I got a little shiver as she took my arm and adjusted the angle of the brush.
“Keep it loose,” she said. “What kind of brother was he?”
“The best.”
“Why?”
“Well, for one thing, he always let me tag along with him.”
“He wasn’t jealous of his spoiled baby sister?”
“He spoiled me as much as anybody. And I guess I would have been the jealous one, since he was older and got to do things. I was always saying it wasn’t fair if he got to stay up later or something.”
“Was he always so quiet?”
I nodded. “He listens.”
She painted a while quietly, covering about twice as much tipi as I did in the same time.
“Tell me your favorite memory of childhood with him,” she said. “One story that will sum up your relationship.”
“‘The Last Good Country.’”
“What?”
“It’s a story he read to me from his Nick Adams book. We used to read it over and over and, since Hemingway never finished it, we’d make up our own endings. Sean would pretend to be Nickie and I would be his sister, Littless. The evil game warden comes after Nickie because of some poaching thing. When he runs away, she talks him into taking her along, and they escape to “the last good country,” his special, hidden place. They camp out, fish, read together—just the two of them on the lam.”
“Like Huck Finn with a sister instead of Jim—or instead of Huck.”
“Exactly. And Sean and I were just like them.”
“But you weren’t on the lam.”
“No.” I laughed. “But we pretended to be, playing by the creek up here. In the story, they fished with willow sticks, and Nick—I mean Sean—used to say that all he needed was a coil of line and a few fishhooks and he could survive. He made Dad get him a sack of Bull Durham tobacco just so he could dump it out and keep his little fishing kit in it.”
“That’s adorable!”
“Sean always wanted ‘The Last Good Country’ to be real. The place I mean. He always wanted to go some place where there were no people, some place where he could live off the land.”
“Did you guys read anything else?”
“Everything. But that was our special story.”
“How come?”
“Well, I loved the way Littless was described, all golden and sunlit—it made me want to be her. She was little, but brave—whether she was reading something that was ‘morbid’ and ‘too old’ for her or worrying about Nickie killing this kid that was spying on them.”
I paused, and Ally kept painting, the sound of her brush soft on the canvas.
“I like the way they worried about each other. There’s a lot of love in that story.”
As Ally and I worked and hung out, I’d been trying to work up the nerve to ask her about sex. Mom had given me plenty of information, but it’s not something you really want to talk about with your parents.
It was impossible to ignore the subject, though, spending the week with Sean and Ally. Not that they were making out in front of me. He couldn’t keep his hands off her, but he would just hold her hand, touch her back and shoulders—that sort of thing. They sat close as we ate dinner outside, their legs draping over each other under the table. And up at the sunset rocks, she’d lie back with her head in his lap and he’d play with her hair.
They always seemed to want to go to bed unnaturally early too, with a lot of fake yawns and “I’m tuckered outs.”
And that was when the fireworks began. On the first night, I didn’t hear much, just a few moans drifting up to the tipi, but I knew right away what it was.
I buried my head in my sleeping bag, then peeped out and lay still, listening.
Ally lost her inhibitions completely the next morning, or else Sean was making her feel awfully good. I could hardly face either one of them at breakfast, and Sean, who was the quiet one, seemed a little sheepish himself.
On Friday morning, when we were mixing up the paint, I gathered myself up and said, “So what do you guys use?”
She knew what I meant right away. “I’m on the pill,” she said.
“M-hmm,” I said, as if I chatted about these things every day. “But that doesn’t protect you against … ”
“AIDS? No. We used rubbers for a while. But I was Sean’s first and, though I’d been careful as hell, I went to the clinic and got a clean bill of health before we stopped using them.”
“Oh. Cool.” Did I really want to be talking about this?
“You know all about this stuff, don’t you, Cassie? Your parents don’t seem like the sheltering type.”
“Oh, yeah, it’s just, you know, I was just wondering.”
“Well, you can ask me anything you want. I remember when I was your age. Everybody pretended that either A, nobody’s having sex, or B, sex is the most important thing in the universe, and unless you are having it, you don’t fully exist.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That pretty much sums it up.”
“I haven’t heard you say anything about having a boyfriend … ”
“No.”
“Would you like to have one?”
“I don’t care, sure, any friend would be good, really—people think I’m weird.”
“That’s because you’re a free spirit.”
“Yeah, right, Mom.”
Ally laughed. “Let’s be sisters, then,” she said. “Moms have to protect you—a sister’s job is to corrupt. We’ll be sisters of the paint. C’mere.”
She dipped her finger in a yellow swirl that she’d added to lighten the sun-color, and she smeared a line across my cheekbones and over my nose. Then she added a line down the part of my hair, and a dot between my eyebrows. “Third eye,” she said. “This is your mystic-soul eye, Sister Free Spirit.”
“Now you,” I said and dipped my finger in red. I gave her cheekbone spots surrounded by yellow rays. She got a third eye, too, and a streak of yellow down the zigzag part of her hair. “And you, with your oh-so-trendy-in-1997 hair-part—dating back to when you were a middle school conformist—I dub thee Sister Dork-Lightning.”
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