by Lorraine Ray
Meredith sat up in a tree, legs dangling with no shoes on in early October, 1968, still warm nights in the desert, and smoking as big as you please after the sun has gone down and our desert street darkened, the sky full of stars and a moon scythe displayed. The drapes of the various windows showed the blue moving light of the living room televisions all the way up the street. The burning tip of Meredith’s cigarette glowed like an insect eye, showed where she perched, where she sat. I couldn’t address the smoking issue. She hid the cigarettes in the tree. And I in the doorway first called out, “Come in for Laugh In, Meredith. Come in for a good laugh. Won’t you? It just started and you haven’t missed much. Come in now and you’ll still get to see most of it. They have a bunch of really big stars on tonight and it’s already funny. You don’t want to miss it, do you?”
The moon scythe rose on the back of the Rincon Mountains. Mysterious trees and strange mounds spread up the street of palms and cacti and gravel front yards. “You go back in. It’s all right. I’ll come in soon. Don’t miss the show because of me,” Meredith said. “I’ll be right in,” she promised, falsely, I knew.
“But I don’t want to watch it if you don’t.” I came away from the door, pulling it closed behind me and walking toward her across the gravel. The gravel stabbed the soles of my feet and pieces of it stuck so I had to stop and knock it off against the calf of my leg before I could go on.
I thought I heard her say “damn.” That was about me, about me coming out. It’s hard to hear a damn when you approach and keep on going, but I was game for punishment.
“But you know you like it,” I persisted.
“Go back in,” she repeated.
“Why don’t you like it anymore?”
“I just want to see the stars come out, that’s all.”
“You can see that any night. Laugh In is only on Mondays. You should come in. It’s going to be funny. Don’t you like the jokes?”
“Sure. I like them a lot. I just want to see the stars come out.”
“Well,” I shrugged down below her, “I tried.”
Meredith in the center of the blood red gravel of our front yard up in the tree smoking as big as you please. I came out into the night, under the desert stars to beg her to come in and join us. But she didn’t want to, and the time I spent begging could have better been spent on that show.
“Come on Meredith. You’ll like the show tonight,” I plead for the last time in a whiny voice. I knew my pleadings were useless. I knew that as the words came out of my mouth and yet nothing I could do would prevent them from coming. They were childish and peevish at times. I would badger her and beg her, but she had no more interest in television shows. I couldn’t understand it at all. She had loved the Mickey Mouse Club with Jack and I and also My Three Sons, and Man from Uncle. Why was she so negative? And it wasn’t as though she listened to the stereo. She only liked the radio, sometimes in her room.
I waited in the night, staring up at her silhouette against the watery gray western sky and hoping she would answer eventually. I could make out the whip-like form of an ocotillo and a bird chirruped from its meager black sticks. Another bird answered from a palm tree.
“Go back in. I’ll be in in a minute or two. I want to see the stars, like I said.” But she said this in a way that let me know that she didn’t really plan to come in until much later. I didn’t like her telling me what to do. I didn’t like her implying that I liked life with our parents. If she was too good for the place, couldn’t I be, too?
“What are you doing?” I asked stupidly. I moved my feet in the gravel. I kicked my toe into the white gravel and shot it across the red gravel. This was sacrilegious in our house. The red and white gravel had to stay apart. Our parents punished us by making us carefully separate the two.
“I want to see the stars come out. How many times do I have to tell you?”
“The show’s gonna be very funny,” I reminded her for about the tenth time. “You’ll miss it again. The jokes are really funny.”
Who didn’t know what she was doing there? She was supposed to be communing with nature but even Gumm said later she smelled smoke on Meredith when she came in. The disappointment of the time came again, another nail in the coffin of innocence. The gradual step by step dissolution of the child Meredith by a person who bought into all the adult vices. That bothered me as I stood there beside the bent trunk of the Rus Lancia and the sad semicircle of bottle brushes in the white gravel. It was the unquestioning acceptance of the vices of older others, of alien natures, which I wanted her to fight against with the same vigor that she once fought the East. Being so strong, so assured, why couldn’t she keep that attitude long enough for me to develop more of it in me?