Riverine

by Angela Palm

  There was a transgression I wanted to confess, but no one in the Catholic church would hear it. One Sunday, I said I had to use the bathroom. I lingered outside the confession box, looking into the screened grate. I could hear the monotone call and responses in the church’s cathedral. The voices echoed down the hall. A week earlier, I had been filling another composition tablet with depressing pop song lyrics in my room when someone hooted at me. I went to the window and Corey was there with two other neighborhood boys, Brandon and Micah. I tried to play it cool, but I was giddy that he’d come to see me without my asking him over. The three of them were all older than me and, while they never spoke to me at school, they doted on me in their own boyish ways or teased me almost sweetly when we were in our own territory—the Kankakee swamp, river rat country. Occasionally we would play Hackey Sack on the porch or video games in our living room or eat an entire bag of Doritos while laughing at nothing. They usually ran off when my dad’s truck hauled onto our road after work because I wasn’t allowed to be alone with them, or any boy, for that matter. But this time, I was alone and the three of them were outside, sitting on the little hill outside my window, right below Corey’s bedroom window. They were drunk—their eyes were bright and their smiles were soft and playful. The sun was nearly sunk and my parents were gone later than usual. “Take it off,” one of them called. Then a sharp, short whistle.

  The idea must have come from Corey. Neither of the other boys would have spoken to me like that without his lead or approval. For a while, I had noticed his light snapping off as soon as I closed my bedroom door at night, wrapped in a towel after showering. It was surprising that parents who were paranoid about my exposed body had not thought to install blinds on my bedroom window. I wasn’t sure that Corey had been watching me, but I would take my time getting dressed, sitting naked on my bed to brush my hair and put on lotion. Had he seen? He’d never said anything.

  I looked down at my clothes. I was wearing a gray White Sox T-shirt featuring Snoopy dressed in a team uniform with faded khaki shorts. “Very funny,” I called back.

  My light was on and it was almost dark. I had watched Corey in his room at this time of night many times before, lifting weights and pacing back and forth, growing his muscles and his manhood. So I knew they could see me well even though it was getting hard for me to distinguish them as anything but voices in the night. “Come on,” one said impatiently.

  Awkward as it felt, I craved their attention—from Corey especially, whom I adored secretly and from afar. Things were changing between us. I could tell by the way that he gripped my thighs when he carried me on his back and by the way that he could no longer look me in the eyes when we were near one another. We orbited ever closer to some unnamed center. A gravity had begun. We were happy when we were together, an easy fit, even if we were unsure of what to do or say. I couldn’t remember a day of my life when I hadn’t known him, or imagine a future that didn’t include him.

  I moved my arm slightly and leaned forward, discreetly looking down my own shirt. I was wearing a black bra with a red plaid print that wrapped around the cups. My underwear even matched. I took this to be evidence of serendipity. Of God’s approval. A prayer crossed my mind—I beseeched the dead to look away. I was tired of being watched by angels. Some things weren’t meant for them to witness.

  “We’re getting bored,” Brandon said. “Take something off.” They did sound bored, but they also sounded hopeful. Still, their boredom felt like my personal failure. I wanted to apologize for disappointing them.

  Instead of turning off my light and rising above the situation that was unfolding, I decided that this could be an opportunity to become more womanly, more like the women I had seen in Playboy. It was a chance to ensure that Corey would look at me and see me as I wanted him to—as more than his friend, more than a playmate he had nearly outgrown. If two more boys had to witness the invitation, so be it. It would be worth it. I took off my T-shirt, my back to the window, and then turned around to face them. One of them whistled louder, but I’d run out of courage. I stood there for a few seconds, willing myself to do something else. But what?

  “Is that it?” one of them called. I knew they had actual Playboys they could be enjoying.

  That’s not it, I thought, determined to do something more. To reveal a body part that would keep them there outside the window. The night grew thick and blue, full of stars. I stood in my bra and shorts, lights on, and looked around my room. I pretended to scratch at a mosquito bite on my leg. I shifted my weight from one leg to the other, never looking directly at the window, never smiling. I was bluffing. It was only meant for Corey, not these other boys. Three hidden faces laughed in unison. “My grandma puts on a better show than that,” one said. After a few minutes, I heard nothing. I was alone in my bedroom, half-undressed. My bottom lip quivered. They were gone.

  I wanted to offer my confession to the Catholics and their dusty little confession closet, but no one let me. No one even asked if I would like the opportunity to confess. “Hello?” I said to the door. Nothing. I wondered if Papa was still watching me, if the dead dogs were still following me. I wondered if they were paying attention when I took off my shirt and failed to entertain the three boys. And if a god was watching us all the time, why did people have to say out loud everything they had done wrong?

  Bread and Wine, 14

  After Catholicism ignored me, I went to the Methodist church in town. If I stayed at this church for a year, I would become an official member and a blue name tag would hang on the welcome board each Sunday, and each Sunday I would pin my name tag with my very own name to my sweater. After a while I might be asked to be responsible for something important, like handing out napkins during refreshment hour. To exhibit enthusiasm for this church and to show my commitment, I signed up for community events that they hosted—car washes and working at Wednesday dinners. At Wednesday dinners, anyone could eat a hot, home-cooked meal with seconds and dessert for three dollars. At first I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want home-cooked food when everyone knew eating out was so much better. It seemed like a crappy combination. You had to go out and pay, but you ate bad food. But after a few weeks, I decided I’d rather eat than help in the kitchen. As it turned out, the food tasted amazing and came from Family Recipes. My family had no Family Recipes. We ate overcooked pork chops with no seasoning or boiled hot dogs and canned vegetables or went to McDonald’s. Even our potatoes came canned, or else in flakes. I was angrier than ever because my mother had never cooked manicotti.

  Astral Projection, 15

  The religious roulette ended after the Methodist dinners stopped. It ended up being one more community that was inaccessible to a fifteen-year-old without a whole family alongside her. Books, though, had never shut me out or made me feel like I didn’t belong. When I gave up churches, Mandi and I started asking our mothers to take us to the nearest bookstore to hang out on Sunday afternoons. We read for hours at Barnes & Noble—the closest bookstore to my parents’ house, a forty-minute drive away. We became interested in alternative religions and purchased instructive books on dream interpretation, palm reading, and astral projection. After studying up on astral projection, we decided to try it ourselves. We locked my bedroom door and dimmed the lights. The book said to lie supine, but I confused the term with lupine, imagining my eyes as two bright, sunward-reaching flowers. A diagram on page four of the book helped me correct my error. In addition to the bookstore trips, I had also checked out nearly every book on the single shelf reserved for texts on non-Christian religions in our school library. I had read the Tao and the Bhagavad Gita and books on Buddhism. I put the flowers to rest and lay on my back, trying to focus on the imagined apple that hovers eight inches above my mind’s eye. The book suggested an apple as the focal point for novice astral travelers, and I was one for following directions. I didn’t like red apples, so it was a yellow apple I used to tempt my soul to emerge from its hiding place and rise up, up. I would position
it on my bed, where it would look down at me freely, unencumbered by my body and the clothes my mother made me wear. I tried to coax it from where it rested, dormant but simmering with energy, at the bottom of my spine. I asked it to slowly boil and bubble up my vertebrae, hop pop hop pop, to come out of my face, transform into a mutant hand, and take the apple. Hold it, bite it, gag me with it, whatever it took to get it out. It was like trying to pick a dandelion that weighed a thousand pounds. Mandi lay three feet from me in the same position, palms to the unknowable god we had both abandoned. There was no second Jesus coming for us. Mandi now had a stepdad at her mom’s house and a slew of young women at her dad’s house, and I was suffocating in my life. We would not keep praying for other people to learn how to change, to see us as people with our own thoughts and feelings. Mandi’s apple was red because that was the kind her mother bought. We disagreed on those aspects of projecting. Maybe that was why it wasn’t working. We relied too much on what was familiar.

  Mandi tried to stifle a laugh, but it came out her nose, which was perfect. I was beginning to hate my nose. It was too round by several millimeters. I compared my face to the shapes in magazines. I could not find a match, so I clamped my nostrils together at night with one of my mother’s clothespins. Nothing was coming out right. Why is your hair so thick? my father would ask. Why are your arms so hairy? You’re a Sasquatch. Meanwhile, my mother had taken me to those open modeling calls in Chicago, where you walked around in front of Ford Models recruiters, shoved pictures in their faces, and hoped they picked you. I hated it. “You can get scholarship money,” she would say. But I knew I would get that anyway. Smarts went farther than pretty, but it was pretty they encouraged. And anyway, I was no Kate Moss. Couldn’t they see that? Couldn’t they see how anxious it made me? My mother rubbed my teeth with Vaseline, as she had for ballet recitals. “It forces you to smile,” she’d say.

  “Stop it. You’re ruining my concentration,” I told Mandi with my eyes closed.

  This made her laugh harder.

  “Seriously, it’s not going to work if you keep laughing. You have to focus.” I got to be the boss because I was older by one year.

  “The book says it takes a lot of practice.”

  “I’ve been practicing. I’m so close, I can feel it.”

  Mandi sat up and crawled over to me, hands planted on the floor next to my shoulders. She stared at me from where my apple should have been floating. “Eat me, soul. I’m a yellow apple!”

  I shoved her and she toppled over. We laughed at ourselves, our legs mixed up together on the shag carpet like pick-up sticks. We were still two girls with a thousand shared limbs, each sensing the other’s position, no matter how impossibly construed. We were sisters more than cousins.

  She unwound herself from me. “Let’s read our horoscopes.” She reached for my Seventeen magazine. We were dead ringers for our horoscopes. I was a serious Scorpio, contemplating my world word by word, drop by drop, comparing everything, making occasional splashes against the beige walls of circumstance. She was a breezy Aquarius, knocking about in the wide gaps of space that opened for her whenever she decided to stand still. A name only took you so far. A family only provided you with so much. We would have to go into the wilderness of the world armed only with our own sense, our own souls, our own flawed bodies and minds, if we wanted to get anywhere or learn anything.

  I lay on the floor and tried again, this time without my cousin. I was supposed to be sleeping, a nine o’clock bedtime for a sixteen-year-old. To make projecting easier, I wore the lightest clothing I owned, a vintage slip that I bought at the Presbyterian resale shop. I had dyed it a soft pink with Rit dye from the drugstore. I looked like a crow-haired Courtney Love, passed out on the floor, and I felt just as spent as she typically appeared, just as tired of waiting for my real life to arrive. I was done with hovering apples. I said rah rah rah rah rah rah rah and counted backward from 341 by threes in my mind. It took a lot of work to keep myself from thinking.

  When I finally rose above myself, projected one aspect of me above the other—my consciousness outside my body—Mandi appeared in my mind. She took my hand and I ran headfirst with her toward water. Time seemed to fall away as we stripped off our clothing and tossed it over our shoulders. We were quiet and we were loud, we were yin and yang, swirling gray. In my altered state, we were red-and-blue pinwheels, spinning with the breath our mothers blew when they were fifteen and sixteen on the Fourth of July in 1975, sitting on a porch and dreaming of daughters who would go to church and wear matching pink dresses. We were blurry in their bellies. We said hello to each other, silently. A preview of the decades we would spend in and out of touch, but always united, always bonded to one another. In my mind, or outside it if I really had projected, we reached the water’s edge and jumped, arms stretched out wide and mouths gaping. When the water hit my face, I was alone again. I was floating in it. It was water, then it was air, then it was time and space together, then it was gone. I looked down and saw myself on the floor in the pink slip. Wake up, I whispered.

  PART II

  FIELDS

  BIFURCATION

  There was one last game of corn tag the summer that we moved—before everyone made their exits from the river. Corey had recently gotten out of the boys’ school for delinquent youth, and he was living it up while he looked for a job. Six of us ran through the field beyond the old riverbed. Even in the dark, we knew when to hop over a hole, when to duck to avoid being decapitated by barbed wire. We knew where the bridges built by the generation of kids before us were still intact and could be used to traverse the creek, a trickle of leftover water from the river that had been rerouted a hundred years earlier. We knew the land as we knew our teenaged bodies. Ripe, firm. Yielding in places. In those days, running was nothing but an extension of self. Like breathing. There was no labor in it, only direction and the feeling of blood rushing in our veins. Above us, a silver moon hung sideways from black sky. Soon, the world would swing sideways with it, unhinged, split wide and dripping.

  From somewhere in the corn, Corey tagged my face, blinding me with his flashlight. “Gotcha.”

  “Where are you?” I squinted against white light. His voice came from all directions, his body near. The absence and presence of him at once disoriented me.

  “Guess.” I saw him in my mind as an amalgamation—the boy I’d whispered to at night, whose bedroom window faced mine for years, and the man who was so now at nineteen by law, by stature, and by a growing rap sheet. His voice was more familiar to me than his flesh, the nights we talked on our walkie-talkies outnumbering the number of times we had touched in the past year. He’d been gone for a few months, with weekend visits home. Though he was hardly around anymore, he would still come back to me when he could and we would play like kids, even though we weren’t. At fifteen, I wanted to tip that balance in favor of flesh. I reached out for him with both arms, ready to grab either version, boy or man, but grasped nothing.

  Corn rustled around us. The sound, when you stand inside it, is like water, the dry husks loud as tides. Feet darted from the light in staccato beats. Corey’s light went out. “Now can you see me?”

  I heard his sneaking smile even in the dark, getting nearer, our bodies like homing pigeons for one another, no matter how long he’d been gone.

  “I can’t see anything.” I stepped forward, but he stopped me with an arm around my waist, restraining me against his body. Wrapped around me from behind, he made me feel small. Crushable. Why did this feel good? I asked myself later. Should I have been afraid?

  We stood there, conscious of our breathing. This was a feeling like love, I thought, if love was a pull, magnetic and inevitable as gravity. If it was a secret, best kept slow and steady and unspoken. Once, we had swung from the thick vines that grew along the trunks of our backyard trees like strangler figs. He caught me when I flew across the patch of ferns below. He held me half a second longer than necessary to right my footing, the near fall staged fo
r the express purpose of knowing whether he’d catch me. I suppose I had always been attached securely around his trunk, leaching what nourished the center of him. Or feeding it. It was hard to tell the difference, to pinpoint whose pulse triggered and whose pulse chased.

  My brother appeared in front of us and we stepped away from each other, caught. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Game on.” I lurched toward him, hoping he’d run off.

  Corey flicked his light back on and tagged him. “You’re out, little bro. It’s home base for you. That’s what you get for spying.”

  Marcus was always half a beat behind, a little too young to know what was going on but old enough to want to be a part of whatever it was. Corey had stopped smoking cigarettes in front of him because Marcus was afraid that everyone around him was dying. He’d spend hours sobbing over our dad’s black lungs. “Don’t you know alcohol kills people, too?” I’d ask, and he’d cry more. Corey couldn’t bear the thought of upsetting Marcus, so he only smoked around me because I didn’t care.

  In a few more months, a combine would plow through the dried stalks and eat up our playground, flattening the field into nothing over the course of a few days. After the combines, winter would come. After that, spring, when the forest along the perimeter of the field would thicken and green and the deer would bed down in it with their young. Another machine would turn the soil over afresh, opening it to receive the next crop’s seed. Spring would heal the land’s wounds. It would heal us.

  Corey’s older sister, Rhianna, had died when he was twelve. After that, he entered a period of stunned quietude. I had barely known her. She had gone to college on a basketball scholarship when I was eight, a rare academic exit from our neighborhood, where only half of the kids would finish high school. A few months later, she was gone. I had watched Corey get locked out of his house after she died, the loss of one child too great for his mother to give a damn about another. His father was a trucker and on the road most of the time. For years, his mother worked the night shift at a twenty-four-hour restaurant near the interstate and slept during the day, only waking to holler at us to quiet down from her second-story window. When he wasn’t home in time for supper, Corey tried the door and found it wouldn’t open. He’d wait a minute, give it one more try, then jump off the stairs—a six-foot leap, landing squarely on his feet. He would wander over to our place to eat and sleep, as if nothing were wrong. He would tell me later that he thought his sister died because she got smart. He thought that if he did well in school, like her, he’d die, too. To stay alive, he rejected school and authority. A child’s logic that stuck.