My glasses fogged up when I burst into the bathroom. Bill was dozing peacefully, his head buoyed by a blow-up neck pillow. I perched my glasses on my head and surveyed naked Billy. He was almost completely submerged, the water licked the top of the tub, a few rivulets escaped when he sleepily shifted to fold his hands across his belly.
I cleared the books and newspapers off the toilet and sat down. Billy started to snore. The family jewels were floating in the hot bathwater, looking like fish balls in my favorite Cambodian soup. I stuck a finger in the water. Almost scalding. I let out a sigh. Survival of the fittest, I mumbled.
• • •
After troubleshooting the hot bath problem, I approached getting pregnant like my father had approached a log-clearing job, with a burning intensity. I scoured as many baby-making websites for secret tips to boost fertility as I could. I drastically changed my diet—I began sipping nettle tea, eating whole grains, no Chinese takeout—to nurture my womb. I jumped on Bill like a crazy monkey when I knew I was ovulating. I also turned to needles. Acupuncture needles.
There’s a Chinese Medicine place near my office in downtown Oakland, and a friend suggested that I go there. When I walked in, the clinic smelled of moxibustion smoke and herbs. At a little desk on the third floor, the receptionist smiled up at me.
I looked around, suddenly feeling skittish. “I want to get acupuncture to get pregnant,” I blurted. I hate going to the doctor—the vulnerability of being sick or broken often overwhelms me, and even during a routine exam, I tend to cry.
She nodded and handed me some forms to fill out. I was relieved that they weren’t standard hospital questions about my medical history; the Chinese doctors simply wanted to know if my hands were cold, how many times a day I urinated, and how many hours of sleep did I get at night.
Then I was shown into a room painted light green with white trim. There was an examination bed, covered with paper, in the middle of the room. A student doctor went over my records. Then a tiny woman named Dr. Ye came into the room, wearing a pink scarf. She sat down across from me and had me stick out my tongue. She had gentle brown eyes, but she furrowed her eyebrows when she felt my pulse and examined my hands. The two of them looked at me for a while. I smiled and felt like an animal at the zoo, but I also had a tremendous feeling of well-being. They began a negotiation about whether I had a wooden spleen or a blocked liver. They looked at me again and asked me to stick out my tongue again. I felt myself giggling, glad to be part of this mystery to be solved. Why couldn’t I get pregnant?
In the end, we settled on Ren 6, 4, 2; some chi-building and smoothing out of my liver. Whatever that meant. I closed my eyes when they got out the needles and didn’t open them again until they had adjusted the heat lamps over me and shut the door. I could hear the rain on the window in the little room. “Twenty minutes,” Dr. Ye said.
I could feel the needles only in this weird pulling of energy. Strings of energy. It felt great just to rest, sprawled out on the table, breathing. As I meditated, I could feel the old pain from my foot, from my bike accident. I had never gone to the doctor after my accident—no money or insurance—but I’m sure I had broken my foot. Now I was finally letting that go. The mistakes that couldn’t be righted, the regret for what was but will never be again. Inevitably things go astray, roads are taken that lead nowhere. But now I was on a new path. I had never done anything like this—nurturing myself—before. It felt wildly luxurious, and it felt right.
• • •
While I turned to needles, Bill told me he would be driving to Arizona.
“What for?” I asked.
“To return the skull.”
“What skull?”
“The one we took from the Indian land.” He pointed at a cow skull that I had hung on our living room wall. I had never properly cleaned it, so it was always dropping a film of dust and it smelled weird. But it did look cool, like some Georgia O’Keeffe painting.
“Huh?” I said. “We found that on the ground.” It was a find from the road trip we took after leaving Seattle for good.
“Native ground,” he said. He was worried the theft had jinxed us. That it hadn’t been a scrotal temperature problem this whole time, but one of bad juju. He went on to say he had been reading a book, Coyote Medicine: Lessons from Native American Healing, that suggested that unknown psychic spirits can affect your life.
I raised an eyebrow. Bill’s usually so pragmatic; this sounded like a bunch of woo-woo BS. “Billy,” I said. “You sound like my dad. Crazy.”
He shrugged. But then again, I was having needles inserted into my body in a bid to get stronger baby-making chi. So who’s more crazy?
A week later he and his friend Julie drove to Arizona and deposited the skull to its rightful place on the reservation. They also did mushrooms at Big Sur.
During his absence, I had cooked up my bag of Chinese fertility-enhancing herbs. Roots and berries that I slow cooked in water for twelve hours in a ceramic crock, which gave off an acrid stench and turned the water black. Once it cooled, I took a dose: it tasted like burned coffee with sour berry; the aftertaste was pure dirt.
Bill got back, mission accomplished. He said, in his mushroom haze that left him giggly and with a perma-smile, that the trees were the answer. They knew so much. I just nodded my head. I looked at the empty wall where the skull had hung, and I swear, I felt a renewed sense of hope and energy. I sipped some more of my herb brew. There had been a time in our lives when Bill and I had actively made fun of crystal-charging nut balls. But now, here we were: nut balls.
• • •
In March I still wasn’t pregnant. My goat Bebe had kidded in October and was in heat again. That’s how long it was taking me to get pregnant. I was getting lapped by a goat.
One day she escaped. I heard her calls near the front of the house and went running downstairs to find her in the street. I called her name, I pleaded, but I couldn’t catch her. Then she headed toward Martin Luther King Jr. Way. She seemed to have a plan, her eyes were so focused, and she was letting out small cries while her hooved feet clattered on the pavement. When she reached the busy intersection, without looking, she began to cross the street, just as a bright orange lowrider displaying twenty-two-inch wheels passed by. Their encounter played out in slow-mo for me: my goat’s spotted body out in the middle of the street; the driver, with his windows down, stereo up. He didn’t have time to even look surprised, he just used one cool hand to glide the car out of the goat’s path.
Safely across the street, Bebe looked kind of bored, like a teenager at an all-ages show. Suddenly, a punk girl dressed in black emerged out of nowhere and collared Bebe. The girl waited for me to run up, breathless, to reclaim my errant, horny goat. I noticed the girl was wearing a tattered sweatshirt with a patch that read “Courage” in death metal script.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you, thank you! She’s in heat,” I explained. The girl scowled. Damn breeders.
To remedy the escaping horny goat problem, I brought home a stud goat named Mr. Lincoln from a farm up in Vacaville. He sat up front with me in my truck on the way to my house.
Mr. Lincoln enjoyed our farm. Plenty of good alfalfa, clean water, slightly cooler temperatures than Vacaville, which got infernally hot, even in March. As for the girls, they were avoiding him. Even though Bebe had been horny enough to escape, she suddenly didn’t seem interested. She and her daughter climbed up onto the back stairs while Lincoln waited at the bottom, lips curled out, trying to catch a whiff of them. He couldn’t climb very far up the stairs before he got scared and let out little cries until I came out of the house and rescued him. Mostly he seemed interested in eating.
Lincoln slept outside, under the stars, alone in a nest of discarded hay and sawdust because the does wouldn’t even let him bed down with them. He better get busy, I thought when I surveyed the dwindling hay barn (a “shed” made by sett
ing up two pallets on end and placing a heavy piece of wood on top of them).
One day I rounded the corner to the backyard and saw only Mr. Lincoln’s back legs, moving forward and backward, forward and backward. Was he having sex? Finally! But as I got closer, I saw that no, he had just found the perfect spot to rub his neck—on my bike pedal. He looked like he was in a trance, just rubbing and rubbing; he didn’t even look up at me when I stood over him. Meanwhile, the does sat up on the back porch, watching in disgust.
Bill took to making fun of Mr. L. He started talking in a quivering old man’s voice, pretending to be the goat: “Let’s see here, first I gotta get something to eat, and then I might just take a nap . . .” And though I laughed at Bill’s Mr. Lincoln impersonation, I will admit that I had started to look at Bill in the same light.
At my regular acupuncture appointment, I told the people needling me—two young Chinese guys—that I was feeling really stressed out. They grew silent. Then finally one of them said, in halting English: “Does your boyfriend beat you?” I don’t know if it was the way he said it, or me imagining the preposterous image of Bill hitting me, but I started laughing really hard. “No,” I said, tears rolling down my face, “he doesn’t beat me.” He maybe couldn’t get me pregnant, and I was slowly starting to accept that as a possibility. I started coming up with Plans B and C—perhaps we would go on a year-long bicycling trip; maybe we would move to Mexico. I came to see my future as plastic, flexible.
• • •
After a few weeks of hosting Mr. Lincoln with no action, I came upon a disturbing scene in the backyard. I smelled it first. Then I heard the yelling.
The does were making a high-pitched cry I had never heard before. Mr. Lincoln’s penis was out—pink and long, and it was somehow spraying urine out in a fine mist, not a steady stream, but in a fan-shape, like the mister setting on a garden hose.
Then he was up, riding the doe though she was much taller than him. His lips were curled up in a grimace. Both of them were making a strange calling noise—it stuttered and crested and sounded strangely like hearing someone talking excitedly behind a heavy door. Mr. Lincoln’s tongue was similar to Kiss guitarist Gene Simmons’s, and he was utilizing it in a similar, showman kind of way. This went on for two days in my backyard. Friends would come over for a visit, peek in at the goats, would say, “whoa,” and slowly back away. A real goat fuck.
How did I know the deed was done? The girls seemed really satisfied. Geriatric Mr. L got invited to sleep with them at night. And then I took him back to Vacaville. He sat up front with me like a pet dog in my farm truck—a rusty 1981 Datsun. I ate an orange and threw the peel on the floor of the truck. This truck, and its disarray of garbage and farm implements, mirrored my dad’s messy Ford.
Instead of trying to purge this behavior, I’d kind of embraced it. It dawned on me that yes, I’m the kind of person who throws the orange peels on the floor and plans to pick them up but never does, who drives thrashed cars with dome lights that don’t work, and will never work. I tend to be graceless, free-falling through life without saying excuse me.
While I was thinking this deep thought, I suddenly smelled goat poo. Mr. L had laid some hot goat berries directly where I buckled my seat belt. At Vacaville, Mr. L’s home farm, Lincoln clattered out of the truck, and I flicked the goat turds out of the seat without much concern.
• • •
Just as the goats got knocked up, I finally did too.
I knew I was pregnant when, one day, the goat milk tasted funny. It had a barnyard flavor to it, like it had gone bad. But the milk was fresh and new. Just yesterday it had tasted fabulously creamy. I put the glass down. Later in the day, my stomach felt strange, like it was stretching and churning. I went to Rite Aid to buy a pregnancy test.
The line at the downtown pharmacy was always slow and long. I stood there, pregnancy test in hand.
“Hey, Novella,” Mac called. Mac was one of our queer friends who wanted to be called zhe, not she or he.
“Oh, hey,” I said. I crossed my arms and tucked the EPT test away from sight.
“We’re having another cabaret,” Mac said. Bill and I loved going to these, Mac was a great host, and the acts were always weird and fun.
“Terrific,” I nodded. Oh god, don’t let zher notice the pregnancy test. We hadn’t told many people that we were trying to conceive. Mac, I was pretty sure, wouldn’t approve of this breeding thing Bill and I were up to. I felt like a sell-out, like a pirate turned merchant marine, Thunderbird-sipper turned wine snob, a hipster urban farmer turned stroller-pushing mommy.
Finally, it was my turn, and Mac flitted off, and I rushed home with the ultimate breeder purchase. In the safety of my bathroom I tore open the pregnancy test and peed onto the little stick. I watched with pure fascination as capillary action drew my urine across the marker that could sense the pregnancy hormones in my urine. First it was negative, a solid blue stripe that I had seen many times before. I let out my breath, pulled my pants up. Looked in the mirror.
I was really starting to look like my mother. She had just come to visit last month, to put the pressure on the whole getting knocked up thing. She had rented a car, and one night drove up to Berkeley to look for her old house. “I don’t know what I’m looking for,” she said, embarrassed. But I understood that desire to go back in time.
In the mirror I saw that I had bags under my eyes, and my crow’s-feet fanned down across my cheeks. When my mom was thirty-eight, she had already had two kids, raised us from babies to toddlers to kids. We had gone to kindergarten, she had divorced my dad, gotten a job, moved to Washington State. I, in contrast, was just starting this process.
Then I looked down at the pregnancy test, flush with urine, and saw a plus sign had formed.
That afternoon Bill came home early. I was out in the garden, trying to catch an escaped rabbit who disappeared behind the back of the chicken coop.
“Help me, Monk,” I said.
He went to one end of the coop and waved a branch at the rabbit. I waited at the other end. She scooched toward the safe middle, and I squeezed behind the coop until I could grab her. She made little grunting noises, and I realized that she was pregnant too—that’s why she was looking for a hiding spot. I found a nesting box for the bunny, stuffed it with straw, and put her in the cage with it. After closing the door to the cage, I looked up at Bill and blurted out, “I’m pregnant.”
Bill puffed up like a rooster. “I did it!” he crowed.
Riana and Novella riding stick horses on the ranch, 1976.
Twelve
When I was five months pregnant, I flew to France.
My sister met me at the airport. Though we talk on the phone weekly, the high price of flights meant I hadn’t seen her since right after she had given birth to Amaya, five years ago. Her time spent raising her daughter had been good to her—she looked fit and happy. In addition to growing most of their family’s food, she collected lots of wild stuff too. Amaya was growing up on the land, running free like we had on the ranch. There was now even a name for it—free-range parenting—and my sister had embraced the philosophy.
I waddled toward Riana, trashed from the long flight. She looked glowing, vibrant, full of life, dressed in tight jeans and a pair of high boots. When she hugged me, she felt lithe and strong. I felt squishy, like ripe fruit. I had been eating like a horse, sometimes waking up in the middle of the night to graze on nuts and ice cream. I was looking forward to being in France and eating as much cheese, bread, and charcuterie as possible.
Instead of buying food, though, we ended up mostly foraging, the way we had as kids. We went clam digging and elderberry collecting, harvested figs from trees growing in the village. We even went to a pond where we collected cattails to cook and gave ourselves mud baths.
“There are all these feral vineyards,” Riana said on one of my last days there. “The grape
s are so good!” She got a look in her eye that promised I wouldn’t be disappointed. So we packed the car with baskets, pulled out of the stone gate that surrounded their house, and drove into the countryside. The Opel bumped along, passing field after field of grapes. Their dog, Zach, stuck his nose out the window, all aquiver. It was September and the vendage was on, so workers were in every field, picking grapes by hand, placing them in lug trays, which were then poured into enormous hoppers loaded onto the back of tractors. It was a timeless process—in fact, this was the same way grapes were harvested when my parents were in France picking grapes so many years ago.
Benji turned off the paved road and we set across a bumpy dirt track that ran into the fields of grapes. He’s got dark hair and eyes, and when his DNA met my sister’s, these dominant traits were passed onto Amaya. She was gorgeous, with long dark hair and olive skin. She sat in the back with me, eyeing my bulging stomach.
“There’s a sour cherry tree there,” Riana said, and pointed toward a riverbank where lots of different trees were jumbled together. I saw it, some dried fruit still clinging to the branches.
“Nobody picks this stuff?” I asked.
“No!” Benji and Riana both yelled, as if they couldn’t believe it themselves. “It’s crazy, Novella,” Riana said, turning to look at me in the backseat with Amaya.
Suddenly, we were there. There were signs that the field had once been in production, but the wooden support beams had rotted and crumbled so the grapes had resorted to scrambling across the ground. They were not trained against the metal wire like the grapes we had seen from the road.
Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild Page 14