by Sonja Larsen
But not Patti. She was too old to believe them anymore when they said it was going to be different someplace else. She didn’t want to live on a commune or move three thousand miles. Usually she was the one to storm out of the room but after my parents could not convince her to go they signed papers to make her an emancipated minor and left for California without her. She was fifteen years old.
I was already on the road with Dale by then. I remember packing the granola, my travelling papers, the teddy bear. Had he been my favourite toy before he was my only one? I remember that I liked his short stubby body and long arms, the feel of his fur and how he looked like the pictures in my Winnie-the-Pooh book. I’d had him since I was one so he’d been to Milwaukee, Hawaii, places I could barely recall. He’d been everywhere with me. By the side of the road, on the motorcycle, tucked into a bed that smelled of soap, keeping me company as I learned prayers I didn’t believe.
The Englishman in the funny-looking car picked us up on day six or seven after we’d made it across the prairies, sometimes sleeping beside the road. We got in his car in the morning and by afternoon, he’d decided what we really needed was a cookout. That’s what he called it. With camping and hot dogs and roasted marshmallows on the campfire.
He was touring Canada. “Big country,” he said. We were in the Rockies by then, finally closer to where we were going than where we’d been.
We drove to a supermarket to buy what we needed. I didn’t like marshmallows, but the Englishman refused to believe this.
“All children love sweets,” he said.
I’d never been inside such a large supermarket before. Underneath the bright lights with the soft music playing in the background, the name of the store echoed in my head. Safeway. There was every kind of marshmallow. Big dusty white, and tiny pastel pink and green, all puffed inside their plastic bags. The Englishman said we had to try them all.
At the campsite, I looked for sticks that were the size and width the man told me to find and he cut little points on each branch with a penknife to put the marshmallows on. The mini marshmallows burned into tiny lumps of charred sweetness. The coloured ones dripped from the burning wood like melted plastic. I ate them burnt and lightly toasted and everywhere in between. Dale wouldn’t eat the hot dogs or the marshmallows but the Englishman didn’t even notice.
He had a lot of enamel and metal pins, all in a little suitcase, stuck onto cloth. Some were souvenirs from places he’d visited and others were military wings and stars. He told me he’d been an air force pilot. He said he’d once shot down a Russian spy plane “in an area where to this very day the Russians deny ever being.” He showed me a pin he’d taken off the uniform of the dead pilot. He said that information was “absolutely top secret.” I nodded seriously, but I knew I was going to tell someone someday. He gave me a little yellow smiley-face button to pin on my backpack.
I ate the marshmallows, I listened to his stories. Finally I pretended I was sleepy, and crouched down into my sleeping bag. In the dark, I could smell the woodsmoke and my own sugary breath. The trees in the campground were as tall as buildings.
The next morning the Englishman offered to drive us all the way to California but Dale decided to stick with the original plan, which was for us to take the Greyhound bus from Vancouver and down through Washington, where hitchhiking was illegal. I was glad; the Englishman’s sweet tooth and the thought of him taking the pin off a dead man made me feel queasy, like a road with too many turns.
At the border the guard looked through Dale’s pack and in his guitar. When he got to me the guard took out all my clothes from the pack and I had a sudden fear that he’d cut open Pooh Bear. Instead he carefully felt the bear’s body and paws. Then he let us get back on the bus.
I loved the bus. On the bus I didn’t have to worry about feeling sick or how soon I might need to pee, since there was a toilet in the back. I sat up to the window on my knees, my forehead touching the cool glass, watching for evidence of California, in the grass or the trees or the houses. The green tinted windows made everything look like a Kodachrome picture. The ripple of water, a mailbox by the side of the road, an old woman’s face in a passing car—they could all be photographs, postcards.
But what I loved most about the bus was the way we rolled by, invisible to the world, instead of standing on the side of the road, holding a piece of cardboard that said West. What I loved best was that when we went by, people didn’t know I was even there. They didn’t want to feed me candy or teach me prayers. They looked right at me but all they saw was their own reflection in the moving glass.
TWO
Our California rendezvous point with the other commune members was the Oakland House, an old Victorian mansion in West Oakland. It was home to at least a dozen people already, including a theatre collective. By the time Dale and I got there some of the others from Quebec had already arrived: Debby, Dale’s friend Casey, another American. More people trickled in every week. There were also other kids: Debby’s baby and two older children, Ben and Molly, siblings who had just moved from Berkeley with their dad.
California was supposed to be the land of sunshine but my first impression was the cool, shadowy darkness inside the Oakland House. When one of Molly’s hamsters went missing we went through every room and discovered the dumbwaiter shaft and the crawl space between the floors. The house was full of hiding spots for lost animals. We spent days looking although we knew the hamster must have died.
When we weren’t exploring we were in the kitchen with Debby and her baby. Debby fed us soup and toast and oatmeal and sometimes even took us to a park where I saw the ocean. But mostly we stayed inside. At the Oakland House there was only one rule: don’t go outside alone. Outside was burnt-out cars and danger, outside was where Ben had seen a man get shot. But inside there were no rules. There were always new people to meet, rooms to explore, a ballroom and microphones and speakers that could fill it with sound.
The ballroom was where we gathered the night of the party, the night that everyone, even the grownups, played hide-and-go-seek. The darkness was supposed to heighten our senses. So was the acid. The acid was on tiny bits of coloured paper. I didn’t take any acid but the older kids did: quarter hits, baby hits, while the thirty or so adults had bigger doses. Were my parents there yet? I don’t think so.
We’d been waiting all evening for the right moment, a moment called “peaking,” to turn off the lights and start the game, but the darkness was still a surprise, a breathing whispering giggling surprise. There were sounds you could hear only in the dark. In the light you never heard breathing or footsteps or the sound of clothes moving on a person’s body. The object of the game was to reach home base without getting found or tagged. Home base was a lighting tower on wheels that kept getting moved around. Hide-and-go-seek evolved into king of the castle, with players attacking and defending the tower with cardboard-tube swords. Somehow my lip got split and for the rest of the night I was a monster chasing people and roaring my way through the Oakland House’s many rooms. The darkness, the sound of my voice in my ears, the salty warm taste of blood in my mouth. How long did we live at the Oakland House? Days, weeks, maybe months? It was easy to lose track of time.
From the Oakland House we moved north to our new commune, 180 acres at the northern edge of the Sacramento Valley. My parents had both arrived and each found new lovers on the commune. My father’s new girlfriend was a woman from the Quebec commune and my mother’s boyfriend, Karl, was a tall, quiet young man who had come from the Oakland House. He was one of a half dozen or so people, including Molly and Ben and their dad, who had all joined our vision of living off the land. The two-storey farmhouse couldn’t hold us all and so we slept wherever we could: in the house, in a small outbuilding, in the barn, and even in an old broken cube van. I’d share rooms with the other kids or my mother, and for a while I had a bed in a hallway on the second floor.
We called our new home Live Oak Farm but even the kids at my school knew that
we wouldn’t be able to have a real farm there. We were off the waterline for one thing, and in the middle of a drought for another. Besides which, it was ranch country, all around us was star thistle and oak, a landscape all the shades of a rattlesnake.
Still, we dug the dirt, we planted the seeds. We managed to grow zucchinis the size of watermelons. “You don’t see these in the supermarket,” someone said. For good reason as it turned out, since our enormous produce tasted woody and bitter. It couldn’t be sold and could barely be eaten. But we did eat it, at nearly every meal. We grew a field of beans but never quite figured out how to get the rocks out of the crop. We spread blood from the nearby cattle yard to fertilize the ground, but it killed everything we’d planted. The smell of blood in the dry heat was nauseating, but I couldn’t stay away from the ground where new shoots came up radiant green against the stinking black dirt. I could see even then that there were people who could only learn things the hard way. People like us.
We’d bought a two-ton truck to haul our expected future bounty of vegetables to market and after the garden failed we cut down trees and sold firewood door to door and sometimes even used the truck to drive the kids to school when we missed the bus and the other car was broken. The truck barely fit into the school parking lot.
The adults hadn’t even wanted to send us to school but after the truancy officer drove out to visit, we had to go. I had no friends except Molly and Ben, but I liked the library and the school lunch, which was a change from the zucchini, beans, and rice we ate every day at the farm.
We often went for days at a time without toilet paper, coffee, tobacco, soap. The adults tried grinding acorns as a coffee substitute and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes made with dried sage leaves. One of the women got caught at the Lucky Supermarket stealing toilet paper and tampons. She tried to hide them under her long skirt. “You don’t understand” she said, bursting into tears. “I really need this.” The manager was so mortified he let her go.
We were poor but always full of big ideas. Someone borrowed money to buy a backhoe to dig irrigation trenches and I gave up the Christmas money I got from my grandparents to help buy gas for it. The men spent a few days with it, out in the field, practising until it broke or they got bored. From a distance the backhoe looked like a sad yellow dinosaur standing beside its nest. After a few months, it got sold and only the hole was left behind.
My other Christmas present that year had a serious worried face and a loud hungry cry. I named the little lamb Bert, after the Sesame Street character. A lamb for me, baby goats for Molly and a piglet for Ben. Bert was so small he wasn’t even weaned yet. I mixed formula in a bottle, and wondered at Bert’s strength, the way he jerked his head on his wobbly little legs to pull the milk from the bottle and how quickly he learned to recognize me from all other humans, bleating and following after me.
“Didn’t you even get any clothes for Christmas?” one of the girls in my school asked after the holidays.
“Obviously not,” another one said.
No new clothes. But Bert the lamb. And for my birthday in March an old pocket knife and nine paper matches on my carob birthday cake. Later on that spring, there were presents for all the kids: a homemade balance beam, a Shetland stallion named Hacksaw and a second-hand trampoline.
The balance beam was not entirely straight, and it splintered our bare feet. Patti C said the balance beam was like a horse; you always had to get back up after you fell. She taught us all how to point our toes as we walked, how to not look down at the rail.
This Patti was one of the founders of our old commune in Quebec. She had ideas about everything—but especially about children. She had me sucking on buttons to help correct my crooked teeth. It bothered her that I was a mouth-breather so she gave me exercises, in through the nose, out through the mouth, to help me learn how to breathe properly. Still, she had trouble fixing herself. She sometimes wore woollen gloves, even in the summer because she had a circulation disease, and she was supposed to quit smoking but she couldn’t.
The Shetland pony was Patti C’s idea too. But Hacksaw was like the truck and the backhoe and just about everything else we’d done: a mistake. He ran across the field at top speed towards any low-lying branch the minute we got on his back. We hung on as best we could since we didn’t own a saddle. When he was not trying to scrape us off his back, he was biting or kicking and when he was not doing that he was trying to jump the fence to get at the neighbour’s mare.
The neighbour said he’d shoot the pony dead before he let it mount his horse. I thought Hacksaw would probably do it anyway, even if he could have understood the risk. That’s what sex was, it seemed—something that made you tear your skin on barbed wire or forget everything else in the world. I had seen it with my own eyes, not just in the pony but in the people at the farm. I had once walked in on Patti C and Dale and she asked if I wanted to stay and watch. I said no. Sex was like a scary movie with just the monster part. I had seen my mother, too, under the moonlight during a camping trip with her boyfriend Karl, like strange animals inside their familiar bodies.
Sex made everyone crazy, not just Hacksaw. Even inside me there was a magnet that drew men in, though I couldn’t feel it, couldn’t see it. Sex was the creepy-crawly feeling of Karl’s hand on my thigh a few months later, like a wasp that could not stay away from fruit. And just like I did with wasps, I held my breath and hoped he would go away. Sex was an instinct, not good or bad, the grown-ups said. Silence was an instinct too.
Maybe people could not help themselves, maybe they were like dogs that gnawed through doors and roosters that woke with the sun and rams that battered themselves senseless. Like Hacksaw, who we finally gave away before he got himself killed.
But the trampoline—that was not like the backhoe or the balance beam or the pony. The trampoline was not a mistake.
The trampoline sat outside the front door of the house, where steps and a porch should have been. What did we trade, or give up or do without, for this? From the road, you could see us, children and adults, jumping, up and down, some of us more daring than others, our bodies flipping and turning in the air.
At school a popular recess activity was to invent stories that began with “the bad news is …”
The bad news is your plane is crashing.
After the bad news is the good news.
The good news is there’s a parachute.
The trampoline was pleasure mixed with the familiar pins-and-needles feeling of fear at the very bottoms of my feet. The fear of bouncing too high, of never coming back down, or coming down in the wrong place. But I loved the breeze that my body created as I move up and down, and the way this was close as I could ever come to being weightless.
The bad news was it happened again.
The good news was it wouldn’t anymore. Because now I knew. Not to go to my mother’s bed if I had a bad dream, and not to get left alone with him. Now I knew.
Every time I got on the trampoline, I played this game in some variation, the good news and the bad news wrapped inside every muscle of my body, the ones that pushed me higher, and the ones that braced me as I came down.
The good news was that after a year of living alone in Montreal my sister had come to California.
The bad news was everyone else was leaving because the commune was falling apart.
Some people, like my father, gave up on the commune and others formed a plan to send a group of people to work in Los Angeles and send the money back to the farm. But after a while it became clear they weren’t coming back either. The phone got cut off and my sixteen-year-old sister spent three days in a local jail, picked up for underage hitchhiking until finally the sheriff drove out to let my mother know.
My father wrote from Montreal:
Hello and how are you? From what I can gather, it looks as if you’ll have to leave the farm in the near future. It’s not unexpected, but I suppose it’ll be quite a shock, I don’t know what plans you have made, or if you’ve eve
n started to make them. You know, of course, that you could stay with me for as long as you wish. You could also visit my parents in Milwaukee (they’d be thrilled) stay with your mother or (probably) do something with somebody in Seattle. It must be amazing to be nine years old and have so many options.
So many options, so many choices. I could live anywhere I wanted. But it was another story for Bert. There was only one place for him to go.
I was running down Hooker Creek Road with Bert, running just as fast as we could go, but it took my mother and Karl only seconds to catch up to us in his big white van.
It was pure reflex, running—it was the smallest and most useless of gestures. Even as I did it I knew that if I’d really wanted to save Bert, I could have seen this coming, I could have left with him in the middle of the night, instead of bolting down the road at a dead run in broad daylight. Bert, who kept pinning me to the wall, charging me in the yard, knocking me flat, Bert who was teaching me the hard way that I was his whole world, Bert, another mistake. It was too late anyway. The butcher was on his way.
Maybe I thought I owed it to Bert, to love him enough to make his body useful. Maybe I was angry at him, for letting this happen to him. Or I was just hungry. Just tired of lentils and beans. Maybe I said no the first few times. But I know that one day someone made mutton and rice stew, and I said yes.
My sister wouldn’t eat Bert. She was disgusted by it, by the way we’d started to call the patties of meat in the freezer Bert burgers. My sister didn’t give a shit about trying to make the best of a bad situation. A lifetime ago she was the girl whose dolls I undressed, whose records I scratched, whose lipstick I tried on. Still, she’d forgiven me. She’d looked after me every day after school. She’d made me snacks and let me watch TV with her. She’d taken me by bus to the hospital and covered my ears whenever my parents’ fighting got too loud. She’d smelled smoke and called the fire department when the curtains caught on fire.