Light filtered over Liza’s face as she told me her stories; decay registered in wrinkles around her mouth and her eyes. She wasn’t beautiful. Not even a little bit. But she was sad, and that seemed to count for something.
I WANTED TO help her. I knew I could. Once, on my day off, I invited her to accompany me to the department store where I worked. I needed to pick up my paycheck, and she hadn’t left the house in days. To my surprise, she agreed, but she looked bad. Her hair was greasy, her clothes dirty and revealing. When she caught someone staring at her on the bus, she stared back confrontationally.
I didn’t understand how she must have felt. I was unremarkable. No one had ever stared at me.
When we walked into Meier & Frank, with its high ceilings and polished brass, my coworkers stopped to say hello, looking curiously at Liza. We headed toward the elevator, but I could tell she was nervous.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
She giggled. “I’m not supposed to be here,” she said. She twisted her hair. “I’m eighty-sixed from this place. I was caught shoplifting here.”
I said nothing, but I quickened my stride, praying that we could get to the payroll office and get out of there before we were noticed.
When we got back to the house, Liza opened another 40. “I’d really like to lose some weight,” she said.
“Do you want to get a membership at a gym with me?” I asked. “We could work out. It would be fun.”
She smiled. “Let me talk to Chad,” she said. “But that actually sounds like a good idea.”
“Great,” I said, a big grin stretching across my face. “This is going to be great!”
THE NEXT MORNING Chad handed Liza one hundred dollars. He was thrilled. On his way out the door, he stopped and smiled at me. “You’re good for her,” he said. And I finally felt good about myself. I felt noble.
Liza and I rode the bus to the gym. When we walked in, we got lost trying to find the membership desk. We wandered around the halls until an employee stopped us, “Can I help you?” she asked, staring pointedly at Liza.
For the first time, Liza didn’t stare back. She shrank.
“Where’s the membership desk?” I asked, trying to appear confident.
The woman pointed up the stairs, then walked away. I acted as if I hadn’t noticed her demeanor, but Liza’s face was crushed. The guy behind the membership desk looked surprised when I inquired about getting a membership. He stared at Liza, then at me. “We have strict membership policies,” he said.
I didn’t understand.
“No loitering,” he said. “And you need to have an address.”
It took me a moment to realize he thought Liza was homeless.
“We have an address,” I said. “We’re roommates.”
Liza spoke up. “Look, I have the money.”
He got uncomfortable. “Okay, fill out this paperwork. I’ll need to see a piece of mail and your ID.”
Liza glanced at me, ashamed. “I don’t have an ID. I lost it.”
The man behind the desk leaned forward. “You can’t get a membership without an ID,” he said.
“Why does that matter?” I asked.
He held up his hands in surrender. “I don’t make the rules.”
“Just forget it,” Liza mumbled to me. “They obviously don’t want me here, anyway.”
He nodded at me. “Do you still want the membership?”
I shook my head. On the bus ride home, Liza’s silence accused me of what I already believed. I had hurt her. Maybe I hadn’t even been trying to help. Maybe I had just wanted to make myself feel good about helping this woman who seemed broken.
When we got to the house, I went to my room, grabbed a book, and left for a coffee shop. Liza didn’t say anything when I walked out the door. I spent the rest of the afternoon drinking coffee, reading, and walking down NW Twenty-Third, looking in the store windows filled with sparkling chrome, chandeliers, and mannequins. I didn’t want to, but when dusk fell, I returned to the house. I straightened my clothes, tried to put on a casual smile, and opened the door.
Liza was sitting on the couch. Her eyes were slits, her body limp. She slurred at me, “Heey.”
I KNEW IMMEDIATELY what had happened. I went upstairs and locked the door. Soon I heard Chad come in. It was quiet for a while, but then the noise rumbled up the stairs, exploding into screams. “Where’s the money? Where is the fucking money?”
I didn’t hear Liza’s reply, just a crash. I jumped up and ran down the stairs and out the door, my heartbeat pounding in my ears, until I reached a pay phone. I called my parents collect. I was sobbing. “Mom,” I sobbed. “Mom.”
Her voice was calm. She would pay for a local hotel and be there the next day. She said not to worry about the twelve-hour drive; she and my father would drive all night. Her voice wasn’t angry or reproachful; she was relieved that I had asked for help.
When they arrived, my parents didn’t hug me. They weren’t huggers, and I had been holding that against them my entire life. Hating them for all those missed embraces, treating them as if they hadn’t loved me enough. But here they were, packing my things into their car while Liza cried. We were quick, gone in less than an hour.
Liza screamed at me on the way out, “How are we going to pay our rent?” I started to turn. I didn’t know what to say. My mother grabbed my arm. “Don’t look back,” she said. “Just don’t look back.”
My parents found me a clean studio apartment. They cosigned the lease, took me to a grocery store, and stocked my refrigerator, then took me out to dinner at a restaurant downtown. They acted as if nothing had happened, just the same as every other time I had run away, but even in the face of their generosity, I knew that I would continue to hold my mother’s temper, and my father’s reticence, against them. I didn’t know yet how to forgive.
A few months later I moved home just as impulsively as I had left, and as always, they accepted me back without judgment. I went back to college after a while. This time I was serious. By then I had learned how to manage my anxiety. I got a 4.0, I worked in the writing center, and I had professors advocating for my future. I felt that I could do anything I wanted.
Then I met Caleb.
THAT SUMMER, CALEB and I tried to make our run-down apartment into a home. We wallpapered over the wrapping-papered walls in the bathroom. The landlord fixed the short circuit in the light above the sink. We hung art and cleaned the carpets.
It was a hot summer—with temperatures exceeding 110—and we didn’t have air-conditioning. Caleb took a job painting houses and worked all day. I was only working part-time, and spent long afternoons napping on that rainbow-colored couch.
One morning I opened the door to let in some cool air before the afternoon heat arrived. A hummingbird flew in and buzzed around confusedly. It finally saw the big glass window in the corner of the living room and flew toward it. I watched the bird bang its head helplessly on the glass. It kept trying, but it didn’t learn. I reached out and gently closed its quivering body in my hands, its wings pulsing against my fingers, as fast as the heartbeat that was living inside me. I could save this bird. I walked outside, opened my hands, and the hummingbird flew away. I rested my palms on my belly, then headed back to the couch for a nap.
I baked in the harsh sunlight that fell through the same big window, and sleep came in fits. I tossed, clothes sticking to my back, and dreamed of the ghost of a woman floating in the corner of the room, in a black dress with black hair. In my dream, she looked kind of like Liza, but she also looked like me. How could I possibly have saved Liza when I hadn’t even been able to save myself?
When I woke—with the baby pressing down on my bladder—I stumbled to the bathroom in a nap daze. Once in there, I looked at the wallpaper that Caleb had so lovingly hung. I had chosen white wallpaper with ivory stripes, and the room looked brighter, cheerier, but even that wallpaper couldn’t disguise the chaos underneath. If I looked close enough, I could still see bound-up gir
l-dolls staring back at me, trapped under those clean white stripes.
5
Would I Rather?
Would I rather?
Marry Caleb?
Become a single mother?
Get married in my parents’ church, where the minister once gave a speech on how women should serve their husbands?
Be married in a field, with a ceremony performed by Caleb’s loathsome friend Cory?
Inconvenience my mother-in-law, the teacher, by setting the wedding date on a weekend before the end of the school year?
Be visibly pregnant on my wedding day?
Admit to my friends and family that I’m pregnant?
Cry alone at night?
Agree with my mother between sobs that I don’t have to go through with this?
Tell her that, yes, I do.
6
Saved
IN THE FALL the summer heat left the Boise Valley, and the evenings cooled while my belly continued to grow. Boise, the City of Trees, derives its name from the French les bois, “the woods.” When settlers discovered the Boise Valley, they found, amid the dryness of the high-country desert, a river flanked on either side by trees, green and lush amid the crackling brown hills.
Fall was Caleb’s favorite time of year. In West Virginia, his home state, the forests changed more dramatically than in Boise—yellow, orange, and gold ballooned over the hollowed-out hills, the blown-off mountaintops, and the pollutant-stained but beautiful rivers. But what Caleb loved more than the changing leaves of the forest was hunting season.
Caleb’s parents owned one hundred acres in Appalachia, and with his father’s help, Caleb had built a cabin on his family’s property that was much like the cabin he had built in Idaho City. He and his father felled the trees themselves, sanded them, and then lovingly fit the pieces together. When Caleb and I married in May, his grandmother had given me a family photo album. In it was a photo of Caleb’s immediate family sitting on the front porch of the cabin, dressed up to look like settlers: Caleb and his father in white shirts and suspenders, his mother and sister in prairie-style dresses, and Caleb with a gun in his hands—either a muzzle-loader or a rifle, I can’t remember which. Maybe it was his father who held the gun, or perhaps it was both of them. All I remember is that gun pointed upward, seemingly cocked. When I looked at that photo, I thought, I’ll never fit into that family.
THE FIRST TIME I visited West Virginia with Caleb—in the hot, humid August after our wedding—the preacher at his family’s Baptist church said to me, “So I hear that you’re going to be a working woman,” and I shrank from his disdain. The church was a simple white building, located in the hills just above Caleb’s family farm. Caleb’s family lived in a hollow, or, as the locals called it, “holler”—narrow, packed tight with greenery, and pulsing with birdsong, crickets, and the rhythmic echo of frogs.
The congregants at the church were friendly working-class people who treated me with kindness, but Caleb was beloved—one of the few residents of the holler to have ever left—and it was apparent that he was expected to move home. When I agreed to marry Caleb, I told him that I didn’t want to leave the West, that the national forests and vast blue skies were a part of my identity. He agreed and reassured me that he, too, didn’t want to leave. Still, it was evident at that church that they had other plans for him.
During the service, the preacher asked everyone in the congregation to close their eyes. He then instructed us to consider whether we were saved, and whether we had ever gone to the front of the church to offer testimony. I wasn’t even sure what “testimony” meant. Lutherans were private; we only went to the front of the church for communion. Later, when I asked my mother what it meant to be saved, she said merely, “Don’t listen to them. You were saved when you were baptized as a baby.”
The preacher told everyone who had already offered testimony to keep their eyes closed and raise their hands. He then said, “If your hand isn’t raised, then open your eyes.” I opened my eyes, and he stood before me, in front of three simple wooden crosses. “If your eyes are open, then this is your chance to come to the front,” he boomed, his eyes on me.
I looked around me. I was surrounded by people shaking, eyes pressed tightly closed, hands held up with urgency. Caleb sat next to me, eyes also open—hands in his lap—and I realized the preacher was staring at both of us. Caleb stared back, defiant, angry.
Finally, a man broke the silence and rushed to the pulpit, weeping. He fell to his knees, and the preacher put his hands on his shoulders, called him “brother.” I shrank into my seat. Caleb reached over and squeezed my hand, then wound his fingers into mine.
WHEN FALL ARRIVED in Boise, only a couple of months after that day in church, I was in my third trimester of pregnancy. I didn’t have the energy to do very much, but Caleb nurtured me so well. He grew to love cooking, especially slow cooking, and he would simmer meals on the stove all afternoon—soups like white bean stew, or roasted tomato—accompanied by crunchy baguettes and spinach salads. When we met, he had been a picky eater who lived off McDonald’s and venison, but he had transformed his diet for me. If I had a yen for something, he made it for me. He was the most indulgent man I had ever met. He rubbed my tight shoulders, massaged my feet. At night he curled his body to mine, held his hand on my stomach. He leaned in and spoke to the baby when my skin stretched and moved outward in the shape of a tiny foot.
OUR LANDLORD SOLD our apartment out from underneath us, and we were forced to move, but that was a blessing. It gave me a reason to ask my parents for help. As they always had before, they helped us move into a smaller but cleaner apartment, and they generously supplemented our monthly income, so that we could afford the slightly higher rent. In the new place, with clean paint, wooden floors, and a room across the hall that was perfectly sized for a nursery, I no longer felt scared.
CALEB WANTED TO go hunting before the baby came. One Sunday afternoon, he asked me to ride with him while he drove into the mountains and scouted for elk. He put his muzzle-loader into the back of my Isuzu Trooper—just in case he saw anything—and we drove toward Idaho City, rain drizzling on the car, then turned off the highway onto a forest service road that wound deep into the mountains. As we drove deeper and deeper into the forest, I realized that we were nearing Atlanta, Idaho, where I’d been with another man, Greg, the sociologist who was the first man I had ever loved.
I WAS TWENTY-TWO years old, and he was thirty-three. Greg, who was working on his PhD dissertation, strongly believed the West could be saved by timber. Trees Are the Answer! was the title of a book he gave to my father. He was brilliant—the only person I’d ever met who earned a perfect score on his SAT but still listened to the Magnetic Fields and Stereolab—and I was mesmerized by his intelligence. Greg came from wealth, but was researching the few remaining Idaho sawmills. Greg was a man torn between the world of privilege he was raised in and the working-class world he was researching. He was torn so passionately that it drove him to drink.
GREG AND I needed to set up camp, but first we decided to stop at the local bar. We walked up to the screen door, and a large dreamcatcher covered in some kind of white fur—coyote, maybe—blew in the wind. I pushed through the door, and the din of conversation stopped. Everyone was looking at us. I looked around. The cabin seemed to be one part tavern, one part café, and one part grocery/knickknack store.
Greg and I grabbed a couple of wooden stools at the bar, and the bartender sized us up. We both ordered gin and tonics, and as she handed us our drinks, I caught a glimpse of a friendly but reserved smile. The man sitting to the left of me was drunk. Really drunk. As I looked around, it seemed that everyone in the bar was: bodies swayed back and forth, Bud Lights gripped in their hands. The man leaned over to me, with browning teeth and stale breath, and began to complain about the “forest circus.” I told him that my father worked for the forest service and braced myself for a tirade as he reeled back in disgust, but Greg leaned over and soothed him. “I
t’s okay, man, her father is old-school forest service. They were a whole different breed back then.”
The bartender leaned over to the man and said affectionately, “Stop bothering these nice people, Frank. You know as well as anybody that you’re full of shit.”
A woman at the end of the bar, who had been eyeing Greg, leaned over and slurred, “You two are both full of shit, ya know? Who cares, anyway? I just want another drink. Why don’t we all do a shot?”
Meanwhile, the bartender was pulling something very slimy and soft out of a jar. I caught a glimpse of a dirty label that read “Pickled Turkey Giblets.” She threw it on a plastic plate, stuck a plastic fork in it, and pushed it over to the woman.
“Here, eat this, honey,” she said. I flinched when I realized that this would be the woman’s dinner. As I watched the woman slice through the giblet with her knife, I felt an ache in my chest.
There are women who succeed at life in the West, who eat oatmeal in the morning, do yoga while the sun rises, and then take the dogs for a hike in the hills. And then there are the women who fail, who make a drink for breakfast, who never see outside the dark paneling of a bar, and who actually enjoy a meal that consists of pickled giblets. I was beginning to fear that I was headed toward the latter. My eyes connected with Greg’s, and he looked like he was going to gag. He motioned me to get up.
GREG AND I finally escaped and headed up the road to make camp near the hot springs. Greg went to elaborate lengths to create a tentlike construction out of the back of the truck that would allow us to view the stars, while protecting us from the rain. I laughed because I knew that he was drunk, and being ridiculous. My laughter made him happy, and he hugged me hard, his first sign of real affection all day. We walked down the road to the springs and swam, kissed, and laughed. He took a picture of me in front of the Sawtooth peaks, and I was very happy in it, full of love.
Goodbye, Sweet Girl Page 6