by Judy Blunt
The clerks watched, squinty-eyed as we strolled from the bins of plastic cows to the racks of penny candy, touching and comparing, arguing the benefit of owning this toy or that in fierce whispers, and as the afternoon dragged by, often we'd be told to buy something or leave. We always obeyed politely, either making a dime purchase and resuming our shopping, much to the clerk's exasperation, or trotting up the street to read comics at the GN Hotel's newsstand until it felt safe to go back. It only took.ten or fifteen minutes to get run out of there unless we laid out ten cents for the adventures of Uncle Scrooge or Superman.
I was a good-sized kid before it occurred to me that our shopping habits were odd by town standards. One afternoon a clerk grabbed my arm as I was leaving the store and demanded to look in my red patent-plastic purse. There was nothing in it that didn't belong there, but I'd earned a lecture punctuated by little shakes that made my head bob. I'd been in the store for a solid hour, picking things up, carrying them around, putting them back when something else caught my eye, clicking my purse open and shut to count pennies and nickels against the price tags. "You can't do that or people will think you're stealing," the clerk said. The fierce edge of her voice made customers turn and look, and I walked out with my face flaming. My mother was a force in her own right, and likely had I told her about the encounter she would have taken Ben Franklin's door off its hinges on her way in to straighten out the misunderstanding. But there was a chance, equally likely, I thought, that she would pierce me with her own suspicious look and side with the clerk. I kept quiet. It took me years to grow old enough and bold enough to try shoplifting, but eventually I got even with a pocketful of Bazooka bubble gum.
Town kids, especially teenagers, were mostly invisible during these daytime excursions. I had no sense of Malta outside the two-block-square business district, no sense of the world beyond Malta. The nearest cities of any size, Great Falls and Billings, lay an eight-hour round-trip from the ranch, and I would not visit these places until I was grown. Dad traveled alone to Havre or Glasgow for repairs or livestock sales, though Mom rode along more frequently as we grew older, but for the four of us still at home, venturing beyond the county line was an event that didn't happen every year.
My story would not happen in this age of VCRs and satellite dishes, computers and CD-ROMs. Self-contained ranch communities still exist out here, insulated by the same layers of prairie and miles of dirt road, but today the world comes to them. Their mail is delivered on the rural route three times a week instead of once, which makes a subscription to a daily newspaper more practical. An FM radio station gives the local news right out of Malta. Today it's hard to imagine any child growing up so ignorant of her own world.
The Sunday before my first day of high school, I sat on the edge of the double bed, testing the springs with slow bounces. At thirteen, I could add a year or two to my age without raising eyebrows. A big, rawboned kid, my mother would say, though she stopped short of words like "chubby." I had written my first check of sixty dollars for room and board and signed with a flourish, carefully deducting the amount and balancing the register as my mother had taught me to do. One hundred minus sixty equals forty was also the balance of my math skills, but that hardly mattered to me. I had ten dollars a week left over for school supplies and spending money, riches beyond belief. I had privacy for the first time in my life, and in a room that "went"—the carpet went with the curtains, the curtains went with the bedspread. The blond furniture all matched and glowed with polish under embroidered dresser scarves. The windows faced north and east, two quiet streets on the south end of town.
A few decades earlier, I might have stayed in a special boardinghouse kept for rural kids, a dormitory-type arrangement for rural families before there were school buses, paved roads and snowplows. High school students from the most isolated regions were on their own by my generation, and we joined a long tradition of country kids forced to "batch or board" to attend high school—students who batched set up bachelor housekeeping in rented shacks, while boarders rented rooms with meals. The nearest school buses ran along Highway 191, thirty hard, gumbo miles north of our place, an impractical commute. The school made no provision for the students outside its district aside from a minimal mileage payment for transportation, and each family made its own arrangement. Some moms moved to town with their children, some placed their high school kids with town relatives. In some enviable cases, parents with several kids attending rented whole houses for their kids to share. With no family resources to fall back on my first couple of years, we shopped the list of widowed ladies and struggling families who advertised for boarders.
My landlady, Mrs. Crowder, had cleared the linens from three drawers in the mirrored dresser, and in one I arranged a small stack of new underwear, a slip, a nightgown and a sweater. After-school clothes, the jeans and old shirts, filled another, leaving the top drawer for sundry treasures. Her winter coats had been pushed together in the closet to clear space, and there I hung the four new outfits my mother and I had sewn over the summer. Beneath them a pair of sensible "go with anything" shoes awaited my first steps into the halls of Malta High.
Mrs. Crowder had taken time to show me how to work our shared bath before she left for her shift at the nursing home, and that evening I stood under the spray of my first shower feeling terribly worldly The house rules were easy. I was not allowed in the basement, where my brother Kenny shared a room with another country boy, nor were they allowed in my room upstairs. I was in charge of making my own bed, cleaning the bathroom after I used it and fixing my own breakfast and lunch. My laundry would go with me to the ranch on weekends. Supper was at six.
I was far more prepared to enter the adult community at that point than I was to join the freshman class of '68. I'd gone eight years to a one-room school with no other child my age since second grade. Most years that I attended rural school, I saw only siblings and a familiar handful of neighbor kids— never more than ten students in first through eighth grades. Now I took my place at the tail end of the baby boom with nearly seventy classmates gathered from all over Phillips County. The whole process beggared my imagination. How did school work when you had more than one teacher, more than one classroom, all those kids? Bells rang, I knew that much, but did everyone just know where to go? Did they move from class to class in groups or alone? Wouldn't it be more logical if the students stayed put and the teachers simply changed rooms? "You'll figure it out," Kenny said. "Everybody figures it out." And he was right. That was the easy part.
The suit I smoothed out on the bedside chair that evening featured a gray knit A-line skirt, shaped more like an H than an A in deference to my waistline, and hemmed to modestly cap my knees. With this went a tailored western-style vest of the same gray knit and a white long-sleeved blouse with flat-felled seams and a round Peter Pan collar. A three-piecer, I thought, dressy enough for the first day but not too showy if I left off the rhinestone pendant. I didn't want to call attention to myself. A pair of white knee socks completed the ensemble, but I wondered if I should wear my lone pair of suntan-colored nylons instead. I studied my freshly showered legs for a long moment, trying to decide.
I'd spent the end of the summer stacking bales in the mosquito-ridden hayfields, and with the frequent exception of bruises and scratches, my legs were bone white. Knee socks it was, I thought. I pulled the new socks from their drawer and tugged them on, folding down the tops neatly to study the effect. The effect was startling. The flat grayish whorls of my knees stood out above the snowy cuffs, the skin as dry as a weathered board, untouched by lotion since babyhood. Spots of thickened red callus puffed my inner knees where they had rubbed against the saddle. A tickle of fear raced through my stomach. I couldn't believe I hadn't noticed them before.
I stepped into the skirt, slid it over my hips with panicky little jerks and studied the gap between sock and hem. Horrors. Half-lidded by the skirt, my knees peered out with the dull glare of a bored rhinoceros. With sudden inspiration I
unfolded the top cuff and pulled it snugly over my kneecaps, stretching the socks up under my skirt as high as they would go. Standing on the bed, I pivoted back and forth in front of the dresser mirror, looking at my fuzzy white legs from all angles. Not a speck of skin showed. Perfect. There was nothing I couldn't figure out.
That night as I laid out my clothes and prepared for the next day, I imagined myself as a character in a novel, the young woman who leaves home to start a new life. I had closed the door on my ranch self, embarrassed now for that sullen, angry child, and wanted nothing more than to join the middle of the pack. For one night I allowed myself the luxury of imagining the students and teachers I would meet, what they might say to me, how I might answer. I drew on scenes from 4-H camp, the three days I spent each summer in the Bear Paw Mountains, where adult leaders taught us to "mix" with other bashful country kids. The rest I gleaned from books. In novels, pretending to be something you weren't was a red flag for trouble, causing no end of grief for the hero or heroine. No matter what, I vowed solemnly, I'll just be myself.
My parents had left for home in the late afternoon, and I watched with interest the way evening came on in this new place, the sun falling behind big elm trees a block away instead of behind mountains a hundred miles distant. Shadows streaked across the pale sidewalks and merged in a jumble of shapes, houses overlapping trees bleeding into fences. I absorbed it all with a thrill of excitement. Town had always been a destination, a place at the other end of the road. Now I was part of it. The distance felt different from this end, like a cushion of fresh air between me and the community that had watched me grow up. I was free, out from under and accountable to no one. The last part was a secret. Our parents hadn't driven away without exacting my big brother's promise to take care of me and show me the ropes.
Standing in Mrs. Crowder's kitchen, Kenny had punctuated Mom's orders with stoic little nods. I grinned, enjoying his show of composure, the warning glances he flicked in my direction. He had fought his way to acceptance like most ranch boys, first with his fists and later with hard work. At the start of his junior year he was looking forward to reclaiming a steady girlfriend and the circle of friends he left behind during summer vacations. He'd made himself clear. If I got into real trouble he'd listen, but I would not be walking to school with him or collaring him in the hallways to ask questions. In fact, I was to avoid him as much as it was humanly possible to do and still live in the same house. Same goes, I told him archly, and the deal was struck.
That Sunday he ushered our parents out onto the stoop, but Mom hadn't finished yet. She leveled at him, stepping closer, her eyes tense under the dark brows. A no-bullshit face. The act fell away, and Kenny braced, no doubt imagining the worst—trailing this pudgy, graceless sister by the hand from class to class the first few days, or, God forbid, escorting her to a social event. The directive, when it came, seemed to relieve him as much as it surprised me. Kenny's head wagged a stern "no way." He would not, he agreed, for any reason, under any circumstances, call me Hog Jowls, a name he'd gleaned from an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies and bestowed upon me a year previous, nor its derivative, Jog Howls, which he'd made up himself when the buzz wore off the first.
Huh, I thought as I baled my pin curl perm into haphazard rows with snap-together pink rollers and practiced making a mouth with the slick ruby lipstick I'd lifted from my mother's collection of Avon samples. What's the big deal about a nickname?
I found my way to school the next morning, found my way to the auditorium for the first-day assembly, found my way to my first classes and by midmorning had found my way to the rest room. Girls bubbled and squealed around the short row of sinks, pivoting on one heel to catch the swirl of pleated miniskirt over jutting hipbone, pouting white frosted lips toward the mirror for touch-up. Wide-toothed combs floated down streams of silky hair. I crouched against the door of one gun-metal-gray stall like a cat on strange ground and took quick inventory of the odd-looking fixtures—a toilet with no tank, the flush handle jutting from a pipe on the back wall, nowhere to set my books. A chrome box with a lock hung from the stall at waist height, and sliding my hand to the bottom I found not a roll of paper but a slot that begrudged a few tiny squares of tissue. With these I scrubbed at my mouth, dropping the obscene scarlet smear into the bowl, then sat on the seat and shifted my books to my lap so I could tug up my wilting knee socks. They drooped down my shins when I stood, the elastic panel at the top stretched too far out of shape to spring back. I took a deep breath that threatened to catch and never come out. Next time I would know. Next time, next time, next time. I followed my heartbeat out the door, looking neither left nor right, and into the march of the hallway, shouts of greeting capped by the tin-slam-crash of locker doors, and the steady drumroll of feet pounding up and down the stairs to class. It was not quite noon, and I was exhausted.
If I opened a book the first two weeks of school, I don't remember, for it took me that long to learn to filter out noise and shield myself from the distraction of people, bodies pressing around me, movement always at the corner of my eye. I'd grown up learning to listen, straining to measure sound against the silence of open space. There, where the landscape repeated itself for miles in all directions, even everyday sounds meant something. A bull's high-pitched challenge drifting in from the wrong direction told us a fence was down; the honk of a car horn meant trouble, a call to come. We knew the sound of a rig turning off the main road, the pitch of a strange motor, the growl of our own pickup pulling in for dinner. When our dog barked at night, Dad got his rifle and followed the ruckus to the skunk in the chicken house.
Town seemed bursting with noise for the sake of noise. There was no stillness, no quiet place to sit and hear the wind sifting through dry grass, and it was this more than the odd taste of bleach in the tap water, more than the stuffy smell of too many cars in the air, that left me raw and shaky at the end of the day. The first few weeks I slept at the edge of my bed, waking instantly at the murmur of voices on the sidewalk outside, the whir of passing cars, and a veritable torment of bored dogs that yapped at the moon or each other or nothing at all.
During school hours, I studied the town kids with an eye to becoming one. Boys were no surprise, I thought, just like boys everywhere, loud, strutty fellows who wrestled and ran and punched arms. But the girls who caught my envy were nothing like the stolid little citizens at 4-H camp. These were giggle-at-boys, squeal-at-anything girls who leaped in pointy-toed circles and clapped their hands to show excitement. They sashayed. They screamed in fear of all God's creatures smaller than a cat, swooping birds included. Where I came from, running from anything as stupid as a bug would have inspired weeks of sibling ridicule, months of having the same or a similar species dropped down your shirt. Fear was a weakness to be overcome, or at least hidden behind a calm gaze. Even a grown man could admit that salamanders, what we called mud puppies, gave him the willies, but he surely wouldn't jump when he saw one. He could be "leery" of things like lightning, especially if he'd been struck before, and folks would accept his caution. But the word "fear" was seldom heard except in its benign form, the way you'd say, "I'm afraid the 'hoppers got the wheat at the Picotte place."
My father couldn't abide a snake, but he did not teach us to run from rattlesnakes we encountered in the hayfields or along the road when we were walking home from school. Instead of fear, he had something called "a healthy respect," and that was what we learned. This was not a live-and-let-live respect for the snake as a fellow creature but the nod of recognition one gives a potentially dangerous adversary. From observing the deed a hundred times, we learned to kill rattlers without risking our own skin. Outside and afoot, we watched and listened automatically, alert when turning new bales of hay to check the twine a second before our hands descended. Snakes tunneled under the windrows after mice and were sometimes baled up in the hay, their thick coils held fast by the twine, still alive and squirming days later.
Being kids, we crossed over the line a
few times, erring toward that lack of healthy respect called "being stupid" or "not having a lick of sense." Gathering cattle one afternoon, Dad spotted Gary and me off our horses and rode over to see what had happened. The two of us squatted amid the sagebrush at the entrance to a badger's den, a burrow nearly a foot wide dug between two half-buried boulders, holding our reins in one hand. We were deciding which of us would grab the buzzing tail protruding from the hole, the only part of the snake we could see, and which would stand ready with a few rocks to kill it when it came free. We had already agreed to share the rattles, a trophy displayed button-down in the hatband. Our eyes were on the prize. We didn't think about where the head might be in that wide, dark hole until our father skidded up and bailed off his horse to grab us and pull us back. We thought about nothing else for a long while after.
I discovered in those first weeks of high school that town-style fear was the one reaction I could not fake. On weekends I practiced as I reined my new colt, Sunny, along trails farthest from the buildings. The face I could do, big eyes and a wide O mouth, but any clear, piercing scream I launched fought its way past three generations of constraint and emerged with the caution of a June rabbit. The best I could muster was a frantic, low-pitched groaning that made my green horse bunch up and walk flat-eared and stiff-legged until I ran out of wind. No good at being scared, I had to go with fearless. In biology class, I sliced into the corpses of earthworms and. crayfish with exaggerated gusto, while real girls dropped their scalpels and cringed. Boys competed for the privilege of being their lab partners.
"How can you do that?" A voice on the tinny edge of hysteria would pierce my concentration as I sawed around in the smelly innards of a perch. "Gawd, I'd just die first." Like the screams, this language of exaggerated postures and eye rolls, flirting and tiny foot stamping compared to nothing I knew. Not letting on, that's what I knew, not showing your insides on the outside. But here, the emotions stepped on each other getting out, lavish with arm-flinging excess. The very melodrama of my peers fascinated me. I watched and listened, learning to read this new language with speed and accuracy, though in my heart I knew I would never speak it.