[2020] The Third Rainbow Girl

by Emma Copley Eisenberg

  I woke to the sensation of the sheets moving, and the blanket being lifted.

  Can I sleep here with you? Jesse asked.

  Okay, I said, and turned away from him onto my side. I fell asleep again. I woke.

  Sweetie, he said. It was the name my mom had called me as a child. Jesse ran his hand down my arm, then onto my hip and thigh.

  I just want to sleep, I said.

  Come on, he said.

  We continued. An hour, two. I’d fall asleep, wake, say something neither encouraging nor clearly rejecting, fall asleep again. Eventually, the sun was nearly up, and the attic filled with heat.

  I had power in that moment, and I didn’t. Jesse had power in that moment, and he didn’t. I wanted to want to have sex with him—I liked spending time with him and being in community with him and getting to sit in his house with his friends and his music, and I knew that sex with me would make him feel good, physically and generally—but I did not want to have sex with him. I looked through the window to Jesse’s back field and the mountains beyond it and knew already that I was bound to this place with a ferocity I had no words for and that I likely would be all my life. I could hear our friends downstairs already, clinking spoons in coffee cups. Someone, the Chef maybe, turned on the boom box releasing rock music, fast and bright.

  Jesse’s hand moved lower. Come on, he said again.

  “When you are twenty-two or twenty-three,” writes Joan Didion, “you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs.”

  2

  THE GIRLS OF MOUNTAIN VIEWS were disappearing. One week they were there at Tuesday night tutoring, and the next they weren’t. I’d see them at the Marathon gas station getting into a Chevy S-10 with a bear dog rack in the bed and a guy with a beard in the driver’s seat. I’d see them at Rite Aid, adorned in that franchise’s signature blue vest, in the middle of the day. Or I wouldn’t see them for months, and then I’d catch sight of them in a group of bodies by the low-water bridge, stomping an empty beer can into a disc, as I drove home from some party of my own.

  What happened to Tina? I’d ask. To Cecilia? To Heather? To Ashley?

  The other girls would shrug. Haven’t seen her in school, they’d say.

  Feeling this specter of loss, I felt myself clutching at the girls who continued coming to our programs ever more tightly. I wanted the red-haired girl to answer the math problems I gave her. She could do them, I knew, so why wouldn’t she?

  Come on, I said, one Tuesday night, then repeated the phrase.

  I don’t want to, she said finally.

  Why?

  You make me feel dumb, she said. No one’s ever made me feel like that before.

  My whole body felt jerked; I flushed and flubbed out a sorry reply. But later that night, I drove faster than I’d ever driven to Jesse’s house, flooring the gas along the straight stretch of 219 just to see if I could.

  I kept going to Tuesday night music nights at Jesse’s house, and Jesse and I went to other parties too—parties at the low-water bridge, parties at his cousin’s house, parties in the woods. At one such party, there was a metal band who wore black T-shirts with neon green writing and wore glow-in-the-dark necklaces. Jesse got two paint buckets from a nearby basement and set them on the ground for us to use as seats. I told him I was queer and that my most recent relationship had been with a woman. That’s cool, he said. He asked me what kind of girls I liked. I told him. He held my hand. He broke open one of the necklaces and rubbed the glowing chemical liquid between his finger tips. When it began to rain, we ran to my truck with its snug-fitting camper shell. In the muddy field, we maneuvered Jesse’s bass out of the truck bed and into the cab. It fit, except for the bass’s curled head and tuning pegs, which Jesse covered with plastic bags and cranked the driver’s-side window up to hold them in place. The sound the rain made on the aluminum camper top, as Jesse and I lay inches underneath, was tremendous. It can’t possibly rain any harder, I thought, and then it did.

  But the best parties were always at the Homeplace, a big square house where Jesse’s uncle Don had grown up. Fourth of July fireworks, Labor Day picnics, birthday Scrabble parties. Always there was pepper jelly and hugs and croquet; always there was the music. I brought my banjo but, afraid to bring it into the Homeplace, usually left it in my car. Eventually Don spotted it and began cajoling me to play. He wanted me to learn and wanted me to play it well. You have good rhythm, he told me at one of those parties, when I was strumming along quietly and trying to catch the chords being played. Come by the house sometime, and I’ll teach you a few things.

  I did, and he did. He told me how there was a very small canon of music he considered “real” bluegrass—Bill Monroe, Ralph and Carter Stanley, Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt, also known as the Foggy Mountain Boys, end of list—and how he had learned to play bluegrass by listening to Flatt and Scruggs on the radio during the years his family had been forced to leave Pocahontas County to find work. Later I would learn that this had also been the way of so many of the musicians—the Stanley Brothers chief among them—he considered real.

  I had gone to some parties at the Homeplace before as Sam’s tenant and friend, but now I came with Jesse as his girlfriend. Family members smiled at us, patted my knee, made comments about what it would be like when Jesse and I married, and I let their comments, sometimes made in front of Jesse himself, stand without correction, though I knew such a thing would never come to pass. These were acts of cowardice, and they were acts of cruelty. I felt for once in my life that I’d been taken into something more than a family—this was a clan; this was a tribe. If we can give back real meaning to the word, instead of its general usage as a platitude, this was a community—to make common, to share. Yet my membership in it felt predicated on me being Jesse’s girlfriend and on me performing that role in specific ways.

  Jesse’s favorite song, his trademark and the one that the other men would look to him to sing, was “It’s Just the Night” by the Del McCoury Band. Jesse had a good voice made for bluegrass, tenor and nasal, but he was shy about using it; it usually took him several beers to get there. Once at a party, when everyone else was calling for him to sing and he was demurring, the wife of one of the other musicians leaned over to me and said, “He hasn’t got good confidence, does he?” “No,” I said, “not too good, I don’t think.” “Aw well,” she responded. “My husband used to be the same way, but he’s better when I’m here. That’s what we women are for.” I said nothing, a thing I’d found myself doing more and more in moments when I felt judgment or fear or sadness surging up against my own discomfort and shame that I was feeling those things in the first place. I remembered the words I’d read in college about not imposing your own culture and values on a different place.

  My membership in this community I loved now also came to feel predicated on sex. I know that I had to get very drunk to have sex with Jesse, but I did have sex with Jesse, most nights, for about five months. This was not something that Jesse did to me, nor something I did to him, but a complicated stew of both of our fumbling actions and ambivalent needs. Alcohol came to be like the third member of our relationship, the center crux without which our connection would have shattered. In her report back from the field on the ways alcohol abuse and sex became intertwined for her, Sarah Hepola writes that the consent issues at stake in these moments are anything but simple. “I knew why the women writing on these issues didn’t want to acknowledge gray zones. Gray zones were what the other side pounced on to gain ground,” she writes. “Activism may defy nuance, but sex demands it. Sex was a complicated bargain to me. It was chase, and it was hunt. It was hide-and-seek, clash and surrender, and the pendulum could swing inside my brain all night: I will, no I won’t; I should, no I can’t. My consent battle was in me.”

  Jesse and I saw each other alone now and on nights other than Tuesdays, sometimes at his grandmother’s house, sometimes at my house on Droop Mountain. He’d fix me a drink,
and we’d watch a little television, and then I’d fix myself another drink. He would take off his shoes and line them up neatly at the foot of his bed, then his shirt and pants, and hop into bed. “Sweetie,” he’d say, pushing the hair away from my ears. I made sure all the lights were off, and in the dark, he touched me the way I liked to be touched. Sometimes it was a great relief not to be seen, to pretend to be just a body devoid of any feeling but nerve sensation, a pink plastic skin made up of nothing but breasts and air.

  I felt caught in a bind—I wanted to belong to a place, really and truly, for the first time in my life, but I felt that these nights with Jesse were the tax I paid for it. I never told Jesse this. There were many other things we did not speak about. I had a credit card that I could swipe anytime I wished and fly away from there. I had a four-year education and a privileged upbringing in New York. Jesse would not have called himself poor, and I don’t think I would either—he always had the cash he needed—but I know he thought and worried about work and money most days that he was alive. Neither of us had what wider America would consider real jobs, but for me this was a choice.

  There was another way to belong to this community: to do the job I was brought there to do, to “alleviate poverty” as per AmeriCorps VISTA’s proclaimed mission, and to do so via “empowering” the girls of Mountain Views, but I was failing at it. I could not empower myself, and yet I was expected to be a role model for others, for girls from a completely different context. The Director seemed to have endless confidence in me to do everything from organize a meeting with parents to talk about college access to set up and staff a community drop-in center for youth, and sometimes her confidence did lift me and give me strange and magical fortitude. There were moments of triumph—a full sign-in sheet of names and phone numbers of parents who wanted to talk more about how to fill out the FAFSA—and there were nights at Mountain Views when I was able to sit down at a long table of teenage girls and be that person for them, a powerful adult woman with hope in her heart and wild laughs in her stomach.

  The red-haired girl did eventually stop coming to Tuesday night tutoring, too, but she did not disappear. She lived with her family in a trailer just down 219 from the schoolhouse where I lived, so I’d see her each day as I drove past their house on my way to work and again as I drove home. Sometimes she would be jumping on the trampoline that sat in their yard or riding a four-wheeler with her sisters. Nothing seemed wrong. And yet, when she’d wave to me as I drove past, something felt wrong.

  Then one day I saw her gun the four-wheeler toward a pile of extra doors and drywall her dad was using to build an addition on their house and lean into the crash, her eyes still open, and I realized what was wrong, if you can call a sensible response to a senseless state of affairs wrong. She was enraged, I think. Enraged at me and at Mountain Views and at her family and the whole town, that whole swath of land, at a state of affairs in which she had a few different options, but none of them seemed liable to give her a good outcome.

  I was getting better at the music, but I still wasn’t good. I learned to watch the Chef’s fingers move over his guitar’s neck and learned to take my chord from him. Jesse was always kind to me, asking if I needed help following the chords and encouraging me to take my banjo out of its green case and play it. But often, and especially later in the night as we all got drunker, I mostly sat and watched the men play.

  I thought I was being respectful of the bonds these men had built and their artistic process—after all, these nights were ostensibly band practice, for Jesse’s band was booked every now and then to play at a festival or anniversary party. Intimacy with women is my literal lifeblood now, but even though I worked with women and girls all day, it was hard for me then. The only kind of closeness I saw was closeness between men, and I wanted to be inside it.

  I see now how much of my free time “and a great amount of time that was not free,” as the writer Claire Vaye Watkins puts it, I spent prizing the movements of men over those of women, and how much time I spent watching men do stuff that I could have spent moving my hands or my mouth or getting to know the Chef’s girlfriend.

  I’m so bored, the Chef’s girlfriend said to me one night when we were the only two women in the room. Aren’t you? She motioned me to follow her outside and pointed to the sky. She taught me constellations beyond the Big and Little Dipper, and told me how she and the Chef had met—in a college poetry class—and why they had never bothered to marry until now—who cares? But even then, I was itching to get back inside.

  Peter and Ruth split; the blond banjo player and the VISTA girl he had been dating split. The blond banjo player had a special love for the word “faggot,” and one night I got fed up or brave enough to say something about it. We had what I thought was a tough, deep, good conversation about it on the screened-in porch of Jesse’s grandmother’s house, me on a wicker chair and him sitting in the doorway, smoking into the night. Why can’t I say “fag” if hatred isn’t what I mean? he asked. You just can’t, I said. The word carries so much pain. I get it, he said. I won’t say it ever again. He was mostly true to his word. Then one night he wasn’t. Uh-oh, he said, laughing, when he saw my face.

  I got a part in the county play that required me to kiss another actor onstage, and when Jesse and his friends came to see it, they got loud during and riled up afterward, pointing at my costar and yelling at Jesse to “simmer down” and “let it go—he isn’t worth it.” For his part, Jesse didn’t seem to care much, but the message from his friends was clear: Jesse owned me.

  The mandolin player looked roughly at my body but wouldn’t meet my eyes. One night at my house, the beige phone clanged, and it was for Jesse. It was the man who booked shows up at Snowshoe Mountain, asking after Jesse and his band. They would put him and the band up overnight, the guy said, plus dinner, drinks, whatever.

  The day of the show was sunny and clear, one of the first bright days of summer when you can sit outside without a jacket, and everyone looked rumpled and surprised at their own bodies. The guys—Jesse on bass, the mandolin player, Jesse’s cousin on banjo, and the Chef on guitar—took the stage.

  Don’t they look handsome?, Jesse’s mom leaned over to me and said. They did. I felt a twinge of pride, a good feeling that spread knowing that Jesse, a person I loved in my way, though the exact nature of that love was unclear, was doing the thing he loved most in the world.

  The mandolin player and the Chef switched off singing lead, but the mandolin player did most of the banter between songs. He called Jesse up to sing, “It’s Just the Night,” and after introducing Jesse to the crowd, he leaned into the microphone: Now, don’t embarrass this guy, okay, because his girlfriend is here today, the mandolin player said. He’s never had a girlfriend before, so it’s extra important. That’s her, right back there. The mandolin player pointed at me then and kept his index finger in the air, and though surely they did not, in my memory all three hundred people seated in lawn chairs turned to look at me. Isn’t she pretty?, the mandolin player asked. And then they played.

  That night after dinner, the band, minus the Chef, who had gone home with his girlfriend, and I went to our hotel. I’d wanted to go home, but Jesse had asked me very sincerely to stay; he was on a high after the day, I think, and wanted to hold my hand all afternoon and I cared for him and wanted him to be well. We sat around the white box room drinking for a while and telling jokes. It was fun at first, then less so. The mandolin player stumbled into the bathroom, then stumbled out of it. He made a joke, I think, something about wondering what kind of underwear I wore and how only Jesse would know the answer. I went into the room where I thought Jesse and I were to sleep, then closed the door. Soon Jesse was there too, and we lay together in bed with our clothes on, just talking over the day.

  The mandolin player began to pound on the door. His speech was slurred.

  What’s he saying? I asked Jesse.

  Ignore him, Jesse said, rolling onto his back.

  But the poun
ding continued. He wanted this room—Why had we taken the only good room? Then, unmistakably, through the door, the mandolin player said, Fuck her good for me.

  Something broke in me then that was about the mandolin player and not about the mandolin player, that was about the girls at Mountain Views and not about them, and like a character in a movie, I turned to Jesse and said, That’s it.

  I got up and hurled open the door and can’t say what I might have done had Jesse not leapt up after me and gotten between us. Jesse was not like the mandolin player—I know that now, and I knew it then. But what kind of man has that kind of man for a friend? In such a small community and with ties that run deep and in every direction, every person is bound to every other in ways that may or may not feel optional, I know, and it is more difficult than it may seem to avoid or cut ties with someone. Yet we never spoke of that night again, a thing that pointed to the fact that both Jesse and I would rather let the lies we were telling ourselves stand than grapple with the specific facts of that situation.

  Jesse knew the mandolin player’s behavior was fundamentally unacceptable, but he felt bound to the mandolin player and also to each of the DMHB, Trey included, in a way that was stronger than he felt bound to me. And why not? He was. I knew continuing our relationship meant keeping quiet about a great deal of what I thought and felt to be true and that I would not be able to stay quiet forever.

  If I began my relationship with Jesse feeling like I was a victim of some violation, I did not end up that way. It became clear to me that what we had in common, underneath our quietness, was an ambivalent relationship to power, influence, mattering. We both wanted these things, I think, and were afraid of them.