At midnight, exhausted, we pulled up to the welcome station at Yellowstone, but the ranger said the campgrounds were full and turned us away. Where were we supposed to go after we’d driven hundreds of miles on steeply graded mountain roads? We drove a mile back in the direction we’d come and saw a dirt road, which we followed to its end. We set up our tent in pitch blackness and climbed in and fell asleep. In the morning when we peeked outside we saw the steep face of a mountain and at its base a glorious rushing river. We washed in the icy river, then drove into Yellowstone, stopping at thermal pools, deep holes with boiling turquoise water, at the bottom the blanched bones of some fallen creature. We waited faithfully for Old Faithful, and on schedule it geysered from the ground, shooting a plume of water a hundred feet, as if the earth were the back of an enormous whale.
We drove and drove—I never tired of looking out the window, watching the world like watching a film. We arrived at the Great Salt Lake at dawn and tried to sleep on the salt-stained beach flat as a mirror, but we were swarmed by small biting flies so we gave up, got in the car, and headed for Lake Tahoe. We set up our tent in a beautiful wooded campground a short walk from the sandy beach, football-sized pine cones littering the ground.
That night we met two brothers, one our age and one in his midtwenties wearing a Stetson, and we sat around a campfire drinking beer and talking. Around midnight Sally and I rose to leave, but Vickie said, “I’m staying.” Sally and I looked at each other. It didn’t seem like a good idea, but we had no control over Vickie, who wanted to make out with the cowboy-hat brother. The younger brother seemed to feel as awkward as we did with this sudden turn. He headed back to their hotel room as Sally and I walked through the woods and unzipped our tent and climbed into our sleeping bags, though I doubt either of us slept. Hours later, Vickie slipped into the tent.
In the morning Sally and I cooked breakfast, eggs and fried Spam—someone had given us cans of the stuff—then we cleaned our campsite, packed the tent, and organized the car while Vickie sat at the picnic table penning postcards to friends. Sally and I exchanged looks. This was the first sign of discord in our small traveling party.
In San Francisco we met Terry at the airport, then drove to Muir Woods. I pressed myself against an enormous redwood, my arms stretched to show scale, to feel with my whole Lilliputian body the monstrously massive, beautiful tree. We slept on Stinson Beach, then drove down the coast, navigating the winding Pacific Coast route, which dropped away steeply beyond the guardrail to desiccated scrub far below. It was Vickie’s turn at the wheel, and as she took a curve she lit a cigarette, steering the car with her elbows, which freaked us out. Then she flicked the cigarette butt out the window, ignoring—or having missed completely—the frequent signs warning of $500 fines, the danger of starting a fire. Vickie was put off by our scolding—the mood had changed since the night in Tahoe when she went off with the cowboy-hat dude. Meanwhile, the storage box that Ed made slowly slid off its frame, slipping inch by inch, obscuring the rear window.
Mexico-bound, we stopped at Venice Beach, where Sally and I had smoked angel dust on that trip with my father three years earlier, though now I could see what I hadn’t back then—that Venice was rundown and dirty, the boardwalk unpeopled, just a couple of homeless men in tattered sleeping bags and strung-out kids huddled under Mexican blankets, as if a rogue wave had washed everything away. We camped at San Onofre State Park, selected from our guidebook without realizing it was in the shadow of a nuclear power plant. There were fast-scurrying mice everywhere, zipping along and disappearing into burrows in the dunes, which made me think that some nuclear leakage had caused a freak explosion in the mouse population. That night as we sat around our campfire, two men invited themselves over, just plunked down next to us, long-haired bikers in jackboots and jeans, bandannas around their matted hair. One of the bikers casually removed his prosthetic leg, propping it next to him. Always there were men who found us, followed us, some we had to shake.
We crossed the border into Tijuana, a sad dusty town with skinny barefoot boys peddling packs of chewing gum, collage-shacks on side streets, tourists bargaining in embarrassing pidgin Spanish with people who didn’t have enough money for shoes or decent houses, trying to save what amounted to pennies on some trinket they didn’t need because that’s what the travel guide said you were supposed to do, barter with the locals.
After a week we drove to the Los Angeles airport so Terry and I could fly home, but Sally had come to California to live. I hated saying goodbye to my sister, leaving her there with little money, just the car and a suitcase and a friend with no common sense, just the two of them now in California to make their lives; they’d have to find jobs, a place to live, wake up each day in a strange land where they knew no one but each other. I sobbed as I watched Sally drive away, sick with worry.
Terry and I signed up for a stand-by flight and waited for our names to be called, sprawled on the airport floor for twelve hours until finally we were on a plane headed east. I was weighted down with my backpack and a manzanita-wood walking stick I’d found on Stinson Beach, its surface engraved with trails from worms, like the contour lines on a topographic map etched into its pulp. I carried this stick on the plane from Los Angeles to New York City, on the train from New York to Boston, on a bus from Boston to Framingham, where someone picked us up and drove us home to Walpole. How many strangers had I accidentally jabbed or tripped with that walking stick?
The trip was just three weeks, but I’d driven as far away from home as I could in the contiguous United States, passed through the vast pancake plain of the Midwest, up and through the sky-scraping mountains, crossed the continent and stepped in California, then returned to home base like touching gools.
I didn’t go to college that fall, even though—surprisingly, given my grades—I’d been accepted at the University of Massachusetts. I wanted to take a year off to save money, to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I had no idea how to chart a course for the future beyond the vague “aim” I’d recorded in my high school yearbook: “to finish something I start,” an acknowledgment of my history of quitting, giving up what I loved, giving up on myself.
One Saturday in July when I was ten, my father took Sally and me to the Lions Club track meet at the high school athletic field. I entered the 440-yard relay race—once around the track—with three girls from my school. Patty Lewis shot out fast and we led, but then she handed off to Sheila Barton, who ran awkwardly, as if her legs were tangled; the way she ran, her gait circular, reminded me of my mother’s manual eggbeater. I waited anxiously with my hand stretched behind me, wincing as runner after runner passed me and advanced down the third quarter of the track.
Finally Sheila handed me the baton and I ran with all my might in my curved lane, passing one runner and then another, but there were still two ahead when I handed the baton to Regina Richardson, the fastest girl in our grade, but even Regina could only pull us into third place, a white ribbon. My face was red from effort, my hair matted with sweat, but my father was there at the finish line, smiling and proud that I’d tried so hard, and that’s all I wanted and needed. I wanted to try that hard again, to make my father proud of me, to be proud of myself.
I worked three jobs that fall, which kept me busy, out of the house by 8:30 a.m. and home at midnight. I cleaned a doctor’s office one night a week, scrubbed three toilets and seven sinks, dusted and vacuumed and emptied trash. I worked as a cashier at Stop & Shop supermarket and as a short-order cook and dishwasher in the cafeteria at the Bird & Son factory in East Walpole, down the street from Bird Park, where my father had taken us to pick chestnuts, the park a gift in 1927 from the Bird family to their workers and the people of Walpole.
For a century Bird & Son earned huge profits selling asphalt and asbestos shingles, running three shifts to keep up with demand, but during the oil embargo in the 1970s profits suffered. By the time I worked there, only two shifts operated. I drove through the gates of the chain-
link fence surrounding the compound—I recall barbed wire, but I’m probably conflating the factory on the east side of town with the prison on the west side—and down an asphalt plane, like a sloping lawn of pavement, past four-story brick buildings with huge windows, their tiny panes opaqued. The buildings were connected in a U shape, with the cafeteria, a single-story cottage, tucked in the center. There was one way in and one way out, like the street I lived on, a dead end.
The cafeteria was run by Frank DeRose, a jolly, short, fat Italian man with bushy white eyebrows circumflexing rheumy brown eyes. At the front of the cafeteria were steam tables to warm pots of soup and vats of Frank’s homemade meatballs, stainless-steel pans filled with ziti or sausage and peppers. A glass shelf showcased slices of pie and cake, and at the end of the serving line was an old-fashioned punch-key register. Behind the alley was a stainless-steel refrigerator, a butcher block, a grill, its steel vent-hood brown with grease, and the Bunn coffee machine, the profit center of the enterprise, where at twenty-five cents a cup Frank made his bones. In the small back room there was an oven, an industrial dishwasher, sinks, cupboards, a bathroom.
I worked alone from 7 p.m. to midnight, some weekends, and the busy day shift in summer. In the kitchen, Frank cooked pans of his delicious meatballs filled with chunks of leftover Parmesan, and giant pans of chicken cacciatore. He’d splash red wine into the tray, then swig from the bottle, singing or humming, bustling around the cafeteria, yelling greetings to the men: “Howie, what can we do for ya, babe?” Often I saw Frank peel a twenty from the thick roll in his pocket for one of the men who’d run into financial trouble. Frank was quick to laugh, guffaw even, wiping tears from his eyes. I loved watching him wring joy from any ordinary moment in that cramped factory.
In the back room I loaded china plates and cups into the stainless-steel washer, steam billowing out when I opened the hatch, a blast of wet heat on my face. I poured coffee and worked the cash register and, when I was alone, cooked hamburgers, or steak and cheese sandwiches, omelets—everything flavored with a hint of cigarette smoke. During the busy lunch hour, three of us worked the line. My coworker Gert was a woman of enormous proportions. She wore flat open-toed mule slippers and stretchy nylon pants. She had a big round face and a big round nose, her skin coated with liquid makeup, and short dyed-cinnamon hair that she curled with curlers. Throughout the morning she reapplied orange lipstick and flirted with the men. I was in awe of Gert’s self-esteem.
Missy, my other coworker, was a waif with baby-fine blond hair and a vulpine face. She wore tight, low-cut shirts that revealed her cleavage when she leaned across the counter. She and Gert were quickly buddies, excluding me from their frequent conversations about sex, which was a relief. They sucked long drags off their cigarettes, Missy blowing a stream of smoke out the side of her mouth, Gert letting the smoke seep out her nose while she talked. I couldn’t help but see Gert and Missy as those cartoon characters, Peter Potamus, a purple hippo, and his tiny monkey sidekick, So-So. One day I came to work and Missy was gone. Fired. Frank told me he’d caught her stealing from the till.
Frank shopped for supplies at Stop & Shop, and once in a while he checked out at my register. I sensed that he wanted me to pass some items through without ringing them up. I’d done this for Nicky’s mother, who didn’t have a lot of money. Seeing Frank in Stop & Shop with his boxes of day-old Entenmann’s cakes marked down, which he quartered and plated to sell for a buck apiece, his “manager’s special” packages of hamburger, cheese ends from the deli, I wanted to give him a break, but this would have demonstrated that I was dishonest, stealing from my employer. How could he, my employer, trust me if he saw me stealing from my other employer? I opted for honesty. I didn’t want to lose what I valued most, Frank’s respect. Perhaps, too, I didn’t want to lose something I was barely aware that I was developing: self-respect.
Men filed into the cafeteria for lunch or dinner, or pie and coffee, depending on which shift or break, always coated in grayish white dust, ashen like half-ghosts, dust thick in the creases of their necks. To make shingles, felt paperboard was coated with liquid tar, then dusted with mineral grit. Every third man was missing a finger from the cutters, often an index finger, or the middle, sometimes both. It was jarring at first as they picked up their coffee cups with their thumb and middle fingers, the index stub pressed against the cup for stability, like a tripod. These were the lifers at Bird & Son; they talked of camping and fishing, cars, the track, conversations I overheard as I collected dirty dishes and wiped down tables. They called me “hon” or “darlin’” as they flipped a quarter onto the stainless-steel counter, happily balancing their hot coffee, black or light and sweet.
There was a contingency of young men, none of whom planned on staying. Harry was probably three years older than me, with stringy brown hair in a messy ponytail, globs of tar stuck in his hair, a single front tooth missing. He was often stoned at work. I could see why someone would need to be drugged to endure eight- or ten-hour shifts there, five or six days a week, how a stultifying assembly-line job could annihilate you from the inside out. Harry walked into the cafeteria one day with a bandage on his hand, a fresh injury, a finger sacrificed to the cutting machines like paying dues, propitiating the gods of corporate profit. If you worked long enough at Bird & Son, you paid in flesh and bone. Some of the young drugged-out factory workers like Harry “spilled” hot tar on their skin to collect the $50-per-inch insurance payout, less if it wasn’t a third-degree burn. Easy money, I suppose. Skin grew back, unlike fingers.
Working at Bird & Son was a tour through factory life, like the tram ride at Disneyland, men toiling, trading their strength, their bodies, for dollars per hour, brawn the currency, as it had been for my grandparents on both sides—housekeeper, cafeteria worker, forklift driver, groundsman—the life my father had lifted himself out of through education, recognized at eleven by a priest as “exemplary” and given a scholarship to prestigious Boston College High School. My father worked in factories in high school and college—a wire factory and a sausage factory, both in the city—but education was his ticket to the middle class, like so many children of immigrants and their children, like me, as soon as I figured out how to get myself to college.
Work became a structure for my life, like a Zen practice—chop wood, carry water—only it was cook omelets, pour coffee, or ring groceries, bag them, or clean toilets, empty trash. Work helped me stay on track, to eschew hedonism for discipline. I was good at work. Work was something I understood from my earliest paid labor, mating socks when I was six and seven. Every day in our house when I was growing up, nine people’s socks fluttered down the laundry chute to the cellar, 126 dirty socks per week, 546 socks a month, 6,552 socks each year: endless socks. There was always a laundry basket of unmatched socks and I’d patiently mate them, piecework for which my mother paid a penny a pair. I liked the meditative task, the sense of accomplishment, the rich rattle of nickels and dimes in my Band-Aid-box bank, a coin slot stabbed with a butter knife into the soft tin.
My mother worried that I’d never get to college, so that December she issued an ultimatum: enroll in college or move out of the house. She wanted me to have the opportunity of an education, as she had not. In high school my mother was vice president of her senior class, president of the student council, president of Theta Sigma Tau sorority. For a yearbook story in which her classmates imagined the future, my mother was cast as the first woman president of the United States, President Starr. She dreamed of attending college, but the guidance counselor told her she should get a job and help her widowed mother and younger brother. Later, in 1960, when she was twenty-two and had just three babies, she wanted to enroll in college, but my father thought that the family would suffer, so my mother surrendered her dream again.
Go to college or move out—my mother was serious. I hadn’t a clue how to find and furnish an apartment, so I enrolled at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the middle of the academic year. There
was a benefit to having misspent my high school years. After a while I grew bored with the UMass (“ZooMass”) party scene, all those strait-laced kids going crazy with their first taste of freedom from parents. Still, I had no idea how to be a college student. I’d loved my classes in my senior year of high school—creative writing, poetry, psychology—but I’d never done homework, never studied. After my first semester at UMass, I was placed on academic probation, an echo of my junior year, when I’d nearly failed. That threat, the idea that I would be kicked out of college, motivated me.
I chose interpersonal communication as my major, with the vague notion of becoming a family counselor to help families like mine after they’d fallen apart; I wanted to glue together all those broken homes. In classes I studied language patterns and speech contexts and persuasion theory and the dynamics of small-group communication, and as the classes became more theoretical, I couldn’t see how I was going to help any messed-up broken families with dry theories on “speech acts.”
In my junior year I took a creative writing class. Sitting cross-legged in someone’s living room, reading aloud short stories and poems, I felt like I’d found my spot, the way Carlos Castaneda had in The Teachings of Don Juan, the place where I was strong, where I belonged. The stories I wrote for workshops were autobiographical or biographical, stories from Walpole, stories I couldn’t shake from my mind, like the story about my dental hygienist, Valerie Ray, Sally’s classmate, who’d been charged with forgery, larceny, and arson. She’d set fire to the dentist’s office to destroy evidence of her embezzlement. Because of my “twisty teeth,” I’d spent many hours in that dental chair with the doctor working in my mouth, Valerie beside him. I wrote Valerie’s story in the first-person point of view because it was easy to occupy the consciousness of a young woman committing a crime.
Body Leaping Backward Page 21