Iph never returned to Forest Lake High for her senior year. Thanks to a book she found at Powell’s, The Teenage Liberation Handbook, Iph is unschooling. Mom was for it from the start, but Dad needed convincing.
“It just means taking charge of your education. And that education doesn’t only happen in school,” she told him. Then she set it out to prove it.
She’s teaching with Mom, taking acting classes at the university, and volunteering for RCT Press.
When Iph finally returned to the cottage, it was with Mom, who wanted to have tea with the lanky woman with white hair and her sweet yellow-eyed white dog. She and Mom became friends, and suddenly Iph found herself with a job.
Sylvie is a tough boss, but kind and incredibly well read. Iph proofreads and does deliveries and post office runs now that she has her license. Once in a while, on her way back down the path from the cottage, she sees Sylvie’s white wolf-dog and a tall white hound race into the deepest part of the wood.
On less busy days, Iph stays home and sleeps so she can dream of Orr. Lately, though, she’s spent most of her free hours haunting the library, researching theater programs, and slogging through applications.
Now that spring is coming, she sometimes takes a sleeping bag to the cello spot and sleeps under the stars. That’s where she’s going today—not for an overnight, only a quick visit.
She and George kiss goodbye on the front porch. Iph notices the mail. She unlocks the door, throws it on the hall table. A large envelope catches her eye. American Conservatory Theater. Her heart pounds. She shoves the envelope in her backpack and hurries into the bright afternoon.
The path to the cottage behind the Witch’s Castle is easy to find now. The others make the same pilgrimage. At first, no one heard Orr’s music. But in the fall, as the weather got cold, visitors to the cello spot often felt the deep resonance through their boots as they tromped up the trail. By the time they rounded the bend and crested the little hill, Orr was always gone.
At the base of the rise, a short way from the forest cello, someone set up an old table with ornate legs and a splintery top under a thick-branched pine. Under the table, out of the rain, is a child’s tape player Allison and Mika found at Goodwill—the kind with large simple buttons that might be worked with the tip of an antler or a talented hoof. It was Jane who first started leaving the mixes. First, random stuff she thought Orr would like. Then a two-song Furies demo tape. Then a four-song EP, recorded at a local studio. Now there’s an actual full-length release. The Furies are signed to a Seattle label. Soon, they’ll be going on tour, opening for Bikini Kill.
Iph sees evidence of Plum in the artful still-life arrangements of forest ephemera on the table. Stuck to the trunk with tree sap are Polaroid self-portraits of Plum as various classical paintings and kiss-printed Post-it notes.
Mika comes more often than Jane or Allison, sometimes overlapping with Iph. She reads X-Files novelizations aloud in case Orr might be listening and leaves fresh-baked pies from the bakery where she works and talks to Iph about how difficult it is dating Lorna.
Mom comes less than she used to, but every full moon she is here, doing rituals of protection. Dad has started running again, visiting the spot daily to pour fresh water from his water bottle into a blue ceramic bowl, even though there is a creek so close you can hear it, and placing mounds of organic oats and corn under trees where there are visible hoofprints.
Today under the blue sky, Iph thinks the cello spot looks a little too much like a shrine or a memorial. The copy of the Furies’ tape has been there since last week, unplayed. Iph pulls a blanket out of her backpack along with a bag of caramel popcorn and a book—Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Also, a battered pocket copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She’s auditioning for Shakespeare in the Park next week and needs to practice her monologue. The sun feels so good after last week’s rain. Iph lies back. Then she remembers—the letter!
How could she forget? She grounds herself, checks in.
Okay—she’s scared.
No, terrified.
She takes a deep breath. Asks herself why.
George, she thinks. But ACT is only in San Francisco. She and George have already driven Mom’s Volvo down there twice for the auditions. George is saving for a car, too. Dad is making noise about George getting something classic and them fixing it up together. So, no. Not George.
Is she afraid of the program itself? Maybe a little. But in a good way. The way you’re scared because it’s something you really, really want.
She sits up. Ugh. The answer is obvious. It’s what she’s been afraid of since fifth grade when she realized she’d graduate two years before Orr. She’s afraid to leave her brother.
She takes out the envelope and opens it with a long, black-painted fingernail. She doesn’t have to pull out the letter to know what it says. Iph feels her path forking, calling her south. She lies back and lets herself read the nice things they say about her audition. She imagines a studio apartment a little like Lorna’s, but in a pink Victorian near Golden Gate Park. She drifts, dreamless at first.
Then comes her favorite dream—a deer approaches, hooves silent on the soft turf. A cold nose presses her cheek. She wakes up. She stands—a tip of antler, a flash of white tail. This is not the first time it’s happened. As the weather warms, she imagines Orr’s memory rousing from its winter slumber.
“Orr,” she calls. “I know it’s you.” The rustling in the bushes stops. Orr has never quite gotten the stealthy, silent deer thing. “See this?” She raises the letter like a white flag. “It’s from ACT. In San Francisco. I go in September.” She waits, but all is still. “That gives us the rest of the spring and all summer,” she says, even though she’s pretty sure he’s already gone.
She gathers her things. The bag of caramel corn is empty and hoofprints mark her blanket. As she walks down the hill toward the trail she hears a familiar melody. The words of the lullaby rise into Iph’s mouth from the forest floor.
Cielito lindo, vienen bajando, un par de ojitos negros
Sweet little heaven is prancing down, a pair of little black eyes
Iph sings in Spanish and in English. At home she’ll ask Dad how to say it in Greek. The chorus comes, her favorite part.
Ai, ai, ai, ai
Canta y no llores.
Sing, don’t cry.
The notes follow her through the forest and out to the city street.
A Note From The Author
Dear Readers,
First, I want to acknowledge that the land where this story is set, the place I have called home for the past twenty-six years, is stolen land, once home to traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde including Molalla and Kalapuya, and many other tribes who made their homes in this green valley and along the Columbia River. It’s also important to note that in 1859, Oregon was founded as a “white utopia” and explicitly forbade Black people from living in its borders—the only state to do so.
When I first moved to Portland in the early ’90s, twenty-five and pregnant with my first daughter, I wondered where the people of color were. I had a hard time finding stores that carried traditional Latinx foods and strangers often asked if I was just back from Hawai‘i because of my winter “tan.”
But Portland also met me with midwives and zine makers, sex work activists and unschoolers, misfits and artists both queer and straight—many of them young parents who, like my partner and I, wanted to transform generations-old patterns of trauma into something kinder, healthier, full of possibility and love. Over time, I even found other people of color, some who were raised here, other who are transplants like me, looking for a quiet place to heal. Our stories have rooted here, adding something fertile to a place that has never wholly welcomed us.
At the time when this st
ory takes place, there was a feeling of reinvention in this small uncool Pacific Northwest city, a sense of DIY pride, a feminist and queer resurgence. Still, the term “genderqueer” would only come into use a few years after this book takes place. When I dug into writing the nonbinary character George, I first thought to use the pronoun “they,” but doing so felt like an erasure of the experience of a nonbinary person in that era. I reached for a language-based solution that expressed the character’s experienced singularity and decided to write George without pronouns, hoping to convey the isolation of growing up with an identity that is unspoken and largely unnamed.
I also hoped to offer a roadmap to readers who are interested in getting to know their own inner landscape. While magical realism is a literary device that lets authors express deep psychological or spiritual ideas in concrete form, for some of us, like me, it’s also a way to see the world—enchanted and full of wisdom if you only take the time to look.
There are endless paths to psyche, but these are some that I’ve found fruitful: the work of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, fairy and folk tales, the tarot, the book Women Who Run with the Wolves by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, listening to stories from my elders, reading poetry, exploring diasporic futurism, becoming aware of the cycles of the moon, paying attention to wild animals wherever I go, and writing down my dreams.
A wise friend of mine believes that time is not linear. That by doing our work in the present, we can heal the past—both our own and our ancestors’. My family’s journey is the inspiration for this book and my dearest hope is to send some healing to all past/present/future versions of my beloved daughters, my own mother, my husband and my father, who died at age thirty but would have loved this book most of all. I imagine our family line like a battered spine glowing gold, vertebrae adjusting to stack strong, sending us into the future. I wish the same healing for you and the ones you love.
Michelle Ruiz Keil
December 28, 2020
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the people who inspired this story and whose love and support inspires me every day—my husband, Carl, my beloved daughters, Luciana and Angelika and Kaylib, my sister and the best of friends. To my own parents, Anita Johansen and Patrick Smith, and, as always, thank you to my nana, Luciana Ruiz Dudley. “Cielito Lindo” was her favorite song.
More and more, I find myself telling young writers how much their work will benefit from theater training. I received mine from the famous, fabulous Donna Russell. I will always be grateful.
Lucky for me, the huge bout of writer’s block I encountered halfway through Summer in the City of Roses was overcome by the radical hospitality of my time in residence at Hedgebrook. The magic of the forest path and my little cottage infuses this story and so does the kindness of my fellow residents, Heidi Durrow, Roja Heydarpour, Jael Humphrey, Diana Xin, Julie Phillips, Liz de Souza and Wendy Johnson. Thank you for sharing your writing, deer sightings and encouragement. The last moments pre-pandemic were well spent with you brilliant women.
Thank you, too, to the writers and readers who answered my late-night Facebook posts about ’90s Portland, especially Rene Denfeld, whose experience as a former punk goddess was put to great use in these pages, and to Portland’s own Dead Moon for my writing soundtrack.
A massive fan-girl thank-you goes out to the band Bikini Kill, who generously let me use the lyrics to their song “Resist Psychic Death” and to Natalie Garyet of Tavern Books and translator David Wevill, who allowed me to use lines from The Boy Changed into a Stag Clamors at the Gate of Secrets to my heart’s content.
I wouldn’t have known about Ferenc Juhász’s poem at all if it hadn’t been for the kindred spirit of poet, screenwriter and bruja Stephanie Adams-Santos. I will always be grateful. Thanks also to fairytale expert and tarot alchemist Coleman Stevenson for reading an early draft of this book and for all her inspiration and support. Poets make the fiercest and best of friends.
Thank you to Satya Doyle Byock and the members of the many seminars I attended at the Salomé Institute of Jungian Studies—our conversations are the sea I swam in as I drafted this book. Love and gratitude are also owed to Connor and Sayre Quevedo and Coda Goodrich, who in some deep but indirect way helped me find the boy in this story. And to their mothers, the writers MK Chavez and Talese Babb, who have loved and supported me for all these years.
It was MK Chavez who introduced me to public health and sex worker activism and who connected me with the force of nature known as Joanna Berton Martinez, aka Teresa Dulce, creator of the nonprofit Danzine. Joanna never met a problem she couldn’t solve with limitless energy, a movie-star smile and surreal performance art. Thanks for the inspiration and for those Friday nights in the needle exchange van on SE 82nd!
Finally, thank you to my agent, Hannah Fergesen, and the folks and KT Literary and the lovely people of Soho Press for their support of my work, especially Alexa Wejko and Amara Hoshijo. Working with you has been a privilege and a joy.
Summer in the City of Roses Page 29
