I am not running away from anyone. Not from dirty dishes or laundry, not from an extended family or its extended quarrels. I am not running from anything at all. I am running to. I am running to the forest, to the place where loneliness has never been able to reach. I refuse to think of whether or not Pan is real, if there is a living creature blowing that music, if I am retreating from reality, if I am no longer even close to sane. The woods close behind me, and the pipes light the way.
The smell of warm earth rises around me, the years drop away. Here are plants more familiar to me than the changing faces of my parents. Here is dogwood and fireweed, wild rose and watercress, and dark violets twining through the grass. They welcome me, bowing before me and whispering in my wake. I part them with my hands and pass between them, and the friendly denizens of this place make a way for me. The tightness of my vigilance slips away. I am among friends, and my muscles move easily. I am lithe and spry and nimble as I move through the forest. I am a child again.
A young birch tugs timidly at my hair. I stop beside it, resting my palm on the smooth papery roundness of its trunk, taking its powdery whiteness onto my fingers. I can feel the life flowing through its sappy capillaries. We share a moment, quietly, two living beings who need to take nothing from each other. Then I gently disentangle myself and go on.
There is no hurry. I have lost my sense of time, left behind all clocks with their Veg-O-Matic approach to time. I would not let this day be diced and minced to flavorless, unidentifiable bits, to half an hour of walking, to three minutes of touching a tree. This time was a whole thing, to be savored as such.
There is no slap of branches against denim, no thump of shoe on leaf mold. I move as the hunting vixens do, warily following the sound and scent of my prey. Soon I feel the cooler flow of air on my face, see the tall reeds rise before me and walk the hard mud bank of the stream. I follow it upstream, moving toward its source, knowing soon I will come to a cleared bank, a place carpeted in deep moss, free of stones and slimy things, a place prepared for a meeting. I smell Pan’s rich scent, breathing it in through my open mouth, tasting his flavor on the air. And I come to him.
TEN
* * *
Fairbanks
The Late Sixties
My childhood telescopes behind me. I think that was the last day of it, the day Pan left me bleeding in the grass and I picked myself up and went forward without him. I never saw him again in the woods. I tried to cut him out of my life, to tell myself that he had never existed. It was an angry denial, an effort to match him rejection for rejection. But despite my denials and his disappearance from my life, he wouldn’t quite go away. He never left me alone, the goat-footed one. He was always there, just at the edges, hidden, almost completely hidden, but keeping everything from fitting together. Like a tiny piece of gravel caught under new linoleum, like a few forgotten flakes of breakfast cereal trapped under dinner’s linen tablecloth and crystal wineglasses, like a single dead fly under the new wallpaper, keeping everything from lying flat and smooth. A little imperfection in my makeup, a little part that would never admit to reality. Like the invisible bits of something on your smooth percale sheets that bite into your flesh at night, that will not be brushed out of your bed, but only find a new spot to dig into you, under your hip, at the point of your shoulder. Pan was always there. He wouldn’t let me grow up, and he wouldn’t let me become totally real.
I had a suspicion, a secret fear.
He was keeping me for himself.
I was always afraid someone else would find out. How could I become a real adult, when my invisible playmate haunted me, taunted me, demanded, “Real or pretend? Real or pretend?” of every thought I had, of every accomplishment I achieved? He was the eye at the bottom left-hand corner of the night window, the shadow glimpsed behind me in a mirror, the single cloven hoofprint in the driveway the morning after the heavy rain, the tiny fragment of blue eggshell on the floor by my nightstand. Never enough to be real, but always too much to ignore.
That fall I entered high school. It was a whole new game. My sisters had preceded me through Monroe High School, setting a family standard I could not maintain. It wasn’t the academics. I’d always succeeded there. Socially. They’d been their class presidents, the winners of elocution contests, editor of the school newspaper, the class sweetheart. It was an act I could not follow. All the teachers wondered what was wrong with me, why I wasn’t like my sisters. They usually managed to pity and dislike me at the same time.
There were other things, too. Dances. Dating. Not for me, but for the other girls around me. Oh, I went to the dances, trailing after my sisters like a bewildered caboose. I stood against the wall and watched the people dance. If boys looked at me, they either smirked, or didn’t see me. It didn’t really hurt, because I didn’t really expect anything else. But as time passed, and I went from freshman to sophomore, and the sneering grew more open, I knew I had to change if I was to survive. I had to find a way to belong, but I didn’t know how to go about it. I expected there would be a price tag to the change, but I wasn’t sure what it would be.
The price tag was to be my past.
First there came a flood, right at the end of summer. The Chena and the Tanana rivers rose, and their brown waters came flowing down the lane and spread and washed through my forest, drowning our garden, filling the basement full and barely sparing the house itself. My family sought out the high ground, spent days at the hill campus of the University of Alaska. Each day I could walk to the edge of the hill and look down at the flooded lands, watching it slowly, slowly drain away again. The flood left a coating of mud on the forest, a bathtub ring around the bases of the trees, a brown gritty residue on the low-growing plants. There was no autumn harvest of berries that year. I walked again through my forest, but it was a place dirtied and foreign, the moss hidden under a coating of mud, the low-growing bushes scummed and gritty. I promised myself the winter would purify the forest, that the melting snows of spring would bring its pristine green back.
But before that, fall came. And with it school, a new school. Public school, because the flood had left our family broke and Candy was already in college and Sissy was starting at the University of Alaska that year. For me, it was a reprieve in the form of Austin E. Lathrop High School. A place where no one knew me, or my sisters. A place where I could pretend to be someone else, where I could start fresh, as no one’s younger sister.
I hardened my heart, and I did. I was tough. No girl in my family had ever been tough before, but I was. I had the clothes to fit the part, the worn jeans and boy’s shirts, the battered jackets. I had the vocabulary. All it took was nerve, and somehow I found it. I kept my grades, the As and Bs that baffled my teachers, a secret from my new friends. I horrified the other girls. But boys began to look at me. I was the girl who couldn’t be shocked, who knew more dirty jokes than they did, who wasn’t afraid to take their dares. I was wild and tough and free.
I told myself that Pan never existed, never had been at all. I pretended him away, fiercely, excusing my betrayal on the grounds that he had left me first. I convinced myself that I believed he’d been pretend. But I dreaded the return of spring, when the forest would call me again.
But I was saved from that.
The tent caterpillars came, denuding the forest as fast as the new leaves came out. It became a bare place that the sunlight blared into unchecked by any softly flickering canopy of leaves. Worse, the insects left long dangling nets of their silken-sticky stuff ghosting from the trees, and as I walked my paths, it tangled in my hair, and the fat, wriggling caterpillars themselves fell onto my head and shoulders. It was a summer without green, and if I thought about it, I felt sick and stripped as the trees themselves. I was like an addict going through a forced withdrawal, deprived of my forest. Whenever I had to think about it, I insisted to myself that it would come back, that my woods would be as green and deep and cool as ever, that the slough would run silver and brown and the blue sky woul
d once more be reflected in its waters.
But in the meantime, I filled my summer with motorcycles, and the dusty boys who came with them. Boys who liked a girl who wasn’t afraid to get dirty riding the back trails, who didn’t care if her hair tangled in the wind. My mother was so relieved to see me finally socializing that she gave me freer rein than ever my sisters had enjoyed. I took the bit in my teeth and ran. I ran fast and hard and wild, sampling beer, learning to drive a motorcycle, daring to kiss a boy.
And if, at night, in my bed, I looked back over my day and knew, somehow, that none of it had been as wonderful as I’d tried to pretend it was—if I knew the beer had tasted sour, the motorcycle been no more than a noisy, smelly machine, only as powerful as its engineering could make it, and the boy only a boy and no more than that—if I lay alone in my bed, and suspected that somehow I had traded my inheritance for a bowl of pottage, then I also knew in those long nights of Fairbanks’s midnight sun shining in my window that no matter how fast or hard or wild I ran, I would never outrun the satyr. He’d drawn the circle that took me in, and he no longer needed to run to catch up with me. No direction I could take would ever lead me away from him. If on those nights I was hungry for more than peanut butter and apples and celery and raisins stolen from the night kitchen, if I was colder than the blankets and Rinky could warm away, if I felt more alone than the moon drowning in the night’s blue sky, then I would promise myself that the tent caterpillars would be gone next summer. I promised myself the forest and the sky and the slough, and long days to enjoy them, days free of the complicated emotional negotiations that boys entailed, hours when I could be wild and free instead of striking the poses that others believed were true wildness, true freedom. Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, when I did not sit up in bed and look out the window for fear someone would be there, sometimes, hovering on the edge of consciousness, I promised myself the forest and the faun.
But it wasn’t to be, not ever again.
The oil pipeline came and drained my Alaska away. The school became crowded, my Latin class was held on a stairway, yellow Alyeska pickup trucks appeared at every stoplight, the city tried to clear the winos and whores off Second Avenue. I didn’t care about any of that. But then property values went up, and civilization came hunting me down, rolling over the woods and flattening them, sucking the sloughs dry. First came the surveyors, cutting perfectly straight lines through my forest, leaving behind a spoor of stakes and pink plastic ribbon. Then came the tractors, pushing over the trees into huge burn piles, scraping the topsoil carelessly aside to bare the sandy ice cream of permafrost beneath. The slough got filled with gravel. They cut the remaining scar up into small rectangles, and put up mobile homes, one on each. The trailer houses had snotty-nosed kids in brown corduroy pants who pedaled trikes in their front yards. They had scrawny yellow-patched lawns and parked snowmobiles in front of their Sears metal garden sheds. Many of the trailers sank and settled unevenly as the permafrost beneath them melted and gave way to their warmth. At first I took that as a positive sign. But the new people just jacked them up to level again, stuck a few more concrete blocks under them, and stayed. They never went away and the woods never came back. Everything that had been mine went away and never came back. The faun should have gone, too.
But he didn’t. And I couldn’t leave childhood with him still standing there.
I got older. Without the forest, I had no choice. I dated, I tried to be real. But it seemed to take me so much longer to grow up than it did for anyone else. As wild as I was, as tough as I was, I was still fifteen before I knew what thirteen-year-olds had known for years, I was seventeen before I felt like I was sixteen. But I tried. I went out with the boys and made out in back seats. But I never dared to go too far, never dared to let them touch the small naked breasts I shielded behind polyester foam padding and tricot-lined bras. Afraid that if they touched them, they’d see, they’d know that the faun wasn’t letting me grow up and away from him. Afraid they’d know I wasn’t real, not like they were, not truly growing into adulthood. Afraid my own breasts would betray me, would let those boys know that I already belonged to the faun.
My senior year. I only dated dumb boys. I was a four-point student, but I never went out with anyone who had better than a D average. I dated the bad boys, the ones who got picked up for shoplifting, for drunkenness, for breaking curfew, for vandalism. I learned how to hot-wire a car, how to slip a door latch, how to doctor an ID card. But I never got caught, I never got in trouble, I was never even suspected. I was invisible. I was always there, at the edges of their crowd, with their girls but not among them, because I intimidated their girls by not caring what they thought of me. I watched those bad boys go through their madnesses, their drunks, their dares, their sudden furies when they turned on one another, the punch-outs that ended in split lips and bloody noses and little more, that ended again with the bad boys soberly shaking hands, saying, “Hey, we were drunk, were angry, we didn’t mean it, friends like us, ain’t nothing going to come between us.” I watched it all from the sidelines, not like a scientist watches a lab rat, but like a child peering down through the railings of a staircase to where the adults are drinking cocktails and conversing amiably. I watched from the borders, knowing that no matter how foolish it all seemed, they were all taking steps, growing up, going on a journey to adulthood. And I couldn’t follow.
I rode on the backs of their motorcycles, hid from the cops in the cold shadows of the concrete supports under University Bridge. I went to the parties in the basements and garages, watched them drink and blow dope and neck and throw up in the snow, fight and cry. I watched what I could not do. I watched them growing up.
One night I climbed the FAA light tower at the end of Davis Road with David, him so drunk I thought he’d slip off the icy rungs and fall into the cold blackness that surrounded us. At the top he made a valiant effort to pee his initials into the pristine white snow so far below us, trying to make a D.P. bigger than any he’d ever peed before. But he was too drunk and his instrument wavered and the great experiment failed. In zipping up, he caught his foreskin in the icy teeth of his zipper, and I had to get it loose for him as he swore and yelped. It was twenty below in January and late at night and we were in a restricted area, one they took seriously, on top of the FAA marker tower with its flashing beacon, and that was the first time I’d ever touched a man’s penis, and him too drunk and cold and sore to care. I was seventeen and he was sixteen, and that should be some kind of coming-of-age story, the beginning of my growing up.
But it wasn’t.
See the pattern?
They grew up and passed me, and I stayed where I was. The tracks of cloven hooves still scored and crossed the paths of my long walks, the boys in my dreams had nubbins of horns and eyes the color of forests, if I left a book outside beneath a tree, the bookmark would be gone, and a fragrant white wood anemone would have taken its place. In mornings when I brought the family laundry in from the line where it had swung all night, my shirts would smell of more than clean night wind. A rich smell, one part forest to one part goat-footed one. I wore my shirts marked with his smell, branded as his territory.
And I didn’t grow up. Not then, not later. Not when my older siblings moved out, went on to college and dorms and marriages. Not when I graduated from high school and my parents gave me new luggage for a gift, not in fall when they packed me up and sent me off to Washington in September. Not when I sat through university classes, studying the botany and biology in their textbooks, getting As again, but knowing that the books would never know the plants as I did. Not when I met Tom, not when we began dating. Not even when the telegram came to my dorm late one night, the floor monitor knocking on my suite door, handing me the ominous yellow envelope that told me both my parents had been killed in an auto accident just hours ago. “Come home stop” the telegram said.
I didn’t go. Home wasn’t there. Home was gone, was buried under tract houses and a new motel on Davis Road. The
meat is not the moose, and I owed nothing to the bodies my parents had once lived in. I wasn’t going to the moon for my father, and I wasn’t being a botanist for my mother anymore. No center to hold, the merry-go-round gone crazy, pink horses and blue hippos flung out to the far corners of the earth. I went spinning off, free, homeless, heartless.
It flung me straight into Tom.
I had been seeing him, in a casual way, for nearly a year, off again, on again, no serious dates, no formal dances or dinners with wine. Only coffee between classes, a casual meeting in line for a movie, a shared ride into downtown Seattle. I did not phone him up and wail my loss to him. I still don’t know how he came to hear of it. My suitemates knew, as they sooner or later knew, by osmosis or pheromones, almost all my private business. I suppose one of them could have called him. But the next afternoon he came to me, with a single yellow rose, and we cut all our classes and went to the zoo, walking silently among the animal displays, saying nothing, not even touching.
And that night we made love.
He had a sagging sofa bed in a tiny efficiency apartment. There was an empty milk carton on his kitchen table, and dishes in the sink. The braided rug by the bed was coming undone. The bathroom window had no curtain, only a towel thumbtacked over it. The pillowcase smelled like his aftershave. These are the things I would remember for years. It would take an effort for me to recall that peculiar newness, the stretched sensation of Tom inside me, opening that unused part of my body. An elusive memory, as difficult to remember as the scent of a particular flower. I would never remember how we got into doing it, only that I was grateful for his experience and patience. Grateful. And afterward, after he had held me and kissed me, and after we had gotten dressed, I washed his dishes for him.
Cloven Hooves Page 13
