Bright Angel Time

by Martha McPhee

  Martha McPhee

  Bright Angel Time

  1997, EN

  The story of an eight-year-old’s journey towards adulthood on the roads of the American West with her family, her mother’s darkly charismatic new lover, and assorted hangers-on.

  Table of contents

  The Gentleman

  Waiting

  Anaconda

  More

  The Promise of Anton

  The Larger Scheme of Things

  Esalen, the New Life

  Plans

  Union

  Hundred-Dollar Days

  Getting Away With Things

  Powdered Milk and Margarine

  Dwayne: Our Second Stranger

  Desert Princess

  Eve

  Love and Sexual Equality

  A Whole Famlly

  The Beauty of Christianity

  The Day the Men Landed on the Moon

  The Great Unconformity

  ∨ Bright Angel Time ∧

  The Gentleman

  Mom learned to fall backward into the arms of strangers without hesitating or looking over her shoulder. She learned to fall freely, with her muscles relaxed and her mind open, inhaling the bitterness of sweat along with stale cigarette smoke, inhaling the thought of freedom with her hands by her sides, her fingertips clutching the fabric of her dress, her reddened lips turned up in a smile. At first she was afraid to fall. She wanted to look behind. She bent at the waist and fell awkwardly, buckling at the knees. But eventually she succeeded, and fell freely into waiting arms that received her, catching her under the armpits, catching her with fingertips pressing into the soft flesh of her breasts. A human pillar, she fell and fell and fell, until she fell in love with Anton. Anton was her therapist.

  It was the spring of 1970. I was eight years old; my sister Julia was ten, and my sister Jane had just turned twelve. It was several months after Dad had left and a few months before we knew Anton well enough to leave everything behind and follow him to California – to make a new life on the road with his kids, in a turquoise camper – with no plans. In 1970, you could do that. Dad had needed a love that Mom was incapable of giving; Dad was a geologist who needed time for his work and he’d fallen in love with a woman who could give him both love and time. But already, by now, Mom had the hope that with Anton she could lead us to a new life that was bigger and better than the one that came before.

  Mom had curly hair, golden curls the color of sand. She was thin, with a big bust, a gap between her teeth and green, green eyes. She wore shiny taffeta dresses with big flowers and no sleeves. Some had matching jackets, some had matching sweaters. The colors were living colors that made me think about summer: peach, lemon, strawberry. Her skin was ivory and smooth and there was no hair on her legs or under her arms. It was comforting skin, the type that showed no signs of stress, honest sincere skin that wrapped her in an extra layer, protecting what was inside.

  Mom did her falling with a group of other patients in a house she referred to as ‘The Farm’. Anton was an itinerant therapist of sorts and he’d come to our town to spread the Gestalt word and his idea of women’s liberation. He started the local chapter of NOW and organized sit-ins in pubs that excluded women. But his specialties were lonely housewives and clergymen; he taught them all to fall, and to him our mother fell.

  We didn’t meet Anton right away. We were on the outside, near the road, with a lemonade stand that Mom helped us set up so that we’d have something to do while we waited for her. We went on Saturdays, arriving early, before the others. Mom left us with three crisp dollar bills in an old cigar case filled with shiny pennies and small bits of tobacco. The dollars were meant to appease us so that we wouldn’t complain about bad business at the end of the morning, when she would emerge from Anton’s with her face swollen with tears.

  Daffodils and forsythia were in full bloom and the scent of the long onion grass filled the air. A gentle mist lifted from the ground toward the sky, and all around were trees. The house was gray and chipping paint, and it stood at the end of a short dirt driveway pocked with potholes. Ivy climbed up the walls, and the window-panes were smoky and unpolished. One window was lit – a window on the second floor illuminated by a blue light.

  “He’s a priest,” Julia said. The words came from her mouth in a steam of warm breath. As she spoke, her left eyebrow rose. Julia’s hair curled like Mom’s in small ringlets, sausages, that fell gently just below her ears. Her dark blue eyes gleamed. We stood by the lemonade stand, a little chilled, dressed alike in our yellow rain slickers and yellow boots, studying the blue light. A car rushed by on the road, blowing air over us. “A Jesuit priest.”

  I hadn’t quite pictured him as a priest. A man dressed in a cope and cassock wasn’t what came to mind when I tried to imagine Anton.

  “He’s not a priest anymore,” Jane said. Her braids hung heavily, pulling her face long. Beads of mist glistened in her hair. “He’s a Gestalt therapist now.”

  “Dub trois,” Julia said, acting smart. That meant no kidding in her vocabulary. She said she knew everything.

  “Mom’s falling in love with him,” I said.

  I didn’t know what a Jesuit was then, but I could tell by the way people looked when Mom told them he’d been a Jesuit that it was important. Awe seeped over their faces like a stain. I did the same with my face, pretending I understood. Gestalt was another one of those words that impressed people and that I didn’t know but used as if I did. I told teachers and classmates, anyone who’d listen, that he was a Jesuit and a Gestalt, and just using the words made me feel big.

  “Gestalt therapist,” Jane would correct.

  We were serious, serious to the point of solemnity. The air was blue, wet and cold against my face and suddenly I felt unusually clean. I thought of us as buttercups, standing in the onion grass in our yellow jackets and boots. We looked odd and out of place at the head of Anton’s driveway: odd because we were clean, as if there were something jarring and peculiar about being clean and being there. Everything about us was clean: behind our ears, the napes of our necks. We smelled of lemons and witch hazel and our clothes smelled of bleach and starch. Our cotton bobby socks were clean, soft as feathers around our feet; our jumpers were clean; our shirts were clean; even the grosgrain ribbons tied around our hair were clean. I had the urge to run deep into the trees and roll around in the bitter and decaying leaves and then I began to laugh. I pointed at the blue light. “Do you think they’re fucking?” I said. Julia had taught me that word. I looked at Jane and Julia and they laughed. “Ka-te,” they said. But we were bored. We laughed hard and loud and I worried that we would disturb Mom and Anton. Then I hoped that we would. I hoped that Anton would come to the window and tell us to be quiet so that we could have a peek at him. I hoped he’d raise the window and rest his palms on the sill and call us each by name. Jane, Julia, Kate – and the sound of our names would come to us, the warmth of his reprimanding words making us want to obey him.

  “He’s a philosopher. And he’s writing a book,” Jane continued.

  “He’s got five children,” Julia said.

  “He’s married,” I blurted.

  “Kate,” they said. We weren’t supposed to talk about that.

  “He’s a Texan and a poker player,” Julia said. “And he’s a big, big man with a big, big head.” Her eyes widened and her nostrils flared. “And he’s generous.”

  “And he likes to eat.” Excitement flooded our voices.

  “He earns over thirty thousand dollars a year playing cards,” I said. I liked saying ‘cards’ instead of ‘poker’. It sounded more professional.

  “How do you know that?” Julia snapped. She hated it when I knew something she didn’t know.r />
  But the image of Anton that I held and hoped for was that of a distinguished man, tall and slender with silver graying hair and long protective fingers, a gentle man.

  The familiar coughing of a muffler warned us, and Jane yelled for us to run. We darted through thistles deep into the forsythia. Surges of panic excited us, shooting up our spines. We thought we could vanish. We were surrounded by thickets and rough branches, and the ground was soft and gushy and speckled with the greens, whites and yellows of fallen blossoms and ragweed.

  Jane parted several branches so that we could spy on the patients. First came Delilah, Anton’s secretary. She didn’t look much like a secretary in her miniskirt and stovepipe patent-leather boots. Her hair was long and it wrapped around her shoulders, dancing with the leather tassels of her jacket. She parked between Anton’s Cadillac and our station wagon and vanished into the house like Mom.

  “She’s a hippie,” Julia said.

  Then the rest of the people came. There was something strange about them, though the women weren’t that different from Mom. I guess it was because the clergymen didn’t look like clergymen, dressed like normal men in pants and T-shirts, and the women were all so similar. Their hair was nicely brushed and curled, held back with bows or bandeaux. They wore wraparound skirts or slacks and bright argyle sweaters with initials embroidered on the front. One by one they drove in, parked with a screech, and rushed from the car to the door as if pulled by some mysterious force. Mom told us not to sell lemonade to the patients. She said some of the housewives were the mothers of our friends and it might make them self-conscious to know that we knew they were in therapy.

  We watched until the last car came and the last person went inside the shack. Then we emerged from the forsythia, coming into a new space that was somehow larger than before, filled with new things. A telephone pole shot into the sky, blossoming into a network of black wires that webbed their way in and out of the trees. Planks of wood leaned against the side of the house, disorganized and ugly. I imagined rusty nails in hidden spots and thought about tetanus and rabies and lockjaw. Jane had read about lockjaw. Lockjaw from rusty nails, lockjaw from stepping in animal excrement, lockjaw from licking our dirty fingers. She warned us that lockjaw was easy to contract at a farm. She told us that our jaws would convulse and our muscles would spasm and our mouths would lock shut permanently.

  “A car’s coming!” Julia sang, running across the road. The first car to stop all morning, in fact the first car ever to stop for our lemonade. Julia’s smile was electric and her cheeks rosy. As the car approached, she waved her hands furiously. Even when she was clumsy she moved with grace. She threw off her slicker and rolled up her sleeves. I followed her. Jane stayed behind: she was above selling lemonade. She said the only reason she came along was to baby-sit us. Ever since Dad left she’d pretended she was our mother.

  Not so long before, Julia had made me her best sister.

  “This is a secret pact,” Julia had warned. “Can’t tell anyone. Specially Jane.” We were sitting on the bathroom counter with our feet in the sinks, washing them before bed. The neon light buzzed overhead, making the bathroom incredibly bright. In the mirror our skin was ugly, betrayed by the light, pasty and pale.

  “I won’t tell Jane,” I promised. Jane and Julia fought a lot and I swung between them like a pendulum. I liked doing that. For the most part I always had someone on my side.

  “Jane’s a bitch,” Julia said. “I’m the one who always does special things for you.” She stuck my fingertip quickly with a needle, and then stuck herself. Small beads of blood popped from our skin and she clamped our fingers together to mix the blood, pressing them hard until they turned purple. When I thought it was all over she put my finger in her mouth and hers in mine. “We can become so close,” she said. “By drinking each other’s blood we can become each other.”

  ♦

  The black Lincoln Continental was dull, dirty. I stood on one side of the road and Julia on the other. The car slid quietly between us, an ocean liner gliding through the sea. Julia disappeared and I heard the soft mechanical murmur of an electric window going down.

  “Kate! Kate!” Julia commanded suddenly, appearing at the front end of the car. “Get a cup of lemonade. This gentleman wants a cup of lemonade. He’ll pay us twenty cents!” She looked at me from across the hood. “And he’s gonna pay us to do him a favor. Get him a cup!” Her smile was big.

  She snatched the lemonade from my hand and passed it into the car. Her arm vanished for a second and then reappeared, a dollar bill clutched in her fist. I wanted to look into the car, but she wouldn’t move from the window. Hog, I thought.

  “Look, Katy.” She held the dollar up. “He wants us to watch him change. He needs to fix his car and he wants us to make sure that nobody peeks at him while he’s changing into his old clothes.” She spoke fast, with assurance.

  “Where do we have to go?” I said, suspicious. I wasn’t going into any woods with this man. Mom had warned us about men who raped and killed. “Raped and killed”: she said it a thousand times, so we’d listen. But Julia was older, Julia knew everything. I watched the dollar in Julia’s fist, wondering how much he’d pay us, hoping it would be more than just a dollar, thinking I’d bargain with him if he didn’t offer more.

  “Nowhere. Just here,” she said. She grabbed my arm and together we leaned through the car window. I felt warm and special.

  It was dark inside the car, and thick dust lay on the dashboard, broken with fingerprints. In several places stuffing poked out from rips in the seat. The radio was turned on, music struggling through static. Stacks of browned newspapers littered the backseat, plastic-foam coffee cups spilled from paper bags lying on the floor. I imagined there must be a lot of coins in that car.

  The gentleman looked oldish, and his skin was leathery and wrinkled from too much sun. He had very little hair: a halo of white fringe and a large freckled bald spot. From his nose dangled something disgusting that I couldn’t make out and I thought I should tell him.

  “This is my best sister. She’s my very best sister, my blood sister,” Julia said, speaking as if she had found something great like blue sea glass on the beach. I knew I should feel privileged that she was including me.

  “You have something coming from your nose,” I said.

  “Kate,” Julia snapped. Kate sounded like bate when she said it that way.

  “She’s just young,” Julia apologized. I hated it when she said things like that – I didn’t feel young.

  “Uh-huh,” the gentleman said, and stared at me. The whites of his eyes were yellow, filmy. I thought he’d wipe his nose, but he didn’t. It was as if he liked having something hanging there. I couldn’t look at it. “That’s a…real nice, really quite nice.”

  There was a strange smell in the car: a smell of old milk and smoke.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, little missy. You’re just as charming as your sister.” He reached for my hand and kissed it on the knuckles. His lips were wet and his whiskers pricked my skin. I was afraid the thing would fall onto my hand, but it didn’t.

  “Now, uh, yes, I could use another cup of this lemonade.” His words drew out long and he stumbled over some of them. “How ‘bout gettin’ me another cup of this lemonade. Yeah…why don’t you, uh, run along?” His eyes caught ahold of mine as he handed me the cup.

  “But aren’t we going to help you? Don’t you need to fix your car?” I asked. The engine was still running, the car vibrated.

  “When you get back, pretty miss.”

  “Go on, Katy.” Julia shoved me gently until I drew away from the car. I could imagine her saying, “You’ve gone and ruined everything and now I’ll have to fix it.” I was mad I’d mentioned the nose.

  I walked back across the road, leaving Julia with the gentleman. I wished I’d told him I thought he had snot coming from his nose. The only reason I didn’t was because I was trying to be polite and the only other word for snot I could thin
k of was booger. My arms felt heavy swinging by my sides – awkward and uncomfortable, as if I couldn’t carry myself properly, and I was afraid that he’d be watching me. I could feel his eyes on my back and it made my legs twitch. Julia can get the gentleman a cup of lemonade, I thought. Julia can watch the gentleman change.

  Jane was picking forsythia, placing the boughs in the crook of her arm.

  “Jane!” I yelled and she turned to me.

  “What’s wrong,” she asked, screwing up her eyes. “Didn’t you sell any lemonade?” Her face looked alert, ready to react.

  “Julia’s so selfish,” I said. That’s what Mom always said to us when we asked for too much.

  “You’re just figuring that out?” Jane said. Her shoulders slumped forward. “I’ve been trying to tell you that for centuries.”

  I helped her pick forsythia, twisting the branches to break them off. They splintered into green and white flesh and I yanked and yanked. There was a difference going from Julia to Jane. Jane was quiet and she didn’t poke at me all the time and boss me around. Unless she was mad at you, she’d just let you be. Sometimes she’d speak and say something really smart, you could tell she thought a lot. Nothing got by Jane. Sometimes I thought I’d rather be Julia and I tried to be just like her. Other times it would be Jane I imitated. Now I imitated Jane. I even put on her long face. But, God, I wished I hadn’t mentioned the nose.

  Five, ten minutes passed. I looked back at the car, glad to make Julia wait. It drizzled and the rain made sounds in the leaves. I practiced making long faces, stretching my mouth this way and that, raising my eyes.

  “What are you doing with your face?”

  “Nothing.”

  We heard a car door slam, wheels screeched, burning rubber churning over pavement. The Lincoln Continental vanished in a cloud of exhaust. ‘Raped and killed’ flashed across my mind, but Julia stood where I had left her, frozen for a minute, with her hands in her hair. Slowly, she began to cross the road toward the house. Slowly, she leaned down for her ribbon which lay on the road, and then she rose and erupted into tears.