by Dana Spiotta
She was not ugly, she was not pretty. But just that old-fashioned word, plain. If she left the room, or if you tried to recall her to others, or even yourself, the adjectives would be limited—not hard to come up with but hardly worth the bother. Thin, yes; neat, yes; hair much more light brown than red, which also made it hard to describe, not so much both-this-and-that as barely-this-and-barely-that; light, milky blue eyes and pinkish white body. Her skin tone gave off a peeled quality that left the line distinguishing lip from face indistinct, her pale eyebrows lost against the nearly same-colored forehead. Bobby once described her as looking like a heroine in a nineteenth-century novel. To her that meant sickly, bland looks that suggested small, prim virtues.
“No.” Bobby laughed. “They would have said you have a noble physiognomy.”
“Right.”
“A pleasing countenance.”
“What does that mean, exactly?”
“Uh, a good personality?” He laughed and tried to kiss her.
“How sweet.” She pulled away, frowning at him. He held her arm. She shrugged him off.
“No, listen.”
She didn’t look at him but examined the floor, lips pursed.
“You are so lovely,” he continued, his voice softer now. “True, it isn’t a loud-volume effect; it is subtle but quite deadly, I assure you.”
She turned a little toward him. He was staring at her so intently she looked back at the floor. She could feel herself flush.
“You have a sort of—I don’t really know how to explain it—what you might call an undertow, if that makes any sense. The longer I’m with you, the more I want to be with you. It gets harder and harder to imagine leaving you behind. It’s not about enchantment or seduction or anything as light as that. It is more like being held captive. It’s powerful and uncomfortable and gets worse all the time.” She couldn’t hear what he was saying. She just knew that her lover thought she was plain.
But as Caroline she could put these two irrefutable facts together, plain and woman. It meant she could move somewhere new and go to the store or apply for a job and people wouldn’t feel threatened or aroused. She knew she could go unnoticed. She could not recall her own face if she wasn’t staring in a mirror. This smeary obscurity that had caused her pain her whole life became an asset now, her anonymity her saving attribute. Her looks had finally found their perfect context as a fugitive. Born to it by being chronically forgettable. (Which was also part of how she got in this position in the first place. Walking slowly, half smile on her face, clutching an innocuous purse, or a package, or a suitcase. Would anyone bother to stop such a person?)
Caroline did possess other assets as well. She could cook. She had worked in her father’s restaurant her entire youth. She could walk into a kitchen with a nearly bare pantry and create chilis and pastas and stews. This made her eminently employable. Restaurants hired people off the books. No legitimate Social Security number required. No references. No one would suspect this bland, wan woman was anything but harmless and ordinary. Because, despite the circumstances that had brought her here, she knew herself finally to be harmless and ordinary.
By the third evening in the motel she didn’t feel nearly as fear-struck. She even had an hour or two of giddy confidence. She was almost ready. Almost.
She imagined in future years there would be time to go over the series of events that led to the one event that inevitably led to the motel room. It felt like that, a whoosh of history, the somersault of dialectic rather than the firm step of will. The weight of centuries of history counterlevered against what, one person’s action? Just in the planning they knew where it would lead. Contingencies are never really contingencies but blueprints. Probabilities became certainties. She knew she would comb over how she came to be involved with cells and plans and people who believed in the inevitable and absolute. Someday she would explain her intentions to someone, at least to herself. And the event, which she could not think about, not yet, the event that she could not even name, she referred to in her thoughts as then, or the thing, or it. But surely in years to come she would think about it, over and over again, especially the part where Mary became Freya became Caroline.
What else?
She brushed her teeth. She ate more peanut butter and bread. She wished for a joint but settled for a beer bought at the store across the street. She exited briefly the afternoon of the third day, wearing large sunglasses and a scarf. She trembled in the fluorescence of the convenience store and hurried to pick up some juice, some beer, the paper. The Lincoln Journal Star. Front page, lower left quarter, a picture of Bobby Desoto. Just pay and leave. She stumbled back across the highway to her mustard-colored motel room. She read as she walked.
She opened the paper to the inside report and felt the fear come crashing back, making her stumble. She started to cry—noisy, hiccuped sobs and gulps as she closed the door behind her, staring at the lines of type. She learned that the group had been identified, although only one had been caught, Tamsin. She was the youngest and weakest. They must have gotten the names from her, just as Bobby suspected they probably would. (Behind her back he used to refer to Tamsin as M.L.C.—Most Likely to Crack.) But Tamsin didn’t really know the details of the various underground plans. The authorities were looking, but they had few leads. Nevertheless, contact anytime soon with Bobby was definitely out. She already knew that would probably be the case, but she cried anyway.
She drank three beers in a row watching TV shows about regular people. She sniffed as her nose ran. She went over everything again and again. Had she already made mistakes?
Her motel room was outside the train station just south of Lincoln, Nebraska, which was practically the dead center of the country. She wondered—she stared at Ironside and then turned the channel to Owen Marshall, and then to a commercial for denture glue—if a lot of fugitives headed for the dead center of the country, stopping there to make a plan of where to go next. Maybe this was fugitive central, a magnet.
PoliGrip. Eat like a man.
Polaroid. Land Camera. SX-70. Almost part of you.
D-Con. House and garden spray. Against bugs.
She wondered if her every thought would be predictable, the same things people always thought in these circumstances, and if she would give herself away without even realizing it. She doubted, actually, that anyone else would follow her Nebraska strategy. Logic would say try to get over the border, to Canada or Mexico. Most would move to the perimeter. That was what they would be looking for.
What else?
She, Caroline, didn’t have siblings, and her parents died in a car wreck years ago. She felt superstitious about writing that down. As if it would curse her poor parents somehow, or undo her younger sister.
For the first couple of years, Caroline wouldn’t be able to resist the occasional phone call to her mother. She knew this was dangerous. She knew this was a big, stupid risk. She knew the FBI, COINTELPRO, the police, all of them, expected this and had tapped the phones of all her relatives and friends. If there was anything Bobby had hammered into her, it was the consequences of involving other people. Anyone she told the truth to could be charged with harboring a fugitive. No contact of any kind could occur. She only hoped that somehow her family understood this. That she was protecting them. Caroline would talk herself out of it as many times as she could, and then she would call from a phone booth. She would wait until her father or mother picked up the phone. She would say nothing. She would listen to the sound of her mother’s voice saying hello, and then her mother getting annoyed and repeating that word, hello, in an urgent way. Then Caroline would hang up and start crying. Or continue crying, as that had already started when her finger first rotated the dial on the phone. She would go as long as she could and then call again, and swear it was the last time, until a few months went by and she couldn’t resist calling once more.
And?
Choose a California Social Security number, start with 568 or 546. The next two digits r
elate to your age. Always even numbered.
She removed the towel from her wet hair. She opened the tiny frosted window in the bathroom to let the hot, steamy air escape. She took the towel and wiped the mirror clear. In the seconds before it fogged again, she glimpsed her newly blond hair. It was a daffodil yellow blond, not the ash promised on the box. The side-parted, sophisticated and liberated woman on the L’Oréal box. From the Champagne Blonde series. Honestly. But it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t feel liberated by her blond hair whether it was egg-yolk yellow or a pale, early-summer corn-silk flaxen. She didn’t feel any relief in discarding her old look, or in no longer having to be the woman she was. She only felt an unnamed dread that had more to do with loss than capture. What do you discover when you remove all the variables? That you are the sum of your experiences and vital statistics? That you are you no matter what your name or whether people expect different things of you? She wanted to feel the joy of no one urging her to go to graduate school, or to get married, or even to give it all up for the movement. To get to be anyone is a rebirth, isn’t it? But she couldn’t be anyone, she got to be—had to be—anyone but who she was. In retreat and in hiding. She looked at herself, and she saw the same whispery, alone person she had been her whole life, more unlikely than ever to feel at home anywhere. And the dyed hair made her complexion more sallow. She looked not monochromatic but subchromatic. A pallid suggestion of a person.
The very last time she would call home was on her mother’s birthday, March 9, 1975. Twenty-nine months, three weeks and two days after she first went underground. She called, and her mother answered the phone. She listened as her mother said Hello? and waited, not hanging up, because she couldn’t, not just yet, and her mother said, “Mary, is that you? Mary?” with a plaintive, quiet voice. She instantly pushed the receiver button to disconnect, still pressing her ear to the handset. She could hear her breath, feel her heart dropping to her stomach, and her knees actually buckling at the sound of her mother saying her name. To her. She leaned against the phone booth and then felt a contraction and a heave as coffee-tinged bile rose up her throat and back down. She knew then she couldn’t call again, ever. Never, ever, never.
She had written it all down, once, on the ripped-out piece of spiral notebook paper. Her name, her history, the members of her family. Where Caroline Sherman had spent every year of her twenty-two years. When she was done, she tore the paper into shreds over the wastebasket. Then she fished the shreds out of the basket and lit them one by one in the yellow glass ashtray. She had it all memorized. She had all the details already in her head if not exactly in her heart.
PART TWO
Summer 1998
Jason’s Journal
SHE, MY MOTHER, apparently walked by my open bedroom door as I was blaring “Our Prayer.” I’d just gotten my hands on the Beach Boys’ three-disc Smile bootleg—you know, the kind of bootleg where there are like ten versions of the same song in a row? All these versions are usually just alternate takes that vary only slightly from the other versions. Say, for instance, on this take Brian stops singing two bars from the end. Or the harmonies get muddled slightly. Or somebody says, “One, two, three, four,” at the beginning in a soft, defeated, boyish voice. So these aren’t versions per se, these are screwups.
There are plenty of other bootlegs featuring actual different versions of Beach Boys songs: they occasionally have an extra verse, or a different person singing lead. Or different harmonies, different arrangements. Sometimes completely different lyrics. What my extended-box-set-bootleg packaging of Smile offers though is almost exclusively alternate takes. Ten, fifteen, twenty takes that are nearly identical to each other. They have already worked out how it is going to go, exactly how it will sound, and the takes are all about executing it. Now, you might ask, why the hell does someone want to listen to all that? And in truth, when I realized what I had bought (ninety dollars, no less), at first I was disappointed. But, and this is a big but, there is something amazing about hearing the takes. It is as if you are in the recording studio when they made this album. You are there with all the failures, the intense perfectionism, the frustration of trying to realize in the world the sounds you hear in your head. Sometimes they abruptly stop after someone says “cut” because they lost it, it didn’t break their hearts enough, they just couldn’t feel it in the right places. Or someone starts laughing, or says, suddenly, “Could you hear me on that?” What happens is you jump to a new level in your obsession where even the most arcane details become fascinating. You follow a course of minutiae and repetition, and you find yourself utterly enthralled. Listening deeply to this kind of music is mesmerizing in itself; the same song ten times in a row is like a meditation or a prayer. So it is quite apt to listen to the song “Our Prayer” in this manner. I’m on listen number three of the full ten versions, at about version seven, and I am peaking—my desire to listen is being satisfied but hasn’t been entirely fulfilled, fatigue hasn’t crept in yet, I still yearn for more, and it is a premium experience at this point, the blast of wall-to-wall harmonies, five-part, singing no words but just beautiful, celestial ahhs, the voices soaring, pure instruments of sound. Really, the Beach Boys at their acid choir best.
She, my mother, stopped by my door, which, as I said, was open, in itself a very unusual thing. I must have just returned from the kitchen or the bathroom and not yet closed the door. Maybe I was so into the music and wanted so much to be back next to it that I didn’t even notice the door. I think actually I had a sandwich and a soda in my hands and I was arranging them on my desk, and that’s why I hadn’t closed the door yet. I noticed her leaning slightly against the doorjamb. I thought perhaps she mistook the open door as some sort of invitation. But then I noticed this tiny smile creeping across her lips, and how she wasn’t really looking at me, and then I realized she was listening to the music, that was why she was standing there.
Okay, it was about eight o’clock, and by this time in the evening—I’ve noticed this, really all the time and without really intending to notice—by this time she was a little drunk. I knew this because I occasionally go to the living room to watch TV. Or I go to the dining room to eat dinner with her. She does this thing where she pours like a third of a glass of white wine and then she pours club soda into the glass to top it off. A wine spritzer, I guess. A corny suburban housewife kind of drink. She thinks it’s a light aperitif, I imagine. You might call it that, an aperitif, if you wanted to make it sound reasonable and almost medicinal. Thing is, she soon finishes and then does the third of a glass and spritzer routine again. Thing is, she does this all evening long. It’s not like I’m counting or even really paying attention, but it is hard to miss when she does this all evening long, every evening. I’m not even saying there is anything wrong with it. She never seems drunk—she doesn’t get all slurry or drop things. She just seems increasingly placid and a bit dulled by bedtime. She is already the sort of person who seems constantly to be halfway elsewhere. So this habit only makes her more and more absent or indifferent to the vagaries or boredom of being in this house. I’m not judging here but merely describing what it is she does. I am just observing her. I think maybe the whole third of a glass plus seltzer thing indicates she isn’t quite admitting to herself how much she drinks, but surely at some point she goes to refill and she realizes she’s down to the last third of a glass in the bottle (and we are sometimes talking a magnum here, a big economy jug) that started the evening full, and she must realize, then, that she is drinking quite a lot. But by then she must also be placid enough, plied enough, by the countless spritzers where perhaps this empty magnum doesn’t weigh on her too much at all. She is by then, well, whoever she is, in her private, silent thoughts, and I don’t really mind as long as she doesn’t interfere with me, which she usually doesn’t.
So she was feeling no doubt buzzed by eight o’clock, and this song caught her as she walked down the hall. She was lost in it, faintly smiling. She looked really young standing there
listening, and sort of uncovered, which was unusual for my mother. She is generally so creepily guarded and cryptic in odd, sunny ways. Like she isn’t really entirely sure she is in the right house or the right life. Like she’s a guest here. I guess she lacks the kind of certainty one expects in a parent. She seems to lack the necessary confidence. The song ended, there were a few seconds of silence and then “Our Prayer,” take number eight, kicked in. During the break she smiled at me—a flirty, sheepish smile, disarmingly unmomlike.
“Great song,” she said. Then it began again, and I lowered it reluctantly.
“A teenage symphony to God,” I said, quoting the liner notes that quoted Brian Wilson.
“Yes, that’s right,” she said, nodding. “They always sound most like that when there aren’t any words. When they use their voices as instruments. Just pure, perfect form.”
So she said this kind of smart thing about the Beach Boys and then wandered off to refill her glass or something. That’s the first time I remember thinking, How can that be?
Antiology
NASH HAD SEEN it happen before—many times, in fact. He stared at the kid’s racing-striped, voluminous nylon messenger bag. Nash recognized the carrier of the bag. Davey D., maybe, if he remembered correctly. D. had that long, snaggly-ass surfer hair, bleached and knotted. He had a habit of pulling at the knots, tearing his fingers through them, then discarding the clumped strands on the floor. And when he took off his knit skullcap, the blond and knotted hair sprouted up and out like a palm frond over his forehead. Nash stood next to the cash register and watched Davey D. shove a skateboarder magazine into his bag. Who gave a crap except it was one of those Japanese imported skateboarder magazines that came wrapped in plastic and sold for fifteen bucks, with a CD sealed inside. Davey D. just eased it into the bag, slid it from magazine stand to flap compartment. No hesitation. No look around.
