Two years later, Jim and my mother would have a daughter, Alice, and two years after that, Leslie and my father would have a second child, Eva, another girl. At ten, I was an only child with four parents; by fourteen I would be one of four kids. For the most part, I loved that filling of the houses, the clamor, the company. We would be too far apart in age to compete for clothes or toys or a family niche. But I would often have the feeling that they had come too late, that I would have to wait years for them to catch up.
When I was in sixth grade, Mother and Jim sold 12000 Spring Street. They were tired of being landlords, tired of living at the main crossroads of the valley, where your front yard was everybody’s business. They bought a house along a narrow river canyon outside town. There, my mother had to give up vegetable gardening. There wasn’t much sun under the live oaks, and every winter the river swelled to twice its size and washed trees and deer and topsoil away on a thundering stream.
What we gained at the new place was privacy. You could do a nude interpretive dance in the back yard and wouldn’t shock anyone but the squirrels. Technically, we did have neighbors, a city-dwelling couple who owned the lot next to ours. They drove their trailer up for a weekend now and then and talked of the grand second home they were planning to build, which made Mother nervous. She needn’t have worried. We soon learned what they were made of. When they arrived on a Saturday, they started construction by raking the leaves. While they raked, they screamed at each other, and at their dog, who soon took to cowering in the willows by the river’s edge. By Sunday, when the leaves were in a neat pile, they packed up and left for their city jobs. The wind blew, the leaves sifted back over the lot, and in a month or so, when the place looked just as it did before, the neighbors returned and started raking again. After about a year, they stopped coming.
We couldn’t grow anything to eat at the new place, but there were flowers on the banked terraces above the river that were older than I was: camellias the size of haystacks, rhododendrons on sagging trellises, a twenty-bush rose garden in dire need of pruning. The house had been rented for years by a couple who wouldn’t have known a hose if it reared up and bit them, so the whole yard was starved and in need of assistance—just the way my mother liked it. She threw herself into weeding and mulching, and in the spring the landscaping showed its more delicate goods: a patch of crocuses at the base of an oak, a raspberry vine that filled out and gave fruit.
The house itself was a modest one-bedroom, long and narrow, with open-beam ceilings and rooms stacked end to end like railroad cars. Off its west corner was a guest cottage, complete with bathroom and kitchenette, and I was to sleep there until we could afford to build another bedroom on the house.
“So how do you feel about staying out here?” my mother asked me as we toured the place. The main room was small, with linoleum and fluorescent lights. The owners had left some white wrought-iron furniture in one corner, and my mother dragged it into the center of the room.
“I feel fine,” I said, glancing around. “It seems cool.” I was already plotting the transgressions I could get away with under my own roof.
As it turned out, I wouldn’t do much transgressing, nor would I sleep there very long. The guest house was a good thing come too early. I was eleven—just shy of laying claim to the place, longing for privacy but not quite over my childhood fears of spiders and storms and the dark. And that place had spiders—armies of them. The house had been on the market for a while, and it had clearly been some time since anyone disturbed the spiders’ peace. They crawled the walls and floors as if they owned them, and wouldn’t be hurried when I approached with a shoe.
When my mother came out to tuck me in at night, I made her go marauding. She went around the room, crushing spiders underfoot, then chased after the ones overhead with a curtain rod. The ceiling was made of old soundproofing tiles, and when she pressed into them, the rod made a faint crunch that I took to be the snapping of spider bones.
“Spiders don’t have bones. They have exoskeletons,” my mother said. She had the rod in her hand, a few legs and black carcasses dangling off the end. Then she started to laugh. “I guess that’s cold comfort. This weekend, we’ll really sweep out the eaves.” She propped the killing tool in a corner. “I’ll go after them with my spray hose.”
When she kissed me and left, I sat up in bed and watched her disappear, then counted to six and waited for the light to come on in her and Jim’s bedroom—a mere thirty feet off. It was a comfort to see their shadows cast on the wall.
As it turned out, I would make those thirty feet in record time when the first winter storm broke out, sprinting through the rain in my nightgown, thunder cracking overhead. That night I slept on the foldout couch in the living room. And when the rains went on and I showed no signs of returning to the guesthouse, my mother moved my dresser into the living room. I slept on that sofa bed for two years, an oddly cozy arrangement. I liked sleeping in the center of the house, where it seemed nothing could harm me. In the winter I had a fire beside me in the hearth, and I woke each morning to the rasp of the coffee grinder and Jim whistling along to the radio in the kitchen.
The mail truck retired around then, though it had been running reliably since we left Boston eight years earlier. Jim parked it on a far corner of our two-acre lot, under a bay tree, and painted it brick red to match the house. It soon became another shed, the back filled with plywood and two-by-fours, the cab gathering dust and cobwebs. Once, Jim needed to move it—to get a backhoe by when he was grading the bit of land sloping down to the river that he liked to call “the back forty”—and to his amazement, the engine coughed and turned over on the first try.
“Geez, maneez,” he said, shaking his head with a smile. “Can you believe that?” The truck rumbled steadily beneath him, and he cocked his head to one side, listening to the idle the way an acupuncturist listens to a pulse. “We should never have moved out of this thing.”
This was Jim’s perennial cry. He had a philosophical opposition to material goods, and watched the expansion of the house with a mixture of satisfaction and dread. “We’ve got to cinch in our belts,” he’d say when a batch of bills came due, or, “Man oh man, we’re going under.”
This talk never worried me much, since it seemed to have little bearing on the actual state of our finances. Mother had a steady job with the school district and was forthright about their habit of socking money away for lean times. She conveyed her usual matter-of-fact faith in our future—not a future of luxury, but one of being well fed, with a roof over our heads—even as Jim seemed braced for a sudden downturn in our fortunes. This difference between them came clear in daily ways, not least of which was their manner of walking the supermarket aisles.
Jim pushed the cart at a snail’s pace, leaning over to squint at price tags, ticking items off a short list. It seemed that thriftiness was a matter of preparation and pacing. If you didn’t rush, you wouldn’t overspend. My mother’s style struck fear in his heart. She wheeled through the store at a clip, tossing items into the cart, and wrote the check without a second glance.
Still, even with all the stops out, our life had to be called frugal. We ate out perhaps once every two months, never bought anything on credit. Even the house, their one large expenditure, was added to slowly. Rather than borrow against their mortgage to pay for the additions, they saved the money to pay for building materials, and did most of the labor themselves, hiring out only for the jobs they couldn’t do—finish carpentry and tilework.
We’d left Spring Street, but I still went to the same school. Instead of walking a mile down the street each morning, I waited out on the road for the school bus, watching my breath mushroom into the cold valley air and mooing at the cows on the far hill. After school, I still spent most of my time with Alison Rider, and with another girl, Maxine, who had moved to town during the fifth grade.
Alison, Maxine, and I were a trio, which did not mean a set of three equally loyal friends, but rather three vari
ables in a constantly shifting equation. When two of us were drawn together, a third was repelled. When I was on the outs I swore I didn’t need the other two; they were pathetic, tucked over there with their heads together. And then something would come between them, a little frisson of boredom or ill feeling, and one or the other would bump up against me in line and make a jibe at the other’s expense, and I’d forget any of that trouble had ever happened—until it happened again.
Alison and I had known each other for what seemed like most of our natural lives. She and Maxine, though they had met only lately, both lived with their mothers, and shared a certain jaunty self-reliance. I believe I was slightly more mothered than they were—though I don’t think their mothers would feel I have the right to say this—but among us this became a liability; it marked me as soft. The two of them were certainly worldly, considering the backwater in which we lived. They listened to Boz Scaggs, knew how to make omelets, and swept the kitchen without anyone asking them to. Maxine, in particular, seemed to know about sex—not just the facts, but the essence of it. It was there in the way she raked her fine blond hair away from her forehead and trailed her fingers through the ends. Somehow, on her, that gesture didn’t look vain, it looked almost weary—a languid, unconscious movement that made the boys flock around her, mooning.
At twelve, I was still a child—bony and restless and given to blurting out stupidities. I remember once trying to calculate Maxine’s appeal. She couldn’t kick or throw a ball; she screamed and turned scarlet at the sight of a mouse. I paused there, having the vague sense that these might be considered her charms. But there was more: she was flat-chested; her hair was too thin to feather or curl; she had gaps between her teeth and was prone to cold sores. Still, the boys treated her with a kind of breathless reverence. She, in turn, didn’t give them a second glance. She was promised to a boy she’d met in Jamaica, where she went during the summers to visit her father.
In the classroom, also, I seemed to be falling behind. The teacher kept a homework ledger, and there were always a few checks just after my name, the good intentions of the early school year, but they thinned out after Halloween, grew patchy by Christmas, until finally there stretched a row of empty boxes. I would ask to see this ledger frequently, hoping for a colossal error in my favor, and now and then I copied down the missing assignments, but I was too demoralized by my own laziness to chip away at the missed work.
Slowly, before my own eyes, I was turning into a laggard and an occasional troublemaker. I experienced this as something happening to me. The teacher singled me out for corrective measures, and under her glare I got jumpy and took bigger chances, flipping her off when she wasn’t looking, for the amusement of my friends—except then she was looking, and she was not amused.
I was becoming corrupted in certain ways, but I was still known among my friends for my sexual naivete, so it was a relief when I got my first French kiss and could stop listening to Maxine’s instructions about tongue rolling and flavored lip gloss. It happened on a Greyhound bus, on my way to a weekend visit with my father. I jumped off at the station in Cloverdale to feather my hair with the bathroom hand drier, and when I got back on, there was a young man in my seat.
“Oh, sorry,” he said, when I hesitated in the aisle. “I’ll move.” He started to pull his bag from the overhead rack.
“That’s all right. No one has a seat to themselves,” I said, suddenly grateful for the packed bus. He was handsome, in a plain-featured way, and his sheepskin jacket made him look bulky and useful.
“Well, all right then,” he said, sinking back into his seat. His name, I soon learned, was Tony. He made a living raising ducks.
“So—mallards?” I asked brightly. Any shred of poise I possessed seemed to have deserted me.
“Yep,” he said, grinning wider.
Later, Tony mustered some excuse to compare the size of our palms, and when I held my hand up, he laced his fingers into mine. I never wished that ride would go slower, though I can’t remember a thing we said for the next fifty miles. When we got to his stop, he said, “Okeydokey,” and leaned over to kiss me, dryly at first; then his mouth opened and—miracles!—there was his tongue. I remember the smell of hay on his coat, and how a strange voice in my head said, So that’s what he wants— as if he were taking advantage, and my part was one of womanly forbearance. In fact, the advantage was mine. I knocked off that awkward first effort with a boy I’d never lay eyes on again. I rolled my tongue this way and that, sure that reports of my ineptitude would never make it back from the duck farms of Sebastopol.
When I got to the station in San Francisco, my father was waiting for me, hands in his pockets, his coat buttoned against the cold. He looked worried, and clutched me in a welcoming hug slightly longer than usual.
“Are you okay?” I asked him, my thoughts of the duck farmer quickly fading.
“I’m fine,” he said, shaking off whatever had him brooding. “I’ve got a few things on my mind. But, hey! You’re here. We’ve got some great things planned for the weekend.”
On the drive home, I watched clouds of worry pass over his face. My father was never much good at hiding his moods. For that matter, neither was I, and perhaps he caught sight of my mirrored concern. Toward nightfall, he gave up pretending.
“Honey, I need to talk to you.” He clenched his lips in a way saved for nervous occasions. I followed him to the living room and sat down, but instead of launching in, he went over to the record player and picked out an album. Celia and Johnny. I thought it was strange—putting on music at a time like that. He slipped the LP gingerly from its sleeve, lowered the needle, and turned up the volume before sitting across from me.
“I’m sorry about the music.” His voice was pitched low, below the jazzy blare of the horns. “I’m worried that the house might be bugged.”
My stomach turned over. I had no reference point for his worries, no idea if they were well founded.
“Don’t worry,” my father said. “I’m just being extra cautious. The thing is, there is a chance that Leslie and I might need to move to Kentucky. There’s some very important work going on there with the coal miners, and they need our help.”
I stared at him in disbelief. I could barely have picked out Kentucky on a map.
“What kind of work?”
“Organizing work. The union is going up against some powerful mining companies.”
“Can’t the people in Kentucky take care of it themselves?” I was conscious of my petulant tone, but I had a feeling he would cut me some slack under the circumstances.
“They are having a really hard time, honey. It’s a crucial fight.” I could see his frustration in trying to convey the urgency in terms I could understand. In fact, he didn’t have to try. He and I had once watched a film about striking coal miners. I don’t remember where we saw it, but the images stuck in my head. Men standing in a muddy road, their faces smudged from a day in the mines, then the rat-a-tat of machine-gun fire, and some of them falling.
Beyond him, out the sliding glass doors, I watched the city lights wink on. I wanted to glide out over the buildings, away from our apartment, which now seemed to be locked in a set of cross hairs. More than my father ever did, I believed in a faceless governmental will. His fears were concrete. He feared phone taps; he feared inflated charges and prison, no doubt, having faced them before. My fears were more vague than that, more high-flown and Orwellian, though I hadn’t read Orwell yet. I was a pure-blooded conspiracy theorist at twelve, the product of bad nerves and little information.
“Honey, what are you thinking?” my father asked.
“I’m thinking that I don’t want to move to Kentucky!” I said, my voice rising above the music.
My father stiffened and raised a finger to his lips.
“Oh my god,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he said, seeing my panic. “Don’t worry about it.”
“It’s not okay. I said Kentucky. They p
robably heard me.” I felt sick. Maybe I had meant to give us away.
When my father saw me rattled, he forgot caution and turned comforting. He took a seat beside me and curled me to his chest. “Look, I’m sorry if I scared you. It’s gonna be all right.” He murmured and shushed, and later Leslie came home and we ate around the lamp-lit table. My sister banged happily on her highchair, sucking on one of those horrid Vienna finger sausages, and I tried to forget about what we’d said.
The next day my father and I went to the neighborhood courts to play basketball, and my fears seemed to shrink in the sunlight. Still, when we dribbled back to the apartment I stopped on the street and stared at our building, the neat walkway, the number on the door. I tried to see if it looked different from outside, if someone watching from a far window, a telescope, a parked car, might find something to mark us from the rest.
One morning, on a weekend visit to that same apartment, Leslie called me into the bathroom. She was standing in front of the mirror, a comb in hand, bangs hanging over her eyes. “How would you like to cut my hair?” she asked, flashing me a hopeful smile.
Up till then I had used scissors only to cut paper and thread, but I shrugged and said, “Sure.” As in most things, my fear of screwing up was outweighed by my hope of discovering some unknown talent. I took the scissors and sliced the air a few times for warm-up.
Leslie brought in a kitchen chair and sat down facing the mirror. “I can dp the front by myself,” she said. “But I can’t reach the back.” She ran her fingers through the hair at her nape. “So, to make layers what you do is comb the hair up like this”—she scooped up a section from the side of her head and pulled it toward the ceiling—“and cut it off straight.” She demonstrated with her fingers.
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