This was the scene at the Arb.
Disambiguation
The Oregon Trail was a historic migration route across the western United States. It is a physical depression in the ground in parts of Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon.
Oregon Trail may also refer to:
The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Mountain Life (1849), a history of the Oregon Trail by
Oregon Trail (1923), an American film serial starring
The Old Oregon Trail (1928), an American western starring
The Oregon Trail (1936), an American film starring
The Oregon Trail (1939), an American serial starring
Oregon Trail (1945), a Sunset Carson western starring
The Oregon Trail (1959), an American film starring
The Oregon Trail (1971), an educational computer game by MECC
The Oregon Trail (1976), a television movie starring
The Oregon Trail (1977), an American television series starring
The Oregon Trail (2011), the 2011 version of a 1971 video game
The Oregon Trail, a card game by Pressman Toy Corporation based on the video game of the same name
Oregon Trail Middle School, a middle school in Kansas
“Generation Oregon Trail,” Anna Garvey’s theory of a microgeneration between Generation X and Millennials
The Oregon Trail Scenic Byway
* * *
—
In the alley behind the bookstore Rust insisted we use a hemp wick instead of a lighter to smoke the Burning Man weed. “More organic that way.”
“Best practices,” Ty confirmed.
“Fine by me. I don’t fuck with vapes. I’m a flower purist, like Willie Nelson. No popcorn lung for me!”
Ty told us about his work with a shaman on lucid dreaming. “Trying for a DILD,” he said, “dream-induced lucid dream.” He pushed his index finger into his palm, to test whether this was a dream or not. The trick, he said, was to do an impossible thing in your waking life so much that you’d do it in your dream life, only in the dream life he would push his finger through his hand and that’s how he’d know he was dreaming and from there he could do anything.
Rust said, “What’s the last thing you want to hear when you’re going down on Willie Nelson?”
What? we asked.
“ ‘I’m not Willie Nelson.’ ”
I said, “My grandma would go down on Willie Nelson. She has a rhinestone Willie Nelson pin on her cowboy hat. We had to listen to him anytime we went through Utah—”
Ty preempted my rendition of “On the Road Again.” “Do we have time to go to the ATM machine?”
“No,” I said. “And the M in ‘ATM’ stands for machine. You don’t need the second ‘machine.’ You wouldn’t say ‘Automatic Teller Machine machine.’ ‘MLB baseball!’ Why do people have trust issues with acronyms?”
The boys gaped at me, hemp wick flickering between them.
“You’re right,” I said. “I hear it. I’ve become a pedant. The tenure track has ruined me. The other day I told Theo that I found the grocery store’s displaying its LaCroix in the foyer ‘problematic.’ It’s only been five years and I’ve become completely insufferable.”
Ty took a toke. “And you said nothing ever got done in academia.”
He passed to Rust and Rust said, “Academia is death.”
I said, “Let’s tell college stories!”
Rust asked, “Are you a representative of the alumni association?”
I accepted the joint and the wick and asked Rust why he wasn’t making art anymore.
“There’s no ‘making art’ and not making art,” he said. “There’s just living. Art is just practice for being alive.”
Ty said, “Show her your driver’s license.”
Rust looked bored but handed me his wallet. The license looked like a license. Stats, organ donor, unflattering photo, bighorn sheep on the header.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
Rust said, “There’s nothing to ‘get,’ ” and at the same time Ty said, “It’s a mask.”
“What?”
“He’s wearing a mask of his own face.”
“A prosthetic,” Rust corrected.
“He made it,” said Ty. “It took him like nine months.”
“Well, a lot of that was experimenting with materials, setting up the lab in the garage, the classes.”
“You took a class?”
“The Tahoe Shakespeare Fest does stagecraft workshops. I took a few.”
I could see it now, barely. A rubbery quality about his jowls, a slight matte swell at the cheekbones. It looked more like him than him. “You made a mask of your own face for your driver’s license photo.”
“This was a few years ago,” he scoffed. “I’m not really interested in that pranky stuff anymore.”
“What are you into, then?” I asked.
“Living my life, being a father. There’s nothing more radical, nothing more creative. You know Ivy had an orgasm when Gwenny was crowning? That’s art.”
I let this go, considered Theo’s theory that Rust was now engaged in a super long-term performance art project. It was the only way to explain his recent phase of breeder orthodoxy. He sent us Sears Christmas cards with him and Ivy and the girls spit-shined in matching white shirts looking like a bunch of Mormons, Valentine’s cards with conversation hearts taped inside. They went to Disneyland, shopped at Kohl’s, had an actual white picket fence. Theo thought Rust was a genius. I thought he was just getting old. Old and boring and numb like the rest of us, graced rarely with brief, intense bursts of aliveness that feel dreamt in the morning. Tonight, I could already tell, would be one of these bursts.
Ty paused with the cashed bowl and asked, “What are you on a scale of one to ten, zero being not at all high and ten being the highest you’ve ever been personally?”
I evaluated myself a two-point-five.
“Where do you need to be to enjoy this reading?” he asked.
I said, “Enjoy is a specific word.”
Ty said, “Survive, how about?”
I said a four would be nice.
“Then onward!” Ty blew out the cashed bowl and began to repack it.
Rust turned to me, his eyes tiny and flooded with blood. “For real,” he said, “how’s the homestead?”
The homestead was a place I visited. It was a place where the consensus was I was not by nature a very considerate person. A place where I had trouble thinking of things from another’s point of view. Did it make it worse to be publicly celebrated for a capacity that the homestead knew to be stunted in me? The checks cashed, but I was beginning to suspect there was something dishonest in fashioning myself a master at transporting myself into others’ points of view. There was maybe even something dangerous in not admitting that when we say we have endless empathy for and interest in other people what we in fact mean is that we exercise, ideally daily, empathy for and interest in ourselves, albeit all our various selves. These were not new thoughts, but recently they had led me to announce and demand commendation for the smallest acts of kindness.
“I opened your office door,” I’d announce to Theo, “so it wouldn’t be cold in there in the morning.”
“I unloaded the dishwasher some!”
I couldn’t help it. I had some loud little clock in my brain that kept track of exactly how long I was solely responsible for the baby, and every second more than my fair share had to be properly appreciated. I was not very good at being alone with her. She bit me, and I got too mad at her for it. I always had bruise rings on my forearms the exact size of her small mouth opened wide. I’d press the bruises when I wanted to feel something. I pressed one now.
Theo liked to tell how back in our courtship I wouldn’t le
t him hold my hair when I threw up. Too cliché, I reasoned with puke in my hair. It took me a long time to let him be nice to me, to let him do nice things for me. After I had the baby, I couldn’t stop. Visiting friends and family invariably noted how hyper-helpful Theo was, while delicately eliding the fact that I was hyper-needy. We never slept but Theo always had energy, had some engine inside him, chugging along. It was mostly love, but love shot through with fear, chivalry and surveillance. We watched each other like two big cats circling a room. He got up with me for night feedings, talked me through them. He made all the meals and changed all the diapers and rubbed my feet while I breastfed. When I finished, he took the baby from the pillow—I didn’t even have to lift her—and rocked her, put her to sleep with the whitewater womb sound he made. They were best friends. I avoided them both between feedings by volunteering to do errands or yard work and executing these slowly and with backbreaking meticulousness. It took me an hour and a half to shovel and salt our sidewalk. Over the course of an afternoon I ripped every single weed from a flower bed by the root with my bare hands, pausing to rescue and relocate each displaced earthworm.
I’d been told many times by various constituencies that all this was perfectly common, avoiding parenting when you feel you’re not particularly good at it, retreating into things you maybe are good at—be it worm rescue, snow shoveling or sex. Promiscuity, maternal ambivalence, wifely rage—many felt it, or even if not, considered such feelings normal. They stressed this. But what did I care that it was normal? My team of mental health professionals in particular didn’t seem to understand that I wasn’t comforted by being normal, that I took normal as an insult, that knowing these troubles were widely felt didn’t ease them, only meant that on top of my avoidance and guilt and shame and numbness I now felt boring, a kind of death. Knowing all this was normal put me somewhere on the scale of pathetic to suicidal. I thought, If this is normal, count me out.
Ty passed me greens.
“Homestead’s good,” I said stonedly.
* * *
—
At the bookstore I put my copy of my book, the one with my annotations for dramatic pause or emphasis, my humble thankses and charming patter, onto a table, introduced myself to the booksellers and returned to find my copy gone. Shelved, sold, it didn’t matter. It was lost and I would have to do my best with a blank store copy—never ideal. But I was feeling fine—four, four and a half, five fine. No worries, I said to myself. I kind of like giving bad readings because people leave me alone after.
Unfortunately, these were my people. They got me. While I Mr. Magooed my way through what I remembered of my opening patter, they laughed as only a hometown crowd could. Once I managed to find my excerpt and begin, they nodded, grunted and groaned in all the right places. They laughed at lines only Reno knew were funny. Their enthusiasm and generosity made me cast off my canned answers come Q&A, discard all my pro forma insights on the writing process and where my ideas came from. I would not, I resolved, answer the question I wished they’d asked, or turn their shitty not a question but more of a statement into an illuminating observation, as I’d learned to do on tour. Instead, I would give the people of Reno the dignity of deeply considering their true questions in all their existential incoherence.
The microphone began an aggressive, low-frequency tsk that no one else seemed to hear. I was up in the hot air balloon watching as I said, in closing and without prompting, context or attribution to Auden, “No poem ever saved a Jew from the oven.”
After my mercifully short signing line, I signed stock, then found Ty and Rust at the reception at the bar across the street.
Rust hugged me. “That was exactly what this town needs!”
Ty said, “That was actually pretty good. I didn’t understand a lot of it? Which I think was the point. So maybe I loved it?”
I said, “Can we not talk about it?”
Ty suggested I read from the first book next time. “But I liked the character based on me.”
“She made you into a buffoon!” Rust said.
Ty shrugged. “I liked the line about my hair.”
Rust said, “I loved when that girl in the front asked you about loneliness and ‘the West’ or whatever and you said, I feel lonelier now than I ever did in Nevada.”
Lonely was not the right word, but before I could clarify, Rust and Ty were arguing whether I had portrayed Ty as a buffoon. I turned away before they could ask me to arbitrate (I had) and was immediately cornered by a local adjunct who’d gone to undergrad where I’d gone to grad school. She wanted to know: Was I down to reminisce? I allowed it, moved by her ardor for what had once been the Big Ten.
“We lived in the forty-dollar block but we charged fans of the other team fifty. Once, this truck of old guys parked on our lawn and paid and then, just as they were headed off to the stadium, they saw my roommate upstairs on the balcony with a beer bong. They like, called up! Like, Can I hit that? I’ll give you beer money. My roommate’s like, For sure! Starts like to come downstairs right? Old guy’s like, No. ‘Stay where you are.’ He wanted to do a two-story beer bong. And he fucking did! Only, as my roommate’s pouring and this guy is chugging, one of those huge bees, the slow drowsy-looking ones—”
“Carpenter bees.”
“Sure. Floats over to the funnel. We all saw it. We were like, ‘No!’—But also like, ‘Yes!’
“Then zip—bee flies right into the funnel! Sucked down the tube. Bro, we all watched it go down the pipe. The old-timer did too—but he didn’t stop.”
“He bonged the bee?”
“He bonged the bee! He paid us a hundred dollars for a parking spot and a bee bong!”
Rust had joined, asked, “Is any of this making sense to you? Are you an insider in her culture?”
I had to admit that I was. I asked who won the game.
The adjunct shrugged. “They did. And after the game the same guy crashed his truck into our side porch, but we didn’t even care because we felt so grateful to have witnessed the bee bong, like, to have lived in its same historical moment. Plus we were renting.”
I said, “Renting is amazing.”
She asked if I had a house.
I said, “We do.”
The first person plural aroused her. “You’re married?”
I nodded. “With a kid.”
This sent her over. “Eeeee!” she squealed. “You have a little baby?”
I said, “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“I know what you’re doing and stop it. That’s not why the foremothers marched.”
“Stop what?” said the adjunct.
“Listen: I am a messenger from the future. I am you in ten years. Pay attention! Don’t fetishize marriage and babies. Don’t succumb to the axial tilt of monogamy! I don’t pretend to know the details of your . . . situation, but I guarantee you, you’re as free as you’ll ever be. Have sex with anyone you want. Enjoy the fact that it might happen any minute. You could have sex with a man, a woman, both—tonight! You could have sex with someone twenty years older than you. You could have sex with someone from the other side of the planet. Better yet, be alone! Enjoy your body, come every day, worship at the altar of the divine goddess. Travel! Travel everywhere, especially short distances. Travel around your kitchen. Travel up some stairs and down again. Pick up and go. Enjoy all the holidays you won’t get anymore—New Year’s Eve, Halloween. Go to the lake, go camping, go on a boat. Go to Vegas for all I care. Even shitty, shitty St. Patrick’s Day in Vegas is better than the best day at home with an infant.”
A friend of the adjunct had joined us, waifish in a sparkly halter top and visibly concerned. “What’s she talking about?”
The adjunct said, “Political lesbianism, maybe?”
I said, “I am delivering a message from the future.”
“Like the Terminator,” Rust h
elped.
“Yes!” I said, pointing vigorously at him, though in truth I have never seen those movies. “I’m like the Terminator! The reverse Terminator! I want you to live. I want you to flourish. I want you to thrive!”
“The Germinator,” the adjunct said.
I said, “Exactly!” and we cheersed.
A long and important pause.
“So . . .” said the sparkly friend, embarking on a new topic. I saw it coming at me like a malicious wave rolling up from a black and briny sea. I heard its roar in the back of her throat, saw my devastation in her shellacked eyes. I looked desperately around the bar for my friends, but they had forsaken me. I pleaded silently for the adjunct to intervene but knew she would not. My glass was empty and here it came, ruin, pain, destruction, death. She batted her eyelashes. “. . . what are you working on now?”
Why not tell them, these luminous childless women of Reno, why not tell them everything? That I was coming of age at an alarming rate. That I’d gained so much weight that my dean had stopped asking me my major. That I did not appreciate the distinction between a symposium and a colloquium. That my chair had called me kiddo, both of us a little drunk at a daytime reception. That I liked it, that having-a-dad feeling. That for weeks into every term I forgot which classroom was mine, what time it was mine, my students’ names. I forgot why the names on the buildings were on the buildings. Motherhood had cracked me in half. My self as a mother and my self as not were two different people, distinct. The woman they admired, who’d written the books they liked or at least had heard of, if only today, was on the other side of a canyon. Someone else had written them, elves-and-shoemaker style. A curtain fell across me each evening, after the baby was asleep, when I was supposed to be resting, supposed to be happy. Happiness is a scam, I know that, but was it so dumb to want something other than the blackout curtain I remembered from casino motel rooms, plastic-lined, unbreathable, which came on, over, upon me every evening? On the radio a whale was trapped in a man-made sound. There are so few of these whales and the ocean is so vast and more importantly so noisy now that they can’t hear each other, can’t find each other, can’t meet and make babies, some voice said. That’s why they’ll go extinct, confirmed my biologist.
I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness Page 9
