A Girl's Guide to Missiles

by Karen Piper

  “Did you work on it?” I asked.

  “I’m trying to remember,” he said.

  Keith had already rushed into the next room without stopping to admire the Sidewinders, and the guide seemed confused by our party splitting up. My dad refused to be herded past the AIM-9L Sidewinder, which he was examining intently.

  “Ah, there it is!” my mom exclaimed, seeing a Tomahawk in the next room. She moved on, walking up and touching its nose like the face of a familiar friend. Leaving Dad behind, I followed her. “This nose is where my computer chips are stored.” She pointed. “That is where the guidance system goes.” The missile was enormous, about eighteen feet long, far larger than the sleek and friendly Sidewinder. I never knew they came that big and shuddered at the thought of one dropping on me.

  “What are these?” Keith shouted back at the guide, who must have felt he was herding cats.

  “Videos about base history.” The old man shuffled over to Keith. I suspected he already wanted to go sit back down, unable to keep up with my fractured family. “Want to see one?” he asked politely. “How about the Kennedy visit?” Keith was staring right at it.

  “No, I think I’ve seen enough,” Keith replied. It was not the right thing to say. I worried about the impression he was making.

  Back in the car, Keith began to quietly sing, “American woman, stay away from me.” Everyone was silent. I froze.

  No, no, no, I thought. All the things I had hid from my parents seemed to want to burst forth in that song. “I don’t need your war machines,” the song went. Yet my parents were the war machines. Keith sniggered and elbowed me, clearly thinking I was in on the joke. My parents must have thought he did not want me, not knowing the lyrics. Was it possible to separate me from China Lake—or them?

  My dad started his own song to drown out Keith. “Oh, I like Jim Hill, he’s a good friend of mine. / That is why I am hiking down Jim Hill’s main line. / Hallelujah, I’m a bum . . .” It brought back memories of all the folk ditties we had sung on family road trips, mostly old union songs my dad had learned from his parents. This song was actually about “Joe Hill,” a union organizer executed by firing squad after being framed for murder. My dad changed his name to Jim Hill, my high school principal after Mr. Crackling left. Everyone loved Jim Hill, who was not creepy like Crackling.

  I joined in loudly, “Oh, I like Jim Hill, he’s a good friend of mine. / That is why I am hiking down Jim Hill’s main line. / Hallelujah, I’m a bum, hallelujah, bum again. / Hallelujah, give me a handout, to revive me again.”

  “All this singing today!” my mother said pleasantly. “Oh, there’s Ridgecrest Heights.” She pointed at some houses. “That’s where another one of Karen’s boyfriends lives.” It was my high school boyfriend Phil’s house. “Are you still in touch with Phil?” My mom turned to look at me.

  “Mom, I went to Sunday school with him when I was sixteen!” I took Keith’s hand firmly. I was on his side on this one.

  “Well, you never know. I hear he still asks about you. . . . What does ‘dating’ mean to young people these days, anyway?”

  “You know, holding hands, that sort of thing,” I replied. “Going to the movies.” Keith and I smiled slyly at each other.

  * * *

  —

  Like the roll moment for a missile, when does a relationship begin to go astray? Was it when I realized that blowing up the Columbia River dams would kill Americans and not Canadians? All I know is that at some point our relationship began to circle around the “which side would you fight for in a war” quandary. Canadians or Americans? What was really meant was, “Are you on my side or not?” Or, “Will you fight for me?” But when did it start, the cups thrown and insults hurled? If only I could capture that moment, examine it, and turn it around. Could we have stopped that moment if we had caught it then?

  All these questions, but no way to turn back, to stop.

  All of us were committed to our own trajectories. Keith had committed to following me to Missouri. I was determined to marry while my father could still give me away. My father was headed to a place none of us could understand. I somehow wanted my dad to know I was taken care of before he was gone, even though “being taken care of” did not even fit who I was anymore. Maybe that was the problem. We were all veering off target at the speed of flight. There was no way to stop us now.

  It was really just a question of where we would land.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The Weather Is a Weapon

  On the day of my wedding, fifteen people sat inside the chapel at my old alma mater in Santa Barbara. It looked like the magazines, surrounded by vine-covered pathways, Spanish fountains, and ocean views from every spot. I decided to wed in this chapel at Westmont College because when I had been feeling at my lowest, a sense of grace had overtaken me there. I do not remember what had upset me. Perhaps it was the existential crisis of Kierkegaard or perhaps it was Garett. But I had been crying in the chapel when suddenly light flooded through the stained-glass windows. I felt full of colors and bliss. Eugene was too frenetic, too sex-as-enlightenment-driven, to capture the moment of innocence I had once felt here. Besides, it was simply not a marrying kind of place. Eugene had orgies.

  I wanted something else. I needed it to be like the magazines, which only my sister understood. I wanted to get married while my dad could still perform his duties. More than that, I needed my dad to say that I was doing the right thing. I needed to hear him say that it was going to be okay, to say, “Go marry him. Your mother and I approve.”

  Unfortunately, it had not started as a good day for my father. “I need to get the . . . ,” he had said that morning, looking at my mom with that familiar helplessness. He shook his fist, repeating, “I need to get the . . . you know, the . . .” Then he gave up and walked away, not knowing how to say he had lost his cup of coffee, not knowing where it was. My mom chased after him with his coffee cup at a plush bed-and-breakfast with more than enough room for someone who did not know the word for “coffee.”

  Now heat lamps protected the patio from the sixty-five-degree weather outside, while inside my sister had covered the wooden benches in white bows. She had started saying that marriage was “mainly a convention,” but she still loved the fabrics and the flowers. She said she believed in Montaigne, who said marriage was for friendship and not passion, which could only exist outside of marriage. At the altar were bouquets of tall purple delphinium, almost completely concealing the cross behind it, which had been the plan. We were not there for Jesus that day.

  But something still was not right.

  * * *

  —

  More than a year ago, Keith and I had loaded up our U-Haul truck to move to Missouri, taking the scenic route over Yosemite Pass, which was where we had our first argument when our brakes caught on fire. We were heading down a narrow road hanging over a cliff when blue smoke started coming from the front wheel. Keith pulled over as I dangled over the cliff, terrified of heights. We did not have a fire extinguisher, so I wanted to call a tow truck or someone to give us a ride into town. But Keith used to be an auto mechanic and said it was no big deal, that the cold would put it out. So we continued on, even though I didn’t want to. Was that when I should have just gotten out and said, You go on without me? But we made it down, which I guess proved he was right.

  After that, our arguments seemed to follow the same pattern. For instance, we ran into a bear sitting on the trail while hiking in Yosemite. I instinctively said, “Stop. Let’s back up slowly,” while Keith instinctively picked up a rock and threw it at the bear.

  “It’s not a dog to shoo away!” I yelled.

  “I’m not trying to hit it!” he yelled back. Only the bear seemed unconcerned. Failing at dislodging the bear, Keith then ran up to it and kicked dirt in his face.

  “Are you crazy?” I shouted. “You don’t run toward a bear.” But it wor
ked. The bear ran away, and Keith thought he was proven right again.

  These were the little arguments.

  Our big argument happened when we got to Kansas, and in Kansas, there is no way to end an argument. It spreads out before you, on and on and on, a flat plain without interruption. There are no forests or bumps in the road or distractions. Just argument. We were supposed to get married as soon as we reached Missouri, but we had postponed it for a year before we even arrived.

  Being a new teacher was stressful enough, I decided.

  In Columbia, a college town of one hundred thousand with a campus built by slaves, Keith could not find the kind of work he wanted, with an environmental nonprofit. Surprisingly, that was not really a thing in Missouri. We found only one such position, and it did not pay. Then he looked into working at the Department of Natural Resources but found it focused mostly on hunting and fishing, not ecosystem management, which was his specialty. Eventually, he settled on the fisheries and wildlife PhD program at Mizzou, even though he complained it was not “fish and wildlife,” as they had at other universities. “Fisheries,” he said, means protecting fish so people can eat them, not for the fish themselves.

  He wanted to save salmon for the sake of salmon.

  Even so, we were delighted that he got into the program on such short notice, with a tuition waiver and an office in the Natural Resources Building. We laughed in the hallway of his new building, which was lined with stuffed animals in glass cases.

  “Hey, a bobcat!” I pointed at one. The taxidermist had made it look mean, as if it would tear you to shreds, which I found hilarious.

  “It’s like some kitsch Twin Peaks set in here,” I said, laughing. The building was new and entirely corporate looking aside from these scary dusty displays.

  “Can you believe it?” Keith said, then grabbed my hand and led me down a staircase. “You’ve got to check this out,” he said. In the basement, we entered a dusty locked storage room, which he had discovered earlier that his key would open. Inside, he pointed to something that looked like an elephant’s foot.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked. There was a glass table on top, covered in a sooty dust.

  “Someone made it into a coffee table.” He laughed as he tried to pick it up.

  “Oh, my God,” I said. “I teach about this kind of shit! I can’t believe that’s here.” I had been hired to teach postcolonial literature and theory, including the history of the British Empire. I knew about the use of elephant feet from Africa as coffee tables in London in the Victorian era. But why was it here, in a basement in Missouri? It could not get more Twin Peaks.

  “Lots of taxidermy specialists in Missouri, I guess,” Keith said.

  We went to his grad student “orientation” on a day when the sassafras and dogwood were starting to turn and the limestone blocks in the old stone buildings sparkled enough to make us relax a moment. The barbecue was held in the courtyard outside a more picturesque building than Keith’s.

  As we approached, I noticed that the meat on the grill looked eerily squirrel- and bird-shaped. I assumed it was tofu, knowing that tofurkey can be shaped to look like a turkey for Thanksgiving.

  I asked a man in a Mizzou T-shirt, “What’s cooking?”

  “Oh hi!” He seemed bright and friendly. “That’s mine there and this one is Sheila’s—” He touched the tofu squirrel with a stoker. “They’re almost done.” Then he turned to Keith and said, “Did you bring your animal?”

  “No,” Keith said abashedly.

  “What are they talking about?” I whispered to Keith as he pulled me to the side, while the friendly man turned back to the grill.

  “Excuse us for a moment,” he said to Mizzou man. “We need a drink.”

  Then he whispered to me, “They called it the ‘Missouri Beast Feast’ and said we should bring the animals we were studying to eat. I thought they were kidding!” I looked back and saw there were squirrels on a stick, turtles on the shell, and lots of tiny songbirds. Even a river otter. Growing up, I had been haunted by Ring of Bright Water, a movie about a Londoner who lives with a pet otter until a neighbor ignorantly hacks it to death. Not Mij! I thought. I was mortified.

  Back at the grill, I asked who brought the otter.

  A bookish-looking blonde perked up and raised her hand. “Aren’t they endangered?” I asked.

  “Oh, they fly in the frozen carcasses from somewhere else,” she replied. “For research.”

  “Yum,” I said sarcastically.

  Keith never could pick an animal after that. He briefly worked on the deer vaccination program, shooting birth control pills into deer with a bow and arrow. In Canada, he said, they would just bring in some grizzlies or wolves to eat those deer right up. Problem solved.

  In the midst of all this, we were getting married, and weddings do not stop to give you more time to contemplate beast feasts or deer vaccinations. The date had been set and the date would arrive. My sister offered to meet me in St. Louis to shop for wedding dresses while Keith went home to visit his parents and clear out the last of his things at an apartment in Eugene. In Columbia, the only options I found looked like ruffly prom dresses. I wanted a bigger city, an LA-sized city with LA style.

  I really had not intended to end up in a tent off the freeway in East St. Louis, but Christine and I were, respectively, thrifty and broke, so we stayed at a sketchy urban KOA campground filled with the sound of truck traffic. It was clean and cheap, at least, with motorcyclists in tents and older folks in RVs.

  “I want something chic, simple, and not white,” I told my sis. “How hard is that?” She was living in Indianapolis at the time, where Mitch’s company had moved.

  After a full day of shopping, however, it turned out it was hard. “We’ll try again tomorrow,” she replied.

  After gathering a sufficient number of quarters, I tried calling Keith from the campground pay phone hanging on the KOA office building in the mosquito-filled night. He was supposed to be at his old apartment that night, which he had shared with a roommate and was still using as a storage space. First he had visited his parents in Vancouver, but he had called me on the way home to Eugene. No answer. Disappointed, I left a message: “I’ll call you in the morning.”

  If I had not had that dream, we might still be married. It was as vivid as a hallucination. Keith was standing on a bright ocean dock with the sun behind him, holding out a bunch of daffodils to me. I felt this peaceful bliss as I walked toward him, ready to take them. Then, out of nowhere, another woman appeared, walked right past me out onto the dock, and took the flowers.

  I woke up in a childhoodlike panic, then realized it was a nightmare. I wanted to hear Keith’s voice, to be sure. Out I crawled to the pay phone once again. No answer. It was two a.m. and his old roommate was out of town. Then I remembered that Keith’s ex-girlfriend lived halfway between Vancouver and Eugene. After that, I could not sleep.

  “Oh, thank goodness, where were you?” I asked when he finally picked up the phone the next day.

  “Yeah, I got tired and slept in my truck on the way,” he said.

  “Oh my God, I was worried! I thought you’d been in an accident!” I said.

  “No, everything’s fine,” he said.

  I slumped in relief and exhaustion. “Thank God,” I said. “I had the weirdest dream last night. . . .”

  After recounting the dream, he said nothing. Then: “I . . . uh . . . yeah . . . okay.”

  “Did you meet Barb?” I asked as the temperature seemed to suddenly drop.

  A pause, then: “Nothing happened. We just talked.”

  By then, I very well knew what “nothing” could mean. I had done a lot of “nothing happened” or “just making out,” after all. He was talking my language now.

  Once he was home, I interrogated him until he finally fleshed out all the nothingness of that night. At first
, he said they only “made out” for a few hours, but I knew a few hours was time for a whole lot of “nothing.” Later, he told me about the parts of her body he had kissed or not kissed, the places that he had rubbed and not rubbed, and the sites that were naked or not naked. Blow by blow.

  Surprisingly, Keith’s repentant, desperate recoiling from his own actions made me feel guilty. I did, after all, torture him into every single painful detail for weeks on end. I broke us both, but still wanted more. I could have left it alone. It was “nothing,” after all.

  First, he said it was because of Missouri, not me. Then he said it was because she accepted him for who he was, while I did not. This meant it was my fault, not his. In some ways, he was right. I had wanted him to be happy in Missouri, to be happy with me, but he never was. I had wanted him to get a job.

  “There’s something else,” he said, and stopped. “When you turned on me in Kansas because I had lied about some little thing from my past, I felt I could never tell you the rest. I thought you would never accept me. That was nothing.” He was talking about the women he had loved and the children he may or may not have had with them. A whole life before me of things that scared me, some of which had been changed because it scared me. Keith had a crazy drug-filled youth.

  “What else didn’t you tell me?” I asked, calmed by his solemn, sad tone. It was his childhood, he said, a story as long as Kansas, and he slowly began to unravel it for me.

  Because he was afraid of his father as an adolescent, he said, he ran away from home and was taken in by men who were not good to him, men who offered drugs and more. By the end of his tale, we were both curled in a ball on the floor crying. “I’ve never told anyone this. It feels like a basketball floating to the surface inside me,” he said. “A huge weight has been lifted.” That weight was transferred, then, from him to me. I had no idea such things happened in the world. How could I not love this poor, fearful, abandoned boy, this son?