by Tracy Ross
A few days later, autumn light reflected off a burnished Redfish Lake. Decaying aspen leaves smelled good, in a sad, slowed-down way. This was our fifth trip to Redfish that year and the last one until next spring. As we wound down from swimming and sand-castle making, I sat with Dad on the white-sand shore and told him how I wanted to go into the Sawtooth Mountains, next summer maybe, on a real backpacking trip.
Dad stomped out a cigarette and put it in his pocket, then smiled down at me like I was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen. He slung an arm around my shoulders, scrunching the feathers in my blue-and-orange down vest. Dad took my hand and led me back to the trailer, where Mom and Chris were fixing dinner: tacos with hot dogs on the side. We crunched the chalky corn shells and guzzled big cups of milk. Later, at the foldout table, we played cards—Spoons or Go Fish—while Dad sipped beer from his koozie and Chris begged him for a taste. When I went to bed, Mom did too, crawling onto the foldout couch directly below my foldout bunk. She read for a while, then drifted off while I listened to the card game. “Pair of jacks,” said my dad. And I fell asleep.
When I woke up next, sandpaper was crawling on my skin. At least that’s what I thought it was, until I felt hot breath against my cheek. The bunk bed where I slept was two feet from the camper ceiling, dark as a coffin and covered in dust. I couldn’t sit up, so I stayed perfectly still, while my eight-year-old brain tried to grapple with sandpaper and beer breath.
At first, I thought someone had broken into the trailer, that I was alone, or else Mom would jump up, tear at her hair, and start screaming. Dad would grab his rifle and shout, “Identify yourself or I’ll shoot.” Chris, a gigantic pansy, would run out of the trailer and hide in the trees.
In the dark, the sandpaper kept moving, five round pieces the size of fingertips. I thought I could hear two people whispering, or one person talking to itself. While it mumbled, the sandpaper scraped my stomach, then pulled up my pajama shirt. It touched my belly button, then worked its way to my nipples. When it was through scratching me there, it slid down to the elastic on my pj pants, where it lifted them off my belly and scraped its way south. In the dark I could feel myself sweating, but I was too terrified to move. The sandpaper stopped near the top of my vagina, then found an opening.
I was swimming in tar. I would suffocate. I listened to the wind beat against the trailer until the breath grunted away from my face and the sandpaper pulled up my pajamas, patting the waistband, laying it gently against my skin. In its place two leathery hands pulled up my sleeping bag and tucked it ever so carefully under my chin.
The next morning I waited until I heard Dad go outside to get the fire going for coffee and eggs, then slid out of my bag and climbed down from the bunk. Chris was stretched out on the kitchen table, which folded down and converted into its own bed. Mom was buried in my parents’ double-wide Cabela’s sleeping bag, cocooned under so much flannel I couldn’t find her at first. I burrowed in beside her, the scent of my dad’s body still lingering in the air.
For a long time I didn’t say anything, just stared at Mom’s eyelids, which flitted along the surface of a dream. I rubbed her earlobe with my finger, feeling the superfine hairs. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I leaned over and whispered that something scary had happened while we were sleeping. Someone had snuck into my bunk bed and put their hands on places that had made me feel scared and sick.
“Mmm-hmmm,” Mom murmured, “okay honey, you go ahead.” Then a switch went off in her muggy brain.
“What did you say?” she said, twisting her ear away from my hand.
“I don’t know,” I whispered.
“Tracy, what did you just say? Tell me what you just said.”
“I don’t know. Someone did something to me.”
Mom sat up, pushing the covers off of us, which let in a shock of cold air. “What do you mean someone did something to you? I don’t understand,” she said. “You’re right here. How could someone have done something when you’re two feet away from me?”
“I don’t know …” I said again. “But I’m afraid.”
“Tracy!” repeated my mom. Now she was yelling, which scared me even more. “What’s going on? Where’s your dad? Don!”
But Dad had already heard rustling in the trailer, so he came inside to investigate.
“Top of the morning, family,” he said. “Who’s ready for some pancakes?”
But no one was ready for pancakes. Chris sat up and then quickly exited the trailer. I cowered under the covers trying to become invisible. Mom looked at my dad, relying on him for answers.
“Don?” she said. “Tracy says someone came into the trailer last night. I didn’t hear anything. Did you?”
Dad’s smile dimmed slightly. He looked from me to my mom and back again, and then he sat down on the bed.
“What’s your mother talking about, sis?” he asked me. “What happened last night?”
I’m not exactly sure what happened after our conversation in the camper, at least not the order of events. Dad asked Chris to take me outside, so we rode around the campground on his dirt bike, peeling out and popping the clutch. I was thirsty and hungry, but also sick to my stomach, like I’d been sunburned from the inside out. Chris and I went to the dock, where we skipped rocks and tried to catch minnows in plastic sandwich bags. We dug in the sand for a couple of hours and then went back to the trailer, where I found Mom still in her sleeping bag, reading a book.
Mom said Dad and I needed to talk. They had discussed it at length, and he assured her that no one had come into the camper and that I’d just had a bad dream. To make me feel better, she said, he and I were going for a walk.
It was warm in the sun and cold in the shade. The wind smelled like pinecones and the promise of snow. Dad led us out of the campground to Fishhook Creek, where I liked to watch the spawning salmon, back when they ran so thick it looked like you could Jesus-walk across the river on their wiggling backs.
When we got to the creek, I found a log and inched across it to the center. Dad scootched behind me, lit a Camel, and sat down so that the soles of his boots skimmed the surface, which was metallic and bright. I felt better, because Dad and I were sitting in one of our favorite spots, balanced on a log above our favorite river, with the sun spilling over our skin. Dad puffed on his cigarette, exhaling streams of smoke that hung in the cool fall air. I balanced on the log, hopping from one foot to the other, staring at one spot like I’d learned in ballet. I had to pick a place above my dad’s head, because it made me feel even dizzier to look in his face.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said after several minutes. “I know what you think that was.”
I considered asking him how he knew that I was thinking Do fish breathe in the murky water that disappears under the grass? I was imagining, in some abstract and childish way, how, if I wanted to, I could slip into the water with them, swim toward the current, and let it pull me out of sight. I held my breath and waited for my dad to tell me why I’d felt so scared and dirty the night before, in my pj’s, in the bunk bed of my trailer, in the safety of my own family. But Dad took one last puff of his cigarette, then threw the butt into the creek.
“I mean it, Tracy,” he said. “I was only tucking you in.”
6
Agent of Change
As far as I can remember, Mom and Dad never brought up the camper incident again. But on this point my parents’ and my memories diverge. Mom says she went to her priest in Jerome and that he told her we all needed to sit down and talk about what had happened. She brought my dad and me into the living room, circling the wagons. She peered into both of our faces, saying, “Okay, you two. Tell me again about that night in the camper.” When both Dad and I stared down at the carpet, she sat back and breathed a sigh of relief. Just as she’d suspected: even if something sinister had occurred, it wasn’t so important that it needed repeating.
My dad, however, tells a slightly different story, one in which he and my mom
both manipulated my memory: “I made up all kinds of excuses that sounded good to your mom. She went along with them. That’s how we overran that particular situation.”
Deep down, I knew that my dad had done something bad to me. But if my parents were so sure that I’d been mistaken, I must have made myself believe them. Who was I to question the people who fed, clothed, and protected me from things like Bigfoot and monsters under my bed? If there was a God, to me, they were It. I had no business refuting their version of reality.
For weeks following our return from Redfish Lake, though, it felt like static electricity radiated through our house. We resumed our schedule of school, Brownies, Boy Scouts, piano lessons, swim team, track, drive-in movies, and Kick the Can. Mom busied herself with her job as the Bickel Elementary lunch-money lady, and Dad lurked around the basement, loading shotgun shells or tying flies, emerging only when Mom needed his help making dinner. At first, I spent more time than usual in my bedroom, playing with my Lite-Brite or writing in a journal that I could lock with a tiny key. But pretty soon I managed to push from my mind the memory—and all physical sensation—of the fingers scraping across my body.
That was the year Darcie Murray and I ran around the schoolyard screaming the lyrics to “Another One Bites the Dust,” with our I Horses shirts over the tops of our heads. Tornadoes of little-girl energy, we did back-flip knee-drops off the high bar and chased boys into the Love Tunnel to pretend make out. One time, a teacher on recess duty heard us yelling “fuck you!” to no one in particular and sent us to the principal’s office. When Mrs. Anderson asked where we’d learned such vulgar language, I told her I didn’t even know what “fuck you” meant (a lie) but that Chris had taught me to say it (the truth).
My erratic energy bursts earned me sprained wrists from falls off the monkey bars and the occasional catfight with girls on the playground, and Dad was always doctoring me up. He burned ticks out of my hair after they’d burrow into me when Jeannie Mitchell and I played house on fresh deer hides while Dad and Gary Mitchell hunted. When I crashed on my bike, Dad used his best tweezers to pick the gravel out of my knees. If I was throwing up, he’d sit by my bed with an old bucket, ready to catch the green bile that erupted out of my mouth. Later, if I felt better, he’d bring in another bucket and sponge warm, soapy water across my shoulders and neck.
Over time, I’d started trusting Dad again, but things were going downhill between him and my mom. They never hugged in front of Chris and me like they used to, and when they did, it seemed forced—a reenactment of affection put on for our benefit. Somewhere along the line, Mom had started to resent Dad’s hunting habit, just as he bemoaned her weekend clothes-shopping sprees. Both of them fought over Chris’s now teenaged defiance, which would eventually make him steal our neighbors’ Christmas bonus checks and grow pot in an old Studebaker pickup Dad had bought and parked in front of our house. But what really dealt the death blow to my parents’ chance for happiness was my mother’s deepening despair. Her past seemed to overtake her, plunging her into clinical depressions that required more and more medications, which themselves altered and darkened her moods.
Years later, she would talk to me about how she had never fully recovered from her hysterectomy, which she says ripped out all the parts of her that made her feel like a woman. Not being able to have more babies made her feel ugly and purposeless. Her problems with sex began even before her hysterectomy, when, in 1967, her obstetrician used forceps to deliver Chris, tearing her underside open. As a result, sex had been painful—something to be tolerated while trying to look and sound as if she was enjoying herself. Mom also endured crippling, near-daily headaches, a result of chronic ear infections she had suffered as a child. She had never been properly treated by a doctor, so the infections just sat in her head and festered. The effect was so powerful that despite seemingly weekly visits to ear specialists, chiropractors, and acupuncturists when I was little, she would continue to suffer from severe migraine headaches until the mid-1990s, when a Los Angeles otolaryngologist would cut her ear away from her head and dig out the fifty-year-old bacteria.
I understand, now, that my mom had never really been able to come to terms with her own ragged childhood or my dad’s untimely death. But the depressions they evoked were jarring and confusing. One minute she’d be cleaning fish at the kitchen counter, whistling the refrain to “Dancing Queen,” and the next minute she would be weepy, lethargic, and unable to sleep. I had no idea that bad chemicals were hijacking the feel-good circuits in her brain, because no one ever bothered to tell me. All I saw was that my mom cried more than the other moms I knew and that she seemed content to collapse into her “comfy chair,” a tattered tweed recliner with matching footrest. She did take me shopping more than my friends’ moms did, spending her paychecks and a sizable chunk of the child-support checks the U.S. Navy sent us every month on the newest Esprit and Izod fashions. But there’s only so much an endless supply of new clothes can do for mother-daughter relations. What I remember more than the weekly shopping sprees was her general discomfort in any and all social situations.
At swim meets and other social functions, she hovered around the edges of large groups, never seeming to know what to say.
“Hey, Doris, come on over. We’re rounding up players for a game of pinochle,” one of the kids’ parents would call out, and I’d see her turn around and walk the other way. When I asked her why she had just ignored an invitation to get to know the other swim team parents, she’d say, “Oh, I’m fine all by myself. I don’t know those people. I wouldn’t want to ruin their game.” So even though I liked the way she cheered for me during butterfly or breast stroke races, her unease and sadness made me uneasy and sad, despite my tendency for extreme Pollyanna optimism.
It’s also why, less than two years after the Redfish Lake incident, I had so easily gravitated back into the outstretched arms of my dad. Where else would I have gone?
On autumn evenings when I was ten and eleven, Dad took me to the gun club so I could watch him shoot skeet. The atmosphere at home still felt depressed and tense. I spent as much time as possible at my friends’ houses, including one in particular, who lived down the street. Her name was Kathie Etter, and I liked going to her house more than anyone else’s because her mom was so warmhearted and sweet. But Dad used the gun club, out near Filer, as his escape, and, on occasion, I would go there with him. On the drive he’d nurse a beer, concealed in a koozie that said Bo Derek A Perfect 10. Usually he’d be scanning the landscape, looking for signs of movement in the brush. But occasionally he would mist up and get quiet, and when that happened, he would put his hand on my knee.
“We never talk anymore, sis,” he’d say, “You’re growing up too fast.”
“Dad, I’m only eleven. And you know me. I’m immature for my age.”
I did feel immature, even though Dad had recently told me about the birds and the bees. Mom asked him to do it, because she felt too awkward, like she’d leave out an important part of the process or wouldn’t be able to say words like “sperm” and “vagina.” But lately I had begun to develop, with tiny molehills of breasts rising out of chubby, little-girl flesh. Molehills meant that my period was coming, and Mom didn’t want me to be afraid when I saw blood on my underpants.
On the night of the big explanation, Dad and I sat on my bed with our shoulders touching. Chris was at the high school practicing for the 4-by-400 relay, and Mom was in the kitchen making supper. The smell of hamburger and Lawry’s seasoning wafted down the hall: beef burritos. I hoped Dad, who was known for being long-winded, wouldn’t go on forever, because I wanted to play tag with my neighbor, Charmelle Puka, before dinner.
Dad launched into his presentation, saying that God had made men and women different so they could fit together, like a puzzle. He explained how penises fill with blood in order to make them stiff enough to enter a vagina. When I let out a little whimper followed by an exaggerated eye roll, Dad put a calming arm around my shoulders. This st
iffening only sounded scary, he said, because, really, it made men feel extremely good.
“Women feel good, too,” he assured me.
I stared at my dad, fighting the urge to recoil. I had never heard the words penis and vagina in the same sentence, let alone uttered by a grown man. But apparently my reaction wasn’t grounds enough for him to stop talking. He went on, describing how men become aroused, and detailing the intricate workings of sex organs. As he talked, his movements became more animated and his breathing quickened. If he could see the horror in my face as he went into greater and greater detail, he didn’t show it, nor did he relent. I bounced up and down on my white ruffled bedspread, trying to calm the feeling of ants crawling up my blood vessels.
By the time Dad got up and walked awkwardly and quickly into the bathroom, I knew everything I would ever need to about orgasms, but not one thing about menstruation.
On the road to the gun club, Dad mulled over my thoughts about my maturity level. He reached a hand across the middle console and smoothed a stray hair that was whipping me in the face. “I like you immature,” he said. “It means you’re bright and beautiful and ready for anything.”
I felt nervous when he talked like this so I started to sing. Dad smiled out the front windshield, tapping the steering wheel, eventually joining in. In the Idaho desert the wind always blows. We drifted across the highway with our arms hanging out the windows. We sang the words to “Hotel California,” harmonizing during the chorus and banging out the rhythm on the sun-warmed doors of the bright yellow jeep.
