Animal, Mineral, Radical

by BK Loren

  I tried to answer.

  He chuckled a little, as if nothing was wrong. “Everybody else is out having a good time.”

  I stumbled a little and tried to move away. He laughed at my retreat. “Poor thing. Can’t get a guy to give you what you need, huh?”

  “Dad, come on,” Laura said.

  He chuckled and headed for the patio. But before he reached the door, he stopped and looked at me. “You need a little—” He grabbed Laura’s crotch. “Doesn’t she, Laura?” He laughed again, not meanly, but as if he believed Laura was in on the joke and I was the odd person out, the loser goody-goody who didn’t see how much fun I could be having.

  “You know, you’re an asshole,” I said.

  He cocked his head and smiled, surprised.

  Laura looked at me. “It’s okay,” she said, first to me, then to her dad. “It’s okay.”

  I looked at her dad. “No, you’re an asshole. You’re a sick fuck.” My words surprised me, too, but I couldn’t quit saying them.

  He laughed again, then he approached me and started to grab my crotch, too. I didn’t think; it was reflex. With one hand, I twisted his wrist, and he was forced to stagger back and away from me. It happened in seconds, beyond my will. And then Laura came at me.

  “Stop it,” she said, pushing me, hard.

  Confusion ripped through my body. I imagined myself going back at him. It’s what I wanted to do. I glanced at Laura. She held her arms out to both sides, keeping me from her dad. Then she started screaming. “Get out of the house, get out now, you fucking bitch, leave!”

  I looked at Laura for any sign to let me know she’d been faking it, that she was not mad at me, she was mad at her dad. Nothing. Her anger was impenetrable, directed only at me.

  I left the party, left Adam without a date, and I walked home. I walked across the open field where Laura and I had played as kids, the place where we had built a secret fort, our refuge every summer until we were nine. In that fort, we had pricked our fingers with needles, pressed our hands together, and swore blood sisters forever. I missed her, the girl I knew then, the friend I came back for.

  The walls of any high school ooze. When you’re a kid that age, there’s no getting around it. The minute you walk through those double doors, life changes. Maybe you like the person you become inside the high school walls better than the person “on the outside.” Perhaps you’re a popular jock, or the prom queen. More likely, however, the walls scream your weaknesses, all the ways in which you are different.

  Monday morning, I walked to school (Laura didn’t pick me up), and when I entered, the walls oozed my name. Within seconds I learned that Adam Dupree had tried to kiss me at Laura’s party, and I had responded by grabbing his balls—not amorously. After assaulting Adam, I had left the party.

  I walked from one class to the other, and crowds of kids parted like the Red Sea, everyone keeping a good distance from me. When I saw Adam down the hall, he glared at me, as if he had really tried to kiss me and I had fought him off. Was he was going along with the story to protect Laura, or was he angry at me for leaving without him? Or maybe he thought I had made up the story. The power of mass media pales in comparison to the power of high school gossip.

  When I look back on the incident, it sometimes overwhelms me with remorse. When I reacted to Mr. Deloria, I didn’t consider that Laura would have to remain there, at the party. She would have to give her guests an explanation for why she had become so angry at me. When the party was over, she would have to sleep in her bedroom, footsteps away from her father’s bedroom. This was in the 1970s. Incest was not a household word then, as it is now. No one would have believed Laura’s story.

  Other times, when I look back, all I feel is satisfaction. I had stood up not only for Laura, but for myself.

  I didn’t realize that my act would cause a permanent dent in my high school reputation—that it would be perceived as something revolutionary. Somehow, Adam Dupree was not made fun of for having his balls grabbed by a girl. As the story went, I fought him off, not because he was weak, but because I was a freak. I was stronger than I was supposed to be. Adam submitted because I was not really a girl—but could never be elevated to the power of a guy—so I was somewhere in between: a genderless monster. It was not just the case of Laura’s father that created my new image. It was that I sometimes walked down streets, or went to a movie alone. Occasionally, I stopped and helped someone who was stuck by the side of the road. I acted as if nothing had changed since we were all boys and girls playing four-square on the playground, all equal in power. I had not grown up. I had not learned how to be constantly, subconsciously, submissive and afraid. I was not a woman.

  The stand-up comic Elayne Boosler puts it in a nutshell. In her bit, she says, “My boyfriend asked me to meet him down by the pier after the show tonight.” She pauses at the audacity of this idea, then continues. “I said, ‘Down by the pier? I can’t meet you down by the pier! It’s dark. I have a dress on. I have my vagina with me.’” The audience roars with laughter. “‘Tell you what, tomorrow I’ll leave my vagina at home, in my other purse. Then I’ll meet you down by the pier.’”

  It’s perfect comedy: an observation of daily life that, when exposed, makes us all a little nervous. So we laugh. After all, it is absurd. A part of a person’s body should not be a liability.

  But this is what young women learn. The transition from girlhood to womanhood includes the lingering awareness that you can be raped. True, a boy or girl of any age can be raped. But the chances increase exponentially for women, and it’s not just the chances that increase, it’s the constant consciousness of fear. As a young woman, you learn you cannot, ever again, walk down to the pier, carefree as a child. You cannot leave your vagina at home, in your other purse.

  I didn’t talk to Laura again until the last month of our senior year. I was walking across “our field,” and between our childhood and high school, it had become a baseball diamond, bright green grass crisscrossed with lawn mower marks, the chain-link fence of the backstop cast in a pinkish hue under twilight clouds. I was taking in the sunset in the way you do when you know you’ll be leaving a place. I would graduate soon, maybe go to college, and the prospect made the jagged mountains seem a little softer, more forgiving. After a while, I heard voices behind me, the sound suspended in the hollow air.

  A few minutes later, I heard footsteps close behind me. I turned. It was Laura. She had split off from a group across the field. She said, “Hi.”

  I must have written a dissertation in my head—that’s how long it took me to say “Hi.” I wished she was walking up to me to say “Thanks, things are better now”—as if her situation could be so easily changed. I wished we were both what we had been in that photo of us in first grade, two excited kids, every choice in the world in front of us, nothing we could not choose, so much hope and energy.

  “You walking?” she said.

  I laughed a little. “Yeah, I’m walking.”

  “Where you going?”

  “Home.”

  Her face was red. She struggled to ignore the people behind us. “You want to walk home with me?” she said.

  I didn’t need any words. I just stopped, turned around, and started walking toward her place.

  Whatever we said to each other in the fifteen minutes or so it took us to get to her house was inconsequential. An occasional, “How you been?” A nod. Some laughter that was anything but.

  A few doors from her house, she stopped. She said, “You staying in this town after you graduate?”

  I shrugged. “Don’t know yet. You?”

  “Got a job.” She smiled. “Hundred bucks a week. Got an apartment. I’m moving out.”

  I wanted to hug her. I said, “Good. That’s really good.”

  Then, for no reason, she reached out and touched my shoulder. It was an awkward gesture that held within it all our attempts to hold on to the way we believed things should be, the affection we once shared and wanted to
continue to share, the expectations we had when we were kids, our excitement about growing up, and the realities that growing up had brought to us. She said, “Take care, will you?”

  “Sure. You do the same.”

  She walked away before I did. I watched her turn the corner toward her house.

  I don’t know for sure what was going on that day in the field. I heard stories about it—that Laura (who had gotten a reputation for sleeping around) had slapped a boy in the face when he grabbed her breasts.

  “She’s fucking crazy. What did she expect?” people said. “She asked for it, she got it.”

  When they asked me about it, I ignored them. When the twelfth person of the day asked me, I said, “You know, Laura Deloria could kick your ass in four-square.”

  The guy looked at me like I was crazy, because I was. I would not succumb, and in the end, I knew Laura would not succumb. I had seen it in her when she was a child. Whatever had happened that day in the field, it was clear to me that she had stood up for herself. She was fucking crazy. And good for her.

  “I got a job. I got an apartment,” she said. Because he did not win. Her life up till then should have been different. It wasn’t. But it would be.

  “She could kick your ass in four-square.” I was downright, happily, self-confidently crazy. I was a girl in high school, and although I did not assume I would always win, I knew I always had a fighting chance.

  GOT TAPE?

  I’m standing in my driveway on a spit-freezing cold morning, waving my mittened hand to a friend who has declined to join me. “No one in this neighborhood’s going to listen to you,” she yells through the fog.

  I shrug. “I’ll be back by dark.” And I step into the frothy jaws of the suburban winter. Within a few strides I’m standing by a mailbox I see every day but have tried to ignore. It’s candy-apple purple with red flames swooshing back toward the house—the kind of design you see on hot rods. Parked on the lawn beside a stack of worn tires is a Chevy truck draped with bumper stickers: I AM THE NRA, RUSH IS RIGHT, and so on. My friend’s voice rings in my ears. Just then, I see some movement to my left.

  “You think he looks good here?” a woman asks.

  The man to whom she is speaking ponders the life-sized Rudolph at the head of Santa’s sleigh. He sets his baby Jesus down on top of Santa’s gift bag to help secure Rudolph’s ties.

  “Excuse me,” I call out toward Santa. “Do you know about the plans to build a SuperTarget and Kmart?”

  They look at me through the haze.

  “On the land behind our houses . . . the old apple orchards and ponds?”

  “Asshole!” the guy says.

  About now I’m thinking of hot cocoa, fireplaces, and moving to another city.

  The man walks toward me. “I met that asshole. He’s tryin’ a sell us a bag a bullshit.”

  “I . . . I have some letters, a petition against it.”

  He drops Rudolph cold. I hold out my pen, jittery with thanks. “If you could both sign, and maybe jot a note in your own words, make it more individual.”

  I hear the pen scratching, then he shoves the clipboard in my direction. “Westminster is OUR town,” he’s written, underlining it about ten times.

  His note hits the nail on the head. In order to Target our neighborhood, this developer must override the Comprehensive Land Use Plan—the single document created by city officials and residents in concert. It states that this land should never be used for retail. I’m out here going door-to-door because I believe the collective voice of the citizens should not be silenced by a nonresident whose annual income trumps ours by a few million.

  “What’re you gonna do with them papers?” the man asks.

  “Deliver them to city council. Maybe organize a group.”

  “You name the place and time, we’ll be there.” He shakes my hand. I wave goodbye through the maze of lights and plastic figurines and run back home.

  “It’s great. You should come along,” I beg my friend.

  “They signed?”

  “And volunteered!”

  My excitement gets to her, and she joins me.

  Next house. A stout man wearing perma-seamed slacks, white shirt, necktie. If it weren’t for his slippers, I’d think he was on his way to work. I smile. “Morning! You heard about the plans for the SuperTarget?”

  “No.”

  “On the land where the ponds are.” I position the clipboard so it will slide easily into his hand.

  “I don’t care,” he says. And he shuts the door.

  My friend goes home to her hot cocoa. When I return that evening, though, she flips through the letters, surprised. “You got all these signed?”

  I nod. “And this is the list of volunteers.”

  Up to this time, my only attempt at civic duty had been to attend a few “COG” (Community Organized Government) meetings. At my first COG, five people attended, three of them city employees. My fellow attendee was mainly concerned about how he could keep kids from setting his fence posts on fire.

  At the next COG it was just the city volunteer coordinator and me. She had a projector, and we watched a movie about the problem of Canada geese in the area. I learned some nifty tips about how to keep them from defecating willy-nilly on my lawn.

  Recalling these vibrant evenings, I feared my list of volunteers might be so many empty promises. Against my better judgment, I rented a conference room, capacity 300, in a hotel. My workouts that week consisted of running from door to door, delivering fliers that announced the gathering.

  I arrived that night just before it was time to start. It was not a bad showing: about twenty-five people, sitting at great distances from one another. I introduced myself and began. People trickled in as I spoke. They trickled and trickled. Thirty minutes later there was standing room only.

  I was nervous and excited. “We need a volunteer for community actions leader, someone who can set up eye-catching booths, stuff like that,” I said.

  A hand shot up. “Me and the missus could do that,” said Silas, the fellow with the holiday lawn display.

  The momentum continued. I ticked down the list of task forces needed—legal research, fundraising, media relations, city relations, planning liaison, et cetera.—and soon we had ten task-force leaders and a dozen or so people on each team. At the end of the meeting, we brainstormed and planned for our first organizational meeting.

  For several days afterward, I tried to figure out why so many people had shown up that evening. There was no precedent for it. Our neck of the woods is known locally as out-letville. The indoor mall brims with ninety-nine-cent stores, wholesale clubs, and those new “security” stores that sell mace, brass knuckles, and a variety of small knives. People here are generally working toward moving out of the area, not coming together.

  It’s true I’m out of place here—probably the only person who fleetingly considered actually voting Nader/LaDuke—but everyone else is out of place, too. There’s scarcely a common thread between us, except this: We’re buffered from endless strip malls and a twenty-four-plex theater by the 108-acre tract of land that is now at risk. Deer, herons, bald eagles, ibis, and fox live here. The property hooks up circuitously with miles of open country, a narrow paradise gasping beneath the wide Colorado sky, snaking all the way up to the Rocky Mountains. Aside from its beauty, this land offers the only occasion I’ve ever had to talk to my neighbors. People walk their dogs there. They fish in the ponds. Silas stables his horse at the old pony farm that will be condemned if this project is allowed to go through.

  In any other situation, the leaders who came that night—a gay couple, a former Black Panther who is now a Republican, two college kids, a Hmong couple, a Libertarian, a born-again Christian, and a handful of liberal-leaning Democrats—would never have gathered under one roof. If diversity’s what it’s all about, then our neighborhood is all that and a bag of chips. But without a shared sense of purpose, diversity spells conflict and isolation, not opportunity. I
figure that tract of land is what brought us together. None of us is about to give that up.

  The group agrees to meet after the holidays. In the interim we’re all supposed to do a little research. My job is to sign us up for a city council meeting. That’s easy. We have a name now: WATCHH: Westminster Alliance To Conserve Home and Habitat, so I make one phone call to sign up WATCHH for the city council meeting, and I’m done. I e-mail the group and ask them to prepare. My e-mail, however, crosses with an incoming note from the city clerk. “I’m sorry. We have to delete you from the agenda.” Furthermore, the note says, “No one from your group will be allowed, under any circumstances, to address your elected officials concerning this matter.”

  What?

  This lights a fire under our melting pot. “It’s unconstitutional,” says Silas.

  “Gag order,” says John, the former Black Panther. But after several meetings with the city attorney, we feel powerless. The city is within the law. In Colorado, if there’s a public land dispute between two “groups” (in this case, the developer’s corporation and our grassroots group), the case becomes a trial and the city councilors become judges. If a judge hears “testimony” a priori, that testimony (i.e., the voice of our group) will be thrown out. Furthermore, if we wish to hold public meetings, we must, by law, invite the developer. Otherwise we’ll have an “ex parte” meeting, which—you guessed it—turns us mute at the public hearing.

  I take this as my first occasion to contact the press. “Sure, that’s the law, but most city councils don’t opt to employ it,” says the reporter. Off the bat, our city is playing hardball.

  Our first official meeting as an organization takes place at my house, and we learn some other sobering facts. “The average amount of retail in most cities is twenty-five square feet per person,” says Donna. “You know what it is here? Fifty-three square feet per person. Lucky us. We have an extra two-car garage’s worth of shopping opportunities for every man, woman, and child.”