Breaking Clean

by Judy Blunt

  The patrol car followed us back down the hill, passing as we pulled to the curb in front of Mrs. Crowder's. As if from a great distance, I watched myself slide out and swing the door shut evenly, taking care not to slam it. Then I was walking away, measuring each step to the entry, through the hall to my room. Six words survived as the epitaph, and even now they can summon a ghost, the flicker of disbelief I felt as the air left my chest and I could not pull it back, the shock of panic, roaring, electric, when I finally understood that I was powerless. Whether you like it or not. We never spoke again.

  In the telling, stories appear to unfold one event at a time. We master them like songs, listening for keys and common themes, learning the clear notes that best connect beginning to end. Stories are contrived. In real time, life is less a song than a competition of sounds—new days spliced to the dying strains of days past, events within them merging without pause or explanation. I can say I entered my room that evening and emerged the next morning as if called to battle. Better yet, I can put my finger on that moment when my knees gave way and I sat facing my own reflection, and say there, right there I began coming to peace with what was real in myself. But only in retrospect do I imagine this clarity. And at the time, I felt only weariness.

  Close to twenty pounds of me had disappeared since autumn, but what remained were the permanent gifts of four farming generations, a legacy of wide shoulders, strong arms and broad, square hands. I would never be cute or giggly. I also fell short of those pleasant virtues by which plain girls are forgiven, that sweet and gentle interior that redeems beauty. I'd been tailored to fit one particular family in one isolated community. Outside it, my ground-covering stride became ungainly, my brand of strength unnecessary, or even worse, I discovered, inadequate. Outside my community, only one cause made allowances for this puzzle of androgynous traits, and that was women's liberation. In the course of the next four years, I allowed the movement toward feminism to adopt me. But still, like my mother, like the ranchwomen who peopled my childhood, I would not spout ideology or argue theory. Strong women roared in silence. We roared by doing.

  In the second half of my freshman year, I settled into a cruising pattern that kept me just below adult radar. I got decent grades. I gradually stopped hanging around with Lois, as her exploits grew more reckless; she began drinking, cutting school to ride around with wild boys in their loud cars. I was done dating, I thought. Thrown together by alphabetical seating charts, Alice Blundred and I became best friends, and gradually I grew to know her circle of childhood pals. Alice had money for clothes and movies, money for Cokes and french fries. Alice and her brother and sisters all worked in their mom and dad's restaurant downtown. A full malt shop menu and a selection of rock 'n' roll tunes on the jukebox made the Sugar Shack Cafe the closest thing to a teen hangout in town, a great place to see and be seen. At Alice's urging, I applied for a job as waitress.

  I circled the block twice before I gathered my courage and entered the cafe, prepared to lie about my age if fourteen was too young. The topic never came up. An hour later I traded on my surname for the first time as I signed a rubber check and walked out of Anthony's clothing store with a white nylon uniform, trusting the bank to cover the default from my parents' account. When school let out the next day, I reported for duty Stretched carefully, thirty-five cents an hour bought me obscurity—a beauty-shop haircut, a few ready-made clothes, a new item called pantyhose that rendered garter belts mercifully obsolete. Then through some sort of governmental mandate our wages jumped to seventy-five cents an hour and I felt rich. I bought wide bell-bottomed, hip-hugging Levi's, tore out the hem and carefully frayed the edge. I wore fringed moccasins and peasant blouses. The Beatles' "Hey Jude" was still the slow dance of choice, and I answered that greeting ten times a day as I served coffee and hamburgers, or layered ice cream and flavored syrups into fluted confectionery glasses. Three or four afternoons a week I stepped behind that counter, coming home to a place of clear rules, expectations and rewards. As slick as shifting gears, school faded into the background and work became the center of my town life.

  From the first, my new boss seemed familiar to me. Elsie ran her business with both hands and a quiet, tireless grace, still perfectly groomed at the end of a sixteen-hour day. As the second shift wound toward closing, only her eyes showed fatigue, a darkening that made her look gentle and hurt. The cafe quieted after the supper rush, and every evening she settled into a far booth to do the accounts, a quiet hiss marking the moment she sat down. I kept one eye on her coffee cup as I cleaned counters and filled the salt and pepper shakers, drifting over to top it off when the level fell below the red lipstick bites on the rim.

  When she called me over at the end of my shift one evening, I was more puzzled than anxious. I slid onto the bench seat across from her, feeling the tightness in my calves and thighs from six hours of steady walking. In the privacy of my room that night, and for days after, I fed on our conversation, replaying her words in my mind, remembering exactly how she spoke, the soft laugh, the way she looked at me, shaking her head. I've never had a kid work the way you do. With the praise came a fifteen-cent raise in pay. In her voice, her simple words, I heard honesty and respect, a quiet nod for a job well done. The feeling that swelled up in me was not pride, but gratitude that bordered on worship. She had found me. Had I been capable, I would have thrown myself across the table and sobbed on her neck. Instead, I rubbed my thumb over a scar in the Formica tabletop, scrambling for the right thing to say. My town face felt nearly familiar by now, a careful face that had no connection to Maybelline or Revlon. It was calm and confident, watchful in new situations, ready to move. When in doubt, I remained neutral, a careful nonchalance I could shift to whatever seemed expected of me—a laugh, a frown, a shake of the head.

  "Wow," I said at last. "Cool." But I couldn't stop the grin.

  I ran home that night.

  I ran with my head back, indifferent to the hooting and tooting cars full of high school kids cruising the drag as they did every night, endlessly. I ran, even though in town girls were not supposed to run, especially girls in skirts. Mistakes I'd made the first weeks of school were easy enough to shake off. Ignorance was not stupidity, I told myself, and I'd proven that by erring once and learning fast. Life went on. But my gut still shrank at the memory of one fall afternoon soon after school began. I was running downtown to the Ben Franklin store, mentally picking through the candy section as I galloped down the sidewalk. School supplies came first, but surely a few bars of chocolate wouldn't break the parental bank. As I neared Main Street, I was greeted by cars full of high school kids honking as they passed me. Some of them sped ahead and circled the block to pass me again, tooting and cheering. I smiled and waved as I would have on the county road, tickled by their friendliness. A block from the store, one of the cars finally slowed to a roll beside me, and a boy leaned from the passenger window, his shout nearly drowned by a squeal of tires as the car swerved away. "Hey, Speedy! Where's the fire?" Laughing, all of them.

  Tonight it didn't matter. In the country, girls ran. We ran to get places, to cover ground. We ran because we by-God wanted to. Looping my purse around my neck, I zipped my jacket over it and set off, feeling a strange shortness tugging in my thigh muscles, reined in for so many months, then warmth as my legs stretched out, searching for a rhythm that had once been automatic. Blocks passed before I had a smooth stride and my knees began to lift and flex and fall without prompting. The winter dropped away, and what rose in its place felt endless. For a little while in the darkness that night I was simply fourteen, dodging from streetlamp to streetlamp, connecting pools of light like the dots on a puzzle page. If no one saw the picture, so what? It was enough to hear the applause of my own feet, to feel the power stealing back, sharp as the spring air that fed it.

  The Reckoning

  My sophomore year, the twins started high school too, and my parents faced the logistical nightmare of boarding four lads in Malta. One problem was
solved when Grandma Pansy moved from her old homestead to town and purchased a small house near downtown. We were welcome to live with her. However, she was in her eighties at the time, and could not be expected to cook and look after us all, or to bear the expense of this, so Mom moved to town and took a job to offset the cost of running this second household. Dad joined the ranks of lonely bachelors during the week, learning to fend for himself. The rest of us shared Grandma's house, my sister, mother and I jammed into a spare bedroom with one double bed and a cot, assorted boy cousins and brothers crammed dormitory-style into the cement basement, all of us living out of suitcases and battling for the single bathroom.

  Work remained the focus of my town life as long as I lived there, and by my second year I had molded an exterior that could slip through the halls of Malta High without a ripple. My hair finally grew long, my belly flat, my jeans tight, and eventually I saved enough money from my job to replace the thick glasses I hated with contact lenses. A few months after my dating debut, I replaced Dennis with Alice's brother Marty, a quiet, nervous senior on his way to the Army. We met on my first and last double date arranged by Lois, just the four of us and a backseat full of beer. A couple of hours into our drive, I added a new dimension by throwing up all over the car—a hardtop with no rear doors and tiny little triangle-shaped windows. I am spared much of the memory of that rapid drive home.

  I stopped by his locker the next day to apologize and offer to wash his car, and he was shy and forgiving. For more than a year I would wear his class ring like a shield, writing letters on airmail tissue first to Germany, then to Vietnam. It was a time of healing, a withdrawal from the playing fields made respectable, even honorable, by hometown rules of war. Good women remained faithful to their soldier men. When that began to pall, I discovered that men in their early twenties treated me with all the respect due my tender years. I joked that the initials of my name, J.B., stood for "jail bait." If my mother, now close at hand, took an extraordinarily dim view of my hanging around with older guys, it followed that after a year of total independence, I took an equally dim view of her interference. And the battle was on.

  One young man in particular bore the brunt of my teen rebellion, and that was Guy, a good-looking charmer of twenty-two with a fast car and a bachelor lifestyle. I was far more the kid sister than the girlfriend, but he would buy a Coke and let me flirt with him over the counter of the Sugar Shack when I was working. Lois was dating his roommate, Bill, perhaps the only reason I found myself at a house party that fall. It was Election Day Tuesday, a rare weekday of freedom since Mom had gone to preside over the polling place and collect the ballots for our rural precinct. Past experience told me the counting wouldn't be done until after 10 p.m., and I felt confident she would spend the night at the ranch rather than drive to Malta. Sometime in the rowdy, post-midnight leg of the party, I began to get sleepy. Thinking ahead to school the next day and work, I began wading through the noise and smoke looking for my cousin. On my second pass through a maze of legs and loud music, Guy rode to my rescue with an offer to drive me home.

  We cruised the vacant streets of Malta for half an hour, talking about nothing in particular. With just enough beer under my skin to feel dreamy and tired, I kicked off my shoes and leaned back, savoring the quiet. Another car passed by. Guy drew a breath between clenched teeth. Swiveling, I caught the flare of brakes as the patrol car spun a U-turn and roared up behind us. Cop lights pulsed on. What time is it? I glanced at my watch. It was 1:30 a.m. Four hours earlier, the old civil defense siren had wailed its 9:30 curfew, a nightly reminder to underage citizens that when the last echo faded the city cops needed no other excuse to pull over a car or question the activity of kids on the street. Though seldom enforced, the curfew statute created the perfect cover for routine beer confiscation and general harassment. I could be hauled to the station and held until a parent retrieved me. I made a wild scramble for my shoes, combing my brain for a believable story. I'll say I was baby-sitting, I thought, just getting a ride home, something straightforward and simple. All I had to do was chew mints, act calm. I could talk my way out of this. Laces tied, coat snug to my chin, I drew a deep breath.

  Guy slowed the car gradually, waiting for me to finish before he pulled to the curb. In the eerie light his skin shone a bruised red, his hair electric blue. He looked at me a second, eyes impossibly dark, hands loose on the wheel, then turned off the key and slowly rolled down his window I had turned sideways to watch as the patrol car stopped under the streetlight behind us. Squinting against the glare, I searched for clues to which cop we were dealing with, reading the profile as he stepped out and closed his door. He slid both thumbs under his wide belt, adjusting the regulation issue of clubs and cannons that dangled from his hips, not dawdling but purposeful, determined. In that sliver of time before he walked toward us, I could breathe again. Ray Cummings, a former neighbor from the country south of town. I knew his kids from 4-H. If anyone would give me a chance to pull out of this, Ray would. Good old Ray. The next bare second held such a maze of information that most of it arrived unassembled.

  Imagine a mouse daring to cross the snow under a full moon, streaking along, every hair alive to danger, and its relief as the refuge it seeks appears just ahead; imagine then, that second when everything changes and all comes clear, that blind instant when it feels the downbeat of wings overhead. In the final beat before the brain shuts down there is no room for thinking. Only knowing, a flash of simple fact that what might be a harmless breeze overhead is not, what seemed worth the risk at the outset was not and whatever comes next will be painful. It was like that. One form emerging from a car became a parting of shadows and two doors closing, chuff-ka-chuff, so close together that the sound came joined in the middle with wings on either side. Of course I knew. And in the moment of knowing I would have struck a bargain with the devil to be dead in a ditch or to be someone else's child. Ours was no random stop, no routine grab for one of a dozen underage teens flitting through intersections after curfew. I was the subject of an official hunt. For as surely as good old Ray sat in the driver's seat of that patrol car, it was my mother who rode shotgun and by the slant of her shoulders, the lean ridge of lip and jaw, she was loaded for bear.

  They approached on either side. Guy sat bug-eyed as my mother hurled hellfire through his open window, a blistering catalogue of insults skillfully spliced to strings of dire predictions and one aspiring charge of statutory rape. On the other side, Ray dressed me down for my shameful behavior, disrespect for my mother's feelings and my father's good name. Then they switched sides. I remember almost none of what was said, but the tone was clear. Such was my shock that I recall neither how I got home nor what we said once we arrived. Probably nothing. I do remember working through the puzzle of why she had appeared, and feeling stupid not to have anticipated it. Someone had to carry the election ballots to Malta after the polls closed.

  "If she wants to believe I'm a slut," I raged to Alice at work the next day, "far be it for me to talk her out of it." All my friends felt sorry for me, but then they knew my relationship with Guy was so benign as to be nearly nonexistent. I had taken no pains to share this fact with Mom prior to the big bust and felt no compunction to ease her mind after. Let her worry. I knew I was innocent. No doubt, I expected the usual punishment, a few weeks of frozen disapproval met by my own equally silent martyrdom. But it was not to be. The next afternoon Dad drove in from the ranch, and for the second time in as many days, I found myself darting, dodging, doomed. The two of them were ensconced at Grandma's table, waiting for me when I got off work. Their voices fell away as I entered.

  Dad nudged a chair with his foot. I sat, slouching as far as the hard back would allow, and picked at a fringe of hangnail, waiting for Mom to tell me to sit up straight. Discipline had always been her job. Dad seldom intruded on our upbringing, partly because he was seldom around the house to observe it, but partly because raising kids simply wasn't his job. In our earliest years, he was the
dusty giant we ran to greet when he came in from the field, clinging, two monkeys to a leg, for a ride through the kitchen to the bathroom to wash up. I fought for my share of his love, sinking tooth and nail into equally greedy siblings, but when we grew beyond the lap-climbing stage, when we no longer ran to meet him, nothing bridged that gap. He did not seek us out to chat about our changing interests. By my teen years, his undivided attention had long become a kind of currency, meaningful conversation weighing like gold coins, praise like hundred-dollar bills, and all changing hands just as infrequently. Facing him across the supper table on my weekends home, I would feel his gaze drift over me and away, ready to notice what wasn't there but never quite seeing what was, unless something made him look. Or someone.

  I concentrated on the word "venom," shading my bland expression with thin lips, narrowing eyes. When the other kids came home late, Mom dealt with them as a matter of course. Bringing Dad into this particular case was an act of pure malice, I thought, a move with no purpose other than to raise my already staggering level of humiliation. Her eyebrows raised once and settled back, cool and steady, a trifle squinty. You asked for it, Sweetie Pie.