Name games in the field. The buzzing of katydids as the parents drove away. Running, the losing of shoes, the messing-up of makeup. All the girls carried camp-issued rectangular canvas satchels with their names written in duct tape, and plastic reusable water bottles. They screamed through the campfire ring. They were looking for their tribe, moving in packs, swinging in hammocks in groups of three and four and five, a cluster of heads bent over a single drawing in a spiral-bound notebook.
I taught drama to the older girls. I dredged up my childhood piano lessons and will forever know the introductory piano moves to “Take Me or Leave Me” from Rent, chosen by a student who had a facial scar as shiny and lovely as Harry Potter’s. I taught writing: Does the story have more than one point/idea/theme? my notebook reflects that I instructed. Could it be read in more than one way? Does the character have flaws and contradictions? Are all the words carefully chosen? Is every word necessary? Is it physical? Include at least three images/sentences/lines that contain the senses—touch, taste, smell, hear, see. Avoid abstractions—love, hate, shy, scary, nature, friendship, beautiful.
Before dinner each night, as per Mountain Views tradition, the girls would raise their hands to tell each other and the staff what they were grateful for. The student with the shiny scar often sat up against the wall of the picnic shelter writing poetry. A redheaded girl took the seat beside me; I would braid her hair and decorate it with daisies. She liked me, I think, in the way that some like weak people in power they can get to do their bidding. She was always asking me to bend the rules for her, and I was always doing it—I wanted that much to be liked.
I’m grateful for knowledge, to know things, said one of the older girls.
I’m grateful for this place, said the red-haired girl. She gestured at the shape of the mountain that was just visible still, in the gloaming, across the field, and the other girls stomped their feet and clapped in agreement.
There was the sense that an experience was happening here, and it was the experience of feeling big and possible and being shoved forward, and it was for the girl campers and not for me or the other adults. There was something in that—not for you—that felt good. After putting my cabin of campers to bed each night, I crossed the open field, the air minty and cold in the mouth, the stars whiter and sharper than they had been in any other place. There was the sound of girls walking to the outhouse in twos, the occasional shriek, then quiet. The moon glowed so completely I could turn off my flashlight and follow the path through the ferns to the staff bunk without it.
Nights I stayed in the campground, I slept on a green army cot that snapped together and sometimes apart. Our cots and bunk beds were arranged around the perimeter of a screened-in shack where the staff women slept. Others were usually there by the time I got back; I was slow and read too much. Reee-ah-reeee-ah-reee-ah—the sound of Betsy’s wind-up flashlight. She would enter, eyes wide, and perch on her cot; then she might get out her guitar and play something low and sexy and fantastic. Talia, who had once been a Mountain Views camper, would stretch out on the floor to listen, and then the Director would come in, lugging a big backpack.
What’d I miss?
The Director had taken over running Mountain Views just a few years earlier. She had grown up in Pocahontas County and gone to the public schools here, then to Harvard. But after a year of her accent being mocked, she came home to help her mother start Mountain Views and fell in love with the man who would become her husband. She went back and graduated from Harvard soon after, then moved home again, marrying on the Mountain Views land.
At night, she sat in the doorway by the old-fashioned red gas lantern and listened as we gave the nightly report. I looked to the Director for cues as to how I should respond to each bit of news. Then the clicking-off of flashlights, then silence. The enraged sound of sleeping bag zippers. Sometimes the sound of grown women crying in the night and trying to be quiet about it. When it rained, that tin roof was a steel drum, filling the cabin with sound. In the morning the trees dripped, and the girls were in rain boots, and the Director was draining the coffeepot again, and the fog didn’t lift off the mountain until lunch.
3
BY DAY, I SERVED TEENAGE girls. But by night, starting in the fall after the camps ended, I hung out, learned to play bluegrass music, and drank beer with a group of grown men.
I lived first in an upstairs bedroom in a square two-story brick house that I rented from Sam, a supporter of Mountain Views who was also a teacher at the local middle school. The house was in Hillsboro, a town of around three hundred in the southern part of Pocahontas County, and sat on one of the few side streets that ran perpendicular to Route 219. As you drove into Hillsboro, there was the town’s only restaurant on your right and the road that led down to the prison; on your left, a car shop and the Presbyterian church. The elementary school—go Red Devils—and its fields and the public library came up fast on the right, and across from them was the Marathon gas station. Beyond this, a beauty parlor, a Laundromat full of gleaming rows of rarely used machines, and then done—219, more two-lane road, heading north. The writer Pearl S. Buck was born here while her parents were on furlough from their missionary work in China and visiting Buck’s maternal grandparents; she returned often.
You could sit on Sam’s porch and know what transpired in all of Hillsboro—at the Marathon station or at the elementary school soccer field just beyond view. Sam’s porch had an ironic light-up palm tree and a sign that showed a parrot drinking a martini and the words “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere.” When I sat on the porch couch on my days off from Mountain Views, zombified and chugging something cheap, Sam would come out and refill my glass with Maker’s Mark, then take a seat on her barstool. She might talk to me or talk to her beau on the phone or pay bills or work on her lesson plans for September, while I stared at the plants growing through her trellis.
If she talked to me, it was about child development and group psychology, how to make a girl who hated herself feel loved in the eyes of a strange adult. She didn’t insist or lecture; she mused, floating these ideas on the breeze for me to pluck off if I wished. She had taught young people for years and would go on to become one of the most influential educational organizers in the state. I listened.
Sometimes—I in the red chair, she stretched on the green couch under a chenille blanket—we watched The Bachelor, though we agreed we preferred The Bachelorette. We always liked the same men—the quiet ones who wore the least hair product. I did not mention that I’d been dating women, though she would not have been fazed.
Sometimes she’d call a pizza in to the Marathon gas station, and I’d walk over to pick it up. Across from the Marathon in a little gravel turnout, a gaggle of trucks sometimes idled in the dark, their frames lifted high enough to insert two Frisbees end-to-end. They were boys and men, pulled up side by side, passenger talking to driver. The Marathon’s sign illuminated its small gas plaza, and the boys and I watched each other as I stepped into the light.
As summer became fall and the work migrated down from the campground and into the log cabin office building, I drove Route 219 every morning on my way to Mountain Views. I drove it first in a green Volvo station wagon with New York plates borrowed from my parents that lost a fog light when I mangled a baby deer in its undercarriage, and I drove it later in a white Toyota pickup with West Virginia wildlife plates that I bought with money orders from the Hillsboro post office. I still didn’t really know how to drive a car, let alone drive one on a road like 219. I had no trust—if I couldn’t see that the road continued beyond a modest crest, I assumed it did not and slowed to a crawl. I sat hunched forward over the wheel and drove so slow the pickups roared past me, swerving into the other lane. Or I rode the brakes, slamming them as I fishtailed down every switchback.
But there was a straight stretch I liked just after leaving Hillsboro. On one side, hay fields and a pond where cows sat and drank. On the other, a two-story white board-and-batten house with lace w
oodwork trim and then the wide valley floor, the Alleghenies rising, layer by layer, mountain on mountain, then sky. In the morning, the valley was dunked in fog, and I could see the houses that lined the road but not much else. At night, the hills were black against the Prussian blue sky. In the fall, a patchwork of oranges. In the summer, a green so blaring it looked fake.
When the work was done, around nine or ten o’clock, I drove this stretch of road in the dead dark. I used it to exhale the day and inhale the night, and then I pointed my nose toward wherever the party was—in a pool shed in the woods or in the living room of a clapboard house near the Greenbrier River.
One day near the end of that summer while sitting on Sam’s porch, I sensed a commotion over at the elementary school field. It was a community soccer game, and Sam was there, talking to a group of young men. One of them leaned against a yellow Chevy station wagon that sported an “I ♥ MOUNTAINS” bumper sticker.
They’re fracking lines, the man, whose name was Trey, was saying. Up on Briery.
He was handsome and solid with a shock of red hair that stuck up in the front. Didn’t look at me, but looked at me.
I didn’t see Trey again until a few weeks later at Sam’s house. Walking home from the Marathon station, I spotted the yellow wagon parked in the grass near Sam’s tomatoes. While people chatted in the yard, Trey sat with Sam on her porch under the parrot sign and talked to her about Buddhist philosophy. His words came through the porch window screen perfectly, to where I sat in Sam’s dark living room. Then he suddenly got up and opened the door.
You can come outside and join us, he said, if you want.
Trey made delicate pencil drawings of trees and rolled his own Bali shag cigarettes and listened to NPR all day on the job site where he hung drywall, and he always had things to tell me about apple pickers in Texas or butterflies in Peru. He was usually unreachable by phone, and was a fan of the show-up and the stop-by and the I’ll-see-you-around-sometime. His favorite book was Siddhartha. “Truly, nothing in the world has taken up so much of my thinking as this I of mine,” writes Herman Hesse, “and about nothing in the world do I know less about than me.”
Trey’s best friend at that time was a large boy named Peter who wore his black hair up in a topknot and drove a blue Toyota pickup I coveted—it had a swooping silver racing stripe. Trey and Peter were working together on the same job site in Hillsboro just a few hundred meters from Sam’s house, and that whole month of August I was on vacation from Mountain Views, I would keep one eye on the book I was reading and the other on 219 for Trey’s wagon or Peter’s truck. I’d “run into them” at the Marathon station, where they would be guzzling gallon jugs of water or shooting the shit with the old men who liked to take in the sun on the iron bench outside the store, and they’d sometimes invite me to go swimming. Usually we took Peter’s truck, and Trey gave me the front seat. Between turns to look at Trey’s hair blowing in the hard wind, I learned that Peter had gone to college in Morgantown, then come back, and that his father was the town doctor. His sister had gone to Asheville, where she worked as an artist, painting murals under bridges and on the sides of buildings.
The swimming hole was where the road dead-ended at the Greenbrier River. Peter would park his truck off to the side, half in the road and half in the dirt. A bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap would magically appear from behind the truck’s bench seat, and a towel, and Peter would bounce off toward the river, over the old railroad tracks, which had been turned into an asphalt biking trail, while Trey walked behind with me. I took off my shirt and swam in my sports bra and athletic shorts, nervous about whether Trey would think I was too fat and whether these were the right clothes to swim in a river anyway, but neither Trey nor Peter was looking or seemed to care. They were already swimming easy circles, splashing each other and throwing the Dr. Bronner’s back and forth like otters.
Toward late summer Trey took me to his house. He showed me the stone wall he was building and the hoop house where he grew vegetables for sale, then led me into the woods. He taught me to play a word game as we hiked uphill for several miles, occasionally stopping to point out a tasty mushroom or put his whole body inside the dying husk of a tree. “Look,” he said, when we had finally crested the ridge and reached a sunny rock from which the whole valley was visible, open as an ocean. I like to come here, he said. He pointed to a mountain on the far side that he thought looked like a pregnant woman. I agreed. Back in his room, a lofted space with new windows and many blankets, he explored the inside of my thighs with his hand. He smelled acrid and good.
Let’s just sleep, he said, leaving his hand there all night.
“Where are you, again?,” people I had known in the northeast—my parents, friends from high school or college—asked through the crackling line. “How’s the weather in Kentucky?” “What’s it like in the South?” “What’s it like in Maryland?” “Are you near the ocean?” “Can you see horses?” “I hear it’s nice over there in South Carolina.” “Where are you?” “Where are you again?”
“West Virginia,” I said. “Pocahontas County.”
Hmm, they said.
These questions were dumb, but on some level I understood. I lived now in a real place that existed, but I struggled to express to them where that was. The words “West Virginia,” it seemed, were insufficient to convey a satisfactory reality. Even expanding the purview or adding modifiers—south central, near the border of Virginia—did not seem to help things.
I began to notice that a certain twoness or a bothness lived here. It was in the symbols displayed on the houses—here a white one with a small Confederate flag flying over its porch, there a yellow one with a sprawling garden in the back and a truck with a “No Farms, No Food” sticker parked smartly in the drive. In the Walmart parking lot in Lewisburg, I sometimes sat and looked at cars. The Walmart was open twenty-four hours, which made it a popular choice not only for me to pee and buy ice cream but also for people to leave their cars overnight while they carpooled to work or to a party, so the sample size was larger. There were lifted Ford 150 trucks with signs that said “Rebel Pride,” and “You can pry my gun out of my cold dead hands,” and “Real women drive trucks.” But in equal or greater numbers there were Subarus and Toyota Tacomas that said “Birthplace of Rivers” or bore stickers for the Human Rights Commission or that said FRACKING in an oval with a line drawn through it.
On the one hand, inside the boundaries of Pocahontas County was a traditional music institute, an antique bookstore, and an artisan cooperative. Just about everyone I knew, local or transplant, had a garden—tomatoes, kale, cucumbers. A coworker of mine at Mountain Views lived in a highly functional home made partly from hardened layers of mud and outfitted with solar panels.
On the other hand, there was the fact that when driving up the steep rocky road to the Mountain Views’ campground, if you turned off at an earlier driveway you would end up at a property registered to a neo-Nazi group.
Oh, I think they got tired and moved on, the Founder said, waving away the idea with her hand, and, at last check with the Southern Poverty Law Center, she was right.
The only restaurant in Hillsboro, which had been closed for years but reopened my first year there to much community rejoicing, was owned by Sam’s neighbor and her husband. Their kids were the only kids of color in Hillsboro Elementary School; years later, she would wake up to the words “NIGGER LOVER” sprayed across the side of her café. Scores of neighbors, the Director included, came out in the snow to help her scrub them off.
Was I in the South? Some people, both in Pocahontas County and not, seemed to think I was. True, I could call up an image of passing a billboard for “Mason-Dixon Auto Auction” off of I-81 on the way there, memorable because above the billboard had twirled a real commercial eighteen-wheeler truck lifted on a metal pole. West Virginia is a Southern state according to the US Census. But so are Maryland and Delaware. Some sources now say a better geographical border are rivers—the Potomac
on the East and the Ohio on the West. If this is so, West Virginia is split vertically by the Potomac River watershed, with Pocahontas County almost exactly on the dividing line.
In a piece the Atlantic published called “Where Does the South Begin?” the author suggests that religion is as good a way as any to draw the boundary. On these grounds, “The divide roughly follows the Ohio River, but it cuts across West Virginia, where the southern tier is Baptist and speaks [with] a drawl and the northern tier is ethnic and cheers for the Steelers.” On this map, Pocahontas and its neighboring county to the north are colored a forest green for Methodist, but the counties to its south and west are red for Baptist.
My friend from college felt sure that politics were at the heart of all things. In the American imagination of recent years, “the South” means Republican and conservative states, “the North” liberal Democrats. But here still, a snafu: from 1932 to 1996, West Virginia voted Democratic in every presidential election except three—1956, 1972, and 1984.
In 1988, when Michael Dukakis got slammed by father Bush and Dan Quayle, West Virginia did not help in delivering the blow. While Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and even New Jersey and Connecticut jumped aboard and voted red, West Virginia joined New York, Massachusetts, and Oregon as one of ten states nationwide to opt for the Greek-Orthodox pro-choice candidate who used Neil Diamond’s immigrant anthem “America” as his theme song. It wasn’t until 2000, when George W. Bush narrowly pulled out the state’s five electoral college votes—and won the election by that exact number—that West Virginia’s red era began, a color that’s been darkening ever since.
Another possibility that people kept suggesting was that I was simply in Virginia. People could grasp “Virginia.” Though she had driven there with her own hands and watched the state welcome signs appear with her own eyes, a friend of mine could not grasp that West Virginia was a sovereign state distinct from the western portion of Virginia. I once lived in Richmond, a woman at a conference told me. I hear it’s lovely over there, especially in Roanoke, a man said to me later on a plane.
[2020] The Third Rainbow Girl Page 7
