In the Wilderness (19 page)

I looked around me in the dim light of the basement, at the friends who stood hunched and pale, holding on to whatever remnant remained of their own reality. Just then Danny let out a long and piercing howl. We stood for a moment, looked into one another’s stricken faces, then I bolted for the stairs. I ran from that house into the street, not caring who followed me, running for home.

In dreams that night I heard his scream again and again, felt it vibrate in my chest, echo off the walls of my room. I thought of possession and exorcism, remembered how violently his body had twisted, the fear in his eyes. The next day
at school they told me Scott had tied Danny to the bed, put ice behind his neck and a gag in his mouth. Could a priest have done more?

In the outside world I had a compatriot: my cousin Les, the one who had shared the open sky and dark outhouses of camp life, who fought daily the same battle I did—against a father who seemed bent on breaking her will to his.

Large green eyes, brown hair falling straight and thick past her waist, highlighted with shades of platinum—the color it had been the first time I met her, when we were two and three. Small-boned like her mother, with the same honeyed skin and high cheekbones, she possessed the kind of exotic appearance that made the town girls look bleached and caused the farm boys to imagine spice on their tongues.

I envied the ease with which she applied her makeup, perched on the bathroom sink, coating each of her long lashes with triple layers of Max Factor. I envied her perfect white teeth, her collection of miniskirts that hung to just below where her long hair brushed her bottom. Mostly, I envied her way with boys. The phone rang from the time she got home from school until the suitors either lost their nerve or were forced to give up the receiver. My uncle Barry, now a construction contractor who worked long, out-of-town hours, intercepted what calls he could. The threat in his self-made voice would have deterred most grown men, but that was what was so amazing about Les: boys would risk anything, it seemed, to gain her attention. I realized early on that part of Les’s appeal lay in her careless regard for the boys’ admiration. By shamelessly baiting then discarding her wooers like trash fish, she ensured their undying adulation.

Even the crosstown boys found their way to Les’s basement
window. I spent many summer nights with my cousin in her house, surrounded by pasture at the edge of town, and we were often awakened by the scattershot ping of gravel, or, if the window were open, her name hissed out in a loud whisper—“Les, Les!” She’d sometimes grant the boy the favor of her attention, but just as often she told him to get-the-hell-gone. He’d slink off, grumbling and aching but not long discouraged. He’d be back in a week or two, bringing along a friend for me: maybe if he could get the cousin occupied, Les would be more inclined to his affection.

There were times when Les, in a fit of ennui, would call the boy herself. Would he like to stop by her window, oh, say, around midnight? I marveled at the ease and polish of her banter, listening on the sidelines as she worked her thirteen-year-old magic, the crackle and spit of hormones nearly tangible over the telephone wire.

One such night, her chosen beau, Geoff, scratched at our window, shadowed by Mike, a tall, precociously hairy boy meant for me. We smoked in the garish glow of Les’s blue-bulbed lamp, then split into pairs. Geoff pulled Les into the next room by her belt loops and she smiled at him, a smile that held all the promise in the world.

As Mike’s fingers began their forays into the folds and beneath the buttons of my clothes, I listened half-jealously to the moans and pleading coming from the next room. I had witnessed the ritual of Les’s courtship enough to understand its rhythms: stroke him, give him a little, intimate more, then pull away, make him pout, pout yourself, let him woo you back, act petulant, kiss him hard, suck his tongue into your mouth deep enough to empty the marrow from his bones—then stop. Sit up. Light a cigarette. You are, your actions must say, bored beyond belief.

Geoff was frantic, begging so unabashedly that my own
face reddened just hearing it. If not for fear that it might wake my aunt, I’d have turned up the stereo, let Black Sabbath drown it all out—the mewling boy, Mike’s raspy breathing, the sense I had of being the ugly sister who could not work this miracle of seduction.

My initial hesitation had goaded Mike into a stronger state of insistence, the intensity of which frightened me. When I pulled away, he was angry, and then my weakness showed through: I could not stand to think he might be mad at me, might be driven by my pathetic inexperience and prudishness to reject me completely. I fumbled apologies, offered shallow kisses.

“What’s the matter with you, anyway?” Mike rose from the couch, tucking in his Mr. Natural T-shirt. He smoothed his shoulder-length hair behind his ears. He was handsome enough, cool in our crowd and generous with his dope. Why didn’t I feel for him, this boy who would eagerly waste himself in my arms, what I had felt for Luke, whose elbow brushing mine had been enough to fuel a week’s dreams?

“I’m sorry,” I said. I was embarrassed having led him on. I deserved his ridicule.

“You know what you are? You’re a prick-tease, that’s all.” He hit the wall with his fist, a loud crack that drew silence from the rec room.

I wanted Les to be there with me, to tell me what to do,
how
to do it. Mike scuffed at the rug with his boot, huffing and cursing Geoff for having dragged him along, and for what? His noise brought the others into the room, Geoff sweaty and ruffled, Les as casual and composed as a diva.

“What’s up?” she asked, already knowing her country cousin had screwed up a perfectly good time.

“She’s a fucking prude.” Mike grabbed his jacket and stepped out of the window, leaned back in long enough to say,
“I’m leaving,” then took off down the road, the crunch of gravel beneath his boots echoing like gunfire.

Geoff glared. Les sidled to the couch, slid down next to me. “Mike’s a dick,” she said, yawning.

I looked at Geoff, standing in the middle of the room, senseless as a toad, stunned with disbelief that he had been pulled back from the brink of having it all by some hick girl who didn’t know her shit from shinola. Les stared at him for a moment, blinked slowly. He’d been dismissed.

It would take me years to realize what Les already knew: the trick is not in making them
think
you don’t care; the trick is in truly not caring. Exquisite disinterest drew a boy like a peacock to its mirrored reflection. Geoff would be there the next time she needed diversion, ignobly and perpetually hopeful, and I would work on perfecting my own emotional veneer; but the truth is, it’s no trick, and this, too, I would learn: the shell you build, one layer at a time, is real. No one gets in, and you may never get out.

Family visitations allowed me long periods of time to spend with my cousin. When we couldn’t scrape together or steal the change we needed to buy cigarettes, we snitched whole packs from our fathers’ cartons, the daring it took to encroach on such territory thrilling us to the bones, outweighing the severe punishment such an act might bring. We slept in each other’s beds, whispering late into the night our secret desires: to make love to a certain boy, to run away, to be on our own until we died, and to die young because we could not imagine growing old and dull.

We parted our hair down the middle and tucked it behind our ears in imitation of the girls we saw on TV. Perhaps because my family felt they must make some, hopefully harmless,
concession to my desires, they allowed me to don jeans, and I wore my Levi 501’s pulled low on my hips. Les snuck me makeup and taught me how to blow smoke through my nose. I was happy, lying in her bed long past midnight, listening to Norman Greenbaum sing “Spirit in the Sky”:
Never been a sinner, never sinned, I’ve got a friend in Jesus
—I sang along, calloused to whatever blasphemous implications might have once made their impressions on me. I no longer believed myself saved. Whatever heaven existed was right here, lying awake next to my cousin, watching smoke rise in concentric hoops toward the ceiling. If I were doomed, then so be it. I could not live the life asked of me because it was hell. What difference did it make?

When Les spent nights with me, in my house near the town’s center, we feigned unbelievable exhaustion in order to huddle together on my bed with the radio turned down low, closing our eyes to the luminescent glow of my black light and the images sprouting from velvet: a brilliant orange and yellow peace sign; a woman with butterfly eyes and blue seaweed hair. We mouthed the words to “American Pie,” deep into gut-felt appreciation of the obscure lyrics—
Helter skelter in the summer swelter
—bringing ourselves to tears of pity with the drawn-out refrain—
singin’ this’ll be the day that I die
. The song became our incantation, seizing us with its bittersweet nostalgia for a past we were too young to remember.

Above my bed hung a poster of some inane early seventies icon—I forget exactly what or who now—but when my father had left for his nighttime work and my mothers incessant footsteps finally fell silent, we’d pull the tacks from the poster’s corners and flip it over: there, Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper rode their one remaining Harley, gloriously doomed, flipping off the world in perpetuity.

We’d bide our time, share a cigarette in the closet, then, when we believed that everyone else in the city slept but us, we’d pull ourselves from my bedroom window and run through the alleys as far as we could until we collapsed, breathless and laughing. Sometimes we made our way to Imperial Bowl, where the few customers left were more interested in their beer than their score and no one bothered to question our presence. Other nights we sat with our backs against a Dumpster, content to shiver in the cool air and smoke, free until the birds began their singing and the horizon colored.

We had other friends who found no need to skulk and hide, and their lives were a constant source of amazement and envy to us. One night we sneaked out and made our way across town to the house of Rick, a boy our age with golden hair that hung in a thick shock across his forehead, a boy who walked with his thumbs in his pockets, never deigning to remove the cigarette from his mouth, clinching it between his teeth with a sideways grin, a boy we both hoped to kiss, though I knew Les would have the better chance.

We tossed a handful of pebbles at his window, then scurried behind the rosebushes. He stepped onto the porch of the towering split-level (his parents had money) and waited. “Rick,” we hissed. “Over here.”

“What are you guys doing?” He stood silhouetted by the light escaping from inside. I pulled him down to us.

“Wanna go run around?” He was our age, maybe fourteen, but the smile that spread across his face showed nothing of the lure of truancy.

“Why don’t you guys come in?”

I looked toward the door. “Aren’t your parents home?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So?
What do you mean,
so?”

“They like to meet my friends.”

Les and I looked at each other. This was beyond our imagination. What if they called our parents? What if they called the cops?

Instead they welcomed us with hot chocolate and little tuna sandwiches on brown bread cut into rectangles, stuck through with blue toothpicks. Rick’s red-haired mother lounged with her drink on the rec room sofa, her sculptured feet drawn up bare beneath a brightly flowered caftan like the ones I’d seen on the Gabor sisters (my grandmother’s Hungarian ideals—such lovely skin! such finely boned faces!).

The father settled into his chair, crossed his legs and smiled. “So—is it Kim? Kim, how’s school going this year?”

I shot a look at Rick, who sat on the sofa next to his mother, leaned toward her as though the few inches separating them were too great a distance to be endured. “Fine,” I answered, then bit into my sandwich. There was something besides mayo and pickles in the tuna—green olives, I decided, worrying the wad of bread across my tongue—pimento, and worst of all, onions. My mother never put onions in tuna. My father hated onions and pepper, odd ingredients of any kind. He tolerated one spice—salt and lots of it. My brother and I had grown up knowing only white: Wonder Bread, mayonnaise instead of mustard, mashed potatoes and cream gravy, white toast dunked in white-sugared oatmeal. I swallowed twice, trying to work the mouthful down my throat without chewing.

Les reached for another sandwich, holding it between her first finger and thumb. She looked like a lady having tea with her matron friends. I watched in admiration as she bit and chewed, bit and chewed, never minding the grit of onion. Her
mother made things like goulash and enchiladas. She was used to this stuff.

“And Les, are you a classmate of Rick’s?”

“No, sir. I go to Tammany.” She dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a napkin and added, “It’s an okay school, small enough to give the kids lots of time with the teachers.”

What in the hell was she talking about? She hated Tammany, called it a pissy little place. The father nodded, pleased with her mature evaluation. He offered her another sandwich, which she demurely declined.

The chat continued between Les and the parents as though they were country club pals. I couldn’t believe it. Not a word was said about the inappropriateness of the hour or why we found it necessary to throw rocks at their son’s window. They beamed their pride upon him and seemed to miraculously approve of us, and what I realize now is that they were both stone drunk.

I felt like I had that night beneath the blinding lights of the football field—as though I had stumbled into another dimension. When it became clear to us that we were not going to entice Rick into the streets, we wiped our fingers on the little napkins, said our thanks and were ushered to the door by Rick’s father, who waved to us as we darted down the alley. “You girls come back and visit us again anytime,” he called, his words echoing off the darkened houses.

We found our way back home and had just crawled through my bedroom window when we heard the sound of my mother’s footsteps at the stairs. By the time she eased open the door, we were buried to our necks in blankets, working with all our might to breathe in sleeplike fashion. I felt her gaze cover us, and then she was gone.