Riverine (14 page)

At the River, my friend’s dad came in drunk and ordered prime rib
au jus
, two inches thick. He ate the monstrous cut of meat with his bare hands, slopping it into the juice like a puppy mauling a rawhide. I watched him from the buser station. He slapped the steak onto the table and tried to speak to me through his wide grin, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. His face was red and his eyes were red and he dumped the juice all over the table, then he rested his face in the mess of food and fell asleep in it. After he was carried out by his friends, I cleaned the mess alone while everyone else smoked. I watched the Kankakee rush by while I mopped, wondering where all that murky water ended up. I called my mom and told her what happened, crying into the pay phone as if it could comfort me, because it seemed like the only thing to do. The more the men at the River surprised me, the more the women seemed to glaze over. They quieted, as if in silent prayer. Their calmness frightened me. My mother called the man’s wife, a friend of hers, to tell her where she could find her husband, and I tried and failed to imagine her surprise. Would I, too, become immune to such spectacles? That day I learned that there were different ways to be a drunk and that a bar was another kind of church.

One day, a man called Muddy who had known me since I was ten fell backward off his bar stool. When I rushed to help him up, he stormed out in horror, the bells on the door jingling after it slammed behind him. He never, ever returned. Sometimes I wondered if he was dead on a couch somewhere, with a bottle of whiskey between his thumb and index finger, sitting in front of a static television, or if he found another place to pray.

I stayed late after my shifts ended because it was better than going home. After a while, people no longer invited me to go to the Pizza Hut. I didn’t want to go because I felt as though I was between worlds when I was around them. The kids in town didn’t hang out in bars. They didn’t feel more comfortable around men nearly their father’s age than boys their own age. They lived in subdivisions and had golden retrievers and mopeds and crushes on one another, while I was being hit on by men in my father’s work crews when he wasn’t looking.

One night, I played “Strawberry Wine” on the jukebox and sipped a virgin daiquiri at the employee table in the corner. The song reminded me of Corey, of how I had tasted him and, with a few different decisions, he could have been mine. It was homage to our lost chances, what with him in prison. A sort of tribute to my longing for him. As I listened to my song, a man named Tim sat down across from me. He bought me french fries and smelled like mouthwash. His voice was high-pitched, although he was twenty-seven. When I was younger, I had watched him fly by my house on a crotch rocket, his curly blond hair blown back by the speed. I was eighteen now. Fair game. “You want to go for a drive when you’re done with that?” he asked. He came in a few times a week. That night he told me that he was separated, getting a divorce, that I was pretty, that we could go to his house. Maybe for a drive, I said, but we never made it out of the parking lot. His truck was brand-new, the spoils of his job as a carpenter. The bench seat was covered in a red-and-black plaid blanket made of wool, and it scratched against my bare skin.

At the River, a man named Dave, who had known my mother for more than twenty years, stayed at the bar from early afternoon into early evening when it wasn’t harvest time. He talked to me about planting and irrigation, about books, about nature, about the presidential election, which I could now vote in, about taxes, about the Farm Bill, and about the college I would go to the following year on a partial scholarship, where he used to party when he was my age. An avid reader of the
Farmer’s Almanac
and in possession of an MBA plus his father’s farm, he knew much about nearly everything. One day while we were talking about waterfowl that make their habitats along the old Kankakee marsh—blue herons, wood ducks—he told me that only some wood ducks migrate south along the Atlantic Flyway, while some stay put through winter. “You can’t tell which are which, not by looking at them, or by where they live.” He meant that it was determined genetically. “They’re programmed as one or the other—to stay or leave,” he said. The ducks had the get-up-and-go gene or they didn’t. Dave was very tan, year round, from having worked outside all his life. He was always alone, always at the bar, elbows up and smiling wider as liquor took hold of him. A happy drunk. Once, I had gone to his house with my family for the Fourth of July and swum in his pool. I could feel him looking at me from time to time, and later we were alone, briefly, in his big empty house. He told me it would sure be nice if I were ten years older. And I felt like I already was, standing there in a bikini and dripping pool water all over his floor. I went back to the pool and dove down to the bottom, where I lay on my back holding my breath and looked straight up to the sun, wondering what was programmed in my own genetic code.

At the River, I read on my work breaks, and everyone got mad because I took the full fifteen minutes. It was only fair—I didn’t smoke and everyone else took a smoke break every hour. That logic was lost on them, so I ignored them. I read books about witchcraft, the Louisiana bayou, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and apartheid. I read books by V. C. Andrews and Stephen King and Thomas Hardy and Mary Higgins Clark and anything by the Bronte sisters and anything Oprah said to read. One day while I was reading, a boy with long hair whom I’d never met sat down with me. He bought my meal at my discounted employee rate. He told me he had read
Jude the Obscure
already. He said that I was beautiful and that he would like to sit there all day until I was done working. “And then what?” I asked. He said then he’d take me to a real dinner. I thought he might be crazy, but I also loved his candor. It was not every day that someone had read the books I was reading or said I was pretty—men I knew only implied it by assuming I was available to them, that I was appreciative of their advances—so I was an easy sell. He asked me to meet him in the parking lot after my shift. I found him sitting on the hood of a blue car with a guitar, waiting for me. He patted the hood, inviting me to join him. Then he got up, stood five feet from me, and sang to me in broad daylight, putting my name into the refrain and looking me straight in the eyes. He didn’t tell me his name, didn’t try to kiss me or touch me. Just a smile and a good-bye. I never saw him again. He was proof of something, but I wasn’t sure what.

At the River, I took dollar bills from men who wore guns in black holsters beneath their overshirts but over their undershirts. I picked the music, and they smiled. We listened to all the Hanks, the Stones, Stevie Nicks, the Judds, Merle Haggard, Joni Mitchell, Aerosmith, Genesis, Bon Jovi, and the Eagles. I danced and sang while I worked—with Kimmy and Dave and Lonnie and Tim and Harvey, and by myself. I called home to lie: they asked me to stay till close. I put on more makeup in the bathroom and stayed late at the employee table because I was still too young to sit at the bar. The regulars, who were friends with my dad, friends with me, took turns sitting with me, and everyone tried to get the bartender to give me a drink, a real drink, but she wouldn’t and I didn’t want one anyway. I wouldn’t learn until college how much I liked to drink. Then, the company was enough.

The men told stories about dogs and ex-wives and fishing and teenagers and motorcycles. The women talked about men who were farmers and steelworkers and carpenters and bricklayers and alcoholics and wife beaters and no good and a little bit good. One night, when the talk went a bit sideways and the pours of liquor went a bit heavy, two of the men argued and tumbled onto the patio, where they drew their guns. But the women were swift to cull their brutes, reducing them back to size, and with a few soft moves no shots were fired.

At the River, I was five and nine and fifteen and eighteen and twenty and sixteen and seventeen. I talked to Kimmy, who had begun dating Dave, and she told me how he made her ache with love. I wanted to ache as she did, but none of the men in the bar produced in me even a flicker of that exquisite pain. I studied the two of them, the way they smoothed one another’s forearms and shoulders in a kind of primal dance, one wood duck spinning gently in the water of its mate’s wake. An undertow that, when seen in miniature, looks almost like love. They were different sorts of people, Dave and Kimmy—as different in appearance as the male and female wood duck. He was mostly quiet and smart, while she was at the edge of unraveling, teetering between precipices of elation and melancholy. Dave talked to me less frequently, and Kimmy never remembered what we talked about, relaying the same anecdotes of her life present and past, again and again. She got lost in her own bubbling laughter, in the perfect harmony of a song only she could hear. And I hoped that I’d grow up to be a little more fun like her, a little less serious, a little more disarming and open-armed and fragile, but I never would.

Kimmy came to my high school graduation party, all the regulars did, and they hugged me and gave me money and said
Good goin’, girl. We’re proud of you
. They were the sum of me, divided into different kinds of pain, different kinds of happiness. Or perhaps I was the sum of them, our common denominator the River and a hard-earned history. Kimmy gripped my cheeks with her long fingers and told me that she loved me. It was her lasting memory, a compilation of many smaller, specific ones that had been lost inside a bottle, a feeling that was true. Still, she knew we had shared something important, if not the details of it. She said, “I could be your aunt. I could be your
sister
.” She told me to stay blond, blond, blond and to marry a man with money and to not get pregnant in college.

That summer a group of men and women painted my portrait at a watercolor workshop. We stayed in a barn on a sunflower farm for a week where there were flower heads big as pies for acres—I had never seen such beauty. In those days before I knew what the need for morning coffee was, I’d get lost in the flower fields before breakfast and show up for class with yellow cheeks. I was there on a work-study scholarship—my parents had paid half the fee. In exchange for the second half of the fee, I washed the artists’ dishes, helped cook the meals, and sat for portraiture. The participants gathered around me like children at the storyteller’s knee. They could hear me breathing, and I could hear their brushstrokes, the soft spray of their water spritzers, the scrub of their sponges against my paper temples. I heard them whisper, as if I were not there, “The mouth. Can’t get the mouth right.” I was a plate of shapes. Apple cheeks, hay hair. No longer a hostess, no longer a student, no longer a daughter. I wore a sundress and cowboy boots that never made it to the page. At the end of the week, I saw my face in seven interpretations, each more surprising than the last. Did I look the way they saw me? Were these the eyes I’d been seeing with all these years? I couldn’t tell. I felt foreign in my skin, wrong bodied. I have wondered whose closets I haunt. Where those seven alien selves have traveled. Whether anyone knows my name, or gave me one:
Plain Girl above Our Fireplace
or
Nothing Special in the Hallway
or
Woman Who Could Literally Be from Anywhere
. But at the time I only wondered,
Where is that woman going?

By summer’s end, I had paid off my car in full and purchased a computer with leftover graduation money. I’d received three annual scholarships: one from my father’s construction company for keeping a high grade point average, one from the arts council for my painting, and an academic scholarship from the school itself. One for each of the three things that had paved the way for whatever the future held. I packed the duck painting in a flat cardboard box and took it with me to the one college I’d applied to—one town over from home—and later to several apartments, evidence of my having crossed over from once place to another. But I never hung it up and I never painted again. I was embarrassed by it, having copied it from a picture. Only an idiot would recreate exactly what was already there and call it art.

M
y need to flee began long before I called it that. It started as a series of adventures, and then it became more pressing, more intentional. Sometimes I thought my aimlessness might have been friction resulting from Corey’s absence. I was still troubled by losing him, though I never spoke of it to anyone. The fact that I still thought of him in this way worried me. Why couldn’t I incriminate him like everyone else and bury it? In addition to English literature, I had decided to study criminal justice in college, and that choice was in large part motivated by the idea that if I could somehow intellectually understand how he had ended up imprisoned for life at nineteen—understand the reasons people commit violent crimes—then with enough education, I could also save him from the fate he’d earned. I could beat the system for him. Or at least make it better for others, on both sides of crime.

I’d selected a college based on proximity to Greg, my hometown boyfriend. Greg worked as an excavator, rearranging the terrain. I liked his job as a metaphor. On the weekends, we would obsessively scour the newspaper for vacant land that we could buy for a future home, but as soon as I started school, I realized we were worlds apart. I was interested in books, in sociology and criminology. He was interested in fishing and heavy machinery and wrestling.

Living one town over from home was barely leaving. Tumbleweeds on the plains traveled farther than I did. I’d wanted so badly to leave, but when the time came, I recreated what I’d already known because I couldn’t think of anything different. Greg was a safety net. If I had a boyfriend I was committed to, around whom I could plan my life, I wouldn’t have to figure out my actual life. I hadn’t seen or experienced much else, hadn’t known many educated women, so everything that wasn’t home was foreign and thus frightening. The first sweatshirt I bought from the college bookstore had the school’s year of establishment printed on it: 1889. It had been operating for over one hundred years. The first in my family to go from high school to a four-year college, I was shocked to learn that people my grandmother’s age had gone to college. I’d considered higher education a “new” thing because it seemed as though my family was just now learning of it.