Stop That Girl (9 page)

“Good evening and welcome. I’d like to introduce myself. I’m Helen Weeks and I’m a ranger naturalist for the National Park Service. I’d like to make one announcement regarding our programs here. We’re having a naturalist-accompanied hike tomorrow very early in the morning. . . .”

I could hear Mom practicing from my new world in the back bedroom. A damp washcloth was molded, lukewarm, to my forehead. The new painkillers had codeine in them, and I couldn’t keep much food down as of yet. My fever had been spiking at 105. I’d burned and poured sweat and had chills under the blankets that had racked my body with shudders so fierce I’d been afraid I would bite my tongue off. My skull felt like it was being probed by an ice pick. My gums were bleeding. The dryness in my throat was making me gag, and then I’d vomit up some kind of bile. My tongue felt raw. I had an itching rash all over my chest and back and stomach. Light drove pain through my eyes. In the darkness, muted images whirled on the black screen before me, running together like stains. My limbs and joints ached so intensely that tears dampened my face.

The first morning, a Park Service nurse stuck a thermometer under my tongue and told Mom I probably had a case of the flu. Fever blurred the day away. I know Mom came into the room at one point and said, “Some of the other people around the compound seem to be coming down with this, so they’ve called the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, and some men are flying out tomorrow to take blood samples.”

“Disease control?”

“I know, who could imagine this,” she said, and her cool hands weren’t as shocking now on my skin.

The next day, two men came to examine me. I protected my eyes from the light, but through my fingers I could see they were wearing safari outfits. They had a canvas satchel full of equipment and, without much conversation, drew several vials of my blood. I’d never had that done before, but it didn’t hurt at all.

“What do you think it is?” I asked them.

“Can’t tell you until we examine your sample, but the symptoms are pointing to tick-borne relapsing fever. We’ll get you started on antibiotics and give you some stronger pain relief, all right?”

“Thank you,” I said, and a few minutes later threw down a handful of pills.

Tick-borne relapsing fever. Mom said it only destroyed the organs when treatment was tardy, and was fatal a mere ten percent of the time. It was caused by spirochetes, nasty spiral-shaped bacteria similar to those responsible for syphilis. Though the antibiotics would kill the first round that had infected me, and I’d start to feel better in a few days, the spirochetes would create clones that would survive and come back to make me sick all over again. And then most likely a few more times before the whole thing ran its course.

“What are you doing today?” I asked my mother, my third day on antibiotics.

“I have a talk out at Cape Royal, and then tonight I’m giving my fireside talk.”

“What’s Kathy doing?”

“Well, fortunately Angus is keen on taking her on hikes and showing her around. And she likes him.”

“Where are they now?”

“They’ve gone to the lodge to get ice cream.”

“Sounds like fun,” I said, gloomily.

“They’re getting some for you,” she added. “Then Roy’s coming this weekend.”

“That’s good,” I murmured.

“You don’t mind being left in the cabin alone this afternoon, do you?”

“I guess not,” I said.

Then she moved out of the room and all was dark again, though I could hear her voice through the walls.

“The oldest exposed rock in the canyon is the Vishnu Schist, a spectacular Precambrian rock, a very hot, dark, volcanic kind of rock, massive and contorted, formed one point eight billion years ago. . . .

“The river has its tools, the boulders, cobbles, sand, silt, and mud, which have taken this great amount of carving in hand. . . . Prior to the closing of the Glen Canyon Dam in 1963, five hundred thousand tons of sediment were transported any given day by the current. But man has permanently altered the process by which this canyon evolved. . . .

“The redwall limestone is actually a grayish-white limestone, dyed by the red beds above, full of iron oxides that wash down when the rains come—”

“How long is it?”
I called out.

“How long is the river?” Mom came to the door. “It’s about fourteen hundred miles long. Do you need anything?”

“No,” I said.

“Am I bothering you?” she said. “I just need to practice a few more minutes.”

“Fine,” I said, and she closed the door and started up again.

After a few minutes, I yelled out,
“How deep is it?”

I heard Mom say, “It’s often up to seventy feet deep before a rapid, then of course very shallow at a rapid where the water runs over the rocks—”

“Polluted?”
I called.

She came to the door. “What is it?” she said. “I don’t think you should be shouting like that. You need to rest.”

“I’m resting.” I wanted her to sit with me, but since she didn’t think of it, I didn’t ask, and after a while, she left for work.

In the dark room I had become like a blind person, sensitive to the slightest of sounds. I could hear the aspens quake. I could tell when a pine needle plinked on the roof. I even recognized the rough sound of deer lapping at the lick. When I started to feel a bit better, I’d get up in the empty cabin, feel the cold vinyl under my feet, and squint out the windows, amazed at how fast I’d gone from a normal person to an invalid. My legs were shriveled and unsteady. I’d lost nearly ten pounds. My skin was pale as paper, the whites of my eyes thin and gray.

One afternoon I propped myself up and wrote Raoul a letter. I still ached all over, but for the first time in days I felt I could put some cogent thoughts together. It was gratifying trying to describe how sick I’d been, and I hoped he cared. Finally I wrote:

Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you about “Sad
Viviana.” It’s a great poem. I like the way the point of view
shifts halfway through, so that you’re never really sure
whether it’s Viviana who’s sad or the narrator. It’s clear he’s
projecting a lot of stuff onto Viviana, and that’s definitely
the nature of immature attraction. I liked the images of
decay and evil that you invoke to show his deteriorating
state of mind, and the lengths to which he goes to embroider
her shallow simple-minded responses to him. Good
work!

It was best to tackle such things head-on.

And the summer proceeded. Angus Frey said goodbye, which was just as well. Roy arrived and played cards with me while I got better, and I was glad he was still there when I had my first relapse. He dug up a little transistor radio for me to listen to at odd hours when I couldn’t sleep. In the middle of the night I could get stations as far away as Nebraska and Oklahoma. In the afternoons Kathy would read to me out loud if my eyes were sore; it was funny hearing her peep out an especially hateful and paranoid passage from Notes from Underground: “ ‘... But in that cold, abominable half-despair, in that conscious burying oneself alive for grief in the underworld, in that hyperconsciousness and yet to some extent doubtful hopelessness of one’s position, in that hell of unsatisfied desires turned inward . . .’ ”

Then, one night, Mom sat on the edge of my bed and said, “You know, I’ve been meaning to tell you something. I’m sorry I was unsympathetic when you first got sick.”

“You mean, the day we were stuck behind the log?” I said.

“Yes. I felt like a real heel. I had no idea. I guess I just thought—well, that you were trying to annoy me.”

“Annoy you?”

“You know, try to ruin the mood, because I was having a good time.”

“You mean, with Angus Frey?”

“Well, in general.”

That was all weeks ago, now, and I was on my third relapse. I’d spent most of my summer in this bed. The view from my pillow was what I’d remember most clearly, that and scattered glimpses of my mother, cheerful all the time now, a picture of health and activity, tanned and slim, her teeth gleaming when she moved like a hungry shark.

“Hey, but Mom,” I said, “why would I do a thing like that?”

Let Me Take You Down

I was under the dormitory in the dirt, poking wires from an old black dial phone at a totem pole of lines I’d discovered in an unlocked box attached to the foundation. When the wires brushed certain screws, a blast of static crackled in my ear, but in a moment I found a steady dial tone, so I wrapped the wire tight and placed the call.

“Archie?” I said, when he answered.

“I thought you couldn’t call.”

“Well, I found a way.” The smell of soil and mildew and old asbestos was making me want to sneeze.

“What’s new?” he asked.

“Did you get my letters?” I said.

There was a click, heavy breathing.

“I got two. How many’d you send?”

“Who’s this?” a voice interrupted. I thought I recognized it as belonging to the oxlike girl from Orinda who frequently boasted about her family’s political connections. “Who’s on my phone?”

“What’s this, a party line?” Archie said.

“Whoever’s butting in should hang up,” I said.

“This is my phone,” the voice complained. “Get off! I’m counting down from ten—”

“My ear is better,” I managed to say.

“That’s good,” Archie said.

“You know, I’m still worried about that bill for the doctor, and then the door.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” he said.

“You should help me out,” I said.

“Three . . . two . . . one . . .”

“I would if I could,” he said.

I was seventeen that summer. I had long brown hair prone to knots, thick eyebrows, an oversized nose, and duck lips. I weighed 110 pounds. I favored plaid bell-bottoms and Clark treks. I ate a head of iceberg lettuce for my lunch, in the manner of eating an apple. I had a little Smith Corona typewriter on which I pecked out letters to my congress-man. During the school year I liked to annoy teachers I found lacking. One day in the spring I placed a snail on my French teacher’s desk before he arrived at class, and the results exceeded my hopes. One look at it and he launched into a tirade about the person who had committed the deed, describing the perpetrator as “a dweller in the house of filth”—the most he’d ever said to us in any language, because he didn’t speak French and most days sat frozen on a stool playing us tapes. As if holding the innocent mollusk personally to blame, he picked it up and hurled it at the wall, the shell shattering into many pieces and the moist, sluggish body tumbling to the floor. Then he grabbed his briefcase and stormed from the room, and I began to laugh so hysterically I cracked the corners of my mouth.

I was restless and bored and slightly unhinged by all the ups and downs at home. Missing the point, Mom and Roy thought I needed to get away from bad influences and enrolled me in a summer-school thing in northern California. Perfect. I had a boyfriend I wanted to spend time with, and now, miles from home, he’d come visit and I’d be able to. His name was Archer Upfield III.

Archie’s parents were old. His father was an airline executive who’d gone mad. They lived in a big decaying house in the Encino hills. Never mind that the pool was green and filled with algae, the Scandinavian furniture bought expensively in the fifties now swarming with dust mites, the kitchen Formica cracked and cluttered with washed-out cottage cheese containers and lids, empty egg cartons stacked like one caterpillar mounting another, and newspapers in piles so long-standing you could smell the pulp breaking down. No, never mind. Archer felt privileged.

My house was down the street. Just a regular house but supposedly a step up from our last one. Mom had been having some medical problems the past year, and she and Roy had thought moving again would cheer her up. It hadn’t.

“That tree is going to obliterate our view,” Mom complained. It became something she was saying every day. “We finally move to a house with a view, and now it’s going to be ruined.”

The sapling across the street tickled the bottom of our view. It was a small tree, a sycamore, planted in the innocent hope that it would grow into a shapely specimen such as the ones that line the streets in European capitals, to be admired by the neighbors strolling past. It was not a bad tree. Except to my mother.

“What will we do?” she said. “That tree will soon block out everything we’ve worked for.”

“It’s just a smoggy valley. Can’t you relax and be happy?”

“I’m trying, Ann. Wait until you’re my age.”

I met Archer when I moved to this neighborhood. We’d attended the same school all along but he’d never noticed me before. Now we sat at the back of the bus and kissed on the ride home. The bus driver yelled at us, things like, “Do I gotta hose you two down?” to which Archie would reply, “Keep thine eyes on the road, Civil Servant.”

Then we’d say goodbye at the corner and, kicking rocks along the ground the rest of the way home, I’d brace myself for the latest batch of bad news.

It was the next-door neighbors. They rode motorcycles to and fro at all hours, tinkered with them in the yard, roasted boars in a pit, shot at beer cans with pop guns, and had been told to conceal these habits while we were buying the house. “If we call the police, they’ll retaliate,” Mom mused, one night at dinner.

“We’ll move again if we have to,” Roy said.

“We can’t let them bully us,” Mom said. “From now on, every time I drive by, I’m going to smile and wave.”

“That will be terrifying,” I said.

“Why?”

“You’ll seem totally psychotic.”

“I’m giving it a try,” Mom said.

If I happened to be a passenger in the car when she smiled and waved, I saw what resulted. The son, a hulking twenty-year-old with greasy hair and legs like woolly cannons, narrowed his eyes in disbelief. I began to duck. “Stop!” I’d gasp.

“This might turn everything our way,” Mom said, waving as we rolled down the street. Doubled over in the seat next to her, I’d say, “I don’t think it’s going to work.”

After a spark plug flew over the fence and hit Kathy in the eyeball, Mom’s next plan of attack involved sending me over with a plate of cookies.

“Hello,” I muttered, when a woman in an orange muumuu answered the door. At least I thought it was a woman. She looked like a mechanic in a wig.

“Girl Scouts?” she said.

“My mother made these for you.”

“Your mother?” she said. “Listen, nobody’s doing any harm over here. You people act like we’re dismembering babies. You gotta live and let live. Right?”

“Right,” I said. “Want these cookies?”

“I’m trying to lose this gut, but what are they?”

“Chocolate chip.”

“Margarine or butter?”

“Um, I think half and half.”

“They got nuts in them?”

“Walnuts.”

“Yeah, all right. Thanks. Tell your folks to take it easy.”

She grabbed the plate from me, clamping her cigarette in her lips as she pushed open the screen door. I trudged home.

More than anything, I wanted to live in a world where people laughed and had fun. A world free for one day from strife. Lately, a world of menace and threat was the only world Mom knew. She either thought we were coming down with horrible diseases, or that neighbors and plants were encroaching on her territory, or that someone didn’t like her, that we didn’t have enough money, that my sister and I weren’t sending enough letters to our one or two acceptable relatives, that the rosebushes were dying, that we were spilling grease on our clothing, that there would soon be a war in the Middle East, that we would be robbed or burglarized, or that her favorite crocks might break in a quake. There was never a moment when we could relax. As far as she was concerned, the more we were trembling with fear, the better.

When I returned from delivering the cookies, I said, “You know, they’re not doing any harm over there. We act like they’re disemboweling babies.”

“Are you serious? This is our fault?”

“Well, maybe it is.”

“It’s our fault we can’t sleep because they have parties at all hours? It’s our fault their deadbeat son uses obscenities when speaking to me?”

“People should learn to live and let live,” I said.

“Maybe you should just move next door!” my mother said. “Maybe you’d rather be part of their family!”

“All I’m saying is Mrs. Dogey seemed somewhat nice.”

“She liked my cookies?” Mom said.

“Yeah, I think she did.”

“Okay, wait and see.
Wait and see.
”

She’d say this whenever she was foisting something new on us. For example, because Kathy collected kangaroos, Mom had been convinced I should collect something. Detecting in me a slight attraction to owls, she pounced. Word got out. From then on I was receiving owl items whenever I was due for a gift.

Though I complained and raged, owls were halfway decent. Rather handsome, with their thumb-shaped bodies and big eyes, they had more presence than most birds. The way an octopus is better than a fish. But not instead of books and records and clothes. And who wanted to be pegged as an “owl person”? At night from my bed I gazed up at the shelf that displayed my enlarging collection and felt something bordering on despair. I wondered why children were encouraged to amass large quantities of animal bric-a-brac. Was it supposed to keep us engaged in life, through the quest to find more? Give us some phony sense of accomplishment as our collections grew? Keep our wants pure?

“You’ll appreciate them someday,” Mom said. “Wait and see.”

“You know what?” I said. “Collecting stuff’s a drag.”

“Ann, there’s nothing wrong with collecting things. Most girls do.”

“I collect kangaroos,” Kathy said.

“Oh, big wow, you’re so cool,” I said.

“How pleasant you are,” Mom observed. “Wait until you go to college.”

“Then what?”

“You’ll miss us,” she said.

Would I? When Mom finally escaped, her years at Vassar were
the time of her life.
I’d heard so much about it, it seemed like nothing else ever lived up to it, so much so it made me wonder if having
the time of your life
was even a good idea. She and her roommate would ride the train into New York; once, the night before such an outing, Mom dreamed a produce man was cursing and chasing them down the street. Next day, flitting around Greenwich Village, they knocked into a fruit stand and a produce man cursed and chased them down the street. They ducked into a subway, laughing and gasping for breath. She felt like her own person for the first time in her life. Not for long. What a thorn I must have been in her side. Imagine having a baby when you were still a kid, a colicky baby from what I’ve been told, a screamer all night long. No help from her parents, just harsh words and told-you-sos. A new job, finding all those babysitters, hard to keep track of it all.

Nana was my favorite. She had her own grandchildren, but we paid her to spend time with me and act like a grandmother. On Friday nights we’d drive her home and watch her amble up the walk with her bag, open the door, and disappear inside.

I wouldn’t miss them. I knew how to resist feeling that.

The place they sent me that summer had sandstone-colored buildings and was as brown as a lion, all dry grass and windy oaks. My roommate, Hannah, was from Chico, the daughter of a surgeon, a party girl. She was bronzed by hours of poolside lounging, her perfect tan set off by the puka shells she wore at all times around her neck. She also had a plastic bag full of marijuana in her suitcase as big as a submarine sandwich. “Like to get stoned?” she asked me, our first day there.