"Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cain Chelsea)

Lisa Michaels

In 1969, my father was arrested for his part in an antiwar protest f in Boston and was sentenced to a two-year prison term. (He and my mother had split up several years earlier, but they had remained close, sharing the child-rearing duties and trying to forge a new kind of divorce, one that was in keeping with their progressive politics.) He began serving his time at Billerica not long after his twenty-eighth birthday. I was a little over three years old. Once he was settled, my mother took me to see him in prison. He had written her a letter asking for books and a new pair of tennis shoes-he was playing a lot of pick-up basketball in the yard to keep his head clear. On the ride out to the prison, I clutched a box of black Converse hightops in my lap, my head bubbling with important things to tell him, thoughts which percolated up, burst, and disappeared-their one theme: Don’t forget me.

I remember very little of our lives then, but that visit has the etched clarity and foggy blanks of a fever dream. We pulled into the broad prison parking lot and stepped out to face the gray facade punctured by a grid of tiny windows. Mother lifted her hand against the glare, then pointed to a figure in one of the barred openings. Was it my father? She hoisted me onto the roof of the car, and I held the shoebox over my head and shook it. I thought I saw the man wave back.

In the waiting room, the guards called our names in flat tones, never looking us in the eye. They led us through a series of thick pneumatic doors and down long corridors to the visiting room. Once we were inside, I saw something soften in their faces. ‘Sit right here, missy,’ one of them said. Mother lifted me into a plastic chair and my feet jutted straight out, so I stared at the toes of my tennis shoes, printed with directives in block letters: left, right.

I sat still until a door on the far wall opened and a flood of men filed in. Out of the mass of bulky shapes, my father stepped forward, the details of his face reassuring in their particulars. He grinned and reached for me across the tabletop scribbled with names and dates, and despite the no touching rule, the guards said nothing. When he took my hand, every manic bit of news I had practiced in the car flew out of me. I was stunned by the dry warmth of his skin, his white teeth, the way he cleared his throat in two beats before speaking. Distance made me notice for the first time these familiar things, which proved him to be real beneath the clipped hair and the prison uniform.

Our conversation was simple. There was little we could say in the span of one public hour. He read me stories, which my mother had brought, cracking the pages wide and roving from bass to falsetto as he acted out the dialogue. I told him what I ate for lunch, and in the silence before he answered I remembered the tennis shoes, flushed with relief to have something to give him. ‘Look what we got you’ I said, and then tore the box open myself. I beamed and bunched my skirt between my knees while he admired them. ‘All Stars!’ he said. ‘These are the best. I’m gonna tear up the court.’

At the end of the hour, the guard rested one hand on his gun, tipped back on his heels, and called the time. Panic closed my throat. I looked to my father for a sign-he would tell the man we weren’t ready-but his eyes were wet and the corners of his mouth twitched down. I turned to the stranger by the wall and flashed a saccharine smile. ‘Daddy,’ I asked, leaning my cheek on the table and looking at the guard, ‘is that the nice man you told me about?’

The guard squinched his face at me, in what passed for kindness in that place, then made a slow turn and gave us a few extra minutes. Once they were granted, we had nothing to say. I sat there with all my feeling funneled down to the smallest aperture, until my chest hummed and my head felt light. Then the guard said, ‘Time’s up,’ and we shuffled to our feet.

In the clamor of chair legs and murmured good-byes, we could speak again. ‘Hey, what do you want for Christmas?’ my father asked. I stopped in the doorway and stared at his dark bulk. I wanted him. But his voice was filled with a sudden expansiveness, and I knew I should ask for something he could give.

‘Something purple,’ I told him. It was my favorite color then, and I let everyone know: I was staking out my turf in the visible spectrum.

I still have a letter he wrote me that night from his cell: ‘It may take a long time, but I’ll try to get you a purple thing. Here’s a pretend one for now.’ Below it is a necklace with a carefully sketched purple star, ringed by faint marks where I once tried to work it free from the paper.

This was the first of many letters he wrote me, each with a drawing in colored pencil. ‘Darling Lisa-Hello, Hello, Hello. I am very happy tonight. I got a guitar yesterday and am learning to play it. I am on a diet so I won’t be fat at all-not even a little bit.’ Then half the page taken up by an abstract drawing: a grid filled with tangled clots of scribbling, a black anvil shape, a downward arrow, the symbol for infinity. ‘I call this picture, Being in Jail: JAIL. I love you darling, Your Father.’

His notes were full of rhymes and playfulness: portraits of me with green hair, or of himself with the head of a man and the body of a conga drum. In places, his loneliness leaked through. ‘I will try to keep writing you,’ said one letter, ‘but it’s hard when you don’t write me back.’ I was pricked by guilt when I read these pleas, then quickly forgot them. At first his absence was a plangent note, always sounding in the background, but it became muffled as the months passed. In time, I had trouble recalling his face.

My mother made several visits to Billerica, but gradually she began to cut ties. My father had become increasingly focused on his political work in the months leading up to the demonstration, and his arrest meant she had no help in caring for me, no one to consult with, no air. She was furious at him, and fury made her feel free. We would move to Mexico and buy a piece of land. She would become a potter, maybe look for work teaching English. I would wear embroidered dresses and turn brown in the tropical sun.

In the flush of her new-found independence, Mother went to a postal service auction and bought herself a used mail truck. She parked it outside of our apartment and gave me a tour. With a tune-up and a few interior improvements, she said, it would get us south of the border. The cab had one high leather seat, and a long lever that worked the emergency brake. To shift gears, you punched numbered keys on a small raised box. It looked like a tiny cash register, and Mother let me play with it while the engine was off. A sliding door led back into a cold metal vault, bare but for a few mail shelves. ‘This is going to be our cozy rolling home,’ Mother said, her voice echoing off the walls.

For the next few months, my mother worked as a waitress and took steps to make the mail truck road-worthy. The first rains of autumn had revealed a couple of leaks in the chassis, so she spent a weekend driving around Cambridge in search of patching material. On a narrow side street, she spotted a promising sign: Earth Guild-We Have Everything.

She stopped in and asked the cashier if they had any sheet metal. The store was a kind of counterculture supermarket, stocked with incense, bolts of cotton, paraffin, books on homesteading, yarn and looms. But it seemed that ‘everything’ didn’t include sheet metal.

‘What do you want it for?’ the woman asked. It was a slow day in the store. Had there been a line of customers, impatient to buy beeswax and clay, our lives might have taken a different turn.

‘I need to patch a hole in the side of my mail truck,’ my mother said.

‘Well’ the woman offered, ‘we don’t have sheet metal, but we have Jim, and he has a mail truck, too.’ She yelled toward the back room, and out loped my future stepfather, a handsome lanky man in square-toed Frye boots, smiling an easy smile.

Jim came out to the curb and looked over the rust spots. He and Mother talked about their vans, how much they’d paid at auction, where they were headed. Jim also had his eyes on Mexico. And at the very moment my mother dropped by, he had been building a kiln in the back of the store for the Earth Guild’s pottery studio. It seems she had stumbled on a man who could help her turn her schemes into brick and wood. By the time they finished talking, the sun was low in the sky and they had a date to change their oil together.

Jim had embraced the counterculture, but not on political terms. He wore hand-painted ties, listened to the Stones, and collected Op Art. When he met my mother, he was living in a commune in Harvard Square called The Grateful Union. ‘Those guys were uptown,’ my mother says. ‘Into spare living and Shaker furniture.’

She and Jim soon made plans to head across the country under the same roof. We would take his truck, since it was considerably cozier than my mother’s. A platform bed stretched across the width of the van, and a hinged half-moon table folded down from the wall and perched on one leg. We ate sitting cross-legged on the mattress. The walls were lined with bookcases, fitted with bungee cords to hold the volumes in place. On a shelf just behind the cab was our kitchen: a two-burner propane cooking stove, a tiny cutting board, and a ten-gallon water jug. Jim covered the metal floors with Persian rugs and hung a few ornaments on the wall: a plaque with the Chinese characters for peace, prosperity, and happiness; a yellow wicker sun.

Before we set out, Jim bought a small wood stove and bolted it to the floor near the back wall. The smokestack jutted out the side of the truck, the hole weather-sealed with the fringe from a tin pie plate. One of Jim’s friends from The Grateful Union wired a stereo system into the van, and Mother sewed heavy denim curtains that attached to the window frames with velcro, so we could have privacy at night. The engine on these snub-nosed trucks bulged into the cab and was housed by a metal shell that served as a shelf for bags of mail. Jim cut a piece of thick foam just the shape of the engine cover, which would be my bed. A perfect fit. I was about the size, in those days, of a sack of mail.

In the spring of 1970, we packed up our essential belongings and set out on a year-long journey across the country, down the eastern seaboard and then across the low belly of the continent to California. The thrill of traveling sustained me for a while, but it was a difficult age to be rootless. I played with other kids for a day or two at a campground or a city park, and then we drove on. After a day on the road, Mother tucked me in on my foam pad, warmed from below by the engine’s heat. In the footwell below me was a small pot we peed in during the night, and so I drifted off to the smell of urine and the tick of the cooling pistons. Now and then, when we were parked on some dark residential street, I would wake to the knock of a policeman, asking us to move along.

And move along we did, until our funds started to run thin, and Mother and Jim began to search for a piece of land, ‘our pie in the sky,’ as Jim called it. Mother was browsing through a copy of Mother Earth News when she saw a classified ad listing land for sale. She located the town, which had a population of two thousand and was marked with the tiniest speck the map allowed, and we drove up through San Francisco headed for that dot.

We ended up buying a clapboard house in the heart of this coastal valley town, a half-acre plot that came with a stucco duplex. Later, Mother would say that you had to call the people who lived in those buildings homeless. Only two out of the four toilets worked. The ceiling plaster bloomed with stains. There were a handful of ramshackle sheds on the property and a line of rusted cars in the driveway. The yard was nothing but thistle and dry grass. They dickered with the landlord a little, and agreed to buy the place for $18,000.

Our new address was 10,000 Main Street. Apparently the town’s founders had been anticipating an explosive growth period which never arrived. Just past our house, the only sidewalk in town ceased abruptly, the last slab jutting out toward the cow pastures and orchards down Powerhouse Road. We would hold down the end of the main drag, on about an acre of good river valley soil gone hard from neglect.

We moved into the front apartment, formerly inhabited by an old alcoholic woodcutter named Floyd, who died in his bed shortly after we arrived. It took us a week of scrubbing to make that place fit to live in. There was standing water in the sink that the neighbor told us hadn’t been drained for six months. Mother made batik curtains for the windows, and lined the musty drawers with butcher paper. In the bedroom, the wallpaper hung in thick tatters, a yellowed flowery print laced with ribbons. We pulled that down and found a layer of cheese cloth tacked beneath it, and when that was stripped away, solid foot-wide redwood planks, rough planed from trees that must have been five hundred years old.

I was given Floyd’s bedroom. Mother and Jim slept in the living room on a bed that doubled as a couch by day. I was not yet five, and it was summer, so I had to go to bed before the sun went down, which felt like exile from the world of light. I would press my face against the screen and watch the older neighborhood kids playing kickball in the street or straddling their bikes on the corner. One evening, not long after we had moved into the house, my mother and Jim came to tuck me in, and the two of them lingered for a moment. Mother sat on the edge of my bed and sang to me. Jim stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets, looking out the western window at the torn-up yard, the bristle of cattails in the ditch, and the corrugated roof of Mel’s welding garage across the street, where he went every afternoon to buy glass bottles of Coke from the vending machine.

The novelty of the two of them tucking me in together in my very own bedroom set me humming with pleasure, and I wanted to say something in honor of this, but I didn’t dare break their reverie. Even as I lay there, mute with happiness, I was conscious of the fragility of the scene-two parents, one child, pausing for a few moments together under one roof at the day’s end.

Late in the summer of 1971, when I was nearly five, my father was released from prison. Friends of his were living on a commune in Oregon, and they had invited him to come and sort himself out.

He came west, as soon as he was free, and gathered me from Mother’s place.

It must have been a shock to see him again, for I have no memory of our first hours together. I know we took a Greyhound bus up to Eugene, and a friend from the commune picked us up and drove us out to the property-acres of dry grass and scrub oak. There, my memories become clearer. The commune members were roughing it-no running water, no electricity, just a few ramshackle houses at the end of a long dirt road.

My father’s attempt to unwind in the woods was a disaster. The sudden move from a cell to the wilderness seemed to leave him nervous and unsettled. The first day he tried to play the hip nudist and got a terrible sunburn. Then he drank some ‘fresh’ spring water and spent three days heaving in the outhouse. I stayed indoors with him while he recovered, making him tell me stories. ‘Me and nature never got along,’ he said.

But as the days drifted on, we settled into the place. My father taught me to use a BB gun in the field beside the commune’s main house. Arms around me from behind, he cheered when we shot the faded beer cans off the stump. ‘Sock it to me,’ he would say, holding out his enormous, olive-colored palm. We ate homemade bread and black beans which the women in the main house prepared, swam naked in the creek flowing through the property. One wall of the room we shared was given to me as painting space. I spent the afternoons scribbling figures on the white paint as high as I could reach, faces with huge, lidded eyes and no mouths, rapt but mute.

One day we wandered into one of the many rough-framed buildings on the property to take shelter from the midday heat. Cinder block and knotty pine bookshelves lined the walls. Up near the ceiling, a long sagging board supported Lenin’s collected works. A sink and countertop unit pulled out of a remodeled kitchen shored up one wall. There was no running water; spider webs stretched from the tap to the drain. A propane stove sat on the drainboard, and beneath it, on the floor, were jugs of cooking fuel and water.

My father moved to the open door, raised his arms up to the door frame and stretched like a cat. He was there in body-a body honed by hours in the weight room, on the courts playing ball with the other prisoners-but in another way he was fitfully absent. At five, I was having trouble pinpointing this. He circled the room slowly, traced a pattern in the countertop’s dust, not pent up, but aimless, as if he had lost something and didn’t know where to search. I squatted near the sink, playing with a set of plastic measuring cups, watched him closely. He moved through the doorway-for a moment framed by light, a dark cutout of a man-then passed out of view.

Thirsty, I decided to make a tea party. I went outside to see if my father wanted to play, and found him sprawled under a large oak tree near the door. He was staring up at the leaves, his hand spread open in the air above him, and didn’t answer at first.

‘Do you want some tea?’

He raised his head and his eyes slowly focused, placing me. ‘No thanks, honey.’

I went back into the shack and filled two of the cups from a jug on the floor. I pretended to have a partner for my tea, and chatted with him a while before drinking from my cup, thumb and forefinger on the short handle, my pinkie raised high.

From the first sip I could tell something was wrong. The water burned my tongue, and when I opened my mouth to scream all the air in the room was gone, there was only fierce vapor. I spat out what I could and yelled, feeling a white heat unfurl down my throat. My father dashed in, smelled my breath and the spilled gas and scooped me up from the floor. He ran with me toward the spring and over his shoulder I watched the shack jiggling smaller and smaller in the field. It seemed lonely, canted off to one side on its foundation like a child’s drawing of a house. The dry, summer hay swayed like the sea, and I heard his breathing, ragged as surf.

When we reached the spring, a bearded man was there filling a green wine bottle. Water spilled down a rock face into a pool bounded by ferns and moss. My father gasped out the story and together they hovered over me, making me drink from the bottle again and again. ‘That’s good,’ they said. ‘You’re doing really good.’ My father stroked my hair. And though I wanted to stop, I tipped my head back and drank for him.

That night we stayed in the main house. My lips and throat were chapped and burning. I began to have visions. A crowd of ghosts led by a goateed figure marched with torches through the room. I told this to the grownups and they seemed alarmed. Some of the other people staying at the house lit extra kerosene lanterns to soothe me, but I could still see the figures. The leader looked furious, driven, his whole body straining forward toward some unknown mission.

My father moved with me to a bedroom upstairs and held me in a worn corduroy arm chair, talking softly, telling me stories of what we would do together when it was light. The vagueness I felt in him during the day had disappeared. He was dense, focused, his legs pressed long against the sides of the chair, his arms around me heavy and still. I sat in his lap, leaning into the rise and fall of his chest. In my last rinse of delirium, I closed my eyes and saw his body supporting me like a chair, the long, still bones, and under him the real chair, fabric stretched over wood, and all of this twenty feet above the ground on the upper floor of the house, held up by the beams and foundation, and beyond that the quiet fields, silver under the moon, alive with animals, the punctured cans lying still by the stump. I saw us perched in the center of this, neither safe nor doomed, and in this unbounded space I fell asleep.