"Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cain Chelsea)
Angela Lam
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Sometimes in your life someone gives you permission to be exactly who you are. For me, that person was Nina.
Let me explain: I grew up listening to the Eagles, Air Supply and ABBA and watching The Monkees and
Outside of my family, my father said, there was no one you could trust. The world was a dangerous place, my father said. The only safe place was home. Now, nearly twenty years later, I know that sometimes it is dangerous to be safe. Sheltered-that’s how my friends and colleagues put it. My childhood, that is. Fiercely protected by a father I respected and feared as much as I loved, I grew up in the shadow of rules and regulations, of ‘Don’t do this’ and ‘Don’t do that.’ When other children were going to birthday sleepovers, I stayed home. It was dangerous at other people’s houses, my father reasoned. You never knew what was going on, what hurtful games children played, what danger parents either ignored or allowed.
Afraid of my being molested, my father taught me about sex when I was old enough to understand the word ‘no.’ By the time I was seven, I knew I was conceived by a bodily function, not delivered by a stork. There were other disclosures, too. When other kids believed in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus, I knew neither existed. My father tried to rob me of an imagination. Instead, he created a girl who would conjure up worrisome events that never happened, who would dream of disaster before it occurred, who would lie awake at night with a tummy ache and a headache and her mind in a whirl. Nothing was safe, although much was sacred. The body, especially. And the mind.
I remember wondering what a normal childhood was all about. I remember trying desperately to make friends. I remember being told to keep secrets, to protect my honor. Even with a lie-although I didn’t lie, not early on. I remember these things the way some people remember a drunken relative or an abusive parent. With fear, with avoidance. But running only makes the past easier to find you. It is better to stay still and let history wash over you and cleanse the pain.
‘Everything is dangerous’ my father told me. ‘Trust no one.’
The year Summer and her family moved in was the worst. I broke promises. I told lies. I kept secrets. I woke with tummy aches and headaches from fear of discovery. Sometimes it is easier to be caught and to deal with consequences than to escape. For the prison of your mind holds no escape, and your heart does not forget.
Everything is dangerous, my father said. Trust no one.
How then shall I trust you?
It was July 1979, the year before Reagan and voodoo economics, the year before my cousin Ken bought his first suburban house, the year my mother returned to work full-time, the year I started babysitting my two younger sisters and taking on more and more responsibility around the home.
Summer and her family, a group of vagabond hippies, moved into the house at the end of the block. ‘Renters,’ my father told me. ‘Just as bad as criminals,’ he said. Of course, they were not to be trusted.
Curious as any eight-year-old, I spied on the new neighbors. I crept up to the front window and peered into the living room. Nothing telling of what evils awaited me there. The room was empty except for a tattered brown recliner and a standing lamp. Not even a TV. The house seemed lonely, sad. A little lost. I didn’t think about it anymore until school started and the bus picked up one of the new neighbors, a tall, thin girl with stringy golden-brown hair and dreamy eyes. She wore floral and tie-dyed dresses and open-toed sandals even in the rain. She smiled and laughed a lot at things other kids did not find funny. She did not curl her hair or wear jeans when everyone else thought it was cool. When kids called her names, she made a sign with her hands. ‘Peace and love,’ she’d say.
I was enchanted.
She was a year older than I was and every bit as mysterious as her name. Summer. A promise of warm weather and clear skies and swim parties and suntans and lazy afternoons at the beach. When she waltzed by the playground, her long hair drifted like seaweed. On the jungle gym bars, she was the only girl unafraid of swinging upside down with a skirt on and letting the boys see her cotton underwear. There was a lack of inhibition about her, an I-couldn’t-care-less about the judgment of others, a spring in her step. Everything about her, from her unkempt hair to the silver beads on her wrists, spoke of magic. When she confided in me that she knew witchcraft, I believed her.
I grew to trust her like I trusted my sisters, implicitly, without words.
One day, Summer invited me over to her house after school. ‘I can show you my record collection,’ she said. When she smiled, I knew I would say yes, even though I knew the answer from my father would be no.
But I was still my father’s daughter, honest and obedient, eager to please. I asked him when he got home from work. He took me aside and closed the door to his bedroom and said, ‘I don’t want you playing with that girl. She looks like a tramp. I bet her parents make her walk the streets at night. She’s not a good influence for you or your sisters. I do not want you going to her house.’
My mother offered a compromise. ‘Invite her over here to play.’
But I wanted to see her record collection. The color of her room. The width of her bed. The closet that stored her clothes.
A week later, when Summer asked again if I could come over, I said yes. I did not tell her my parents forbade it. It was my first lie, my first secret, and the power of it burned in my stomach like a hot fist.
I jumped off the bus and headed across the street and into the empty living room of Summer’s home. A warm sweet scent arrested me. Summer grabbed my hand and led me down the hall through a beaded rainbow-colored curtain and into her room. I sat down in a beanbag beside the unmade twin bed with its rumpled sheets and strong odor of dogs and urine and something else, something I did not recognize. Summer opened her closet door and withdrew albums I had never heard of. She gathered the ones she liked best and we stepped into the family room where a teenage boy lounged on a sofa with his arms around two teenage girls. ‘That’s my brother, Sky,’ she said. ‘And his girls, Tina and Lori.’ Another young man with long hair and a beard sat cross-legged on the shag carpet strumming a guitar. ‘That’s Hunter,’ she said. ‘My mother’s brother.’ An older woman with a long braid down her back rocked in a hammock. ‘That’s Nina, my father’s mother.’
Without asking permission. Summer proceeded to play Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Manic Depression,’, ‘Break on Through to the Other Side,’ by the Doors, and Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb.’ Hunter stood up and retreated to the kitchen and returned with a bowl of steamed vegetables and a glass of water, which he passed around the room. Tina stood up and adjusted her bikini top and said she was going to make an alfalfa sandwich and pour herself a glass of goat’s milk. Sky paused from kissing Lori and patted Tina’s bottom and said, ‘Go get us something, too.’
Tina glanced down at me. ‘Would you like something to eat?’ I remembered my father telling me never to eat or drink anything at anyone’s home: The food could be poisoned; the drinks could contain alcohol; I could get sick, maybe die. ‘No, thank you,’ I said.
From across the room, Nina beckoned me. I expected to be reprimanded. But she gathered me into the hammock and wrapped her arms around my chest and said, ‘I want to tell you a story. About how we came here.’ Her deeply bronzed skin creased when she smiled. ‘We started in New York – Brooklyn, to be exact. Nothing to talk about there. Just smutty skies and mean-spirited people. Summer’s father met Yellow Bird at a concert in Central Park, and they decided to run away together. That was the year Summer was born. I went with them. There was nothing in New York for me. Nothing worth mentioning, that is. We packed our belongings into two duffel bags. We had a roll of quarters and hearts full of love and hope. After spending the night on a park bench, we found a trucker going west. Said he’d drop us off in Chicago. We didn’t like it there, too much like New York, and we wanted to see the Grand Canyon, so we found another trucker going west and headed out again. Never did make it to the canyon. Got stuck somewhere in Idaho. Walked twenty miles in the snow. Don’t ask me how. We were young and invincible.’ Nina hugged me tight against her chest. ‘Tell me, child, do you believe in magic?’
I thought of the life-size statue of Jesus nailed to the cross, and the promise of eternal life. I guessed it must be magic. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘When we die, we live forever.’
Nina nodded and looked entranced by the thought of eternity. ‘We come back sometimes, you know. Depending on how good we are and what we’ve done. I was an eagle once. I flew so high I could kiss the clouds. I bet you were a coyote or a wolf. You have the hunter in you, child. A brave soul. Of fire and water. A daughter of the moon.’ She touched my eyelids with her fingertips. ‘Even your eyes are like crescent moons.’
I thought of my father saying I was nothing because I was a girl. In China, girls are bad luck. A curse on the family. I knew I was lucky. I had been born in America to an American woman and allowed to live, not forgotten and drowned in a well.
But I liked Nina’s story better, of how I was the daughter of the moon, a brave soul, a hunter.
Nina twirled a brown beaded necklace around her neck. The beads clacked in time with the rhythm of the music. Nina’s skin creased into folds above her eyebrows and beside her mouth. There was a peacefulness about her, a quiet consistency that echoed in the room. I wanted to know her better, to feel her leathery skin against my palm, to listen to more of her stories.
A sliding glass door opened, and a naked woman entered from the backyard. Nina introduced her as Sally. She was Summer’s mother’s sister. An aunt. Only no one called her that. They called her Sally. I remember turning away from her nakedness, a sight I did not want to acknowledge, although everyone else looked and did not say a word. In my home, the body was hidden and ignored or protected from strangers. Sally rubbed her arms and her breasts and her belly and her thighs with a large terry cloth towel and massaged lotion into her skin.
‘Sunbathing,’ Nina explained. To get the bronze Nina had. I wondered about my yellow skin, how it would deepen in the sun, and I thought about how much trouble I would be in if I ever stripped down to nothing and lay outside to burn.
Sally slipped into a bikini and joined us. Hunter grabbed a bowl with a pipe and announced it was time for a peyote feast. Sky and his girls gathered around on the carpet. Nina and Summer joined them. I stood, waiting to be invited. Nina smiled and patted the space beside her. I slipped between Nina and Summer and felt exhilarated and frightened. My chest tightened in the billows of sweet-smelling smoke. The bowl and pipe were passed around the circle after each person inhaled a few breaths. When it was my turn, the heat from the pipe stung my throat. I coughed and choked. My head spun. Nina’s face, with its gentle brown creases, grew large and floated like a giant moon in a pale sky. She shook my shoulders gently. ‘Are you all right, child? Breathe. Deeply. From the bottom of your chest. Feel your belly expand. That’s right. Slower. Steady, now. Don’t go too fast. That’s it. Do you want to try again?’
I did not know whether or not I wanted to try again. Someone was knocking on the front door. Someone was yelling my name. My mother.
Hunter answered the door. Nina joined him. Voices rose and fell. I thought about the hurt in my belly, the tightness in my chest, the swelling in my head. I did not want to go home to precision and order, responsibility and consequence, rules and regulations, silence and lack of love. I wanted to stay in the chaos of smoke and music and exotic foods and vivid stories, of nakedness and openness and acceptance and love. I wanted to sleep beside Summer with her arms around me, her naked belly pressed against my naked back, not alone with an armor of cotton around me. I wanted to listen to the strange rhythms of guitars, not to the sappy love songs or brokenhearted tunes my mother played on the radio. More than anything, I wanted the freedom of Summer’s world.
Nina drifted around the corner, looking for me. ‘Your mother is asking about you,’ she said. ‘I told her not to worry. I would walk you home.’
I stood up, dizzy and nauseated. Nina linked her arm around my waist and led me outside. I could see my parents’ house down the street with its yellow stucco and bright red trim. My family was different. I knew how others judged us-except for Summer and her family. They were different, too.
I stared at Nina’s bare feet against the pavement. She smiled and wiggled her toes. ‘I can feel the vibrations of the earth on its axis. It is the pulse of the universe.’
‘Aren’t you afraid of stepping on glass and cutting your feet?’
‘All cuts heal.’ Nina hugged me close. Her flowing gown smelted damp. ‘Nothing can be broken that can’t be fixed, you understand? We are human, strange and wonderful. We are meant to be broken. By pain. By grief. By disappointment. By each other.
But we are made whole through love and forgiveness. Remember that, and you will never be lonely.’
She stroked my hair and kissed my cheek. ‘I hope you come visit us again.’ Though I did not say it, I knew I would never again be allowed back into Summer’s home. Nina and I walked, hand in hand, down the sidewalk and across the street. Nina stopped at the front door and waited until my mother answered. No words were exchanged. My mother’s angry stare bored into me. I shuddered in my skin, already feeling her icy words in my body, her violent pleas to be obedient, to honor my father’s demands.
After I stepped inside, I bolted for my room and closed the door. My mother did not knock, but just stepped inside and said, ‘Tell me what possessed you to go over to that girl’s house when your father told you not to? I was worried sick, don’t you understand? I knocked on every neighbor’s door. No one knew where you were. I called the police. I called your father at work. I thought you had been kidnapped and raped and killed. I thought you were never coming home.’
Tears crested in my half-moon eyes. I held my breath, determined not to let them fall.
‘You know better than to sneak around behind our backs. You are grounded for a month. I’m going to have your grandfather pick you up at school and bring you home. I’m going to call from work and make sure you answer the phone. You’re a disgrace to our family and a poor example to your sisters. Just wait until your father gets home.’
My mother stormed out of the room and banged pots and pans in the kitchen as she attempted to cook dinner. My head ached.
My stomach churned. I felt so bad I wanted to die.
At dinner, no one spoke of my transgressions, though my sisters glanced at me with furtive eyes. My father was not home. He did not return from work until late at night when we were supposed to be asleep.
The following morning, my father called me into his room. ‘You embarrassed us,’ he said. ‘What will people think of us if they saw you at that slum? What type of parents will they think we are for letting you go over there?’
I did not know and I did not care, but I was told I should know, I should care. So I did.
I listened to my parents. I let my grandfather pick me up after school when everyone else rode the bus. I let my mother call me from work to see that I was home, caring for my sisters like I said I would. I let my father lecture to me about good people, honest people, trustworthy people.
A week before Christmas, Summer and her family moved as mysteriously as they had appeared. By January, another family had moved in, a more conventional one, with a mother and a father and two children, a boy and a girl, both of whom did not want to play with me or my sisters, even after my father said it was okay. ‘They go to our church, be nice to them,’ my father reasoned. But they kept to themselves as much as we did.
Only once did my father speak of Summer’s departure, and when he did, he dramatized it as if it were a made-for-TV movie. ‘They left in the middle of the night. They had something to hide and did not want to get caught. They didn’t have a moving van. Just a truck. They piled up furniture and left the place a mess. The owners had to paint and re-carpet and replace doors and the stove. They left trash everywhere. And they never paid rent. Not once.’
I missed Summer. I missed the escape into a world where time did not matter, where tasks could be forgotten, where it was just fine to be. I wanted stories like Nina’s to tell my children someday.
Years passed. I forgot about Nina and Summer-for a time. When I was nineteen, I moved 110 miles from home and lived with my boyfriend. A year later, I married. Three years later, I had a son. For five years, I did not own a TV. I listened to whatever my husband played on the stereo. I walked barefoot and naked in the house. I have stories to tell. Of my wedding reception: how the best man had broken his toe and was downing vodka to numb the pain and when the time came for his elegant speech, he wavered with his glass and said, ‘Get a life!’ We laughed. Guests and relatives cowered with shame. It is a tale I tell strangers when they want to get to know me.
I still have problems trusting others and myself. I keep secrets. I exaggerate. Sometimes I lie. When others berate me and demand perfection, I forget to open my heart and offer them forgiveness and love. Many nights, even with my family home, I feel alone.
I’m still looking for that freedom. Sometimes I see it when I grow out my hair, wear clothes that are no longer in style, disregard consequences. I see Summer in the man I married, a man who is proud of his body, relishes his talents, doesn’t weigh the opinions of others more than his own, a man who has seen my body change from a back injury, a pregnancy, an abortion, and who loves me more each day for the woman I was, the woman I am, the woman I will someday become. I hear Nina’s voice in the stories I tell: delivering an unapproved valedictory speech at my high school graduation, leaving my boyfriend to date his best friend, having sex at a construction site high above the city lights, writing love letters to a writer whose work I fell in love with long before I fell in love with him, taking my three-month-old son with me to work, nursing him during my ten-minute breaks, nourishing him with my milk, my presence, my poetry, my love.
Each day is full of discovery. I give myself permission to be whoever I am, a spirit of fire and water, a daughter of the moon, a brave soul, a hunter, a wife, a mother, a writer, a woman.
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