All Over Creation (5 page)

It wasn't your fault that the sexual reproduction of flowering plants failed to hold your interest. You were becoming an adolescent, after all. When your conversation veered off like a car out of control, toward shades of frosted lipstick and the boys who smoked Pall Malls in the weeds behind the maintenance shed at school, Lloyd's face froze. He grew surly at the sight of your love beads, recoiled at any mention of rock and roll. The first time you used the word “groovy,” he choked on his gravy.

“You are not leaving the house dressed like that,” he said, catching you sneaking out the door in your worn jeans with all the holes and patches. “I won't have you parading all over town dressed like a beggar.” You turned around to face him. “Your navel is showing,” he added, eyeing it with disgust.

If he couldn't even tolerate your navel, then how was he to cope when life kick-started changes inside you that went deeper still?

The next year, in ninth grade, there was a man, a history teacher named Elliot Rhodes, slouching in front of the blackboard in a rumpled flannel shirt, stroking his mustache. When he read out loud in class, he looked right at you. At first you thought it was your imagination, but after a couple of times you knew it was for real, and your stomach heaved so violently you could hardly breathe at all. At first you mistook this passion for vocation—you'd always known you would be a teacher (or an explorer or a poet, you weren't exactly sure which), and now you understood why! The power of his knowledge made you weak in the knees. That fall, he taught you all about the great civilizations of the world. He pressed you to question your beliefs, to think about real ideas. He considered Japan to be spiritual and deep, and he taught you a koan: What is the sound of one hand clapping? You carried it home in your heart and whispered it to yourself every day, stunned at its poetic profundity. When you told it to Momoko, she looked at you like you were nuts.

“But, Mom, it's Japanese. It's Zen.”

“Stupid. Make no sense.”

“It's not supposed to make sense. It's supposed to help you reach enlightenment.”

“Never heard of it. Anyway, why you need enlighten when you got good Methodist church to go to?”

“Oh, Mom.” You sighed, glancing at Lloyd before going one step further. “I don't believe in organized religion.”

Lloyd looked up and shuddered.

At church there'd been talk. Rhodes had just graduated from some liberal college in California. He was a hippie, a commie, an anarchist, a freak. What did they know? In fact, he was a conscientious objector, and you knew this because he told you, after school, the day you lingered in the classroom once the other kids had gone home. He'd protested the war in Vietnam. He'd marched on Washington. He admired Asian culture. He could never go over there, as a soldier, to kill. You leaned against the edge of his desk. He looked at you with an enormous aching, and for the first time you understood the tragedy that was war. He reached up, traced the slant of your eye with his thumb, told you he had a thing for—

Abruptly he turned away. Tugged at his mustache and sent you home, but even though you had to walk for miles because you missed the bus, you were brimming with such a wild joy it felt like flying. You'd sensed his struggle, the sudden gruffness in his voice, the violence in the muscles of his back as he attacked the blackboard with his eraser. The back of a grown man. The fall sky turned steely, then darkened to dusk. You did a skippy little jig in the gravel. The stars were out by the time you sauntered into the kitchen.

Momoko looked at Lloyd. Lloyd cleared his throat, wiped pie from the corner of his mouth. “You're late.”

“I stayed after school.” Surfing the edge of a long-suffering sigh.

“You in some kinda trouble?” Momoko asked, bringing a plate of franks and beans that she had kept hot in the oven.

“No.” Pricking the rubbery pink lozenges with your tines. “I had to help Mr. Rhodes.”

Lloyd hemmed and hawed, and you could feel the slow ache of his thinking. He took a toothpick from his shirt pocket and started excavating his back molars. When he got to the front incisors, he snapped the toothpick in half and placed it on the edge of his plate. Finally he wiped his mouth with his napkin. “I don't trust that man. He has dubious morals.”

“He does not! He's an activist. A man of conscience! Just because he won't go fight a war in Asia. That's more than
you
can say!”

Lloyd drew in his breath like he'd been sucker-punched. Put down his fork and napkin and pushed to his feet. His eyes were as cold and bright as the sun on snow in winter. It was as if he could see into the corners of your mind, know thoughts before you had a chance to think them, track the rebel contents of your heart. As a child you were secure in his omniscience, knowing that everything occurring on this earth did so with his blessing, according to his will. Now you looked away.

“What's happened to
your
morals, Yumi?” His voice sounded dead.

You couldn't raise your eyes from your dinner plate. “I believe anything is okay as long as it doesn't hurt anybody.”

Cassie's dad would have whipped her for talking back. You got sent to your room, which was where you wanted to be in the first place.

 

 

At the Thanksgiving pageant, Mr. Rhodes slumped in the front row, and standing center stage, you felt him watching. The play seemed silly, and you'd long outgrown your role, but even so, the words were never as rich in all the years you'd said them.

“Noble Pilgrims,” you recited, voice trembling, “my people and I welcome you to our land. We know that your journey has been a hard one, and we will help you. Pray, take our seeds and plant them. . . .”

You wanted him to know that you welcomed him, understood him, even though there was a petition circulating at church to have him transferred out of the school district. You knew that Lloyd had signed it. Shoot, he'd probably started it.

When you returned for your curtain call, his seat was empty. Your heart sank.

The following day he asked you to stay after school. He paced back and forth in the empty classroom, ranting about historical accuracy. “It's revisionist bullshit! It was genocide—we
stole
their land, and then we exterminated them. And now we call it Thanksgiving?”

He seemed very angry, like he was yelling at you. “Don't you know
anything
about the Shoshone and the Bannock who've lived on this land for thousands of years, before there even was an Idaho?” Staring at him, your eyes burned, and you wanted to cry. Then he stopped and stood in front of you, and before you knew it, he had pinned you in his arms against the desk, and he was kissing you, hard. It was not at all what you'd imagined, involving a lot more bristle, more teeth and tongue than romance, but he whispered, “So lovely . . .” and ran his fingers through your long hair, and that was enough. It was plenty. This is it, you thought, shivering uncontrollably. It's happening, and you tried to pay attention so that you could remember how his hands felt against the skin of your heart and tell it all to Cass.

He had a baby blue Volkswagen Beetle in a town of Fords and Chevys. On Saturday you skipped 4-H and he picked you up behind the school. He was wearing jeans and an old fisherman's sweater. He took you to a tiny clapboard house on the outskirts of town, which he was renting for the school year. He made a big pot of split-pea soup on top of a woodstove. You helped him peel the carrots, and afterward you ate the soup with big hunks torn from a loaf of French bread. The crust was burned. He had no chairs, so you sat on a mattress in the corner of the living room. You put the empty bowls on the floor when you were done. The room filled with steam from the simmering soup, clouding the windows. The sheets were speckled with grit, and the flattened pillow smelled like the scalp of his head. It was the best smell in the world, and you buried your face in it, hugging it, wanting to take it home with you. There was no toilet paper in the bathroom, only a stack of dusty newspapers, and afterward you found yourself wiping his semen from your aching adolescent pussy with the headlines of an old
New York Times:
NIXON RESIGNS.

 

 

You phoned Cass right after dinner.

“I did it!” you whispered, and she cried, “No way!” and you could almost hear the screen door slam as she came rocketing out of her house, down the road, and up your driveway. You grabbed her wrist, hauled her panting through the kitchen and up the stairs, slipping past Lloyd, who was headed toward the bathroom. Barricading your bedroom door, the two of you sat, legs crossed Indian style, head touching head.

“I can't believe it!” squealed Cass, “You really—!”

You reached over to clamp your hand across her mouth. Lloyd gargled in the bathroom on the other side of the wall. When you could trust her to be quiet, you let your hand drop.

“All the way?” she whispered.

You nodded.

“What was it
like
?” Her eyes were glistening.

You savored her awe, lay back on the pillows.

“It was . . . unbelievably romantic,” you said. “He made split-pea soup.” You smiled dreamily, staring up past a constellation of phosphorescent stars. When you were little, Lloyd had pasted them onto the ceiling for you, following the diagram from a book that he had bought—Orion, Andromeda, and the Dippers. It had been years since you'd really noticed them.

“Split-pea soup?” Cass sounded unimpressed.

“Mmm. I peeled potatoes while he washed peas. He chopped up carrots and—”

“Yummy, I
know
what's in split-pea soup!” she cried, bouncing up and down on the bed. “What happened
after?
”

“I'm getting to that. The room was hot, so we took off our sweaters.”

“And he was driven wild with desire?”

“No. He played his guitar.”

“Ooooh, how romantic! What did he play?”

“Jefferson Airplane. Some Dylan. ‘Lay Lady Lay.' ”

“I
love
that! And then did you do it?”

“No. Afterward. First we ate the soup.”

“Did it hurt?” she asked.

“Just a little. The first time.”

“The
first
time! Oh, my goodness, Yummy! How many . . . ?” Her face was bright pink now as she pressed her fingers to her mouth. Sweet Cassie, you thought, feeling so mature all of a sudden—and that was when time did a weird, elasticky thing, like a cartoon slingshot, sending you zinging way out ahead of her in years.

“I don't know,” you answered, from far away. “Three? Maybe four?”

“Did you, you know . . . ?”

“What?”

“You know . . .” She hesitated again. She sounded lonely, left behind like that. “Did it feel good?”

“Mmmm,” you said, smug and inscrutable, adding to the distance between you. “It felt great. Totally far out. No . . . it was soulful. . . . I can't explain.”

It wasn't really soulful, but you were already rewriting the experience. The real story, as you dimly recall it, twenty-five years later, was that it didn't feel great at all, and it just went on and on. What you identified as pleasure started in the silence after the sex part was done and the winter afternoon was growing dark. You lay there, staring at the ceiling in dim light, and held a naked man for the first time in your life. For a little while, maybe fifteen minutes or so, you honestly felt that this was what it was like to be all grown up and happy. Then he rolled out of bed and put on his jeans and started looking for his car keys.

Lloyd left the bathroom and stopped outside your closed door. He cleared his throat.

“Aren't you girls supposed to be studying?”

“We
are.
” Your tone ripe and condescending. “We're
doing
our
homework.
”

Cass looked alarmed.

Lloyd hesitated. “Sounds like just a lot of chatter to me,” he said. “Finish up and go on home, Cass. It's getting late.”

You listened as he descended the creaking stairs.

 

 

“Lady,” Elliot crooned, strumming at the strings of his guitar,
“you keep askin' why he likes you? How come?”

You knew not to ask questions like that. Still, he teased you:

He told you all about San Francisco, about the brown hills of Berkeley, about the scene. There was no bullshit, he explained. That's what was so great about it. None of the crappy materialism of middle-American capitalist culture. You looked around the bare room in the small house. There was very little materialism in evidence. He could use some new sheets for his bed. He slept under a military green sleeping bag with a nubbly flannel lining, printed with hunters and ducks. He could use a new frying pan.

You had an idea. There was some extra stuff at your parents' house. They were going to give it away to the church fair anyway. You could bring it next time? It was such a good idea, and you were excited and proud to have thought of it, but to your surprise he smiled and shook his head. “No thanks,” he said. “I don't need ‘stuff.' ” And the way he said it made your heart sink, like there was a larger point you were missing completely.

He told you about his friends. One was an anarchist sandal maker. One built drums. Another walked through a plate-glass window while tripping on LSD.

“Was he okay?” you asked.

“He died.” He was staring up at the ceiling. “He thought he was going to Europe.”

You couldn't think of anything to say to that.