Stop That Girl (8 page)

“What’s wrong with you anyway?” Mom asked me, our second day there.

“Something’s been biting me all over.”

“Stop sulking,” she said. “Get out and take a walk. Try to absorb your surroundings. Isn’t it great, being away from that metropolitan morass?”

“It’s not that great. I have nothing to do.”

“I just told you what to do,” she said.

“But I don’t want to do that.”

“Suit yourself, then, if you want to waste this chance. By the way, did I tell you girls our friend Angus Frey will be visiting sometime soon?”

“I like Angus Frey,” said Kathy.

“Where’s he going to stay?” I said.

“At the lodge,” Mom said. “He won’t be in your way, will he?”

“Why is he coming?”

“He’s never been. Is that good enough for you?”

“I thought he’d been everywhere,” I said.

She said, “Isn’t it nice to know you still have so much to learn?”

“Have you called Roy yet? When do we get to talk to him?” I always tried to get the last word with my mother.

She was revising the text of her campfire talk, practicing in front of the mirror in her room. She had a tape recorder, and she was taping herself too. At night she would be delivering these talks in an open-air amphitheater to a surprisingly large and attentive group of people spending the night in the park. After the talk, people would raise their hands and ask questions. Hearing the strange lilt of her voice as she rehearsed, a sort of Vassar/Annie Oakley hybrid, I’d cringe.

I had a lot of books and I sent out letters, and letters began to come in, and I heard long descriptions of parties and sleepovers my friends were having, and sometimes they collaborated on messages to me, and everyone signed. One day I received an envelope from Raoul and was chagrined by how happy it made me to see my name in his handwriting. He wrote, “Did you hear Poplick got canned? Someone told the administration he smoked dope in his spare time, and he wouldn’t deny it. I salute the man for his integrity and hope he’s having lots of orgasms!”

Too bad. Poplick was a good teacher, creator of haunting vocabulary sentences like
I talked to the homunculus in the
supermarket.
I wondered how he was taking it, what he’d do with himself next.

In between waiting for mail, between chapters in books, I walked in the woods. Preferably alone. I could pretend I wasn’t there that way. I could live in the world of my next letter to Raoul. I’d try to make it engaging and pithy, just the right blend. One day, in the piebald light of the forest, I noticed a squirrel sitting on a log and decided to join it. Not only did the squirrel hold tight, but after a few minutes of twitching and staring it began to inch my way. I held out my open palm, the way I’d been taught to put strange dogs at ease. The squirrel moved closer and sniffed my hand, and I felt its short rapid breath on my skin. A wild animal was paying attention to me! Its eyes shined like beads of oil; I’ve always remembered the strange thought I had looking at them. I was trying to define the look of a live eye compared to that of a dead one.
In the difference is the mystery
of love.
The squirrel and I sat together awhile; then, with a spasm of its brow, it shot off into a narrow purple shadow between the trees.

And so Angus Frey joined us, as announced. Sitting in the kitchen with the low ceiling and hodgepodge of stinks, sipping red wine with Mom from paper cups, he looked improbable there, a schooner in a bottle. He mashed beef Stroganoff up the backside of his fork, using his knife like a pushbroom across the scratched Melamite plates. He asked us questions: Was Kathy obsessed with baseball because of the sport of it or because she could record the statistics? Was I trying to teach myself Russian because I was interested in the culture or because I identified with the country’s status as enemy? Did we understand how Parliament worked? Had we heard the latest on Aboriginal land rights, or the nuclear testing in the South Pacific, atolls glowing with waste, and had we tasted kangaroo? Mom put on lipstick for these dinners. She was thirty-six years old.

And then came the episode with the tree, and all that followed. I could easily start with how my mother’s legs were astride this fallen tree, a log as wide as she could straddle, a Ponderosa pine tall enough to topple from one side of the narrow dirt road and land on the other, fully blocking our way. We had taken a little day trip down an obscure Park Service road, a road to a lookout point, a dead end. And while Mom and Angus Frey discoursed on the geologic panorama before our eyes, a thunderstorm stole over and lightning cracked like whips, sent us sprinting to the car, Mom whooping like a kid, Angus Frey breathing hard, the smell of wet cloth and hair filling the Buick while Mom turned on the engine, the windows steaming, Kathy’s teeth chattering the way that usually made me laugh. I rubbed her bare arms like I was trying to coax a fire. I had an awful headache. “Let’s light the stove and have cocoa when we get back,” Mom said. As we drove along the rough muddy road through the dim light of the forest, the newly fallen log appeared before us like a premature horizon, none of us sure what we were seeing. We stopped and got out and assessed.

“We’ll have to get over it somehow,” Mom said. “No one will be coming to save us.”

We were twenty-five miles from the compound, damp and chilled, and Mom had a talk that evening, and yet she was watching Angus Frey patiently as he attempted to pry at this log, sweat beading on his neck, removing all but his undershirt as he jabbed at it with the crowbar he’d rooted out from the back of the car. “Not making much of a dent, am I?” Angus said to my mother.

“I know what we’ll do. We’ll collect logs and sticks. We’ll stack them along the tree on both sides, and we’ll make a ramp and drive over the top of it.”

“A bloody good plan,” Angus said, shaking the kink from his platter-sized hand.

“I feel crummy,” I said.

Mom said, “The sooner we get this thing built, the sooner we’ll get back.”

Kathy and I were sent into the forest to look for logs and sticks.

“I feel really sick,” I told her.

“I feel cold,” Kathy replied.

Her upper lip was stiff, the way she looked when she might cry. I said, “Don’t worry, there’s one.”

“It’s too big.”

“No, just grab it and pull.”

“Are we lost?” she asked.

“We know
where
we are,” I said. “We just can’t get
away
from where we are.”

“We’re here because a tree fell down,” Kathy said.

I said, “Ostensibly.”

“So we’re lost?”

“I just told you, we’re not lost.” The branches we pulled up from the floor of the forest were moist, measled with fungus and lichen. As we dragged them along, they splintered apart into pulp.

“So what are we?”

“We’re stuck,” I said.

“Stuck.” She tasted the sound of it. She was eight years old, serious and graceful in a way that made me think she’d be a legitimate human being one day. “Like the animals in the La Brea tar pits?”

“They were stuck in tar. We’re not stuck in tar,” I said.

“What are we stuck in?”

“Look, isn’t it obvious? There’s a big thick log across the road, and we can’t drive over it until we build a ramp. You can see that.”

“What if we can’t build a ramp?” Kathy said.

“I don’t know; we’ll have to camp here and we’ll get hungry and then we’ll probably resort to cannibalism,” I said.

“Ew,” she said.

“We’ll make a pact not to eat each other or Mom. We’ll eat Angus Frey,” I said, suddenly feeling nauseated.

“Come on, you can carry more than that,” Mom said, when we chucked the sorry limbs onto the pile.

“Mom, I feel sick.”

“Funny how you feel sick now, right when we need your help.”

“No, my head feels like there’s a knife in it.”

“It’s the altitude, you’re not used to exerting yourself. We’re making progress, keep it up.” And maybe we were— especially Angus Frey, who could carry two logs at once, like a bear dragging his kill. He’d place his offerings at Mom’s feet, and Mom would test the wood with her boots, kicking and stomping it into form. We still needed a lot more to bolster the pile to the necessary height, wide enough for a car.

“We’re sticky,” said Kathy.

“Stuck,” I said.

It started to rain again. The rain tapped through the trees, soft and steady.

“We have some curious specimens of wildlife in Australia,” said Angus Frey. “For example, girls, do you know what mother kangaroos are capable of?”

“Oh, about the blastocysts?” Mom said. “That’s fascinating. Yes, tell them.”

“The female knows when it’s a good time to rear her young, and if conditions are poor—say by way of a drought; food’s scarce—she can hold on to her fertilized egg in a condition of stasis, or diapause. When conditions improve, the embryo begins to grow again.”

My head spun. “You mean,” I said, “like now?”

“Like now what?”

“You mean if we were a bunch of pregnant kangaroos, since we’re stuck, we’d do this now?”

“If you were starving, yes, I reckon you might,” said Angus Frey.

I said, “Why are you talking about pregnant kangaroos?”

“He’s telling you something interesting,” Mom instructed me.

“How big a setback does it have to be?” I rasped. “I mean, can the kangaroos stop the embryo for an hour because of some little setback like this and then, if everything turns out okay, just start it up again?” Sweat was pouring down my face.

“That I cannot tell you,” Angus Frey said. “A fine question, however.”

“I don’t know if I believe it. It goes against everything we learned in biology.”

“Indeed, though some hormone’s responsible—”

“Now that I think about it, it’s
totally impossible.
”

“Why are you so worked up?” Mom said, staring at me.

“Perhaps she’ll be a biologist, and she can come to Australia and research the matter.”

“I don’t feel right,” I said. “Mom?”

“What?”

“I feel horrible.”

Out of range of Angus Frey, she lowered her voice to a hiss. I felt her fingernails dig into my wrist.
“I put up with
your friends year in and year out, you’d-better-just-this-once-put-up-with-mine.”

“What are you talking about?” I pulled away and wrapped my arms over my chest. The sky was dimming, and another swell of nausea surged through me. “Mom?”

“It’s time,” she announced, and took the wheel of our family car.

“All clear,” Angus Frey called out, and we stood to the side.

The Buick rolled backward twenty feet. Throwing it into DRIVE, she approached the log at a confident pace. The ramp consisted now of many twigs, stumps, and rocks, and some support stakes hammered straight into the rough bed of the road by Angus Frey. The front wheels made contact and began to mount. The pile snapped and groaned but held. The Buick reached the crest. The back wheels began to spin. Mom gunned the engine and rocked her weight onward behind the wheel. Our family vehicle lurched and stopped halfway, suspended over the fallen tree like a seesaw. “Oh, hell!” I heard her say. Yet she wasn’t lashing out like she’d usually be doing if I wasn’t pulling the lint out of the dryer efficiently, or if Roy were putting the knives away in the wrong drawer. “Come on, then, let’s give her a push!” Angus roared, and up we were behind, our palms flat on the rump of the car, shoving and rocking it with all our might. At last the front end tilted forward and the vehicle rolled down the pile on the other side and coasted a few feet before Mom brought it to a halt.

“Beaut!” cried Angus Frey, and as I moved in the direction of the car every muscle in my body contracted, my arms and legs turned to lead, and my throat erupted like a volcano.

“Unnnh,”
I said.

“Mama, Ann’s throwing up!” screamed Kathy.

“Classic,” I heard her say. Then Angus Frey was holding my head, swabbing my brow with his hanky. He was lifting me in his arms and carrying me to the car. “Helen, your daughter’s burning alive,” he said. My mother ran over and tested my face with her cold hands.

She said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”