The Abundance (10 page)

FUNNY HOW BADLY I'D TURNED OUT.
Now I was always in trouble. It felt as if I was doing just as I'd always done—I explored the neighborhood, turning over rocks. The latest rocks were difficult. I'd been in a drag race, of all things, the previous September, and in the subsequent collision, which landed me in the hospital; my parents saw my name in the newspapers, and their own names in the newspapers. Some boys I barely knew had cruised by that hot night and said to a clump of us girls on the sidewalk, “Anybody want to come along for a drag race?”

I did, absolutely. I loved fast driving.

It was then, in the days after the drag race, that I noticed the ground spinning beneath me, all bearings lost, and recognized as well that I had been loose like this—detached from all I saw and knowing nothing else—for months, maybe years. I whirled through the air like a
bull-roarer spun by a lunatic who'd found his rhythm. The pressure almost split my skin. What else can you risk with all your might but your life?

Time unrolled before me in a line. I woke up and found myself in juvenile court. I was hanging from crutches; for a few weeks after the drag race, neither knee worked. In juvenile court, a policeman wet all ten of my fingertips on an inkpad and pressed them, one by one, using his own fingertips, on a form for files.

I'd already been suspended from school for smoking cigarettes. That was a month earlier, in early spring. Both my parents wept. Amy saw them, and began to cry herself. Molly, too, cried. She was six, missing her front teeth. Like the rest of us females, she had pale skin that turned turgid and red when she cried. She looked as if she were dying of wounds. I was the only one who didn't cry; but then, I was an intercontinental ballistic missile with an atomic warhead. They don't cry.

Late one night, my parents sat at the kitchen table; there was a truce. We were all helpless, and tired of fighting. Amy and Molly were asleep.

“What are we going to do with you?” Mother raised
the question. Her voice trembled and rose with emotion.

She couldn't sit still; she kept getting up and roaming around the kitchen. Father stuck out his chin and rubbed it with his big hands. I covered my eyes. Mother squeezed white lotion into her hands, over and over. We all smoked; the ashtray was full. Mother walked over to the sink, poured herself some ginger ale, ran both hands through her short blond hair to keep it back, and shook her head.

She sighed and said again, looking up and out of the night-black window, “Dear God, what are we going to do with you?”

My heart went out to them. We all seemed to have exhausted our options. They asked me for fresh ideas, but I had none. I racked my brain, but couldn't come up with anything. The US Marines didn't take sixteen-year-old girls.

OUR FATHER TAUGHT US THE CULTURE
into which we were born. American culture was Dixieland above all, Dixieland pure and simple, and next to Dixieland, jazz. It was the pioneers who went west singing “Bang away, my Lulu.” When someone died on the Oregon Trail, as someone was always doing, the family scratched a shallow grave right by the trail, because the wagon train couldn't wait. Everyone paced on behind the oxen across the empty desert and some families sang “Bang away, my Lulu” that night, and some didn't.

Our culture was the stock-market crash—the biggest and best crash a country ever had. Father explained the mechanics of the crash to young Amy and me, around the dining-room table. He tried to explain why men on Wall Street had jumped from skyscrapers when the stock market crashed: “They lost everything!”—but of course I thought they lost everything only when they jumped. It was the breadlines of the Depression, and the Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl, and the proud men begging on
city streets, and families on the move seeking work—dusty women, men in black hats pulled over their eyes, haunted, hungry children: what a mystifying spectacle, this almost universal misery, city families living in cars, farm families eating insects, because—why? Because all the businessmen realized at once, on the same morning, that paper money was only paper. What terrible fools. What did they think it was?

American culture was the World's Fair in Chicago, baseball, the Erie Canal, fancy nightclubs in Harlem, silent movies, summer-stock theater, the California forty-niners, the Alaska gold rush, Henry Ford and his bright idea of paying workers enough to buy cars, P. T. Barnum and his traveling circus, Buffalo Bill Cody and his Wild West Show. It was the Chrysler Building in New York and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco; the
Monitor
and the
Merrimack,
the Alamo, the Little Bighorn, Gettysburg, Shiloh, Bull Run, and “Strike the tent.”

It was Pittsburgh's legendary Joe Magarac, the mighty Hungarian steelworker, who took off his shirt to reveal his body made of high-grade steel, and who squeezed out steel rail between his knuckles by the ton. It was the brawling rivermen on the Ohio River, the sandhogs who dug Hudson River tunnels, silver miners in Idaho, cowboys in Texas, and the innocent American Indian Jim
Thorpe, who had to give all his Olympic gold medals back. It was the men of every race who built the railroads, and the boys of every race who went to war.

Above all, it was the man who wandered unencumbered by family ties: Johnny Appleseed in our home woods, Daniel Boone in Kentucky, Jim Bridger crossing the Rockies. Father described for us the Yankee peddler, the free trapper, the roaming cowhand, the whaler man, roustabout, gandy dancer, tramp. His heroes, and my heroes, were Raymond Chandler's city detective Marlowe going, as a man must, down these mean streets; Huck Finn lighting out for the territories; and Jack Kerouac on the road.

Every time we danced, Father brought up Jack Kerouac,
On the Road.

We did a lot of dancing at our house, fast dancing; everyone in the family was a dancing fool. I always came down from my room to dance. When the music was going, who could resist? I bounced down the stairs to the rhythm and began to whistle a bit, helpless as a marionette whose strings jerk her head and feet.

We danced by the record player in the dining room. For fast dancing, Mother only rarely joined in; perhaps Amy, Molly, and I had made her self-conscious. We waved our arms a lot. I bumped into people, because I liked to close my eyes.

“Turn that record player down!” Mother suggested from the living room. She was embroidering a pillow. Father opened the cabinet and turned the volume down a bit. I opened my eyes.

“Remember that line in
On the Road
?” He addressed me, because between us we had read
On the Road
approximately a million times. Like
Life on the Mississippi,
it was the sort of thing we read. I thought of his blue bookplate: “Books make the man.” The bookplate's ship struggled in steep seas, and crowded on too much sail.

I nodded; I knew what he was going to say, because he said it every time we played music; it was always a pleasure. We both reined in our dancing a bit, so we could converse. Sure I remembered that line in
On the Road.

“Kerouac's in a little bar in Mexico. He says that was the only time he ever got to hear music played loud enough—in that little bar in Mexico. It was in
On the Road.
The only time he ever got to hear the music loud enough. I always remember that.” He laughed, shaking his head; he turned the record player down another notch.

It had been a long time since Father had heard the music played loud enough. Maybe he was still imagining it, fondly, some little bar back away somewhere, so small he and the other regulars sat in the middle of the blaring
band, or stood snapping their fingers, drinking bourbon, telling jokes between sets. He knew a lot of jokes. Did he think of himself as I thought of him, as the man who had cut out of town and headed, wearing tennis shoes and a blue cap, down the river toward New Orleans?

I was gaining momentum. It was only a matter of months till I went to college and got free. Downstairs in the basement, I played “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” on the piano. Why not take up the trumpet, why not marry this wonderful boy, write an epic, run a medical mission in the Amazon as always intended? What happened to painting, what happened to science? My boyfriend seemed never to sleep. “I can sleep when I am dead,” he said. Was this not grand?

I was approaching escape velocity. What would you do if you had fifteen minutes to live before the bomb went off? Quick: What would you read?

I drove up and down the boulevards—fast—up and down the highways, around Frick Park, over the flung bridges, and up into the springtime hills. My boyfriend and I played lightning chess, ten games an hour. We drove up the Allegheny River into West Virginia and back. In my room I shuffled cards. I wrote poems about the sea. I wrote poems imitating the psalms. I held my
pen on the red paper label of the modern jazz record on the turntable, played that side past midnight over and over, and let the pen draw a circle an hour thick.

In New Orleans—if you could get to New Orleans—would the music be loud enough?