The Source of All Things (8 page)

I understand, now, that my mom had never really been able to come to terms with her own ragged childhood or my dad's untimely death. But the depressions they evoked were jarring and confusing. One minute she'd be cleaning fish at the kitchen counter, whistling the refrain to “Dancing Queen,” and the next minute she would be weepy, lethargic, and unable to sleep. I had no idea that bad chemicals were hijacking the feel-good circuits in her brain, because no one ever bothered to tell me. All I saw was that my mom cried more than the other moms I knew and that she seemed content to collapse into her “comfy chair,” a tattered tweed recliner with matching footrest. She did take me shopping more than my friends' moms did, spending her paychecks and a sizable chunk of the child-support checks the U.S. Navy sent us every month on the newest Esprit and Izod fashions. But there's only so much an endless supply of new clothes can do for mother-daughter relations. What I remember more than the weekly shopping sprees was her general discomfort in any and all social situations.

At swim meets and other social functions, she hovered around the edges of large groups, never seeming to know what to say.

“Hey, Doris, come on over. We're rounding up players for a game of pinochle,” one of the kids' parents would call out, and I'd see her turn around and walk the other way. When I asked her why she had just ignored an invitation to get to know the other swim team parents, she'd say, “Oh, I'm fine all by myself. I don't know those people. I wouldn't want to ruin their game.” So even though I liked the way she cheered for me during butterfly or breast stroke races, her unease and sadness made
me
uneasy and sad, despite my tendency for extreme Pollyanna optimism.

It's also why, less than two years after the Redfish Lake incident, I had so easily gravitated back into the outstretched arms of my dad. Where else would I have gone?

On autumn evenings when I was ten and eleven, Dad took me to the gun club so I could watch him shoot skeet. The atmosphere at home still felt depressed and tense. I spent as much time as possible at my friends' houses, including one in particular, who lived down the street. Her name was Kathie Etter, and I liked going to her house more than anyone else's because her mom was so warmhearted and sweet. But Dad used the gun club, out near Filer, as his escape, and, on occasion, I would go there with him. On the drive he'd nurse a beer, concealed in a koozie that said Bo Derek A Perfect 10. Usually he'd be scanning the landscape, looking for signs of movement in the brush. But occasionally he would mist up and get quiet, and when that happened, he would put his hand on my knee.

“We never talk anymore, sis,” he'd say, “You're growing up too fast.”

“Dad, I'm only eleven. And you know me. I'm immature for my age.”

I did feel immature, even though Dad had recently told me about the birds and the bees. Mom asked him to do it, because she felt too awkward, like she'd leave out an important part of the process or wouldn't be able to say words like “sperm” and “vagina.” But lately I had begun to develop, with tiny molehills of breasts rising out of chubby, little-girl flesh. Molehills meant that my period was coming, and Mom didn't want me to be afraid when I saw blood on my underpants.

On the night of the big explanation, Dad and I sat on my bed with our shoulders touching. Chris was at the high school practicing for the 4-by-400 relay, and Mom was in the kitchen making supper. The smell of hamburger and Lawry's seasoning wafted down the hall: beef burritos. I hoped Dad, who was known for being long-winded, wouldn't go on forever, because I wanted to play tag with my neighbor, Charmelle Puka, before dinner.

Dad launched into his presentation, saying that God had made men and women different so they could fit together, like a puzzle. He explained how penises fill with blood in order to make them stiff enough to enter a vagina. When I let out a little whimper followed by an exaggerated eye roll, Dad put a calming arm around my shoulders. This stiffening only sounded scary, he said, because, really, it made men feel extremely good.

“Women feel good, too,” he assured me.

I stared at my dad, fighting the urge to recoil. I had never heard the words
penis
and
vagina
in the same sentence, let alone uttered
by a grown man. But apparently my reaction wasn't grounds enough for him to stop talking. He went on, describing how men become aroused, and detailing the intricate workings of sex organs. As he talked, his movements became more animated and his breathing quickened. If he could see the horror in my face as he went into greater and greater detail, he didn't show it, nor did he relent. I bounced up and down on my white ruffled bedspread, trying to calm the feeling of ants crawling up my blood vessels.

By the time Dad got up and walked awkwardly and quickly into the bathroom, I knew everything I would ever need to about orgasms, but not one thing about menstruation.

On the road
to the gun club, Dad mulled over my thoughts about my maturity level. He reached a hand across the middle console and smoothed a stray hair that was whipping me in the face. “I like you immature,” he said. “It means you're bright and beautiful and ready for anything.”

I felt nervous when he talked like this so I started to sing. Dad smiled out the front windshield, tapping the steering wheel, eventually joining in. In the Idaho desert the wind always blows. We drifted across the highway with our arms hanging out the windows. We sang the words to “Hotel California,” harmonizing during the chorus and banging out the rhythm on the sun-warmed doors of the bright yellow jeep.

W
hen I was twelve my dad said I needed to start thinking about carrying my own gun. He signed me up for a hunter's safety class at his buddy Al Bolish's house. Every Wednesday evening for six weeks, we made ourselves peanut butter sandwiches and headed to the farm town of Filer, which smelled like the inside of a cow's stomach where milk was curdling into cottage cheese. The class filled up in one afternoon with a dozen kids who'd rather sit inside and watch first-aid videos than shovel hay for their dads. I was one of the few girls in attendance and nervous the first day of instruction. But my dad knew my aptitude for survival; he promised me I'd shoot better than anyone else. All kinds of common sense goes into handling a weapon, and Dad wanted me to know it, mainly so I wouldn't accidentally ping him in the ass.

At Al's we learned how to hold a rifle while crossing under a barbed-wire fence. We turned on the safety and checked the
chamber for bullets before aiming. Then we practiced loading and unloading our ammo, making sure to always leave our gun chambers empty when we were finished, “because stupid people stand a fifty percent greater chance of shooting themselves in the foot,” Al said.

On the last Saturday of class, we took a paper test, which I aced, finishing a good five minutes before my runner-up. I walked my booklet to the front of Al's living room and accepted a hug from Dad. Al smiled through chew-flecked teeth and threw a fatherly arm around my low back. He and Dad winked at each other when it was time to head outside for our shooting test.

Dad grinned proudly as I slouched past all the farm kids to a line etched in the dirt, dutifully pointing the tip of my .22 single-shot Winchester at the ground. I didn't arch my back and puff my lungs like the other hunters when I hoisted the rifle to my chest. I steadied it on my shoulder, put my finger on the trigger, and pretended to be Annie Oakley as I glared down the sight.

I would have lined that target up all by myself. Probably tore the bull's-eye apart. But then Dad took it upon himself to give me a little help. He walked up, put his hands on my shoulders, and pressed himself into my back. “Look for the target in the center of the V,” he said. “Hold your breath. And squeeze.”

Leaning into Dad, I felt uneasy. He was solid and strong, but stuck out in places I didn't necessarily like. Since the sex-education talk, something about him had changed, and I didn't think it was for the better. He seemed to spend more time looking at me, letting his eyes pour over my body. He studied me, from my feathered bilevel haircut to my size 6, brown-and-tan Nikes.
Sometimes, when I was in the bathtub singing, he'd barge in, pretending he didn't know I was there. I had no idea how other dads reacted to seeing their daughters naked, but mine seemed to spend too much time apologizing, stammering about how he needed a lightbulb or a bar of Ivory, while his eyes continued to bug out of his face. Little did I know, I was walking the tightrope of ambiguity. Did Dad stumble into the bathroom while I was bathing “accidentally,” or was it on purpose? My dad had always gazed at me with affection. But now his gazes made me want to crawl inside my own skin.

Out on the shooting range, I could feel Dad pressing against my back, as he held me to demonstrate how to aim. His breath—a nauseating mixture of maple bars and Folgers—was hot on my ear. When our cheeks touched, I felt the odd texture of his facial skin, which he prided himself on shaving “smooth as a baby's butt.” The sensation made my teeth bite the sides of my cheeks. But with Al and the other kids watching, I had to be brave. I couldn't turn around and tell my dad to give me some space. Instead, I steeled myself against him, clenching the back of my body into one big muscle.

Dad either didn't notice or chose not to say anything. He braced himself against me, squeezing his arms against the outside of my biceps. “Atta girl, sis,” he whispered. “Keep it up. You're doing great.” The next time I shrugged my shoulders, he seemed to get the hint.

Freed from his grasp, I lowered the gun and stamped my boots in the dirt. I resteadied the rifle and stared down the sight. Waiting until I was sure everyone in the class was watching, I pulled
the trigger. The bullet tore a hole through the tiny black dot in the center of the target.

The next time my dad asked me to go to the gun club with him, I didn't race outside to the jeep. By my thirteenth birthday, I had begun to feel nervous and worried in his presence. Every time I turned around, it seemed his eyes were glued to my breastbone. He told me jokes—out of earshot of my mom or Chris—that made me hate my own body. I'd come out of the shower and he'd be standing in the hallway, waiting. I'd look for my mom, hoping she was noticing the same thing I did. But Dad chose his opportunities carefully. Mom was usually out of earshot; if she wasn't out shopping, she was cleaning the living room or parked in front of
Knots Landing
.

A few months into my thirteenth year, I stood in Mom's bathroom asking her to shave my armpits. The next day, my swim team, the Magic Valley Dolphins, had a meet, and the last thing I wanted was to show up at the swimming pool with hairy pits. The trouble was, every time I tried to shave I ended up cutting myself.

“Why don't you ask your dad to do it?” Mom said.

“I don't
want
him to do it. Why can't
you
do it?”

Over the past year, my body had continued to quicken, hips spreading and breasts rising out of supple, sun-freckled skin. Now I caught Dad watching me as I pushed out my chest and looked at my reflection in the microwave door. Sometimes I could feel him
peering through the hole he'd smashed in the wall of Chris's room during a remodeling project. He would stand as still as a statue on the other side of the three-inch-wide wall. But I could hear him breathing, and that made me want to turn into a caterpillar that had wrapped itself inside a cocoon.

Dad had also liberated himself from merely watching. Now he was coming into my room when I was on the verge of sleeping, asking if I was feeling okay, offering to tickle my back. From the time I was little I had been a bad sleeper, so even though I was thirteen, I still liked it when either of my parents came in to soothe me as I settled in to bed. But lately, I had begun waking up in the morning with cotton in my mouth and a cobweb of bad feelings in my head. I couldn't put my finger on the origin of the feeling, but I sensed that it had something to do with Dad.