Stop That Girl (7 page)

“Me first,” said Raoul.

We hopped back on our bikes and rode a few miles over to Pierce. Pierce was an agricultural college then, in the west end of the valley, where the Santa Monica Mountains rolled down to the basin. The air smelled green with alfalfa, and at night it was the best place to ride. The walkways were well-lit, built on gently rolling hills, so you could glide down them and feel like you were flying.

I had a green Nishiki ten-speed. I’d saved all my money, from trimming ivy up and down the block, mowing the lawn every Saturday morning, cleaning the bathroom, and folding laundry, to get it:

Down went our bikes into the grass, and we sprawled out like earthworms beside them. The grass felt cool and spongy. From under a distant floodlight came the sound of a tennis ball receiving some good sharp whacks.

“You didn’t want to stay, did you?” I said.

“No way,” said Raoul. “It was like an orgy in there.”

“I know it.”

“I mean, I like those people, but I just wasn’t in the mood.”

“Me either,” I said.

“It’s hard to believe people even have orgies,” Raoul said. “I mean, real orgies.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I, personally, would feel too self-conscious.”

“Right. Like, I’m really going to relax and get into making love to someone with ten people watching,” Raoul said.

I pressed my lips together and nodded. Somewhere, deep down, I harbored a lot of feeling for Raoul. But I’d never shown it. I wasn’t sure he felt the same way. I was afraid that if I reached over and tried to kiss him, it would wreck everything.

Raoul had a little flask of Southern Comfort and he offered it. I took a swig. Then we lit our Marlboros, and I watched a small plane with a green light flying over the valley like a bug. The rest of the sky gray as a parking lot. “I really,
really
don’t want to go away,” I said.

“Nothing you can do about it?”

“I’ve argued but it’s no use.”

“Do you think the song “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” is anti-travel?” Raoul said, tapping a blade of grass against his front teeth.

“How?”

“Well, because all he could see was the other side of the mountain,” Raoul said.

“So it’s not worth it to go anywhere, is that what you think the song’s about?”

“I’m just
wondering
if that’s what it’s about,” he said.

“Maybe it’s anti-bear,” I said. “Since it’s the bear’s perceptions, the bear’s nearsightedness, the song celebrates.”

“Why would a song celebrate a bear’s nearsightedness?”

We’d planted ourselves about twenty feet from a pig enclosure, and suddenly, as if there had been a change in the direction of the wind, we could hear the animals snorting in their pens.

“Maybe because as nation builders destroying the wilderness, it was better to think it didn’t matter,” I suggested.

“I get it,” Raoul said. “When ravaging forests, no need to think of the bears, because when they go over the mountain, they appreciate nothing.”

“Exactly.” I laughed. I thought of telling this to Angus Frey.

“I’m hungry,” said Raoul.

We climbed on our bikes again and went whooping down the hill.

Out on the flat, shifting gears, we zipped down Winnetka, and the warm air tickled my neck and my hair waved behind me like a flag. We hugged the corner at Sherman Way, cycled into downtown Reseda, stopped and bought ice cream cones at Sav-On, and sat on the high square curb to eat them.

Reseda. A pornographic bookstore and a sewing and hobby center existed side by side, as did a church and a liquor store. In December someone hung tin dreidels on the wires and ratty candy canes on the streetlights. It was a town and it wasn’t. It had an honorary mayor instead of a real one. It was part of LA but it was called Reseda, just like there was Encino and Tarzana and Canoga Park. In a low and dismal appliance store across the street, a double row of televisions flashed a cheesy variety show with some warty old guy in a sequined cape singing his lungs out.

“Don’t you think it’s kind of disturbing, seeing a bunch of TVs on together like that?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Raoul. “As a matter of fact, I do.” He was licking his green pistachio ice cream into a square.

“I wonder why.”

“Maybe it makes you feel like an insect,” he proposed. “You know how flies have those compound eyes?”

“I do.”

“The philosopher-psychologist William James writes about how it feels really unpleasant to sit on a warm spot created by someone else. If he can write about that, we can write about this.”

“Good idea!”

We were on the staff of the school paper, so the next fall we printed a little blurb about it. We offered a prize to anyone who could tell us why we didn’t like the sight of many television sets lined up in a store. Then we printed all the replies, proclaiming the last to be the winner:

●
It’s not depressing. It’s a sign of a healthy economy, you
pinkos.

●
Since your eyes don’t know which one to choose, you
feel inadequate and confused.

●
Decadent consumerism.

●
It makes you feel like a lot of people except you are
going to be getting a new TV.

●
The normal has become significantly grotesque.

●
It’s a visit to the future when the powers that be
mock and control us from a screen.

●
What a bogus contest, use the space for sports.

Meanwhile, I was still mulling the question of warm spots on seats, particularly horrible on toilets.

“So, I wrote a new poem,” Raoul said then, from our perch on the curb in front of Sav-On.

“Oh?” I said, and felt the corners of my mouth curling into a nervous smile.

“I guess I feel a little weird, just a little, about having you read it. I mean, I say some shit that sounds weird, sort of out of context. And it’s sort of in the straight-up thought-stream tradition, because I was trying to let as much slip out as possible. You know, actually, writing this bullshit really helps relieve my frustrations about being stuck in this present reality. I guess I’m ready to show it—sorry for doing so much prefacing—I’m basically a little insecure about my stuff sometimes, but with you I should feel safe.”

He pulled a wadded-up piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to me.

“So, it’s called ‘Sad Viviana,’ ” he said.

“ ‘Sad
Viviana
?’ ”

Viviana sat in the front of our French class, blond hair reaching for her hips.

After a few seconds, he said, “By the way, I totally want to say I dug that article you wrote about your mother finding a thumb in a soda bottle.”

I sniffed.

“Was it true?”

“Who knows? She said it was,” I said.

He started to laugh. “Did she sue?”

“Thumbs are probably everywhere,” I said. I’d finished my ice cream; my hands were sticky; it was time to take off. “I made a mistake in the tone of that article.”

“How?”

“It was just wrong. I glorified my mother instead of questioning her.”

“That would have been distracting,” Raoul said.

“Well, see you later,” I said.

“That’s it?”

“Gotta go,” I said.

“Hey, are you going to write or what?”

“I’ll write.”

“You’d better,” he said. “Let me know what you think of that poem.”

I pedaled away, crossing the cement-bedded, litter-stained, rat-run LA River at Tampa, taking the dark bumpy way down Topham into my neighborhood, the poem festering in my pocket like a dead thing. Maybe I had it wrong, maybe it would say something negative about Viviana. Like that she was a leech upon society. But I doubted it. The poem would surely imply there was something deep about her, something complex and doomed. What about me, though, wasn’t I complex and doomed?

I arrived home right as Mom was pulling up in her car from work. She didn’t see me in the dark, coasting up to her car. She was curled over, looking intently at something, and upon hearing my voice, she jumped a little.

“Mom.”

“Hello, dear,” she said. Her hands disposed of whatever she was holding as if she’d performed a magic trick, but I thought I saw a small white box disappear from sight. “Help me carry these bags in. I bought some supplies tonight for our trip, with my discount.”

“What were you looking at?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Mom said.

“I saw a little box, like for jewelry.”

“Oh, that?” She shrugged, pulled the box from her pocket, and opened it for me. On a square of green velvet lay a silver pendant shaped like a woman’s head.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Truganini. You remember the story,” Mom said, snapping shut the lid.

“Is that, did—?”

“Look at this receipt! I bought out the store!” She waved a long tail of paper at me, like a pesty kite.

In the morning we were off, my mother and sister and I, climbing into our loaded-down Buick before dawn. Roy stood in the headlights clutching his de-elasticized pajama bottoms in one hand, waving to us with the other. He’d join us later in the summer, as soon as he possibly could.

“Bye!” we cried, driving away.

“See you soon!” Roy faded.

Where were we going? It was a place to which people by the long caravans and busloads rolled out year after year, to take pictures, buy postcards, cross off their lifetime lists. I knew I should have been more enthusiastic, more agreeable, more supportive and glad, but when you hear about this place the rest of the year too, see books lying around about it, have
rare prints
of it all over your house, just how much longing can you drum up?

Anyway, I had other names for it:
Sublime Cleft, Exalted
Fissure, Noble Crevice, Overvalued Crack.

The ice chest squeaked the whole distance. In Barstow, we fueled up at a certain gas station that Mom had claimed for years contained an unattributed mural by Orozco. “I’ve seen his work at the Dartmouth College library, and I’m certain it’s his,” she pompously liked to say. The morning sun was shimmering on the concrete, making optical illusions that reflected like glass. Tumbleweeds and dust devils skittered over the crusty ground. The wind carried grit in it, as the earth dried up and flew away.

The Park Service compound turned out to be a cluster of brown cabins next to a parking lot full of gas tanks and government vehicles. Our one-bedroom cabin was stuffy and dilapidated, with old vinyl flooring curling away from the baseboards like unhealthy toenails, revealing a mat of dead insects, dust, and hair. The kitchen smelled like propane, and the bathroom was equipped with flaking fixtures and a shower stall so cramped you knocked your elbows sudsing up. In the living room, Kathy and I slept on canvas cots reminiscent of battlefield stretchers, positioned around a potbellied stove that was rough and corroded and smelled like it had been used to burn human protein in. Forget television. We were lucky to have a lamp. All along the tops of the log walls, pockets of nesting materials—pine needles, newspaper scraps, kapok—dangled and bulged like half-extruded dung.

Behind the cabin sat a big white block of salt, there for the purpose of luring mule deer forth from the woods to lick it, in a bright patch of sunlight coming through the aspen and pine. It worked. Morning and night we saw their thin pink tongues flickering from their black-lipped muzzles, necks craned, frightened of being so close to the cabins but driven by their need to sample the white rock.