The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope (43 page)

Once I saw a friend of Gracie’s step out of the back of a van parked in the driveway. As the girl bent to tie her fringed boots, I saw, through the open van door, a boy buttoning his shirt. I knew the girl was only seventeen, a high school senior. A sweet, bright kid. I felt I should do something. But I wasn’t sure what I should or could do. At their age, I had the responsibility of a farm. I had first Cole, then Addie, in my bed. Most of the girls, Gracie told me, could get birth control pills at the local clinics. Many of the boys who crowded our porches faced the bane of chastity: the draft. So, after I’d gone over the facts of life once again with Gracie, I could think of nothing more to say than “be careful and don’t get pregnant.”

One evening, Adam found a hand-rolled cigarette on the stable floor and a lighter nearby. “It sure doesn’t smell like tobacco.” He sniffed the twisted end.

We’d both read about marijuana, and the Woodstock festival of muddy, stoned hippies had been all over the news the weeks before. Neither of us was easy with the idea of the girls or their friends doing drugs. But the lighter concerned us as much, maybe more, than the pot. We knew what a burned-down stable would cost.

“I want to know what it’s like before we talk to the girls about it,” Adam said. “Let’s try it.”

I held back, reluctant. But Pauline had tried it and proclaimed it “no big deal.” She preferred Jack Daniel’s, she said.

So we strolled out past the stables and lit up the cigarette, passing it back and forth between coughing fits. A cool puff of wind wafted the smoke farther into the pasture.

Not much happened. Adam seemed a little more talkative. I felt relaxed and a little weird, but not elated or particularly high. It seemed as if the world, not me, had gotten oddly and thoughtfully drunk. An experience far short of the dire warnings I’d read in magazines and newspapers. I scorched the spaghetti sauce for dinner that night, but we both ate a lot and thought it particularly good. Then we went to bed without ill effect.

But we did have some new rules after Adam found the marijuana. No visitors in the stables unless Adam or Rosie was with them. No matches or lighters anywhere near the stables. No one could offer or give Lil and Sarah anything stronger than chocolate milk. And because the number of visitors on the weekends had increased, and a few parents of Rosie’s high school friends had called looking for their sons and daughters, everyone had to come through the house and introduce themselves to us.

As the boys would troop by on their way to gather in the fields, Adam would shake their hands firmly and look them in the eye. Then, with uncharacteristic paternal sternness, he’d announce his rules: “Stay away from the stable and horses. Take care of the girls. And have a good time, boys.”

“Sure, Mr. Hope, it’s cool.” The boys always nodded. Rosie and Gracie would roll their eyes at Adam and pull the boys through the house and out the back door.

O
n a May Saturday in 1970, Gracie and Rosie prepared for a big party they’d be having out in the pasture. Sarah and Lil left earlier that morning with Pauline for the beach. All afternoon, the older girls bustled around in the kitchen and house, driving firewood, tables, and baskets of food out to the spot where they usually gathered, under one of the large live oaks. Adam cleared an area in the pasture we never used for riding. They would be allowed to have a bonfire there. They’d be far enough away to dim their music and debates, but close enough to run back to the house for the bathroom or any emergency.

I spent the day in the garden, mulching, trying to keep the water in and the weeds out. Adam mended the far corral and worked with a young mare, a pretty, gold thing whose love bite had left a bruise on my behind the week before. By sunset, we were beat. We sat inside at the kitchen table, drinking iced tea and watching each other sweat.

After dinner, Adam and I relaxed on the front porch, greeting a steady stream of arriving kids. The yard filled with cars and vans. It looked like it was going be one of their bigger parties.

Finally, the mosquitoes chased us inside. There was no more iced tea in the refrigerator, so we each poured ourselves a glass from a pitcher of bright red Kool-Aid. Adam finished his quickly and poured himself a second glass. I settled down on the couch with a novel while he gave the stables a final check for the evening.

It was well past ten o’clock, my normal bedtime. I didn’t feel sleepy but the words on the page blurred toward the margins. I set my book aside. I was back in the kitchen, trying to decide if the Kool-Aid tasted like strawberry or cherry—maybe raspberry—when Adam joined me and a batch of kids shuffled through. We rose to greet them. They were a brightly dressed group, all so sweet and beautiful. I felt a great tenderness toward them.

When they left, the salt shaker on the table undulated slowly to some music I couldn’t quite hear. One of the boys had been carrying a mandolin. “That boy must be a very good musician,” I said and pointed to the dancing salt shaker.

Adam gave the table a long, quizzical look. We both sat down again.

“The flowers are beautiful,” he said. I’d cut some zinnias and lantana and put them in a bottle. They danced, too. The bright pink, gold, and orange petals trembled delicately, keeping time with the salt shaker. They were the most beautiful flowers I’d ever seen. Their hairy emerald leaves curled gently, waving in a breeze. I bent and inhaled the simplicity of tart chlorophyll and sunshine. When I opened my eyes, the room glowed.

Adam, fluctuating between the definite and indefinite, watched me. I held my arms out to him in an invitation. He was surprised, but game. I tapped time on his shoulder as we waltzed around the table. He was the most beautiful and exquisite man. So right and so good.

The whole world was right and good and sweet and we danced. The breeze swirled around us, cooling our skin. I smelled horse, marigold, leather, dirt, and sweat on us. I heard the birds outside, an infinity of calls. The stabled horses breathed and shuffled. Farther out in the pasture, more animals and the voices of the kids, a faint echo of chirps. A car rattled down the road. Our home hummed around us. The room spun slowly and glowed as we danced. We kissed and got lost in the dark forest of kissing; I slowly sank to the floor, pulling Adam with me.

A wave of sound washed down the tube of the hall and curled itself into and out of footsteps, then giggles. There seemed to be a million of them in the hall, thousands of young people, staring down at us. Their faces looked more beautiful and funnier than any I’d ever seen.

“Excuse us, Mr., Mrs. Hope,” someone said in a high, tinny voice. It was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. I was gone, rolling on the floor and giggling. The joke was contagious. Every time Adam looked at me, he laughed, too. Wires of hilarity coursed through my face and stomach until I ached.

Then, gradually, we quieted, the wires of laughter loosened. Limp, we watched the undulant ceiling form and reform itself, the skin of the room. We breathed and held hands, lying on the floor, and listened as the house breathed around us. The birdsong brimmed on and on.

The ceiling and the birds were too active, and I turned to Adam.

He grinned. “Why are we still on the floor?”

“Because we can be.” I held his face in my hands and got closer. He hummed his sweet bell tone, a lilting spring-green sound. His face began to come apart, disintegrating into its individual features, but the change did not disturb me. I moved into his changing face, closer, until I could see nothing but the dark, bright black of his pupils, the endlessness of him. His features dissembled then reassembled into another complete face. A man, his mouth open in rage and pain. Then he was an Asian woman, large-eyed, expectant. Then a calm, fair child. On and on. Face after face. Each face distinct and whole, historied. Faster and faster, the changes came. Face after face. Like a current sucking me out of myself.

I cried out, jerked away, and shut my eyes.

Then there was just light and breath, the music of him, his essential beautiful alienness. He rose and rose and rose all around. He touched my face. The whisper of his fingertips on my cheek surged down my body and out my feet. A cry jolted me and I realized that the cry had come from me, my own voice of pleasure. I sank back onto my kitchen floor and lay beside my ordinary husband, the father of my children.

Children. Daughters. There was a knife, dark and solid in that thought, but I could not identify it.

I told Adam about the knife. He told me that the Kool-Aid must have something in it. He felt a little funny.

“I’ll say,” I agreed.

In a single fluid move, he got off the floor and took a sip.

I angled myself up and drained my glass. To me, it tasted like too many things I could not name. “What kind of Kool-Aid is this?”

“Exactly.” Adam peered at the glass in his hand. “This is the kind of Kool-Aid we need to ask questions about. I’ve read about kids putting LSD in Kool-Aid as a kind of test to see how ‘cool’ someone is.” I followed him to the sink and watched him rinse his glass. The swirl of pink water laughed down the drain.

Adam picked up the pitcher and sniffed the Kool-Aid. “There must have been eight or ten gallons of this in the coolers I saw some kids lug into the kitchen earlier.” He scowled, somehow both comic and paternal. “How do you feel?”

I rubbed his shoulder, my warmth for him erupting in my chest, radiating down my arm.

“Wonderful.” I giggled. “Go! Go find out what it is. I want to know.” I pulled him toward the back door and pushed the screen open. “I should go lie down again. I’ll wait for you in bed.”

He kissed me softly, then obediently set off into the darkness, an inch of brilliant candy-red sloshing in the pitcher he still held. He weaved his graceful way between the cars and vans parked behind the house. His mobility amazed me.

I was no longer sure I had feet, but I stepped outside and looked up. The night sky shimmered with points and streaks of pinks, lavenders, and oranges. Birdcalls slid through. The dark knife remained unnamed, solemn and quiet in the press of sound and color. Odors of hay and horses and wood and young people wafted by. Days or minutes may have passed since I’d sat on the couch reading. Time had turned to rubber. I was happy, very happy until the ground went red—first the rust-red of Carolina clay then blood-red. Then, the dark knife ripped the world in two and everything came in. An animal howl filled me. Jennie! Jennie! Jennie! But I could not bring her face before me. Just darkness. The dark immenseness. Hated, hated darkness. In me, on me.

Then I was inside on the bathroom floor, tearing my shirt off. Sorrow sparking through my clothes as I threw them down. My face was like wax in the heat, my bones too close to the surface. I had to turn from my own reflection in the mirror. I sat with my knees pulled up to my chest, afraid of the sorrow and darkness that breathed through me, faster and faster, until a large hand reached around from behind me. The hand told me that I was alone, that it was my own breath I heard. Those words spread a calm through me. I uncoiled in the thick, warm air and listened. I heard that everything was okay. Good. There was just
is
. Is-ness.

Is
filled the bathroom. In all directions it continued. Endless.

After a while, I ran a bath, filling the tub with water. And the water was like water all over the earth. Iridescent. Alive.

Naked, I saw that everything about me was good. In the moonlight through the window, the slackness of my lower belly and my breasts, the silvery stain of old pregnancy stretch marks, the little veins on my legs and ankles, the darker freckling on the backs of my hands and my arms, the colors of my hair dulling toward gray were no longer signs of age but beauty, simple and present as the joints in my wrist, as the crickets outside and the sparkle of the bath water through my hands. All was right and wondrous, sweet, infinite.

I eased down into the cool bath. My body loosened into the water and I knew again without any doubt that the world was well and beautiful. Not all the time and not for everyone, but for the All which the individual and the singular is a part of. I had first known this, beyond any reason, when I was a child alone in the woods, and I knew it again. I breathed deeply and calmly. Stunned.

The pale, half-drawn shower curtain, the bathroom walls, and the small square of the bathroom window seemed to breathe with me. I was in a room in a house on a ranch in a state in a nation in a world that turned.

Then a young man appeared at the toilet. It seemed right that he should be there, peeing with his back to me, but I also sensed there was something unusual about the two of us being in the bathroom together. He sang a few bars of a jumpy little tune. He jigged his shoulders like a gnome. Then he turned and let out a yelp as he zipped up. “Mrs. Hope!” He rubbed his face and eyes. There was still something I couldn’t understand. I didn’t bother to cover myself as we stared at each other. My inability to comprehend what was going on struck me as hysterically funny and I burst out laughing. He bumbled out the door, calling, “Everything’s cool! I’ll get help! Rosie’s right on the front porch!”

Moments later, Gracie and Rosie exploded into the bathroom, upset over something, turning on blinding lights. They spouted a chorus. “It’s two in the morning. What are you doing in the bathtub in the dark? What happened? Are you okay?” To appease them, I let them dry me and dress me. They kept asking if I was okay. They moved too much, they talked too much, and there was too much I did not understand. Funny, sweet girls. They glowed like daughters, but finally I told them to shut up.

They led me to the bed. I propped myself up on the pillows. The sheets glittered white around me. Then Gracie and Rosie sat in the dark on either side of me like sentinels. A good way to go to bed.

I sighed. My body relaxed against the headboard. When I closed my eyes, I could see all my nerves swept clean. Sweet and new as the moment after sexual climax.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked. “Adam?”

“Where is Daddy?” Rosie started to rise from the bed. “I’ll go—”