I REMEMBER THE EXACT DAY that Linc and Cinnamon arrived—July 13—because the night before, my family had gathered around the television to watch Texas Democrat Barbara Jordan become the first black woman to deliver a keynote address at a major party convention. “My presence here is one additional bit of evidence that the American Dream need not forever be deferred.” I know this quote by heart; her ringing speech and the whole spirit of the ’76 convention still give me chills. This period when we lived in Washington, in a white house not far from the real White House, will always live in my memory as the pivotal moment for my family, but it also marked my dawning awareness that our lives were converging with something larger than ourselves, a whole country at a crossroads.
I remember where we all were sitting, too. My mother had given up on any furniture materializing so she’d bought a dusty brocade sofa and a couple of faded-to-pink butterfly chairs at an estate sale so we could have somewhere to sit and watch the speeches. She was anxious that we hadn’t recruited a single student for our school, but my father promised that as soon as the convention was over he was going to hit the pavement like a salesman on a tight commission. The hope that a Democrat might win back the presidency had stirred some good feeling in our household, and we were tuned to the NBC Nightly News with John Chancellor and David Brinkley, looking forward to a couple nights from now when Jimmy Carter would officially accept the nomination.
We had finished our dinner of sauteed mushrooms on toast—it was a rare treat for Molly and me to eat in front of the television—when a roving reporter stopped in the hive of the Wisconsin delegation and, to my mother’s surprise, interviewed an old college friend of hers, Linda Silvers, whom she hadn’t seen since my parents’ wedding. Linda and my mother used to picket for labor and hand out campaign flyers at county fairs and farmers’ markets around Madison, but had lost touch during our many moves. According to the caption on the screen, Linda was now chief of staff for Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson.
“I knew she’d do something with her life, but chief of. staff?” My mother’s enthusiasm carried what seemed like a tinge of regret. “She’s not even forty.”
“She sure looks it, though,” my father said. “Too many late nights on coffee and cancer sticks.”
“That’s not my point.”
“Maybe you should look her up, Val. I bet she has a bunch of D.C. contacts, and could help us.”
“Maybe.” My mother stood up and cleared the plates, the television casting her in a platinum glow, then left to clean up the kitchen. The rest of us were watching a profile of Amy Carter, who was Molly’s age and devoted to the family housecat, Misty Malarky Ying-Yang, when three taps of a car horn sounded from the street in front of the house.
Linc had made one brief call from the road a day or so before, so we’d been expecting him and Cinnamon at any time. But he had run out of coins before my mother could ask when they’d arrive or how they were traveling. Hearing the car horn, I wondered if they really had managed to hitchhike all the way from Mazama, Washington, to Washington, D.C. But when we all gathered on the porch to greet them, Linc unfolded himself from the back seat, and Cinnamon got out on the passenger’s side, of the strangest-looking VW Bug I had ever seen. It was plastered with Salem cigarette ads. White, sea green and gold, with the words SALEM, MENTHOL FRESH, SMOOTH, REFRESHING, FILTERED CIGARETTES splashed on the doors and curving along the roof and hood.
And instead of some friendly stranger dropping off our aunt and uncle and waving goodbye, to our surprise the driver’s side door opened and out stepped a third member of the Freelandia commune, my father’s least favorite of all: Uncle Line’s best friend, Tino Candelaria.
My mother, Molly and I gave Linc hugs. He wore an All-Temperature Cheer T-shirt and was sweaty and ripe from a week in a Bug without air conditioning. My father slapped him on the back hard enough to make him cough. “I didn’t know there’d be three of you,” he said, barely acknowledging Tino. “Just you and Cinnamon are staying, right?”
Linc’s beard had grown down to his chest, and he’d gone balder since I’d seen him last, two years ago. He had a patch of black hair like an Oreo cookie at the top of his forehead; behind it stretched a cap of sallow skin. And he’d lost weight. He used to look like Sancho Panza: short, potbellied, the happy gnome, with a malleable face that made me smile. But now he seemed diminished, as if dried in a toxic sun.
“No, it’s going to be three of us,” Linc muttered. “Hope you don’t mind.”
My father started to object, but my mother’s voice rode over his. “So where did you find this car?”
“I didn’t tell you about that?” The question seemed to jolt Linc to life. “Some Seattle adman gave it to me for free.” He fished a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, offered a cigarette to my parents, who both refused, then lit up. “I don’t even like Salems, but I agreed to drive the car around Seattle and park it at ball games and conventions and down by Pike Place Market, all the touristy places.”
“They gave him a green outfit with Salem across the front,” Cinnamon said. “And a trunkful of free smokes.”
“Those menthols will kill you.” Linc inhaled deeply. “Eventually I blew out of Seattle and took the VW to the commune. It’s a junker, but we got here all right.”
“So basically you stole the car,” my father said.
“The adman was shady, a real slick talker. He told me to cruise the Washington hot spots, and that’s what I’m doing.” Linc adjusted his black-rimmed glasses. “Washington State. Washington, D.C. Same deal.”
Cinnamon cut in, “So this is your crib?” Unlike Line, she seemed ageless. A band of freckles dappled her cheeks and shoulders, and she had long straight hair the color of her name.
My father’s light-adjusting glasses had turned an ocher hue in the dusk-lit early evening, but I could tell from the way he stood, his arms at a right angle, his chin resting on his fist, that he was feeling put out. “Bet this beats a shack in the woods,” he said.
Tino had been uncharacteristically quiet. But now he tightened his ponytail, wiped his hands on his peasant shirt—white, stained gray around the collar—and gave my father a soul handshake. “So what’s the scam?” he asked.
“No scam,” my father said defensively, his forearms tensing.
“It’s just lingo,” Cinnamon explained. “Hippie talk for ‘What’s up?”’
“Thanks for the translation,” Tino said. “But I know you’re working some kind of magic here, Pete. Who died and gave you a castle?”
My mother told the hippies about Bailey Dornan and the special lease they’d signed. She admitted that we’d gotten a good deal. “But we need to get students under the roof ASAP if we have any hope of making it.” She didn’t go into her reservations about Bailey except to say, “Our landlord is a pill. You’re not going to like him. But at least he hasn’t been coming around too much.” Nor did she mention the money from Aunt Natalia, which I’m sure my father appreciated, since he didn’t want the hippies rifling through his drawers.
Tino and Cinnamon hauled sleeping bags and foam pads, burlap sacks and milk crates full of tapestries, records and paperbacks up to the front hallway. Linc pulled out a guitar case bedizened with advertising stickers— You Deserve a Break Today; Nothing Sucks Like an Electrolux; First to Sears, Then to School— and showed us his beat-up guitar, which someone passing through the commune had abandoned. Molly strummed it and I did a few bars of “Smoke on the Water,” the one song I’d learned in the Lake Bluff dorms, and Linc said he was a beginner, too. This drew an eye-roll from my father, who was no doubt dreading the discordant fits and starts of a novice guitarist under our roof.
We helped the hippies sweep out the car, which was littered with empty Shasta cans, cigarette butts, plastic thermoses with faded gas station logos and Burger King and Jack in the Box bags. I knew that my uncle and his friends had been living off the land for the past few years, so I was surprised by how much fast food they’d put away on the trip.
“You probably shouldn’t park there,” my father said to Line.
Tino laughed when he saw the painted fire hydrant next to the car. “Who’s that supposed to be?”
I piped up, “Benjamin Franklin. They did it for the bicentennial.”
“Ben Franklin, huh? Aren’t you a sight for a full-bladdered dog.” Tino gave the fire hydrant a kick with his huaraches. “Go fly a kite, bro.”
My father was not amused. “I got a twenty-dollar ticket for parking there.”
“And you paid it?”
“I didn’t want to get towed.”
“You gave your money to Jerry Ford?”
“D.C. government, actually,” my father said, visibly annoyed that this reedy guy, with the rolling Mick Jagger walk and Zapata mustache, had come to live with us. Tino liked to flirt with women, my mother included, and my father had a territorial nature.
Linc dug his own set of keys from his pocket. “I’ll move the car,” he said, turning sullen again. He slumped into the front seat of the Bug and reparked.
My mother and Molly were talking to Cinnamon about the cross-country trip. I half listened, but mostly gawped at this woman in the floral-print babydoll dress. When I was eight, she made me ring bearer at her and Line’s wedding and whispered in my ear, “Just bring me the ring, and you and I can run off together.” She was the first woman ever to enter my dreams.
Smoothing her feather earrings with her fingers, she talked about the attrition at the commune in the past several years. “Hot Plate Peterson crapped out and joined the System in Portland. He used to work bareass in the orchard, but last I heard he’s wearing a suit. Cheeba Viti found an heiress girlfriend, who bought him a plane ticket and set him up in Taos. Rudy Wentzel moved to town and now sorts mail at the Mazama P.O. After the drought last year a whole caravan blew the scene and headed to Yellow Springs, because ‘at least there they know how to fucking farm.’ And then we had that bummer with Maryjane. You remember Maryjane?” Cinnamon asked.
I’d never heard of a Maryjane, and though my mother nodded, she didn’t look as if she had either.
“Tino’s ex? The cheerleader? She couldn’t get her hands dirty. She laid a serious trip on us when Tino and I got together. She went crazy, like Anita Bryant. What did she call us, honey?” she asked Tino.
“Libertines.”
“Libertine, Ovaltine. She took a scissors to every last piece of clothing we owned and went running back to her mom in Tallahassee. How do you like that?”
My mother didn’t like it, and neither did I. Molly, picking up on the scandal, looked as if someone had sped by and ripped a lollipop from her mouth.
Tino was counting the money in his wallet. He seemed to have a large wad of bills, but by the way he shook his head, they must all have been ones.
Cinnamon grabbed the side of his belt. “Maryjane’s loss,” she said.
My mother turned to Linc in dismay. “You didn’t tell me about this.”
Linc scratched the Oreo cookie on his head, which stuck out over his forehead like a phylactery. “You never asked.”
My father had an I-told-you-so look on his face as he watched the numbers play out before his eyes: not two but three unwelcome guests. And if that weren’t enough, a triangle: my uncle, his best friend, and his best friend’s new girlfriend, who only recently had been my uncle’s wife.
“It’s cool.” Linc shrugged. But I wasn’t convinced.
“So you’re separated? Divorced?” my mother asked.
Cinnamon acted as if it were no big deal. “We’re still married, but marriage isn’t a contract,” she said. “We still love each other, but it’s not like we have to wear straitjackets.”
I didn’t know what to make of this. As much as I wanted to see Cinnamon as an earth goddess, an ever-replenishing gift to the world that no one man could keep, I couldn’t help feeling that she and Tino had betrayed my uncle.
“It’s not my business. As long as you’re all okay with it.” My mother waved the matter away, though apprehension lingered in her eyes. “We’re just glad you’re here.”
“Us too.” Cinnamon stretched and her dress rose to the very tops of her thighs. “You kids have grown since I last saw you.” She hugged Molly and me at the same time. She smelled sweet, like honey and patchouli oil with a hint of nicotine. “You’re pretty as springtime, Molly. And look at you, Daniel. I love your hair.”
Tino pulled the last box from the trunk. “Look what I brought, kids.” He lowered the box so Molly and I could see it. There must have been fifty fireworks in there. “How do you like this stash? They were practically giving it away—post-Fourth of July sale—at a roadside stand near Intercourse, PA. Intercourse is the place for fireworks, kids.” He smiled at my mother, who looked away.
Tino pointed out each one as if he were working the counter of a candy shop: “This is a pinwheel. That’s a cherry bomb. Here’s the fizgig, the whiz-bang, the snake, the squib, the flowerpot. We’ve got sparklers for the ladies.” He handed a box of these to Molly. “And Roman candles for the gents...”
I was about to take the Roman candles when my mother intercepted them. She grabbed the sparklers from Molly and returned the fireworks to the box. “Thanks, but no thanks,” she said. “The Fourth of July is over, and I don’t think this is a good idea.”
Tino pointed to the ’76 flag hanging in front of our house. “What’s the prob, Val? A nice patriotic family like yours, how can you not want some discount pyrotechnics?”
“They’re dangerous, for starters. And that’s our landlord’s flag, not ours.”
“Let’s ask one of the Founding Fathers what he thinks about all this. So, what do you say, Ben?” Tino leaned his ear in the direction of the fire hydrant. “Ben says light ’em up!”
With visions of me and Cleo watching the fireworks from the windows of my room, I pleaded with my mother, “You didn’t let us go to the Mall on the Fourth.”
“And you know perfectly well why,” she said.
But my father, Cinnamon, Linc and even Molly, who’d been on the verge of righteous indignation, ten-year-old style, over the suggestion of adultery, weighed in on Tino’s side. Realizing that she was outvoted, and also that she was asking a lot of my father to put up with these recent arrivals, my mother said, “I’ll tell you what I’m willing to do. If Jimmy Carter beats Gerald Ford in November, we’ll throw a party here at the school and you can have your fireworks.”
That night I lay under the turret’s pointy nipple while Tino and Cinnamon moaned and thumped against the wall. On the commune Tino had built an elaborate tree house, so he and whoever shared his bed were used to sleeping close to the stars. He didn’t bother to grab his stuff from the hallway. Instead he hauled his sleeping bag straight to the top floor and, seeing that I had taken the turret room, tried to talk me into handing it over to him. I’d never been good at defending my turf, but luckily my mother had come upstairs, too—and she wasn’t about to give ground again.
On his way out of the room Tino flicked the fringes of my American flag. “You a Nixon fan, Danny? You sure have a lot of red, white and blue in here. Maybe you should wear Tricky Dicky’s favorite pin: AMERICA, LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT.” Tino was annoyed not to have his room of choice. He seemed the type who got what he wanted. “You’ve raised quite the little nationalist, Val.” He laughed then dragged his sleeping bag and pad to the other top-floor room, right next door to mine.
Lying awake to the moans and love sounds of Cinnamon, I decided my life could be a lot worse. I’d have to see more of Tino than I’d bargained for, but I could get used to drifting off this way. Out of the darkness Cinnamon took shape, as if materializing from a nearby planet onto my starship. She hovered in zero gravity, a weightless blanket over my chest. I twisted in the sheets, nuzzled my pillow until the hologram beside me shifted and rearranged itself: feathered hair framed her face; a braided bracelet clung to her wrist as she reached out to touch my cheek. But soon the noises in the next room turned to talk then silence, the face beside me disappeared, and I was alone again.
All around me I heard a faint clicking in the walls and a rustling sound that seemed to rise slowly from the house’s foundation. I’d only been trying to spook my sister when I’d said that an old lady had died on the upper floors, but on cloudy nights like this one, when no moon or starlight brightened my room and after the whole house had gone to sleep, I almost believed that the place was haunted, that a former owner was out to chase us away. Or perhaps Aunt Natalia had spirit-traveled from her mausoleum in Detroit. I remembered reading about a clerk in the White House who saw the ghost of Abraham Lincoln sitting on a bed and pulling off his boots. Eleanor Roosevelt, who used the Lincoln Bedroom as a study, said that she often sensed that a strange presence watched her while she worked. And several White House staffers over the years had felt a cold rush of air and seen chandeliers flicker and doors snap shut inexplicably, certain that Lincoln’s restless spirit drifted about them.
That night I tossed and turned, repeating “It’s just an old house” over and over until I fell asleep.
At breakfast the morning after the Democratic Convention ended, I hatched a plan to get back at Tino. As though his theft of my uncle’s wife weren’t enough, he’d also spoiled Jimmy Carter’s acceptance speech by imitating his soft, folksy accent and calling him a slave-state Jesus freak. Molly and I were eating Cheerios on the window seat of the living room when I saw that Tino and Cinnamon had still not moved their records, paperbacks and bags of clothes out of the front hallway. I looked around at our mostly empty house and thought of the word “naked,” picturing the couple asleep under the covers right now, yesterday’s clothes tossed on the floor.
I recalled the familiar nightmare of showing up at school without a stitch on. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” I said to Molly, “to embarrass Tino in front of everyone?” My sister had a daredevil streak that came out only at transitional times, so I figured I’d try to exploit it. I told her to sneak into the third-floor room next to mine and steal the couple’s clothes—“just like Tino stole Cinnamon from Uncle Line,” I said, appealing to her sense of measure for measure.
And with only the slightest hesitation—“Go on,” I urged her; “think of Line”—Molly put down her Cheerios and rushed up the steps. The little o’s in her cereal bowl looked like a chorus of schoolkids crying “ooooooo” after a dare. A minute later she returned, giggling, and dropped a paisley bandanna, hip-hugger jeans, a peasant shirt, a floral dress and underwear at my feet.
“Did they see you?” I asked.
She was laughing so hard her cheeks were red as a child’s wagon. “Tino yelled, ‘Come back, you little Sprite,”’ she said. “Who calls someone a can of pop?”
“That guy’s weird.” I picked up Cinnamon’s dress; its threadbare softness tickled my arms. “Quick. Let’s hide the rest.” We grabbed their remaining clothes, and were stuffing them into the kitchen cupboards when my mother came in from the back yard.
“What are you devils doing?”
“Nothing. Just putting away the cereal.” I closed the cupboard door and thought of ways to distract her from checking. I had seen a copy of Steal This Book at the top of the pile of Cinnamon’s and Tino’s stuff, so I fetched it to show to my mother. “Remember we were talking about this book?” I said. “The one that ripped off Line’s idea?”
My mother took the paperback from me and leafed through it, reading the table of contents out loud: “Free Food, Free Clothing and Furniture, Free Transportation, Free Land, Free Housing, Free Medical Care, Free Communication, Free Play.” She turned to a chapter called Free Education. “This one starts out fine. He’s talking about auditing classes. I see nothing wrong with sitting in the back of a huge auditorium and listening to a lecture. Even if you’re not paying for it, that doesn’t hurt anyone.” My mother flipped the pages. “But then listen: ‘The only reason you should be in college is to destroy it.’ That’s vintage Abbie Hoffman. He makes sense for a second and then says something crazy.” She showed me a page titled People’s Chemistry, then read the subheadings: “Stink Bomb, Smoke Bomb, Molotov Cocktail, Sterno Bomb, Aerosol Bomb, Pipe Bomb. See what he’s calling for? Out-and-out revolution.”
I wondered if the communards had ever been revolutionaries or if they’d bring chaos to the school. Now that they lived at the seat of government, they could plan something radical and drag our students into it. I imagined Cinnamon dressed up like Patty Hearst, in a slick beret, her top buttons undone, an heiress to billions storming a bank with an assault rifle on her hip. Sexy, I had to admit.
But my mother took the look on my face as concern. “Don’t worry about these guys, if that’s what you mean. They’re hippies. They’re into peace and love and Janis Joplin. The yippies, Black Panthers and Weathermen—they were a different story. They were guerrillas.”
Molly laughed at the word “gorillas,” and I seized the opportunity to ask for the book back. “I don’t want this around my house,” my mother said, slipping the paperback into her Naugahyde purse.
Molly was standing in the doorway closest to the living room, a look of excitement on her face. “Someone’s coming down the stairs,” she squealed, and ran out the back door.
“What’s wrong with your sister?” my mother asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
But it was only Line, in cutoff jeans and a Jersey Maid Yogurt T-shirt. Somehow he managed to get all kinds of free stuff by writing companies and saying, “I love your product.” I would be honored if you’d send me any promotional items so I can tell all my friends about ... the stunning brightness of All-Temperature Cheer ... the healing power of Curads ... the incredible suction system of Electrolux vacuum cleaners ... the delicious taste of Jersey Maid! Tino liked to tease him and call him a sellout, but I thought the idea was ingenious.
“How’d you sleep?” My mother poured my uncle a cup of black coffee.
“I might need a different room.” He nodded dolefully toward the ceiling. “I’m right under the lovebirds.”
“Oh, dear,” my mother said and turned to me. “Why don’t you go give your father a hand, Daniel. He’s cutting back the ivy.”
For the next several hours I helped weed, rake and bag our jungle of a front yard. I couldn’t believe how fast the greenery grew in this city. I knew that George Washington had chosen D.C. for its strategic location along the Potomac and at the intersection of north and south, and I could feel what the city must have been like then, a hardship post built on swampland. By lunchtime Molly had gone back inside to help Linc and my mother clean the downstairs, while my father and I went out to Roy Rogers to pick up boxes of fried chicken.
We were all sitting in the den, paper napkins spread in our laps, when Tino and Cinnamon appeared. They stood hand in hand at the threshold between the den and front hall, framed like a painting of the Fall of Man, only minus the fig leaves and the looks of disgrace.
Molly screamed and covered her eyes. My mother fumbled a biscuit and nearly dropped it. My father stood up, as if to offer this Adam and Eve a refuge. Linc sedately finished his drumstick and wiped his beard with the back of his hand.
“Afternoon.” Tino waved. His private business looked like a Groucho Marx mask flipped upside down. “What’s for lunch?”
“How about some clothes?” My father checked behind him to see if Molly and I were watching. Molly had turned her chair around, her eyes on the floor. I looked down too, but under the V of my brow I glimpsed Cinnamon, pale and hipless, her hands half concealing the russet triangle of her crotch, her small nipples peeking through her curtain of hair. Before I lowered my head completely I could have sworn she smiled at me.
“We usually come to supper in proper attire,” Tino said. “But a certain wood nymph visited our room this morning and made off with our clothes.”
“And why would someone do that?” my father asked.
“Perhaps you should query your children. It’s youth that keep company with sprites and fairies.”
“Daniel?” my father said.
I had no skill for pranks, and couldn’t remember a single instance when I’d gotten away with something. I knew that Tino and Cinnamon could have come downstairs wrapped in their bed sheet or shielded with pillows; they could have grabbed towels from the second-floor bathroom, or at least made some effort to cover themselves. But since Tino, especially, had no shame, he could stand before us all, bare as the day he was born, and in so doing claim his victory. Molly and I had not avenged Uncle Line; we’d only worsened his despair by arranging this portrait of infidelity. Tino didn’t have to say “Enough is enough”—he had already won—so without a word of explanation I ran to the kitchen, opened the cupboards and brought back the box of clothes.
But when I returned, Tino had gone out to the front porch for all our neighbors to see.
“Get back in here,” my father demanded.
“Take it easy, bro.” Tino flashed a peace sign. “I was going to make a bathrobe out of that American flag. But no can do.”
I threw him his clothes, and he took his sweet time climbing into his underwear and hip-huggers.
Across 16th a young black woman stood on her porch looking in our direction. But she was too far away to catch an eyeful. She yelled at someone inside her house, and a moment later yanked open her screen door and disappeared.
Cinnamon slipped her babydoll dress over her head and came out to join us. “Looks like someone took your flag,” she said to my father.
The flag and flagpole were missing. Only the bracket remained.
My father turned to me, his face flushing. “Is this another one of your pranks, Daniel?”
I looked to my mother, Molly and Line, gathered at the door, a troika of expressions: anger, disapproval, resignation.
“I’m innocent,” I said, but I knew no one believed me.