Burning Woods, Oregon, 1994
On her way out of the house in the early morning, Lily stopped by her mom still splayed on the couch, mouth open and drooling on a needlepoint pillow of dogs wrestling. Lily felt for breath under Alice’s nose with the back of her hand, confirmed, then slipped out quietly and started the long walk up the driveway to wait for the school bus by the highway. There were barred owls out in the early dawn, hooting at her with some urgent message she felt too sleepy, or too human, to understand. Whoo-hoo-hoo-hoooo. Her science teacher mentioned that there was a pneumonic phrase for this call. Who-cooks-for-you? Who-cooks-for-you? Who did cook for Lily? Not Alice, certainly. As she waited for the bus to come rumbling up the highway, she leaned against a milepost marker, sighed, and wondered how her mother came to be the way she was. She shuffled her feet to keep warm, thinking about it. It seemed to Lily that Alice had a sort of perverse, destructive nature like a volcano or virus—she couldn’t exist without destroying something else in the process.
In third period science class, Lily sat next to Max at the raised lab desk, slowly stirring a hot bowl of pineapple mush. On the board, their teacher Mr. Janowicz drew a denatured enzyme, its once tightly curled form unfurled across the chalkboard like a garden snake, or a sperm, as Sarah pointed out through a crude, concealed hand gesture from across the row. Mr. Janowicz lectured on the effects of heat on the enzyme, how once it became denatured there was no way to wind it back into its previous form.
“Think about it this way,” Mr. Janowicz said. “You can’t unbake a cake, or unfry an egg. That’s because once heat is applied, the molecular structure is changed forever.”
Max doodled a picture in the margin of his notes of a decidedly unscientific scene—a dragon and a warlock doing battle with similar-looking denatured enzymes flying through the air all around them like lasers—not paying much attention to Mr. Janowicz’s lecture. At least some of it was getting through, Lily thought, looking at the little enzymes flying out of the wizard’s fingers. Or were they lightning bolts? Lily knew that no matter what, Max would still ace the test.
“Max? Care to join us?” Janowicz asked, peering over their desk at Max’s drawing before returning to the front of the classroom.
“Ooh. Caught red-handed,” Lily whispered.
“That’s totally racist,” Max said, cocking his head, deadpan. “Like saying thieving red Indians.”
“Really?” Lily asked, heat rising yet again in her neck. “Dude. Sorry.”
“Nah. Just fucking with you,” he said, poking her in the rib, ignoring the narrow-eyed gaze from Janowicz. He scribbled a note in the margin below the dragon and warlock.
It’s actually Scottish in origin. It means to have blood on your hands after the hunt.
Blood. After the hunt. Lily became acutely aware of his presence not inches from her right thigh, her side and waist, the curve of her ribcage and cheek. She could still feel the point where his finger met her rib. She saw him with his nose in an etymological dictionary. She saw him after the hunt with bloodied hands, straddling a slain animal. She felt how close their own bloods were to one another. It was a matter of inches. Eleven, maybe. She stirred her puree and added a little more hot water. She told herself, Denature those enzymes. Focus! Her cheek burned, her fruit steamed, and she could smell Mr. Janowicz’s garlic breath from just outside her field of vision. The combination overwhelmed her, leading her down a familiar dark tunnel, releasing a spreading blackness in her brain. The tunnel led her into a new and different form. Sound wound in on itself and disappeared like someone abruptly turning down the radio dial. She was unfurled—she was the snake—as she slid down and out of her seat. The world faded away into complete darkness and she heard Sarah’s somewhat blasé voice, as if from a valley away:
“Mr. Janowicz. Lily fainted again.”
When she woke, she lay prone on the floor. Her vision returned slowly. Mr. Janowicz and his strong garlic odor bent over her, his white dome of backlit hair glowing in the fluorescent lights. He snapped two fingers in front of her face, holding her head and neck with the other.
“Welcome back,” he said. With her head in his hand and his glowing white, frizzy hair luminous under the fluorescence, Lily thought they almost looked related. Maybe he could be her father? She closed her eyes a moment and pretended he was, which felt kind of nice, the knowing.
“Nothing broken?”
“Nah. Not that I know of.”
“You have a ride home?”
“No,” she said, closing her eyes again.
“I’ll take her.” Max peeked out from behind him. “She lives on the way to my uncle Boomer’s.”
Lily felt the blood returning to her heart and limbs, faster and faster. She cursed Max a little for his control over her blood flow. Any self-possessed girl should be able to take care of her own oxygenation needs. Any feminist daughter knew that.
After school, Lily gazed out the passenger’s side of Max’s old Ford truck as they waited to turn out of the parking lot onto the street. Two of the Dickerson boys, junior Todd and fifth-year senior Dempsey, walked in front of the truck and went down into football hike positions and growled like they were going to charge the truck. They found their own antics extremely funny as they walked off up the street kicking inanimate objects.
“The accent’s really on the first syllable of those boys’ last name, isn’t it?” Max said, shaking his head.
“Absolutely.”
“You know why I did that rain dance last fall?”
“Because they’re total douchebags?”
“Yes, but also because those boys actually took the time to save up their feces and leave them on the hood of my truck. I mean, do you know what kind of planning and foresight that must have taken? They probably busted the one working neural pathway between the two of them.”
“Man. I’m sorry. People are shitty.”
Max laughed. “Pun intended?”
“Absolutely.” Lily gazed in bashful self-satisfaction into the blurring trees as the truck picked up speed heading toward the highway. She enjoyed seeing everyone disperse after school, as though the density of so many youths in one place were unnatural, dangerous. There was relief in the untangling of souls back to their wooded nooks. Max revved the engine as they headed away from the school, and as though he had read her mind, yelled out the window:
“Run, rabbits!”
Kids bussed in from teensy towns like Burning Woods or Logsden that dotted the patchwork Siuslaw Forest and Willamette Valley to come to high school in Philomath. Some of the “towns” were no more than an intersection with a fruit stand or a market selling beer, fishing supplies, and candy. Every day after school, said rabbits scattered back to their corners of the musty, wet woods. They fell back to their logging, milling, or farming families. They retreated to their back-to-the-landers or skittered back to the commune. The green squares of the checkerboard forest somehow managed to pad the enormous gaps between people and their politics. The freaks nestled in nicely next to the rednecks, the trees acting as silent wardens of the peace.
Some twelve miles away from school, Max turned off the highway onto the forested two-lane highway out to Lily’s house. The gray sky hung threateningly low and the dark green leaves quivered in the overcast light, waving a manic plea for sunshine as the Pacific squalls shook them up. When they dropped down from the blacktop onto the gravel of Lily’s driveway, something big in the bed of the truck made a loud thud.
“What’s back there?” Lily asked, eyeing a blue tarp covering something large in the bed.
“Elk.”
“Seriously? Dude, that’s totally out of season,” she pointed out, puffing up a little, self-righteous as a dandelion bloom. “It’s spring.”
“I know, I know,” Max said. “Relax, kitten.” He made a tiger-scratch motion with one hand while he cranked the manual steering hard to go around a curve. “Someone poached him out on my uncle’s cabin on the rez, probably for the velvet antlers. There’s some big market for velvet. Supposedly cures cancer. Helps with the sex drive, or some shit.”
“Really?”
“Who knows. But people apparently take the ground-up horn in capsules or teas. Some ancient Chinese hoo-ha. People will do anything for a boner. Anyway, my uncle chased off the poacher and gave me this little elk here to process.”
“Well, ashes to ashes,” Lily said, hearing her grandmother’s words caught in her throat, feeling just about as prissy as her grandmother would have at the mere mention of a boner.
“More like elk to jerky,” he said. “We don’t exactly get down with the King James in my family.”
“Right. I mean, neither do we. Not really. Not since my grandparents died, anyway.”
They rode the remainder of the long gravel driveway in silence. So he will be straddling a slain animal, after all, Lily thought. As her dilapidated white farmhouse came into view, Lily felt a little embarrassed by the dirty set of Tibetan prayer flags flapping in the wind, and by the prominent scrap-metal Gaia sculpture out front. Moreover, she was washed by a weird sense of shame at the giant carved Native American wooden salmon in the side yard, leaping, forever leaping, into the air. As if seeing herself for the first time through Max’s eyes, it became clear to Lily that her mother’s world was one of appropriation. She tried on beliefs like they were costumes in a dress-up chest; hers was a sort of spiritual tea party.
“How’s Donnie Jr. doing?” Max asked.
“Aw, she hates wearing the cone. But I have to say, it’s kind of hilarious.”
“Well, take care of that sweet little duck of yours,” he said, knocking her gently on the jaw with a slow-motion punch as she stretched to get down from the tall truck cab.
She watched him as he backed up and turned around, rumbling fast up the gravel driveway, the blue-tarp lump in the back of the truck slumping to one side. Did Max just wink at me? She felt a bloom of warmth where he had gently grazed her chin with his knuckles and had to sit down on scrap Gaia’s knee for a minute to let the dizziness pass. She was curled up, sharing Gaia’s lap with a sculpted version of the earth as constructed from old tires, fenders, radiator tubes, springs, and tractor parts, when it started to rain. The drops came slowly at first, then poured cool and fast down her face. She closed her eyes and let the water roll over her, each drop pinging loud on the metal goddess, and tried to melt back into some sort of state she could understand.
Inside the house was empty and cold. It felt as if no one had been in there since the morning hours. The patchwork quilt was crumpled on the floor next to the couch and the previous afternoon’s dishes remained in the sink. Ladybugs clung to the hole in the wall, but in significantly smaller numbers. One of her mom’s books on feminism was propped open on the kitchen table next to an empty magnum of wine. It read:
The sort of flaw that is often excused in men—the precipitous fall from grace—is commonly perceived as “ruin” when observed in females.
After reading the passage, Lily went to the library and leafed through the dictionary on its little podium to look up the word “precipitous.” The second definition was “very high and steep” and she thought of the quote again, picturing naked women falling off mountain peaks like pink flightless birds flapping their arms, a pile of them squirming below, ruined. She closed the book and put some kindling in the wood stove and started it with a match. Two days before it had been sunny and warm, and here she was again, the air in the house cold as winter. Oregon spring is like that, Lily thought. It would love and leave you with the passing of a cloud over the sun.
Rubbing her hands together for warmth, Lily could see the partially fogged window to her mom’s sculpture studio, the back of her mom’s friend Darla’s head taking up most of the space with her giant black bouffant, the two of them presumably imbibing and talking shit about recent ex-boyfriends. Darla went through at least as many boyfriends as Alice, almost as though it were some competition. The two tried not to overlap, but in their town that was an almost statistical impossibility. Smoke curled from the chimney in the studio and Darla’s old Dodge Dart waited patiently in the drive.
Lily walked outside and circled the small studio like a coyote. The one window was cracked open to let in air but was almost completely obscured by condensation. Lily heard the two friends’ voices drifting out the space and paused to eavesdrop. They slurred their words a little.
“You know, that fucker Randy wasn’t even good in bed,” Alice said. Darla cackled and they both started laughing. “Like two minutes, tops. I swear.”
“Good riddance. He was also not father material, if you ask me.”
“You really think I need a father for Lily? Naaaah,” Alice said. “That girl is better off without one. She’s a genius, you know.”
“She’s very bright, for sure,” Darla said. Lily peeked up and saw them pouring some more wine into handled mason jars—the “fancy” glasses, her mom would joke to friends.
“It’s almost scary sometimes. Like I don’t really know if she could be an evil genius or just a genius. Did I ever tell you why I named her Lily?”
“No. Why?”
Alice threw back her wine, paused for a long moment with her face pointed skyward, as if to reconsider telling the story, then finally said, “Because when I found out I was pregnant at fifteen, I tried to get rid of the baby by drinking a whole bottle of Lillet I stole from my parents’ cupboard. I was almost two months along. My parents found me passed out in the pasture with cuts on my body, and when I woke up they were force-feeding me ipecac to make me throw up. I guess I must have spilled the news in my drunken state. They carried me inside into bed where they bandaged my cuts. Then they tied my arms and legs in place with belts.”
“That’s horrible,” Darla said, sounding a bit sobered.
“That’s just how they were. Well, my mom, anyway. My dad said so little I feel like I hardly even knew him, you know? He certainly never stood up to my mother. She turned me over in the field that day and must have thought, ‘You’re not going to die? Good. Now go stay in your cell.’” Alice poured herself more wine. “After a few days they took off the belts. But they locked me in my room for most of the first trimester and kept me under supervision for the entire pregnancy. When I had to throw up from morning sickness, they gave me a bowl. I peed in a bedpan.”
“Alice, I’m so sorry.”
“Well, you know, my mother believed it was a child of God they were protecting. But that little girl, she was meant to be here, child of God or Gaia or whomever. She just grew and grew into the most intelligent thing. She changed my whole life, that little one. I’d never really known love until I met her.”
“I bet your mom tried to own that victory.”
“Oh, absolutely. But I refuse to give her credit for that one. Things would have worked out as they were meant to without her ‘meddling.’” From her place below the window, Lily could just see her mother’s long fingers perform dramatic air quotes.
“No kidding,” Darla said, the sound of her chair screeching on the concrete floor as she rose to embrace her friend. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”
Lily slumped under the window as it started to rain again, her back picking up little splinters from the cedar shingles as she slid down to the ground. She could care less about a few splinters. This was the first she’d heard of her mother’s in-utero attempt to off her, but somehow she was not completely surprised. She could hear quiet sniffles from her mom and Darla as they embraced inside. And here you are the one crying? she thought as she listened to the sobs. Because everything is about you, isn’t it? The rain from the roof dripped off on her in a line on her shoulders, her skin like ice. She decided she didn’t want to hear any more and slunk away from the window to curl up into a ball at the back corner of the building, out of earshot. She held tight to her legs as she rocked and looked out over the misty field.
The harrier was back, rising in the distance. Lily wanted badly to cry, to feel something. But her whole body felt numb. The harrier dropped, missed, dropped, and missed again. Shit, she thought. I’m not even supposed to be here. I guess every damn one of us hunts blind. The closest her body could get to crying was a strange itching behind her eyeballs. She rubbed at her dry eyes with her flannel as the harrier landed in the distance under a tree. The great bird adjusted her soggy wings and something dark and acrid settled in Lily’s center. She felt pure rage, digging her already black fingernails into the dirt. Well, at least I feel something, she thought. But as far as feelings go, it was not the welcome kind.
Lily went up to her room, put on a CD of the band Veruca Salt as loud as she could, and stayed there. Every lyric seemed to mock her newfound sense of shame. Can’t fight the seether—I try to ram her into the ground. After a while, she moved to The Breeders, but they spoke the same kind of truth. Spitting in the wishing well for sure. An hour or so later, she heard Darla drive away and the sound of the kitchen door squeal as her mother came inside. The album ended and in the abrupt absence of the bass line she heard the clank of dishes being stacked and rinsed in the sink drift up. She knew this probably meant her mother would be on an upcycle. She could almost smell the remorse wafting up on the air. There would be folded sheets and limited drinking in the house for at least a few days, possibly a week or even two. Her mother would make breakfast and send her to school with a complete and balanced lunch. They would go through all this again—pretending they were a normal, functional family.
But there was no point in holding her breath during this phase. It would fall all apart like petals from the tulip. It’s the flower that ends before it’s done beginning, she’d heard someone say. Day by day the petals would fall and there they would be again two naked stems of women. A ruined pile. After overhearing Alice’s confession about trying to abort her, something had shifted in the way Lily perceived her mother. There was a new chasm between them that was too wide to leap over. No reconciliatory hugs or gifts bought out of guilt could close the gap. Lily found herself on her own, the tie that binds a young girl to her mother severed. She still loved her, but from a distance.
Feeling a bit freed by the recent untethering, Lily decided that while her mother was consumed with her brief redemption, she would have to take action of her own. She put in another CD—Nirvana’s In Utero. She scoffed. In utero, she thought. What if she had succeeded? As Kurt Cobain’s thoughts on nothingness and pain seemed more acute than they ever had before, she told herself, Fuck it. She decided to seduce Max by the light of the upcoming lunar eclipse. There would have to be a picnic and booze involved. If it was how she’d come into the world, she thought, she might as well own the forces that had shaped her and harness them for her own. She knew she was not watertight. The cold from outside had seeped deep into her bones and she could almost feel something dark and moldy growing there. Her new independence felt intoxicating. The idea that she could have been killed before she ever lived made her want to live faster, harder, before someone took it all away.