Burning Woods, Oregon, 1977
As summer took hold of the Siuslaw, the populace freed their mildewed souls in prostration to the sun. Layers came off and people flopped their soft, over-wintered bodies onto towels by the river. It was the time of year when people became amnesiacs about the preceding nine months of rain, gushing to one another, “Why would we live anywhere else?” For the kids, summer break from school meant bike rides, swimming in clear crisp lakes, and picnicking relatively mosquito free. The brief reprieve from the eternal drizzle allowed for hikes and the harvesting of sweet, sun-shined fruits, as the grass crinkled like paper at the ankles and people explored their territory anew. But stark sunshine creates stark shadow, and in the darkest shade of peaceful moments can lurk the most vicious of things.
Alice and Sal, or “Sally” as she was known only on her birth certificate and to Alice’s parents, laid their pasty bodies out on their towels under the sun on a slim, gray strip of beach lining the local swimming hole. Sal wore board shorts and a running bra that kept her almost nonexistent breasts firmly in place. Alice, always up for a little attention, wore a crochet bikini she’d made herself, the loose weave revealing flashes of pink nipple and hinting at the mound of soft blonde fur as she flipped onto her back and arched up toward the sun. Boys watched them from above where everyone parked their cars on the gravel shoulder, watching them flip back and forth like skewers in the hot sun. The guys whistled, but the two girls didn’t deign to acknowledge them. They only had eyes for one another.
Sal clocked the way Alice arched her back and watched as a trickle of sweat formed between her breasts. She wondered what it would taste like were she to test her tongue against Alice’s soft, glowing skin. When Alice lifted her sunglasses and found Sal looking at her in that particular way, her heart raced and she made sure to arch a little higher, to let her legs fall apart and sway back and forth, catching the sun on her long, smooth slopes. Both girls wondered the same thing but felt different kinds of guilt about their attraction to one another. Sal’s guilt was rooted in the feeling that growing up on a commune, with hippies, had sculpted her into some kind of perversion of nature. She wondered if the feelings she had for Alice had gurgled up from the wellspring of free love she had been forced to drink from and whether that well was better off capped and boarded up forever. Alice, on the other hand, had been assured by her Catholic upbringing that with no uncertain doubt the feelings for Sal she let roll through her body and shiver her skin to attention were the work of the devil himself. To act on her feelings would be the most sinful transgression of her fifteen years, and one she feared might bring fire and brimstone to her doorstep.
“How can you be cold?” Sal asked, putting her hand on Alice’s goose-bumped forearm. “I’m sweating like a pig.”
“Not cold. Just got the shivers, I guess.” Alice flipped her glasses back down to hide the obvious tenderness in her eyes and rolled over onto her stomach again.
A lifted truck started up on the road above and a male voice shouted something unintelligible as the giant tires peeled out from the gravel. Gravel tumbled down the hill, sifting into the enormous ferns, and a fine mist of gray dust lifted up over the girls and settled flat on the air, shading them with a veil of uncertainty.
Later in the week, Alice walked alone along the highway toward Sal’s house on the commune. All summer, Alice had been waiting for yet dreading Sal’s going-away party. A year ahead in school, Sal was leaving town to study biology at Northern Arizona University, and Alice would miss her terribly when she went away. Under the impending deadline imposed by Sal’s plane ticket and packed bags, Alice finally decided she needed to tell her something she’d never mustered the courage to tell anyone in her sixteen years. She had to admit she was in love with her. The act would take courage from somewhere deep within the pale well Alice called a self. The risk and potential outcome of such a confession horrified her into a state of nausea and sweaty-palmed nervousness. As she walked the two miles from her parents’ orchard to the commune driveway, she wiped her hands on her blue cotton dress and nervously plucked hairs from her eyebrows, the pricks of pain keeping her steadied.
Sal greeted her with a double-armed wave as Alice walked the last hundred feet up the driveway toward the main house, past jaunty signs painted with flowers and spirals that said, “BREATHE” or “The LIGHT is Within YOU” stuck in the ground as a sort of empirical greeting for any and all venturing onto the communally owned land. Sal grew bigger and more real with each graveled step Alice took toward her, until she loomed large as an oak or an oncoming train. As the two embraced, Alice was not sure the light was within her, or that she was capable of breathing, but she did her damnedest to fake that she was breezing through the day like a samara on the wind.
In preparation for the party, Alice and Sal helped hang strings of lights outside, dragging feet upon feet of extension cords from the big house in order to hang a chandelier from the largest oak tree above the enormous reclaimed wood tables. The commune may only have been two miles from Alice’s parents’ house, but culturally it was light-years away. People wore corduroy and suede fringe, jewelry that jangled, bangs or long hair parted in the middle. There was no Sunday dress code except dirtied knees on coveralls from helping the garden. Worship involved not the Lord and Savior and His Son but the Sun in the Sky or a many-armed blue female elephant. They discussed commune business in a “forum” and danced regularly to exotic stringed instrumental music, winding their arms through the air like they were braiding the invisible. Sometimes they did a dance where they all held hands and wound the entire group from a loose and limbering spiral into a tight knot, their bodies crushed up against one another in a spiraled lump. Alice wasn’t really sure of the point of the exercise, but always played along because she loved the people who lived there, the way they laughed from their diaphragms and not their throats and hugged strangers for far longer than she had ever seen her own parents touch anyone. But most of all, she loved that these were the people who had helped create her Sal.
Sal’s chin-length, curly brown hair and dark skin seemed to suck the sun to it. Her almond eyes betrayed a strong mix of cultures in her blood. There was a particular reticence among commune children to pinpoint who exactly begat them, as often these facts were as fluid as a storyteller’s tales, shifting and moving like sand under the wind’s guile. Alice knew Sal’s father well, as he was a prominent figure on the commune, but whenever Alice asked her about her absentee mother, Sal said with a smirk, “I am a daughter of the earth, remember?” And that summer, it seemed to Alice that the dusty earth of the southwestern deserts were all Sal wanted to talk about. Alice began to be jealous of the dust itself. It seemed to her that a place with things called Gila monsters, little pink-and-black dragons that once they bit you were almost impossible to unlatch from your leg, was more science fiction than a region of her own country. Sal talked about shrikes and thrashers, Mojave greens and kangaroo rats. She described the life cycle of saguaros and the skeletons of cholla. She spoke in reverent tones of a collection of plants and animals that more resembled a Dr. Seuss landscape than anything Alice had ever known stalking the coast range Sitka of the low-lying Cascade range or the oak savannah of the Willamette Valley. As they hung the last of the white lights, weaving the wires around the trunk of the oak, Alice promised she would come visit first chance she got, as long as Sal kept her safe from monsters. Sal laughed, the deep kind she liked to call the “hippie guffaw,” and put her arm around Alice’s much taller, bony shoulders. Sal’s head rested there. She promised she would do her damnedest.
That evening at the party, the girls started a huge fire in the pit and mingled with the other guests. They were given beers with a wink by the eldest member of the commune and told to “be responsible.” Busses, Westfalias, and Volkswagen vans in candy colors rolled up the driveway and parked on the grass pell-mell, the loud doors releasing vaporous clouds that smelled like some kitchen experiment burning on the stove.
“A party here is really just an excuse for people to smoke way too much grass and participate in the doctrine of free love,” Sal whispered to Alice.
“I didn’t know regular love cost anything,” Alice said.
“They say all love comes at a cost.”
“Now that’s not very bohemian thinking.”
With the bonfire lit, the strawberries from the garden picked and still warm from the sunshine, the girls sat down with the rest of the party and Sal handed Alice another beer concealed in a red plastic cup, letting her hand linger a little while on Alice’s as she transferred the beverage.
“Try it with the fresh strawberries. It’s amaaazing,” Sal said.
Alice was in a sort of ecstasy with the sweet, warm strawberries and bubbles dancing on her tongue. Emboldened by the alcohol, she gazed seductively into the fire, thinking of how to get Sal alone to reveal her feelings. She was lost in a scenario involving Sal, some tall grass, and moonlight by the frog pond, when she noticed a small, balding, blond man watching her from across the fire. He wore a tan suede jacket with fringe and beaded Native American moccasins, though clearly he himself was not. His thinning hair glowed almost white despite a fair amount of natural grease smoothing it back around his ears. Around his neck hung a bundle of necklaces including what appeared to be a shark or dinosaur tooth and a very tiny spoon. His eyes were wide, rimmed in pink, and a little crazed. Alice wondered how long he’d been staring at her like he wanted to eat her. She set down the bowl of strawberries and wiped her mouth, suddenly feeling self-conscious.
Next thing Alice knew, as though he had moved with the shifting of the smoke from the fire, the man was sitting on the bench next to her sidling closer and closer.
“You sure were enjoying those berries,” he said, leaning in.
“Ah, yes,” Alice said politely, waving the bonfire smoke from her eyes. “They’re from the communal garden.”
“Of Eden?” The man said, laughing far too loudly at his own proto-joke. Up close, Alice could see the broken capillaries in the whites of his eyes and could smell an unfamiliar acrid odor on his breath. She looked around the fire to see if anyone was watching them, if anyone knew this man. Sal had been called away to help with something in the barn, leaving Alice to contend with the man alone. He didn’t introduce himself, but instead just stared at the bowl of fruit in her lap.
“Would you like one?” Alice said, again defaulting to a politeness her Christian upbringing had drilled into her, unsure what else to say or do.
“Indeed,” the man said, plucking the largest one, letting his hand linger too long in the bowl sitting in her lap, then eating it with little grunts. Alice looked around for Sal to see if she’d returned, but she couldn’t locate her among the crowd. Alice wasn’t really sure what was going on, but she felt a flight instinct kick in.
“Excuse me a moment,” she said, getting up.
“Don’t go,” the man grabbed her arm. She pulled it out of his grasp, hard, almost knocking herself over.
She walked away from the firelight and lit-up trees toward the big farmhouse, the beer feeling less ecstatic now in her body, more like the rocking of a ship in a storm back and forth in her veins. She stumbled through the dark and toward the porch light, twisting her ankle in a hole in the ground. She walked the rest of the way more slowly, the pain in her ankle growing warm and sharp.
Inside the farmhouse, she walked slowly through the living room while touching all the exotic items on display. There were large Turkish silver stars embossed with intricate patterns or with cutout patterns of flowers and vines. There was one extremely large sketch hanging over the fireplace of a man and woman lying down, entwined and naked. You couldn’t see their faces, but you could tell by the intimate and gentle way they held each other that they were in love. On the couches there were throws and pillows in bright hues and mismatched patterns, vases filled with dried flowers on the end tables, and tapestries on the wall from unknown countries. There was nary a cross with Jesus crucified as could be found in every room of her parents’ house. The closest this place came to a representation of Jesus was perhaps Kenneth, the longhaired bearded fellow who lived in the addition off the kitchen and made driftwood sculptures. She walked upstairs to the bathroom, the pain in her ankle biting with each step.
She was sitting on the toilet spacing out, trying to regain her wits and stop the rocking, when a loud rap on the door startled her.
“Occupied,” she said quietly.
“Is that you, strawberry?” a male voice asked.
“Who?” she said, pulling up her underwear and smoothing her dress down. She flushed the toilet and turned on the faucet, washing her hands for a long time. “There’s another bathroom downstairs,” she finally yelled. She paused for a long time, looking through the cabinet and inspecting the bottles and tubes one by one—face cream, hemorrhoid cream, Tylenol, nettle tincture, arnica. She sorted and resorted the many toothbrushes before finally unlocking the door. Her hand paused on the handle before she opened it, but she had to go out at some point, and it had been quiet outside in the hallway for some time. But when she opened the door, the moccasined man was right there, quietly waiting.
“I thought you left me,” he said, leaning up against the wall. “You offered me your fruit then ran away.”
“Um,” Alice said, attempting to sidle around him in the narrow hallway. “I didn’t offer you anything.”
“You were seducing me from across the fire all night,” he said. “Don’t think I didn’t notice.”
“I was just spacing out,” Alice said, for some reason still bound by the tight boundaries of a politeness that had been disciplined into her with each lesson in Sunday school, each prayer before a meal. She felt roped by the confines of graciousness and courtesy when all she wanted to do was run.
“What you need is to loosen up,” the man said, offering her white powder from a teeny round jar, heaping the powder into the spoon hanging from his neck.
“No, thank you.”
He snorted the powder himself, then pinned her to the wall and kissed her in a sort of vicious way. She squirmed, but he held her by the shoulders, thrusting himself against her, holding her captive against the wall. She had never felt or seen an actual penis, but an image of what was grinding against her flew into her head like some toothy, demonic creature escaped from a black hole.
“No.” She managed to get her mouth away from his for a moment. “No, no, no.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” the man said, pulling her by the shoulders into the bedroom with a pile of coats on the bed. “Don’t be so disagreeable, honey.” He threw her down into the coats and closed the door behind him. She felt her ankle twist again in pain.
“I have to go,” she said trying to get up out of the coats. “I don’t want to.” To her own ears she sounded like a toddler.
Then, as if she were moving three times slower than the man, he was on her, his pants were down and her skirt up, and a new pain was ripping through her middle, far stronger than the throbbing in her ankle. The man was inside her and grunting like he had been while eating the strawberries, pinning her shoulders down but with his head turned up toward the heavens, as if to close his eyes against his own sin. She tried to make a noise, but only a little hiss of an exhale like a deflating tire came out. The man put his hand over her mouth, his other forearm across her throat pressing down. Still he refused to look at her and her wide, horrified eyes. Her mouth covered, Alice looked for something to focus on beyond what was happening. Her eyes settled on a large spider in the corner of the room, making its way from one wall to another, pausing briefly in the corner as if to watch.
He got up quickly, pulled his pants back up, and said, “Thanks, doll.” As though she had given him something willingly.
He left the room and Alice buried herself in the coats, burrowing deeper like an unweaned kitten trying to hide, to find the smallest, darkest place she could. She wanted to cry huge, loud tears into the fibers of the partygoers’, coats, but nothing came out. She rolled and punched the coats with quiet fists. Fuck, fuck, fuck. She looked again for the spider, as though its witness mattered somehow, but it was gone. She stamped each and every coat with her fist. What had she done wrong? Clearly she had done something wrong. She wished she could rewind the evening and change every moment. She needed to restitch, to sow time into neat, orderly, understandable rows.
After what might have been minutes or hours lying there, Alice extracted herself from the coats and pulled up her underwear. Outside in a tree on the dark side of the house, a western screech owl made its call like a bouncing ball. It sounded to Alice like the creature was mocking her with its laugh. Ha-ha-haha-hahahaha. There were two bright streaks of red on her thighs like someone had rubbed strawberries on them. She felt sick and ran downstairs and out into the darkness where she threw up all the delicious fruit, the beer, everything she could, into the grass. She vowed she would never touch a beer or a strawberry again, as long as she lived, and walked back toward the light of the fire, trying not to limp.
Back at the fir, Sal asked her if she was okay, putting her arm around Alice’s broad, but somehow very fragile, shoulders.
“You were limping,” Sal said.
“I just twisted my ankle is all,” Alice lied.
“Can I help you?”
“No.”
She stared into the fire feeling emptied and knew that she would never be able to tell Sal any of it, that she loved her too much, that the blond man in moccasins had raped her. She felt simply empty. The man with the tiny spoon was nowhere in sight and Alice understood somewhere deep inside that she would probably never see him again. And then, as quickly as a rain cloud covers the sky, the atmosphere of the party turned chaotic. There was a sort of running around of headless chickens, as it were. Everyone was looking for answers to a question they didn’t understand.
“Where’d Donnie go?” Alice heard an unfamiliar man say from across the fire. “Son of a bitch owed me a pound of grass,” he mumbled, getting up to refill his cup.
“Don’t invite that dealer junkie over here again,” Sal’s dad Charles said from across the fire. “He’s not welcome here, and you know it, John.”
“He owed me a pound of grass, man. Relax, Mao.”
“Calling a Korean man Mao is not funny in any way, man. And your tone is not conducive to open communication, John.”
“And your tone sounds like an old dictator,” John said, slurring his words and tossing a spray beer from his cup. “King Charles the communisss dictator is not happy?”
“Somebody take John to lie down?” Charles asked the crowd of onlookers.
Drunken John was escorted to the house by Kenneth-the-Jesus substitute to sleep off his drink. The rest of the party continued, feebly trying to shake off the chaos. A woman came over and comforted Sal by putting her arm around her.
“John didn’t mean it,” she whispered. “Your dad is no dictator.” She whispered the word like it was the worst swear word in existence. “He’ll apologize tomorrow.”
“We can’t fix all the unkind men of the world, as much as we may try,” Charles said, settling in beside them, unsmiling. “And tomorrow doesn’t always fix what’s broken today.”
Alice suddenly understood this to be true. There were some universal truths about breaking. Plans break, bones break, and spirits break. She knew then that some people break whatever they want. Across the fire pit, Sal smiled and waved her hands in the air in conversation with an older woman, probably describing some beautiful desert creature she would be abandoning Alice for in a few days. Sal looked so innocent and in love with life. Like gravity pulling water to flow downward, all the affection she felt for Sal drained into resentment, pooling at her feet in the shadows of the flickering fire. Sal remained unbroken and was probably unbreakable, at that. She sat and watched the fire in a decidedly unsultry way. The way the fire moved and flickered on the wood pleased her. The destruction felt deliciously final. She looked around at all the people laughing, saying nothing about something, and all she wanted to do was to burn it all down, piece by piece.