ONE AFTERNOON ELIZABETH BROUGHT a friend home to study for a Shakespeare test, a young woman I have to list as the first bona fide hippie I had ever met. We were living in a farmhouse in a little community in Alabama by this time, several miles from the university where I was enrolled in graduate school. Elizabeth had gone a little stir crazy staying home with our son, who was by now eighteen months old—we were calling the baby Robin, according to plan—and so she had begun taking a few university classes that appealed to her. She was happy, she was making friends of her own for the first time since we moved into the farmhouse. I was happy too, now that I was back in school and no longer tied to a job I wasn’t well suited for. Right out of college we had lived in Florida for a while, where we had jobs in the publics schools, and I had been pretty unhappy.
I was immediately attracted to this girl who came home to study with Elizabeth, this hippie, whose name turned out to be Twyla, a strong painful attraction that is not really explained by her appearance.
Twyla was not a beauty by any standards. She had feverish, unhealthy-looking pale blue eyes and a weak chin. She had big feet and knobby knees. I didn’t care. She was beautiful anyway. I couldn’t take my eyes away from her. She was slender and barefoot, her straight blond hair hung down past her waist. It had never been cut. She wore no shoes or bra or other underclothes—this was immediately apparent through her thin washed-out dress. Eventually I was able to look down the front of her dress when she bent over and I saw her small breasts and pale, pale nipples.
She was a California girl—seventh generation, she let slip easily into conversation—raised in Palo Alto and had taken her first lover when she was fourteen, “a dirty hippie,” as her parents supposedly called the guy, who was himself twenty-two or twenty-three at the time, a graduate student at Stanford. It had been true love. They would have been married if her parents weren’t so awful. He showed her how to smoke marijuana and seven times they had dropped acid together. I was strangely thrilled by this information.
Elizabeth said, “You’re lucky you—”
I interrupted before Elizabeth could finish her sentence. “For heaven’s sake, don’t be so judgmental, Lizzie.” This silenced her and I flushed with embarrassment that I had been obviously eager to hear Twyla’s every word.
This guy shot Twyla up with heroine once, she said, because she needed to experience everything, even the bad stuff, but he wouldn’t let her do it again because he loved her so much. Twyla said, “I dug it, man. He could do anything to me when I was high and I was just, like, there.” He had taught her to love the Rolling Stones, whose albums she wanted to have buried with her when she died.
Elizabeth tried to bring the conversation back around to Shakespeare, but Twyla loved to talk about herself. Her second lover was a forty-year-old black man with expensive suits and a big belly. He smoked big cigars. She told us all this in the most offhand sort of way, as she and Elizabeth began to make study plans. My head was spinning. She told us of many lovers. She said she had learned to pee standing up, that’s why she didn’t wear underwear, it was just so cool, you just spread your legs and let it fly, man, whew, you ought to try it sometime, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth said, “I’d get it all over myself.”
Twyla said, “I can show you some techniques.”
I left the room and they studied for a while. I pretended to be indifferent to their work, but I kept skulking through the kitchen trying to hear what they were saying. It was clear to me that Elizabeth was really just tutoring Twyla for the test. Twyla was picking her brain, Elizabeth didn’t mind. Eventually I heard them stray from the subject of Shakespeare and on to personal matters. Later Elizabeth showed her around the house we lived in, the small white farmhouse beneath spreading oaks and pecans. “It’s our dream house,” she said, “but it’s not as perfect as it looks.” She told her that when we first moved in you could see right through the walls. The wind swept through these cracks like an arctic gale, and headlights from cars on the road at night blared in just as easily and woke us from sleep. During a bad cold spell the first winter, the water in the dog’s waterbowl froze in the kitchen. We piled covers up sky high on our son Robin, and once or twice had to move the whole family out of the house and into someplace warm. Our fuel was stored in a propane tank in the backyard, and as there was no gauge on the tank to show the amount of fuel remaining, the tank sometimes ran out, leaving the house frigid and the stove unworkable. The guy with the propane company refused to deliver fuel on weekends, so we had to exist for two, even three days at a time with no heat or cooking fuel. Elizabeth referred to the bathroom as the Black Hole of Calcutta—it was tiny and windowless and dark, with no shower and barely any space to turn around. The toilet depended on a shallow well with a defective pump for water to flush. Not only would the pump “lose its prime” and overheat and express its other many flaws, but sometimes the water level in the well would fall so low that there was nothing to draw up the pipes even if the pump was working. When the levels fell this low, the water had to be tested for safety, and invariably the test proved the water to be unsafe. Elizabeth told all this in a funny, appreciative way, not complaining, and I could tell the description of the place had had its effect on Twyla.
At first I thought she was simply infatuated, happy for Elizabeth and envious in a friendly way. Much later I understood that this was not true, that she was insanely jealous, pathologically maybe, and hated us for having what she could not and would do anything to destroy what we had. None of this did I suspect at the time, of course. I knew I should have left them alone to work, but I could not. I came into the room where they were studying. I had been looking after Robin, inside where I was spying and also outdoors at the swing set and feeding lumps of sugar through the fence to the goats.
“Okay if I come in for a while?”
Elizabeth said, “We’re taking a break.”
I stayed and stayed. I talked and talked. I became chatty and charming, or so I imagined. I was a fool, I knew I was. I tried to shut up, but I could not. I told every corny asinine thing I could think of. Suddenly nothing that I had to tell seemed good enough to bestow as a proper gift upon this amazing girl. I understood the paucity of my experience. I was a chucklehead, a hick, all things Southern seemed stupid and wan. All my innocent tales of a happy childhood were foolish and mean. I realized I had nothing to offer a hippie. I had outlived my time, my relevance on this earth. I had no social protests to report—I had been in the navy, for God’s sake, lived in married student housing in college, had no other lovers than my wife. I had done no drugs outside those prescribed in the hospital, except alcohol of course. I had attended no sit-ins. I knew nothing. I was jealous of every man Twyla spoke of. And she was married too, Jeeziz! I hated her husband.
Later on I met him. He was slender and dark-eyed and dark-haired and gorgeous. He grew marijuana from seed and worked with the poor. His parents had been Christian Scientists, so if anybody said the word spleen, for example, he fainted. I thought even this was cool. He couldn’t watch porno movies because somebody might speak of body parts in a clinical or mainly descriptive way. “Your testicles are tight and smooth,” coming from the screen, would send him onto the floor. I thought even this idiotic phobia was cool. He had been jealous and suicidal when he first understood that Twyla believed in “free love” and that she planned always to take lovers, then he grew to understand it better. He began to see that there was always enough love to go around and that nothing could come between soul lovers, even other soul lovers—my poor head was reeling by this time—and so he began to take other lovers himself, including a high school girl down in Florida where they worked on a Vista project, a black girl he got pregnant. Now he had a child in Tallahassee named Robby. They were living in California when she had the affair with the black man who smoked cigars, and he, the husband, Frank was his name, took his morose self and a guitar and went all alone up in the woods on Big Sur and built a campfire and planned to sit there and strum the night away. Instead the wind caught the embers of the fire and blew them all over the dry forest and started a three-county forest fire that burned up a couple of small farms, including a dairy herd and all the barns. Frank was almost burned up himself and then had to spend some time in jail on suspicion of arson, but finally he got off.
Elizabeth said, “He had a guitar with him when he was arrested? That’s hilarious!”
As if that were the point of the story. For my part, the guitar made the story. It’s why they were cool and I was square. My entire history seemed trivial and worthless in the presence of this girl. She was only about nineteen, and I was maybe twenty-nine by this time. I found myself wondering whether I was too old for her, too middle-class, too Southern, too monogamous, too everything that I was. I was astonished to find that I had simply blanked out my marriage and the son I was holding in my arms as introductions were made. I was fantasizing sex with Twyla before I had known her ten minutes.
I checked Elizabeth’s face to see whether she had noticed that I was making an ass of myself, and I thought she had not.
This woman, this girl, this Twyla, seemed to have brought with her into our home a completely new world, a world I had only barely heard of, California, the new sixties generation they talked about on TV. I envied it, her, everything that was not me, us. I wondered what she was thinking of our home, was it too “square,” too older-generational? We had a couch—did hippies scorn couches? We had good rugs given to us by Elizabeth’s parents, fuck. We had shelves filled with books. We were living in a farmhouse in Alabama at the time, growing all our own food, almost hippies ourselves, though we had not meant to be and didn’t consider this a fact until much later. Twyla commented on the “cool lifestyle” we lived. I put this phrase in quotation marks to show how corny it seems now, almost a parody of itself, and yet it seemed absolutely authentic then, the finest most genuine compliment I had ever received. She loved the farm, the garden, the animals. Maybe I was a hippie after all.
She even said so: “You’re kind of a hippie yourself, dude.”
I almost swooned.
Elizabeth gave a curt laugh and said, “I don’t think so.”
I could have killed Elizabeth. I felt like I’d been “outed,” to use an anachronistic expression. I wanted to be a hippie. Well, why not? A genuine long-haired free-loving acid-dropping hippie chick had proclaimed me one. Why deny what was mine by right? All my former dreams were hereby canceled. I didn’t want anymore to be everything I’d ever dreamed of being. Husband, father, student, agrarian, forget about it. I was already thinking of growing a beard, finding out where love beads were sold, painting my car with flowers, burning a flag, a draft card, learning to talk differently, to say “dude” and “groovy” and “that’s not my bag.” “Lifestyle” I wasn’t so sure about. I could say almost anything but “lifestyle.” It was all coming back to me now, Johnny Carson, “happenings.” What was a “happening”? Shit, I couldn’t remember.
Elizabeth and I had seen hippies on the Tonight Show, and maybe in the news, but we had never met one, so I hadn’t paid very close attention to what they were talking about. What were the chances I was ever going to meet one in my own house. They were supposed to be in Berkeley, I thought. Haight-Ashbury. It was coming back to me now. I was always a little embarrassed by them. They looked like fools for the most part. I hadn’t realized how beautiful they could be. I was titillated and envious of their talk of “free love” and their casual politics of drugs, but mainly they seemed like a bunch of losers. I couldn’t keep from thinking of James Dean who had it so totally made and didn’t know it, what a whiner, well they all were. James Dean would have made a perfect hippie if he had lived.
“I love your pad, man,” Twyla said. “I’d love to crash here sometime.”
I should have been listening to Carson more carefully, I realized now. I would have to find out what “happening” meant before I saw this “chick” again. And now she wanted to crash here. In my pad. I had a crash pad.
Twyla said, “This is the kind of pad me and my old man want to get someday.”
Jesus, I was living in a pad and hadn’t realized it. Maybe I really was a hippie. Me and my old lady—Elizabeth and I, I meant—we had wanted this without knowing it was hip. Oh Christ. I wouldn’t say it, I wasn’t in love. Yes I was. Of course I was, oh fuck man, I was deeply in love. Out back we kept a big vegetable garden and ate what we grew, little else except some occasional meat that we bought in town.
Twyla loved that. “Oh man,” she said, in her totally California way, “that is just so amazingly boss.”
Fuck Shakespeare, fuck Elizabeth, fuck even Robin, God forgive me. I suggested a tour, didn’t Twyla want to see the place? I showed her the pantry, where we kept the harvested garden, rows of Mason jars filled with vegetables green and red and purple, green beans and butterbeans and purple hull peas and okra and cucumber pickles and tomatoes, even potatoes. I showed her the freezer. We froze sweet corn and yellow squash and zucchini and mustard greens and kept them packed in cellophane packages in a chest-style freezer.
Twyla said, “Groovy Tuesday, bitches. Are you like, vegetarians?”
I said, “Yes.”
Elizabeth said, “No.”
At the same time.
We looked at each other. It was strange to have shared the same dreams as this girl who was so different from me, us. She dreamed of a farmhouse, a vegetable garden, all the things we had dreamed of. Why were Twyla’s dreams hip and interesting and modern and ours so old-fashioned? We had promised ourselves, someday, a place where our dog could run free and chase rabbits and our son could grow up among slow cattle and a steady old horse and wide spaces. It was what we had, the house we were standing in. A little white-painted frame house shaded by huge trees, it stood within sight of only one other house, “the Big House” as that larger structure was called, a great antebellum home at the top of a hill, with a flock of wild peacocks living in the trees behind the place. Sometimes when I went out the backdoor in the early morning a cock and two or three peahens would be standing on the porch with puzzled faces and surprised eyes, as if trying to discover who the new people were. When the backdoor opened they would screech and take noisy flight, beating their loud wings like wild turkeys in the frantic, comic escape. They sailed ungainly through the air and into the trees.
I said, “Let’s walk outdoors, I’ll show you the place.”
Twyla and Elizabeth put aside their books and study materials and went with me out the backdoor. A pasture with a couple of horses stretched across rolling hills to deep woods. I picked up Robin and shifted him onto my hip and felt the fine corn silk of his clean hair against my face. We went down the steps toward the pasture. A herd of nanny goats made their funny noises at us from across the fence and obeyed the gentle prompting of a huge, horned ram, who stood between them and the strangers beyond the fence. We walked out into the pasture and watched the comical goats fan away from us, their tails writing curlicues on the summer air.
I said, “Are you up for a long walk?”
I knew that Elizabeth was ready to walk, she loved this rolling land even more than I did. She pointed out huge gray mounds in the field, the beds of fire ants. She led Twyla to a patch of dewberries and picked a few for herself and a few more for Twyla. The berries melted on their tongues, and I felt proud of Elizabeth, even though I already knew I would throw her aside for one chance to make love to this magical person in our midst.
Through the woods ran a small river, where fish swam and where deer stood ankle deep on a sandbar and drank from the stream. We walked down onto a sandbar and I showed the others, including the child in my arms, the two-toed hoofprints of deer. “Look,” I said, pointing at a certain pattern of tracks, “this was a doe and two fawns.” Farther on I said, “Come over here, on the gravel spit, I’ll show you where the raccoons come to wash their food.” The farmhouse, and the land that stretched away from it, and all the animals, wild and caged, were a way of being in love. I loved Elizabeth in part because I loved this geography. Elizabeth and I, through some shared good instinct or intuition or mystery, had known this when we set out. In college, just as we had picked out our child’s name, we envisioned this farmhouse, these wide skies. Now I was willing to offer it all to a nineteen-year-old nymphomaniac for sex. In the dizziness of testosterone and, I suppose, in fear of something I’ll never be able to name, this fact did not seem in the least muddleheaded or dangerous or bizarre.
On the way back up through the pasture, as we headed back for the house, Twyla noticed a small, old, broad-backed horse that belonged to the owners of the property. She said, “Let’s go for a ride.”
This concerned me a little. I knew the owner and liked him.
He was a bachelor, a gay guy, I suspected. We rented the farmhouse from him, in fact. He kept this little horse for his nieces, who were twelve and thirteen and who came twice a year to visit on the farm. He doted on these girls. He bought a blue bridle for them, and a little saddle, which he cinched onto the horse when they visited the farm. He would set them up on the horse and walk alongside as they rode. I knew he wouldn’t want us pestering the horse. Nobody ever rode the horse until the nieces showed up at Christmas and in the summer.
I laughed at Twyla’s suggestion that we go for a ride, as though she had intended it as a joke. The little horse was placid and calm, munching grass slowly. We walked up to it and I put my hand on its coarse hide. When I gave it a sharp friendly crack with my palm upon its flank it did not stir. The smell of horse rose up from the flesh with such poignancy that the odor seemed almost visible in the air above the place where my hand had struck. Robin reached out from my arms to touch the horse as well. He gathered hands full of its mane into his little fists. He is the exact age I was when my father died, I suddenly thought. If I died today, would he have no memory at all of this moment, of me or this horse’s fragrant mane twisted in his fingers?
Twyla said, “I’m serious.”
Elizabeth said, “No, absolutely not. This is private property.”
Twyla said, “I wouldn’t get so uptight about some rich old fuck’s private property.”
She said the phrase “private property” as if it meant something filthy.
Elizabeth said, “Well, then, let’s walk up to his house and ask him. He’ll probably say yes. He’ll probably put the saddle on for us.”
Twyla said, “A saddle is like a really evil thing, man. It’s like oppression, you know? Like the establishment always wants to oppress the masses and shit.”
I said, “Really I don’t think it would be a great idea.” Twyla was beginning to scare me now. I felt some of my attraction for her waning. And yet I did not side with Elizabeth or common decency either.
Impulsively, I found myself in a diversionary tactic. I said, “But this young man might like to go for a ride. Want to, Robin? Want to ride the horse?”
Looking back through the veil of all these years this moment seems to have taken place in slow motion. I see the green pasture, a sky full of gathering clouds, the horse, the child, the two women. Myself, of course, grinning like a madman. Impulsive beyond even my own powers to imagine, I lifted Robin up and set him suddenly on the broad low back of the old horse. The place on the horse’s back where I placed him seemed as wide and safe as a porch swing. The child was sitting there flat on his butt with his little legs stretched out in front of him. He smiled his crooked smile at me.
He was wearing corrective shoes then, I remember, with steel insteps and high tops, all laced up. His short pants were red, and his pullover shirt was white with a pattern of red clowns. I was about to say, “How do you like the horse, Robin,” or some such ridiculous words, when the horse spooked. No sound, no sudden movement, nothing obvious to me, just the new small sudden weight of a toddler on his back, I suppose, with no warning at all. A rider, no matter how diminutive, was too much for the horse. It was an old horse, as I’ve said, and not a fast one by any means, but one moment it was there beside me and all of us were safe and smiling and happy, and the next moment it was moving, gone, running headlong away from us, and carrying my little son with him. For a long time the child did not fall. He stayed right in the middle of the broad back. The sudden acceleration toppled him over, of course, immediately, so the ride that he took on that mesalike table of horse’s back was in a prone position. He was jiggling slightly with the horse’s movement, but still he seemed to be lounging, stretched out, as on a porch glider. And yet the feeling for me was far more hideous than the image before my eyes. It was as if I had accidentally dropped him off a cliff, my hands were so empty, my son was falling away from me so fast. The horse galloped and galloped. It put such distance between us. It took Robin away from me. My hands were so empty! My eyes were riveted to the speck of red and white that his clothing made on my retina, but really by the time he fell I could not actually see the child himself at all, only the rags of bright clothing and some mass of familiar flesh that filled out those clothes, that gave them substance and meaning.
The bundle that fell from the horse to the ground seemed to bounce once, if bounce is really the proper word. Not a springy recovery or a leap upward that affirmed anything at all or seemed a metaphor for human resiliency or vivid resistance, but the earthbound necessity of movement that might occur with a sack of flour dropped from a height, more a simple jolt that changes the shape of the sack but really is no movement at all, a sudden shifting, redirection and settling, an unimaginative sudden conclusion.
THERE IS A GOOD deal more to tell here. It seems a great wonder we survived this day at all, these years later. Survive it we did. We went on living more or less happily, more or less normally, in the same little house for two or three years after this. Let me jump ahead to say that Robin was all right, he was unhurt. The accident could have been dangerous, even fatal, but thank God it was not. When the three of us reached him we found that he had had the breath knocked out of him and for a moment he made no sound at all, only cast his eyes wildly about for familiar imagery, only held his face in a terrible grimace, and then once he saw the three of us he expelled all that had been held in, his lungs reactivated. He needed to cry heartily for a few minutes to recover himself, to assure himself of the proper working of his internal organs, but he was not hurt, not in any serious way, he was fine, eyes wide open and amazed.
Among the adults there was a kind of hilarity in the moment, once we realized he was all right, that spared me much of the criticism for my idiotic behavior, which had placed him in danger. We laughed our heads off and comforted Robin and then became serious and recalled each detail of where we were at any given moment, what we saw, what we thought, and then someone would say some small thing, and off we would go with our laughter again. Briefly we became fearful he had fallen in one of the huge ant beds, which could have been more dangerous than a fall, fatal possibly, without immediate medical help. When we had dusted him off and found this not to be the case, we laughed again.
I should go on to tell that in the days to come Elizabeth and Twyla studied together a number of other times and became friends, despite the too-sudden and disquieting beginning the three of us made together. Elizabeth did not hold my attraction against me, and we overlooked what seemed to have been an angry manipulation of us by Twyla that played a part in my bad judgment. Elizabeth liked her. They liked each other. They disagreed on almost everything and yet this was all right with both of them. I was happy for Elizabeth and yet I envied their friendship. The better we knew Twyla the less she talked in her caricatured hippie fashion, the less she bragged about her sexual promiscuity, and the more we saw what a lonely desperate girl she was, essentially raped and left by a graduate student when she was in junior high school, and now in love with a husband who had done the same thing to a teenager in Florida who lived in a shack in the swamp with a half dozen brothers and sisters who sat with scabby legs and snotty noses on a tumble-down old porch with a refrigerator on it, holding her new baby and trying to spell out a letter to this man in Alabama saying I love you, come get me, save me, oh God.
Finally I actually did “make love” to Twyla a couple of times. It was terrible, degrading for both of us, on a stinking mattress with no sheets in a storage room in the shack she and her husband lived in. She had long black hairs growing out of her pale nipples. By the time this happened, she and Elizabeth were not just first-time study partners but best friends, and so my betrayal was far greater than it might have been before they became close. Fucking Twyla was no great conquest, she was a nymphomaniac, plain and simple. Prozac and a twelve-step group could have probably prevented a lot of trouble if this had happened a few years later. Still, Elizabeth and I would stay married for fifteen more years, twenty in all.
But that’s not the story I’m telling. I’m telling of the horse that was killed in the pasture that day as result of my setting Robin on its back and spooking it and sending it off with arthritic abandon. There is no great drama to it. After Robin slipped off the horse’s back, the horse went on running for a while and finally stepped into one of the foot-deep holes left beneath one of the enormous ant hills, where the dirt had been burrowed out. Its leg was broken. We did not even realize this for a long time as we went on rejoicing that Robin was safe. We noticed that the old horse had stopped galloping in its slow comical way across the field, but it took us a while longer to catch on that something was wrong.
Twyla noticed first that the mare was limping. She said, “Look.”
We looked in the direction she pointed. I said, “That old gal strained a gut.” Nobody laughed though.
Elizabeth said, “I think she’s hurt.”
The horse stood still now, beneath a single cottonwood tree, as if for the shade. We walked across the field. Robin had stopped crying by this time and had lain his head on my shoulder, whimpering low as I carried him. We walked the twenty or so yards to where the horse stood and saw immediately that the ankle was broken. The swelling was already huge, and the fracture was compound, the bone had broken the skin of the ankle and there was a trickle of blood. I said, “Oh God.” Or maybe all of us said this.
I left Robin with Elizabeth and Twyla and ran back up the pasture to the Big House. Peahens bustled away from me as I crossed the yard and bounded up the porch steps. The old lady was there, the landlord’s mother. She was smiling and gracious. She said, “Well, I should have been the one to come visit you.” When I told her what happened she said, “I’ll call Howell, he’s at the office, he’ll know what to do.”
She left me standing on the porch while she used the telephone. When she came back, she said, “Howell asked if you’d kindly wait here at the house till the veterinarian comes. He called him. Then walk him out to where you left Sally.”
I said, “I feel just awful about this. It’s terrible.”
The old lady said, “The girls will be crushed. Their father is a brutal man, their mother, my daughter, is a drunk. This farm is the only real life those girls have. They’ll miss old Sally.”
The vet decided right away that the horse needed to be “put down,” but he decided to wait for the owner to arrive before he did anything final. He gave the old mare an injection of some kind, and after a while the horse became wobbly with the drug and knelt down slowly and rolled over onto her side. Her eyes were wide open and glassy but she was still awake.
The three of us were chastened and silent. In a short time we heard a small tractor making its way down the pasture and when we looked we saw it was driven by a black man and that the landlord was riding standing up beside him. I asked Elizabeth to take Robin back up to the house, and so she and Twyla were not there, thankfully, when the final shot was administered. The horse died quickly, and immediately it seemed a completely different creature from the one that had lain there two seconds before. It seemed not just to have died but never to have had life in it. The black man hitched the mare by its back feet to the tractor with a log chain and dragged it off into the woods where I supposed he would dump it into the deep ravine that separated the woods from the river. The landlord rode on the tractor with him, and so this left me to walk alone back through the pasture in the direction of my family and the rest of my life.