Age 18 pretends and hides her mutilation. What will it be? A lizard’s life? A peacock’s? A thrush’s or a slough’s muck? Age 18 speaks through her scars with the tongue of troubled flowers.
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Light from the radio dial brightened the front seat as we traveled south. My cheek pressed to the car’s window, I stared out into the night. We were somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains and the highway had once again become two-lane, broken in stretches by the rocky hills and cliffs. I loved the blue hours between midnight and 4 a.m., their mysterious quiet. Stopping only for gas, we’d halved the 1,238 miles from our Minnesota prairie college to Washington D.C. where we were headed for the May 21 student protest.
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Four of us rode in the car. Judy Fox sat in the passenger’s seat, her hand kneading the back of Ander’s neck, who had been behind the wheel for hundreds of miles. More beautiful than handsome, he had the looks of a shy model. In the dim light I watched him turn to Judy; they spoke in low smoky voices. Judy, a long legged senior, had a tiny mole on her upper lip, kinky auburn hair, tangles of it, and a voice like Dietrich if Marlene had been raised in Minnesota. She wore glasses with dark red frames and intelligence poured from her eyes.
☽☾
In the back seat sat myself and the dissolute late 30ish philosophy professor, Michael Smith, his narrow face sprouted stubble, a bottle of vodka was peeping from his trench coat pocket. Hopefully, asleep at last, his head slumped, bumping my shoulder. Spruce and fir trees moved closer to the highway and I could smell them through the half-opened window.
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I’d just turned 18 and was only six months free of the hospital where I’d spent two months after being shot at a party. The boy’s parents were in Paris, and the 19-year-old invited his friends to a Thanksgiving night get-together where he drank boisterously. When he found his father’s shotgun and loaded it, I thought he was showing off. He followed me into the bathroom where the thing went off in my face. Now I am a freshman in college; now I weigh 90 pounds and cradle the paralyzed left arm, my broken bird, against my chest.
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I didn’t wear a sling. I refused to, no matter if the hand felt heavy and burned as if someone had set it on fire. I bowed to it, the electric shocks pulling my head down. When Judy rolled a cigarette I couldn’t stop studying her hands, their deftness, her fingers, their tapering shape and their movement, how she twisted the ends of the paper before she licked it. My right hand, never small like the rest of me, tried not to witness my left hand drawing its fingers in, tightening into a forever fist.
☽☾
Moon baptized the highway in shine and a deer stood frozen on the opposite shoulder, iced in the headlights. I glanced through the back window and saw the ghost deer fly through the taillights. I wanted to be with the deer in the cold dew, not fending off Michael Smith’s hand that inched toward me. He had removed his wedding ring. I covered my teeth, hidden in thick braces, with my palm. I was taking a class from him this quarter, The Philosophy of Good and Evil. To an older man, a girl of 18, even maimed, must have had some appeal. He liked words like duality, he favored dichotomy and Manichean, and he considered Zoroaster to have been the first philosopher and Nietzsche the last.
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After the first class, Michael had invited all his students to his stark apartment for a meet-and-greet. Only a handful showed up, but those who did stood, as there were only two chairs. His wife Lillian had waved at me, beckoning me over to the nubby gray couch. I knew her shattering before I sat down, I knew her kindness and she knew mine. She told me she was a Lakota Sioux who grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The rhythms of the Lakota language had been torn from her. The white world held this sad beautiful woman with meltingly black hair and eyes in contempt. Her slender hands clutched an icy tumbler. She called over her and Michael’s two sons, with their enormous black eyes. Eyes already tragic and christened in the shouts of their parents’ fights.
☽☾
We stopped beside the highway to stretch in the 4 o’clock morning. Michael and Ander stood up and peed in front of the car, we women squatted behind the car. Out of nowhere a truck approached, headlights rising like white girders.
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The May dawn was streaking the sky. Dogwoods clouded the hillsides, throwing their tawdriness into the blue spruce. Through the car’s dirty windows sunlight illuminated the fingerprint smears and insect cemeteries and the faces of fading travelers. Washington D.C. and the anti-war march seemed a mirage ever farther away. We were still in the land of conifers and cedars when one of the back tires started to drag, and then bounce.
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“We need air in the back tire,” Ander said.
“It sounds flat,” Judy said. She looked fresh and only her husky voice sounded tired.
“It’s not flat, it needs air.” There was an edge in Ander’s voice.
“Why don’t you pull over and we can put the spare on?” Judy asked.
☽☾
I already knew the words about to come out of Ander’s mouth. I knew when the words came, the inhabitants of the car would go still as if a death had been announced. “We don’t have a spare,” he said. I bit my lip to keep from laughing aloud. My shoulders rose and fell. The car had begun to bounce and thump in earnest with a cadence to the bouncing. I felt excitement at the nearness of danger. We spotted the Phillips 66 casting its beacon from the highway’s coastline.
☽☾
The tire made the sounds of rim scraping asphalt as we coasted into the station and managed to stop near the air pump. Michael Smith roused himself, scratching the stubble on his cheeks. “Is this D.C.?” he mumbled. We all piled out of the injured car into the dawn air.
☽☾
The gas station attendant, a burly white guy wearing a wet coffee spill on his jacket, surveyed the tire damage and sucked his teeth. “You drove the rubber right off. You were riding on the rim and throwing off sparks. I saw you coming,” he said with a chuckle. “I’ll give you a refurbished tire for $42. We only take cash. Otherwise, you’re stuck here.”
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In Age 18 dollars, $42 was huge. The four of us, me, Ander, Judy, and Michael Smith huddled. “How much money do we have?” Judy asked. I had $10 in my bag and considered myself rich. I could kick in $5. Judy had $10, Ander had $15, and Michael Smith had two quarters he could fork over. We offered him $30.50 for the refurbished tire. The burly man hesitated then agreed. I had coins in my pocket and cared most about finding the soda machine. The pain in my arm had followed me out of the car but I would kill it with Darvon and aspirin and an ice cold Coke. I would kill the sizzling hanger wires in my hand.
☽☾
I headed for the Ladies’ Room, one of those which never locked unless someone was inside and now I was the one inside. I was the one brushing my teeth and taking a luxury sink bath, the one putting on lipstick and eyeliner and changing into a tight mocha-colored T-shirt with pink striped sleeves. I looked at myself in profile with my compact mirror, first from the right and then the left. There were two of me, two halves, and I knew I would shun the left side. I would hide her. Age 18 and in the mirror you‘ll find no angels singing, no elixir of sun-drenched sand and waist-length hair swimming down your back. In the mirror there’s the torment of the river otter and the moth caught in sticky entangling pupa.
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A soda machine blinked from the back wall. The place was empty. I stopped to gaze at Miss May on the garage calendar. Miss May of long ago. A barefoot blonde in green shorts and a white halter. Still years away from centerfolds holding up their enormous jellyfish breasts, each finger tipped with a scarlet claw. Girls from the deep ocean.
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The Coke machine sold 10 oz. bottles. My coins tinkled as they fell, the bottles rattled. I studied the vending machine’s selections as if I could almost see the souls of Hershey’s, Butterfingers, Dots, Cheez-its, Tom’s Bugles, Tom’s Barbecue Chips. A dime bought me Cheez-its; another bought me Dots. These were the feasts of Age 18. Where are all those lost vending machines? Those 10 oz. bottles of ice cold Coke and the lips that touched the glass rims?
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The interstate lanes multiplied going into Washington D.C. The traffic became stop and go, then bumper-to-bumper. Here we were in America’s beating heart, city of monuments and temples to the founding fathers, city of symbols where we had come to raise our voices. The last Dot and Cheez-it eaten, I nodded, soon fast asleep.
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We had the address of a rich Quaker family who invited the Minnesota student contingent to sleep on a floor in their recreation room. Two other cars were coming. “Oh look,” Judy said, after we found the enormous colonial house. “How cool, there’s an old man with a ponytail.” We parked on the lawn and the old man turned out to be Linus, the 15-year-old son of the family, a follower of Hare-Krishna. He wore jeans and smelled of incense, his head shaved except for a topknot ponytail. After showing us where we needed to park, he helped us transport our stuff inside.
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I carried my red vinyl hatbox and a sleeping bag and Linus laughed when he tried to take them from me and we played tug of war. “You smell the same as me,” he said. “Patchouli.” I told him how my mother made me sleep in the basement when I was home because of patchouli’s stench. The boy’s eyes slipped into mine and then he winked. I was the youngest of the students who had come and his eyes said we were sympatico. I smiled at him with a closed mouth to hide my braces that gleamed like railroad ties. He was not going to the march.
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Age 18 the year of scalded skin and dogs with two heads, the year I walked into the kingdom of protest. The Mining of the Harbors March had dissolved into a blur of bodies, bull horns, and speeches, endless speeches. We marched and marched while the speeches rained over our heads, burning phrases so filled with fire and atrocity and outrage they became a mantra of plunder and pillage. I could only feel the My Lai Massacre, the gang rapes of tiny Vietnamese girls, some only 12-years-old and pure as lotus blossoms, I felt the terror the girl knew when the last sunburnt and deranged American thrust himself into her. I thought of my own entrance into death, losing my eyesight, the blackness of the brain shutting down the nonessentials. I felt divorced from everyone, here on my red planet with the scorched sky, keeping my left arm close, seeing if anyone saw, a vigilance without end that blocked out the larger world.
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We marched and marched and approaching the line of federal marshals, the sun was blazing in my eyes and as I tried to cross the line, a white shirted marshal arrested me. We waited to be fingerprinted, the woman officer told me to place the thumb of my right hand in the ink and then she left. The flush spread in my face, a full body sensation of heat, I lowered my voice to confess I couldn’t use my left hand. My right thumb appeared twice. I felt divorced from everyone, keeping my left arm close, seeing if anyone saw, a vigilance without end.
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Our bail had been paid by the Society of Friends. A van ferried us back to Washington D.C. and a guy in a red-and-blue-checked flannel shirt sat beside me and asked if the police had done that to me, had broken my arm. He seemed disappointed when I told him it had been an accident, a shooting. Age 18 doesn’t yet know how to describe the red planet. The crooked limb I’ll not free myself of, the torment of others looking and judging what they see. Will I always live at the gorge under the scorched sky electrified by red lightning, the rocks a hot luminescent? Who even knows what day of the week it was? Why must I remember the flannel shirt guy, why can’t he too disappear? When we arrived at the large colonial house I felt relief, like I’d arrived at home. Linus came to greet me and ask about the march.
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As dusk fell into the trees we sat on the ground behind the house and chatted. I wanted to know about him being raised as a Quaker, then turning Hare-Krishna. He showed me a picture of himself with long flowing hair. He was 13 then and now he’d turned 15 last month.
“After I shaved my head I knew I’d made a big mistake. A grand slammer.”
I chuckled. “Your head has a nice shape. It’s not knobby or square.”
He leaned over. “You don’t see this.” He pointed to a small bump near his ponytail.
“You mean the deviled egg?”
“Yup.” He grinned. “The mustardy one.”
I studied him, the nose, the chin, the forehead, the lips, the Mediterranean skin and hazel eyes. Neither of us had our adult faces yet, we were still becoming, still very thin, feral.
☽☾
His parents both worked in the government. Interior and State. They believed in simplicity. They believed in letting him and his sister express themselves. “Quakers are bound to a Peace Testimony. That’s pretty much why we run a hostel for antiwar students,” he said. “I thought when you guys got here, it’s just another bunch of students and then I saw you.”
“What’d you see? A nutty Kookaburra?” I said, joking.
“I saw someone I recognized and I knew we’d never met.”
☽☾
Did he recognize my cheek when it was raw before the two scar revisions that broke up the dredged straight line and created a more pleasing zigzag? What had been done to close the hole in my face was a wrenching of the flesh, a stretching and tugging. A pinkish strip of a scar. A searing cattle brand—Red Planet.
☽☾
I’ve never known anyone like Linus, the son of rich parents who were permissive and enlightened. I regaled him with stories of my farm childhood, the cantankerous donkey Jack, my snuff-spitting, Three Feathers-whiskey-drinking stepfather, 15 years younger than my mother, stories that made both of us laugh. My brown eyes, his river eyes. He told me his family had lived for two years in Jakarta. His father’s job. He’d learned about mosquitoes with their delicate evil needles. In Jakarta they had Mosquito Weather alerts. Flies. The house lizards with a flick of their tongue captured flies and disappeared back into their camouflage. He had tutors but learned volumes from house lizards. A city where you could hear the midnight mutter of folk spells being cast. Hare-Krishna converts chanted in the streets. They acted goofy and he liked that. The dreams of a country undersea. Jakarta was sinking. He looked up and I saw him take in my scar, his eyes touching it, his mouth wanting to ask what happened. His shyness or kindness held his tongue back. Was I interested in meeting his best friend who lived about a mile away? We could cut through the woods. Sure, I’d love to go.
☽☾
His friend came from wealth like Linus and had his own basement and bedroom there. They both went to an exclusive private school. Both had skipped a grade. “Tell him about Ioway,” Linus said. “Guess how many kids she had in her high school graduating class?” We both sat against pillows watching a large color TV, where the news was broadcasting today’s marches and mass arrests. We drank Cokes and I told them about the 42 kids in my high school class, the poor bedroom slipper-wearing Mr. Shedletsky, our Algebra teacher who lisped, his class the only math class offered, period, and Madame Reeve, almost 70, teaching French, the black hairs nesting in the wrinkles around her mouth, accentuated by the como tale vu’s tightening her lips, and the only foreign language available for 30 miles. We all chortled and I laughed until I hurt. I was in Jakarta. I felt weirdly welcome here. Now the marchers on the TV gleamed as colorful as a sunset at high noon and the police line could have been a floating island of blue green algae.
☽☾
We walked in the dark into the woods and inhaled the damp earth and new leaves. I laughed and started skipping and turning in circles. He followed my lead. We heard night birds whistling and chirping. We sang Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree. Merry merry king of the bush is he and ran back up the hill, then down. Laugh Kookaburra! When we stopped to catch our breath and leaned against a tree he asked about the scar and the braces and I told him about the shooting. I told it straight. Nonchalant. “You’ve been through the wringer,” he said. I took his words as a strange compliment. That he understood the wringer and what it took to come through it.
☽☾
I told Linus goodnight and tiptoed into the rec room where all the Minnesota students camped. Earlier I’d unrolled my sleeping bag close to the bathroom, and now as I picked my way through the prone bodies, I saw someone had set up their bag close to mine. Grabbing my red hatbox suitcase, I locked myself in the bathroom, bathed, changed my clothes, and then stretched out on my sleeping bag and closed my eyes. I was still running in the trees, breathing the damp earth.
☽☾
I did not open my eyes when I heard someone stirring in the sleeping bag next to mine, then my stomach clenched as I recognized the movement followed by a mutter, and the din of fingernails scratching a bristled chin. I’d listened to those bristling scratchy sounds for a thousand miles in the car. His unclean teeth green as if he’d been eating insects. Michael Smith, my married Good and Evil professor, had propped himself up on his elbow, leaned over and kissed me before I could turn away, his lips and wiry whiskers grazing my cheek. His stubble reeked of smoke and liquor dirt. When he reached over and squeezed my breast I pushed his hand away. “Please. Michael,” I said. “Please don’t do that. You’re married and Lillian is my friend. I won’t betray her.” He lay back and I got up. In the bathroom I brushed my teeth.
☽☾
I saw Linus in the doorway carrying a blanket. He dropped down to the floor beside me. “I brought a blanket. I thought you might be cold,” he said. I smiled. I stayed in a half sleep all night aware of him, that shivery feeling, both of us lying on our sides facing the other, breathing in our incense skin, cinnamon and patchouli. Together but chaste. No words in our little swamp forest, just a recognition of the other, he still a boy at 15, and me at 18 still a girl.