I know what I am like to her. I am a wild and savage little animal. She perceives me as refusing the good civilization she offers me. Like a muddy feral kitten, rescued from a thunderstorm, spitting and sinking its impotent fangs into the hands that seek to smooth its rough fur, scorning the saucer of warmed milk offered it, choosing instead to huddle beneath the sofa and hope that someone will leave the door standing ajar, if only for an instant, so it can risk its draggled tail in a dash for the dark and storm outside. I am neither cute nor likeable.
So she puts the pressure on me, and it is not for grades, nor for anything else I understand. I dont know what she wants me to give her. I only know that if I give it, I will no longer be me. Me is all I have, and I cling to me, instinctively, without even knowing how tightly I hold on to my selfness.
I am not like the other girls, who ask her questions about her clothes and her hair and her nails, who listen giggling in a circle around her desk at recess as Mrs Haritsen tells them something cute her husband said, or something wild and silly she did in college. I dont like it when she talks about how much she misses Idaho, and how much we are all missing by growing up in this wild place. She feels so sorry for the other little girls, and her pity makes them vaguely insecure, wondering what wonderful things they are missing that evokes so much condescension from her. I dont want her pity. If she doesnt like Alaska, she can leave. Does she really think the woods will turn into a city because she wants them to, that the roads will widen and be paved, that the winters will become less cold and dangerous because petite Mrs Haritsen thinks they should? Shes stupid. I force her to give me As, and hope she will go back to the states soon. I pray that a nun will teach me next year.
Home is almost as bad. My sisters fight over boyfriends. Jeffrey met Sissy at a dance, but when he came to visit her at our house, he met Candy, and now hes asked her to the movies instead of Sissy. My mother is at a loss as to what to do about it. She tells my sisters that they must sort it out for themselves. She asks them, rhetorically, if either of them really wants to date a boy who could be that insensitive. Of course they do. He has a car. My mother folds her lips and irons a mountain of laundry, refusing to listen to any more squabbling. So Sissy cries and calls Candy that bitch when I am the only one around to hear it. And Candy primps endlessly in the bathroom mirror, ignoring the pleas of those with bursting bladders, when she isnt sulking because Sissy wont lend her blue eye shadow to her.
It makes my life miserable. First, Kimmy tells on me when, in agonized desperation, I go into the woods across the lane from the house and pee. Never mind that Candy was the one hogging the bathroom. I am uncivilized and my mother scolds me for it, not privately but in the kitchen where my little brothers hear and giggle endlessly about it. What did you use for toilet paper, they demand, interrupting the scolding. Leaves? Moss? Birch bark? They giggle wildly, uncontrollably, even when my mother turns her scolding on them. They are unremorseful, and I am able to escape her, leaving her to tell them Its not funny as I tiptoe down the stairs.
But the room I share with Candy and Sissy is a sulfurous and brooding place. Candy is pulling her hair out of curlers, and Sissy is lying on her bed, reading, and not watching her. She is not watching her so intensely it is like the sharp edge of a knife blade pressed into the silence, and I am tempted to beg her to watch Candy, to stop ignoring her. One glance would be all it would take to ignite the storm, and then they could shriek and wail and slam hairbrushes down. The tension would be broken, and I could relax then, could read a book while they quarrel as imperturbably as I can sit out a storm under a spruce tree.
But Sissy wont look, and Candy is so miffed that she turns from the mirror and attacks me instead. Did Mom tell you to stay in the basement when Jeffrey comes to pick me up? she demands.
No, I say, trying to make it withering, but not succeeding. I am too surprised, and I am not able to hide it.
Well, she said she was going to, so make sure you do. Candy turns back to the mirror.
This may be the opening Sissy has been waiting for. She slams her book and sits up ramrod straight, her face going rocky with righteous indignation. She did not. She said you could ask Evvie nicely, and that sure wasnt nicely. Im telling.
Go ahead. Who cares? Not you, for sure. You dont care what people think of our family. Look at Evvie, for crying out loud. Look how she runs around. Susan Adams told me that Kerry Pierce asked her if Evvie was a girl or a boy. He couldnt tell by looking at her. No one could! Look at her! Last time Jeffrey was here, she was running around in that same shirt, and I swear the same dirt on it. Hes going to think thats the only clothes she owns!
Shes just a little kid! Sissy jumps to my defense. Leave her alone. She cant help how she looks!
Maybe not, but she could at least be clean. Look at her! Mud on her knees, God knows what on her chin, her hair full of twigs, probably from shitting in the bushes somewhere. Like a little animal.
Whose fault is it that she couldnt use the bathroom? Sissy demands.
I dont say a word. I am looking at myself in the mirror, over Candys shoulder. It is a large dresser mirror, and I can see nearly my entire body. I stare at myself. I cannot remember the last time I studied myself in the mirror. I suddenly see what it is about, why Mrs Haritsen hates me, why I eat my lunch alone. I suddenly see the raggedy dirty jeans and the shirt with the elbows out. I think of what I wore to school on Friday, the green pleated skirt with half the hem dragging out, the yellow blouse with the little flowers on it that has a coffee stain on the stomach. I wonder why I have never thought about it before, why I have seen everything else so keenly and never myself. I wonder why my mother lets me run around this way, and then I know. She doesnt have the time to worry about it. Squeaking wheels get oiled. If I dont demand new clothes, a trip downtown to get my hair cut and styled, money for hand lotion and nail polish and new socks, new shoelaces, jeans that arent hand-me-downs, I will never get them. The money is already stretched as tight as it will go. Thank God for one child who doesnt nag and whine and beg. I think of Sissys new nail polish, Candys white mohair sweater, Kimmys new Barbie doll camper, and I know that it should have been mine, my new dress, my new jeans. But what I dont demand I dont seem to need, and if I am content, no one will jar me from it.
I come back to the room and they are still fighting, my sisters, screaming at each other, ostensibly over me, but actually over Jeffrey. You dont care about anyones feelings, not Evvies, not mine, no ones, as long as you get what you want! Sissy is saying, and tears are running down her face.
Thats not true. You know thats not true. Its not my fault that Jeffrey liked me better, and it sure isnt my fault that Evvie looks like a pile of barfy rags!
I snatch up Sissys book from her bed and I let it fly. Its only a paperback, it shouldnt matter, but when it hits Candy in the face she screams, and even before the book is all the way to the floor, I can see the blood rushing out of her nose. She screams again, air bubbling past the blood from her nose, the blood that is falling on her white mohair sweater, and then I am gone, up the stairs, eeling past my mother as she comes down, making my escape before she knows I am the culprit. I grab a knife and a small bucket from the kitchen as I dash through it, trusting they will help me buy my way back into her good graces when I return. Rinky picks up on me as I race out the door and attaches himself to me like a sidecar. We careen down the lane and across Davis Road. And into my woods.
The path under my feet is hard, bare earth, beaten out by my own feet, and I fly along it, jumping fallen logs, veering around boggy spots. I could run this in the dark, I know it so well, and frequently do. It is fairly clear at first, as my path follows an old grown-over survey cut, but then it gets to the slough, still full of water this time of year, and I veer off, paralleling it, crouched over to run down an old rabbit trail, ignoring the branches that snatch at my hair and clothing, going to earth like an animal, fleeing into deeper forest. I run until I am sure I wont be able to hear them call me, even if they send one of the boys up to stand by the mailbox on Davis Road and yell for me. Then I stop and drop, panting, onto the deep moss. Rinky gives me one sniff, to be sure I am all right, pushing his cold black olive nose against my cheek and into my ear, and then goes off on his own business, whatever that is. I am alone with my images of Candys blood bubbling over her mouth and onto her sweater. Dark red blood, clashing with her nearly auburn hair. I cant remember that she has ever had a bloody nose before, at least not one from getting hit with something. I know she will blubber for at least an hour, and Jeffrey is due to pick her up in only half an hour. I am betting the blood wont come out of the mohair sweater, even if they soak it in cold water and put meat tenderizer on it. Well, I reflect savagely, at least I wont be around to humiliate her when Jeffrey does come.
My small bucket is beside me on the moss, the short kitchen knife inside it. I pull my knees up, start to rest my chin atop them. Then I stop and look at them. Muddy, where I knelt down earlier today when I was roughhousing with Rinky. And torn, so that my knee, too, is dirty, and showing through the rent denim.
So? So.
I cannot forget the grubby, unkempt kid I saw in the mirror earlier. That is not how Ive been imagining myself, all this time. I think of myself as me, as looking like me. Ive been seeing myself in terms of what I can do rather than how I look. Runner. Stalker. Tree climber, ditch jumper, mushroom hunter, game spotter. I had no clear physical image of myself. Ive only seen the view from my windows. I never thought to wonder how I really looked, to others.
It was bad.
And yet a stubborn part of me doesnt want to yield, refuses to rush home and wash up, brush my hair, put on clean clothes, and nag my mother for new clothes and new shoes. A part of me says, tough for them. Maybe Ive only discovered this today, but I suspect theyve known it all along. All along. They havent done right by me, and even if I never knew it until now, they knew it all along. So let them live with it. If theyre embarrassed by my looks, too bad. Thats how I am. And if theyve never cared enough to come to me kindly, to gently help me change, then screw them. Ill look this way. Always. Forever and ever and ever. And let them be ashamed. I wont ask for new clothes, for new shoes. And if they offer them, I wont want them. Not ever.
I close my eyes, imagining how horrible it would be if I went home and my mother and sisters had gone out and bought all new clothes for me, new shiny shoes, a coat with no teethmarks on the sleeve, jeans with knees in them. And if they gathered around me and brushed my hair and cut it and curled it. And then I went to school. And everyone would see the big change in me, and theyd gather around me and ask me questions. Whered ya get the new dress? Are those new shoes? I like your hair that way a lot better. You really look nice. And I would have to smile and let them sniff me over. It would be admitting that I had been wrong, had been unkempt and shaggy. It would be admitting that they had been right to feel sorry for me all this time, to be disgusted by me all this time, to ostracize me all this time. It would be surrender. Its too late. Its gone too far, I cant even surrender now. Not if I want to survive as me.
My eyes are stinging like Im going to cry, but this doesnt make sense. Im angry, not sad. Angry. I take the knife from my bucket and stab it deep into the moss. Angry. I stab the moss again, and again.
Rinky comes back, snuffles my hair, snuffles at what Im doing, nearly getting his black nose cut off by my knife in the process, finds it incomprehensible and hence uninteresting, and goes off again. Comes back a second later, licks my ear comfortingly, and leaves again.
The music begins, tentative and breathy. I lift my chin a fraction of an inch, and freeze, listening. There are only five or six notes to the simple melody, and it seems familiar, but I cannot put a name or words to it, nor say where I have heard it before. I turn my head slowly, listening. Sound travels strangely by water, and it takes me a minute before I am sure I have my direction. Across the slough. Damn.
I stand, catching up my bucket. There is a place to cross the slough, one where I will not get more than knee wet, and I head that way. As I go, I keep an eye out for wild mushrooms. My mother loves wild mushrooms, and has taught me twenty-seven different edible varieties, as well as those that I must not touch, and those that are merely useless or unsavory. I find several orange delicious, their caps actually a mottled green, but a secret orange ring hidden within their stems that makes identification easy. I draw the knife tip across the gills, watch the milky liquid rise to the cut. Lactarius family. Same as the pepper cap. I roll Latin names on my tongue as I scavenge mushrooms and walk.
The bottom of my bucket is covered with mushrooms by the time I get to the crossing place. I stand on the bank, picking my most likely path, and then set off, stepping from grass tuft to grass tuft, edging along an old log for part of the way, and then working my way again from tuft to tuft. Rinky comes, crashing and splashing to catch up with me, and nearly knocks me into the slough as he races past me. I have only two misses, and it is the same foot each time, so when I reach the other bank, I am only knee wet on one leg, and ankle-wet on both feet. Not bad.
The music has not ceased, but is smoothing out, as if the player is becoming more practiced. I know who it is, I do not need to catch the elusive tracery of his scent upon the air. I follow my nose and ears now, follow the sound and scent trickling between trees and brush, still pausing every now and then to add another mushroom or two to my bucket. Here is a hedgehog hydnum, a shingled cap with spiny little underpoints instead of gills, and a small orange boletus, its orange cap still tight to its white stem, hiding the soldierly rows of tubes that substitute for gills on it.
And here is a faun, goat legs akimbo, perched on an old log, cheeks red with puffing, eyes merry at my approach. He doesnt stop playing, but plays for me, deliberately, showing off how well he blows his pipes. For they are genuine panpipes, the little wooden tubes bound in a row with some vegetable twine. They look new, the wood unscuffed, unworn, new-made for spring. I sit next to him on the log, watching how its done, how his mouth leaps from pipe to pipe. He is sweating, his curls are damp as they bob on his forehead, and I am struck again by his odor, sweeter than the warm breath of nursing puppies, pungent as crushed herbs, like tree resin and squashed raspberries and rich crumbly loam in the hand. Like all the sweetness of the earth embodied by a scent. It is a pleasure to sit beside him and smell him, and the music he plays has a similar unity to it. Breathless and soft it whispers like wind, like water over pebbles and rain dripping from branches, like birdcall and yet like the trumpetous sounding of an elk. He plays on and on and I listen.