Later that evening we had supper at my grandma’s place and The Mouth was there also with his wife and kids, my first and third cousins, and my grandma said but where’s our Tash, and The Mouth cut my mom off and said Mother, this is a spectacular pot roast. I had never heard The Mouth use the word spectacular in any context whatsoever. I’d vaguely thought it was a sin to say spectacular. So while I was busy chewing over his use of that particular word, I hadn’t noticed that my mom was getting more and more pissed off with her brother and his habit of controlling every single aspect of her life. Which in fact was still not quite the thing that bothered her. She was used to that by then, obviously, and she could ride that out.
I did know that Tash and Ian had applied for library cards in the city, and were bringing home books not by Billy Graham or about the Sugar Creek Gang. And pamphlets about communism and Albania being a great place and if there’s one thing other than John Lennon that gets The Mouth’s back up, it’s communism because it was the reason why the Russians took everything away from the Mennos and sent us all packing when life had been so coarse and sweet back there on the banks of the Vistula.
Tash had learned the meaning of the word metaphor, and had started applying it to almost every aspect of her life, and ours. I heard my dad say to her: Tash, some things are real. Some things are nothing but what they are. And Tash asked him how he knew that and he said he didn’t know that, but he believed it. And some things are more than they appear to be. What things, she had asked. And my dad said he didn’t know exactly. I remember being frightened by that conversation and making a mental list of the things I knew, and then wondering if they were real or not.
That may have marked the beginning of my self-biting period. I wondered if Tash was possessed by the Devil. Suddenly, in comparison to loving metaphors and communism, it seemed tame and typical and status quo to be drinking at the pits, to be staying out all night with a boy, and to be storming around the house in a bra and panties swearing along with Marianne Faithfull and saying oh my god to everything anybody ever said to you. Why did my sister require more than that? What the heck was she doing with that library card of hers? She’d gone too far, I knew that much.
sixteen
This evening I tried to explain to Travis how it was that he found me lying on the shoulder of Highway 23. It’s my chain, I said. It’s faulty. It happened to me frequently. One second you’re flying down the highway to America, the next you’ve got your Wrangler flare pant leg caught in the chain and you’re down, stuck pinned to the road staring up at the clouds and picking gravel out of your skin, waiting for someone to come along and rescue you.
Usually it was a farmer passing by. He’d get my pant leg out of the chain and throw my bike in the back and give me a ride to the border. Once I got to shift gears for a carny named Snake. Now! he’d say. It was fun. He made me wear one of his hats with the carnival logo on it so if someone saw me riding with him they’d think I was a co-worker and not report him. He told me he was on antibiotics because he’d gotten the clap from the cotton-candy girl. He told me that a kid like me could make twenty-five cents per rat at any fairgrounds if I knew how to swing a bat. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. He told me he could not afford one more felony. I said man, tell me about it, although I was only ten and had never heard the word felony before. It sounded like a pretty girl’s name to me.
Travis put my bike into his dad’s truck and asked me why I didn’t tuck my pant leg into my sock. Somebody might see me, I said. I’d rather fall.
I made Travis promise me that he would never become the type of person who tucked his pant leg into his sock while riding a bike and he said I was superficial but he knew what I meant. He said he’d take off his pants and ride around in his underwear first.
Where would you put your pants, I asked. You’re not gonna have a carrier!
What’s wrong with a carrier, he asked and I said no, no carriers. Carriers are for little kids.
Well, then he said he’d get a clip for his pant leg and I said no, no clips, and he said my bike etiquette was extreme. I felt like an idiot for feeling good about knowing how to look on a bike. I had to get my driver’s licence soon.
He asked me if I felt weird lying beside the road under my bike. Now that you mention it, I said. He drove us to a field and we smoked a joint and climbed into the back of the truck where we could stretch out and stare at the sky. Just another hard surface to lie on while contemplating infinity.
Let’s talk more about bikes, I said. We talked about when we were kids and dressed up our bikes for the July 1 parade, which included a contest.
You don’t want to win though, I said. He agreed. (In this town, if you win something you’re dead.) Hey, we actually agreed on one thing, I said.
He asked me if I was warm.
Yes and no, I said. And I’m not on the Pill yet, I told him, which he said was cool but when would I be. Maybe two weeks, I said.
Should we take off our clothes anyway, he asked. I guess we could, I said. We lay in the open box of the truck like two dying fish on the bottom of a small boat. He told me I was cute in the moonlight. I wished he’d said beautiful. Cute made me feel like a garden gnome.
He said we should go to Europe together and I could learn how to bake bread and he’d sell his writing and we’d have this little place up hundreds of stairs in a building in Paris with a courtyard and we’d ride bikes everywhere and play in fountains and make love continuously. I said: I do ride my bike everywhere. No, he said, but in Paris, with a big carrier that could hold baguettes and wine and fresh flowers. I said: Baguettes? Then why would I have to learn how to bake bread? And hey, I said, what did I just say about carriers?
Nomi, it’s romantic, he said.
Well, but how would we get to Paris? I asked.
We’d save money from our jobs, he said.
What jobs? I asked.
Nomi, you have…
No, too many variables, I said. What’s that bright light headed straight for us? I asked. It could have been a seeder. It was some kind of giant farming implement bearing rapidly down upon us like the Apocalypse.
What the fuck is that, asked Travis.
It’s like we’re in Jaws, I said. He told me to roll myself up in the shag carpet in the back and then he jumped out and ran around to the cab and started it and took off. The field was really bumpy and I felt my bike fall on top of me again, although this time I was rolled up in a carpet so it didn’t hurt as much.
He drove to The Golden Comb’s trailer out on Kokomo Road and parked behind the purple gas tank and that’s where I emerged from the carpet like a cute but not beautiful butterfly and put my clothes back on. I had orange wormy pieces of rug in my hair. He pulled them out one by one. He was so gentle and sweet and he sang an Eric Clapton song in this weirdly satirical operatic voice but underneath he seemed to mean it so I put my hands on his waist and up under his shirt and we waltzed around, badly, and then we fell.
We sat in the grass and sang stupid nursery songs that had perverted hand movements. We tried to whistle “Crying” by Roy Orbison straight through without laughing. We loved Roy Orbison. Let’s name our baby Roy Orbison, said Travis.
Do we have a baby? I asked.
We will someday, he said.
Hmmm, Roy Orbison, I said. What if it’s a girl?
Nova, he said.
Nova? That’s a car.
No, it’s a star, he told me.
I don’t want to have kids named Nova and Roy Orbison, I told him. I liked the name Miep. Miep was the woman who had saved the letters of Anne Frank and had also done kind and dangerously heroic things for her. A real star.