I hope you understand that I have never before agreed to an interview. The fact that I am doing so now is extraordinary and speaks to the changing circumstances in which I find myself.
To pick up where I left off in my previous message, while I was away at art school in Wisconsin, my stepbrother Clinton married, moved to a nearby suburb, and had a child. This created an ideal situation for me upon my return, because with Clinton out of the way I felt comfortable setting out food for the stray cats I often saw wandering around our neighborhood. I had often done this when I was much younger, but then one of them gave birth to kittens underneath our porch and had created a little nesting area which she wouldn’t vacate. Clinton trapped the mother and then drowned each of her kittens in a bucket, and when I became hysterical at learning what he had done, he claimed the neighborhood had enough stray cats already and he was saving them from a life of misery. I was about twelve then—Clinton would have been sixteen—and after that I stopped feeding them out of fear for their safety. But once I came back from Wisconsin I managed to convince a local vet to spay and neuter the strays I brought in, free of charge, as a service to the community. So I began feeding the cats again, and once they became docile with me I’d take them in for their surgery, care for them while they recovered, and then release them. I didn’t have room in the house, after all, and my mother’s health was already beginning to decline.
It was then that I began visiting the art supply store almost weekly, because I had taken to creating charcoal drawings of the cats as they slept so sweetly in the beds I made for them while they healed. As I said in my previous letter, I knew Ricky Rowan from CCD classes and high school, and he had also worked at the Circle K where my friends and I often stopped for Slush Puppies after Junior Service Club meetings. I had always thought he was attractive, but I didn’t date. I know this sounds foolish now to an outsider, but through most of high school I genuinely believed I had a vocation, which is the Catholic term for believing I had been called by God to the celibate religious life. I gave that up when I decided to go to art school, but even during college I only went out on sporadic group dates, mainly because I felt terrified of that last hour of the date. According to my friends, nearly all dates followed a pattern. There was dinner or a movie, or both, and then the last hour was all physical, with the man always overeager and demanding. I had no stomach for that at all, so I avoided the whole enterprise.
What softened me toward Ricky, though, was that he was very gregarious and friendly. When I came into the store he always asked to see my drawings, and he appreciated my skill. Through asking me questions about the cats I drew, he learned of my work with the strays and openly admired it. Who doesn’t enjoy being admired? When he asked me out to dinner I couldn’t help but say yes. Respect was something I was unaccustomed to from men, and it was very disarming and appealing, the way he seemed to think so highly of me.
As to that first date, I don’t remember where we ate—I think I was too nervous to pay much attention to the food—only that we went to the beach afterward, at Santa Cruz. It was a spontaneous idea Ricky had, and although I agreed, I was full of anxiety because I was trying very hard to control that final hour and ensure I made it home untouched. He was an artist, as well. In high school he had painted a mural in a hallway and created a ceramic model of our school crest, which may still be on display in the entrance for all I know. So on the drive to the beach I began talking to him about a trip my mother and I took to Spiral Jetty, the earthwork Robert Smithson created in the Great Salt Lake at some point during my childhood. When I was around ten—four years after my father died and not long after she began dating Garrison Brand, my future stepfather—my mother took me on a trip to Bountiful, Utah to visit her sister. I think she wanted to spend some time with my aunt and ask her advice before things got too serious with Garrison.
But while we were there, she and I drove down to Salt Lake City and visited the Jetty, which was new then. We walked out onto the black rocks and followed them to the center, and it reminded me of the garden labyrinth behind Our Lady of Mercy, except made out of rock and silt instead of white gravel, and surrounded by reddish water instead of neatly trimmed hedges. At the time I thought it was a little strange and anticlimactic, and I wondered why anyone would build this rough, rocky pathway into a lake and say it was art. But the sky above it, I remember, was enormous, and shaded an otherworldly blue. I described every aspect of it to Ricky. There in his car, driving toward the beach, I almost felt like a hostage—as if I had to be sure to endear myself to him and make him feel a connection with me so he wouldn’t hurt me when I was vulnerable. He hadn’t done anything to make me feel that way, but it began to happen inside me naturally, I suppose as a type of learned response.
So I kept talking to Ricky about the Spiral Jetty and how it was like an ancient petroglyph recreated in modern times, and how Smithson had reversed the spiral to symbolize eternity. I talked about how hard I had to squint in the intense sunlight, because the desert sky was big and clear and the rays from the sun felt absolutely direct, and the way the wind whipped at my mother’s silky scarf so that it rippled like a flag. I was painting this picture for him, I suppose, so that he would be imagining me as a ten-year-old child with her mother, and when we arrived at the beach he wouldn’t have the heart to do anything unseemly to me.
But when I stopped to take a breath, he said, “It’s covered now.” I asked, “What’s covered?” and he said, “Spiral Jetty. The water level rose, and it’s been covered for a decade now. The whole thing’s underwater, like Atlantis.”
I stopped talking then. I had no idea this childhood landmark of mine had vanished, and I felt bewildered and sort of sad to realize it. Ricky looked over at me—he was still driving then—and I guess he saw the look on my face, because he said, “Hey, it’s still there, though. Eventually there’ll be a drought again and it’ll be visible, like before. I think that was part of the artist’s point.”
“When do you think that will be?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But everything goes in cycles, right? And probably when it turns up again it’ll be all covered in salt from the lake, like those crystals you can grow in a jar.”
I was trying to picture all of Spiral Jetty under the water, preserved and silent, like a shipwreck. And while I was doing that, Ricky pulled into a parking space and I felt anxious all over again because I had been off my guard as far as setting up some kind of advance protection from what he might do. But it turned out he was very much a gentleman for things like that. He didn’t touch me unless he was certain I wanted him to. Ricky could be very intuitive and empathetic, which you may not realize. I think that’s why he was so good with my cats, and why he could unapologetically and without hesitation attack my stepbrother at the front door of my home. Yet his strong feelings could be too much for him at times, and sometimes he would get overwhelmed and shut it all down, like a shopkeeper dropping the metal grate across his storefront at the end of a day. That way of his could feel bewildering, but it never occurred to me how insidious it would become. When he liberated himself from compassion he was a very dangerous kind of free.
Well, my pencil lead has run down to a stub, and my new mechanical pencils aren’t ready yet. I will write again when the wood has softened.