It hadn’t been a great week to start with but when I talked to Mary on the phone it corroded. She told me her dad had died, had a heart attack in the Kienow’s parking lot, carrying a package of freshly ground meat. Maybe Mary doesn’t handle grief well, but the way she said it, the fresh meat part, just got under my skin.
I lost the baby. That wasn’t the worst part, though. I hadn’t even known I was pregnant which is what bummed me out the most. I’ve never kept track of all that, the cycle thing. When it happens, it happens. Taylor was always trying to tell me I ought to be with the moon and something about the way he said it always made me feel he thought it was the ultimate woman way to be. And that I had somehow failed. Every so often he used to relate these exponents of his personality that frustrated the hell out of me. Not to say Taylor’s not all right because he is. But like I told him, I live in the city you idiot. How the hell does my body know the difference between moonlight and streetlight. I’m not the ocean with a gravitational connection to the celestial sphere. Taylor shrugged.
So I lost the baby I didn’t know I had. I woke up feeling uneasy and sometime after lunch I got this really gnawing ache in my stomach. I got clammy as hell, and nauseous. Next thing I knew there was a lot of blood and my stomach was racking. I sat on the edge of the bathtub totally distracted by what was happening. Instinctively I knew, though I have no idea how. I telephoned “Call a Nurse.” She said I should come in and get checked out, and that it was really important I bring a sample of the discharge. That’s how she put it, discharge. I was feeling too weak to be my usual obnoxious self so I only said, thanks a lot, and bye.
Since then everything’s been about death – death or dying. Mary’s dad and his goddamn fresh meat. Dead men and dead meat and discharge. Sitting on the edge of the bathtub I was overwhelmed with the awful mess my own body had made.
There’s some song about tire tracks on my heart, a anything new. I’m twenty two years old, nearly twenty three, and I didn’t even realize until very recently that duplicate number ages only occur every eleven years. I have no idea why that struck me as so sad, but it did. Next time I’ll be thirty three. God.
Everything happens when you’re too young, too young to appreciate it, and suddenly there’s nothing to nd now I know the feeling. There isn’t look forward to. That day I wanted to be eleven again, meeting up with Holden Caulfield for the first time, or Ponyboy. That’s when things were sweet. Holden just carrying on all the time about his lousy childhood, and Ponyboy watching everybody getting shot or busted up or going crazy all around him, and him just keeping on staying gold.
Taylor was on vacation and he expected me to join him. Actually, come to think of it, a lot of what was wrong with me probably had to do with being on summer break. As much as I hate school, vacation’s worse. There’s all these expectations of accomplishment. Everybody’s traveling, and not just flying to some particular destination, but sailing to an unknown one, or levitating for chrissakes. Other so-called friends are “working on a novel,” or a “series of paintings,” or giving immunizations to babies in Nicaragua. Taylor was off searching for the meaning of life in the desert, totally bummed out about graduating with a history degree. He said he didn’t know how to organize his knowledge. What that hell is that supposed to mean, anyway?
See, the deal is, Taylor ain’t no altar boy even though for the past couple of years he’s been pretending to be. When Taylor met me he was just coming up after a long downhill slide which landed him in jail for a couple of weeks. He never said a whole lot about it except that he followed some bad advice. Apparently his partner took most of the heat because his record didn’t look too good. Taylor did some bargain thing and only got thirty days. They let him out early ‘cause they needed the space.
The phone call with Mary’s what put me over the edge. It couldn’t have taken me more than half an hour to get packed. Two hours later I was on a Greyhound, sitting across the aisle from some creep, traveling across a state I’d been born and raised in but had never bothered an excursion through. I’d always figured anything east of the Cascade mountains had been blocked off for good reason.
I met up with Taylor exactly where he promised he would meet me, in NoName eastern Oregon in a dirty café called The Bronco. He was alone which surprised me. Because of the way Taylor romanticized the Old West I had expected a whole crowd, dudes with shit sticking to their boots, dark weathered faces and a wise and faraway look in their eyes. Instead, I found Taylor sitting all by himself.
Somebody had loaned Taylor a truck, some incredibly old thing that started by pushing a button. The way he drove it annoyed me for some unexplainable reason, one hand on the wheel with an ease that seemed so pretentious.
We spent a couple of days hanging out with some semblance of likeability between us, though we were both aware, I think, that we were doing a stupid little dance around each other. I tried to do my part by swallowing my initial resentment of following Taylor, felling like I didn’t have anything better to do than tag along behind him all summer. And I tried to be fair and not blame him for not telepathically knowing about the baby. But I’ll admit, I felt more than a little let down.
So, I sat around and tried to be nice, which isn’t usually a high priority of mine. Taylor left early every morning, fishing supposedly, yet another aspect of his new personality. I got up around ten feeling strangely as though I’d missed something. Of course there wasn’t anything going on, but the day felt old. Everybody talks about the woods being peaceful but I never heard so much ruckus in all my life. The birds just wouldn’t quit, and once I yelled to shut up, they were just driving me too much. I felt stupid, don’t you know, throwing rocks and going off at the birds.
There wasn’t anything to do but work on my tan so I made a huge ceremony out of it by turning over every half hour on the dot, even lying on my side. I burned at first, of course, ugly red stripes down my shins and across my chest. That made me feel even worse.
By Thursday I was pretty much sick to shit of nature and the whole pastoral thing. None of it added up. I thought about Whitman and Thoreau and how I always knew deep down inside that they were crazy, and I hated myself for having bought into it in my literature classes. At noon the sun was glaring and I couldn’t handle it, couldn’t drift off like usual. I felt like a pig on a spit instead. Then these creatures called horseflies started swarming around. These dudes are so big I was scared to swish them away. They ought to be considered rodents because of the way they make this defiant eye contact. Finally I packed it up and was about to go insane when Taylor came back.
I told him we had to do something, go into town for a drink or shopping or something and he reluctantly agreed. I could tell he was disappointed in my poor naturalist abilities. We started down the highway but Taylor pulled off and drove forever down a road with ruts so big my head kept cracking on the top of the truck. Every mile or so he had to stop and get out in order to open a cow gate. Once through he stopped again to close it. I was pretty scared of getting shot, fairly sure that we were trespassing, given all the signs posted everywhere saying exactly that. I knew better than to say anything to Taylor, him being a born again cowboy and all.
The road seemed to be going nowhere, just up and down and around scattered bunches of cattle, chewing, with the most ridiculous flat dead eyes. Taylor wouldn’t talk and I got sick of trying to make him. The dust was fierce, settling all over me dry and gritty. Finally I got so frustrated I thought I was going to start crying. I yelled at Taylor, but he only answered quietly that we’d turn around real soon.
We went over a hill and below us was a valley full of the same old craggy sagebrush and cow shit. The road was forced to go around what appeared to be an attempt at a house, a crooked two story thing with a wisp of front porch. Taylor pulled over an shut off the truck.
If there hadn’t been a flat iron in the back of the truck we probably would have left. But after sitting around for about ten minutes with nothing to say we got out. The wind was blowing hot and dry, almost growling. Taylor started browsing around in the tool box. He kept slapping the iron in his hand like a ball into a mitt, with a casual seriousness.
The lock snapped off without any effort. When Taylor pushed the door open pack rats scrambled. Dank air rushed out in our faces. It stunk. Inside was a convolution of stuffed furniture, clothing and magazines. The huge old cook stove caught my eye right away, blue enamel and chrome, covered with the droppings of the rats, and spider webs. I don’t know why I decided I wanted it, but I told Taylor I did, and he smiled an agreement.
It took gargantuan effort on our part to load it in the truck. I don’t know why we even bothered. We had to put it on a tarp and drag it down the steps. It sounded like we were breaking it apart, but that didn’t seem to matter. Getting it into the truck bed was the hardest. Taylor took the tailgate off and we used it for a ramp, me pulling and Taylor pushing from behind.
We should have left then and I’ll never know why we didn’t. We stood there staring at the house, looking so pathetic with the door hanging open, like some old woman sound asleep with her head back and her mouth open, exposing a void of missing teeth. Taylor walked over the hoisted himself onto the roof. I stood, squinting, concentrating on the familiar slope of his shoulders silhouetted in the dusty sun.
“I lost the baby,” I yelled.
Taylor glanced down and grinned at me. “I love you too, baby,” he replied.
It was the saddest miscommunication of my life. I jumped into the bed of the truck. When I touched the stove the burning hot iron bit my hand. I looked into the tool box and saw a coil of rubber hose and a plastic milk container, stored there by the cowboy whose truck Taylor was borrowing. His resourcefulness pissed me off for some reason.
I never reconsidered. I siphoned about a quart into the container. Taylor came and stood beside me. “Don’t swallow any,” he said.
I walked over and sprinkled gasoline on the side of the house. It soaked right up. Then what happened next was the worst thing, I think. Taylor and I walked back to the truck and sat on the hood, smoking, not saying a word. I listened to Taylor’s breathing. It sounded completely normal.
I walked back to the house and stood there, giving peace a chance, waiting for the cosmos to speak to me. I thought of this guy I read in some lit. class who wanted so much to be a part of nature that he used to climb these incredibly tall redwoods and tie himself to the branches, and wait it out. Just for the experience. Or something.
I don’t know for sure, but it wasn’t anger, or even hatred that compelled me. I didn’t feel that much strength. What I felt was contempt, something I’d always thought was an unpure and complex emotion. But what I found out was that contempt carries its own genuine weight. As if any of my philosophizing mattered a goddamn bit. My cigarette burned my finger. I flipped it against the house. It fell to the ground. After a second or two it ignited. I was kind of shocked. It wasn’t even a minute before one of those old boards let out a crack, and then right away thick black smoke got caught in the gritty wind and spiraled away.
We never got caught, Taylor and me. I doubt anybody even noticed. We drove about a mile across the plain until we found the highway. We went to school fall term even though I thought all along that somehow we wouldn’t. Part of me still believed that significant events occur which drastically alter one’s existence. But the rest of me knew there was no such thing. Taylor started grad. school and I still see him around now and then. He’s dating this woman who’s got a little kid. She seems to really like him. I know how that is.
Raven Chronicles, 1997
I lost the baby. That wasn’t the worst part, though. I hadn’t even known I was pregnant which is what bummed me out the most. I’ve never kept track of all that, the cycle thing. When it happens, it happens. Taylor was always trying to tell me I ought to be with the moon and something about the way he said it always made me feel he thought it was the ultimate woman way to be. And that I had somehow failed. Every so often he used to relate these exponents of his personality that frustrated the hell out of me. Not to say Taylor’s not all right because he is. But like I told him, I live in the city you idiot. How the hell does my body know the difference between moonlight and streetlight. I’m not the ocean with a gravitational connection to the celestial sphere. Taylor shrugged.
So I lost the baby I didn’t know I had. I woke up feeling uneasy and sometime after lunch I got this really gnawing ache in my stomach. I got clammy as hell, and nauseous. Next thing I knew there was a lot of blood and my stomach was racking. I sat on the edge of the bathtub totally distracted by what was happening. Instinctively I knew, though I have no idea how. I telephoned “Call a Nurse.” She said I should come in and get checked out, and that it was really important I bring a sample of the discharge. That’s how she put it, discharge. I was feeling too weak to be my usual obnoxious self so I only said, thanks a lot, and bye.
Since then everything’s been about death – death or dying. Mary’s dad and his goddamn fresh meat. Dead men and dead meat and discharge. Sitting on the edge of the bathtub I was overwhelmed with the awful mess my own body had made.
There’s some song about tire tracks on my heart, a anything new. I’m twenty two years old, nearly twenty three, and I didn’t even realize until very recently that duplicate number ages only occur every eleven years. I have no idea why that struck me as so sad, but it did. Next time I’ll be thirty three. God.
Everything happens when you’re too young, too young to appreciate it, and suddenly there’s nothing to nd now I know the feeling. There isn’t look forward to. That day I wanted to be eleven again, meeting up with Holden Caulfield for the first time, or Ponyboy. That’s when things were sweet. Holden just carrying on all the time about his lousy childhood, and Ponyboy watching everybody getting shot or busted up or going crazy all around him, and him just keeping on staying gold.
Taylor was on vacation and he expected me to join him. Actually, come to think of it, a lot of what was wrong with me probably had to do with being on summer break. As much as I hate school, vacation’s worse. There’s all these expectations of accomplishment. Everybody’s traveling, and not just flying to some particular destination, but sailing to an unknown one, or levitating for chrissakes. Other so-called friends are “working on a novel,” or a “series of paintings,” or giving immunizations to babies in Nicaragua. Taylor was off searching for the meaning of life in the desert, totally bummed out about graduating with a history degree. He said he didn’t know how to organize his knowledge. What that hell is that supposed to mean, anyway?
See, the deal is, Taylor ain’t no altar boy even though for the past couple of years he’s been pretending to be. When Taylor met me he was just coming up after a long downhill slide which landed him in jail for a couple of weeks. He never said a whole lot about it except that he followed some bad advice. Apparently his partner took most of the heat because his record didn’t look too good. Taylor did some bargain thing and only got thirty days. They let him out early ‘cause they needed the space.
The phone call with Mary’s what put me over the edge. It couldn’t have taken me more than half an hour to get packed. Two hours later I was on a Greyhound, sitting across the aisle from some creep, traveling across a state I’d been born and raised in but had never bothered an excursion through. I’d always figured anything east of the Cascade mountains had been blocked off for good reason.
I met up with Taylor exactly where he promised he would meet me, in NoName eastern Oregon in a dirty café called The Bronco. He was alone which surprised me. Because of the way Taylor romanticized the Old West I had expected a whole crowd, dudes with shit sticking to their boots, dark weathered faces and a wise and faraway look in their eyes. Instead, I found Taylor sitting all by himself.
Somebody had loaned Taylor a truck, some incredibly old thing that started by pushing a button. The way he drove it annoyed me for some unexplainable reason, one hand on the wheel with an ease that seemed so pretentious.
We spent a couple of days hanging out with some semblance of likeability between us, though we were both aware, I think, that we were doing a stupid little dance around each other. I tried to do my part by swallowing my initial resentment of following Taylor, felling like I didn’t have anything better to do than tag along behind him all summer. And I tried to be fair and not blame him for not telepathically knowing about the baby. But I’ll admit, I felt more than a little let down.
So, I sat around and tried to be nice, which isn’t usually a high priority of mine. Taylor left early every morning, fishing supposedly, yet another aspect of his new personality. I got up around ten feeling strangely as though I’d missed something. Of course there wasn’t anything going on, but the day felt old. Everybody talks about the woods being peaceful but I never heard so much ruckus in all my life. The birds just wouldn’t quit, and once I yelled to shut up, they were just driving me too much. I felt stupid, don’t you know, throwing rocks and going off at the birds.
There wasn’t anything to do but work on my tan so I made a huge ceremony out of it by turning over every half hour on the dot, even lying on my side. I burned at first, of course, ugly red stripes down my shins and across my chest. That made me feel even worse.
By Thursday I was pretty much sick to shit of nature and the whole pastoral thing. None of it added up. I thought about Whitman and Thoreau and how I always knew deep down inside that they were crazy, and I hated myself for having bought into it in my literature classes. At noon the sun was glaring and I couldn’t handle it, couldn’t drift off like usual. I felt like a pig on a spit instead. Then these creatures called horseflies started swarming around. These dudes are so big I was scared to swish them away. They ought to be considered rodents because of the way they make this defiant eye contact. Finally I packed it up and was about to go insane when Taylor came back.
I told him we had to do something, go into town for a drink or shopping or something and he reluctantly agreed. I could tell he was disappointed in my poor naturalist abilities. We started down the highway but Taylor pulled off and drove forever down a road with ruts so big my head kept cracking on the top of the truck. Every mile or so he had to stop and get out in order to open a cow gate. Once through he stopped again to close it. I was pretty scared of getting shot, fairly sure that we were trespassing, given all the signs posted everywhere saying exactly that. I knew better than to say anything to Taylor, him being a born again cowboy and all.
The road seemed to be going nowhere, just up and down and around scattered bunches of cattle, chewing, with the most ridiculous flat dead eyes. Taylor wouldn’t talk and I got sick of trying to make him. The dust was fierce, settling all over me dry and gritty. Finally I got so frustrated I thought I was going to start crying. I yelled at Taylor, but he only answered quietly that we’d turn around real soon.
We went over a hill and below us was a valley full of the same old craggy sagebrush and cow shit. The road was forced to go around what appeared to be an attempt at a house, a crooked two story thing with a wisp of front porch. Taylor pulled over an shut off the truck.
If there hadn’t been a flat iron in the back of the truck we probably would have left. But after sitting around for about ten minutes with nothing to say we got out. The wind was blowing hot and dry, almost growling. Taylor started browsing around in the tool box. He kept slapping the iron in his hand like a ball into a mitt, with a casual seriousness.
The lock snapped off without any effort. When Taylor pushed the door open pack rats scrambled. Dank air rushed out in our faces. It stunk. Inside was a convolution of stuffed furniture, clothing and magazines. The huge old cook stove caught my eye right away, blue enamel and chrome, covered with the droppings of the rats, and spider webs. I don’t know why I decided I wanted it, but I told Taylor I did, and he smiled an agreement.
It took gargantuan effort on our part to load it in the truck. I don’t know why we even bothered. We had to put it on a tarp and drag it down the steps. It sounded like we were breaking it apart, but that didn’t seem to matter. Getting it into the truck bed was the hardest. Taylor took the tailgate off and we used it for a ramp, me pulling and Taylor pushing from behind.
We should have left then and I’ll never know why we didn’t. We stood there staring at the house, looking so pathetic with the door hanging open, like some old woman sound asleep with her head back and her mouth open, exposing a void of missing teeth. Taylor walked over the hoisted himself onto the roof. I stood, squinting, concentrating on the familiar slope of his shoulders silhouetted in the dusty sun.
“I lost the baby,” I yelled.
Taylor glanced down and grinned at me. “I love you too, baby,” he replied.
It was the saddest miscommunication of my life. I jumped into the bed of the truck. When I touched the stove the burning hot iron bit my hand. I looked into the tool box and saw a coil of rubber hose and a plastic milk container, stored there by the cowboy whose truck Taylor was borrowing. His resourcefulness pissed me off for some reason.
I never reconsidered. I siphoned about a quart into the container. Taylor came and stood beside me. “Don’t swallow any,” he said.
I walked over and sprinkled gasoline on the side of the house. It soaked right up. Then what happened next was the worst thing, I think. Taylor and I walked back to the truck and sat on the hood, smoking, not saying a word. I listened to Taylor’s breathing. It sounded completely normal.
I walked back to the house and stood there, giving peace a chance, waiting for the cosmos to speak to me. I thought of this guy I read in some lit. class who wanted so much to be a part of nature that he used to climb these incredibly tall redwoods and tie himself to the branches, and wait it out. Just for the experience. Or something.
I don’t know for sure, but it wasn’t anger, or even hatred that compelled me. I didn’t feel that much strength. What I felt was contempt, something I’d always thought was an unpure and complex emotion. But what I found out was that contempt carries its own genuine weight. As if any of my philosophizing mattered a goddamn bit. My cigarette burned my finger. I flipped it against the house. It fell to the ground. After a second or two it ignited. I was kind of shocked. It wasn’t even a minute before one of those old boards let out a crack, and then right away thick black smoke got caught in the gritty wind and spiraled away.
We never got caught, Taylor and me. I doubt anybody even noticed. We drove about a mile across the plain until we found the highway. We went to school fall term even though I thought all along that somehow we wouldn’t. Part of me still believed that significant events occur which drastically alter one’s existence. But the rest of me knew there was no such thing. Taylor started grad. school and I still see him around now and then. He’s dating this woman who’s got a little kid. She seems to really like him. I know how that is.
Raven Chronicles, 1997
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