Mrs. Everything (24 page)

Bethie hugged her sister, thanked her for the boots.

“Be careful,” said Jo, and kissed her cheek. “Be good.”

Back in the bedroom, Bethie considered a stack of underwear and bras; Devon cruised by with his wicked grin and put them back into the dresser drawer. Bethie smiled at him, unable to help herself. She put her boots in the bag first, thinking that she’d changed enough to leave most, but not all, of her previous life behind.

*  *  *

The five of them left on Wednesday morning, an hour later than planned, because Marjorie hadn’t filled the Vanagon’s tank and Connie had forgotten to pack her allergy pills.

When they finally got on the highway, the first leg of the trip was easy. They sang along with the radio and listened to the news
reports: President Johnson named Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg to succeed Adlai E. Stevenson as the United States’ representative to the United Nations. Defense Secretary McNamara said the situation in South Vietnam was getting worse. (“Big surprise,” Flip hooted.) Congress was expected to pass the administration’s Medicare–Social Security bill.

By five, they were outside of Pittsburgh. Dev pulled off the two-lane road onto a dirt driveway, dragging a plume of dust behind it. As they got closer to the farmhouse, where they’d be spending the night with Devon’s friends, Bethie saw a man standing on the porch, barefoot in denim overalls with no shirt on underneath. A little boy, maybe two or three years old, was hanging on to his leg. The boy had curly hair and pouty lips, and he was naked, with a milky-white belly and sunburned shoulders. He stared and sucked his fingers, unimpressed with the sight of five young adults piling out of the van, all of them disheveled and smelling of pot. On Dev’s orders, they hadn’t smoked in the car—“That’s all we need, the Man pulling us over,” he’d said. But there had been rest stops, and Marjorie had hidden a dozen neatly rolled joints in a gold cigarette case. One of them would keep watch while the remaining four huddled behind the bathrooms, giggling between tokes.

“I’m Scout,” said the man, hugging each of them in turn. He smelled like freshly turned dirt and unwashed armpit. Bethie made herself smile and tried to breathe through her mouth. “And the little fella’s name is Sky.”

“Well, aren’t you a cutie!” Marjorie said, clasping her hands at her chest and bending down to look him in the eye. Sky stared back at her before taking his little penis in grimy fingers, aiming, and peeing on her sandal and her bare toes. Marjorie screeched and hopped backward. Scout laughed. “I don’t think he cares for your shoes.” While Marjorie hopped off in search of a hose, Sky inserted his index finger into his right nostril, rotated it, pulled it out, and stuck it in his mouth. Bethie shuddered, burying her face in Dev’s shirt, which smelled like patchouli and her sweetheart’s
warm skin.

The farmhouse’s first floor was a series of big, barely furnished rooms, with walls stained brown from woodsmoke. Bethie looked down and saw holes in the wooden floors that let her peer straight down to the basement, and the chairs and couches all looked like they had been picked up off the curb on trash day. Bethie picked her way through the living room and found the kitchen, where a woman standing over the sink introduced herself as Blue. She wore a dirty peasant blouse with red-and-gold embroidery around the neck, and jeans. She had lank dark-blond hair, bare feet, dirt under her fingernails, and the same milky skin as Sky. “I hope everyone likes pasta,” she said, her mournful voice suggesting that probably nobody did, and that she’d be in trouble for serving it. Bethie and Marjorie and Connie worked in the kitchen, helping to chop mushrooms and onions and garlic, and wash a bushel basketful of a dark green leafy vegetable that Blue told them was kale. While the pasta boiled, Bethie removed dirty dishes, books, broken crayons, newspapers, and a copy of
The Hobbit
from the long wooden table, and wiped off the crumbs and smears of sticky stuff underneath, and Connie brought over chipped, mismatched plates, silverware and glasses and cloth napkins. There were only seven forks, and eight of them, but Blue told them that Sky didn’t count because he mostly ate with his fingers. Bethie shuddered again, thinking of the places that those fingers had been, and hoped the little boy’s parents made him wash up before he started eating.

Over dinner, she learned that Blue’s name had once been Bonnie, and that she’d grown up outside of Cleveland and attended OSU. Scout had once been Scott, and he and Devon had been graduate students at the U of M together before, as Scout put it, “we chose another path.” Bethie also learned that Scout’s main crop on the farm wasn’t corn or zucchini but marijuana, and that there was a lab set up in the basement where he was manufacturing acid, using the recipe that he and Dev had perfected in Ann Arbor. Bethie picked at her pasta, wishing the cavernous dining
room were a little more brightly lit so that she’d be able to tell exactly what she was eating, and what was a mushroom and what was a dead fly. (“Hey, it’s protein,” Scout had said, after a slightly hysterical Connie told everyone that she thought she’d swallowed a beetle.) After dinner, the guys went down to the basement. Bethie could hear conversation and laughter floating up through the holes in the floor, while the girls did the dishes. Blue explained in an apologetic tone that they were a little short on beds and blankets and pillows, and there was only one functioning toilet in the house. “ ‘Functioning’ is a little generous, babe,” Scout said, climbing up the stairs with a joint burning between his fingertips. “Honestly, if you’ve just got to whiz, the woods are a better bet.”

Bethie tried to smile as Dev took her hand. “Come on,” he said, walking her toward the backyard. “There’s a tent.” Bethie followed him out into the darkness, hearing a mosquito whining in her ear, and almost tripping over an abandoned rake.
You could be home right now, with a real bed and a functioning toilet, and a summer job selling sheets and towels at Hudson’s
, she thought, and tried to tell herself that this was an adventure. When they rounded the corner, she saw that the tent was wonderful, like something out of a children’s book, a tall white triangle, its circular base covered in rugs and pillows, its canvas walls sheer enough to admit the moonlight’s glow. Bethie and Dev sat on a blanket, underneath the star-shot sky, smoking a joint. Dev laid a tab of acid on her tongue, and when they made love, Bethie could feel the world swirling around her, the dirt warm beneath her back, the silvery moon and the stars moving, in a stately waltz, above her head. The darkness hid the farmhouse’s peeling paint and broken shutters and the way the doors didn’t quite line up with the frames. Warm golden light shone through the windows, and in an upstairs bedroom, Bethie could see Blue holding Sky against her chest, sitting in a rocking chair, her lips moving as she sang him to sleep.

“Beautiful,” she murmured, as Dev rolled off her, taking her
hand.

“What’s beautiful, Alice?” he asked.

“Everything,” she said, her voice dreamy, and Dev laughed and rolled her against him, tucking her into his arms. It was wonderful, being with Dev. Better than wonderful; it was fair. With her uncle, sex had been a thing taken from her. She and Dev took from each other and gave to each other in equal measure. It was just the way it should be. When he woke up, she would tell him that. She’d explain what had been done to her, and tell him how much he meant to her.

“I love you,” Bethie whispered, finally giving voice to the words she’d said in her head a hundred times. Devon held her, and didn’t answer. When Bethie rolled on her side to look at him, she saw that he’d fallen asleep. His eyes were closed, his mouth was open, his black hair tangled. Bethie combed her fingers through it and eased a pillow underneath his head. She knew that he loved her, even if he’d never said so. He told her she was beautiful all the time, and in the clearest sign of his affections, he never made her pay for the drugs he gave her, a courtesy she’d never seen him extend to anyone else.

Bethie decided that she would gladly abandon her dreams of fame and fortune as long as she could be with him, wherever he went. They would be wanderers, travelers, moving lightly through the world with nothing more than backpacks on their backs. Anyplace there was a college or a university, anyplace there was a concentration of young people who wanted to open their minds, Dev had friends, or could make them, and Bethie would be at his side. She couldn’t imagine being without him. She loved his lean body, his black beard, his glittering eyes, his smell. She loved how he called her Alice and pulled her onto his lap, as if she were no bigger than a doll. She loved how he had looked past her sprayed curls and her starched party dress and seen her adventurer’s heart. She loved him, and she would make him love her, if he didn’t already, and they would be together forever.

*  *  *

When Bethie woke up in the morning, the air in the tent was humid, and her skin was unpleasantly sticky. Devon was gone, the tent’s flap was open, and Bethie opened her eyes to see Sky staring down at her dispassionately. Someone had given him a shirt, a men’s undershirt that hung down past his knees. “I like your shirt,” Bethie said.

“It’s a dress,” Sky said disdainfully, and wandered off.
Well, at least he didn’t pee on me
, Bethie thought. There was that.

Bethie pulled on her own dress and inched into the sunshine. Connie hurried over to whisper, “You do not want to go in that bathroom. Believe me.” She gave a dramatic shudder, and Bethie went into the woods to do her business before joining Connie and Marjorie, who’d found a garden hose. The girls rinsed off for as long as they could stand it underneath the icy blast. The men were already piling things into the van. Scout gave them each an apple, “grown right here, on the land,” before they all climbed aboard and set out for Rhode Island.

On the first day, when there’d been five of them, they’d been tight but relatively comfortable. With seven adults and a squirmy toddler, the van felt unendurably crowded. Flip wanted to listen to music, like they had on the first leg, all of them singing, but as I-95 brought them closer to New York City, Devon insisted on the all-news station that delivered traffic reports every ten minutes. (“Isn’t it funny,” Connie murmured, “you put a guy behind the wheel of a car and he instantly turns into your dad?”) Two of the men sat up front, Dev behind the wheel and Scout in the passenger’s seat, riding in comfort while everyone else was shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, with Sky in the very back of the van, on top of a pile of luggage, with his T-shirt hiked up to his waist, dreamily tugging his penis toward his feet, letting it snap back, and doing it again. (“I guess they don’t believe in giving him toys,” Connie whispered when Bethie alerted her to the situation. “He’s just making do with what he’s got.”) Bethie sat in the third row, in the middle
seat, with her arms pressed tight against her body, smelling clary and lavender oil, marijuana and body odor. In spite of the smells and her discomfort, the pot and the pills Dev had given her that morning suffused her limbs with a pleasant heaviness, making her drowsy and content. She felt like a cat basking in the sunshine, and couldn’t wait until they arrived. Dev said they’d be able to pull a blanket up close enough to the stage so that they could hear. Bethie imagined it, being close enough to touch Odetta or Joan Baez as she curled up next to Dev, with his body warm against hers and his clever fingers combing through her hair.

*  *  *

Traffic slowed once they got off I-95 outside of Providence and made their way along the back roads to Newport. Dev steered the van through heavy traffic, over a suspension bridge that carried them over the water, toward the sprawling fairgrounds and the city’s downtown, and Bethie felt her heart speed up, eager for a glimpse of the Atlantic, which she’d never seen. She’d pleaded with Devon to drive them past Newport’s famous mansions, and he’d agreed, but from her seat in between the three other women she saw the grand summer houses in pieces—a glimpse of roof here, a peek of lawn there, a sliver of the glinting water, then just more cars. The sidewalks were full of people, some of the men in tie-dyed T-shirts or chambray work shirts, some of the women with bare feet and long dresses, or crowns of flowers in their hair.
My people
, Bethie thought. She couldn’t wait to jump out of the car and join the throngs. The drugs were still working, giving everything a honey-dipped glow, and everywhere she looked there were young people playing guitars or harmonicas, banjos or fiddles or even blowing into jugs, singing, repeating lyrics back and forth, trading songs. As soon as Devon stopped the car, Bethie could hear the music, and feel it, too, the thudding of the bass and the pounding of the drums, through the windows and right up through her feet.

“C’mon,” she said to Marjorie, grabbing the other girl’s hand. They left the men to sort out the tents and found a concrete bathhouse with a row of stalls and sinks and mirrors made of polished metal. Bethie breathed through her mouth while she used the facilities, washing her hands and splashing water on her face. Marjorie stripped off her purple cotton tank top. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and Bethie saw her breasts, small and almost triangular, set far apart on her chest, with nipples that pointed toward her belly. Marjorie grabbed paper towels, squirted soap from the dispenser on top, and scrubbed her breasts, the back of her neck, and her underarms. “Ugh! That farm! That kid! That bathroom!”

“We’re here now,” said Bethie, feeling a smile stretch her face. Outside, the crowd swept them up and carried them toward a makeshift-looking wooden stage. And there was Joan Baez, surprisingly small and slender, with her wavy hair blowing and her dark eyes wide and intent, standing in front of the red-and-white-striped backdrop, singing “Long Black Veil.” “Look what I’ve got,” Marjorie whispered, reaching into her pocket. Marjorie had wide hips and narrow shoulders and big, slightly bulgy blue eyes that made her look a little like a frog.
But a friendly frog
, Bethie thought, as Marjorie opened her hand to reveal two squares of acid, both of them stamped with a cartoon likeness of Goofy.