Lullaby for the Rain Girl (26 page)

By the time we emerged from the apartment for the first time together, the first time as a
couple,
freshly washed and sexually satiated, it would have been obvious to anyone that we were young lovers; we walked hand-in-hand, swinging our arms childishly, breaking from each other and running, tackling each other and tumbling onto grass, kissing and nuzzling and tickling. The Rachel I saw now seemed a completely different person from the sullen, alienated girl who’d been my roommate, Peter’s girlfriend; this girl was loose, silly, happy, pure pleasure to be with. Her gap-toothed smile, once glimpsed so rarely, radiated from her face now. She would grab my arm, pull me to her, kiss me on the neck and jaw and cheek. I found myself laughing, laughing as I could hardly ever remember laughing in my life. Our first outing, to the grocery store, was an occasion of wild shrieks and giggles, stupid kid jokes that were for some reason hilarious to us, as when she shoved two big grapefruit into her shirt and asked, grinning: “Better?”

“Worse, worse!” I cried, grabbing at her chest, dislodging the grapefruit and causing them to tumble down her shirt and onto the shop’s floor. I chased one as it rolled down the aisle, Rachel’s laughter following me. People stared at us. I threw the grapefruit into our shopping basket, figuring that if we at least bought them, no one could complain.

We brought the food home and put it away, started kissing each other and thus inaugurated another quick sexual session, this one on the sofa. We pulled ourselves together again after that and went out once more, first to give notice to Mr. Bogg, then to simply wander in the summer sunshine. Our mood was quieter now—the frantic hysterics of the morning had abated—and we strolled slowly, easily, completely comfortable with each other, at ease in the world.

Part of me understood how strange this was. I didn’t like thinking of it, but couldn’t help it: Sherry and Peter had left all of two days before. Rachel and I had both been cruelly betrayed and abandoned. Yet it hardly seemed to matter now. The more I thought about it the more I realized that Sherry’s and my relationship had been at its end anyway: knowing each other since childhood, a couple since middle school, we had simply arrived at the time to move on. We’d grown and changed. It wasn’t possible to continue as we’d been.

But as we made our way along State Street—utterly without destination—I felt something else, too. For a while now I’d had an odd,
fated
feeling about Rachel Blackburn—ever since I’d read her poems, really, and seen her as something besides a fairly brainless little punk chick. We were both writers, after all. And certainly after our acid trip it had felt as if we shared something private, something secret—a thing shockingly intimate. The fact that we were both victims of Sherry and Peter’s behavior only tightened the bond. There was a sense in me that Rachel and I had been moving inexorably toward each other for a long time—even, perhaps, that if Sherry and Peter hadn’t betrayed us, we might eventually have betrayed them.

We wandered through a record shop, where Rachel complained that they didn’t have
“shit
for music here” (“Where’s Black Flag? D.O.A.? The Big Boys?”), and a bookstore, where she pulled down a volume of Sylvia Plath and had me read “Daddy,” my first encounter with that apocalyptic fever dream of a poem. “You do not do, you do not do / Anymore, black shoe...”

“My dad was a good guy,” she said thoughtfully, replacing the book on the shelf, “but I’ve known a few Nazis in my time.”

We had a snack at a little café next to the Arlington Theater—cheesecake and iced tea—and then found our way to Anacapa Street and the county courthouse, with its wide lawn and lovely gardens.

“Remember this place?” she asked, grinning.

I laughed. “What do you think?”

“I think,” she said, in her best stoner voice, “that the hippie boy was
trippin’,
man!”

I growled and grabbed playfully at her; she slapped at my hands, laughing.

“Hey,” she said, looking up, “you ever been up in that clock tower?”

“The El Mirador,” I said, following her gaze. “Yeah. It’s a nice view.”

“I’ve never been up there. Let’s go up. Is it free?”

“It’s free. You just walk up there, or take the elevator. Nobody stops you.”

We took the elevator and stepped out, the vast, misty vista of Santa Barbara everywhere around and below us.

“Cool!” she cried. “You can see
everything!”

We sauntered around, looking first toward the ocean, then the mountains, spotting familiar buildings—even our own apartment. Rachel was exhilarated.

“Makes me think I can fly, being up here!” She stood at the railing, arms outstretched, gazing down at the traffic on Anacapa Street.

“Look on my works, ye mighty,” she called out laughingly, “and despair!”

“Despair!” I concurred loudly.

“Despair!”

# # #

“Like I said, the High Plains,” she told me later, on the lawn of the courthouse, as we sat together sharing a can of Coke. “I was an only child. Mom drank. Dad didn’t know what to do with her. He was strong in every way except dealing with
her.
I don’t have good memories of my mom, Benja-me-me. She was an angry drunk. She passed out at the kitchen table some nights. I remember covering her with a blanket sometimes, putting it over her shoulders, and just leaving her there. This would be late, after Dad was in bed. Dad was a farmer, or he tried to be. But the land there is terrible. He could never really make a living at it. Wheat, cotton. And sunflowers—there were lots of sunflowers in the summer. I loved those. But it was a raggedy-ass place. The house was old, things were always falling apart. My dad did what he could but at some point it all got away from him. When my mom died he just seemed to lose energy. He started falling apart just like the house and the farm. He was always thin; he grew thinner. Smoked all the time. He tried, but...

“Living in that area—it was like a ghost town. There was
one
school, for all grades—Harman Combined School. It wasn’t literally a one-room schoolhouse, but Jesus, it was close. But there were hardly any kids, that’s why it was ‘combined.’ Families had been leaving there for the past fifty years. They’re still leaving now. There were
five
other kids in my kindergarten class. I graduated high school with three. The town was dying—it’s still dying, shit, if it’s not already dead. Downtown Harman had a library—that was important to me—a grocery store, a bank, a hardware store...what else? A real estate office.
Three
bars. It was just this dead little burg in the middle of hundreds of miles of wheat fields and buffalo grass. Our house was way out of town—it took an hour to get there on my bike.

“I read a lot. Mystery stories. Fantasy. Anything. That’s when I got interested in poetry. I remember there was a book at the library I checked out over and over again, called
The Pocket Book of Story Poems.
A little paperback. I read it over and over again. Ogden Nash and Poe and A.E. Housman and all those guys. Poems that told stories, you know? Perfect for me, at that age. I needed stories. I needed poems. I needed to be
away
from that place,
even when I was there.

“Music helped me. You couldn’t buy a record in Harman, so I joined record clubs. You know, pay one dollar now and get twelve records and you have to buy ten more over two years or something? I got the Sex Pistols delivered right to the front door, which was cool.” She grinned. “Dad made me get headphones.”

“That I can picture,” I said, taking the Coke from her. “But I can’t picture you as a country girl.”

“I was, though. Plaid shirts and boots and everything. But it’s not like people imagine the country—horses and ranch hands. It was just us, with the seasonal help that Dad would hire. See, you just think I’m some Valley Girl or something...”

“Rachel, I did
not
say...”

“But look.” She flexed her right arm. “Go ahead. Feel.” I did: the muscle was big for someone her size, stone-solid. “I’ll have you know that I can run a fuckin’ John Deere
tractor.
Have you ever run a tractor, hippie boy?”

“Can’t say as I have.”

“Well, there you go. I have all sorts of talents that you know nothing about.”

“I’ve read your poetry,” I said, “and I’ve had sex with you. What other talents matter?”

“Ha!” She took the can back. “I had to leave, though. I knew it long before Dad got sick. But shit,
everybody
leaves Harman. The population has dropped every year for the past fifty years. Back in the twenties it was thousands. It was like a hundred when I left.”

“When was that?”

“Almost—hm. Three years ago.”

“After your dad died?”

“Yeah. Everything was sold off. I got a little money from a life insurance policy—that’s what I’ve been living on. But that’s it. Like I told you, it all went for debts.” She stared at the grass. “Poor Dad. He tried. He really did. But nobody can make it out there, not really. The place broke him. It breaks everybody. It would have broken me, if I’d stayed there.” She reached into her back pocket then, bringing out a little black wallet. She took out two tattered snapshots and, looking at them for a moment, handed them over to me.

As unlikely as it seemed, the photos made it clear that Rachel was telling the truth. The first was of a thin, reedy man, middle-aged, in a worn blue farmer’s shirt and black baseball cap. His skin was dark and hard-looking, deeply creased, clearly the skin of a man who had spent much of his life in the sun. He was squinting self-consciously at the camera and displaying an uneven grin. I noticed that he had the same gap between his two front teeth as Rachel. Brown wheat fields were blurrily in the background.

“Dad,” she said. “I love that picture of him.”

“He looks,” I said honestly, “like a nice guy.”

“He was. Hated having his picture taken, though.”

“Yes. You can see that.”

The other photo was of Rachel herself, smiling in a plaid flannel shirt, old blue jeans, and scuffed brown boots, her hands on her hips before a decrepit-looking old house. The same brown fields were in the background. Her outfit was incongruous enough, but her long, straight farmer-girl hair and utter lack of any piercings on her ears or eyebrows or nose made her almost unrecognizable.

“I was fifteen,” she said. “That was just around the time that punk started turning me into a bad girl.” She grinned.

“You look sweet. Sweet and innocent.”

“I was. But not for much longer. That was the time I knew I was going to have to get out of there eventually.”

It was growing late: the sky’s blue was darkening, the shadows creeping slowly across us.

“I needed
cities,”
she said suddenly, passionately. “I needed
people.
Music. Art. Poetry. Restaurants. The first thing I did when I left a couple of years later was go to Fargo. I look back on it now, that place seems—sort of unsophisticated, you know? But it was a
city
. There were clubs where bands played. Even hardcore punk bands, if you knew where to look. Real bookstores and real record stores. I worked in Fargo as a waitress for a while.”

“What made you leave?”

“The winter,” she said. “The fucking snow. I’d lived with that too long. I decided I wanted to go somewhere it would never, ever fucking
snow
. My dad died in the middle of winter. He died on a gray day at the end of January with the snow pouring down outside.” She shook her head. “It poured for days. It didn’t stop for him, for his dying. It just kept dropping down. I hated it.” She brightened suddenly. “I’d been sending my little movie stories to Hollywood, so I thought, What the hell, I’ll go there, where the sun never stops shining.”

I touched her hand. “I’m glad,” I said, “that you didn’t quite make it.”

“Well, I might still. Just to go to the clubs on the Sunset Strip. Want to come with me?”

“I want to go anywhere you’re going.”

She looked at me. “Aw, shit, Benja-me-me.” She leaned over and kissed my temple. “So do I. With you.”

7

Those weeks, that summer: in memory they stand luminous, multi-hued, bright as High Plains sunflowers or the Santa Barbara sky. Rachel bowed to the inevitable and got a job—at the same restaurant where I worked, in fact, which made the days fly by; I would never have imagined that waiting on tables could be
fun,
but it was with her there, both of us in our employee uniforms, passing each other in the kitchen, sharing a quick kiss or grope by the condiment station. After a few days it became evident she was actually better at the job than I was; I was amazed to see how she could pour on the charm with customers, especially male ones. She certainly got better tips than I did.

“It helps,” she said sardonically, “to be a cute girl.”

And at work she
was
cute, in some odd, off-kilter sort of way. She could even turn her mistakes to her advantage. More than once I saw her roll her eyes prettily when someone complained about something she’d forgotten to do—roll her eyes and then hit herself playfully on the temple with the heel of her hand, as if to say, “Gosh, I’m so dumb!” The self-deprecating humor worked. And she could be funny in other ways, as when I passed her with a tray of food while she was taking an order from an elderly gentleman.