The Source of All Things (15 page)

C
an I smoke another cigarette? It's almost time to board.”

“Don't smoke, Trace. You know it's bad for your health.”

“Don't you think it's a little late to start preaching, Dad? Children learn by example.”

Mom, Dad, Chris, and I sat in blue plastic bucket chairs in the dingy one-runway terminal at the Twin Falls County Airport. Outside, even the air seemed brittle. February in Twin Falls is grey and cold or cold and grey, with no other combination. That must be why the official Groundhog Day groundhog doesn't live there: the sun is too weak to create a shadow.

In a little while an American Airlines twin prop would skid onto the tarmac, belching a trim, pinch-mouthed stewardess from the belly of the plane. Smiling and waving like a prettier version of our own Miss Idaho, she'd summon me and the half-dozen other
passengers lounging around the candy dispenser onboard. Fingering the lighter I stole from Chris's glovebox, I'd hurry across the tarmac, trying not to look back at my family.

“It doesn't have to be this way,” said my dad. “We're not asking you to leave.”

Except that they were—Dad, Mom, Claudia, and the Health and Welfare Department, everyone who claimed to have my best interest in mind. In early January—after our big fight, the suicide threat, and several other minor infractions that led my extended family to believe I was within inches of running off and joining the circus—Mom went to Claudia and told her I'd become too difficult for her to control. This was partly true: after the suicide stint, I stopped listening to either of my parents, believing that neither was sane enough to give me orders. The less I listened, the more terrified Mom became, until we were having colossal, blowout fights on a near-nightly basis. We bickered about everything from whether or not I could go to the Dairy Queen after a football game to why I borrowed my mom's favorite sweater without asking. I'd end up screaming that I'd rather live in hell than have her for a mother. Afraid of the twitching in my arms that made me want to grab her and throw her out a window, I'd tear outside and sprint down Parkway Drive. All I wanted was space, and a few puffs of a cigarette to stop my blood from searing my arteries, but instead of letting me kick the curbs until my toes broke, Mom would chase after me, shouting, “TRACY! COME BACK! DON'T LEAVE ME, PLEASE!”

Seeing her like that—keening and wild-eyed, like a character out of a Greek tragedy—had the opposite effect on me from the one I believed she was going for. Her hysteria drained my compassion
and filled me with disgust, making me vow to become emotionless.

Claudia did a cursory search for foster homes in the greater Twin Falls area. And apparently no one wanted me. Even Joy refused to take me back to her beige ranch house, like all the other ranch houses, on Indian Trail. Her name, along with my mom's, my mom's attorney's, Claudia's, and the Twin Falls county prosecutor's, all appear on the document filed by the Twin Falls county magistrate on January 27, 1986. It's four pages long and states that the “present residential placement, as well as the placement options presently available to the Health and Welfare Department, do not appear to be consistent with the best interests and emotional well-being of the child. An alternate placement, with the child's relative in Oregon, has come to the Guardian Ad Litem's attention, and the Guardian Ad Litem is of the belief that it should be presented to the court.”

Nobody asked what I wanted. If they had, I would have told them that Reed and I were going to California. We'd find a beach where we could sleep under the stars. We'd surf and swim and eat scallops cooked like marshmallows over an open fire. If things worked out between us, maybe one day we'd have babies. The whole family would take up skateboarding, which we would do on the boardwalk where they filmed
Three's Company
.

But nobody wanted my opinion. The court decided I should move to Tigard, Oregon, a suburb of Portland, to live with my dad's sister, Lori, and her accountant husband, Nick. In exchange for helping Lori care for my infant cousins, I could camp out in the family's guest room, go to a school where nobody knew me, and give up my spot on the Robert Stuart cheerleading squad.
Bitchin'.

Out on the runway, the plane skidded to a stop and a ladder ejected from within. It was time to go. Dad put his hands on my shoulders and looked at me like he used to when I'd beat myself bloody riding my bike as a kid. I'd come home with gravel in my kneecaps, bawling about not being able to pop a wheelie over the curb, and he'd tilt his head and puff out his lip, reflecting my expression back to me. Sad face got me again. I let him hug me, but jutted my butt out so our vital organs wouldn't touch.

Then it was Chris's turn to say good-bye. He stood before me in a pair of dark-blue shrink-to-fit Levi's and a navy blue Ralph Lauren shirt. He didn't smile or wink at me like he had before that summer. We'd talked only once since I'd run away, and that was during Christmas vacation when he got drunk at a party and drove me to the very airport we stood in now, watching crop dusters dive like swallows over the wheat fields. Parked in the gravel at one end of the runway, he'd blazed Bacardi-fueled anger at me, saying, “I don't know what happened and I don't want to. I love you and Dad the same. Can't we just make this go away?”

And now it was going away because I was going away. Dad would move back in with Mom, and Chris would return to the University of Idaho. Four months from now, my parents would drive to Oregon, pick me up, and take me home. We'd all resume the lives we had before Dad started fantasizing about wrestling me in the shower. I said good-bye, leaving a chapped-lip kiss on my mom's tear-streaked face, then followed the other passengers across the tarmac and onto the plane.

Less than forty-eight hours later, I stood at the bus stop in front of my aunt and uncle's house, awaiting my inaugural ride to Whit-ford Middle School. Dark clouds clotted the sky. Half a dozen kids milled around me, joking and trying to shove one another into gutters swollen with rainwater. I froze my face into an expression of friendliness and tried my best to avoid eye contact.

That morning I'd sugar-watered my hair into a great wave that crested one eye and swooshed down across the other, and I had smeared my lids with metallic gold and green shadows. From my dad's army duffel I pulled an oversize purple silk shirt and an enormous yellow sweater, layering them over black, ribbed leggings. On my feet: a pair of soft-soled jazz shoes that I'd spray painted metallic gold.

Lori's eyebrows shot up to her hairline when I showed up at the breakfast table dressed like Annie Lennox. “That's what you're wearing on your first day at a new school?” she asked when I sat down next to her at the table. Her blue eyes clicked. She was getting ready to do volunteer work and was dressed in a grey sweater and pleated khaki trousers. Nick had already vanished, on his long commute to Portland, ten miles away, where he worked.

“I think so,” I answered. “Why? Does it look stupid?”

“No, not stupid,” she said, smoothing the edge of her place mat. “It's just a little … noisy, don't you think?”

I didn't, and wore the outfit in spite of her poor opinion.

I went outside and stood in front of the house with the other kids at the bus stop. The longer I stood there, the more I wished I hadn't worn the gold jazz shoes. The kids around me splashed through rain puddles in K-Swiss sneakers, Guess jeans, and Polo
oxfords. Next to them I looked like a thrift-store version of Punky Brewster.

I stepped onto the bus anyway and made my way to the back. I found an empty seat and scootched across it to the middle. I dug into my pack for the dog-eared copy of
Romeo and Juliet
Lori had lent me for freshman Shakespeare. But my hand landed on a hard, plastic bubble.

I pulled it out, and saw that Nick or Lori had slipped me a Valentine's Day present without my noticing: a heart-shaped container filled with red-and-white heart-shaped candies. Below them I found another heart-shaped box, this one full of miniature chocolates. Putting both of these on the seat beside me, I kept digging and found a pair of pink-and-white ankle socks with more hearts embroidered around the cuffs. Beneath all of this was a card that had the words, “Dear Tracy, Love exists if you believe it” scrawled across it in Nick's high-powered ink.

My heart lurched. I stared out the window at the rain pelting the greenest earth I'd ever seen. I hadn't felt love—for love's sake, with nothing attached to it or weighing it down—for many, many months. I pulled my valentines onto my lap before the bus could hit a pothole and knock them onto the floor.

If I'd have thought someone was watching me, I would have shoved them deep into the bowels of my backpack and kept them there until I could look at them again, in the privacy of my own bedroom. But because I was the new kid, and sad, with pain etched into the creases of my forehead, I lined them on top of my backpack and gave them—and myself—an awkward, secret hug.

I made friends at Whitford Middle School the way the Nazis made enemies: by wearing a swastika over my heart. I was standing on the basketball court, trying not to sweat through my running shorts, when a voice a few feet away from me said, “Hey, bitch, what's up with that shirt?”

I looked up from the spot on the free-throw line I'd been examining to a girl with hair so red it was purple. She was glaring a hole though my Sex Pistols shirt. I noticed with a sizzle of self-vindication that her hair was also long on one side and short on the other, just like mine. She stood apart from the other girls, who were lined up against a cinder-block wall waiting to be picked for volleyball.

I honestly had no idea what she was talking about. Beads of sweat, generated by hormones and anxiety, popped onto my forehead. I checked my posture and slouched over.

“I made it. It's punk rock. Don't you like it?”

“No I don't
like
it,” said the girl, stepping closer. I wondered if she was going to shove me. “And if you keep it on, you're gonna get your ass kicked. There's a lot of Jewish kids in this school. Some of their grandparents even went to Auschwitz. They're not gonna like it if they see some Nazi lover walking around. What are you? A member of the Aryan Nations or something?”

Aryan Nations. Aryan Nations
. I wracked my brain, trying to remember where I'd heard that term before.
Oh no
. Chris had told me about them when he came home for Christmas from college. His school was in Moscow: Idaho headquarters for the neo-Nazi skinhead organization, which was responsible for murdering anyone who wasn't white and which, I'd heard, cavorted with the Idaho chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Now that the real meaning
of my swastika was being revealed to me, I wanted to sprint out of the gym and burn it. But with the purple-haired girl breathing stale smoke breath into my face, I decided it was smarter to feign ignorance.

“Aryan Nations?” I said. “No way. Never heard of them.”

“Well …” said the purple-haired girl. “You're lucky, cuz I'm gonna take pity on you. But only because you seem so innocent and stupid. My name's Mary. Go tell Mrs. What's-Her-Face that you got your period and you need me to take you to the locker room. I keep an extra T-shirt stashed there. It probably reeks, but whatever. Anything's better than that thing.”

And that's how God, or the Holy Spirit, or some other benevolent deity took pity on me for the first time in teenage memory. Because from that day forward Mary treated me as a friend. She and her parents lived in a big, beautiful house with lots of windows that let in the sun. Mary's mom believed that kids should make their own decisions about things like smoking, so she let Mary torch up whenever she wanted. When we met for lunch, Mary would feed me cigarettes and let me listen to New Wave bands on her Walkman. That's how I became addicted to nicotine and first heard Flesh for Lulu, the Smiths, and the Jesus and Mary Chain.