In the spring of 1967, I dropped out of high school, certain I was smarter than anybody else in that low-slung brick building and departed my Midwest home. I put out my thumb on highways and small-town roads with the poetry of Ferlinghetti, music of the dead. and girls with flowers in their hair, my ultimate destination. Though there were other reasons I left the only home I had ever known, Calvin was the tipping point. Black-haired and red-lipped, Calvin was our new minister—an over large-man with a handsome pompadour and a steamed velvet voice. In the pulpit of Tabernacle Presbyterian, he was mesmerizing. When his big hands gripped the lectern tight and his pretty lips pursed like an open kiss, every woman in the congregation leaned forward in her pew.
But down in the church basement, it was me Calvin’s eyes followed, over those hair-sprayed updo’s as they offered him plates of homemade cookies. He could see I was meant for a deep, abiding, soul-scorching love. And soon, it was me he began driving in his Oldsmobile 98 to the field behind the crumbling farmhouse on the dead-end road.
It was in the cornfield, between the fluttering leaves, that Calvin’s groping fingers got stuck in the zipper of my skirt. “Dammit,” he mumbled.
I told myself his fumbling was just his way of coaxing my soul closer to his. “Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips,” I recited as Calvin finally extricated his fingers from the zipper.
“What?”
“Prometheus Unbound. We’re reading Shelley in my English class. He’s chained to a rock, and birds are eating his liver.” Calvin’s sweat was dripping into my eyes, so I closed them. His naked chest made a sucking sound when he got off me.
“Are our souls one now?” I asked, opening my eyes to the sun in my face. All I could see of Calvin was a looming, backlit shadow.
“Your soul belongs to Jesus,” he replied, pulling up his pants.
I looked up at him, my skirt still around my waist. “But I want you to have it.” A stick was poking my right thigh as I pulled my skirt down.
On the far side of the cornfield, the school band kept fumbling through the opening bars of The Saints Go Marching In. “Do you love me as much as Jesus?”
“Don’t talk like that. Listen, remember our secret vow?”
“I guess.” I swatted away a fly.
“Do you?”
“Do you love me?”
“Sure. Now stay here until you hear my car leave, okay?”
“Okay.”
I lay there in the cornfield, stick poking, sun blinding, until the I heard the Oldsmobile rumble away.
***
Only a week later, I heard that Calvin had become engaged to Valerie Wiendensocken, my English teacher. When I was seven, her little brother had tried to drown me in the community pool, and her father owned the biggest Cadillac dealership in the state. I cried so much and so hard that my eyes became slits, and my face puffed up like a pumpkin.
I paced the cornfield where we had merged our souls—or at least where I’d offered mine—until I tripped on a rock, falling hard and biting clean through my lip, chipping my front tooth. I sat there in the dirt, blood streaming from my mouth. I guess I swallowed the bit of tooth enamel. All I could think about was how much I hated every Wiendensocken and how much more I hated Calvin.
On hands and knees, I smeared the blood dripping from my lip all over that rock, cursing Calvin to the blank, dumb sky. Then I prayed—not to Jesus (who didn’t love me)—but to the dark angel who had tumbled out of Heaven (he always seemed more interesting, anyway), for real, true love to find me, soul to soul.
When my mother noticed my broken tooth, I refused to go to the dentist. I was marked forever. A visible wound. Like stigmata.
***
One afternoon, I was forced to accompany my grandmother to the hair salon, where I picked up a magazine. What is a Hippie? inquired the cover. Smiling faces adorned with vivid sunbursts danced under a rainbow of dazzling primary colors. The TV news claimed San Francisco was overrun with drugged-out kids in filthy jeans, running amok and setting fires in the streets. But elsewhere, I’d heard it was the capital of poetry, music, and self-expression.
As I flipped through the pages, it was a revelation. Inside, young people were living free. In that moment, I knew that if I didn’t escape my small town, I’d end up baking cookies for other versions of red-lipped lies.
At midnight—which seemed the perfect time for departing one world and entering another—I climbed out of my window and walked three miles to the highway. Until then, the farthest I had ever traveled was to Cincinnati, which my grandmother called The Paris of the Midwest.
As I walked, fallen leaves crunched beneath my shoes. I was really going. “Here I go, going, going,” I whispered to the night sky. It was so dark—no moon. A frigid breeze blew on that April morning before dawn, but I kept walking, head down against the wind. I would get there, hell or high water. Hell was just fine with me; it couldn’t be much worse than what I was leaving behind.
***
The last eight hundred miles were with a trucker who let me sleep in his semi-trailer on the plastic-covered mattresses he was delivering. I managed to lift myself out of my body in exchange. He fed me and didn’t ask questions. If he saw anything reflected back in my eyes, he kept it to himself.
Most of the details of that journey have faded, but I distinctly remember the day the rear doors of the trailer opened, and he said, “We’re here.”
I climbed out into a world smothered in fog. The tops of buildings disappeared as if forgotten, and distant lights blinked on and off through the mist, like winking eyes. Whenever the fog parted, I glimpsed the mammoth bones of the great bridge, only for them to vanish again, as if I’d only dreamed them.
Then the sun rose, hanging on the horizon like a red eye over the churning bay, black as oil in the early light. The fog curled around me as I threw back my head to the seagulls squawking overhead.
“Here I am. I’m here!”
In my happy delirium, I hadn’t noticed the truck’s engine starting. I turned to see the taillights blink before winking out, leaving me alone in an empty warehouse parking lot. It was then I realized that everything I owned in the world—except what I was standing in—was still in the truck.
The mist had turned into a light but determined rain. Within minutes, I was soaked through.
I began walking. Where else could someone wet, friendless, and penniless possibly go but toward a bridge called The Golden Gate?
***
Shivering, water squishing in my shoes, I discovered that the more determinedly I walked toward the bridge, the more it seemed to disappear. At last, the great span was hidden by streets as steep and winding as a rollercoaster. As the rain and mist grew heavier, my exhilaration faded proportionately.
I descended yet another street into a forest of buildings. People rushed past me on the sidewalk, but none wore flowers in their hair. The glimpses of faces under umbrellas were harried or blank. No one paid me the slightest attention. I had been walking for what felt like hours, and by now, I was so drenched I wasn’t sure I hadn’t started to melt.
I was sloshing past a café, its lights glowing bright behind a rain-streaked window, when a young, bearded man with an umbrella stepped out and, astonishingly, spoke to me.
“What a wet little bug you are. Come inside. Let’s get you something warm.”
The rain dripping into my eyes rendered his face a damp blur, but the golden glow from the café window backlit his head like a saint in stained glass. Too tired to argue, I didn’t resist as he guided me by the elbow.
Inside, the café was crowded nearly to bursting, a deluge of chattering voices rising, ebbing, and rising again. People smiled as the bearded man wove me through the crowd, mostly young, though we squeezed past an old woman perched on a stool, smoking the very end of a cigarette. She sucked in deeply and exhaled smoke toward the ceiling. Her dress was dirty and torn, and I couldn’t help but turn my face away at the smell. She was rank, fetid, fusty—but confusingly, after we passed, a faintly pleasant scent lingered. I thought of my grandmother’s old-world roses, so dark red they could almost be black.
The woman didn’t seem to notice me, and I soon forgot her as I was guided to a booth near the back of the café. A tall, eely girl flopped down beside me and began drying my hair with a cloth napkin.
“Drink this,” said someone at my elbow, and I lifted a tiny teacup to my lips. The steam rose into my nose, and I hesitated, overwhelmed.
“Give her sugar.”
Someone dropped a cube of sugar into the strange, thick coffee. I took a sip and almost spat out the bitterness, but the people in the booth were watching, smiling. I forced myself to swallow, though the lump of sugar was still in my mouth. My tongue curled around its sweetness.
“It’s good, real good, isn’t it good?” asked a Black man with glasses, the lenses pink as grapefruit. The people at the table clapped.
“Sunshine, sunshine, sunshine, sunshine,” sang the Black man. “You are my sunshine.”
“Stop rubbing her head, Peppermint,” said a woman in cowboy boots and a green dress. “She’s not a doll.”
“She is, though. Yes, she is a doll,” said another man who had scooted next to me—or more of a boy-man. His head was crowned with an explosion of tight, bright blond curls, and he had only a bit of fuzz on his upper lip. His eyes were so shiny, I wondered if they were made of glass.
“Give me your hand, Doll Girl. I want to marry you.” The boy-man grabbed my hand.
“Dolly Girl,” said the Black man, leaning over my shoulder. Behind the pink lenses, his eyes glittered golden.
“Dolly Girl,” repeated the eely girl, smiling. “I’ll braid your hair with ribbons.”
“Dolly Girl,” whispered the boy-man in my ear. I wanted to pull my hand away, but he was holding it even tighter.
The lights overhead began to flicker, and someone shouted, “It’s time!”
“Lock the door, lock the door,” people chanted. “Time for Her.”
A girl with a red flower in her hair stood up from another table. The crowd parted as she crossed the floor. She placed a hand on my shoulder and looked down into my upturned face. She was beautiful.
I watched, mesmerized, as her lips formed words. They seemed to float in the air, carried by her breath.
I’m your momma
I’m your poppa
I’m your grandma too
I’m breakfast, supper,
Dinner,
All your dreams
Coming true.
You were going
She
Is coming
Coming,
Doll Girl,
For you.
The girl’s hand cupped my chin, and I couldn’t look away. I stared into her black stone eyes. In my mind, the words never and always formed.
“What poems are inside you, Dolly Girl?”
“I don’t—”
She let me go, and it felt as if everything keeping me upright tumbled—click, clack, click—like bones reduced to sticks dropped carelessly on cold, hard ground.
When she moved away from the table, I started to follow, but the boy-man grabbed my wrist.
“Let’s go,” he whispered. But my stomach was fluttering oddly, as though I’d swallowed a jar of moths.
“That’s one of those weird chicks that comes with the old lady,” he said, still gripping my wrist. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Something’s wrong with me,” I tried to tell him, but he pulled harder.
I turned as he opened the door, searching for the beautiful girl with the red flower and black stone eyes. Just before the door closed, I saw her standing beside the raggedy old woman.
