Riding Fury Home (16 page)

Unfortunately, over the fall and winter, I had gained quite a bit of weight and none of the dresses I'd brought to school with me fit anymore. The only way to wear my favorite dress, an orange A-line with flaring sleeves, was to dig out a girdle and suck in my breath.

When I got to the dining room, I was a bit late—a bad habit of mine. Mike rushed up, looking peeved. “What took you . . . ?” The others greeted me, and we sat down to eat.

Mike and I usually spent our time together alone, and when seeking company I preferred hanging out with my political comrades, so I hadn't gotten to know his friends. They seemed to admire him. They listened avidly to his description of his latest art project, and praised his previous work. Then they launched into some other subject, but I didn't really bother listening. I was staring at my steak, the puddle of steak sauce and the blob of ketchup next to it. It all looked revolting. I hadn't regained my appetite yet since the flu, and the girdle wasn't helping. In fact, I could barely breathe. It seemed I was breathless with silence, as if the more everyone talked, the quieter and farther away I got. My wind was gone; I could see myself shrinking and shrinking and felt no power to do anything about it.

As disgusted and angry as I was with Mike, my silence bound me. We continued to sleep together in his twin bed, where our nightly sex was rote and quick. No matter that I reassured Mike that my diaphragm was in, he always pulled out to have his orgasm outside me, while his roommate's Led Zeppelin music beat through the alcove door.

 

 

THE IOWA SNOW MELTED; the first emerging buds brought the remembrance of green. I had been bragging to my radical friends about my plan to drop out after the end of the school year, but I was incredibly relieved when Kate said she would move with me. Truth was, I was scared. Just in case, we both negotiated a one-year leave of absence, so it felt less irrevocable if the world turned out to be even worse than school.

Over spring break, Kate and I were making an exploratory expedition to California. When we'd discussed where to spend our year off, we had come up with two options: New York City or San Francisco. Kate was also from New Jersey, and we both wanted to avoid being too close to our families, so if we liked California, that's where we'd go.

We bought two cheap one-way student tickets to L.A., planning to travel up the California coast and then search for a ride back to school. It turned out Mike, Kate, and I were on the same plane. He lived in Colorado, where we were changing planes. We disembarked the plane in Denver together, and there was Mike's dad, waiting for him as we exited the gangway. He was compact like Mike, but clean-shaven, with blond hair in a crew cut, wearing a button-down shirt.

“Dad,” Mike said, “these two girls are from Grinnell. They're catching another plane. This is Kate, and this is Karen.”

Mike's dad smiled. “Hello.”

I stood there expectantly, waiting for Mike to elaborate, but he looked right through me.

“Well, see ya!” Mike nodded goodbye.

“Bye, girls,” his dad echoed, waving his hand.

Mike and his dad turned away. I grabbed Kate's arm. I was breathless with hurt. Was I nothing to him? I'd been a fool, putting
up with his vanity, the nightly quick fucks, his disregard of me. I'd been growing sick of it, and yet all I'd done about it was withdraw into an angry silence, as familiar as the crackling air between my parents.

AUNT SOPHIE, MY DAD'S sister, picked us up at LAX and drove south. At her suburban home in Orange County, I wandered into a small backyard fragrant with flowering lemon trees. The air, so warm and different from just-thawing Iowa's, seemed magic and sweet with possibility. I stared, dazed with wonder, at the brilliant purple and magenta bougainvillea climbing the back trellis. My God, we'd landed in Oz.

Kate and I had no plan, except to get to San Francisco and check it out. After we'd spent a couple days hanging out and swimming in the Pacific, Irwin, a friend of my oldest cousin, Aaron, stopped by the house. It turned out he was driving north, back to college in Santa Cruz. From there, we could easily take a bus to San Francisco. The next day, he and another male student picked us up. Beyond L.A.'s freeway maze, I was mesmerized by the strange treeless hills of California rolling by. In the last couple hours of the seven-hour trek, Irwin's friend took over as the driver. Kate was in the passenger seat, and Irwin was in back with me. “I'm beat,” he
said “Mind if I rest?” And before I could say much, he laid his head in my lap. It startled me, but I let him be. After a while, he started rubbing his hand against my leg. I had no particular attraction to him, but I didn't stop him.

Since the airport scene with Mike, I'd decided if he couldn't acknowledge me as his girlfriend to his dad, I was free to do whatever I pleased.
To hell with him
. That night, Irwin and I went at it under a sleeping bag thrown on the floor while Kate was asleep or not asleep on his twin bed—I didn't really check. I went along with Irwin's moves, which were swift, abrupt, and of the school of
wham, bam, thank you, ma'am.

In the morning, Kate gave me a rageful, chilling look over breakfast in the campus cafeteria, but said nothing until we'd parted from Irwin. As we walked along the Santa Cruz beach, carrying our duffels, Kate spat out, “Didn't you think of me at all? How could you be so inconsiderate!” I felt lousy about the whole thing, and mumbled an apology.

But as Kate and I traveled, I was intoxicated with my newfound ability to entice men, giddy with the power of it. It was
being
desired that was erotic for me. I didn't know yet that this was no great feat; it was just about a girl trailing pheromones, big eyes, and willingness wherever she went.

 

 

IN SAN FRANCISCO, I made out furiously with a high school friend of Kate's while she was in the bathroom. I couldn't seem to stop myself, and didn't really want to.

After a week of sightseeing in the city, we went to the Haight-Ashbury Community Center bulletin board—the Grand Central of hippiedom—looking for a ride. Coincidentally, we bumped into
another Grinnell coed, Wendy, while staring at the Haight-Ashbury listings. Among the handwritten signs tacked into the cork was one by a couple with a van driving to Chicago, passing right through Iowa—and the three of us arranged for a ride. When Jim and Mary picked us up, we climbed with one other passenger, Bob, into the back of the white Econoline van, whose rear seats had been removed and replaced with a mattress covered by an Indian print bedspread on a raised platform. We headed due east, leaving the city Kate and I had agreed we loved and would move back to.

All went well as we climbed the Sierras, descended into the Nevada desert, skirted Salt Lake City, and clambered into the Rockies, but the van broke down at the Continental Divide, a few miles outside of Rawlins, Wyoming. The engine coughed and died as we rolled onto the shoulder of the highway. No amount of coaxing would restart it. Jim and Mary were stuck with their van, waiting to be towed, but the rest of us, who'd found this ride from the bulletin board, felt no loyalty.

Kate stated the obvious: “We'd better pair up for hitching. Four is too many.” She gave me a dismissive glance and added, “I'm hitching with Wendy.”

Kate was pretty disgusted with me for my sex play with every male we met. The last straw for her had apparently been when I fucked Bob, who'd turned out to be a real male-chauvinist creep, in the van while everyone else got out at a rest stop to pee and grab some food. It had to be a real quickie, but we still weren't quite done when the first person returned.

Bob had said something stupid about women-libbers earlier that day, and he and Kate had gotten into a fight. She didn't take crap like that. I thought he was a jerk, too, but later Bob's foot had nudged up against my hip while we were resting on the mattress in
the back of the van. He wiggled his toes a little. I reached under the covers and stroked his ankle.

 

 

GETTING READY TO HITCHHIKE, we pulled on boots, hats, and gloves and gathered our bags. Wendy and Kate got out first, stood on the shoulder of the interstate with thumbs out in the late-afternoon light, and, being two women, got picked up right away. Bob and I took our turn. Off the side of the highway, there were patches of snow amid the clumps of sagebrush. We stood shivering in an icy wind that buffeted the treeless bowl of prairie and shook the sage bushes. We could see Jim and Mary huddled in the stranded van, waiting for a passing highway patrol car. It came all too soon, red lights flashing.

The cop wore a Stetson, like someone out of a grade-B Western. He motioned his thumb at us. “Get in the patrol car.” He waited until Bob and I were seated in back, then leaned his head into the doorway. “Do you know it's illegal to hitch on the interstate?” He let that sink in a minute, in no rush. “Give me your ID. Just may have to take you in.”

He sat in the front seat, writing our information down onto something I couldn't see. I was thinking about my Zig-Zag papers, red joint roller, and baggie of pot stashed in my duffel. Inside I had gone cold and still and breathless. Each second buzzed in my head like a swarm of anxious bees as I watched that shoulder.

Finally, the patrol officer got out and opened our door. He handed Bob his ID, casting a disgusted look at his long blond ponytail. “You're no spring chicken, boy! Hell, twenty-seven years old!” He glared at Bob. “You're just lucky she's eighteen.” He gestured with his chin in my direction. “Just you watch it,” he concluded to Bob.

The cop handed me back my ID. “Young lady, you and this boy are going to get back in that van and wait while I call the tow truck. If I see you set one foot and one thumb out on this highway, you are going to see the inside of Rawlins's jail. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” I muttered quietly.

“Yes, sir,” Bob piped up.

 

 

THE AUTO REPAIR SHOP said it would take a day or two to order and install a new thingamajigger for the 1961 Ford van. We rented one motel room with two double beds. We were all too beat to go to dinner, so we shared what we had among us: a big bag of Fritos and some string cheese.

Then the four of us all lay sideways across one of the beds and vibrated to one quarter's worth of Magic Fingers, but Mary got up partway through and lay down on the other bed, said it was making her sick. She was still recovering from the abortion she and Jim had driven from Chicago to San Francisco for. Abortions were illegal in Chicago, like they were in most of the country, but they knew someone who knew someone who knew a doctor in San Francisco who would do it.

Bob and I wound up playing around with each other in the bathtub. When we went back into the darkened room, Jim was snoring deeply. For just a moment, I thought of Kate, and wondered if Mary was asleep or lying awake, still nauseous. We got in bed, and Bob was on top of me and at it before I had time to think further about Mary. I hoped he'd remember to pull out. I'd told him that first time in the van that I had left my diaphragm back at school in Iowa, since it hadn't occurred to me I'd be sleeping with anyone on my trip. Part of me knew pulling out wasn't the greatest birth control method, but denial and momentum took over.

In the morning, the four of us walked a few blocks to a coffee shop. Along the way, I noticed the traffic was mainly pickup trucks, and every truck had a gun rack in its cab with one or two rifles resting long and dark across the cab window.

The coffee shop was bustling. The counter had orange vinyl stools, and the padded booths were nearly full, mostly with men. Their hair was cut short and neat beneath their cowboy hats. Pointed cowboy boots were tapping the floor. The waitresses and the few women customers wore heavy makeup and had their hair poufed out, teased, and sprayed. There was an unsettling lull in the din of conversations as we entered and found an empty booth. No one else there looked like us: Bob with his blond ponytail, Jim's curly brown hair shooting out from his center part like an unsheared poodle's, Mary and I in bell-bottom jeans and peasant blouses.

The second night, we all stared at the road map, locating ourselves right on the Continental Divide, gauging how far we had yet to go. We were all antsy to be on our way.

In order to make up time, we agreed that we would just keep driving, stopping only for brief bathroom breaks and to grab some food. Bob and I took the first shift while Mary and Jim dozed against each other in the back seat. Hours later, somewhere in Nebraska, Mary startled awake and yelled, “Would you watch how you drive up there!?” She could feel the car making great lazy swings from lane to lane across the highway.

I laughed, not really caring. “Okay, okay, don't worry.” The late-night road was empty, so I felt it didn't matter if I drifted. As I was driving along in the dark, Bob was playing with my nipples and occasionally dipping his hand down to my crotch. Every now and then I reached over and fondled his penis beneath his jeans. Back on the highway after confinement, I felt like a reckless character in
a movie, a female
Easy Rider.
Gone was the good girl. The wildness of playing with a near stranger while driving made me aroused and wet. It was terribly distracting, and I steered erratically. Finally, Mary announced, “Pull over. You need us to take our turn.”

Bob and I stepped out of the van into a Nebraska night smelling like wheat and clambered into the back. We scrunched down under a sleeping bag, making out and fondling each other, undoing our clothes just enough to have access to each other. Then Bob pulled my pants and underwear off, lowered his jeans around his hips, and was humping on top of me. His belt buckle was digging into my thigh, and, as usual, the act of screwing was a letdown.