Free Stop That Girl by Elizabeth Mckenzie Page B

herself too. At night she would be delivering these talks in an open-air amphitheater to a surprisingly large and attentive group of people spending the night in the park. After the talk, people would raise their hands and ask questions. Hearing the strange lilt of her voice as she rehearsed, a sort of Vassar/Annie Oakley hybrid, I’d cringe.
    I had a lot of books and I sent out letters, and letters began to come in, and I heard long descriptions of parties and sleepovers my friends were having, and sometimes they collaborated on messages to me, and everyone signed. One day I received an envelope from Raoul and was chagrined by how happy it made me to see my name in his handwriting. He wrote, “Did you hear Poplick got canned? Someone told the administration he smoked dope in his spare time, and he wouldn’t deny it. I salute the man for his integrity and hope he’s having lots of orgasms!”
    Too bad. Poplick was a good teacher, creator of haunting vocabulary sentences like
I talked to the homunculus in the
supermarket.
I wondered how he was taking it, what he’d do with himself next.
    In between waiting for mail, between chapters in books, I walked in the woods. Preferably alone. I could pretend I wasn’t there that way. I could live in the world of my next letter to Raoul. I’d try to make it engaging and pithy, just the right blend. One day, in the piebald light of the forest, I noticed a squirrel sitting on a log and decided to join it. Not only did the squirrel hold tight, but after a few minutes of twitching and staring it began to inch my way. I held out my open palm, the way I’d been taught to put strange dogs at ease. The squirrel moved closer and sniffed my hand, and I felt its short rapid breath on my skin. A wild animal was paying attention to me! Its eyes shined like beads of oil; I’ve always remembered the strange thought I had looking at them. I was trying to define the look of a live eye compared to that of a dead one.
In the difference is the mystery
of love.
The squirrel and I sat together awhile; then, with a spasm of its brow, it shot off into a narrow purple shadow between the trees.

    And so Angus Frey joined us, as announced. Sitting in the kitchen with the low ceiling and hodgepodge of stinks, sipping red wine with Mom from paper cups, he looked improbable there, a schooner in a bottle. He mashed beef Stroganoff up the backside of his fork, using his knife like a pushbroom across the scratched Melamite plates. He asked us questions: Was Kathy obsessed with baseball because of the sport of it or because she could record the statistics? Was I trying to teach myself Russian because I was interested in the culture or because I identified with the country’s status as enemy? Did we understand how Parliament worked? Had we heard the latest on Aboriginal land rights, or the nuclear testing in the South Pacific, atolls glowing with waste, and had we tasted kangaroo? Mom put on lipstick for these dinners. She was thirty-six years old.

    And then came the episode with the tree, and all that followed. I could easily start with how my mother’s legs were astride this fallen tree, a log as wide as she could straddle, a Ponderosa pine tall enough to topple from one side of the narrow dirt road and land on the other, fully blocking our way. We had taken a little day trip down an obscure Park Service road, a road to a lookout point, a dead end. And while Mom and Angus Frey discoursed on the geologic panorama before our eyes, a thunderstorm stole over and lightning cracked like whips, sent us sprinting to the car, Mom whooping like a kid, Angus Frey breathing hard, the smell of wet cloth and hair filling the Buick while Mom turned on the engine, the windows steaming, Kathy’s teeth chattering the way that usually made me laugh. I rubbed her bare arms like I was trying to coax a fire. I had an awful headache. “Let’s light the stove and have cocoa when we get back,” Mom said. As we drove along the