stories, which my mother had brought, cracking the pages wide and roving from bass to falsetto as he acted out the dialogue. I told him what I ate for lunch, and in the silence before he answered I remembered the tennis shoes, flushed with relief to have something to give him. ‘Look what we got you’ I said, and then tore the box open myself. I beamed and bunched my skirt between my knees while he admired them. ‘All Stars!’ he said. ‘These are the best. I’m gonna tear up the court.’
At the end of the hour, the guard rested one hand on his gun, tipped back on his heels, and called the time. Panic closed my throat. I looked to my father for a sign-he would tell the man we weren’t ready-but his eyes were wet and the corners of his mouth twitched down. I turned to the stranger by the wall and flashed a saccharine smile. ‘Daddy,’ I asked, leaning my cheek on the table and looking at the guard, ‘is that the nice man you told me about?’
The guard squinched his face at me, in what passed for kindness in that place, then made a slow turn and gave us a few extra minutes. Once they were granted, we had nothing to say. I sat there with all my feeling funneled down to the smallest aperture, until my chest hummed and my head felt light. Then the guard said, ‘Time’s up,’ and we shuffled to our feet.
In the clamor of chair legs and murmured good-byes, we could speak again. ‘Hey, what do you want for Christmas?’ my father asked. I stopped in the doorway and stared at his dark bulk. I wanted him. But his voice was filled with a sudden expansiveness, and I knew I should ask for something he could give.
‘Something purple,’ I told him. It was my favorite color then, and I let everyone know: I was staking out my turf in the visible spectrum.
I still have a letter he wrote me that night from his cell: ‘It may take a long time, but I’ll try to get you a purple thing. Here’s a pretend one for now.’ Below it is a necklace with a carefully sketched purple star, ringed by faint marks where I once tried to work it free from the paper.
This was the first of many letters he wrote me, each with a drawing in colored pencil. ‘Darling Lisa-Hello, Hello, Hello. I am very happy tonight. I got a guitar yesterday and am learning to play it. I am on a diet so I won’t be fat at all-not even a little bit.’ Then half the page taken up by an abstract drawing: a grid filled with tangled clots of scribbling, a black anvil shape, a downward arrow, the symbol for infinity. ‘I call this picture, Being in Jail: JAIL. I love you darling, Your Father.’
His notes were full of rhymes and playfulness: portraits of me with green hair, or of himself with the head of a man and the body of a conga drum. In places, his loneliness leaked through. ‘I will try to keep writing you,’ said one letter, ‘but it’s hard when you don’t write me back.’ I was pricked by guilt when I read these pleas, then quickly forgot them. At first his absence was a plangent note, always sounding in the background, but it became muffled as the months passed. In time, I had trouble recalling his face.
My mother made several visits to Billerica, but gradually she began to cut ties. My father had become increasingly focused on his political work in the months leading up to the demonstration, and his arrest meant she had no help in caring for me, no one to consult with, no air. She was furious at him, and fury made her feel free. We would move to Mexico and buy a piece of land. She would become a potter, maybe look for work teaching English. I would wear embroidered dresses and turn brown in the tropical sun.
In the flush of her new-found independence, Mother went to a postal service auction and bought herself a used mail truck. She parked it outside of our apartment and gave me a tour. With a tune-up and a few interior improvements, she said, it would get us south of the border. The cab had one high leather seat, and a long lever that worked the emergency brake. To shift gears, you punched numbered keys on a small raised box. It looked like a tiny cash register, and Mother let me play with it while the engine was off. A sliding door led back into a cold metal vault, bare but for a few mail shelves. ‘This is going to be our cozy rolling home,’ Mother said, her voice echoing off the walls.
For the next few months, my mother worked as a waitress and took steps to make the mail truck road-worthy. The first rains of autumn had revealed a couple of leaks in the chassis, so she spent a weekend driving around Cambridge in search of patching material. On a narrow side street, she spotted a promising sign: Earth Guild-We Have Everything.
She stopped in and asked the cashier if they had any sheet metal. The store was a kind of counterculture supermarket, stocked with incense, bolts of cotton, paraffin, books on homesteading, yarn and looms. But it seemed that ‘everything’ didn’t include sheet metal.
‘What do you want it for?’ the woman asked. It was a slow day in the store. Had there been a line of customers, impatient to buy beeswax and clay, our lives might have taken a different turn.
‘I need to patch a hole in the side of my mail truck,’ my mother said.
‘Well’ the woman offered, ‘we don’t have sheet metal, but we have Jim, and he has a mail truck, too.’ She yelled toward the back room, and out loped my future stepfather, a handsome lanky man in square-toed Frye boots, smiling an easy smile.
Jim came out to the curb and looked over the rust spots. He and Mother talked about their vans, how much they’d paid at auction, where they were headed. Jim also had his eyes on Mexico. And at the very moment my mother dropped by, he had been building a kiln in the back of the store for the Earth Guild’s pottery studio. It seems she had stumbled on a man who could help her turn her schemes into brick and wood. By the time they finished talking, the sun was low in the sky and they had a date to change their oil together.
Jim had embraced the counterculture, but not on political terms. He wore hand-painted ties, listened to the Stones, and collected Op Art. When he met my mother, he was living in a commune in Harvard Square called The Grateful Union. ‘Those guys were uptown,’ my mother says. ‘Into spare living and Shaker furniture.’
She and Jim soon made plans to head across the country under the same roof. We would take his truck, since it was considerably cozier than my mother’s. A platform bed stretched across the width of the van, and a hinged half-moon table folded down from the wall and perched on one leg. We ate sitting cross-legged on the mattress. The walls were lined with bookcases, fitted with bungee cords to hold the volumes in place. On a shelf just behind the cab was our kitchen: a two-burner propane cooking stove, a tiny cutting board, and a ten-gallon water jug. Jim covered the metal floors with Persian rugs and hung a few ornaments on the wall: a plaque with the Chinese characters for peace, prosperity, and happiness; a yellow wicker sun.
Before we set out, Jim bought a small wood stove and bolted it to the floor near the back wall. The smokestack jutted out the side of the truck, the hole weather-sealed with the fringe from a tin pie plate. One of Jim’s friends from The Grateful Union wired a stereo system into the van, and Mother sewed heavy denim curtains that attached to the window frames with velcro, so we could have privacy at night. The engine on these snub- nosed trucks bulged into the cab and was housed by a metal shell that served as a shelf for bags of mail. Jim cut a piece of thick foam just the shape of the engine cover, which would be my bed. A perfect fit. I was about the size, in those days, of a sack of mail.
In the spring of 1970, we packed up our essential belongings and set out on a year-long journey across the country, down the eastern seaboard and then across the low belly of the continent to California. The thrill of traveling sustained me for a while, but it was a difficult age to be rootless. I played with other kids for a day or two at a campground or a city park, and then we drove on. After a day on the road, Mother tucked me in on my foam pad, warmed from below by the engine’s heat. In the footwell below me was a small pot we peed in during the night, and so I drifted off to the smell of urine and the tick of the cooling pistons. Now and then, when we were parked on some dark residential street, I would wake to the knock of a policeman, asking us to move along.
And move along we did, until our funds started to run thin, and Mother and Jim began to search for a piece of land, ‘our pie in the sky,’ as Jim called it. Mother was browsing through a copy of Mother Earth News when she saw a classified ad listing land for sale. She located the town, which had a population of two thousand and was marked with the tiniest speck the map allowed, and we drove up through San Francisco headed for that dot.
We ended up buying a clapboard house in the heart of this coastal valley town, a half-acre plot that came with a stucco duplex. Later, Mother would say that you had to call the people who lived in those buildings homeless. Only two out of the four toilets worked. The ceiling plaster bloomed with stains. There were a handful of ramshackle sheds on the property and a line of rusted cars in the driveway. The yard was nothing but thistle and dry grass. They dickered with the landlord a little, and agreed to buy the place for $18,000.
Our new address was 10,000 Main Street. Apparently the town’s founders had been anticipating an explosive growth period which never arrived. Just past our house, the only sidewalk in town ceased abruptly, the last slab jutting out toward the cow pastures and orchards down Powerhouse Road. We would hold down the end of the main drag, on about an acre of good river valley soil gone hard from neglect.
