Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture Read Online Free PDF

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