But most hippies we knew were harmless, hapless even. I sometimes questioned her about one she’d dated for two months a few years before who apparently told her he’d keep dating her only if she gave me up for adoption. The parallels between hippies were evident, I thought—the long slow vowels, the dun-colored clothes, the dull eyes, the lack of normal jobs—and by bringing up this one, I hoped to show her plainly her lack of discernment.
What we were really talking about was not hippies, though, but how she hadn’t been sure she wanted me when I was little, and even now I felt her fantasy of escape—from me, from her life with me—and I wanted to make her ashamed, and repentant.
“He was awful,” I said, “that hippie boyfriend you had. I hate him.”
“Hate‘s a strong word, Lisa. I don’t think you hate him.” She paused. “Though I did hear, after dating me, he was dating some woman who had a dog—she totally loved her dog—and he told her that he’d keep dating her only if she gave her dog away. Can you believe it? He found the one thing that was most important to a person and asked her to give it up for him. He was very troubled, Lisa. We don’t need to hate him for it.”
I hated him all the same.
Ada Ellen was thin, a sprite, with a pleasing, scratchy voice, luminous honey-colored skin, green eyes, and golden hair that flew out from her head in ringlet wisps. She was only five, almost two years younger than me, but mature for her age, maybe because she was home-schooled. She and I wore bathing suits.
We jumped into the pool. Afterward we got towels in the house beside the large tan washing machine, away from the group of adults.
“Shhh,” she said, showing me a pack of Juicy Fruit gum hidden in her towel. I wondered how she’d gotten it. For both of us, sugar gum was forbidden.
We slipped past the naked adults and danced carefully over the rocks and pointy grasses to the one bush in the middle of the yard we might hide behind. I walked as fast as I could, finding the blank dirt patches in between tufts of sharp, dry grasses and stones. The bush had hardly enough leaves to give us privacy. We unfolded the silver paper and we chewed piece after piece, eating the powdered sticks like candy. The wads grew in our mouths, pillows of tooth-colored gum.
“What are you two doing over there?” my mother called.
Ada and I emerged from the bush and stood side by side, facing the naked adults, my mother in her suit, and continued to chew. Ada’s triangle scapulae poked out of her back.
“Is that gum?” Anne, Ada’s mother, asked. “Who gave that to you?” Anne’s skin was a creamy yellow hue, like milk left out. Her breasts, small and flat at the top, collected into sacs at the bottom. She wore a batik cloth around her hips.
“Gum fools your stomach into thinking that food is coming down,” Anne continued. “If your stomach thinks food is coming down, it starts to produce stomach acid to prepare for the food.”
My stomach ached. It would not stop me.
A woman I didn’t know who sat beside Anne, naked except for a towel, said, “The acid will eat away at the lining of your stomach.”
Hippies were not bothered about clothing, I thought, but they sure had strict rules about sugar.
“It’s true,” my mother said to me.
“Right here,” Anne said, cupping her hand for us to spit it out. “Spit it out.”
Ada spit first, and I followed.
“Go brush. Both of you.” We walked into the dark house, up the stairs to a bathroom on the second floor. I used Ada’s toothbrush. She watched me go to all the sides of my mouth, and as she watched me, she unintentionally moved her mouth like mine, a weak mirror image, her upper left in motion with my upper right, as if she were brushing her teeth at the same time.
On one of these afternoons after my mother left, I stayed to play with Ada.
“Follow me,” Ada said, slipping into a bare room at the top of the stairs.
Anne was sitting cross-legged on the floor in the middle of the room, facing the door. She had the batik cloth wrapped around her legs and was naked on the top. Her husband, Matthew, was fully dressed and stood against the two windows at the far side of the room. Ada stood on one side of her mother, facing me.
“Have you ever tried nursing?” Ada asked in an insistent, cheery voice I’d never heard her use before, as if it were a performance.
“Ada likes to nurse,” Matthew said from the other side of the room. “You should try it too.”
I stood facing all of them. “No, thanks,” I said.
“It’s great. I do it all the time,” Ada said in the same oversweet voice that would be one of the most haunting parts of the incident, how my friend had changed, become robotic and artificial, turned against me. Anne’s arm on her back.
“No, thanks,” I said, again. “I just don’t want to,” but I could feel pressure building like the air before a storm.
“Show her,” Anne said, and then to my surprise, Ada knelt down and lay sideways in her mother’s lap and sucked at a breast.
Matthew took a few steps forward so he was standing behind Anne. “Just try it. You’ll like it,” he said. “Just once.”
Ada stopped and sat on her knees beside her mother. “I love it,” she said. “It’s great.”
At this point I understood that I would not be able to leave this room until I’d sucked on Anne’s breast. Maybe not for long. It was a humiliating notion; I was glad no one else was there to watch.
“Okay,” I said, and crouched down into Anne’s lap like Ada had.
There was no milk at all, her skin was tacky, a few degrees colder than my mouth, and tasted bland. No salt. I wasn’t sure how long it was supposed to last. If I stopped too soon, I might have to do it again. I closed my eyes. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five.
“Thanks. That was great,” I said, sitting up.
“The Ellens made me nurse from Anne,” I told my mother a couple of weeks later. I’d just built up the courage. We’d already seen them again; I didn’t want to get stuck alone with them and feared I would if I waited longer to tell. We were sitting in the car in the driveway about to go somewhere.
“Nurse?” She froze.
“I had to do it.”
“They forced you to nurse?”
“They wouldn’t let me leave.” I hoped she wouldn’t be ashamed of me for giving in.
She yelled, “What?“ and turned off the engine and ran back into the house. I got out of the car and stood in the driveway near the bottlebrush tree. Over the next few days I heard her speaking to people on the phone. Often she was crying. Years later she said she’d called my father, who said she shouldn’t have called the police, downplaying the seriousness of the incident. She called other people. I assumed her reaction and these phone calls meant I wouldn’t have to be alone with the Ellens again, and in fact we did not see them again after that. I was relieved, although I worried about Ada. My mother’s new boyfriend Ron said she should call the police, and she did, filing a report.
Before Ron, my mother spent some time with a man who made art out of sticks.
I didn’t like him, or the way she fluttered near him, sparkled, seemed to levitate and be made up of air rather than a comforting solid. He was aloof, spoke softly, as if he were hiding something, and was shy in a way that made me suspect he was sneaky. One night after dinner we followed him to his car and he opened the trunk. Inside, on a blanket, was a stick he’d wrapped in places with several bands of colored thread and string. Attached to one section was a crystal, and to another, a feather.