Claire
Claire drove with her right hand drooped over the steering wheel, making contact only at the wrist. Her left hand rested in her lap like a dead bird. She was twenty-nine, the mother of five. She sat with her lips tight, her thighs wide, her right eye squinting from the smoke that curled into it. Over the course of our thirty-mile drive, she told me she’d been sexually assaulted as a child, that her father was a drunk and that she in turn had married a drunk. She told me all of this matter-of-factly (possibly the only way you relate such things to a stranger,) flipping her steering wheel hand as she did, a gesture meant to impart her acceptance of fate and its vertiginous sides. After her fifth child, Claire told me that she pulled out of her marriage, but only by pulling out a kitchen knife in order to do so. Ironically, or as luck would have it, she was the one charged with assault.
“Ain’t that a pisser,” Claire said, and the dead bird in her lap flew up to comb through her hair.
Out the car window, Ponderosa pines slid past in stately columns, hawks circled on thermals, blue birds sat on fence posts like miniature chips of the sky. I watched Claire flick cigarette butt after cigarette butt at them, revealing a bored aggression toward the land, a chronic kind of restlessness bred not in cities but in small towns on Saturday nights. Newport, Dalkena, Usk, places to get out of and never return to. Poking her chin at a signpost we passed, Claire told me she’d grown up on Usk.
“Fuckin’ shit hole is what it is.”
It was Easter weekend and I was hitchhiking from Spokane, Washington, to Argenta, British Columbia. Half an hour before, Claire had appeared from the convenience store near where I stood. She moved with a shuffling, loose-limbed gait, her worn shoes kicking clouds of dust up to her knees, and her long orange hair catching licks of the sun. She wore a light cotton dress printed with roses, and over that a down-filled, hunter-green vest, its red collar turned up against the invisible breeze. Hooking a loose tendril of fire back over an ear, she crossed the crushed gravel between us and asked if I wanted a ride. Throwing my backpack in the back seat of the maroon Oldsmobile station wagon, I skipped around to the front passenger door and slid in.
At my feet a pair of beer cans rolled like the carcasses of bees. There were multiple cracks in the windshield, as well as a large vulva-like split in the dashboard that was hard to ignore. Claire threw a loaf of white bread on the back seat without looking over her shoulder. It was the exact color of the skin stretched over her cheeks. Pulling out of the parking lot, she leaned forward and tuned in a classic rock station, then accelerated to seventy, weaving the expanse of hood down the road. She straddled the centerline and straightened the curves. When she snapped a pink bubble of gum by biting it with her teeth, a light bulb went off in my head.
I’d met Claire three weeks earlier outside the A&P in Minot, North Dakota, pushing a shopping cart loaded with groceries and trailing a pair of runny-nosed children, a third balanced on her hip like an over-sized watermelon. I’d met her one frightful Saturday night outside a bar in Boca Raton, Florida, the shouting match she was having with her lover stopping me cold with the fear I was about to witness a murder. And I’d met her in every Laundromat and Salvation Army I’d ever been in, her spider-like hands folding socks and underwear as if folding up years.
But the truth was I’d never talked to Claire. I’d grown up a little too nice, a little too polite, a little too secure in my white middle-class home. I was intimidated by the raw edge of life and the vocabulary that went with it. Granted, I’d had my share of working-class jobs, and had sat on my share of scaffolding and equally dangerous barstools, listening to and smiling wanly at the ribald commentary and running critique of women’s asses. But as the Oldsmobile floated down the road on worn out shocks, each bump rocking it like the rock of a waterbed, I began to realize I was seated next to a woman who was more sure of herself than I would ever be. There was a streak of unselfconsciousness in Claire I was unable to muster, and a brutal, crass honesty that left no doubt in my mind she meant what she said.
“I tell my kids if they fuck with drugs I’m going to fuck with them.”
Claire lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out through her nose. She chewed the skin on the inside of her right cheek. As I asked questions, she began populating the landscape with memories. She pointed to a low mountaintop and said she’d been there, and when we swung near the Pend Oreille River, she told me of rock fights with her brothers, and how at sixteen, she and her friends built bonfires and drank until they threw up in the dark. Claire related everything while staring straight ahead. I watched her in the context of a shorn landscape passing outside. Rimmed with yellow and pale blue, an oval bruise floated on the back of her neck. When she caught me looking at it, she looked over and then returned her eyes straight ahead.
“He raped me with a beer bottle,” she said flatly. “Budweiser I think.”
Claire’s stories were solid pieces of narrative I could pick up and turn over. In her honesty, I sensed a terrible hunger for significance, the same that exists in us all. Taking her right hand from the wheel and smoothing her thigh, she offered, “I don’t ordinarily wear dresses. I’m really a tomboy. Not one of those made-up bitches you see in the magazines.”
I studied Claire’s face and tried to imagine the friends that she had, how she swore at and mistreated her children, how she made love and probably never had anyone truly make love to her. With the sun coming in the window from the west, it was hard not to notice her small breasts unsupported by a bra beneath the thin cotton. Her ill-strung body was stork-like, strong and sinewy, yet a feminine softness filled the car like a third personality. Looking at Claire, a distasteful thread of desire wended through me. It was a combination of lust, sympathy, and disgust.
As the Oldsmobile shuttled down route 20, crows lifted from roadkills and resettled behind us and the long sinuous tongue of blacktop took us north over low hills. Claire never asked me where I was from or where I was going. She never tried to present herself as anything but what she was. I edited my thoughts and as the blue sky paled to milk-white at the edges, we lapsed into silence.
“Here we are,” she said.
Abruptly we pulled into a dirt driveway. A doublewide squatted among weeds and an array of wrecked cars. In that moment, I wanted to reach over and touch Claire, for one crazy moment stop her world from its insatiable spin. I wanted to tell her life was unfair, that the situation she’d grown up in was criminal. I thought, too, I might tell her that love was something rarely found in this world—a great, holy, improbable feat—attainable by the masses, accomplished by only a few. Claire was wrapped in a cyclone of five children and an ex-husband that showed up fortnightly to beat her. I was an interloper into her world, a bird that had migrated down a wrong corridor. Claire looked straight out the windshield and her eyelashes curled up like the wingtips of a raven.
I reached for the door. The solid metal handle was in stark contrast my thoughts. The last thing I remember was the sight of her two teenage sons racing from the trailer we’d pulled next to, the boys breaking from its interior like hounds in front of a shotgun. They bounded down the wooden stairs and slapped open palms on the hood of the car. Claire was just standing up, the sun ripping into her hair to set it on fire and the blue veins in her neck swelling as she opened her mouth to swear. It was Good Friday, and a small flock of chickadees flew overhead, twelve little apostles singing a sharp-noted song.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said, reaching to grab my pack from the back of the car. To my surprise Claire turned to face me. It has been three years now, and still, I don’t know how much pain, ambivalence, and clenched sorrow were contained in that split second of smile, not smile.