Nancy
That fall, when my best friend, Iris, is away visiting her grandmother and I am bored, I find myself hanging around with Nancy. She had come to our commune, Sunnyridge, alone in the summer and stayed on for months. In the kitchen, Nancy offers to hold Nathan while Mom kneads a five-loaf mound of bread dough, and when it’s Ann Marie’s turn to cook, she’ll patiently play with whiny, half-naked toddler Jarod for hours.
Nancy has a curved nose and curved posture to match, salt and pepper hair, a creaky New York accent. To be honest, she looks like the illustration of the old woman in the story of Hansel and Gretel. When she speaks, people don’t listen to her for very long. They nod and then move away like they have done her a favor just by giving her those few moments of attention. Nancy doesn’t get mad. She acts like she deserves nothing and is just grateful that no one has told her to walk down our red dirt driveway and leave.
Nobody says it, but she is less important than women attached to men, women who are young and beautiful, or women who have money. Overlooked Nancy is none of those things. She has, instead, kindness. She speaks softly, looks me in the eyes, and wants to know what I think. I think I am doing a good deed by spending time with her. I am, after all, Mom and Dad’s daughter, and they started the commune. If they are the king and queen of Sunnyridge, I am a ten-year-old princess. It is very nice of me to bestow my company on her.
Nancy asks if I want to go for a walk through the forest, past the stream. Why not? There’s nothing better to do. She wants to show me a trail she has discovered. While we walk, she tells me how she hitchhiked across the country, alone, to get to Sunnyridge. She talks on and on about her adventures—getting in and out of cars, getting rides. She talks as if she has been waiting for someone to listen to this story for a long time. It sounds kind of exciting to travel, to see new places. Like what Iris and I might do if we ever run away from home.
She asks me what I am looking forward to, and I tell her that I am waiting to get my period. I say, I hope it will happen when someone has just had a baby because then there will be Kotex around. I don’t want to try to use Tampax. No way would one of those thick, cardboard tubes I see painted red with blood in the outhouse garbage box fit inside of me. Don’t you think someone would buy Kotex for you? she asks. I don’t know—I mean I wouldn’t want to ask the town run. It would be embarrassing.
As we walk under the cool shade of the firs, she says, One bad thing happened on the trip. Oh? There was this one ride, a man in a truck. He didn’t rape me, but, you know, he made me—she looks away. What? I ask. Made me give him a blow job. I search my mind, I don’t know what that is. I think about a Blow Pop, a lollipop with pink, hard gum inside. How your jaw aches trying to chew it. What is it? I ask. She explains. She didn’t want to do it. He forced her to. He had a knife. Still, it was kinda nice to think he wanted me for something, she says. Most of the time, I feel so undesirable.
Oh, I think, oh. I will never get in a car alone with a man. Everyone knows chicks shouldn’t hitchhike alone. Poor Nancy. No one loves her, and now I don’t either. Why did she let a man do that? I will never, I will never be like her. A penis in her mouth? She should have bitten it off.
Iris comes back from her trip. She tells me about her grandma, what they ate, what her grandma likes to watch on TV. When Nancy says hi or tries to talk to me at dinner, I turn my shoulder and pretend I don’t hear her. I avoid her soft, wet eyes. Squeezed between my sister Gabi and Iris on a bench in the lodge, as I chopstick up brown rice and salad, I say, in a loud whisper, Don’t you think Nancy looks kinda like a witch?
Leah Korican (@leahkorican) grew up on a commune in the backwoods of Oregon. This piece is an excerpt from Wonderland - A Memoir, her work-in-progress about that time and place. Her writing has been published in Heartwood Literary Magazine, Canary, and Literary Mama, as well as in anthologies including Her Story (Shambhala). Her visual art has been shown nationally. She lives and works in Oakland, CA. You can read and see more at www.leahkorican.com.