Again she let her mind drift to the scene at the Raparound, her foot in his lap, her toes working to excite his cock. She touched herself for an instant to heighten the memory but it was unnecessary, the memory was vivid enough without such enhancement. She found herself wrapping words around the memory, putting lyrics to its music, the words she would use when she told Sully about it.
For she would tell him all of it. From the overtures on the street to the wildness which she herself was not yet able to imagine. She would tell him all of it
Soon enough.
Seventeen
The last of the sunset glowed red in the west as Karen left the house and headed back into the woods. She had paused first at the door of her father’s study, heard the typewriter chatter, pause, then start tentatively up again. She wished he would finish the book so that she could read it. It wouldn’t be much longer, she thought. He was working steadily, working every day, and sometimes she would stand silently outside his door and hear the typewriter keys click away without interruption for ten or fifteen minutes at a time.
When he was out of the house she was occasionally tempted to peek at the manuscript. Once she had entered the study in his absence but had been unable to make herself look at what he had written. It could do no harm so long as he did not know that she had read it, but still she felt it would be a dishonorable act on her part.
She walked only a few yards into the woods. It was light out now but would be dark before long, and she did not want to be confronted with a long walk in the dark. That might be an unpleasant experience at any time, and would be especially unpleasant stoned. If the grass took her in the wrong direction, she might really find herself imagining that there were bears in those woods, or that the trees and vines were actively conspiring against her.
Her fingers found the little foil packet in the pocket of her jeans. She left it where it was while she smoked a regular cigarette, sitting with her legs crossed and her back against a tree. She smoked the cigarette all the way to the filter, then carefully stubbed it out on the sole of her shoe. In her mind, Smoky the Bear frowned and shook a warning finger at her.
“Only you can prevent forest fires,” she said aloud. “Only forest fires can prevent bears.”
She took out the packet, unwrapped the aluminum foil, let the two neatly rolled joints fall into the palm of her hand. A boy in town had given them to her almost a week ago and she had been saving them. She was in the right kind of mood now and the woods seemed a perfect place to smoke. It was a natural act that ought to be performed in natural surroundings.
She could have smoked in the house. In her own room or in the living room. Her father knew she had smoked, they had talked about it, and he didn’t seem to object to grass. He had smoked himself on occasion, although she gathered he had not had any grass in a long time. Christ, everyone smoked. People on Social Security were lighting up and blowing the tops of their heads off. She had known kids at Northwestern who had turned their parents on, and one kid who had been turned on by his parents. “Families that blast together last together.” Even her mother smoked, and anything that woman could do couldn’t possibly be hip by definition.
Her mother’s words on the subject struck her as one of the most extraordinary cop-out speeches she had ever heard. “Now I know very well that marijuana is harmless, Karen. It’s probably less injurious than alcohol, although the data are not yet conclusive. A lot of testing remains to be done. And Wayne and I have experimented with marijuana. The fact remains that it is against the law. The law may be a bad one but that’s neither here nor there. It’s the law, and violating that law can lead to a great deal of sheer heartache for young people. Also, I think it’s inadvisable in any event for adolescents to become involved with a drug like marijuana before they have the maturity to handle it. It’s the same as with alcoholic beverages. In fact I very much hope the powers that be will legalize marijuana so that its use can be controlled, limited to adults. I don’t suppose I can tell you what to do, Karen, because there are certain decisions you will no doubt make for yourself, decisions you will have to make for yourself, but I would strongly, very strongly, advise you to stay away from ‘pot’ until you’re over twenty-one.”
And of course she called it pot and used pauses to put invisible quotation marks around the word.
What bullshit! What complete and total bullshit! It’s harmless and everybody’s doing it but it’s illegal, so don’t do it until you’re over twenty-one. The advice was not only bullshit. It was also a little late; she had been smoking for almost a year before she got that particular lecture.
Now she put one of the joints between her lips and struck a match. She took a long easy drag, inhaled deeply, leaned her head back against the tree trunk and closed her eyes. She got a hit almost immediately and her mouth relaxed in a smile. The boy who had made her a present of the two jays had said it was dynamite, and it had been no exaggeration. She exhaled through pursed lips, then opened her eyes and wrapped the second cigarette in the foil and returned it to her pocket. She wouldn’t need them both tonight. One would be plenty.
Why had she decided not to smoke in the house? For the same reason, she thought, that she should not have brought the black boy home. Because it was silly to lay any trips on her father. It was immature and unnecessary, and she didn’t have to play those games anymore.
It would be fun to turn him on, though. Not now, of course. His book was going well, and the last thing he needed was anything that might push his mind in a new direction before he had finished his work. When the book was done, then perhaps they could smoke together. At that stage it might even be valuable for him. A good head-type high might give him some new perspectives, so that when he went over the book, he might be able to see it from a different angle.
And it would be very heavy, too, the two of them sitting around smoking. He had taught her how to drink, and she cherished the time the two of them sat together drinking highballs and rapping. She had never understood the special pleasures of alcohol before, perhaps because she associated it on the one hand, with her mother and Wayne and their friends and on the other hand with the fraternity-type jocks and their vomitous beer blasts. Perhaps she could return the favor by teaching her father how to smoke, how to go with it and let it take him into his head.
There was a time, before she went away to college, when she had had similar hope for her mother. It was shortly after her own initiation to grass, and she had managed to half convince herself that a few tokes was all her mother needed to turn her head around. Further reflection had forced her to realize that there were certain things grass just couldn’t do, and that this was of them. By the time her mother delivered her little sermon and confessed her own “experimentation” with “pot,” Karen had more or less guessed that the woman must have tried the stuff at one time or another, and that it obviously hadn’t done any good.
She took another drag and let herself go with it. Her mother and Wayne — there were two live ones, she thought. And the most depressing thing about it was that they thought they were so fucking hip. They wore the loud elaborately casual suburban clothes straight out of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, they subscribed to Ramparls and the Free Press, they bought and read all the right books, they went to cocktail parties to raise money for Eugene McCarthy and the Black Panthers and whatever Asian country had most recently had an earthquake or typhoon or famine. They carefully salted their conversation with all the words that had gone out of style about a year ago. Christ, they were depressing.