Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [4]
Coop sat in the small, dark farmhouse kitchen with us and attempted to talk of this, but he could barely take even one step into telling us of the absurdity and danger of what he had allowed himself to do. So we did not know what had occurred. I remember we sat there and chanted, ‘Coop’s lost week, Coop’s lost week. Where did he go? Who was he with? Who was the woman who must have so exhausted him?’
The smooth rolling hills of our farm were green in the constant rains of winter and parched brown during summer and fall. Driving home, north out of Nicasio, we climbed to the peak of the hills, then abruptly swerved right onto the farm’s narrow dirt road, which went downhill a quarter-mile before it reached the barns, the car clobbering over speed bumps made from the rubber of tractor tires that had been hammered into the earth with spikes. When Claire and I were older, returning from parties in Glen Ellen, half asleep and with full bladders, we cursed the existence of the bumps. In the darkness, at the foot of the hill, we had to halt the car. My turn, I said, getting out in my new cotton dress and tight shoes to push the too-friendly and wide-awake mules off the path at the foot of the hill, so we could drive on.
As sisters we reflected each other, competed with each other, and our shared idol was Coop. By the time he was in his late teens we discovered he had other lives, disappearing into the city, haunting pool halls, dances, returning just in time to drive Claire into Nicasio for her piano lessons. She’d watch his lean brown hands, how he handled the clutch, how he took corners as if guiding them through water, swerving back to the straight road in a single gesture. She loved Coop’s easy, minimal effort towards whatever was around him. A year later, picking her up in Nicasio, he shifted over to the passenger seat and threw her the keys, pulled a paperback out of the glove compartment and began reading while she, frantic and uncertain about everything, steered the suddenly massive car—she felt she was screaming— up the winding road to its crest and then slid down the hill to the farm. He never once looked up, never once said a word, maybe glanced at the face of an almost sideswiped mule as it caught his eye in the side mirror. From then on, Claire drove to and from piano lessons alone, missing Coop. Coop, who with his confidence would sweep a hay bale over his shoulder and walk to the barn lighting a cigarette with his free hand.
Sometimes Claire and I would come down the hill with the car lights turned off in complete blackness. Or we would climb from our bedroom window onto the skirt of the roof and lie flat on our backs on the large table-rock, still warm from the day, and talk and sing into the night. We counted out the seconds between meteor showers slipping horizontal across the heavens. When thunder shook the house and horse stalls, I’d see Claire in her bed, during the brief moments of lightning, sitting upright like a nervous hound, hardly breathing, crossing herself. There were days when she disappeared on her horse and I disappeared into a book. But we were still sharing everything then. The Nicasio bar, the Druid Hall, the Sebastiani movie theatre in Sonoma, whose screen was like the surface of the Petaluma reservoir, altering with every shift of light, the hundred or more redwings that always sat on the telephone wires and chirruped out loud before a storm. There was a purple flower in February called shooting star. There were the sticks of willow that Coop cut down and strapped onto my broken wrist before he drove me to the hospital. I was fourteen then. He was eighteen. Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.
Who was Coop, really? We never