Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [6]
Territorial was Claire’s lovely name for that horse. I kept watching her. Later I told her it was because of all the blood on her cheek, though she said it was just her hands that hurt. We were both fifteen years old then, when Coop finally entered the barn and crouched down by me and called me ‘Claire.’ So that Claire herself became confused, uncertain for a moment as to who she was. But she was Claire, with what would become a thin scar like the path of an almost dried tear under her left eye, where all that blood had escaped.
Something happened in the horse barn, that early evening, between the two of us, in the confusion. We had stepped suddenly into the large uncertain world of adults, and we would now need to be distinctly Anna and distinctly Claire. It became important not to be known as the sister of—or worse, mistaken for—the other. From then on we would try to bring Coop into our fold. In the next few months we often slipped back into this ‘incident,’ to talk about it. There was a border now between us, something we had never achieved in the series of photographs that kept the two of us arm in arm. The album, I suspect, is still with Claire, on one of her bookshelves. If she studies it, she could parse more clearly how the two of us evolved away from each other. The year Claire cut most of her hair and grew more distant, the year I stared out, wild-eyed, everything in me a secret.
Why was Coop never in our father’s photographs? There were a few pictures taken of him, but these seemed preoccupied with texture and light. And there were some abstract reflections of him in a window, or of his shadow on the grass or on the flank of an animal. How many things could you throw your image against?
In any case, it was Coop who had found us that evening in the barn and had mistaken our identities, who had eventually come over to me and lifted me into his embrace and said, ‘Claire, my god, Claire,’ and I had thought, Then I am not Anna, then that must be Anna over there.
Coop began living in the grandfather’s cabin. From there, on the high ridge, he could look out onto black oaks and buckeye trees, where a glacier of mist appeared caught for an hour or so each morning in the roughness of the branches. He was nineteen now, in a desired solitude. He was rebuilding the cabin, working alone. He bathed in the cold water of a hill pond. In the evenings he slipped past the farmhouse and ended up in Nicasio or Glen Ellen, listening to music. Occasionally he ate with the others, abruptly rising from the table, bread still in his hands, and was gone—the exit and destination unannounced. The sisters knew that their days with Coop were finite. He was courteous and unruled, away most evenings. Returning, he’d cut the motor at the top of the hill and coast down so no one would hear him, then walk the half-mile to his cabin along with a shadow.
He accompanied the girls into town only if they insisted on hearing music. At the Nicasio dances, Claire and Anna wore their San Rafael dresses and graded the men in the bar, as if Coop, sitting beside them, were another species. He kept his distance, laughing silently to himself, barely speaking. Who is Coop, really? they asked themselves. Once, having decided to go to Rancho Nicasio an hour after he’d left, they saw him on that small dance floor, caught in its mayhem. Women were being swirled and then caught in his brown arms. He was not a good dancer, quite bad in fact, but girls buried their faces into his neck, their pretty heels next to his cow-shit boots. ‘Well, he’s a cowboy,’ Anna claimed. They didn’t want the spell broken, and melted away before he could catch sight of them in the crowd.
Still, being older, he remained the emotional negotiator and translator between them and their father, handed the moderating role a mother would have had. It did not fit his temperament, and perhaps it was the desire to escape all this that made him move into the grandfather’s cabin. To rebuild it he needed money,