Roadmarks

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Roadmarks” by Jesse Lacy. Jesse is a writer from the Shenandoah Valley currently residing in Richmond, Virginia. They are an MFA candidate in nonfiction and fiction at Virginia Commonwealth University, where they are an associate nonfiction editor at Blackbird. They are currently writing a coming-of-age memoir in essays about suburbanization, the opioid epidemic, and the time their grandmother won the Virginia Lottery.

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I.

In the metal womb of her mother’s sedan, Cherry and I weave around Pleasant Valley Road, looking for nothing. We make our way through the McDonald’s drive-through like we always do, eating the food our mothers have forbidden off the dashboard. It is this act of greasy paper-wrapped tenderness that makes life bearable, though neither of us have the words to communicate that’s what we’re doing—bearing life, surviving. We chatter a constant murmuring dialect of veiled needs and desires:

Why can’t our mothers drink something other than cheap wine and beer?

I’m still willing to take some, but the bready smell makes me wanna ralph.

Will your brother buy any for us?

Haven’t seen him in months.

Damn.

I’m bored. There’s nothing to do in this town.

Did you do as bad as me on the Precalc test?

I bombed, like embarrassingly bombed.

Yeah… Are you hungry?

I’m starving. I mean, I’m really starving.

A breeze whooshes through the open windows, and I imagine the suburban air as an umbilical cord, the context by which I grasp and understand life beyond Cherry, beyond her mother’s car.

Across from our spot in the McDonald’s parking lot, a man drops his pants from where he sits on a bench in front of the neighboring Waffle House—his cock facing traffic, facing us, and it is the first time I’ve seen a penis except for changing my nephew’s diapers or accidentally barging in on my father while he’s taking a piss because he never locks the door—and Cherry and I laugh, because what else could we do with the windows down? And the man locks eyes with us, starts jerking himself off, so we laugh harder, because we are still learning fear, because we haven’t figured out anything yet—not the danger of sex or cars or mothers or this sprawling development building up around our hometown that feels so much like home and like nothing at the same time.

II.

Eliza is back for the summer after her first two semesters at BYU, and we’re driving around the country roads out past Dinosaur Land in her red 2000 Subaru Impreza who she has affectionately named Sandra. A month from now, Eliza will be back in Utah, where she will discover she is a lesbian, and I will move to Richmond, where I will drunkenly beg a woman pressing her fingers inside of me to stop. She won’t stop.

But right now it’s 11 p.m., and Eliza and I are listening to Cigarettes After Sex, Greg Gonzalez lazily mumbling Nothing’s gonna hurt you, baby when Eliza misses a sharp turn and sends Sandra soaring off a 12-foot cliff. I hear Eliza scream before I realize, in the dark, that there is no more road ahead of us. My lungs empty as the seat belt cuts into my chest. I cough. The seat belt is strangling me.

“Fuck,” Eliza says, and it’s the first time I’ve heard her swear without it sounding practiced. I can tell she is losing it. Although I feel like I am dying, I do not ask Eliza for help. I will be strong enough for both of us at this moment.

Smoke billows out from under Sandra’s hood; the music groans as Eliza fumbles with the aux cord to make it stop. I manage to unbuckle myself.

“We gotta get out,” I wheeze, music still oozing through the speakers. I’m scared the smoke means Sandra’s gonna blow.

We scramble out and assess our situation. Sandra’s totaled: scrunched up, spewing rubbery-smelling smoke at the bottom of the cliff which is lined with shredded car tires—not just Sandra’s. Under the light of the night sky, I notice the open grass in front of us looks more like a car graveyard than a country field. “At least you’re not the only one,” I say, gesturing around us. This is the wrong thing to say because it makes Eliza start crying.

An elderly couple emerges from a lonely white house across the road to peer over the cliff at us. “We’ve already called 911,” the lady says matter-of-factly, a serene grin on her face—the kind that says this happens all the time. Her casual demeanor pisses me off, and I resent her for calling the police. I am used to handling these things on my own. Eliza takes the old man’s hand as she climbs up the cliff. I insist on climbing up myself, my arms and legs burning as I scratch my soft, bruised-up unathletic body against the rocks.

After the cops come and go, Eliza’s polite Mormon parents arrive on scene, her bishop father’s simmering rage tucked beneath an uncanny, well-mannered smile. The absence of my parents is palpable, like it always has been—at choir concerts, field trips, fundraisers. I called my father, and he told me he was on his way, but my folks live closer to these parts than Eliza’s, and he’s nowhere to be seen. I awkwardly cross my open flannel shirt over where a seatbelt burn begins to stew in the nook between my breasts.

Three years from now, Eliza’s father will find himself unable to accept and acknowledge her joy in a community outside the church, and I will be in out-patient treatment for PTSD. I will instead envy Eliza for the ease with which she embraces her queerness, the way she will be able walk into Babe’s when she visits me in Richmond and feel nothing but belonging. I will feel this envy stew within me even as I know she hasn’t been given an easy path either. But for now, I sit and wait for my father on the old couple’s porch, gazing into the midnight horizon of roadside debris and cow shit and all the rusting totaled cars, Sandra still smoking out there among them.

III.

It is dusk. A deer launches herself at my father’s truck. She has watched us cruise down the hill out of our neighborhood, and now she decides to collide her defiant animal body with the aluminum and steel of the passenger door. I look into her eyes, and she is wild. The chemicals in her brain must be buzzing. Years of evolved instinct have trained her to either catapult herself toward or away from the cabin of this truck. Instinct has brought her here to sever the rearview mirror from its anchor. She is nothing but decisive. I look through her downturned lashes at her oblong pupils, and I know she is fierce. Here, she is the biomechanics of survival incarnate. Here, she dives decisively toward annihilation.

A different summer, my family camped in the mountains. There we saw another deer, wobbling, a black stump where her rear leg should be. The deer hung around the campsite, nibbling on our table scraps. I was a kid then. Then, I would have sworn, watching her in the dark, she strode with ease. I would have sworn she only wobbled when she knew we could see her. Even now, I want to nullify the deer’s ache, her need to loot our campsite for scraps. Even now, I want to deny the flies that burrowed in her blackened stump of not-leg, buzzing away and leaving pockmarks, the same way fingernails can dent a throat.

IV.

I am the only queer person in this support group for survivors of sexual violence. I am also the only member whose rapist is a woman instead of a man. The group coordinators are particularly gentle with me. When they speak to me, they clasp their hands together in front of their mountainous neck scarves and nod slowly as I speak, though I cannot recall a word I say to them. They tell me they want me to feel like they are holding space for my experience, that my feelings are valid. This strenuous effort meant to nullify my feelings of terror makes me feel nauseous each time one of the coordinators meets my eyes. I last maybe two sessions.

Though I am sure the coordinators’ care is genuine, they remind me of how, afterwards, the rapist drove me home. Of how she said she didn’t want me walking home alone while I was hungover. Of how she said it wouldn’t be safe. In the car, the rapist promised to introduce me to the rest of her queer friends. She’d send me an invite to another party.

Later, she Venmo requested me for booze and gas money. With each support group meeting reminder that illuminates my cell phone, I am reminded of how I sent the rapist that money, of how I texted her back.

V.

I’m in the car with Mama after Sunday service when she tells me I need to choose between Girl Scouts and church. I want to tell her neither, but I don’t think that’s how these things work, so I keep my mouth shut for a while and think. Apparently, the pastor and the community aren’t fans of Girl Scouts on account of them letting homosexuals participate. Mama says she isn’t crazy about the idea of a dyke braiding my hair, but she’s also not crazy about a lot of the things they say at church, either.

I’m hesitant to choose Girl Scouts on account of the fact the girls there make me nervous. They’re pretty and nice, yes, but also, they’ve got this knowledge I haven’t got yet. There’s something about the work of being a girl, step one in Girl Scouts, that makes no sense to me. And it’s not just that the girls have got neon cold shoulder tunics from Justice and tinctures to make their hair shiny. I fail the girl thing at a deeper, more fundamental level.

Mama’s wearing her Sunday finest, a blue blouse and a floor-length beige skirt. Her eyelashes are crumbly black, flaking around her deep-set eyes as they focus on the road ahead. I’m wearing an itchy floral hand-me-down dress from one of my cousins. The clothes we wear at Girl Scouts are a hell of a lot more comfortable, and Mama fusses with her makeup less before we go. So I tell Mama I wanna do Girl Scouts, which seems to make her happy.

The car ride home is quiet after that. I think about the Girl Scout girls, their smooth hair, their happy faces, their freckles. I imagine they surround me in a big Girl Scout group hug. I imagine they treat me like family.