Given World

by Marian Palaia

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

“Complex and haunting…vivid and unforgettable” ( People), this story of one injured but indefatigable young woman is a stunning portrait of a family, a generation, and a country all coming of age. From a quiet family farm in Montana in the 60s to the grit and haze of San Francisco in the 70s to a gypsy-populated, post-war Saigon, The Given World spins around its unconventional and unforgettable heroine, Riley. When her big brother is declared MIA in Vietnam, young Riley packs up her shattered heart and leaves her family, her first love, and “a few small things” behind. By trial and error she builds a new life, working on cars, delivering newspapers, tending bar. She befriends, rescues, and is rescued by a similarly vagabond cast of characters whose “‘unraveled souls’ sting hardest and linger the longest” ( The New York Times Book Review). Foolhardy, funny, and wise, Riley’s challenge as she grows into a woman is simple: survive long enough to go home again, or at least figure out where home is, and who might be among the living there. Lorrie Moore said, “It’s been a long time since a first book contained this much wisdom and knowledge of the world.” The Given World is “an immensely rewarding and remarkable debut” ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

Release date: April 14, 2015

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Print pages: 304

Sample

Given World

1. Hawks

They say our early memories are really memories of what we think we remember—stories we tell ourselves—and as we grow older, we re-remember, and often get it wrong along the way. I’m willing to believe that, but I still trust some of my memories, the most vivid, like this one: there was a newspaper, and a headline, bigger than the everyday ones. It was morning and I was alone at the kitchen table, sleepy, my feet resting on the dog—he was a cow dog, speckled black and white, name of Cash—on the floor underneath. I had a spoon in my hand and was waving it around; drops of milk splashed on the paper.

The headline said, “Johnson Doubles Draft to 35,000.” It was summer and I was nine. I knew who Johnson was. He was the president. He was tall and talked funny, and his nose took up half his face. The reason he got to be president was on account of the last one getting shot in Texas, by Lee Harvey Oswald, who got shot by Jack Ruby, who did not get shot by anyone. JFK was the president when I first started school. John-John and Caroline were his kids and his wife looked like a movie star. When they buried him, she wore a black veil over her face so no one could see if she cried. John-John held her hand.

President Johnson, in the paper, said Vietnam was a different kind of war. I knew I could ask Mick about that: about how many kinds of war there were, or how there could even be different kinds, but he was outside. My parents were out there too—Mom probably in the garden already, digging up potatoes before the sun got so high and hot it would turn them green, and Dad fixing fences or tractoring or scaring up dopey runaway calves. The usual. Our life.

I collected the bowl of apples and the peeler Mom had left on the counter for me and went out to the front porch. I balanced the bowl on the railing and slid my feet between two spindles to stand on the bottom rail, so I could lean over and get a better look at my brother. Mick was crouched in the driveway next to a black Triumph motorcycle, his high school graduation present to himself. He was hoping to catch a girl with it, I knew, or to go away on it, or both. I was not in favor of either, but he was over the moon. The bike was magnificent.

His toolbox lay open in the dust, and a greasy rag dangled like a cockeyed tail from the back pocket of his coveralls. Most of his blond hair was tucked up under a train engineer’s cap, but a few wayward strands crept down his neck and caught the poplar-filtered morning light like filaments of some shiny spun metal. No one else in the family had hair like that. Not even close. I thought about sneaking up behind him with a pair of scissors and snipping off a piece, but it seemed like a lot of work and probably not worth the repercussions. Instead, I looked around for something small to throw at him, as it was my habit to be annoying. I did know better than to hit him with an entire apple.

Without looking at me, he said, “Don’t even think about it,” and gave one of the screws on the engine an infinitesimal turn.

“I wasn’t thinking about anything,” I said. I was still searching, but there was nothing. I’m sure I sighed. I was a great sigher in those days. I picked up the bowl and sat down with my back to the wall, scissored my legs open, and set the bowl between them. The peeler was still on the porch railing.

“Crap.”

“What’s wrong? Can’t find a weapon?”

“I left the peeler. It’s on the rail.”

“Bummer.”

“Get it for me?”

“Nope.”

“Thanks.”

“My pleasure, Cupcake.”

I didn’t move. I sniffed the air and it smelled like cow farts. I said so.

Mick said, “What smells like cow farts?”

“The world.”

“Probably not,” he said. “Probably just Montana.”

“Oh.” I pondered my entire range of geographic and zoologic knowledge, not coming up with a whole lot. “So, does that mean Africa smells like hippo farts?”

“I doubt it. Hippos fart underwater.”

“So what other animals are there?”

“Anywhere? Or just in Africa?”

“There. In Africa.”

“You have an encyclopedia, Riley. Why don’t you look it up?”

“I have to peel these.” I took an apple out of the bowl and balanced it on the top of my head. “Plus, it wouldn’t hurt you to just tell me.”

I heard him sigh. I think he must have taught me how. “All right. Then will you be quiet?” No promises. I made a noise, like hrrmm.

He pulled the rag out of his pocket, dipped it in a tin of rubbing compound, and began to buff a tiny scratch on the gas tank. “Elephants. Don’t even tell me if you didn’t know that already. Antelope, zebras, giraffes, wildebeests, warthogs . . .”

“Warthogs?” I sat up straighter. “You made that up.”

“No,” he said, “I did not.”

I tilted my head forward to drop the apple into my hand, put it back in the bowl, and slitted my eyes like a snake. I considered my options. My tendency to doubt was well earned, but I still believed most of what Mick said, unless the bullshit was totally obvious. He was ridiculously smart. He read tons of books and remembered what was in them. Not like some people.

“What do they look like?” I said, still not sure which way this was going to go.

“Like bristly little pigs. Their tails stand straight up.”

I was eyeing the peeler, and even went so far as to set the bowl next to me so I could get up to retrieve it.

“What else?”

Mick said, “I’ll draw you a picture later.”

“When later?”

“After now.”

We were almost done. I could tell.

“Where do these guys live?”

“At the beach.”

“The ocean?” To me, the ocean was the most magical place in the world, even though I’d never seen one, never been farther outside Montana than the North Dakota Badlands. But even the Badlands had once been underwater, or so I’d been told.

“Yes. At the beach at the ocean. Where beaches are.” Mick popped off the spark plug wire, reached into his toolbox for the ratchet, and loosened the plug. The noise the ratchet made was a bit cricket-like. I wondered if I could tie that in somehow to make the conversation go further. Gave up.

Mick looked over his shoulder at me. I wasn’t moving. I could have been dead. “Are you going to peel those apples or what?”

“What,” I said, but that was it. I knew it was going to be.

I got the peeler and began skinning apples, imagining for a short time they were small rabbits and me a wily trapper collecting pelts, but it didn’t make me feel very good; it made me feel a little sick, in fact, so I tried to take it back, in my head, but couldn’t. By the time I finished, Mick had disappeared into the garage. I took the apples inside and set them on the counter. “Here are your rabbits,” I said—whispered—to no one.

I whistled Cash from his refuge under the table, and together we padded the two flights up to my room, which had once been the attic. It was small, because the whole house wasn’t very big—just a tallish box, perfectly square with the exception of a two-story addition off the back. I could get to the roof of it from my window but had to be careful on account of the steep pitch, for snow. The walls were blue, with tiny green and yellow fish trailing like ivy around the windows. Mick had painted them when he and Dad fixed the space up the summer before.

I was nearly asleep on the floor, one hand buried deep in the fur around Cash’s neck, when I heard the bike start up. I bolted down the stairs, banked off the bannisters, miscalculated, and slammed my shoulder hard into the wall at the bottom. I hesitated just long enough to straighten a framed picture there, which was long enough to miss Mick’s turn from the long driveway onto the frontage road. I stood on the porch, tracking his progress beyond the hedgerow by the rooster tail of fine Montana silt he kicked up. I watched until all evidence of my brother and his bike disappeared from sight, a mile or more away. Cash leaned against my leg, and I reached down to scratch behind his ears.

“Shit,” I said. I did not realize my mother was standing at the screen door until I heard my name.

“Riley,” she said, “I really wish you wouldn’t swear so often.” Mick was teaching me. He was doing a good job.

“Sorry, Mom. But damn . . .”

“Riley. I know.” She pushed the door open and held it with her hip, laid her hands on my shoulders, rubbing the one that hurt. I wondered how she knew. “Maybe I’d like to go with him too.”

I snorted. “You would not.” I tilted my head straight back so I could see her expression, but it was upside down and I couldn’t tell anything from that angle. Not that my mother was all that decipherable anyway. We never knew from day to day, sometimes from hour to hour, which mom we were going to get. There was quiet mom, silly mom, fierce-but-not-mean mom, and mom with the faraway look in her eyes. That mom was almost but not quite the same as quiet mom, who still knitted and cooked and made us do our homework. Faraway mom just stood at the window, looking out at what I would remember later, after I’d gone away: the distant mountains, the buff-colored wheat fields, red-tailed hawks drifting with the thermals, poised to drop out of the sky, like missiles, onto errant field mice.

“Mick’s leaving, Mom. Isn’t he?”

She leaned down and kissed the top of my head. “Looks that way.”

“Where’s he going?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think he does either. Hopefully to college.”

“When?”

“Soon, I imagine. He hasn’t told us yet.” She did not sound particularly unhappy at the prospect of Mick going off to school, and that confused me, since I could see nothing good coming of it. At all.

I went to his room that night after dinner to ask him about hawks. Dozens of drawings were pinned to the walls, of everything, seemingly, he’d ever seen when he went outside, or the pieces of outside he brought in: wildflowers, rocks, sticks, bones, trees, birds, reptiles, mammals big and small, mountains, clouds, planets.

He finished the song he was playing on his guitar, set it down, pulled a dog-eared book from the shelf and read: “ ‘Krider’s Red-tailed Hawk is a very pale race found in the Great Plains. These are light mottled brown above and nearly pure white below. The belly band is often indistinct or absent, and the tail is usually light rust above and creamy below with faint barring.’ ”

“ ‘A very pale race,’ ” I said, or mumbled. I was lying on the floor with a stuffed animal draped across my forehead like some bizarre woolly headdress. “Aren’t we a very pale race?”

“We are,” Mick said. “Paler than most.”

A minute passed. Then two. “Most what?” I didn’t even know what I was asking.

“Go to bed, Riley.”

Mick played for a while. Bob Dylan. Peter, Paul and Mary. I loved the dragon Puff. Hated it when he had to go. Finally, Mick laid his guitar on the bed, scooped me up off the floor and carried me to my room. I tried to not be entirely deadweight, but I wasn’t so easy to carry anymore.

“You’re going to be too big for this pretty soon, you know.”

“I know. But you’ll be gone anyway. So it won’t matter.”

I waited. I kept my eyes closed.

Mick said, “Good night, Punk.”

“Night, Bozo,” I said. I think.

I heard him leave on his bike again, sometime in the deep middle of the night. Cash woofed in my ear.

“Forget it, dog. He’s not taking either one of us.”

When I rolled over I heard something rustle. I pulled a piece of notebook paper from underneath me and held it up to the light coming through the window. I could tell what it was by the straight-up tail and the bristles. It was standing under a palm tree on a beach, gazing out at the waves.

I traced it with my finger. “Hey, little buddy.”

I fell asleep, still hearing the sound of the motorcycle long after it had faded, and dreamt of rabbits, hairless and round, like little moons.

At breakfast the next morning Mick didn’t even look tired. I searched his face for some clue as to where he might have been, or what he might have seen, or what he was thinking about. He looked exactly the same as he had every morning of my life.

He said, “Quit, Riley.”

“Quit what?” I stared at my bowl, at the cornflake crumbs floating there. Like I was an astronomer and they were a newly discovered constellation. Discovered by me.

“Looking at me like that.”

“I’m not looking at you. Obviously.”

“Riley,” Mom said. She didn’t finish, but I knew.

Arguing wasn’t going to get me where I wanted to go, especially since I didn’t know where that was. I sneaked a look at my father, on his second cup of coffee and getting ready to light a cigarette, to see if any help might be coming from that quarter. He tapped the cigarette on the table and a few strands of tobacco fell out. I could smell it, sharp and bitter. Mom stood up and started clearing dishes, raising an eyebrow at Dad when he looked at her. There was a new no-smoking policy in the house, and sometimes he forgot. He put the cigarette behind his ear.

“Was there something you wanted to ask your brother, Miss Riley?”

“No, sir.”

“I think there is, and you’re probably not going to get your answer by staring a hole through his head.”

“I wasn’t—”

“What,” Mick said, “do you want to know?”

He said it gently enough, but it didn’t matter anymore. I knew if I asked, whatever it was, and got an answer, I wouldn’t like it, unless he said he was staying put, and I knew that wasn’t even a distant possibility. Mick didn’t want to be a farmer. He wanted to see the world. He’d been telling me that since I could remember, but I had never realized it meant he’d be leaving me. I’d always imagined us somewhere together; somewhere that looked a lot like home.

I said, “Never mind.” I excused myself, put my bowl in the sink, and left by the back door. Cash came with me, wagging his tail hopefully.

•  •  •

When the college catalogues came, Mick pored over them at the kitchen table. I helped by tearing the corners off the pages, piling the bits of paper together, and blowing on them so they scattered. Havre and Great Falls were okay, close enough that he could come visit. Missoula was too far away, on the other side of the mountains. Mick had that catalogue open.

“You aren’t thinking about going there, are you?”

“Yes, nosy. I am thinking about it.”

“But it’s so far.”

“Not so far, really. Not nearly as far as some places.”

“So far really.” I started another pile of corners. When it reached a decent size, I blew on it. Hard. Some fell on the floor.

Mick looked at me like he might be angry this time, but wasn’t. “This is what people do, Riley. They get out of high school and go away to college. Or some do.”

“What about the other ones?”

“They do other stuff.”

“Other stuff around here?”

“Some of them.”

I waited.

“That’s not going to be me, kiddo.”

I sat down hard on the chair next to his and flipped through the pages of the Havre catalogue. “This looks nice,” I said after a while, even though I wasn’t really seeing it.

Mick laughed. “Relax. I haven’t decided anything yet.” He turned my chair around and tilted my chin up so I had to look at him. My eyes kept blinking, and I swallowed so hard my throat hurt. Mick pushed back from the table and pulled me onto his lap. “I was never going to stay here forever, Riley. I thought you knew that.”

I leaned into him, lowering my head to bite one of the buttons on his shirt. “I didn’t,” I said, sort of, because I had a button in my mouth. “You should have told me.”

“I should have,” he said. And we left it at that. For a little while it felt okay.

Then he brought a girl home. There had been others, but I hated this one the most. She and Mick disappeared behind his bedroom door, and with my ear pressed to the wood I could hear them murmuring. Whispering. I hated her, and I hated it. He was telling a stranger his plans.

I went down to the creek with Cash, to escape the house and the heat and the terrible tightness in my chest. We lay in the shallow water and I watched the cottonwood leaves turn in the sun, even though there wasn’t any breeze. I groped for stones in the sandy bottom and threw them at the far bank. After a while Cash started to retrieve them. “Silly dog,” I said, and hugged his wet fur.

I wondered what they were doing in Mick’s room—if he was reading to her or playing songs for her on his guitar. I turned over and put my face in the water, to see if I could leave it there long enough to drown. He’d be sorry. He’d hate her too because she was there when it happened, distracting him. I held my breath as long as I could, staring at small, current-smoothed rocks, water plants and tiny fish. It wasn’t going to work. I raised my head and took a deep breath.

“Crap.”

Mick’s bike was still parked in the driveway when Cash and I got back to the house, and I didn’t want to go in there. I draped myself over the porch rail and watched the water from my hair puddle on the wooden planks under me. I was dizzy, and my face felt fat and bruised. When my stomach started to hurt from the pressure, I slid toward the edge, until my hands were flat on the porch and my legs stretched out behind me. My mom called, but I couldn’t answer. I tried to slide back to where I’d started, but instead I crept forward even farther, until my feet went up and over my head, and I did a handstand into the garden, landing on my back instead of my feet. I never was much of an acrobat.

It might have been funny if it didn’t hurt so much. My right arm was twisted under me, and even though I’d never broken a bone before, I knew I’d broken one this time. Cash was crazy barking at the front door, and my mom and Mick and that girl came out. When Mick picked me up, the girl stood off to one side. She was crying. She was.

At the clinic in town they set my arm and put my shoulder back where it was supposed to be. The shot they gave me knocked me loopy, but it drove the pain away, or at least deep enough I didn’t care about it.

Back at home, Mick carried me up to my room and put me in my bed under the covers. I groped around for the stuffed animal I always slept with and sometimes still dragged around with me. When I found it, I laid it on my chest.

Mick said, “What is that thing, anyway?”

“It’s a rabbit. See?” I held it up by its one remaining ear.

“Damndest rabbit I ever saw.”

“Still a rabbit.”

I slept for a few hours, and when I woke up saw that Mick and that girl had both signed my cast. I tried to rub out her name. It was Gail. Stupid name. Stupid girl.

A few days later we met, officially. She said, “Well aren’t you a cutie pie?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not.”

Mick said, “You think she’s cute? Better get your eyes checked.” I wanted to hit him with something hard and heavy. They both laughed and walked away across the yard, her hand in the back pocket of his jeans. I sat on the porch steps and banged my cast against the handrail while Cash watched, looking worried. It hurt a lot. My dad found me doing it and made me stop. He sat with me and tried to tell me it’s natural for things to change, and for us to not like it much, but then we get used to it, and after a while it’s as if things are the way they were always meant to be.

“You’re going to survive this, Riley.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I do think so, and I’m the dad. Got it?”

“Sure.” I didn’t want to make him feel bad, but I didn’t believe him for a second. I leaned my head against his arm, and we sat there until my mom came out.

“What are you two up to?”

“Just sitting here.” He scooted me and him over a few inches, to make room.

She sat down and smoothed her skirt over her knees. “Grass could use a mowing,” she said.

“Thought I’d get to it tomorrow. That be okay?”

“Sure. Or the next day.”

“Fair enough,” he said.

We all heard the bike but no one moved except Cash, and he only moved his head, and just a little. Mick and Gail waved as they headed down the driveway. We waved back, but they didn’t see.

She came almost every day for a while. Sometimes she stayed for dinner. I don’t remember what she talked about, if she talked at all. She was pretty, and her hair was blond, but not as blond as Mick’s. She liked him a lot. It was kind of sickening to see.

But then she stopped coming. I asked my mom why, and she said I should ask Mick. Because she didn’t know.

“She wanted to go steady.”

“And you didn’t?”

“Seems sort of pointless.”

“Because you’re going away?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

We were in the driveway. He reached into his toolbox, came out with a screwdriver and held it in his hand, looking at it like he’d never seen one before—like it was a new specimen; a previously undiscovered species.

“Did you break her heart?”

“She says I did.”

“Are you sorry?”

He put the screwdriver back and picked up a crescent wrench; tapped it on the hard-packed dirt.

“Yes. I am. Is that okay with you?”

“Sure.” I didn’t want him to feel so bad. Not about that. I knew he didn’t mean to break anyone’s heart. Not even mine.

“That’s the way the cookie crumbles, isn’t it.”

“It is,” he said. And he tried not to smile, but I saw.

Eventually he took pity on me, bored out of my skull and not able to do very much. He let me help with the bike: hold and hand him tools, turn screws, tighten bolts, polish; especially polish.

“Jeez, Mick, It’s shiny already.”

“So’s your face, punkin’ head. Keep rubbing. You missed a spot.”

“Ha-ha.”

And he took me riding. I didn’t even have to ask. I couldn’t believe it. He showed up one day with a new red helmet and we took off for the Little Rockies, a small mountain range thirty or so miles away, completely surrounded by the pancake flatness of the plain.

I held on with my good arm, the mending one tucked between us like an injured animal, while we drove through a narrow canyon that began on the rez, just past a small white church and the picket-fenced graveyard behind it. I had to get off and wade while Mick coaxed the bike through a sandy creekbed to solid ground. We rode slowly through sunlight and shadow, between the craggy limestone canyon walls where windblown conifers and ferns improbably, and probably ill-advisedly, tried to grow. On the ridgetops I could see lines of stunted trees, like crouching soldiers waiting for their orders. Charge. Take cover. Retreat.

Mick told me about some animals that lived in the Montana mountains not so long ago, like ten thousand years. Saber-toothed cats with canine teeth seven inches long; dire wolves; short-faced bears; a lion with long, long legs, bigger than a Bengal tiger.

I asked him where they went.

“Probably somewhere they thought people would stop trying to kill them all the time.”

“Are there any left?”

“Not the same ones. Newer ones.”

“Like what?”

“Like timber wolves. Elk. Bears.”

“Regular animals,” I said.

Mick laughed. “Exactly.”

•  •  •

The day he started packing for Missoula, I was ready on the roof outside my window. I had an old Easter basket full of rocks—bigger than pebbles, but nothing too lethal. I waited for him to come out of the house, to head out to the garage for a trunk or a duffel bag. I could see Cash in the yard, watching, with his head resting on his crossed front paws. Dad’s tractor was kicking up great clouds of dust along the far fence line; it hadn’t rained in months, and the grasshoppers were eating everything in sight. The forecast said soon, though, and I’d heard my parents talking about how they thought they could smell it coming, even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky you couldn’t see clear through.

My cast had finally come off, almost on its own, so we hadn’t had to go back to the clinic and pay a doctor to do something, as Dad put it, you didn’t need to go to medical school to figure out. My arm from wrist to shoulder was as pale as it had probably ever been. I remembered talking with Mick about a “pale race,” but couldn’t remember what we’d been talking about. I thought it might have been something about birds.

I heard the screen door slam and scooted to the edge of the roof, braced my feet against the rain gutter, and waited. When Mick appeared I leaned over the edge and threw the first rock. It went wide, but he heard it and looked up.

“Damn it, Riley. If you hit me, I swear—”

He stood in the yard, waiting, daring me to throw another one. I did. I missed again and grabbed the biggest one in the basket. I held it for a minute while we stared at each other, and then threw it as hard as I could. Mick didn’t duck or try to get out of the way. The rock glanced off his forehead, and it began to bleed. A lot. He disappeared and I heard his feet thump the porch steps.

I pushed on the gutter with my heels, in a hurry to get up and away, but the gutter came loose, and then bent, and came looser, and instead of sliding up the roof backward, I was sliding down. I tried to hold on to the shingles, but there was nothing to grab.

“Crap,” I said to myself. And just like that, I was airborne again.

It was nothing like flying, even from that height. I landed on my back, again, but with my arms straight out this time like scrawny, useless wings, and all the wind knocked out of me. It hurt a lot worse than the first time, all on one side, and as soon as I started to breathe again, I tried to stop. Mick was kneeling over me, blood from the cut on his forehead dripping onto my neck and chest, and he was telling me I had to do it, had to breathe, had to stay still. He kept wiping the blood off, saying, “It’s going to be okay.”

I wanted to say I was sorry, but couldn’t get the words out. He pushed the bangs off my forehead. He said, “Hang on, Riley. Hang on. I’ve got you.”

A helicopter came, and they strapped me to a canvas stretcher to lift me up and into it; I held on and didn’t make any noise. They flew me to the hospital in Glasgow and my mom came along. Dad and Mick drove over.

I remember a bright, cold light, and starting to count backward from a hundred. Then a thick bandage, wrapped completely around my middle. They were all standing around my bed.

I said, “Hi,” and tried to think back. I pressed on the bandage, to see if I could figure out where the