Helen Zuman - Mating in Captivity - A Memoir

Around midnight, we stopped to eat at an antiseptically perky roadside diner. I ordered bacon and eggs, crushing visions of caged pigs and chickens. For now, penury locked me in a toxic foodscape.

As I plucked the last fleck of egg white from my plate and started on the garnish—ornamental kale, an orange slice—Hunter asked, a teasing glint in his eye, if I knew what turned the sky blue. Rifling through my mental scrap heap, I snagged a tattered thought. The sky reflects the sea, right? Or the sea reflects the sky? I didn’t know. But I wanted to. I noticed, as I groped for an answer, that I was flirting with him. He’d noticed, too. I saw it in his cocked head, his sly grin, his brows like furred rust, arched in expectation.

Back in the truck, he asked, “How are you at giving back rubs?”

I tensed. “Not so good,” I said.

Letting go of the gear knob, he reached over and ran a finger down my spine. “It’s this part that gets stiff from driving.”

His touch left a tingle. I relaxed. Had I been too quick to deny a request as harmless as mine for a ride?

If concern for his wife surfaced, I dismissed it. Marriage was Deathculture bullshit—a mutual defense pact, masked as lasting love, that all couples, consciously or not, wanted out of.

Well past midnight, we crossed the line from Oklahoma to Texas. Hunter pulled off the highway at Texas Exit Zero.

He didn’t say why he’d stopped. Maybe—despite the cigarettes and ginseng pills, the half-gallon thermos of coffee, my drive-all-night fantasy—he needed to sleep.

He killed the engine, then disappeared behind the curtain. Venus thumped her tail against the floor. “Come back here,” he called. “I want to show you something.”

What the hell does that mean? I thought. And then: Maybe this is something else I’m out here to experience.

Behind the curtain was just one double bunk, its mattress neatly sheathed in baby blue. Hunter sat, facing me, at the foot of the bed. “Lie down on your stomach,” he said.

I buried my nose in a pillow reeking of aspen cologne. I felt his thumbs on my back, then his palms. The steady press of his powerful arms.

“Pull your shirt up. Undo your bra.”

I tensed again. Had I shunned the role of Girl in The Oraculum only to take it on now?

“No. I don’t want to.”

But then his hands crept up toward my shoulders and over my breasts and my back arched into his heat. I ached for this. Doom released me, for a few delicious beats.

After, speeding west through a foggy dawn, I savored the gift of this night—coupling, for once, on my own recognizance.

Could exile be wholly a curse and bear such luscious fruit?

Each week, Hunter drove round-trip, Virginia to California. I lodged at a hostel in Flagstaff, Arizona, and walked to the Little America truck stop every Thursday evening to ride with him to the coast and back. Saturday nights we bobtailed into downtown Flag to dine at San Felipe’s Cantina or the Weatherford Hotel. Sometimes, after a couple drinks, I forgot my betrayal.

Between weekends I sought work, with scant luck. How to account for the gap in my résumé? I shied away from framing Zendik as a typical farm or artists’ collective—and besides, I would have risked a bad review from any resident listed as a reference. Worse, I didn’t want to wash dishes or bus tables or count cash for five or six dollars an hour. And I refused to gain a trade skill, as that would have meant investing in life beyond Zendik. So I scraped by on a couple money orders from my mother, the occasional twenty from Hunter, wages from day labor, and the kindness of a roommate, who paid for my bed at the hostel one night. I swung between panic and trust that I’d be all right.

One afternoon in early November, Hunter squinted into my future, the road ahead a haze of slate-blue rain. “I don’t know what those people at that farm did to you, but I see a girl who’s beautiful and intelligent and thinks she can’t do anything. You need a plan for what you wanna do and how you’re gonna do it.”

I couldn’t argue. Recalling that for a short time in North Carolina we’d thanked farmers beyond the Farm, in a grace before meals, I decided to try growing organic produce.

After vetting every entry in a national database of sustainable-ag jobs, I sought and landed an apprenticeship in Chico, California, at Pyramid Farms. I’d get $7.50 an hour, plus a trailer to myself, rent-free, and all the veggies I could eat. I figured I’d save enough in one season to fund trips to the places succeeding Alaska and the Sawtooths in my travel dreams: Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand. Could razing my faith in a faraway Eden unbar my lost garden?

The job didn’t start till mid-March. In mid-November, I moved to the Reevis Mountain School of Self-Reliance, a wilderness homestead east of Phoenix. I’d spent the month of August there in 1998 and returned for three weeks the following June. In 2004, joining four other interns, I found the scene both familiar and strange: this ring of young seekers ’round an older leader embraced me with appreciation and trust. As the orchard filled with persimmons smooth as pearlescent balloons and pomegranates like hives packed with jewels, how I saw myself softened and sweetened. Here I played a free woman bearing gifts—not a slave to unpayable debt.

In mid-December, I took a break from Reevis to meet Hunter for what he must have known would be our final ride. He’d burned his goodbye into the mix CD he handed me as I climbed down from his cab for the last time.

On the first track, a woman begged a stranger to remove her to parts unknown; on the last, a man wistfully released his companion to chase a dream of her own.

Months later, I burned the disc—watched it curl and melt—in a bid to break Hunter’s hold. Grieving my loss, cursing his desertion, I couldn’t dismiss our love as Deathculture bullshit. I did take solace in knowing he wouldn’t keep me from Zendik.

At Pyramid, I worked mostly alone—fixing drip line, digging thistle, harvesting carrots and garlic. This freed me to design my days as I pleased. When summer’s heat set in, I began rising in the half dark to start work at first light. Through by noon or one, I could read books, take naps, hunt fruit: kumquats, loquats, oranges, lemons, figs, cherries, peaches, plums.

But the joys of self-rule couldn’t hold me on their own. As July marched by in a blaze of hundred-degree days, I grew surer and surer I was meant to be a Zendik warrior. The flour canister in my cupboard would soon hold enough cash for flights to my dreamlands. My fellow field hands—a couple sharing a trailer—wanted more space and more work. If I left, they’d get both.

Still. I expected quitting to cost me. In mid-July, gearing up to give two weeks’ notice, I steeled myself for an angry blast.

Instead the farmer asked what he could do to help me beat the heat. Replace the cooler in my trailer? Build a canopy for shade?

But it wasn’t the heat that drove me. It was my story. What he could change in that, he’d already changed.

In late August I set out overseas, hoping my Edens would disappoint me. Hawaii’s Big Island dripped fruit (passion, bread, jack; avocados, sapotes, cherimoyas), as well as fresh coconuts, macheted for water and meat, but yielded no bohemian pocket I wished to slip into. New Zealand—backdrop to the Lord of the Rings films—withheld both elves and Rivendells. The Australian outback, richly embroidered with intricate song lines, seemed a vast, scrubby waste from the cab of a truck.

And yet when my jet touched down at JFK on October 7, 2005, I did not want to call the Farm. At rest at last in my mother’s Brooklyn apartment, assured of shelter, food, and love, I dared to ask why.