We are thirteen, my cousin Sally and me — girls on our own, on the roam, under the big skies of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We’re here for the summer, living in a trailer that my aunt Helen has rented as part of a lengthy effort to seduce her law-school professor Phil, who lives next door. Phil is such a mensch that his place is always full of neighborhood boys, and Helen’s advances keep getting rebuffed, but she keeps on trying.
Meanwhile Sally and I hitchhike on the highway, carrying little dollar-store knives in our pocketbooks. We play-act holding them to the balls of anyone who tries to harm us. The big blue mountains loom around us, the fields stretching out to nowhere and everywhere. We wear halter tops and totter down the asphalt in high heels. Sally teaches me to bite off half of a wine-red bing cherry, then use the other half to redden my lips, and we sing along to Linda Ronstadt’s “Willin’.”
