Chronicles of a Radical Hag (with Recipes)

by Lorna Landvik

  She closes her eyes, as a pang of missing Phil skulks through her, and when she opens her eyes again, she reads the next letter and the next. When she gets to Haze’s journal, she feels nearly paralyzed, stupefied.

  The summer sun is setting when Sam comes out, and when he flicks on the patio light, Susan realizes how long she’s been reading.

  She sighs and closes the journal.

  “You okay, Mom?” asks Sam, sitting next to her.

  Susan’s nod doesn’t last long before switching direction, shaking side to side. She blows out a sigh and shrugs.

  “Honestly, Sam, I don’t know what I am.”

  “So you . . . you didn’t know all about this?”

  “No! No, of course not! I’m absolutely shocked.” She sits for a long time, biting her lower lip.

  “Mom?”

  Her son’s face is hurt, quizzical.

  “Oh Sam, I just feel so, well, hurt! Hurt and left out! I mean . . . oh, what do I mean?” With her lower lip extended, she exhales so that her bangs flutter. “I just feel bad that Haze didn’t tell me! She’s not only been a mentor, but she’s been like . . . well, an aunt to me. An aunt who’s always on my side. And right now, well, right now—oh my gosh, I just realized if she’d had the baby, it would be my aunt! Or my half-aunt . . . or uncle!” She flutters her hand in front of her face, her eyes filling with tears. “Now I feel like I hardly know her. Like I hardly knew my grandfather.” She shakes her head. “He and my grandmother always had—I thought—such a loving relationship.”

  Sam is listening to his mother the way a top student listens to his tutor.

  “It seems like they did, from everything I read,” he says, his hand fanning out toward the box. “I mean, it seems like he loved Haze but he loved your grandma too.”

  She knows he’s right as soon as she hears the words, and because she doesn’t seem able to hold it up, Susan bows her head.

  “Sam,” she says finally. “That is so . . . big of you to think that. So adult.”

  “Mom. Come on. I’m not a total moron.”

  Mother and son look at one another, and Susan thinks she will always remember the fullness of this moment, the lingering smell of charcoal from the Larson’s backyard grill, the barking of another neighbor’s beagle, the night air, soft as a baby’s blanket, but most of all the sense that all the struggles Sam and she have had over the past year have graciously stepped aside for a moment, allowing for something new between them.

  “I have to tell you,” she says, speaking without censorship, as if to a friend, “my mind is sort of blown.”

  Sam nods. “You and me both. I didn’t know old people did stuff like that.”

  A laugh blurts out of Susan, and seeing Sam’s face, she regrets it immediately, but not being able to help it, she laughs again.

  “Sam, Haze was only”—she does some quick calculations—“in her late thirties when she and my grandfather had their . . . affair.” The words sound strange coming out of her mouth, as if they were spoken by someone else.

  “Yeah, but your grandpa was old.”

  “He’d have been in his sixties, that isn’t—“she stops herself, realizing the lens through which Sam looked at age was a different prescription from her own. “You’re right he was old.”

  “Then again, Haze likes older guys.”

  Puzzled, Susan looks at him.

  “Royal, remember? Wasn’t he like a bunch of years older than her? And wasn’t Haze’s dad a bunch of years older than her mom? Maybe it runs in the family.”

  When Susan’s expression doesn’t change, Sam says, “Mom. She wrote about it, remember? In her columns?”

  “Oh, yeah,” says Susan, her surprise at his memory stretching her words. She takes a sip of her decaf, the fact that her son made it helping her to tolerate its triple-than-usual strength. “But you’ve got to remember too, your grandfather was a pretty dashing guy.”

  “Guess that runs in our family,” Sam says, one eyebrow cocked, his voice smarmy.

  FOR SO MANY MONTHS, Susan’s big California King has been as wide and lonely as a raft whose fellow shipmate mutinied, but when she’s in bed later that night, she feels something she hasn’t felt in a long time: contentment.

  Contentment expands into buoyancy. When was the last time she and Sam talked so much, laughed so much, shared so much?

  Good old Haze, she thinks. She knows in the morning and in the days to come she’ll have to fully process what it means that her beloved grandfather cheated on her beloved grandmother, but for now she’s grateful for Haze, the adulterer who brought her so close, at least for an evening, to her son.

  In his own room, Sam texts/doesn’t send to Lorde: “HERE’S A SONG TO GO WITH YOUR ‘ROYALS’—‘LOYALS’—WHEN IT COMES TO LOVE AND SEX, WHO ARE WE LOYAL TO? JUST ASKING.”

  16

  May 20, 1980

  Oh my, the world throws tantrums, and we can do nothing to rein them in.

  I have a high school friend, Wilma (I could write a whole column about how much she hated her name), who ventured westward right after graduation, winding up in Portland, Oregon, where she worked for a spell as a telephone operator. In one of those hard-to-believe, this-could-only-happen-in-a-movie occurrences, a gentleman caller (not the Tennessee Williams kind, but one who dialed “O,” needing a connection) complimented her on her voice, which led to a conversation, which led to a date, which led to more, and eventually a walk down the bridal path. Wilma’s husband is a rancher, and she writes me periodically about the goings-on in her neck of the woods, which happens to be thirty miles from Mount St. Helens, which erupted in a major volcano last Sunday, spewing lava and ash and gases. You’ve probably seen some of the television coverage—the destruction is vast and dark and reminds us of how it’s so easy to think of ourselves as big shots until Mother Nature reminds us how puny we really are.

  I haven’t heard from my friend; I telephoned, but the lines were down. I’ve sent a letter, but this is no rain or sleet or snow that the valiant post office must push through; this is lava and deep ash and asphyxiating gases.

  Wilma told me once that she loved North Dakota, loved the unending expanse of prairie and its deep quiet, but the breakup with a boy she thought she might someday marry made her buy a bus ticket west.

  “There are all kinds of places to love,” she wrote me once (I save all my letters, and I’ve been rereading the ones she sent). “I still think North Dakota is beautiful, but my gosh, Haze, to live near mountains and the ocean is really something! Jed’s favorite cousin lives outside New Orleans, and we visited him last year, and I thought I was in another world, let alone another country, and it made me think, I could love this too, this swampy place where logs float in bayous except they’re not logs—they’re alligators!”

  Wilma was born with a shriveled left arm; it dangled from her shoulder like an afterthought, but she was not the type to ask for pity or special favors.

  She moved to our town in the fifth grade, and during show-and-tell she stood in front of class and said, “This is my arm.” With her right hand, she batted at her shrunken arm and laughed at the audible gasp that rose in the room. “I didn’t do anything wrong to get an arm like this, it’s just the way I was born. I love to play basketball and with an arm like this, it’s a little harder, but my mom says everyone has something that makes things harder for them than it does for other people. So don’t feel sorry for me, or if you do, feel sorry for my eyes because I hate that they’re blue. I wish they were green. It’s much more mysterious.”

  I can quote her fairly well because when I got home from school, I wrote everything down so I wouldn’t forget. This show-and-tell presentation topped even Rod Kjelberg’s, who once brought in the litter of puppies his dog Moxie had.

  So I’m thinking with all that strength of character and presence of mind that Wilma has—surely she’ll survive a volcano. I’ll let you know when I hear from her.

  CAROLINE’S MOTHER, who has instructed
everyone to call her Sarah (“except you, Caroline! To you I’m still Queen!”) dips another tortilla chip into the bowl of guacamole.

  “We have some good Mexican restaurants in Winnipeg but nothing like this. This is so good!”

  Caroline is physically seated at Mercedes’s dining room table, but mentally she is floating in the Sea of Tension, off the Isle of Worry. She had asked if she could help—practically pleaded—but Mercedes and Tina are a competent team in the kitchen and insisted that Caroline and her mother sit back and relax; after all, they are guests.

  At first, after introductions had been made, small talk had been small, touching on weather, Sarah’s changing planes in Fargo, and the bumpy little commuter plane that got her to Granite Creek, and Caroline’s toenails.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it!” said Sarah of the alternating colors with which Caroline had adorned her nails. “And look at yours!” she said, noticing Tina’s sandaled feet that sported the same alternating colors on her toenails. “Did you plan that?”

  Caroline had offered another fake smile, thinking, No, after we got out of the shower one day, we decided to paint each other’s toenails and got a little wild.

  “They are fun, yes?” said Mercedes. “Next time I will paint my own toes with ten different colors!”

  Laughing, Tina draped her arm around her mother and pulled her close. “I’ll bet you don’t even own a bottle of nail polish—and if you do, I’ll bet it’s clear.”

  “That’s what I like too,” Sarah said, fluttering her modestly manicured fingers.

  Now at the dinner table, Caroline can barely eat, even when Mercedes serves her daughter’s requested favorites, mole chicken and chile rellenos, dishes that Caroline has eaten with gusto at this same table at least a dozen times.

  “Sarah?” says Mercedes, holding a bottle of wine, and to Caroline’s great surprise, her mother nods.

  She winks at Caroline.

  “I’m on vacation.”

  After her and her mother’s second glass of cabernet, the evening begins to loosen up.

  “I’ve never been to Mexico,” says Sarah, “but after eating this food, I have to go.”

  “Oh, the places I could take you,” says Mercedes. “My tía, my aunt Consuelo, is the best cook I have ever known. All children learn how to love vegetables when Tía Consuelo makes them!”

  “Where does she live?” asks Sarah.

  “In Tampico. Most of my family still lives there.”

  “Are you not allowed to visit them? Because of your immigration status?”

  Caroline rolls her eyes. “Mum, Mercedes has been a U.S. citizen for decades.”

  Sarah offers a little shrug to Mercedes. “I only meant . . . I know they make things a lot harder for you people down south than for us people up north.”

  The moment of tense silence is short-lived when everyone realizes Sarah wasn’t making a politically incorrect statement (of which, thought Caroline, she’d already made plenty).

  “It was no big deal, legally wise, when Caroline moved down here,” continues Sarah. “I’ll bet it was a different story when you moved to California.”

  Suddenly recognizing that her mouth is open and half full of half-chewed chicken, Caroline closes it, staring at her mother.

  “I think the prejudice comes from the language,” says Mercedes, pouring more wine into Sarah’s glass. “It’s easier to be afraid of someone who doesn’t speak the same language.”

  “It’s a good thing you’re not from Quebec!” says Sarah to her daughter.

  Caroline laughs, and her heart beats in a sped-up rhythm. She’s not used to feeling so comfortable, so good in her mother’s presence.

  Sarah turns to Mercedes.

  “Have you ever been to Canada?”

  “Yes, to Vancouver, once with my husband. Manny had a client who asked him to work on the landscaping of his second home. Or maybe it was his third. Or fourth—he had a lot of money.”

  They laugh.

  “I hear how pretty it is from Caroline,” continues Mercedes, “but I am still not used to the cold here—I don’t know how I would do in an even colder place.”

  “Actually, where we are is not much colder than Minnesota,” says Sarah. “Maybe not colder at all.” Shrugging elaborately, she spills a little wine and then giggles and says, “Whoopsie.”

  Caroline raises her eyebrows and smiles at Tina. The knot in her stomach seems to have unraveled.

  They are still raving about the flan dessert as they repair to Mercedes’s little patio.

  “Christmas lights!” says Sarah. “I love that you’ve strung Christmas lights out here!”

  “Manny always liked many lights. He said they make everything look festive, and I agree. Although Tina would sometimes say, ‘Mama, we’re not living in a cantina, you know!’”

  “Well, we could decorate our houses like Versailles,” says Sarah. “And our kids would still think our taste was awful.”

  “I can see it!” says Mercedes. “The children of Louis XV whining and crying about the ostentatious throne room!”

  For years, Mercedes has kept a “Word a Day” calendar and studies each day’s entry, bringing it into her vocabulary like a welcomed guest. It’s not anything that thousands (millions?) of people who buy that same calendar do, but nevertheless Sarah gapes at her.

  “Mercedes, the day I know the Spanish word for ‘ostentatious’ is the day I know the Spanish word for ‘dog’!”

  “I think what she’s saying,” says Caroline after a brief and confused silence, “is that Mum doesn’t speak a word of Spanish. And she’s impressed by your command of English.”

  Sarah nods, and Mercedes, who has also helped herself to the evening’s wine, says, “I like to be a commander, in command of things. And it’s perro.”

  Tina howls. It’s one of the things Caroline likes best about Tina—her wild and uninhibited responses. She’ll laugh hard at a comic on the Tonight Show and a minute later be sobbing over a commercial for pet adoption.

  “Mamá,” she asks, “¿estás borracha?”

  “Of course not,” Mercedes sniffs and to Sarah says, “My daughter is wondering if I am drunk.”

  “I’ll bet you’re wondering the same thing,” Sarah says to Caroline. “And in answer to that wondering, I say, No.” She took another sip of her wine. “But ask me in two minutes.”

  The years, decades, disappear as she and Mercedes laugh like two junior high school girls, and Caroline and Tina sit back in their webbed plastic patio chairs, feeling as if roles have been reversed and they are the mothers watching the antics of their silly daughters. The mirth is contagious.

  It’s beautiful and balmy, and a few bold stars have poked through the shroud of a summer night’s sky that tentatively explores darkening. Half of Mercedes’s backyard is devoted to a vegetable garden, and while the air isn’t exactly redolent with the smell of snap peas, tomatoes, and zucchini, there is a scent of soil, of green growth, of offering, and Caroline is so filled with love for her mother, who seems to have unbuttoned a couple top buttons, so filled with love for Mercedes and her deep graciousness, so filled with love for Tina, the woman who is at her side to both battle and embrace life, that words slip past the usually vigilant censor squad, and she says, “Mum, I need to tell you something. Tina is more than my friend. She’s my everything.”

  What has happened in the backyard? Was there a sudden eclipse?

  The four women, two in their twenties, one in her late forties, and the other in her midfifties, sit at a patio table draped in a floral plastic tablecloth, a big red candle sputtering its flame in the center, twinkles of multicolored lights scalloped across the rectangular wood frame Mercedes had paid a nursing student who was good at carpentry to construct around her patio. There might have been peripheral noise: Mercedes’s next-door neighbor was a fan of country and western music and often played Dolly Parton and Tammy Wynette at decibels that floated down the block, and her neighbor two doors down
liked to rev his Harley before he roared off to whatever sports bar or symphony (Mercedes didn’t like to make assumptions) he was attending, but right now no one heard anything but the words just spoken, clanging in everyone’s ears.

  “I’m a little confused,” says Sarah finally. “What do you mean by ‘my everything’?”

  A panic has caught in Caroline’s chest like a sudden burst of heartburn, and she looks wildly at Tina, who looks back at her gravely . . . and then winks.

  The surprise of it—and her nerves—makes Caroline laugh, but it is a laugh that’s extinguished nearly as soon as it’s lit, and Caroline faces her mother and says quietly, “It means I love Tina. Someday I’d like to marry her.”

  Sarah gapes at her daughter as if Caroline is suddenly speaking in tongues but obviously not the Pentecostal Christian kind. (Once a woman from Regina spoke at their church’s monthly program and, suddenly seized by the Holy Spirit, began to babble nonsensically; at first Sarah thought she was having a seizure.) She looks at Tina and Mercedes, and from the look on her face, it’s obvious she’s looking for some sort of answer; when no one provides it, she pushes her chair back with a force that the flimsy aluminum legs can’t handle, and she topples backward.

  Everyone else is out of their chairs in seconds, with Caroline calling, “Mum!” and Tina calling, “Sarah!” and Mercedes calling, “Are you all right?”

  “My shoulder,” moans Sarah as Caroline and Tina help her to sit up on the cement patio floor. “I think I’ve done something to my shoulder!”

  “We’ll get you to the hospital,” says Mercedes.

  “No,” wails Sarah. “I don’t think my insurance is good down here!”

  “Mum, don’t worry about it,” says Caroline. “Now put your good arm around me, and we’ll boost you up.”

  The other women lend their hands in support and help lead Sarah down the walkway and to Caroline’s car in the driveway.