"That would be a challenge. You could sew the faces back onto people who ski into trees."
"You want to come? We could ski into trees together."
"I don't know. I'm not really thinking too far ahead right now."
He took my feet into his lap and massaged my arches. He had the famous hands of a surgeon, there was no denying it, but I had no sexual interest in Carlo. I still had a slight hope he'd come up with the perfect plan for the two of us that would make me happy and fulfilled, but even that was fading.
"What else could a modern couple like ourselves do in Aspen?" I asked him. "Besides ski into trees, and try to spot movie stars snorting coke in hotel lounges? Aspen sounds kind of fast-lane."
"After Grace, it would be, yes."
"Don't make fun of my country of origin."
Carlo looked surprised. "I've never heard you defend it before."
"It was a joke."
"Well, what about Denver, then. Not so fast-lane."
"Denver's nice." I felt the familiar tug of a brand-new place that might, this time, turn out to be wonderful. And the familiar tug of Carlo wanting me to go with him. I'd seen Denver once. It had endless neighborhoods of sweet old brick houses with peaked roofs and lawns shaded by huge maples. It would be a heavenly place to walk a dog.
"Would you ever consider getting a dog, Carlo?"
"A dog?"
"They have four legs and say 'woof woof.'"
"Oh, right."
"I've met this wonderful dog, in Grace. He's half coyote and he'll sit for five hours in the back of a pickup truck waiting for you, just because he trusts you to come back."
"This sounds serious."
"He's a good dog." I realized I hadn't thought about Loyd all day, which I viewed as an accomplishment. This must be how it is to be alcoholic: setting little goals for yourself, proving you can live without it. When really, giving it all that thought only proves that you can't. My mood suddenly began to plummet; I'd felt elated all afternoon, but now I recognized the signs of a depression coming. If I timed it right, Hallie's letter addressing my last depression would arrive on target.
"Shoot, look at that!" Carlo dropped my feet and jumped to turn up the volume on the TV. "That's you!"
It was. I yelled for Emelina but the spot was over by the time she showed up in the doorway wearing one of J.T.'s shirts, looking stunned.
"You were on the news," Carlo explained excitedly. "They said something about the Peacock Ladies and then they said something about Southwestern folk art, and they showed you two standing up in the truck, and this old lady in a black dress..."
"Dona Althea," I said.
"...holding up the pinata, and another lady and a cop..."
"Officer Metz."
"...and I didn't hear anything else because we were yelling." He stopped suddenly, looking embarrassed by his enthusiasm. He and Emelina hadn't officially met.
"Oh. Carlo, Emelina. Emelina, Carlo. An old friend from a previous life."
I didn't say which one was the previous life, and which was the present. I didn't know.
Hallie, what I can never put a finger on is the why of you and me. Why did you turn out the way you did? You're my sister. We were baked in the same oven, with the same ingredients. Why does one cake rise and the other fall? I think about you on your horse, riding out to the fields in your gray wool socks and boots and your hair looking like the Breck Girl gone wild, setting off to make a new world. Life must be so easy when you have dreams.
I read in the paper that we'll be sending another 40 or 50 million to the contras, so they can strafe little girls and blow you up with your cotton crop. It hurts to know this; I could be a happier American if I didn't have a loved one sending me truth from the trenches. You're right, we're a nation of amnesiacs. I'm embarrassed. It's an inappropriately weak emotion. You risk everything, while I pay my taxes like everybody else and try not to recall the unpleasant odor of death.
My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction somebody points me. Today I thought I was a hero. We sold fifty peacock pinatas to raise money for the Stitch and Bitch Club, which will somehow save the town of Grace. But it's not my cause, I'm leaving. I have no idea how to save a town. I only came along today because it looked like a party and I was invited. Remember how we used to pray to get invited to birthday parties? And they only asked us because we were so grateful we'd do anything, stay late and help the mothers wash the cake pans. I'm still that girl, flattered to death if somebody wants me around.
Carlo asked me to go with him to Denver or possibly Aspen. Carlo's still Carlo. He wants to know why you haven't written. (I told him you're busy saving the world.) I almost think I could go to Denver. Carlo is safe because I don't really love him that much. If he stopped wanting me around one day, it wouldn't be so terrible. I wouldn't die.
Hallie, I realize how that sounds. I feel small and ridiculous and hemmed in on every side by the need to be safe. All I want is to be like you, to be brave, to walk into a country of chickens and land mines and call that home, and have it be home. How do you just charge ahead, always doing the right thing, even if you have to do it alone with people staring? I would have so many doubts--what if you lose that war? What then? If I had an ounce of your bravery I'd be set for life. You get up and look the world in the eye, shoo the livestock away from the windowsill, and decide what portion of the world needs to be saved today. You are like God. I get tired. Carlo says "Let's go to Denver," and what the heck, I'm ready to throw down the banner of the Stitch and Bitch Club and the republic for which it stands. Ready to go live in Denver and walk my dog.
I went out at dawn, alone, to mail my letter and prowl my old neighborhood. I kept trying to believe I felt good in this familiar haunt. I'd brought my city clothes: a short skirt and black tights and stiletto-heeled boots (the sight would have laid Doc Homer flat), and I walked downtown among strangers, smiling, anonymous as a goldfish. There was a newsstand four blocks down where I used to go for the Times or the Washington Post, which Hallie and Carlo would spread all over the living-room floor on Sunday mornings. Hallie would constantly ask us if she could interrupt for a second. "Listen to this," she'd say. She needed to read it all aloud, both the tragedies and the funnies.
I ducked into a coffee shop that had decent coffee and wonderful croissants. As I sat blowing into my cup I realized I was looking around to see who was there--a habit I must have picked up in Grace, where you looked at people because they were all identifiable.
A man at a table very close to my elbow kept looking at my legs. That's another thing you put up with when you're tall--men act like you've ordered those legs out of a catalogue. I crossed them finally and said, "See, look, I've got another one just like it."
He laughed. Amazingly, he wasn't embarrassed at all. I'd forgotten how the downtown scene could be--people cultivating weird-ness like it was a disease or a career. He had a neatly trimmed beard and was extremely handsome. "How Emma Bovary," he said.
I smiled. "You seem to have lost your syntax. Perhaps you're in the wrong place. The Cafe Gertrude Stein is down the street."
"Well," he said. "Well well well. Perhaps you could provide me with some context. Do you have a name?"
"Cosima. It means Order in the Cosmos."
"Cosima, my love, I'm in desperate need of order. If you have the New York Times in your bag there, I'd be willing to marry you." I had the New York Times.
"I'm not in the habit of marrying strangers," I said. I was suddenly disgusted with what I was doing. I'd go anywhere Carlo wanted, I'd be a sport for my students in Grace, I'd even tried to be a doctor for Doc Homer, just as I'd humiliated myself in the old days to get invited to birthday parties. If I kept trying to be what everybody wanted, I'd soon be insipid enough to fit in everywhere. I grabbed my bag and stood up to go. I told the man, "You don't have the slightest idea who I am."
The second night in Tucson I slept like a chi
ld, so drenched in sleep that when I woke up I didn't know where I was. For a minute I lay lost in the bed, trying slowly to attach the physical fact of myself to a name, a life, a room in a house within a larger place. It was a frightening moment, but nothing new to me, either. So rarely in my life did I truly surrender to sleep that it took an extra effort for me to pull myself out. It felt like slogging on my elbows up a riverbank.
Carlo wasn't in bed with me, of course; he'd skirted the awkward issue by saying he had a weird shift and might as well sleep on the sofa and not disturb anybody. But he'd had plenty of opportunities in the past to see me wake up confused. He always claimed there was something wrong with the electrical current in the temporal lobes of my brain. He said that explained why I couldn't remember parts of what I'd lived through, and remembered other parts that I hadn't. I was attracted to easy answers but mistrusted them too. Carlo's specialty was the nervous system; he tended to think all human difficulties were traceable to neural synapses gone haywire. And I feared--no, I knew--what was wrong with me was more complicated than what's wrong with a badly wired house.
Carlo was already gone but left a note, saying to think very seriously about Aspen. It sounded like a joke, put that way, but I folded the note and stuck it in my suitcase. Emelina was cheerful at breakfast. She'd sensed the previous day that my mood had turned black and blue, but she was intent on our having a vacation even if neither of our hearts was really in it. We'd gone to the movies and eaten at McDonald's, which by Grace standards is the high life. We ordered Happy Meals; she was collecting small plastic replicas of impossible-looking vehicles for her boys. We had enough now to go home.
On our way out of town she insisted that we stop at an obvious tourist trap called Colossal Cave. It was colossal by no means, but a cave. We stood a long time in the dim entry while the guide in a Smokey Bear hat made small talk, hoping for a bigger crowd. There were only seven or eight of us. It must be hard to give your whole spiel to a group that wouldn't even make a baseball team or a jury.
"So when's Loyd get home?"
"Friday," I said.
"That switch-engine deal gets long, doesn't it?"
"It never seems to bother you," I said, although I had an acute memory of the night I'd glimpsed them making love in the courtyard.
"Mm," she said.
"Then again, Loyd might be making the whole thing up. He's probably got a sweetie in Lordsburg." Emelina looked startled. "I'm kidding," I said.
"Don't say stuff like that. Knock on wood." She thumped the side of her head.
"Well, it's occurred to me to wonder why Loyd wasn't married or anything when I came along. If he's such a hot item."
"He was."
"Married?"
"No. Seeing somebody, but not that serious. Definitely not married. He was once, awhile back, for a year or two, I think. No kids. He didn't tell you?"
"I never asked."
"Her name was Cissie. She didn't deserve him." Emelina peeled off her Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt (actually John Tucker's). It was cave temperature down there, only 55 degrees but much warmer than outside, where it was predicted to drop below freezing that night. A woman near us was wearing a mink coat.
"I wasn't about to leave it in the car," she said to us, without provocation.
Loyd had never mentioned even a large personal fact like a previous marriage, whereas this woman in mink felt compelled to explain herself to strangers. That's how it is: some people are content to wait till you ask, while others jump right in with the whole story. It must have to do with discomfort. Once while I was waiting to file off an airplane, a grandmother came down the aisle carrying a doll in one arm and a little boy in the other, and she actually took the time to explain to us all as she passed, "The doll is his sister's, she's up ahead." I could relate to the urge. I remembered all my tall tales to strangers on buses. I was explaining in my own way; making things up so there would be no discussion of what I was really.
At last our guide spoke some encouraging words and the little crowd followed him down into the cave. As he walked he told us about an outlaw who'd ducked in her to hide his loot, back in the days of Jesse James, and apparently had never come out. This was meant to give us a thrill of fear, but it seemed more likely that there was a back door somewhere and the bad guy got away with the money. That's how things go. I still believe Adolf Hitler is living in the South Pacific somewhere with sanded-off fingerprints and a new face, lying on a beach drinking mai-tais.
Emelina hadn't seen a cave before and was very impressed. There were delicate stalactites shaped like soda straws, and heavy, hooded stalagmites looming up from the cave floor. She kept pointing out formations that reminded her of a penis.
"You've only been away from home three days," I whispered.
"I didn't say it looked like J.T.'s," she whispered back.
The sound of trickling water was everywhere, even over our heads. I shivered to think how many tons of rock and dirt were up there above us. I'd forgotten that caves were not my favorite thing.
The highlight of the tour was the Drapery Room, which was admittedly impressive in size. The guide pointed with his flashlight to various formations, which had names like Chief Cochise and The Drapes. The walls and ceiling glittered with crystallized moisture.
Then, for just a minute--they always have to do this--he turned off the lights. The darkness was absolute. I grabbed for Emelina's arm as the ceilings and walls came rushing up to my face. I felt choked by my own tongue. As I held on to Emelina and waited for the lights to come back on, I breathed slowly and tried to visualize the size of the room, the distance between myself and the roof that I knew was there. Instead I saw random images that didn't help: Emelina collecting the little fast-food cars for her boys; the man in the cafe who'd suggested I marry him. And then while we all still waited I understood that the terror of my recurring dream was not about losing just vision, but the whole of myself, whatever that was. What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.
18
Ground Orientation
Loyd and I were going to spend Christmas at Santa Rosalia Pueblo. Snow fell steadily as we drove north through the Apache reservation. It enclosed translucent desert trees in spherical white envelopes, giving them form and substance. It was surprising to look out over a landscape that normally seemed empty, and see a forest.
When I closed my eyes I saw papier-mache peacocks. I'd been helping out on the pinata assembly lines. I'd had nightmares again and wasn't sleeping well; I figured I could be useful. We didn't turn out five hundred pinatas in ten days--that was a little ambitious--but we passed the halfway mark. The last fifty or so were the best by folk-art standards. By then we'd already used up every scrap of blue crepe paper from the attics and bureau drawers of Grace, and so had to be enterprising. Some women cut up denim jeans. Mrs. Nunez made peacock wings out of the indigo-colored flyleaves of all twelve volumes of the Compton's Children's Encyclopedia. To be sure, there were no two alike.
I also sweat blood over my mimeographed broadside. I wasn't a writer except by default. Viola refused to help, saying I was the one that went to college so quit whining. I tried to include all the things that made Grace what it was: the sisters coming over with their peacocks; their blue-eyed descendants planting an Eden of orchards in the idyllic days before Black Mountain; the confetti-colored houses and stairstep streets--everything that would be lost to a poisoned river. All in one page. Viola wouldn't let me go longer, claiming nobody would read it. There was some argument over whether to put the note inside the pinata, like a message in a bottle. I said city people didn't buy art just to crack it open; I was respected as an expert on city people. So my modest History of Grace was rolled, bound in ribbon like a diploma, and inserted into each peacock's beak.
The second Tucson excursion filled two chartered buses. Some husbands and kids got into the act, and also my students. I declared it
a class project. I told Raymo if he sold ten peacocks I'd give him a C +. But I didn't go. Loyd had asked for a week's layoff and we set out on the trip he'd been planning forever.
"Don't you have to stop somewhere and check on your roosters?" I asked. We were near Whiteriver.
"I don't have any roosters."
"You don't?" I was incredulous. I thought he'd just stop going to fights himself. "What, you sold them?"
"Collie Bluestone kind of took over the business."
"So you could get back into it if you wanted to."
"Nope. He's moved over to the Colorado River reservation. He's fighting them over at Ehrenberg."
This was a good bit more frightening than if Loyd had presented me with a diamond ring. "But I'm not...What if you and I don't work out, Loyd?"
He downshifted for a rutted stretch in the road. "No offense, Codi, but I didn't give up cockfighting to impress you. I did it because you were right."
"I was right?"
"About what you said."
"What did I say?"
He didn't answer. I vaguely remembered saying something about puncture wounds and internal hemorrhage. Making that a spectator sport. "I can't believe you'd do this thing all your life and then just quit one day after something I said. Maybe you were ready to give it up anyway."
"Maybe I was." We were both quiet for a while, passing through winter-killed fields of grass and sage. Two black horses grazed on bristly shrubs in a field with no apparent fences.
"You and your brother were twins, right?" I asked, apropos of nothing.
He nodded. "Identical. Twins are bad luck."
I laughed. "For the mother."
"No, in the pueblo. When twins are born people say there'll be a poor rainy season or grasshoppers or some darn thing. In the old days you had to let twins die."
"Both? You couldn't pick one and let the other one go?"
"Nope."
"I can't imagine the mother who'd do it," I said, though of course I could. I had probably starved my own child to death in utero, rather than risk known disaster.
"There's a Tewa story about a mother sneaking her twins out of the pueblo and leaving them with Spider Grandmother to raise."
Animal Dreams: A Novel Page 19