The Magic of Found Objects

by Maddie Dawson

  She stopped for a moment. I could hear her take in a ragged breath. And I waited. Then she said, “I knew he had a girlfriend back home. Maggie. He was very clear about that. But we wanted each other just the same. He hadn’t had much experience in sex stuff, and we were joking around about how he needed to rectify that situation immediately, and then we were just fooling around in the little tent he brought, and we were in the sleeping bag, kissing and stuff, and then—well, he kind of went wild on me. He said he loved me, and I said, ‘No, you’re just loving everybody in the world right now!’ But I thought, Well, what if this is the real deal with this guy, and I turn it away because of being afraid? What if this guy is the love of my life? And the girlfriend back at home isn’t really the one for him, but just the only one he’s ever known? So we just let go. Fell into the whole experience. Let it happen. And well, we kept doing it all through the three days. We went skinny-dipping with about a hundred people in the river, and looking at all those bodies—all shapes and sizes and conditions—well, damn, it felt like the way life was supposed to be. You know? This was going to be the new world order after this.”

  She let out a big sigh. “We’d wake up in the morning and there would be this fog all over everything, and people around you waking up, too, and getting food, with music playing. All these groups playing the most amazing songs. Sly, Country Joe, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane—really amazing music from everybody you ever wanted to hear. Groups I’m sure you never even heard of.

  “And then the rain started. Oh my God, the rain! A big storm came in, and everybody just got drenched, and the place got so muddy. We were playing in the mud, sliding in it like toddlers, soaked through and laughing so hard, like we were little kids again.

  “We couldn’t keep our hands off each other. Cissy took me aside and said, ‘What are you doing? This guy is not your type at all!’ But it felt like none of that mattered. I had never laughed so much.

  “And he was the same. He walked around through that whole three days with a hard-on. We were living in this euphoria, like a time out of time kind of, and—oh yeah, then I got sick. Maybe it was the mud and the lack of sleep and all the people around me, but I got really, really sick. Ran a fever and everything, and he took care of me. He was so gentle and helpful, like the way he probably was around the farm with the animals. He took me to the medical tent, and he stayed there with me while they gave me fluids and food. He’d been planning to leave; Tom wanted to get back, to be home by Sunday night, but Robert said he wouldn’t go. Not while I was sick. Isn’t that the sweetest thing? So Tom and Robert had an argument, and finally Robert told him he’d find another way home. We all figured he could hitch a ride; lots of people were probably going to New Hampshire, and so Tom left. I was feeling a little better by then, but I let Robert carry me back to our tent. By then, it was our tent. We were a couple. Nobody knew for how long—maybe for only another hour. Or a day.

  “And then this is the part I’ll never forget. Coming out of our little tent on Monday morning and standing there in the fog, wrapped up in the sleeping bag, and there was Jimi Hendrix on stage, playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ He played it with such crazy discordant notes, like he was creating a whole new anthem for us. A lot of people had gone by then, and all around us it looked like a war zone, like Gettysburg, maybe, there was so much trash and garbage everywhere—but there was Jimi Goddamned Hendrix, and this just seemed like the new America, what we were all going to come to, a land of love and music, and everything was going to be all right. The war was raging on, and everything that had felt so messed up before was now going to be fixed. It sounds stupid to say now, and naive, but it was like mankind had moved in a whole new direction, like the war was going to end, and everybody was going to connect to everybody else and everything in the universe. I started to cry it was so beautiful. And I was standing there next to Robert, and he felt it, too, and later we just got into my car, with Cissy and Gary, and we drove back to my little house, and he stayed with me. Every day he’d say he was going to go back home. Every day we’d look up the bus schedules and then he’d decide to hitch a ride back, and every day we were having the most amazing sex, and then he started helping some guy fix his car, and the guy said he’d start paying him and giving him work. Your dad was always good at machines and stuff like that, and—I don’t know—I think we both just kept expecting it to end, and then it kept not ending.

  “And then . . .” She let out a big breath. “I found out I was pregnant.”

  “Ohhh,” I said softly. “Us.”

  “Yeah, you little rascals!” She laughed. “So much for plans, huh? You had other plans for me and your dad. It was a shocker. When I told Robert I was pregnant, I was scared what he’d think, but he got the biggest smile on his face, and then he and I started dancing around the house. This was a baby that was conceived in the new world, he said. A baby of huge, intense, great magic and change for the whole world. A Woodstock child from the music and the love. That was it, then. We took it as a sign that he wasn’t supposed to go back to the farm. He was going to stay with me, and we decided we’d move back down to Woodstock, because it was our lucky place, and we rented that little cottage—the one I still live in—and everything felt so perfect and right.”

  I cleared my throat. “What did his family say? Were they so mad at him?”

  “Well . . . yes.” She laughed drily. “He had conversations on the phone with his mom and dad, and I think he called Maggie and told her, too. He didn’t really want to talk about that part with me, because it didn’t have anything to do with me, he said. Maggie was his problem, was how he put it.

  “But then Bunny and Gordon drove up to meet me, and we all had lunch together in a little diner near the house where Robert and I were staying. And I’ll never forget how Robert was brave, even though I could tell that seeing his parents there really was hard for him. And Bunny was sweet to me. She asked how I was feeling, and she brought me a present, some farm ointment that helped with dry skin and stretch marks, I think. And also a plant. A peace lily. She hugged me before they left, and she said, ‘I rather think that you and Robert need to get married. You’re a family now.’ And so we did.”

  “And then we were born?”

  “Yes. Then you were born in the back room of our little cottage. Two of you! That was kind of a shocker, let me tell you. I hadn’t been so much keeping up with the prenatal care, and we thought you were just one giant baby—and then after Hendrix was born, it was like you said, Yoo-hoo! Don’t forget about me! Oh my God. We were so sweaty and tired, and both you and Hendrix were these wide-eyed babies, looking all around, and snuggling up to nurse. And Robert—” Her voice catches. “Robert got up in the bed next to me and next to you and Hendrix, and he said to me, ‘Tenaj, you’re a sorceress. You took three days of music and magic and turned it into two babies.’”

  We were quiet for a long moment. I couldn’t believe my dad said that. I thought of how he certainly wouldn’t have said that anymore. But it was amazing to think of how he wanted us. At the time. That he was glad. Something fluttered inside my own heart. He wanted us.

  She let out a long sigh. “So that’s how it happened. That’s your story, baby.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “So you came from love,” she said. “You were conceived during the most incredible display of peace and love on the planet—half a million people gathering in the mud and the rain for music and love. No matter how it turned out, you came from love. Sent here special delivery by the universe.”

  That May, Hendrix and I turned sixteen. He was fully involved with Ariel by then and also working with our dad on the farm. For me, I was still writing poetry and working on the school newspaper and writing short stories about unrequited love. I stopped seeing Billy David with his clumsy hands and his childishly obscene way of sitting on his bike seat, and I started going out with a guy who called himself Steppenwolf for some reason, and he was dangerous and wicked and also a po
et, and we sneaked out and ran the streets at night when the good people of Pemberton, New Hampshire, were sleeping. My parents detested him, although I was sure Tenaj would have liked him if only I could manage to get him and me up to Woodstock to meet her.

  We’d go on long hikes in the woods by ourselves, and I’d tell him about my hippie mother and the stories about Woodstock, and he’d tell me about his plan to move up there someday himself and his wonderful ambition, which was to set up a card table in the downtown area, and write five-minute poems for people who came by on the street. He would charge five dollars per poem, and he’d get famous and probably rich.

  The day he told me that, we made love in the woods, using his black leather jacket as a blanket underneath my hips.

  It was my first time, and I lay there afterward, with my vagina stinging and burning, and twigs digging into my back, and possibly a rock pressing against my head. I had tears in my eyes, thinking that this was the most romantic thing that could ever happen to a person. And if I was pregnant from it, then so be it. This would be a child of the woods and the leaves and the poetry and the dream of Woodstock. I looked over at Steppenwolf, who right then was the most beautiful human being I’d ever seen in my whole life, lying on his back, his eyes glistening in the sunlight, his hand flung over his forehead, his gorgeous body exposed there in the daylight.

  If I was pregnant, it would be karma, and I would have a reason to call Tenaj and tell her of this celebration of the amazing ongoingness of life, of her legacy. She would be so stunned and amazed. We’d have moon ceremonies and we’d light candles and I’d travel up to see her and dance with her at the full moon, and oh, there would be all kinds of things we’d do, to welcome this child. To welcome me into motherhood.

  For some reason, she and I had stopped talking every week. Maybe once a month I’d call her, but she seemed busy and distracted. I’d try to talk to her about Woodstock again, to hear her talk once more about how loved Hendrix and I had been. But she was focused on the gallery, and her voice felt far away. She said she was tired. She was busy, and I was busy.

  We were connected somehow . . . We weren’t talking much, but it was fine. I made up my mind I’d probably move up there and live with her if I was pregnant. Steppenwolf could come, too. We could be hippies up there with my mom.

  But then I wasn’t pregnant, and I forgot all about calling her. One day, months later, when I went back to try, I discovered that the phone booth had been removed. There was nothing there but that little penny, still stuck to the concrete.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “You know that I think of you as a daughter, don’t you?” says Gabora. She smiles at me, activating her sweet old-lady dimples. But I am not fooled. Gabora, bless her heart, is not harmless. I’ve worked with her since my first day on the job at Tiller, when I was still a “baby publicist,” as she called me. She tells people she had to break me in—which always makes me sound like a racehorse or something. But it’s probably true; she was my first big test of strength.

  “Why, thank you so much,” I say. “You’re sweet to say—”

  She interrupts me. “Which is why I feel perfectly justified in asking you why in the world you’re wearing those shoes! Who would even try on those shoes in the store?” She laughs and shakes her head.

  I am wearing clogs, ladies and gentlemen. So sue me. They’re comfortable. Also I’ve been on an airplane. I have had to remove shoes in the security line. Clogs come off and go on very easily. This was ideal when I was not only managing my own items in that line, but also the items of a certain ungrateful old lady, for whom I am responsible for the next three days.

  I sigh. We have survived the TSA checkpoint, as well as the endless wait at the gate (during which I was sent off to procure bottled water, a People magazine, sugarless gum, a neck pillow, and a sleep mask), and the flight itself, during which she needed help with her seat belt and the itinerary, and then we landed and were staggering through the terminal, searching for the location of our driver who was hired to meet us but was late . . . aaaaand the drive to the Charleston Pines Inn & Conference Center.

  And now we are in the lobby, resting Gabora’s bunions while Adam checks us in.

  “Never mind,” she says and leans over and pats my knee. “I can see I still have some work to do with you. It makes me happy. Gladdens my heart to be working with you again. Remember the blue suit?” She winks and pats her huge blonde bouffant hairdo—a wig, the kind Dolly Parton might appreciate—and smiles at me with her Kiss Me Pink lips, circa 1954.

  Ah, yes, the blue suit. I knew it might come up. One day ten years ago, as we rode in a cab to one of her many readings, she was delivering me a pointed lecture about fashion and professionalism and the need to dress for the job you intend to do. And then suddenly she leaned forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder and instructed him to pull over, right that second. Then she marched me into a high-end clothing store called Gina Louise’s that had seemed to materialize right out of thin air at her insistence, and she bought me a royal-blue linen jacket and skirt and a white chiffon-type blouse to wear underneath it. I tried it on under duress. It made me look like a member of the 1950 Junior League, and I didn’t even want to come out of the dressing room to model it. But she made me. And then she declared it perfect. She said, “There. You look nice. We are going to bring you some class if it kills us,” she said.

  “I don’t suppose you still have it,” she says now.

  “I do. I have it. It doesn’t fit so well anymore . . .” Which is a lie. I have no idea if it fits or not, because it is in the back of my closet. The only reason it hasn’t been given to Goodwill is that it reminds me of that day, and the truth is, I have a little soft spot for Gabora Pierce-Anton. It was so nice of her, even in her pushy way, to care what I looked like. I had been pretty much emerging from my Poor College Girl Slouchy-Style days, which had been preceded by my New Hampshire Farm Girl days, with a smattering of hippie boho thrown in, in honor of my mother. Far, far from Junior League.

  And now here we are. I think I look pretty nice in my black slacks and an oatmeal-colored silk tunic, with a little twist of silver hanging from a cord. And my clogs. No matter what she says.

  She’s looking me up and down. I cast a longing glance over to the check-in counter, where Adam seems to be next in line. He looks over and shrugs.

  “I have just one big issue with you,” Gabora says. “You know, in the past, you would have gotten People to do a story about my new book. What happened here with your team? I got nothing.” Her eyes narrow.

  I want to say that the fates smiled down on us by not having People write about her book, since every story that has run anywhere has been filled with criticism of the implicit racism of her book. But I manage to shrug. “Well, magazines do what they do,” I say. “We sent in the press release, but they were tight for space this week, I think.”

  “Well,” she says, sniffing, and folds her hands over the pocketbook on her lap. “I suppose they think an old woman like me doesn’t care anyway. They no doubt think I’ve had all the attention I’m entitled to. Getting old is not for the faint-hearted, believe me. Maybe my next book will be about Eleanor and Peter losing their grandmother to some kind of mercy killing. See how People magazine likes that.”

  She bares her teeth at me, which is meant to be a smile.

  It’s been five years since her last book, five years since we’ve gone out on tour together. Back then, we only went to major bookstores, where throngs of children, parents, and grandparents showed up and waited in line to get their books signed. Sometimes they’d bring stacks of Peter and Eleanor books from the series, and the little girls would wear pigtails just like Eleanor does. A few times, children even brought along little stuffed white mice, like Lancaster, the pet that Peter and Eleanor take along on their adventures.

  And then . . . well, Gabora stopped writing books. There were a few little health issues once she reached eighty. She and I kept in touch sporadical
ly; she said she was thinking of traveling the world, just as soon as she felt strong again. Her daughters, Lois and Tillie—known to me as Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters—were looking after her, she said.

  And then suddenly—there was another book! I would not have put it past Lois and Tillie to have forced her to write it, for reasons of their own. Perhaps the family coffers were getting dry; maybe it would be great to have one last bestselling infusion of cash to see all the grandchildren through college.

  At any rate, Gabora now seems much, much older and tireder. Whereas she used to boss me around pretty severely, now she’s adopted a little-girl tone of voice.

  She is looking now at Adam. “He’s certainly no snappy dresser. Not a competent woman alive would want that in her bed. What has happened to men, anyway? Those short jackets they wear, the five o’clock shadow all day long! And their hair—they just let it do anything! Anything at all. Who do they think wants to see anything like that?”

  Adam is now one-handedly staring at his BlackBerry. Au contraire, I think. He does look a little tousled, but the truth is he is sporting a delightful bedhead mess of beach hair. With his sleepy eyes, he looks like a guy who maybe just fell out of bed after having hours of divine sex. Gabora probably doesn’t remember what that’s like. The bigger question is why did her generation of women want men with oily, slicked-back hair anyway? What was so great about that?

  I smile at her and say nothing. That’s the difference now, five years later; I’ve learned the power of silence.

  She’s looking at me sharply. “Wait, you’re married, aren’t you? Now I remember; you have a husband. What’s his name?”