Eight bucks. I booted the headstone.
“That’s not really going to help.” I turned to the man leaning against the maple, one leg crossed over the other, his hands casually shoved into the pockets of his suit pants. He was frowning. T-Bone is practical to a fault, something to do with his French Canadian farmer genes. And he is a true friend, another thing to do with genes, those passed down by some distant Canadian Mountie who married and had children when he wasn’t tracking criminals in the snow.
The wind whipped around me, stirring up the dead autumn leaves, sending them into the air with a clatter. They grabbed at my legs and hair, like a mother’s fingers, trying to soothe a child in tantrum.
The Round Corners Cemetery is as old as the invention of the shovel. It clutches a hillside north of town on land a goat would think twice about tackling. When we were children, Wynn and I used to pass the cemetery on the bus ride home from school. We argued: Were the dead really lying down or standing up? Were they clinging by their fingernails inside their coffins eternally fighting the force of gravity?
Round Corners Cemetery climbs the hill and stretches into a neighboring cow pasture. Plenty of room for expansion. For all it’s needed, George used to say. Round Corners has only five hundred living people. An earthquake could wipe out the entire town, suck it into the center of the earth, and the cemetery would still have room to spare. Such burial zoning and planning baffled George the real estate agent. He looked at that cow pasture waiting for Round Corners’ deceased and saw condos. The prospect of mansions among the mausoleums put a cold smile on the face of George the accountant.
Winter was as kind as George when it came to the cemetery. It wore at the headstones, each year shrinking them a little more, bone-colored slabs growing smaller and smaller, the way old people do. The tombstones were like popsicles. The Vermont weather constantly sucked and licked at them. Some were nothing but nubs, and nearly impossible to read.
If you strained your eyes, you could make out Snowden, Smith, Elder, Pratt; they came first and farthest on ships across the ocean. Then the less worn and easier to read were Desautels, LaBerge, Champlain, Soutiere, those who later rolled down from the North like a snowball. The clearest were Solomon, Goodsell, Martinez, Wysecki; they melted into the Vermont pot, either drawn here by the beauty of the Green Mountains or driven here by jobs they could no longer stand, by cities that smothered them and drained their heart, by bumper-to-bumper traffic and breathless crowds, by fear that kept them from dashing to the convenience store for a carton of milk in the middle of the night.
And now, there was George, expanding the cemetery. You could read his shiny new headstone a mile away.
Furious, I did a Mexican hat dance around George’s grave, kicking out at the granite.
It always disturbed T-Bone to see me like that—out of control, letting George make me crazy, kicking dead people.
Tomorrow I would wake up, full of guilt, not about George, but about T-Bone. I would remember the sadness in his eyes and hate myself. I always wanted to tell him: I’m not really like this, please don’t think less of me, it’s just George. But he knew that. T-Bone knew me better than I knew myself.
T-Bone was so gentle; he wouldn’t last a minute in the real world, a world where the most important things were not milking cows and tap-dancing. He was forty last birthday. I have known him since he immigrated to Vermont from Canada with his Uncle Andre at the age of thirteen. I was eight. They bought the farm next to ours. T-Bone took over at the age of nineteen when a drunken cow fell on Uncle Andre and killed him. The cow didn’t get soused on purpose. It was in the wrong place at the wrong time, hanging its head over a fence when some kids, out to be wild and wondering about a cow’s capacity for Rolling Rock, happened upon it.
Some mornings I get up early, before the sun, and drive over to T-Bone’s. I watch him dance as he milks the cows. Something about his body swaying, circling cows and milking machines, lifts my spirits. The sound of the taps on the bottom of his L.L. Bean boots clipping the concrete fills the barn with rhythm and steals into my soul. I close my eyes… and it’s as if I were painting again.
T-Bone interrupted the hat dance. “Have you had breakfast?” he asked. I shrugged. “You know you get testy when you haven’t eaten. A nutritious breakfast is important. I should have brought the cinnamon rolls. I made them with raisins, your favorite.” T-Bone nibbled on his bottom lip. “Yes, I should have brought the rolls.”
T-Bone’s a worrier. His mind runs a thousand “what if” scenarios a day, like a computer calculating contingency plans for the government. Nuclear holocaust, milk subsidies, tomorrow’s forecast, anything is fodder for his overactive imagination. He worried when I was painting and when I stopped. He worried when I married George and when I buried him. He worries when no birds come to the feeder and when he can’t keep it in sunflower seeds. He is a tall, lean, anxious man. He burns calories like autumn leaves; his insides—every organ, muscle, and ligament—must chug and churn twenty-four hours a day.
T-Bone stopped pacing, glared at me, growled something to the effect that I “needed something in that beautiful body besides beer,” and resumed marching up and down the cemetery.
Unlike T-Bone, I don’t exhaust my metabolism. I also don’t smoke or chew my fingernails or crack my knuckles. I meditate and wait. I sit on the hard porch step of my house, my legs wrapped around me like a flowing robe, and study the faded painting of Milky Way on the side of the barn. I listen. I hear the busy chatter of the leaves, the voice of autumn, the whisper of my breath echoing through the passages of lungs and heart and time. Some days I hear T-Bone pacing over at his farm a mile away.
But the meditation stopped working. And the painting went wrong. I tried harder, and George tried harder. Our beer budget grew. George died. But the painting didn’t come back. The beer budget doubled. Odie decided to turn Round Corners into the Louvre of Vermont (no telling what that’s going to do to the beer budget). And I ended up in a graveyard on a cold October morning, a thirty-five-year-old artistic has-been acting like a two-year-old tantrum queen.
Some might say I put too much store in the inner self. Artists will. We’re always reaching for the unseen mystery on the top shelf, our bodies stretched heavenward, ready to fly off the common chair of reality. So, it can be disorienting when we feel too old to reach, can’t even find the energy to drag the chair over to the shelf.
I learned how to meditate from a little man who called himself Raj. He had a huge self, yet hardly one at all. He liked Jackie Kennedy, spy thrillers, and my house. I was thirteen when Raj passed through on a whiff of Eastern mysticism.
My husband George wafted into my life on the last gasping fumes of an aging Volvo. Could I use your phone? he asked. Sure, I said, and let him into my life. I don’t want this to sound too romantic, like love at first sight. I prefer to think it was pure timing. Not that George couldn’t be charming, occasionally. But there I was nineteen and never before left to my own devices. We married fourteen days after we met, two weeks after I buried my father. I learned how to drink Rolling Rock beer while living with George. He liked Richard Nixon, baseball books, and taxes. George was an accountant and a real estate agent.
I watched T-Bone till up the cemetery’s leaves. He paced like a machine. Back and forth. Plowing a furrow through the leaves. I closed my eyes and listened. He was plowing his way to China. When I opened my eyes, I was surprised I could still see him. I expected there to be only his head sticking up from the pacing excavation, floating above the hole bodiless, back and forth like a duck at a carnival shooting gallery.
“It is especially important to eat at a time like this…” he said. I tuned out the rest of the lecture.
Across the cemetery, under a balsam fir, is my father’s grave, next to the grave of my mother, who I have never met. It is a pretty spot, not so steep that they have to cling to anything but each other. My father said they were the perfect couple. They could send each other’s hearts r
acing with just a smile. My mother looked like me, and my father called her his Wild Gypsy Rose. Her name was Rose. She never painted a picture. She did, however, draw caricatures to make my father laugh. He kept them in a shoe box in the closet. At night I’d hear him in his room, chuckling, and I’d know he had broken out the shoe box again. She died two days after I was born, asking for paper and pencil to draw “the scrunched-up face” of her daughter. The nurse promised the paper after she rested. My mother never awakened from her nap.
“Dance for me,” I said to T-Bone.
“What?” That stopped him.
“Dance for me, T-Bone.”
How many times have I said those words? I have loved his body for as long as I can remember. From the beginning I have been fascinated by the way T-Bone’s body flows. It is slender and neat and slides through space. He’s at ease in the tug and pull, a part of moon and tide and gravity. That was something I knew nothing about; I was born a klutz. I envied his ease in the cosmos. He interested me, and so, I spent half my childhood following him around. I studied him. I wanted to feel that motion. When I was twelve, I began to make sketches, which embarrassed him at first. Probably no teen-age boy likes to be sketched. But T-Bone was especially shy. I’ve never known anyone so bashful. It took years, and constant nagging on my part, to get him to open up and talk to me.
I remember once when he was fifteen and I was ten. We were sitting on a bale of hay in the barn. The light streamed in over T-Bone’s shoulder and cut through his profile like a chisel. He was telling me that his real name was Jacques Leon Thibeault and that Thibeault was a proud name in his home in the Laurentians.
“Why do you let them call you T-Bone then?” I asked.
T-Bone shrugged. “My uncle says kids will be kids. They will soon tire of it.” But they never did and the name stuck like meat to the ribs.
“Well,” I said, “I like it.”
“You do?”
“Sure, it has personality. You wouldn’t want to be any old Tom, Dick, or Harry. You’re special.”
That embarrassed him. But, I noticed, from that day on, he never had any trouble talking to me.
T-Bone was dressed for talking that morning in the cemetery. He had an appointment at the bank and was outfitted in a marvelous double-breasted suit that some Montreal tailor whipped up for him. The suit was cut and sewn for a man accustomed to the feel of leather briefcases, elevators, and clean, climate-controlled offices. It made T-Bone look long and polished and sure of himself.
He has always been a handsome man with thick dark hair, blue eyes, and a smile that has a warm effect on everyone, even strangers. In the suit, he looked capable of flirting with a pretty woman or flipping a credit card at a clerk. I knew he didn’t own a credit card and that, except for me, he was tongue-tied around most women. Women found him attractive though. Like me, they loved his smile. It was a charismatic crinkling of facial muscles, something you’d expect on a Kennedy, totally wasted on such a shy person as T-Bone.
Tap-dancing T-Bone, everyone called him. Dance for me, I silently begged. Let me lose myself in you.
“Remember the time I asked you to pose in the nude?”
T-Bone blushed. “You were a precocious child, Maud.”
“Even at the age of fourteen, I knew a good body when I saw one.”
T-Bone muttered in French, shifted uneasily, and tugged at his silk tie. He glanced at the watch I gave him on his last birthday. It was one of those new Swiss ones, fine parts in a plastic case, incredibly light. He says he can’t even feel it on his wrist. I wanted to buy the one with polka dots on the face and a purple and yellow checkered band. Or how about the one that smelled like bananas? He said the gray pin-striped would be fine.
I have never worn a watch. Until I met George, I was not aware of the passage of time, of years that escaped and hours that dragged. All the clocks I knew were on canvas and, for awhile during my surreal period, drippy and melted. During my “George Period,” clocks and everything else I painted became precise little things on a Maud Calhoun greeting card—sold winter, summer, spring, and fall at the cash register at Round Corners Restaurant. In recent years, that has been my only art, greeting cards, with tiny pictures that couldn’t possibly matter in the great scheme.
“So, how am I to do Odie’s painting, George?” My boot hit the gravestone with a clunk. “This is all your fault. I should have shot you before you had a chance to leave me. Saved the car.”
T-Bone sighed. “George couldn’t help it that Odie Dorfmann was his best friend.”
“Don’t defend him. He knew Odie was running for reelection on a cultural platform. To nail the arts vote, Odie said. George encouraged him. He thought they could build it up into a tourist attraction, give the local economy a shot in the arm. Fine, I told George and Odie, just don’t involve me. But Maud, George said, you’re the one with experience in tourist attractions.”
“It was bad luck that Odie won the election,” T-Bone said.
“He was running unopposed.”
Sure things. George liked sure things, situations he could control. He was good at that sort of thing, organizing the world, taking action, solving problems, putting things right. I’ve often thought George would have done wonders in the Middle East. He believed in new beginnings. If one idea didn’t work, he tried another. He refused to let himself get bogged down by historical baggage, negative attitudes, insecurities. Those are children of the past, and George was a child of the present.
When I first married George, I desperately needed someone with that quality. I have never been any good at taking care of myself—logistically. I could have a headache for days and never think about walking five steps to the medicine cabinet and a bottle of aspirin. I used the dishes until there weren’t anymore and then I was surprised when I couldn’t find a clean plate. All through grade school Wynn the appearance conscious was the one who noticed when I needed new shoes.
But I didn’t marry George just for his domestic skills. In his own way, George believed in me, “Maud, you can do anything you set your mind to. I know you’ll be a great artist someday.” In fact, I think George believed in me too much. He could never leave my art alone. He always wanted to help me “make it better.” It was his idea to go into the greeting card business—“Money is how our culture measures success, Maud. You don’t want to be one of these artists that don’t make a dime off your work until after you’re dead, do you?” And it was George’s idea “to centralize, and thus, focus” my work by containing it in a studio “that would have been the envy of Picasso.”
I gave George’s stone several more smacks with my boot, rubbed my eyes, gazed out over the other graves. Across the cemetery, an old woman was taking a rubbing from an ancient stone. On her knees, she scrubbed furiously at the headstone, transferring the impressions of the gravestone to paper with a piece of charcoal, while the wind buffeted her and the leaves rubbed against her legs. She pushed away a lock of thin, gray hair blown into her eyes. The sheet of white paper she was bent over fluttered, and she hurried to grab it.
When I was young, before I got mixed up with husbands and politicians, I made rubbings of leaves with crayons—red, orange, brown, yellow, blue, purple, pink. I stacked them together and stapled them into a book. And, although I made the book in summer when the leaves were green and supple, I called it my autumn book.
I love color. I have no interest in vast amounts of knowledge. George could never understand the way I could pass up the chance at facts, figures, and dates. I like to eat breakfast cereals full of shapes and colors, red balls, pink hearts, yellow stars, purple dinosaurs. George was a Cornflakes man. He liked numbers, sure things. You could always count on a spreadsheet. When we sat in Olympic Stadium watching the Montreal Expos play, I was the one who screamed and yelled and demolished hotdogs smothered in mustard and relish. George kept statistics. What looked to me to be a hard-hit grounder through the clumsy third baseman’s legs into the green Astroturf of left field was to
George a ground ball to seven with an error on five.
The old woman returned the charcoal to a small fishing tackle box, then carefully rolled the paper and slid it into a cardboard tube. She nodded as she passed us, then began to whistle, something that sounded like the wind, lonely.
I was tired. Granite is harder than the human toe. I slipped to the ground and leaned my head against George’s stone. It was hard and perfect and new. I hadn’t fazed it, just as I hadn’t fazed George in thirteen years of marriage.
Without a word, T-Bone picked me up and carried me to the truck. He settled me gently on the passenger seat. As he drove me home, I swore I’d never speak to George again.
Why do we speak to the dead? Because in death they seem a million times more sympathetic than they were in life. Because we left something unsaid. Because they had filled a hole we didn’t even realize was there.
Or maybe just because they still piss us off.
It’s over, George. Are you there? George?
Maybe it’s because they never let us get the last word in.
2. A Life Like Country Music
Beaver Road dead-ends at my barn. There the front yard, the drive, and the road all blend together into a part grass, part gravel common area. A gathering place for vehicles and equipment and lawn chairs. My house looks down a valley, a tunnel of ever-changing color. Full and green in summer. Skeleton black and white in winter. Cider warm brown, gold, and red in autumn. The valley roller coasters up hills and down all the way to Lake Champlain some thirty miles away.
A writer would say the day was a perfect specimen of Indian summer. The sun has burnt off the early morning haze, leaving air so clear and trees so bright—that it sends tourists scrambling for their cameras and artists for their easels. I have not broken any records to get to the paints. Standing in my front yard, I watched T-Bone speed to his appointment. He hates being late for anything. He waved as his voice flew out of a cloud of dust and dried leaves: “Get something to eat.”
Maud's House Page 2