by Elliot Reed
SEASONS
Kids learn about spring, summer, fall, and winter. These are all made-up. These made-up seasons sometimes go by other made-up names. Within these four made-up seasons there are countless other made-up seasons. Somewhere in fall comes the season of making hand turkeys with construction paper and brown finger paint. In winter, once the ponds have frozen, comes ice-skating season. Summer is swimming season, though you can swim in the other seasons if you don’t mind being cold. Fall: pumpkin season. Pumpkins grow all summer, too, but their official season is the one when they get ripped off the plant. Anything can be a season if you say it is. Rafting season starts in late summer and runs through early fall, past the tail-end of swimming season. If ever I raft in other seasons, rafting season will expand to include that other season. After rafting season comes smell-of-rotten-leaves season. Sweater season stretches through fall, winter, and some of spring, depending on where you are. It was summer when my uncle got in the back seat of a police car, and in that season he was only wearing a t-shirt. When autumn came, that’s when I started picturing him shivering in his concrete cell. By then I’d given up thinking that strong daydreams were mystical visions from some kind of a spirit realm. I even quit believing in the one I had, on the bridge, before I got on the raft, the vision in which I’d seen River Jim. I told myself that all the visions I’d ever had were ones I’d invented, and that I could imagine whatever I wanted, so I envisioned a prison sweater on my uncle and felt a little better with this made-up image. I envisioned the gypsies in the Florida Keys selling coral and shells on the roadside and painting the hulls of boats for money. I pictured El Hondero in Ohio, where he was at the tail-end of digging season. I saw him digging alone, in the woods, leaves falling all around him, looking for the mother lode, and saw that he’d found not a single piece of mica, that he was suffering trench foot, and that his teeth were ground flat because he’d been living on acorns for weeks. I smiled and then felt sad—emotions have very short seasons. Standing in the yard of Jim’s shack on the banks of the river I imagined that I was my father, so many seasons ago, and I held my hands up and made a square with my fingers, put the river in the square, and the river seemed to run faster when I did that. When I dropped my hands the river slowed back down. I heard the ice in Jim’s rum runner, then I felt his hand on my shoulder, and with that the season of revelations reached its end and I was ready to leave the river.
TANGLED LINE
Every line will tangle itself if you give it a chance, and everyone has been beaten by at least one tangle. Jute rope has a will: it wants to tangle itself. Line has a mind like an animal. Wet hair, the same. To untangle a tangle, your willpower must be more than that of the line. There are piles of orange extension cord tangled in weeds outside shacks on the banks of rivers. Let them lie.
TAKEOFF
When something takes off it doesn’t necessarily take anything but itself off and usually what it’s taking itself off of is the ground, as in the case of a plane or a fleeing goose, but it doesn’t have to, it can also take off down a road or down a river or through the woods or on a train. If you meet a sad-looking woman in a parking lot beside a car with one of its side-view mirrors broken and dangling and you ask her, “What happened?” and she says, “He hit me and he just took off,” you can be sure she’s referring to another motorist rather than somebody taxiing around in an airplane, although there is a bruise on her face and so you can’t be totally sure what hit her, where she was when it happened, and how it happened. If you yourself have recently left the place where you were staying for the night, let’s say a place where you could no longer stand to be, you will realize that someone at that same moment might be saying, “He just took off,” in reference to you. You might see this as a coincidence. What takes off must arrive somewhere other than where it came from. If the woman beside the car asks your name and where you’re from and you tell her, because she has the eyes of someone nice, and then when she asks you where you’re headed you say, “Anywhere, as long as it’s away from that river,” she might take this as an opportunity to offer you a seat in her car and the two of you might, together, take off.
TOY DOG
A miniature version of a particular dog breed. There are very few toy-dog mutts (see BREEDING DOGS) because most toy dogs can’t survive for long in the wild. Chihuahuas, on the other hand, a small breed by nature yet not technically toy, are excellent survivalists and will often sire litters of mutts in wilderness dens. Toy dogs are made the size of toys by breeders who choose the runts of normal-size dogs as breeding stock, then the runts of those runts, then the runts of those runts, and so on until what would usually be a midsize dog can now, even at maturity, be kept in a red leather purse. Toy dogs are hypervigilant and almost always on edge. They can look in two directions at once, possibly as an evolved defensive mechanism, or possibly because their breeders tried to make too many changes over too few generations. If you get in a car with a stranger (see GETTING IN CARS WITH STRANGERS) and a Pekingese toy dog in a red leather purse occupies the passenger seat, where the driver has indicated that you’re meant to sit, it’s good manners to take the bagged Pekingese on your lap and to stroke its quivering, ratlike head as the car takes off. Toy dogs are very sensitive and must be treated with tenderness (see TENDERNESS), especially if the owner of the toy dog is giving you a free ride somewhere.
TALKER
Someone who starts talking and doesn’t stop for a long time, frequently moving from one subject to another and talking about that second subject for a while before continuing to yet another subject without once taking a break. There are several subvarieties of talkers, some you’ll be able to understand and others you won’t, kind of like radio stations. Talkers will go on talking whether or not you’re talking back or even listening. Some talkers are people who have recently spent a lot of time alone, or have something very important to say and once they have they’ll be quiet. These are the quick-tale talkers. Compared to some other people I’ve met, the night patrol officer was one. Compared to some people, he was easy to listen to. River Jim, on the other hand, was not so easy to listen to. His talk was typical of the ruminations of the elderly. It traveled across time, went from place to place, name to name, and thing to thing. In a five-minute span I heard him talk about President Nixon and how to trap beavers and the Kansas City Royals and why the bacon at the dollar store was going up in price. A talker would be easy to understand if you had some reference guide you could use to decipher him, but usually you don’t. You knew River Jim expected you to know something about what he was talking about when he leaned in, gave your ribs a little jab with his elbow, and laughed in such a way that it would be bad manners not to laugh along with him. Sabi Juarez, whose car got hit in the parking lot just before I got in it, was an easy-listening-type talker. She had a sharp Mexican accent. The consonants were all sticky and bouncing around her teeth, and she sometimes dragged a vowel way, way out. Sabi was also fun to watch as she talked. Her hands, most of the time, were somewhere in the air near her head, even when she was driving. Her hair was charcoal black and very curly, just like El Hondero’s. Her fingernails were a bright red with no chips taken out of the paint, and they went in and out of her hair, which shook and swept like a flock of birds or something as she drove me along and fluffed it and talked. Sabi told stories about her ex-husband and his obsession with conspiracy theories, his terrible habit of sleepwalking, and her terrible luck with cars. She talked about her telemarketing job and the people she worked with, how they stole things from her cubicle, how she deflated their tires as revenge, how she’d had terrible bad luck with her first car, a Chrysler LeBaron, how she’d vowed, at age sixteen, never to spend over three hundred dollars on either a car or repairs for a car because any time you spent money on a used car you were gambling and she hated gambling, how she hasn’t to this day gambled on anything but scratch-off tickets and on cars because gambling on cars and scratchers isn’t real gambling, technically, and though sh
e’d had mostly bad luck with her cars, she’d had some good luck, too, like the one Jeep that ran for ten years. The car we were in, a station wagon with hail damage and a cracked windshield, ran fine but now it had a side-view mirror missing because “some gringo in a silver pickup ran right into it and just took off” shortly before I walked past Sabi in the parking lot. She asked me again if I’d seen him, the guy who did it, and I said, again, that I hadn’t, but I’d heard it, because I was close by but focused on counting the number of squabs on the power line. There were white squabs, albinos, a good-sized population, there were black-and-brown squabs, too, and I was pretty sure there was at least one blue squab up there on the line. I asked if she’d ever eaten squab, and she said no, but Chicken Teriyaki was her favorite food. She asked me questions about my life and seemed to find what I said wildly interesting. When I couldn’t answer a question, she supplied an answer for me.
TRIAL DATABASE
If you break the law and you get taken off to jail, it can take a while before the court gets around to making a solid decision about how long it’s going to keep you locked up before it gives you your trial. When it decides what day it wants you to go on trial, it publishes the date and time on a trial database, which you can look up online. Sabi’s apartment was at the end of a cul-de-sac in a suburb where there were dozens of other two-story apartment buildings that looked just like hers all joined together side by side in front of a deep forest of sycamore and oak trees. Her computer monitor was on a desk next to a cushion where the Chihuahua was sitting, chewing on his stick of leather, a little bell on his collar jingling as he chewed the mud-colored leather stick until it was white and spitty and flat and he could eat it. Sabi showed me how to look through the trial database online. Her ex-husband, for instance, had a trial in a month. She planned on going there and telling the judge to lock him up forever, but maybe she would tell the judge to let him go, she couldn’t say for sure. It all depended on whether or not she’d forgiven him by the time of the trial. When we looked up my uncle’s name on the internet we found out that he was going on trial in a week.
TELENOVELA
Spanish for a TV novel, a TELENOVELA is a TV show where people have their lives ripped apart by love. All the major emotions play out in the telenovela: jealousy, mortal betrayal, coincidence, homicide, Little League, mating, expectation, boredom . . . Telenovelas come in weird, dreamlike, glittery color. The women wear lots of makeup. If you don’t speak Spanish you won’t be able to understand what the telenovela people are saying but you can gather what’s going on from their tone of voice and by watching what they do. Even the Chihuahua seems to understand when something important is happening, but this is probably because he reacts to the way Sabi is reacting to the plot. The Chihuahua gives either a whine or a yip depending on Sabi’s reaction. Telenovelas are more interesting to watch if you’re watching with somebody who fills you in on some of the important words here and there because she knows Spanish and is for some reason interested in making your telenovela experience a more pleasurable one. Even if you’d be happy to just watch the melodramatic actors walk around getting emotional in the glimmering light, even if you could just sit there and let the Spanish wash over you, it’s bad manners not to act riveted by the translation of a woman like Sabi Juarez, a woman who has been kind enough to offer you her couch and who fed you a piece of Chicken Teriyaki with her chopsticks earlier.
TESTING FOR LICE
If you’re a nurse at an elementary school and you hear from one of the teachers that a louse was spotted on a desk in the first-grade classroom just a few minutes ago, you must test everyone for lice. This is best done with rubber gloves and chopsticks. You must summon all the first-graders and have them form a line outside of your office. Then you must check their scalps, one by one, using your chopsticks to lift their hair and look beneath it. You will find some children more cooperative than others. Some will be angry. Some will protest at the sight of you with your rubber gloves and chopsticks. Others, the kids who never get a tender touch from their parents or from anyone else, will seem to enjoy the touch of your chopsticks. I remember closing my eyes and feeling her chopsticks in my hair. I remember the feeling was ecstasy—the chopsticks, her hand keeping me from swaying, her breath on my neck, the darkness because my eyes were closed and I had entered a state of deep relaxation—and then the sound of her voice telling me to go on, move it. I remember walking around to the back of the line.
TAKING GIFTS
It’s great to get gifts sometimes, but other times it can be not so great. By taking a gift from the wrong people you can find yourself in their debt. This means they can ask you to do stuff you don’t want to do and you’ll feel like you have to do it. Taking gifts from strangers, including the gift of hospitality, is always a gamble. All you can do is hope that the gift-giver doesn’t ask for repayment that you can’t offer. If your uncle gives you a radio, and if you know that your uncle is basically a good person, then you can take the radio and use it in your treehouse without worrying that he’ll come by asking you to clean the gutters of the mansion. If a little boy you don’t know offers you his milk carton and the two of you are in the cafeteria at a bunkhouse for boys and girls who are wards of the state, it should occur to you that this milk-carton gift is meant as payment for your protecting him. If a woman you just met in a parking lot offers you her couch to sleep on and takeout Chinese food for dinner once you get there, and on top of it she lights a joint in the living room while you’re watching telenovelas, it might occur to you that she’ll want more than for you to run chopsticks through her hair.
TEMPTATION
For the toy dog, there is no temptation as strong as the sardine being dangled above its head. It must battle its wild-dog genes with the good manners it has been taught over the years, and it will wait, fixated on the sardine, until its master says, “Goo-boy take it.” Or this: You’re in a financial crisis. You’re out of money. Your mansion has a huge insurance package covering fire damage—all you have to do is build a fire inside and cash in. Or: You’re living beneath a bridge over a river. You dream of floating down the river but you’re not sure how, then one day a bunch of barrels washes ashore from some place upriver where they’re manufacturing a substance that goes in those barrels. When you fortuitously see the pile of barrels (see MEETING FORTUITOUSLY) floating in an eddy of water by the banks below your bridge, you’ll be tempted to lash them into a raft. All jumps are in some way tempting. All voids beckon. When you look out the window of your treehouse at the ground far below you, the idea of falling that far is tempting because you’ve never felt what it feels like to fall that far. If the events of the past few days have run you down, let’s just say, as an example, that your raft was obliterated, you were arrested, and you learned that your father had committed suicide, your willpower will be sapped and temptations that appear will overpower you. If you’re alone in a house with a woman you hardly know, a woman who was the age you are now on the day you were born, and this woman makes it clear that she would like it if you took her clothes off, how tempted you feel to take her clothes off will depend on the answers to a number of questions. Is she nice? Does her house feel comfortable? Does she seem like a Daddy in a bad way, or does she just seem lonely because her husband recently left her to be with a woman he met at his work? When Sabi parts the beaded curtain between the living room and her bedroom and she’s wearing a nightgown, how do you feel? Do you want to know what it feels like to have sex?
TOKYO SONATAS
Amazing, beautiful compositions for the synthesizer and marimba produced in the 1970s by a group of scientists and artists in Tokyo, Japan, the TOKYO SONATAS are only available on a vinyl record I haven’t been able to find anywhere except in a crate in Sabi Juarez’s living room. Genius is random, shows up like a submarine, and disappears, is what Sabi said. Genius hit the Tokyo people hard in 1974. I’ll never forget hearing the beautiful sounds of the TOKYO SONATAS at Sabi’s house. I use the word BEAUTIF
UL for the TOKYO SONATAS, and the word BEAUTIFUL has, so far, appeared six times in this key, but I have never properly defined it. I have never understood what the word beautiful means, but it’s something like this: everything you know, all the names of things, they’re coming to a point. In the middle of the night, before you and Sabi take the dog for a moonlight walk, she has you hold him while she tenderly slips his two back legs, and then his two front legs, through the holes in a thin red sweater. She says, “Beautiful,” and you put the dog down.