Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  I can get lost in a story in the paper and it starts to seem real, as if it’s happening before my eyes. But of course it is real. I wish I could marry this unfortunate woman and take care of those children.

  When Maddie came over to see me, I showed her the story.

  “In New York they’d be living over a grate,” said Maddie, dropping the paper on my broken wicker hassock. “They’ve got it pretty good here.”

  She looked around disdainfully at my place—what used to be our place. I admit I’ve let it go. She was on her way to work, and she had brought some doughnuts and coffee. She looked older, a bit hard in the eyes. Her cheeks were hollowed out. Her hair was cut short, and it flipped away from her face like wings.

  “Come over tonight and eat supper with me,” I said. “I’ve got a can of kidney beans and a can of corn.”

  “No, thanks. I can’t tonight. Besides, I’d rather go out. What I’d like is some really good fettuccine Alfredo.”

  “Beans and corn are the prince and princess of nutrition. Millions of Mexicans count on them.”

  “I’m not Mexican.”

  “You’re not Italian either.”

  “I bet your cats eat better than you do,” she said, eyeing my lounging gray twins, Zippy and Bub. “You don’t make them follow your diet, do you?”

  “Oh, no, I let them have what they’re used to. They’re naturally thrifty anyway. Cats don’t take more from the world than is necessary.”

  Maddie laughed so hard she roared. “Bill, you are still so naïve! What about all the songbirds cats kill? They don’t have to hunt for a living, so they kill birds just for fun. They know they can depend on you for turkey-and-giblets or fancy-snapper-dinner, or whatever.”

  Whether she was right or not, I wouldn’t agree. “They don’t kill for fun. It’s practice. Toning, keeping in shape. That songbird thing is erroneous. A neighborhood cat kills one cardinal and everybody blames the whole tragic loss of the world’s songbirds on one cat. It’s unfair.” I attacked one of the doughnuts she had brought. It was delicious. “Are cardinals songbirds?” I asked.

  She touched my arm gently. “Bill, I’m too busy for this role playing, or whatever you’re doing. Did I tell you about my roommate’s divorce? How her skunk of a husband testified that he had multiple personalities? He claimed he was faithful but that one of his personalities named Zeke was the one who went out with all these women. Can you believe such a story? He said he had five personalities, but she told me she could name six or eight herself.”

  On this topic I had nothing to say. That Lisa had Maddie’s roommate for a sort of parent bothered me. I said, “Open your mouth. I want to see that bone you were talking about.”

  “No. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I was trying to be romantic.”

  “Not now, please.”

  “I don’t remember that bone in your mouth.”

  “It’s just my brains pressing down. I’ve had a lot on my mind.”

  She turned to go, and I found her coat. “It was nice to see you, Bill,” she said. “I don’t really know what I expected.”

  As Maddie went out the door, I said, “I still love you,” but evidently she didn’t hear me. I remember the last time she let Lisa come here on a visit. Lisa was studying her geography workbook, her gnawed pencil flicking. I said, “You are the most wonderful child. I love you so much.”

  “That’s good to know,” she said, not looking up from her map of South America.

  That night I heated my beans and corn in the microwave. As I ate, I watched Wheel of Fortune, then Entertainment Tonight. I ate slowly, concentrating on each bite. On ET, they discussed whether Elvis had been murdered, had committed suicide, or had faked his death. I think Elvis was in deep retreat, like me, and made a fatal miscalculation. They said Elvis put aluminum foil on his windows to keep daylight out, and he stayed up all night.

  I don’t know why Maddie and I were being so difficult. I have the feeling she wants to come back to me but is too proud to admit it. It is what I’ve wanted, but we don’t seem to be able to make it happen. And, worse, I am losing our daughter. I also have the feeling that nothing is chosen, everything is inevitable—these fateful patterns of human behavior.

  I sit in my easy chair in front of the television and write in my journal. My Insight of the Day: To avoid the trap of history, you’ve got to knowingly reenact it, go with it right up to the edge, then pull back. Then you’re free. I have no idea how serious I am.

  Surely what Maddie and I are going through is as old as time. If I could go back to the way we started out and try it again, I imagine following the same steps. When Lisa was born, Maddie triumphantly held the baby to her breast and said, “You see, Bill, here we are—indivisible.” She saw something mystical in that union of flesh. But now it seems as if we had deposited ourselves in the fresh innocence of our baby, and we were left emptied out, disconnected. Eventually when Maddie left me, it was so sudden, without warning, it was as though she had yanked out my heart by the roots. I thought of those battlefield scenes where wounded soldiers hold their own innards in their hands like a newborn baby. When she left, she explained that we had to live apart in order to work out our differences. She was full of vague dissatisfaction. It was typical of the times, she assured me, making light of my despair. She had an offer of a job in Louisville—an opportunity to grow, she claimed. And Lisa could go to the ballet school there.

  The weekends were confusing. Maddie made excuses to stay in Louisville. It took a while for me to realize the separation was bolstered by excuses and rationalizations—all contrived to accommodate Bradley Simpson, C.P.A. He was her goal all along. When I saw the separation was a devious scheme to admit him and his piggy eyes and his furry shoulders into her bed, I turned inside out like a sleeve. I was standing outside my own life, looking in. That’s when I took to the bottle. Bradley Simpson is history now. It still makes me cross-eyed to think of him, but he is not important to our future, the story of Maddie and me. He didn’t last, but our estrangement did. She liked her new freedom, her apartness from me. The inexplicable thing is now that she is back in town, I seem to be pushing her away. That is a flaw in me, like the desire to drink. Once things are set upside down, I don’t know how you get them right again. I have to be forgiving, no matter the cost. If she is coming closer, I need to be receptive. But I haven’t learned how. I have an instinct for the wrong move.

  After supper, when it is dark, I get out my quilt pieces. What I’m up to isn’t really a secret, although no one knows about it. And now I realize I want to surprise Maddie when it’s finished.

  Grandma pieced quilts at night, when she sat down to rest but needed to keep busy doing something practical. How she would laugh to see her grandson piecing a quilt! I’m sure she never knew a man who could even thread a needle.

  I like to think I’m communing with Grandma as I sit here by the fire, watching television of an evening. She made wedding-ring quilts for the marriages of all her children. She quilted and watched Bonanza and The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie, all those frontier melodramas. I remember most fondly her sense of design, her love of color, and her overriding practical need to find a use for every scrap. She had the hots for Pernell Roberts of Bonanza. He wore a hairpiece and she wanted to rip it off in a steamy fit of passion. Or so I believe.

  It’s true that I didn’t volunteer to Maddie—or to anyone—that I’m quilting. I know the significance they’d find in it. But somehow quilting makes me feel closer to Maddie and Lisa. Not that either of them would ever want to do such a thing. I also want to know what it’s like to be a man improbably piecing a quilt. It’s interesting: the clumsiness of my fingers on the needle, the times I’ve pricked my finger, the snip-snap of scissors through cotton. I lay the blocks on the floor and play with them for hours. Maybe I want to know what it means to be the kind of man a woman walks out on.

  I’m not making a modern quilt, one of those ugly things made to hang on a
wall. I hate those landfill collages—chewing-gum wrappers, plastic bags, tinfoil, bottle caps, all shouting a statement. I went to the Fabric Barn and bought yard-long remnants of delicate prints. They sell them especially for people making old-fashioned quilts because no one wears those prints anymore or keeps scrap bags. I know Grandma’s scrap bags still exist somewhere in the old house. I need to go find them.

  My pattern is a design I saw in a magazine. It is windows—many, many prisms all shimmering and reflecting the complexities of light. As soon as I pieced the first block, I could imagine the rest radiating from it, reflecting and interlocking and overlapping, like the light on a flowing river. It’s all shades of blue—translucent and silvery and sky and dusk. Slate and rock and ice.

  Grandma pieced in blues. I gaze into these windows and work toward the time when I get the quilt all pieced and can spread it out in the light. What I like best is the way the act of piecing the blocks is part imagination and part patience. It throws me outside time. It slows me down so much I feel like a Russian standing in line for hours to buy toilet paper. It becomes a meditation, stitch after stitch after stitch.

  I won’t tell Maddie about the quilt. I’ll just wait and show it to her when I’m finished. I’ll surprise her, and then we’ll go back to the way we were. The quilt will be for our daughter, a present for her marriage someday.

  Proper Gypsies

  In London, I kept wondering about everything. I wondered what it meant to be civilized. Over there, I was so self-conscious about being an American—a wayward overseas cousin, crude and immature. I wondered if tea built character, and if “Waterloo” used to be slang for “water closet” and then got shortened to “loo.” Did Princess Di shop on sunny Goodge Street? And why did it take high-heeled sneakers so long to become a fashion—decades after “Good Golly Miss Molly”? I wondered why there was so much music in London. The bands listed in Time Out made it seem there was a new wave, an explosion of revolutionary energy blasting from the forbidding dance clubs of Soho. The names were clever and demanding: the New Fast Automatic Daffodils, the Okey Dokey Stompers, Tea for the Wicked, Bedbugs, Gear Junkies, Frank the Cat, Velcro Fly, Paddy Goes to Holyhead. But the dismal, disheveled teens who passed me on Oxford Street made me think there could be no real music, only squall-pop, coming out of the desperation of the bottom classes. Yet I wondered what rough beast now was slouching toward its birth. I had an open mind.

  However, I wasn’t prepared for what happened in London. I was cut loose—on holiday, as they said in Britain. I had little money and no job to go home to, so this was more of a fling than a vacation. I had abruptly left the guy I was involved with, and now he was on a retreat (on retreat?) at a Trappist monastery. He had immersed himself in Thomas Merton books. Andy was very serious-minded and had high cholesterol. Actually, I believe he found Merton glamorous, but I always remembered the electric fan in India that electrocuted him—an object lesson for transcendental meditators, I thought. I was separated from Jack, my husband. New Age Andy had been my midlife course correction, but now he was off to count beads and hoe beans, or whatever the monks do there at Gethsemani. When he was a child, my son saw the dark-robed monks out hoeing in a field, and he called the place a monk farm. I didn’t know what I’d do about Andy. He was virtuous, but he made me restless. I knew I was always trying to fit in and rebel simultaneously. My husband called that the Marie Antoinette paradox.

  I was all alone in London, so in a way I was on a retreat, too. I had a borrowed flat in Bloomsbury for a month. My old college friend Louise worked in London as a government translator, but she was away, translating for a consulate in Italy. Back in the sixties, the summer after our junior year, Louise and I had gone to Europe together—“Europe on $5 a Day.” During that miserable trip, Louise’s mother died back in Jacksonville, and she was already buried by the time the news reached us in Rome. We didn’t know what to do but grimly continue our travels. We ended up in England, and we took a train to the Lake District, where we met some cute guys from Barrow-on-Furness who had never seen an American before.

  Louise’s flat was on a brick-paved mews just off Bloomsbury Avenue. It stood at the street level, and all the flats had window boxes of late-fall blooms. There was no backyard garden—just as well, since I didn’t want to mother plants. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I was supposed to be thinking. Or maybe not thinking. I wondered if I should go back to Jack. I didn’t want to rush back automatically, like a boomerang—or a New Fast Automatic Daffodil.

  Two days after my arrival from JFK, I still had my days and nights mixed up. On Sunday, I slept till well past two. After breakfast I went walking, a long way. I walked up Tottenham Court Road, past all the tacky electronics stores, to Regent’s Park. I walked through the park to the zoo. When I got there, the zoo was closing. I decided not to proceed farther into the dim interior of the park but walked back the way I had come, on the wide avenue. The last of the sun threw the bare trees into silhouette.

  As I walked toward the flat, I kept thinking about Louise. I hadn’t seen her in five years, and we were never really close. She was always following some new career or set of people. She thrived on people and ideas, as if she hoped that any minute someone might come along with a totally new plan that would radically change her life. Her closet was a dull rainbow of business suits, with accessories like scarves and belts and necklaces looped on the hangers and a row of shoes below. Big earrings were stashed in the jacket pockets. There was nothing else in the flat that seemed personal, no knickknacks or collections. She was without hobbies. No stacks of magazines, only some recent issues of Vogue and a lone Time Out. There was nothing to be recycled or postponed. The cupboards had only a few packages of Bovril and tea, and the refrigerator had been thoroughly cleaned out for my arrival. A maid was due each Thursday. I knew no one back home who hired someone to clean. In my neighborhood, in a small town on the edge of the Appalachian Mountains, if you hired somebody to clean or cook or mow, people would figure you had a lot of money and hit you for a loan, or they would gossip.

  Louise’s place was like a lawyer’s reception room. The art on the walls was functional—a few posters from the National Gallery and a nondescript seascape. But in the hallway between the living room and the bedroom was a row of eight-by-ten glossy color photographs of plucked dead turkeys. The photos were framed with thin red metal edges. In the first one the turkey was sitting upright and headless, its legs dangling, in a child’s red rocking chair. In the second, the turkey was sitting in the child’s compartment of a supermarket cart. I could make out the word “Loblaw’s” on the cart, so I knew the photographs were American. In the third, the turkey was lying on a rug by a fireplace, like a pet. In the last, it was buckled into a car seat.

  I longed to show Jack these pictures. He was a photographer, and I knew he would hate them. The pictures were hideous, but funny, too, because the turkeys seemed so humanized. I had a son in college, but Louise had no children and had never married. Was this her creepy vision of children?

  It was almost dark when I reached the flat. A sprinkle of rain had showered the nodding mums in the window box. Clumsily, I unlocked the outer door with an oversized skeleton key and switched on the light in the vestibule. Beyond was a door with a different, more modern key. I opened the second door; then a chill flashed through me. Something was wrong. I could see my duffel bag on the floor. I was sure I had left it in a hall closet. The room was dark except for the vestibule light. Frightened, I darted back out, pulling both doors shut. I jammed the skeleton key into the lock and turned it. At the corner, I looked back, trying to remember if I had left the bedroom curtains parted slightly. Was someone peeking out?

  I walked swiftly to the nearest phone box, a few blocks away, and called the number Louise had left me, a friend of hers in case I needed help. It was an 081 number—too far away to be much use, I thought. A machine answered. At the beep I paused, then hung up.

  I might have been mistaken, I thought.
I could be brave and investigate. I walked back—three long blocks of closed bookshops and sandwich bars. It would be embarrassing to call the police and then remember I had left the bag on the floor. I had experienced deceptions of memory before and had a theory about them. I tried hard to think. Louise had assured me, “England is not like the States, Nancy. It’s safe here. We don’t have all those guns.”

  I had some trouble getting the outer door unlocked. I was turning the key the wrong way. I had to try it several times. When I got inside, I fit the other key to the second door, but it pushed open before I could turn the key. It should have locked automatically when I closed it before, but now it was open. I could see my bag there, but I thought it might have traveled six inches forward. Now I realized that the outer door may have been unlocked, too. My courage failed me again. Turning, I fumbled once more with the awkward skeleton key. Then I rushed past the bookstores and the sandwich bars to the call box, where I learned the police was 999, not 911.

  “I think my flat has been broken into,” I said as calmly as I could.

  A friendly female voice took down the information. “Please tell me the address.”

  I gave it to her. “I’m American. I’m visiting. It’s a friend’s flat.”

  “Right.” The voice paused. The way the English said “Right” was as if they were saying, “Of course. I knew that.” You can’t surprise them.

  “I thought London was supposed to be safe,” I said. “I never expected this.” In my nervousness, I was babbling. Instantly, I realized I had probably insulted the London police for not doing their job.

  “Don’t worry, madam. I’ll send someone straight-away.” She repeated the address and told me to stand on the corner of Bloomsbury Avenue.

  I waited on the corner, my hands in the pockets of my rain parka. People were moving about casually. The scene seemed normal enough, and I was aware that I didn’t believe anything truly calamitous could happen to me. This felt like an out-of-body experience, except that I needed to pee. Soon four policemen rode up in a ridiculous little car. I had heard they didn’t go by the name “bobbies” anymore. (Not P.C.? I had no idea.) Two of them stayed with the car, and two approached me, asking me questions. They took my keys.