The Orange Blossom Express

by Marlena Evangeline

  After the thrill of the first dance, when her mother and father joined the other dancers in some configuration of allemande left, allemande right, Maggie would look for Sally Johnson and Jimmy Bell because their parents danced too, and the children would escape to the Zanja, an old irrigation ditch that still carried water where they’d listen to the medley of the fiddle jingle with the fresh sound of water slapping over moss-covered rocks.

  The Zanja had been the main water source of the early haciendas before the town of Redlands was built, ribboning across the desert like a silver thread, carrying water to the rural citrus groves of early California. Even after the construction of Big Bear Dam, which ensured the town’s water source, the Zanja linked to it, and the streets of the town were laid at an angle to allow for irrigation flow, so none of the avenues in Redlands ran true east or west. Next to the rush of water, down in the Zanja, the wayward children would watch the shooting stars of summer glide through the heavens until the music stopped and then run hurriedly back to the dance floor and pretend they’d never left.

  Even at home, the impetuous Maggie would wander ever further than the amphitheatre of wooden seats of the Bowl, and one day, at the mere age of three and a half, Maggie trekked past the Bowl, and library, and the Lincoln Memorial, with its two pools full of pennies, all the way to town to the City Hall, where her mother worked. She could not understand the drama when her father, frightened and enraged, caught up to her, and yet, she would not accept the fact, ever, in her life that she was not a free agent of light and sun and might travel as she willed. At that very young age, she sulked against the punishment she received and knew that her behavior had been entirely acceptable. And a year later, when she released the brake pedal on her father’s ’39 Ford sitting parked out in front of the house, and thrilled then as the car moved away from the curb and into the street, even then, she scoffed at her father’s unusual concern. Her secret independence grew like a gangly fast-growing vine.

  Zihuatanejo

  All things Norse boiled in Maggie’s blood, even here, south, more south than her Southern California heritage, more south than her Norse forefathers, south and Southern, her blonde heritage blurred into this world of dust and smoke, her own manner as strikingly stubborn as the Swedes before her, and her own sultry temperament stirring to a slight anger the longer she waited in the Mexican street. For some reason, the thought of her mother rose like an apparition. She sucked the thought back into herself. She couldn’t wouldn’t think of her mother now, would she? In Mexico it never pays to think of your good, nice, determined, ever so prim and proper mother. Especially that stubborn and strong-willed determined and ever-not-so-proper Maggie, and especially not then, waiting and annoyed about Felipe who still hadn’t come. That’s what she thought right then, at that moment trying not to think of her mother, and so she didn’t, didn’t think of her, not actually, but like all good daughters and all bad daughters too, something of that ever so prim and proper mother lived right under the rile of freckled skin that belonged ever so strongly to Maggie alone, yet, there, there, in that Norse blood Maggie’s mother could be felt, right then, even on that dusty Mexican street, that mother who’d never been further south than Tijuana, looking though memory at Maggie with a puzzled and curious look, like she’d done a zillion times before as Maggie grew herself to young womanhood; there, that mother, staring at her from the past, puzzled and hurt at Maggie’s strange and bewildering behavior, looked sadly at her daughter with her pale snow blue eyes, and if we could have seen that mother looking at the strong-willed child we would have seen her shedding soft blue tears.

  Green green, it’s green they say …

  GRASS SPEWED FROM THE MACHINE like blowing snow as Johnny Morrison pushed the lawn mower across the wide front yard: under the chirping whirr of metal, the sliced green plume of grasses flew from the blades over the sidewalk and over the small child following in his path. He swiped his hand across his brow and smiled.

  “Can I get the blanket, daddy?” Maggie asked.

  “Okay, go get your mother.”

  The delighted child ran up the steps, and when she and her mother returned Emma spread a blue blanket over the cut of fresh grass. Johnny Morrison smiled.

  “Let me rest for a second,” he cautioned.

  “I’ll get you some lemonade first,” said Emma. “Do you want some, Maggie?”

  “No. I just want to fly.” Her mother frowned and went into the house.

  When she returned she had two glasses of lemonade. She gave one to Maggie, who took a small sip.

  “Done, Mom. Are you done yet, Dad?”

  “I am. Are you ready to fly?” Johnny gulped the lemonade.

  “Oh yes, Daddy. I am.”

  Emma rushed over to the blanket, excited and pleased too, pleased with her child, her husband, the warm summer day, the cut grass, the small wooden house, the palms above, pleased with bounty and living, and the blonde child of her loins, and the tall gangly Swede that she loved for his charm and gentleness and goodhearted nature: sometimes hockey player, gambler, devil-may-care adventurer, mortician, all around good-guy man, and smiled at her husband and their simple day that seemed larger than most, and she grabbed two corners of the blanket as Maggie plopped herself in the middle and Johnny grabbed the other two corners and smiled at his pretty wife, petite, strong willed, devoted, hard working, kind, the pretty woman he’d been struck with at a malt-shop in Minnesota, bragging later, amongst the guffaws of his buddies, that he’d marry that pretty girl. The hockey players, seed farmers, pilots and bums that were his buddies bent over in laughter.

  As Maggie’s parents tightened the blanket and lifted her off the grass, the child thrilled: almost airborne. Inside her, somewhere, delightful excitement swelled like a magnificent bird, as if she were now some winged creature, unconnected to earth and its trappings, and as her parents flung her up from the blanket, she felt an unbearable lightness, and felt she might suspend herself in light and air forever, and then gravity, down and down and down into the soft sling, and giggling, she flew up, and up and up again, suspended, a child of light and air and summer, and down and down and down into gravity, begging them to throw her higher and higher into the sheer delight of moment, excruciating lightness, suspended in weightless delight: joy.

  “Incorrigible,” laughed Emma. “We can’t do this forever.”

  “Please, mommy,” begged Maggie, “more.”

  “Darling, I’ve a cake to bake and I must get ready for work tomorrow.” The child scowled as her mother put down one end of the blanket and went to the house.

  “Darn it,” pouted Maggie.

  “Help me,” said Johnny. “We’ll clean up the grass. You sweep.”

  “I hate sweeping, daddy. I want to fly.”

  “Do it anyway,” he said. “And then we’ll go down town for ice cream. You can’t wear us out doing that all day long.”

  “Okay,” she consented, and picked the large broom from the side of the house and dragged it behind her to the yard. Johnny took the broom and swept the walkway.

  Later, in the California dark of southern midnight she awoke in the deep quiet of the old house and listened to the sounds of night: outside, crickets and frogs chirped a midnight song, and somewhere long away, a dog barked. Up near her chin, a black cat purred, and beyond, as if in some other world, she listened as if she were another child listening, to the child listening and they seemed suspended in each other’s consciousness, as if similar parts of a kaleidoscope, somehow unattached, somehow bound, suspended in some moment, floating in each other’s lightness, some indelible moment that spun like a flying child. And both children knew themselves to be other than what the world thought. It would always be so. The willfulness that stirred the blood of her grandfather, Osmond, swarmed in her own blood like an ancient dream, slivers of sudden change, as bright forward as a child tracing some archetypal motion, as if some other thing inhabited a part of her being—embedded in her soul—and that thing seeme
d to have its own willfulness—some inherited dynamic—a sudden restlessness that stirred her to movement, an essence she wore like casual circumstance.

  Zihuatanejo

  This wasn’t exactly a casual circumstance, although you might have thought, at first glance: a tourist, perhaps? but that’s not why she had come to Mexico, and even Maggie seemed pretty casual about the whole thing: looking casual under great stress is sophistication and Maggie had sophistication bred right into her Redlands bones, so even though she was annoyed, a passer-by might not have noticed; the old man, for instance, didn’t notice that she seemed annoyed. He saw a pretty girl petting a burro, a pretty gringa, a blonde thing. The burro put his head against Maggie’s arm as she petted; this annoyed Maggie too, but you couldn’t quite tell because she moved away from the animal and went back down towards the copper pots. As she did this, the old man took the rope attached to the bridle of the burro and led it away. Maggie did not see this, and she picked up a hammered copper bowl and ran her fingers over the pummeled surface. Just another tourist is what the old man had thought, but not so the copper vendor; the copper vendor, a suspicious man, peered at her through his opaque eyes. The surface-clouded eyes matched the hammered surface of bowls, and the mottled iris hid the salacious intent: He didn’t like Maggie because she wouldn’t buy the brass framed mirror and he knew she had the money to do so: he could smell money, not only the money scent, but the actual amount. Maggie could’ve bought the entire shop of wares and the man knew it. He hadn’t made thought into a certain suspicion just then, but he knew instinctively she wasn’t really a tourist. A buyer perhaps? Someone that might try and cheat him out of money if she wanted more than one piece of copper? Someone’s lover, just passing time? A thief? The suspicions lived underneath the gargoyleous eye, rolled like a whale and disappeared as the thought occurred to him that she might come back and buy later. Leave her be, he thought. She wants the mirror. She will return and pay full price. He noticed that she smoked too much, but he couldn’t tell why; if a man had been with her he would have suspected that it was the man’s fault, and it was a man’s fault but a man Maggie had not yet met.

  The other life before this one would make her cautious, so when she checked her wallet she looked around first to make certain the copper vendor wasn’t watching.

  I’d already left the alley, and ambled then to a street vendor to eat a crisp turkey taco. I knew trouble when I saw it, and thought, rather foolishly, that if I left right then I wouldn’t find it.

  Maggie knew trouble too, and she carried trouble along with that sophistication in a most unusual and provocative manner. She knew this about herself and she liked herself more because of it. She dared anybody to bother her, the attitude providing her with enough substance to operate without annoyance. After checking her wallet, she bent and tied the shoelace on her Converse All Stars, one had loosened and dragged on the ground when she walked, and after tying a double knot she noticed the burro had gone. It made her feel lonely, not alone; Maggie always managed to be alone, but rarely did she feel lonely like she did right then. The feeling lasted only a millisecond, not more, and soon in the midst of her annoyance she decided upon another shop to explore. Down even further than the copper wares were some embroidered goods and she fingered through a pile of cotton blouses, and then, back towards the end of the stall were some heavy woven sweaters. She wove herself into one of the sweaters, pulled the off-white dream around her shoulders, and paid a woman for the sweater. Down the street, the copper vendor seethed beneath his bent teeth but Maggie moved on towards the center of town, thinking that if Felipe finally came, right then, when she wanted to do something else, he would simply have to find her. Right then, is when she bumped into me, then casually excused herself and continued on her way. She would have nothing to do with someone as disheveled as me eating a street taco, but headed to a stand where she ordered some fresh carrot juice.

  Sunday dinner …

  At least once a week in Redlands, a pot roast made generous with potatoes and sweet peas and corn flanked the Morrison’s table; this saddled by loaves of wheat colored bread, and condiments, homemade pickles, and jams and jellies and home canned fruits too nourished the Morrison dinners. Pot roast with carrots and mashed potatoes became as common on Sunday as Weber’s bread and Skippy peanut butter were during the week.

  The eyes of John Morrison flashed in wonder because of the warmth, the simple bounty, the promise of California.

  The spirit of provision that came of the farming ways transferred to this warmer climate, and, though they struggled from paycheck to paycheck, somehow the dinner table never felt that lack. If there wasn’t meat, there was cheese, and if there wasn’t cheese, potatoes round and plenty made soups and breads and cakes, and if there weren’t potatoes, there were peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

  Maggie did not acknowledge the effort it took Emma Morrison to set that ample and stunning table: she was young and we must forgive her. And even though she seemed a dutiful daughter, her mind did more than her mother would have ever allowed; her thoughts tramped around in their own ways, rambled into corners no one ever imagined, took their direction from the wayward pages of a frayed book, snuck then into ideas remote and profound.

  But the family’s sentence had moments, even though it wasn’t a long sentence: It wasn’t a paragraph or anything. That’s not how it felt to Maggie, not then anyway; later, much later it would be bigger, much much bigger, maybe even a book, but then it was just a simple sentence. She kept looking further than her daily bread as if it was only her spirit that needed food. She looked past the extraordinary effort her mother made to provide and sustain the small family, past the gentle nature of her struggling father, past the present circumstance into the lives of the families that lived in the larger, grander houses and wondered how it was they lived. She wandered the grand magnolia-lined streets where the massive Victorians spread like the large trees and wondered what happened inside: Did they eat meat and potatoes? Were their blouses and shirts starched as tight and clean as the ones her mother ironed? What did they do to get those houses? Were they given them? Would she get lost if she went there? Did that make them more important, or less? Did they eat peas with potatoes? Did they work too? When they went, where did they go? Why, what, where, when? The questions erupted like small pellets and disappeared under the blonde skull.

  Had John Morrison been of another generation and not bred by the gloomy Norse blood, he might have been a painter or a writer: but he shunned words because they were the realm of his father, Osmond, who after years as a successful farmer, became a Lutheran preacher. The booming word of God echoed in the Morrison’s large homestead like the bray of the Badger runaways infusing every juncture of John’s adolescence. Success had given Osmond the treasured time to think deep thoughts and these thoughts were of the bountiful earth and how it nourished him and they echoed back to him through the Bible he kept turned open in the living room. Reverence filled his days: and the boastful farmer became full of religious zeal and pride. Every night he read to the family and listened as they recited verse back to him. The religious fervor that had seized the farm drove John Morrison west with his bride.

  And John’s gentle nature infused the family, but Maggie sometimes wondered if gentleness meant weakness, and she wondered if weakness were good or bad. She felt the aura of her father’s gentle spirit a good thing, but sensed something else in the fabric of the family that had not yet come to bear. She thought herself profound when she thought these things, knew herself to be apart from the family that bred her, but then, part of it too, even though she did not always know which part of it suited her most.

  Zihuatanejo

  She didn’t feel profound right then, warmer now that a sweater curled around her shoulders, but profound had left earlier and anger reappeared like a bright snake. She skittered through the marketplace in American fashion, too fast, too quick, too casual; the Mexicans ignored her and she liked that. She liked
being ignored when she didn’t want to be bothered. She let go of the anger, like a bright kite, and wondered what it might feel like to be entirely invisible. She thought she’d like it sometimes, like now, but for the most part, she thought the idea of invisibility annoying. As much as she liked being ignored when she wanted to be ignored, she hated being ignored when she wanted recognition. In fact, nothing annoyed her more, not even Felipe, so she decided she might think of something less annoying and perhaps more engaging: she thought about the money, knowing she’d brought too much. The three thousand dollars in her purse was three thousand too much; even though the other twelve thousand at the hotel had been left in place, she thought about what she’d left and worried about what she’d brought. But she only worried because she had nothing else to do at the moment; she’d already shopped and smoked and waited and now she had to worry just to get to where she wanted to be. The sun had dimmed and the fog had lifted somewhat, but the dingy brown of the village seemed much the same as it had three hours before. Three hours, she thought, and hoped that she could make Felipe pay for making her wait. Oh, she knew he’d come soon: he wanted the money as much as she wanted to spend it.

  On a staggering night in June, the Police wheeled a small blonde child into the mortuary where John Morrison worked as an embalmer. The similarity in appearance to his own child, Maggie, buckled his knees; he fainted for the first time in his life. And for the first time in his life, John Morrison asked someone else to finish his job. He walked the short block to home, Courtner’s Mortuary being only a short block on the other side of the Bowl, and sat down at the kitchen table and cried alone. When he had recovered his composure, and later, after Emma came home from work, he announced that he had quit the mortuary and would never, ever embalm another body again. The news shattered Emma, as it had been a good job. They could always pay the rent, but she understood her gentle husband’s nature, and felt a supreme duty to support his choice. Something would come: they were certain. And come it did. John got a job installing linoleum and tile, and soon Maggie tagged along to jobs where he showed her how he softened the tiles with the torch, took then the hooked knife, drew it along a clever line, scooted then the tile in place.