What did she want? Why wasn’t this brain drain working? She wanted the familiar, and the house where she lived had become foreign land; she had learned a new language to live there, but she couldn’t speak it. It wasn’t really her language! It was just body language. Hank and Maggie had had great sex. A body language. But that was gone. Lately, those words curled up in first person, alone, with no modifiers, on blank white sheets. So was that the extent of their relationship? Sex? And if so, what now? What was that word she was looking for? What about her heart? If she was banging her brains out, surely she was in love. Wasn’t she? Or she had been. Hadn’t she? What about that heart? What tongue does it speak? Where might she speak it? To whom? Hank didn’t speak her heart language. They’d lost touch. When they lost touch, they lost out. What about her soul? What language did it speak? Where might she speak it? To who? Who that fit in this thought? Love? Was that the word she looked for? Where might she find it? What page was that on? Where was that book? What shelf? Whose library? Her heart kept writing questions her head couldn’t cash, and the head kept insisting the heart pay attention. She could not think herself out of it, and she could not think in it. They lived together, of course, we know this, but the more money Hank made, the more he was gone; the more he was gone, the lonelier she became, the lonelier she felt, the darker burned her thoughts, the blacker the coals, the more difficult it was to see. There was no light inside the caverns of her mind. The cave had grown black. Someone had tripped the breaker. Who was that? Do you have a match? Might you light one? With just a little light, we might help her read the next page. Find the right word. Write the right word. The well-placed word can work miracles even in the darkest of tunnels. What might the word be? It’s an action word: a verb. The verb will lead somewhere. The action here precedes the noun. Or does it? What’s before action? Where might the noun reside if there is no action? In darkness? In the cave with Maggie? What’s in the dark cave with Maggie? Is anyone there? It’s hard to say now. But we’ll say later. You just have to be there when they say it. What they? The they. The who are they? We don’t always know, but they’ll say it. You can be sure of it. So. Being there is important. You can’t hear a thing unless you’re there. There is no light unless you’re listening. Without the listener the dark is darker. Maggie is invisible in the darkness. She cannot see and no one can see her. It’s very difficult to write without light. And you need to write to find the right word. Otherwise you’re writing in the dark, blindly, groping for things. What things? Anything. Anything you might see, feel, or touch. Anything that connects to a thing. Even if that thing dissolves and puddles to dust. That thingyness is what we grope for. And that we grope is human. All too human.
The freedom that Hank had discovered allowed her less; her freedom was directly related to his. When he had less, she had more; now that he had more, hers seemed slipping away. The more he was gone, the closer he expected her to stay to the house; the more she stayed home, the lonelier she became. The lonelier she became, the less she was agreeable. When she was less agreeable, the less Hank stayed home. He was still the subject. And she was the modifier. But her modifications had turned sour and dark. She looked to Hank to change the description, but Hank was a noun, the subject of the sentence. Maggie was not only on the wrong page, she was the wrong word in the wrong sentence on the wrong page. She needed a complex sentence, her own complete thought, joined by a conjunctive to another; and, that sentence needed a related degree of complexity. Indeed, this compound relationship might be extraordinarily simple if it were just let to happen, but Maggie was still an adjective. She hadn’t seen the light.
The ways Hank entertained himself had not always included Maggie, except for body language, and now in the new silence, the gap yawned wide, like a crevasse, in some great glacial sheet of ice. He learned to fly, spending his time at the airport, or in the sky, coming home excited and exhilarated. His spirit soared while hers diminished. He talked to the sky, the clouds, the air. Maggie worried about the drugs, about Hank flying, about their relationship, her life. The negative defined her; she was not of her society but apart from it, not of her relationship, but apart from it. She dug deeper in the garden soil, cultivating, feeding the soil different manures, visiting nurseries, buying soil supplements: oyster shells, blood meal, lime, cocoa bean hulls, straw; she bought what she could and brought it home to build the shallow soils. But her garden still languished; the winds blew so strong at the ranch she could not get the earth there to yield, as if her wind had another destination, as if the garden she kept trying to nurture could not grow there.
But the world of earth was not Hank’s world; he was of the sky. Hank flew higher—in airplanes, with drugs, it didn’t matter. He used the ranch for touch and goes—a practice landing field—touching down—taking-off—touching down—taking off—never really taxi-ing to the terminal—never tying down. They were never in the same place at the same time. When he came home, she left to go shopping; when she came back, he left to party. When they went places together, they only occupied the physical space; they did not link, there was no chain reaction. She had become less than he thought. He had become someone she didn’t know. He complained that she didn’t like to do anything, but she argued that she just didn’t like doing his things. She thought getting loaded was boring and wasteful; she hated the fucking airplanes. She was sick to death of grass strung out all over the house, and kilos, and stems and fucking marijuana seeds everyplace. And if he wanted friends over to get loaded, she said, she wasn’t going to cook, thank you, or be there, or clean up the mess. And why, just why the fuck didn’t he clean up his own god damn kilos?
He said he made the money and she didn’t do any fucking thing anyway, so why, just why, didn’t she shut up and clean up the fucking kilos herself? And why couldn’t she be civil to his friends, and why, just why did she think she shouldn’t clean up the mess? Who, just who, did she think she was? So she went to a ceramics class and learned to throw pottery. Sometimes she could center the clay, but more often than not she would struggle with the awkward lump, watching it spin on the wheel, half a second off, like the beat of her heart, swishing in circles underneath her firm fingers that pressed into the clay trying to control its form, while the clay kept spinning, spinning, spinning. She bought a potter’s wheel and set up a studio at home and practiced finding a center. She replaced baking bread with baking clay. She spent hours kneading clay, pushing it back and forth like bread dough, building its strength and elasticity, slowly, repetitively, day and day, pushing the clay this way and that, waiting for it to magically transform, and transform her, or it, or this life, or something, something that needed great changing. So daily, she pushed, again and again, pushing, hoping for change, hoping for some transformation, some accumulation that was bound to stack to something sometime, wasn’t it? Wasn’t this daily bread, this clay, this earth, wasn’t this something? The clay she kneaded, back and forth, the mud that needed her hands to form some chalice, some vessel, became an obsession.
Maggie took care to keep the clay moist, to cover it well, to protect it from the dry air that still troubled the house with dust and soot and bothersomeness. It was as if, she thought, day after day, kicking away at the potter’s wheel, that she spun the outside dry sands and rock in her hands, soaking the dry soils with waters, trying with her might to make it yield more than its promised, inevitable, dust.
Hank hated having clay in the house, and became more annoyed with Maggie by the day. Maggie dressed now in the same baggy muddy pants and a long work shirt, waking early each morning to start work, to knead clay, to slip on her tennies and kick them rhythmically, in opposite directions, one forward, one back, rhythmically, back and forth, against the cement disc of the potter’s wheel, and watching the clay underneath her hand search and yield to its center. Thump thump, thump thump, her legs spun the wheel, her hands formed the clay. By nine o’clock each morning her hands were rough from the wet clay and the back porch was spattered with
mud. Hank became fastidious about his dress and left the house early to be away from the mess of clay. He was bound for the sky. Instead of muddy Redwing boots on the floor, he spread maps over the tables, and became annoyed if the house hadn’t been cleaned. Most often, now, Maggie forgot the house, spending all her time making pottery or working in the garden. Books on flying and cloud formations found their way into the house, stuffed between Maggie’s messy collection of reed baskets and dried wildflowers.
The house overfull, not bare or empty; the corners were still cluttered with tools and saws and tough leather gloves with black grease and the sap of orange and eucalyptus trees, but these things were covered with dust and were no longer used, nor put away. Maggie refused to handle any of Hank’s belongings, and Hank hadn’t the time to deal with the tools of his past. His entrepreneurial interests had been quickened by his new skills as a pilot. He bought a plane, and stayed away for days and weeks. He had discovered the sexual revolution, deciding to take the revolution on the road, without Maggie. He developed an interest in short women with large breasts—anything different from Maggie’s tall, willowy, flat-breasted frame. The distinctiveness of the ranch had diminished. They were captives looking for escape.
Yet when Hank came home full of enthusiasm and wonder Maggie found him enchanting, as if he were but a small child, and the impishness of his wonder and excitement was electric. The charge would excite her in the way a mother found joy in a child’s discovery, a moment that she cherished not so much for herself but for him. Those moments, however, set her apart even more since she could not share them. They belonged to the child in Hank, and the child in Maggie had ceased to exist. She became the negative parent, the voyeur. She had let Hank define her. This was not an inside job.
Patrick left for San Diego, not only to develop some more business contacts, but to re-establish an old friendship, and this friend kept him away from the ranch more and more. Maggie felt doubly isolated. She was separated from the world by the business that Hank conducted; there was only a small subculture where she felt comfortable because their life existed outside the law; she was separated from Hank because of his interests; she was separated now from her very real friendship with Patrick because of this old relationship; she was isolated from herself because she was bound up in Hank’s life which she had made her own. Her heart and her head were still fueled differently, premium and diesel, and the engine was missing, put-a-put, put-a-put-a-put, cough, cough, put-put, put-put-put. The engine was lost in action. The little engine that had once thought it could, couldn’t; this engine was on the wrong track. Her two tracks of cognition were running on empty, and the empty chamber couldn’t fuel a heart. It only fueled heartache. And that heartache was still half a second-off, beating, in off-time, never on-time, thump-a-thump, thump-a-thump, thump-a-thump. Her heart ached for what she had lost with Hank, as well as what she had lost herself. She lost interest in reading and could find little reason anymore to leave the ranch, instead, lighting a joint from time to time, and falling into a dreamy despair, languishing in the heartache, taking the growing puppy for long rambling walks, and sitting in the sun with the light on her face, while she let the wind blow tangles into her long thin hair.
Jailhouse Rock …
CHAPTER 20
BY THE TIME SHE WAS ALLOWED to use the phone, Lucy had grown accustomed to jail. It’s not that she liked it, which would be the wrong way to describe her feelings. But it was her life. The way she lived. A prisoner. She had adjusted to the reality of prison life, and, since she could do absolutely nothing about the situation, she adapted like an amoeba, or an animal shut in a cage, or a species on the brink of extinction. As is common in most species, especially in the pregnant female, she looked, instinctively, and relentlessly, for a way to survive. Physical adaptation was primarily important because of the child; she had grown used to the bed with the sagging springs; her back no longer ached because of it.
Slowly, her demanding pregnant body had adapted to the food and the chiles and the swelling discomfort of heartburn. Her mind even adapted to the fact that her body had no freedom. But her thoughts refused adaptation. Her thoughts were free and her mind was alive. In this she took her satisfaction, returning to her thoughts, again and again, releasing them like pollen from the flower of her mind, setting them free in a vast summer of ideas: ideas about her future, and how the past must yield to the present in the process of creating the future—reaping a bountiful harvest in this unlikely garden.
So when she finally called Mary Pointer she did not do so in panic; the slow acculturation she had experienced had dulled her American sense of time and place. She was more of her current circumstance than even she realized; she was willing to wait for the vast wheels of time to create a paper trail to her door, the ream of paperwork that would instigate her release. The phone call was merely a formality that was extended to her, finally, and, in truth, eased the responsibility of her release onto her family. Her mother was an aggressive business woman, and Lucy knew that she would eventually be able to circumvent the difficulties of the international red tape. By the time Lucy called home, she was able to reassure her family of her circumstance, that she was safe and not in any kind of danger; and, she realized the additional time had been a blessing, and gratefully took the lesson to heart. That is not to say, however, that things in jail were comfortable; they were not, but Lucy grew accustomed to the daily routine. The sheets were still a cloudy gray, not white and bright like the bed clothing she had once grown accustomed to. The woolen blankets felt harsh against her bare skin; she would not deny that, nor would she think of complaining, even when wakefulness mingled with the light of dawn and she felt that she could not under any circumstance attempt another night of sleep in such uncomfortable conditions. Perseverance, however, became her helpmate, and each night, again, she would crawl into the saggy bed and pull the scratchy woolen blanket over her smooth skin and her unbelievably swollen belly, and toss, and turn, into the next dawn. The mornings were the better part of the day; the excitement of rising and brushing away the discomfort of night, and wondering, for Lucy, what the day’s routine might bring. That the routine of prison was of interest to her was not as odd as it might seem. The routine was decidedly different than any Lucy had ever encountered. Each day became a learning experience; and, even though it was pressed upon her, the days were rich in experience. Lucy’s pregnancy did not keep her from work anymore than it kept her from learning. After she no longer had morning sickness, she joined Ruby in the kitchen. She learned how to mix the masa and roll tortillas. She became an expert at making salsa, and started paying attention to the prison garden where the tomato plants grew along with the tomatillos, and the peppers, and the long red chiles. The more she cooked with the women, the more she learned their language; she learned to read the way they moved and the gestures they made; she began to hear the subtle nuance of inflection that changed a word of warning to one of anger. She watched the women with the children and became enchanted with the way even the youngest children became an integral part of the chores of each day, rather than being set off from them as in America. The children were underfoot in the kitchen, helping the women, and sometimes the older children took the younger ones and cleaned the rooms or helped other workers doing other chores.
The children were raised in common here; each woman was unafraid to discipline or love the child of another. The prison had a sound, she thought, a beat, something old and well sung, a chant, perhaps, ancient and primordial. It was a sound she had not heard before and it came to her through the slow rhythm of the women and the children at work and at play. The beat rose slowly, pumping to life in the flurry of cooking and feeding and cleaning, and then lingered slowly like the afternoon, and rose again for early evening before sinking to quiet with the sun. The tune repeating itself, day by day, again and again, lulling the women like a sleepy dance.
An open fireplace was the central feature of the kitchen, and here Lucy roasted tomato
es and peppers and garlic for salsa. The pungent smells mingled with the sounds of the day. Lucy turned a tomato on the indoor hearth, one side had blackened to perfection. The onions were not yet cooked and the skin of the pepper and the garlic was just starting to blister. She pushed them closer to the fire. A large griddle to the side of the fireplace collected heat indirectly, and here Ruby cooked the tortillas, scooping a nut-sized piece of masa into her palms, and patting it back and forth in her moist cupped palms, clap clap, clap clap, expertly forming the soft masa into a saucer-sized circle, clap clap. Then slipping it to the hot griddle until the masa formed bubbles, while using the tips of her fingers to press the edges of the tortilla as it cooked, watching carefully, the bubbles, as to know when, exactly, her expert fingers might flip the tortilla to its other side. Ruby’s tortillas were thicker than the ones the other women made; Lucy had commented on it once, and Ruby had said that her mother taught her and that before that her grandmother had made the thick substantial tortillas because her grandfather loved to eat and because of that it had become a family tradition. Angel joined them in the kitchen carrying a fifty pound sack of corn, slipping it down on the tile floor, smiling.
The Orange Blossom Express Page 19