by Jacki Lyden
So I went to Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana, without any money. In my junior year, I spent a term studying in Cambridge, England. I lived at Number 26 Huntingdon Road, a nook-and-cranny house, full of sags and angles and stairs that led three steps up to surprise landings or a single room. Each day at about six A.M., the milkman, his face as red as a dried cherry, pushed four bottles of milk against the door with a salutary clink. Lights winked on up and down the street. From the perimeter of the city, edging toward town, lorries gurgled as they shifted gears crossing the bridges to the market center. I would open the door and find the letters, the post, as we called it, and be reassured about the way another day had begun, with its morning accoutrements of post and newspaper and milk bottles, the milk fat bursting up in the necks and rounding the tinfoil heads like something lascivious could be expected to pour forth. Number 26 smelled of menthol sachets and wrinkled laundry, cigarettes smoked by the American students who lived there and who, for the most part, would return to America virtually unchanged by their time abroad. Number 26 made me think of Mabel. I suggested to her in a letter that she could imagine Cambridge by thinking of the gothic Waushara Fish Hatchery. She wrote back that she could not imagine me so far away, fish hatchery or not. In Cambridge at Number 26 Huntingdon Road, the mail slid through the slot two or three times a day, like poker chips from her life spilling into mine. And I thought that if my mother tore a strip of paper in two, one half would stay in her hand and the rest would somehow find its way to me.
What I studied in Cambridge—the Romantic poets and the writers between the wars, Woolf and Lawrence and Forster, as well as England's writers of the 1950s—was less important to me than the fact that I was there. I tried to get away each day from the American world of the other students by riding around town at four o'clock on a bicycle, passing the college backs, or back gardens, where crocuses flooded in deep purple pools on the riverbanks in spring. I stopped at evensong at St. John's, listening to boy sopranos levitate oval notes up to the clerestory. I flirted with English boys whose fathers paid their pub accounts at the college drinking establishment.
Baxter, our art professor from the Polytechnic, had a shock of prematurely white hair, like Andy Warhol's, and Baxter's face also had the surprised wonder of the eternal boy. He arrived with art books spilling from under his arms and placed them under a projector. As we sat in the dark, Cézannes and Manets and Picassos leapt up on the walls. Baxter's lilting voice slipped around like silver trout in a stream. His voice swam beside the apples and bathers and gardens of the paintings on the wall. When he stopped talking and turned on the light, a few of us sat dazzled. The rest of the American students snoozed peacefully on the worn Persian carpet, where peacocks spread their tails, peacocks so brilliant that you could almost hear them strutting. Here, I thought, safety lies.
I bought a Victorian fainting outfit with a corset and full sleeves at the Cambridge market for five pounds. Then, for extravagant money and intending to return it, I bought a creamy Victorian silk hat with peach organza roses and orange blossoms dripping off the brim. This way, I thought, I will keep my love from slipping away. We were engaged, he was back at school in Indiana. I wore the outfit beside the river Cam at dawn, having asked one of the harmless English boys to take my picture. I arched my back and leaned over the water. I thought I looked like a dryad, or a naiad perhaps, hovering between dry land and mist, fusing the mortal and immortal worlds. I was exactly like Dolores, trying to fix in illusion what I could not hold on to in life. It turned out that my fiancé, a law student, was secretly having an affair, a fact revealed to me in a letter from his roommate. The letter caught up with me on my first day of travel in France, and I carried it with me as I crossed the English Channel in tears. And something else: when I looked down at my hand as our train left from Calais for Paris, I noticed the naked socket that once held the fiery opal of my engagement ring. The opal had been a gift to my fiancé and me from Dolores. The ring with its empty socket was, I thought, one of nature's perfect moments.
At the end of the college term, I went to work as a waitress in a nearby hotel called the Old Bridge in Huntingdon, Hunting-donshire. In those days, British hotels, like hotels everywhere, would hire American, Chilean, or Dutch students—anyone young and willing and reasonably pleasant—to haul trays of cream desserts and haunches of beef and high teas on silver plates to customers who tied up their pleasure barges on the river Ouse. I loved the Old Bridge. Sometimes at night we pushed back the furniture and danced to American songs, or went out to the great houses in uniform. All the non-English help were encouraged to speak as little as possible. The tiny maître d', Jad, was from Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East, he assured me, and his wife, Vicky, who wore platform shoes to attain five feet, was from Spain. One night I turned on the light in my dormitory room, only to find my American ex-fiancé. It was a shock, and the tumult that followed afterward was even more of a shock, the supplications and the violence and his disappearance before morning arrived. And not so long thereafter, I stood looking at the Ouse, thinking of Ophelia and a weedy death. I saw honeycombs in the light, double vision in the gardens. I craved sleep. I remember sitting with the village doctor as he announced loudly, Preggers!, then took a phone call to answer his wife's questions about what he wanted for his dinner. I watched his hand, as big as a boxing glove, holding the heavy black receiver, while I felt the ground give way beneath me. I had befriended a girl a few years older, Mary Jane Snook, aged twenty-three. She had raven black hair and a hooked nose. She was the bartender at the Old Bridge and a rapid polisher of glasses. She had a worldliness and sense of security that astonished me in the middle of her nursery rhyme name. And she had a mother, who was a social worker at the Cambridge maternity hospital, who arranged everything because I told her the truth—that I would kill myself before delivering the man in questions child. I intended to drown myself, my last act as a river nymph.
Suddenly one night I was living in Cambridge for the last time, and Mary Jane and I were cutting flowers in the garden and giving them to each other and intending to be friends for life. As the plane took off, I thought that I could not stand going back to America, that I wanted to stay in Cambridge where the streets felt like my veins, the river a balm, the cadence of speech my melody. The pilot announced that Gerald Ford had just become president of the United States. I had largely missed Watergate. I leaned back against the cushions and thought of the rivers Cam and Ouse flowing somewhere beneath me, and how their bends crawled through the fenlands. I thought of those who were pursued, who Baxter had told us about on one of his rambles—the outlaws and outcasts who hid from the Crown in the marshes. The Fens, he said, for centuries protected the secrets of those who hid themselves there, and I felt that I had added a secret of my own.
ON THE RODEO TRAIL
FROM A RENTED ROOM AT POLYXENY
KOULIOPOLOUS'S HOUSE
FALL RIVER, MASSACHUSETTS
JUNE 1975
Dear Mother
I'm thinking of you on the rodeo trail. Who would have thought it would be like this—cheap motels and rented rooms. No, I expected that—what I wasn't prepared for was the ugliness of cheap, the tackiness of fiberboard, the ashtrays dumped in hummocky chairs, the acrid smell of vomit in sinks. I've made an escape from my escape and found myself a boardinghouse to live in. My landlady is a Greek woman named Polyxeny Kouliopolous. She is in her seventies, an avatar of Mabel. We pick rose petals from her bushes which she makes into jam, burning her hands, and she heats a paste of beauty. On Sunday afternoons she shimmies on the porch in her slip to Greek love songs in which lovers wander off never to return. Her slip, with its yellowed lace, and the coiled rosettes of her iron hair make me think of a very old and unattended wedding cake aging in a shop window. I would go mad without her.
Perhaps I should not have run away and joined the rodeo so soon after graduation, but then again, why not? They were there and so was I and I thought: subject, photograph, pursu
e. A photo-essay on these carnies, picturing a rodeo and all the lives it touches. Maybe sell the pictures to Life or a camera magazine. Thrown lariats, looped horns, winner takes all. Maybe be an overnight journalistic sensation! Half the people in the rodeo are wanted, the other half just haven't been brought up on charges yet. The men have folded-up faces and questionable intentions and IQs lower than their gas gauges. Anyway, this town, Fall River, Massachusetts, is noted for the ax murderess who lived here in the last century, Lizzie Borden, who chopped up both her parents like carrots! Can you even imagine! Got away with it too because they thought she was crazy. Don't let that give you any ideas! Just kidding. Love to Mabel,
Bye for now...
JLL
Twenty years have passed since I joined the rodeo. It was a mad impulse, lived out brokenly. Sometimes nothing changes. I am writing this book from a rented house in another city in another country I hardly knew before coming here. I came just north of the border, to Canada, on an instinct of love and craft, as I left my college town for the rodeo years ago, on the promise that no morning would be like the morning before it. The Diamond'S Rodeo was a traveling secret, feckless, where the odds of making sense were as good as those in a shooting gallery. No one asked questions about where you were from or expected you to be around by the time the rodeo reached the next town. Life was intense and fragile, the vicissitudes of a carny existence, feinting and dodging, calculating whiskey shots and bed partners. I was the only twenty-one-year-old girl there, but then I was also the only one whose mother sometimes inhabited a world much crazier than any rodeo. I had the field of invention all to myself, amid men, horses, con artists, thieves, and prostitutes. I had the horses to myself, and I had the road, and the road was in love with me. And it carried me away, always listening for a motor turning over somewhere beneath a cloudless blue sky.
I didn't know that the rodeo managers, Mary and Gordon, had their eye on me back in Valparaiso. They were an odd couple. She was from Birmingham, Alabama, tall, as coarse as hide, as profane as a truck driver. Gordon was Scottish, a gray little man whose accent was the most distinctive thing about him. It was all but impossible to understand him. He was the terrier to Mary's wolfhound. They could have been anywhere between thirty-five and fifty years old, it was impossible to know or to ask. They were recruiters of those weaker than themselves—like me, like Am-way distributors. They found people who could solicit ticket sales by phone. Proceeds, they claimed, would go to the charity that ushered the rodeo into town. Come See the Breathless Action! The Drama of Men and Horses! The charity made twenty-five dollars if they were lucky, the rest of the take went to the Diamond'S and principally to Mary and Gordon, who trawled the country looking for gullible villagers to plunder. When they came to my Midwest college town at graduation, the offer to leave with them seemed like a free ride on the nation's freak circuit, and I didn't have the money for bus fare back to Menomenee. The spring of senior year had been a nightmare. First of all, I hated being back in Indiana. Then I was laid off from a waitressing job and unable to get another. The last few months had meant eating cake mix, posing half undressed for a Christian "art photographer," who was the university's fundraiser by day. And when the rodeo came to town, my friends and I sold tickets at a phone room they'd set up over a bank. I needed money desperately, and I wanted to be a journalist on the road. I couldn't wait to get there. I needed the rodeo.
I confess that not long after joining up with this traveling, exhibition rodeo on the East Coast, I realized that the same charity tickets were sold and resold and sold again to the unsuspecting "in the names of poor children who would otherwise be unable to attend this dramatic re-creation of an actual Wild West rodeo in your town." It was like pouring cream on bananas, a pitch we purred into the telephone. Who bought our pitch? Rubes, generally. Good-hearted rubes we conned and plucked, from Massachusetts to West Virginia. I was Fagin. Elderly women answered our lies with money and little notes that went, "Although I am seventy-eight years old and have a plastic hip and sometimes fear I will have to eat cat food, I want to give you this four dollars so that a crippled child can go to the rodeo in my name. Matilda Tutweiler."
I shuddered, should have quit, didn't. Too proud to go home where everyone had said the rodeo was all blast anyway, too accustomed to the enchantment of chaos, too angry. I could avoid my employers by taking rooms in houses with old ladies like Polyxeny Kouliopolous, while Mary and Gordon lived in seedy motels at the edge of town. On the Fourth of July, Mary poured herself into a dinky motel swimming pool with a winner's cup of gin. Her face hit the water first. She looked like a sheet being floated over a bed. Her glass drifted to the bottom of the pool, much more slowly than Mary herself. Gordon dived in after her. "Barmy, aide kin go bilde arrude 'er," which was, "I'd go wild without her." Once, to escape them, I traveled with the rodeo itself, not an advance person, and became briefly a cupcake rider, the girl who carried the gizmos to the guys—flags, torches, lariats, guns—as the horses performed familiar antics they could have done in their sleep. They were fake wild horses, nudged on by tin cowboys. But it was Sheba-perfect, a distant never-never land. The Diamond S was on the lam from the law, God, wives, taxes, permanent retirement plans, and every other form of human responsibility. The rodeo was bad at many, many things, but when it came to human irresponsibility it was outlandishly good. You never had to apologize. You never had to live with your mistakes in the same town for more than one day. You made children happy, women dream, senior citizens with plastic hips feel as though they were helping humanity. I took pictures when I was not absolutely mortified at what I was doing, dreamed of submitting them to a photo magazine. But after a while, I stopped. I knew I would be living with the evidence of my daily betrayals, and the only record I wanted was whatever my memory could make. I had seen my mother do that, and it seemed the nub of art. She dreamed imagined beginnings and exotic outcomes. I'd squint harder and find out I was in places like Nitro, West Virginia. Nitro was the end of the rodeo trail for me. It was my Living Allegory town. It was a good place for innocence, if any remained, to be used like iron filings to detonate sulphur. Everything else could perish, and a girl like me could make her escape.
JULY 5,1975
WASHINGTON, D.C.
EN ROUTE TO NITRO, WEST VIRGINIA
Dear Mother:
This letter is a lie:
What a nice time I'm having! I'm making pots of money, and all the rodeo people are just one big happy family—so reminiscent of last year in England. Everybody helps everybody else—to steal from whatever town we're in. Just kidding! Have you ever actually seen anyone pick a lock? Not a safecracker—I mean with a screwdriver and crowbar. But things are getting better. Polyxeny took me to a kalamatiano dance, and I met a Greek student from Amherst College who is brilliant, I think. Why didn't I go there? I assure you I have more balls and brains than he, but it's amazing how people underestimate 100-pound 21-year-old girls from Wisconsin. Look at Georgia O'Keeffe. What else—what are you doing for the Fourth of July? I was supposed to go to the Mall in the nation's capital to watch the fireworks, watch a city of spun sugar melt under colored icing, but my new employer got drunk and fell into a motel pool. Oh, and I bought a car—a British Ford East Anglia with left-hand drive which I named Nelleybelle. It cost 800 dollars. It's my boon companion. So, mother, I'm trying to figure out—why that student is where he is and not me. He took me to a party but left with a much older woman poet named Erica Jong. She thought she was pretty hot stuff.
Love,
Jacki
JULY II, 1975
GOD, IS IT HOT HERE!
MENOMENEE, WISCONSIN
Dear Jacki:
For the Fourth of July—what else? I marched in a parade! Felt great, wrists like steel putters, hitting notes through a barrel. The crowd bellowing like it won a prize. I'm going to play timpani with the Legion Band again in Mukwonago. There was a Demolition Derby Days going on before the fireworks with all the funny old clunker cars
. Also, I placed bets on a frog jumping contest and watched a dog being spayed. I am a little worried about your sister—changed her name to Ka and has a sun tattoo like a shrunken head on her stomach. She runs around nude in the woods on this commune in Oregon and she told me she made a belt for herself out of leaves. Doesn't that sound awful? Your sister Sarah says she wants to go to law school after college. I say go for it! I am trying to find another job. The waitressing at the hotel has me so tired afterwards I feel like melted butter. I want to ask my doctor if he thinks I can stop the Thorazine. Do you?
Love,
Your mother who is kickin' and rarin' to go
AUGUST II, 1975
ELLA'S BOARDING HOUSE, NO. 7
NITRO, WEST VIRGINIA
Dear Mabel:
Well, I did a little stint as a cupcake rider. At least it got me out of the snake pit for a few days. I would rather handle the dime cowboys and nickel Injuns than the characters in any of these towns. They ride when there's no money to be had, but at least they know they're out there on the lunatic fringe, on horseback or off. Not like the mayor of one town in New England, who gave me a tenner and told me to come get comfortable in my bikini while he ate ice cream in his lawn chair. I tore the ten-spot to piecemeal in front of him. Whereas the wastrels I'm with, legs splayed by their horses, mouths puckered from Jim Beam, are too "wore out" for other kinds of horseplay, I believe. Got dressed up in a cowgirl spangly outfit with a fringed bolero and matching skirt. All I had to do was canter around the ring, a cupcake with a flag—I'll tell you, that horse could have done it without me. Not like those 1940s posters of women standing on the backs of horses leaping over Cadillacs in arabesques and fandangos. Later I came out walking—I mean my horse was walking—and presented a lariat to Mr. Buddy, who does the cattle roping. I fanned on horseback around Elmo, the Brahmin bull rider from Oklahoma, crazier than a loon. He has exposed gums like dead night crawlers; he's about twenty-five. None of these guys are exactly bring-home-to-Mom material, but one or two try to speak nicely. I don't know, Mabel. Think I ought to come home?