by Jacki Lyden
"Keep your eyes on the green light," said a bored black gas station attendant at two in the morning. He bit off a piece of sausage jerky. In no mood to talk, but his face said, White Girl, Seriously Lost. I was in Maywood, Illinois. But where was Maywood, Illinois? I did keep my eyes on the green light, and on the rodeo, and on Tiller's face, now faded to a bilious shade in my mind, and I never saw the stop sign or the driver who had the right of way. I felt a giant metallic cannon shot hit Nelleybelle broadside, and the car spun like the inside of a kaleidoscope. A telephone pole came into view through the windshield, dead on. I put my head down toward my chest and the steering wheel. The boom of the contact with the pole was seismic. The lights dripped away, and everything was wet. I could see absolutely nothing and hear everything.
Jesus God, I'm blind.
Hands, which somehow belonged to me, rushed at my eyes and, no, I wasn't blind, but blood sluiced into my eyes as if from an upended gut bucket. The bucket was my head, a deep and nasty gash starting at the forehead and parting my hair. My scalp had been gored by an exposed spoke on the steering wheel, the windshield was gone, the back seat zippered metal. A Christian burial for Nelleybelle on the highway. The other driver was unhurt. I tilted my head back while I waited for the ambulance I could already hear, ears so acute that I could name grace notes in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony from the upper balcony. Justice and punishment, for all the wicked things you've done this summer.
A couple of days later, when I arrived home in Menomenee, Sheba had preceded me. Mabel had warned me when I called from the emergency room in Illinois. "She's not so bad," Mabel had said. "Just buying swampland in Florida and putting good jewelry in the church rummage sale. People call, tell me to come, she's shoplifted a scarf or a birdhouse. She's writing another will, and she cut me out, I can tell you."
It was fall. For years, the fall brought exactly this lunar reflectivity, disturbance in Sagittarius, Dolores's swift plunge from reality as Sheba rode in triumphantly with her entire retinue of tricks. Nearly every September, from senior year in college until some years thereafter, Sheba was back from her summer of taking prisoners on her travels, and ready for action. I left the hospital and my girlfriend's house with a bandaged head and a blood-soaked jacket, my hair scraped off jaggedly as if with a scallop shell, twenty stitches in my scalp and features that resembled a topographical map. Mabel screamed when she saw me at the bus station. "Jesus H. Christ! Did you get banged up or runned over?" And in a way I felt I had been run over by my choices in life.
Welcome home. Mabel put me to bed in Dolores's house, brought me simmering chicken soup, and I drifted off to sleep. Hours later, Dolores came in from her date, breathy but not delusional, though she seemed to be saying that she wanted to make her date crêpe suzettes while she did a cancan, that she'd make syrup out of roses after she rode a trapeze around the room. She'd shot a game of pool. I fully woke up. It was after one in the morning. I heard my mother come up the stairs. She opened the door, and the light behind her announced a debutante's entrance.
"See my bandages," I said, pointing to my head.
"Gross-out," she said. "Do you want to meet Dean? My date?"
"No," I said, turning over, wanting to start again in the morning. But I wish I could tell you about this kid, Tiller. Brains like stuffing probably all over his shirt by now. Want to wrap him with my bandanna, sing him a lullaby, ice his forehead. But of course Til never see him again. I healed. My mother, for the time being, did not.
A few weeks later, I took Dolores riding in the state forest near our home. I knew I was playing with fire because she was sick again. She had walked into the middle of a parade in a nearby town and tried to march with the drum section. Because of many other pranks and the general state of her mental health, I had filed for a commitment hearing. It was ridiculous to take her into the woods, she hardly knew where she was in her own home. But I didn't care. I was sick of her being sick. I wanted my mother back. I wanted to go for a ride because it was October, because it was the way we had always celebrated my October birthday, because it was fall. It was fall, and everything in the woods was dying as if in operatic mise-en-scene: light like a reflection off old brass, sumac a frilly plumage, lavender wild asters crumbling to a color I remembered from sixth-grade science, called "tincture of regulus of Venus." My mother and I put on orange fluorescent vests as protection against the bowhunters who were after small game, and we saddled and bridled our horses. I had convinced myself that this would be good for her. There would be fresh air, motion, equine sweat and wild turkeys in the underbrush, and other healing portents of nature. I cleaned the dirt from the horses' hooves, one at a time, smoothed the burrs out of their manes with baby oil and a wide-tooth comb, got impatient and used my fingers to wipe down their dirty backs and ran my dirt-caked palms over the muscles in their haunches. Then I cinched the straps tighter and brushed their forelocks and dusted them with fly spray, and the Queen of Sheba and I moved out into the forest.
She talked about a racehorse she intended to buy, a solid investment. As she has unlimited wealth from her new company, or is expecting a certain group of unnamed investors to come through, it would be easily affordable. Think of the purses, she said, the parties, the winners' circle!
"Yes, Mom," I say. "But you don't have money for a racehorse. You don't have money for a hobbyhorse."
My mother stared at the horizon, ignoring my stupid joke, and rode in a dignified manner befitting her sense of fortune and power. Sheba in the desert. There was nothing but the sound of the wind through the jack pines, whipping a whisde at us. These were the Wisconsin trails and fields I knew best—a territorial stagecoach route, overgrown now with blackberry bramble. The pioneer who had abandoned the spent apple tree, I thought, probably had descendants working at the local car wash, or writing insurance policies. The limestone fences, cobbled from the boulders of the kettle moraine, poked through the fields like knobby tibia and fibula. In the distance I thought I saw a brilliance like wings flashing, a pheasant in flight or the sheen of a woman's veil floating in the wind. Sheba drags her veil past Dolores's cheek, and Dolores spurs her horse forward with a blood certainty that she can capture the future. Sheba is off and running, and I'm inside the sound of drumming hooves.
My mother is forty-four at the time of that ride. She lashes her horse like a woman in battle, Aisha against the followers of Ali. Chestnut hair streams a nimbus from her head. I wish for my mother a breastplate and chain mail, even as I stare at her, horrified. She rides as if she were escaping from a band of Visigoths, hunched over her horse as if she had an arrow in her back. "Go," she screams at poor old Houston, her quarter horse, "go!" And Houston, sensing he has the possessed on his back, does go, an old cow pony remembering the roundups of his youth. My Polish Arab, Shadow, is so skittish that he bolts straight up on all fours at the cackle of rustling wind. Now he's planted himself stolidly as if bronzed. He no more wants to chase down a madwoman on horseback than be skinned alive. I whip him with the reins, but we lope forward only a few paces. We trail a marauding Minerva who flirts with death, spiking hearts on her standard. Shadow wants no part of it.
Galloping across the fields is a wrangler from a nearby ranch. I know him. A monosyllabic farm boy, rawboned and dressed in a tattered undershirt. Thick tobacco cud moused in his cheek, which he takes out and holds in his hand when he drinks soda water. As he tears past, he can only be thinking, These broads are stupider than shit. He catches up to Dolores, grabs her reins in a wink. Efficient fucking cowboy. Shadow bucks and dances his hooves at the tree branches and I am on my ass. Look up. The wrangler is staring at Dolores's horse and empty saddle. She is on her feet, screaming, "You spoiled my trophy! I was going to win twenty thousand dollars, asshole! I'm suing you for everything you've got." She stomps along the trail, disappears into the woods.
The wrangler looks over at me, mystified by weird-people behavior. He can talk to animals, understands their direct needs for comfort and release from pai
n. Hay, grain, alfalfa, horseshoeing, that's his vocabulary. Tobacco juice pours from his mouth like a punctured rotten tomato. "Is she crazy or what?" he asks.
I say, "She's bonkers. That's my mother."
I let my mother go because the Queen of Sheba is my quarry. There are bowhunters out there in the black pines, looking for grouse and quail. Maybe one of them will nail her. I hope he gets her right between the eyes, so that I can do the dance of Salome. I'll put her head on my platter. I start after her, feeling sheepish, calling, "Mother, remember the bowhunters, hunters! The hunters are out!" Silence answers me. Let her stomp through the woods and get lost. I'll get the sheriff and have her back in the clink by nightfall. An hour or so later, when I get back to the car I find it missing and she with it. I notice a note on the tack house for the wrangler who rescued us.
"I have your dog, asshole," her note reads in handwriting puffed like birthday balloons, "your Australian blue heeler. Answers to the name of Lucy. If you want to see her again, you better come up with ten thousand dollars. And a kite."
I sigh. Imagine the day spent ferrying Lucy back to the ranch, a sweet old dog whose tail is probably wagging right now in gleeful anticipation of a doggy biscuit fed from Dolores's hand. She loves animals.
That same fall a close friend mentioned that she thought her mother had heard of the perfect job for me, traveling and writing and taking pictures. In spite of everything, I hadn't fallen out of love with the road. I thought that, yes, this probably was the job for me. It was based in Chicago, a job for a travel trade magazine, and to my astonishment when I phoned the office, the manager said the magazine was looking for an editorial assistant, and she would be happy to see me if I would like to come down. I was ecstatic. On the day I was to drive to Chicago, however, Dolores, totally lunatic, took the car on a secret mission so I had to postpone. When she got back, Kate and I managed to hustle her into a hospital, and though she was only voluntary that time I hoped she might stay there long enough to let me go out and look for a job.
I have wondered, and think it is probably true, that loneliness can be fatal. That winter, my first in Chicago, Dolores had a daytime dream she couldn't wake from. That winter my former stepfather remarried. Dolores went out and got two blood tests. She bought a dress and flowers. She booked the church. She described her fiancé to Pastor Nordstrom as tall and dark, but when he asked her details, like name and profession and where he lived, she couldn't answer. She broke down, left a valentine with a real arrow through it on Sarah's pillow at home. But by then, I was living in the big city, Chicago.
TravelGo was a trade journal for travel agents, and my part-time job was not, it was explained to me, actually traveling and writing and taking pictures, as we'd discussed it might become when I was hired. The job instead consisted of repetitive calculations I was horrible at: logging ads, measuring typeface percentages, giving out prices on the telephone for quarter pages, all things that made me weep with tedium. But it paid eighty dollars a week, enough to move to the city and get a roommate or two. Finally, after several months of horrendous boredom, I was allowed an assignment, the launch of a Greek cruise ship called the Stella Solaris out of Galveston, Texas. And it had an especially exciting aspect: it would require a grown-up evening gown, my first. As usual, I had no money for anything, but Sarah, a talented seamstress, helped me by making a John Kloss lingerie-look dress out of a Vogue pattern catalogue, beige crepe, with a fashionable seventies keyhole neckline over the breasts. As I look back I think the designer might have been influenced by Frederick's of Hollywood. The dress looked good with liquid liner and blue eye shadow. It had a rhinestone strap around the back of the neck that worked architecturally like a sling to hold up the gown. I felt like Loretta Young, on the old Loretta Young Show, swirling down the stairs to arrive at the Mecca of Glamour. I had silver platform shoes that cost ten dollars in a budget shop, an airline ticket, and a spot at the guest table below the captain's dais on the StellaSolaris. A limousine picked me up at the airport. Yes! I was part of the professional travel-writing group; someone else was from the Houston Chronicle, someone from the Associated Press, writers from the travel trades. And I thought: I'm passing. They probably think I'm older, like twenty-seven. Now cruise ships seem like overstuffed hobbles to me, but then I was thrilled to be on one, having A Paid Assignment. At dinner the first night the captain was charming, the travel writers funny and forthcoming, the wine free, the linen and silver real. I was enjoying myself. The writers impressed me with their knowledge of where to buy the best cigar in Quito and how to get a charter to Yucatán, and I didn't even mind that most of them visited perfectly safe destinations most of the time. And then the rhinestone necklace went ping, and the beige crepe dress fell into my lap like a strip act. I was naked. There was no escape from it: I pulled the dress up and sat there, holding it over my bare breasts, and prayed to God to strike me dead. Think of something to say, Jack! I informed the table, "This happens all the time!"
A man, I think it was the writer for the Houston newspaper, said, "Oh my God," leapt up to give me his jacket, spilling a bottle of red wine onto everybody else. They must have been saying all sorts of things, but I heard only babble, and the room went black. I decided that God had heard my prayers, delivering me to darkness as forty waiters marched out of the Stella Solaris'?, huge kitchen in double, martial rows with flaming trays of baked Alaska perched upon their shoulders like epaulets. I grabbed the newspaperman's jacket and my dress, now hanging off my hips, and prepared to make my escape on the silver shoes, darting in and out of the column of waiters. It was like trying to make a touchdown in a cloak. I had very nearly gained the door when the lights went on. A distinct snicker of laughter went up from the table beside me. I locked myself in my cabin and sobbed, certain my future was in smithereens. And then I thought, Dolores always got up, didn't she, got up when her psyche was buff naked in front of a room full of people who might not even like her. I changed into the paisley lime green pants outfit I had made myself for my high school's junior prom and went upstairs to face the music. The women writers were sympathetic; one came over to talk. I thought she might make me feel better.
"That was pretty bad," she said. "If I were you I'd be committing suicide right now."
TravelGo fired me a few months later. By then, though, I hardly cared about the dress incident. I'd lost several thousand dollars by failing to enter ads into forthcoming issues. When the editor fired me, she was wearing a Peter Pan costume and we were handing out magazines at a trade show. You have no future in this business, she said.
Radio wasn't about ad pages, at least not public radio. It was about taking a speaking part, the come-here-and-let-me-tell-you-a-story part. I didn't get to it for a long time, until I was twenty-five. In one of my gazillion part-time jobs before that, I taught journalism fundamentals in Chicago, and a student wanted me to recommend her for a job in radio. I was twenty-four. The job involved getting up in the morning at three A.M. to report the highway traffic patterns for morning rush hour at a big news radio station. "You won't get up that early," I told the student, who was older than I.I don't know if she would have or not, but I did. I called WIND radio in Chicago. The station manager said he was looking for someone who'd driven a taxi to gather traffic information for the air. "I've driven a taxi," I promptly lied. The guy who hired me said later that he knew I was lying, but that I sounded cute and he wanted to meet me. I wrote traffic copy that said, "It's heavy on the Dan Ryan from 79th to 103rd." Once I wrote that there was a snafu in traffic, and I described a car crash like a roller rink, and the editor put big red lines through it and suggested I might be happier as a newswriter. We wrote copy during the long nights and early morning hours, listening to the police scanner, the exhumation of the bodies of John Wayne Gacy's victims as they were reported one by one; we watched the snow pile up and spell the death of Jane Byrne's mayoralty; we got trapped by more blizzards; got drunk; fanned the facts like hard-pitched baseballs.
The
first day I was ever live on the air on my own show, at another station some six months later, was the day my mother was seriously missing, just before Christmas 1980.1 realized that radio had always been there, like the voices in my head. I believed I could speak all those voices, just as Sheba did. I could take the dreamer's part, or the part of the damned. I could take the voice of the woman my mother wanted to be, the assertive one, the confident voice. If my mother had been Sheba or Marie Antoinette or Dolores Gimbels, president and CEO of Creative Renaissance, then I could be Zelda Thorne, my alter ego.
Zelda Thorne. I invented her name that first night on the air, just for myself, and for years she did the hard parts for me. As the girl I was, I could do nothing. My dress would fall off, I was too shy, too stupid, I heard the voice of my stepfather in my head. You're dumb, chum. You're a moron. But Zelda Thorne could do and say anything. Zelda had, after all, been the name of F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife, and she was manic-depressive, she was crazy. Crazy people have no boundaries. They can come up to you and ask you your secrets. Asking questions others want to answer is about giving yourself permission to enter their world, however insane they may be or you feel yourself to be. Wouldn't you want to talk to Zelda Thorne? She was so brave, so witty. Radio entered me, like a wave. I thought of Sheba. I thought of talking into the night and traveling into the heart of darkness and looking for shards of truth amid deceit and about how deceptions in time become their own facts and how we invent ourselves with our speech. Speaking on the radio, I was invisible, hidden behind the harem's scrim, speaking to you in your head. On the radio, like Sheba, I became the voices of the people I spoke of—the lost farmer, the dying war casualty, the brilliant lover of life. Imagination and voice, that is all there is. One day when I was twenty-six, I opened the door to National Public Radio, and the world opened to me. After that, all the voices that would not leave me alone had a home in the air. Sheba was speaking to me, saying, "Go anywhere. Go." Being alive on the airwaves was like traveling back to the source.