Lorna had driven our Jeep into town, and for a few precious hours we were alone.
I knocked on the window, put my hands together like I was praying, and asked for more, but Bruce couldn’t hear me.
Dense cold and wet heat—it’s a Colorado ritual.
“No,” Bruce told me later. “It was just to keep me from going crazy.” By that time he was wrapped in a red and black beach towel and was standing in the dining room. He had quit dripping by then. I had taken a kitchen towel and turbanned it over his wet hair and kissed him on the nose, and as I backed away I could see the puzzled look on his face. “Who is she, Eileen? I don’t even know who that girl is.”
Each morning the snow revealed to me the incidents of the night before. I saw where Rainbow, a neighborhood cat, had crossed our deck and, at the edge, left its yellow spray. On a nearby hillside I saw the big, bald lines where neighborhood kids had been sledding days before on plastic garbage bags. A few of the bags were threaded on a bare pine bough at the bottom of the hill, waving in the wind, waiting for when the kids came back for their next run.
Early one morning, though, before I’d had a chance to see anything in the snow, I saw Lorna near the front door quietly putting on her jacket. The skimpy luggage at her feet made her plans clear. Directly up and to the left, I stood unseen on the stairway.
I watched Lorna pull on a pair of gray insulated boots we had bought her. Carefully, as if she were dressing for more than the cold, she wound a muffler around her neck and tucked its fringed ends into her jacket. She pulled an envelope out of her tote bag and walked it to the bookshelves and left it there for us to read—just thanks and so long and don’t worry. She pulled on a pair of gloves and opened the door. Even where I stood—safe, distant, a flannel robe around me—I felt the cutting air blow in.
Long story made short: I didn’t stop her, didn’t say good-bye, didn’t wake Bruce so that maybe . . . I don’t know. I guess maybe covers a lot of territory. I turned and went back to bed, slipped under the covers where I found Bruce’s warm lanky legs, and I fell into the same murky sleep as that little bear under our deck, the one who must have been dreaming of summer and sunshine and something better than pizza to eat.
Later that day, after errands and a long wait at the pharmacy, I drove home, then hurried from the car to the house with my arms loaded—sacks and dry cleaning. I didn’t even manage to get the car door shut. When I had unlocked the front door of the house and set down my load, I turned around and started back to the driveway to close the car. There were my purple gloves and scarf that I had dropped onto the snow-covered ground in my hurry from the car. Like a woman who identifies herself with a string of pearls or her ragged kitchen broom, I saw myself in an instant out there—just three small dabs of color on an otherwise endless, frozen plain. Besides its hundred other tricks, snow can do that, can show you in a lightning flash just who you are.
I stood there looking for I don’t know how long. Looking and thinking. Thinking and burning.
At first I thought the far-off throttled roar I heard was my pulse pounding in my ears, but the sound slowed and then gathered momentum and then finally crested over on the east ridge. I looked up at a black spot coming closer, weaving, rearranging itself into a twoheaded form, the dark green rounded nose of a snowmobile finally visible. I could smell gas and oil and see its foggy gray trail drifting up into pines. It barreled toward me and the two shapes on the snowmobile became people, neighbors—closer and closer—until I could see that it was some snow-masked man driving, and holding on behind him, blonde hair streaming, one of the Ramos twins throwing confetti. They waved at me when they drove by, but I didn’t even have time to get my hand up.
Nocturne
It was a Tuesday night when Maize and I ran out of money in Santa Fe—a place dusty and old and, if you aren’t careful, the last place you might visit. We knew that we didn’t have much cash left, but it was a surprise anyway to dig to the bottom of my purse and find only a Revlon eyebrow pencil tucked in the bottom folds. Like someone who suddenly finds herself in deep, dark water, I woke up fast. I dumped my purse out on the queen-sized bed and rummaged through the collection of cosmetics and Kleenexes, pens and maps, car keys, paper clips, sunglasses, and lotion. Nothing. Not a dollar bill. Not a quarter. I stood up with just a towel around me and I looked at Maize for what would come next.
Maize, my cousin, was a homewrecker. She was tall for a woman and dark haired, my wingless angel, and wherever she moved, in whatever room, to pick up a magazine or to just stand at the window, she stayed at the center of things while everything else slid to the edges. “Why would a man want salt when he could have honey?” she would ask me and then fold her legs under herself wherever she was sitting, and for many men, it was just too much. Compulsion, obsession. Wanting what you can’t have, which makes you want it more. Maize—a name she had given herself three years earlier in Portland when she found it in a Farmer’s Almanac—said that she did not make up the rules of life, but that, thank God, she had the brains to break them.
“Now what?” I asked Maize. I had just finished a long, hot shower. I was wrapped in a big white hotel towel, and I didn’t need anyone to tell me that what I had been feeling up until that point was happy. Then, while I was digging through my purse for a comb, the facts started to drift and I realized the money was probably gone—blown in the week and a half we had spent in Santa Fe.
It was the first time I had run my course and come out flat broke, scared, and older. Maize never knew any other way to live but like this: on tightropes or where she found easy passage into others’ lives. Whether what she had was borrowed, stolen, or given recklessly to her in darkness or over a bottle of booze or out of some weak, twisted passion, Maize made the most of everything. She spent big and looked good. And when the money ran out, as it often did in those days because there was a cycle to it all—getting and spending and laying waste—she fell and fell hard. That time, starting with that Tuesday night in Santa Fe, she took me down with her, my beautiful milk-skinned cousin, chestnut hair, long legs ahead of her time. Her blue eyes were what I thought of then as medicine.
“O.K., Regina” she said. “Relax. Let’s do a quick accounting.” But in my heart of hearts, if there is such a thing in me, I knew the money was gone. How could it not be? In room 217 of the El Dorado we had temporarily shed our former selves and assumed the lives of queens. Four hundred dollars worth of new lingerie was a reason for being. Once a day we ordered baseball-sized steaks that melted in our mouths. Neither of us cared about jewelry, but in well-made clothes, in leisure, in the wonder of lying naked and watching late-night cable TV we thought that we felt the presence of God. We were astounded to look over and see each other in a two-hundred-dollar-a-night room. Maize would laugh and say that she remembered, but only vaguely, when I was waitressing. I reminded her that somewhere—ten or twenty lives ago—she had driven a school bus, driven it badly, watched while one kid in the back of the bus crowned another with a crescent wrench.
Maize was not easy to upset. She’d had so many ups and downs that they had all become one big movement. So standing there in the El Dorado with the threat of being broke was merely something in the passing for her, some sign that we were now in the middle of things. Maize pulled out her suitcase and tote and casually searched them. She came up with Bill Barnes’s Firestone credit card, which she claimed to be an authorized signer for. She held it up, the red and gold plastic which at that moment offered no safety or comfort for me.
“Maize,” I said, “that won’t buy us food.”
“Well, of course not,” she told me. “But if the fuel pump goes or a tire shreds, you might just end up thanking me. Well, thanking Bill, actually.”
Bill Barnes was an orthopedist who claimed to finally understand the finely woven fabric of his life when he met Maize. “Nice man,” Maize had said of him, “but terminal sentimentality. I’ve seen him cry about the beauty of bathwater.”
I looke
d over at my cousin who sat glamorous and rock hard in the El Dorado. She was wearing a green silk lounging robe—a short little low-cut surprise we had bought a couple of days before.
“O.K. Just let me in on the plans here, Maize,” I said, sitting next to the small storm of objects I had dumped on the bed.
From what I knew of her, she never actually thought about money. Her mind worked through parallel subjects: cars, airline tickets, good leather pumps, a nice bottle of Bordeaux that could have easily paid my monthly rent back home in Des Moines. Somehow, she figured a way to these things. She kept her eyes open and jumped at the means made available to her. I had seen men offer their lives to Maize in airports while waiting at the luggage racks or for the rent-a-car. I had watched hotel clerks soften to her, finally writing off her entire bill, suggesting she come back in the spring when the cherries were in bloom or the festival began or the warm, blue sky turned seamless. “Aren’t people just the greatest?” she would turn and say to me.
That was one difference between Maize and me. There were about four people in the world that I loved, only a handful that I could tolerate, and everyone else scared me to death. Runaway trains and drunk drivers don’t faze me, but put me in a room full of people and my heart starts pounding against my ribs.
There in Santa Fe on that Tuesday night I was looking at Maize, waiting for my cousin, my thirty-eight-year-old madonna of the pick-pockets, to put our world back into place and set it spinning.
“It’s not like I just snap my fingers and there it all is,” she said to me from across the room. Her green robe was half-unbuttoned. We indulged each other like that. Some pretty flesh. A ginger thigh.
“Well, I didn’t expect you to,” I told her, “but we’re out of money and we’re in your territory now.”
“Gee, thanks.” She bit the edge of her thumbnail. She crossed her legs and tapped a bare foot on the plush, silvery carpet. “Not to worry,” she told me. “Look, we’re two young, ablebodied women.”
Maize had ample practice working through her financial worries. She had stripped several people bare of their savings, cashed in gold Krugerrands, pawned dead women’s jewelry, given love and sympathy in return for an almost new Audi. True to her word, she had spent the money and driven the car into the dust. She didn’t know that the small red light on the dashboard was an oil warning.
And yet, this is not to say that Maize was all bad. In fact, in those days she was probably at her best—freewheeling, lively, able to carry on a great conversation in a bar. She could talk politics or come to a convincing moment of truth about some great painting. Babbling incoherently, she could fake French or Portuguese for those listening with untrained ears. In those days—in the good days that I remember—she was a beautiful thing to watch, all kidskin and smooth moves. That was before she lost the faith and cut her hair and took a couple of steps down in the world—falling off in Memphis, shoplifting in Detroit.
But on that Tuesday night in Santa Fe, even though we had run up against and hit the wall, Maize still had the faith. She ran out to the parking lot and she spent fifteen minutes searching the car, and when she came back to the room—lo and behold—she had two rolls of nickels and a pocket of loose change.
“Well, my little Fig Newton, oh you of little faith,” she said to me, “get your clothes on. I’m taking you out.”
Nightlife with Maize. Window-shopping. Driving around with a decent radio station tuned in. A bottle of sloe gin that we pull out from under the front seat of the car, then stopping at a convenience store for lime Icees. “What do you call this drink?” I asked her.
“Sloe gin lime Icee,” she said.
“What if it’s a cherry Icee?”
“Oh, that’s a cherry Rowdy,” she said. “Totally different drink, Reg.
I had never been lost and out of money before, driving around in a town that I didn’t know, although it was something that happened to me later many times. A seed gets planted. A taste for fine things is acquired. Maize’s face and voice, as I remember them, still go straight to my quick.
We were in Bill Barnes’s gunmetal blue Volvo station wagon—a nice enough vehicle with cruise control, the car’s title in the glove compartment signed right over to Maize. “Hey,” she said, “at least we’re mobile.” I loved the way she held the steering wheel with the flat of her palm.
We dropped into a couple of bars and proceeded to the H Lounge. The bartenders there were shovel-nosed and all business. A few couples danced with the stiff uneasiness of eighth graders. Maize leaned against the bar and scouted. Two drinks and four dances later, a young gallery owner named Tommy Sodoma was eating honey-glazed peanuts out of Maize’s hand. And some three hours after that, Tommy was lying in an alley, the rough imprint of a brick still on his forehead. He had proven a little unwieldy back there in the moonlight. When his lack of generosity became apparent, when it was clear that Tommy did not feel like making a donation to us that night, Maize picked up a brick—the only brick, she swore to God, that she ever used—and gave him some much-needed rest right along the hairline.
“Jesus, Maize. Is he dead?” I asked when we returned to the car. Somehow, I couldn’t ask that standing over him. There was a thin stream of blood. There were shards of moonlight on the ground. His arms and legs spread out so that he lay big as a Norway spruce.
“Breathe easy, Regina,” she said. “He’s just taking twenty winks. He’s going to have a two-egg hangover tomorrow, though.”
As it turned out, Tommy didn’t carry enough cash to even get us into the track, and I think Maize regretted having to use that brick. It just was not her style.
Two weeks. Three weeks. I don’t know how to tell time when I’m spiraling downward. Maize had my hand and we slept in the back of the car. We washed ourselves over the sinks in dirty rest stops. We had a bar of lavender soap and two big, borrowed El Dorado towels. We took our shirts off and submitted ourselves to cold water and the aftermath.
Maize told me that it would be all right. She kept watch for her next opening, for the place where she would enter another life like a golden breeze, smelling of lavender, ordering with flawless Italian off a menu.
At night, stopped somewhere along the road, we put newspapers up to the car windows. We ate peanut butter straight out of the jar with plastic spoons while Maize told me her life story. Getting and spending and creating the waste that trailed her from Minnesota to the Gulf. “Ever lie on a beach and let the tide roll in around you?” she asked me. “Ever let those dark-skinned waiters walk down and serve you gin and tonics on the sand? Those waiters bend over you, Reg, the glass cold and slick, and it’s enough to take your breath away.”
We slept a lot for those two or three weeks. Bad dreams. Long, one-way nights, and in the morning, lines of hair-trigger light at the edges of the newspaper. “It’s time to get up, Regina,” Maize said each morning.
“What for?” I asked.
But Maize always had a way of getting us up and moving. She opened all the car doors and persuaded me with sunlight. She would put her hand on my face and I would recognize that which I could not have, but which I wanted all the more because of it.
Two weeks. Three weeks. And then we separated, figuring one-on-one was easier, surer mathematics. She wanted to go north where Bill Barnes was fly-fishing for the summer. Walking away from me on Market Street, my cousin Maize was both my inspiration and the saddest thing I knew. Hot blood in cold veins—I love her still. She took me down with her for one long, dark month. That was several years ago, but something was planted.
In the years since Maize, I have tried to see things right, but there is never a clear, clean line between what is mine and what belongs to others. In New Ulm, Texas, I spent three weeks in jail, and later—alone, dried out—I borrowed a man and his car in the Carrabassett Valley.
The Users of Memory
Netta Cartwright believes these are the things that will bring her husband Franklin back from the dead: thick Velveeta sandwi
ches, fresh air, plenty of talk and music. She throws the windows open, though it is October in Boise and the smoke-filled breeze whips the lacy curtains, makes them dance in the near-cold. Netta works the radio dial the way other retired women learn to spin the Bingo basket up at St. Mark’s on Thursdays—90 percent wrist, 10 percent luck. She turns up the radio’s volume when something good comes in: Johnny Paycheck or “The Wabash Cannon-ball.” She taps her foot and tries to find the music’s rhythm and then tries to pass it on to Franklin.
“You hear that, honey?” she yells, her foot cracking thunder, louder than the radio now.
Carlene, Netta and Franklin’s eldest daughter, watches her mother and shakes her head, amazement and disgust and weariness all rolling up into one big ball. “How can you be sixty-three and not know anything?” she asks Netta. Carlene is sorting through a bowl of butter mints, picking out the pinks and slowly eating them.
Netta is too busy to answer or to even listen. She must concentrate on the slippery rhythm, pick it up, then get it all the way down to her foot.
Just an arm’s length away from the women, Franklin lies on a bed near the living room window, and in the strictest sense he isn’t dead, of course, but he’s close enough: low vitals, a complete loss of hair, a mouth that won’t form a single word. The left side of his body is soft and slack, useless as a flat tire. Netta has been known to walk right over and smack that arm or give a half-soft karate chop to the withered leg, hoping for even the slightest reaction. She’d appreciate a blink or even a nod from Franklin—thank you—but he just lies there, silent, not even a half-light shining from his old, whiskered face.
A Brief History of Male Nudes in America Page 10