“You’d probably miss him, considering your current accuracy with sharp implements.”
“Maud!“
“He’s only going to help.”
“I don’t need his goddamn help.”
“Well, you’re getting it anyway. Because I don’t like cows.”
T-Bone screamed. “Goddamn, Maud.”
As I slammed through the back door, I heard T-Bone yell, “That goddamn van is pinging again. Have the kid listen to it. Before it breaks down on you somewhere.”
“What do you care!”
“Do it, Maud.”
Thomas could call up the automotive encyclopedia on his computer, get some idea of what the problem was. T-Bone was not mechanically inclined. He was not inclined toward anything anymore—a situation I personally was familiar with but had never identified with T-Bone.
I took the road home slowly. The mile between T-Bone’s and my place had never seemed so long. The road was empty. Waiting. I passed my drive, carefully reversed, and turned. I parked the van sideways, climbed out, and approached the faded painting of Milky Way. Suddenly the Rolling Rocks and my argument with T-Bone got to me. I was so tired. My legs gave out and I decided to sit. That’s where Thomas found me when he came out for his nightly sky watching, asleep on the cold ground. He lifted me into his arms and carried me into the house. I opened my eyes and smiled at him.
“You’re a funny kid. Do you have any information in that computer of yours on Machu Picchu?”
10. Mailwomen Have Elephant Memories
Country western music poured out of the radio in the studio. The theme was lovesickness, as usual. I thought of T-Bone. He was milking the cows again. Thomas’s presence had a stimulating effect on him, as I knew it would.
“I go to work in the middle of the night,” he warned Thomas that first morning.
“So do astronomers,” smiled Thomas.
To his surprise, Thomas liked working with the cows. He’d never had much experience with anything bigger than a dog before, anything that stepped on your feet one minute and licked the hat off your head the next. He was accustomed to animals whose shit fit in a pooper scooper. He said he was learning valuable things. He had given up the life of a protester and was now leaning toward the Peace Corps.
Thomas explained the intricacies of a milking machine to anyone who would listen. Today it was Wynn, as she trimmed his hair by the sink in my studio. An old paint rag was draped around his shoulders like a beautician’s cape. It was pinned at the neck with a clothes pin. I watched Wynn snip at Thomas’s blond hair and wondered if she was doing her pelvic squeezes.
Wynn said she could do twenty pelvic squeezes while she was curling Marie LeBeau’s hair. Marie, a schoolteacher, had short, black hair. She liked the curl tight, close to her head. Every time she came in, she said to Wynn: “Give me a do those kids can’t undo.” Marie taught ninth grade English. (She told every new group of kids: “Please don’t tell me about your love lives in the first personal essay. Give me something to look forward to.”) Wynn said the squeezes went like this: She wrapped a strand of Marie’s hair around the hot curling rod, held it for a moment just as she held her pelvic muscles, then released both her bottom and Marie’s curl.
Wynn purchased a book that gave instructions for all kinds of exercises for pregnant women. She performed her exercises daily. Whenever she had the chance, she squeezed, lifted, or tightened something. The book said if she did the exercises faithfully, her delivery would be easier and she would regain her shape more quickly after the baby was born. Harvey said he couldn’t understand it: First, she couldn’t wait to get fat enough for maternity smocks and now she was worried that she’d need them for life. Wynn told Harvey he knew nothing about prenatal care.
“This will fall right in shape for you,” Wynn told Thomas as she combed and clipped. “No fuss. No muss.”
“Just right for my busy lifestyle,” Thomas said.
I dabbed sienna on the canvas. I finished sketching Wynn shortly after Thanksgiving, yet she continued to stop by more days than not. The smell of paint no longer affected her like a rocking boat; she and the baby were cruising through the second trimester. She seemed more contented here than at the shop. She always brought something to eat, a cake, a pot of chili, a casserole. I tried to ignore the chocolate chip cookies on the table.
Wynn told Thomas, “I have known Maud all her life—did she tell you we were in geography together?—so I know about creative urges. They are special things. You can’t just shut them off when you want to. They possess you. It’s a craziness in you. You wait and see. Maud’ll forget to eat and sleep and change her shirt. She’ll come into the Round Corners Restaurant looking deader than yesterday’s meatloaf. It used to drive George nuts. We’ve got to take care of her.”
Thomas said he would.
“I couldn’t do what Maud does,” said Wynn, tilting Thomas’s head forward to clip the little hairs along his neck.
The phone rang. I concentrated on the sienna and ignored the phone. Thomas started to get up, but Wynn shoved him back in his seat.
“Maud, will you get that, please?” Wynn said. “We’re busy here.”
I wiped my hands on a cloth and grabbed the paint-speckled telephone. It was Ella Snowden. She didn’t even say hello, just launched into some story about losing the notebook in which she was writing the poem to go with the mural. It was to be the epic saga of Round Corners and its residents. She’d searched the house, the car, the entire post office.
“It’s not like me to misplace anything, no matter what Frank says, and especially not a notebook. Frank says I’m the most disorganized woman in Round Corners; and if I lost one of my notebooks, it was my own fault and no reason to take it out on him.” Ella sniffed. “It’s amazing how you can be married to a person half your life and they still know so little about you. You don’t get to be an employee of the United States Postal Service by losing things.”
Ella has been writing poetry for forty years. She has never been published. The closest she ever comes are the little rhymes she writes at the bottom of her Christmas cards. The people of Round Corners like Ella Snowden’s “verses”; some even admit they look forward to them Christmas after Christmas.
Each year Ella took one week of paid vacation from the United States Postal Service and attended a writers conference in Middlebury. Also, each year Frank tried to talk her out of it. I miss you too durn much, he said. But Ella wouldn’t give up those seven days for a chance to meet John Keats, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost at the same cocktail party. Now, if you threw in Allen Ginsberg, she might be tempted. “That Ginsberg fellow is somethin’,” Ella says.
At the writers conference, Ella pretended she was not an old woman running a rural postal route, threatened every year by budget cuts. She mixed with the young people and listened to their ideas and loaded her notebooks with thoughts. And she wrote poetry entirely unlike the poetry she penned in Round Corners.
Conference poetry was about politics and loneliness, about war and fear, about the land and love. She wrote all night at conference. She wrote while miles away Frank snored and dreamed. In the morning, the young students found her asleep, bent over a notebook on the table, her gray hair wild from scraping fingers. They hesitated about waking her but knew she would be upset if they didn’t.
So they woke her. They watched her struggle up from deep dreams, heard her whisper “Frank,” and then, her eyes would pop open, awake and more alert than her young colleagues. They helped her out of the chair. She grew stiff during the night and often needed to lean for a moment on one of the young men. Someone would hand her the notebook. She would smile and thank them as they entered the dining room.
“The dining room,” Ella says, “is always buzzing and clacking and banging. It’s not the food trays you’re hearing; it’s the words. They fly like a gaggle of geese over your head, honking, drawing your attention, making you smile at the joy of life. I’m so contented in that dining room.”
I’m one of the few in Round Corners privileged to read Ella’s conference poetry, and Ella said the Round Corners poem was like those. “I didn’t intend it to be so, but the words are spilling out of me, Maud. In buckets. It frightens Frank; hell, it frightens me.”
This passion poetry, Ella said, seemed out of place in Round Corners. For one thing, she could not pull all-nighters in Round Corners; she tended to give people the wrong mail when she had less than eight hours of shut eye. And this time of year—the Christmas season—she especially needed her wits about her.
This poem was different in other ways, too. It did not rhyme. All her Round Corners poetry rhymed. This poem just seemed to grow. It was born in a tumult of words tumbling to the paper, a waterfall of words. Sometimes it was a swampy mess, and other times it was a miracle. Ella had never had a poem come to her in this manner, where she felt more recorder than writer.
“Is this the way it was with you and the house, Maud?” she asked.
I knew what Ella was experiencing: the joy of the smooth ride. There was nothing like being possessed, to be driven and to drive. We come back again and again to feel that feeling one more time. We’re creativity druggies, and we’ll do anything to find that high again. We’ll put up with recalcitrant cows and dead husbands who still think they know more about art than we do. I have tried everything to find my way back: Rolling Rock, perseverance, meditation.
Nothing works.
As my farmer father used to say, it comes when it comes. I envied Ella.
“Is this the way it is with Ginsberg, Maud?” Ella asked me one day. “All this fury? All this joy? All this inevitability?”
Frank did not like Ginsberg. He did not want Ella reading Ginsberg in bed at night. He said it was silly to read something you didn’t understand. But Ella could not resist Ginsberg’s words; they rattled around in her head, filling it to bursting, until it no longer mattered that she didn’t know what a “peyote” was. She told Frank poetry doesn’t have to rhyme all the time, and wasn’t “angelheaded hipsters” a lovely image? Frank huffed.
Ella named her poem about Round Corners “Howling Mad Home.” Allen Ginsberg wasn’t the only one who knew crazy people, Ella said.
“Have you looked in the stamp drawer?” I asked her. “How about the mailbags? Maybe it got mixed up and found its way to Montpelier.”
Ella gasped. “Oh, that can’t be, it just can’t be.”
“Take it easy, Ella.”
“But, Maud, if that notebook should fall into the wrong hands…”
“We’re not talking government secrets here, are we, Ella?”
“I write everything in my notebooks. Things I don’t even remember writing in the first place, thoughts I never knew I thought. ‘Howling Mad Home’ was not a cat poem; it wasn’t a rhyme about spring or a daffodil verse. It was about real people living and loving, people who took out the trash and scratched their bellies. If the contents of that notebook ever became public, I would have some explaining to do, Maud. There are references to certain friends, certain neighbors, a certain husband.”
I tried to soothe Ella. She and Frank were married forty years ago. It was a small ceremony in a little Catholic church up the mountain. They started attending the Reverend Swan’s service when the diocese turned the chapel in the mountains into a resort. Neither she nor Frank skied. They never had children. Up in the closet she still had a box of napkins engraved with golden wedding bells and “Ella and Frank.” How’s that for hanging onto something?
Ella said she knew Frank better than she knew herself. She could tell from the look in his eye whether he wanted hotcakes or Quaker Oats for breakfast. She knew he was afraid of heights and hated putting on the storm windows each fall and taking them off in the spring. She knew, at that very moment, he probably was sneaking a nap in the rocker by the wood stove in the store next door. Because she knew him so well, she figured he probably hadn’t meant it that morning when he said she would forget her head if it wasn’t attached.
“When was the last time I lost something of his?” Ella cried. “I have accounted for forty years of socks, underwear, handkerchiefs, tools, and receipts.”
“I’m sure he’ll apologize tonight,” I said.
But he didn’t.
I helped Ella look for the notebook, but it was as if it just vanished, disappeared into dust. Wynn said she bet it was the knitting needle thief. Don’t be ridiculous, Harvey Winchester said, which is not unusual since Harvey couldn’t agree with anyone lately. Thomas drove into Burlington one morning and returned with a new notebook for Ella, a lovely hard-covered book with blank pages and a gingham print cover. Wynn gave Ella a new perm in my sink, to pull her out of her funk.
“It’s a perfect perm, not too tight,” I said, smiling at Ella. Her bottom lip quivered as she stared at her reflection in the mirror.
“Just right, Mrs. Snowden,” Thomas agreed.
“It’s you, Ella,” Wynn said.
Ella sighed.
I sighed.
The next day I found myself sketching Ella. She held a quill pen in her hand and wore a lacy, high collared blouse. She sat at an angle and looked off into the distance. Below the soft blouse she wore blue pants with dark stripes down the side, part of the official ensemble of the United States Postal Service. Ella wanted only to be pictured from the waist up. She thought her hips were too big. I sketched her full frame and when it came time to draw the blue linen uniform my pencil made the shape of billowing skirts, flowing, romantic, unofficial.
Wynn, leaning over me as I worked, gripped my shoulder happily.
“It’s the spitting image of you, Ella,” she said.
“Haven’t you got some pelvic squeezes to do?” I growled.
11. When a Snowflake Is Not as Light as a Feather
The van gave out half way up the mountain. The Olive Eyesore said, “Ciao, Baby.” The Artmobile said, “See you around the old Seurat.” The Cause Of One of My Great Fights with George threw in the towel.
This was not your normal breakdown. This was a Stranded Motorist in the Dead of Winter breakdown. The cold snap turned into a full-fledged winter—and a way of life—three days ago when it began snowing. Snow continued to fall, sticking like an unwanted house guest.
Motorists dared not let their gasoline tanks get low in case they met up with a whiteout, steered into a tree, and had to cool their heels until help arrived—or, as in my case, they drove a beast vehicle with a mind of its own. I tapped the fuel gauge; it said half full. George said he wouldn’t believe that instrument of faulty information if it swore on the Bible.
That’s the difference between you and me, George. You expect all machinery to lie to you. I prefer to think of it as one of our mechanical friends showing a little creativity.
No, George, creativity never killed anyone, except for maybe an airplane inventor or two. I know I could freeze to death, thanks for reminding me.
The engine only uttered its last cough a few moments ago and already my toes were frostbitten. I realize that is medically impossible. The van still had some stored warmth. I wasn’t exposed to the elements, except for the wind that whipped through the cracks around the windows. They have never rolled up completely. I’ve preferred it that way; usually it gives the van that wide-open-spaces feeling. But when you’re wondering about the human capacity for withstanding sub-zero temperatures, you begin to see the advantages of tight windows and doors.
I have been stranded before by my mercurial mechanical amigo. Experience kept me from going into hysterics and ripping up the upholstery for dinner.
I don’t have to worry about food, George. Someone will come along. Check the glove compartment for candy bars? Don’t be ridiculous.
I plunged into the glove compartment. There was an opened package of stale rye and cheddar crackers and three sticks of gum.
I thought I had a can of Pringles in there. Why would T-Bone steal my potato chips, George? He wasn’t always mooching off us. I invited
him to dinner, because I wanted him around. He was a great conversationalist, and he always helped with the dishes. We talked of other things, besides cows. Name them? There was…
I know you never trusted him; he never trusted you. So what’s new? The men in my life never trust each other.
I popped a stick of gum in my mouth. The taste of cinnamon flooded my taste buds, making me hungry. That’s the way it is when you’re stranded: All you can think about is food and warmth. It doesn’t matter if you just finished a seven-course meal that a small Third World country could live off of for a week. It doesn’t make a bit of difference that you’re wearing three wool sweaters; a down parka explorers tested against the blizzards on Mt. Everest; insulated, top-of-the-line, straight-from-the-L.L. Bean catalog boots; two pairs of gloves, one silk and the other lambs wool and leather; and a hat that better be warm because it makes you look ridiculous. You’re still hungry and cold, from the moment the engine goes kaput.
I climbed between the seats and dug around in the back of the van. I unearthed an old Army blanket under a shovel and three empty paint cans. I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and crawled back into the driver’s seat.
Isn’t this the way it always happens, George? I’ve started painting again, nothing earth-shattering yet, but it keeps that buzzard sheriff from the door. Wynn and Ella are preening like mother hens. No one has asked to see the painting yet. They’re afraid they’ll destroy the muse. They just hover and cook and offer to run errands for me. I’m painting, and now I’m going to lose all ten fingers to frostbite.
I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the seat. At that very moment, T-Bone probably was curled up with a Rolling Rock and a bag of chips by the wood stove. Cat probably was chasing a potato chip across the floor. Maybe I could send him a psychic call for help. According to Raj, we’re all connected by one mother of a consciousness.
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