“But when you were pregnant, didn’t Lewis drive you crazy with his helpfulness? Didn’t you ever want to tell him to leave you alone?”
I looked up and saw a shadow drift across Freda’s face.
“I’ve never wanted Lewis to leave me alone. Some men thoroughly enjoy fatherhood. I’d rather have one who cares too much than one who doesn’t care at all. They had to drag my daddy out of a bar every time my mother was ready to have a baby. She had to drive him to the hospital. It’s a time to share, my mother said; you want someone around even if he is half drunk and pukes all over the nurses’ station.”
Wynn moved Freda to the dryer next to me, flipped the bubble down over Freda’s head, and twisted the temperature setting. She knocked on the plastic bubble.
“You all right in there?” Wynn yelled.
Freda gave the thumbs up sign.
It was a Saturday morning. Freda dragged me out of bed to lend moral support while she sat under a dryer burning her ears in Round Corners’ only beauty shop. Under the big bubble dryer, a tiny hurricane whirled around her head, blocking out sound, letting in only thoughts. As Freda thumbed through a magazine, I knew her mind was not on the European chocolate-lovers diet (eat all you want and lose beaucoup pounds a week) or seven ways to develop assertiveness. She even passed on an interview with Cynthia Sands, “the diva of afternoon soap operas.”
“Perhaps it’s good that Lewis and I are through with having babies,” she said in the car on the way to Wynn’s. “He’s hardly ever around anymore. And I couldn’t bear to go through it without him.”
That morning she walked into Wynn’s shop and said, “Make me into a new woman.” She didn’t have an appointment. She didn’t tell Lewis where she was going. She wanted a new look to lure back her old Lewis Lee, she said.
“I miss that man. I miss those afternoons, when the children were in school and we could take our time loving.” The cavorting in those television beds was nothing compared to what happened between her and Lewis, she said. And afterwards, he would hold her and they would talk as friends do. “None of that cigarette-after-it’s-done shit like they do on television, Maud,” Freda said.
Freda’s new look resembled many of the new looks walking around Round Corners. Not quite right. Was it lopsided? Maybe the curl was too tight or the cut too short? There was nothing to pile on top of her head as was Freda’s style for years. Wynn said she thought the short, earlobe-length fluffed out by a perm was flattering. She showed Freda all kinds of things she could do with two little barrettes. Wynn clipped the curls back from Freda’s face.
Later, at the Round Corners Restaurant, I said, “Well, it’ll grow out.”
“That’s something to look forward to,” said Freda. “Unless Wynn mistakenly used some solution that stunts growth. I wouldn’t be surprised. Her concentration is shot to hell. There are some definite disadvantages to being a one-beautician town.” Freda tried combing her hair again. “Oh, what is Lewis going to say?”
“He’s going to say you’re beautiful.”
Freda looked skeptical.
“Really. It kind of grows on you.”
“Really?” said Freda, stretching up on her tiptoes to examine her hair in the mirror of the old medicine cabinet hung high over the potatoes in the back room of the Round Corners Restaurant. Freda had to juggle on a sack of Maine’s finest spuds to see.
“Really,” I said, patting Freda’s arm.
I flexed my tired shoulders as I passed through the kitchen, grabbing a cheeseburger deluxe for Amos. I hadn’t read a newspaper in weeks. I worked and painted, painted and worked, sometimes I ate, sometimes I slept.
Thomas was my clock, making sure I arrived at the restaurant on time and remembered dental appointments and paid the electricity bill. The arrangement was good for the painting, but lousy for my knowledge of world affairs. Amos and Bartholomew did their best to keep me informed on current events. It was risky, relying on them for my sole contact with the outside world. They viewed life through a different window than most people, one of those windows common to New England houses, a little window stuck on its side under the eaves. The window was skewed, and you tended to slant your head when you peered through it. To Amos and Bartholomew, nothing was as bad as it could be, but then everything was damn near awful. They loved to consider the worst that could happen and then elaborate on it.
“I knew they were going to sink that boat,” said Amos.
“Me, too,” said Bartholomew.
“What?” I said, placing the cheeseburger deluxe in front of Amos and refilling his coffee cup.
“The cruise ship,” said Amos. “Those astronomers are pointing out the stars to Davey Jones now.”
“That’s a fact,” said Bartholomew. “Sunk it just like they said they would.”
“Oh, no,” I said.
“You just can’t deal with people who have suicide as a career goal,” said Amos.
“You don’t have anything to bargain with,” said Bartholomew, nodding. “Human life is about the same as an ant’s.”
“Poor Thomas,” I said.
“Thomas?”
“He’s partial to astronomers.”
“We’re all partial to something,” said Bartholomew.
“Exactly,” said Amos. “Those people who took that ship were nuts, not dumb. You think they picked the world’s top scientists out of a hat? They knew how important those astronomers were to the world and what would happen if they were blown off the planet. We’re going to have to live on those damn stars some day and now who’s going to tell us how to do it?”
“None of them survived?”
“Maybe the ones who knew how to swim and still had arms and legs to do it with,” said Amos. “Must have looked like some kind of war zone.”
“And don’t forget the sharks,” said Bartholomew.
“Must have been terrible,” said Amos.
“That’s a fact,” I said.
I had to find Thomas. Freda, not eager to go home until she had fooled with her hair some more, agreed to close up the restaurant. When I arrived home, the yellow van was parked in the drive. I started calling Thomas’s name the moment I stepped through the door. I searched every room of the house. The radio was playing a country song in the kitchen. The dishes were washed. Thomas was a better housekeeper in despair than I am in contentment. Upstairs the bedrooms were empty. My bed was made. I never made my bed. A stack of freshly laundered clothes had been placed neatly on the corner. The attic was dark. No one answered my calls. The emptiness frightened me.
I jumped when the phone rang. It was T-Bone.
“He’s over here. I pumped him full of Rolling Rocks. He’s got the tolerance of a baby.”
“Thanks.”
“You coming to get him?”
“Can I just stay at your place, too?”
“What am I running? A hotel?”
* * *
Lines. Shapes. Line becomes shape. Shape becomes form. Form becomes content.
Feather the line, coax it across the page, into a circle, into a leg, into a backbone. Go back and give it strength. Dark. Darker. Strong enough to stand up to your moods and emotions and opinions.
In the painting, the sun is shining from the east. It makes shade. Rub. Smear. Shade. Suddenly, there is roundness and volume.
There is depth, thanks to cosmology and a charcoal pencil.
Where is perspective? More line. More shape. More form.
I can’t draw fast enough, George. It’s wonderful. I feel flow.
The switch has been flipped, at last.
My God, George, I feel…
Line becomes shape. Shape becomes form. Form becomes content.
Content becomes… content becomes…
A cow.
* * *
This painting is getting bigger every day. At its current rate of growth, it will burst the seams of the studio, and then I’ll really have a mess.
The painting has grown into an ill-mannere
d child. It devours gallons of paint, burps outrageously, and asks what’s next. Like all mothers forced to live with their children for days and nights without end, I am a woman on the edge. I can’t stand it any longer. I have to talk to someone. Preferably an adult.
What can I do, George?
Relax? That’s it. I expected more from a man with cosmic experience.
* * *
Nothing about the painting was working. “What can I do?” I asked Thomas.
“Read a book,” suggested Thomas. “Take your mind off your problems.”
Thomas reads the strangest books in the world. He lent me a collection of “scientific/realistic/metaphysic” essays called Maintenance of the Universe. The essays are written from the point of view of a man who describes himself as “janitor to the stars.”
“How do you paint a comet?” asks the author of Maintenance of the Universe. “Do you climb to the top of the world’s tallest ladder and hold out the brush as it streaks by? Do you sail to a satellite, wait, and fling the whole can of paint on it as it passes? Or do you turn the binoculars on yourself and look far away to that place inside of you that is too deep to swim and too quick to catch, to that place where you can change the color of a comet just by wishing it so?
“Such are the considerations of the celestial handyman.”
I threw down my paintbrush, swung around and searched the shelf of paint cans, selected six, and packed them in a box along with several brushes and a roll of paper towels. I cut off the tips of my woolen gloves and pulled on a coat.
Outside I stared at the side of the barn and the faded painting of Milky Way. For a moment, I heard my father again the day he walked into the mural of a barn door. I heard him howling and saw him holding his nose as it turned red and tender and twice its size. And I remembered how he held out his arms, when he was sure he’d smell again, and we collapsed against each other. I felt our chests rising and falling with our giggles. I tasted the cool, foggy morning, as we sucked the mist from each other’s mouths.
I shoveled a path to the painting, propped the box of paints in the snow bank, and set to work. George said Milky Way’s big black and white Holstein body reminded him of inkblots. I tried to ignore him. He began to pitch a softball against the side of the barn. Bang, bang, bang.
All right, George, inkblots. Bang, bang. What do I see in this one? A butterfly? What do you mean, in winter?
Bang, bang.
A lion in a dentist’s chair. Is this painful for me? Who are you, Freud?
Bang.
A wing walker riding a pterodactyl. Is the wing walker frightened? No. He’s happy. At last he’s flying.
Bang.
I think that is all the time we have today, Mrs. Calhoun? Cute, George, real cute.
* * *
Thomas drove home that evening the way one does with his eyes on paintings and not paths—into a snow bank. He didn’t stop to consider any damage to the van, he was so excited about Milky Way. He rushed to get out of the vehicle, flinging open the van door, which struck the snow bank and bounced back into Thomas’s nose. He entered the studio cursing and holding the injured extremity.
“What the hell is going on, Maud?”
“Going on? Nothing. You better put an ice bag on that nose.”
The next morning, Thomas called T-Bone, who arrived in a truck with a big winch, and together they pulled the yellow van out of the snow bank. It took two seconds. The day was bright as a beach, the sun reflecting off the snow. Twenty-five degrees and sunny. Vermonters considered such days a gift, a picnic, a wonderful surprise like finding a ten dollar bill tucked between the pages of a book you hadn’t picked up in years.
The two banged into the house, knocking the snow from their boots, unzipping jackets, and tossing them on pegs by the door. “It feels good in here,” Thomas said, heading for the shelf where the coffee was stored and expertly filling the coffee maker. Thomas the California boy wasn’t sold on winter yet. The sun coming in the kitchen window beamed down motes into the air. It flowed over Thomas’s head and shoulder, and suddenly he was a golden child. He turned, smiled, shoved a lock of golden hair from his eyes, and leaned against the counter.
I fiddled with a pencil, doodling on the red-checkered tablecloth Thomas had bought to set the atmosphere for his last Italian dinner. I heard T-Bone gasp and quickly looked at him. He stared at my doodling. I glanced down at the drawing. It was Thomas the golden child, bathed in light, in peace.
* * *
T-Bone nearly lost three Holsteins in January. The narrow escapes threw T-Bone off balance. He felt himself teetering horribly. It frightened him. “The only place I feel safe is in your arms,” he said.
But I was painting again. He knew what that meant: Sometimes I worked through the night. I forgot to eat and bathe and call him when I wasn’t going to be over. “I used to be able to take it, Maud,” he said, one night holding me tightly, under the covers in his big bed. “It used to be enough to just watch over you. Now, I need more. God, I think I’m turning into George.”
T-Bone the worrier sat at my kitchen table, studying a coffee mug. None of my dishes match. I do not think in terms of eight-piece place settings. If I see a piece of pottery I like, I buy it. That’s that. No wondering if it will complement the rest of my china. “Has this pottery been tested for lead paint?” T-Bone asked.
Such potential failures as not saving me from lead poisoning prey on T-Bone’s mind constantly now. Suppose there was a blizzard and it piled up snow for a week and I couldn’t get out for food or wood. He was sure his truck wouldn’t start. He would try to limp the mile between our doors, but all the landmarks would be buried and he would wander in circles until spring. By then, I could be dead from starvation or frozen or moved away. Such was T-Bone’s luck.
Or suppose the government needed him for a top secret mission. They required a man of his skills: a man fluent in two languages, good with animals, able to keep a secret, not too talkative, walks with a limp. They want him to impersonate an old sea captain, who has retired with his pet parrot to the Vermont hills but reportedly still is active in the smuggling business. The deal goes down on a boat on Lake Champlain, but promptly is blown by T-Bone the valiant sea captain with a weak stomach. T-Bone forgot to tell the government men he hates boats.
“I hate change,” T-Bone said, sipping his coffee. He shook his head. So many things in T-Bone’s world seemed to be changing. He had no confidence in himself or his ability to keep his herd healthy. Was it his imagination or were the women of Round Corners wearing their hair wilder? He thought he saw the librarian in a punk cut yesterday. That same day he passed Reverend Swan going into Snowden’s and the minister didn’t even say hello or bless you when T-Bone sneezed. The least you could expect from a minister is comfort in the time of a cold, T-Bone thought. He remembered when he was a boy and Father Julian held the crossed candles under his throat to bless his tonsils, voice box, and sinuses. The doctor had to remove his tonsils anyway, and no amount of ice cream would restore his faith in God’s henchman, St. Blaise, the great protector of throats.
“Do you want to drive into Burlington and catch a movie tonight?” asked T-Bone, continuing to eye with distrust the suspected carrier of lead poisoning.
“Thanks, but I’m working on the painting tonight. Why don’t you ask Thomas?”
T-Bone put the mug down with a thump. “Because it’s not as much fun sharing a bucket of popcorn with Thomas.”
“You could accomplish some real male bonding,” I said. “Digging into the same bucket of buttery, high-cholesterol snacks ought to be right up there with hunting down small defenseless animals together and roasting them on a spit.”
“You’ve been reading those magazines at Wynn’s again, haven’t you?”
T-Bone coaxed and pressed, and I refused and sent him home to sulk. “Men don’t sulk,” he said, slamming out of the house. I watched from the kitchen window as the limping T-Bone stalked past the snow cow Thomas made yeste
rday. The cow wore a toga, a Halley’s Comet baseball cap, and a Mona Lisa smile. T-Bone stopped and stared at the pile of snow in the shape of Plato the Bovine. Suddenly he bent, scooped up a handful of snow, formed a snowball, and hurled it at the cow. “Bond this,” he yelled, flatting the cow’s snout with a second fast ball. He spun to launch a third attack, lost his balance on a patch of ice, and went down with a crash. When I last saw him, he was rubbing his rump and climbing into his truck.
“Right. Men don’t sulk,” I said, heading up to the studio. “My ass.”
17. Don’t Get Your Gooey Fingerprints on my Crystal Ball
The sign said, “Sister Wilma—Spiritual Counselor to the Stars and Skiers.” A palm was painted below Sister Wilma’s name. An eye winked from the center of the palm. Mountains, presumably Vermont’s Green Mountains, were pictured in the background. At the foot of the hills, in precise letters, was: “All Credit Cards Accepted.”
Six high-powered floodlights lit both sides of the sign at night. Sister Wilma said hers was a prominent clientele, and that she did most of her business after dark. I believed it. A man practically knocked over Ella as he hurried to leave Sister Wilma’s undetected. “Sorry,” he grunted, then fled down the steps, his back hunched, his collar turned up, his hat pulled low. We saw him shove a pair of sunglasses on his nose as he climbed into a red sports car and roared away into the night.
“Don’t we know him?” Ella said.
“I wonder,” said Sister Wilma from behind us, making us jump, “when we will cease to apologize for seeking spirituality in the out-of-the-way place.”
We turned and met Sister Wilma, a plain woman who carried forty pounds more than she should on those Earth shoe-clad feet. (“I didn’t know they sold Earth shoes anymore,” Ella whispered.) Sister Wilma was dressed like a hausfrau, in polyester pants and striped linen blouse. Her hair was permed against its better judgment. The tight Afro gave her an unnatural appearance, bug-eyed and jowly like a frog in a bathtub. She had porcelain skin, which would never tan in a million years. A million lifetimes.
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