by Carmel Bird
In the 1950s a girl called Louisa and I used to take turns playing the music and singing the score of Oklahoma!. It was a favourite among many favourites of ours. (We adored Carousel.) The meadow, the golden haze, the corn, the elephant.
Tasmanian schoolgirls safe and sound in our front rooms (hers or mine), we thrashed the tunes out of the upright pianos and lost ourselves in the lyrics. Everything we knew about the state of Oklahoma was contained in the words of the songs. We didn’t see any play on the word ‘corn’. We saw life, I have to say, through a golden haze. We did, we did. (And note that in a traditional image of an elephant, the animal is represented in profile, with the result that only one eye is shown. So the handy rhyme of ‘high’ with ‘eye’ is benign, suggests no harm to the elephant.)
The encyclopaedia now tells me that the word Oklahoma is derived from two Choctaw Indian words: ‘okla’ and ‘humma’ meaning ‘people’ and ‘red’. I enjoy knowing this stuff, and I would have liked to know it then. But like the mythic lands of Camelot or Paradise, Oklahoma was a lovely word for a far-off place in the imagination. I probably read things about it one time or another in National Geographic, but the real place and the fantasy place never connected. In the nineteenth century Oklahoma was ‘a dumping ground for displaced Indian tribes’. ‘By the 1970s nearly all of Oklahoma’s residents reflected a typically Midwestern American culture.’ It’s in the Bible Belt.
As I read the entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, learning of oil wells and liquor laws and timber, my eye is caught by the names of three ballerinas of ‘international fame’—Rosella Hightower and Maria and Marjorie Tallchief. Louisa and I would have been interested in those girls, the Hightowers and the Tallchiefs. I wish I could say we knew of them, that we played a game—you be a Hightower and I’ll be a Tallchief—but that would not be true. Our own names were good enough, and we knew it—Power and Pretty.
Louisa Pretty was more than pretty, she was beautiful.
I tell Ken I’m writing stuff about me and Louisa and how we used to like the musicals, and how there was this coincidence because just when I was going to write about us and how we used to play Oklahoma! the bomb went off in Oklahoma City, making a big difference to the way I think about Oklahoma. Coincidence is a thing, isn’t it?
Boy from Starpoint Man from Dreamland
The day I began writing about me and Louisa and our interest in musical comedies was the day before the bomb went off in Oklahoma City. The meaning of the word ‘Oklahoma’ changed forever just after nine o’clock on 19 April 1995. On page 23 of Time there’s a picture that gives new resonance to the words ‘red people’—a picture of Gary Glover as he is carried from the wreckage, his anguished face and striped shirt drenched in and dripping with blood. (And who is Gary Glover? I don’t know, except he is the red man in the business shirt being carried from the bombed building in Oklahoma City on 19 April.)
Just as the name ‘Auschwitz’ strikes horror, as the words ‘Hoddle Street’ took on a grisly meaning they will never lose, now the word ‘Oklahoma’, once the jaunty title of a musical, awakens images of death, terrorism, evil. Side by side on the piano’s music rest I have placed the musical score and the Time magazine. One, a thick buff volume with open black type, its spine reinforced with ancient sticky tape; the other bearing a life-size coloured photograph of the face of the man accused of making and planting the bomb. Most of the man’s forehead is occupied by the red letters of the heading ‘Time’. His eyes are small, blue, their gaze, which does not meet the camera, is intent. You’d have to say his mouth is small and mean. And to the left, below his nose, the yellow words in huge block letters that sit out from a thin black shadow: ‘The Face of Terror’. Between these words and the T of Time is a photograph the size of a playing card—a rescue worker in brown and yellow protective clothing, wearing a red helmet stamped with a yellow ‘5’, cradles in his arms the body of a baby, its head smudged with blood, its limbs dangling limp, on its feet a pair of grubby, tattered booties, palest yellow. I cannot look at this picture of the man and the baby without weeping.
The face of terror is huge and dominant, its sights set on something out there, something for which it will bypass the little window where we see Goodness in helmet number five and Innocence in the yellow booties.
Inside the magazine the window picture is enlarged, and differently framed so that it contains two other figures. Photographed by Charles H. Porter IV, the structure and design of the picture are that of an ‘Adoration of the Virgin and Child’—the backs of the bare heads of two men appear in the lower right-hand corner, their gaze directed towards the child. All lines of attention, theirs and that of Number Five, meet a point which is the eyelash of the closed eye, just visible in the baby’s profile, framed by the thick smudge of blood. The face of Number Five, whose name is Chris Fields, bears an expression of deeply bitter tenderness and sorrow. Turn the page and you find repeated the face of the man accused of planting the bomb. This time it is smaller than it was on the cover, but it is still larger than the face of Chris Fields. If you flick the page back and forth, fold in the leaf that separates the two pictures, the gaze in those blue eyes now just misses the baby’s eyelash.
The baby’s name was Baylee Almon and on 18 April she celebrated her first birthday. When her mother heard the explosion she thought it was thunder, but then she saw it was the noise of the destruction of the building where she had left her baby in daycare, and she soon learnt they had found a baby in yellow booties. ‘I knew it was her.’ Baylee’s mother didn’t want the press to take up Baylee’s story. Too late—those booties are on the cover of Time. They cover the feet on the end of those limp, blood-spattered legs. And the baby’s arms dangle in an odd posture as her head is supported by the forearm of Chris Fields. I can’t take my eyes off the brown firefighter’s gloves bunched in Chris Fields’s left hand—Baylee’s fingers trail across the tops of these gloves. ‘She was learning how to walk.’
Yes, this is the message from the Heartland. ‘A Blow to the Heart’ is Time’s headline. The biggest shock for people in America, some say, has been that the terror came from within, and that it struck at the heart in the heart of the heart of the country. Someone sings about asking your heart for the truth in Oklahoma! ‘Firemen tenderly carried the infants, as paramedics wrapped them in long white gauze like christening dresses.’
Will it ever be possible to produce Oklahoma! again?
The name of the motel the man accused of the bombing stayed in was ‘Dreamland’; the name of his high school was ‘Starpoint’. The boy from Starpoint, the man from Dreamland.
Watch out for him.
I say that to Ken and he says yeah, watch out for the man from Dreamland all right.
A few days after the bombing I watched the video of the movie of Oklahoma. Very dated; rather dull. I can’t quite understand what Louisa and I used to see in it. Well, the songs are catchy. But I am a different person now, and a lot of things have happened to the world and to us, and to movies for that matter, since we used to play and sing together in the sleepy backblocks of Tasmania, dreaming of faraway places such as Oklahoma, Paris, London, New York. The big capitals were places we wanted to visit; but Oklahoma, like Camelot, was just a great word, a myth, a location for the imagination only. In my own mind’s eye, the corn resembled incredibly tall wheat because I didn’t know how corn grew. And concealed by the wheat were herds of elephants, their heads visible from the eyes up. I never bothered to find out the truth about corn; but I was a sucker for elephants. I collected families of little black carved elephants and also I gathered stories and books on the subject. Elephants are so very big, and so dainty, silent, loving and intelligent. And my imagination was fired by pictures of them dressed for ceremonial Indian processions where they were gorgeously decked out in silks and tooled leather, embossed with gold and silver, pearls and precious stones. They tinkled with little bells, and bore on their backs the palanquins of Indian princes and princesses. I read ab
out a prince who made love to his princess behind the curtains of the palanquin on the royal elephant’s back.
Ken says like Emma Bovary’s cab or something. And I say yeah, like that.
I was a Sucker for Elephants
Actually, anything with a whiff of the exotic could get my attention. I hung round the Chinese grocery because they had glass display cases containing embroidered silk slippers and jackets and mysterious little cups and teapots. I hung out at the Chinese Joss House in the Queen Victoria Museum. The whole museum was a source of fascination and inspiration to me; it was one of my ‘other’ places, where I found Egyptian mummies and antique clocks and strange dark paintings done by people who came to Tasmania from England in the nineteenth century. The Joss House was the thing I loved best in the museum. It was a bright-red lacquered temple dedicated to gods I didn’t know, peopled by Chinese statues dressed in gorgeous robes. Today, of course, exotic and ethnic shops are so commonplace they have lost their magic and now we yearn for different ‘other’ things. But for myself, I thank god for the Chinese in Tasmania. They provided one of the few hints of another reality in the smooth white woolly blanket of daily life and dreary expectations of the bourgeois backblocks. I was mostly interested in sex, of course. All this elephant and Chinese and musical comedy stuff is a dead giveaway—beneath the surface of everything I thought and did there was a sexual subtext. Looking for the secret, looking for the truth about life and death and sex. Conscious that the secret lay somewhere other than in the ordinary, the everyday; hopeful that scarlet Chinese temples and Egyptian mummies might hold the key, or at least a clue. Ancient Sanskrit texts advise women to imitate the gait of elephants because it is so sensual and seductive.
Ken says he got interested in art for the rude paintings, and when he was a teenager he took up oil painting because he wanted to do rude pictures himself and hang out in cafes on the Left Bank and have nude models.
I took up oil painting and used to go out at night during my last year at high school to join an adult class at the local technical college. This caused a minor scandal when my school found out, because students were not allowed out at night. I was getting off the chain. In the class we did still lifes and figure drawing. We painted nudes. One weekend I asked Louisa to pose for me in the nude and she posed as Mary Magdalene. I painted her draped in long red hair, weeping at the foot of the Cross. Our parents were very surprised, but they didn’t intervene. This was art. One day this picture will turn up in a cellar or in the storage space above the garage. It will be particularly clumsy and awful, but when I was doing it I was transported, working with great oily stuff such as viridian green, prussian blue, vermilion, rose madder, carmine, while Louisa knelt on the floor in front of the fire. The long red hair was imaginary; Louisa had short brown curls.
It was a very safe life and it got on my nerves at times. Even risky things were tainted with a terrible sameness and uniformity—smoking, drinking and sex—it all seemed so routine, so dreary in the end. Where was the palanquin on the back of the royal elephant for heaven’s sake? If we had not been wrapped up in the bourgeois blanket we might have nipped off to the mainland at the age of seventeen and set about seeking our fortune. But while we were pulled forward by dreams of life in Paris, we were also pushed back by a post-war fifties relief at finding ourselves safe and sound on our own little island. The only way out, and it was safe, was education. So we left home (daring) and went to university and had some fun and got degrees. Although they were proud of us for doing this, our families secretly wished we had stayed closer to home and married the boy in the bank. They had succeeded in keeping us safe for years, they wished we could be safe forever.
Paramedics wrapped them in long white gauze like christening dresses.
‘Baylee had just marked her first birthday on 18 April. At 7.45 the next morning, her mother left her at the Federal Building’s daycare center and went off to her new job at an insurance company.’
Ken commented that the choice of a job at an insurance company was interesting, in the light of what happened on 19 April, and I agreed.
The Glory Box
Beside the piano at Louisa’s house stood a large camphor chest which Louisa’s father had ‘brought back from the war’. In the chest were kept silky embroideries, also war relics, and precious cloths and bed linen saved up for Louisa’s future married life—the glory box, the hope chest. I loved its camphor smell. It came into its own when Louisa, a schoolteacher, married another schoolteacher. But this was something that happened on the rebound. First of all Louisa fell head over heels in love with a gorgeous man who appeared to be courting her, but who turned out to be uninterested in marriage to Louisa.
If lives have a tragedy, a tragic moment, a turning point, this was that moment in Louisa’s life. Louisa entered the Miss Tasmania contest and (beautiful Miss Pretty) I think she nearly won. I had by that time skipped the island, and didn’t pay much attention to Louisa’s effort to be Miss Tasmania. I am repelled by beauty contests, and I know I was horrified and saddened that Louisa had lent her beauty to the thing. I think, in the narrative of her life as it has filtered through to me, that the contest was Louisa’s final try to toss off the white woolly blanket and reach out for the stars—or for anything.
There was the wedding, marriage to the other schoolteacher and a good life of a respectable Tasmanian type. I missed her wedding, but I imagine it—she wore her mother’s veil, her nieces as bridesmaids, her mother in pastel brocade perhaps, her father proud in morning suit. Louisa Pretty changes her name to Louisa Small of Happy Ever After Street.
It’s okay as a narrative. Beautiful girl full of promise grows up and does right thing and marries bloke and lives happily ever after. They had some children and they grew up. I wonder if the old piano (with its yellowing ivory keys) is in their house, and I wonder where the camphor chest is hanging out these days. Chances are it’s right there next to the piano, filled with bed linen, waiting for the daughter to get married. Has any use ever been made of the silken trophies Louisa’s father brought home from the war? Probably not. These things are inclined to end up in second-hand shops a bit later on. Today’s treasure is tomorrow’s trash. Treasure hoarded too long can lose not just its value but its point, not to mention its gleam. I imagine gold thread unravelling from Chinese shawls.
Ken says there’s an old Indian shawl in a cupboard at his place. And it’s got gold thread unravelling—black silk with gold patterns just starting to break down. And he says, what’s more, that he often wonders where all the trash in charity shops and the like comes from, how it got where it got, who cared about it and then who decided to chuck it out. Apparently he sometimes thinks about getting rid of the Indian shawl, but then he thinks it meant something (or other) to his late sister, and he just leaves it where it is until the next time round (whenever that is). So he understands perfectly what I am on about with the Chinese shawl and unravelling threads and so forth.
Disregard my doubting tone when I speak of Louisa’s life and happiness—my hints of imperfection and corruption—perhaps Louisa’s life describes in perfect modern terms the nearest we can get to myth. Perhaps it was, after all, a good idea that she should die at the age of forty-nine. Well, I don’t mean ‘good idea’ exactly—I mean how everything has its season, maybe.
Stayed home, got cancer, died, was cremated, ashes scattered in the Southern Ocean. Stayed home, husband confessed infidelity, said he was bringing other woman home to live. Got cancer, died, etc.
I imagine gold thread unravelling from Chinese shawls.
Paramedics wrapped them in long white gauze like christening dresses.
Another Turning Point in the Life of Louisa Pretty
Scene: Louisa is sitting on the new grey leather couch, a bottle of good white wine is open in an ice bucket on the low table in front of her. There is a crackling fire. On the mantelpiece, photographs of Ron and Louisa’s wedding, the children when they were little. Louisa is dressed in a tail
ored skirt and blouse. Pearl clip-on earrings—she never had her ears pierced. A Strauss waltz is playing softly on the radio. Enter Ron, stage left. He is tall and handsome and efficient, wearing a well-cut navy-blue suit. There is something shifty about his eyes—but there always has been. He takes the glass of wine Louisa offers and stands by the fire. He has an announcement.
Ron: What I have been meaning to tell you, Lou, is that I’ve thought about things a lot and I’ve finally decided the only thing to do is for me to make a clean breast of it, and for Cathy to move in here. It’s the only way. It won’t make any difference to you, really, and it will save a whole lot of trouble—save me going backwards and forwards to her flat all the time. You see that, don’t you, Lou? It’s neater, safer, better all round.
(Cathy came; Louisa stayed. Louisa died. I don’t know what happened to Ron or Cathy.)
Ken says it’s a terrible story and he wishes Louisa had gotten out and had some fun while she could. He says that even if she was going to get sick, she could have left when Cathy came, and could have taken a leap in the dark instead of just crawling under the carpet or into some dark corner or whatever it was she did. I say that’s more or less what I think too. But the leap in the dark wasn’t Louisa’s thing. Too risky. Her father had been in Insurance. And I remember when we used to do gym at school—we had to vault the horse and Louisa always held back. I thought it was because she was ladylike and didn’t want to spread her legs suddenly the way you had to. I think that’s sort of true. Ken asks, do I think getting so dramatically sick soon after Cathy came was a way for Louisa to get attention, but I say I don’t really know about that.
What is This?