Uphill Walkers

by Madeleine Blais

  It was a matter of marking time before I would be let go.

  One afternoon, I was asked to write a poem to accompany a car rental ad during leaf-peeping season. I was given the assignment at 4:30, and when it was time to punch the clock at five, I asked if I could take it home and work on it overnight.

  The editor snapped at me.

  “Who do you think you are? Shakespeare? All we want is a little foliage ditty.”

  Another editor, one of the seemingly interchangeable gray-faced men with sagging jowls who sat at a desk in the center of the newsroom, surrounded by smoke, added his opinion: “Newspaper poets only need half an hour.”

  These men radiated despondency. Their organizing principle appeared to be disappointment. The parade had passed them by, and now they had nothing but contempt for those who were riding the floats of public attention. They could not bear the eruptions they were witnessing all around them: blacks asserting their rights, young people refusing to go to war, women demanding a life beyond making Patriot’s Pudding Jell-O in the kitchen. They reacted with disgust at Angela Davis’s raw racial call to arms. “Look at that hairdo,” they said, ridiculing her Afro. “Bats could live inside that.” A story came over the wire services about a school principal who called girls into his office and made them jump to see whether or not they were wearing a bra. An editor brought it to me to read, and when I was finished, he said, “Let’s see you jump.” Whatever passion for self-expression had brought me to this job was certainly not being satisfied by it, although I did get one bit of excellent advice. In a puff piece about the opening of Mama Leone’s Restaurant in Boston, I used the words “colloidal chemistry” and even worse, “culinary.” Another reporter cringed when he saw it in my copy, later slipping me a note: “The word culinary is best used only in the S.S. Pierce Christmas catalogues and even there, with grave misgivings.”

  Chapter Ten

  Cheap Symbolism

  “BE NICE TO RAY. HE NEEDS TO KNOW YOU GIRLS SUPPORT HIM, MADDY. Take him out to Friendly’s for a big beef cheeseburger, that’s what he likes. Ask him how the new course is going,” my mother would say whenever Raymond had taken on a new endeavor that was finally supposed to open the door to a stable future.

  Sometimes he dreamed of running a vegetable stand, and he would study pictures of produce. “Your good fruit man,” he would say, “knows the name of every apple in the world.” If he had managed to make it as a fruit and vegetable and plant man, he would have aligned himself with a proud local tradition. It is a bedrock belief among the residents of the Connecticut Valley that its land is the richest in the world—something to do with the quality of silt from the river—and no soil anywhere, not even in Italy, creates produce that equals the perfection of tomatoes, peaches, and sweet corn. If consumed at the same meal, at the height of the season, they constitute their own holy trinity.

  At one point Raymond studied graphology in the hope of becoming a handwriting analyst. When I asked him about it, my voice was overly cheerful, like a sunflower or a red-breasted bird.

  “It’s a definite science, you know, not just some flake thing. Catch someone when he’s writing down his John Hancock. Watch the way he crosses his t’s, and if he uses funny marks instead of dots for his i’s, you better steer clear. Worst of all is someone who leaves the bottoms of a’s or o’s open. That’s when you should head straight out of town. Matter of fact, I’d run like hell. Take a bus to Omaha if you have to. Those kinds of people,” he would say, “are mass murderers.”

  Unfortunately, there wasn’t as much call for handwriting analysts as the teacher had led him to believe, especially one who saw apocalyptic rampages in each and every squiggle.

  With Raymond I had learned it was a good idea to censor the subjects we discussed, knowing how easy it was to set him off. One treated him the way you sometimes see parents of an only child treat their offspring, as a prized orchid or as an experiment that failed. He would often pose some supposedly rhetorical question such as, “If you were a landlord, would you rent to me?” to which the only possible answer was a resounding, unequivocal “yes.” It had become increasingly clear that certain topics had to be avoided because they might rile him, including religion, politics, and almost anything in the news. One of the few safe subjects was the valley itself where he had lived all his life. Did he think the braided rugs at Thorndike Mills were a bargain, was he still a fan of the strawberries at Sapowski’s, when was it exactly that the restaurant at the Notch went out of business?

  I also learned to wait for the right time for a conversation, the precise moment of equipoise when he would neither snarl at nor dismiss somebody, when his thoughts were not ganging up on themselves, when they were beige rather than magenta, flan rather than curry. Listening to him meant listening to what he had to say, not what you wanted to hear. It required a radical act of self-abnegation that no doubt proved of service in my work as a newspaper journalist, though it would have been hard to figure out how to include it on a résumé. Specialized skills: “Can deal with her brother = can deal with anyone.”

  “I keep reading articles about runaway housewives,” our mother said one Thanksgiving. “Women who think if they have to wash one more dish or pick up one more dirty sock they will lose their composure altogether. One lady I read about skimmed off ten dollars a week from the household expenses for a year and hightailed it to New York City. She got a room at the YWCA, where she said the down-to-earth conditions were a relief from the racket and the bickering she had to put up with at home— kids fighting over TV shows nonstop, refusing to pick up after themselves—and spunky gal that she is, she got a job as a cook at one of those $1.19 steak restaurants. Sure, she’s working hard, but now, she says, at least the customers appreciate her efforts and she gets a regular paycheck. She said that if you add up everything a woman does to keep a house afloat without the slightest compensation, she should be given a salary of fifty, one hundred thousand dollars a year, minimum.”

  We had just seated ourselves, and her cigarette was still lit. The talk clearly interested her more than the turkey. It wasn’t that she was looking for a fight. She was simply baffled. A book called Beautiful Lofty People, filled with word snapshots of people who faced life with intensity and integrity, had recently come to her attention. Is that what it meant to be beautiful and lofty nowadays, to embezzle from the family kitty and run away? She had dolled up for the evening. She favored in those years a modified Bohemian look, so she had on dangly earrings, and her dress was a cotton print, some kind of batik. Across her shoulders she had tossed a shawl with just the right amount of insouciance. The table had not merely been set; it was in costume. Out of her arsenal of fine possessions, she marshaled only the top artillery for the occasion: the Haviland Limoges dinner plates, white with gold rims, the wedding band pattern, heirloom from her mother. We were supposed to take special pride in the paintings on the wall of people we had never met, with creepy eyes that appeared to shift on the canvas.

  “At least I never did what those housewives are doing. At least I never ran away. At least I never joined a commune.”

  We four girls looked at each other. Is my memory right? Were we all really dressed alike in bright orange granny dresses, or is that just some horrible hindsight slander?

  As if, we told her, a commune would have you.

  “And what do you mean by that, dearie dots?”

  Our answers came out in the usual choral rush, with each of us trying to top the other. I cannot say who said what when, but I remember the rapid-fire gist of it perfectly:

  “Mom, honestly. You’d hate it. Everyone wears unisex clothes.”

  “And no more Salem cigarettes. You’d have to smoke Acapulco gold.”

  “Which, in case you don’t know it, is a very intense form of marijuana.”

  “You’d have to eat an exclusively macrobiotic diet of brown rice.”

  “Ditch the American eagles and the gold draperies. Paint all the rooms black.”
r />   “Hang up a poster of Castro.”

  “And Che.”

  “Listen to rock.”

  “Copulate as a gesture of friendship.”

  “Stay up all night talking to boys about ways to get out of Vietnam.”

  “Suggest that they might want to get braces.”

  “Or shoot off a toe or two.”

  “Or, artificially induce tachycardia by not sleeping and eating horseradish and chili.”

  “Commiserate with them about their lottery numbers.”

  “Explain that girls don’t always say yes to boys who say no.”

  “And, if you go back to college, you’ll have to insist on canceling your regular final so you can take an interdisciplinary, ungraded test, the purpose of which is to determine how well a person reacts to being alive.”

  By now we were giddy with our own humor.

  Michael, unamused, said, “Pass the potatoes.”

  “They’re fattening.”

  “But they have iron.”

  “So do nails.”

  “Eat a nail then.”

  Our humor was willful, mocking the stoned quality of so much of what passed for conversation in our age group. “Far out,” someone would say, only to be gently corrected. “No, not far out. Far fuckin’ out.”

  “How much,” asked Jacqueline, driving the riff to a pleasant end, “would this Waterford glass pitcher be worth if it weren’t cracked?”

  “A thousand dollars,” we all answered.

  And then, suddenly, Raymond looked up from his plate, his face almost shiny with sweat from shoveling down the turkey and the dressing and the cranberry, a voraciousness not to be lightly crossed. The rest of us had barely begun.

  He had perked up at the mention of potatoes. Not only had he exhausted his options at the encyclopedia companies, but he was also bouncing from one get-rich-quick scheme to the next. Recently, he had heard about a sewing factory that was going out of business, and he talked our mother into subsidizing the purchase of hundreds of wooden spools. He had an idea that he could get us, the girls, and our friends, especially the ones who were art majors, to paint them some old-fashioned hue and resell them as candlestick holders. Huge heavy shipments, which we pretended to ignore, arrived at 5 Center Street daily.

  “Potatoes,” he said. “A most versatile vegetable. You can fry them, boil them, bake them. Eat ’em sliced, diced, or mashed. Use them in soup, stew, or shepherd’s pie. I’m not just pulling your juggler’s vein.” His face was now like a furnace, glowing with the gravity of his commentary, the words building on themselves, tense and interlocking, roiling and urgent. “If George Washington Carver had worked with potatoes instead of peanuts, he wouldn’t be the famous Negro he is today.” And then he said it again, and again, and again, laughing louder with each recitation, a wheezy private laugh that took over the table, entering into the stuffing and into the gravy, so that before long one fork and knife after another was placed silently on the right side of the plate, blade in, as we had been taught, while quietly we removed ourselves and our dishes from the room.

  Later, while we were cleaning up, we sang “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” by the Animals.

  “Save the cranberry sauce,” I said.

  “Save the cranberry sauce? Rest assured, cranberry sauce, redemption is on the way,” said Jacqueline, who bowed her head and placed her hands, palms down, over the bowl, murmuring, “Repent, repent.”

  Our mother poked her head in.

  “Girls, I want you to come to the living room as soon as you’re done. Maureen is going to recite Robert Frost’s ‘The Death of the Hired Man,’ aren’t you, Maureen?” This was Maureen’s signature piece for the speech contests at Ursuline, which, we had just learned, was going out of business in the era of Free Love. Apparently, the market for young girls willing to wear white gloves and attend afternoon tea dances and contribute to the Mission Bank on a daily basis had dried up in the same sweep of social change that was causing housewives to hit the road and young men to flee to Canada. More grace gone, more vanished standards to lament.

  Maureen nodded and giggled. She had just won a regional contest.

  “Maureen,” we said, “first you were the belle of Bondsville, and now you’re the toast of Munson.”

  Maureen’s deep alto could have belonged to any of the sisters.

  Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table,

  Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,

  She ran on tiptoe down the darkened passage

  To meet him in the doorway with the news

  And put him on his guard. “Silas is back.”

  Later that night, our mother went into the Green Room, as she so often did on the holidays, and sat at the piano that always needed a good tune-up and played songs that ranged from the old-fashioned “I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard” to the predictable “Danny Boy” to the lighthearted “The Entertainer” from Scott Joplin’s Ragtime, a selection that would later be known as the music from The Sting. Lost in old chords and the happy thunder of major keys, she shed a certain severity. For a moment, the footloose tinkle of Joplin’s music transformed the cold, heavy house with its groaning pipes and drafty windows, heating it up with sound itself.

  “Sadie, Sadie, married lady.”

  At last, we had the opportunity for a true last hurrah, a last hurrah of such extraordinary pedigree and vintage that no more would ever be required.

  A Blais daughter was getting hitched, and the wedding would be performed at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, followed by a reception at the house in Granby.

  June 23, 1973. Christina’s vows would be the excuse to grant the house one last facelift and one final blast of consecrating ritual before it went, as it was slated to, on the market. Raymond designated himself the official fixer-upper of the house. With the help of a friend, he would strip off and replace the wallpaper, repair the crack in the ceiling, even install a new sink. Often these home remedies threw into relief all the other work that needed to be done. “Gresham’s Law,” our mother would say, invoking the one practical financial concept that lived on after that good grade in college economics. “Bad money drives out good money. We should just sell the house now and stop trying to fix every square inch.” But as often as she said it, she refused to act on it, persisting in giving him money to make repairs that led to the need for even more repairs.

  We spiffed up the house as best we could, with some necessary skimping. The barn, for instance, was repainted but only on the side that showed. Christina was supporting herself and her fiancé, who was still in school, on the salary of a part-time nursery school teacher. She turned to me to get money for a root canal and flowers.

  Her husband-to-be was a man of boats, sailing them, refinishing them, insuring them, selling them. “His mistress,” Uncle Dermot kept saying, to everyone’s dismay, “is the sea.” Together, the young couple had the vigorous clean-cut looks of people in an L.L. Bean catalog. They dressed alike in Izod shirts, khakis, and Weejuns.

  Whether as a gesture of respect or one of penny pinching, or both, Christina consented to wear our mother’s dress. When she went to get her wedding dress out of the hall closet less than a half hour before the ceremony, she accidentally imprisoned the heirloom avalanche of satin our mother had worn with such hope on her wedding day. The doorknob slid off in Christina’s hand, like a tooth so ready to go it extracts itself.

  “Ignore the cheap symbolism,” we told her. “You know they can’t start without you.”

  Someone got a neighbor who was known to be handy, meaning he could remove lids from ordinary jars without expecting a government commendation. “This little Phillips-head should do the trick,” he said, and when it did, many future prayers were pledged to the causes of his choice.

  After several last-minute showers, we were all late arriving at the church. Uncle Dermot’s hair was damp as he led his niece down the aisle, and our mother had also dressed in haste, so that her bun appeared
to have only the most precarious allegiance to her skull. It was the era of loud polyester prints, and throughout the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church were women wearing floor-length dresses with designs that varied from the geometric to the botanical.

  After the ceremony, the couple left on a trip to Nova Scotia. They were both only twenty-two. They moved to Glen Olden, Pennsylvania, where they lived in an otherwise unoccupied house owned by Christina’s father-in-law. It makes no sense that houses that are dark on the outside are necessarily dark on the inside as well, but it was true about this one, the feeling of discomfort fed by the hulking furniture. We all have free-floating memories of the poverty that afflicted us in those first few years on our own. I was once diplomatically passed by as a bridesmaid at a dear friend’s wedding because it was understood that I could not possibly bankroll the pink silk dress with dyed-to-match pumps. Jacqueline remembers owning a single pair of operational shoes. Maureen, in her first year as a teacher, would buy a family pack of chicken every Sunday, freeze each piece individually, and then eat one piece per evening until the next Sunday. Christina and her husband were joined in Pennsylvania by Michael. The house had heat but no hot water. While Michael and Christina’s husband headed off to school at Rutgers, Christina would sometimes arrive at work early in order to wash her hair, hoping it would dry quickly in case the director dropped by. Jacqueline recalls visiting Christina in Glen Olden and marveling because Christina had became “an expert, an utter expert, at making Bisquick coffee cake, and while it was cheap to make and it wasn’t nutritious, if you were to buy it, it would cost a fortune. I remember thinking: Here’s someone who isn’t taking poverty lying down.”

  The first time Raymond went to Northampton State Hospital, in the winter of 1974 after he had a psychotic break in the middle of a plant store where he was hoping to find work, wasn’t necessarily the worst, or the longest, of his stays. But when he was let out, we could tell that omething had changed in his life for all time. At Northampton he experienced the traitorous nature of his illness to the fullest: the alleged cure only made it worse. It was Raymond’s bad luck to go to the hospital at the very moment in its history when it had the fewest resources due to the policy of deinstitutionalization begun under Kennedy with the best of intentions and often the worst of results.