It is a winter afternoon. I look at the fire, the dogs sleep, and my mind turns round and round finding a place to rest. We are alive. Our conversations aren't taxing. Good dog, good dog. They go out, and I watch them running hard on the trail of something. There is a white cat that likes the falling-down red chicken coop and she (I think of it as a she) drives the dogs crazy. I mistook her once for a possum. Sometimes there are deer exploding out of the overgrown forsythia and they bound gracefully into the woods, the dogs in hot pursuit until they reach the little white flags that signify the underground electric fence and there they stop, on a dime. I can see the deer's white tails visible for a second before they disappear into the trees. So that's where hightailing it comes from. Yesterday I found a mole on the carpet, tiny pink snout, pink paws. I was glad it was dead and not lingering, grateful that dogs don't kid around. I scooped it up with a piece of cardboard and threw its body in the trash.
I don't know why I didn't think to touch its soft fur or feel the little weight in my hand.
I wish I had.
Edward Butterman Sleeps at Home
My friend Jo invites me for supper. "We're having beef stew and three kinds of dessert," she says cheerfully. I thank her, but Rich is in the hospital, I've been there all day, and tonight I'm just going to crash. "We'll bring you the leftovers then," she says. The next morning there is Jo at the door. She hands me a package wrapped in foil. "We ate all the stew," she says, "but here are three different desserts." Rich has a sweet tooth these days and I take Jo's desserts to the hospital. He is just finishing lunch and I hand him the little package.
"What's this?" he asks. "Beef stew?"
I love this stuff. It happens all the time. Rich knows nothing of Jo, or what she made for dinner, but since the accident he knows things he couldn't possibly know. Maybe when one part of the brain is severely injured, another part kicks in. Maybe hindbrain, the earliest brain, still in there underneath our more highly evolved layers, communicated differently, without language. If we peel those layers away, maybe we've got the family heirloom.
After all, who needs words? My dogs know more about me than I know about myself. When they look at me with that imploring "no, don't do it" expression, I realize I'm about to drive into town for a cup of coffee and the paper.
The first time involved a puppy.
My friend Denise came east after the death of her beloved dog, Gus. In the old days before his accident Rich and Denise were news junkies together; it was Denise who once gave Rich fifty pencils with the words The Nicest Man in the World engraved on them. The second day of her visit we were downtown shopping, and on the sidewalk in front of the store there was a woman holding a gangly cream-colored puppy. He was a white Doberman, ears and tail intact, and he was for sale. I watched Denise's face when she took him in her arms and realized this was a done deal. That night the puppy, christened Henry, ran around the apartment with my dogs, Harry and Rosie, all three of them barking. I remember thinking how Rich would have hated the chaos. The phone rang. It was a nurse from the facility where Rich was living telling me my husband wouldn't come out of his room. He was certain Dobermans were outside his door, waiting to attack him.
Rich knew nothing of the puppy in our apartment.
Today Rich mentions the name Eddie Butterman and says something about the stock market. He has talked about an Eddie before, but without the last name.
"Who is Eddie?" I asked the first time.
"Eddie is our beloved Eddie," said Rich. "Eddie is the only Eddie around."
He unwraps the desserts and breaks a chocolate brownie, offering me half. "No thanks," I say, but he sets it apart for me on a napkin anyway.
" The lounge lizard was here again," says Rich, brownie halfway to his mouth. "Maybe I should imitate him."
"Who?" I ask. "Imitate who?"
"The lounge lizard." Rich smiles, pops the brownie in his mouth, and the conversation ends.
Six months ago a friend was angry with me and I with her. I had written about something someone said many years ago, but it was she who heard the words, not me, a fact I had completely forgotten. Her experience was precious, and she accused me of stealing her memory. Not only that, but what she remembered with grief I had somehow transmuted to gratitude, so besides stealing her memory, I also got it wrong. We argued, but there was no meeting place. For days the same questions went through my head. Is memory property? If two people remember something differently is one of them wrong? Wasn't my memory of a memory also real? There were no solid answers, just winding paths I went round and round on. I thought of nothing else; a chasm had opened between me and my friend.
When I went to see Rich that Thursday, the first thing he said was "Please forgive the selfishness of an old man who seizes the past for his own." He paused, but I was already listening closely. This sounded oddly like what I'd been thinking about. "...a version of the past, Eddie may not have experienced anything like it but he realized with the turn of a page that he could do storytelling ... the first abundance of retelling fairy tales and fables and legends would come from their mouths—Eddie's and your father's."
I scrounged around in my pocketbook and found my pen and notebook.
"Once one goes to the trouble of becoming a storyteller," Rich continued, "they want the whole magilla—not only to be the first but the only—I'm not saying that occurred. I'm always glad when it does as long as feelings aren't hurt." I scribbled as fast as I could. "Eddie's fables include multiple storytellers but none of them feels at any loss if they're not the first or second out of the dugout. The art of storytelling is too various to have any one person have complete control."
He was speaking slowly, pausing as if giving dictation. I was amazed at what I was hearing. Not only did Rich know nothing of the argument, he wouldn't have been capable of understanding it. On top of that, he had never before stuck to any subject for more than a sentence or two. And here he was holding forth so eloquently on just what had been obsessing me. "...that method of storytelling is forgotten, that time of Eddie's in which everyone seemed to add memory on memory deep in the forest, layers of dirt and leaves and branches get covered up—in a sense the past is underfoot."
I was present at a miracle.
So now when Rich mentions Eddie Butterman in the hospital I call his brother. "He was a cousin on our father's side," says Gil. "We never called him Edward. He was always Eddie. He did something in the stock market, married a shoe heiress, ran around a lot, everyone knew him at the racetrack. He even wore a checkered jacket like in Guys and Dolls. He disappeared out west years ago. Nobody knows what happened to him."
Rich is in the hospital because last Friday he didn't know who I was. At first I thought he was kidding, I thought I could see him laughing behind his eyes. First I shouted, then I begged—talk to me right now, this minute, talk to me. He didn't respond to anything, not me, not the nurses, not his arm being jostled, or even his shoulder shaken—usually a surefire way to raise his ire. Nothing. They took his blood pressure, fine; no temp, fine. But he wasn't there. And when he began to come back from wherever he'd been, he couldn't walk. He couldn't even stand. The word seizure got thrown around, the word stroke.
A couple of years ago, Denise and I were in Mexico, both of us counting the days until we would be back with our dogs. We were pathetic. San Miguel was great, roosters and flowerpots on rooftops; our house was up a steep cobblestone street, the food was delicious, and all we wanted to do was get on a plane and go home to our dogs. One morning I was trying to get through to Rich on the telephone. He was at the Northeast Center for Special Care in Lake Katrine, New York, and I was in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, hollering into the receiver, intent on making him hear me, willing him not to let the phone slide away from his ear. I was staring at a tile on the counter as I shouted, "Rich? Rich? Can you hear me?"
"Hello," he said, somewhat cautiously.
"How are you?" I shouted, my eyes still drilling into the terra-cotta square.
/> "Fine," he answered.
" What have you been doing?" I shouted. There was a pause.
" We made some tiles today," he said.
When I got home I checked. I even talked to the person in charge of art and recreation. Nobody had made tiles, not that week, not ever.
I have always believed (if rather uneasily) in the invisible world. I know people who have had messages from the dead. My sister has premonitions. Once in a while somebody sits down at the foot of my bed and I feel the mattress give and wake to no one, just an air of friendliness in the room. Sober citizens I know have seen ghosts. But Rich had no truck with any of it. He was a reporter, he needed evidence, there was none. I wonder what the old Rich would have to say about the new Rich.
***
Lunch is over, Rich has fallen asleep. "He was a heavy smoker, wasn't he?" three doctors have asked, after looking at his swollen legs. "No," I tell them, wondering what's in store for me, a sixty-three-year-old woman smoking a pack a day. "Rich never smoked," I say, and they look surprised. Well, that is not strictly true. Rich told me that all together in his life he had smoked parts of six cigarettes.
I got hypnotized once to stop smoking. I smoked three packs a day and one late night, condensing George Steinbrenner's biography for the New York Post (nothing negative, they told me), I finished four. I called a hypnotist the next day, although hypnotism scared me. What if I couldn't come back from wherever I went? I imagined myself dangling at the end of a fishing rod, flung far into a lake, unable to be reeled back in. What would become of me? Who would inhabit my body? The hypnotist had a long gray ponytail and love beads. "I haven't lost a patient yet," he said. I walked in a smoker and three hours later walked out with no interest in cigarettes. That lasted twenty years.
My daughter Jennifer knows I'm smoking. She can tell over the phone. "I'm just drinking tea," I tell her. She is expecting twins in August, and has every reason to want her mother healthy. "No," I say, "of course I'm not smoking. Do you think I'm crazy?"
A few months ago I was wondering about whether I could afford to hang on to my apartment in the city as well as live full-time up here in this house. Winter was coming and the price of oil high, and the roof would need replacing soon, not to mention offspring who could use help now and then. I worried about this a lot. I tried to imagine selling the place I'd lived for almost thirty years. I didn't feel a huge pang, since all my stuff is up here, what's left of my apartment looks like somebody's half-eaten sandwich. But still, but still.
On Thursday I went to pick Rich up and bring him home for the afternoon.
"I can't leave" was the first thing he said to me.
"Why not?" I asked.
" We've got to sell the apartment," he says, "the real estate lady is coming today." It had been years since Rich mentioned the apartment. I didn't think he even remembered it.
I'm visiting Rich every day at the hospital. I leave my cigarettes in the car. Stroke victims, heart attacks all up and down this floor of the hospital. Is this what I want? I don't even like smoking. I don't want a cigarette. But something with a longer reach than me wants one, and I wind up smoking a pack a day. Ridiculous.
The third day Rich tells me his foot is going to be amputated. He is calm, matter-of-fact. "No," I reassure him. "Nobody's going to amputate your foot. Your foot is fine," but then I wonder. Maybe the episode left him without feeling. Maybe he was numb. Was that why he couldn't stand? Here was a possible clue as to what happened. I stroke his foot. "Can you feel that?" He nods. " That?" he nods again.
"How much sensation makes a toe?" he asks.
Not so long ago I was asked to write an essay about being a caregiver. But I'm not a caregiver, I wanted to say, I'm a wife. I scribbled notes for days, weeping with frustration and sadness, still defensive, still justifying my decision not to bring Rich home to live. But I couldn't have done it, I kept reminding myself, nobody could have. When I went to see Rich that week he mentioned our troubles. "What are your troubles?" I asked, and clear as a bell, this was his answer: "I want to leave this place and go back to New York City. I don't think they're doing much for me here and I think I could be released in your care."
***
I keep wondering where Rich went when he vacated his premises. He sat on a chair in the common area, his head down, hands folded. His face was expressionless. But it's impossible not to interpret even a blank look; our species' survival can depend on our ability to read a face. Years from now I may remember Rich's empty gaze as a look of bemused affection, as if he were saying, "What is all the fuss about, leave me alone, I'm fine, I'm just sitting out back in the sun." Because that's what I want to believe.
I remember where I went. When I was hypnotized I went barefoot down a bunch of pink marble stairs, soft underfoot, and at the bottom was a grassy bank and a blue lake. I was damp clay, ready to receive. When I came back up those stairs, I was peaceful. When I left the office I walked home slowly, my face turned to the sun. When Rich returned from wherever he'd been, he was fighting mad. But maybe we yanked him from somewhere he wanted to stay. How to know?
After a week Rich is sprung from the hospital. His doctors are thorough and nice and one of them keeps sheep. They have run every kind of test and all his results are normal. Hallelujah. The consensus is that he was dehydrated and that is what caused what we now refer to as the episode, the event. Dehydrated. We are such simple organisms. Saturday he is able to take a few steps. When I drive home that evening, I don't light up in the car. That night I stop smoking altogether.
I have no desire for a cigarette, it's not a struggle. I'm calm. Go figure.
"Edward Butterman sleeps at home," Rich told me yesterday.
I wonder if there is someone I should call.
Knitting 2002 To Present
112 shawls
½ sweater
¼ sweater
47 hoodies
34 cowl adaptations
17 blankets
29 ponchos
52 hats
15 things with ruffles to keep you warm
323 scarves
1 dog-bed blanket
⅔ wedding blanket
34 neck cozies (my own invention)
1 headband
Outsider Art
I have chicken collections and lots of old books; I've got small wooden horses and big wooden horses and pieces of crap picked up off the street—a run-over windshield wiper flattened into the shape of a bird, a gas burner from a very old stove my son found in the woods when he was a little boy, which when stood on its end resembles something the kids and I dubbed the Rat God. I've got my father's collection of skipping stones in a black plastic ashtray; I've got fossils and beads and closets full of yarn. Still, I was never consumed with a passion for any one thing until two years after my husband's accident when I walked through the halls of the Northeast Center for the first time and saw all those amazing paintings. The art was made by the residents of the facility, and one painting in particular knocked me out. It was red houses and blue sky and orange hills and green grass and white clouds. In the upper right-hand corner, a yellow sun with a smiley face. I used to stand in front of this painting before I went upstairs to see my husband and then again before I went home because it cheered me up. After a couple of weeks I got up the nerve to ask if the artwork was for sale, and if so, could I please buy the painting above the drinking fountain.
It was for sale. I couldn't believe my luck. Bill Richards, the painter who ran the art studio at the center, introduced me to the artist, Ed Kindberg, a shy man in a wheelchair. Ed had never painted before he came to the Northeast Center, and now he couldn't stop. I bought the painting from him and then I bought two more. I couldn't stop either. Ed was happy, but I was obssessed. Every time I came to see Rich I first made a beeline for the art studio. Ed's work was changing. The rooftops of his houses resembled the ears of a cat, and he began painting cats' heads floating in the sky above the houses. The hills got blacker, and Ed began p
ainting huge crosses looming over the landscape in a dark sky. These paintings were frightening and beautiful. It wasn't enough to own a few of Ed's paintings, it was as if each piece was supposed to be mine, and when I became embarrassed at how many I was buying I bought them for my friends. Another painter at the center always drew three women—different colored pens or pencils, different faces, clothes—but always three women. I picked one, and then I realized it wasn't enough. Her work was about many versions of three women, and I wanted my experience of her art to be closer to hers. I bought half a dozen wonderful drawings.
I didn't know it right away, but a new world had just opened up. I read an article in the New York Times about Bill Richards and his studio at the Northeast Center, and I learned that other institutions had art programs, and that this kind of work is called Outsider Art. I found books, and began to learn a little. The term Outsider Art generally refers to self-taught artists, very often these are people who live on the margins of society, but it has its roots in the art of the insane, first noticed in Europe the late nineteenth century and then celebrated in the first half of the twentieth, by the artist Jean Dubuffet. Dubuffet named it Art Brut, raw art. He championed it as the real thing, art unpolluted by society's expectations or a culture's constrictions. This was art that came straight from the psyche without a filter. The artists were the mentally ill—men and women in insane asylums—and they used whatever medium was at hand. One man made sculpture out of chewed bread; another, Adolf Wölfli, received a pencil and two pieces of blank newsprint every Monday, and he worked obsessively until there was nothing left but the bit of lead held between his fingernails. His drawings are complex, but the same good-humored face is staring out at the observer in all of them.
A Three Dog Life Page 8