Fresh Eggs (19 page)

She thinks about the giants from Seville … Captain Martin VanBuren Bates … Anna Swan … rubbing elbows with presidents and kings … falling through the floor while dancing … Dr. Pirooz calling her a swan …

She thinks about her father … wanting to teach art … his own father dropping dead … going deep in debt building those layer houses … asking her to display herself like a fancy hen … to save the family farm … like he tried to save it.…

Twenty-two

Calvin Cassowary doesn't want to get out of bed. It's been a week since Rhea agreed to his plan for saving the family farm. At first her consent relieved him. Made him proud. Confident things were going to work out fine. Now he's not so sure. Relief is turning into anxiety. Pride into shame. Confidence into uncertainty.

“Get up already,” Donna says, poking his chest with her elbow. “It's a good idea.”

Calvin digs out a handful of Kleenex from the box under the bed table and hands them to his wife. He gets out of bed and puts on the old, knee-ripped Wrangler jeans he laid out the night before. Puts on the old paint-speckled shirt that had been his father's. Squeaks downstairs to make coffee.

When the coffee's made he pours himself half a cup and puts the rest in a Thermos. He slides his sketch pad under his arm, fishes out three thick-leaded carpenter's pencils from the junk drawer by the refrigerator, goes out on the porch, where he stands slowly sipping his coffee, hoping that the chilly morning air will scour his doubt.

He goes to the old cow barn. Slides the doors open, as far as they will go, to let as much sunlight in as possible. The barn has been empty for nearly fifteen years, but the smell of cow lingers. The sight of his father and grandfather pitching bales of hay into the high lofts lingers, too.

This morning's work will be easy.

He rips the six new canvases from their plastic bags, then, after driving spikes into the walls, twelve feet off the floor, exactly twelve feet apart, hangs them like medieval tapestries.

The canvases are gray. They need to be white. He pries open the five-gallon tub of paint he bought at Bittinger's Hardware in Wooster, the same day he bought the canvases, and with a brush as wide as his hand, starts painting. When one side of the six canvases are painted he turns them over and paints the backs. He goes in for lunch.

“Finished yet?” asks Rhea.

“Just getting started, pumpkin seed,” he answers. Donna has made grilled cheese sandwiches. He remembers that when Jeanie made grilled cheese sandwiches, she made them with thick slices of real American cheese. Donna uses thin, pale slices of fake cheese, individually wrapped in plastic.

In the afternoon Calvin starts sketching.

That day he hiked up Three Fish Creek to the marsh, he'd drawn Rhea's county fair exhibit from every angle, sketching the words and pictures that would be on every panel of canvas. The six canvases will form an outer wall around a small stage in the middle. This is where Rhea will sit, queen-like, in a golden chair, surrounded with arrangements of silk roses and daisies. She'll be protected from the sun and rain by a canopy, painted white with golden stripes. Silver bunting will drip from the canopy, swirl down the corner posts like frozen lightning.

Rhea will look beautiful sitting there. Music will be tinkling in the background. Exotic Middle Eastern music maybe. Maybe the haunting music made by wooden Incan flutes. Maybe an Appalachian dulcimer gently plinking Pachabel's Canon in D Major. Donna had Pachabel played at their wedding. Everybody loves Pachabel. Even crusty old farmers at county fairs love Pachabel.

Calvin begins to sketch the first canvas. This one will be all lettering. Old-fashioned circusy letters. They will say:

R
HEA THE
F
EATHER
G
IRL

A
MERICA
'
S TEEN-AGED DOVE

C
OVERED HEAD TO TOE WITH REAL FEATHERS

Calvin hasn't used his fingers for anything but writing checks for fifteen years. They still have their natural talent, but they are stiff and uncertain and won't move his pencil an inch until so ordered by his equally stiff, equally uncertain brain. “Damn!' Calvin hisses again and again as his lines on the canvas fall short of the perfect lines in his head.

It is midafternoon before the letters are drawn exactly as he wants them. He wants to fill them with paint right away. But he knows Jimmy Faldstool needs help in the layer houses. Rhea's schoolwork needs grading, too.

In the morning Calvin can't wait to get out of bed. To make his Thermos of coffee. Fill in the letters on that first canvas. He does not paint the letters flat, like the letters on old Alfred's FRESH EGGS sign. He gives them depth and roundness. They appear to float on the white canvas. He stands back and, in awe of his own work, says, “Damn!”

He starts the next canvas. It will read:

S
HE
'
S AMAZING
!

S
HE
'
S REAL
!

S
HE
'
S BEAUTIFUL
!

Donna Cassowary always has too much work to do. Cook. Clean. Shop. Manage the books. Manage her MCS, her multiple chemical sensitivities. Now she has to sew Rhea's Feather Girl costume. Calvin wants it finished by the first of next week, so he can paint Rhea's portrait on his canvases.

“Maybe I can get Marilyn to help,” she suggests to Calvin. “She does all the dance costumes for the Tuttwyler Tappers.”

“I don't want local people knowing about this,” Calvin says. “We let Marilyn Dickcissel in on this and we might as well take out an ad in the
Gazette
.”

So Donna has to go it alone.

She drives to Freda's Fabric House in New Waterbury. She wishes she could buy polyester. It is so easy to work with. There are so many beautiful textures and prints. But synthetic fabrics are just soaked with formaldehyde. Formaldehyde gives her brain fog. Makes her cuticles itch like poison ivy. Rhea's costume will have to be made of natural fabric.

She sneezes the entire hour she's in Freda's. MCS is a bitch. It turns you into a convulsing zombie, alive but robbed of a full life. “You can't imagine what it's like,” she told Calvin on their second date, when they were sitting on a bench atop the dam at Hinckley Lake, watching some old man with a boil on his neck fish for bluegill. “There are chemicals in everything today. Everything we eat. Everything we wear. Take something simple, like going to a restaurant. First, the seat cushions make you itch. Then the ink on the menu makes you sneeze. The waitress's perfume welds your eyes together and the MSG on the lettuce makes you puke. It's like that constantly.”

“Can't you get shots or something?” Calvin asked.

She told him that while shots and pills were helpful—and incredibly expensive—there were only three sure-fire ways an MCS sufferer could escape his or her misery. “And only one of them is permanent,” she said.

“Death, you mean?”

“Bingo.”

“And the two temporary ones?”

Donna hesitated. It was, after all, their second date. “Sleep and sex.”

Calvin was intrigued immediately. “Sex?”

“When you get—aroused—your endorphins override everything else that's going on in your body—toothaches, gas, allergies, sore toe, everything, so you can—you know.”

Donna watched Calvin's face fill with blood, knowing it wasn't from embarrassment.

“So,” he said, “if there's ever anything I can do to help you with this MCS of yours.…”

They made love for the first time that night, on an itchy blanket made of synthetic fibers. And now after all these years of marriage they still make love twice a week and her endorphins are still kicking in just fine. But her eggs just won't let his sperm knock down the door.

She's been married to Calvin for nine years and she's only been out to the layer houses two or three times. She's never been out to the old barn at all, all that dust and mold and decaying hay. She's never once scratched the cats under their chins, or dug her fingers into Biscuit's fluffy back. She just stays in the house, doing housework and doing the books. She walks around the lawn a little. Walks in the woods once or twice in the winter when the pollen balls are frozen. She's as much a prisoner as Rhea is. As much a freak. She should have an exhibit on the midway, too:

T
HE
A
MAZING
D
ONNA
—Q
UEEN OF
KLEENEX

S
HE WALKS
!
SHE TALKS
! S
HE
S
NEEZES AND
S
NEEZES
!

S
HE
C
AN
'
T GET PREGNANT NO MATTER HOW MUCH SHE
S
CREWS
!

Donna buys some cotton, some silk, several yards of flimsy linen gauze, a bag of gold sequins, beads of many colors.

That night she spreads out what she's bought on Rhea's bed. “Any ideas about your costume?”

Rhea shrugs. “I guess it's got to show a lot of my feathers, huh?”

Donna dabs her nose. “Well, yes. But we're not going to make you look like some hoochie koochie dancer.”

“Hoochie koochie?” Rhea asks.

“Like a stripper.”

Rhea laughs at this. “I could be totally naked. That would make us some money.”

“I was thinking maybe something Egyptian,” says Donna.

“How about a Grecian goddess?” asks Rhea. She playfully raises her arms as a Grecian goddess might.

“Oooh, that's an idea. How about a fairy tale princess?”

“Or just a fairy,” says Rhea. “Sort of a Tinker Bell look, you know?”

“Maybe something Indian,” says Donna.

“India Indian or Pocahontas Indian?”

“Pocahontas Indian. Buckskin skirt with fringe. Big headdress maybe.”

Rhea's head is shaking no. “I'm already a walking headdress.”

Says Donna, “Well, then how about we go with the Egyptian thing?”

When Rhea's costume is finally finished, Calvin sketches her in it. It takes three hours for him to get the sketches he needs. Then he spends the night—from midnight until well after dawn—transferring his best sketch to the remaining canvas in the barn. Then he paints it, his hands shaking the entire time.

He is amazed by the finished portrait. It is beautiful.

Twenty-three

At dawn they leave for the Burgoo County Fair. It is the first fair of the summer, in Ohio's flat western corner, where the cornfields blend into Indiana without anyone noticing.

Rhea Cassowary is in the pickup with her father. The lunch Donna made them is in a grocery bag on the seat between them. Peanut butter and jelly by the smell. Joon Faldstool is behind them in his Gremlin. Joon has been recruited to sell eggnog-flavored snow cones.

Both Joon and the snow cones were late additions to the county fair idea, both coming from Joon's father about three weeks ago.

“You know what,” Jimmy Faldstool said one morning when he and Calvin were having their morning coffee in the locker room. “I was looking through the classifieds in the Cleveland paper the other morning and saw this little snow cone wagon for sale. Completely equipped for $3,200. I says to Joon and the wife, ‘Good gravy, everybody likes a snow cone when they go to the fair—know that I do—and wouldn't that be a way to make some extra money. For everybody concerned.'

“‘I could buy that snow cone wagon,' I says, ‘and set it up there by Rhea's exhibit, and sell snow cones to the people coming out, or just walking by. And I could split my profits fifty-fifty with Cal.'”

Calvin said, “Think you could make it pay? Every county fair I've been to there's a snow cone stand every ten feet.”

Jimmy was ready for his boss' skepticism. “You sell cherry and grape and root beer snow cones like everybody else, you might not make much. But if you were selling egg nog snow cones—nobody else would be selling eggnog snow cones. And it would fit right in with Rhea being covered with feathers. And look at all the eggs we got. Good gravy, Cal. We paint up that little wagon fancy like you did those canvases and put it right there by the entrance and we'll make money hand over fist.”

Calvin said, “Our eggs belong to Bob Gallinipper.”

Jimmy said, “True enough. But our family responsibilities belong to us.”

And so Calvin gave Jimmy the green light. It was a cute little wagon with counters and windows on three sides. Jimmy painted it bright yellow with milky white trim. On the sign board on top Calvin lettered:

I
CE
N
OGGIES
!

E
GGNOG
-F
LAVORED
S
NOW CONES

M
ADE
W
ITH
F
RESH
F
ARM
E
GGS

Above all three windows he painted portraits of Rhea, herself enjoying an Ice Noggie.

And that's why Joon is following in his Gremlin, pulling the snow cone wagon. Rhea can see in the pickup's side mirrors that he's sucking on a can of pop.

The pickup itself is pulling a tiny house trailer. It's an old one, a 17-foot sky blue Holly built in the late fifties. It has two beds and a kitchen, but no bathroom. So they'll have to use the public toilets. The bed of the pickup carries the stage and the canvases, a plywood ticket booth, two cases of Rhea the Feathergirl tee shirts, and the high-back Victorian chair that old Henry's second wife, Camellia, bought brand new from the Sears & Roebuck catalog. Calvin has painted the chair gold to look like a throne.

When they get to Tuttwyler, Rhea is surprised when her father turns left and drives towards the town square. “I thought Burgoo County was the other way,” she says.