Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail (13 page)

She heard a car crunching gravel in the lot behind the building.

Her father said, “Come on up here, Sandy. People are coming in, and the viewing's about to start. I need you to help me lift the lid.”

Window Lights

I don't like the way the world is going nowadays, so I'm taking a break. A man gets tired of always striding out to gather trophies. A lot of guys who feel the same are just staying home with their guns. I'll stay here with my meager entertainments, waiting until the air clears.

I used to go on business trips, with my garment bag and briefcase hugging me like a little entourage. The last time I flew, the plane sat on the runway forever. On the P.A., the pilot apologized for the delay, saying we had missed our takeoff window due to inadequate federal funding for air-traffic control. I stared at the window by my seat. I noticed some strands of what appeared to be dog hair in the window. They were stranded between the two sealed ovals of plastic. The pilot announced that we would have to wait thirteen minutes for the next takeoff window. In my mind, I could see my little girl, gauging when to enter a jump rope turning before her.

Here at home these days, when I look out the window I can tell if the slightest change has occurred—a bird on the fence, a sprinkling of leaves on the neighbor's fish pool, a fallen branch from the sycamore tree. I notice any new colors and patterns of light. My grandmother called windowpanes “window lights.” And that was appropriate, since in her time windows were the main source of light. Grandma never turned on the electric bulb in her kitchen until it was far too dark to see and she had to feel her way around.

I recall her last years alone. I'd see her on periodic visits to Tennessee, where she had gone to live in the place she was raised. It had been a log house originally, in the pioneer style, with a shed roof above a porch and a breezeway called a dogtrot running through the middle. There was a chimney on each end of the house. My uncle Lon and his wife had lived there a long time. Lon was Grandma's oldest son. Lon and Bessie bricked over the logs and closed in the dogtrot. They added a wing and a lot of other things Grandma didn't like. When she moved back, she shut off the new part with the parlor and the picture window. Lon and Bessie bought a brick mansion with white columns in Nashville after he made it big in religious publishing. One night, Lon got drunk and smashed his car into a van of high-school wrestlers. He wasn't injured, but when he saw all those hurt kids scattered across the median he returned to his car and shot himself to death.

Grandma hated the picture window. “It don't set well with me,” she said. It wasn't that she was afraid of people looking in, although by then a development had sneaked up around the house. She didn't like looking out at other people's houses and cars. She stayed in the back room, a nest she had made for herself with a path worn in the flowered-print rug. When I went to see her, I noticed her little nook had its own unique smell. It was a rancid smell of pork grease and old shoes and coffee and stale cornbread and age. She tuned in the local news on the radio every morning to learn the deaths, the weather, and the wrecks. But when Lon gave her a police radio one Christmas, she wouldn't use it. “It ain't right somehow,” she said. “You're supposed to hear it on the regular radio, not like Eavesdropper Pop.” She wouldn't use the telephone either. Lon and Bessie insisted she have one, for emergencies. Once, she lay on the floor for two days with a broken hip. She could have dragged herself over to the telephone, but she wouldn't. “Why, that hip commenced to heal, me a-laying there that way,” she told me later in the hospital.

I sometimes imagine I am turning into my grandmother. Lately I've realized I am living on little but air and water and a few cans from the no-frills store. I've got drugs all the way out of my system. I don't drink anymore. I don't even take medicine. I'm laying low, observing, retreating, going off for forty days and forty nights, descending into the cave, maybe into the dark night of the soul—those clichés of mythic descent. I'm open to them all. My guide is the light of the television screen. Late at night, I have my pen ready to write down the toll-free numbers of the special offers.

It's peaceful. The cats politely ask to go outside. They bring back the news—a mouse, some feathers. In one way or another, the world comes to me.

And here comes Maddie, out of the blue. She called the other day. She moved back here to Lexington a month ago. I hadn't seen her yet, although she promised we'd talk when she got settled. She told me about her alienated-wives' support group, her skills-rejuvenation program, her trainee probation period at Luggage Land. I still love Maddie, and when she called and hinted that she wanted to end our separation, I was confused. I thought I did, too—she and Lisa are all I ever wanted—but I didn't think it should be easy for her.

She asked me if I was taking care of myself, eating right.

“I'm living on a dollar a day,” I told her. That wasn't exactly true.

“How possible?” she demanded. “What can you get for a dollar?”

“You can get a can of hominy for forty-seven cents and if you mix that with a can of kraut you've got a pretty decent meal.”

“Bill, are you trying to starve yourself?”

“Oh, another day I might eat oats,” I said. “Not that instant stuff—you're just paying for packaging and processing.”

“You can't live on oats.”

“Why not?”

“You're just too lazy to cook. You're refusing to deal with food because I'm not there to cook for you.”

“It's sociology,” I said solemnly. “I'm running an experiment.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I'm an isolated, uncontaminated specimen. I'm studying the effects of TV on the blank and hungry slate of the human mind.”

“You're making this up.”

“Every day I write down an Insight of the Day,” I went on, reaching for my journal. I shifted the telephone to the other ear. “Today I wrote, ‘If you stay alone without speech, until you can hear yourself think, the universe will be opened to you.' ”

“Have you tried counseling? I know a good—”

“I get plenty of counseling from TV. I just let things happen. I just wait at home till somebody on the tube tells me what I have to do. Isn't that what everybody does? Turn on the TV and somebody says buy this, eat that, don't eat that, watch this? What's so strange? Do you find that strange?”

“I guess I'm not really surprised.” I could hear Maddie sigh, a last-straw kind of sigh. There's no kidding around with her. She always takes me so seriously. I thought she'd see I was trying to make light of my isolation—the fact that she tries to keep Lisa from me. But I guess there's a lot we've never understood about each other.

“You've got a frugal habit of mind,” she said. “You always save food. You take the cracker packets home. And you save the jam jars and the soap from hotels.”

“Maddie, I'm thinking a lot lately about people who don't have much to eat.”

“But you can afford to eat, can't you? Are you trying to make a point about child support?”

“No. I'm thinking about people who don't have money to eat. The other day I chipped a tooth. I decided not to get it fixed. It makes me aware of all the people who can't get their teeth worked on.”

“That's dumb. You'll lose your tooth.”

“But people have always lost teeth. People used to be toothless by forty—if they lived that long. My grandmother didn't have a tooth in her head.”

“I'm taking care of my teeth because they told me I'd have trouble with false teeth on account of this bone in the roof of my mouth? They said they'd have to cut it out to fit false teeth in. How'd you chip your tooth?”

“Popcorn.” My tongue raked over the chipped place. It made a satisfying rasping feeling on my tongue, like sandpaper. I said to Maddie, “I can clean my tongue with the sharp edge of the tooth. You know how cats' tongues have those spines all over them?”

“I hope you're not going to get scurvy,” Maddie said. “You at least need to take antioxidants.” I could visualize her long black wavy hair, the little round knobs of her cheekbones. Those knobs were a motif all over her. Her beautiful shoulders and breasts reiterated her cheeks. I loved her knobbiness. Even her knees were appropriately shaped and beautiful.

“I want to kiss your knees,” I said.

“I think you must be lonely,” Maddie said. “And I can help if you let me.”

“Help? What on earth can you mean? You can help by bringing Lisa back home. How is she? How are her teeth?”

“Lisa's fine. Her teeth are perfect. She's practicing her clarinet all the time.”

“She won't play it for me when she comes over.”

“You get on her nerves. She can't concentrate with you hovering over her.”

What could I say to that? At least I wasn't drinking anymore. That should count.

It intrigues me that I don't get this tooth fixed. I never minded dentists. I always liked the laughing gas. It would send me on an adventure in the woods. The wallpaper at the dentist's is a mural of a forest landscape. Once, while getting a tooth filled, I was Hansel, leading my sister Gretel bravely into the forest. We met Little Red Riding Hood, asking for directions. She was going to her grandmother's. I accidentally sent her to the witch's gingerbread house. The child was really Lisa, in her Halloween costume. I see the significance of all that now, but I didn't then. Not that I have much confidence in the dream state. It's just stuff floating around, relaxing, stuff you mostly forget when you wake up because your memory receptors are shut off in sleep. That makes sense to me. The mind's swirling impressions and memories and capacities just let loose in a free-for-all. It's Dada. I think Dada was thumbing its nose at Freud. Freud was a Victorian, and everything had to make sense to those people. Then the Surrealists and the Dadaists came along and turned dream symbols on their head and laughed themselves silly.

Just when my dreams start to make sense, there's a punch line, like Maddie calling.

Today, the morning newspaper tells about a homeless couple with two children. The husband is a Yankee, but the wife is sixth-generation Kentuckian, Scots-Irish to the bone. The husband lives under a bridge with some other guys, beside an open fire where they drink beer. He used to work with horses, but then he couldn't get work. She sleeps at the shelter with her two children in a single bed. She walks her nine-year-old boy to school. The school gave the boy a coat and some jeans and shirts and sweaters. He got to pick them out himself at the mall. He makes A's and likes to draw. The mother walks around town with the four-year-old girl till it's time to line up at the community center for a hot lunch. In the afternoon, they get the boy from school and play in the park until it's time to go find some supper. She says she doesn't like to keep her kids in those centers, around all those drunks, so she keeps walking.

I can get lost in a story in the paper and it starts to seem real, as if it's happening before my eyes. But of course it
is
real. I wish I could marry this unfortunate woman and take care of those children.

When Maddie came over to see me, I showed her the story.

“In New York they'd be living over a grate,” said Maddie, dropping the paper on my broken wicker hassock. “They've got it pretty good here.”

She looked around disdainfully at my place—what used to be our place. I admit I've let it go. She was on her way to work, and she had brought some doughnuts and coffee. She looked older, a bit hard in the eyes. Her cheeks were hollowed out. Her hair was cut short, and it flipped away from her face like wings.

“Come over tonight and eat supper with me,” I said. “I've got a can of kidney beans and a can of corn.”

“No, thanks. I can't tonight. Besides, I'd rather go out. What I'd like is some really good fettuccine Alfredo.”

“Beans and corn are the prince and princess of nutrition. Millions of Mexicans count on them.”

“I'm not Mexican.”

“You're not Italian either.”

“I bet your cats eat better than you do,” she said, eyeing my lounging gray twins, Zippy and Bub. “You don't make them follow your diet, do you?”

“Oh, no, I let them have what they're used to. They're naturally thrifty anyway. Cats don't take more from the world than is necessary.”

Maddie laughed so hard she roared. “Bill, you are still so naïve! What about all the songbirds cats kill? They don't have to hunt for a living, so they kill birds just for fun. They know they can depend on you for turkey-and-giblets or fancy-snapper-dinner, or whatever.”

Whether she was right or not, I wouldn't agree. “They don't kill for fun. It's practice. Toning, keeping in shape. That songbird thing is erroneous. A neighborhood cat kills one cardinal and everybody blames the whole tragic loss of the world's songbirds on one cat. It's unfair.” I attacked one of the doughnuts she had brought. It was delicious. “Are cardinals songbirds?” I asked.

She touched my arm gently. “Bill, I'm too busy for this role playing, or whatever you're doing. Did I tell you about my roommate's divorce? How her skunk of a husband testified that he had multiple personalities? He claimed he was faithful but that one of his personalities named Zeke was the one who went out with all these women. Can you believe such a story? He said he had five personalities, but she told me she could name six or eight herself.”

On this topic I had nothing to say. That Lisa had Maddie's roommate for a sort of parent bothered me. I said, “Open your mouth. I want to see that bone you were talking about.”

“No. Don't be ridiculous.”

“I was trying to be romantic.”

“Not now, please.”

“I don't remember that bone in your mouth.”

“It's just my brains pressing down. I've had a lot on my mind.”

She turned to go, and I found her coat. “It was nice to see you, Bill,” she said. “I don't really know what I expected.”