A Phantom Herd

Collected in my memory, a certain sunny fall morning. It springs forth from later that year, 1962. I spent it at a church luncheon party with my mother and twenty or thirty ladies from the Women's Fellowship Circle of our Congregationalist church. The party was held at a home that nestled into a cactusy gully at the gates of the saguaro monument far out on the eastern edge of our valley. One of the ladies of our church who was a prominent member of the Circle, a group of mostly Midwestern ladies, hosted the Annual Autumn Potluck. This was the first and only year my mother attended, bringing me with her, me, the only child and mother, the only youngish woman.

  The sweet old women at the meeting came from many obscure Midwestern bergs, all of them nothing more than whistle-stops, really, the kind of towns Sinclair Lewis gave to Carol Kennicott to fantasize her various failed reforms, towns that were hard to stomach, with self-satisfied Main Streets, which were very different from my queer, dusty Southwestern home. We had landed in an exotic, American place, where people drifted in and out to spend their winter days reclining on lawn chairs under the intense sun. My home was the kind of place people fled to when they were dying of tuberculosis, suffering from asthma, or enduring arthritis. Sun seekers, sun lovers crowded the state.

  On the whole, the old ladies who had migrated out of these teeny burgs which were in many ways identical to Gopher Prairie had conversational interests which lay in bridge or canasta, which my mother tried briefly and discovered she detested, in the candies of the Midwest, which she took a genuine interest in, specializing in Swiss varieties and collecting a giant copper tub which was used in some mysterious candy factory, and in hand-wringing about the troubled way the financing of "the folks" new tractor had recently turned out. "The folks" were the people they had left behind in the Midwest.

  When the ride which Mother had arranged came for us on the day of the party, I watched the big white auto crunch over the gray gravel of the semicircular drive in front of our house and followed its progress as it nosed around the stunted bottle brushes that were spaced evenly around the inner arc of the drive; Father had insisted that the gravel beyond the bottlebrushes, in the small semicircle, be the type that was dyed pink, and in the unrelenting hot sun of an October morning this backdrop to the little bushes was like a torrid zone of dilute blood. If you picked up an individual piece of this dyed gravel and looked closely at it, you could see ordinary gray gravel underneath the pink paint. The bent trunk of the Rus Lancia tree, a transplant from Africa, writhed in the very center of that bloody zone. The small bottlebrush plants were like a set of uptight acolytes surrounding the greater African tree. As a teenager I was horrified to be living in a house that still displayed the pink painted gravel, which was so gauche to me. We kept it there when it had long since gone out of style.

  From my position standing beside Mother in the small shade of the red concrete porch, I could already see when the car came to a halt that the seats in the car, front and back, were packed with large, festively-dressed church ladies. On one side of the backseat there sat an especially large woman, one of the fellowship. She was so large that an adult would never fit beside her, so the driver of the car had already decided that I would have to slide in there.

  "Send her around to the other side at the back, Juney," said this lady driver to my mother, when Mother opened the front door of the car. The person who needed to go around to the back was me. "She'll just squeeze in perfect."

  "Go on," mother urged me, spinning around. "You heard her. Around to the back door on the far side and there's more room there than in the front."

  I saw from her stern expression that Mother was anticipating trouble from me about this seating arrangement. If so, she was right. I stood my ground without budging. Perhaps, I thought, if I just stand on our gravel outside the car door where Mother is going and if I keep hoping, this order to find a seat in the back would be rescinded and I would get to sit with my mother in the front after all. I knew she wouldn't be able to close the door with me standing in it.

  "Go around to the other door. Sit back there with the nice ladies," said Mother again stiffly when she dropped onto the car seat and found me in the open door and already trying to force my way onto her lap. Several of the ladies chuckled. "Go on," she said, blocking my access to her lap and almost swatting at me.

  "Around to the back," she said, angrily pushing me out of the path of the swinging door.

  Hell aptly describes the trip around the back of that idling, shivery car. I felt the early October sun boiling on the nape of my shaved neck. I had a large patch of prickly heat there, something I developed regularly in the late, sweaty part of our desert summer. I did not want to be wearing the dress Mother had put me in nor did I want to be sitting all by myself with those old church ladies in the backseat while Mother was up front. Hot tears welled in my eyes. I brushed my bangs off my forehead angrily; if the driver put the car in reverse I would be squished and that would teach Mother to abandon me to the backseat. I almost wished it would back.

  The thick white car door popped open magically when I approached the door handle, and after a moment's hesitation, I squeezed myself in beside the largest, tannest lady imaginable and somehow she closed the door. The minute the heavy door had shut, banging my hip against the interior handle, this huge woman reached over the back of me and grasped my far shoulder with her big hand in order to squeeze me up against her flesh. Someone had hung one of those ubiquitous canvas bags, with water inside, from the rolled-up window. The water dribbled down on my calf when it didn't splat the floorboard of the car. I had to keep my knees leaning over toward the large lady's leg in order to avoid the water drops that wanted to drip onto the skin of my leg and slide into my sandals.

  The lady smiled. She leaned over and her chins folded under her mouth, loads of brown folded chins; her broad brown face, framed by brown hair and bangs, smiled toward the front of the car, but her eyes rolled to the ceiling as though she were suffering to have me near her and then she said politely, in a long puffing effort, toward me, "Isn't this?going to be fun? We get to go?to a party?together. I'm Peg."

  I listened to her question and introduction and glared at her glumly. Fun was not what it was, not for me, no, it was more like an agony to have to be the only child present with the prospect of going to a house with more old ladies, maybe twenty or thirty of them, smelling of perfume, pinching and poking at me, and to be driving all the way to the cactus monument with the water bag dripping beside me and mother in the front seat and this strange, large Peg person beside me. I felt isolated from my mother. To hear the adults laughing at me and feel their amusement with my small body, small voice, and small nods, burned a part of my soul. I began trying to twist thin sections of my hair at the top of my head, fingering out small segments and winding them around my finger and then tugging them. Even with the very short haircut Mother had ordered I could pull some hair out. The pain soothed me somehow and made the stress of being alone in the backseat somehow more manageable for me. I threw the loose hair down the side of the car seat. Peg didn't seem to notice.

  Peg rolled her eyes up again examining the white plastic cover over the light in the car ceiling. "You live?so near the church. Aren't you lucky?" I nodded, but I wasn't sure that was true. "Do you like?your Sunday School teacher?" she asked me, suddenly, as though she wanted to pounce down on me with her question. I nodded solemnly. "Do you? Yes, you do? Ah-huh." She looked up at that ceiling again as though she were desperately seeking divine inspiration for her next question. It came out eventually in the same impulsive manner and she manifested a dire shortness of breath by speaking in tiny puffs. "I sure liked?my Sunday School teacher?a long time ago in Benton County, Indiana. Did you know that?you're mother and I?are both from Indiana?" I nodded. "You did? You did know that already? Well, then,?did you know that my old teacher?in Indiana?taught me a lot about the Bible? Her name was Mrs. Gar-de-Kellogg, and?isn't that a funny ?long name for a lady? Gar-de-Kellogg, Gar-de-Kellogg. I've remembered it?for all this t
ime. She had about the funniest name in our town except for a man whose name was Buster T. Tooker that was another town character we used to laugh about a lot. Oh boy, we were mean?in those small town?to anybody different. Seems like?we couldn't get enough?of picking on people. Anyway, she was a nice lady and I remember her still even out here in Tucson. And do you know?she came out to Tucson once and I got to take her out to dinner?and we went to a Mexican restaurant? That was just super?special, let me tell you. She really liked Tucson, because it was so different?from Indiana where she was from on a river and where she lived for a while after she was married in Southern Indiana?with the covered bridges. Well, orange groves?.really interested her?a lot?and date palm groves. Tucson has a lot?of those up near the mountains. Has she seen?the groves?"

  "Oh yes, she knows about them, or she ought to know," mother answered. "She ought to know Tucson has date and orange groves." I was supposed to know many things about agricultural products. About vast orange groves and cotton farms and peanut farms, too.

  "And the cactus. But my old teacher?.had seen prickly pear. That she had seen?in Oklahoma. She told me she had never really seen?a real mountain, though, until she got to New Mexico?and Arizona. That's because Indiana is so flat. Do you remember?Indiana being flat? You do? Well, Mrs. Gar-de-?.Kellogg taught me all about the characters?of the Bible and their stories. There are some good?stories in the Bible. Do you?know?your Bible stories?"

  I nodded glumly.

  "She doesn't," said Mother, chiming in from the front seat to my considerable chagrin, "She hardly knows them at all. If you quiz her she answers everything wrong and doesn't care. She isn't interested in the Bible at all. If you sit her down in front of Bible stories, she refuses to read them. Her older sister knows the characters and their stories better. She has a good grounding in the Bible. But this last one of mine is not interested at all. Not one iota. Well, certainly not in comparison to others her age in our family. Not the way her Indiana cousins do, I should say." This was an old sore point between us that she was bringing up again, because I refused, rather passively, to learn anything about the Bible people or even speak their names much of the time, no matter what coaching was attempted or what comments she made to evoke jealousy of my older sister or my cousins in me, something which she would not let up on, but kept on knocking away, knocking at that same old door. I hated the mention of these Indiana cousins and their perfect knowledge of Bible stories; she said while they were rowing on the Salamonie River they tested themselves and the best cousins were the ones that lived down in southern Indiana and were around the covered bridges and their memorization skills about the Bible beat everyone and they were just quiz-masters in their city and county and they even were going to state contests about the Bible. Bible quiz-masters, that was my cousins, but they didn't have to try so hard and show everybody up the way they did. That was unnatural. They didn't even have stuff like that, Bible quizzes, in Arizona so who the heck cared? Who were they anyway to be interested in these old stories in the Bible when there were better things to do? Those Indiana cousins just seemed to be doing nothing every day after school but studying Bible stories and getting all the names perfect and telling what all of the people did, which was a lot of strange stuff. And I didn't see the importance of having an interest in those people. Jesus was a good guy, but I wasn't sure about the rest of them; they might be culprits. If they wrote the stories themselves, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, those guys, they wouldn't make themselves culprits, would they? Didn't people write stories and make themselves heroes even if they were in truth culprits? That was human nature in action. Now, if Judas before he hung himself or whatever he did had written a gospel and said he was a real scoundrel I would take a real hearty interest in it. That might be a story worth reading. Jesus would probably say the same thing about listening to Judas' version of the whole thing. Jesus wasn't a pansy about bad guys and he said you had to hang out with bad guys to be sure of doing any honest to goodness good. Jesus' opinion was a bit like writing; the scary bad people make the best characters, if you can't reform and change a character your audience will feel bored.

  "Her cousins are practically Bible experts at age ten, or seven, even. They can answer questions faster than you can ask them and they compete in all these Bible contests which are all around Indiana and the Midwest. Boy, do they ever win, win, win. They're going out to contests in Los Angeles and they're very disciplined," Mother explained.

  This was a stab in my direction. I was conscious of the fact that Mother had not mentioned me in that praise either. This was a great shame. In her eyes I didn't know about the Bible and I wasn't disciplined enough to learn.

  I narrowed my eyelids and felt the pain of praise that never was going to be mine. Why did she have to like something that was as useless as memorizing Bible facts? Why couldn't she brag about me for a change?

  "Who's that, Juney?" asked the driver, dreamily.

  "My Indiana nieces and nephews."

  "Oh, they're in those Bible quizzes back there?"

  "Sure, those are good," piped up the lady beside my mother in the middle of the front seat.

  Suddenly, we turned into another housing development and abruptly into a drive. On a hot street the idling car basked in the sunny semicircular gravel drive, parked exactly halfway between twin towering coconut palms. The driver whispered to my mother some terrible secrets about the youngish lady whose house we were idling in front.

  "Juney," she hissed, leaning her glossy gray and lavender permanent forward slightly, stiffly, and rolling her eyes sideways in her head to almost be able to see my mother without turning her head sideways and my mother correspondingly leaned slightly forward, not eagerly, but still receptively, respectfully, to hear what the old lady wanted to tell her. "They kept her locked in the cellar...God forgive them for what they did to her because she no more knew what she was doing that the puppet knows its master...what an old story it is...and all of this happening about twelve years ago and her left abandoned out on her own for the longest time...oh, about two years, I expect, on the old family farm and it had one of the biggest cellars in all of the county, they say."

  "His family or hers?" asks a lady in the far corner of the back seat, "I only ask for a reason."

  "Well," thought the driver. She put her finger to her lips, "I'll have to think about that one. I suppose it was in Hamilton County. No, I tell a lie, it was Butler."

  I had no idea what these old Congregational church ladies were talking about. Their sentences conveyed secret messages, vague hints of confused worries, and labyrinths of emotions, which I egotistically related to myself. Morosely self-absorbed, I wondered if they were talking about me in some language of strange symbols and interconnections. They might be discussing my horrendous lisp, and the thought made me blink back bitter tears of disappointment and fury. From my overwhelming interest in myself, I was missing the details of another great story, perhaps it was my greatest treasure. A writer has to keep their thoughts on others at all times. The best stories in almost any situation are about someone else. One must be ready to redirect the reader and reposition the herd.

  "Butler County! I had a cousin in that county once," says the lady beside me with satisfaction.

  "I had one too," said the driver.

  "Made her way...all the way out to Arizona."

  "Well, heavens to murgitroyd."

  "They took the girl to Chicago and then brought her out here."

  "I never knew," said Mother, fascinated always with the trivial details of the lives of others, especially when they had trials and tribulations.

  "And she had never been or even thought of asking?"

  "Never wants to now."

  A young woman in a serape and skirt came out of the house and everybody in the car shut up about her and stared as she fumbled with the keys, locked the door and checked the tap of her garden hose before she came out to the car and squeezed up the back seat worse. Peg had me thoroughly squashed against the
door.