When we’re through, we’ll go down to the kitchen for a snack, and I’ll think, this is how we are most affectionate, when we stand hip to hip spreading mustard on bread, feeding each other bites of Swiss cheese and smoked ham. Why not skip the other part?
Well, it’s time to go to wherever I’m going. But I have to do something first—a favor. This morning, I went for breakfast in the motel dining room and the waiter began rather suddenly talking about angels. I had mentioned the moon because it had still been out, that wispy kind of disappearing moon, a blue-white color—and he said, oh are you a moon person? I had no idea what that meant, really, and yet I answered, yes I was. And he said he was too, and that also he was an angel person. I said is that right, and I was waiting for him to ask what I wanted, which was French toast, but he didn’t. He kept talking about how angels were such a strong feminine presence in his life and that the moon was feminine too, of course. I began looking around a bit to see if anyone else thought he was a little crazy, but then I thought, well, I’m not in a hurry. It’s not a bad thing to talk about angels.
I remembered when Martin and I went to Paris and we were in a very small restaurant, maybe four tables, and the waiter there began to tell us about his wife learning to ride a bicycle at age thirty-eight—he spoke wonderful English—but Martin made the tiniest movement with his wrist and the waiter saw, and knew, and stopped talking about his wife and told us about the specials. I was sad about that, I’d been interested in him, a French person telling a French story. I’d thought, I’ll bet if I were here alone, he’d have told me a lot about his family, about himself. As it was, I felt that Martin was in charge, that the city belonged to him and he was letting me hold on to one edge of it like I held onto his hand. Like the young children I saw out on a field trip one day holding on to a rope.
But anyway, my waiter told me how he saw angels in dreams and they never spoke but it seemed to him they were getting ready to, and then he all of a sudden remembered what he was supposed to be doing and he asked me what would I like. And I said, French toast, which seemed so mundane, considering, and he said, oh that was a good choice, that was his favorite. And I said, well why didn’t he join me, apparently I was the only one in his station. He got this look, and he played around nervously with his collar and then he said well he’d love to. And he came out with two platters of thick-cut French toast—extra-large servings, he said, winking—and he sat down with me and tucked his napkin into the neck of his shirt and then—why not?—I did the same and we began eating with some relish. And then the manager came over and said, “Lawrence, what do you think you’re doing?” And there was this awful stillness, the couple across the room holding their forks midair. I started to say something and the manager—so young, actually impressed with himself—said, no no, I’m asking Lawrence. And Lawrence said, why, he was eating breakfast. And after a moment the manager said he was fired. Right now. I said, wait a minute, I asked him to join me, he didn’t have any other customers. I was getting kind of excited like when a good fight starts. Lawrence said no, it was his fault, he’s always had trouble with boundaries. He asked would I mind giving him a ride home, though, he didn’t have a car, he’d never had one because he didn’t understand how they worked. I said, well you don’t have to understand how they work to drive one. He said, how can you just assume such amazing things, get behind the wheel trusting your life to this car not knowing anything about it. I said, well, you fly don’t you? and he said yes but that he understood perfectly well how airplanes worked. And anyway, he wasn’t driving the plane. (The manager was still standing there, and you know he suddenly seemed like the silly one, just standing there with his winter-white arms crossed, his cheap watch ticking on his wrist, while Lawrence and I talked about … well, I don’t know, the philosophy of technology or something.)
Anyway, the point is, I think this is sort of wondrous, this event. I do. And there is no one to check it out with, no one to pass or fail me for my observation and this is a vast relief I feel such a lifting inside. Hope, I think. I’ll bet Lawrence has angels everywhere in his house, moons hanging from his ceiling. I intend to see. Suddenly time is time. I’m leaving a twenty-dollar tip for the maid. I have always wanted to do that. It makes sense to me. And anyway, Martin and I have too much money. We have for some time. At first it was just that we didn’t have to worry about whether we could go out to dinner at some fancy place. Then we got way ahead on tuition, on the mortgage, on everything. We made bigger donations to more organizations. Then he started investing. I never wanted to know about it, I found it sort of frightening.
We buy things over and over again. New cars, before the new-car smell has gone from the old one. New furniture, new silverware, the latest fashions that are sometimes out of style before we’ve taken the price tags off, more, more, always more, full boxes coming in, empty boxes going out, for what? So that we can sit out on our (new) deck in the summer and drink vodka and tonics out of our vodka-and-tonic glasses with limes that have been cut with the (new) lime cutter? It’s always bothered me, what we lost when we stopped being able to fit our things into the trunk of our car. Martin doesn’t believe me. He says it’s a luxury of being rich to wish you were poor. I don’t want to be poor. I just want to be appreciative.
Twenty-five years ago, when I met Martin, he was a hippie. He had a ponytail, tied neatly in the back with a piece of rawhide that smelled like incense. We did drugs once in a while, we used to hurry to clean the kitchen before we came on to the acid, we didn’t like coming down to dirty dishes. In those days, Martin talked about angels too. About parallel universes. About the industry of ants, the wisdom in the dance of the honeybee. I would sit on his lap, my long hair streaming down my back, my long dress on and my long earrings, too. I was braless and barefoot, and Martin and I were filled with wonder at the way the dust motes were colored, we’d never noticed.
I do have to go now. It’s almost checkout time. I wonder where I’ll eat lunch.
Dear Martin,
I hope you’ve gotten a little bit used to this, to my being away. I have, suddenly.
I am here in a room in someone’s house, in a very small town called Midgeville. When I asked at the gas station this evening where the nearest motel was, the man said there was no motel in town, but that the Lewis family had a kind of bed-and-breakfast, real nice place. You didn’t get your own bathroom or anything, but you got a bedroom. Twelve dollars. So I came here and it’s the most wonderful place. An older couple I’d put in their mid-seventies lives here, and the house is full of the old-fashioned things I love—doilies, a grandfather clock, maple end tables crowded with photos and flowered porcelain dishes, overstuffed sofas and chairs with soft pillows tossed here and there. The bed I have is a beautiful brass one, a blue-and-white quilt on it. The front window looks out onto the garden—I can’t really see much now, but Mrs. Lewis told me it’s her husband’s hobby, his pride and joy, he’s got sixty different kinds of rosebushes out there. One variety produces silver blossoms! She said she puts them in a vase with the purple roses, that they’re lovely together.
I feel a little like a child again, up in my room, the door closed, listening to the sound of voices below me. I’m looking forward to the morning—Mrs. Lewis is making applesauce muffins and I know they’ll be served with some care. My job is only to receive.
I drove for such a long time today, and I didn’t really get tired. This surprised me—you know how I always used to fade out after an hour or two when we took turns on a trip. But I went for miles and miles, listened to radio stations come in and out, thought about what it would be like to live in each town I passed through—there, the grocery store with the woman in pink curlers coming out, that’s where I’d shop; there, the small stone library, that’s where I’d request bestsellers from the gossipy librarian. I love doing this, Martin, I used to try to explain it to you, why I wanted to take the side roads. But you were always interested in saving time, so we took the interstates and th
ere was never anything to look at, not even telephone poles. When you take the small roads you see the life that goes on there, and this makes your own life larger.
I stop wherever I want to, for as long as I want. Today I browsed in an antique store and I went into a dress shop to try on a yellow skirt I saw in the window and I stopped at a farm stand and bought a big fat tomato and then sat in the car and ate it from my hand like an apple. Then I just sat there watching people for a good half hour or so, seeing who came and what they bought, watching kids yank at parents’ hands or quietly rearrange the peaches. I listened to the sound of paper bags being rolled shut, the cash-register drawer dinging open and then being pushed closed. I liked this. You would never have stood for it. I remember once when we were in New York and we passed a man making pizza in a window, throwing the dough high up in the air. I wanted to watch and you lasted about fifteen seconds and then we had to move on. I could have stood there all night. We are so different that way.
I passed a sign for a pet cemetery this afternoon and I went to see it. It was off the bumpiest dirt road I’ve ever been on—you’d have been clutching your chest, Martin, yelling about axles and to turn back, oh yes you would. But I was very careful and nothing happened, the car seemed interested in getting there, too. I’d never been to a pet cemetery before. It’s a heartbreaking and wonderful experience, the crooked signs, the used toys marking the heads of graves, the animals’ names, most of them ending in Y, of course. There was a parakeet named Petey, a cat named Roly Poly. A lot of dogs—Rusty, Tippy, one called Admiral Commander III. I found a little boy, about seven, sitting at the side of one of the graves—his dog Sparky was buried there. Part bulldog, he said, mostly bulldog. The boy, named Ralph, said he never thought Sparky would die—he didn’t seem to be that sick, but he never came back from the vet’s. He told me Sparky snorted when he laughed, that’s what he said, that the dog laughed and that he snorted when he did so. Ralph had his skateboard with him, he visited every day on his rounds. He had a new dog now, Ruffian was his name. But as Ralph so eloquently explained, “Ruffian is his self, but this one here, that’s Sparky.”
It is rather a luxury to go on this way, Martin, to know that you are attending to what I am saying. That you will read this letter through, perhaps twice, because it is a letter and not me.
I wish you could see this quilt, the stitches so tiny and fine and hand done. But even as I say this, I feel some reservation, a stinginess of spirit. Because I don’t think you’d appreciate the stitches. If you’d been driving, I wouldn’t even be here.
Not long ago, I saw a woman in a drugstore pick something up in her hand, delighted, and hold it out toward her husband. It was just a perfume bottle, but the shape of it was lovely. “See this, hon?” she said. And the man said, “Yeah,” but he had his back to her and was walking down the aisle away from her. The woman put the thing back, diminished.
Do you know what I mean, Martin? I think this comes from mistakes so many women make early on in a marriage. When we got engaged, I stopped driving my own car. I rode shotgun every time we were together. The default settings on the mirrors, on the closeness of the seat to the wheel, they were yours. Remember when that car caught on fire, the engine? Maybe it was auto grief. Don’t think I’m crazy, Martin. I have only gotten out my shovel, to dig a bit. I’m just pointing out what I uncover. You can look or not. I want the difference to be that I don’t put the thing back on the shelf because you say it’s not worth seeing.
I just read this letter over and I see that there is a lot of anger here.
I’m sorry.
Love,
Nan
I am staying at a bed-and-breakfast on the edge of a lake. The windows are wide open and the wind has come in to snoop around, to lift the doilies, to blow up the edges of the bedspread, to push at the closet door, creating a low and urgent rattle. I can hear waves lapping at the shore and the sound is faintly obscene. There is an owl hooting somewhere out there, but I can’t see him.
I took a walk earlier, just around the block. The sidewalks heaved crazily, damage from the tree roots below, and at one point I tripped and nearly fell flat on my face. An older man walking behind me came rushing up, asking if I were all right. I said I was fine, thank you. He said, wasn’t it a lovely evening? and I said it certainly was. Good weather will do this to people, bond them in their gratefulness. The man was wearing wrinkly clothes and he had prickly looking gray stubble on his face. Cactus man.
He told me he’d been a lifer in the US Army. “Logistics,” he said. “Know what that is?” Not exactly, I said. “Well,” he said, “it’s the most important thing. First ones in, first ones out.” Uh-huh, I said. I didn’t want to talk army. The sky was a mixed color, peaches and blue. I wanted to think about that. Or I wanted to think about the fact that this old guy was once my age. He was once younger than I, and I imagined him slicking his hair back to dance in the moonlight with girls whose perfume scent frightened him and aroused him. How different they were, dressed in smashable taffeta, so carefully arranged in hair and in makeup and in words. Everything about them practiced, and he raw and improvising. The pearl of their teeth through the passion of their dark lipstick, should he? The shadowy and too tender indentation at the base of their necks, how could he? We passed a small library and the man said, “I know all the gals in there.” I thought, I’ll bet he does. I’ll bet he comes in regularly, leans on the counter and chats and chats and chats with the “gals” and they chat back, and when they turn away from him they smile at each other with a gentle weariness. I’ll bet his name is Willy or something like that, and he puts down beer in the VFW hall in the late afternoons, his hat pushed to the back of his head. I’ll bet he has many keys on his key chain and that the fob is tacky and meaningful. Baloney must be in his refrigerator. His socks must be thin and cheap and the blue that turns purple, and he must not be strict about how many days in a row they are put to the task.
Our steps made such a fine sound on the roller-coaster sidewalks. Our conversation was so light and arbitrary and I felt like my imagination was off the leash and rolling in the grass that had turned bluish in the setting sun.
I still feel that way now, that my imagination is free, that I have a red carpet unfurled before me like Dorothy’s yellow brick road and I can go on and on. Speak, this journal says. I’m listening to you. Go ahead and say anything. Confess. Exult. Weep. Nothing makes me walk away. Nothing bores me. The truth is always interesting, whatever form it takes.
I am washed up and settled in for sleep in a stranger’s bed, which always feels luxurious to me. There is something about being handed buttered toast as opposed to making it yourself, and there is something about lying against another person’s selection of sheets. Not a hotel’s choice, a person’s, who had a dialogue in their mind before making their selection. Too many violets? No, I don’t think so, and look at the blue next to them, that’s nice.
I’ve been thinking about that waiter Lawrence’s house. He did have an amazing amount of angel paraphernalia—calendars, wallpaper, figurines, many pictures, bookmarks, coffee mugs, even a bathroom rug. I’m afraid he was on the way from refreshingly eccentric to fearfully peculiar. Such a slight and delicate thing he was, the waist of a woman dancer, a wrist with skin so translucent I could see the blue lines of his veins like an etching. We had some tea (Celestial Seasonings, of course), and he told me he was a little sad that angels are so popular now, because he’d loved them long ago, from the time he was a little boy; and when too many people love what you do, some of the pleasure is lost. When he was seven, he’d used the shoelaces from his sneakers to anchor an angel figurine at the head of his bed. Unfortunately it had fallen and given him a black eye.
He had difficulty holding jobs, and thought perhaps what he’d do next was apply at the dry cleaner. No customer contact required, he said, he’d just work in the back, alone. He thought it would be hard for him to get into trouble there, didn’t I agree? and I said yes, that
was probably true, and I tried to sound optimistic, but the truth is it tore at my heart a little that such a true and friendly person must keep to himself.
He asked me where I was going and I said I wasn’t sure. I said I was a fifty-year-old runaway and he said really! and there was some admiration there and suddenly I felt it for myself.
Today, when I was driving down a small, winding road, I came to an albino squirrel, stopped in the middle of the road. It was frozen in place. I didn’t have time to stop but I didn’t hit it; it was between the wheels. And I was so relieved and then I thought, well, that was probably purposeful; isn’t that interesting; that squirrel has learned that if you don’t quite make it across, you just hold still and the cars will go over you. But it bothered me, and about ten miles down the road I felt like going back to see if the squirrel had made it over to the side of the road. My first thought was, you can’t do that. You’ll waste a good half hour. And then I thought, you can too. And I did go back and I saw the squirrel off to the side of the road, dead. Some car had hit it after all, because it hadn’t had the courage to honor its own correct instinct. And I began to cry because I had this thought about people, that they do this all the time, deny the wise voice inside them telling them the right thing to do because it is different. I remembered once seeing a tea party some little girls had set up outside, mismatched china, decorations of a plucked pansy blossom and a seashell and a shiny penny and a small circle of red berries and a fern, pressed wetly into the wooden table, the damp outline around it a beautiful bonus. They didn’t consult the Martha Stewart guide for entertainment and gulp a martini before their guests arrived. They pulled ideas from their hearts and minds about the things that gave them pleasure, and they laid out an offering with loving intent. It was a small Garden of Eden, the occupants making something out of what they saw was theirs. Out of what they truly saw.