Banana Rose

  I kept nodding, but I forgot to speak into the receiver. “Nell?” Anna asked again.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Tell me the order,” she demanded.

  “A Standard, a Shell, a Seven-Eleven, a Conoco, an Amoco, and then scream,” I repeated.

  “Good. We’ll spend the weekend together. There must be a motel there,” Anna surmised.

  “Anna, aren’t you surprised about my divorce?” I asked feebly.

  “Nell, last time we spoke, you were having a hard time. To be honest, I knew something was off when you stopped here on your way to be married. It just had to play itself out.”

  “Well, Anna, I did love him,” I said defensively.

  “Aw, Nell. I know you did. You still do. You’re suffering.” She talked more softly. “I want to help. I know how deep it was between you two.

  “You do?” Suddenly, I got scared and paranoid. “I can’t make love with you, you know.”

  “Nell, you’re an asshole. I don’t want to make love. I’m your friend. Do you think that’s all I ever want to do?” Anna was hurt. She had a right to be. It had never even come up in conversation after that one time in Dansville. It was just that I didn’t trust anything right now.

  “Anna, I’m sorry.” I started to cry. “I don’t know where to turn.”

  “I understand. You need to be with people who have known you a long time, who know your history, who can reassure you that your whole life isn’t all broken up.” Anna was so smart. I didn’t quite grasp what she meant, but I suspected she was right.

  I recited Anna’s words to myself over and over again as I drove to meet her. The sky was slate gray. The snow had melted, and everything looked soaked. Colors come out better when they are wet. The bark on the elm trees was browner, the concrete grayer, the red barns redder. Sadness became vivid to me. “Chew Pouch Tobacco” was lettered on the side of a barn. I thought of chewing gum, but desire fell through my feet. There wasn’t anything left. There was just the car, the wheel I gripped with my two hands, the heat pouring out of the slots on either side of the front dashboard, and the jerking click of the second hand on the clock. I knew on that day that Minnesota would always be the land of sorrow for me. It would be about dying.

  I drove through lost Lutheran towns, one after the other. I figured the devil must have left these towns because there wasn’t enough pizzazz there for him. He abandoned the cows and the cats to fend for themselves. He knew that this kind of cold, this kind of gray, does not produce evil, only drunkenness; not the true darkness that glints off a black Cadillac, only a dead haze. In late December, people here didn’t have the energy to work for the devil, and the heat of hell was a dream. All they knew was that winter would be here for five more months, and they surrendered themselves to it.

  As I pulled into Lakestone, Minnesota, the digital clock on the bank blinked 1 P.M. To pull in, all I needed to do was make a left. Lakestone, with its two-block strip of brick stores, ran parallel to the two-lane highway.

  I looked for a Standard station. No Standard station. I saw an Amoco at the far end of the street, but I had to go down the list. No Shell, according to a woman in a green parka with a fur-trimmed hood. No 7-Eleven, according to a teenager, who looked at me as though I had rabies. He was wrong. I was heartsick. Yet the smell of death was in my whole body. I pushed open the glass door of the five-and-dime store, and everyone stared at me. It felt as if I had just walked into a perfectly normal American store wearing a gorilla costume. Yes, I wanted to say, I’m Jewish. I’m dark. I do not live here.

  I approached the redhead behind the cash register and asked if there was a Conoco station in town. She shook her head. In human language it meant “no.” I was tempted to tell her I had a rendezvous with a six-foot-one-inch lesbian.

  Well, then, Anna and I were going to meet at the Amoco. I left my car parked and walked down the sidewalk to the other end of town, where Anna would drive into Lakestone. I leaned against a sign advising you to get your car lubricated. I wasn’t waiting in anticipation. I just waited. If she came the next day, I would still be standing by the lubrication sign.

  I saw Anna’s gold Volkswagen enter Lakestone. The road was empty, and she drifted in like a dream. She pulled up in front of me. She brushed the hair off the side of her face and got out of the car. She stood opposite me as tears fell down my checks. She didn’t hold me or touch me; she just stood there. My mouth filled with mucus from my running nose, and my collar became wet from the tears running down my neck. My arms hung by my sides. I was a flower naked in her own rain. Anna faced me in silence.

  “Anna, I loved him so much.” There were no visions of peyote or mountains or tipis. There was just me crying in a Midwestern town with an old friend who had appeared from noplace. I don’t know how long I stood there—maybe my whole life before I choked, “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You stand here,” Anna said. “I’m going to the gas station for Kleenex.”

  “They won’t have any,” I cried. “Don’t leave me.”

  She went back to her car, shuffled in the front seat, and found a crumpled paper towel she used to clean her window. She handed it to me, and I rubbed it across my face.

  “You are beautiful, Nell.” I don’t know what she meant by that. “C’mon, we have to find a place to stay.” I reached out to hold her hand and gripped it tight. At that moment, I was no longer a big sister. I was thoroughly helpless.

  We found a hotel called the Brickman. It was four stories high. In the lobby, there were three old men sitting on a yellow plastic couch. One had on green striped socks. You could see the skin above his ankles before the gray flannel pants came down to cover his leg.

  I stood behind Anna at the reception counter. “We want a room for one night, please, for my cousin here and me.” At that moment, I thought Anna must have been a goddess, because they handed over the key for room 302 as she signed her name on the register.

  “Thank you,” Anna said. Anna knew how to talk human language. As we rode upstairs, I noticed a sign that said the elevator had a capacity of two thousand pounds. I was fearful that my heavy heart put us over the weight limit.

  Room 302 had one window overlooking a silver grain elevator near the railroad tracks. Beyond that were lots of trees, all snarled up together. When I looked straight down, I saw two pickups and one station wagon parked at an angle to the sidewalk. This is a bustling town, I thought to myself. I was learning to be sarcastic.

  Anna was in the bathroom. A picture of a white farmhouse hung over the bed, which sported a gray bedspread with threads hanging by the hem. The carpet was gold with a floral design and the walls were beige. Cheery, I thought, and threw my eyes to the ceiling.

  “Nell.” Anna stood by the bathroom door. “Do you want to wash your face?”

  “No.” I could start a fight with Anna. No, I couldn’t. I went into the bathroom, picked up the white washcloth, ran it under hot water, and rubbed it across my face. I looked in the medicine chest mirror. My eyes were all swollen. I didn’t care. I was the ugliest person in America.

  Anna was sitting in a one-armed armchair when I stepped out of the bathroom. I’d never seen her so soft looking. I think she was worried about me.

  “Anna,” I said out of the blue. “Tell me about forgiveness.”

  “What do you want to forgive?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. There’s this tight square in my brain.” I pointed to my left temple. “If I could open it up, I think all the darkness I carry around would pour out.” I paused, turned my head and looked at Anna. “I don’t know what happened with me and Gauguin.”

  Anna was quiet for a moment, then said simply, “Let’s go for a walk,” and picked up a green canvas satchel. We walked along the sidewalk, past a feed store, sewing machine store, and drugstore. The drugstore’s display of sunglasses had fallen on its side and looked like it had been lying that way for a hundred years. Across the street I noticed Kay’s Luncheonette. I could
get some meat loaf there with mashed potatoes and gravy. Then I could run up to our hotel room and vomit in the toilet.

  I held Anna’s hand as we walked. I looked up at her. Earlier she’d been my big sister, now she was my mother. The sidewalk came to an end, just like that. It fell off and after a parking lot there was prairie. Tall dried weeds and rolling hills.

  We went up and down three of them. After climbing the fourth, we stopped and looked around. Occasionally, the sun peeked out from a crack in the dense clouds, and the hills became golden for a moment. Then they went back to being fields of dried weeds.

  Anna nodded her head toward two flat rocks and we walked over and sat on them. In the distance, we could see a thin river snaking through a pasture. Closer to us was the town of Lakestone. Our hotel was the highest building.

  Anna dug in her canvas bag. Uh-oh, I thought, now she’s going to read me one of her short stories.

  “Anna,” I said, “I can’t listen to a short story now.”

  “Nell, I have no intention of reading you my work,” she said matter-of-factly. “I brought some poetry. It’ll help you.”

  I looked at her. “Anna.” I said, “I never realized you were so sweet.”

  “I’m not. Now listen.” She opened a book of poems by Pablo Neruda and read me something about good-bye. I listened to it as though it were the wind blowing over me. Next, she read me a poem by César Vallejo, about how he was going to die on a Thursday in the rain in Paris.

  “How did he know that?” I asked. I was stretched out on my back, my head on Anna’s knee.

  “How did he know what?” Anna asked.

  “When he was going to die?” I answered.

  “Poets know everything.” She pushed an old fly from her face that couldn’t believe it hadn’t died yet. After all, it was December.

  She read me a poet named Linda Gregg. She was divorced, too, and in the poem she was picking apples.

  “Anna, I don’t know what to do with my life,” I said after she had finished reading.

  “Me either.” Anna looked down at me.

  “No, really. What have you done alone all these years? I can’t even sleep at night alone. I wake up around two and toss and turn for two or three hours.”

  Anna pushed the hair from my forehead. “I’ve always been alone. I don’t know anything else,” she said.

  We went back to the hotel. In the lobby was an old red Coke machine that I hadn’t noticed before. It said Coca-Cola in fancy white script and had a long thin glass door in the middle that opened to reveal old green Coke bottles filled with dark fizzy liquid that rots teeth and iron nails. I pulled out two bottles. They were cold and wet in my hands.

  We went up to our drab room. I drew a bath. Anna poured in soap suds. She sat on the toilet seat and drank her Coke while I sat in the hot water and drank mine. When I wasn’t tilting my head back with the bottle to my lips, I placed it on the ledge of the tub.

  I talked all the way back to another life and Anna could follow me there because she knew that life. I told her about how Eugene made love funny, and how he sounded like a crow when he came. I told her about the kids I had taught at the Red Willow School, how we built a greenhouse one spring and went to an orchard in Velarde, where we learned about apple blossoms turning into apples. I told her how once when I visited my parents I had cried in the basement and didn’t know why. I thought maybe it was because my life in Taos had become so different from theirs in Brooklyn and I was happy in mine. I told her how my mother had sent us an electric blender after she visited Gauguin and me in Talpa, how she refused to go to the bathroom in the outhouse. I told her about everything but Gauguin. I had no words anymore for Gauguin. There was nothing left to say about him, but I did tell her how crazy he had become with the death of his parents, how I knew I could no longer help him, how we had already died, and now I was just the wind blowing over our grave.

  I told her how I thought it must hurt when you die, because Alice had held on so hard to life as it was pulled out of her. I told her about Rip and how we’d never understood his death.

  I washed my underarms and then stood up in the tub. Anna held up a raggedy beige towel for me.

  We went to Kay’s Luncheonette in the late afternoon, and I didn’t vomit. I had a club sandwich. Anna had a bowl of oatmeal. I could never figure out Anna and her tastes.

  Anna told me that last month she almost went out with a man she met at the Dansville library. When she heard he hunted a lot, she decided she couldn’t do it.

  “What makes you a lesbian anyway, Anna?” I was suddenly curious.

  “I’ve always been. I slept with a man once when I was eighteen—my brother’s friend—just to check it out. It wasn’t for me. I love women.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I even had crushes on my female baby-sitters when I was eight.” “Do you like your father?” I asked.

  “Sure. My father is a good man. Very reserved, though. He doesn’t talk much,” she explained.

  We crawled into bed early. Anna fell asleep immediately. I lay on my left side, facing the window overlooking Main Street. A square of street light came in between the half-closed yellow curtains. It ran along the floor and up a quarter of the side of the one-armed armchair. That night I understood that stones, especially smooth ones, never sleep. They were just stone cold and awake. That was how I felt, but there wasn’t any peace in it. My hands and feet were cold. I knew no socks or mittens would warm them. I kept looking at the square of light, listening to Anna’s even breathing. I was glad she was there, even though she was asleep.

  Sometime in the middle of the night I dozed and dreamed that I was completely white, even my eyes and hair. I was at the edge of a wood and the place was full of moonlight. Dead people walked past me. There was my grandfather. He hardly noticed me. There was an old janitor that used to work for my father, and a seventeen-year-old boy I’d met two years ago in Hopkins, Minnesota, who had just joined the carnival. All their faces were black. They had come out of their graves.

  I burst out of sleep, my fists clenched and my heart squeezed tight. I let out a soundless scream, then Anna woke up and grabbed me. “What’s wrong?” she yelled, frightened.

  “I don’t know. My heart hurts.”

  “Nell, are you having a heart attack?”

  “I don’t know.” I paused. “No, I don’t think so, Anna.” I reached out for her. “I’m scared. I’m doing the best I can. I miss Gauguin.” With those last three words, I tumbled over a waterfall and went under. I was swept out to where there was no one, where there never would be anyone, to the place I had always been afraid of. As my body went, my mind traveled through rock and desert. My mouth became dry. My hands were a thousand years old. My face was in Anna’s shoulder. She was a skeleton.

  “Nell?” she called me back. “Where are you?”

  “Nowhere.” I lay in that place, clutching Anna until, sometime before dawn, we both fell asleep.

  Late the next day, we left each other. The sun tried to come out as I drove back to Minneapolis. It didn’t make it.

  48

  IT WAS THE SECOND Sunday in February. I’d just come from working out at the Jewish Community Center and was pushing my shopping cart down the aisles of Lund’s Market. I stopped in front of the Minnesota wild rice. As I reached for a bag, I remembered leaning over them once as they boiled in a pot and the smell of northern lakes filled my nose. That triggered the memory of our last vacation together up at Gull Lake. Tomorrow Gauguin was moving to California.

  I put the rice back on the shelf and pushed myself over to an empty corner of the store where they sold birdseed. I stood there gripping the metal bar of my silver shopping cart, crying and facing the Dew-Hum bird feeders. To my left were the colored columns of eight brands of kitty litter.

  I pulled in my last sniffle and walked over to the fluorescent-lit fresh vegetable section. I reached for a cabbage. I put it back. I looked at the brown misshapen bodies of the potatoes. Th
ey’d suffered enough, I thought, and pushed my cart past them. In pink and silver cellophane stood fresh gladioli, mums, and African violets. They reminded me of graves. I abandoned my cart in the middle of the store and walked out.

  The day was cold. I was as crazy as I’d ever been, and instead of getting in my car I walked down Lake Street and turned right on Hennepin. I could go to the Croissant House, to the Rainbow Café, to Orr Books. No. I walked along Hennepin until it ended eight blocks down at the Lakeside Cemetery. I entered beneath the high iron gates.

  The wind split my face apart. I trudged up one of the hills, past the graves of Philip Bates, Mary Bates, and the whole Bates clan. Past a sepulchre for Hudson Crews and a cement sanctuary for the Robinson family. I was headed toward Alice’s grave. Suddenly, I broke down crying again, a dry hard cry like cornflakes without milk. I squatted near the gravestone of Elmer Johnson and leaned my back against his death marker. The ground was too icy for me to sit on it. In the distance, through the bare maple branches, out past the cemetery, I saw the Lyndale Butcher. Every once in a while, a car moved slowly down the street.

  I got up, realizing I couldn’t bear to find Alice’s grave. There would just be a marker on the ground. I was consumed by an aching I had never known before. There was nothing to do for it, no place to go to relieve it. I headed for the exit. I’d go home and take a hot bath. Maybe that would help. Maybe it was the cold that was affecting me, I told myself, but I knew that wasn’t true. I walked all the way back to my car, feeling that even the air pulled into my lungs was something strange and foreign.