“Gauguin, I’m glad you feel like a woman, because I feel mostly like a man. When we get home, I want you to do the dishes.” Then I threw my hand over my mouth.
“How do you feel like a man?” Gauguin asked.
“I don’t know. Sometimes I’d like to go to war with everything—fight, punch, throw a bomb in a department store. Sometimes I walk down the street and hope someone will attack me, so I can tear them to smithereens.”
“But you’ve never even hit anyone,” Gauguin commented.
“Maybe that’s why I want to. I want to be Kung Fu King who fights Godzilla and then eats his legs.” I sat straight up, engrossed in a vision in front of me. “I want to be a guerrilla fighter in the Amazon and carry grenades in my mouth. I want to save Jews in Auschwitz and break the head of every Nazi.” My fists were clenched. Gauguin stared at me with his mouth hanging open. “I want to ride a great white stallion and go off into the hills like the Lone Ranger. I want to walk into a bar in Manila wearing green army fatigues, sit down and drink six whiskeys straight, then turn around and punch the man next to me. We have a brawl and someone gets thrown through the double plate-glass window, and I swing from the chandelier.”
I flung my head back. “I want to be a matador, a train conductor, head of the FBI, President of the United States, the King of England. Goddamn it, Gauguin” I turned to him—“I-want-to-be-Ernest-Hemingway. I-want-to-be-Miles-Davis. I-want-to-be-Picasso.” I said these last words with a staccato clarity that stunned me into reality. “I want to be the greatest writer, musician, and painter in America!”
But I wasn’t a writer, and Gauguin was the musician. I was just learning how to paint. Those were men artists anyway. Where did I fit in? I stood up and threw my hands above my head. “I am King Kong on the Empire State Building. I have the American Constitution written by all men in my mouth, and I am about to eat it.”
Suddenly I remembered where I was—the Bosque. I looked around and saw Gauguin walking down by the marsh about a hundred yards away. I called to him. A minute later, he returned.
“Come on,” Gauguin said as though nothing had happened. “We should head for the feeding grounds.”
I’d almost spoiled a good day. I decided to shut up and get in the pickup.
Betsy Boop started right up. Already we could see the snow geese and the sandhill cranes in the distance. Their great white wings flapped against the red sky at sunset. We pulled over to the side of the road. Gauguin threw himself out of the truck and clapped over his head. “What a symphony!” he yelled.
I watched as though I were a dreamer. Some of them skidded onto the surface and then settled into the water as if they were sitting down on a couch. There were Canada geese, mallards, and a few rare whooping cranes standing on slender legs and leaning over like young girls in ballet class. Swans swam around the edges like lace. This was winter. Dark blue water, white feathers, and a sky that had gone nuts with color. I could feel the bite of cold.
Gauguin returned to the truck to get his green down jacket, and I opened my door, got out, and joined him by the shore. All these white wonderful birds, and my attention was fixed on Gauguin in his green duckling jacket. I remembered a story he had told me at the top of Talpa Mountain. Not a story really, because it had no ending. More like some heat you keep in your mind, the same as if an iron pressed only one place on your shirt.
It was when Gauguin was a kid, maybe ten years old. He loved to catch salamanders. Once in late September, he was out in the back yard of his grandmother’s Iowa farm with his head down watching for a salamander to appear. He was in full concentration and wandered out past the wheat field into an abandoned orchard. Suddenly, when he lifted his eyes from the ground, he saw a tremendous yellow light at the other end of the orchard, like the burning bush Moses saw. He thought something was on fire. Instantly he began running toward it. When he got close, he stopped short and sucked in his breath.
It was a rabble of monarch butterflies, thousands of them, all feeding on the rotting pears that hung from the branches or had fallen to the ground. The monarchs filled the entire tree and all the area around it. He said his whole boyhood was in that moment. Nothing was before or after. His body opened, and the frail yellow animals fed on his heart.
Darkness moved in on the Bosque. We became cold and went back to Betsy Boop, our white bird of flight. The road out of the Bosque was long, thin, and very flat. It ended at The Crane, a restaurant where everyone went for hamburgers and to look over their bird books to count how many different kinds of birds they had seen. Gauguin and I went in The Crane, too. There was a stuffed owl standing on a ledge over the front door.
We sat at a booth with spongy red cushions and leaned our elbows on the wood table carved full of messages. One said, “I’m from Oak-la-Coma.” I nodded at it and said to Gauguin, “This person doesn’t like where he comes from.”
Gauguin reached across the table. I felt his hot hands on my cold ones. He brought my hands to his mouth and blew on them.
I smiled at him and said, “I love you.”
“Me, too. It was a great day. Wish we didn’t have such a long ride home tonight. Are you going to get a hamburger?” he asked jokingly. We were both vegetarians.
I wrinkled up my nose and shook my head. “Let’s see a menu.” I ordered a grilled cheese, and Gauguin had green chile stew. We weren’t much up for talking. A young boy with a crew cut sat next to his father at the next booth. The father had a crew cut, too. I leaned over and whispered across the table to Gauguin, “I think they are from Oak-la-Coma.” Gauguin smiled and nodded. The waitress served us. My sandwich was on a white plate with potato chips on the side.
I was halfway through eating when I held up my grilled cheese and said, “Did I ever tell you about how I learned to make one of these?”
Gauguin bit into a flour tortilla and shook his head.
“It was Christmas vacation—I guess I was about fifteen—and my parents flew me down to Miami Beach where my grandparents were spending the winter. They were staying in a one-room efficiency with a roll-out bed and a small gas stove at the Carlyle Hotel on Collins Avenue. Everyone at the hotel was old. In fact, everyone in the whole Collins Avenue area was old. It was my first plane flight and my first time in Miami. The first night I was there, I called my parents long distance and cried, ‘I’m taller than everyone here.’
“To cheer me up, my grandmother walked with me the five full blocks to Wolfie’s. Wolfie’s was a fancy delicatessen with rotating cream cakes on display in glass windows. Grandpa stayed home. He never went out to eat. He drank two-day-old coffee black and ate stale white bread. He used paper napkins that were folded and refolded many times, because he could not waste anything.
“The waitress placed a full bucket of dill pickles and a basket of poppyseed rolls at our table, even before we looked at the menu. Grandma ordered cabbage soup. She bent her small cabbage head over the bowl to bring the spoon to her mouth. I ate flanken in barley soup. Flanken’s a meat that gets real soft in soup. The waiter kept filling our water glasses, even if we took only one sip.
“When we returned to the efficiency, I smelled the boiled chicken my grandmother made every day. The smell was in the air all the time. I said, ‘Grandma, I don’t want to eat chicken.’
“Putting her hand to her mouth, she said, ‘But darling, what will you eat?’ Hot dogs, hamburgers never entered her mind. She didn’t get frantic, though. You’d think she would have, since chicken was the only thing she made in those days, and if I ever refused food, she was afraid I would immediately go into a coma.
“We put sheets on the little cot they had for me and we all went to sleep. The next morning, I was awakened by the rattling of paper. Grandma had walked to the grocery store four blocks away. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you what I bought.’ There was a loaf of white bread, Kraft American cheese presliced in squares and wrapped individually in cellophane, and a carton of milk. ‘I’ll teach you to make a grilled cheese
sandwich. You can make them whenever you want.’ My face lit up. I’d never made one before. We cooked it in her thin tin frying pan and used a white dinner plate for a lid so the cheese would melt. I went mad for those sandwiches. I made at least three a day, and whenever we ran out of cheese and bread, my grandmother and I would walk to the grocer together.
“One night I woke up at midnight—we went to bed about 9:30 every night. I snuck over to the stove in my white cotton nightgown with yellow embroidered daisies, and by the streetlight coming through the window, I made a grilled cheese sandwich. This time I even used two slices of cheese. As I was waiting over the pan for the butter to melt, I heard my grandfather whisper, ‘What’s she doing?’ My grandmother said, ‘Shh, let her,’ and they turned over and went back to sleep. So there I had full permission to learn a thing and do it whenever I wanted. I waited until the cheese melted out of the sides of the bread, and with a spatula I put it on a plate and sat by the small kitchen table and looked out the window at Collins Avenue. The Carlyle Hotel sign blinked pink over and over again. I didn’t cut the sandwich in half. I ate it whole in the humid heat of Miami Beach, with the heaven of my grandparents snoring nearby. It was the most wonderful grilled cheese I ever had.”
“Better than mine? With avocado, tomatoes, and green chile?” Gauguin teased.
“Yes, the best I ever had.” I nodded.
6
IT WAS A RAINY Saturday in April, and I was acutely aware that Taos was not Brooklyn. Now, most of the time I was glad of this, but when it rained on a Saturday, I wanted a matinee movie. There was only one movie theater in Taos and that theater had a peculiar affinity to only one movie, Jaws, and they only played that at seven and nine in the evening. You watched the movie eating stale popcorn out of a round cardboard container. Once in a while, on a Tuesday evening out of the blue, they’d sneak in a Russ Meyer flick, something like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and Gauguin and I would sit in the audience and eat our stale popcorn faster and faster.
It didn’t rain much in Taos. The Anglos of Taos couldn’t handle it. Most of us were refugees from the outside world, and a slight change in weather shook our delicate balance with the universe. If it rained, Blue headed for her fireplace and sat inside it all day, and Big Barney moved his curtain a quarter of an inch from the window, saw clouds, and went back to sleep instead of going on a wood run near Tres Piedras.
So what was I, Nell Schwartz, supposed to do with the realization that I was not in Brooklyn and it was a Saturday and Gauguin was going to practice his music a good part of the day? We were now living together in a small three-room adobe near Blue’s house. We had no running water, an outhouse, a wood stove for heat, and a gas one for cooking. Our rent was seventy dollars a month. We split it.
I ate breakfast and drove into town. Town was the plaza, stores built around a central square. All the stores were brown stucco like adobe. El Mercado was where you got nails and string, the army surplus was for wool socks, and there was the good old Rexall counter. It was so gray out that the lilacs hanging over the parking lot of the Taos News were like wet mops, and there was mud everywhere. You had an inkling it would be a lot sweeter missing and longing for Taos than actually living there just then.
I took my book, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and plopped myself in a booth at Grandpa George’s. Grandpa George was a Pueblo Indian, an elder in the peyote church. He was married to an Italian woman from Baltimore. She had a mole in the shape of a star on her right cheek and four front teeth missing. She was twenty-three years old, and Grandpa George was eighty-two years old. She was five foot eleven, and he was five two. One day I asked her, “How does an Italian girl from Baltimore who majored in physics end up here?”
She was turning over a white flour tortilla on the wood stove. She turned to me, grinning. “I got lucky.”
I was on chapter four in the Kesey novel. I ordered chocolate cake. Some things at George’s weren’t so good, but their chocolate cake was okay. I looked up as Cassandra walked in. Cassandra was a nomad who rode her horse across the mesa in the company of five cats and eleven dogs. I said, “Hi, Cassandra.” She said hi back, but I could see she couldn’t remember my name. I wasn’t insulted, though. Hell, if a person doesn’t know night from day, I don’t mind that she doesn’t know “Banana Rose.”
Cassandra used to own a little house in Rincoñada, a small town of about eleven buildings below the piñon hills. She was always late for her job at the general store, because she had a terrible time with time. She couldn’t understand that if the clock in her house said twelve, the clock in the general store would also say twelve. How could that be? One day she sat at her kitchen table and turned her white Big Ben back to eleven o’clock and then ran down to the post office to see what time that clock said. Lo and behold, it said twelve o’clock. Then she ran home and turned Big Ben to 3:00, 8:00, 6:00. She ran to her neighbor’s. The neighbor’s clock said 12:05. She ran to Sanistevan’s car repair next door. That clock said 12:06.
Cassandra spent the whole afternoon turning the hands of Big Ben. Outside the blue morning glory petals curled in on the heat of the day. Cassandra made 12:30 happen. Then 3:30. Then 8:30. She examined all the half-hours. Then she looked at the quarter-hours. She fine-tuned minutes to 11:23, 4:23, 7:23. She turned midnight to noon, morning to afternoon. The heavens turned faster and the earth spun through stars and sunlight all in her little kitchen in Rincoñada.
Cassandra had gone through many winters and springs. By Big Ben time, she was in 1995. Things were spinning in the room. One o’clock, two o’clock. The flowered wallpaper, the pitcher on the refrigerator. Three o’clock, four o’clock, five o’clock, six o’clock. The green linoleum, the vigas on the ceiling, the light switch, the painting of a Cheshire cat sitting next to a mouse with a peace sign above their heads. It was a whole day of spinning. Did her grandmother Beulah die last year, or was she in some future life about to be born? If it were eight in the morning in Rincoñada, how could she call Peking, China, in the coin phone down at El Mercado and it not be morning in China, when it would be morning in Taos? And how was it that if all the clocks in Rincoñada—she quickly grabbed a pen and paper to calculate exactly how many clocks that was. She figured that if she included Under the Sun Art Gallery, which no one included as part of Rincoñada anymore, because they had had a For Sale sign up for the last twelve years saying, “For One Dollar Down You Can Own This Place,” Rincoñada had twenty-nine clocks. If all of them were precisely correct, so that at 11:01 they all said 11:01, when Cassandra moved her clock to 11:08, how come they didn’t all jump ahead? Weren’t they all interconnected?
The next day, when she walked into the general store at ten o’clock instead of nine, Jake started to yell at her. She ignored him and pulled out the footstool, reached up to the clock above the cans of ham, turned the little hand back to nine o’clock, and went over to the cash register and began to wait on customers. His mouth fell open. He went over to talk to her. Before he had a chance to say anything, she turned to him and said, “You know the baby I lost last year? She left time, that’s all, and spun out into another century.” Jake drew his eyebrows together and scratched his left ear.
Cassandra had never seemed so happy and relaxed. At two o’clock she stood on the footstool and changed the clock to five o’clock. She smiled at Jake as she walked out the door waving. “Is it okay if you lock up? I have some things to do.”
She went home and put a sign in her big bay window: “If you know what time it really is, you don’t need to live here.” She hammered three boards across her front door and left. Ever since, Cassandra has traveled the hills of northern New Mexico with all her animals, coming into town only if the dogs have been lazy and haven’t caught enough jackrabbits. Then she scavenges food for them. Once in a while she gets lonesome for a clock and sits in the lobby of the New Mexico Federal for a half-hour and studies the second hand moving click click across all the numbers. She sighs, seems to feel at peace again
, and leaves on Sugarfoot, her beloved horse, and the whole band of animals follows her.
Jake told me all this one afternoon when I had a flat tire near his store. So now when I see Cassandra, I never mind that she doesn’t know my name, since I know she’s living in eternity.
I ate the icing between the two layers of my chocolate cake first. It was pretty good. I thought of the icing my mother used to put on my birthday cake. She’d used Bakers chocolate, and the cake shone like a slippery seal. It was still raining out. I finished the cake and paid. I didn’t want to sit in George’s. I wanted to sit in Ratner’s on Delancey Street near the Brooklyn Bridge. I was in a bad mood. I walked down to El Mercado and wandered up and down their aisles. I could get pink moccasins. No, I could get bubble gum in the shape of a toad. I could go outside.
I went outside and sat in the plaza in my yellow slicker. I let the rain fall all over my upturned face, but I wasn’t happy. This wasn’t romantic. I could go home and start a fight with Gauguin. That could be entertaining. I could tell him I didn’t like the way we made love last night. It had been fine last night, but today it could be fighting material. What other fighting material could I think up? He didn’t make enough money. I didn’t like when he played music the other night and came home at 2 A.M. He forgot to buy me coffee yogurt when he went shopping, and he knows how much I like coffee yogurt. He made fun of the painting I did two days ago, said the circle in the middle looked like a melon, when I’d meant it to look like the world.
I began to smile. I was feeling a little better. I had real things to be unhappy about. I thought, “Gray is gray, and rain is rain. Rain is a plural word. If only one raindrop fell from the sky, would it be rain? If that raindrop fell only on me, would I be the only one who knew rain?” I decided to go to Rexall and get some chewing gum. The gum was twenty-seven cents.
I took a walk down Morada Lane, east of the plaza. It was a long dirt road, edged by Russian olives. The ruts in the road were filled with puddles. I stood in front of one and watched the rain hit the water’s surface. The puddle only reflected gray sky and a vague brown image of my face. I walked to the end of Morada Lane, but I wasn’t finished walking, so I went up past the Mabel Dodge house and kept going. Mabel Dodge Luhan was a rich woman from the east who’d moved to Taos and married an Indian from the pueblo. Out behind her house was pueblo land—miles of sagebrush, and to the left a little cemetery with a morada. Way in the distance I could see a cottonwood, the only standing tree. I headed for that cottonwood; when I got there, I was going to hug it. The earth was very muddy and sucked each of my footsteps, but it was the smell of the sage I remember most. Sage is the color of a blue line in your notebook. Don’t think blue. Actually look at the line, then water it down a bit. Make the color run over the whole page. Let it become diluted turquoise, let it mix with a touch of yellow, and let it stand against a red brown. Now let that color become smell. Fill the gray air full of rain. Let your ears go dead. There is no sound. That’s what it was like back there behind the Luhan house.