Chronicles of a Radical Hag (with Recipes)

by Lorna Landvik

  Routine had it that my next visit was to the fabric section in the back of the store, examining the bolts of sturdier denims or corduroy for the gym bag my mother graciously sewed me every year. Once the morning had been whiled away in Engelman’s, ritual called for a stroll across the street for lunch at Bertram’s: egg salad sandwiches accompanied by a cup of beef barley soup for my mother, and a tin dish of chocolate ice cream for me.

  Shoe shopping came next, and my long deliberation between patent-leather Mary Janes or brown Oxfords began to wear a tad bit on Mother, whose breaths became punctuated by sighs and whose fingers drummed a jittery tattoo on the arms of her chair. It was clever on her part that she spared herself the hours I would have spent shopping for a dress by sewing me one herself and surprising me with it the day before school. Knowing it was coming and that I would love it (Mother was an excellent seamstress with an eye toward the latest fashions) was the very best buttercream frosting on a rich chocolate cake. I still get shivers thinking of the blue gingham dress with the white bolero I wore on the first day of seventh grade, so impressing the newly arrived from Chicago and oh-so sophisticated Loyce Denham that she lied, saying she’d seen the very same dress in the window of Marshall Field’s.

  So here I sit on a park bench directly across from an elementary school on its first day of classes, basking in the September morning sunshine, basking in all that excitement and promise of children ready to learn their ABCs, their fractions; lucky children who’ll study about people like Newton and William Shakespeare and Betsy Ross, who’ll be introduced to the mysteries of the solar system and a musical scale, who’ll learn how to square dance and climb a rope and not to eat too much paste.

  There are fourteen letters from readers clipped together, and Sam goes through them all. Most of them thank Haze for the walk down memory lane and the remembrances of their own school days it brought forth.

  A man had written in faint, spidery penmanship:

  I walked two miles to school in good weather. And in the winter my Pa would hitch up Sadie and pull me in the sleigh. Miss Monroe would greet us at the door, bell in hand. There was a wood stove in the back, and sometimes we spent recess gathering kindling. Ansgard Sonnestrom was pretty good about stocking the wood bin. Of course it was common knowledge the bachelor farmer had a crush on Miss Monroe. ’Course all of us schoolboys were in love with her too, I suppose.

  The face of Miss Rosenblum, Sam’s kindergarten teacher, flashes into his head; her pink full lips and her auburn hair that rolled softly at her shoulders, and her voice that always seemed on the verge of a laugh, as if she were constantly getting a charge out of her charges. Sam wanted to marry her when he grew up.

  Lame, he thinks, feeling his face flush at the memory, and yet if he looked into a mirror, he would see that he was smiling.

  Another letter reminds people that Mrs. Moutkis, the third-grade teacher at Granite Creek Elementary school for forty-five years, is celebrating her ninetieth birthday and all are invited to her reception at the VFW Hall on Second Street.

  The next few columns he reads might be vaguely interesting—if he were an old lady maybe who likes to read about babies and popcorn makers and some television show called Queen for a Day. He sighs and turns to a column dated Tuesday, November 24, 1964.

  My career in band lasted only through eighth grade (the clarinet is a beautiful instrument but not in my hands), and yet I’ve never forgotten the quote Mr. Baldry had taped above the chalkboard:

  “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.” —Victor Hugo

  While not a talented performer of music, I am an avid listener, and yesterday I spent my lunch hour at Bonomo Records, flipping through racks of albums and 45s. Mr. Bonomo (any time I see him I want to break into the Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy theme song) is the type of store owner who is amiable and knowledgeable, always willing to answer questions and help but also willing to sit behind the cash register, smoking his pipe and letting browsers browse.

  I was doing just that, and needing to be cheered up, was in the rock ’n’ roll section, comparing the black-and-white portrait on the Meet the Beatles! album with the orangish-sepia portrait of the quartet whose album was simply called Kinks. Whichever album I bought, I planned to play it loudly when I got home.

  Sniffing a light and pretty perfume, I turned to see a young woman wearing a Kingleigh College sweatshirt. Standing in front of the Broadway musical albums, she was sniffing too, and not in reaction to her own lemony fragrance, but because she was crying.

  Going over to her, I asked if she was all right.

  Her head bobbled, and I saw she was holding the cast album of Camelot.

  “Oh,” I said, immediately understanding the cause of her distress. “The record Mrs. Kennedy says they liked to listen to at night.”

  The young woman’s lip trembled. “I was too young to vote for him when he first ran.”

  My eyes responded to her words by filling with tears, which surprised me because I thought after yesterday, I was all cried out.

  “I’m majoring in elementary ed,” said the young woman, “and the teacher I’m student teaching with? She said last year, when the announcement came over the PA system, her hands actually bled.”

  Seeing my startled reaction (was she talking about stigmata?), the young woman offered a weak smile. “She said the only way to keep herself from crying out was to clench her hands as hard as she could, and her fingernails actually broke her skin.”

  Still taken aback, I said, “Those must have been some pretty sharp fingernails.”

  “She files them pretty pointy. And I don’t think she meant she was gushing blood or anything.”

  After an awkward silence, she added, “What a weird thing to talk about, huh? Sorry. It’s just that I . . . well, I’m feeling so many things.”

  This I could understand. “Me, too.”

  A magical thing happened then; after a short orchestral introduction, the rich voice of Robert Goulet singing “If Ever I Would Leave You” filled the air.

  The young girl and I moved closer to Mr. Bonomo and the Camelot album he was playing on the hi-fi near the cash register.

  “My son Alan’s in Colombia,” he said. “Not the college—the country. He’s in the Peace Corps. Helping build roads.” He took a puff off his pipe. “It was all because of President Kennedy.”

  Mr. Bonomo moved the stylus back to the beginning of the album, and we listened to that entire album. Three other people came into the store, and they too gathered near. Nobody said anything, but there was an occasional sniffle, a clearing of throats.

  Sunday marked the first anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, and I spent it in my apartment, alone in my sadness. Yesterday I didn’t feel so alone.

  There are forty letters in this column’s file, and Sam reads several that address various conspiracy theories; an unsigned one says the country is far better off without that rich SOB, but most are somber and sad in tone.

  “Hey, Sam,” says Susan, entering the conference room. She sits next to him, setting a can of sparkling water on the table. “I thought you might like a beverage.”

  Sam takes a sip, wishing it were Coke.

  Regarding the piles of paper in front of her son, Susan asks, “Read anything interesting?”

  Sam shrugs, his usual answer to many of his mother’s questions.

  “Okay then,” says Susan, a trail of resignation in her voice. She turns to leave but freezes when Sam says, “Well, there is one thing.”

  Susan feels her shoulders tense, waiting for whatever snotty or whiny salvo he’s going to lob her way.

  “How come Haze’s columns are all so different?”

  It takes her a minute to process his civility.

  “Well,” she says finally, “she’s a woman of many opinions and she observes—”

  “No, I mean different size-wise. In length. Some are short, and others go on and on. Usually a column’s
about seven hundred words, maybe a thousand.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Sam nods at his phone on the table. “I googled it.”

  Internally, Susan does a cartwheel. That her son noticed Haze’s disparate column sizes and that he bothered to type in search words like “normal newspaper column size” thrills her.

  “I’m surprised that you noticed that. It took me much longer—in fact, it wasn’t until I’d gotten hired full-time after college that I figured out Haze didn’t stick to a particular word count. So I asked my grandfather about it.”

  “What’d he say?”

  Susan sips at her coffee, wanting to prolong this sweet moment when her son’s voice is eager, interested in what she has to say. She’s excited too that she has a piece of newspaper lore to share with him.

  “He said that he used to publish her on the next-to-last page of the metro section, the same place he’d published the previous Ramblin’s by Walt column. The weather was on the same page, and when Granddad realized Haze wasn’t as strict with her word count as Walt had been, he’d adjust the page accordingly. For instance, if it were a short column, he’d list the temperatures in far-off places and maybe add a two- or three-line report on rainfall in Nepal or why the weather in Washington is so good for growing apples. If the column went long, the reader wouldn’t know the temperature the day before in Berlin or Peking—uh, Beijing—because that would have been cut. I heard Granddad say this more than once: ‘We just let Haze be Haze, because that’s what our readers wanted.’”

  Sam nods. “Makes sense.” He picks up a letter. “Anyway, look at this—it’s a letter from Mr. Dodd about a column Haze wrote about President Kennedy.”

  “Oh, brother. I can just imagine.”

  Harlan Dodd is their next-door neighbor, who several years ago declared himself a member of “The Tea Party” and who at the annual county fair will situate himself in a booth, wearing a tricornered hat, and rant about birth certificates and socialized medicine being the bomb that’s going to blow up the country.

  “No, that’s the thing—it’s not whack at all!”

  Susan takes the letter and reads aloud:

  “The day President Kennedy was murdered will forever be a stain on our national soul. We must all find a way as Americans to work together to fulfill the dreams this visionary president had for us.”

  Staring at the letter, Susan slowly shakes her head.

  “I know,” says Sam. “It’s like some totally different dude wrote it.”

  4

  August 10, 1965

  I am not the only one writing about this story, but I feel more closely tied to it than the reporters who’ve come from Duluth and Fargo and the Twin Cities to cover it. How could I not feel proprietary; Connie Varner is married to Brian Varner, a news reporter who writes so eloquently for this paper!

  “At first the doctor said twins,” Brian said, still shaking his head over what’s transpired. “A month or two later, he gave us the news that it was going to be triplets, and Con agreed, from all the activity, she was pretty sure there were more than two of them. But the fourth one! The fourth one waited for his birthday to let us know he was here!”

  If you’ve fanned away the cloud of smoke that rose up from all the cigars Brian passed out, you’ve seen their pictures in the paper, but let me tell you, in person their darling-ness is off all recognized charts. Now that little Richard (“we’ll see if he plays the piano as flamboyantly as the Little Richard,” jokes his dad) is home from the hospital, the Varner household is a riotous and happy bedlam, filled with tag teams of friends and relatives helping feed, change, dress and rock four hungry, squalling, crying, sleepy babies.

  Rita was my favorite, but only because I got to hold that soft, warm bundle in my arms and she didn’t make a fuss when I sang to her (although her face puckered for a bit when I tried to hit that high note). I’m sure Roxanne or Rhonda will be my favorites when I’m given the privilege of holding and serenading them with off-key lullabies.

  Connie, who runs her nursery with an easy aplomb, told me, “If I think about all I have to do, I’d go crazy. So I don’t think about it. I just do it.”

  That’s a pretty good philosophy for almost anything, I reckon. And I took Connie’s words to heart because I’m on a deadline with this column, and I had sat for too long in front of my silent typewriter, daydreaming and mooning over that sweet quartet of babies. But if Brian, their own father, can turn in a two-thousand-word prize-winning investigative report on taconite waste, surely I can tear myself away from my own daydreams and write something as well.

  “I liked today’s column, Miss Haze,” says Mercedes Garcia, pulling open the blinds in the hospital room. “Four babies all at once!” She smooths the blanket over Haze’s chest and begins to softly sing.

  “You like that song, Haze? That was one my mother would sing to me. Mama had a beautiful voice, nicer than mine even, if you can believe that!” Mercedes chuckles. “I think lullabies are nicer in Spanish, don’t you? More pretty. More soothing. English . . . better for traffic policemen! So hard, so bossy! Spanish is more . . . like a dancer’s language, sí?”

  Mercedes is the best kind of nurse, combining strength (she can lift—and has sometimes carried—patients heavier than herself) and softness. She will shave a man or help put on makeup for a woman when they want to rally for visitors; she’ll sit bedside and listen to their complaints and fears, holding their hands if they want. Most always, they want.

  She has lived in Minnesota for seven years, after accepting her daughter’s invitation to join her in this northern state.

  “Ay, it’s so cold,” she said to Christina, her first Thanksgiving holiday in Granite Creek. “I don’t think I can live here.”

  She was serious: it was a cold that felt like an assault, and she felt cut up by ice that found its way into the wind, into the sleety snow, and onto the roads and sidewalks, making driving and walking perilous.

  “Mama, you’ll get used to it,” said Christina, who had ventured from Los Angeles to attend the University of Minnesota on a full scholarship. “And you’ll learn how to dress for it.”

  Manuel had been able to see his daughter collect her doctor of veterinary medicine degree, and during the ceremony had confessed to Mercedes that it was the proudest moment of his life.

  “Next to when you got your nursing license,” he quickly added.

  They held hands over their armrests, and when they watched Christina stride purposefully across the stage to accept her diploma, he whispered, “She’s just like you—wanting to help people.”

  “You mean animals,” whispered Mercedes, and that caused a stutter of inappropriate giggles.

  They had never said anything to Christina, but to each other they teased “as long as she’s getting a medical degree, couldn’t she get one that will pay more? In obstetrics or radiology or plastic surgery?” They did live in Los Angeles after all.

  Four months later, Manuel was dead of a heart attack while watering a lemon tree in the lush backyard of a Bel-Air client.

  “OH, I MISS MY MANNY,” says Mercedes, running her fingers through Haze’s lank hair. “He was always my partner in life, you know? My good things were his good things, and vice versa. We could brag so much about Christina, in a way we never would to anyone else, and then too, we could joke about her, the way we never would to a single other soul.”

  She sits down, drawing the chair close to Haze’s bedside and listens for a moment to the old woman’s breathing.

  “Since I come here, I have been reading your columns, Miss Haze. I didn’t learn English until I was seventeen and came to the United States. But ay, did I love learning it! It was hard for Manuel—some people don’t have that good ear—but for me English was a great adventure, and I, I was Ponce de León!”

  Dr. Delancey scurries by the open door, but he doesn’t look in.

  The nurse shakes her head and whispers into Haze’s ear.

  “
You’re lucky Dr. Winner is your doctor. Might as well have a doctor with that name, sí? And he is good and kind. Not like Dr. Delancey, who thinks he is more important than any patient he might treat.

  “All right,” says Mercedes, standing up, eyes toward the monitors. “I must go check on Mr. Douglas, the old grabber who—”

  There is a rap on the door frame.

  “Hello, Mercedes,” says Lois, mopping her face with a hanky. Haze teases her about being “such an old fussbudget with your hankies,” but Lois inherited from her mother a drawerful of embroidered little cotton squares and can’t see the point of not using them. “Whew, this air conditioning feels good. It’s a sauna out there.”

  Mercedes nods sympathetically; it still surprises her how a place that can get so cold can get so hot.

  “So how’s our patient?” asks Lois.

  “No change,” says Mercedes. She raises her eyebrows, and her mouth bunches in an expression that conveys things could be better but they also could be worse.

  After the nurse leaves the room, Lois sits next to her old friend. She won’t use the hanky for tears—Haze would have none of that—but it takes her a moment to compose herself. If Haze can hear her, she wants to make sure she speaks in a strong and steady voice.

  “I saw Janet Oakes at the FoodKing,” she says. “Guess what was in her cart? Two steaks, two pints of cottage cheese and a carton of eggs! She’s on some crazy ‘all protein’ diet, and she went on and on about already losing six pounds! My gosh, she can’t be more than a size twelve to start with—what’s the point? Well, we do know what the point is, don’t we? She’s man hunting, is what she’s doing, afraid to be out in the world without a catch, even though once she reels ’em in, she doesn’t know what to do with them!”

  Lois shakes her head. “And then she has the gall to say how much she’s enjoying reading your old columns, the ones you wrote when she was just a little girl! Ha! She may be younger than us but not that much younger!”