Chronicles of a Radical Hag (with Recipes)

by Lorna Landvik

  She sits still for a moment, imagining the wisecrack Haze would have had at the ready.

  “Haze,” she says, and a clog of emotion makes her clear her throat. “Haze, everyone’s talking about your old columns! Susan—I was leaving your room just as she was coming in yesterday, remember?—anyway, Susan says young people are saying things like, ‘They’re so retro chic,’ and older people are saying, ‘Oh, it takes me back.’ So come on, you’ve got to wake up and enjoy your expanding demographics!”

  Lois studies her friend’s face. It looks younger, in repose; instead of dragging her features south, gravity kindly settles on them. But her hair! Haze always had the best hair—thick and wavy, even as she was careless in its upkeep (unlike Lois, who attends her Thursday-morning hair appointment as reverently as a nun attends mass).

  Now Haze’s hair is greasy and plastered to her head, and Lois makes a mental note to talk to one of the nurses about washing it.

  “I wonder if they’ll reprint the column about our meeting—remember that, Haze?”

  As it celebrated the beginning of their friendship, Lois’ll never forget it, especially as she cut it out and framed it, and it’s hung above the kitchen light switch for decades.

  June 8, 1966

  For any of you disturbed by my behavior at the Corcoran Veiber lecture Wednesday night, my apologies. I really couldn’t help myself.

  There was excitement in the air in the theater lobby—a famous author had come to town! I admit I wasn’t familiar with Mr. Veiber’s work, although once I saw his name on the Cultural Events calendar, I checked Incident in Rhodesia out of the library and had gotten halfway through it.

  Once inside the theater, I took my seat, smiling at the woman next to me and remarking to her how I couldn’t remember ever seeing so many men in the theater.

  “Mr. Veiber has lived the sort of life Hemingway would have liked to live.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s what it says in the program,” said my seatmate, shrugging. “I personally haven’t read any of his books. I just like coming to these lectures.”

  After Mayor Albeck introduced “a man whose work has influenced and enlightened me and a generation of men with his huge appetite for life’s adventure,” the room exploded with applause, as the author appeared stage right.

  “He looks like he has a huge appetite for life’s food,” my seatmate whispered, as we peered over the rows and rows of men who’d jumped to their feet.

  That caused our first giggle.

  Mr. Veiber was certainly big-boned, with boulder shoulders and long legs that had a lot to do with his six-foot-two-inch height (also noted in the program), but it was that which had nothing to do with his bones that was truly awesome in size: his belly.

  I mention this because it seems to me a man rarely apologizes for his excess girth and even seems proud of it (unlike women). Mr. Veiber wore a cape (indeed, it would be hard to try to button a suit jacket around that girth), and as he strode to the podium, he swirled that cape like he was preparing to dance the flamenco or fight a bull, igniting more giggles between my seatmate and me, which went unnoticed in the clamor of the standing ovation.

  I wish I could say once Mr. Veiber began to speak, the adolescent behavior of Lois (we couldn’t share all that laughter without sharing names) and me disappeared, but the fact is, the more the great man spoke, the harder it was to keep a straight face.

  To begin a speech about how you “don’t want to jinx anything, but you’re reasonably sure the next time you’re behind a podium is when you’re accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature” sets a certain tone.

  The writer proceeded to tell of his beginnings with a “slattern” for a mother, who’d married into wealth but whose soul was impoverished and whose life mission was that of sucking dry all creativity and daring in her son.

  Along with frequent eyebrow raising, Lois and I quietly tsked and nudged one another.

  “Multiply that with three dull sisters who followed the lead set by Mother and you’ve got a boy who has to fight to protect what is precious and good.”

  The giggles began in earnest when the writer began speaking of the only woman to understand him, to nurture and recognize his great talent, his Italian lover, the bella Luciana. On and on he went about a college semester spent abroad, and how this paragon of beauty and virtue helped convince him that it was literature, and not law, that was his destiny.

  If he wasn’t bragging about how he could see and feel things others couldn’t, he was bragging about how he could make others see and feel things with his universal, yet singular style of writing. When he started bragging about his prowess as a ladies’ man, “even though all the women who came after Luciana were trollops and gold diggers and murderous vixens, all” (yes, that’s a direct quote), Lois and I could no longer contain ourselves. Our stifled giggles had grown too big to stifle and were the subject of many turned heads and disapproving looks, and finally we had to escape into the fresh air of the lobby.

  We joined a man at the coat-check room and asked him why he was leaving early.

  “Probably the same reason you are,” he said. “I enjoy Mr. Veiber as a novelist, but as a person, he reminds me of a blow bag of an uncle I take great pains to avoid.” He centered his hat on his head and gave the brim a quick tug. “I’m sorry I had to sit through that, but it must have been especially hard for you trollops and gold diggers.”

  We all got a big laugh out of that one, and when Lois added, “Don’t forget us murderous vixens,” I knew I’d made a friend.

  “Oh, Haze,” says Lois with a chuckle, “remember all the letters you got after that one? Remember how Mr. Veiber’s publisher even threatened a lawsuit and you were so proud of your own publisher standing up for you? How he said you had every right to offer your ‘review’ of his performance, just as a book reviewer had every right to write his or her opinions?

  “I was so flattered, feeling like your co-conspirator, and I guess that’s still how I feel.”

  Lois leans into her friend.

  “I’m conspiring with you right now, Haze. Conspiring with you to get that feeding tube out of your nose, conspiring with you to heal that brain of yours, conspiring with you to come on back. I mean it, Haze. Come on back.”

  5

  “‘So it was cool getting a couple days' work, and they said I could stay on as long as I like, but I didn’t come here to work in a hostel in Madrid! ’Course you’ll probably wish I did when I run out of money and start asking you for loans. LOL Hasta la vista, baby!’” Phil stares at his phone for a moment, chuckling. “He’s always been a go-getter, huh?”

  Pretending to study the menu, Sam doesn’t answer.

  “He’s taken some great photos too.” Phil’s thumb moves along the phone’s screen. “I don’t know—maybe that’s how he could fund his trip, selling his pictures—have you seen this one?”

  Phil holds out his phone, and Sam nods, thinking, Yes, Dad, I’ve seen your brilliant son’s brilliant photos. They’re all over his fucking Instagram page.

  “It’s amazing the quality of pictures these phones can take. I remember getting a Polaroid in the eighth grade, and I couldn’t imagine anything getting any more modern—I mean a photograph that developed right before your eyes! But these things!” Phil looks at the phone again, shaking his head.

  The server brings a coffee and a Coke, and they order—Sam chooses the beef burrito and a chicken taco—and he tries not to stare as the pretty young woman in her flouncy ruffled skirt bounces toward the kitchen.

  “So how’s the new job?” asks his dad. “Does it make you miss vacuuming out RVs? Or should I say taking a nap in one of the RVs you’re supposed to be vacuuming out?”

  Sam’s face reddens—his dad’ll never let him forget that one.

  “So they’ve got you doing what? Making copies? Running errands? Getting people coffee? If I worked for the paper, I’d rather work down at the printing press than in the office—at leas
t you’d get some physical exercise and—”

  “I’m mostly helping with Haze’s columns,” says Sam, jabbing his straw in his pop glass.

  “How can you help her with her columns? Didn’t she have a stroke?”

  “Dad, are you kidding me? We’ve been running her old columns from like fifty years ago, and people are going insane. They can’t get enough of them.”

  His dad sips his coffee.

  “You really haven’t been reading them?”

  “Sam, just because I’m married to the Gazette’s publisher, doesn’t mean I read every single thing the paper prints.”

  Sam’s heart thumps at his father’s use of the present tense to describe his marriage.

  “Especially something I know wouldn’t be relevant to my own life.”

  “What do you mean?”

  His dad laughs. “Come on, Sam. I’m a guy. What am I going to get out of an old lady writing about old lady stuff?”

  It bothers Sam that he can’t tell when his dad’s joking or not, and he doesn’t return his dad’s smile, which makes Phil try even harder.

  “And what kind of name is ‘Haze’ anyway?”

  “You seriously don’t know?” says Sam. “We just reprinted a column about it.”

  May 30, 1967

  It’s my brother, Tom, older than me by ten years, who dropped the l from my name and called me Haze.

  When I was brought home from the hospital, legend has it that he held me in his arms and sang, “She puts us in a daze, our little Haze.” He sang it throughout my childhood, and I can’t tell you what I’d give to hear that playful little ditty sung by Tom.

  He did not have the same good luck my sister’s husband, Harold, or my cousin Stewart had. He did have the same bad luck his very best friend, Eddie Wilkes, had in that neither of them came home from the war. At least alive. Tom was killed in the battle of Saipan in 1944, two weeks after Eddie lost his life in the Normandy invasion.

  Eddie had black hair and blue eyes and the whitest teeth I’d ever seen, and like every sentient female, I had a crush on him. He was a regular presence at our house and supper table, and his sense of humor often manifested itself in practical jokes, which were greatly appreciated by us kids, less so my parents. He was the first to possess a whoopee cushion, a joy buzzer, and rubber vomit and was suspended from school twice for his enthusiastic use of them. He had a beautiful tenor voice and a repertoire of popular songs and was happy to elevate Tom’s less accomplished piano playing in impromptu parlor concerts.

  Years later, I stood on risers at my high school choir concert, bewildered and frightened, watching my mother flee the hall as we sang a Gershwin medley.

  Afterward, she fanned her face with the concert program and explained to me her exit. “It was ‘You Can’t Take That Away from Me.’ Whew.” Tears sparkled in her eyes. “I can’t hear that song without remembering how lovely Eddie sang it.”

  And Tom! How did my parents ever recover from the loss of their only son?

  Mother claimed that Dad installed a hoop above the garage door the day after Tom was born; he certainly passed on his love of basketball to their firstborn. Father and son joked that it was their office, with Dad issuing the stern command, “Tom, meet me in my office!” and Tom pretending to sulk, pretending to drag himself out of the chair from which he wanted to leap. “Oh, all right.”

  The only time I saw my father strike my brother was when Tom came home the summer after his first year at college and announced that he had enlisted in the navy.

  “I’m hoping to get a South Seas assignment,” he said. “They say it’s—”

  Dad’s palm slapped away whatever words “they said” out of Tom’s mouth, and my mother called out, “Byron!” and I cried out, “Daddy!” and Tom stood staring at the carpet runner, his hand cupping his cheek, and Dad stood there looking like it was he who had just been slapped, and then he did something else I’d never seen him do: he began to cry.

  He and Mother and Tom talked late into the night, long after Vivienne came home from a night out with girlfriends, whose beaus were also overseas, and long after I’d been sent to bed. The bedside clock had a luminescent face that read 12:42 when Tom came into my room.

  “You up?” he asked, knowing I would be.

  “Yes,” I said in a small voice.

  He sat down in the rocking chair that my grandmother had brought over from Norway, the chair that had wound up in the room of the last child to have been rocked in it. Next to it was a little basket that stored some of my toys, including a small rubber ball, and Tom picked it up and threw it to me.

  It was our ritual, playing catch as we talked, and there were often long pauses between sentences when the only sound in the room was the splat, splat of a caught ball and maybe a “good catch” or an apology for a bad throw.

  “Haze,” he said after the ball had been passed between us dozens of times, “I’m sorry you had to see that. You know Dad loves me, don’t you?”

  “We all love you!” I said, and threw the ball with such wild aim that Tom had to flail his arm to catch it. He then dropped the ball in the basket, and coming to sit at the foot of my bed, he picked up one of the teddy bears who kept sentry there.

  “You know he slapped me just because he was scared, right?”

  Burrowed under the covers, I nodded.

  “He doesn’t have to be scared, Haze. If anyone knows how to watch out for himself, it’s me! I just, I just feel like this thing, this war is like a forest fire or a volcano or something, and it needs every able-bodied man it can to help put it out, you know?”

  “It could go out without you,” I said, my voice muffled.

  Tom addressed his next comment to the teddy bear. “I can’t believe it—even Haze is against me.”

  I quickly assured him I wasn’t and to cheer him up, suggested we “sing our song.”

  And so we sang “You Are My Sunshine.”

  Tom was usually the one to make me laugh, and I always tried to return the favor. A few years earlier, when I’d first heard the song on the radio, I asked him why anyone would name their son “Shine.”

  “Oh, Haze, you kill me,” he had said, pretending my child’s pun was a real knee-slapper.

  I killed him in a good way; a torpedo killed him in a bad way.

  Two songs that do our family in: “You Can’t Take That Away from Me” and “You Are My Sunshine.”

  PFC Lance Tolan didn’t enlist, but a low draft number sent him to Vietnam, and after reading his obituary last week, I called his family. Lance’s mother and I talked for a long time, and when I asked her if she wanted me to write anything about Lance for my Memorial Day column, she said yes.

  “Tell them that he had big dimples and everyone said he looked like a young Sean Connery as James Bond. Maybe that’s why he liked to read spy novels! Tell them that he wanted to go into the FBI. Tell them that he could multiply big numbers in his head and that he was a talented cartoonist who always illustrated the letters he sent home. Tell them that he had to buy a second Pet Sounds album by the Beach Boys because he wore out the first one playing it so much. His father and I listen to it every night in his honor.”

  Sam had been in the conference room reading Haze’s column and the response letters paper-clipped to it. When he read the first letter, a flare of anger rose in him.

  Are you kidding me? he thought as he read the letter by some jerk named Snell, who was in deep need of what last year’s English teacher had pounded into her students: the importance of critical thinking. That’s all you got out of this?

  To the Editor:

  I do not subscribe to the Gazette to hear thinly disguised antiwar propaganda. Hitler was a menace who threatened the world. What would your naive columnist do—let the tyrants and despots take over? A soldier’s death is always hard, but let her be comforted by the fact her brother—just as young Mr. Tolan—died in glory, in the highest of service, to their country.

  Sincerely,

&n
bsp; Mr. Joseph Snell

  He was shocked when he read the next letter.

  To the Editor:

  Sometimes I feel the world’s gone crazy and I’m the only sane one, and other times I think I’m nuts too. Like Haze, I lost someone—an uncle—in the Normandy invasion. He was only twenty-nine, and he’d taught me how to ride a bicycle and, later on, how to change a bicycle’s flat tire. My mother’s best friend lost her husband in the battle of Okinawa. I thought that might be the war that ended all of them, but then along came Korea, and now I have a cousin whose son is listed as MIA in Vietnam.

  What and when do we ever learn?

  Harlan Dodd

  As Sam tells his dad about the column and the responses it got, Phil wonders when he last saw his son so animated, so excited.

  “Now, I’d read that column,” says Phil when Sam finishes. “And I can’t believe an old fart like Harlan Dodd could write a letter like that!”

  “Right?” says Sam with a laugh. “Actually, it’s the second letter of his I’ve read. And the first one was the opposite of the way he is now too.” He leans over the burrito and taco he had ignored while telling his story. “That’s the thing. I thought—like you—I was gonna be stuck reading a bunch of old-lady shit—uh, crap—and some of it is crap, but a lot is—I don’t know, there’s a lot of stuff that . . . that makes you think about stuff.”

  Phil resists the urge to reach across the table and ruffle Sam’s hair and instead watches as his son attacks the food on his plate.

  “Sam,” says Phil, both amused and stunned, “slow down. You’re going to choke.”

  The plate is clean in what seems like seconds, and Sam sits back, as if a little stunned himself. He swipes at his mouth with a napkin.

  “I’d love to sit around and shoot the breeze, Dad, but I gotta get back to work. Muchas gracias for lunch.”

  AS HE ENTERS THE RECEPTION AREA, Shelly arranges her features into what she considers a smile but what looks to the rest of the world like a wince.