Chronicles of a Radical Hag (with Recipes)

by Lorna Landvik

  That Royal and I were clunky in our execution of the cha-cha didn’t bother him in the least, and when the lesson ended, he said, “Oh well, Gene Kelly wasn’t always Gene Kelly.”

  We’re having so much fun. I’ve introduced something into our marriage that I think will be a long-lasting source of enjoyment—I picture us doing a rhythmic rumba at our ten-year anniversary, a tempestuous tango at our twenty-fifth, and a stately waltz at our fiftieth.

  After our second class, we decided to walk to Irv’s for malteds, and as most of you know, this most wonderful establishment has jukeboxes at every table, and Royal put in a nickel, and a Tito Puente song came on, and my wonderful husband, right there in the middle of the linoleum floor of Irv’s Ice Cream, cha-chaed with me.

  If wonders ever did cease, it would sure take the fun out of things.

  As was the new norm now that Haze’s old columns were being published, the receptionist’s console lit up with phone calls from readers who felt a need to bother Shelly with their inanities, including the warbly voiced woman who called in to say, “My Herb and I danced together, and let me tell you, my Herb and I romanced together!”

  April 4, 1969

  You can get lost in daytime TV. I watched a couple game shows in the morning and would have laughed at Paul Lynde on The Hollywood Squares if laughter were something that came easy to me. In the afternoon I watched one soap opera after another, comparing my troubles with those who got dizzy in As the World Turns, with those who desperately needed The Guiding Light as they were battered by The Secret Storm all the way to The Edge of Night. Assuring Royal that I’d eat something, I made a tuna salad sandwich, but it sat on the coffee table all afternoon, its bread hardening around the edges, its lettuce wilting. The phone kept ringing until I took it off the hook. I thought an actress on TV was screaming (all sorts of things happen on those soaps) until I finally realized it was the tea kettle I’d forgotten I’d put on. I had the lights on even though it was sunny outside.

  I had a miscarriage. My second. The first one happened last year, and I just couldn’t write about it. I can’t believe I’m writing about it now; it’s so personal, but writing’s always been a tonic for me, and boy oh boy, a tonic I need. A little gin wouldn’t hurt either.

  This time I had tried so hard not to think of names, not to linger in those irresistible departments at Brady’s—Maternity Wear and Infants & Babies—where I’d examine the bowed dresses (why are bows the accessory for expectant women?) and tiny pink and blue cotton onesies. The sewing room had already been painted a soft yellow in anticipation of our first baby, but the door’s been shut since, and I haven’t yet dared open it. And it will, for now, stay shut.

  You wonder all sorts of things, first and foremost: What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I do what billions of women before me have done? Why does this body of mine destroy that which I want the most?

  I am writing what Royal told me, because he is, after all, a doctor. He said it wasn’t my fault, or my body’s fault, that it was something that has no fault at all.

  “Often it’s nature’s way of expelling a fetus that isn’t viable. Other times it happens and we don’t know why. There are women who smoke and drink and don’t get enough rest or fall on the ice who deliver healthy full-term babies, and there are women who take meticulous care of themselves and miscarry. You cannot blame yourself. All you must do is be tender with yourself.”

  Oh, tears were shed! And the ache is still there, but I am trying to follow the doctor’s prescription. Which yesterday meant eating a half pan of peanut butter bars. (I might need to further consult the good doctor as to what separates tenderness from indulgence . . .) Today I’ll try to offset that pan of bars as well as some pain by taking Brigadoon for a walk so long it’ll tire him out.

  I know we all have our sorrows. We’re taught to keep them private (ja, I’m talking to all you Scandinavians!) because their sadness would only be amplified in sharing them. I guess I feel differently. For me, a burden shared is a burden lightened. At least a little bit.

  Along with Haze’s column, Susan reprinted a letter that was written by a kindly, long-deceased man who invited classrooms of children out to his farm for hayrides in the fall and sleigh rides in the winter.

  To the Editor:

  Thank you for Haze’s last column. I too have been childless and not by choice. But I bore the weight of it being my own fault. The doctors said everything was working with my wife but not with me. It makes a man feel diminished. I know my wife, God rest her soul, would have been a wonderful mother, and I denied her that. Still, she stayed with me for thirty-seven years. And we had a lot of fun. Traveled to all contiguous states and in ’59—their first official year in the union—we visited both Hawaii and Alaska!

  Sometimes, when we saw our friends go through problems and tragedies with their kids or grandkids, we’d think maybe we were lucky after all, being spared that kind of pain. But it really never erased the pain of not having children in the first place.

  Once we sponsored an AFS student—a wonderful boy from Finland—and Genevieve would have welcomed a new student every year, but it was too much for me. I worried day in, day out over Arno’s safety, imagining something terrible happening and how could I ever face his parents?

  I know I’m nearing the end of the road what with this weak ticker of mine, and that’s all right. I’ve had a long life, and Genevieve said she’d be waiting for me on the other side with her dancing shoes on and the shiny green dress I liked so well. Wishing children will happen for you and your husband, Haze. Any child would be a lucky duck with you two as parents.

  Sincerely,

  Robert Beckdahl

  Leland Township

  8

  Tina wipes her eyes on her napkin.

  “Oh, chica, that was sad.”

  “I know. Poor Haze.” Caroline shakes her head.

  “I can hardly believe they’d publish that all those years ago. I mean, it’s so . . . personal!”

  “And how about that Mr. Beckdahl? His letter was a lot different than the half dozen or so from readers who were ‘outraged’ that a family newspaper would run such a column.” Caroline looks at her watch. “I’m surprised my mother hasn’t called yet. That column’ll hit her hard.”

  “My mother too,” says Tina. “Most mothers, I imagine. Most people.”

  Caroline returns the coffee pot to the fancy machine that has turned her into a barista, capable of frothing up cappuccinos as authentic as any found in Italian espresso bars.

  “Yeah, but my mother can really relate. She had a miscarriage. A couple months after my brother was born.” Caroline turns around, leaning against the counter, her hands curled around its tiled edge. “She told me—just last year—that she was sad but also a little relieved, and that relief made her feel like a terrible person.”

  “Oh, chica,” says Tina, getting up. She wraps her arms around the person she loves most in the world, and when she breathes in the scent of Caroline’s shampoo—some organic brand with grapefruit extract—she feels tipsy.

  IN CAROLINE’S WORLD, she considers the glass not just full but brimming. That’s why it kills her that she can’t share with her mother that which makes her the happiest: her love for Christina. But the Abramsons—her mother, father, and brother—are all members in excellent standing of a church that believes in love, but only when it’s parceled out to particular people. It is Caroline’s great shame that she still feels she must lie to her family, but the idea of being cut off from them is too much for her to consider.

  “I’m such a baby!” she had cried to Tina on their second date. “I love them just the way they are, and believe me, that can be a heavy load—I mean, my brother plays bass in a Christian heavy-metal band!—but I feel I have to protect them from loving me just the way I am!”

  They had had dinner at the Sundown (Tina finding the CheeZee Bites both delicious and slightly horrifying) and sat afterward in the small gazebo on the north end of th
e town square, observing the hustle and bustle of a Friday night. A choice viewing spot, the gazebo allowed for a little privacy, plus its wrought iron bench was so small that its occupants had to sit close together.

  It had been a soft spring night, and the college kids teeming into The Pylon for live music and cheap beer had their jackets off; one of the teenagers skateboarding down the courthouse’s handicap ramp was wearing shorts. Two silver-haired men in suits took a smoke break outside the Palace Theater, where a touring opera company was performing Tosca, and a babysitter led a row of blond children out of Irv’s Ice Cream, all of them focused on their cones.

  The two women sat with their shoulders pressed together—about the only public touch Caroline dared exhibit to the world (much to Christina’s exasperation).

  “It’s a big closet for me!” she joked, while being completely serious. “It’s going to take a while to step out of it.”

  “Hola, Dr. Tina,” said one of the blond children, whose Brittany spaniel had just that afternoon been in for its giardia vaccine.

  “Hola, Tracy. ¿Cómo estás?”

  The child, who was in her first year of middle-school Spanish, blushed with pleasure.

  “Muy bien,” she answered, as her younger siblings nudged against her, asking her what she was saying.

  After the parade of blondness had passed, Caroline sighed.

  “How are you so comfortable being you?”

  Tina laughed. “Who says I am?”

  She felt the pressure of Caroline’s shoulder against hers, and more than anything, she wanted to clamp her arms around this woman on this downtown night that smelled of lilacs and baked waffle cones, wanted to pull her close and kiss her until the far-off crescent moon bloomed into a half, a full, a blue moon.

  “Well, you came out to your parents.”

  Tina nodded, remembering that bright morning when she was home on Christmas break and the sun spilled into their little house in Glendale as if poured by a bottomless pitcher. In Minnesota, where she was in her first year of veterinary school, it had been seventeen degrees below zero; here, the outdoor thermometer affixed to the backyard fig tree read seventy-three, a difference of ninety degrees! She had felt so warm and loose, especially after eating a plateful of her mother’s huevos rancheros and drinking thick dark coffee, that she felt, well, now’s the time, and had said the nine words that had been stuck in her throat for years: “I just want you to know that I’m gay.”

  Both parents stared at her for a long moment, and Tina felt lightheaded, her lungs filled with air she couldn’t expel.

  “Siempre lo supimos,” said her father finally. “Pero esperábamos que no fuera cierto.”

  We always knew it, but we were hoping it wasn’t true.

  “Why?” Christina had asked, almost blind with the flood of tears that filled her eyes.

  A sigh lifted her father’s wide shoulders, so strong from decades of hefting shovels full of dirt, from hoeing, spading, from lifting trees out of the bed of his truck, gently patting their burlaped roots as he carried them across emerald-green lawns.

  “Because we want your life to be easier,” he had said, and that’s when the tears breached their levee and poured down Tina’s face.

  “Father Renaldo thought he was telling us something we didn’t know, but we did,” said her mother, dabbing at her own tears with a paper napkin.

  “Father Renaldo,” said Tina, confused. “What has Father Renaldo got to do with anything?”

  “He saw you kissing a girl at that retreat you went on. That one in the twelfth grade? He called us to say you must ask for forgiveness or you could go to hell.”

  A flush fueled by anger, embarrassment, and confusion heated Tina’s face. She remembered that retreat to Big Bear and how she and a girl from a church in Simi Valley had formed a sudden attraction that had them sneaking out of a lecture featuring a nun advising a room full of teenagers how to live a virtuous life.

  “But that was what, five years ago? Why didn’t you didn’t say anything to me then?”

  Tina’s father examined his fingernails (he was fastidious about his nails, scrubbing away all traces of dirt when he got home from work), and without looking up he said in Spanish, “We didn’t think it was our place. We didn’t think it was Father Renaldo’s place.”

  “Like your Papi said, we knew a long time ago—” here Tina’s mother looked at her husband—“by the time she was about eleven, twelve, right, Manny? But we decided we wouldn’t say one thing or another until you told us.”

  Staring at the pretty blue coffee cup—her mother liked color in her kitchen—Tina shook her head, astonished by all that had transpired at the table at which she had only expected breakfast.

  Her eyes grew round at the thought that came into her head.

  “Is that why you switched churches?” Tina remembered coming home for Thanksgiving break and her surprise when dutifully accompanying her parents to mass, they drove to a different parish, all the way in Burbank.

  “Maybe,” said her father. “And of course we didn’t like the grape juice.”

  “Sí,” said her mother and then exaggerated her accent to a “Cheech and Chong” level. “We give a lot of money to that church and still they can’t give us a little stinkin’ wine for Communion?”

  “YOUR MOTHER’S SO FUNNY,” Caroline had said after the first time she met Mercedes. Throughout her life, Tina’s friends had expressed similar sentiments, only they had always said, “Your parents.” Tina wondered how her mother’s sense of humor would hold up after Manny died; after all, he had been not only her partner in life, but the two of them traded jokes and riffed off one another as if they were partners in comedy as well. But even in grief—and Mercedes’s grief was deep—she didn’t lose what was an essential part of her personality.

  After she and Tina had hauled onto the brick patio over a dozen potted plants Manny’s clients had sent over, Mercedes dabbed at the sweat under her nose and said, “They seem to forget the gardener died.”

  Tina’s gasp preceded her laugh. Mercedes’s laugh preceded her tears.

  “OKAY, I’VE GOT TO GO,” says Caroline now, reluctantly unwrapping herself from Tina’s arms. “What time can I expect you?”

  Dinner that evening with Mercedes is planned, and they are picking her up at the hospital, giving Caroline a chance to stop in and visit Haze.

  “By six at the latest,” says Tina. “Unless Lovie has her pups.” A trucker had found the golden retriever mix limping along the county road and had brought her in. As well as having a broken hind leg and a sweet nature (earning her the name Lovie), she was pregnant.

  Caroline leans in to kiss Tina. “If she does, call me. I’ll be your delivery assistant.”

  “WOULD YOU LIKE A DONUT?” asks Sam, setting a white box on the receptionist’s desk.

  “What? I—”

  “Pick out which one you want, and I’ll get you some coffee.”

  “I—”

  But Sam’s already hustling off toward the break room, and so Shelly opens the box from Sweet Buns Bakery, which a traveling reviewer from the Star Tribune—the state’s biggest newspaper—once claimed set a bar so high other bakeries could only limbo under it. There are a dozen donuts arranged in three rows, and iced and sprinkled, they look like pastry jewels. Reaching for a cake donut with chocolate frosting, Shelly changes her mind and takes a glazed cruller, just as Sam returns with a pot of coffee. He refills her mug and says, “Do you use cream or sugar? Because I’ll go back and get it.”

  “Just black,” says Shelly. “The only way coffee should be drunk.”

  “I don’t know,” says Sam. “Not that I’ve had a lot a coffee, but the few times I have, it seems cream and sugar only help it.”

  Shelly draws her lips in—it’s a reflex of hers to stymie any rare smile—and considers the donut she’s holding.

  “Oh, let me get you a plate,” says Sam. “Or at least a napkin.”

  He races off before she c
an tell him not to bother, she’ll just set it on a tissue, and just as she’s chewing her first bite, he’s back, brandishing a small paper plate and a napkin.

  “There you go,” he says, setting both down on her desk. He grabs the latest issue of the Gazette—there are always several fresh-off-the-press copies of the paper on the coffee table in the reception area—and tucks it under his arm. “These’ll be in the break room if you want more,” he says as he picks up the bakery box and races off.

  “Wait, I—” she says, but he’s already disappeared down the hall.

  The donut deserves the high praise the traveling food editor gave it, and with each bite Shelly’s teeth break through the slightly crunchy top layer and into the smooth, near-creamy middle, and she wonders, why don’t I eat donuts more often?

  She would love to sit savoring her caffeine and sugar, but a phone light on the console goes on. There were calls before Haze’s stroke and the publication of her old columns but only about a tenth—or maybe twentieth—of the calls she gets now.

  “Granite Creek Gazette,” she says, her voice sharp. The column on Haze’s miscarriage was printed this morning, and as the caller jaws on and on about how moved she was, Shelly rolls her eyes, thinking, here it comes. Before the publication of Haze’s old columns, the receptionist had plenty of time to do her sudoku and crossword puzzle and to read her cozy mysteries (always knowing who did it way ahead of the books’ amateur sleuths).

  “We appreciate the feedback,” she says, when what she wants to say is, “Yeah, yeah, now may I please get back to my donut?”

  Because Susan likes to keep track of the callers’ opinions, Shelly marks a small tick under the “Like” column after she hangs up, and two seconds later, the phone rings again.