Chronicles of a Radical Hag (with Recipes)

by Lorna Landvik

  What she says is true, but even as she says it, Susan knows that even if her grandfather were to speak to her from the Great Beyond or the Press Room in the Sky or wherever he may have landed, his answer would be as simple and profound as, “it just happened.”

  Susan knows Phil loved her and also knows that she took their love for granted, paying more attention to the demands of her job and of parenting than the demands of her marriage. She’s not blaming herself for his affair, but she does blame herself for the ease with which she put him second, third, fourth.

  Susan has learned some things about herself that are not fun to learn, that like a bookie, she keeps tabs on what she’s paid out and what’s owed her. She expects those she loves to act the way she wants them to act, and why can’t they see that what she wants is what they should want?

  Once early in their marriage, she and Phil lay on their bed, post-sex, slick with sweat and satisfaction.

  “If I could, I’d marry you every day,” Phil had said, and while Susan thought it was romantic, she also thought it was childish, a tad needy.

  “Let’s not get carried away,” she had joked.

  He had been so proud of her when she took over the paper, talking her through her many fears and doubts. For the longest time Phil had been her biggest cheerleader, and she sees now how seldom she shook pompoms for him. He loved selling recreational vehicles and was good at it, but her ownership and running of the newspaper was the career in the family that really mattered, that changed people’s lives. (Although she had been approached many times by someone telling her what fun they’d had on the speedboat or snowmobile Phil had sold them, and just last week the Sawyers in their motor home named “FancyFree” had pulled up next to her in the bank parking lot, and Mr. Sawyer had leaned out his window to gleefully announce, “Tell Phil we’re on our way to Phoenix, and then we’re taking this baby all the way to Orlando!”). People had fun with the products he sold them, and yet she knew in her heart of hearts, she had subtly (or not so subtly) given out signals that while he made a good living, there was something unserious about it.

  Tears dribble down her cheeks.

  “But Grandma never did that to you!” she hisses, slapping the top of the tombstone. “She never made you feel small!”

  Of course Susan doesn’t know this; no one knows what happens within a marriage unless one is in that marriage, but still, she has a pretty good idea.

  What she remembers about her grandmother is how she adored her grandfather. All those summers Susan spent at their house, she was always struck by how right before her grandfather was due home, her grandmother would put on a Henry Mancini album, spritz her favorite perfume (Seven Winds) behind her ears, and pat her hair.

  “Got to cast my spell,” she once told her granddaughter.

  Susan can’t remember ever putting on a Bruce Springsteen album (Phil’s favorite) or spritzing on her favorite perfume (Chloé) in anticipation of his coming home. Her feminist side argues, did he ever put on an album by The Pretenders (her favorite) or spritz on his favorite cologne (Paco Rabanne) in anticipation of my arrival? She feels bad, thinking how nice, and how easy, it would have been for her and her husband to have celebrated one another like that.

  “But you didn’t,” she says to the name engraved on the left side of the marble stone. “You didn’t celebrate Grandma, did you?”

  Her tears aren’t dribbling now, they’re running, and even as she says (shouts) the words, she knows they aren’t true.

  She knows they’re not true because she knew her grandfather, knew her grandmother, knows Haze. And she knows Phil. And knows that people can love each other and still make mistakes. Susan knows her grandfather didn’t sleep with Haze to purposely hurt his wife, and she doesn’t think Phil slept with that stupid dental hygienist (she can’t—or won’t—remember her name) to purposely hurt her.

  “It’s just so mixed up!” She flings the thermos at the tombstone, and daiquiri splashes across it. Both mortified and slightly awed by her gesture, she looks around and is relieved she’s still all alone. She staggers a bit as she stands, not from the alcohol but a cramp in her leg. Gathering up her blanket, she murmurs a quick apology to the gravestone splotched with liquor, and after tucking the thermos and blanket in the handlebar basket, she mounts her bicycle and rides out of the cemetery.

  18

  “How about that game last night?”

  Sam looks up from his desk. “Huh?”

  “The Twins,” says Dale Jacobsen, the paper’s sports editor, who seemed incapable of starting a conversation without a reference to a team’s score or amazing hit or dunk or goal or ref’s bad call. “They won last night. Pulled it out in the ninth inning.”

  “Wow, sounds great,” says Sam.

  “It was,” says Dale. “Three runs. It was great.”

  He stands in the door’s threshold for a moment before he shakes his head, mutters, “See ya,” and wanders down the hall, hoping to find someone with whom he can rehash the game’s highlights.

  Sam’s just glad Dale hadn’t seen him bawling, which he was close to doing. He’d been reading a column on the subject of spring flowers; at least the first paragraph had been about yellow crocuses “poking up from their soil beds, like curious little blond toddlers after a long nap.” The second paragraph startled him so that he had to read it again.

  This is a spring I won’t discover with my dog, Brigadoon. No more walks with her pulling at the leash as she sniffs all the new things growing; no more watching her run around the backyard birdbath, scattering those newly returned robins, who only want to clean themselves up; no more of her interrupting my planting of annuals over and over by proudly delivering her ball to me, then gleefully chasing after it.

  Brigadoon, my dear pal, died last night in her sleep. She lived eleven years longer than her original master, my late husband, Royal, whom she loved enormously. She grew to love me enormously; dogs are loyal, but they’re also pragmatic, and after she understood Royal wasn’t coming home and that I now doled out the Alpo, I was the recipient of that big dog love.

  She had slowed down, and her muzzle had long gone white, but still, she’d wag her tail and wiggle her hind end like a puppy every time I came through the door. She loved snuggling next to me as I read a book or watched a television program (yes, she had couch privileges), laying her head on my thigh, sighing with contentment when I’d scratch behind her ears or pet her furry skull.

  “Hey, Sam.”

  Looking up, Sam is much happier to see his mother in the threshold than Dale Jacobsen, and after he answers “hey” back, she asks where Haze has taken him now.

  Sam understands immediately what she means, and he offers a big smile, which to Susan, is like a present, a bouquet.

  “Back to when her dog died. Listen to this.”

  As Susan sits on the wooden chair facing Haze’s desk, Sam reads, “Brigadoon always sensed what I needed. If I needed cheering up, she was suddenly the comic, pouncing at a squeaker toy and pretending to get angry that it squeaked, or rolling on her back and pedaling her back legs as if she were on an invisible unicycle. If I were really low, she became my own personal bodyguard, following me around the house (waiting patiently outside the bathroom door), sitting next to me whenever I sat, or pulling her leash, always draped over the back-door doorknob, and carrying it to me, with the prescription ‘Come on. You need a change of scenery.’”

  Susan stares at her son with a mixture of pride and wonder: he has such a nice speaking voice—when did it stop cracking? Again, she’s startled by how much taller he’s gotten, or is it just that he’s not slumping? He looks almost, well, she couldn’t say “regal,” could she? Sure, she could, she’s his mother.

  “Mom?” says Sam. “Why are you looking at me so weird?”

  “Was I?” says Susan, with a laugh, and as she stands, she says, “We’ll run that one, okay? Are there many reader responses?”

  Sam looks down at the sheaf of papers. “A
bunch.”

  “Pick out a few, and we’ll run those too. Everybody loves a good dog story.”

  “HOW LONG WILL SHE BE LIKE THIS?” Sam asks Mercedes.

  “We don’t know,” says the nurse, her eyebrows circumflexed over her brown eyes. “It’s no fun for her though, is it?”

  Sam shakes his head, embarrassed that the sudden lump in his throat makes it impossible for him to talk. He’d ridden his bike to the hospital on his lunch break, and now he wishes he were anywhere else. To kill time as he composes himself, he slowly shrugs off his backpack, and setting it next to the bedside chair, he sits down. After clearing his throat, he says, “So. When did you, like, decide to be a nurse?”

  The question surprises both of them. Sam doesn’t know why he asks it, other than trying to make conversation.

  “Well,” says Mercedes, touched that this teenaged boy has even an inkling of interest in her. “Ever since I was a little girl. I always had my little brother Ramon pretend he was sick so I could take care of him. It was not his favorite game.”

  Sam smiles.

  “But he’d play with you anyway?”

  “He had to. I was older than him, and until we were teenagers, bigger and stronger. But he was never good at pretending he had a broken leg or a concussion.”

  “What’s he doing now?”

  Again, Mercedes feels a flush of surprise. When has anyone been interested in her brother? “Ramon is in Mexico. In Monterrey.” Her chest swells with both pride and homesickness. “He’s an attorney. Much better advising clients than he was pretending to be a patient!”

  They both laugh, and then Sam asks, “Do you have any brothers and sisters here in America?”

  “One. My brother Ernesto lives in California. But my sisters, Rosa and Lupe, live in a place called Tampico. In Mexico.” A picture of her siblings as kids flashes in her head. Ramon, arms crossed over his chest, wearing his usual smirk. Ernesto with his arms around her and Rosa’s shoulders, always their protector. Lupe, the youngest, her face turned, dreamy, always looking elsewhere.

  Warmed by the memory Mercedes asks, “You have a brother, yes?”

  Sam nods. Through his mom’s standing in the community, he’s used to people he doesn’t know knowing about him.

  “He’s traveling through Europe.”

  “Yes, your mother told me about his trip. She’s very proud of him, of both of you.”

  “Uh . . . she might be a little prouder of Jack,” he says, feeling the tips of his ears grow hot. “He’s like SuperSon.”

  The nurse smiles. “Does he fly?”

  “Just about.”

  When Mercedes leaves to attend to other patients, Sam sits in the strange quiet of the hospital room, where equipment whispers and hums.

  “Hello, Haze,” he says finally. “Sam here. Sam Carroll? Sorry it took me so long to visit . . .”

  For the longest time, it hadn’t occurred to him to do so; previously Haze was just the nice old lady who always seemed happy to see him the few times he was in the office, but now, after reading so many of her public and private writings, he feels he knows her almost as well as his friends. Maybe even better.

  “I just wanted to tell you I know about you and my great-grandfather. Wow. I know it was kind of snooping—you did have those letters and stuff locked up—but . . . I couldn’t help myself. Well, I could have, I guess, but I didn’t.”

  He finds himself directing his gaze at the foot of Haze’s bed. He doesn’t like looking at Haze’s face, which looks like a pale mask, doesn’t like looking at the tube in her nose.

  “And my mom read them too. I figured I sorta had to share them with her, you know? We were both wondering though, why you kept them in your office—not just the letters from my great-grandfather but the journal too. My mom thought maybe it was because you wanted to keep him close to you. Although he’d be just as close to you at home, right? Anyway, I’m sorry . . . but in a way, I’m not. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about old people’s love affairs—no offense, and I guess you weren’t that old when it was going on—but I like the idea that a relative of mine made you happy for a while and vice versa.” He takes a deep breath and pursing his lips, expels a long stream of air. “Wow. I don’t know, reading all that and reading your columns . . . you just, you just seem to know so much. About how people feel and stuff. And you make me think about stuff too. And so I just wanted to come in here and say thanks. ’Cause who knows—maybe you can hear me, right? Maybe you’ll wake up in a couple days and say, ‘Hey, Sam, glad you came to see me. And no prob that you read my all my private personal shit! And your girlfriend Elise is right—you do have a beautiful voice! I was hoping you’d sing to me!’”

  Startled by what he’s sharing with her, especially his claim (yearning) that Elise is his girlfriend, Sam shifts his gaze to Haze’s mask/face. Tears rise in his eyes, and he begins quietly, almost whispering, to sing a song his mother often sang to him when he was little, “You’ve Got a Friend.”

  His ears suddenly go red when he hears, “That’s pretty,” and he has an intense wish that there were such things as Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, which he would immediately plunge under. He jumps up and mumbles that he was just leaving, but the tall, skinny old woman entering the room says, “Oh, don’t go on my account. You’re Susan and Phil’s boy, aren’t you?”

  Sam nods, again not surprised that someone he doesn’t know knows him.

  “I’m Lois. Haze is my best friend.” Ignoring his gesture toward the chair he now stands beside, the woman goes around the other side of the bed and strokes the patient’s cheek. “Hello, gorgeous.”

  Embarrassment over his serenade fades, and curiosity takes its place.

  “Oh, yeah,” says Sam, “Lois. I’ve read about you in her columns. You guys met at that . . . that writer guy’s lecture.”

  “We certainly did.” To Haze, Lois says, “This is the young man who’s helping his mother with all your old columns.” She looks up. “Susan and I often run into each other here.”

  “Are you sure . . . are you sure you don’t want to sit down?”

  “No, but you go ahead,” says Lois, and holding the bed’s safety rail, she stands on her tiptoes before bending her knees and executing a small squat. “I sit way too much. And when I do my little exercises, I figure it might inspire Lazybones here. Right, Haze? Or are you going to lie around forever?”

  Sam sits down as if her words have pushed him, and the woman laughs as she rises again on her tiptoes.

  “Haze insists we keep up the jokes.” As she slowly squats, she says, “And she insists all company talks about her, so tell me: what’s been your favorite column so far?”

  “Umm,” he says, feeling his ears grow red again. “Let me think . . . well, today I read about when her dog Brigadoon died. We’re going to print that one.”

  “Oh yes,” says Lois. “Good old Brigadoon. She was a real friend to Haze.”

  “We . . . we had a dog. Well, it was my brother’s dog, really; we got him right before I was born. He named him Mario—after the Mario Brothers video game? He was a goldendoodle, half golden retriever and half poodle? They’re supposed to be really smart dogs, only I guess Mario didn’t get the memo.”

  Still executing her slow bends, Lois chuckles.

  “He died a couple years ago, got hit by a car. He’d get loose and run all over the place.” Sam swallows hard. “We never got another dog after Mario.”

  “That’s not saying you won’t,” says Lois briskly. She brings her hands to her hips and stretches to the right. “You thought you’d never get another dog after Brigadoon, didn’t you, Haze?”

  Sam is fascinated, both by the old woman’s agile moves and by what she’s saying.

  “Did she? Get another dog?”

  Lois stretches to the right. “Dogs. She’s had a couple since Briggy. I’m taking care of the one she’s got now—Polly. In fact, I’m trying to figure out a way how to sneak her in to see Haze.”
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  “Maybe we could dress her like a candy striper.”

  Lois hoots.

  “That might be just the thing that would wake Miss Lazybones up—seeing Polly in a candy striper’s uniform!” She leans over the bed rail and strokes Haze’s cheek. “But I’ll never forget the day she got her first dog after Brigadoon, because I was with her. It was the same day we saw that awful Elm Street nightmare movie, remember, Haze, and I was so rattled?”

  RIDING BACK TO WORK, Sam thinks of Mercedes and Lois and how weird it was that he had not only had but enjoyed conversations with both of them. Two women old enough to be his grandmas (he doesn’t know that Mercedes is only a few years older than his mother; to him anyone with graying hair qualifies as grandmotherly) who not only interested him but made him laugh and vice versa. Go figure!

  Back in Haze’s office, Sam, who one weekend with Jack watched a whole marathon of the Nightmare movies on cable, googles the date of the first one released, making it easy to find Haze’s column about the new dog in her files.

  November 19, 1984

  Well, I went and did it. I know the repercussions might be long-lasting, that my freedom has been compromised, and that I will often question my sanity, but I got another dog, or I should say, he got me. It’s the craziest thing, after having seen a matinee movie, my friend Lois and I were walking around Kingleigh Lake, me more for the calorie-burning exercise (I always ask for extra butter on my popcorn), and Lois more to calm herself, as the movie’s villain had really spooked her. I was reminding her that she was the one who chose A Nightmare on Elm Street over The Terminator (note to the new cineplex owners: why do most of your movie selections cater to teenaged boys?) when a dog was suddenly in step next to us. Really, neither of us saw him dash out from behind a tree or a parked car; it was as if he appeared out of thin air.

  “Where’d you come from?” I asked the scruffy, collarless canine, but being a canine, he of course didn’t tell me, although his mouth did seem to offer a smile (really!), a greeting of “Howdy!”