Chronicles of a Radical Hag (with Recipes)

by Lorna Landvik

  “I know! And that Haze stayed on at the paper, that she didn’t want to work somewhere else, that she didn’t want to move somewhere else . . . it must have been so painful for her.”

  “Did she ever have another boyfriend?”

  “Not that I know of,” said Susan. “But then again, she was pretty good at hiding her extracurricular affairs.”

  They laughed again at the truth of the statement as well as Susan’s choice of words, but the frivolity was short-lived for Sam.

  “I wish I had a grandpa like you did,” he said, sighing. “One who was interested in my life.”

  AFTER ACCEPTING THE RECEPTIONIST’S COMPLIMENT that they both look “super!” Susan and Liz leave the spa. Even as it’s mid-September, the late afternoon air is warm, and they decide to take a walk.

  “Let’s go by the library construction site,” says Liz, taking her friend’s arm, “because I want to hear all the wolf whistles we’ll get on account of our poreless skin.”

  “Yours does look good,” says Susan.

  “Yours too. But did that esthetician really have to say, ‘For upkeep, you might want to schedule regular appointments’?”

  “I’m sure she recommends that for everybody.”

  “Yeah, but the word upkeep. That’s what you use to describe lawn care.”

  Their spa day inspires them to take a long walk, and as they turn onto a residential block, they return to their earlier conversation, with Liz saying, “I never knew any of my grandparents,” just as Susan says, “I know the relationship I had with my grandparents was pretty special.”

  They laugh, and Liz posits that great minds think alike.

  “But you go ahead,” Liz continues, and Susan tells her that after her and Sam’s conversation, she had been moved to call his grandfather about his delinquent role in Sam’s life.

  “How’d that go?”

  “Dad was defensive at first, as he always is when he thinks I’m criticizing his parenting/grandparenting, but honestly, if I didn’t contact him, I’d never hear from him.”

  “Do you ever talk to your stepmother about it?”

  Susan shakes her head. “She’s busy with her own kids—she’s got eight, you know. And at least twice that many grandchildren!”

  “Eight kids! Can you imagine having eight kids?”

  Like Susan, Liz has only a quarter as many, a son and daughter, both in college.

  “And I think all but one lives in Southern California, so they’re really in each other’s lives.” Susan sighs. “So after Dad says he’s gotten several postcards from Jack, he complains that he never hears from Sam, and I tell him, ‘Dad, Sam never hears from you. Make the effort like Mom would have.’”

  Susan’s mother had often talked about having the boys come out to Mission Viejo for the extended summer vacations Susan had enjoyed in Granite Creek, but talk was as far as it got, Sam being only two, and Jack six when Donna McGrath died early from cancer. When her father remarried two years later, he told Susan that while he welcomed visits from her and her family, he hoped she’d understand that they’d have to stay at a hotel, seeing as Elaine’s three youngest children were still at home and they had no extra room.

  Susan sighs again; it’s a pattern her breath reverts to when thinking/talking about her father.

  “But less than a week later, Sam got a letter from him. I tell you, Liz, he was thrilled. I forget—because I hardly get them anymore—how much a letter can seem like a present.”

  “Did you get to read it?”

  Susan nods, and an old, white-faced collie lumbers toward them, wagging its plume of a tail, and they both lean over the picket fence to pet it and praise its “good-doggedness.”

  “I told him I totally understood if he didn’t want me to,” says Susan as they resume walking, “and he made a joke about the two of us having a history of reading private correspondence. But I knew he wanted me to read it.”

  “What’d it say?”

  “First of all, I’d forgotten what beautiful handwriting my Dad has. Really, he’s an artist.”

  “And some schools don’t even teach cursive anymore,” says Liz, shaking her head.

  “In the letter Dad told Sam a little bit about the view of the ocean from his deck, about how he’d played hockey when he was a kid in Minnesota, and that he has season tickets to the Kings games, and he asked if Sam knew the first NHL team in California was the Oakland Seals.”

  “The Oakland Seals? I never heard of them.”

  “Neither had I. The franchise didn’t last long.” Susan shrugs. “Dad spent about a page and a half writing about hockey. But then he wrote that he’s happy to hear Sam’s doing good work on the newspaper. He wrote how his own dad—my grandfather Bill—was disappointed in his sons’ lack of interest in the paper and how hard it is feeling like a disappointment to your own father.”

  “Oh, man. He said that?”

  Susan nods. “Which is more than he ever told me. So anyway, Sam wrote him right back.”

  “Did he show that to you?”

  “Nope. But he asked me for a stamp. And then Sam got another letter from Dad.”

  Susan answers the questioning look on her friend’s face.

  “I believe their correspondence is now ‘officially private’; at least he hasn’t shown any more of it to me. I just hope it continues, because I can tell it means a lot to Sam.”

  Liz smiles. “I’m glad. And by the way, you’re glowing.”

  Susan is happy, talking about this budding relationship between her son and father, but she reminds Liz that any improvement in her complexion is due to the clay mask whose guarantee was to revitalize and renew.

  21

  Class had begun with Sondra reading a column Haze had written about the Challenger space shuttle explosion, which ended:

  We were watching the miracle of pioneers “boldly going where no man (and women too!) has gone before,” and within seconds, a giant cloud with two shooting plumes left us awed and confused, not knowing exactly what we were seeing. It didn’t take long before we were told. The miracle of this space mission was tragically earthbound.

  “Hey, Ms. Garnet—are you crying?” asks Dylan, and Liz, wiping her eyes, nods and says, “Sorry, I just remember that day so clearly. I was a new teacher and just so excited that one of our own was going up in space.”

  May 28, 1985

  Today I had a root canal. Although my dentist is kind and sympathetic and doesn’t take personally the enmity his patients feel toward him, it still, despite his best efforts, was an unpleasant experience. I was shot so full of novocaine that I felt my mouth, chin, and tongue were made of blubber, but still, I was aware of the pain, aware that something was being done to the nerves of my teeth that seemed almost sacrilege, and I vowed right then and there to never, ever go to bed without brushing and flossing. (So far, the vow is being upheld!)

  I took a long nap when I got home, and this evening did what a lot of people do when they want to enter a vegetative-forget-about-everything state; I invited Howdy up on the couch to watch TV with me.

  There was a documentary about a bunch of musicians singing a song called “We Are the World,” and I watched it, fascinated. That’s the way to do it, I thought, raise voices in song to raise money for good causes—this one for famine relief in Africa.

  One tear after another streamed down my face, and after I dried them, I wrote out a check. Will my money matter? Maybe not a lot, but maybe a little. And sometimes a little to someone in need is a lot.

  I wish I could sing—I mean, in a way that people enjoyed. Eddie—I’ve written about him before; he was my brother’s friend and like my brother, was killed in World War II—he could have been a professional singer along the lines of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, or for you younger readers, Prince or Michael Jackson. Really, he had a voice that took you places, a voice that could make you cry, sigh, and dream. I think Eddie, had he lived, would have tried to make a living out of singing. I don’t think
he would have pshawed and apologized for his talent. I think he would have realized, hey, I’ve been given something, and I’m going to use it! And why not, it sure beats sorting nails (the job he had before he shipped out) at Nelson’s Hardware! Why are we so easily talked out of our dreams, think our talents are too puny to water, to let bloom?

  So a day darkened by my petty fears of dental intrusion and pain turned into a night of hope and pride that I’m part of this human choir, despite a certain inability to stay in tune.

  “I like how it started off one way,” says Charlotte, who sits down after reading the column aloud to her classmates. “I mean I can so relate to hating being in the dentist’s office.”

  The other kids laugh, as does Charlotte, revealing a mouth filled with a scaffold of braces.

  “But then she kind of turns, you know, and the column’s about something else. And then something else. I like that I get surprised. And I wish Eddie wouldn’t have died . . . so that he could have been a singer.”

  Now as a blush stains Charlotte’s face, and afraid she’s revealed too much and that she sounds stupid, she stares down at her hands.

  “I’ve got a cousin who’s a great singer,” says Kyle, and because he’s several castes above her in the high school hierarchy, Charlotte feels her blush begin to wane.

  “He’s in a band, and they write their own songs and everything.” Kyle smiles at Charlotte, which makes her feel fizzy as a shaken can of soda. “And I like that video,” Kyle continues. “Of all those other people—not my cousin—singing that ‘We Are the World’ song. You can still watch it on YouTube.”

  “What do you think of Haze writing about feeling hope and pride that she’s part of ‘this human choir’?” asks Liz, standing at the front of the classroom. “What other metaphor could she have used?”

  “Well, she is talking about a group singing together,” says Stacy. “So that kind of makes sense.”

  “Yeah,” says Abdi. “Like she could write about being part of the human zoo if she was like at the zoo or something.”

  Burbles of laughter rise up, and Dylan says, “Or part of the human wasteland if she was like at a garbage dump or something,” and Grace says, “Or part of the human circus if she was like at a clown convention or something.”

  “Okay,” says Liz as the laughter threatens to take over the discussion. “Let’s move on. Claire, why don’t you read the next one?”

  The girl, taller than anyone in the classroom, stands and begins to read.

  June 4, 1988

  Reading stories about the ACT UP action in New York City and the arrest of protestors gathered to bring attention to the lack of AIDS research and drugs, I thought of an old pal.

  Of all my childhood friends, I think the most fondly of Richard. His dad was president of our town’s bank, and he and my father were good friends as well.

  In the summer, we were part of the same neighborhood gang that played hide-and-seek or kick the can on summer nights, and skated down at the pond or slid down the big hill behind the library in the winter. But my dearest memories are of playing with Richard inside, at his house or mine.

  That boy had the most fabulous imagination. We’d spend hours on the high seas, the brocade sofa in the front room our sailboat, warding off marauding pirates or man-eating sharks. The same sofa was our train car, and we were hoboes, riding the rails all the way to California, where we’d pick our breakfast off trees and swim in the Pacific. We’d play Americans versus Nazis, although neither of us ever wanted to be the Nazis.

  At my house, we played different games. Up in my room, we’d spend hours playing house. He loved playing dolls as much as I did, and our play—thanks to him—was much more fun and detailed than when I played with my girlfriends. There was always a crisis going on; his doll might be dying from scarlet fever, or she was deaf, and we had to invent sign language for her, or we had to amputate her toes because she’d been lost in a blizzard searching for her runaway pony.

  We played dress-up too, and he was as—no, more—extravagant as I was, digging into the trunk stuffed with my mother’s and sister’s cast-off paraphernalia. I was always Ruby Redman, and Richard was always Olivia Oliver.

  You might gather that Richard was “different.” He knew it too and confided in me how good he was at hiding it.

  “Can you imagine what my Pop would do if he saw me playing with these?” he asked once, after my mother’s voice calling “Supper” ended our afternoon of play and we tucked our dolls away in their crib. “Or not just my pop—anybody. Please don’t tell anyone, Haze.”

  When my brother, Tom, died, and my parents were in their dark cloud of grief, Richard helped me a lot, always willing to listen (over and over) to my stories of Tom and sitting quietly, holding my hand, when those stories inevitably brought forth tears.

  “This is the thing, Haze,” he told me one afternoon, walking home from a Saturday matinee at the Prairie Rose Theater, a movie that had been preceded by a newsreel about General Eisenhower and his steady command of U.S. forces. “War is fun to play, like cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers, until you figure out what the real stuff is. I mean, think of all those cowboys who got scalped or the Indians who got smallpox from infected blankets, or the robbers who got shot, or the cops who got killed by robbers who didn’t really want to kill them but needed money to feed their dying neighbor’s baby or something.”

  Richard’s thinking was always so much more layered than other kids’; he never stopped at what was in front of the curtain but always investigated what was behind it, above it, below it.

  “If there’s a war going on when I grow up, I tell you what—I won’t be in it. I’ll be a conscientious objector. Or I’ll say to the president, ‘Instead of a war committee, start up a peace committee.’ And I’ll be on it.”

  I had to laugh. “How will you even get the president to listen you?”

  Richard shrugged. “I’ll figure it out.”

  He would have too.

  I never did tell anyone about Richard, but as the years passed, it became more and more obvious that he was “different.”

  In the schoolyard, boys threw words at him like “Pansy! Sissy boy! Faggot!” as casually as they threw footballs and baseballs to one another. Torment was a daily part of his life, but he bore it all with a strength to which those boys were blind.

  His family moved to Detroit when he was in the eighth grade. I gave him a bag of penny candy for the long car ride; he gave me a wooden box he had handcrafted (one more of his many talents!). He had etched with a wood burner the words “Pirate Booty” on it, and he explained it was for my dearest treasures. I had lots of good childhood friends, but none of them had the imagination, the pizazz, the heart of Richard.

  I lost touch with him, but I hope he’s doing well. For all I know, he is on a secret presidential committee, working on peace. Peace for everyone, including people like him.

  The classroom is silent when Claire finishes, and she looks up, an expression of sadness on her long face.

  “Should I read the letter they printed with it?”

  At Liz’s nod, she does.

  To the Editor:

  Haze Evans’s most recent column brought back memories of my cousin Gerry, who was made to suffer all his life because of who he was. It is my shame that I didn’t stick up for him as much as I could have, but his flamboyance, his difference, frightened me. I thought it might be catching. The poor kid—I’ll never forget at a big family reunion, Gerry was called those same bad names as Richard was, at a family reunion! By his relatives!

  Nobody knows what happened to Gerry; he lit out the day he graduated high school. I hope he found someplace where he could be himself, hope he made a new family of people who welcomed him in.

  Harlan Dodd

  Claire sits down, looking as if she might cry. Some of the other kids in class do too, Liz notices.

  Sam feels both thrilled and frustrated that he can’t tell his classmates how he himself fo
und that box Richard gave Haze and what “pirate booty” he found inside. Instead, he responds to the letter Claire just read.

  “This is the weird thing,” he says. “Harlan Dodd is my next-door neighbor, and he’s this real right-wing tool—”

  “Sam,” warns Liz. “Let’s keep it respectful.”

  “But he’s so hard to respect!”

  “Yeah, he yells at us if the toe of our shoe happens to touch his precious lawn,” says Jacob.

  Liz restrains her smile; she’s heard stories from Susan, and she can bet that the toes of shoes belonging to Sam and his friends often find their way “accidentally” onto the old crab’s lawn.

  “In the summer, my mom has to ask him to turn down his TV ’cause it’s always blasting Fox News—”

  “My grandpa listens to that too,” says Elise. “My grandma hates it—she says it’s turned him into an ‘angry old buzzard.’”

  Liz is about to interrupt, explaining that they’ll be covering Fox News when they explore Trends in Media, but then thinks, fuck it, and she smiles as she imagines the reaction her students would have if she’d vocalized that particular thought.

  “There sure seem to be a lot of ‘angry old buzzards these days,’” says Sam, and the class hoots when he makes his voice sound like that which he’s just mentioned.

  “But still,” he continues, “it makes me kinda sad . . . just like that column did.”

  There’s a shift in the classroom, and once again Liz notices (and will later tell Susan) how Sam has directed it. Since their Radical Hag Wednesdays began, his classmates have looked to Sam as their leader—he, after all, gets to read Haze’s columns as part of his job at the newspaper. Nobody else works at a newspaper; only Charlotte Henry comes close to having such a cool job. (She lives on a horse farm outside town and leads tourists on trail rides.)

  “My mom says how scary a time it was,” says Brianna. “She says before, the only AIDS anyone heard of were these diet candies—I think they were spelled different—that she and her sister used to eat. When they heard about all these strange sores gay men were getting, and then dying . . .” Her voice fades to a whisper. “She says everyone started getting afraid. You didn’t know if you’d get infected by swimming at the Y or kissing somebody!”