Chronicles of a Radical Hag (with Recipes)

by Lorna Landvik

  “My grandma says she loved President Reagan—she voted for him twice—but she thought he totally blew it when it came to AIDS,” says Patrick. “She says if he would have addressed the problem earlier, then maybe—” The boy’s voice cracks, and he stops speaking for a moment. “Then maybe her brother—my great-uncle—wouldn’t have died.”

  “My dad was on his college golf team,” says Grace. “And their best player died of AIDS. My dad never even knew he was gay, and he felt bad that he—I think his name was Mark—never felt comfortable enough to tell him. He said the only reason they got to nationals was Mark.”

  Liz feels as if her heart is physically reacting to sadness, feels as if it’s clenching up like a morning glory under the hot afternoon sun.

  “When the column first ran,” she says, “so many people wrote in. When Susan—uh, Mrs. McGrath, the Gazette’s publisher—ran it again, she printed a few of those letters, which are included on your hand-out. Jacob, do you want to read the last one?”

  Sam feels himself tense. Jacob always gets embarrassed when he has to read aloud, his ears baking red as he fumbles over words, and Sam’s surprised when his friend stands up—when has he stood up when he’s asked to read aloud?—and begins, in a clear, confident voice, to read.

  To the Editor:

  Regarding Haze Evans’s most recent column on the AIDS epidemic: I would say cancel my subscription, but then where would I get my news? Maybe I’ll just declare here and now that I’ll never read another column of the radical hag, whose employment at your paper continues to baffle and disgust me. AIDS is a scourge, brought on by people whose minds are perverted and twisted, and what they are getting is an answer to their sick and anti-God choices. She professes compassion for this small minority; I profess compassion for the vast majority who live their lives as God intended them to, loving their partners in the holy matrimony God intended. I am sickened.

  Sincerely,

  Mr. Joseph Snell

  Again, Sam breaks the silence.

  “Haze wrote a column about him when he died,” he tells his classmates. “In fact, it’s the column I brought in today.”

  While they discuss the columns and letters reprinted in the Gazette, Sam occasionally brings in one that hasn’t had a second appearance in the paper.

  “I think the letter Jacob read is the last one Mr. Snell ever wrote in to the paper, because this is dated June 16, 1988.”

  “Well, let’s hear it,” says Liz, and Sam stands and reads the column.

  I renew my season tickets every year to Palace Theater Presents, and I often will travel down to the Twin Cities to see a play at the History or Guthrie Theaters, or a comedy revue at Dudley Riggs. I am a big fan of stage presentations, from musicals to Shakespeare to improv to heavy dramas and to everything in between. When I read a review that describes a production as “provocative,” I think, oh, goodie, I’ll see that. I like to be provoked, to think, to find a new way of thinking, or conclude that my old way was just fine. But traveling down to St. Paul to see You Itch, I Scratch was not just a waste of travel time but a waste of the playwright’s time, a waste of the actors’ time, and most certainly a waste of the audience’s time.

  “Bare my soul, you sole bear!”

  “Jump higher or risk stubbing your toe!”

  I kid you not, these were actual lines said by the hapless actors portraying the circus trainer/philosopher Jean Paul Sort-of and his pogo stick–wielding acrobat lover. That the play was only an hour was a blessing, but no one that I saw leaving the theater looked blessed.

  Speaking of provocation, I seemed to provide plenty of that to one very faithful reader (and responder), who often called me a “radical hag” and who thought I had an anti-American/leftist/amoral agenda. His letters angered me, but they also made me proud of myself—and of him—for caring so much. His obituary was in the paper last week: Mr. Joseph Snell, age seventy-four.

  He was an insurance man, who after retirement became a prolific oil painter, whose work is displayed around town (check out his North Shore Sunrise in the First Bank lobby and The Beauty of the Lilies in the narthex of his home church, St. Matthew’s). In the past few years, he was a regular exhibitor at the Granite Creek Art Fair, and we shared a laugh (somewhat) when I bought his painting Autumn Maples.

  “I’ll take it for sixty,” I said, teasing him, as the price tag was seventy-five.

  “For you,” he said, “one hundred.”

  Whenever I’d receive a particularly critical letter (which most of them were) from Mr. Joseph Snell, I’d look up at the lovely Autumn Maples, which hangs in my office. Sometimes I have a hard time squaring what came out of his pen versus what came out of his paintbrush, but I guess that’s because we’re all really puzzles inside enigmas inside mazes.

  After Sam finishes reading, his classmates say things like, “Whoa,” and “He painted? I can’t believe it!”

  “I’ve seen the picture,” Sam says, “It’s, like, abstract but . . . cool.”

  “I can’t believe she was so nice writing about him,” says Charlotte, “when he was always so mean to her.”

  “My mom says that the percentage of reader letters was about 80 percent loving her stuff, and 20 percent not. Joseph Snell was definitely on the ‘not’ side, and there’s no one who wrote as many anti-Haze letters as he did.” Sam holds up the paper he’s just read from. “After the column she even included a recipe in his honor!”

  “What’d she call it?” asks Stacy, “Crab Apple Cake?”

  “No,” says Charlotte, “Crusty Old Coot Cookies.”

  “No,” says Dylan. “Big Bastard Biscuits.”

  “No,” says Caleb, “I’m a Douche Donuts.”

  Amid the laughter and the shouting, Liz calls for order with a single word.

  “Class.”

  THANKS FOR CARING BUTTERSCOTCH/PB BARS

  ½ cup butter

  1 (1 ounce) square unsweetened chocolate

  ⅔ cup packed brown sugar

  1 egg

  1 teaspoon vanilla extract

  1 cup all-purpose flour

  1 teaspoon baking powder

  dash of salt

  1 cup butterscotch or peanut butter chips

  Melt butter and chocolate in a large saucepan over low heat. Remove from heat. Stir in brown sugar until dissolved, and cool to lukewarm. Add egg and vanilla, and mix well. Combine flour, baking powder, and salt; stir into chocolate mixture until blended. Stir in chips.

  Spread into a greased 9-inch-square baking pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 22–27 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Cool on wire rack. Cut into squares, and serve after dinner or arguments.

  22

  “Mama, why not go out with him?”

  “Ay,” says Mercedes, and Tina laughs as a blush colors her mother’s face.

  “But really, why not?” Tina kisses the head of the sleeping puppy in her arms and says, her voice softer, “Papi wouldn’t mind. He’d like to see you not so alone.”

  “I’m not alone!” says Mercedes. “I’ve got you, I’ve got Caroline, I’ve got my friends and my colleagues at the hospital, I’ve got—”

  “Mama, what could it hurt? I can tell every time Mr. Wilkerson brings his cat in that he’s a nice guy. Very devoted to Fluffy.”

  “Ay,” says Mercedes again. “I can just hear Manny—‘You can’t go out with someone who calls their cat Fluffy!’”

  Both women laugh, loud enough to wake the puppy, whose transition from sleep to tail-wagging wakefulness is abrupt.

  “So you agree, eh Cesar?” says Tina, petting the wriggling dog, “That Mamacita should go out with the good Mr. Wilkerson even though he calls his cat Fluffy?”

  “You want me to take him out?” asks Caroline, coming into the living room with a tray bearing mugs of hot chocolate.

  “Nah, I’ll do it,” says Tina and leaves the room with the puppy, cooing, “Shall we take a little walk? A little walk so you can tinkle?”

  Merced
es thanks Caroline as she takes a cup of hot chocolate.

  “We always just plopped marshmallows in our cocoa, but Tina tells me this is how you made it for her when she was little.”

  Thanking her, Mercedes dips her spoon into the whipped cream adorned with chocolate shavings, and with spoon in mouth nods her approval.

  After enjoying their beverages for a moment, Mercedes says, “I suppose Tina has told you about my predicament?”

  “Predicament?”

  “About my invitation from Mr. Wilkerson.”

  “You call a man wanting to take you out for dinner a predicament?”

  Mercedes smiles, but to her—and Caroline’s—surprise, her eyes fill with tears.

  “Oh, Mercedes,” says Caroline, moving closer to the woman on the couch and putting her arm around her.

  “Tina . . . Tina thinks I’m foolish. But I . . . Manny was the love of my life. How could I go out with another man?”

  Caroline squeezes Mercedes’s shoulder.

  “Tina doesn’t think you’re foolish. She knows how much you and Manny loved each other. She just doesn’t want you to be lonely.”

  “I’m not—”

  Caroline cuts off her protest by asking, “If it were reversed, if it had been you who died, well, wouldn’t you want Manny to be happy, to find companionship . . . or love?”

  “No! I’d kill him!”

  It’s the look on Caroline’s face that makes Mercedes laugh, and realizing Mercedes was kidding, Caroline laughs too.

  Taking a big sip of hot chocolate, Mercedes tongues the whipped cream that remains on her upper lip.

  “If I had been the one to die first,” she says, “yes, yes. I would definitely want Manny to find someone else. He would need to find someone else. But men are like that, I think. They need someone to take care of them more than women do.”

  “Still,” says Caroline. “A dinner date is only a dinner date.”

  Mercedes nods. “And I do hear they have really good food at Zig’s Supper Club.”

  “I know it was a favorite of Haze’s,” says Caroline.

  “Guess who peed and pooped?” says Tina as Cesar charges into the room. “This little wonder dog!”

  January 28, 1988

  While in the Cities just after the fifteenth anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade decision, I witnessed a demonstration outside a clinic that had antiabortion protestors carrying signs reading, “Murderer!” (and worse) and shouting the same things to anyone entering the clinic.

  Some biographical details in the following stories have been changed to protect the innocent or guilty, depending on how you look at it.

  I knew “Jane Roe #1” in high school. She sat next to me in English . . . until she didn’t. When we took turns reciting “The Raven,” everyone laughed when she lowered her voice and read her section in a spooky, Boris Karloff–like voice. Our teacher called on her more than anyone to read aloud, because she’d use all kinds of funny accents to bring life to the text: when she read Emily Dickinson, she’d use a high, melancholy voice; when she read Keats, she’d do it in a stuffy British accent; and her Russian accent while reading Chekov was uncanny . . . and funny.

  She was the peppiest member of the pep squad and as a member of the student council, had lobbied for recess, saying that even high-schoolers should swing and teeter-totter. I used to think it was a shame my old friend Richard had moved out of town, because he and Jane Roe #1 would have really hit it off.

  I didn’t think anything of it the day she didn’t sit next to me in English, or when she was absent the next. Then the weekend came, and the party lines were buzzing with the news that this bright, funny star (who always had the lead in class plays) had died. The whole town was stunned.

  Her death was attributed to “complications due to an emergency appendectomy,” but her best friend told me she had traveled with her boyfriend (Mr. BMOC, who was going to UND on a full academic and athletic scholarship) to “see someone in the Twin Cities” to get rid of her pregnancy.

  I had no idea what she was talking about. As a (naive) junior in high school, I knew about pregnancy but had no idea people sometimes got rid of them; all I knew was the ache and loss as well as shock (Jane Roe #1 had had sex!) I felt.

  “The poor girl,” I heard my mother say, her voice choked, to my father. “The poor, poor girl.”

  Jane Roe #2 was a girl at college. I didn’t know her well, but Rose, a bohemian who lived in my dorm, did. Usually it was the jazz records she played at full volume that had people banging on her door, but this time it was her bellowing that caused me to timidly knock, asking, “Rose, Rose, are you all right?”

  Rose was a girl whose take-no-prisoners persona was either feared or admired, and to see her tearstained and shaky when she opened the door was to see her in a previously unseen way.

  “Dorothy!” she cried. “Dorothy!”

  She had an illegal hot plate in her room, and I turned it on and made us a pot of tea while Rose sat on her bed, sobbing.

  I handed her the cup of Earl Grey, and she sat holding it a long time before she was able to speak.

  “Dorothy,” she said, a final sob shuddering through her. “Dorothy dropped out of school!”

  Admittedly, dropping out of school is a big and often regrettable decision, but Rose’s reaction seemed, to put it mildly, a bit over the top.

  “Dorothy the writer?” I asked, of the girl who wore a beret as regularly as most of us wore headbands.

  Rose nodded. “The editor of Cardinal’s Song!”

  This was our college’s biannual poetry journal, which had been the first to publish a student who’d gone on to become a fairly well-known (relatively speaking) poet.

  “Oh,” I said. “Why’d she drop out?”

  “Her modern lit prof got her pregnant! She went home to Milwaukee on spring break and paid this woman two hundred dollars to get rid of it, and she couldn’t stop bleeding! She just called me—from the hospital! She said the doctors there are telling her she’s lucky to be alive! And her parents aren’t letting her come back to school!”

  This is what I remember: The black bedspread under which Rose huddled (where’d she find a black bedspread anyway?), trembling as if it had a life of its own; the Emma Goldman poster above her bed, whose curled right corner needed more tape; the muffled shouts and laughter from the field hockey game on the athletic field her window faced.

  “What’s going to happen to the teacher?”

  Rose wailed.

  “Nothing! She told her parents it was him, but they don’t want a ‘scandal’! So they’re making her drop out!”

  I know I’m not the only one with these stories. And the fact that I’m not makes me think, thank heaven for Roe vs. Wade. Now people can go to real doctors, in real clinics.

  The thing is . . . I always wanted to be a mother, but I could never carry my pregnancies very far. Even though logically I knew it wasn’t my fault, I still felt it was. And I think women who have trouble conceiving babies or miscarry them are often antiabortion: how could anyone be so cruel as to get rid of something we want so badly?

  I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and these are my personal conclusions: Your story isn’t mine. No woman owes me her baby. If you believe you can’t have a baby, I shouldn’t have the power to say, “You must.” For too long, men (and some women) have thought they have control over women’s stories, not understanding that every single person has the right to have power over their own story.

  I know there are those who ask, what about the baby? I understand that. I ask that question myself. I desperately wanted my pregnancies, hoped that they’d grow and become babies I delivered, but there are women who desperately, for many reasons, do not want their pregnancies to grow, who do not want to deliver a baby.

  At the clinic, I heard antiabortionists shouting at a young woman, “God will punish you!”

  What gives them the divine insight to know what and why God punishes? And how is the puni
shment that God does or doesn’t mete out to someone else any business of theirs?

  Long ago I wrote about my own miscarriages, and many readers wrote in, saying things like, “Oh, don’t worry, you’ll have another,” “It was meant to be,” or this: “It’s Nature’s way of expelling something that wasn’t right.” Most people were truly concerned, but some, probably thinking I was being overdramatic, reminded me that it was no big deal, after all, I could just try again! It’s funny, some of those people who thought my miscarriages were nothing to get upset about and that I only lost “a couple cells” are the people I know who most oppose the legalization of abortion. When a miscarriage is natural, it’s God’s will, and it’s “all for the best,” but when a woman chooses to lose “a couple cells,” it’s murder.

  Liz gets a kick out of chaperoning school dances. She likes seeing the kids all dressed up, perfumed, and cologned, likes the mix of shyness and bravado, likes watching the awkward moves a cool kid can make and the smooth moves a nerd can make on the dance floor, likes the decorations (lots of orange and red crepe paper and glittery leaves taped onto the walls in celebration of Fall Fest!), likes whatever disco-ball lighting effects the AV club comes up with, likes (even while missing the live bands that used to play) hearing the music the DJ spins. What she definitely does not like is being yelled at by a parent.

  After a bathroom break, she’s on her way back to the gym, when a woman marches toward her, her face nearly as red as her dress.

  “What exactly are you trying to prove?”

  “Hello, Mrs. Bancroft,” she says, having met the same woman at open house earlier in the school year, although her voice then had been much more modulated.