The Art of the Wasted Day

by Patricia Hampl

  That was what he wanted to tell me, I figured—give me that sense of importance. I thanked him, and though I saw that he would like to sit longer in the smoky room, I wanted to go. And I did. On to the next thing.

  Surely he’s long gone by now, the old man stuffing his clippings into his coat pocket, ordering another beer, staying in the dim bar after I scurried away, glad to be free of him.

  Then last year he appeared again—not him, but the rest of his message. I think that’s what appeared. Another boring event, another just-say-no occasion where I had shown up, done what was asked of me. You can count on me, and there I was at the Czech hall where my grandparents had danced. I was supposed to read an excerpt about the old neighborhood from my first book, one I never read from anymore, the one the old man had wanted to talk about. The program, devoted to “the working-class history of St. Paul,” was organized by the state historical society. Six people engaged in family history projects were making presentations, one after another, unused to public speaking, yammering away. Yet another way to lose an evening of life, sitting there, listening, pretending to listen, making to-do lists in my head.

  I was second to last on the program, read my couple of pages, sat down, waiting for it to be over—just one more person to go, an older woman with a bad hip shagging up to the front to report on her father, a blacksmith many years dead. She displayed a photograph, a long horizontal print crowded with workingmen outside the old Great Northern Railway shops. The names of the men were on the back, she said, and she began reading them off. Good Lord—this is never going to end, tears of boredom forming in the corners of my eyes. Frank Hampl, she read, the name leaping out of her litany like a reprimand.

  I went up to her afterward, asked to see the photo, knowing I couldn’t possibly pick him out of the group. My eye went right to him, the family laser beam latching. He looked tough and romantic, a young Johnny Depp. A tender bruiser. Hollywood in that face, one of those fuck-you-love-me faces of the bad-boy lead. You know, the woman said shyly, they say it wasn’t an accident.

  I stared at her. The hideous fall into the boiling vat of water, the poor guy (as my father always added) who hadn’t realized Frankie was down there—he had to live with that. The accident.

  He was very prominent in the union, you know, this daughter of a brother blacksmith was saying as we both stared at the historical photo. Very big in the union effort. Some thought it wasn’t no accident.

  The dim deco bar, the man cramming old clippings in his jacket pocket. I have something I want to tell you.

  If I had stayed for his story, instead of just tossing the vignette in the beaten-up shoebox of memory . . . well, we’ll never know now, will we? Was he in possession of this vignette, the telling moment? Or was he—was it possible—was he . . . the poor guy? Live with it, live with never knowing. Plenty to ponder, nothing, finally, to narrate. This is life, not art.

  The welter of images, the absence of a controlling narrative. Life itself in its disarray, being life, refusing to be tidied into a story. And then the story refusing to be refused. Protesting formlessness. Insisting on resolution, on shape.

  I’ll never write about Frankie again. He isn’t a vignette anymore. And never again can it be an accident.

  * * *

  —

  Now, warm in our winter house, another vignette comes flickering forward as the light fades tonight—one I never told you, which is strange, given the subject, given that I told you everything, sometimes over and over again (crazy about you, just crazy about you). This one is mine and not an inheritance:

  Midwinter, a Saturday afternoon at the Olympic, the skating rink across the street from the house where I grew up. The day is gray. A piercing cold safeguards the freshly flooded ice, keeps it hard. We skate on the cloudy glass, barely nicked by the early skaters, of which, as always, I am one. This is years before the heart-thumping Friday nights when I will hyperventilate over whether Tommy Hough or Billy McGehan or someone will ask me to skate with him. My arctic entry into erotic life is years ahead, but it will always have something of ice in it.

  This is still childhood. We’re skating separately, boys zigzagging on their blunt hockey skates, practicing slap shots with their sticks, girls treading along in white boots whose slim blades have toe picks that look as if the metal were cut with pinking shears. We skate, five girls in a row, holding hands. What will we do when we grow up? This is our subject.

  We glide round and round. Carol Bardis says, “I’m going to have five children, same as my mom.” Joyce O’Neill is quick with her own showy number: “Ten,” she says tartly, at nine already a Catholic matron who will take her chances with the rhythm method.

  I’m a crack skater, an accomplishment I wear with feigned modesty. I’m on the ice every day, practicing relentlessly. I would like skating lessons, but my father says no, I will stick with the piano. We can only afford one extra. I can pull myself into a tight column, spinning like a wand without falling in a dizzy heap. Cutting the ice backward, pivoting forward, fearless in my turns and jumps, executing swan dives and the rarely attempted shoot-the-duck that involves a crouch, speeding on one skate—all this I do. Even backwards I do this.

  Other skaters stop and watch me. Sometimes they cheer. I pretend not to notice, pretend to be skating just for the pleasure of it. And it is a pleasure, though also it is this other thing. My cold little star glows inwardly, all faces turned toward me. But right now I’m just skating like everybody else, round and round the perfect ice with my friends as they announce their futures. I’m on the outside, taking broader strides than anyone else in the line as we round the curve near the warming house.

  Katy Masters will enter the convent, she says gravely, trumping everyone and bringing things to a momentary silence. Eileen McPherson, a sensible girl, soldiers on: she has decided on two, a boy (first) and a girl. She speaks with satisfaction as of something nicely settled.

  My turn. They’re waiting for me, the big talker, to ante up. What is my number? Always vying for first place, will I join Katy Masters in the convent?

  Confusion seizes me. Panic flutters in a zigzag neural pattern from brain to stomach and back again. An inner fizz of distress spreads everywhere. This is mixed up with something else I can’t locate though it’s even worse. Much later I recognize this other thing as shame, an emotion unfamiliar to me in my easy glory as a beloved child with good-girl bona fides, boring Father Kennedy and even myself with a tedious grocery list of low-grade repetitive sins toted up for confession on Saturday nights.

  I drop Eileen’s hand, fending off suffocation, and peel away in a showy flourish. No one thinks this odd—we form brief skating lines, and then sail off alone or go to the warming house for hot chocolate. The ice is free space. And everyone knows I like to skate fast, off on my own.

  But what is this, what’s happening? Why must I run away from this cheerful game? Why can’t I sing out how many children will be mine in the gauzy phantasm of the future we love to inhabit?

  I know why. Also I don’t know. That is, I know what it is, but I’m baffled by why it is.

  Zero. That’s my number. That’s how many children I will have. This is not a wish, not a decision. It’s not even a bravura abdication of the sort Katy Masters has announced. It is a recognition. This seed of self, unitary and vacant, is dead center, the moon-colored essence of my fate. It has announced itself at this icy moment and without my permission: age ten, winter all around me, and zero is my number. Why is that my number? I don’t know. But it is.

  I skate away, take to the ice. I shoot the duck, I rise again and lift my outstretched leg in a perfectly executed swan dive, winging my arms out, my head up to the blank sky. I do my tricks.

  I don’t understand what has happened. But that it has happened—that I know. It is a framed moment, not a story, but something much smaller, a spark of meaning I will return to all my life. The DNA of i
dentity. What, much later, I learn is a vignette, a photo frayed at the edges, its old silver frame stowed in the dark attic of the mind.

  A bare fragment of story, caught in the sticky amber of recollection. It isn’t even a subject, it’s the threshold of a subject, a necessary opening to a wider interior to be explored, considered, read like the book it wants to become. It is something insubstantial made substantial sheerly by virtue of its indelibility. A vignette shifts the mind away from storytelling into speculation. Why, why? A bit of narrative sand irritating itself into a pearl of thought. An essai in the making.

  The vignette is the construction site for a palace of values, a hand-built habitation, well sited, with views and loggias, stately gathering rooms and odd, intimate nooks. It leads down the rabbit hole of thought, not to the taut wire of narrative. And this, on the smooth surface of our home ice, is my first.

  But is it art?

  It is not. It’s life. That’s all, the sand-grit that works its way under the shell of the self. There are so many shifting sands, glinting in the winter light, moments that make a life, though not, alas, a story.

  * * *

  Summer now, and I’m sitting at Vlasta’s table, the Formica rectangle wedged between the tiny dark kitchen and the window along a scant passageway, another alleged room in this jigsaw apartment. A heavy drape with a jungle design hangs on a rod and serves as a door to the bath just behind my chair. Nothing is wasted here, every inch has a purpose, brought smartly forward for its moment, then falling back in formation until called up again. For now, this corridor serves as dining room.

  When Vlasta doesn’t have us out walking or hiking in the wine country of south Moravia, this is where I am every late July—at her table, taking in her perfect meals as if they too were a trek we embark on, hour after hour, moving slowly in place over the cuisine of the region she commands as surely as she knows the land, the vineyards, the forest trails. Restaurants are out of the question—foolishly expensive and that food. No, no, no. Put that credit card away!

  It won’t be long before the flower-patterned platters start emerging from the closet-kitchen. For now I’m supposed to keep sipping Becherovka from one of her mother’s Moser liqueur glasses, the cut glass incised so sharply it seems it would nick your finger if you didn’t handle it carefully. But you—that is, I—want to do everything carefully, gently here. It’s the point of being at her table. Rush has left the room, food has slowed the pulse. Pavarotti comes forward again—One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating.

  Gauze curtains over the window barely obscure, outside, ranks of the same kind of building we’re in—what the Czechs call panalaky, panel buildings, dour construction dating from the socialist era, slabs of cheaply made high-rises for workers to live in, or be warehoused.

  To be fair, these apartment complexes in Znojmo, a provincial south Moravian capital near the Austrian border, are less dismal than the taller high-rises of the Minneapolis West Bank where recently arrived Somalis now make their homes, turning that early-twentieth-century Scandinavian immigrant enclave of cottages and kitchen gardens into a neighborhood of halal markets.

  Modernism for the masses is aging in place everywhere, its proud reach now a bleak supplication to high heaven. A hopeful, if arrogant architecture. Its ideal lives on in its ragged reality—rising, yet sagging somehow, on both sides of what was for so long the essential opposition of my lifetime: East/West.

  Znojmo’s panalaky offer more cheer now than the aging Minneapolis high-rises—the cheap windows here have been replaced with triple-glazed insets, the elevators are sleek and assured. These buildings, once the gloom gray of the socialist color wheel (brown, gray, tarnish black), have been rouged up and wink in ice-cream pastels. Vlasta’s building is banana yellow. She owns her own apartment—private ownership is back, whereas the Minneapolis buildings are public housing rentals, a reversal of Cold War economic patterns.

  I’ve been returning these recent summers to Vlasta’s apartment, driving from Prague to Znojmo with my friend and hers Anna, a cardiologist and public health doctor I met in Prague right after the end of the Cold War. The two of them are hiking buddies, mad trekkers, mushroom hunters, knowers of forest lore, hardy campers, both aging out of the endurance hikes that brought them together years ago, but still game. I often have to stop on our hikes, pretending I’m taking in the view while they soldier on. In fact, I’m gasping to catch my breath.

  I know why I return, not for one of my “subjects,” though this year I plan to seek out another of my monastic heroes—not you and your nuns this time, but me and my monk: Gregor Mendel. The pea plant man? you said, puzzled, when I first proposed him as one of my exemplars of leisure. Why not Linnaeus? you said. If I was thinking about a life given over to the pacific naming and ordering of the flora world, the innocent age of science, wouldn’t Linnaeus be my man? After all, as I’d told you, my florist father thought of naming me Linnaea.

  But no—I’ll get to that, darling. Remember your Post-it note attached to the clipping about the twenty-fifth anniversary of Prague’s Velvet Revolution? What about how leisure fits in with the Cold War? Didn’t you say something about that at dinner? A connection? Discuss!

  You’re the one who googled, on a hunch, the date of Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri—March 5, 1946. Seven days before you were born! How pleased you were with that bit of research, making world history part of my lifeline.

  But beyond Gregor Mendel, what I’m looking for is right here at this small table, the Moser liqueur glass fracturing light onto the embroidered place mat (the meticulous work of Vlasta’s long-dead mother), the linen starched, ironed solid as plywood, yellow thread flowers with their green vine as perfect on the reverse as on the front. Care and tending, the art of domesticity—the art of gardening too, Gregor Mendel’s art. The force field of private life facing off against history’s hammer (and sickle). Vlasta and Anna have lived their lives—except this coda we’re in now—on the colder side of the Cold War. Yet here, I keep finding, is warmth curiously missing in America after all.

  The meal will be served in courses by pixie-like Vlasta, never-married Vlasta, who cared for her father and mother until they finally left the planet in their nineties. She’s well into her seventies, small pert head, precise movements, an operating room nurse’s sense of order, though in fact she worked as a shop assistant in a state-owned hardware store. She lives now on a pension no American graduate student could imagine surviving on. Even Anna, who was not favored under Communism and has not thrived under the new market economy, shakes her head in wonder: how does Vlasta manage?

  Light on her feet, quick, exact. An artist of the day, snapping her perfectly laundered linens on our guest cots, practically saluting from her high command on the battlement of the beautiful meal. Reed thin, an Ariel of the dumpling, sprite of a melting pork roast, beef svíčková limpid in its cream and tart berry sauce. And much to be said about the astonishing reincarnations she resurrects from cabbage, and pastries so airy they seem about to levitate off the faded china platter. This is the food of my Czech grandmother who left this region at the end of the nineteenth century and became a cook for “the rich” in St. Paul. Same food, same deft touch, same tricksy spirit. Paradoxically, the same ability to purvey luxury out of poverty.

  Leisure, we tend to think, belongs to wealth. Its ease is a result or symptom of success, a sign of an excess of riches. It’s what you get when you’ve clawed your way—or your father or grandfather did—to the top. Didn’t the Romans with their otium cum dignitate require a slave class to do the heavy lifting to assure their life under the grape arbors? Hasn’t history always relied on the toil of designated classes or castes to let it be a civilization? The shame of it—the cost of leisure being someone else’s hard labor and broken body. My grandmother’s bowed legs—rickets, my fathe
r said, frowning, when I asked about her cartoonish stance.

  My grandmother must have sensed the latent shame of “the nobles,” as she called the people she first served as a girl in Europe. Later in America, still a girl, becoming a culinary wizard who cooked for the “rich,” the word she used—as we did—to indicate her employers with amused, even affectionate contempt. We always had the sense, around her table, that we were having more fun. Being us was better than being them. There was something slightly ridiculous about being rich. In a college sociology course we were asked to name our socioeconomic class—working class, middle class, upper middle class, wealth (which had just that one word, “wealth” apparently lifted above class categories, in a range of its own). These were the choices. I was stumped. Finally I wrote—I still think accurately—serving class.

  After her, the next generation of women, her daughters, my aunts, childless stay-at-home wives who cooked for their uxorious husbands, whose lunch pails they outfitted with snugly wrapped sandwiches, scratch-baked slices of cake, a thermos of coffee. My Irish mother, “a working woman” (her proud term for her file clerk job), who married into this food-obsessed clan, was aghast at all this effort. She was glad, she said, to be “born in the frozen food age.”

  I first came to Czechoslovakia (as it was then), during the Cold War, because of this Czech grandmother (the iconic Czech novel is Babička—Granny—the domestic goddess of the nineteenth-century Czech Romantic movement, a touchstone not simply of family, but of the nation, the familiar grandmother figure as a stealth political operative with her knedlíky and kolačky). But even if my own Czech granny was part of my urgency in getting here, oddly enough, I didn’t seek out her past once I arrived. It was not she, after all, who first brought me here, but an unexpected collision with history.