American English, Italian Chocolate

by Rick Bailey

  “In Rick Bailey’s memoir, readers will find short essays filled with poetic language and the feel of a satisfying short story. In writing that is filled with quick humor and poignant tenderness, Bailey’s experiences reflect our own humanity back to us.”

  —M. L. Liebler, poet, editor, and author of I Want To Be Once

  “Rick Bailey’s writing sparkles with wit and self-deprecating humor, provoking laughter that hurts with the recognition of our own foibles and faults. His keen observations transcend the ‘small’ subjects of these short, powerful essays.”

  —Jim Daniels, author of Rowing Inland and Eight Mile High

  “Rick Bailey is insatiably honest, addictively affable, meticulously observant, and beautifully precise.”

  —Lisa Catherine Harper, author of The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage

  American English, Italian Chocolate

  American English, Italian Chocolate

  Small Subjects of Great Importance

  Rick Bailey

  University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln & London

  © 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

  Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image © Stocksy/Michela Ravasio.

  Author photo courtesy of Tiziana Canducci.

  Acknowledgments for the use of copyrighted material appear in Source Acknowledgments, which constitutes an extension of the copyright page.

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938202

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  For Tizi, Lisa, and David

  Contents

  1. Big White Birds

  2. Boy Scouts, Ringworm, and Paris

  3. Sound Off

  4. Kissing Age

  5. There Will Be Horses

  6. Sick Wild

  7. The Man from Glad, Car Crash, Amnesia

  8. Clinical

  9. Psyched

  10. Love and Breakup in the Time of Watergate

  11. Love at First Shite

  12. Feet First

  13. For Donna, Ibsen, Pepys, Levitation

  14. The Soft Imperative

  15. Third-Wave Coffee

  16. Wisdom Teeth and Encyclopaedia Britannica

  17. What’s Up with Dramatic-Value Vomit?

  18. Old Houses, New Residents

  19. Bee Spree

  20. Hello, Mr. President

  21. Chemical Neutral

  22. Pure Corn

  23. Fly

  24. The Honey Room

  25. Bridge Failure, Heart Attack, Fava Beans

  26. Monkey, Nail Biting, Jesus

  27. Cardio, Lightbulbs, and a Funeral

  28. The Rule of One

  29. Water Me

  30. Feathers

  31. The Quality of Your Sleep

  32. My Father, Going Deaf

  33. No Secrets, Victoria

  34. Flip-Flops and the Leaning Tower of Pisa

  35. Ravioli, Richard III, and a Dead Bird

  36. Apri la Porta

  37. Buongiorno

  38. What’s New

  39. Small Beans

  40. American English, Italian Chocolate

  Source Acknowledgments

  1

  Big White Birds

  I’m not supposed to see this: a woman is stopped behind me at an intersection, cell phone pressed to her face, her free hand chopping the air while she gives someone what for. This sunny Tuesday morning in June, the grass is green, the trees are in full, gorgeous leaf, and the woman’s face is breaking into jagged pieces as she pours out her anger. I fix my mirror, the better to see her. It’s a private moment, but I can’t help but watch because some years ago, on this very corner, my wife and I were having such an argument, and I was chopping the air too, a grotesque mask of anger on my face, and we were being watched.

  But on that day my wife was in the car with me, and the person watching was beside us, not in front of us, watching us with a bemused look on her face, not unlike the look on my face right now. When I stopped fulminating and took a breath, my wife turned and looked out the window at the woman spectator.

  She jerked a thumb in the woman’s direction. “What’s that bitch looking at?” she said.

  The light changed, and we both burst out laughing, which meant whatever the conflict was, in all likelihood, we were going to get through it.

  When the light changes, things are getting worse for the woman behind me. I drive through the intersection, watching her complete a left turn. Then I see it: a male mallard standing by the side of the road. Never a good sign. I slow down and see, flattened on the centerline, a female duck. But for the orange feet, it looks like a savaged sofa pillow. I feel this tightening in my chest. Who wouldn’t? Who doesn’t love a duck?

  For a month or two every year, we have ducks in the neighborhood, in our yard, in our ditch. We have two ducks, a male and a female. We’d like to think that, like us, they mate for life. They squabble, they bully each other and shut each other out, but they hang in there and make things work. This idealized notion of duck love, it turns out, is a fantasy. Termites mate for life. Wolves and swans mate for life. Ducks do not.

  We’ll look out an east window of the house and see two heads bobbing in the ditch, or we’ll see the two of them squeezing through the fence to get to the neighbor’s bird feeder. Sometimes they sit under one of our apple trees and have a conversation. She says, “Quack.” And if my sources are correct, he answers—when he does—with a soft, low-pitched, slightly uxorious “Rhab-rhab.” Wherever they go, she goes first. He follows, more brilliantly colored, slightly wider, possibly dumber, possibly mesmerized by her tail. And wherever they go, they almost always walk.

  Why on earth do they walk?

  Why would they squeeze through a fence when they can fly over it? Why would they walk across the road? Maybe it’s a relief not to fly. Flying is hard work. In seasonal migration, ducks fly fifty miles per hour at altitudes up to four thousand feet. With a fifty-mile-per-hour tailwind, they cover eight hundred miles a day, a trek so demanding they then take three to seven days to rest and feed and recover.

  But in the case of these ducks, our yard ducks, my belief is they don’t fly because when they fly, they don’t really know where they’re going. They know our yard and Beverly’s yard. They’ve been to John’s yard across the street. Let’s waddle over to Beverly’s and see if she put out some of that corn. They know the Mississippi flyway and their flight plan between here and Arkansas and Louisiana. But otherwise, I think they’re pretty much lost most of the time. When they take off and get above tree level, how do they know where they’re going? Do they think, Hey, I saw some water over by the library. Or, Let’s fly over to Drayton Plains. I don’t think so. They must think, Where the hell are we going? And, Whatta ya say we head back to the ditch and chill? It’s not like they’re looking for other ducks to hang out with. Unlike geese, which get mobbed up, ducks seem to pair up, find their little bowers of delight, and lie low.

  We refer to these two as “our ducks.” My wife refers to them as Mr. and Mrs. Mallard. We have the idea, probably ridiculous, that the same ducks come back to us year after year. Like our ditch is their Poconos, and the lovin’ is easy.

  So seeing the dead female, even if it’s not our female (and how can I be sure?), and her swain by the side of the road, even if they don’t mate for life, is a shock. I feel vicarious mallard grief.

  The dead duck—and our fantasy of the two of them mating for life—reminds me of the miraculous appearance of swans in Freeland one year.

/>   “Let’s go for a ride,” my father said one Sunday.

  As a kid, I remember having a sense of total disorientation, usually in the car, usually at night, my father driving, my mother sitting next to him, my brother and I in the back. I would wonder, a pit of fear in my stomach, How can we not be lost? How do they know where to go?

  We took lots of rides on Sundays, usually in the late afternoon. While my parents talked in the front seat, my brother and I looked out the car windows, hoping the ride would lead to Mooney’s Ice Cream Shop in Saginaw. Some days my father would take circuitous routes to fool us, so we would have that moment of surprise when we recognized at last where we were. If we found ourselves on Brockway, that odd hypotenuse in mostly perpendicular Saginaw, we sat forward in our seats, eager for sweets. But this particular day, I knew Mooney’s was not in the picture. We were going the wrong way. As I monitored our left and right turns, the farms and barns and bean fields, I got the idea we were going to Breckenridge, which should have meant a visit to my grandparents. No such announcement was made. The mood in the car was somber. My parents talked, when they talked at all, in hushed tones. Something was wrong.

  We passed the road to my grandparents’ house. Then came a turn I recognized, toward Henry and Kathryn’s house. Henry was my father’s childhood friend. They had been in the war together, Henry on a ship in the Pacific, my father operating a radio for the Army Air Force. My father was the last one to see Henry’s brother Don alive. They met by accident on a train moving troops. Don had a box of fried chicken his mother had sent him. They sat on the train in the middle of nowhere, ate chicken, and talked about home and where they thought they were going. When the train reached Chicago, they said good-bye. From there my father went to Guam. Don went to Italy and was killed.

  Henry was my father’s age, but he looked older. He had smoker’s gravel in his voice. His face was red, tracked with blue veins and broken capillaries. He had a substantial gut, spindly legs, and tattoos on his right arm. He seemed ill at ease around kids. When we swung into Henry’s driveway that day and got out of the car, my father pointed at the rope swing hanging from the willow in the front yard. He told us to stay outside.

  Ordinarily on a Sunday afternoon, Henry and Kathryn’s son Billy came outside, and we played together. That day he did not. Billy wasn’t there. My brother and I killed time for a while. We took turns on the swing. We threw rocks at frogs in the ditch. Finally we went inside to ask, politely but firmly, still thinking of Mooney’s, when we were going to get out of there.

  My mother was sitting on the sofa in the living room with Kathryn, whose face was red and distorted, her eyes swollen from crying. My father was at the kitchen table talking to Henry. When he said something quietly to him, I saw Henry sit back, shaking his head, and blow a stream of blue smoke at the ceiling.

  We were given a few vanilla wafers and ushered back outside. A few minutes later my parents came out of the house and pulled the door shut behind them. We rode in silence back to Saginaw, went to Mooney’s, and got ice cream.

  On the ride home I crunched on my cone. My brother, two years older and a better listener, leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Henry has a woman.”

  “Huh?” I said. “A what?”

  He put his finger to his lips. “A woman,” he said. “Henry’s got a girlfriend.”

  I couldn’t make sense of it. How could Henry have a girlfriend? I looked at my parents, at the space between them in the front seat of the car. Had my mother, I wondered, ever sat over there right next to him in the car? Had they once held hands? I’d seen them all dressed up and dancing together at a social function one night and found it to be funny and embarrassing. What were they doing? The thought of them having a life separate from each other had never occurred to me. Nor had it occurred to me that they could ever want to be with anyone else. Every night, after they turned the lights off, I heard them kiss each other and say good night. Five kisses.

  “Good night, sweetie.”

  “Good night, dearie.”

  When I came downstairs the next morning, they were up already, in the kitchen, being parents.

  Henry, Kathryn. A woman.

  My father sat up straight in the car, as usual, but that day he seemed a little smaller, like something had crumbled inside of him. We seemed vulnerable.

  Sometime after that, there was a small commotion in town. It had rained hard for a week straight. The Tittabawassee River had risen above its banks and flooded the flats on both sides of the river. Word traveled: there were swans west of town. On the next Sunday afternoon we got in the car, drove across the bridge, and stopped on the west side of the road, joining a throng of people looking out over the flooded remains of a cornfield. A hundred yards out, two swans swam in the brown floodwater. My mother had brought binoculars. We took turns looking at them.

  “Where do you think they’re going?” someone asked.

  No one knew. We just hoped they would stay and maybe come a little closer. When it was my turn, I held the binoculars to my face and brought the birds into focus. All the buildup. They were kind of a disappointment. What was the fuss? They were just big white birds.

  The next day they were gone. A week later the floodwaters had receded. In the stretches of river water left in low sections of the field, carp flopped around, slowly suffocating. As far as I know, the swans never came back.

  2

  Boy Scouts, Ringworm, and Paris

  I came perilously close to going to a two-week Boy Scout camp. My brother had gone a couple of times. It seemed natural that I would go too. I liked swimming, I liked tents and knives, I liked tying knots. But all that stuff about medals and badges, about merit, filled me with performance anxiety.

  During the first few meetings I went to, in the school gym, we all stood in line a lot. At attention. We saluted a lot. We saluted no one in particular. The salute was like a toast, To Scouting!

  We recited the Boy Scout pledge: “Something something something, brave, clean, and reverent.” One Tuesday night I had to fold the American flag with Mike George. Actually, I had to do it for Mike George. He had rank—I think he was a lieutenant. It was our nation’s flag, deserving of our respect, I got it, but he was so pious and grim about it, glaring at me like the flag was going to be part of a funeral—my funeral if I didn’t do it right—that scouting just did not make a good first impression. Reverent was a reach for most of us in that room. Don’t get me started on clean.

  I went to a cookout one Saturday in Wardine’s Woods to earn my cooking badge. (“Cookout” was not the official Scout term. I think Lieutenant George called it a bivouac.) The Tenderfoots—not Tenderfeet—had to use pathetic aluminum mess kits to rustle up grub over an open fire. No hot dogs allowed. I remember looking at Reed Leman’s chow. He was poking at some meat sizzling in the pan. He told me it was turtle.

  His brother Glen said, “Yeah, turtle.”

  “Where’d you get it?” I asked.

  Reed said they’d caught it and killed it, just a few minutes ago. Now they were cooking it.

  His brother Glen said, “Yeah, killed it.”

  I warmed up some ground beef, gave my potatoes a bath in a panful of not-hot water, and burned my fingers. Mike flunked me on account of the potatoes, while Reed Leman passed with flying colors. His potatoes were covered in savory turtle gravy. His brother Glen said, “Yeah, gravy.”

  That February, still a Tenderfoot, I spent one miserable night at Bear Lake, a “polar bear” event. Before going outside to sleep in tents in subzero temperatures, we sat in the mess hall eating chicken neck soup that the dads (“masters” in scout parlance) had prepared. My tentmate, Howdy Richards, had three bowls, spitting out vertebrae like dice as he ate. The masters announced they would sleep inside, in case we needed them. Mike George made ready to sleep in a hole he dug in the snow. When Howdy and I trudged out to our pup tent, all I could think was, What’s good about this?

  And now, the summer of my twelfth year,
I was going to spend two full weeks at Bear Lake?

  That’s when ringworm came to visit.

  I was thinking about ringworm the other day, waiting at the gate to get on a plane in Paris, where I had amused my bouche for a week. A twenty-something woman sat down across from me. She had red Lady Godiva hair and a red passport. She wore a gray jumper, black stockings, and knee-high black leather boots. I had decided to stop reading A Movable Feast—figuring I didn’t really need it anymore—and to wait patiently instead. I would enjoy a moment of vacancy and watch people.

  This woman took out her computer, turned it on, and began to read. While she read, she groomed herself. She braided her red hair into red rope and threw it over her right shoulder. Then she went to work on her face. She scratched at blemishes on her cheeks, above her eyebrows, and on her chin. Every so often she would purse her lips left, pinch a pimple on her right cheek, and pull a cone of flesh from her face, stretching it, holding it, then stretching it farther, to the breaking point. When the cone snapped back in place, she looked from her computer to her thumb and forefinger, rolling something between them, evaluating each specimen of human matter she had harvested before letting it fall to the airport carpet. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  She reminded me of a boy I used to watch during church services when our kids were small. He picked and scratched at himself through the service. For some reason, his mother favored the front row, so the entire congregation could watch him while he inspected and then ate every bit of organic crud he scraped from his flesh. Before having a bite of Christ, this little manimal served himself himself as an appetizer.

  When it was announced the flight would be delayed, the red-haired woman was swatting her left ear. The action reminded me of a duck I’d seen in the yard, whacking its ear with a giant orange foot.

  The summer I was to go to Boy Scout camp, I noticed a red spot the size of a dime on my belly. It looked like a sunspot, its circumference raised and fiery red, the interior a crater of glowing pink-orange. It didn’t hurt or itch. It was just there. Then I noticed one on my neck. After a day or two, a few more spots appeared on my arms. When I showed my mother she took me to the drugstore and consulted Fred Gaul, the pharmacist. He looked and thought, looked again, and then said, “Hmmm.”