by Rick Bailey
But this dramatic-value vomit is a modern thing, a movie/TV thing. Entertainments past? I’m pretty sure no one vomits in Shakespeare for dramatic effect. In all thirty-seven plays put together, in a total of 807 scenes, the word “vomit” occurs only six times, “puke” only twice. And usually it’s figurative vomit.
You might expect to find some emesis in Shakespeare, as it figured prominently in the practice of medicine in his time. To keep the four humors in balance and to restore the patient to health, doctors prescribed emetics to induce vomiting, or laxatives, or proceeded to a salubrious bloodletting. In “Sonnet 118,” Shakespeare writes, “We sicken to shun sickness when we purge.”
The closest we come to dramatic-value vomit in Shakespeare is when Hamlet, standing in a graveyard in act 5, scene 1, holds up Yorick’s skull and addresses him/it: “a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times, and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it” (my emphasis). If Hamlet were to hurl, it would be justified. But in the all the Hamlets I’ve ever seen, he doesn’t. It would be superfluous. Hamlet can say what’s on his mind. There’s no need to show us. Possibly in contemporary productions, a director of Hamlet would suggest, “My gorge rises is your motivation to rush downstage and honk into the pit.”
Please don’t make it so.
No, in Shakespeare, there are no vomits, dramatic-value or otherwise.
And fortunately, Shakespeare also predates the shower as dramatic time-out. If there were ever a shower scene candidate, it’s Macbeth. When he asks, contemplating his murder of Duncan, “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash the blood clean from my hand?” you might picture him thinking that while slumped against the tile walls in the castle shower, steam rising around him, signaling confusion, incarnadine waters guttering in the drain.
So too Lady Macbeth, with steam rising around her in the shower, might deliver the lines: “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” and “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” She scrubs her hands, asks: “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.”
Who wants to pause for a shower?
You might think the dread Lady, as she becomes more unhinged, would vomit at least once, before her exit.
She doesn’t need a shower or dramatic-value vomit. She just uses her words, and the show goes on.
18
Old Houses, New Residents
A couple of gay guys have moved into the Berlin house. As far as I know, this is something new in the neighborhood.
The houses in our neighborhood go by the names of the families who lived in them. There’s the Whittaker house, the Hawkins house, the Stahl house. We’ve lived in the Hawthorne house for twenty-six years. Before us were the Youngs, who didn’t stay long enough to give their name to the house. You have to live in the house for years and fill it with kids and then empty it of kids. Once it’s empty and you’re left wandering around listening to echoes, it gets your name. I guess we’re there.
But I’ve thought lately, especially since I’ve been watching a lot of Doc Martin, that it might be nice to just drop the “The,” elevate the “H,” and call our place “Hawthorne House.” Have a little sign painted and nailed above the front door. The shortened name would give our house a kind of stature, make it seem English-y. “We’re having a little gathering at Hawthorne House on Saturday. Care to join us?”
For about ten minutes I entertained the idea of giving the house its own name. I found an English-house-name generator online. I was asked to choose three terms I could associate with the house. I chose “good view,” “trees,” and “sheep.” Okay, there are no sheep around, but the atmosphere is bucolic, so think metaphorical sheep. See those squirrels? Next, what is the house near? Down the hill behind us is a minor pond that gets warm and gicky in August, home to a couple of large, primordial turtles. “Pond” was not a choice. I went with lake. Finally, a color that relates to the house. When our son was three, he always referred to it as “our blue house,” possibly because at that time the leaky cedar shakes, once slate-gray, had been so weathered and generally sun-blasted they appeared kind of blue.
I clicked “Okay” and then came the names, none of which seemed apt. “House at the End of the Vale.” Too isolated. “Court of the Rushes.” Too bustling. “Lake of the Swan.” Too Yeats. “Blue River.” Huh? Was I supposed to put “cottage” or “house” on the end of these? Blue River Cottage? Lake of the Swan House? House at the End of the Vale . . . House ? There were lots more choices, all of them terrible. I had a feeling we were heading for “Love Shack in the Glen . . . House.”
No sooner did the gay guys move into the Berlin house I began to notice traffic over there, first cars, then trucks. On the side of the trucks I saw the future: marble countertops, hardwood floors, elite plumbing. Yard lights squirted out of flower beds newly plump with impatiens. Urns and potted plants appeared.
I rode by on my bike one day. One of the new owners was outside applying sealer to the paving stones with a roller.
“Rick.”
“John.”
“You live in the Berlin house,” I said.
“The Berlins,” he said.
“Three owners back.”
“Well, there’s a lot of work to do.”
“It’s looking good,” I said. Before the Berlins was the guy from FEMA. Before him the FBI agent. Ten years back, in its prime, it was the Berlin house because the Berlins had lived there forever.
He said he liked the Berlin house better than the FBI house.
While we were talking, a van pulled in the driveway. Custom Kitchen and Bath.
So there goes the neighborhood, I thought, but in a good way. Except pretty soon, our house would start to look so dowdy and ordinary and, well, hetero.
There are also new occupants in the house directly across the street from us, in the Baker’s house. It’s called that not because of a family named Baker. The historical owner was a baker, an Armenian kind-of-misanthrope who left for work in the predawn hours for twenty-five years, walked his black dog in the yard, and did not respond much to friendly overtures. I only know his name was Mike. I never wanted to say “Mike’s house.” It seemed familiar.
These new residents of the Baker’s house are shadowy figures. They are young. They have lots of cars. They never seem to be home. I think they are renters. Occasionally I see a young man smoking on the sidewalk outside the garage. When I walked out to get the newspaper one morning I heard him talking on his cell phone. Actually, he was yelling. “How the fuck can someone make that much money in sales?” It was 5:00 a.m.
I was getting ready to water the rhododendrons and geraniums the other day when, looking out the living room window, I saw a lawn chair in the Baker’s yard and a young woman lying on it, in a swimsuit. I don’t know what I saw, I really don’t, but what I thought I saw was a young woman sunbathing topless in the Baker’s yard. That would also be something completely new in the neighborhood. What about the small children living next door, in the Adida house? What if they saw a sunbathing topless woman? We have binoculars, strictly ornamental things, sitting on a windowsill in the living room. For a second, I considered fetching them, just to verify. Was that a strap I saw on her right shoulder? I pictured the young woman sitting up, applying lotion to her bosom, and then looking across her lawn, across the road and our lawn, meeting my binocular eyes and waving, holding up her hand, making a loose fist, and extending her middle finger in my specific direction. I didn’t look. Really, I didn’t.
The baker was still living in that house when my wife and I backed down our driveway early one morning some twenty years ago. We drove south to the airport, boarded a plane, and flew to New Jersey. Alan, a friend of ours, was dead. Maybe our most important friend, the one responsible for bringing us together in college. We landed in Newark and drove to the Jersey shore, to the home he had shared with Allen, his partner.
It
was our first time meeting this new Allen, who told us that he had bought a funeral plot close to a big tree in the cemetery, which he thought Alan would like. He told us that before his final hospitalization, our Alan had flown to Arizona to see his parents, to try again to explain his life to them, to try to reconcile and to prepare both them and himself for his death, and that he had been once again terribly, even brutally rejected.
On this a warm summer day we sat on the porch drinking lemonade. We met surviving Allen’s parents, who were warm and gentle and, like their son, haunted by the terrible last weeks and days. When the time came, we drove to a funeral chapel. The casket was closed. There was no ceremony. We just had time together, with our Alan’s small acquired family.
Before we left, Allen pointed at a table and told us we could take some photos of our Alan. There were a lot of them. Help ourselves.
We approached the table. There were, indeed, a lot of photos. In all of them, our Alan was dressed as a woman. He wore a blond wig, a sleeveless dress. He mugged lasciviously at the camera. We picked up one image after another, looked at each other, and set them down. That wasn’t how we wanted to see him. It wasn’t how we remembered him.
I wish now that we’d taken one of those photographs. I would have put it away, probably with the letter he wrote telling us he was sick, a letter I’ve never been able to read a second time. Probably I wouldn’t ever look at that photo again, either, of his other self, the one he evidently wanted to leave us with, but it would be there.
Old houses, new residents.
One Thursday morning I’m taking trash down to the road. It’s 6:00 a.m. The residents of the Baker’s house set their trash out the night before, in flimsy plastic bags the crows plunder. It’s not uncommon to see bones and eggshells in the street in front of their house. I glance over at the Berlin house and check out their garbage can, which is brand new, more like a vase (rhyme it with Oz) than a can.
Who are these people? Do we want to know? Can we ever know?
We could try.
“Hey, we’re having a little gathering at Hawthorne House on Saturday. Care to join us?”
And they might say, “Sorry, we’re busy.” Or they might say, “Who are the Hawthornes?”
Our response would have to be, “Really, we have no idea. For the time being, it’s our house. Come to our house.”
19
Bee Spree
Yesterday I committed apicide. And I took pleasure in it.
Actually, this wasn’t my first time. When it comes to bees, I am a serial killer, an apicidal maniac.
Every so often, bees appear and take up residence in and around our house. I’m cutting the lawn and see one disappear under the bay window on the back of the house. On the next pass with the mower, I see two or three, or five or ten more come and go. This summer they have infiltrated the house through a gap in some shingles, just above the front porch. I watch the traffic for weeks. I’m not sure where they’re going, but I know I don’t want them in there. Mostly these are little guys—I would say honeybees. They are not aggressive. I can get in their little faces. They are not distracted. They are all about their business.
A few years ago carpenter bees made a home in the cedar fascia and soffit outside our screened-in porch in the back. Carpenter bees are big brutes, the size of bumblebees, with broad shoulders and a fierce buzz. They cast a big shadow, a menacing, inky blot that moves across the screen in midafternoon. They drill a perfectly round five-eighths-inch hole in the wood and make a ninety degree turn. Then they bore into the wood. During the worst of this invasion, some afternoons when I sat inside and it was perfectly quiet, I am sure I heard them—tick tick tick—gnashing their bee teeth, gnawing on our cedar.
The popular solution, recommended by the Michigan State University gardening center, is to use a turkey baster to puff Sevin, a fine, lethal powder, into the holes they bore. I can’t imagine why this method is popular. Gravity works against you. In the injection phase of the campaign, you squeeze and hold the baster bulb, lower the baster tip into the poison canister, and let the bulb go, drawing the powder up into the baster tube. Then you hold the baster aloft, insert the tip of the baster into the hole the carpenter bees have bored, and vigorously squeeze the bulb to puff poison up into the carpenter hole. The problem is that the powder obeys gravity and your Sevin spills back down the tube of the baster. It’s hard to get the goods to the bees. To foil these pests, I roll small cotton swabs in the powder and insert them in the holes. Coming home from work, a bee has to drag his weary wings through the poison and past the swab and, in the process, hauls the swab into the hive, if it is, in fact, a hive. Thus do I deal out doom. It works.
Honeybees are more challenging. There’s more of them. For some time now I’ve used a heavy vacuum cleaner, a shop vac, running a few inches of water into the bottom of the can, positioning the end of the hose at the front door of their hive, and letting the appliance run. Poor bees. As they approach their home and power down, slowing their flight to enter the hive, they are sucked into the vacuum cleaner. The bees leaving the hive on a search mission, they too are powerless to avoid the suction and the hose. In a few hours’ time, you can dispatch a great many bees—hundreds, I would say. Once I’ve depleted the population, I give the nest a generous shot of Raid and mew up the queen and survivors, hoping to finish them off. I don’t like to think of their demise, the maelstrom of air and water, the confusion and terror of their last moments. But then, neither do I like to think of their settlements inside the walls of my house. It’s my house. I will fight to maintain the boundary between my world and theirs.
When I was in college, a professor who had recently become a father talked candidly about his protection fantasies. He said he lay awake at night imagining what he would do if an intruder broke into his home and threatened his wife and baby. He described these musings, with a hint of embarrassment, as his “Straw Dogs fantasies” (for the Sam Peckinpah movie in theaters at the time, an orgy of violence starring brainy little Dustin Hoffman). “You will understand one day,” he said to us. When I became a father, I did understand. And in this way, I also vaguely understand those who arm themselves and celebrate the Second Amendment. They live rich fantasy lives. They are their own well-regulated militia.
But bees.
Not just bees, but honeybees, symbols of impending environmental collapse. I know we need them. I know I should call someone. There must be a bee whisperer out there, some ingenious and generous soul who can conjure them, lure them to safety so they can fulfill themselves. Or in an ideal world we would learn to coexist. In exchange for my no-shop-vac, no-Raid pledge, the bees would vouchsafe a no-sting, enjoy-our-honey pledge. But that’s nonsense.
When I hear the buzz, I go on high alert. They can live where they want, and they definitely have a place in the scheme of things. But around and in my house? No. I will stand my ground.
20
Hello, Mr. President
In this dream, I’m having a plane crash.
I’m sitting in the full lotus position, dropping through space, alone. It’s cold and dark, windy and noisy. I’m confused at first, but then I get it. Someone else is going to have the crash. I just happen to be outside the plane, falling. I gather that my death is imminent, and somehow I know that I’m falling toward the sea. At first I feel terrible regret about all I’m going to miss in this life—my wife, my kids, my grandchildren. Then, after a few thousand feet of freefall, comes resignation, acceptance. I picture the eventual search detail looking for me. And suddenly, in this dream, I’m glad I wore my new long-sleeve jersey from the Gap. It’s bright. It makes me easier to see, in parking lots, for example.
I picture my wife in a search plane, its engines droning, a headset clamped to her ears, binoculars pressed to her face, as she surveys thousands of square miles of desolate ocean.
A uniformed guy sitting next to her says, “What was he wearing?”
“His new shirt from Gap,” she says.
“What color?”
“Kind of a . . . cerulean,” she says.
Uniformed guy nods, thinks, gives up. “Just gimme a color,” he says.
My wife the color theorist explains that it’s a kind of blue, a hue, really, somewhere between pure blue and cyan. She says that I looked good in it (choking up when she says this), that I was easily recognizable, in parking lots, for example.
Crap, I think. Blue! They’ll never find me now, lost in the blue, blue sea.
And then the dream fades to black. I don’t hit the sea.
I don’t die.
Experts say you don’t die if your dream fall is completed. I’ll have to take them at their word. I’ve never actually finished the fall. I’ve never hit the sidewalk after falling from a tall building. I’ve never crashed into the desert in a poof of dust, Wile E. Coyote–like, after falling from a cliff. Even when, barely asleep, I stub my toe or fall off a bicycle or slip on a patch of ice, triggering that annoying hypnagogic jerk that wakes us up, I never totally fall. I don’t skin a knee or bump my face. Is there pain in dreams? I don’t recall feeling pain in a dream. Is there death? All those reports of seemingly healthy people who die in their sleep—you start to wonder. Who’s to say they didn’t dream-fall to their dream- and actual death? There’s no test for that.
Experts also say a person is likely to have a falling dream a half a dozen times or so in a lifetime. Here’s a list, courtesy of those who study dreams, of the most common recurring dream themes: falling, flying, losing your teeth; being chased or naked or late; water dreams; test dreams.
Everyone must have their own list of recurring dreams. I have a recurring house-filling-up-with-water dream. Usually it’s a house on a hillside. It’s someone else’s house; nevertheless I feel a strong sense of responsibility and desperation in the dream as I slosh from room to room, eventually escaping out the back door onto a veranda, where water reaches my waist.
