Snakewoman of Little Egypt

by Robert Hellenga

  “Do you want to return the clothes?” she asked. “It’s okay if you do. My mom can take them back if you don’t want to. She knows everyone at Field’s. In the women’s department. It wouldn’t be a problem. And we could walk back to Département Féminin in the morning. We’d still have time to catch the train.”

  I turned on my side so I was facing Claire. “I like your parents,” I said, truthfully. “You’re lucky.”

  “I feel like a little girl when I’m home,” she said. “Safe.”

  “And at TF?”

  “I have to be a grown-up.”

  “It’s all right, Claire.”

  “You’ve been my student all semester, Sunny, and I’ve been your teacher. But now I think it’s the other way around. I think you’re the teacher and I’m the student. You have all these great stories, about your husband shoving your arm in a box of rattlesnakes, about shooting him, about casting out demons, being in prison, and raising that woman’s daughter from the dead, and that evangelist getting bit and dying and then the people in the church telling the police it was a heart attack. What have I got? A nice house and a priest husband and two kids who spend all their time in front of the TV.”

  “I didn’t raise anyone from the dead,” I said.

  “But you were there.”

  “You’ve published a novel.”

  “Yeah, and nobody read it.”

  “What about your affair with the astrophysicist?”

  “I’ve got that too, but it’s nothing to brag about.”

  “Write about the collision of the Milky Way and Andromeda, or the heat death of the universe.”

  She laughed.

  “Everything is material, Claire. That’s what you told us over and over in class.” Everything is material. Intentionality is the enemy. Be open to surprises at every stage of the way. Write shitty first drafts. There are only two stories: someone goes on a journey; or someone comes to town. “Araby” and “Cathedral.” I was running out of advice. Claire’s advice. “This trip is material,” I said. “ ‘What was your agenda? What did you want to happen? What obstacles did you encounter? Was it a success or a failure? Why did you want me to come with you? What did you want to happen? What did you learn? Did anything take you by surprise? Did you discover something you really care about?’ You made it sound easy in class.”

  “This is what I wanted to happen, Sunny. I wanted you to be my friend. I wanted you to be my sister.”

  Now I was taken by surprise. Really taken by surprise.

  Claire turned over on her other side and I snuggled up behind her and put my arm over her, and we went to sleep that way, and when I woke up in the morning, Claire was gone.

  12

  A French Christmas

  On Christmas Eve Jackson drove home from his office in the early afternoon. It had snowed the night before. Not too much. Just right. Snow plows had cleared and salted the roads. The sun was out. Jackson put on a pair of clip-on sunglasses he kept in the dash.

  The thesis that had emerged spontaneously from his field notes was “managed ecstasy.” Think of the festivals of Dionysus, or of Demeter, think of Mardi Gras, think of the dance of the molimo among the Mbuti, think of all the indigenous communal rites and festivals—in the Caribbean, in Africa, in Hawaii, all over the globe—that Christian missionaries had been at such pains to suppress. Think of Christmas. Think of the early Christian church itself. There was no rational reason to join the church in the first century. Why subject yourself to ridicule, alienation, even persecution? You joined because you’d experienced something: ecstasy. And ecstasy was what the Church of the Burning Bush was about. Not sexual ecstasy—though Jackson thought of Sibaku, bathing in the river; of Suzanne leaning out the window on the rue Stanislas wearing her blazer over a white blouse but no pants; of Sunny growling with pleasure as she approached a climax and whispering nonsense in French—but something larger, something that Freud was never able to acknowledge: collective ecstasy, stepping outside of one’s self into a larger whole. The people in the Church of the Burning Bush had come to this experience the hard way, out of a rural culture that had been marginalized in the modern world, and the church, like the ancient festivals, offered them a sacred space—however irrational and even misguided—in which it was safe to explore ecstatic experience. It was impossible to imagine them sitting quietly in their pews, like Episcopalians.

  He stopped at Bertrand’s Cellar on State Street for a bottle of crème de cassis and a bottle of champagne. Expensive, but it was Christmas Eve. He was thinking about cutting a Christmas tree but Sunny had objected. She had no objection to shopping, no objection to presents. She’d just spent a small fortune in Chicago with Claire. But she wanted a secular Christmas.

  His present for her was a trip to Paris. In June. He had the nonrefundable tickets—direct flights from O’Hare to Orly—in an envelope in his briefcase. They would stay in the residential hotel on the rue de Lille where he’d lived with his parents. They’d go to Suzanne’s country place in the Dordogne and visit the excavations at Abri Pataud. He’d propose to her in the Café Anglais. There was a picture of it in the Time-Life Classic French Cooking. They’d hit the tourist spots, of course. The Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Montmartre, Les Deux Magots. They’d walk along the Seine, take coffee at one of the bars near the Hôtel de Ville, where he’d skated with his parents, and spend an afternoon in the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution in the natural history museum. But they’d also go to special places that Suzanne had shown him: the Square d’Orleans, the garden at the Musée de la Vie Romantique, or the Irish Cultural Center (the Centre Culturel Irlandais).

  She’d cleared the drive, which always drifted over when the wind was from the north, a second time. The sensation of entering a magic realm came over him, as it often did, as he entered the woods, where the snow had not drifted, and where a woman he loved was waiting for him in the valley below, which she called a bottom.

  Jackson had never gotten over Christmas. He still experienced the special sense of time that anthropologists recognize as sacred time. Like sacred places—Mount Moriah, Saint Peter’s, Half Dome in Yosemite, the sequoias, the Mountains of the Moon. Traces of sacred time still resonated in popular commercial culture: the “magic” of Christmas. But there was a deeper resonance too, the experience of time unfolding not just as one damn thing after another, but as a cycle of observances or festivals anchored in the cycle of the seasons. Among the Mbuti—no calendar, no winter, no snow. But he’d still felt Christmas in his bones, meshing with one of the irregular Mbuti festivals.

  He could smell wood smoke. Sunny had built a fire. She was out in front, filling the wheelbarrow with logs from the woodpile. She tossed a log into the wheelbarrow and waved exuberantly. Maya, who was watching her, turned her head to look at Jackson, and what Jackson thought at that moment was that they should go to Paris that night and get married in Paris. Why wait until June? Or go tomorrow. Saturday. They could fly to Paris on Christmas day and get married at the Mairie on Monday. He’d call the travel agent, and he’d call Suzanne tonight. He looked at his watch. Three o’clock. It would be nine o’clock in France. Although there was probably a residency requirement. They could go for two weeks, three. The second semester at TF didn’t begin until the end of January. Almost the end.

  It was three o’clock. The sun was still shining, but the snow was not melting. It was too cold. He helped Sunny with the logs and followed her as she pushed the wheelbarrow around the deck to the back of the house. She’d stacked up enough wood for a week.

  Inside the house was nice and warm. Sunny added a couple of logs to the wood stove and checked the humidifier. The ceiling fans were going, pulling warm air up to the ceiling and forcing it down the outside walls.

  “Let’s go to Paris,” he said. “Tomorrow. I’ll call the travel agent. They’re still open. We can go tomorrow. Stay for three weeks. We can stay at Suzanne’s apartment. They’ll be at their country place in the Dordogne.”

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p; She laughed. “What about the millennium party? You’ve invited thirty people to a party a week from Saturday.”

  “We’ll cancel. People will understand.”

  “What about a passport?”

  “You don’t have a passport?”

  “No, why would I have a passport?”

  “You can get a passport in one day at the passport office in Chicago.”

  “And I’ve got to start work on my hot-snake certificate.”

  He could see that she was right, that he’d gone temporarily insane. “Then let’s put up a Christmas tree,” he said.

  “Now I see what this is all about!”

  “Forget Christianity,” he said. “Think of it as a midwinter festival, a Saturnalia, a celebration of the harvest, the introduction of agriculture. Restoring the mythical golden age. Propitiating the threatening forces of winter.”

  “Okay,” she said. “We won’t go to Paris, and you can have a Christmas tree.”

  He didn’t mention the tickets in his briefcase. When he closed the shutters over his desk, he was aware of a beam of light, the same beam of light he’d seen back in September. But weaker. But you could see it. You could see the dust motes if you looked carefully.

  He ran his finger through the beam and then he looked out through the crack between the shutters.

  “Look at this,” he said.

  Sunny looked.

  “Do you see it? The beam of light.”

  “Barely.”

  “You see all the dust motes?”

  “I see them. Barely.”

  “But you can see them?”

  “All right, I can see them.”

  “You’re looking at the beam, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Now come over here. Look along the beam. Between the crack in the shutters?”

  She looked.

  “What do you see?”

  “What do you think I see? I see outside.”

  “But what exactly.”

  “I see a lot of finches and nuthatches, and chickadees at your squirrel-proof bird feeder. I see a woodpecker, I see two cardinals on the railing. And beyond that, the stream, the bridge, the woods.”

  “That’s the difference between looking at Christmas and looking along Christmas. When you look at it, you see a lot of old pagan customs that have been cobbled together with Christianity and the modern advertising industry.”

  “And when you look along it?”

  “When you look along it? You get a glimpse of the ecstatic core that lay at the heart of the ancient religions.”

  “The magic of Christmas? ‘Frosty the Snowman’? ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’?”

  “Frosty and Rudolph too,” he said.

  They cut a Scotch pine from a stand of evergreens at the very back of the property, which bordered on a cornfield. To the south of the evergreens was the old Indian burial mound.

  “I’m saving it to dig in my old age,” Jackson said. “I don’t want the state archeologists getting involved.”

  “How do you know it’s an Indian burial mound?”

  “Just look at it.”

  “Looks to me like an old wood pile that somebody abandoned a long time ago.”

  Jackson laughed. He was lying on the ground under the Scotch pine, sawing through the trunk with a curved pruning saw. “My dad hated Scotch pines,” he said. “The needles are too sharp. There’s too much sap. My mother liked them because they didn’t drop their needles.” Jackson looked up at the sky. “In another fifteen minutes it’ll be dark,” he said. “We could get lost.”

  “Yeah.”

  “This Indian burial mound can be disorienting.”

  “Yeah.”

  “One night we had a molimo party,” he said, “and everybody came out here, and we couldn’t find our way back.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “How about Maya? Did she get lost too?”

  When Maya heard her name she jumped up on Sunny.

  They dragged the tree together. They were both wearing gloves, but the needles pricked through the gloves.

  Jackson set it up in a new kind of stand that could be adjusted to hold the tree up straight no matter how crooked it was. That is, once you had the tree locked into the stand, you could adjust it any way you wanted. He’d used it only once, before he got sick. It was not a very nicely shaped tree, and it was pokey and sticky. But it was a tree, and once they got it on the stand, it stood up straight.

  Sunny modeled her new clothes while Jackson put the lights and the ornaments on the tree, coming down the stairs in her little black Audrey Hepburn dress, then in her beige sweater and slacks, then in her new lightweight blue blazer for spring over a white T-shirt and pair of Calvin Klein boot-cut jeans, and finally in a checked blazer for winter, a striped shirt, brown bag and matching shoes. She modeled the French scarves from Département Féminin, the opaque black stockings, the T-shirts, the tight-fitting strapless bra, a French teddy—everything except the cami–cache-coeur outfit and the putty-colored skirt, which she was saving for the party.

  By the time she came down in her Egyptian cotton pajamas and warm slippers, he had the lights and ornaments on the tree and was in the kitchen, fixing omelets.

  The Flavor of France was open on the kitchen table to a Christmas Eve menu in the back of the book. “This is what we should have had,” Sunny said, saying everything in French: huîtres, Estouffat de Noël à la Gasconne avec des pommes de terre à la vapeur, salade de mâche, Camembert, et Crêpes Grandgousier for dessert.”

  “Next year,” Jackson said.

  After supper they were going to watch a French film about a drunk who wants to be a circus performer and a painter who’s going blind, but on a sudden impulse Jackson got his parents’ old slide projector out of the basement and brought up several boxes of his mother’s slides. He and Sunny were both a little tipsy.

  The slides were in trays. Thirty slides per tray. All labeled by Jackson’s mother in her neat handwriting. In special slide boxes. Jackson hadn’t looked at them since his mother’s death. Since long before that. None of his cousins had wanted them, and he hadn’t really wanted them either, at the time, but now he was glad he hadn’t thrown them out.

  There were several boxes, each containing a dozen trays of thirty slides. It took him a while to find what he was looking for. PARIS 1971–72. He’d been twelve years old. After the initial shock of going to a French school, the Collège Saint-Denis, it had been the happiest time of his life. And, he thought, in his parents’ lives. His father had been a visiting professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études.

  His mother had taken the slides, and she’d labeled each one with a fine-nibbed pen in her neat handwriting.

  The bulb was burned out, but there was an extra one in the projector case. When he put it in, a powerful beam of light lit up the wall above the piano. He could see the beam itself, full of dust motes, like the shaft of light he’d watched that afternoon, but more powerful. He put in the first slide. He could still see the beam, but when he looked at the wall, he could see himself, a younger self, standing between his parents in front of the residential hotel on the rue de Lille, not far from the large office that his father shared with the editor of the Revue d’assyriologie, whose book was being published by the University of Chicago Press and who had arranged his father’s visit. He looked at the beam of light again, and then at the screen. He ran his finger through the beam. He looked up. Sunny was watching him.

  “You ready?” he said.

  “Any time you are,” she said. She thrust both hands in the beam of light and a black bunny appeared on the screen, blocking the image of him and his parents. And then a black dog that looked like Maya, and then a flying bird. An then a couple kissing.

  “Where’d you learn to do that?”

  “Vacation Bible school,” she said.

  “Not the last one?”

  She shook her head. “Not the last one.” She laughed. “Let’s get this over with.”
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  He looked at her to make sure she was joking and advanced the tray to the next slide.

  His mother, who had taken a year off from her job as a librarian at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library, had busied herself with small things in Paris. She loved shopping in the small markets. Stopping for a coffee at the café. Stopping to chat with the woman at the boulangerie and the men at the different butcher shops, for pork, beef, horse, who offered free advice. She loved the apartment with its little terrace overlooking the street. She took pictures of everything: the café, the bistro where they ate twice a week; the Cave Rue Fabert on the rue Fabert where the proprietor let Jackson help him seal wine bottles with wax; the dead stuffed rats in the window of a shop that sold rat traps near Les Halles.

  There was a slide of Jackson with Claude Lévi-Strauss, a former director of the École, shortly before Lévi-Strauss was elected to the Académie Française. Slides of him with the concierge, on the carousel in the Luxembourg Gardens, at the puppet show at the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. There were slides of students in the courtyard of the Sorbonne, wrapped in long university scarves; slides of the Christmas lights on the Champs-Élysées: and one of the three of them, taken by a stranger on Christmas Eve, ice skating at the Hôtel de Ville. Jackson between his parents, holding their hands, unsteady on his rented skates.

  “Did you have to speak French at dinner?” Sunny asked.

  “Yes. It was hard at first—hard for me—but then it got easier.”

  He got out his Guide Bleu and located the residence hotel on the foldout map. On the rue de Lille.

  Later, after he’d been graduated from the University of Chicago, Jackson had taken a year off and gone back to Paris. He hadn’t taken a camera because he hadn’t wanted to look like a tourist, but later he’d regretted it. He had a picture, somewhere, of the apartment he had shared with Suzanne Toulon on the rue Stanislas, not far from the residential hotel. By this time his parents had divorced. It wasn’t a bitter divorce. It was amicable. They’d simply gone their separate ways. One day they were married, the next day they weren’t. His father stayed in the apartment in Hyde Park and continued to work on the Assyrian dictionary at the Oriental Institute. His mother got a job as a reference librarian at the Blackstone branch of the Chicago Public Library on South Lake Park. She moved into a small apartment on Fullerton, near the Church of Our Savior, which she attended for the rest of her life. Neither remarried. And what Jackson wondered, as he followed Sunny up the stairs, was what his parents saw when they looked back on that time in Paris. Would they have recognized the handsome couple in the slides of them skating in front of the Hôtel de Ville or sitting at a bistro table, holding hands, or standing at the flower stall at the Métro stop at Place Maubert? And he wondered if from a distance of twenty years he would recognize the forty-year-old professor sitting on the edge of the bed, eager as a young man, and the beautiful woman sitting next to him, pulling off her jeans.