Juliet wants to do something in the kitchen—birthday cake, I don’t let myself think—so I’m sent out. The younger women accompany me. Neither Cory nor Liza has been here to our house before. I walk down to the garden with them, the three of us holding beers, and they aren’t awkward at all, but laughing with each other as I quiz them about school and plans for fall like a perfectly typical old fart of an English professor, which is exactly what I am. Liza already knows me, but Cory isn’t sure how to comport herself. They’ve both got acts for being around friends-of-parents, secondary acts for profs, but I don’t want to see those masks, give them what clues I can with body English and eyes: You two go ahead and say whatever you want, be yourselves.
The sunset is in progress, glorious deep orange under high clouds rising in perspective off of Mount Blue. I mean, really, unusually vivid color, and it lights up everything around us. The young women aren’t ironic about this, but gaze out at all the big color and let it fill their faces. And the color just gets more intense after the sun falls through the last ridge of cloud and below Spruce Mountain, which is the shoulder of the more imposing Mount Blue. The fiery orange goes floral pinks then a heavy, living red.
“Fuck wow!” Liza says, coining a phrase I have used since.
Cory checks me for language opprobrium, finds none.
“Like tripping,” I say, that old saw, trying to break the generational ice, but it’s completely true for once—this is trippy as hell—the sky actually seems to be raising itself up over us, this ridge of cloud coming in heralding tomorrow’s rain moving briskly and seemingly upward and over us, still fully lit, lighting us and everything around us, but moving, too, expanding, pushing out over us.
“A man after my heart!” Liza squeals, meaning about the tripping. Cory giggles at her old pal’s openness and raises her hands to the sky and well, fuck wow! We all slug at our beers. These girls are partiers. They’ve let me know, and it’s good to be trusted by anyone, but especially by these young women, these lovely, brainy young women, with all their plans and mistakes and loves and successes and endless days ahead of them.
Back at the house I bustle. Swordfish on the grill, vegetable skewers around it, close the lid for smoky flavor and carcinogens. Tablecloth on the deck table (a beautiful old cedar rig, owned by our housesitter, actually, so another friendly nod to him). And Barb and Jan set the table and open two bottles of wine while Juliet and the younger women talk seriously about art and then life—no cussing—art and life with their arms folded seriously in front of them, all nodding with the truth by the cold woodstove as the screen door bangs and the food bowls swing past. Juliet is someone other women like immediately, young or old.
I rush dinner to the table, and everyone helps, salads and potatoes and fish and vegetables, and we’re all a little buzzed from beer as we dig in. The fish is unbelievably good, moist, fresh, sweet, tender. And the rice is nice. And the vegetable skewers are awesome! Cory says. Everyone buzzes in delight, even Liza, who is supposed to hate fish. And the salad is great and the wine is fine, and we toast (We’re gonna have a good time!). Just a very nice meal on the deck (I built this deck with my dad and a college-kid helper in two weeks, three years back) with no bugs and with four candles and both beautiful young women across from me. And beautiful Juliet beside me—also funny as hell, my own wife—and lovely Jan to my left hand and handsome Barbie at the other end of the table. Barb telling us about a new boyfriend. Lots of general boyfriend talk and much laughter. And Cory says sadly that she and her boyfriend have just parted.
“Oh, I enjoy breaking up!” spouts Liza in response. She’s abominable! We laugh, and laugh some more. Jan asks if I did anything special for my birthday.
I tell the eel story at boring length, I admit, but it’s my birthday, tell the whole story of looking for surprises from the river, and finding them. It’s risky material, in a way; I’ve never told anyone but Juliet about my lucky basket, for example. This is private stuff. But it’s me and it’s my birthday and I tell the story and that’s the way it is. Cory and Liza watch me closely as I speak: odd man. Barbie looks at me skeptically: this kind of stuff, she never knew about me. Jan keeps her eyebrows raised in what might be interest. Juliet, she’s weighing when to break in and change the subject, but it is my birthday. She lets me go on. And I tell them about the eleven-ball shard, trying for some irony, but now, for a moment their interest flairs: what could eleven refer to? What meaning there? What magic?
“Eleventh hour!” Liza says ominously.
“November,” says Cory.
“Eleven lords aleaping,” says Barbara, the cynic.
“Age of puberty?” says Jan.
“Football team,” says Cory. This is funny, somehow, and we all laugh.
“I’ve got some new paintings,” Juliet says.
And off we go on that subject, a good damn thing.
As the food disappears, I remember the bottle of champagne that’s been in the fridge all summer, go get it, pop it open with a dramatic if amateurish splash on the table. The older women, they’re red wine. But Liza’s eyes light up, and Cory’s, and within ten minutes they’ve drunk the entire bottle between them. And any reserve they may have shown at dinner, any deference to their elders, any uneasiness around Mom and mom-types, any queasiness about eels and the secret superstitions of middle-aged men, all that’s gone.
Jan and Barb clear the table. Juliet has disappeared somewhere. Then they’re all singing: Happy Birthday to You. And the lights go out and here comes Juliet bearing this nice store cake, angel food in half chocolate icing, half bare, and four candles burning, the whole familiar script, four candles instead of forty-six or forty-seven, which I blowout succinctly. No one will be spanking me. My secret wish is for love all around. Barb’s got a story about the guy who built her studio. And Jan a story about her ancient father. I’m quiet, now, having told my stories. Juliet tells her funny story about being alone in Greece, with its awful ending: some Greek businessman squeezing her neck in an alley and her drunken escape.
Cory tells the funniest story I’ve maybe ever heard, about getting caught stealing from the Peanut Farm (which is a little gift shop in Farmington, owned by people we all know well). Then Liza: a riotous tale of breaking up with a loser boyfriend! We are screaming with laughter. Then Cory again, a story about getting caught in a fraternity riot at school in Arizona—she does the most perfectly hilarious imitation of herself holding a beer as everyone but she punched and rumbled and finally ditched when the cops came, and how nothing happened to her at all, though she never moved. The table’s covered with plates and wineglasses and bowls and odd scraps of food (the dogs work the under-table buffet), and we’re all sitting around it practically dancing, turning and twisting and throwing our hands in hilarious gesture, flinging our heads back in laughter. Laughter, laughter, and it echoes out into the empty woods.
But suddenly we hear tires screeching down the road, someone peeling out with unusual violence, peeling out over and over, backing up, peeling out, engine roaring, and then we hear a woman’s voice yelling, Go away! Hoarse and afraid, that voice, and it keeps going on. Get out! I’m scared of the guy who lives down there, no doubt about that, no chance I’m going to stroll down there that quarter mile and have a word with him. Instead, I call the cops.
And pretty soon, over the repeatedly screeching tires and the continued yelling and screaming, we hear the super-tuned engine of a cop car coming over Porter Hill nine-hundred miles an hour, and see his headlights swing across the fields below us, and hear him stop down the road, hear his door slam. Then we hear this good officer talking. The miscreant must be someone he knows. Miscreant belligerent, officer soothing—we can just barely hear the tones, the too-human sound waves carrying over the dew-wet fields as they might over a lake, carrying in the clear air, still night. Then a loud Fuck you! And more screeching tires, sweep of headlights, roar of engine, changing gears, up and over Porter Hill. Then some sound of the woman berating the
cop, too. What a job he’s got! Shouting from the woman followed by his calm tones—much drama—until it all fades to quiet, nothing, and the night is around us.
We’re all quiet then, too. Except for my saying that I’d never heard anything like this in seven years here. Of course the fireworks had to come tonight. Some nice neighborhood you’ll think we’ve got here. And then the cop car, cruising slowly, back over Porter Hill.
We at the birthday party all sip wine, no eyes meeting. Whoa! The wild interlude (my neighbors on all sides having heard the same noises and having also called the police will talk with us about the eerie tire-screeching of that night for months), the dog-day disturbance, has stopped us cold. Then Cory again, bless her heart, breaks the spell with a tale of terror—apropos—from her college. Men and their fucking violence. This guy in her dorm. But Liza’s got a funny example, and then Cory a funnier one yet, and before long we’re all laughing again. Fuck wow! But really, the night is about over.
Eleven o’clock already. We get up one by one and clear the table, assemble finally in the kitchen amid lots of smiles and last Happy Birthdays and more stories and a couple more plates in the sink and dishwasher, plans for the coming weeks, a couple of preliminary goodbyes.
Cory says, “Hey, show us that eel!”
“Agh,” says Liza.
It’s in the refrigerator, plastic bag. I pull it out. Jan just doesn’t want to see. Juliet has seen it already, so the two of them back away and talk their own talk, hug by the door, intermediate goodbyes.
“Ick,” says Liza, as I open the bag.
“That’s an eel, all right,” says Barbie wryly. She has seen it all. “That’s a hell of an eel.”
And, I don’t know, suddenly metaphor takes over, and it’s like I’m showing them my cock. Liza, at least, recoils just the way she might if I did, has had enough, joins her mom and Juliet. Barbie drifts inward, lost in her own thoughts, turns back to the sink, stacks a plate or two, gives a yawn. Cory’s interested in a clinical kind of way, the nurse of our metaphor. She says, “Show me the head.” And I do, and it’s just an eel, that’s all, a fish of the sea swum all the way to our place for my birthday, habits at sea unknown.
Goodbye, goodbye. Off go the Saabs into the night. Juliet and I do some more straightening and cleaning. Midnight, and we’re in bed, the warmth of the day still suffusing our upstairs room, a nice breeze sneaking through the screens to cool us. By dawn it’ll be cold, but we’re snug.
And then there’s the roar of an engine, and more of that goddamned ghostly screeching, three or four passes by our drunken neighbor in front of his house, then one good one in front of our house, then nothing, just silence.
“You have a crush on Cory,” Juliet says kindly.
“Who wouldn’t?” says I, knowing Juliet has one, too, and all the world, a crush on the young.
“That is true,” says Jules.
We lie there in the dark, and the day is done, and I am forty-six, Pop, thanks to you and Mom and every lucky chance these 16,801 days, and one more day down.
Scioto Blues
If you move to Columbus, Ohio, from Farmington, Maine, you will not be impressed by the landscape. It’s flat around Columbus and the pre-prairie rivers move sluggish and brown. In Maine you pick out the height of flood on, say, the Sandy River, by the damage to tree trunks and the spookily exact plane made by ice and roaring current tearing off the lowest branches of riverside trees. In Columbus you pick out the height of flood on the Olentangy or Scioto rivers by the consistent plane attained by ten thousand pieces of garbage, mostly plastic bags, caught in tree branches.
Always in the months after I moved I was looking for a place to run the dogs, Wally and Desmond, who are Maine country dogs used to the unlimited woods. We started on a subsidiary athletic field at Ohio State—long, kick-out-the-jams gallops across mowed acres, lots of barking and rumbling—then leashes to cross Olentangy Boulevard and a parking lot, so to the Olentangy River (my students call it the Old and Tangy), where the boys swam hard just across from the Ohio Stadium, known as The Shoe, in which the football Buckeyes famously play.
By the time the university started building the gargantuan new basketball arena in the middle of our running field, the dogs and I had found Whetstone Park, a big urban preserve a couple of miles upstream, just across the river from Route 315, which at that point is six-lane, limited-access highway. Really, Whetstone’s a lovely place, well kept, used in multiple ways, though not much in winter, always the sounds of 315 in the air like a mystical waterfall with diesel power and gear changes. There are athletic fields, a goldfish pond, picnic areas, tennis courts, basketball courts, an enormous and important rose collection in a special area called Park of the Roses, just one section (about three miles) of an all-city bike path, tetherball, speed bumps, a library branch (in satisfying possession of my books), fishing spots on the Olentangy River.
Which runs through Whetstone after a scary trip through a couple of suburban towns (Route 315 its constant companion), through a dozen new developments and several parks, past or near at least six shopping malls, also through the backyards of people who love the river, love it to death. Indeed, the detritus at its banks in Whetstone is emphatically suburban. Plastic grocery and other store bags of course dominate, festooning the trees in various colors, the worst of which is the sort of pinky brown that some stores use in a pathetic and surely cynical attempt to imitate the good old kraft paper of the now fading question, “Paper or plastic?” The best colors are red and blue, because at least there’s that moment of thinking you see a rare bird. Garbage bags are part of the mix, too, but heavier, so lower in the trees.
Certainly plastic soft-drink bottles come next in sheer numbers. These things float best when someone upriver has put the cap back on before flinging, perhaps out of a car window. Or perhaps not flung, but only left beside a car in a parking lot along with a neat pile of cigarette butts from the emptied car ashtray. Come to think of it, these bottles are probably seldom thrown directly into the river. The plastic walls are thin, so plastic bottles aren’t always the long-distance travelers you’d think. Cracks let water in, and silt. The bottles don’t end up often in trees, either, because they are light enough and smooth enough for the wind to knock them free. They are everywhere, though. They rule.
Tires occupy their own category, and come in two sorts: with and without wheels. Those with wheels are heavy but float, so end up high on logjams and in trees; those without wheels get caught up in the silt and mud and form strange ring-shaped silt islands or, buried deeper, show just a little tread as part of a sandbar, or deeper yet, disappear from the world of light and air entirely, perhaps to emerge in a century or two, or a millennium, or more. They aren’t going anyplace.
Next there are car parts other than tires. Like bumpers and doors and hoods. These must be dumped at riverbanks, is my guess, off the edges of parking lots built too close to the water, then carried by floods. Occasionally, too, a whole car gets in the water, and slowly demonstrates the second law of thermodynamics: all things seek randomness. Entropy continues its work of unworking, and the car spreads downstream. The iron involved is at least no problem.
Aerosol containers make a strong showing in the river, those former dispensers of paint and freon and deodorant and foot spray and whipped cream and so forth. Indestructibly happy bobbers, these canisters are capable of long trips, clear to the Gulf of Mexico, I’m sure, and before long into the oxygen-free, Lake Erie-size dead zone the Gulf now boasts. But some do get up high in tree crotches and last there for years—decades if they’re of stainless steel. WD-40 as a product gets a special mention here, for the paint on the outside and the oil film on the inside keep these cans alive and recognizable for years wherever they roam.
Newspaper and other print matter turns up but disappears just as fast, leaching what it leaches into the water. A special category of printed matter I ought to mention is pornography, which I often find high and dry, the park being i
ts entry point into the river. Juggs was one magazine I happened across. It had many photos in it of women who’d had obviously harrowing operations. Also, some kind of trading cards that featured various young women naked. These I discovered clipped neatly by the bark flaps of a shaggy hickory at the eye level of a large adolescent or small man, footprints and dribbles beneath, the whole gallery abandoned after our riparian onanist had done his work.
Other items: prescription medicine bottles, but not in abundance; mattresses common, usually appearing as skeleton only, that is, the springs; pens of endless varieties, mostly ballpoint, ubiquitous, some working; twisted shopping carts; tampon tubes of pink plastic made by, I believe, Playtex (plenty of these, from flushes, giving lie to the idea that sewage is well managed upstream); guardrails; lengths of rope of various types; lengths of cable, mostly Romex; joint-compound buckets (but these are fast fillers and sinkers and join the silt banks permanently with their tire friends and with broken glass bottles).
Glass. Any glass that turns up (except tempered, as in windshields) at least turns back to sand, squandering its legacy of power and fire. The rare complete glass bottle with lid does float by, but these are goners, baby; first rock they encounter and it’s smash, step one toward beach glass for kids to find. Eyeglasses you’d think would be rare, but just in the last year I’ve found three pair, lenses intact.
Into Woods Page 14
