The Magic of Found Objects

by Maddie Dawson

  The name Tenaj flashes across the screen on the caller ID. Now maybe it’s because I didn’t have any breakfast, or that I didn’t get much sleep, or that I have slight cramps and a headache—but I feel myself almost falling backward. I feel like black squares are filling in all the spaces in the air.

  I hear from my mom only very sporadically—the way you’d perhaps catch up with an old acquaintance after years of silence. And each time she calls, it’s to drop some random piece of information that just crossed her mind and perhaps tripped the wire that made the “Phronsie” bell ding in her head. The last time, about a year ago, she called to tell me that she was dyeing her hair black because when you’re bleaching it blonde, the color is so rarely just right. It’s often brassy or gold, or even too white. Didn’t I agree?

  That time I tried to keep her on the phone, plying her with questions about her life. That’s when she told me, laughing, that she was getting divorce number three.

  “Wait! Wait!” I said, in the same merry voice she seemed to be insisting on. “You’ve been married three times? Weren’t you the one who once told me that marriage was so terrible for women that you weren’t ever going to get married again?”

  She laughed. “Honey, what can I say? With this last one, I fell in love with a rich New Yorker who bought two of my paintings and was the benefactor to lots of artists I knew, and he loved my work the best, so when he asked me to marry him, what could I say? But it was a big mistake. Big, big mistake. I will not go into the details. Perpetuates the negativity, you know. Muddies up your aura if you’re not careful.”

  We never did get to the explanation of divorce number two.

  Darla keeps talking, something about airports at Thanksgiving. After a moment, my phone pings. Voice message. Despite everything, all the years of silence, which I am so used to by now, my heart can’t seem to stop pounding. Darla says, “Are you all right? Do you need to go take that call?”

  “No, no, I’m fine,” I say.

  Which is a lie. Fifteen minutes later, as soon as I can get away, I go into my office and close the door and lean against it. When I can calm my breathing, I press the button for the voice mail. And there is Tenaj’s voice, clear as day, as though no time has passed. There’s the breathiness, the slight laugh. She says, “Phronsie baby. I know it’s been ages, but I have something I need to tell you, darling. Hope we can connect. It’s important, too important to tell you in a message. So call me. Namaste, if that means anything to you.”

  I take three deep breaths and punch the CALL BACK button.

  “Hello,” I say softly.

  “Hi,” she says in her dry, gravelly voice. She always sounds like she’s just finished laughing and may start up again soon. “I know you don’t want to have anything to do with me, so I’ll get to the point. I keep getting messages from the universe that I’m supposed to give you.”

  I close my eyes, feel my heart start its rat-a-tat-tat.

  “I’m only telling you this because the universe is not letting me rest until I do, you understand.”

  “Oh, please,” I say. “I’d really rather not—”

  “Just listen, will you? I’m supposed to tell you that you’re about to make a big mistake. And to stop it.” She laughs. “So—there you have it—stop whatever it is.”

  “Well, that covers a lot of territory,” I say. “I shouldn’t drink my next sip of coffee maybe? Or is it my work I’m not supposed to do?”

  “You know what it is,” she says. “It’s probably not the coffee.”

  I look out the window at the office building across the street, at all the people in the windows having a routine, ordinary day. Who aren’t right now—and probably never will be—getting messages from the universe, courtesy of their mother.

  Mothers who didn’t leave and then forget to come back for them.

  She’s different now from the way she was when I knew her. I know that. I’ve seen her. For too many nights than is probably mentally healthy, I’ve been known to get up out of bed and find my way to the computer where I type her name into the Google search engine.

  What I’ve learned is that she’s somewhat successful now in the art world. She’s known for her “whimsical jewelry made from polished stones and glass and wire.” She has a little company called Spells and Blessings, and she produces bracelets and necklaces that give healing messages and bring world peace and love. There are pictures of her out in the world, wearing her long boho-style dresses and dangling earrings and necklaces. She has bright eyes and long crinkly hair, and usually she’s holding glasses of wine and smiling. Clearly she’s no longer shackled to whatever customers happen to come into her gallery in Woodstock.

  In fact, the Times profiled her once in their Home section, and showed her standing in a futuristic, all-glass kitchen with modern appliances. She was smiling into the camera and stirring a big pot of a famous love potion she’d made, which turned out to involve turmeric and ginger and other secret herbs that would bring long life and vitality, she claimed.

  The caption read: “Tenaj DeFontaine, artist, cook, and psychic explorer, knows the secrets of love don’t always reveal themselves without a little help from the unseen world.”

  The article said that Mrs. DeFontaine considers herself a free spirit and has had several marriages.

  “Mrs. DeFontaine says that love is out there for everyone. It just may not show up in the form we’re expecting.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  My mom was my lifeline in those clandestine phone calls when I was in middle school and high school. Girls at school being mean? Who cares? The important thing was to love yourself. And to laugh at anything that might take you away from all that love. The other important thing, she said, was to always be yourself, even if that person you were was weird and quirky and didn’t know anything about getting along in life.

  “You may not know who you are, but remember that nobody else knows who they are either. Those people who seem like they’ve got it all together? They don’t. You can always love everybody and everything,” she said. “Flow it to anybody you think you might hate. Flow it to that David Billy—”

  “Billy David.”

  “Yes, him, and to whoever else needs it. Hendrix needs a lot of it, my poor lamb. No, no, I’m not going to think of him as my ‘poor lamb.’ That handicaps him. I’m going to picture him in the bloom of safety and love and health. Everything happens for a reason, you know. Even his accident. We are all where we were meant to be.”

  I said that accident meant that I couldn’t have visitation anymore. It meant that I was adrift.

  “No, no,” she said. “It didn’t. It meant that you and I found this much more deeply personal way to connect. We’ll always have our secret, Phronsie. I love secrets.”

  One day I said as lightly as I could, “So, hey. I need you to tell me about you and my father and Woodstock. I want to know the whole, whole thing.”

  “Oh God,” she said and laughed. “Oh, man! That. It’s got a lot of parts you might not want to hear,” she said. “Things that might not be considered appropriate.”

  I was fifteen by then. We talked about things that weren’t appropriate all the time. It was sort of our thing.

  “It’s your love story,” I said. “Nothing wrong with a love story. And it’s my origin story, so I have a right to know it, don’t I?”

  I was hungry for stories of love, because I was in love with Billy David, and I’d even gotten grounded for making out with him in his truck parked in our driveway in broad daylight. And then, in the most romantic gesture I’d ever even heard of, Billy David sneaked over to see me two nights in a row when everyone was asleep. I sat at my window and he stood on the packed-down snow and we did sign language to each other. I love you.

  “Nothing you can tell me about Woodstock would shock me,” I said.

  I scooched down on the floor of the phone booth for this one, sitting there in the cramped space, in the dirt, next to the candy wrappers and an
old penny that somebody had dropped so long ago that it was fused into the concrete floor.

  “Well,” she said, and I held my breath. “First, a little background. I was twenty-three when Woodstock happened, five years older than your father. And very worldly! Ohhh, I was worldly. I went there because I had me a plan to meet the musicians who were performing. Not to be a groupie or anything. I wanted to design album covers for them. So I figured I’d meet a bunch of musicians and start doing portraits of them, you see? And that way I’d get to be a famous artist. So my best friend, Cissy, went with me, and we took along this other guy we both liked. What was his name? Oh! Gary Stephenson, that’s right. He was cute in a kind of artistic, I-don’t-have-time-for-talking kind of way. Very, very sexy. He talked with his eyes closed. And he had a beard. We loved his beard, and also the way he wore his jeans. Way low on his hips. And he didn’t wear any underwear. Said he liked going commando.” She laughed.

  I stayed silent just in case she’d remember I was her kid and would start censoring any juicy details. But she didn’t.

  “So we drove there in Louis the Lizard, which was the name of my old 1965 VW Beetle. Ha! You should have seen that car. He was some kind of faded horrible lizard green—well, I thought he was beautiful, but no one else did. He was the first car I owned, and he had a window that was about four inches wide and four inches tall, and it was so smoky from all the dope that got smoked in him that you could barely see out the back. Everybody got a contact high just from riding in him. With me so far?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Her voice got all dreamy. “We got on the road coming from Albany, and there were just cars everywhere. The traffic was unbelievable. We didn’t live that far away, just an hour or so, but we couldn’t really even get close. Cars were stopped on the highway, and everybody was heading to Max Yasgur’s farm, where the festival was taking place. Only as we got closer, the road was impassable, so we all got out of our cars and were standing around talking to each other and smoking joints and passing them around. Some people just left their cars altogether and were walking five or six miles with their sleeping bags. And the people! Oh my God. Everybody was like the most fun person you ever met! We were all so high, and we were singing at the top of our lungs. I was singing Joni Mitchell, and—”

  I hated to interrupt, but she was showing signs of going off on a long, unnecessary tangent. “So, how did you meet Daddy?” I said.

  “Well, your daddy. Let’s see. He came in a truck with one of his friends, a guy named Tom, and they happened to be parked near us on the highway. It was all random—if you believe in random, which I don’t. Everything is for a reason. Anyway, they’d just happened to stop there, and they were outside, leaning against the truck, and Robert had a beer, and we were all just talking, and it was like everybody who came along was like my instant best friend and we’d just all been invited to the same groovy party. I kept thinking, Wow! I’ve never seen so many people who are exactly like me! We had a couple of joints, and so we started sharing them, and Robert offered us a beer. I hadn’t ever had beer before, because I thought that was just for ‘juicers.’ In those days you were a juicer, or you were a stoner. And I was definitely in the stoner category, but he said I should try it. Right away, he was looking at me—and Phronsie, he was so—well, he was so gawky and shy.” She laughed. “Okay, I have to try to recreate for you what your father was like. He hadn’t grown into his body yet. You know the type? He reminded me of a big puppy who is falling all over himself because he hasn’t gotten used to his own size yet. Long, skinny legs, big feet and big hands. And this neck that was totally white even when his face was so red. Oh, and he kept blushing! I had on a long patchwork skirt and a halter top, and things kept slipping out of place, and I’d see him looking at my tits and then he’d have to turn away because he was so embarrassed for looking. I’d been with guys for a long, long time by then, and none of them were like that. Everybody was jaded by that time. Nothing was new anymore. And Robert just kinda stood out. He was so fresh. Like, he hadn’t ever smoked any dope, hadn’t ever seen so much love and sex and mud and hippies. His jeans were worn way too high on his waist, and his hair was so short, like a haircut Richard Nixon would have thought was cool, and he had on a plaid shirt, and everybody but me was just sort of ignoring him. Oh, and he had these sunburned ears that stuck out, so big it was like they didn’t really belong to him. I love me an underdog, so I went over and put some of my beads on your father like a necklace, and he turned almost bright purple. My fingers touched his cheek when I did that, and man oh man, it was like we’d both had an electric shock or something. I could feel it going all through my whole body, that current.”

  “Did you have any idea at all that you were going to marry him and that he was going to be the father of your children?”

  She laughed. “No. Oh, God no. I wasn’t anywhere near thinking that way. About him or about children or anything. I was just there to have a good time and get myself famous.”

  It was dark, she said, by the time they got into the concert, and even then, they didn’t make it to the front gate; they broke through a hole in the fence.

  “By that time, everybody was just piling into the festival. It was a free concert. Music was playing, people were dancing and talking, and I heard a girl saying, ‘I feel like I’ve found all my true brothers and sisters right here!’ And then Robert and I found a spot and put our sleeping bags down and we walked around, looking at everybody and everything. And laughing. We couldn’t stop laughing. There were tents where you could buy food and water pipes and posters and beads, stuff like that. I told Robert I did glasswork art and crocheted necklaces. We sat down on the ground and shared a hamburger, and a little girl about five years old came over and sat down with us, and Robert gave her his half of the burger. I loved that he did that! And when I looked at him, I thought he looked like somebody who was all lit up from the inside. Maybe I was stoned, but he just had all this love in his eyes. Rockets of love.”

  Her voice ran down.

  “And?” I said.

  She took a deep breath. “Then Richie Havens—he was the first act—he started to play, and the music just kind of swept over us,” she said. Her voice got a little husky. “Robert—there was something about him that was so touching and sweet. His eyes were just wide with amazement at everything he was seeing and experiencing. He was so open to absolutely everything! When I told him I was going to go up to the stage to talk to the musicians, he came with me, just in case, he said, any of the rock stars wanted to kidnap me and have me live in their trailer with them, can you imagine? So funny! And along the way he told me about his life in New Hampshire—the farm and everything. I couldn’t imagine that kind of life actually. He told me that because he was the only son, his job was to run the farm alongside his dad. And he said he was going to get married to his high school girlfriend. They’d gone to prom together. He said that like it was the biggest deal in the whole world, going to prom. He even knew what color dress she’d worn—can you believe it? He’d had a cummerbund the same color, lavender, he said. The word cummerbund just sounded so weird and hilarious, and I started laughing at it. For the rest of the day I called him Cummerbund. And it would make him blush. But . . . well, it was also just so sweet and also so foreign to me—the idea of this all-American, short-haired guy with the stick-out ears, who had pretty much just come right from the prom! I kind of dug that about him, that this kind of life existed somewhere. And here he was, looking around at everything like he was Dorothy in Oz: ‘Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.’

  “By the time we got back to our spot, Gary and Cissy had kind of become a duo. And Tom, your dad’s friend, had lost interest in all of us and was wandering around. He’d met this band camping near us, and he was spending most of his time with them. I could see I was going to have Cummerbund to tend to, and here he was, talking on and on to me about his completely normal, American life on a farm in New Hampshire. He could do a who
le riff on how dumb chickens are! He was hilarious on the subject of chickens. After a while, he asked me about my life, like he expected that I was going to have the same kinds of stories he did. I half expected him to think I was going to talk about what color my prom dress had been. But oh, Phronsie, my life was so different from that. My parents had both died already—my dad had cancer and died when I was twelve, and my mom had drunk herself to death after that. I pretty much raised myself, ’cause I lived with an aunt who didn’t have much time for me because she already had five kids. So there I was, working as a waitress but determined to make it with my art, living in a little cottage on the outskirts of Albany, and when I started talking to Robert and he was the nicest, most solid human being I’d met in a really long time, he made me laugh about how crazy everything was. He didn’t know any hippies, he didn’t know anybody who was cool, really, and he just looked at everything with this wonder in his eyes. I loved it. I kept falling over laughing at the things he’d say. And—well, he’d just look at me like he had the moon in his eyes or something. He’d say, ‘You’re so beautiful.’

  “So over the next few days, what happened between Robert and me was just inevitable. It was magic at work. It was transformative. Like serendipity. Meant to be.” She was quiet for a moment. And then she whispered, “It changed my life completely, those days.”

  “Because you fell in love?”

  “Yes, sure, but not just with him. Because I fell in love with the whole world. Every blade of grass, every molecule of mud, the notes of the music, the smell of the people there and the dope they were smoking. All of it was just surreal. That night, we climbed up a hill and looked down on the whole scene, and it—well, it knocked me out. There were campfires everywhere and lanterns and candles. Little dots of light all over the field. Sooo many people, and all of us were listening to the same music all at one time, and I couldn’t get over it. We were—I don’t know—so connected. By those songs. Even Robert, who lived a life so different from mine, even he knew all those songs. They were our common language. We sat there on that hillside in the dark, looking down at almost half a million people all listening to the same songs—and you just couldn’t help but fall in love with all of life. All of humanity.”