One night in April there I was at the Dragon Lady, reading as always, but occasionally staring out the window, and in the way that we sometimes notice things we have overlooked a thousand times before I noticed a phone booth in the parking lot. I could see its fat directory dangling from a metal cord, twisting slightly in the wind. I sat and tried to think of someone to call. I thought of my family—a person could always call family, I thought. But I didn’t know where Malinda was, and my mother wasn’t really my mother anymore. Earlier that year she had suffered a religious crisis and gotten married for the fifth time, to a preacher from Atlanta whom she’d seen on cable television. She’d started calling me every day to encourage me to accept Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior. Now she spent her days running her husband’s church’s child care center, a service the church provided, my mother said, to make sure that its dearest, most innocent lambs got the love and compassion that all of God’s creatures deserved. The last time we’d spoken I could hardly hear her over the chatter of so many children in the background.
“Any word from Malinda?” I’d said.
“God’s looking after her,” she said. “I have that as a comfort.”
“What?” I said. “I couldn’t hear you over all that screaming.”
“God is a comfort,” she said.
“I can’t hear you,” I said. “I guess you’d better get back to your new family. Don’t let me keep you.”
People walked in and out of the Dragon Lady in pairs, talking and laughing, and I sat trying to think of a single person I knew well enough to call, and what I might say. No one to call! It seemed to me that if a person couldn’t think of a single person to call, then that person was in trouble.
Finally I thought of you. And when I did it seemed you were the answer I’d been searching for, it seemed that if I could talk with you, make some kind of connection with someone, then something might change, I would be okay again.
I didn’t have your number, but how many Merriweather Washingtons, I thought, could there be in that one-stoplight town, in fact in the world? I went to the register and bought a roll of quarters, then out to the pay phone. Everything was automated by then and I had to give that name, Merriweather Washington, to a robot. But the robot had trouble and kicked me out of its system to a human being—WHAT LISTING, PLEASE?—and I had to say it again, Merriweather Washington, and then the number came up, the robot speaking again, and I had to listen twice because I was having trouble holding things in my mind. In fact I had trouble believing that one could punch numbers into a machine and, as a result, actually speak to someone. The fact that the phone rang and someone answered fairly bewildered me.
“Is Carson there?” I said, my voice tight from disuse. There was a moment of silence.
“You kidding?” said the voice on the other end, a woman’s. “Who is this?”
“A friend from school. Does Carson still live there?”
And then she, your sister I suppose, told me the news. “Carson don’t live here no more,” she said. “She dead.”
I slammed the phone down in its receiver, as if by doing so I could change things. A hot shame came over me, a pounding sort of panic. I sank down and sat on the floor of the phone booth, my knees pulled into my chest. In brief flashes I convinced myself that there had been some kind of mistake, that I had misheard, but the voice on the phone came back, and back, and back again: she dead, she dead, she dead.
Some days later I gathered the nerve to call again and this time your mother answered. I told her my name, told her I was a friend of yours. “Of course,” your mother said. “I remember you, Mary. Carson talked about you all the time.” When your mother spoke of your death, the year before, she used the word “expired.” When she spoke of the car crash, the boy you’d been with who ran off the road and into a ditch, she used the word “misfortune.” I heard Regis scream in the background and my throat went tight, I couldn’t speak, I managed to thank her and hung up the phone.
I kept thinking of all the things you’d planned to do—raise Regis, open your café, see your name in lights—and I couldn’t believe you were gone. Not long ago you had lived and breathed. You were a living body, you heart beat, blood pushed through your veins, cells split and multiplied, you ate and drank, you thought and spoke, you were alive—and now you weren’t anymore, now you were dead, now your image was taped to the wall hovering amongst the departed, and I couldn’t get my mind around it, I couldn’t believe it. I could hear your voice in my head with such clarity. I kept hearing you talk about the Oscar you were going to win one day, the moment they would call your name. I’m sitting way up in the back probably, you said, and then they call my name and the music playing and everyone looking around, saying, “Who the hell Carson Washington?” and it take a month and a half for me to get myself down the aisle and up on stage, and then they try and tell me I ain’t got time left to thank nobody but I say, Listen, baby, I’m three hundred pounds and you just try and move me, that’s something I’d like to see. And I couldn’t believe you were dead, I couldn’t believe it.
In some strange way the news of your death saved me. I started to wonder what I wanted to do. I had only the vaguest idea of my future. I was scheduled to start graduate school in the fall, in French language and literature, after which I imagined teaching high school, living a quiet life in a tiny apartment, probably with several cats. But now I saw very clearly what was missing—the things I would regret if I never did them.
First on the list was reconciling with my sister, and so I set about the business of finding her. I looked in the classifieds for a car and found a Buick Centurion for two hundred dollars. The car’s owner was a man in a cowboy hat, and he seemed reluctant to sell. As we took the car on a test drive he listed all of its flaws: the heat and radio didn’t work; the wipers dragged; the tires were bald and the brakes iffy; there was a bit of trouble with the transmission, the engine overheated and so it was best to drive at night if I was planning on going farther than ten miles. “She might break down on you tomorrow,” he said. “I’d hate to see you stuck on the side of the road. You better look around some more.”
But I bought the car and packed it up with everything I owned in the world, with clothes and books, a sleeping bag and pillow, my old clarinet (long dead in its coffin), a fifty-year-old manual typewriter I’d bought at a pawnshop along with a spare ribbon. I imagined that this was the last ribbon on earth suited to the machine, and sometimes grew preoccupied with the problem of the ribbon, and the notion that within so many feet of black fabric I would have to say all that I had to say because when it ran out there would be no replacing it. Though this was ridiculous—one could write by hand, for instance, one could always find another typewriter—it filled me with anxiety.
As I was leaving campus it occurred to me that I might first drive down to that town of yours, that awful place that had held you captive. At the exit to your town I pulled off the highway and drove for miles and miles through yellow fields. The town itself was small and it wasn’t hard to find city hall, where I stopped for your address, and from there it was just a short walk to your house, a small white block of a house with a red door and red shutters. To the mailbox by the road, your father had affixed the Washington name with reflective foil stickers. A small bicycle lay on its side on the front lawn. Regis had been a baby when I’d known you but now of course he was old enough to ride a bike. This troubled me. The windows were open and I could see your mother’s curtains, white lace, lifting and falling with the breeze. In back of the house was an aluminum swing set, blue, with two white plastic swings dangling from it. A sprinkler was running, though it couldn’t have been for the grass—the grass was long dead—it must have been running for a child, for Regis, but there was no one out.
I walked around some more. There wasn’t a building in town taller than a single story—all of the houses and shops and municipal buildings were squat and flat-roofed. Even the church—the First Assembly of the Fire Ba
ptized—was this way. It had been converted from a house and still had a screened-in porch at the front. There weren’t many people out, but now and then I passed someone and they’d nod to me, seeming to wonder what I was doing there, who I was, what I wanted.
At the center of town there was a small grocery store and I walked through it. Everything had been priced with a gun, little flags of white paper with numbers printed in purple, the way things used to be years ago. I picked up a loaf of bread, squeezed it. I picked up a variety of cans—half pears in lite syrup, fruit cocktail, sliced pineapple—and examined them, placed them back on the shelf. I thought of you shopping there, going through the aisles. I found the pastries, the donuts. I found the cereal. Though I knew it was ridiculous I was compelled to touch everything. On my way out of the store I waved to the cashier—a fat woman in a flowered dress—who remained expressionless, as if she couldn’t see me.
I walked to your house again, knocked on the door, even looked through the living room window, but all was quiet. Which I told myself was for the best. I didn’t know what I’d say if someone had answered.
By the time I left town the sun had gone down. On the southbound road away from that place I drove past the county nursing home where your mother and sister worked, a single-story building made of red brick that had obviously once been a motel. It had a large central lobby and a long wing extending out on either side, each room with a door opening right out into the parking lot. All the rooms were dark and only the lobby was lit, by light of the television. When I drove past I saw that all of the home’s residents had been wheeled to the lobby in their wheelchairs and arranged around the television in a horseshoe. They sat with their backs bent, their heads bent, and they seemed like spineless creatures languishing under the sea. I pulled to the side of the road and looked for a long moment at that place. Black women in pink scrubs walked about, going in and out of the lobby, and I thought perhaps one of them was your mother. Around that nursing home wasn’t a stick of life. It sat in the middle of a giant paved lot. Rising above it was a tall sign that had once said something but now no longer did, now it was only a giant white sign that said nothing. A chill went through me. To live in that town one’s whole life, to die there—one of those long, suffering deaths, day after day after day in bed looking out the window into an empty parking lot—it was unimaginable. I sped off as though fleeing the scene of a crime. But the picture of this nursing home stayed with me for many years, dogged me, it raised the hairs on my neck every time I thought of it. In dreams I saw the home glowing green, saw myself in it, and woke in a sweat.
A bit farther down the road (would I never get out of this place?) there was a train coming and I had to stop for it. The clanging of the signal, the traffic arms coming down, the blinking lights, the bright light shining out in front of the train, and then it came into view. The ground shook. The train was slow-moving, car after car after car, some piled up and overflowing with coal, some piled with crushed automobiles, some of the boxcars with their doors flung open, empty. It occurred to me then as it always did when I saw an open boxcar to run after it and jump inside it and ride on to wherever it was going, to make a new life there. As I sat watching it—slow, slower—I saw something twisting in the air, it went in and out of the path of the car’s headlights, one of those white wisps of cotton you’d mentioned. The cotton seemed propelled by some inner force. It turned and lifted and curled and fell, turned and lifted again, twisting. Just when it seemed about to disappear, sinking down, it lifted again; it would never come to rest, it would never settle anywhere, which was a problem I knew something about, the problem of being weightless. I watched that cotton for I don’t know how long, hypnotized, and then the train was past and the cotton, the last trace of you, swept along with it, and I crossed the tracks and headed north.
Back home I stayed with Walter Adams, and went about the city tracking down Malinda’s old friends. “God, Malinda,” people said, shaking their heads, “we were wicked tight for a while but then one day she just dropped me.” Somehow the fact that I was looking for Malinda escaped these people and they wound up asking me how she’d been, what she’d been up to all these years. “I don’t know,” I told them. “I haven’t seen her in five years.”
“You mean,” they said, “you haven’t talked to her in all this time, your own sister?”
One person sent me to the next, then the next, and I spent two weeks hunting people down at their jobs, I walked the long hallways of hospitals and hotels, I went up and down the aisles of grocery and discount stores, in and out of restaurants, until eventually a story came together—that Malinda and a group of her friends spent their summers in the resort town of Ogunquit, Maine, working in the restaurants, where they made enough money in three months to support themselves for the rest of the year.
When I got to Ogunquit I went to all of its restaurants, showing Malinda’s picture around until late in the night, but no one had ever heard of her. After all of the restaurants had closed I took a long, despairing walk on the beach. It seemed I had reached a dead end, it seemed I would never find her. I put my feet in the water and felt the pull of the tide. I decided to swim for a while. Without thinking too much about it I swam out farther than it was reasonable to swim. I could see the shoreline, curved and winking, but it was vague and out of reach, like some dream I’d once had. Then I was suddenly tired, out of breath, and it seemed I would never fight my way to land. I lay on my back trying to gather my strength and I started to wonder what the point of swimming back might be. It occurred to me that I might as well just float away. Though moments later, propelled by some primal instinct, I would start back to shore, and make it—at the time the sky was black and the water too was black, at the time I was floating on my back with my ears sunk underwater and it was quiet, quiet, at the time I felt utterly, hopelessly, infinitely alone, at the time I was going slack and I knew then, just for a moment, what it was like, I knew what you meant, I knew what you said was true, I knew I was drowning.
Elegy for
James Butler
(1952–1996)
Northern Arkansas, 1952. Oh that you had been born somewhere, anywhere else. A swamp of a town, as you told it, its inhabitants like the creatures of a swamp, primitive and slow-moving, with the stupid smiles and heavy-lidded stares of frogs. No place for you. A person with a bit of taste, as you called yourself. A person with a bit of class. Throughout your childhood you waited like a customer in line at a complaint window. Somber, patient, holding a numbered ticket in your hand, you believed there would come a day, one day your turn would come at the head of the line and you would be given the chance to explain to someone, a surly employee in blue coveralls, your predicament. I believe some mistake has been made. I do not belong here. And there would be no doubt. One look at you would tell the story. You were a short, slender boy with an oversized head; you were pale, with hair so thin it was colorless; you had a soft, sibilant voice, a lilting cadence; you were nearsighted, with thick glasses in tortoiseshell frames, your eyes strangely magnified behind them; you were weak, pigeon-toed, with a funny, shuffling walk, and no, no, you did not belong here, you were not the right kind of boy for this place, anyone could see.
To be a boy in your town, a proper boy, was to be outdoors, running barefoot and shirtless through the woods, to shoot down squirrels and birds with slingshots, to wrestle and fight with other boys—those writhing, muscular, brainless organisms—to flick open and closed, open and closed, the blade of one’s pocketknife, to move through the world mudcovered, dirt thick under one’s nails, to spit on the ground, to piss against trees. Meanwhile there you sat on your grandparents’ front porch, in a cane rocking chair, reading from your encyclopedia set, listening to classical records on the Victrola. Every afternoon you sat there in your linen shirts and trousers—preened and polished, your nails clipped, your hair oiled and parted to the side—you sat sipping tea from your grandmother’s rose-trimmed china cups, and when the other boys pas
sed you by on their way to and from the woods, they called out to you the worst name they knew—Fairy!—and the word and its name became one, the word floated in the air, glimmering and alive, the word settled like dust around you. Though it would be many years before the troubles of sex introduced themselves to boys your age, they knew already the difference between you—Fairy, Fairy, Quite Contrary—they knew already, you were not a proper boy.
There was nothing for you to do but wait. Wait and perform those duties necessary to your survival and eventual escape. Through one decade and into the next, through grade school and junior high, through the long, yawning stretch of high school you waited, practicing your piano in the mornings and evenings, the metronome knocking out time as you ran your scales and arpeggios, ascending and descending and ascending again; you waited in the front row of every classroom with your hand raised; you waited with your hands folded through Baptist services every Sunday, you waited while you waded into the town’s cold lake to be baptized, fell back into the arms of your preacher, even with your head submerged underwater you were waiting, waiting, waiting for the day you would leave for college and renounce that place and everyone in it, everything you had said and done and pretended to believe within its borders. And when finally the day came (like Ulysses you escaped from your cave under the aegis of an animal), when you left to study music in New York, you watched from the window of the Greyhound bus as the porter loaded your suitcases into the luggage compartment, you watched as your grandmother stood waving a kerchief, you looked back and told yourself: I am never coming back, I will never see this place, these people, ever again.
Elegies for the Brokenhearted Page 12
