Idyll Banter (2003)

by Chris Bohjalian

  Once when Grace went to Burlington and left Ian alone, she had keyed the redial into their neighbors, the Pertas, where thirteen-year-old Amaia was home. That night when Grace returned, the teen girl said, her voice a combination of incredulity and wonder, that she and Ian must have spoken a hundred times that day. Ian loved the redial feature, and the nearly instant connection it offered.

  Nevertheless, Grace insists that the real secret to raising Ian alone is that she is a "hyperactive workaholic overachiever." In addition to her job as a schoolteacher and the time she commits to community theater, she spends her Tuesday nights playing an African drum with a group of musicians and dancers. She and Ian have horses in the meadow behind their home, a pair of miniature Arabians. And their 175-year-old farmhouse itself is a steady home-improvement project, with Grace doing much of the work herself. Right now she is replacing the joists in the basement and strengthening the first floor.

  Ian is in their den today when I arrive for a visit, meticulously acting out the first half of the 1997 blockbuster movie, Titanic. One moment he is Leonardo DiCaprio showing Kate Winslet how it feels to stand at the bowsprit of the massive ship as it plunges through the Atlantic waves, and the next he is trying hard to turn the vessel away from the iceberg that has appeared out of nowhere. He is so focused on his performance that easily fifteen minutes pass before he puts his head into the dining room where his mother and I are sitting to say hello. When he discovers I am there, however, instantly the movie is forgotten as he leads me upstairs to show me how he and his mother have rearranged things in the loft in his bedroom, then the exercise bike in the guest room, then the map of Massachusetts he has completed at school, then downstairs to the work his mother is doing in the basement, and then outside to visit Gypsy and Little Fellow, their horses.

  Like his mother, Ian has a lot of energy.

  Ian is short, as are many people with Down syndrome, but he's not that much smaller than I am. I am five-eight. Most of the time he dresses like the other teenagers at the public high school he attends, which these days means baggy blue jeans and T-shirts.

  Unlike his peers, Ian will occasionally break a few fashion rules. Once when I went straight from the airport to meet my daughter at a rehearsal--I'd been out of town for five days--I arrived wearing the black sports jacket I had worn on the plane. Ian tried it on, rolling up the sleeves because my arms are longer than his, but the makeover was uncanny. We have, apparently, similar-size shoulders, and so with the sleeves cuffed the jacket fit nicely. Ian was transformed into a man before my eyes. His posture grew from the casual slouch typical of many teen boys to the erect posture of a foreign diplomat. He put his shoulders back, his chest forward, and positively strutted around the corners of the dance room where his mother and my daughter were rehearsing.

  Ian is a chameleon--or, as Grace calls him, a mimic. He understands instinctively the maxim about clothes making the man, and loves costumes. After he saw Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, he would don the multicolored cloak his mother had made for him and parade around the house as Pharaoh. Currently, with his mother in Once on This Island, a musical that features four temperamental gods pulling the strings on a mystic Caribbean island, he is often costumed in the majestic robes worn by Agwe, the show's god of water.

  In this production, Agwe is played by a young Vermont actor named James Blanchard. James, twenty-three, and Ian have been friends since the two met when Ian's mom and James worked on another musical together, and James offers Ian one of the few things his mother can't: a male role model. It's one thing to stop with Mom for an ice cream after rehearsal; it's a considerably bigger deal to stop to have one with James.

  In a blurring of worlds, however, Ian never calls him James. He always refers to him instead as the name of the character James is playing at that moment--Dr. Craven last season, Agwe this summer.

  This evening James and the ensemble are learning the blocking and choreography for a song called "Rain," in which Agwe unleashes a fierce storm upon the island. The dance has broad arm movements, prayers and pleas, and some very fluid dancing. The choreographer is moving quickly because there is a lot to cover. Nevertheless, standing there between the lip of the stage and the front row of seats is Ian, watching Agwe carefully and mirroring precisely the way the water god lets loose a tempest.

  When the actors finally take a break, James sits down with Ian and teaches him precisely how Agwe will summon the squall.

  "Ian has a natural theatrical bent, and so he loves to recite my lines with me. But basically we just play together the way I might play with any children in the cast. We goof around, we have fun," James says. Then, after considering Ian a moment, he adds--his voice rising slightly in wonder--"He has to be one of the most cheerful people I've ever met."

  So long as Ian's mother is in a show with an Agwe or a Dr. Craven--or any of the other stage dads who've passed through his life--the teenager doesn't seem unduly concerned by his father's absence.

  My wife wonders what it says about our world that it's the people among us with the lower IQs who hug unashamedly and love unconditionally. Ian is the only teenage boy either of us knows, including our nephews, who actually wants to embrace people.

  These days I'm a theater person because my daughter is a theater person. But I've noticed as I chauffeur my Grace to the different shows she's been in that theater people hug, too. They hug even me, and all I do is drive one of the cast members to rehearsals because she's seven years shy of her driver's license.

  Consequently, Ian is in his element in his mother's community of actors and dancers and singers. He may never play Tony in West Side Story, but someday he might lip-synch "Something's Coming" and make us imagine, for a moment, Richard Beymer's fiery gaze and fervent conviction that he has a miracle in his future. He may never reprise Mandy Patinkin's Broadway performance as Archibald Craven in The Secret Garden, but he sure can belt it out in the car.

  Me, too--at least when I am with Ian. When we're driving to rehearsals together, I handle Neville Craven's songs and Ian sings brother Archie's. The two Graces are responsible for the women around them. And though I realize that my singing voice hovers between laughable and appalling--I am incapable of either carrying or distinguishing notes--my inhibitions slide away when I'm around Ian. I succumb completely to the boy's energy and enthusiasm and spectacular joy in the moment.

  Certainly there is a long litany of things that Ian will never do in this life, but that's true for us all. Unlike many of us, however, Ian makes people happy--and that is a mighty accomplishment for anyone.

  *

  PART IV

  THE

  LOCAL WILDLIFE

  Chapter 1.

  SURLY COW DISPLAYS NO REMORSE

  SOME YEARS AGO, my wife and I were driving south through Hinesburg on a foggy night in the spring, when out of the mist came a herd of cows in the road, charging north. We stopped the car and prepared for death, and then watched as the animals ran past us on both sides.

  When the animals were well behind us and the ground had stopped shaking, we exited the car and started screaming and hollering as loud as we could. The farmers who were chasing the cows were yelling too, and so they thought we were trying to help corral the cows back into the barn where they belonged. This made for a perfectly fine arrangement: We could shriek, the cows could run, and everyone got a much-needed cardiovascular workout.

  In all fairness, I actually did wave my arms a bit at the cows and try to push a few in the general direction of the barn. A number of times I even explained that I was a vegetarian, but obviously these cows were female, and they knew they were in no danger of becoming Quarter Pounders.

  Eventually we got the cows home, and we did so without spilling any milk on either the asphalt or our car's fender.

  I did learn a valuable lesson that night, however: Cows can be ornery.

  Farmers, of course, learn this at an early age. Cows can be surly. Cows can be stubborn. Cows can be stup
id.

  And so I think it speaks volumes about Curt Estey that he has 110 cows on his Bristol dairy farm, and there is only one with whom he has a somewhat contentious relationship: No. 26.

  Now No. 26 isn't huge, but she's 1,300 pounds of solid Holstein. She offers roughly sixty pounds of milk a day, and the amount is steadily climbing. She's an admirable producer.

  And she's good to look at: cow eyes as deep as precious stones, a nose that looks like a scoop of blackberry sorbet. When she lows, her moo is a cross between a foghorn and the alto in a more than adequate choir.

  But No. 26 grew testy during the last trimester of her pregnancy this spring. It was the first time she was with calf, and she grew demanding in unattractive ways. She grew piggy. Mulish. Downright bullheaded.

  The folks on the farm found themselves steering clear of the cow. They couldn't wait for her to become de-calfeinated.

  Finally, in early May, No. 26 exploded. She was eight months pregnant, and she'd had it with mud and Curt and the other cows. She'd had it with being an animal that had to cram four stomachs and a baby inside her. And so while Curt was training her to enter the milking parlor, she became a one-woman World Wrestling Federation wrecking crew. A Bovine Boxer. The Great Holstein Hope.

  One moment she was a cow and the next she was a blur, slamming Curt into the wall of the barn, and breaking two of his ribs.

  Now this was not the first time that Curt had had his ribs broken on the farm. A scant thirty yards from the spot in the barn where No. 26 had hip-checked him into the boards, a tractor had toppled upon him when he was eleven.

  This was by far, however, his most painful accident, because the cow in question has shown absolutely no contrition.

  "I've seen no evidence there's any guilt inside her," Estey says, "and that's very troubling. I've seen no sign of regret."

  Moreover, No. 26 has now had her calf, and the farmer has yet to witness any indication that the new mother will instill even the most rudimentary sense of right and wrong in her progeny.

  Consequently, I called a variety of people who've spent their lives around cows to see if No. 26 was typical of the species: Hard-hearted. Amoral. Quick to anger, slow to remorse.

  The sad news? No. 26 is not merely typical, she may be quintessential. Said retired Lincoln farmer Fletcher Brown, "How difficult are cows? Why, they're as bad as some people!"

  Chapter 2.

  DEAD BAT DUTY DRAWS THE LINE

  IF YOU ARE among the especially strong-stomached who occasionally read this column over Sunday breakfast or brunch, stop eating. Right now. Chew whatever is in your mouth, swallow, and push your chair away from the table.

  OK. Ready?

  There is a dead bat inside my woodstove. It looks glued to the inside of the door, its little bat head half-buried in the wrought-iron damper, its little bat body pressed flush against the creosote paste. Its furry bat back has upon it what I believe is a furry bat fungus.

  I would tell you more about what the dead bat looks like, but I can't look at it long enough to give you the sort of idiosyncratic details of decomposition that might bring this piece to--forgive the irony--life.

  See, the bat's been there since Labor Day.

  No, that's not true. I discovered it Labor Day, but for all I know, it has been there since the Fourth of July.

  It's still hanging upside-down inside my woodstove because I am dead-bat-removal-challenged. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty much any dead-animal-removal-challenged, but bats are especially problematic for me.

  This is because a bat looks like a small flying rodent that happens to move at supersonic speed, while squeaking like a bath toy on crack.

  And as my friend Ron Rood says about bats in his book, Animals Nobody Loves, most bats have a face "as endearing as a Halloween mask" (which makes me especially glad the dead bat in my woodstove decided to auger into the wall face first).

  My sense is that removing the bat would be a relatively less stomach-turning proposition if the animal were simply dead on the woodstove floor. I'd simply adapt the method I use to remove dead mice in the attic, and push Mr. Bat Cadaver into Mr. Paper Bag with a stick, and then run like an Olympic sprinter to the Dumpster next door.

  The bat in the woodstove, however, presents a (gulp) stickier problem. Given the way the little fellow clings to the door, I have a feeling I'll need either a spatula to scrape him from the side, or spaghetti tongs to yank him off it.

  I may be wrong, but I've yet to find the courage to find out.

  In any case, the arrival of Carcass the Bat in our woodstove has precipitated a lot of discussion in the house about sex-role socialization, the different responsibilities of women and men, and the proper division of labor in the modern home.

  In other words, my wife and I have had a lot of conversations that have begun, "Chris, would you please get rid of that indescribably horrible, grotesque piece of yuck in the woodstove?"

  My wife is, by any definition, a feminist. Right now her nightstand has on it--this is not column-driven hyperbole--books by Susan Faludi, Jill Ker Conway, and Kate Millett.

  It's clear, however, that in our household, disposing of dead bats remains man's work. I don't know why this is . . .

  Oh, who am I kidding, I know exactly why this is. It's because the dead bat smells like cheese at the beach in August, and looks like roadkill too repulsive for crows.

  Consequently, at some point soon I will have to overcome the fact I am dead-bat-removal-challenged. I will have to find the courage to get the spatula or the tongs or perhaps even the little fireplace shovel and murmur, "Ashes to ashes, dust to . . ."

  Or, perhaps not. It's September, the nights are chilly. Perhaps I should be grateful to the bat for choosing to die where he did.

  Perhaps it's time for the first wood fire of the year. Little bat . . . tiny flitter mouse . . . baby chiropteran . . . Can you say "cremation"?

  Chapter 3.

  TOWN'S ALL ATWITTER ABOUT ROSIE

  FOR A FEW days last month, all anyone was chirping about at the Lincoln General Store was Rosalita Poplawski's hysterectomy.

  Sometimes, if the group assembled around the coffee machine was male, the conversation would be couched in euphemism ("I think it's a woman problem"), but other times the twitter would focus on how the family was coping: "How's her sister doing? She worried? How about Teo?"

  Once, I overheard an analysis of Rosalita's methods of contraception. "I don't get it," someone observed. "If she's on birth control, why does she keep laying eggs?"

  Why indeed? Until last month, Rosalita was laying about twenty eggs a year, a total that probably wouldn't impress a chicken, but isn't half bad for a cockatiel. Her sister, Isabella, lays about the same number.

  The two birds are five years old, their coloring a combination of soft yellows and orange. Sometimes Rosalita sports a letter or two on her head, a result of descending from her perch to the bottom of the cage and burrowing under the floor made from newspaper (though never, of course, this newspaper).

  The birds are small, about six inches long exclusive of the tail feathers that trail behind them like a wedding dress train. They live in the Sparks-Poplawski household in Lincoln: Rosalita belongs to Teo, seven, and Isabella to Nicholas, eleven.

  Until recently, they were the sort of robust birds that would fly happily around the inside of the Sparks-Poplawski home, landing contentedly on the children's fingers, the parents' heads, and dropping birdie-poop smart bombs wherever they wanted.

  About three months ago, however, Nicholas and Teo's mother, Becky, noticed that Rosalita's squeaks were weak, and she was holding onto the cage with her bill.

  And so she took Rosalita to the Shelburne Veterinary Hospital, which was a relatively easy task, except for the fact it was twenty below zero, and Rosalita is a Latino cockatiel--which means she prefers a slightly warmer climate than polar tundra. Becky warmed up the car for a long time, and put Rosalita in her birdie transport, a cat carrier.

  The
veterinarians, Dr. Ross Prezant and Dr. Steven Metz, diagnosed the problem right away: egg jam. A cockatiel egg is roughly as big as a good-sized marble, which isn't big at all unless you're a cockatiel and the egg is doing an internal imitation of an ice jam in March.

  Consequently, Prezant performed surgery: He broke the egg. By Christmas Day it was clear Rosalita would live, and by the Tuesday after Christmas she was home.

  In the third week of January, however, the ailment returned: Oval Ovum Entrapment. Once again, Prezant extracted the egg. In addition, this time the doctor put Rosalita on birdie birth control--a protocol that might, at first, strike anyone who isn't relentlessly optimistic as a tad unnecessary, given the fact that Rosalita's only birdie buddy is female, too.