But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me.
Chase: Lady in the yellow hat, let’s start with you. Would you say this poem is reflective of our time?
Yellow Hat: Yes! Yes, I do. The poem is under one hundred words! Bravo! Indeed, this poem can be read while rollerblading, unicycling, in line for a muffin at Starbucks—on any handheld device. This is clearly a modern poem. In the past, so many poems were just unbearably long. For example, “The Wasteland” was so very wasteful of the land. I believe it was over four hundred lines. Think of all those trees that poem murdered.
Blue Hat: Hold on, hold on. How is this poem modern, or even postmodern, or post-postmodern?
Yellow Hat: What do you mean? Desi tries to do away with Lucy! No surprise! Imagine that tension. It is a rerun we do not need to watch, and yet we do. It grabs us hard, those menacing muscles of an angry Cuban. This poem grapples bravely with the universal “maid” in trouble. Or the need to hire a maid.
Blue Hat: I object. For starters, the word Maid. With a majuscule no less, I see (gestures to screen). That won’t do, won’t do.
Yellow Hat: Would you prefer the word “hussy”?
Blue Hat: I will ignore that, thank you. This poem demeans women. It is sentimental. “Beside the springs of Dove,” “Fair as a star …” Further, the poet—no offense to the lily of Boise—is devoid of vision. The narrator wallows in his own private grief—I’m assuming his, but that is narrow of me. Lucy’s lover could have been—
Yellow Hat: Ethel.
Blue Hat: A pre-streaming TV Lucy from fifty years ago is past her expiration date. A poet of our time should at least be au courant with binge TV and contemporary zombie melody. Our post-911 angst needs to find its expression. You wonder where these untrodden ways can possibly be if there is no ATM machine along the paths. And is there electricity? What was Lucy wearing when she disappeared? A hat? We need poetry that makes its music from the uninhibited pixies of our pixilated world so that it can lead us to a stratospheric dance. A poet should be a one-man Hubble telescope, not a vexatious crank turning himself inside out. Herself. Oneperson Hubble. I fail to see the necessary gravitas.
Yellow Hat: Gravitas? Listen. This poet envisions a black-and-white world, filled with visceral emptiness. We mourn for the fresh-smelling Lucy Ricardo, violet-tinted Lucy, bathed in Dove. “She lived unknown, and few could know …” An imaginative reader delights in a lovely vision of Lucy and Ethel headed downstream, but is also aware of the saddened, emasculated yet still narcissistic Desi, standing with raised hands beside potbellied Fred and bawling, “Lucy!”
Blue Hat: If you’re going to infer Fred Mertz from a poem, it is going to need more concrete details, but I will grant the multicultural aspect—Lucy plus Cuban. More specifically, Lucille Esmerelda McGillicuddy Ricardo. An A for trying.
Yellow Hat: Details. The success in this poem lives in what is not said. There are hints of terror and a bit of relief. One smells a cigar being lit, and then put out too soon. Most American poems having to do with Lucy’s legacy fail to address the universal problem of mouse-brown roots and the fact that no comedienne could genuinely fill Lucy’s shoes.
Blue Hat: I must be going insane.
Chase: Ladies, stop this. Allow me to interject. Could you each address the music of this poem? Does it sing? Or does it warble, off-key?
Blue Hat: The silly rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b. Oh, please. And the meter is simply old-fashioned iambic tetrameters alternating with trimeters. It’s greeting-card meter—the same as the meter of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” for fuck’s sake. The Anglo-Saxon hemistich b-b-b-c stresses of a rap song would be more modern than this antiquated, petrified heartbeat. I don’t hear real music here, for there is nothing at stake.
Yellow Hat: But the lines are melodious! The rhyme scheme is like a pulse; it dribbles our heart’s pant-o-meter. And I do feel that there is a lot at stake. A red-headed kook named Lucy is dead but still causing trouble. We’re looking at a poem bravely skydiving before heading into unwieldy adult diapers. Few poems are willing to tiptoe into that place of stillness. Few would dare to hint at the word morte, or Mertz, with anything like conviction.
Blue Hat: A poem so obscure and vague can mean anything you want it to mean. Our poets should use the textures of our own time—our techno wars, our steroidal sports team, and our creative obsession with heartsmart fats—to create globs of profundity. Poems are artful literary truffles.
Chase: And now we come to the part of the program where we reveal the Trick, the McGuffin, if you will. The poem submitted to us by Ms. Lily Larkin, sewage maven of Boise, is not a poem of her own devising. It is, rather, the timeless poem, one of the Lucy series, written by the venerable William Wordsworth, in the early nineteenth century. Thank you, Ms. Larkin, for playing Trick the Critic, and thank you, guests in hats, for chancing humiliation, and thank you, lovely audience, for tuning in. Next week we will pick on Walt Whitman. Send us your favorite Whitman song of himself, and we will probe his body electric.
XV
Dancing
I’m fascinated by stories that go back and forth in time and place. Characters retell their stories to themselves, reshaping episodes in light of new information. Characters who try to puzzle out where they have been and what their lives have come to are always on the verge of something. Regret and hope ride in tandem, a jaunty couple on the road to transformation.
—BAM
Quinceañera
Featured in Good Housekeeping, July 2013
The rented hall had a flat, gray, dense carpet and a bandstand that seemed too large for the room. The mariachi band had only six musicians, and the trumpet player drowned out the violinist. Bob had inserted his ear plugs before leaving the car. Margo walked ahead of him, stylish in stilettos and a swirly black skirt.
He and Margo sat at the head table, on a dais, in a row with their friends John and Dee. Miguel was their mutual yard man, and Miguel’s daughter was now fifteen. This was her quinceañera. Wearing a giant pink Civil War dress, she floated around the room, greeting guests and smiling through her glowing pink braces.
“She’s lovely,” Margo murmured to Dee. Or seemed to murmur. Bob’s hearing was a wall of fuzz and noise.
A knockout, Bob and John telegraphed to each other with their eyes. The girl standing next to her wore a shimmering tight dress that hiked up her butt with about a millimeter to spare. Several other barely dressed teenage girls strutted about the room, their long dark hair slinking with their sinuous bodies.
Bob took a deep breath and settled in his seat for the evening, content not to make conversation. Margo had insisted that they be here because their presence meant so much to Miguel. Bob agreed, although he disliked noisy social occasions. Margo liked going out, and he usually gave in because he felt guilty for being away so much on flights. He flew for UPS out of Louisville. Long hours of tense, uneventful piloting often made him crabby when he got home, but Margo would say, “Let’s do something fun.” Although they had met in the anonymous clubbing scene in L.A., when he was working as a flight instructor, Bob never thought clubbing was fun. Here in her native Kentucky Margo had a large network of friends from her job in retail clothing, and she liked to plan event weekends with them. He didn’t see the point of arbitrary social occasions that amounted to little more than shallow, forced pleasantries and a lot of driving. He would rather read a book. But he felt that a quinceañera was different. It was genuine.
Margo and Dee were watching some children playing with balloons in the center of the dance floor, but Bob and John were fixated on the teenage girls.
With a giddy grin of pride, Miguel brought a bottle of bourbon especially for the four guests on the dais. He had offered cans of Bud to the other tables.
“It is special,” said Miguel. “Enjoy for me.”
“Congratulations, my friend,” John said, twisting open the bottle.
Bob had a six-o’clock flight to Stockholm th
e next morning, and he didn’t want to get loopy here, so he opened a bottle of water for himself. Margo sipped a little of the bourbon from a plastic glass. He thought she would have preferred wine. But maybe he was wrong about that. She rarely confided in him anymore. He didn’t know what she liked. A rift had opened between them in the last year or two. She said he never listened to her. He felt she was overly critical of him, so why listen?
The mariachi band, having played “La Bamba” and “La Cucuracha” and other obvious old songs, was touring the tables, taking a request at each.
“‘Malagueña,’ por favor,” Margo said, when the band stopped in front of the dais of the four affluent bosses. She clapped her hands gleefully and her clunky gold jewelry glinted in the light.
The violinist reacted with animated delight, as if they had been asked to play something authentically Mexican—obscure and special. The musicians ripped into the song, playing with more energy than they had with “La Cucuracha” and the others. Why would a song about cockroaches be featured at a banquet anyway? Bob wondered. “Malagueña” was inspiring, varied, wild, and energetic, sounding tropical, historic, dangerous—and by turns lonesome and frenetic. The musicians were lost in their fervor, each soloist singing with eyes closed.
Bob was surprised that Margo knew this song. He wanted to talk to her about it later. Margo knew so much more music than he did. At her job the satellite radio played the world-music channel all day. Her iPod was a world of mystery.
He hated himself for thinking her gaudy baubles made her seem older. She would be thirty soon.
The high-priced mariachi band, hired by the hour, left the stage and a tattooed D.J. took over, cranking up the sound—the test of Bob’s tolerance. With his earplugs, Bob felt he had a deficiency of sensation-sorting syndrome, or something like that. He couldn’t distinguish words of conversation from background noise. All the talking around him flowed together. John, on his third plastic glass of bourbon, and Dee and Margo were having an uproarious discussion. They knew him well enough to leave him out in a noisy situation, which was fine with him. He could drift around like the girl in her billowy dress, paying attention to everyone and no one. “He’s on auto-pilot,” Margo sometimes explained to people when he tuned out. Once, she had said to him, in front of friends, “You may as well be flying to another planet.” “Hauling freight to Mars,” he replied.
Margo and Dee were on the edges of their chairs during the quinceañera ceremony. The girl’s mother, Maria, and some other women set her down on a throne and pinned a tiara on her head. Then Miguel (in his cowboy shirt and ten-gallon hat) and Maria (tall in her silver heels) joined her. They removed the girl’s shoes and set them aside. They took a pair of new shoes from a box—silver shoes with very high heels, stilts—and slipped them on her feet.
“Cinderella,” Margo’s lips said.
Miguel danced with his daughter around the room, her new shoes invisible beneath the dress. His cowboy boots expertly slipped beneath the hem of her dress without catching it. A skill a gardener would have, Bob thought, imagining a trowel. “Miguel is a treasure,” Margo was always reminding him.
On the dance floor a dozen family members made a hand-linked circle around Miguel and his daughter. One by one they took turns dancing with the princess in her tiara and floating dress and new shoes. Three small wiggling children in the circle danced with her. When the dance finished, Maria brought her daughter a pink-frocked doll wrapped in cellophane like a gift basket. The girl accepted the doll, and with a giggly grin, she fumbled with the wrapping. She hugged the doll and held it in her arms like a baby. Then she began to dance with it, tilting and swaying in her new shoes. The lights dimmed and she danced with her doll—slowly, mournfully, lovingly, tearfully, in a farewell dance. Three times she circled the dance floor alone, lost in a reverie of childhood.
“That was so beautiful,” Dee and Margo were saying to each other for five minutes afterwards.
John was killing the bottle of bourbon.
Bob said to Margo, in what he hoped was not a shout, “I’m going to get some air.”
“The cake is next,” Margo said. “Cake!” she screamed. Her lipstick had faded.
“I’ll be back.”
He left by the side exit and zipped through the parking lot, relieved to be out of the noise for a while. He had been moved by the fresh beauty of the dance, but he didn’t know how to explain that to the others above the noise. The girl’s mood fascinated him. She seemed to be acting an ancient role that she had been taught to play, but at the end she had flung the doll away and flopped down at a table with her gum-chewing chums.
The mariachi band was in the parking lot, loading their instruments into a van.
“Gracias, amigos!” Bob shouted. They shot back a stream of friendly Spanish.
“Your band is better than that noise,” Bob said. He heard the thump of the amps shaking the building.
It wasn’t dark yet, but he could see a slim sliver of the moon through the clouds, a soft silvery glow like a pale marble. He had always loved the moon and liked to keep track of its phases. Flying with a full moon rising made him feel like David Bowie’s Major Tom, about to drift away.
He walked up an embankment behind the parking lot to the grounds of a pioneer fort built by the first settlers of Kentucky. Perhaps the fort nearby was only a reconstruction. He had never been here before. Probably he should pay more attention to local history. He didn’t remember ever learning anything about Kentucky in California public school. Margo had dragged him to Kentucky five years ago because she was homesick in California, but he had never made an effort to fit in here.
He had gotten off on the wrong foot with her father because Bob refused to go hunting with him. And lately John had been urging him to go hunting with him. John wanted to bag some sandhill cranes. It was legal now. In a wildlife refuge once Bob had seen a pair of sandhill cranes perform a mating dance. The majestic male, in his plain gray plumage, hopped around the female in a circle, jumping up and down and flexing his wings as though he didn’t want to take off without her.
Bob didn’t want to shoot a beautiful bird down from the sky. He didn’t want to fit in. He detested Bluegrass music. He didn’t care about basketball. He didn’t want to play dress-up. So many people went about in costumes. The orange-clad hunters. The Civil War re-enactors. The festival goers. The basketball fans in “true blue.” He had to work in his mud-brown UPS outfit, and off-duty he never wanted to put on another costume of any kind.
Bob found himself in the pioneer cemetery. A plaque told him that there were about five hundred graves here, most marked by simple blank stones. “To the Wilderness Dead. Those without graves … unknell’d … uncoffin’d and unknown.”
One stone stopped him abruptly—the grave of the first white child buried in Kentucky. Two years and two months old.
Another stone read “JANE.”
He lingered, drawn by these slim clues to former lives. He would like to bring Margo here before they went home tonight, but he knew it wouldn’t be her idea of fun. She was expecting him to dance. Still, he wished they could get through to each other, the way they used to when they were younger and silly—but so sincere. They were still young, but soon enough they would lie mute in the shadows of two stones. It was a far-fetched thought and he brushed it away.
He wandered through the cemetery, bounded by a low stone wall, then came to a white memorial stone at the opposite end. There he read in the fading light that the pioneer cemetery was dedicated in 1974 “by Neil Armstrong, astronaut pioneer to the moon. …”
Overcome, Bob had to sit down. He sat on the stone wall, his feet in the grass. He didn’t believe in signs or omens, but he believed wholeheartedly in the power of coincidence. He felt profound pleasure that he, Bob, a flyer and moon lover, should stumble upon Neil Armstrong’s presence here. It didn’t mean anything, but it was pleasing for all these similar things to come together in an unlikely way. He was glad to be sitting on t
his historic stone wall, at this point on the earth, in the moonlight, alongside the first settlers of Kentucky, with the ghostly footprints of the first man on the moon. And nearby a mariachi band and a gathering of Mexicans—pioneers too, crossing a border—were celebrating a girl who was entering her quinceañera, her flowering. In his enthusiasm, Bob jumped up, to go tell Margo.
The Horsehair Ball Gown
Featured in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2013
On Thursdays, if the weather was pleasant, Isabella Smith drove her older sister, Maud, to Lexington to have lunch at Harvey’s, the best place outside of Louisville to get a Kentucky Hot Brown. They liked the friendly old-time atmosphere, with its Venetian blinds and antique portraits of forgotten families, and although alcohol was on the menu, the restaurant was never rowdy. It was clean, and their usual waitress, Shannon, knew their preferences.
But they had not been to Harvey’s for two weeks. An incident that had occurred there during their last visit was so unnerving that Maud was afraid to get in the car, even for the ritual delight of traveling to Lexington, which she said was like “going to heaven in house shoes.” What had happened at Harvey’s had Maud so nervous and confused that Isabella was increasingly distraught. At church, her mind wandered, replaying the perplexing incident, and Maud, sitting next to her, silently clasped her hand, as if they were riders on a Ferris wheel.
Maud was near ninety, and it was Isabella’s duty to care for her, much as they had both cared for their mother in her declining years. When Isabella was a child, Maud had helped to take care of her, babying her and calling her “Little Bit.” Isabella called Maud by the familiar term of affection, “Puss.” They still used these names with each other. They were the sort of women who remained little girls around their mothers. They spoke childishly to their mother even while Maud was married to Mr. Burnham—for a tragically brief time. A heart attack felled him at the spring stock sales, and the surprise of it made Maud never trust love again.
Patchwork Page 46
