A cassette tape?’
She held it out reading long-ago handwriting that wasn’t mine. ‘Sex Machine?’
There was a brief pause – the song selected, the disk set in place, the music beginning suddenly. The lights of the jukebox turned red, then green.
‘Mom?’
The voice was sultry, sweaty.
She sighed, putting the cassette tape back in the envelope and placing it in the round curve of my papasan chair, which I cannot sit in anymore as it’s impossible to get out of. The chair was full of things I couldn’t yet bring myself to throw away. I wondered if Anna were just anticipating all the subsequent cleaning she would do after I died – if her encouragement for purging was a result of her own selfishness.
This morning’s efforts now fill two canvas bags marked Property of The United States Postal Service, bulging and lopsided by the front door – the huge bags they use in the warehouse before the mail gets sorted. Funny to think they’re full of a dead mailman’s shoes instead of birthday cards and bills. He had more shoes than I ever did. Bought them on sale, he always said proudly. For work.
I wonder if I should attempt to move the bags somewhere else; they look so uninviting, crowding the hallway with the type of past we won’t want to remember. But where else could they go? Welcome, I will say. Don’t mind my dead husband’s shoes.
Open before me is the story of Arch Rock written faithfully in my red journal, the speech bubble around my old words leading to a young ink woman with feathers in her hair. I put the envelope on top of her. It is bulky at the bottom, some of the items misshapen and the envelope worn thin in places. I touch my tongue briefly to the open flap, but the adhesive has long disappeared along with my taste buds. I decide to begin by chance, and reaching in I’m reminded of the haunted houses at St. Mary’s Primary where, with eyes closed, you hoped for something manageable like the peeled grape-witch’s eyeball. My mind is certain, however, that this long-ago envelope was carefully filled with only pleasant things. Some memories have no need of a physical reminder.
I pull out the cassette tape that Anna had found so offensive and rattle it beside my ear. The plastic casing is cracked, and there’s nowhere to play it now except the old stereo in the basement. We haven’t done the basement yet. I make a note to see if the stereo still works; it would be nice to hear again. Setting it down, I notice the brown ribbon running through the bottom of the tape is broken.
Impatient now, I turn the envelope upside down and everything slides out together as if the passing of half a century has enabled each souvenir to attach itself to the next, afraid of being alone.
In the pile, a thin paper rectangle is shiny with the politics of the summer. Though it never occurred to me at the time, I suppose giving out bumper stickers on the island had an air of the ridiculous about it. I try to peel away the waxy paper backing but my fingers won’t work and this governor died a long time ago anyway. Still, I think I’ll keep it.
I’m reminded of the shows on television, where a professional cleaner will come into someone’s house to help them get rid of things. There will be protests, the mother saying, But it was my grandmother’s chair. And the professional cleaner will say, Yes, but that chair is not your grandmother.
It’s easy to laugh then. It is easy to laugh, but it is much different when it’s your own hand, hovering above the trash, hesitating with memory.
Mackinac
The sun from each day etches itself in progressing shades of brown on my skin and Bryce begins calling me his Little Indian Princess. Trainer says he’s sick of the white man appropriating minority culture this way, and Rummy points out that Trainer is white himself and the least politically correct person he knows, and Trainer calls him a lying Canuck. The resulting conversation ends with shots of Jaegermeister, and Trainer giving Rummy a piggyback ride down Main Street, both of them yelling, The British are coming! At four in the afternoon tourists stop to take pictures.
These strange incidents are rarely worthy of conversation, each unlikely act obtaining a sort of normalcy and blending together with the last. The schedule hanging in the back of the Tippecanoe runs from Thursday to Thursday and often there are no corresponding dates, or even the month.
Everything is green and the lilacs begin to bloom. Hundreds and hundreds of trees turn purple and white and pink. Bushes that were thin and broken and brown just days ago now reveal their purpose, exploding with breezy trumpets of flowers; the air is full of their scent. Some people come just for this, to take pictures and walk among them. They blossom quickly and stay for weeks. The shops sell sweatshirts and china plates with sprays of lilac on them.
What else should we see on the island?
When guests ask, I point to the large white house near the west bluff.
‘You can’t go in,’ I tell them, ‘but sometimes she’s there. You can see her through the windows.’
The governor of Michigan uses the summerhouse for both business and pleasure. Supposedly when the state flag is raised it means she is in residence, but though the flagpole is tall and visible from atop Fort Hill, the small blue flag is difficult to see. The Detroit Free Press is a better indication of the governor’s whereabouts. Bryce tells me the flag’s crest includes both a moose and an elk, supporting a shield on which a man is waving and holding a gun. ‘We don’t fuck around here in Michigan,’ Bryce told me proudly. Incongruously, the white ribbon at the bottom of the flag reads in Latin: if you seek a pleasant peninsula, look around.
The governor’s mansion is described as stately, Victorian, picturesque, and also as a tax burden by some Republicans. The current governor is a Democrat, and she points out that when the Republicans were in office and made use of the home the cost of it didn’t bother them. It is a nice house for parties. I know this because the groundskeeper employed by the governor lives in the house and loves drinking Shiraz-Cabernet. After a bottle or two he becomes a gracious host, inviting random people he’s just met back to the mansion.
We arrive there late one sweltering night after the pubs have closed. No one knows his name, but none of us care as he leads a group of us, stumbling, into the living room which is tasteful and white and open. Trainer keeps wondering aloud where his bellboy is, and Rummy throws up on the governor’s couch.
‘You guys fucking know how to party,’ the groundskeeper says with approval.
Trainer takes in the vases of flowers, the gold candlesticks, the heavy portraits on the walls, and says, ‘This place needs a lot of fucking to liven it up.’
The groundskeeper nods and says, ‘hell yeah’, and then takes a mirror from his pocket.
‘You guys need a bump?’
Rummy shakes his head, no, and wanders out the front door wiping his chin, where we hear him continue his dry heaving on the front stoop. Bryce pretends he doesn’t indulge, so Trainer sits down to do a line and the two of them discover they have the same dealer. After more drinking someone brings out a deck of cards, and at four in the morning all of us, minus Rummy, play Crazy Eights, a game the groundskeeper punctuates with accusations.
‘Cheating motherfuckers,’ he says after every hand.
We ignore him.
‘You all think this island is some backwater shithole,’ he continues, as if defending it from some unspoken insult.
‘But, seriously. You know who’s stayed here? In that bedroom?’ He points to a window. ‘George fucking Bush.’
‘I told you!’ Bryce says to me.
Bryce has already told me the long list of historical figures that have visited the island over the years. Mark Twain is said to have rocked in a chair on the porch of the Grand Hotel, Gerald Ford came here as an Eagle Scout, and George Bush Senior, as the groundskeeper now swears on his life, was here in secret one summer. Bryce’s friend Dickweed has corroborated this fact, although I didn’t believe him at the time. Dickweed claimed that while he was wandering the streets late one night a few years ago he fell over in front of a carriage. It was forced to s
top and two men wearing black searched him. After the men realized Dickweed was merely drunk, they led him by the arm to the roadside and were on their way.
‘So I’m by the side of the road and this old guy leans out of the carriage as it speeds up and says, “Have a good night,” and it was the fucking president.’
So the story may or may not be true.
The groundskeeper gets up abruptly, and he disappears saying something about turning on the sprinklers. I look out the front door to check on Rummy, but he’s disappeared. His bike is gone, so maybe he made it home.
We choose the third-floor guest bedroom for the night, listening to the gentle sound of the chugging waterworks and the occasional swearing from our new friend still somewhere outside.
‘Rummy says Anna Jameson visited the island back in the day,’ I say.
My face is buried in Bryce’s armpit, and there is a pause while I wonder if he’s asleep.
‘I refuse to give you the satisfaction of asking who that is,’ he says.
The stately bedroom has thousands of flowers everywhere: the bedspread, the curtains, the wallpaper. We do not notice this until the next morning when the governor’s butler asks us to please get the hell out of the house before he calls the police. The house is on a hill, however, and we know that the trek upwards on bicycles will not be one the police make eagerly. We also cannot believe that the governor has a butler.
When we leave the governor’s mansion it is cool and raining, and we notice the gardens around the front of the home have been dug up during the night. Strange mounds of dirt and uprooted plants lie in the darkening soil.
Rain is impossible to ignore when you travel by bike, and water saturates my eyebrows and eyelashes. My face is wet and dripping, my fingers cold on the handlebars. The rain soaks my knees as they bob up and down, and wets two patches over my breasts, until gradually I’m wet through. The neglected piles of horseshit become muddy lumps, steaming and disintegrating before they can be shoveled away. We swerve expertly around each of these, spraying gravel as we skid too fast into the lane leading to the Pine Suites. In five minutes we are home and splash into Bryce’s apartment, taking our clothes off. My jeans weigh thirty pounds – I could have been swimming in them. We throw everything into the bathtub and my body is wet and shiny, beads of rainwater moist in the hollows of my collarbone and elbows.
‘Give me a wet hug!’ Bryce shouts.
His arms extend towards me, his crotch red and waiting. I squeal away from him, our bodies bare and uneven in the morning light. He spins me onto the bed and wraps me in the white sheet, rubbing me dry.
‘You’re like my little butterfly in a cotton cocoon,’ he says.
My head pokes out from around the sheets I have been sausage-rolled into.
‘I’m telling all your friends you said that.’
He touches my nose to his, a gentle gesture, before bundling me over his shoulder, still helplessly entangled in the sheets, and spanking me thoroughly. My shrieks are muted by the sound of the rain hitting pavement, roofs, and windows, and there isn’t anyone else.
We stay naked, playing with the wooden chessboard he brought from home. I lose. Both games. I strategize with my horses, the alphabet L a letter of attack. He plays with his castles and captures all my pieces, horses first. I find this particularly demoralizing.
‘I don’t understand why you don’t let me win.’
‘It’s chess. It’s a game. You’re not four.’
‘You should let me win.’
He chalks up my unsportsmanlike behavior to my spoiled upbringing.
‘You’ll never go places in life with that attitude,’ he tells me.
I refuse to play chess with him again.
St. Paul, 2:30 p.m.
I owe my career to a pair of boots.
Russ Gerhardt was in office for forty-five years, city councillor, mayor. He liked me because he liked my father. They met on Seminary Avenue when Russ rolled down his window for directions to the hair salon and took a liking to my father’s cowboy boots. Russ bought them right off his feet for seventy-five dollars after he promised to give my father a ride home. Real leather and made by Minetonka, my dad had worn those boots for years, but figured Russ’s offer was a sign from the Virgin that it was time he got himself a new pair. The boots didn’t fit Russ, but they had a drink together and my mother served steak and potato salad for dinner, thick mayonnaise-and dill-covered potatoes lit by the flames of her best red tapered candles. Alan and I stopped by for the celebration, her check-up that morning marking five years since her diagnosis, and at that time we were still renting out in Bloomington; Alan’s route was not the best and I was tutoring for hardly any money and trying to find it rewarding.
‘International politics,’ Russ said over the potatoes. ‘Hell! I don’t know anything about that, but whenever you feel like answering some phone calls come down to city hall anytime.’ I started that Monday. He already had a secretary, but he gave me a desk and eventually paid for some trendy business cards printed on Deluxe Victorian Gray Linen that stated I was his assistant, which meant nothing except I was on the payroll and safe, far away from children who didn’t understand conjunctions or where India was on a map.
When the press called, I always knew my lines. I was never fooled like Patty often was, getting her name in print beside a damaging quotation.
‘Mayor Gerhardt likes having a good time, you know? And hel lo? All the charges were dropped.’
Russ always looked to me for damage control.
‘You know people, Bell,’ Russ would say with a hand on my shoulder after giving Patty the afternoon off. ‘You know what they need, and make them think you’ve given it to them. In another life, you could have been a politician.’
Russ was a man whose gray hair had been dyed black, his scalp stretched in the operation that spreads the hair you’ve still got across a larger portion of your skull. From far away he looked young, as he had when I first met him as he tried to walk in my father’s too small boots. From up close, his skin was unnaturally tight, tanned. His nails were always manicured, his teeth whitened. His only visible fault was a lazy eye that confounded the doctors; numerous surgeries had been unsuccessful and Russ accepted it finally as his cross to bear. A very lightweight cross.
He was a man in public office, and he needed me – although initially only to fetch his grande double-shot lattes with whipped cream. In the twenty-five years I worked for him, the price of these luxury lattes tripled. When he’d eaten the whipped cream with the plastic spoon, he’d top up his latte with whisky. I’m not sure how many people in the office knew this. I went home and told Alan, of course. Alan hadn’t voted for him, but neither had I. My first election was the most exhilarating, after that they became routine.
Bell, Russ would call the night before the municipal vote, go make some signs disappear, but don’t tell me about it.
When she was old enough I took Anna with me, asking if she wanted to see democracy in action. It was always late at night; she slid sleepily into the passenger seat beside me, waking up as soon as we spotted the first sign.
‘There’s one!’
A different name every election. Bob Anliss. Gerry Carmichael. Sanyika Hassan. Each one went in the trunk. There were hundreds of us all over the city, playing politics. The blue signs were good, everything else the enemy. These silent nights were when I liked Anna best. She and I, headlights off, cruising up to dark-green lawns, the trunk open slightly, engine idling as I waited for her to uproot the metal frame with the plastic sign attached, then leap back into the car so we could slide off towards our next conquest. On a good night we’d get up to a hundred lawn signs, some from public spaces as well. Ours disappeared too, of course – some of the night was spent putting back signs that had disappeared.
‘Russ is the team we want to win, right, Mom?’
‘Always. That way I keep my job.’
At two or three a.m. we cruised back into the driveway, and I
carried the warm body of my daughter back into the house, her palms black from the dirt. When she was in bed I made one last trip to the dump at the east end of the city. I waited until the entrance was empty of other late-night visitors, reversing into the stench through the chainlink gates.
The sky black overhead, that moment was my own small part in history. Surrounded by garbage and plastic bags that would never disappear, I was the center of it all. I loved the surprising cold of the metal frame, the slice of the sign’s plastic edge on my fingers – dozens of cuts carved into my skin, thin white marks just deep enough to hint at the blood beneath.
Propping the trunk open I flung the signs by the handful. Victorious, elated, I spun like a discus thrower, letting go and saying,
‘Fuck you, Carmichael!’
Or:
‘See you later, Sanyika!’
As the trunk emptied, as the sky hinted at gray, I imagined myself: picked up by the ankles, spun and flung into another world where the night was always like this. Always exciting, and better than the day. No labels left but one. Alone.
I returned to my car, loving this secret life.
The next morning I answered the phones, telling Barry from the Pioneer Press how Russ was appalled that opponents’ signs had gone missing. Vandals, it happens every year, I recited carefully, pointing out that many of our own signs were stolen as well.
‘Off the record,’ Barry said, ‘how many’d you get?’
‘About a hundred,’ I told him. ‘It was a good night.’
But these experiences are on a sliding scale, and this will always be the middle of my life. It always felt like the middle, even then, when I stopped to think about it. I knew the beginning had ended. The middle was something to fill in the gap before the end. RE-ELECT GOVERNOR GRANHOLM, the bumper sticker from my envelope says.
There are many things I have accomplished since that summer evening, many labels I can tape to my chest, though most have been stripped away again, altered and reaffixed. Mother. Retired. Widow. Beautiful, once.
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