Some Wildflower In My Heart

by Jamie Langston Turner

  “I just love coming home!” she proclaimed at last. “There’s nothing like that feeling of knowing your day’s work is done and you’re back home.”

  If I had been asked to draw a picture of the kind of home in which Birdie and Mickey Freeman would live, I am certain that I would have produced something very similar to what stood before me at the end of the driveway. I suppose the absence of contrapuntal elements between the main character and her habitat only adds to the unfortunate predictability of my story. I cannot change the facts to make my story more engaging, however. Birdie’s house must stand as it is.

  It was a white house, exceedingly white, so white that it had a slightly bluish cast. In fact, there was a great deal of white to be seen everywhere, from the billows of cumulus clouds overhead to the white sheets on the clothesline alongside the house. Indeed, it could have been the setting for a television commercial for laundry detergent. I thought it most imprudent, however, that Birdie had left sheets on the line while she had been away from home for nearly eight hours, especially as there had been a thirty percent chance of rain showers that morning, which, fortunately for her, had not materialized.

  There were black shutters at each window; the front windows consisted of small panes of beveled glass. Ruffled curtains, two planters of white chrysanthemums beside the front steps, and a black wrought iron railing around the tiny porch completed the quaint effect of Birdie’s house. A stand of tall pine trees behind the house made the house appear even smaller. A whimsical thought came to me. It would be easy to imagine Snow White inside this house awaiting the arrival of the seven dwarfs.

  The house beside the cemetery brought to mind a novel that I had read, the first work of fiction, I believe, by the talented journalist Anna Quindlen, a book titled Object Lessons. As I recall, the father of the main character lived in the caretaker’s cottage within a cemetery. The main character herself had lived there before her marriage. Sharply delineated impressions remain in my mind of the lush, brilliant foliage surrounding the cottage.

  As I have said, Birdie’s house was not within the confines of the cemetery, however, and as I looked more closely I could see the dim outlines of at least two other houses beyond the pine trees. Since I saw no direct access to the houses from this side, I assumed that they faced McKinney Bridge Road, which runs parallel to Highway 11 on the other side of the cemetery. I concluded that the neighbors to which Birdie frequently alluded must reside in these houses, for I observed no others nearby.

  The long driveway led eventually to a carport, the free-standing type, with a trim aluminum roof painted black. Dark flagstones provided a walkway from the carport to the front sidewalk. I did not drive under the carport, which sheltered no car at present, but stopped my Ford about six feet away from it.

  “Come on in,” Birdie said before I had even turned off the ignition. “I know you must be ready to get started, and so am I.”

  My heart was strangely unsettled as I walked behind her up the stone walkway and then to the sidewalk. I kept my eyes upon her small white sneakers, and as I watched her mount the front steps, I could not decide which I desired more: to return to the safety of my Ford in the driveway—that is, to start the car and put it in reverse, to undo this awful mistake by canceling all future piano lessons—or to follow Birdie Freeman’s steps across the threshold of the white door that she was preparing to unlock.

  Of course I followed her.

  That first day I wanted to see nothing inside her house, yet I saw everything. My desire was only to have the first lesson finished so that from that day onward a routine free from distractions could be established. I wished for the setting to become irrelevant, invisible for all practical purposes. I wanted to view my piano lessons as a visit to a clinic. Birdie was merely a doctor who would diagnose my condition, prescribe a semiweekly remediation, and chart my progress. I might as easily have leapt into Niagara Falls and tried to imagine myself sitting beneath a lawn sprinkler.

  Birdie’s home was as tidy inside as it was outside, yet while the blacks and whites of the exterior gave forth an air of subdued conservativism, the interior was a riot of color. In an earlier chapter I mentioned my sensitivity to color. A multitude of strong, intense colors affects me on a visceral level.

  After stepping across the threshold into Birdie’s house, I stood very still. The brightness of the room assaulted me. Though in perfect order, it was clear to me that the living room was used a great deal. The two recliners, one upholstered in peach and the other in royal blue, appeared comfortably “broken in,” as they say. The sofa fabric was yellow, with startling designs of white prisms woven into it. Imprinted bands of bold, rich colors fanned from each small white pyramid. It was what is referred to as a busy pattern, one which, if stared at too long, begins to writhe or jerk.

  There were several multicolored braided rugs of varying sizes positioned over the hardwood floors, and upon the coffee table was arranged—although the effect was more informal than the word arranged suggests—an assortment of ceramic figurines, which Thomas would refer to as “gimcracks and doodads.” The table also held three houseplants (an African violet, an ivy, and a bonsai similar to the one that Birdie had given me), framed photographs, and a few magazines. I noted in particular two issues of National Geographic and one of Reader’s Digest.

  A rectangular cabinet of blond wood occupied one corner, its lid raised to reveal a phonograph player. Leaning against it on the floor were a number of phonograph albums. The one facing outward featured the smiling visage of Jim Nabors. Other miscellaneous furnishings included a low bookcase, an old dictionary stand—displaying what I assumed at first to be a huge dictionary but that I later discovered to be a family Bible—and two floor lamps. The curtains were striped in yellow, green, and navy.

  The walls were covered with a plethora of art: original paintings, including everything from a watercolor of a red schoolhouse in the style of folk art to a convincing impressionistic oil rendering of trees along a shoreline at sunset; two cross-stitched samplers; framed quilt squares; floral prints; several large photographs of nature scenes such as one might see on wall calendars; two wreaths; and an old metal Nehi Soda sign. Right above the piano was a hand-stitched poem with an embroidered forest scene in the background. This poem, to which I will return later, was titled “Gifts from the Wildwood,” and I was to memorize it over the course of the next several weeks as I sat at Birdie’s piano each Tuesday and Friday afternoon.

  As I absorbed the blow of finding myself inside the fastidiously kept yet madly kaleidoscopic living room of Birdie Freeman, I heard her offer me a glass of ginger ale. Resting my gaze at last upon the piano, beside which sat a small rocking chair with a red gingham seat pad, I declined with a brief shake of my head. For a moment I felt that the room was in motion.

  “Well, then, let’s come on over and sit down here,” she said, pointing to the piano stool. “You’ll probably need it lower.” She spun it around a few times as if she were steering a ride at an amusement park. It was an old-fashioned stool of dark mahogany, with a needlepoint design of dusky pink roses upon the round seat. It was small but sturdy.

  “These are what we’ll start out with,” she said, picking up four books of different colors titled The Music Tree series. “This first one is just real basic,” she said, choosing the gold book, which bore the subtitle Time to Begin, and setting the others aside. “But since you said you’ve never had any music lessons at all, I guess we’ll just go through the whole series from the beginning like I do with all my new pupils.” She smiled at me, then flipped through the gold book from back to front. As she did so, I saw the titles of several songs: “Trapeze Artist,” “Noisy Neighbors,” “Goldfish,” “Naptime,” “Inchworm.”

  When she reached the front of the book, she stopped and folded it back with great deliberation. “Well, here we go,” she said. She set the book on the music rack in front of me and traced with her small forefinger as she read aloud the words at the top of t
he page. “Unit One. Discoveries. Learning about Higher.” Then she leaned down by my side, her hands on her knees, and said, “You’re so quiet, Margaret. Is anything the matter?”

  “No,” I replied. “I simply want to get about our business.”

  Her face broke into a smile at once, uncomely for its dental defects yet radiant for its spontaneity. “Yes, let’s do that,” she said, her eyes sparkling. “Let’s get about our business. I like that.” She straightened up and, pointing again to the page, said, “Now, first of all, when a note goes up higher on these five lines called the staff, it sounds”—here she raised the pitch of her voice—“higher, and you use one of these higher keys up here on the keyboard to play it.” I watched as she applied a finger to keys of successively higher pitches, striking lightly and quickly as if each key were a live coal, hot to the touch.

  9

  Night Seasons

  One Saturday evening in late September, after I had completed four piano lessons at Birdie’s house, I accompanied Thomas’s cousin Joan to a play, or a “play trilogy” as it was billed, in Greenville. Though Joan’s salaried career is in advertising and publicity, she also writes a weekly freelance column for the Berea Bugler and the Filbert Nutshell called “Arts in the Upstate” in which she highlights the work of various regional artists, musicians, and writers. As an ancillary of the news media, she receives two free tickets to all area arts events, and when serving as reviewer, she frequently invites me to share the evening with her.

  For me these evenings are charged with a mental stimulation that can only be described as electric. A live performance naturally produces a powerful current of response, but the evenings with Joan are further intensified by the knowledge that she is compelled to formulate a balanced, well-focused, succinct judgment for immediate publication. After each performance, we generally stop at the Second Cup Coffee Shoppe, though I do not drink coffee, where Joan reads her notes to me, and we discuss the performance.

  The program that we attended that September evening was staged in a small theater known as the Factory Floor, located in what had once been a leading textile factory in Greenville. Although the building itself was enormous, the factory had ceased production in the early sixties, the owners claiming that there was no room for expansion at the present site.

  Several enterprising businessmen had subsequently purchased the vacated factory and transformed it into a so-called “art and trades center,” which they named Marva-Loom Marketplace, Marva-Loom being the name of the original textile factory. Besides a host of upscale specialty shops, the Marva-Loom Marketplace houses the Candy Corner, an art gallery called the Signet Studio, the Yogurt Yacht, and, as I said, the Factory Floor, the theater where a troupe of aspiring young dramatists take to the stage.

  The director of the Factory Floor, an outspoken woman named Ramona Hull Chadwick, has during her tenure been touted as “a gutsy crusader of the avant-garde” and has received great publicity throughout the Southeast for her use of the stage to “proclaim unorthodoxy”—an unpopular activity among the large conservative element in this region—and to champion the causes of minorities. I read an interview of Miss Chadwick recently in which she was quoted as saying, “Rich, educated, elitist, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males are the scourge of society.” Some of the wind is taken out of this statement, however, when one considers the fact that Ramona Hull Chadwick herself is a rich, educated, elitist, white Anglo-Saxon female.

  “Did you say you’ve seen these plays?” Joan asked after we had found our seats.

  “No, I have read two of them,” I replied. “Reading a play on the printed page and seeing it performed are two different experiences, however.”

  “You can say that again,” Joan said. “Did you go with me that time over to Spartanburg to see Hamlet?”

  “No,” I replied.

  “That’s right. I went with this man from work. How could I have forgotten? Dumbest thing I’ve ever done. The guy wore a toupee. Anyway, I must have studied Hamlet at least a dozen times in different classes, but I’d never seen it. So this man asks me to go with him, right? And it was like I’d never even heard this story before! They decided to be real creative and change the setting to a South Pacific island. What a hoot! Everybody in the cast wore Polynesian garb and ate pineapples and coconuts. When Hamlet told Ophelia to ‘get thee to a nunnery,’ I laughed right out loud all by myself. There she was, wearing a grass skirt and a lei and being told to go to a nunnery. Where do you suppose the nearest one of those was? Bora Bora?”

  Without turning to face her, I saw Joan shake her head and then open her purse, rummage through it, and at last remove a piece of Doublemint chewing gum. As I wondered whether she had written a review of Hamlet that night and, if so, whether her sarcasm had been veiled or blatant, I saw that she was unwrapping the gum and folding it into her mouth.

  I could not recollect ever having seen Joan chew gum before, and it struck me then that her behavior this evening was out of the ordinary in a number of respects. She had arrived ten minutes late to pick me up, though I knew well her preference for claiming her seats for a performance at least twenty minutes in advance and preferably thirty; she had talked far more than usual on the trip into Greenville, much of what she said being disconnected and incomplete; she had missed the turn to the Marva-Loom Marketplace and had taken an inefficient detour through several winding residential streets; and now she was masticating a stick of gum as if she had a vast surplus of nervous energy.

  You would not call Joan “pretty” if you passed her on the street. You would, however, immediately perceive an expression of intelligent skepticism in her dark blue eyes. If you were to spend an afternoon with her, no doubt her physical appearance would steadily improve to the point that you might describe her as “arresting” or speak of her “mystique.” Her widely spaced eyes, which she often closes in thought, the patina of her fine dark hair, her habit of smiling with only half of her mouth (the right side), and her tasteful but unstudied manner of dress combine to produce an aura of detachment and nonchalance, which I believe generally attracts the interest of others.

  On this night Joan wore a dark green dress of raw silk and a single strand of pearls. As she opened the stenographer’s pad she always carries with her on occasions such as this, she asked me, “So which two have you read?”

  “Trifles and The Twelve-Pound Look,” I replied. Though I believe that my company is not onerous to Joan, I also understand that she values my extensive knowledge of literature and places confidence in my assessment of a given performance. I admit to feelings of gratification upon reading her newspaper reviews, not only because I think highly of Joan but also because I recognize in what she has written certain phrases of my own invention.

  “I looked all three of them up at the library last week and read them,” Joan said. “I was surprised at how tame they are. From what I can tell, tonight’s going to be pretty unusual for the daring Ramona.”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  Joan’s energetic and unprecedented gum chewing produced a distinct snap. As if I did not understand, she continued. “You know what I mean. She normally uses such way-out stuff that everybody pretty much equates the Factory Floor with weirdness as far as drama goes.”

  I nodded. In the past three years Ramona Hull Chadwick had directed performances of classic absurdist drama such as Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, in which the main character is a cipher named Mr. Zero, and Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs, which tracks a couple’s unsuccessful search for the meaning of life as they exchange aimless dialogue in a castle in the middle of an ocean.

  I glanced to the rows behind us and saw that the theater appeared to be filled to capacity. My watch revealed that the performance should begin in one minute.

  “So we can safely say that these three plays have a pretty strong feminist agenda, right?” asked Joan, uncapping her pen.

  “Undoubtedly strong,” I said, “though admirably subtle.” I went on to comment o
n the wisdom of Miss Chadwick in including the work of a male playwright in her trilogy, for J. M. Barrie, whose name is so fondly linked with such beloved books as Peter Pan and The Little Minister, also wrote the play The Twelve-Pound Look.

  The lights were dimming as Joan whispered, “It’s interesting how the play that’s from the furthest back is really the newest.” Joan’s spoken words are often characterized by a lack of clarity, although her writing is quite lucid and precise. I understood her meaning, however. The Man in a Case, though set in the late 1800s—and based, incidentally, upon a story by Anton Chekhov—was published quite recently, in 1986, whereas the other two plays were both set and published, I believe, during the first half of the twentieth century.

  The actors and actresses were capable, the costumes appropriate, and the sets adequate though not elaborate. As these were all one-act works, there were scene changes only between plays, during which time many members of the audience took a brief leave from the theater to the Yogurt Yacht next door. The man seated next to me returned after the first intermission with a large, damp stain on his light blue necktie.

  The three plays—The Man in a Case, The Twelve-Pound Look, and Trifles—were set, respectively, in an outdoor park, an elegant English parlor, and the kitchen of a midwestern farmhouse, and for their speedy transformation of the stage between plays, the stage crew earned a word of commendation in Joan’s review.

  Briefly, Wendy Wasserstein’s The Man in a Case presented a brisk scene between an impetuous young Russian girl and the dignified schoolmaster to whom she is betrothed. Miss Chadwick’s interpretation of the work made the schoolmaster out to be even more of a dolt, in my opinion, than the script suggests. For my part, I feel that the girl in the story is not the only one to benefit from the termination of the engagement.