THE LOCAL WOMEN ARE PERFORMING A TRADITIONAL DANCE
The local women are performing a traditional dance. Twelve of them have lined up in the parking lot outside Save-On-Foods wearing their special costumes—a loose-fitting garment made of a flowered cotton material called a housedress. Around their waist is tied the ceremonial apron, a square of material, also of cotton, which hangs in front of their bodies to protect the housedress from soap suds, grease stains, the muddy hands of grasping children. Usually the apron is solid white in colour but it may be pastel or checked, and sometimes it has pockets or a ruffle around the edge. It all depends on which locale the women are from. Urban women are known for canvas aprons in solid colours, women of the suburbs for nostalgia aprons trimmed with lace. Pay close attention: the apron of former times was used (metaphorically) to tie the women to something called domesticity, a state of hominess created by them for men and for children.
The dancing women wear dark red lipstick, their faces are smudged with pastry flour and from their hands swing cast iron frying pans. On their feet are the authentic fuzzy pink slippers of the dance and though difficult to imagine, these slippers have been solemnly passed down from one generation of dancer to the next. They are made of acrylic—a petroleum by-product which will last for ever. The dancers’ heads are covered with curlers, three-inch metal tubes around which strands of hair are wound and affixed to the head with steel pins called bobby pins. These curlers complete the traditional dress.
Now watch as the women dance. Those strings of single-family dwellings, plastic laundry baskets, dogs, cats, sectional sofas and six-month-old babies which are attached to the yellow polypropylene cord trailing from their right ankles are called domestic paraphernalia. They form part of the complicated twirling and hopping movement of the dance. Each dancer must spin in a circle, moving at such a rate as to lift the cord off the ground. She will then hop over the spinning cord at least once with each rotation. Two hops are sensational. Three—nothing less than sublime.
The more domestic paraphernalia trailing from the right leg of a dancer, the more prestige a dancer will have. This is because a long, heavy line of goods will be harder to spin and hop over than a shorter one. Fatigue is a problem, as is tripping because as the dancer spins she must jump higher and higher. Only the best dancers can sustain the dance.
The traditional dance of women is a frantic dance and the accompanying music must reflect this frenzy. Circus music meant for jugglers and acrobats is good. Hurried up versions of “Entrance of the Gladiators” or “The Flight of the Bumble Bee”are also used. So is “The One Minute Symphony”—repeated endlessly.
Now you know why the women’s traditional dance is performed in an empty parking lot—the hazard factor—the essential ingredient of all good dances, that brush with death. Any minute now a house could be loosened from the strings of domestic paraphernalia and be hurled into the spectators. Hence the expression: raining cats and dogs. So stand back. As a member of the crowd you’ve got to be careful, keep your head down, and be aware of the exits.
When the women perform their traditional dance the effect can be dizzying. Twirling, stomping, shouting, the momentum quickens, the paraphernalia spins. Whole city blocks have been toppled by flying debris. Sometimes the dancers themselves take flight, riding their washing machines and garbage cans high over the heads of the gasping spectators. Once Delores Delmonte, that famous, furious solo dancer unleashed a shopping mall. A terrible, wonderful sight.
This group we’re watching now is particularly fine, especially that woman, third from the left, the one in the pink-and-blue-check housedress. She’s managed to string a good six hundred metres of domesticity behind her. Even a small Bank—no wait, there’s more. Several institutions as well—a hospital, a school, a television station. My god, she’s spinning her cord two feet off the ground. An inspiration! And her jumps! Look at those jumps. Two! Three! There’s a fourth! And she’s still upright. Incredible. But hold on. That school is coming loose. There it goes, yes, it’s beginning to rise. A magnificent ascent.
And those children. Look what’s happening to those children: shaken from their classrooms along with their desks, books, blackboards, teachers. Sprinkling over the crowd like confetti.
Bravo!
Bravo!
SCORE
My husband of eighteen years announced he was going back to his first wife. He’d been married to her for two years twenty years ago and brought many stories of hating her to our marriage. I loved those stories. One time she flung herself screaming onto the hood of his car. Once, in a fit of anger, she smashed his tropical fish tank. Fifteen Siamese Fighting Fish, seven Zebras, two Tri-coloured Sharks flopping for air on the wall-to-wall Berber.
But your first wife? I asked him. Why?
Real estate, he said.
The first wife had become part of our family’s history but I wasn’t eager for her to take over the here and now. Our kids called her Boo Boo. I called her Boo Hoo, though her real name was Charlene. She was famous for crying.
Tell me again, I said. Why real estate?
She makes a lot of money, my husband said.
I tried a thing or two to change his mind. While I might not be making bags of money thinking about this wily world, I do on occasion write a clever story. I tried sitting at my desk naked from the waist down, pencil in hand. No interest. I invented some zappy Erma Bombeck thoughts, put them inside a cartoon bubble and attached the bubble to his mind on a string. Ho hum.
I tried keeping score for him. I kept score anywhere I could. On the fridge door in black marker I wrote: My Life l8 – Her Life 2. He didn’t find it funny. I arranged his Cheerios on a plate to read: Dead Tropical Fish 24 – Current Live Household Pets 4. On his Father’s Day wrapping paper I scrawled: Our Children 2 – Her Children 0. But his heart was thrusting elsewhere.
Tell us about the time crazy old Boo Boo stayed in the cherry tree for three days and cried because you forgot her birthday. This from our youngest. Tell us about the time she slugged you in the bar. The time she spiked your tea with Ex-Lax. The time she went on your job interview and did all the talking to make sure you got the job. Stories better than Archie. I saw my mistake. On the front door with red crayon I wrote: Boo Hoo Nostalgia Tales 23 – Resident Adult Female’s Neo-Neurotic Tales of Life & Laughter 5,292.
Then I cleaned the fridge. My husband said, Twice in eighteen years is not a good score. Our son said, It looks like you won’t be making it to the play-offs.
As a tribute to the extra mile I was running on behalf of the family, I abandoned books on philosophy and took up a new kind of reading. I got a book on dances; I’d heard it takes two to tango. A book on archaeology, leaving no stone unturned. A book about growing grass over the septic tank, with special instructions for laughing at all costs. I was looking for a doorway into not caring.
Finally I asked my husband that pearl of a question: What can she give you that I … ?
Small kitchen appliances, he said, then listed them off: an electric popcorn maker, a toaster oven, an ice-cream machine, three different models of blender, a food processor, an electric can opener, an electric knife, a hand-held electric mixer, an old-fashioned electric mixer with three sizes of bowls that fit into each other, a yogurt maker, an electric juicer, a bread maker, five different kinds of coffee makers, a singing kettle, an electric kettle, a small microwave oven for the family room.
Big deal, I said. What else?
History, he said, getting to the science of the matter.
History? I asked. What about the time she cleaned up in the divorce settlement? Remember what a maniac she was? All you got was the idiot dog and the hat stand.
Exactly, he said. Once-upon-a-time. I’m sick of the present.
You want history? I said. Well, remember this. Then I burned down the house.
Standing before the charred and smoking elbows of two-by-fours which had once been our three bedroom split-level on a quiet cul-de-sac,
my husband looked at me with new interest.
Our son said, remember the time Mom burned down the house because Dad was going back to Boo Boo. Even though it happened only an hour ago. Our daughter said, I loved it when Mom had all that ash on her face. She looked like something out of Star Wars. There was pride in their voices.
My husband said, Okay, you win. I’ll settle for a two-hole toaster with a special slot for toasting English muffins.
We moved to a motel. Our son hung a victory banner over the doorway to room 203. It read: HISTORY RULES.
For a while I didn’t mind running the history-making department; I believed it was my duty as a parent, as a fully participating member of the community. And, I reasoned, when you’ve got history you’ve got time at your back—it doesn’t get a chance to over take you. You can sit on a lawn chair and not worry about time passing you by. You can dangle your feet over the edge of your existence, lean on fence-posts if you can find one, drum your fingers monotonously on cardboard tables. I can see the sense of this, the beauty of this. But there’s history and there’s history.
I packed my bags and moved next door to room 205. A day later I heard our daughter say, remember the time Mom said that history is a whole world of meanings and not just memorable events strung out in a hopscotch line? I liked it when she climbed onto the motel roof with the megaphone, the way the crowd gathered like a threatening storm, and the firemen and the sirens.
I had done none of these things. It looked like my daughter was well on her way to creating a remember-the-time world of her own.
But my husband?
I called up Boo Hoo. He’s all yours, I told her.
Who? she said. Never heard of him.
THE CHILDREN DO NOT YET KNOW
The children do not yet know what goes on beneath the bedsheets. We, of course, visit there regularly because that is where the airport is and, as you get older, the flights you can take there become more and more appealing.
Right now, the children believe that something titillating goes on beneath the bedsheets, although they don’t know this for sure. Grave gropings, perhaps, or the warm sponge of torsos, buttocks and breasts.
We do not plan, as yet, to tell the children about the airport because we feel that they should wait their turn. After all, they have a fair bit of youth ahead of them and won’t be interested in flight until they are done tramping around in the awkward mud of concrete things: mortgages, income tax returns and the like.
Our friends feel the same way as we do. It’s a favourite topic with us at our backyard barbecues: when to tell the children about the airport. We are all in favour of waiting until they are fully adult and then presenting the airport to them as a kind of consolation prize for responsible, middle-class living.
We first found the way to the airport by accident, under my husband’s pillow, and a welcome discovery it was. I banged my head on it—my husband trying to squeeze new life out of an old situation—and, yes, I would have to say that since we have found the airport, a new intensity has entered into our marriage.
We spent weeks just trying to pry open the solid oak door (much grunting, much straining) and then several more clearing the descending wooden staircase of debris and repairing loose planks.
When we finally reached the airport we were enchanted. A white-washed tarmac stretching for miles toward a distant horizon, a flat mega-canvas dotted here and there with the shining forms of silver aircraft. Overhead, a cloudless sky. And not another person in sight. We immediately ran in different directions, my husband to a B-52 Bomber and I to a sweet, twin-engined Cessna with wings decorated to look like the wings of a butterfly, yellow and orange, much like the fabric design on our patio furniture.
The best flights, we have since found, are night flights, although we have been known to slip down for a quick one on a hot, sleepy afternoon.
Very often the children will be out building something in the back yard, a stadium, say, out of old boards and upturned flower pots or a vast city-complex out of empty margarine containers, cookie boxes and G.I. Joe tanks. I might be in the kitchen doing up the lunch dishes and my husband, standing at the kitchen window looking out at our children.
He might say to me very quietly, “Feel like a short flight, Barbara?” and I, smiling coyly and glancing toward the window, might say, “Well, Raymond, if you think there’s time … ”
We have many flights to choose from. There’s the Run Away From Home Flight, The Adulterous Affair with Gummy Genitalia Flight, The Chorus Line and the Lonely Businessman Flight, The Family Flight, The Rescue Flight (a heaving sea of red jello) and The Vampire with the Enormous Penis Flight. These are some of our favourites.
Our friends like to visit our airport and we like to visit theirs. We have a great many friends and they are all, like us, unremarkable in the general silence of things. Many times when I drive through the city and see the crowds of unremarkable people going about their business, I wonder what it is that keeps us all like-minded. TV was my first thought but now I know it to be the airport. Having an airport beneath our bedsheets is the best kept secret of unremarkable people.
My husband continues to be quite definite about waiting to tell the children about the airport. Every time he returns from a flight, he tells me this. You see, he spends a great many hours away from his sales job sitting in the corner of our living room reading books on magic to impress the children but they remain unimpressed by the fantastic. Faeries, splendid castles, secret doors are a solid bore to them; they want the full dose of palpable reality. Fantastic to our children is the existence of the San Francisco Giants, or the black garbage truck that prowls our street on Mondays, or the World Atlas with its peacock display of nation flags in the index, or the thrill of commerce—having their own garage sales. It is only unremarkable, middle-aged adults like us who are lured by the fantastic: you spend half your life trying to dominate the physical world and the rest of it trying to forget what you know.
So we are very happy to have found our airport. And before long, when our children have become unremarkable adults themselves, they will be able to experience the airport, too. At that time, a final mystery for them will be solved. They will understand why, for all these years, their father and I have been so eager to go to bed in the evenings. Why we must have our Ovaltine at nine. Why our reading material must be arranged on the bedside table just so. Why the pillows must be plumped and the feather quilt made smooth to resemble a white-washed tarmac. These are all the preparations which my husband and I regularly take so that at midnight, if all is quiet in the household, we can join hands and descend the long, wooden staircase to our airport and the purring F-117 Stealth Bomber that awaits us there.
ALTERED STATEMENTS
1995
THUNDER SHOWERS IN BANGKOK
Sitting on these front steps. Two drunks go by saying my name. Hello, you two, hello.
They were all there, all the important ones, on the cover of the final issue: Mina Holland, George Van, Howard Curtail. The three of them looking solemn, standing full-faced before the camera, posed on a freeway overpass. Cars and trucks behind them, indistinct, a blur, a streak of grey because of the slow exposure. And only the poets in focus, as if they’d stepped out of time, walked away from the murky world. The photograph in black and white, the magazine title and their names printed in red.
I was living in a third-floor room then, on the corner of Railway and Fourth. People from the old days dropping by to read their works. One we particularly admired, though his output was small: John Savage, or Savage John as he called himself then. We knew him for his warmth and accessibility but that was only one extreme. His work was marked by bleakness and we spent many hours talking of this, how this could be so. I felt that the bleakness was true and said how we are always on the edge and that this is the truest reality—knowing as much about this life as we are able to bear. After that we become giddy and drunk and must have the necessary moments of forgetfulness. This thought bec
ame the theme of the final issue, the preface, a quote from Lorca: Life is laughter amidst a rosary of deaths.
Years later John Savage was found dead on the 401, the top of his head shaved off but clutching that last important work. He’d had a part-time job washing down the freeway at night. Tough work but possessing the right amount of scrab. Scrabbing was what we were about—the low-lying, lizard-crawling belly living where we found our poems. The diving deeply, the geyser quest. And we put out this journal whenever we could. Thunder Showers in Bangkok, we called it, because that was right too.
In those days we’d mine the junk heaps of this miserable city, finding our poems in the grimiest of places. Creating our jewels from the trash of the age. At times we’d read in the lobby of the public library for the street people and the mentally confused who gathered there for the warmth. Or hold poetry festivals in church basements where maybe three or four strangers would attend.
Little by little, we witnessed the death of the literary age.
And now?
Cities are dying for lack of what we were able to say.
Electronic wizardry is everything.
And we find ourselves committed to very small acts, hoping to find a manageable content, some link, some rope to swing on. Reduced to servicing our intense inverted passions because out there is so unknowable.
Ordinary reality is not all there is and, to put it bluntly, is something of a bore. Breton said that, or maybe it was Blake. It doesn’t matter. This is the beginning of the twenty-first century and we like to mix things up, everything from all the times, frothing together in a crazy late life stew. And so I’ve arrived on these steps where I spend my days watching the drunks go by. Didn’t use to be so many drunks, now they’re going by all the time. The eternally stunned, the eternally confused. And I’m living in slow time. Even without a watch I know the hour, the day, almost to where the moment is tethered. The rest of the world is beyond me, an indistinct blur, in nanosecond time.
Down the Road to Eternity Page 7
