Sing Them Home

by Stephanie Kallos

  Don’t worry, sweetheart. I know you’re in there.

  Ah. Now I understand why I haven’t written. I’ve been afraid. Just penning these few words, giving over these few lines to this baby on these pages has already stirred my hopes.

  Who am I kidding? I’m already feeling plenty for this child. Impossible not to.

  Anyway, so far so good and that’s all there is to say about it. Llewellyn and I certainly didn’t expect this so soon (who knew that even physicians could be taken in by the myth that breast-feeding has a contraceptive effect!), and the reality of having two babies under the age of two hasn’t really settled in yet, but I’m hardly complaining. Llewellyn seems worried, but the truth is, I feel wonderful. Lots of energy. Fingers crossed our little girl will be getting a sibling for her first birthday! (Oops. That exclamation point got away from me …)

  Other news: I’ve taken on the work of volunteer costume designer and seamstress for a production of “Romeo and Juliet.” The house is a riot of fabric. Larken is having the time of her life, winding herself up in mock brocades and silks. A sensual heaven for her. She entertains herself while I treadle away. It’s a happy time.

  Emlyn Springs hasn’t done a play for something like ten years, Hazel Williams told me. Apparently pageants and the like used to be a big part of life here, and for a long time a retired English professor named Dr. Stubblefield used to put on a Shakespearean production at the high school gym once a year. After his death, no one stepped forward to organize anything, and that was the end of it. There’s been no effort to resurrect any kind of stage production—at least not until that uppity outsider with the inappropriate attire, the doctor’s wife, arrived in town …

  I know I shouldn’t be so hard on Emlyn Springs, but sometimes the resistance to anything, anything that hasn’t been proposed by someone over the age of sixty is astounding. No wonder so many young people move away. There just doesn’t seem to be any appreciation for new ideas—or even old ideas, resurrected!

  After letting Hazel Williams in on my plans (such a dear, she pledged her support right away), I made a presentation at a community council meeting, proposing a comedy, something light like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” or “As You Like It,” but the reliable naysayers (Estella Axthelm, Greta Hallock, etc.) wanted something with more “dignity,” more “weight.” (I think what they really wanted was something with starring vehicles for middle-aged divas. They probably would have chosen “King Lear” if they’d had unilateral powers.) In any event, the majority vote was for “Romeo and Juliet.”

  I’m just happy that we’re doing some kind of cultural event. It’s so important for our children to see that we value the arts. And it’s been wonderful seeing people come together for this, even if it’s meant enduring Estella Axthelm’s scenery chewing. The play isn’t called “Juliet and the Nurse,” but that seems to be a negligible detail in Estella’s mind.

  I still notice disapproving looks from certain elements of the population when I stand up at these meetings and propose what I expect seems like one hare-brained idea after another, but I don’t care. There’s nothing I want more for this town than to see it reinvigorated, and there’s nothing standing in the way except for small-minded people.

  At least I’ve made a dear friend in Viney. Now that she’s gone to work for L. I see her every day.Fellow anarchist! She’s funny and wise and seems to have made peace with small-town life.

  Chapter 14

  Corpse Pose

  In the back of the room and as close as possible to the exit, Gaelan is playing dead. Rhiannon—also pretending to be a corpse, possibly with greater success—occupies a mat next to him.

  Let your body relax, the instructor is saying. Allow your mind to empty …

  Viney would be so proud. She’s been trying to get Gaelan to do yoga for years.

  He remembers the first time he saw Pumping Iron. He was fourteen, maybe fifteen—it was before he had his license anyway because Viney was the one who drove them up to Lincoln to see it. The very beginning of the movie gave her the vindication she’d been seeking. “See!” she whispered ferociously, as they watched Arnold Schwarzenegger and Franco Columbu standing at a ballet bar, doing port de bras with a professional ballerina. “If he thinks flexibility and grace are important, then you should, too!”

  Gaelan would have gone to a ballet class if Rhiannon had suggested it; as it is, she prefers yoga when it comes to rounding out the fitness triumvirate: “You can’t just do cardio and strength,” she insisted soon after they met. “And you can’t just do five minutes of half-assed stretching at the end of your workout, Gaelan. You’ve got to build in more flexibility training, or—trust me on this—you’re going to end up with injuries. I’ve seen it happen with so many bodybuilders.”

  Gaelan wonders how many of Rhiannon’s bodybuilding ex-boyfriends are languishing back in Oregon because they didn’t learn to salute the sun. He’s not about to ask; nor has he offered any resistance. He’s been coming to yoga classes with Rhiannon on a daily basis ever since they first worked out together.

  … Clear away any chatter in the mind, surrender your efforts to the earth …

  Experience has taught him that complying with any request from a woman—even if it’s completely unrelated to sex—is the best way to expedite a sexual relationship and ensure happy times between the sheets. Women need compliance. In fact, Gaelan has concluded, the more compliance women receive outside the bedroom, the more eager and aggressive they are in the sack.

  Sexual attraction isn’t a separate entity for women, something they wall off from the rest of their lives; it arises from and connects to everything. Women carry different things in their heads, Gaelan suspects, when they come to bed. For men—and he’s no different, he’d be the first to admit it—sex is a simple here-and-now experience. But a woman in bed might be remembering how you quibbled about buying artichoke hearts, forgot to hold the door open, or didn’t take the shortcut. You have to prove yourself to women in these little ways all the time. They remember everything that happens outside the bedroom and bring it in, even though they don’t always know that they’re doing it. It’s really best to just lay low and do as they ask.

  … If thoughts do arise, simply take note of them as if they’re clouds passing across a perfectly blue sky …

  His willingness with Rhiannon is paying off: Today after class they’re going to his place for the first time. Back at his condo, everything is ready.

  There is nowhere else you need to be, nothing else you need to be doing …

  They’re playing dead longer than usual.

  At his first class, Gaelan wasn’t sure about Corpse Pose: svasana. He just didn’t get it. At one point he actually sat up and looked around the room, making sure that there wasn’t more to it, that lying on your back with your hands palms up and your feet slightly apart and your eyes closed was really what everyone was supposed to be doing, that he wasn’t the butt of some yoga-class-initiation prank. But scattered throughout the room were thirty-some men and women all pretending to be dead. Gaelan noted that many of the male corpses had hard-ons. He was reminded of miniature golf courses. All that was missing were the flags.

  He understands the point of it now, sort of. The physical part of it at least is starting to come more easily. But clearing the mind? It’s impossible.

  He wishes this were not so. He’d like to stop thinking about what he learned during his father’s funeral celebration—that the girl he broke up with fifteen years ago is a widow with a (11? 12 yo?) son, living within a seventy-five-mile radius. He wishes that this knowledge didn’t keep asserting itself at inappropriate times, like now.

  If his mind is going to chatter, he’d rather have it chattering about Rhiannon. If his sky is full of clouds, he’d like them to take the shape of Rhiannon’s body when she’s doing revolved crow balance or standing splits.

  … sink deeply into your center now, finding contentment in simply being …

  M
aybe she’s having as hard a time of it as he is.

  Rolling his head to one side, Gaelan squints his eyes open, hoping to find that Rhiannon is sneaking a look at him as well, that she’s just as eager for class to end and is anticipating, imagining what will happen between them when they get to his place.

  But no. She doesn’t look like she’s anticipating anything.

  How can she? She’s dead.

  There’s a memorial in Gaelan’s condo. He doesn’t think of it that way, but that’s what it is. It waits behind a closed door, the last thing to be revealed to the women he brings home: a reward for their patience, a confirmation of their hopes, because their first impressions of Gaelan’s habitat are not positive.

  With minor variations, this is what the women experience:

  For two weeks, they partner through a series of steadily accelerating intimacies: from flirting over coffee to exchanging dessert spoons at lunch to neck-nuzzling over martinis to French kissing in the parking lot to heavy petting at the movies. So far, so good.

  Then (finally) they’re invited to his condo.

  The first thing the women notice about Gaelan Jones’s place of residence is that it’s very clean—not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s also disturbingly tidy, as if the occupant is the sort whose nervous system short-circuits if the magazines aren’t perfectly aligned and the steak knives aren’t set uniformly at a thumb-joint length from the table edge.

  The stereo is on, tuned to a radio station that plays insipid pop hits from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s: “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” “Rainy Days and Mondays,” “Up, Up, and Away.” Perhaps it’s been left on to sedate the cats. (The cats are not in evidence, but the women have been told he has them.) It’s the kind of music that accompanies dull working environs, sonic pabulum for people who labor grimly in windowless cubicles. It is, Gaelan’s women imagine, music that their mothers listened to while rubbing Lemon Pledge onto the coffee tables or ironing spray starch into their dads’ dress shirts.

  Gaelan presents them with cocktail-hour refreshments: wine or beer, slivered vegetables, stoned wheat crackers, dip, nuts … The women sip their drinks and scan the room: There is sleek, nondescript furniture in shades of beige, a set of free weights, a glass-fronted entertainment center, a high-tech elliptical trainer. No posters, no plants, no family photos. Even the dishes and wineglasses are bland and featureless.

  Gaelan settles on the sofa next to them, one cushion away. The women feel the structure beneath the upholstery—timber frame, steel springs—respond to his weight in incremental stages: compression, resistance, stasis, support. They are reminded of his bulk, his sculpted physique. Gaelan Jones: weatherman and bodybuilder. These are the facts they all know—the only facts they know, really, now that they think about it. The women bite into celery sticks. The sound is deafening; massive wood beams being razed by bulldozers.

  They chat. To his credit, Gaelan is a very good listener, but in this sterile setting, the women feel as if their previous history with him has evaporated. They find themselves recycling stories they’ve already told, imparting information they’ve already shared. The conversation keeps them circling one another, wary, decorous—like wrestlers in a way, except that the actual wrestling match might not materialize; it could be canceled due to the sexual side effects produced by Easy Listening FM and monochromatic home decor.

  Gaelan’s women begin to doubt the wisdom of undertaking a liaison with this man. Maybe his television persona—and his impressively buff, swoon-inducing physique—is all there is. Maybe he’s all looks and no substance. He’s a decent, if somewhat restless kisser; but what if the sex doesn’t measure up? What if it’s as careful and mediocre as the surroundings? Maybe they were better off having a relationship with his televised form; they could invest in a ten-inch portable and lug him around. They wouldn’t feel any awkwardness then, any pressure to touch or be touched.

  (But didn’t they come here in hopes of being touched? Aren’t they looking for sexual diversion? Poor Gaelan, he attracts only the rebounders and the chronically confused.)

  Their host, on the other hand, shows no sign of being ill at ease. He is affable and polite, the antithesis of naughty. The women wonder if there isn’t a chaperone somewhere, stashed in the broom closet maybe, or secreted in the vegetable crisper. The women keep their voices low and abstain from further encounters with the celery and crackers.

  “Would you like to see the rest of the place?” Gaelan asks, after an interval of thirty to forty-five minutes.

  “Okay, sure,” the women reply, polite but nonplussed, knowing there is only one other room to see. They haven’t even kissed yet. They’ve barely touched. How exciting can it be?

  The women check their watches and think about buying groceries, doing laundry, reading legal briefs, grading student essays on The Scarlet Letter. They ponder whatever tasks they’re avoiding by being here, whatever obligations await them when they leave, which will be any minute now because this rendezvous with the weatherman isn’t going the way they’d hoped.

  (And what did they imagine? They didn’t expect him to jump their bones right away, did they? That can’t have been what they had in mind.)

  Gaelan gets up and walks down a short hallway, stopping in front of a closed door. They follow, drinks in hand. He nudges the door open.

  The shrine is revealed. The women are mesmerized.

  It’s a quilt, but nothing like the quilts their grandmothers have passed down, quilts that are packed away in hope chests, folded between sheets of tissue paper, surrounded by moth balls that are hard as hailstones and stink of camphor, quilts that are cherished but unused, being far too prudish and compliant-looking to grace the beds of modern women—unhappy women in this case, since Gaelan’s women are universally unhappy as well as confused and have no appetite for commitment, not now anyway; they are here because they possess a keen desire for boisterous, vengeful, heart-pumping, healing, and/or illicit sex. The quilts belonging to Gaelan’s lovers are rendered in dainty modulated patterns (Flower Basket, Flying Geese, Wedding Band), patterns featuring large expanses of white cotton that has been salvaged, surely, from the honest, plain white sheets of their ancestors’ marriage beds. These fields of white, virginal as wedding gowns, underline the makers’ belief that to rely overmuch on pattern and color is to invite danger; looking too long at a complex design might incite the viewer to commit morally complex acts. The quilts belonging to Gaelan’s lovers were made by nice Nebraska housewives who never laid down naked with any man but their husbands; the hands that stitched them were guided by hearts and minds that would not approve of late-afternoon trysts with a thirty-eight-year-old television celebrity, a man of dubious talents, odd obsessions, and a bachelor to boot.

  But this quilt! The weatherman’s quilt! A blast of artistic unconventionality, a free-for-all of swirling, angled shapes, the colors of culinary spices and tropical florals. Who would have guessed?

  Here, too, are the cats they’ve heard about, dozing in the middle of the bed: orange tabby and calico. Their coloring makes them look as if they’ve been stitched into the design. Their bodies are curled together like intersecting commas. As the women draw closer, the cats’ eyes wink open, and they register the arrival of visitors with opera diva stretches and vocalizations. For some of the women, Spencer and Kate are a boon; the dog lovers could care less; the allergic begin to sneeze. But for all of them, the prospect of generic, beige-colored sex has been eradicated. The quilt, so charged with eroticism it could be the cover art for a new translation of the Kama Sutra, changes everything.

  “What a gorgeous quilt,” the women exclaim—or murmur, muse, sniffle, coo, depending upon individual temperament and the degree of sexual heat surrounding that revelatory moment.

  “Thanks,” Gaelan replies. He’s glad that the women like it, but he prefers to downplay its significance, not acknowledging that the quilt can’t help but be the most remarkable thing about his domicile—and his psyche.
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  “Where did you get this?” the women continue. They are moving toward the bed now to get a closer look. Spencer and Kate, knowing they will soon be displaced, vacate the room.

  “My mother designed it.” None of the women notice that this isn’t an answer.

  It’s true, basically, but Gaelan omits the fact that the quilt Hope made was carried skyward twenty-five years ago, and that, years later, after making dozens of thumbnail sketches and paintings, he re-created it from memory, handing over his renderings (and his first two paychecks as KLAN-KHAM’s weatherman) to the fabric artist who constructed this fascimile.

  So it is Hope’s quilt, yes—but it’s Gaelan’s, too, for it is his memory that intensified the colors: turmeric, paprika, curry, lime, periwinkle blue, hibiscus red, black pepper, stamen pink. It is his memory that created the quilt’s patternless geography, with bits of fabric veering off, meandering, spinning apart like planetary bodies that have fallen out of orbit. Hope’s quilt was an orderly, dilute version of this one, an early draft.

  The women make a natural but erroneous assumption.

  “Your mother made this?” they say, aghast.

  Gaelan doesn’t respond, preferring to regard this question as rhetorical.

  The women then ask something along the lines of “Is she a professional artist?” “Does she sell her quilts anywhere?”

  To which Gaelan must reply, “Actually, she’s dead.”

  “Oh, no!” the women cry. “When did she die?”

  “A long time ago, in 1978.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  The women set aside their wine glasses. Bending over the bed, they begin smoothing their hands over the quilt. Gaelan moves behind them. He presses the concavity of his body against the convexity of theirs. He reaches around them. For a while, their hands and Gaelan’s explore the quilt together. The women are able to lean into the circle of the weatherman’s beautifully cut arms without hesitation or worry now. Everything feels right.