Last I heard, Leah was dancing at the Barrel of Dolls, a strip club near the railroad tracks, the place across the street from a figure drawing studio where men use charcoal to trace the lines of women hired to pose nude before them. They are men practicing art. Over at the Barrel, men make an art of sitting on barstools surrounded by the grind of beer and undulating women, using their eyes to capture the outlines of bodies, using their mouths to make color.
Maybe she’s still there, spinning herself into middle age, though I think even Leah must be past pretty by now and anyway, I hope she has something gentle, after years of dollar bills being the thing to make her dance. Maybe Sleestak stayed by her side and grew respectable with the years. Maybe she left him for another man, someone who’d crossed over from the figure drawing studio and saw something still shimmering in her hair. Maybe her mother’s tuition benefit waited for her, after all, and she took up painting herself and spends her days sitting in the sun with canvas and oil paint. Maybe something like magic happened in the case of Leah Fiuma. I don’t believe much in magic, but I don’t underestimate it either—not where such things as need and beauty are concerned.
And this is power of memory. This is what the mind can do, if you allow it to rise from its thick beams and dirt-packed basements, if you invite it to wander without tether, unnailed by the hammer of logic. It can go back thirty years to that dead-end street and find Leah as she was. Before the Barrel of Dolls. Before babies and the trifold brochure. I can find Leah Fiuma sitting once again before her vanity, butterfly blouse falling from her shoulders while she rubs a dab of pink into her cheeks. This is memory, yes, but something new has come to join it, a mystery larger than Jesus or Sleestak or anything contained in that brochure. The two of us sit once again beneath a poster of a boy on his bicycle pedaling into the wind, the sound of “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” floating up from the front porch. It’s 1979; I’m eleven years and perched on the edge of everything. I push my fingers through the raised patterns of the bedspread while roses open in Leah Fiuma’s face, and for a moment, there’s nothing ugly in the world.
Our Lady of the Lakes
HOW WE LONGED TO see her—hoping, even praying sometimes, for her to appear. But then our greed was nothing new, especially where groceries were concerned. On shopping days, a dozen hands pawed the insides of brown paper bags, touching the surface of things, blessing the potatoes with our longing, placing our palms upon cartons of eggs and bags of flour—those shopping days were like a holiday to a family of seven children. The oldest or most jaded among us might suck her teeth and make wisecracks about the abundance of generic labels and the same old sacks of rice, but it was merely posturing. The giddiness infected us all, brightened even the cracked linoleum floor and persisted beyond the unpacking of food, everything in the house temporarily overflowing. But even then, in the highness of those grocery days, it would have been tempting fate to expect her. It would have been wanting too much and foolish besides because my mother usually bought off-brand or—God forbid—margarine and we were, in fact, most often deprived of her.
Still, there were times when she’d appear in the bottom corner of a bag, hidden among canned corn or bags of puffed wheat, astonishing as a box of Pop Tarts, wondrous as name-brand sugar cereal. There she was, on a package of butter, an Indian maiden kneeling in the grass, the blue of lakes and sky converging behind her, accompanied by flowers and pine trees and sometimes cows.
The design of the box changed over time, but the maiden always wore a buckskin dress and beaded belt. Always, her hair was raven and lit with feathers. Always, she held a box of sweet cream butter in her hands, presenting it with such reverence that the very idea of butter became something of a religious offering.
With her fair skin and rosebud mouth, she didn’t look like any Indian maiden we’d ever known—and we’d known plenty during our time on the reservation near Buffalo, women with golden skin and smiles ten times wider than the woman kneeling in the meadow. But who could be picky where butter boxes were concerned? Maidens were big in the 1970s, the culture helping itself to headbands and beadwork but feeling progressive because people had learned not to say squaw. Other than a fascination with Muhammad Ali, the Bermuda Triangle, and the general rise in the popularity of horror films, nothing marks my early childhood so much as the distorted affection for all things Native.
The package itself was an achievement for the way the maiden held in her hands a replica of the very same carton on which she appeared, so that the entire image—maiden and lake and pines—were repeated ad infinitum, the girl and her butter box continuing forever. But the endless loop of butter and maiden was simply an added bonus; the magic of recursive packaging, while captivating, was not why she mattered.
The real trick was her knees. The shine of the exposed caps, the gleam of them, the way they flashed flesh and reflected light in just the right places. And more than that, the way the perfect beads of her knees provided a secret revealed only to those wise in the ways of butter packaging.
Some used a razor to cut away a square surrounding her kneecaps, a small patch of cardboard which was lifted and pasted onto the maiden’s chest. We were less brutal—not because we were kind, but because we were children with limited access to razors and too impatient to mess with scissors and glue.
We’d slip the sticks of butter from the box as soon as groceries were unloaded, erupting into fights over the cardboard panels, eventually divvying them between the siblings or cousins, taking turns folding the package the way we’d learned to do—bringing the maiden’s knees up to her chest, transforming the exposed caps into a stunning pair of breasts, the polished divots looking for all the world like perfectly bronzed nipples.
You would have thought that the secrets of the universe were unfolded for how often we bent that carton back and forth. Hundreds of times, and as often as we could. Until the crease gave way and the bottom half broke off—the maiden’s legs forever severed from the rest of her body. It was something like magic to witness the change from butter-bearing beauty to bare-breasted woman. There was a certain thrill in turning everyday body parts into the most private parts, and a real respect for the power of a few folds to render something as solid as butter packaging into low-grade pornography.
She was an object, Our Lady of the Lakes. But even as we coveted her image, my sisters and I knew better than to be impressed by such a Barbie doll version of a Native girl (or any girl). We must have questioned the reality of someone kneeling in greenery while happily offering up her dairy, and would eventually become disillusioned by the fact of women’s bodies (ankles and faces and breasts) being used to sell products since the very idea of product came into being.
Still and all, I cannot help but think of her knees every time I pass her in the grocery cooler (how she knelt on them, what we did to them) where all these years later she still waits, stacked into tidy rows and smiling sweetly while holding out a box of butter—making offerings of herself for as far and as long as the eye can see.
The Lady with the Alligator Purse
IT HAPPENED LONG AGO, the thing that started me on this path.
A fourth-grade play. We were to choose from a cast of historical figures and act as that person in our very own classroom production of Famous Abolitionists of New York State or Forward-Thinking People of the Americas or some such title. The first task was to select roles. The teacher lifted cardboard cutouts of various historical heads to show our options, until, one by one; we’d raised our hands to volunteer for a part. Frederick Douglass was snapped up in a second. As was Abraham Lincoln. Next went Harriet Tubman. Then Sojourner Truth. Even Dolly Madison was chosen before Susan B. Anthony—though how Dolly fitted into the play I fail to recall; perhaps the company that manufactured cardboard heads had sent our class an extra by mistake.
Who I played and how I managed to sneak past receipt of the pile of stiff fabric (crocheted shawl, wig, and lace collar) that was Susan B. escapes me. Was Vicky Marie Sweet, the
girl who smelled of mothballs and pee, stuck being Susan? It’s likely. I remember only their cardboard heads, the way Dolly Madison’s name reminded me of fruit pies, and the tension seeping into the teacher’s voice as she held Susan’s unclaimed head: Well, boys and girls, someone will have to be Miss Anthony.
The view of Seneca Lake falls away as we eat but we talk easily, and the early passing of light is not such a loss. I’m getting to know this woman, a poet, and enjoying the dinner, not because of the food or the way the lake blackens before it disappears, but because of how her eyes rise from the twin circles of her glasses when I confess my interest in Susan B.
“Susan B. Anthony?” she says, and begins to describe one of the suffragist’s acts in the next town over before starting in on her crab cakes. I nod. Western New York was a hotbed of religious and social upheaval in the nineteenth century, inhabited by the likes of Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass in Rochester, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Amelia Bloomer in Seneca Falls. Even today the region produces unexpected progressive bubbles in the midst of cabbage farms and Amish outcrops, so I’m not surprised to learn that Susan B. did something important in Waterloo, New York.
“What I’m most interested in,” I say, “is whether the woman ever had any fun.”
The poet goes silent for a moment, looking thoughtful while she chews, so that I’m afraid she’s seen my comment as belittling of Susan B.’s lifetime of work on behalf of women. But no, she’s not offended. She simply thinks and offers the slyest of smiles before speaking.
“I assure you, she had some fun.” Her eyes rise above the glasses again as she sips water, “No need to worry about our Susan B.”
Our Susan B.? She makes it sound like Susan is a friend, as if she’s the woman walking into the restaurant this very moment to join us, waving and smoothing back blonde waves as she slips out of her coat. Every image I’ve ever seen of Susan B. floats before my eyes. All of them streaked gray. No hint the woman ever cracked a smile.
“How do you know?” I ask. “How can you possibly know?”
I like this woman for many reasons, her poetry and her humor, but most of all because my desperation to unearth the pleasures of a long-dead suffragist causes her no marked concern.
“Trust me,” she says while fishing into her purse for a square of holistic gum. “Miss Susan had herself some good times.”
Miss LuLu had a baby, she called him Tiny Tim,
She put him in the bathtub to see if he could swim.
“The Lady with the Alligator Purse”: a thing to sing while clapping hands and jumping rope. A song in the same vein as “Miss Mary Mack” and “Have You Ever, Ever, Ever in Your Long-Legged Life?”
He drank up all the water, he ate up all the soap,
He tried to eat the bathtub, but it wouldn’t go down his throat.
Call for the doctor, call for the nurse,
Call for the Lady with the Alligator Purse!
What child lights into a bathtub with his teeth? What mother lets him? Wholly nonsense. Holy nonsense. Such gobbledygook as only children can sing. I spent many hours inside the words of that song—my earliest memories involve listening as older girls sang and let their palms slap in quick rhythm, watching and waiting until I’d finally managed enough coordination of hand and mouth to join in.
So imagine my surprise, my utter surprise, to learn that Susan B. is the Lady with the Alligator Purse! The Susan B. Anthony House in Rochester even sells a replica of the oversized bag Anthony carried as she crisscrossed the country by wagon and train—a bag crammed with speeches and pamphlets and a copy of the transcript from the 1873 trial in which she was found guilty of the high crime of voting. She’d had it printed herself, that transcript, and insisted on showing it around.
In all the hundreds and thousands of miles she traveled speaking on behalf of women, even as the grown-ups shut her out, occasionally pelting her with harsh words and rotten fruit, children took note of her purposeful stride and that big old bag. Even if they had no inclination toward voting or the perusal of court transcripts, they noticed, and granted the woman in the high collar the honor of title role in their brilliant silliness.
It’s late November. Roses still bloom in Memphis, but the weather has begun to change and the trees have finally started to let go of their leaves; the slender offerings of willow oak mainly, but fan-shaped leaves too, from ginkgoes gone gold all over the city. Each step along the sidewalk has me crunching on acorns with flesh the color of Tibetan monks’ robes. And the smell of this walk, which rises from the combination of falling things and cool weather, reminds me of a man I once knew—something about the cherry tobacco from his pipe; more than the man himself, the inside of his mouth is something to remember. And I wonder as I trod upon scarlet magnolia seed and newly fallen leaves, did she ever know such things, Susan B., the taste of cherry smoke, the burning underside of autumn, the way such things can make a cathedral of the body?
Yes, the woman across from me says. Yes.
Back to the one eating crab cake while Seneca Lake fades from view. Yes, she says, winking as she says it, as if she understands the smoke and cathedrals folded into the question.
A well-known figure for most American schoolchildren, Susan B. Anthony was special where I grew up. Part of western New York State history, along with Douglass and his North Star and Tubman and the Underground Railroad with stations dotting the landscape—our own Lake Ontario, a crossing point to freedom. Such figures and their importance to the region were stamped into our heads. Names. Dates. Silhouettes.
But the things you said, Susan! The things you did!
If we were told of your chutzpah, I don’t remember it. With your shawl and tight bun of hair, local hero or not, you were every girl’s fear. And I think that you, dear Susan, or rather the image of you, the severe lines and hooded eyes, and the hair—my God, most of all the hair!—even as they held you out to us, you were made into a cautionary tale.
Voting itself is not the most riveting topic to fourth graders. Nor is it so riveting to adults perhaps, given the low turnout in elections. Who can say if we are rightly discouraged by the whole mess or whether we forget what it means to be denied the option. Even if the teacher had stirred us with impassioned testimony—the way the Nineteenth Amendment not only allowed women to vote but, in doing so, acknowledged them as human enough to be counted—even then, we still might have fought to be Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, leaving Susan B.’s head to hang heavy in her hands.
If only we’d known that she was the Lady with the Alligator Purse! If only we’d been told that she was the one we’d sung of since we first learned to sing, all the hand clapping and laughter, the rhyme itself becoming part of our bones, oh Susan, how the lot of us would have battled to be you.
“Perhaps it’s a matter of marketing,” I say to Sally, a friend with smart hair and smart thoughts, a woman, like me, who wants to not only admire but to cozy up to Susan B. Other friends—strong women, thoughtful women—admit to trying to relate to Ms. Anthony and finding themselves left cold.
I think of the Quakers, the group from which Susan sprung. Humanists and contemplatives, they are perhaps the most progressive of Christian sects, but are forever plagued by the image of the man on the side of the oatmeal box.
“Aren’t they sort of like Amish?” a colleague once asked after I’d confessed attendance at Quaker Meeting. While I’d noticed a certain proclivity for natural fabrics and sensible footwear, there was not a pilgrim hat nor buckle shoe among the bunch. The Quakers, like their famous daughter, have a bit of an image problem. No more laughing, no more fun—Quaker Meeting has begun.
“We should scan an image of Susan and use Photoshop to loosen her up.” I say to Sally. Erase that high collar. Unwind the bun, remove the fussy dress, and set her upon an oversized shell, like Aphrodite rising from the sea.
We laugh, imagining Susan B. in a white dress standing over a subway grate like Marilyn in The Seven Year Itch; or pic
turing her with earrings, a nose ring, and a Love Hurts tattoo. But the laughter goes only so far, no matter how we try to extend it, because we know what it means, the way we’d need to soften our best suffragist to make her a more popular American icon. As if the problem resided with the perfectly plain-faced Susan.
It’s not a stretch to imagine that Susan B. ate all her vegetables.
I’ve heard talk of a ragdoll in her possession as a child, but the truth is that the Anthonys did not allow their children the distraction of toys so that they might better tune into the inner light, the higher plane. They wanted good things: freedom for slaves, opportunities for women—and my God, look at how they succeeded.
Still, I wonder about the vegetables and know somehow that little Susan B. made herself swallow her portion of stewed spinach. And this is where she loses me—though even this may be unfair. Maybe she spat them out while the other Anthonys were pondering educational reform. Perhaps little Susan looked toward the window and said, “Have you ever seen such a sunset?” and they, so unused to interruption from the dutiful daughter, would have had no choice but turn to the window while the dark-haired girl ran, mouth full of spinach, to the back of the house, emptying it into a stand of Queen Anne’s lace.
Queen of the Fall Page 2
