Queen of the Fall

by Sonja Livingston

  I ask what she cooks and she says it’s more like reheating frozen things than actual cooking and sometimes it’s as simple as setting out donuts and boxed cereal and whatnot.

  “Well,” I say, “I’m sure the kids like all that stuff.”

  “Yes,” she says, “they sure do.” She sits beside me saying she notices I have only one load spinning in the washer and do I live alone. I nod while tucking the paper I’d been grading into my bag. “I have a husband, but he’s away a lot,” I say and realize just how sad it sounds. “And two cats,” I tack on, as if it won’t sound sadder.

  I want to tell her about my husband’s talent, the way he’s home right now making a painting of the river, and that we’ll go to the pub tonight for leek soup and soda bread and beer. And more than that, I want to explain that I don’t mind the solitude, my love of space, the price of which is sometimes loneliness. I want to describe the way it settles around me, the space and the freedoms I have, the way my life has both worked out and not worked out according to anyone’s idea of success. But she’s only asked about my lack of laundry and is now telling about a cat she once had and her current menagerie: two parakeets and a betta fish. “I talk to them birds all day long,” she says, laughing. “All day long, Lord.”

  “I hope you don’t mind my asking,” her voice changes, the laughter evaporating, “but why did you move here?” Her eyes go shy again and as I scan the smooth face, I think maybe she’s not so old after all, or I am truly grown older today, the gap between us closing. Anyway, I’m used to this question and the tone in which it is asked. Unlike New York or San Francisco, where the appeal is generally assumed, Memphians are stumped about why outsiders come. The tourists down on Beale Street, the British and Germans lined up at Graceland they almost understand, but someone coming to stay? It’s nothing short of a mystery.

  “A job,” I say, and tell her about my students at the local public university, how I was the first in my family to go to college, how so many Memphis students are in the same boat. I like this woman who reheats frozen pancakes for a horde of hungry children every morning and I suppose that besides technically answering her question, I’m hoping for something more, but she just looks away and asks if I know her niece over at the college.

  “I’m afraid not,” I say once she says the name. There are more than twenty thousand students, but I leave this out, not wanting to dilute her niece among the others.

  I stand to check my laundry, asking if she takes naps after working all morning.

  “Only after I watch my programs.”

  “Soap operas or game shows?”

  “Neither,” she says, “I like the old ones, Bonanza, sometimes Gunsmoke and The Big Valley. And Walker, Texas Ranger; now that is my show.” I laugh at her taste for television Westerns and wonder if she likes old detective shows, like Starsky & Hutch.

  “Not really,” she says. “But I love that Barnaby Jones.”

  “What about Quincy?” She shakes her head, she doesn’t know much about Quincy, and I’m spinning my wheels trying to remember shows from childhood when she switches to movies.

  “Normally I don’t care for Elvis, but I like Frankie and Johnny a whole lot,” she says. She throws me a look of pity when I don’t know the film, and says, “the one where Elvis is on a riverboat with the girl who played Elly May in The Beverly Hillbillies.”

  “What about other musicals?” I say, moving to the washer whose red light has finally gone dark. “The Sound of Music?”

  “No,” she laughs. “I don’t like that kind of show.”

  “West Side Story?” I pull the wet ball of clothes into the metal basket as she asks what it’s about and I say it’s Natalie Wood as a Puerto Rican girl who loves a white boy but no one wants them together. We both laugh then—though I’m not sure whether we’re laughing over the idea of Natalie Wood being Puerto Rican or the fact of people being kept apart by skin color.

  “Hmm,” she says after a minute. “I do like me some Shirley Temple films.”

  “Yes,” I say, “she’s all right,” while slipping quarters into the dryer, and by the time I return to my seat the entertainment thread has worn down to nothing and it gets quiet, something settling onto us, the sort of thing that can’t be turned back once it starts. As I sit listening to the clank in the spinning dryer, all talk of Bonanza and Elly May Clampett out of the way, I know the question she’ll ask before it comes—one that didn’t used to come, or when it did could still be answered with the sort of possibility that let both answerer and asker off the hook.

  “No kids?”

  “No,” I say. “Nope.”

  It’s odd the way the tender places are not touched so much by those we know as by strangers sitting in metal chairs while laundry tumbles behind small circles of glass. Funny how such moments come between talk of old TV shows and the sound of the man in the pick-up outside revving his engine while waiting for his girlfriend to switch her load.

  “You never wanted any?” She’s looking straight at me now, silver curls catching the light. I look away for a minute, toward the woman who runs the place, folding laundry for those who prefer to pay more and drop it off, her long hair pulled back in a utilitarian bun, a style she’s probably worn for forty years, a habit as fixed as the way she apologies every time I ask for change, yes, ma’am, sorry, ma’am, while handing over the half roll of quarters.

  “You really want to know?” I look back at the woman beside me, and a man who’s just taken a seat at the table starts flipping through a magazine when she says, “Yes.”

  “I never could,” I say. I feel something then, something with force enough to cause tears in the Laundromat but with muscle enough to stop them at the root. No children. Never could. The fact of it still so strange. Something’s moving in me, and she’s watching closely, and though some small part of me wants to apologize for no good reason, like the woman as she changes dollars into quarters—no, ma’am, sorry, ma’am—I say it clean and cool, as if I’m ordering a Diet Dr Pepper from the counter next door. “I tried and couldn’t, then the marriage ended and now I’m older, married again and children wouldn’t fit.”

  She keeps looking, our eyes almost connecting, the blue and the brown, before something flits away in her, and who knows, maybe I flit too from a moment so swollen it nearly splits, from this Laundromat stuck between a bowling alley and THREE LITTLE PIGS BBQ in southeast Memphis.

  The man at the end of the table coughs and turns the page of the magazine and something loosens around us.

  “How about you?” I ask, and listen as she tells about her boy, how his wife is expecting and how excited she is, but she hopes they don’t think she’s putting a crib up at her place. And it’s a fine conversation then, her telling about her son while I get up and begin to fold my clothes into my basket.

  “They sure don’t look dry,” she says after a minute, “You planning on air drying?”

  “They’re dryer than they seem,” I say.

  “Hmmm,” she says. “Well, maybe you’ll come in at this time again.”

  “Maybe I will,” I say, and don’t tell her how far from home this Laundromat is, how I traveled nearly twenty minutes from a neighborhood of big houses and fine streets to sit in this particular place, so far removed from anything familiar. I don’t say it because I can’t make sense of it myself, and realize just then that I’m ready to make my way home. I gather up my coffee and basket of damp clothes and the bag of ungraded papers, and say, “It was nice talking with you.” I tell her my name and ask for hers, which is odd considering I’m on my way out the door.

  “Joyelle,” she says—or maybe the name is Joelle—either way it comes too fast, and all I know is that it sounds something like joy as I prop the door with a hip and push into my car fast because it’s started to sprinkle. I put the basket in the backseat and sit for a minute watching the sun filter through bare oak branches and—not despite the rain, but because of it—the light is just right. To say the sky is w
ashed in gold would be too much, but there are hints of it everywhere, yellow light coming through the crown of black branches, so that I feel the weight of the day just then, the perfectly full weight of it.

  Coda

  This River

  AND JUST LIKE THAT autumn is here again. I’ve left behind apple orchards and Great Lakes, exchanged cattails for catfish and the muddy banks of the lower Mississippi—but the scent of fall hangs in the air the same way everywhere. This morning I find a message written upon a paved path near the river as I walk—words scrawled in pastel chalk:

  WE HAD OUR FIRST DATE HERE.

  Sweet, I think. I walk a few more feet and find another:

  RIGHT HERE, ALONG THIS RIVER.

  The word river is underlined with two squiggly lines of blue, as if making the symbol for water; the word here is capitalized as if to mark the very spot. I keep walking, and the messages keep coming:

  WE HELD HANDS.

  Who is this writer sharing memories along the walkway? A barge loaded with coal passes and a mockingbird calls from a cottonwood tree. I continue along the path, wondering how many more messages have been written. A few more and the path narrows. I find what will be the last message—the letters are capitalized, and hearts chalked in pink surround the words:

  WHAT A GOOD FATHER YOU’LL MAKE THIS JULY.

  I do the math. Newly pregnant, and sharing her news. A romantic, this writer, walking him along the path of beginnings, revealing her news a few words at a time. She may not have intended to announce their pregnancy to those of us attempting to walk off breakfast or to center ourselves before heading to work, but here they are, her words:

  RIGHT HERE.

  When will the next rain come and wash them away?

  And what can any of it mean, the invisible couple, the memory of a first date, this secondhand joy, all of it written in chalk?

  ALONG THIS RIVER.

  How such things press upon on us, I think, as I step over a swarm of chalk-drawn hearts, feeling excitement for the child coming in July. A child I will never know, but how glad I am of its coming. Strange to be suddenly connected to strangers through messages chalked on the walking path on Mud Island. But how much they mean, these words written upon the path, this handful of symbols that will disappear when the next hard rain comes. How much they matter, stories of apple trees and chipped vanities and holding hands along the river—the traces of our various backs and forths, our reaching and spinning, our many falls, and the occasional wondrous flights. All of it set down like white stones through the forest, like so many little glints of light.

  A Thousand Thanks

  TO KRISTEN ELIAS ROWLEY and the University of Nebraska Press for shaping this book and for all they do to promote literary nonfiction. To Gregory Gerard, James Graves, Jenny Lloyd, Elizabeth Osta, Sally Parker, Deanna Ferguson, Jim Mott, and Maureen McGuire for careful readings. To my colleagues at the University of Memphis, my writing community from the University of New Orleans, and my students who mean more than they know. To Dinty W. Moore, Linda Allardt, Joseph and Amanda Boyden, and every writing teacher I’ve ever had (including Srs. Eileen Daly and Clare Ehmann, who kept me in line and taught me to diagram sentences, in that order).

  To Gail and Peter Mott, Elizabeth Ross, Kristen Iversen, Richard Bausch, Marcia Aldrich, John Griswold. Deb Wolkenberg, Gia Lioi, Craig Bullock, Lisa Shillingburg, and friends, editors, and former colleagues who have so generously supported my work. To Toni Plummer, Valerie Sayers, Jennifer Warlick, Kathryn J. Thomas, Susan Latoski, Nancy Bennett, Darlene Cowles, Patricia Roth Schwartz, Beth Lathrop, Kathy Zawicki, Leigh Simone, Nina Mortellaro, Connie Boyd, Natalie Parker-Lawrence, Mary Louise McClelland, Beth Thomas, Minter Krotzer, Terra Keller, Betsy Hoffer, Kelly McQuain, Shelley Puhak, Kathleen Willis, Julia Walsh Postler, Leanne Charlesworth, MJ Iuppa, Mary Anne Parker-Hancock, Adam Lewandowski, Scott Gould, Mamie Morgan, Young Smith, Curt Nehring Bliss, Terry Forward, Roberta Liebhaber, Leanne Charlesworth, Phil Memmer, Kathy Pottetti, Martin Lammon, Carol Moldt, Deb Vanderbilt, Jen Litt, Anne Panning, Sarah Freligh, and others who invited me into their classrooms and organizations.

  To Ellen Wheeler and Mary Ellen Sweeney of the Susan B. Anthony House in Rochester, New York, for the tour, good information, and for putting up with silly questions.

  To my family—Livingstons, Skyes, Rosarios, Heywoods, and Motts—who remain my primary way of knowing the world. To families and friends from Corpus Christi, especially those from the old neighborhood—who could have guessed that a dead-end street could stay in the heart so long?

  To Jim Mott for knowing when pelicans will fly over Arkansas and where to best view the moonrise and how to find wild azaleas along trails that have become our own.

  Source Acknowledgments

  WITH MUCH GRATITUDE I acknowledge the journals in which earlier versions of these essays appeared: “Land of the Lost,” Arts & Letters, no. 27 (Spring 2013); “Our Lady of the Lakes,” Bellingham Review, no. 67 (Fall 2013); “World without End” and “Klotilde’s Cake,” Blackbird 13, no. 2 (Fall 2014); “Our Lady of the Roses,” Fourth Genre 14, no. 1 (Spring 2012); “One for Sorrow,” The McNeese Review 50 (2012); “Mock Orange,” Water~Stone Review 17 (Fall 2014); “The Lonely Hunters,” Seneca Review 41, no. 3 (Spring 2013); and “Something Like Joy,” River Teeth 14, no. 2 (2013).

  “Land of the Lost” won the 2012 Susan Atefat Prize for Nonfiction from Georgia State College, “Our Lady of the Roses” was listed as a Notable Essay in The Best American series (2013), and “Mock Orange” was a finalist for the 2014 Judith Kitchen Prize in Nonfiction.

  Notes

  The Lady with the Alligator Purse

  Information on the public poll comes from New Dollar Coin: Public Prefers Statue of Liberty Over Sacagawea: Report to the Honorable Michael N. Castle, House of Representatives (Washington DC: General Accounting Office, 1999).

  Information on Susan B. Anthony’s purse comes from the Susan B. Anthony House in Rochester, New York, and their website: www.susanbanthonyhouse.org.

  “The Lady with the Alligator Purse” is an American hand-clapping song with many variations, including versions in which the mother is called Miss Lucy or Miss Suzie and the Lady sometimes utters “nonsense” or “nothing” to the child’s problem. I combine the version I sang as a child with one recorded when Susan B. Anthony campaigned for suffrage in California.

  Blackstone’s Law was published as Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765–69).

  Flight

  All italicized text comes from Judith Kitchen’s essays “Songs to Undo the Spring” and “Only the Dance,” in Only the Dance (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994).

  One for Sorrow

  “One for Sorrow” is a traditional English nursery rhyme based on superstitions and the number of magpies one sees.

  The verse from Tennyson is taken from In Memoriam A.H.H., sec. LIX, 1849. From In Memoriam (Portland ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1890).

  The Lonely Hunters

  The line from Carson McCullers is taken from The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940).

  The poem “The Lonely Hunter” was written by William Sharp and published under the pseudonym Fiona MacLeod in 1896 and appears in From the Hills of Dream: Threnodies, Songs and Other Poems (Portland ME: Thomas B. Mosher, 1901).

  “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” was written by the Bee Gees in 1970 and covered by Al Green in 1972. No actual lyrics appear in the essay.

  Epigraphs

  I

  The lines from “Persephone, Falling” are by Rita Dove, from Mother Love (New York: W. W Norton, 1996).

  II

  The lines of the anonymous Irish poem “Táim sínte ar do thuama” are taken from a translation by Frank O’Connor in Love Poems of the Irish, ed. Seán Lucy (Cork, Ireland: Mercier, 1967).

  III

  The lines from Judith Kitchen come from the essay “Songs to Undo the Spring,�
�� in Only the Dance.

  About Sonja Livingston

  Sonja Livingston is an assistant professor in the MFA Program at the University of Memphis. Her first book, Ghostbread, won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Book Prize for nonfiction.

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