Three Novellas

by Sandra Shwayder Sanchez

I

  Sara

  Sara assumed she would continue in the field of psychology as that was her undergraduate background and it had always fascinated her. She took a road trip to visit the universities she thought she would apply to. The University of West Virginia was too close to the location of the now abandoned commune. She considered it briefly but walking around the campus disturbed her. She remembered that first summer when they had come once or twice a week to sneak into the dorms and use the showers. Not “sneak” exactly; the trick was to dress like the students, which was easy because in those days the students adopted the hippie style, and walk in boldly like you belonged there and knew where you were going. The women with kids pretended to be visiting cousins. One of them actually had a cousin who was enrolled but lived off campus. It was that cousin who gave them the idea for the shower “raids” as they jokingly called them, “stealing clean” they called it. (Abbie Hoffman had made stealing an intellectually respectable political action.)

  Eventually they built their own shower, gravity fed from a strong year-round spring up the hill and warmed by the sun until they acquired a rusty old propane powered water heater and a propane tank of industrial size in trade for a healthy pregnant holstein heifer. They built a shed big enough for four or five adults from which they could enjoy the sunrise while showering. Those mixed communal showers gave rise to an entire season of gossip in the small town nearest them, another obstacle to their longevity on the land. But they all worked hard from first light to last and were far too tired in the evenings for the wild orgies the neighbors imagined, even had they been so inclined. Those neighbors would have been surprised to discover that the couples were monogamous and the singles chaste (until and unless they became part of monogamous couples). Nor did anyone use any drug more serious than the marijuana they grew in modest amounts in a well-hidden field. What bound this group was a belief in socialist principles, a good work ethic, respect for the land and a desire to remain aloof from the more irresponsible elements of the sixties “back to the land” movement. They were earnest young people seeking a moral utopia in the midst of the holocaust of industrialized civilization.

  Thinking back on it, Sara realized it had been the building of the main house that had finally and irrevocably splintered them. They all got too involved with their own visions of what it should be, and it defeated them. But there were other things, many things along the way, that had already weakened the little community: a mother with small children insisted on making concessions to the capitalist telephone company that ate at their philosophical foundations, and not everyone wanted to sue (and thereby antagonize) the local electric coop that had used chemical spray on their right of way one morning before dawn (“Did they really think they could go undetected? Did they really think they could get away with it?” “Haven’t you noticed? They CAN get away with it.) There were increasingly heated discussions about the morality of raising beef. One mother accused another of starving her infant because of too many politically motivated food taboos. There was even talk of calling Social Services in the nearest city. One man insisted that his pregnant wife go to a hospital for her delivery, and she lost respect by acquiescing (“If you are too chicken to let Melinda help you, at least have the integrity to speak for yourself”). Their meetings turned into vituperative debates over every aspect of their communal lives. Sooner or later, everyone scattered, to single-family homesteads, to other communes, even “back to civilization” with downcast eyes.

  Sara stayed on even when she realized that it was not a simple love of the land but a list of shared prohibitions that had brought them all together, and this made her unutterably sad. She stayed on until she was the last one, all alone, abandoned with the shack, the sheds, the huge excavation where the new main house was to have been. They had indeed built and roofed a shell but scavengers came and took the lumber and the piled-up building materials inside. In the night, Sara thought she could hear them tearing the skeleton of the house and she knew there was nothing that she, all by herself, could do. She thought about taking the rusty old rifle with her and running them off and then thought again and went back to sleep, her heart broken. It was the very next day that she left. It had begun to snow, the last big snowstorm of her last spring there. It had been three years but would be more significant than the next three decades in her life. For the warm earth spawns ghosts and those ghosts accompanied Sara everywhere ever after.

  Lying on a bed beneath an open window on a dark summer afternoon, the darkness of storm, the rain coming in on my legs, I look up at the trees through a window and hear rock and roll music from the distance mingle with the thunder and the swoosh of cars on the wet asphalt and all these things remind me of London, a lifetime ago, sitting in the room, looking up at the curtains blowing into the room, hearing Miriam Mekeba and the city rain bouncing with a light sound off the pavement and there I was remembering New York and when I went back to New York I remembered London, back and forth in time, my memories round in circles: riding my bike in a Maryland suburb near the University at dawn remembering the mornings I rode my bike around the Bronx remembering Rome. Where haven’t I been? briefly passing through? I don’t remember what I was looking for in all those cities, with all those people. I remember a lot of lonely, misplaced women too old or too young to belong anywhere.

  Riding the 6th Avenue bus, the organ grinder, a hunchback. This I must have dreamed before I dreamed I was lost on the bus and before I dreamed the truck’s headlights coming at me, running me over. I remember that dream very clearly and then the day that the leaves swirled around my ankles as if just before a storm and I saw the woman, the hunchbacked woman in a torn dress, very drunk, and all this remin’d me of the nightmare. The woman is homeless and she rides back and forth on the bus. She lives on that bus for as long as she can and the driver jokes with her. Actually, he is making fun of her because she is retarded but she doesn’t realize that he is making fun of her so she doesn’t care. That would have been Denver.

  In New York there was the subway and all those drunks: the man who told me about owning a horse once with a girl on it, and a big dog. He’d had all these things and now he wanted a dime. Striding down 2nd Avenue to the wine store I see an old beggar woman rummaging in a wire trash can and I offer her the half of my sandwich I was saving for dinner. “What is it? Ham? Roast beef? Pastrami? No, I don’t like pastrami.” She disdains to speak to me, foul eater of pastrami that I am.

  Standing on Howard Street at night by the bus station, thousands of birds crying. It was obscene those birds making that noise in downtown Baltimore at night, as though the forest were still there. A bus station in Alabama, the ladies’ room smells terrible and a young girl, maybe fifteen, she talks to me. It’s three in the morning. She just got a divorce she tells me. Good thing there were no kids she tells me. I ask how old she is. “Fifteen” she tells me, proudly.

  In Florida a woman with half her nose missing tells me about her rose bush and how she waited twenty-one years for it, the husband promised it to her and forgot, time and time again and the boy was born, grew up, went to war and was killed, and the husband died and then she up and went to town and bought herself the rosebush but it wouldn’t bloom, not for years and then one September it put forth one white rose: the September rose she called it and I wondered why she was telling me this story and what I was doing there: buying honey I think. I think I stopped to buy honey because she had a sign out front. A busload of kids came then and she had to tell them how the bees made the honey and their teacher kept shushing them. I don’t remember what I was doing in Florida or how I got there or if I was with someone else or alone. Too many places.

  Sometimes early in the morning while I drink coffee and wait for the dawn and listen to the sound of the geese flying over to the Park I indulge myself in memories of West Virginia. I felt so nurtured there. I lived in the dry rotted remains of a two-room shack held up by inertia and I had never felt so at home
anywhere. Outside every window were scenes of a thousand greens and a deep peace.

  Nestled and hidden in the nooks and crannies of rock formations and forest I could see the tops of tipis, to the east, the fading colors of an India-print bedspread flapping in the entry to the hayloft of the leaning old barn: Tom lived up there with his ex-biker wife and they fixed it up prettier than the house. I lived in the house because I was the cook, needed to be close to the kitchen. Why me? How had they known that I would be the best cook? Never cook anymore: frozen dinners when I have the time, fast food from machines when I don’t. I was so thin in those days, of course: eating only what we grew and walking up and down hills, miles every day, no level ground in West Virginia: they said if it was ironed out flat it would be bigger than Texas and Alaska put together.

  They said a lot of things. Tall tales were an art form, the thing to do on long winter nights by the fire. I don’t remember anyone clearly, just oblique shadowy profiles or faces partly hidden by beards, long hair. I remember earrings and eyelashes on cheeks, habits of flipping long hair back over the shoulder, ways of walking, expressions of speech, everyone in pieces. I didn’t really know anyone that well. They didn’t really know me at all.

  One by one they left, or two by two, or couples with children, sometimes sending friends back in their places but over time, fewer and fewer people living there in the woods. Finally just me.

  I was an exile in time and only there could I be at home or at least create the illusion of it. It was so still there. I missed the animals though they were trouble in the winter. The geese could take care of themselves and the first few summers they were there living in the old barn and on the generous creek. But one summer they were gone: a few bones in the barn, foxes I supposed. I missed the geese and that summer I was sad, but later I got used to it and concentrated on the garden. Sometimes a man from up the road left his horses there to pasture when there wasn’t much rain and the grass on his place wasn’t sufficient. I took nothing for the pasturage. I was glad to see the horses there.

  The man who actually owned the land decided to hang onto it, a good “investment” he said, unashamed at discarding his socialist principles so easily. He justified it by saying the community had let him down by not remaining committed to that hard life, more cold days than warm, more work than reward, so it seemed to them and to him, the man who had learned his lesson, had put youthful ideals aside and “grown up”…but not me. I loved it: the poetry of the creek and the beauty of the life on the land: I lived inside a landscape painting and heard music everywhere. I loved it. And yet, not enough it seems. Left on my own, I couldn’t stay either: more cold days than warm, more work than reward, more work than I could manage all alone. I tried to finish the house we had started together. He said I could live there…but I couldn’t.

  Sara didn’t belong and she knew it. No matter how long she stayed or how hard she worked, she was a stranger. Neighbors offered to help her but never asked her to reciprocate and this hurt her deeply. They were as kind or as cold to her, depending on their respective personalities, as they would be kind or cold to anyone among their own who was lacking something vital: sense perhaps. What Sara lacked was a history. They asked her enough questions for sure but couldn’t relate to the answers. She was guarded and brief and her last name was simply too exotic to be real. She had given herself the name of Brindisi after the town in Italy from which she and her youthful husband had once embarked for Greece, one of the too many places she hadn’t stayed.

  How could she tell them that she had been on the run from her mother’s third husband since the age of fourteen? Sara had hitched rides all across America, had worked odd jobs and flown off across the Atlantic without any clear plan, had married briefly when she was only eighteen, had come back and gone to a small alternative college on a scholarship because the college admissions officer had been so enthralled with a vagabond who had read so much and knew several languages: they let her take a test in lieu of requesting a high school transcript.

  She discouraged his other interest in her with a ready wit and he responded gracefully (perhaps with relief, being married with grown children) and continued as her mentor. She graduated in three years with a degree in Behavioral Science. When anyone expressed amazement that she had finished so quickly, she just told them she had nothing else to do those three years and that always brought a laugh and put an end to questions about how she had spent her summers and winter and spring breaks. The college library had been her home. After graduation, feeling once again dislocated, she joined a commune made up of people she barely knew because she craved the beauty and moods of mountains. But to the mountain people, Sara would be strange twenty years hence. In the end that was what really drove her away, not the hard work or the cold winters.

  “All science is an attempt to cover with explanatory devices—and thereby to obscure— the vast darkness of the subject. It is a game in which the scientist uses his explanatory principles according to certain rules to see if these principles can be stretched to cover the vast darkness. But the rules of the stretching are rigorous and the purpose of the whole operation is really to discover what parts of the darkness still remain uncovered by explanation.” Naven, 2nd ed. Gregory Bateson. Stanford University Press, 1958, pp. 280-281.

  Professor Cormack was delighted that Sara was interested in his idea of a particular kind of ethnographic study of an isolated mountain community in Appalachia and she was excited about the excuse to return. Of course there was a mountain of paperwork that had to be taken care of in order to be accepted by the university but, as head of a department, he was able to make sure the red tape moved smoothly and by the time she had completed the first half of her first semester she was an official, bona fide graduate student.

  She spent that first semester doing background reading, culminating in a careful and fascinating reading of Naven by Gregory Bateson for an understanding of his concept of the ethos and eidos of an entire society. It was this unusual and interesting approach that Professor Cormack wanted her to take in her study of her old neighbors.