Marcelo in the Real World

by Francisco X. Stork

  “We should all be so ill.”

  “The part of her body that I like the most is her eyes. When I look into them, I feel like staying there as much as possible. Is that force sexual, as far as you know?”

  Jonah shrugs his shoulders. The shrug, as far as I can tell, means that he has no way of knowing the answer to my question. It is a question that only Marcelo can answer.

  I am confused all of a sudden. Confused that Jonah could think that Jasmine and Marcelo could be more than friends. It has never occurred to me and I cannot believe that Jasmine could be interested in me that way. Perhaps the comfort I feel around Jasmine is also sexual in a way I don’t understand. Maybe attraction for another person is like the IM, where body and mind cannot be separated.

  Jonah looks in the direction of the open window and I hear the sound of the piano. The notes come slowly, one after another, each carrying a slightly different tone of sadness. We listen in silence, then Jonah speaks. “When Jasmine’s mother was dying, they put up a bed there in the living room, and that’s the song she wanted Jasmine to play to her at the end.”

  “Gymnopédies,” I say.

  “Pardon?”

  “The music is called Gymnopédies, by a composer named Satie.”

  “Really? That’s one touching piece of music. I wouldn’t mind hearing that when I’m dying.”

  “The stars seem so close to the earth here.”

  “You like it here?” Jonah asks.

  “Very much.”

  “There’s not many places left where you can still make an honest living off the land. Amos can do it ‘cause the farm is bought and paid for. He was nearly fifty when he got married. Jasmine’s mother was a waitress downtown where Amos and Father used to go on Friday nights to have a few. She and Amos had this bantering going back and forth for years. Everyone knew they liked each other. One day Amos said something flirty to Lila, and she just turned around and told him that if he wasn’t intending to ever get serious then she’d appreciate it if he left and never came back. They got married the following week. She was nearing forty. The doctor told her it would kill her to have kids but she went ahead and had two. After she died, Jasmine became a little mother for the whole family real quick.”

  The piano stops playing, and a few seconds later we see Jasmine come out the back door. She looks around before she spots us sitting in the back of the pickup truck.

  “What are you guys doing? I don’t like this. What have you two been talking about?”

  “We were having a heart-to-heart,” I tell her.

  Jasmine glares at Jonah.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay, don’t look at me like that,” says Jonah, jumping off the flap of the truck. Then he whispers to her loud enough for me to hear, “I think you finally met your match.” He moves away before Jasmine can punch him in the shoulder. Jonah announces, “I’m gonna get me one last beer and I’ll make sure those guys aren’t getting too comfortable. One more beer and we’re out of here, I promise.”

  Jonah enters the house and closes the kitchen door behind him.

  Jasmine says, “You like it here. I can tell.”

  “Yes. Here you can still make an honest living.”

  “You got that from Jonah.”

  “Here a person would not have to pretend or lie.”

  “Not as much, maybe. That’s not to say that it doesn’t happen anyway.”

  “You are saving your money to take care of Amos in a few years and to build your house-slash-studio.”

  “Jonah talks way too much. In a few years I’ll have saved enough to pay for Amos’s medical bills and my health insurance, and maybe I’ll have enough to finish the studio and a little extra to fix this place up. We need to get six more cows and a new steel tank to hold the milk until the truck comes to get it. They already told Amos they were going to stop buying his milk unless he got one. Then we have to cement the bottom of the cows’ stalls. New regulations. Actually old regulations, but somehow Amos has gotten away with it. Knowing him, he’s probably bribing someone. You got the milk and cheese from twenty cows, the honey, Kickaz’s stud services, maple syrup we harvest from the trees on the hill, firewood—and I can give piano lessons and get a parttime job as a music teacher in a school. That should give us enough to get by.”

  “And your music?”

  “It’s part of the plan. It’s at the center of it all. Everything else supports it.”

  “When you went to Boston you always planned on coming back.”

  “Of course. My plan was, is, to make as much money as possible and then come back. Besides, after James died, Amos was impossible to be around at times. At the beginning of dementia and Alzheimer’s, there’s a lot of hostility, paranoia. I needed to give us some space. He’s better now. If he takes his pills.”

  She looks up at the sky and studies a dot of light crossing the darkness. I follow the light as well. “Maybe I don’t know any better, but I always knew this was where I belonged. It’s not that life will be easier here. It’s just that here’s where I belong, that’s all.” She waits for me to speak. I am thinking about the places where I felt I belonged and how, maybe, these places are no longer there for me.

  Cody’s voice brings me back. “Jasmine, you better get in here! They’re getting into it!”

  We go back to the house. Amos is sitting on the sofa, blowing rapid puffs of smoke out his pipe. He is addressing Samuel Shackleton, sunk beside him on the sofa. Some of his words are slurred.

  “Maybe old Eleanor wasn’t hot like she used to be, but she was lukewarm enough for fucking. It’s that bull of yours who’s got no more yeast in his dough. Pecker’s flabby as yours.”

  “Dad!” Jasmine cries.

  Cody finishes putting the violin in the case and goes over to the rocking chair and sits down. He seems ready to enjoy himself. Jonah brings in two chairs from the kitchen, one for me and one for him. Jasmine is already seated on the piano stool.

  When everyone has finished taking their seats, Samuel responds. “Shit! Old Bruno still hardens up like a telephone pole with every other cow that’s put in front of him. Just ‘cause the oven’s warm don’t mean it’s hot enough to cook the rolls. That cow of yours is just plain too old and ugly. Besides, she’s Bruno’s momma.”

  “Look here,” Amos says, “an animal is not made so as to be able to turn down the opportunity to get it on, unless his equipment is not working. An animal ain’t like a person. If the female animal can conceive, the male animal will jump the female, willy-nilly. Now take you, for example. You gonna go home tonight warmed up by that cheap Scotch of yours, and you gonna look at Jane asleep there with her curlers, maybe snoring a little, and you’re gonna say, ‘Naaah, I don’t think so,’ and you’ll turn around and go into the bathroom and dig out one of those old magazines you got hidden in the towel drawer, and you’ll try to handle things as best you can. But an animal is not put off by age or ugliness. If she still can, he will.”

  “Oh-kaay, time to go home.” Jasmine claps and stands up but no one stands up with her. She sits down again. “Samuel, you’re our guest, so in accordance with long-established custom, you get the last word. Say your last word and then you all have to scat.”

  Samuel Shackleton downs the last drop of Scotch in his glass slowly. Then he speaks. “All’s I can say is that there comes a time in every bull’s life when he decides to stop being a motherfucker. Wished the same principle applied to menfolk as well.” He sits on the sofa staring at Amos. Then when he can’t hold it anymore, his laughter bursts out, together with everyone else’s.

  Amos sticks his pipe further down his mouth. I can tell that he is not happy with the long-established custom of letting the guest have the last word.

  The Shackletons file by, each shaking my hand. When it is Jonah’s turn, he says to me, “Good heart-to-heart tonight.”

  CHAPTER 24

  At five forty-five the following morning, Jasmine comes out of the house. I am in the front yard, surrounded by
the plastic animals, lifting weights. I stop long enough to see her rub her eyes. Either she is rubbing off remaining sleep or she cannot believe that someone would be up so early doing what I’m doing. I stop and put the ten-pound dumbbells on the ground.

  “What are you doing?” she asks, yawning. “How long have you been out here? What time is it? And where did you get those?” She is looking at the dumbbells. They are round and coated with blue plastic.

  “Which of the four previous questions would Jasmine like me to answer?”

  “Don’t tell me that you brought those dumbbells in your backpack.”

  “Yes.” I don’t understand what is so strange about this.

  “No wonder I nearly broke my back when I was getting your backpack down from the Jeep.” Namu walks over and sits in front of Jasmine, waiting for her to notice him. “Your owner is one crazy boy, Namu. I gotta get some coffee.” She turns around and goes back in the house.

  After breakfast we load up Kickaz. Jasmine wants to take supplies to Amos’s shack so that, come winter, Amos doesn’t have to do it. She puts a blanket on Kickaz’s back and then places an aluminum frame on top of the blanket. On various parts of the frame she places Amos’s supplies, as well as the tent and sleeping bags and other stuff we’ll need for our trip.

  Amos seems unusually lucid this morning. He does not confuse me with James. He recognizes me as Jasmine’s friend, although a couple of times he calls me “Marshmallow.” Jasmine says that the reason he is so subdued is that the “meds” have kicked in.

  By seven we are on our way. We ascend the knoll where Jasmine is going to build her house-slash-studio, go down the other side, and then go up over the forested mountain that Jasmine calls a hill. Here there is a trail that we follow, and from the trail I see paths to clusters of trees. “Maple trees,” Jasmine tells me. “There’s about fifty of them on this hill that we tap for syrup. The syrup you had this morning for your pancakes comes from one of those trees.” Namu stops and cocks his ears. Jasmine stops as well. And I stop after her.

  “Listen. Can you hear them?” Jasmine asks.

  I hear popping sounds.

  “People out hunting. It’s illegal to hunt in August but they still do it.”

  “What do they hunt?” I ask.

  “White-tailed deer.”

  “With guns.”

  “Yup.”

  “Has Jasmine ever hunted?”

  “Yup.”

  “And killed a deer with a gun?”

  “Yes.”

  It is a way of seeing Jasmine that I did not have before. I wonder how many new ways of seeing Jasmine there will be during this trip.

  “Sometimes the meat from venison lasts us all winter.” I understand that this is her way of explaining why she hunts.

  We walk for more than an hour. She is leading Kickaz and I am holding on to the aluminum frame. “Look.”

  There, hidden in the middle of the hill, are a dozen or so thin and tall white trees. The green leaves on the top rustle with a breeze that is not felt on the ground but must exist up there. “Birches. Aren’t they pretty? They’re my favorite. I don’t know why. Those white trunks in the middle of a brown-and-green forest. And in the fall, their leaves make a tinkling sound.”

  “This is where Jasmine…where you get your ideas for your music.”

  “There are so many sounds. The wind makes different sounds depending on the different trees it travels through. There are sounds that the earth makes. And wait until you get to the water. Then there are animals too. And they all come together sometimes.”

  I hear the popping sound again. “And guns,” I say.

  “Yeah, and guns. I guess I should include the sound of those as well.”

  The memory of Wendell poking my chest comes to mind all of a sudden. Here’s another unexpected experience—this pleasure I feel when I imagine how I am going to tell Wendell that I will not ask Jasmine to go on a boat ride. What do I call that?

  “That’s a red-tailed hawk.” We have reached the top of the mountain. Above us, a hawk circles and rises, dips and tilts without a single movement of his wings. “He’s looking for a rabbit. There’s tons of them in the valley below.”

  “Are we climbing that mountain too?”

  “Hill,” Jasmine corrects me.

  Hidden Lake, she explains, is not only hidden, it is also secret. There are no roads to the lake, so people have to hike to it. Until recently, only a few old-timers like Amos knew about it.

  We are halfway down the second mountain when we suddenly see the lake. We stop as if stunned by sudden brightness. From the side of the mountains I can see the full circumference. Here and there around the sides I see the fishing shacks. They are small wooden structures, and I don’t know how any person can lie down and sleep inside of them.

  “See that one painted blue with the white stars all over? That one is Amos’s.”

  “How do they sleep?”

  “The shacks just barely fit a cot. In the winter they drag the shacks to the middle of the frozen lake, make a hole in the ice, and fish and carry on like teenagers.”

  “But the cold.”

  “See this?” She touches a pouch inside the harness. “This is coal for the stove that warms Amos at night. In the daytime he toughs it out. Every time I come over I bring some supplies. Can you imagine making the trip we just made in the winter? Amos gets someone to take care of the animals, puts his snowshoes on, and off he goes. A couple of years ago there was a civil war over generators. The younger fishermen wanted to bring over generators so that they could watch TV and have all the comforts of home. But the generators are so noisy and smelly. This quiet would be gone. You should have seen them. I had to stop Amos from bringing his shotgun out here.”

  “And then?”

  “So far those in favor of modern comforts have relented, out of respect and maybe a little fear of the old-timers. But when the old-timers go, the generators will come on the back of snowmobiles.”

  We get to Amos’s shack and unload supplies. There are bags of rice and cans of pork and beans and coal for the small iron stove that is connected to a black chimney pipe sticking out of the roof.

  Then Jasmine unfolds the tent. We pick a spot not far from the edge of the lake with the front of the tent facing the water. It is a tent shaped like a triangle, big enough in the middle for a person to stand up. As we are putting it up, I look around for another tent. I realize for the first time that Jasmine and I will be sleeping side by side. I have never slept with anyone else except Yolanda, when we went to Spain, and then we each had a single bed in a hotel room. This is different somehow. It makes me nervous. “Pull up the pole on your end,” she yells at me. My nervousness makes me think of Adam and Eve and how they realized they were naked after they ate the apple.

  “What are you thinking about? Snap out of it. After we finish getting the camp ready, I’m going to get the canoe out in the lake and go fishing. What would you like to do?”

  “Marcelo came to Vermont to ponder, remember.”

  “Well, here you are. You can stay here or come with me in the canoe. Either way you’ll have lots of silence.”

  “Jasmine will not talk.”

  “You’ll be facing forward and I’ll be in the back fishing. You won’t even know I’m there.”

  We paddle, or rather, Jasmine paddles close to the shore, where the shade of the trees reaches the water. Then Jasmine directs the canoe straight into a fallen tree. “Duck,” she says. I put down my head quickly and we slide through a space so narrow that only a canoe as slim as ours can fit through, and we are in what seems like an even more secluded lake surrounded on all sides by bushes of red, yellow, and white flowers. When we reach the center of the cove, I hear a splash and the canoe stops. I turn my head around and Jasmine whispers, “The anchor.” Then she places her index finger to her lips.

  I lower myself to the floor of the canoe and listen. I listen to the periodic swoosh of Jasmine’s fishing line. I listen
to splashes in the water. I hear the buzz of insects, the wind ripple through the trees, lake waves, and now and then the high-pitched sound of a large bird, a sound of pain.

  How did Ixtel become real for me? The world is full of Ixtels who I can help without hurting my father. Why this one? How was it her suffering that touched me? Father. I feel connected to her through my father’s actions. I feel an obligation to right my father’s wrong. But why? Shouldn’t my father’s welfare come first? His welfare is my welfare. How does one weigh love for a parent against the urge to help someone in need?

  I feel like what is right should be done no matter what. This lack of doubt makes me feel inhuman. But it is not a question of my head for once. I hear the right note. I recognize the wrong note. Maybe the right action is a lake like this one, green and quiet and deep.

  It is dusk now. Jasmine has divided the one fish she caught into two pieces and dropped the pieces into a plate of flour. She is now cooking them in a skillet she got from Amos’s shack. I am thinking about time and how quickly the hours of the day passed.

  “Did you know that when we were out there on the canoe, you sat still for almost two hours? I mean, you didn’t even twitch. I couldn’t see your eyes from where I was, but for a while there I thought you had fallen asleep sitting upright.”

  “No. I wasn’t asleep.”

  “What goes through your brain when you’re still like that? Were you thinking about what you were going to do when you got back?”

  “Jasmine was still as well. She didn’t speak to me.”

  “I was throwing my line every which way, trying to catch the one and only fish in the whole lake. For a while I sat on the floor of the canoe with my back against the seat and closed my eyes.”

  The fish is cooked. She puts my half on a tin plate and scoops corn from a can she opened before. “Dinner,” she says. “Otherwise it would have been pork and beans.”

  “Does Jasmine…do you want to say a prayer?” I ask.

  “Okay.” She puts her plate on her knees. I do as well and close my eyes. “Thank You for this place. Thank You for the fish.” I open my eyes and see her begin eating. “What? Why do you look so surprised?”