--by our own faculty member and fiction writer Jonathan
Penner, who has generously offered
to come in from his leave in order
to introduce Elizabeth to us.
So, please welcome Jonathan Penner.
[APPLAUSE]
In time to come, those who have the honor
to introduce Elizabeth Evans will need
do little more than say those two words.
In fact, I may be one of the last
who can presume to tell anyone who she is.
Elizabeth is an Iowan born and bred and educated.
She's been a winner of literary awards
ever since her student days.
Her stories are widely published,
and have appeared in a wonderful collection titled Locomotion,
which I notice is out there on the table.
What gives us special pride, of course,
is that she's a part of our literary community
at the University of Arizona, where
she teaches fiction writing.
Elizabeth's novel The Blue Hour was recently
published by Algonquin.
The reviews, packed with superlative praise,
convey, of course, enthusiasm, but much more than enthusiasm.
They also convey admiration and respect.
They convey understanding-- something
every writer needs after years of typing words
into the unpopulated ether.
And they convey, in generous measure, what an author hardly
dares dream of finding--
gratitude, simple gratitude, that this book was written.
I think we're about to find out why.
And now, those two words--
Elizabeth Evans.
[APPLAUSE]
OK, you guys are going to have to tell me if I'm
in the right spot for this.
That sound OK?
Yes?
OK.
Thank you all for coming.
It's nice to see familiar faces, and unfamiliar faces, too.
Last night, I was in an audience.
I went to see Tony Bennett last night.
If you told me 20 years ago that, for my birthday,
I would ask for tickets to see Tony Bennett,
I would have laughed.
But I did.
And there's a part of me that really
would have liked to have been somebody like Tony Bennett,
singing thrilling songs to people.
Big house of people that you sang these songs
that they remembered and loved, and it was very stirring
for everybody.
And I thought, well--
when I was thinking about coming into the night,
I thought, well, I'll read a poem by somebody,
since Tony Bennett got to sing all these songs that he
didn't write, and they were really wonderful.
They made him sound so good.
I thought I'd read this poem.
I think I know it mostly by heart,
but I have it with me in case I need some help.
And it's a poem by William Butler Yeats,
and it's called "Adam's Curse." it's one of my very favorite
poems, and it's about writing and love,
and puffing yourself up in both things.
"Adam's Curse."
It's the poet talking to his old love, Maud Gonne.
"We sat together at one summer's end--
that beautiful, mild woman, your close friend, and you and I--
and talked of poetry.
I said, 'a line will take us hours, maybe,
yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
our stitching and un-stitching has been naught.'
Better go down upon your marrow bones
and scrub a kitchen pavement or break stones
in all kinds of weather.
For to articulate sweet sounds together
is to work harder than all these,
and yet be thought an idler by the noisy set of schoolmasters,
bankers, and clergymen the martyrs call the world.
And thereupon replied that beautiful, mild woman,
for whose sake there's many a one who will find out all
heartache on learning that her voice was soft and low,
'to be born woman is to know, although they do not speak of it
at school, that we must labor to be beautiful.'
I said, 'it's certain there is no fine thing since Adam's fall
but needs much laboring.
There have been those who thought
love should be so much compounded of high courtesy
that they would sigh and quote, with learned looks,
precedents out of beautiful old books.
Yet now it seems an idle trade enough.'
We sat, grown quiet at the name of love.
We saw the last embers of the daylight die,
and in the trembling blue-green of the sky,
a moon, worn as if it had been a shell, tossed by time's waters
as they rose and fell about the years
and broke in days and weeks.
I had a thought for no one but your ears:
that you were beautiful, and that I strove
to love you in the old, high way of love,
and it had all seemed happy.
Yet now, we'd both grown as weary as that hollow moon."
William Butler Yeats.
So what I'm going to do tonight is read from The Blue Hour.
I'm going to read a bit of the first chapter.
I won't read the whole first chapter, because some of you
have heard me read from this before,
and I want to make it fun for you, too.
So I'll read a bit, and then skip forward and read a little
from the fifth chapter.
Chapter 1.
"Some people complain because they can't remember things--
say, the name of the couple who once lived next door, or even
the order in which events in a life began to go wrong.
But I remember-- not just names and sequences,
but the lush depths of a chinchilla coat as it hung
in cold storage, my father's hands rising off the steering
wheel, even the optimistic green and white of the amphetamines
a certain doctor prescribed for my mother halfway toward the end
of everything, which is why I also know that the very first
glimpse my family had of the Bishop house included Channing
Bishop--
tan, tall, suddenly right there, bolting out the grand front door
and into the summer rain at the precise moment
that our realtor lifted his finger to the bell.
'Well, hello there,' my father said.
A friendly man, laughing and smiling,
he stepped to one side of the walk
to clear a path for Channing Bishop.
My shy mother, a little nervous, backed
into a clump of wet evergreens.
She raised her fingertips to the plastic rain bonnet
covering her bun.
A thing decorated with little balloons of red
and yellow and blue, that bonnet had
come as a premium with a loaf of bread.
She raised her eyes towards its transparent roof,
and murmured to my sister Nancy and me, 'I bet I look snazzy.'
How much does it matter that the year was 1959?
Is it more important that it was 1959,
or that it was early June, the wet trees and lawns
throwing off a swarm of enchanted green light?
While my mother struggled with the ties of the bonnet,
Channing Bishop paused to yank a windbreaker over his head.
'Enjoy yourselves,' he said, then rushed off down the walk,
like no one answering a door in our experience--
no, like some cool TV detective giving the slip
to farcically inept cops.
I was 10 at the time, and no sophisticate,
but I felt certain my parents would take Channing Bishop's
breezy exit as a snub.
And my heart ached for them when he
bolted through the opening in the handsome stone wall
at the top of his walk, and sped off in the silver sports
car parked at the curb.
If my father felt bad, however, he didn't show us.
'Man, oh, man, that is some car,' he cried, while Nancy--
13, clawing her way towards glamour--
Nancy whipped her eyeglasses from her skirt pocket
in order to watch Bishop zip off down the street.
Nancy was full of contempt for the stuff of our lives,
and in general, I considered her arbiter of all action.
On this occasion, however, I meant
to show the world that I couldn't
be even slightly impressed by someone who
had been rude to my parents.
Along with the realtor--
a tall man, beefy, with a butch haircut
so short it was transparent--
I turned away from the street, and helped my mother out
of the bushes and onto the walk once more.
I can't remember a time when my mother didn't
struggle with her weight.
And when she was particularly heavy, as she was that summer,
her broad-cheeked face had what I thought of as an oriental
character--
stereotypically placid, inscrutable.
She had other sides, of course.
In the company of certain girlfriends,
she was often giggly, and given to making odd noises
to suggest delight, horror.
Still, that day, before our arrival at the Bishop house,
she'd worn only the inscrutable face.
And I was surprised by the change that swept over her
as she stood looking into the Bishop foyer--
something to do with the lift of her chin.
A brighter eye, animal alertness.
'Now, just remember, we are only looking at this house
for the experience,' she said.
'It's not for rent, and it's way out of our league.'
She looked at Nancy and me as she spoke,
but I sensed she really meant her words for the realtor.
'That Chan,' the realtor boomed.
He winked at my mother as if he knew
her to be a woman accustomed to rude young millionaires.
'You'll get to know him once you settle and meander, Mrs. Powell.
He's quite a guy, really.
You've no doubt bought Bishop meat.
You know the products, not the family.'
My mother didn't respond to the realtor's words,
only stared ahead into the twilight interior.
And I glanced at my father to see if this would suffice.
No.
At that time in his life, my father's main business
was asphalt, and years of hopping out
of his car to nudge along his crews
had left him with a ruddy face and hands.
Still, while he stood outside the Bishop house watching
my mother, waiting impatiently for her to say something
to the realtor, the color in his cheeks
rose as steadily as some well-fed flame.
'Dotty,' he said, 'Chuck was speaking to you about Bishop
meat.'
For my mother to show even the slightest disregard
for what my father wanted made goosebumps of alarm rise
on my arms.
She adored him.
I was proud of how much she adored him.
It seemed to make us royalty.
'Mom?' I tugged on her arm, prompting her.
'We always buy Bishop's hot dogs, don't we, Mom?'
'What?' She gave me a brief, annoyed glance,
then turned to the realtor.
'So this is that Bishop?' she asked.
It would seem comical to most people, I'm sure,
how grand and intimidating Meander, Illinois,
with its 50,000 people, seemed to us after Dolores,
Illinois with its 7,000.
But there was the uprooting of it, too.
My father had assured us we would love Meander.
We were going to grow rich there.
Even so, Nancy had slammed doors, broken things,
worked out a scheme to stay on in Dolores in her friend Trudy's
old playhouse.
Then my mother had turned deadly serious and warned Nancy,
'if Dad feels the move is important, that's that.'
We were moving because my father planned to start a door
factory in Meander--
aluminum doors, screen doors, garage doors.
Until we reached the Bishop house,
we'd looked only at rental properties.
We'd live in a rental until my father got his factory running.
After that, he would build what he always
called Dotty's dream house.
He'd already bought a wooded lot and had an architect draw up
plans.
The memory of the blueprints and drawings
he scrolled out across to our kitchen table
still fills me with nostalgia.
Rooms seductive as glades, rooftops dappled light and dark
by the foliage of pen and ink trees,
somehow more dreamily beautiful than any tree ever
was in real life.
'Help,' the realtor laughed, as he groped in the dark main hall
for a light switch.
The rest of us still stood in the foyer.
Nancy's long, thin nose sniffed at the masonry tang
of the house, as if it released deep, instinctual warnings.
Nancy was always sensitive to decay, odors of the body.
She went pale and fainted with some regularity.
'This place may be famous,' she whispered,
'but it smells like the underground lavatory
at the park.'
The agent laughed.
He was jumpy with laughter, and as he laughed,
he patted at his big belly as if it were a faithful pet.
I liked him, but I suspected I should beware any and all
of his noisy charms.
Earlier that morning, during our drive over from Dolores,
my mother had mentioned that her phone conversations
with the agent had given her the clear impression he considered
us a bunch of hicks.
'Hicks' had been a mistake on my mother's part.
'Hicks,' my father had cried, and lifted both hands from
the steering wheel as if to prove himself shocked beyond
concern for our safety--
which wouldn't have surprised me in town at safer speeds.
I knew his theatrical bent.
But at that moment, we were rushing down a country road.
Wet gravel popped loose beneath us.
One bad bump would have sent the car on a roll into a ditch
through barbed wire and fields of corn.
Nancy and I shrieked.
Our mother closed her eyes.
She looked as if she were going to sleep,
had already accepted our doom--
a gesture almost as awful as the way we drifted to the left
just before my father lowered his hands to the wheel once more
and declared, in a voice both brittle and damp,
furious and pained, 'hicks?
You don't know beans about what that man thinks, mother.'
In the sudden blaze of the Bishop home's front hall lights,
however, it did seem as if none of us
fit properly into our clothes.
And our clothes were the wrong clothes, too, weren't they?
One of my father's socks had slipped
into the heel of his shoe, exposed his pale ankle.
My mother was weary.
The little hitch in her step left
from a childhood bout of polio showed more
than it normally did.
Her linen suit, though she continued to bestow upon it
the honorific 'good,' that old beige suit had grown too small
in belly and bust, and after the damp day in the car,
its fabric had the rusty, wrinkled look of rags hung up
to dry beneath our kitchen sink.
As for Nancy, though I usually considered
her the epitome of teenage glamour,
that day, the hard crest of hair she
had sculpted above her forehead gave her face
the startled look of the bats caught by camera flash
in my Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom.
And myself, today I hope I'd look at myself with greater
charity, but at that moment in the Bishop hall mirror,
I saw only a skinny kid, dishwater-blonde hair whacked
to within an inch of its life, dress
so large I might have been the clapper inside a bell.
Practical eyeglasses, teeth bucked as a mule's
from years of finger-sucking.
It occurred to me that I resembled those children
the social service agents sometimes
brought to my grade school--
scrawny kids who weren't sure what last name to use
this month, kids we all understood
would be gone in a few weeks, never seen again,
so why make friends with them?
The agent threw more switches.
More lamps blazed, spotlighting the staircase,
the ceiling of the landing, and the hallway
high above our heads.
'Aha,' my father said approvingly.
My mother smiled at his pleasure, then
lifted her eyebrows at Nancy and me
to let us know that we should smile, too.
Her lipstick was the bright red of those days,
and considering how shy she was, it always
struck me as brave of her to wear.
Such a decided color.
'18 inches thick.'
With the butt of his palm, the agent thumped the walls
of the Bishop house. 'Imagine that.'
We all took turns thumping a wall, papered
in what my mother assured us was real grass cloth--
apparently a good thing, and in keeping
with the taste of the home's famous architect,
the agent added.
My mother nodded.
Clearly, she wanted to say something,
and the struggle between her ambition to speak
and her shyness turned her cheeks pink.
Such moments always made me nervous--
both that she would speak, that she'd lose her chance to speak.
And I took refuge in a pointed examination of the front door's
panes of colored glass, each one swirled with caramel,
the dreamy creamy stripes of agate and horn.
My heart beat hard.
My mother's opportunity was passing.
It was too late.
The agent began to turn towards the entry to the living room.
'Oh.' Her hand flew up like the hand of a schoolgirl.
With a little gasp, she said, yes, she
was familiar with the architect's work.
Prairie School, Oriental influences.
My father jingled the keys and coins in his pants pocket,
and when she finished, he smiled and said, 'hmm, is that right,
mother?'
The agent smiled, too, then went on to recite certain facts
about the house, its use of local limestone.
'Mm-hmm.' Though deep-chested as a pigeon,
my father stood just 5 foot 6, and consciously or not,
he'd developed a posture for talking to taller men--
head held down, hands in his pocket,
every now and then offering up a little nod.
In this way, he managed to look polite, but also preoccupied--
confident, even wily, instead of small and deferential.
'Next,' said the agent, and ushered us into the buffered
green light of the living room.
Except for a grand piano, the living room stood empty.
Its drama was heightened by the way in which the house perched
on an incline.
We'd entered at street level, but the living room
was two storeys up, and looked out
into leafy branches of hackberries and elms
and acres of bright, rain-drenched grass that
ran down to a creek backed by buff and gray cliffs.
'Gosh,' I murmured.
Behind me, the agent laughed.
'That's what I say, Penny.
Gosh.
What do you think, Bob?
I bet your dad would get a kick out of seeing you set up
in a house like this.'
OK, I'm going to break off from that point in the first chapter.
The Powell family does end up buying this house,
and they learned that Chan Bishop is selling the house
because his wife has taken the children,
and she's run off with his best friend.
And he doesn't want to live in this house anymore,
but he still wants to live in the neighborhood,
so he's building himself a house nearby.
And in the next chapters, the reader sees that the family--
sees a family move to Meander from this smaller
town of Dolores.
You get to know a bit about Channing Bishop
and certain of the rather sophisticated neighbors
from the area, particularly a woman named Margret Woolum
and her daughter, Eleanor.
You're also filled in on that the father is setting up
this factory in Meander, and he's gotten into several deals
like this in the past, where someone's told him a hard luck
story and his sympathetic nature has
sort of been suckered into some not so terrific business deals.
So, let's see.
So as we come up to Chapter 5, the father's
going back and forth quite a bit to his old businesses
and his new businesses in Meander.
So I think that brings you up to date.
There's one reference to--
Channing Bishop comes by the house,
and he makes a joke about Penny, the narrator,
studying art history or something,
because once he'd been by before,
and she was looking at art books while she
was trying to eavesdrop on the adults' conversation.
And I think that's everything you need to know.
OK.
So this is Chapter 5.
"According to the Meander newspaper's newcomers column,
my family's favorite activities were
hikes in the woods and water sports at their summer home.
I look at this clipping today and wonder, hikes?
Water sports?
Did water sports mean playing chicken on inner tubes?
Did my parents say water sports, or was that something dreamed up
by the newspaper man?
Both reporter and photographer, he had been a bossy guy.
My mother should stand beside the kitchen's barbecue.
No, not there.
Here.
What's the little girl's name?
Somebody comb her hair, why don't you?
With his knee, the photographer nudged Nancy closer to my father
on the breakfast nook's banquet.
Then he asked my mother, 'what are you saying you
got in the pan there, missus?
'Frijoles,' read the caption that appeared in the newspaper.
'Mrs. Robert Powell stirs frijoles,
a vital part of the international theme dinners
enjoyed by the family of four.'
International theme dinners?
In the photograph, Nancy and I and our father
sit in the breakfast nook while, spoon in hand, our mother
pretends to cook at the never quite functional
but exceptionally handsome brick barbecue.
Our postures are bad.
I show all my big buck teeth.
My father wears white socks.
Still, we looked happy in a way that sophisticated people,
for all their handsome arrangements of limb and lips,
rarely managed to look.
One reason I married my first husband--
when he saw that photograph, he said,
sounding like some old softy looking into a pet shop window,
'Aww.
And you can even see your mom's not stirring anything in that
pan, can't you?'
The afternoon that the newcomers article appeared,
Chan Bishop came by to drop off a copy he'd
torn from his own newspaper.
When I answered the door, he pretended to be shocked.
'What's this, Patty?' He said. 'Taking time off from your study
of art history to fraternize with the neighbors?'
I understood that he teased me, and that I shouldn't act
too impressed by his manner.
It alarmed me, though, that someone who didn't even
know my name felt free to look into
and comment upon my character.
'Actually, my name's Penny,' I said.
I sensed my mother coming up behind me,
and wished she would go back.
My father had just called to say he'd
be waylaid in Dolores another day or two,
and even though my mother wore her glasses,
you could see her eyes were red from crying.
Also, whatever the ambitions of her shirtwaist,
the fabric blue and white and--" excuse me.
"The fabric, blue and white and depicting gardens and pavilions,
men in powdered wigs down on their knees
in front of women with small, up-thrust bosoms,
it seemed to me to look like a bedspread.
And I was, I'm sorry to admit, shamefully miserable
about the fact.
I wanted Chan Bishop to admire my mother.
I wanted him to have the sort of teasing friendship
with her that he had with Margret Woolum--
something that would define my mother as
welcome in that world, too.
'Now, don't worry.'
Chan nodded at the record album and six-pack of beer,
one already punched open, that he carried in his arms.
'I'm not descending upon you, Dotty.
I was on my way to the Krauses' for dinner,
and I just thought I'd drop by with this.'
He maneuvered his clipping of the newcomer article
from his pocket.
'Oh.
Well, thanks.' As if counting the pulses in her artery,
my mother held her free hand upon her neck.
The Woolums and Chan Bishop made her nervous.
I'd heard her say so to my father.
'Of course,' Chan grinned, 'you girls could let me come
in and drink a beer, and thus spare me a good half an hour
of listening to the Krauses explain how they knew Haldis
and I had trouble, but they hadn't wanted to interfere.'
I flushed at the name of his ex-wife.
I thought of this Haldis as a criminal and outcast.
My mother, however, just smiled and said,
'ah,' and invited him in.
As Chan went into the living room,
he insisted my mother must hear his record album.
Nancy arrived home.
Supposedly, she'd been at the library,
but her whole being radiated with the marvelous adult
odors of cigarette smoke and the perfumes she
and her friends had tried on downtown.
Since moving to Meander, Nancy had figured out
how to approximate the hairdo worn by Elizabeth Taylor in Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof--
combed back from the brow, then forward onto her cheeks.
She now owned a tube of pale lipstick
and a compact of cream beige powder for chin and nose.
'How humiliating,' she cried, when my mother handed her
the newcomers clipping.
'Anyone can see there's nothing in that pan.'
'Oh, pooh,' said my mother, as if she saw beans plain as day.
The neighborhood cleaning lady, Bea Dart,
now cleaned for us, too.
And as Bea walked through the hall with a vacuum cleaner,
my mother called, 'Bea, do you think this pan looks empty
or not?'
Bea Dart set down the vacuum, then stepped into the kitchen.
She was probably no older than my mother.
She may even have been younger.
But she was worn, huge, her calves above her anklets
thick with bulging veins, the skin beneath her eyes
a wrinkly velvet brown that made me think
of the gills of mushrooms.
Out in the living room, the stereo needle
made a little skip, then a song sung in French
by some husky-voiced chanteuse filled the downstairs.
'That must be Mr. Bishop,' Bea said,
and she picked up the newspaper photo.
'He likes that foreign stuff.
Hmm.' She handed the newcomers article back to my mother.
'You look real pretty there, Mrs. Powell,' she said.
I nodded, happy and grateful.
'Oh,' said my mother. 'I mean, thank you.
Thank you, Bea.
But, look at this pan.
Do you think people would know it's empty?'
'Well,' Bea cocked her head to one side,
'there's no reason somebody might not think that you got
a little bit of something in there.'
[LAUGHTER]
Then she and my mother went out in the hall
so my mother could locate her purse
and write out Bea's paycheck.
'I look ugly.'
Nancy seized up the clipping. 'And I don't even look like this
now, but everyone who sees it will remember what a dork I was
when school started.'
Chan, entering the kitchen, placed his hands
over his ears, his eyes, his mouth--
the three monkeys of discretion.
I was pleased that he assumed we'd understand what he meant,
but Nancy stomped from the room and up the stairs.
With a laugh, Chan took a seat on the kitchen nook banquet
and pulled me down on his knee, which meant I immediately
pegged him as the type who showed his friendship for adults
by acting friendly towards their sons and daughters.
Still, I stayed put.
I didn't respect myself for it, but I
seemed unable to resist even what
I took to be fake affection.
When my mother returned to the kitchen,
Chan explained to her that he'd been in France that summer.
He'd heard the woman on his record album
while he was in Paris.
She smiled and nodded.
She was working on dinner--
a meatloaf of hamburger, seasoned with Lipton's onion
soup and ketchup and extended with oatmeal and eggs.
I pointed to the empty record cover
Chan had set on the table--
a tousle-haired young blond woman,
clad in only a man's pajama top, throwing open her shutters
on a view of the Eiffel Tower.
'Is that the singer?'
I asked.
Chan laughed.
'Afraid not, Penny.'
This is what we pretend the singer looks
like while we listen to her.
He tapped the cover with a fingernail
that was as pale as shell against his tanned skin.
Then he murmured, 'But Haldis, she had legs like this gal.'
I glanced over at my mother, now busy working the soup mix
into the meat.
On behalf of her and a host of others--
including, perhaps, my future self--
I said, imagining myself clever and opaque,
'but don't you think that name Haldis,
it sounds like a mineral, or maybe some kind of fish.'
Chan laughed, then look back at the photo.
'Haldis loved having her picture taken,' he said.
My mother glanced up from her work with a droll smile.
According to our lights, Chan had just
told us something that put his ex-wife in the wrong,
revealed her conceit, and this meant that we were all
becoming friends.
Chan, however, didn't return my mother's smile.
He stood abruptly, tipping me from his knee,
and while my mother quickly looked down, abashed,
he walked to the refrigerator, opened it,
and took out one of the beers that he had stashed there.
'Haldis.' He stared into the blank face of the refrigerator--
his old refrigerator.
Haldis' and his refrigerator.
'Haldis was a true beauty,' he said.
And then he did look to my mother
for a reaction, his face a little sly,
like the face of a boy who watches
to see if his parents will reprimand him for some minor,
but dirty bit of business.
With a quick stroke, my mother cracked an egg
on the rim of her metal bowl, tossed the shell into the sink.
'A true beauty.'
The words reverberated in my head
like the last words of a chorale.
And with all my heart, I wished that Chan would say,
'you're a true beauty too, of course, Dotty.'
I didn't, however, expect to look up and see
him moving towards her, reaching an arm around her.
And I shrieked in alarm, 'Mom!'
Instinctively, she shrieked, too.
'Hey!' Chan turned, hands up in the air.
'This is all I was after, ladies.'
Slowly, like a criminal showing his weapon to the police,
he brought forth a can opener from behind a curtain
over the sink.
'See?
It's my old church key.'
'For heaven's sakes, Penny.'
Red-faced, my mother stared back into the bowl of meat.
'For heaven's sakes, you half scared me out of my skin.
Just go find something to do.'
'That's right,' Chan grinned.
'Go gargle with peanut butter, kid.
Go play in traffic.'
My mother started to protest, then stopped herself
and laughed instead.
To show I was a good sport, I smiled, too.
But Chan was done with me.
He turned toward my mother and began
to tell her how Haldis had bought
the material for the kitchen curtains on one of their trips
to Bali.
'Do you know Bali, Dorothy?'
he asked.
Dotty.
He called her Dorothy.
He went back and forth.
'The people in Bali, they don't have art, Dorothy.
They say, no matter what they do,
they do it as well as they can.'
My mother looked up from patting the meat into a loaf pan.
'That's nice,' she said.
'So everything's art, then.'
'Everything or nothing.'
Chan took a long drink from his can of beer.
So, where's the boss today?' he asked. 'Is he off making roads?'
She nodded, then, a little teary-eyed, bit her lip.
'She misses him,' I murmured.
Chan studied her for a second, then tipped the last of his beer
into his mouth.
'Of course she does,' he said.
'He's a lucky guy.'
I liked Chan Bishop for saying that.
And later, after he'd gone on to the Krauses for dinner
and Margret Woolum came by, I tried
to think of a way I might repeat his praise in her presence.
I'd settled myself in the breakfast
nook with colored pencils.
It seemed a legitimate occupation
while I eavesdropped on the women's conversation.
The meatloaf was baking alongside three big potatoes.
I was drawing a jay, with black eyes made extra bright
by the squares of reflection I included on each pupil,
and Margret Woolum was telling my mother
how Chan had given Haldis a Mercedes-Benz after she
left him.
'Can you imagine that?'
Margret said.
'Mercedes-Benz,' I mouthed, just as I mouthed the words my mother
had written on an index card pinned to the bulletin board.
'Dialectical.
Sine qua.
Etiolate.' I'd never heard of a Mercedes-Benz.
I pictured a wild animal--
wild, furry, made up into a coat of unimaginable splendor.
Just recently, I'd learned about chinchillas
when Margret Woolum brought home hers from the cleaner's
cold storage.
Each fall, according to Eleanor Woolum,
her mother installed the chinchilla and a blue fox
in the cool closet of the family guestroom.
One afternoon, home alone, Eleanor and I
had become so intoxicated by the fur's glamour
that we'd stripped naked in order
to take in more of those lofty coats, the cool slip
of their satin linings.
'Chan said he'd take us out to his parents' home
sometime,' my mother told Margret.
'Is it really as grand as people say?'
'Oh.' Margret emitted a regal blast of cigarette smoke.
'It's impossible, really.
They live in just a fraction of it.'
Then she went on to tell my mother how the senior Bishops
were charming, really, but they'd
marched Chan and his brother off to schools in the East
at some awful age.
'Six, I think.
They were hardly home until they came back to run the pack.'
Margret stretched her mouth wide to dramatize her horror,
then let loose her throaty, exasperated laugh.
'Who understands men?
As soon as Chan and Haldis had Mike,
Chan started talking about sending him off to school.
They fought about it, believe me.'
In a quiet, careful voice, my mother asked, 'Did you like her,
Haldis?'
'Oh, Haldis was wonderful.
The two couples had wonderful times together.
Season tickets for the opera in Chicago,
some terrific vacations, plus the kids were friends.'
My mother nodded.
'I suppose you were shocked about what happened.'
Margret tilted her head to one side,
looked my mother over a bit.
'Well,' she drawled, 'no, honey, I wasn't shocked.
Everyone else seemed to be, but no, I wasn't.'
My mother glanced my way, then said,
her voice lowered, 'I guess he's having a hard time of it.
I didn't mean to count, but he had an open beer when he
arrived, and he finished two more while he talked to me.'
Margret tapped a teasing finger on my mother's arm.
'Maybe you made him nervous, Dorothy.
He usually comes over for coffee in the morning
before he leaves for the office.
And from what I gather, he thinks you and Bob are Mr
and Mrs. Wholesome Americana.'
My mother eyed the clipping on the counter.
'I certainly look wholesome in that,' she said.
'Positively corn-fed.'
Margret laced her fingers in a girdle across her flat belly,
and explained that she had just spent
a week on unflavored gelatin mixed with bullion.
She knew all kinds of tricks, she said.
Cigarettes helped, of course, and sit-ups.
And, she half-whispered, 'Haldis and I used ex-lax once.'
'Ex-lax?' My mother's eyes opened wide.
I felt an outrageous excitement at the idea of my mother
changing into someone like Margret Woolum.
And without thinking, I blurted, 'you know, Mom,
grandma uses ex-lax.'
The women looked over at me then.
Without a word, they walked into the living room.
A little while later, on my way upstairs,
I heard them discussing the replacement of our living room
furniture, my mother doing her best not
to appear to ask advice, and Margret doing her best
to appear not to offer it.
'And what about classes at the junior college?'
My mother explained, she wanted to learn French.
Margret said something that I suppose must be French,
and my mother, sounding shy and grateful--
and a little impatient, too-- asked, 'well, what did you say?'
Margret laughed, then translated in a sexy voice,
'have you a room for two?'
I found Nancy in the upstairs hall.
She was scowling, and wore only underpants
and a shirt decorated with the design of blue American coins.
On the floor in front of the hall mirror,
the fashion magazine lay open to an article entitled,
'Do You Have Great Legs?'
Knees touching, Nancy, bent from the waist,
inserted a pencil between the fleshiest part of her thighs.
According to the magazine, she explained,
if she could do this without the pencils touching flesh,
then her thighs were not too fat.
It must have been October by then.
Nancy had acquired a boyfriend--
not the high school Greek boy of her dreams,
but a classmate shorter than herself,
with a high, squeaking telephone voice.
An unremarkable boy, but enviable all the same.
The entire world seemed to be in sharper focus for Nancy
now that she had a boyfriend to escort her through it.
I lay down on my stomach to consider
the legs of the model in Nancy's magazine.
They were like the legs of the woman
on the cover of Chan's record--
long, slim, supposedly like the legs of his ex-wife, Haldis.
I thought of what Chan had said about Bali,
and then I thought about the photographs of fat Russian women
that the newspapers ran now and again--
enormous women shoveling snow from city streets,
or, without what Westerners would have considered
requisite shame, spreading their great selves
across crowded beaches.
Those photographs.
They always struck me as some sort of encoded warning
to females who might aspire towards equality.
I rolled onto my back. 'Nancy, I said, did you ever think,
what if everyone were beautiful?
Would nobody be beautiful then?'
'That's impossible,' Nancy said. 'It's dumb.'
'But what if it were possible?
And how do you know?
Look at dogs, how dogs look alike.
All Cocker spaniels, all German shepherds.
Maybe someday, we'll all just be types.'
Nancy didn't pay attention.
Her voice dreamy, distracted, she
said, 'I'm going to buy a raincoat like the one
that lady's wearing on the cover.
That's the same kind of raincoat that Audrey Hepburn wore in Love
in the Afternoon.'
[AUDIO OUT] given out even, and we never
had to worry about those things.
Forehead wrinkling, Nancy bent with her school ruler
to measure the fold of flesh that formed
when she executed a knee bend.
She made a notation on a piece of paper,
then fixed her bright eyes upon me and announced,
'Mrs. Woolum says Haldis Bishop was so skinny,
her hip bones stuck out in front of her stomach.'
Haldis Bishop.
Why did everyone talk about Haldis Bishop?
'Some people don't have food and clothes.'
I said, 'what if we didn't have food or clothes or a place
to live?'
'Penny.' Nancy hung her face over me.
All of a sudden, she started to grin.
'Now, promise you won't tell?'
'Tell what?' 'Well, I overheard Archie tell Dad that
they'll clear over a million dollars the first two years
the door plant's in operation.'
The blissful feeling of release that spread through me
almost immediately turned to suspicion.
'How'd you hear that?'
I asked.
'Listening in on the phone.'
She raised one full hand of fingers and a thumb
from the other hand, wiggled them in the air.
'Six zeroes,' she said.
I rolled onto my stomach.
Six zeros formed in my head-- zeros with stick legs and arms,
fat men tumbling into one another like something out
of a math book, a drawing meant to make children
laugh while they learn.
'Well, wait,' I said. 'Six zeroes is nothing.'
Nancy frowned. 'Well, a one and six zeroes.'
I tapped my finger against the three-prong outlet on the wall
beside me.
'You know those masks were ones laughing and one's crying?'
I asked.
'This thing looks like the crying one.'
Nancy glanced my way.
In a flat voice, she said, 'that's tragedy.'
I pushed myself up onto my knees.
Near the electrical outlet, a small metal flap
led to what I knew was one of many tiny tunnels belonging
to that house's obsolete vacuuming system.
I lifted the flap, and pressed my ear to the opening.
In stories, when a person located a spot like that,
she'd end up hearing everything she wanted to hear,
or didn't want to hear.
And it seemed unfair to me that the tunnels in our house
had nothing to say.
All they gave back was a dull murmur
you found inside seashells--
the tiny roar your blood made as it moved about inside
your head."
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks.
You're a great audience.