Maud's House (13 page)

So they woke her. They watched her struggle up from deep dreams, heard her whisper “Frank,” and then, her eyes would pop open, awake and more alert than her young colleagues. They helped her out of the chair. She grew stiff during the night and often needed to lean for a moment on one of the young men. Someone would hand her the notebook. She would smile and thank them as they entered the dining room.

“The dining room,” Ella says, “is always buzzing and clacking and banging. It’s not the food trays you’re hearing; it’s the words. They fly like a gaggle of geese over your head, honking, drawing your attention, making you smile at the joy of life. I’m so contented in that dining room.”

I’m one of the few in Round Corners privileged to read Ella’s conference poetry, and Ella said the Round Corners poem was like those. “I didn’t intend it to be so, but the words are spilling out of me, Maud. In buckets. It frightens Frank; hell, it frightens me.”

This passion poetry, Ella said, seemed out of place in Round Corners. For one thing, she could not pull all-nighters in Round Corners; she tended to give people the wrong mail when she had less than eight hours of shut eye. And this time of year—the Christmas season—she especially needed her wits about her.

This poem was different in other ways, too. It did not rhyme. All her Round Corners poetry rhymed. This poem just seemed to grow. It was born in a tumult of words tumbling to the paper, a waterfall of words. Sometimes it was a swampy mess, and other times it was a miracle. Ella had never had a poem come to her in this manner, where she felt more recorder than writer.

“Is this the way it was with you and the house, Maud?” she asked.

I knew what Ella was experiencing: the joy of the smooth ride. There was nothing like being possessed, to be driven and to drive. We come back again and again to feel that feeling one more time. We’re creativity druggies, and we’ll do anything to find that high again. We’ll put up with recalcitrant cows and dead husbands who still think they know more about art than we do. I have tried everything to find my way back: Rolling Rock, perseverance, meditation.

Nothing works.

As my farmer father used to say, it comes when it comes. I envied Ella.

“Is this the way it is with Ginsberg, Maud?” Ella asked me one day. “All this fury? All this joy? All this inevitability?”

Frank did not like Ginsberg. He did not want Ella reading Ginsberg in bed at night. He said it was silly to read something you didn’t understand. But Ella could not resist Ginsberg’s words; they rattled around in her head, filling it to bursting, until it no longer mattered that she didn’t know what a “peyote” was. She told Frank poetry doesn’t have to rhyme all the time, and wasn’t “angelheaded hipsters” a lovely image? Frank huffed.

Ella named her poem about Round Corners “Howling Mad Home.” Allen Ginsberg wasn’t the only one who knew crazy people, Ella said.

“Have you looked in the stamp drawer?” I asked her. “How about the mailbags? Maybe it got mixed up and found its way to Montpelier.”

Ella gasped. “Oh, that can’t be, it just can’t be.”

“Take it easy, Ella.”

“But, Maud, if that notebook should fall into the wrong hands…”

“We’re not talking government secrets here, are we, Ella?”

“I write everything in my notebooks. Things I don’t even remember writing in the first place, thoughts I never knew I thought. ‘Howling Mad Home’ was not a cat poem; it wasn’t a rhyme about spring or a daffodil verse. It was about real people living and loving, people who took out the trash and scratched their bellies. If the contents of that notebook ever became public, I would have some explaining to do, Maud. There are references to certain friends, certain neighbors,
a certain husband.
”

I tried to soothe Ella. She and Frank were married forty years ago. It was a small ceremony in a little Catholic church up the mountain. They started attending the Reverend Swan’s service when the diocese turned the chapel in the mountains into a resort. Neither she nor Frank skied. They never had children. Up in the closet she still had a box of napkins engraved with golden wedding bells and “Ella and Frank.” How’s that for hanging onto something?

Ella said she knew Frank better than she knew herself. She could tell from the look in his eye whether he wanted hotcakes or Quaker Oats for breakfast. She knew he was afraid of heights and hated putting on the storm windows each fall and taking them off in the spring. She knew, at that very moment, he probably was sneaking a nap in the rocker by the wood stove in the store next door. Because she knew him so well, she figured he probably hadn’t meant it that morning when he said she would forget her head if it wasn’t attached.

“When was the last time I lost something of his?” Ella cried. “I have accounted for forty years of socks, underwear, handkerchiefs, tools, and receipts.”

“I’m sure he’ll apologize tonight,” I said.

But he didn’t.

I helped Ella look for the notebook, but it was as if it just vanished, disappeared into dust. Wynn said she bet it was the knitting needle thief. Don’t be ridiculous, Harvey Winchester said, which is not unusual since Harvey couldn’t agree with anyone lately. Thomas drove into Burlington one morning and returned with a new notebook for Ella, a lovely hard-covered book with blank pages and a gingham print cover. Wynn gave Ella a new perm in my sink, to pull her out of her funk.

“It’s a perfect perm, not too tight,” I said, smiling at Ella. Her bottom lip quivered as she stared at her reflection in the mirror.

“Just right, Mrs. Snowden,” Thomas agreed.

“It’s you, Ella,” Wynn said.

Ella sighed.

I sighed.

The next day I found myself sketching Ella. She held a quill pen in her hand and wore a lacy, high collared blouse. She sat at an angle and looked off into the distance. Below the soft blouse she wore blue pants with dark stripes down the side, part of the official ensemble of the United States Postal Service. Ella wanted only to be pictured from the waist up. She thought her hips were too big. I sketched her full frame and when it came time to draw the blue linen uniform my pencil made the shape of billowing skirts, flowing, romantic, unofficial.

Wynn, leaning over me as I worked, gripped my shoulder happily.

“It’s the spitting image of you, Ella,” she said.

“Haven’t you got some pelvic squeezes to do?” I growled.

T
he van gave out half way up the mountain. The Olive Eyesore said, “Ciao, Baby.” The Artmobile said, “See you around the old Seurat.” The Cause Of One of My Great Fights with George threw in the towel.

This was not your normal breakdown. This was a Stranded Motorist in the Dead of Winter breakdown. The cold snap turned into a full-fledged winter—and a way of life—three days ago when it began snowing. Snow continued to fall, sticking like an unwanted house guest.

Motorists dared not let their gasoline tanks get low in case they met up with a whiteout, steered into a tree, and had to cool their heels until help arrived—or, as in my case, they drove a beast vehicle with a mind of its own. I tapped the fuel gauge; it
said
half full. George said he wouldn’t believe that instrument of faulty information if it swore on the Bible.

That’s the difference between you and me, George. You expect all machinery to lie to you. I prefer to think of it as one of our mechanical friends showing a little creativity.

No, George, creativity never killed anyone, except for maybe an airplane inventor or two. I know I could freeze to death, thanks for reminding me.

The engine only uttered its last cough a few moments ago and already my toes were frostbitten. I realize that is medically impossible. The van still had some stored warmth. I wasn’t exposed to the elements, except for the wind that whipped through the cracks around the windows. They have never rolled up completely. I’ve preferred it that way; usually it gives the van that wide-open-spaces feeling. But when you’re wondering about the human capacity for withstanding sub-zero temperatures, you begin to see the advantages of tight windows and doors.

I have been stranded before by my mercurial mechanical amigo. Experience kept me from going into hysterics and ripping up the upholstery for dinner.

I don’t have to worry about food, George. Someone will come along. Check the glove compartment for candy bars? Don’t be ridiculous.

I plunged into the glove compartment. There was an opened package of stale rye and cheddar crackers and three sticks of gum.

I thought I had a can of Pringles in there. Why would T-Bone steal my potato chips, George? He wasn’t always mooching off us. I invited him to dinner, because I wanted him around. He was a great conversationalist, and he always helped with the dishes. We talked of other things, besides cows. Name them? There was…

I know you never trusted him; he never trusted you. So what’s new? The men in my life never trust each other.

I popped a stick of gum in my mouth. The taste of cinnamon flooded my taste buds, making me hungry. That’s the way it is when you’re stranded: All you can think about is food and warmth. It doesn’t matter if you just finished a seven-course meal that a small Third World country could live off of for a week. It doesn’t make a bit of difference that you’re wearing three wool sweaters; a down parka explorers tested against the blizzards on Mt. Everest; insulated, top-of-the-line, straight-from-the-L.L. Bean catalog boots; two pairs of gloves, one silk and the other lambs wool and leather; and a hat that better be warm because it makes you look ridiculous. You’re still hungry and cold, from the moment the engine goes kaput.

I climbed between the seats and dug around in the back of the van. I unearthed an old Army blanket under a shovel and three empty paint cans. I wrapped the blanket around my shoulders and crawled back into the driver’s seat.

Isn’t this the way it always happens, George? I’ve started painting again, nothing earth-shattering yet, but it keeps that buzzard sheriff from the door. Wynn and Ella are preening like mother hens. No one has asked to see the painting yet. They’re afraid they’ll destroy the muse. They just hover and cook and offer to run errands for me. I’m painting, and now I’m going to lose all ten fingers to frostbite.

I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the seat. At that very moment, T-Bone probably was curled up with a Rolling Rock and a bag of chips by the wood stove. Cat probably was chasing a potato chip across the floor. Maybe I could send him a psychic call for help. According to Raj, we’re all connected by one mother of a consciousness.

Tap, tap. Tap, tap. I jerked awake. It worked; T-Bone found me. I swung toward the tapping at the window and screamed. Pressed against the window was a face from hell, fat lips moving like fish mouths, eyes crossed, nose squashed into a Picasso proboscis. I collapsed against the seat. It was Odie.

“Gotcha, Maud,” Odie laughed.

“You moron,” I clutched my heart.

I don’t care what Raj says, there is no way that Odie Dorfmann is tuned into the collective consciousness. You have to be a member of the food chain to join that club. So it was pure luck that my Volkswagen Vixen broke down on Odie’s beat.

Odie had two more stops on his daily rounds. I waited in the patrol car as Odie rattled the doorknob on the summer camp. He checked the windows and peered inside, his gloved hands cupped around his face. Odie made his rounds whether the mercury shot to ninety or plummeted to nine.

“I wouldn’t mind a week on the beach,” Odie said, blowing on his fingers and bundling into the police cruiser. “The only thing on television lately are basketball and travel ads. Come to our island. Lie on our sand. Eat our fruit. Drink our Mai Tais. Hell, I don’t even know what a Mai Tai tastes like.”

“It has a little umbrella in it.”

“No shit?”

I nodded. “To keep the cherries and orange slices from getting sunburned.”

The closest Odie was likely to ever get to a Mai Tai was in one of the Chinese restaurants in Burlington, according to Odie’s wife Arlene, the lifetime spouse of a public servant and keeper of the checkbook in the Dorfmann household. A public servant’s budget didn’t stretch to islands and exotic-sounding drinks with umbrellas, nor did the sheriff’s heart.

Arlene and the rest of the town knew that for all his talk of tropical paradise, Odie felt responsible for Round Corners and its people, especially in winter. He could not thaw out in the Bahamas while his friends remained frozen fish sticks in Vermont. He had to look out for people like me.

Actually, Odie is probably a good lawman. He takes a personal interest in the people he’s sworn to protect. And he has to be one of the most honest politicians in the whole United States. He has no illusions of grandeur; he’s fairly incorruptible. He doesn’t have his eye on a higher office. He isn’t greedy, and he has an almost boyishly innocent respect for the law. He simply likes being the biggest frog in our little pond. If he ever lost an election, it would hurt his feelings more than anger him.

Running unopposed most of the time, Odie has little chance of not being a selectman, yet he still persists with campaign promises and posters. In Odie’s tiny mind, they are part of the democratic system, even if they are superfluous. Odie is like the bidder at an auction who keeps bidding against himself.

“I’ll send one of the boys from the service station for your van, Maud,” Odie said, reaching for the police radio.

“Don’t bother,” I said. Tomorrow Thomas would drive me out to the Traitor Vehicle and it would turn over with one try. It would purr like one of those babied vehicles at the Indianapolis 500. I’d been the victim of this automotive contrariness before.

Odie didn’t understand people who left life to chance or put up with menopausal mobiles. He regularly checked on the old people in town, just to make sure chance hadn’t played a dirty trick on them and held up their emergency fuel funds. He didn’t want any frozen bodies in his county, Odie said, pretending to be tough: It wouldn’t look good. Last year, the Dorfmanns ran short of wood for their own stove because soft-hearted Odie had snitched repeatedly from the pile. Just taking a “few sticks” over to so-and-so to tide him over until his wood’s delivered, he told Arlene. She nodded. She’d heard it all before.