The next day, I decided to try and wipe Maggie’s cat’s mess off the squares I could save and arrange them on the kitchen floor in pretty piles of color because I’ve always liked stacking up my supplies more than actually making something of them. Toby was in his tilted baby seat on the kitchen table, making faces out the window at the empty porch, when I heard the knocking. At first I thought he might be rocking off the table, but when I looked up, he was still smiling out the window. I looked around the kitchen—the only other thing in the room where the knocking could be coming from was the cardboard box with Aunt Ruth’s quilt in it that I had dragged into the kitchen to do something with once I’d finished cleaning up my own quilt squares. There was knocking again, and I looked over into the box, lifting up the quilt warily, in case there was a mouse in there knocking around in the wooden canisters I was going to throw away.

“Allo … allo I … anybody home?”

God, it was someone at the back door—a sound that was still so alien to me that it nearly scared me, and worse, I’d just gotten everything set up for a nice afternoon of solitude. I’d put the water on to boil for spaghetti.

“Watcha doin’?” Maggie asked rhetorically as she pulled her red wagon over to the back steps to unload it. She had packed Amanda and a large cardboard box marked Syringes 100 Count onto it, and for an insane second I pictured her forcing me into a life of heroin addiction that very afternoon. Then, in a simple, manic gesture, before I could say “Come in” or “Go away,” she reached down and pulled up Amanda and stood her on the porch. She gave her a little push forward, identical to the gesture Debbie uses for Baby-Talks-a-Lot by pulling her string so she performs. I knew, before they came in the back door, that this was going to be Baby-Wrecks. I could picture it: my house will belong to this baby—she will have won it by the law that says the weak and the helpless come first. Every wall outlet and every wire, every pot I put on the stove, and every stair step, every small thing on the floor, from bugs to dust to paper clips, will be hers. All the furniture I keep highly polished will be hers for the fingerprinting, and I’ll have to put away all my knickknacks and books, and ashtrays. She will claim my magazines, simply by placing one fat wet palm in the middle of a page, making a fist, and then bringing the wadded page up to her slobbering mouth. And the only thing I can say, as I run before her gathering up the china cup of strawflowers, is “I’m just afraid she’ll hurt herself, that’s all.”

“Uh—hi … has Amanda had the flu yet?” I asked Maggie, who was still struggling with the carton. Amanda was pulling out the cascade of green strings and buds from the little potted plant that had finally started growing for my gardening neighbor.

“What? No … yes … who knows … that’s for Chuck to worry about—he’s the doctor—there! This sucky little thing is heavy!” The playpen that she finally pulled from the box was suddenly exposed, pristine in its welcome, simple beauty—a small square of pine on wheels with a partially chewed mattress. Amanda screamed and threw down the plant when she saw it, but no matter.

“Little bitch … come on, sweetie … you know Mommy has lots of work to do today … ow! Make no mind of Amanda … stop that! Amanda’s having a little sugar reaction … there!” And she was trapped; screaming, with strings from the plant and hairs from her mother in each fist, but trapped. “Where can we put her? Do you have a TV? Wait, I’ve got it—you’ve got another kid, too, right? At the bus stop, little Doodie –”

“– Debbie.”

“– Debbie told me you’re dying for someone to play with yours. Isn’t that just great! Maybe we could switch off on some babysitting sometime—I’m going stir-crazy down there cooped up all day—how about you? Is that your kid in the window? What’s that you’ve got him in?”

“Why don’t you come in …”

“Isn’t he the cutest thing today! What’s wrong with his feet?”

“Nothing—yet. Jack—my husband—just thinks the brace would be good insurance for later. Then, he says, Toby’s legs have no choice but to grow straight.”

“What is your husband, some kind of macho-nut?”

“He’s a salesman,” I began automatically. “What do you mean?”

“And you must be a Mrs. Macho-nut to go along with such a harebrained idea! God’ll grow them straight! Whew! Don’t ever let Chuck see that—he’d have you arrested, he’s got such a soft heart … among other things. It’s a good thing your husband didn’t ever hear what the gypsies did to kids …”

“What?”

“You really want to know? Promise you won’t tell your Attila-the-Husband?”

“What?”

“Hey, what’s all that steam coming from your kitchen?”

Now, nobody on earth, I guarantee, would ever admit that she was making a pot of spaghetti to eat alone in the middle of the afternoon. “Oh! I’m just humidifying the kitchen, where I’m working. I think I’m coming down with the flu.”

“Well, let’s put Amanda in there, since that’s the healthiest place. Come on, sweetstuff … we’re going for a little ride. Look at this kitchen! So neat and clean. What else do you do all day besides clean? Ah … you’re still working on that quilt—is that how you’re doing it—making little piles first? Wait just one little minute! What’s this?” And she had Aunt Ruth’s quilt out of the box faster than I could turn off the spaghetti water. “Isn’t this gorgeous! Did you do this incredible thing? And where did you ever come by all this talent?”

I told you, no one ever listens to what you say. Not only did she forget Toby’s very existence from one day to the next, but she also forgot our whole conversation about Aunt Ruth’s quilt yesterday, just as she forgot to finish the story of what the gypsies do. Now I’m going to have to seem like a compulsive nitpicker if I remind her about any of this, rather than a devil-may-care conversationalist who can float and toss on any whims. Or, since there’s no way for her to know any differently, I could take credit and say that I’m the artist—I made the quilt. But I can’t lie—I’m much too superstitious, or too Catholic.

“My Aunt Ruth made it for me.”

“Wow! It’s so ugly it’s actually beautiful, you know. It forces your eyes back to it each time they try to get away—happily horrid, don’t you think?”

“I don’t think … ”

“I love playing with the parameters of an artistic construct,” she said, crouching in front of the box of things I wasn’t sure of, like the plastic placemats with the quilted edges where food always gets caught, the naked-lady stirrers that Jack brought back from Idaho, the wooden canisters shaped like tree stumps. “What art does to the eye—how it controls the viewer—you know what I mean? I mean, as ugly as this quilt is, it forces me to look at it. But once I did something quite the opposite, which I considered more than revolutionary at the time. It was when I was in San Juan—”

“You were in San Juan? That’s a coincidence! When? We were there on our honeymoon!”

“Well, my trip was no honeymoon, I can tell you that—I’d just gotten out of jail.”

“Jail? In Puerto Rico?”

“And I had so little to work with in the way of materials, you know … and I was feeling pretty alienated, so I created my Revolutionary Sculpture.”

“Why were you in jail?”

“Political espionage, I like to say—somebody framed me—planted two lousy little grass seeds smack in the middle of my daddy’s custom blue-tufted Caddy upholstery. Framed! Probably because I slept with Tom Hayden. That was when they realized that the Ugly American was also the Rich American—I’m lucky my father owns property there, or I wouldn’t be here today.”

“Wow … ”

“I’ll tell you wow—you tell me if you don’t think this was a dynamite idea: a sculpture composed of stuff so gross you had to look awayl You had no choice—it was a play on your conditioned responses, among other things. Do you have anything to drink?”

Of course! My first social moment in the neighborhood had come and I’d nearly missed it. “I’ll make some tea.”

“Tea! That’s cute! … anyway, picture this … ”

And while I got the mugs out and checked them for stains, and emptied the kettle all the way out to get rid of as many of the calcium flakes in the bottom as I could, she described a sculpture so horrible, so gross, so disgusting, that I’m embarrassed to repeat it, even now. Let me just say that it contained things normal people put into the garbage disposal, or flush down the toilet, all of which she said she had arranged in the steamy Puerto Rican heat, on top of what she called “the most disgusting object of all—a plastic Rubbermaid lazy Susan.”

Aunt Ruth, by now, was aghast. I know she wanted to open my cabinet door and point out my nearly complete collection of Rubbermaid and Tupperware, all nested according to size, all squeaky clean, but I held her back.

“I’d do something so horrible it can’t be believed, rather than settle for mediocrity,” Maggie was continuing. “Take these toys, for example.” She picked up Toby’s pumpkin camper, my particular favorite, next to the pear cement mixer, of the whole Fruit Groop of rolling toys. “This is a classic case of mediocrity—just make it good enough to get by with—don’t go out on any design limbs, don’t rock any boats …” She was holding his toy above his head now, and Toby started to cry, indignant, at about the same time that the teapot whistled. “Kids don’t know any better—it’s really up to us, as parents, to supply them with playthings that will stimulate their imagination, not deaden it.” But she gave the camper back, anyway, and Toby hugged it in happy, maybe deadened, silence.

“Mediocre literally means the middle of the mountain, and that’s nowhere. Maybe that’s why it’s so frightening to me,” she said. “I actually get an asthma attack when Riva wants to go to McDonald’s and I have to sit in there waiting for her to finish a Ronald Turd and all I have to look at are colonial scenes of Independence stamped out, like in 1984, at the factory. Don’t you have any herbal tea?”

“Just Salada …”

“Nothing for me, then. Where was I? I’ll have to bring my own—I can’t drink that stuff. I have some so good it’s nearly a trip in itself … where was I?”

“In the middle of the mountain …”

“Ah yes, the kaleidoscope. Here—check this out.” And she reached into her big woven bag and handed me a long, intricately carved wooden tube with a wheel at one end. “It’s Amanda’s favorite thing in the whole world, but we’ll let you see it, too, won’t we, sweetie?” Amanda was curled, nearly comatose, in her playpen, chewing on the end of the mattress and twirling a reddish curl with her free hand. She continued to watch the side of the refrigerator and didn’t answer when I took the toy and looked inside, as Maggie insisted I do.

“Isn’t that something else?” she called to me as I entered the tube. I aimed it at Maggie first, and she broke into a brilliant Roman candle of red fuzz. Then, turning slowly around the room, I exploded my cabinets into a thousand green fragments, with the white-handled knobs dotting through them like tiny tulips. The steam from the kettle waved in gray silken scarves through a porcelain crystalline structure of stove and dry ice in an endless frozen cave …

I had to have the kaleidoscope.

“Gee, that’s really nice … hmmmm … neat … where’d you get it?”

“My mother sent it from Germany. She probably knocked on the back door of some little cottage in the Black Forest and then jewed the stooped little guy out of his last artifact. But I’m sure there’s nothing like it anywhere around here. Mother searches the world for the unique …”

“Oh. Why is your mother in Germany?” I asked, casually putting the toy on the counter beside the tea canister.

“Well, do you want her version or her doctor’s version?” Maggie asked, suddenly turning and looking out the window. I pushed the kaleidoscope just a tad more behind the canister. “She’s so hateful!” Maggie was nearly whispering and twirling the tassel on the window shade as she spoke; twisting, twisting, twisting. “She has a trinken problem, if you get my drift.” And the tassel popped off in her hand. “Great goin’ Mag,” she said to herself, wiping away a tear.

I shoved the toy behind the canister and said, “Say, don’t worry about that.”

“I can’t help it—every time I have to talk about her, the same thing happens. Her boozing is what ruined our whole family—my father had to leave, he had no choice—here—what do you want me to do with this? Did you crochet this yourself? Look at this, Amanda, Mommy’s crying again.”

And nowhere have I read what you should do with a stranger in your own kitchen who is crying. Aunt Ruth shook her head and looked at her watch.

“Well!” I said. “How do you like the neighborhood?”

“Don’t make me laugh.” She sniffed, looking for something to blow her nose in. I gave her a flowered cloth napkin. “Are you out of tissues?” she asked, and then blew a long, forlorn, foggy kind of sound.

“Well, that’s a long story,” I began …

“Save it. Let me tell you—I can’t believe this place! Can you?”

“Well, I thought it reminded me of a play village when I first saw it,” I began, artistically enough.

“Damn right—Plasticville, U.S.A. I’m convinced this place is a big fake—I bet it’s really a Potemkin village.”

Oh boy, here come the college references. And after that comes my admission of stupidity. “What do you mean?”

“Potemkin—you know—Catherine the Great’s, I guess, great lover. He was also a general, and when she wanted to ride past the peasants, she wanted everything to look hunky-dory, and he wanted to get laid, so he had these fake fronts set up, like a movie set—you know—and the peasants stood in front and waved and cheered and looked insanely happy, like in a McDonald’s commercial. While their own houses were squatty and smelly and falling down behind. And she was happy and he got his rocks off. The End.”

“Is that true?”

“Far as I know.”

“That’s fascinating!”

“Stick with me, kid, and I can teach you loads of stuff.” She stood up. “We’ve gotta go. This obligatory friendship visit is all well and good, but it’s got to end sometime, and when my stomach starts growling—I answer back. Listen, why don’t you and the little gimpy kid come down to my place tomorrow? Bring your sewing project, and bring that gorgeous quilt. We’ll take it apart and make something out of it.” She nudged Amanda. “Come on, babe, Mommy’s got to get something to eat … I’m sorry about your window thing … you really should take those shades down, anyway—they only block the sun.”

And then she was gone. I turned the spaghetti water back on and walked around the empty rooms for a few minutes, touching things gingerly, now that I’d had some company. Everything felt strange. Her presence and her words were still there, and I was sensitive for a little time after she left, as if I’d just pulled a splinter out and the skin was still sore.

The next day, while I was finding clean clothes for Toby for the walk to Maggie’s, I also tried to make the beds before I left, but one by one I was beginning to let my jobs go undone, so I could chase after her. I hadn’t vacuumed now for a couple of days and Jack would be home the day after tomorrow. It’s not that I’m any kind of neatness nut: I was actually really sloppy as a kid, my aunt says, but I think you can’t deny the fact that the only way you have any hope of elegance is through cleanliness. I like to think about the whiteness of a day at the Naval Academy, or the dresses Kitty Carlisle wore in an old movie—that’s elegance, totally based on being clean. Diana Vreeland’s maid irons her money for her, and Jackie Onassis has her sheets changed every time she touches them. Cleaning things up is one of the few positive actions you can take against the clinging, rotting, dragging tendrils of mortality that get everything in the end, breaking everything down.

And so I left the dishes in the sink, telling myself that at least I was cleaner than Maggie, which was one of my bigger mistakes. You’re supposed to try to be as good as the best, not better than the worst.

I gathered up Aunt Ruth’s quilt so Maggie and I could rip it apart, and Toby, and went down the street to Maggie’s, thinking that any neighbors who were watching would probably be saying I’ve finally fallen to my own level. And they were around; I could feel them there, partially hidden by the bushes. Glynnis said, “How’s the hippie?” as I rolled Toby past her mailbox and she took her Book of the Month out. “Can you believe it—they used an ambulance to move their junk in with! What gall! I’m going to check to see if there isn’t an injunction against using public property that way—what if I were going to have a heart attack and they had it loaded up with dishes! Be careful with that one,” she finished, banging the mailbox shut. The gardening neighbor waved as I passed, and the Avon Lady merely watched from her window until I turned into Maggie’s cluttered driveway, and then dropped her white ruffled curtain before I could see her expression.

Each time I saw her, Maggie looked different—that was one of the things that was the most fun about her. She really dressed like an artist. She wore hand-embroidered tunics over tissue-thin jeans, and dark sweaters, with hand-tooled sandals and hand-bent silver earrings. Her hair was usually loose, but the shades and tones of red changed, depending on whether she’d just put avocados, or lemons, or mayonnaise all over it for the morning.

“Don’t breathe a word about this nifty staying-home routine to a soul, or I swear, they’ll take it away from us! It’s too fantastic to be true,” she used to say on a good day. “Do you realize what I can do—how terrific I can look? I can stand on my head for hours at a time, put tea bags on my eyes, and raise my IQ while I reverse gravity. I can wear a mask, fast, cleanse my entire system—and I’ll look ten years younger than the idiots who are begging to work! And you know what they look like? Crawling to the tub at the end of the day. Picking off their calluses with cruddy fingernails. They’re covered with paper cuts, and guess who’s going to start looking awfully good to the hubbies at a party—me! And these working women fall asleep halfway through any party, anyway. Who needs it! But keep your mouth shut, you hear?”

Now, when I brought my quilt over that particular morning, her hair was tied up in white papers and she said I was just in time to help her pack, because she was quitting, leaving, running away. She said she hated Chuck more than words could tell, and she turned so quickly from the front door back into the living room that some of the papers flew out. One fluttered past me and settled down on top of the quilt in the back of the stroller, and I wondered if Chuck would be as easy to catch if she let him go drifting free like that.

Her clothes were spread all around the room: wools, velvets, cashmeres, silks, and she was stuffing some black lace underwear and some sweaters into a gray duffel bag. “I’m not really leaving for good—I’m just gonna shake him up a little. He’s got to see that he can’t treat me like he treated Barbara. Now I know why she left him, and I sure got the booby prize in that contest.” When the bag was full, she zipped it and rolled it across the room. “Damn him! After all the trouble I went through—” and she kicked it over to the door. “If you could just hide a few of my things at your place, he’ll really worry, and I’ll spend a night or two out, just for good measure. Will you do it?”

And so in a matter of a half hour I was walking back up the street past the Avon Lady’s curtain and Glynnis’s mailbox with two of Maggie’s angels on the red wagon. They were from the church she was christened in before it was modernized, and they were life size.

“Don’t worry what people say,” she called from her doorstep, white curler papers fluttering like butterflies, as I started down the street. “Just think to yourself, If I do it, it’s done.”

The next day I was emptying the trash and trying to remember how this incredible week had begun by looking through its remnants there in the metal can. The problem with poor people, I decided, is that they are too connected with material things, details, doors closing, the other shoe falling. Perhaps it comes from a racial memory of taking care of other people’s things, but poor people, peasants, always follow the bouncing ball and are perfectly fooled by magic. Maggie, on the other hand, seemed to care only about her own feelings—all the things in the world were placed here for her use—they had no being apart from that. I heard her coming down the street, singing, and I didn’t look up until she was as close as her singing voice would let her get—her idiosyncrasies enabled her to keep a little extra social distance—say, the amount a large summer hat would have given you in the olden days.

“Watcha doin’?” she sang.

“You’re back already?”

“Just for the season. I told him I’d go through one more season here, get my money’s worth, so to speak, before this place drives me bats.”

HEY, LADIES! SHOW US YOUR COFFEE MAKERS! she yelled, so suddenly and so loud that the lid clattered out of my hand. “You watch—one of those suckers’ll come running out with a Mr. Coffee if we stand here long enough. Let’s go inside and light a fire. I’m freezing.”

“I brought my own tea this time,” she said, settling into Jack’s armchair.

“Specially blended on the Colombian shores, or slopes, or whatever.”

“Where’s Amanda?”

“Sleeping with Chuck. Very, very kinky, but what are you gonna do? He’s gonna be her mommy, he can do it better than me. We do Open Marriage, you know?”

“He fools around?” I asked, casually enough.

“You can’t fool around if you have Open Marriage—that’s the beauty of it. The rules are different, but they’re just as strict, because this is a very touchy situation. You’re both trying to screw the other while pretending to be so supportive it’s nauseating. There’s not supposed to be any sexual duplicity, that’s all. Fucking means so little, really—just ask one of your husband’s secretaries.”

“Well, you know, Jack swears to me he works too hard, he’s too old, and we have two kids …”

“And you’re too cute for words. Is the water boiling yet? I’ve seen your little hubby flitting through the neighborhood. He’s a pretty fine specimen for you to be acting so smug.”

“Yes, but you don’t have to open his suitcase and smell his underwear when he’s had it packed in a hot climate for over a week.”

“Oh, I don’t think you have anything to worry about; not yet, at least. It looks like you and Jack still have some vital signs. Open Marriage is strictly Intensive Care—for the terminally bored. And usually the patients run out, and besides, who cares, right? Remember, it’s style, not sincerity, we’re after at this stage. Here—have a sniff of this tea—you’ll admire its style after a while, I can promise that, at least.”

Which is how I ended up sewing my first fabric collage of two hundred or so buttons on a dish towel until the tea wore off.

“Do what I say and you’ll have a fine piece of work,” she said. “You have to think big, like I’m always telling Chuck. Get beyond yourself, think into the thing you hold in your hand, feel the immenseness of it. Become one with it.”

“Become a button?” It was Aunt Ruth’s voice, coming out of my own mouth.

“Sure, mother-of-pearl, slipping in and out of tight holes, popping off at the worst times …”

“You know,” I interrupted, “don’t you hate it when you always have to pull the thread that goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and then the button falls off; yet you can’t find the right thread that will zip open the sack of rice?”

“You buy rice by the sack? Haven’t you ever heard of Minute Rice?”

“Listen! I’ll teach you how to become an artist,” she said when she poured more tea.

“It’s the least I can do,” she began. I watched her mouth. “The artist, as teacher, is everyone’s parent, because only he or she bothers to think for everyone else. I’m sure Norman Mailer is my real father. He’s got lots of kids he doesn’t know about and my mother—well, forget her. I knew we were spiritually connected when I read his interview in Playboy and I wasn’t afraid to die for a full hour afterward.” She had slightly buck teeth, and she was very careful not to spit as she talked. I appreciated that. “I’m always afraid of death otherwise—can you believe it—I can’t. And I sat on the grass after I read that interview and I tested myself—and it was true—for the space of that hour, I wasn’t even afraid of the dude I was living with, and he was a nice rough character, I can assure you. But that’s exactly what an artist does—he keeps you from being afraid of the dark for little bits of time, just like your parents used to, before they started drinking, and then, for Crissakes, I was even afraid of my own mother! But I can prove all this, lest I rave …” and she pulled out her sketch pad from deep within her batik bag. “I can create you, just like any parent can. Here—let me draw you. Tell me, how did you see yourself when you first moved to this Godforsaken place?”

I told her only the good stuff.

“Now, as I draw,” she said, “I always lose myself in the piece—I become the vehicle, the transporter, for something greater, brighter than me. Finally, when it really gets hot, I actually feel transparent.” She looked up. “Invisible tissue, once the flame of inspiration passes through …” She looked up again. “Then I collapse in on myself like a Chinese lantern from yesterday’s garden party. There.”

She handed me a sketch, and without ever having seen her, she’d drawn a picture of Aunt Ruth, in the flesh, wearing an apron with long strings, leaning on a broom, with a plaid peasant babushka on her head. I burned red with embarrassment.

“Give that back—you’re not like that any more,” she said, tossing it into the fireplace. “Here’s what you’re like now …”

And while Aunt Ruth darkened and burst into red flames, she drew me in the present: as a slow, grinning Gila monster watching a lone fly buzzing over my head. 🏠

☜* previous Chapter Seven 🏠

next *☞ Chapter Nine 🏠