Remember those Christmas village sets (maybe your mom or Grandma has/had one) that depict wintery scenes from Victorian-era towns, each little ceramic building maybe white-bulb-lit from within, and the whole set connected via running electric cord that had to be somehow hidden beneath white cotton batting (the snow) or behind plastic evergreen sprigs sprung from bark bases (the trees)? Yes—it was holiday time in some European-ish northern-clime, and transported to your living room. The bells from the steepled church were practically ringing in storybook satisfaction. There was a bread maker’s shop, a post office, a grocer’s store, and maybe a cobbler’s. One set in my family included skaters jerked along by magnets over a small Disco-blow-sized mirror pond (half hidden amidst the felted snow). A great aunt’s collection was locally famous, stretching across multiple card tables in a new arrangement each season—the spread reflective of arduous, minute, and entirely fictive civic planning. As a granddaughter, I remember the Styrofoam packaging most distinctly: the perfect negative of each house and the squeak as each was (delicately) pulled from its place, and then refitted at January’s end, even the cord and plug re-nestled in their bed.
The idea of a small town is appealing to a certain part of the brain: the idea that there only needs to be one of things; that a town’s layout, involving so few things, could be so simple and logical so as to be apprehended all at once, as if viewed from above. That people and the businesses their families owned could be synonymous, and as permanent as brick buildings.
Can you imagine anyone now taking a name to denote his or her trade? Baker, Blacksmith, Occupational Therapist?
Maybe it’s the same part of my brain mesmerized by form-fit Styrofoam that wants to idealize a small community. But ride with me here, for a moment. Forget the bad stuff: gossip, groupthink, nepotism that isn’t even recognized as such. Think of a cemetery where some of the names on even the oldest, most sunken and crumbling tombstones match those in the yellow pages, the local Ford dealer’s name or beauty salon owner’s name, and where some newer stones have names with birth dates and a waiting hyphen, someone—maybe working out at the gym right now—nevertheless claiming her place. If this is getting too Spoon River for you, go back to my previous paragraph. Imagine inheriting a needed and respected trade: being taught all the skills of the craft right along with your abc’s, and then handed a capital investment and an assured place in your community.
On a bike ride last fall we came upon just such a cemetery. We propped our bikes against a gate and walked around. We were so newly arrived that I felt a physical uneasiness leaning my bike against a gate and walking away without locking it—this in an empty cemetery on a deserted state highway, miles from town, surrounded by thousands of acres of corn. I kept my bike in view as we moved among the stones, as if some ghost had been waiting for something just like it.
Some of the gravestones were so old they had begun to sink, even these markers of retracted life in retreat. Others lay toppled or crumbling; their decay seemingly paused to us, even while ongoing just as we were stepping along through the rows. We made out names and dates from as late as two centuries ago etched into soft purplish-colored stones and on a few towering monuments, complete with their own tiny fenced gates and carved angels. Of course there were veterans’ slabs and baby graves, and paired spinster sister graves, and, yes, there were two graves for women from a century ago not labeled with their names at all but only their titles, in this case weirdly identical: “wife of Dr. ____. “ From the dates, and study of nearby markers, I didn’t gather that these were in-laws, but Dr. ____’s first and second wives.
He, of course, was the one with the private fence and stone angels nearby.
There would have to be a cemetery or two in a Christmas village set of my town—along with a water department building, salt trucks, the Goodwill, Rural King, Taco Bell, and Napa Auto Parts.
If seen the other night from above, roofs peeled back, I would have been found in the yoga studio in final relaxation, some of us in a variation called "feet up the wall."
The studio doesn’t have its name on the front, by the way, like the Mill from my grandma’s Christmas village, because why does it need a sign? Everyone knows it’s the yoga studio.
And next door to that would be the The Curling Iron, a beauty salon, and on the other side of that Cellular One, and a block further the GM dealer. In our town, small as it is, there are more than one of many things: three banks, two grocery stores (one, Super Wal-Mart), about ten car washes, three or four insurance agencies, a Verizon Wireless place, a cable company, a Mexican restaurant, a few consignment stores.
We do have a skating rink—but it’s indoors, for roller skating, and used now mostly for Zumba.
As well there are not one but about fifteen different churches, each with its own separate, active congregation (according to an events listing that takes up a quarter of the newspaper).
And there are bars, dry as it is on Sundays. One of the rowdier ones is on the other side of the Yoga studio. This night, as we lay in corpse pose, staring upward, a woman in the street outside began to yell. I pictured the bar as if its roof had been peeled back: its karaoke machine, Nascar flags, and Budweiser taps (still considered here, proudly within a driving range of St. Louis, an American beer).
Her voice wafted over the studio, crisp on the wintery air.
“If I don’t want to have fucking sex with you, I won’t have fucking sex with you.” She was not endangered, but lecturing. We in our corpse pose were a group of women stretched on floor mats in a room without furniture—not a non-silly contemporary pastime for an adult. Each of us was trying to relax, trying not to think the racing thoughts of our day, me trying not to think of Christmas village sets, what could be for dinner, how I ever ended up in this room, on this ground, in this Christmas village set that is really not mine at all, but that is as odd to me as tiny ceramic eighteenth-century German carriage house to my aunt’s living room in the 1980’s of Brussels, Wisconsin.
And all of this not two hundred yards from the courthouse, yep that one with its Back to the Future clock, its white moon face to the night.
