Conversation Piece

Conversation #1:

Blip. Blip. Blip.

“Now what are these. Collard greens. Can’t say I’ve ever seen those before.”

“You have plenty on your shelf.”

“And fish.” (Makes a face.) “I don’t eat fish. I catch ‘em, I clean ‘em, I cook ‘em, but I don’t eat ‘em. “

“Well, you should try collard greens sometime. Oil and salt on them, they’re great.”

“Nope. No green stuff for me. Just a little bit of lettuce maybe. And every once in a while green beans, but only if they’re cooked right. And I mean just right. I do eat corn. And potatoes.”

Takes one last look at my food, reaching for the end of the bag of greens with only the tips of her fingers, and shudders in disgust.


Conversation #2:

“I used to give a seminar for women and their money. ‘Smart women finish rich.’ I used to have all these figures then, showed how much you’d save over time if you start putting something away a little each month.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen those charts.”

“You’re so smart to be thinking of this now, when you’re so young yet. Man. So many kids around here, they just want to make the monthly payment on their car, make rent. Nobody thinking anymore about the future.”

“And we’ve all seen where that leads, haven’t we?”

“Oh yeah, oh yeah. Take banks. It’s our fault too. We were lending people money we shouldn’t have been. So, English teacher. You know, I’ve written books. Three of ‘em actually. Novels. I’m always working on something, just scribbling away. Course the writings not real good—but that’s what editors are for, right? Clean it all up.”

“ Um, sure.”

“I got a kid, trying to get him to go to the junior college first, get some credits. But they all want to spend the big bucks to go live in the dorms, have freedom. You got your whole life to have freedom, I say. You can wait a few years and save some money first. But they don’t see it that way.”

“Uh Huh.”

“I mean, that’s why you’re so smart to be thinking about your future now. I mean, with this political situation. What we got in Washington, what mess they’re up to now.”

“Mm.hm…”

“I mean, look—I don’t try to get political with anyone. Anyone’s politics is their own business and of course I can work with anybody. But that snowstorm in DC? Now wasn’t that the Lord?”

“Mm.”

“But saving money. Yep. Now here’s how I think of it. Say you walk by a window, and you see a purty dress. I mean, a real purty dress. You want that dress! But it’s way too expensive. So you say, no , I’d just really better not. I mean, a smart girl like you, that’s what you’d say. Then, the next day you come by, and it’s 50% off! Well, now you could buy it. Now you could buy it, and look at all that money you’ve saved. That’s saving money.”

“You know…. I think I’ll just take your card here….”


Conversation #3:

“Excuse me?”

We’re in the pool, sapphire-tinged water, vaguely medical in its hue, lapping chest deep. I push my goggles up, and an older woman, one of the water walkers, is bobbing toward me, parting the surface with her fingers as she glides. “Yes?”

“Did you read that article in there, tacked up to the bulletin board in the locker room?”

“Yeah,” I say, though I didn’t really; I just saw the headline.

“Well what can we do to help? All those teachers are losing their jobs.”

“I know. Mine’s been cut too, actually.” I tell her this as some kind of fair warning. Without my contacts, I am only peering in the direction of her white shape, the sound of her voice, but I know she can't know who I am either.

“And the swimming teacher!” the woman continues. “You know, every fourth grader in the county gets their swimming lesson from her. Every one. Now what are those kids going to do?”

“I know. It’s terrible.”

“And they can’t close this pool. Where will people who need it go? You get a lesson from that swimming teacher, you get a work out, I tell you.”

After my swim, I stand in the locker room, dripping and squinting, and read the article. A few decades ago, a local fourth-grader drowned in a river. The PE teacher at the college here started a swimming lesson program, and later it expanded to include all the fourth graders in the county, so there is now a full local generation taught to swim by this one woman.

It’s like my grandmother who, in my town, taught spelling and cursive handwriting to thirty years of third-graders.

And what a power in that, I’ve often thought: a creepy, secretive power, flying under all of our radar.

Group Discussion

“Above all, it’s important to ignore rumors.”

“Oh—and they’re flying!”

“There’s the one about the pool closing…”

“I heard that one.”

“At the pharmacy the other day, there was this woman. Said she knows all about because of where her friend works. Well she went on and, and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”

“…build a new Wal-Mart.”

“Everyone in town has something to say. And I’ve been getting emails. And you can read all about it on Facebook too.”

“Oh yes. Guess-who was on there. This isn’t a rumor. It’s true and you can go look at it yourself.”

Conversation #4, in Stirrups

“Man, you just got here and now you’ll have to look for a new job! That’s the pits.”

I know.

“Still. You don’t have any family here, how’d you end up here?”

It’s a good question, and one everyone here asks—with that same awe in their voice that seems to end, so weirdly, in disapproval or suspicion. Don’t they live here? Have they no faith in the merits of their own town?

I try to explain; we’re from the Midwest. We’re from small towns. It is a good little college they have here, and I was glad for a job.

“Now, if you want to have a baby some time, I always tell people, six months it might take, after you go off pills. But, it could happen soo-oner.” He ends in a sing-song, a joke with a happy wink.

But I have not asked about having a baby. I’m here, as I’ve specifically explained, to refill a birth control prescription.

“Okay,” I say, and think wistfully of my Portland doc, and her most serious, searching question: Do you wear your bicycle helmet? Every time?

“We’ll see you again next year,” the doc says, and then stops. “Or—man, maybe we won’t huh?” He shakes his head, then shakes my hand. Good luck to me.


A Walk with T.

“Careful. Or I’ll hear about this Monday.”

But he shoves me again toward a mud puddle. I respond by launching myself from a curb into his side, a wrestler descending from the ropes. He grabs my head and scrubs my hair with the flat of his fist.

No one was coming out of any of the houses to save me. We joke about this. What will they say after we’re gone? Remember that teacher we had that one year? The one whose boyfriend beat her?

Or, they’ll remember him as my husband, since that’s what so many call him here, bank tellers, grocery store clerks, co-workers. People here even mention to me “my husband” when I am alone and when I have never met them before, causing me always to want to double-take, to turn around in a circle looking over my shoulder.

It’s like I suddenly grew old enough, crossing those 2200 miles to get here. Maybe it happened at the Continental Divide. But maybe it was halfway through Nebraska, where, for me, the bartender gallantly opened a Lite beer.

If we did stay here, they’d marry us off for sure, just through force of repetition. Even people I gently correct forget by the next time I see them, so it’s like sweeping a drift of sand.

“See? We should have brought the movies,” I say as we pass the video store: Spotlight Video, with its neon sign and new release painted windows and one strangely boarded-over window, like a car drove through it.

Once I’d walked in to return some movies, and one of my students was sitting behind the desk, working on an assignment I had given. She looked up at me in total surprise. I was an apparition.

It made me remember a math teacher, new one year to our middle school, who was not married but living with her boyfriend, to whom she referred, in a way that deeply embarrassed us all, as her partner. She also went by “Ms.,” the first woman I ever knew to do so, and as if it were related, was skinny—skeletally skinny—could be seen around town running, of all things, and gave us her home phone number so we could call if we had homework questions, even at night. We thought she was the weirdest adult we’d ever met. I don’t think anyone ever called her with a homework question. I think that because one night when I called her she seemed so surprised, and even annoyed, like she’d forgotten that she’d offered.

Any questions? I joked with my student at the video store, and was grateful when she shook her head no. I was in a nubby jacket, not in my teacher clothes.

Everything is mud. We walk along the road, where it is less muddy. Grass everywhere is browned and matted, the fur of a long-sleeping or dead animal; trees are sticks and twigs.

“Look.” T. grabs my arm. There’s a small dog inside a house, stock still and staring over the back of a couch. Framed by the front window, it’s like a painting, the dog’s little face rigid, ears perked.

“Doesn’t it look like a painting?” T. says. “I thought it was, for a moment.”

On and off, in different places, at different times of day, we talk about where we’ll move next, when, what kinds of jobs we’ll find. What can we get? But also, what do we want actually?

We don’t know, of course. But we keep talking in the same circular way that had been enough last spring to tornado us here.

I MapQuest our route again, and that purple line stretches so unbelievably long back across the country.

“Let’s go to that library.” T. teases me as we approach a dip, a ditch, and then a looming brick building, new and tucked behind winter bare trees. “I’ll vouch that you’re my friend.”

“Very funny.” There, to my mortification, I’d nearly failed to qualify for a library card, unable to provide the name and number of one other person in town, someone not living with me, who knew me.

I’d had to pull out my big guns: I’m an English teacher. At the college. The librarian—after looking over her shoulder—whispered that I could just put down my office number for my reference.

It was too bad the student of mine I’d seen outside the library, on my way in, had ridden away already. He lives about ten miles out of town, and in my class had written essays about riding his bike long, and then longer distances, starting with the first time he’d left the end of his grandparents’ long driveway. We’d chatted there in the parking lot, and he’d showed me the big four-wheeler gloves he’d outfitted to the handlebars of his bike, for the wind.

Now he’s ridden as far as the state line, and across it.

Passing the library, T. and I come upon a street decorated with basketball cut-outs. The boys’ team has won the state basketball championship. We pass a small boy on a makeshift pitcher’s mound in his side yard, a bucket of baseballs at his side, and a man squatting to receive these pitches eyes us. What do we think we’re doing—walking around?

“Pitchers and catchers,” T. says gamely. We turn on to a street named Oil.

Earlier—while I was upstairs prowling for jobs and googling cities, and T. was making a spinach soup—he reached far into our second-hand dishwasher to fiddle with a metal loop sticking up, something out of place. Extracting the thing, he found it to be a tiny, child-sized engagement ring, with five plastic diamonds in a row. He’d called me downstairs, wonder in his voice. It was like our dishwasher had proposed to him.

For a minute—for one minute—it was like this town had tried to marry us.

I take the opportunity near the end of our walk, while T. leans to inspect the new buds on a tree—he knows the names for everything, he knows the genus and the species—to give him one more good, loving, relieved, terrified punch to the arm.

The Candidates' Debate

Post Removed.

Village People

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.

Piece that begins and ends with partial listing of season-specific sensations

Knuckle skin cracking from dry winter air; lips a mess

Smell of car heater air mixed with chlorine smell coming from me, after lap swimming, wet hair under my hat stiff brushes sticking to wool of hat

White, white light—so diffuse, is it seeping in at the horizons? Whole sky one cloud sweater. Then all light pinkish at night before blue, and then total black, save lights from the refinery, like a carnival cruise ship come in to dock in the middle of town, white spume and Olympic torch, nude fire blast like fog horn

Total dearth of street lights. Blank windows like black paintings on our walls. Inside house at night, lights out, coffee table vs. shins

Most corn fields in sight from the road hacked down to stubble, but tractors still float past at morning intersections. Picking through New Year’s this year

Smell of fully melted pumpkin seeping over my desk

Shock and then even a little anger at mini, inflatable holiday nativity scene tethered, like hot-air balloon, to the courthouse lawn of our town. Then amusement at sight of it in daytime, deflated. (How seriously can we take these culture wars?)

Also inflated penguins sliding atop inflated mailbox, waving letters to Santa in the direction of the post office, courthouse south lawn

Winter branches, first top-frost of snow, grass blades and mud still poked up through; neighbor kids on their trampoline bouncing the shards of an ice puddle

Whole dead deer on highways, backs twisted acrobatically

Coming to full stop at a desolate country four-way, accelerating again all the way back up to highway speed

Letter to the editor: Our Christmas spirit needs revitalized. We’re the only town with no Christmas tree? And those same old wire snowflakes.

Christmas office party treats made with Eagle Brand, Tostitos Queso, marshmallows. I make a dessert with Vanilla wafers.

Trips through many towns, all the way to Iowa for Thanksgiving, up to Wisconsin and Minnesota for Christmas and New Years. One wonderful absence from list of seasonal sensations: airports. Anything airport related. Motoring (still, with our Oregon plates) through towns with names like Oblong, Eureka, Montezuma, Mount Pulaski, each with its own water tower, grain elevator, church steeples, Dollar General. At every town entrance, proclamations of local high school greats: division-clinching girls’ softball program; state champion football team; a pole vaulter, a wrestler. Along the main streets, names of more young people, each nailed to its own telephone pole with a yellow ribbon.

Invitation to a living nativity stuck in our back door. Will there be live donkey? Someone’s real baby? We are actually curious and want to go, but fall asleep on our couch.

When we visit the main streets—Story City, Iowa; Palestine, Illinois; Vincennes, Indiana—we get the feeling shop owners are calling ahead to one another down the line, letting them know we’re coming, though we’re really not buying much of anything. In Vincennes, we are given free peanuts in a newspaper cone, and organ music is piped out over the sidewalk. T buys a cast iron pot, and the clerk teases me: Now what will he want me to cook? Even the small PC repair shop seems to be in the antique business, even the record store, where the gray-ponytailed clerk/owner ambitiously offers to mail me a copy of the Dylan Christmas album on Tuesday, once it comes in (which he does, though not after calling me on Monday to assure me it’s coming). A woman in a thrift/Antique store has set up a murder scene from a famous play we do not know, but which once appeared at the local theatre currently being restored, she told us as if we knew all about that theatre. There are antique gun and blood and poker chips and liquor bottles on an antique bed. She has also turned off the heat in the shop. We drift through with our hands shoved under our armpits, searching for something we can pay her for. Her inventory includes remnants of her real life. She jokes about how she inherited the china in the glass case from an in-law, earning the set after decades of hand washing each piece after holiday gatherings, never breaking a one. Of course she’s the last one living of that clan too. That, she reflects, is also why.

Cold Frame

This week we missed Portland.

T. was invited to a poetry reading. I heard a friend had an art show, and saw an email about the last shindig of the season at our old favorite, the Hollywood Farmer’s Market. Subsequent horrors included Facebook photos of fall hikes in the Gorge and, most heart-rending, one afternoon a slim, forwarded flier advertising the second half of an OPB documentary on wild horses. Now, we would never know what had become of Cloud. Finally for me, everything culminated in a dream: a bus moving around a downtown square, not in Portland but some dreamland city. Waking, I flashbacked to my youth. So many friends’ mothers had professed unabashedly, even proudly, the inability to “drive in a city.” (Luckily, not my own mother, who’d back a flat-bed down an aircraft carrier’s runway, just to see if she could.) But it could happen to me one day—this Midwestern-woman’s fate. I saw myself trapped in a center lane, white-knuckling a steering wheel, totally bereft of my once legendary ability to parallel park.

In my experience, the bottom of any midnight cycle of self-loathing and regret, the nadir of its swirling waters, returns one always to the same place: craigslist. And just as the post-break-up haircut is contra-advised, neither should one scour the postings of a longed-for city. Look away from the vintage furniture, upcoming micro-brew festivals, and shelter kittens.

Near the end of the horrible week, my parents called. “What are you guys up to this weekend?”

Not much. T. was attempting a dish with turnips. He’d been given a free bunch, greens included, which in Portland would have been like being given a glove slap to the face: a challenge to which one rose, or buckled in shame. But as I’d reported apple pies the previous week, a second culinary experiment as highlight seemed depressing even to me. Not only did my boomer parents have cooler music and hair in their teens than me, their social lives as retirees put T’s and mine to shame.

But on Saturday morning, the actual dawn of the weekend, we surprised ourselves with a plan. Today was the day we could make the cold frame.

In Portland, we’d lived in a third floor apartment and our garden was a pot of Basil on a sill. Here, moving into a house with a yard, we built a raised bed before we unpacked all our boxes. It was August, and the locals, with their pristine acres of fiercely-tended lawn grass, doubted we’d get anything going—but we did: radishes, spinach, lettuce, arugula, kale. Only the beets didn’t make it. As of November 15th, our garden is still blooming. T. thought we could keep it past Christmas if we built a cold frame, an enclosure with clear top panes sloping toward the south.

We just needed an old set of windows. But what we needed for that was a place like Portland’s Rebuilding Center. What was the equivalent here? In an antique shop in a town nearby, T. thought he’d seen a basement supply of old windows and doors, and so we headed there first—not realizing the odyssey upon which we’d set ourselves.

The path to the antique store took us first past an auction.

I’d seen a few advertised in the paper here—and I know that auctions occur all over the country and are not indigenous to the Midwest; there’s just something about them that feels like they are. Perhaps it’s all the old men in coveralls, the collective and public process of coming to consensus on the worth of a neighbor’s household of things—thing by thing.



The auction was much like a yard sale crossed with a tent revival. (Between the auctions and the yard sales, on a summer Saturday in one of these small towns it’s as if there’s been a community disaster, all that furniture out on lawns.) Two large groups of people moved with two jabbering auctioneers, one circling carefully organized tables in the back yard and one in the front. Were there any storm windows? No. But there were twenty plastic garbage cans, eighteen rakes, exercise bikes and end tables, quilts and cake pans and then boxes of things like handsaws, sewing patterns, glass lanterns, Christmas table runners, and half-used jugs of laundry detergent T. began fondling a cast iron pan. We could really make a pork chop, he began to murmur. I counted the cash in my purse. We were getting a number.

The auctioneer rattled off roasting pans, pitchers, mixing bowls, moving quickly down to single digit prices for first choice, then down to whole groups of items. T. and I tried not to look at each other, our eyes the same size as when we heard the price to rent an entire house. When the auctioneer announced the furniture, we slipped inside the house for a peek.

And there they were: a nubby, curving, three-piece sectional couch, a velour chair, a Wurlitzer, Murphy bed (working, the sign proclaimed), mod dressers and credenzas. The house could have served as a set from Mad Men. In the thin air around my thudding heart arose the wails of urban hipsters, choir invisible. And though I’d scoffed at those kids in their skinny jeans and body art back when I’d lived in PDX, I came charging out of that house with my number, freak flag, flying.

And I won that gold velour parlor chair for $2.



Do you want the sectional too ma’am? The auctioneer teased. The audience laughed, this joke being repeated for me. No one had wanted that couch, not even for a dollar.

We picked up a cast iron pot for $5, and then a granite roasting pan for $4. Now how will the windows fit in the car? T. said, the first to recall the day’s intended project as we struggled down the street with our purchases.

We would eventually find our materials—but not before an afternoon of rabbit trails from Antique stores to a glass shops, to random dumpsters by the railroad tracks, various yard sales, and a junk shop run by a little old man, a World War II vet, who held forth on aging, wives, Idaho, and school buses all while standing in front of a barn of used storm windows—but, oh, no, he didn’t have anything for sale. All those windows he was using. It was finally a tip from a employee at Rural King—a warehouse store deserving of its own entry—who frowned, shook his head, frowned, shook his head, and finally admitted he had almost backed his truck over someone’s discarded stack of used windows the other night, and where had that been? Finally, he remembered: his daughter’s neighbors. What street did she live on? He shook his head. Oh, no. But, he could describe how to get there—and we braced ourselves for another set of local directions: turn right by the new fence, left where the big tree used to be…

By the time we began building our cold frame, the sun was slipping behind the neighbor’s house. In the past few weeks, with most of the corn suddenly vanished, shorn down to its stubby stalks, our town’s true land formations have revealed themselves. The world is flat and bare here, even the leaves flying away, sometimes spinning straight up into the sky. I am aware fully of how different is this landscape from the one I knew in New Mexico, and in Oregon; at the same time, with all these stick-figure trees and burr-ish bushes, the great white-washed slate of sky, I feel so weirdly at home.

So how was our Saturday? How would we have spent this day if we were in Portland?

I knew enough not to ask T. directly—not after the week we’d had.

We surveyed our work and cracked two Stags, a brand we’ve begun drinking because it comes in aluminum. Our new town doesn’t recycle glass.

Now that we’re here—either exemplified in contrast, or exaggerated in holdout—we’re such Portlanders.

Then T. says he thinks we can plant another row of lettuce yet. We’ve still got all those seeds.

Zombie Night

Yesterday, working the door at my school’s trick or treat event, I greeted some 2,000 of my fellow citizens while dressed as the bride of Frankenstein. Attendance estimates ran indeed as high as my white-and-black-striped beehive wig. But even if overestimated by half, the figure’s enough for bafflement. Barely does the entire county boast 20,000 souls. Apparently, from transformers to T-Rexes, from Hannah Montana to Hanna-Barbera, we all love our Halloween. Picture it: a small town and a dark October night (given, a year when the World Series involves two other teams) where a community event can actually draw the community.

I came home bushed. The librarians built a spooky maze through the stacks. The chemistry teacher, a former monk, wore a cowled robe as he passed, purple smoke brewing in a test-tube. Students in 70’s platforms or 80s rocker skirts, dressed as nerds, Geishas, cowboys, or news anchors helped direct traffic. One of my co-workers had lit upon the trick of inserting a balloon into the top of my sagging wig, but still, I’d left exhausted by all that hair. How were there so many people in this town? Who were they? Most had no idea who I was, but they’d smiled at me as I bent to smile at their children, my black lipstick cracking.

I’ll to add it to my list of things to do when new in a town: go out in a disguise. It’s nice to be where no one is very sure of every name; where all of us are in zombie make-up.

Luckily, back home, there was a frozen pizza in the fridge (no energy tonight for quinoa, not to mention squash curry or pumpkin gnocchi—most recent, grasping attempts to retain foodie-status so hard cultivated as Portlanders).

Luckily, too, an episode of 30 Rock, T. already in place on the couch.

Two months ago, T. and I forswore cable, snobbing it up for the guy from Mediacom, whom we weren’t averse to letting assume more noble pastimes on our part. Or, so we’d assumed. Instead, he’d looked around our barren rental, its piles of flimsy boxes of flimsy books, and, as if reading right through to our barren souls, said, “Oh, you’ll want cable soon.”

“We’re going to try it first and see,” T. squeaked in response, already suspecting he would indeed come to wish we’d sprung for cable. I’d have been more scared, too, but was busy sweating out a previous prediction, delivered moments earlier by our Mediacom oracle as he’d run a cable to my second floor office: it could take “a few hours” for our Internet to activate. What was I supposed to do for two hours offline? Learn to knit? (But how!)

The big secret—don’t tell the cable guy—most nights do find T. and the cat and I flopped on our beleaguered, well-traveled couch griping about Jay Leno, and his show that now dominates one-third of our channel options. How can that idiot be so popular? How can any majorly-produced, “mainstream” program derive so much humor from seventh-grade homophobia, with so little remark? How does any respectable actor agree to appear on this circus of dog tricks and fake tans?

But, on Thursday nights we get 30 Rock.

I began peeling the layers of my Wal-Mart Halloween-aisle nail polish. This season’s first few episodes have taken up my material, invoking the divide of urban and rural, blue and red, the coasts and the heartland. At the end of the season opener, fictional New York network executive Jack (Alec Baldwin) leans in to glare at the home audience while reciting, “Give the people what they want,” as the show cuts directly to, yes, Jay Leno’s. What else does America want? Country, answers the blond star Jenna, donning white boots and vamping to the Monday Night Football theme.

In tonight’s episode, Jack and Liz (Tina Fey) drive south, leaving their urban island for a rural outpost in search of a new cast member to whom “the people” will respond. “There is no ‘real’ America,” Liz insists, directly countering a distinction drawn by Sarah Palin (as well as recalling Fey’s impersonation). Jack—the Republican, a romantic cynic, nostalgic for the good old days of the good old boys—maintains there is more heart in the heartland, and that it can be brought back to Manhattan for profit. Before they leave, his aide attaches a fake (lesser) label over the real label on the underside of his tie, effecting Jack’s “country” disguise.

The joke of the episode turns on Liz’s assertion coming true: the rural inhabitants of Stone Mountain are just as mean-spirited, foul-mouthed, and clubbish as the New Yorkers. “We’re all the same. We’re all Americans,” Liz taunts Jack.

Beyond the gore-splattered surgical masks tonight, I didn’t see much that was, truly, evidence of the one all-encompassing ugly American. An overheard exchange confusing a student dressed as a Geisha (yes, a Japanese figure) with “the real Chinese students,” referring to actual Asian International students, not Chinese (and who were dressed as monsters, and naughty nurses), would have stopped the heart of my Study-Abroad-Administrator sister. But I fear this is a mistake made often in New York too.

It’s always the lesson: it’s too easy to lump black and white—or, red and blue. This small town in Illiana is not interchangeable with any other; it’s not like the one where T. grew up, 200 miles away, and it’s not like the one I’m from, 300 miles further. One “heartland” town isn’t the same as any other, just as Seattle is not Houston, Boston not San Diego.

Tonight, hundreds of fellow citizens came out to a cornfield for free candy, for a family event with neighbors. This is in a community with a major chocolate brand as a major factory employer, with so many acres of that corn grown for snack chips. Less than a mile from the school, a state prison houses a population nearly one-third of the town's, and at night its tower lights glow over the corn like a moon. The clown shoes, bloody butcher aprons, and Disney princesses only fit amidst this weirdness.

I am told that when we give away groceries for holiday meals later in the year, the lines will stretch out the door.

But even as the categories, urban and rural, feint and dance from the claimed corners of their distinctions—in wealth, opportunity, power, values—they dissolve.

One of my students was giving away carved pumpkins—these from the garden, where two weeks ago I’d been on the team rescuing the last produce from the frost. A green, un-ripened pumpkin can be cut early and brought indoors to keep turning as long as its “intake” stem is put into a vat of water.

“I didn’t think you’d be in to that sort of thing,” he commented as I loaded my car with my prize.

A pumpkin? A community garden? Wearing a beehive wig (lilting to the left now) and black nail polish?

“Small children?” I joked as trick-or-treaters came and went. “Only once a year.”

The pumpkins he’d carved were beautiful, each with a panel cut away, flipped around, carved with a ghoul’s face, and re-inserted deep within the pumpkin. I’d never seen the trick before. He’d researched it online.

“No,” he said, shaking his head, embarrassed. Then, “it’s cool. Never mind.”

And we laughed. And went home, probably, to eat our same candy giveaways in front of the same TV shows.

Unless he has cable.

On the Road / Going East, Young Man

At the DMV the other day, side-by-side at computer testing stations and competing for points on our driver’s exams, T. finally beat me, and by a point more than he had the last time.

“You didn’t miss the question about the blind in a crosswalk again did you?” he asked as we dug out our passports and utility bills, ready to pose for our pictures.

“Worse. I missed the one about a red, octagonal sign.” It’s test anxiety, I’ve become certain. I suffer from it only at DMVs, though luckily, in the four states in which I’ve lived over the last decade, I’ve always passed.

We each took our turn sitting and grinning, accepting our new state ID’s, relinquishing our old. It wasn’t until we’d been living here in Illiana a month or so that I began to realize how entwined is the story of T. and me with moving; how, if chronicled, our relationship would be a road-trip novel and not a sit-com because there’s no set. Perhaps it was this second major move of ours that showed me: we were good at loading a van, forwarding our mail, plotting a route with the atlas. We were too good, knowing tips and tricks: getting copies of medical records, taping the screws for the futon frame to the futon frame.

We’d first met as transplants, expats, the stories of each of our lives—short as they’d been at that point—parallel stories of moving from small towns in the Midwest to colleges in the Midwest, and then to graduate school even further away. Of course that’s a common story: to grow up is to move on, and to go to college is to go away, maybe especially in the Midwest where success is measured in distance traveled from home. But just because it’s as old as Sister Carrie doesn’t mean it isn’t formative.

Nor is the territory we’ve now covered as a young couple, even unmarried, unusual for our generation: many of our friends shed addresses annually, enrolling in programs, accepting jobs, or moving to a city without a job, the couples carrying on commuter relationships or taking turns following one another—or not. Our best friends live hundreds of miles from us, scattered, and in constant motion. I sometimes wonder if cell phones and Facebook would so easily have replaced address books if it weren’t the case that address books stopped working; that physical addresses now slid from people.

The one difference, of course, is that this time we’ve moved back: we’ve returned to T.’s home state, and to within one strong football rivalry of mine. And from the beginning of our relationship, begun in the wilds of New Mexico, some part of it has been about the Midwest and this myth of our shared heritage.



What did it mean to be Midwestern? Among our grad school friends, we were not uncommon in our fly-over roots, though the others who claimed the lineage seemed to me to have come from less Midwestern-y places. (Is Kansas in the Midwest?) And some had come from Midwestern cities, whereas T. and I could count our hometowns’ stoplights. I knew what it was to drive an hour for the event of back-to-school shopping at Kohl’s. T. knew what it was to be the first of his family to finish college, and subsequently the only member, even of the cousins, to leave. But to New Mexico he’d brought a set of the homemade-game Washers. For friends, I prepared “Midwestern tacos,” which featured iceberg lettuce, ground hamburger with spice from packet, and black olives. Back home, these concoctions were only called “tacos,” just as any food paired with rice and soy sauce was “Chinese.”

In T.’s writing there were corn cobs and crows; in mine, silos and Saran-wrapped casseroles “keeping” on the frozen floorboards of Fords. Maybe I in particular claimed the label Midwestern all the more fiercely once I’d left the place, indulging that perverse part of my personality that refused to accept even gentle teasing and had instead learned to embrace and incorporate such feedback—about my smile, patience, or cheeriness—like a tree growing around an axe blade. When told that my Midwestern stories were, um, nice, I decided I was a regional writer, misunderstood, writing about a region that was misunderstood: its underlying passion masked by a veneer of simplicity; the subtexts of its dialogue too faint for the untrained ear. Maybe, like Alice Munro, what I was doing was Canadian Southern Gothic. The result: twelve more “plots” in which women and lonely teenagers did a lot of longing and staring, driving aimlessly along rural routes or talking politely in diner booths, usually about the weather. Though that was fitting as my primary antagonists were forms of weather: tornado, snow, and the sheer cold of cold itself.

To some dear Texan and New York girlfriends, city-savvy, with whom I huddled in a bar booth at least one full year of grad school, Midwestern meant white bread, fairly synonymously. A sit com of us during that time, or so we said during a dry spell for everybody, would be called No-Sex in Not-A-City. That set would have been cheap, consisting entirely of one torn, plastic-covered bar booth. Of our bartender, viewers would see only a pair of hands. My character, the Midwesterner, would have been some kind of cross between Miranda and Charlotte: a woman, maybe a little awkward or perhaps chunky or geeky, but friendly, one with Miranda’s no-fuss, no-make-up tomboy look and Charlotte’s general prudishness and culturally insular upbringing.

When girlfriends of mine visited from home, my New Mexico friends commented that we all had “such beautiful Midwestern hair,” which I think now means healthy, but totally unstyled. Pony-tail ready. One of those Texan friends has since relocated to Minneapolis, and I keep meaning to ask about the effects on her hair.

In Portland—a place like the Midwest where women can wear tennis shoes and leave hair unstyled—there were lots of Midwesterners; they were all successful people who’d left—that is to say, left successfully. Many whom I encountered were catering, or adjunct teaching. (I was doing both.) When we’d meet up, without speaking of it directly (after all, that wouldn’t be nice), we’d acknowledge what we knew to be the reason for leaving: the Midwest was boring. A Prairie Home Companion was funny, but who could listen for more than an hour? And maybe not at all if you weren’t in the car.

Of course there were people who’d left the Midwest for more serious considerations than bookstores and art scenes, say they were other than white, or gay, or simply men who don’t love football, but who do like to cook, and maybe even bake a little bread or perhaps play the trombone past high school... Or women who wanted to go someplace they wouldn’t forever be known as girl. (There’s one across the street from me here. I haven’t met her yet but I’ve been told by other neighbors: “And that little girl over there? She’s a chemist at Marathon!”) There are reasons that, on the west coast, even people-from-the-Midwest-originally will say, with a wink, “Have a good trip back East,” when you are only flying to Milwaukee.

Perhaps there is something in the American imagination that suggests that those who landed in the Midwest were those who’d headed west, young man, but who hadn’t made it very far. Even here, T. and I have noted the odd quickness with which some locals will put their own town down: All we got here… Now if you wanna drive to Indy… My students write copiously of their boredom and disdain. They long for a place where there’s action, where it’s cool—like, maybe, the glittering Terre Haute.

So maybe it was a very strange thing, and not a normal move, for T. and me this time to load up our life and point our Budget truck East, back to the Midwest, and to the rural Midwest at that: the red patches even in these blue states. When I mentioned that we were leaving Portland to a young man all alone at a vacant truck stop in a deserted stretch of Idaho, he said as much to me, utterly mystified: doesn’t sound like a good trade.

Though we were moving for better jobs, and for a chance at affordable housing, it felt like the end of an odyssey.

We were returning to where we’d come from, originally, to where our stories had started.

And it felt a lot like failing.