Banana Rose (18 page)

“Rip says he was poisoned by the mushrooms you made last night,” Gauguin told me.

“Come on, you don’t believe that, do you? I ate them and I’m fine, and so did Blue and Lightning.” I looked up from the arrangement of fruit. “He’s probably got the glitch. He drank a lot of water last night. You know, everyone gets sick when they first come to Taos until they get used to the water.”

I was suddenly tired of Gauguin’s father. I hadn’t seen Gauguin since yesterday, and that was how he greeted me? I began to paint the melon yellow.

“Well, I’m going to try to get him something to make him feel better and see if I can hang out with him some more. He leaves early tomorrow.” He stepped toward the door.

As he reached for the knob, I said, “You know, I didn’t poison your father.”

“I know.” He ran back and kissed me. “Got to go!” he called, and ran out the door.

I sneered in his direction and then went back to my picture. What a family, I thought. Then I thought of my family and decided I should shut up.

The yellow looked good on the melon. I added some orange.

I
T WAS IN
M
AY
that I dreamed of Isaac Bashevis Singer. I was living in the town of Taos, which in the dream was a broad avenue of cars, taxis, and flashing neon lights. I wrote Singer a letter, and he came to visit me. He rode a white horse that changed into a burgundy-colored Morris Minor. He parked in front of Grandpa George’s. I waited inside to meet him at a table with a red linen tablecloth. The room was dimly lit. As Isaac passed under the front door, a sign blinked: “Steaks as Smooth as Butter.” He sat down next to me and said, “I have a cold.”

My mouth fell open. I was afraid he’d die.

The waitress came over and he ordered chicken soup. He asked, “Could you make sure there’s a lot of breast in it?”

I said, “But Isaac, you’ve never eaten meat in your life!” Then I woke up.

Two nights later I had another dream, this time set in North Dakota. I was in a small café in a town named Upton. My grandfather drove up in a white jeep, entered the café, and sat across from me. I was eating a cucumber. I was nervous, so I talked a lot. I couldn’t control my mouth. I told him about a math test I had just taken. He turned to me and asked, “What’s four times four?” Then he looked at the menu and I understood that he was about to order a hamburger.

I yelled, “No!” and woke up, my heart beating hard. I looked around. It was morning and Gauguin was not lying next to me. I got out of bed and went outside. Gauguin was sitting on the bench out front with a plate on his lap. The plate was blue and there were two fried eggs on it with toast.

I sat down next to him and told him the whole dream and how I felt in the café. He nodded. I told him the whole dream again, this time describing more of how it had felt to be in North Dakota. Then I told him the dream I had had two nights before, the one where Singer met me in Taos. Then I just sat on the bench, looking out at the mountains like two elephants kissing.

Gauguin didn’t say a word. After a moment, he held up a forkful of egg yolk, my favorite part. He put it to my mouth and I ate it.

A week later, I told Gauguin I had to have chicken, that I had to buy a chicken at Safeway and cook it and eat it. Until that moment, I had been a vegetarian for seven years. I would eat turkey on Thanksgiving if someone else cooked it, but mostly I ate no meat. The meat department in the grocery store was essentially nonexistent to me.

Gauguin asked me if I was sure I wanted to do this.

Yes, I said.

He drove me over to Safeway in Betsy Boop and waited outside while I went in. I leaned over the cool refrigerated air and stared at cellophane packages. Yup, they still sold chickens and chicken livers and wings and thighs. I felt dizzy. The chicken was fifty-three cents a pound. I saw a row of packages in which the chickens were cut up in eighths. The chicken skins were pale yellow. I could see the raw meat underneath. My hand reached out and picked up a package. I felt its soft coldness. I dropped the package back and ran down the aisle and turned the corner. I stood in front of the saltine crackers and wept, but a voice in me urged, “Do it. Go ahead. Buy it,” and I knew the voice was not the devil. It was me. I wanted to eat meat again.

I went around the corner, picked up the package of chicken that was cut up in eighths, and stood in line to pay for it. As I waited, I chewed a stick of spearmint gum and tears rolled down my cheeks. The cashier rang up the price, put the chicken in a brown paper bag, and handed it to me after she counted out my change. I took the bag in my left hand and marched out the automatic exit door as if I were accompanied by Beethoven’s Ninth.

Gauguin started up Betsy Boop, and it jiggled loudly in idle as I settled myself into the seat with the chicken on my lap. I felt the truck’s accusation, also the magpies’ and the cottonwoods’, as we chugged along the road back to Talpa. I was Abraham bringing Isaac to the sacrificial rock. Gauguin said nothing and then he turned on the radio. It was full of static and a country singer’s voice droning on about a yellow moon. He turned it off.

When we got home, I made chicken with wine and onions. Gauguin said it smelled good, but he was going out to practice with a new band. I sat alone at the kitchen table with a thigh in wine sauce in front of me. I took a bite. I put it down. I felt slightly nauseous even before the chicken hit my stomach. There was something about cooking meat myself and eating it after seven years that really made it meat, really drove home “animal” in my mouth.

But I wanted it, and I knew it. The two dreams I had told me that. I wanted to eat meat from now on, but there was no mistake about it. An animal had died and I was biting into its flesh. I finished eating the thigh and slurped up the onions in wine sauce.

From that moment on, in a hundred ways I tried to say good-bye to Taos. “Look, Nell,” I’d say as I rode down to the Red Willow School. “See the turn, the broken fence, the fallen adobe. Take it in,” but it didn’t work. I never really believed I would leave New Mexico.

“J
ESUS,
N
ELL, WHAT
the hell are you doing?” Gauguin ran across the yard and grabbed my arm. I sat in the driveway, my mouth covered with dirt.

“I’m eating it,” I said.

“What is the matter with you?” I looked up. It was August first.

“You’re eating the land?” He was incredulous. I lifted another handful to my mouth. He shoved my hand away and lifted me to my feet.

“I don’t want to leave!” I screamed.

“Cut it out already, will you?” Gauguin said.

“No!” I pulled my arm away from him and stomped up to the vegetable garden at Blue’s. She was visiting her mother in Baton Rouge. We’d said good-bye so many times before she left that it became unbearable.

It was the best vegetable garden we ever had. I sat down and pulled out small tender pigweed that grew near the heads of Bibb lettuce. We could make salade niçoise. I’d ask Gauguin to go into town for a can of tuna. There were some potatoes back in the kitchen we could boil.

“Nell.” I heard him coming up to the garden.

“Do you want to have a salad?” I yelled without turning around.

“Nell, the truck’s packed. Everything, including our dishes. We’re leaving. Now.” I looked up at him. I didn’t say a word. I began to pull weeds again. Gauguin squatted beside me. “Please, Nell,” he said softly.

I started to cry. “I can’t.” I shook my head. “I want to make a salad.”

“C’mon, the house is empty.” Gauguin pulled gently at my sleeve.

Hearing the word
empty
, I stopped, pigweed still in my hand. Something shifted in me, and I knew it was all over. I stood up and followed Gauguin to the truck. I settled into the passenger’s side and stared at my hands in my lap.

“Aren’t you even going to say a final farewell?” Gauguin asked as we pulled away from the house.

“No, I’m carrying it all with me. I’ve got it all in my head,” I said quietly. I pictured the orange-flowered curtain that hung from thumbtacks at the windowpane, the braided brown rug in the kitchen, the black wood stove, the bumpy adobe walls that we’d painted fresh white, the turquoise windowsills, the Russian olive by the porch, the shadow from the marijuana plant that grew so high last summer, it took up all the light by the back door. I started to chew at my hair, the way Anna used to do.

We hit the blacktop, and at the turn the truck skidded a bit.

We drove past the terrible Mexican restaurant where Blue had gotten food poisoning so fast, she started vomiting immediately after the last bite of her taco, past the courthouse with the farmer’s market in front. Red chile ristras hung from posts. Past the one stoplight in town, past JCPenney’s where I had bought orange plaid flannel sheets, past Kit Carson Park and the post office on the left. Box 1206. I suddenly remembered I’d forgotten to return the key. “Gauguin, we’ve got to stop at the post office. I have to return the key.”

“They’re closed, Nell. It’s Sunday. You can mail it to them,” he said.

Box 1206. I was sure the mailbox was filling with letters for Nell Schwartz that I would never get.

“We’ve got to stop. I’ve got to get my mail,” I said in a last-ditch attempt never to leave Taos.

“Jesus, didn’t you have them forward it on Friday?” Gauguin was exasperated.

“Yes, but you know how they are.” Then I took a deep breath and just gave in. “Okay, keep going.” I looked out the window, defeated.

Past the entrance to the pueblo, past Taos Mountain, though you couldn’t ever pass it. It followed you wherever you went for a hundred miles. Past cows and the nodding wild sunflowers that grew all along the edge of the road like a thin yellow highway line. I started to cry. Gauguin reached out his hand and touched my leg.

“Are you mad at me?” he asked.

I turned in disbelief. “Gauguin, we’re leaving...” I paused. “I hate you,” I said under my breath.

“Yeah, should be in Boulder by nine tonight,” he replied. We slowed down at the blinking light and then continued at top speed.

Past the chamisa, past the bar in the valley at Arroyo Hondo, past the sign for San Cristobal. The road ascended and then evened off into Questa. Past Questa and the café that sold thick shakes, past the grocery store with the public phone outside.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” I said aloud.

“It’s only six hours north. You can come back and visit,” Gauguin said.

“You’re an asshole. I hate you,” I repeated.

Gauguin began to whistle. I looked out the window again. The land was full of sagebrush and stretched for miles. Back, way back behind me, I felt water rising. It was in an adobe house and the water washed away the whole house and the fields behind the house. Something was drowning as we headed north into another world.

H
OUSES WERE HARD
to find in Boulder, and they were expensive. We slept on an old friend’s living-room floor for a week and a half and finally, out of desperation, rented a room in a house with two biology students, Dell and Eddie, who were in their junior year at the University of Colorado. We slept in the back room, which was originally the den and had a door that opened onto the back yard.

At 6:30 our first morning there, Dell ran through our room with his spotted police dog, Dilbert. He wanted to let him out in the yard.

Gauguin, half asleep, raised himself on his elbow. “Uh, Dell, couldn’t you use the front door? We’re sleeping.”

Dell turned to Gauguin as he held the screen door open for Dilbert. “Oh, sorry, guys. Dilbert had to go real bad. I didn’t know you were sleeping.”

“We were,” Gauguin confirmed it.

“I’ll be quieter next time,” Dell assured us.

“Next time don’t come through. Use the front door, and go around,” Gauguin said. This time his voice was just below the level of a threat.

It didn’t matter. Dell ran through every morning, and it was always early, between 6:30 and 7
A.M.
Each time we screamed at him. Then I laid my head back on the pillow. At that moment each morning, I experienced memory: I’d left Taos. I was living with two college students. I was in a town without adobe, without the pueblo. Suddenly Taos Pueblo mattered. While I was in Taos, it had just been a part of everything. Now that I was away, I realized it was the essential sacred gem of the place. There was no core like that in Boulder.

Five days after we moved in, I was sitting at the kitchen table when Dell and Eddie brought in three brown bags full of groceries. They unloaded sugarless Graham crackers, brown rice in a box, whole-wheat spaghetti, kidney beans, cold-pressed safflower oil and sesame oil, peach kefir, orange-sweetened buckwheat cookies, sprouted wheat bread, raw peanuts and cashews, organic carrots, avocadoes, lemons, tea with fourteen herbal flavors, and soy milk.

“Hey, guys”—I had picked up the salutation from Dell—“did you go shopping at the co-op?”

“Nope. At Safeway,” Eddie explained as he threw the carrots into the vegetable bin of the refrigerator.

“Huh? You’re kidding. They sell this stuff at the supermarket?” I held up the soy milk.

“Sure,” Dell chimed in, and nodded.

I scratched my cheek and read the label on the tea: “Jubilation.” Then under the tea’s name the box read, “Bless you, you are good.” The tea was blessing me. I scrunched up my face. There was so much talk about the New Age up in Boulder. This must be part of it, I thought. It was then that I promised never to drink anything but Lipton’s. Lipton’s didn’t ask anything of me. With Jubilation, I had to consider the state of my soul.

As I sat at the kitchen table, Dell and Eddie went to their rooms and changed into shorts and running shoes. They were going to jog down the street, but before they left they tore open the cellophane on the buckwheat cookies and each took two. “For energy,” Eddie said, holding up his cookies. He saluted, then he and Dell dribbled out the door.

I leaned my elbow on the gray Formica tabletop and stared at the package of cookies. I reached out and took one. I bit into it. It tasted like cardboard. No, worse—like eating a windowsill, and it was as tough as an old Buster Brown leather shoe. I spat it out into my hand and grimaced.