Authors: Natalie Goldberg
Gauguin pointed to an item on the menu and asked, “What’s this?”
The waiter slapped his hand on Gauguin’s shoulder and said, “This all is real gen-u-ine flanken.” He said it in a Texas accent, thinking he was imitating Gauguin. Naturally, Gauguin wasn’t from Texas, but in New York anything that isn’t New York is a slow drawl.
“You-all might like some chitlins in your chicken soup.” The waiter pronounced this with lots of space between the letters of the words, as though the sound of the language echoed the flat open plains outside of Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.
Gauguin was defensive. “I’m not from the South. I’m from Minnesota.”
“Oh, yeah? Where’s that?” The waiter had a big smile on his face and he slapped Gauguin again on the shoulder. This time he wanted to help. “Have the brisket,” he said in his regular voice. “It’s good. You’ll like it.”
I looked over at Gauguin. Confusion swam across his face.
“Hey, try the pastrami here. You’ll see what I’ve been talking about,” I suggested to help him. He ordered it on rye.
When the waiter left, Gauguin said, “What the fuck was all that about?” I shrugged and didn’t say anything.
The waiter returned, this time gallantly. He proudly placed the pastrami sandwich in front of Gauguin. The meat was stacked so high that it fell over.
“Now there’s a sandwich!” The waiter nodded at it, turned on his heel like El Capitaine, and marched off to the table across the room by the window.
Gauguin was impressed. “I can’t get my mouth around it!” he exclaimed.
I loved New York in that moment.
“Nell, it’s amazing that every Jew in the street doesn’t drop dead from hardening of the arteries. Just like that!” He snapped his fingers. “Right in front of the subway cars and garbage trucks. Help! Pastrami clogged my heart!” Then he pretended he was collapsing from a heart attack.
When he recovered, he reached for a whole pickle in the metal tub that was placed on the table, bit down hard, and smiled.
We ate apple strudel for dessert and afterward took the subway uptown to the Museum of Modern Art. A blind beggar singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” reached out his hand as we passed him in the station. Gauguin dug in his pocket for change and then said, “Hell,” took out a dollar bill, and placed it in the man’s cup.
“Thank you. May God be with you.” The beggar’s voice rang out in the airless underground.
We came out into daylight and fumbled a bit while our eyes adjusted. Gauguin stretched his neck back as he looked up at the tall Midtown buildings. He was fascinated by the falafel vendors. “They even sell that on the streets!”
I nodded and laughed. I enjoyed New York with Gauguin. Everything was fresh for him.
We entered the lobby of the museum. The air conditioning felt good. The city streets were steaming.
We went upstairs to the permanent collection. A Klee, a Picasso, a Monet, a Bonnard. One after the other.
Gauguin was stunned. “I can’t believe we’re seeing the real things, not just posters or postcards.”
Gauguin joined me in front of a painting, then leaned toward the wall to read the card. “
‘Intérieur a la boîte a violon,’ ”
he pronounced in his silliest French. “By Henri Matisse.” He stood back with me again.
“What does it mean?” I asked. I had taken Spanish in high school.
“ ‘The inside of a violin box,’ I think.” He scratched his head.
A black violin case lay open on a pale yellow upholstered chair in the lower left-hand corner of the painting. The inside of the violin case was blue. The chair was by an open door that led out to a balcony overlooking the sea. On the other side of the room was a dressing table with a round mirror. The walls of the room were pale yellow, like the chair but with a swirling pattern.
“I want to paint like that someday,” I said, mesmerized. “I want that freedom. How he thinks it’s okay to make art out of something that ordinary—I’ve been trying that since Boulder, but look how sure of himself Matisse is.” I pointed to the black strokes that indicated birds out the window. Then I pointed to the sea.
The museum guard in the corner took a step forward and coughed. I retracted my hand.
“Yeah, and look at the people below the balcony,” Gauguin added.
“Amazing—he made each one with just a gesture of black paint.” My body was sucking in the painting. I felt how Matisse felt, saw what he saw—and what couldn’t be seen with the eyes, things that were not in the room he was painting but that the canvas demanded be there.
Gauguin grabbed my hand. “C’mon, let’s go find some paintings done by my namesake.”
I moved differently after that Matisse painting. Every step I took was a block of color. Every breath was a shadow. Every movement of my head or hands was a shape, and every painting I saw was a banquet of language. The painters were talking to me. I never knew before how much paintings spoke without words and told me in form and color about the natural unity of the world.
This visit with Gauguin felt like my first real trip to the museum, as well as his. I was meeting these painters now with hunger and friendship. They could teach me something. And it felt good to have the man I loved and had married standing beside me.
When we got to the third floor, Gauguin grabbed me right in the middle of one of the galleries. He was excited by everything he was seeing. All he’d expected was a hug in this public place, but I turned my head and kissed him so full on the lips, my tongue so deep in his mouth, right under an Alexander Calder mobile, that it felt as though we were flying through space, like two people in a painting by Chagall.
As we neared Ohio, on our drive back to Minnesota through Pennsylvania, we thought of stopping at Gauguin’s Aunt June’s, only thirty miles south of the highway. But when we approached the turn, we stopped at Stuckey’s instead and walked up and down the aisles of pecan chews and Ohio T-shirts in the kind of daze that driving across flat country induces. We ordered one hamburger to share and stood at the counter watching the thin blond man throw a ball of ground meat on the grill so hard that the meat flattened out, but just in case, the cook also pressed the spatula over it. In front of us was a glass case with a light that kept warm the precooked french fries in individual white bags. I ordered some. We paid, took our food to the orange booth by the window, and ate quickly. The hamburger was good. We ordered another one. Outside the sky was pale blue and stretched out forever. I asked if they had coffee ice cream.
“You must be from New York. Only New Yorkers driving on to California ask for coffee. Nope. We got chocolate, vanilla, and butter pecan.”
After dawdling for too long, we decided to skip Gauguin’s aunt and head for Rip’s mother, who lived in a small town in Indiana. It was out of our way, but we didn’t care. We got back in the car and continued west. When we got to Logansport in late afternoon, we passed a Dunkin’ Donuts, made a right, drove down half a block, and parked in front of a small stone house with a large white porch. We knocked at the front door. No answer. We went around back.
There she was, in a white apron, squatting barefoot by the peas. She was eighty-two years old and had warm patches of pale red freckles all over her arms and face. She was tying clear plastic bags to a thin white string she had strung across the garden.
“Camille.” Gauguin called his grandmother by her first name.
She looked up. We hadn’t told her ahead of time that we were coming. “This is to fool the birds. I devised it myself,” she explained, half to herself. Then she paused. “George?” She squinted as a big smile blossomed in her face. “My word! Help me up, honey. It’s so good to see you.” She looked past him at me. “This must be your bride.” We hugged. Her body felt generously soft and full. “Come in the house.” She looked back at me. “My, George, she’s pretty. I like her dark skin and her hair’s real nice.”
She wiped her hands on her apron, climbed up the three concrete steps, and held open the back screen door as she ushered us in. The kitchen was cool and pale green against the humidity that clamped down among the dogwood and spruce trees outside.
Immediately Camille began to make her famous chicken and dumplings. As she cooked, she rattled on about how beautiful she’d heard the wedding was, how cute my parents were, how tired we must be from our long trip, and how she had once visited New York City when she was thirteen.
“Camille, you know you don’t have to do this. We can take you out.” Gauguin held up his hand.
“How often do I have you? Don’t you miss my dumplings? Here, you just sit still and sip at your pink lemonade. Nell, do you want some cookies? I’ve got some Oreos in that jar there, the one with the fat belly. I figure the jar’s been eating too much and wants you to have a cookie. Ah, wait.” She brushed some hair out of her face. “I’ll scoop you up some vanilla ice cream. George, hand me that big silver spoon over there on the drain board. I’ll pour some of my peach preserves over it. Right from the tree out back.”
“Camille, are those old trees still making peaches?” Gauguin asked.
“Well, yes, if the frost don’t get them first. This year I think I’ll be lucky if I get two peaches from all four trees together.”
She ran back and forth from the refrigerator to the stove to the gray Formica table. Her small fists were powdered with white flour. When she rolled out the dough, she pressed her full weight into it and stood on her toes for leverage.
I stirred the ice cream as it melted in my dish. Gauguin motioned to me with his eyes to eat it. I didn’t want to.
“Camille, tell me about George when he was a young boy,” I asked. It felt funny to call Gauguin George.
“He was the sweetest thing. Remember, George, how you used to catch salamanders, kiss them, and let them go? You learned to do that in Iowa with your grandmother Mary Ellen. I was afraid you’d get warts. Then remember when you were twenty-one and came to visit here in that black limousine you drove, painted pink and silver? Your red hair was down to your shoulders. I thought, ‘
Now
what’s he up to?’ But you still ate my dumplings and peach preserves and I said to myself, ‘Don’t worry, Camille, the boy’s just fine.’ Honey, hand me that Mazola oil.” She pointed to the bottle above the sink. “How’s your dad? Tell me, George”—she turned her blue eyes away from the dough and toward him—“does he ever go to church? I worry about him and pray each Sunday for him to find his way. You know, he can’t get into heaven if he doesn’t go to church.”
“Now, Camille, Rip will find his own way,” Gauguin assured her.
“Well, I know he’s independent, but you can’t fight God. You’ll lose. He’s got all the big atomic weapons wrapped into one.”
“Where’d you hear that?” Gauguin asked.
“The preacher said it last month.” She paused in her kneading to look at Gauguin. “He says, ‘The president thinks he’s mighty, but let you tell me, one sweep of God’s hand, and the whole world will be blown up.’” She nodded emphatically and in wonder at God’s power.
“You mean, ‘Let me tell you,’ ” Gauguin corrected her.
“That’s what I said.” She turned to me. “Honey, you don’t have to eat it, if you don’t like.” The vanilla ice cream was soup in my dish.
I smiled weakly. I’d never understood why someone would eat vanilla ice cream.
After Camille fell asleep in front of the TV, Gauguin and I took a walk in the cool evening. We held hands and strolled under the bright lights of the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot.
“Does your grandmother like me?” I asked.
“When you went in the bathroom, she whispered to me, ‘She’s real sweet. I like her shiny dark hair,’ but I think it helped that you liked her dumplings.”
We slept that night under a pink satin coverlet on a bed that was soft and full of lumps. It was the one Camille and her husband had slept in. He was a coal miner, and when the mines closed, he left. They never heard from him again until he died fifteen years later. His brother sent Camille a telegram. “Robert died. We buried him in Greeley, Colorado. Send money for the tombstone.” Camille read the note, sat down in the kitchen, put her face on the table, and cried, her hands tucked into the pockets of her white apron. She sent money for the gravestone from what she’d made baking bread in her big oven and selling it still hot to her neighbors.
The next morning, we ate cornflakes and more peach preserves. I cried when we left Camille. I cried because I loved her and I loved my own grandmother, and I cried because the wedding and the honeymoon were over and now we were headed straight through the Midwest to Minneapolis, for good.
“H
EY,
G
AUGUIN, WHERE’S
your wedding ring?” We had just passed the exit for Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
“I took it off,” he said.
My eyes moved from his left hand on the steering wheel to his face, which was looking out at the blue slate highway with its broken yellow line. We had been driving for a long time.
“You took it off? How come?” We had bought them at a hock shop on First Avenue for thirty dollars apiece. I liked wearing mine.
“Because you didn’t change your last name,” he said, still staring ahead.
“What? Before we were married, you said you didn’t care. You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I’m not. I felt weird telling my grandmother you were Nell Schwartz. Even at work right after the wedding, my dad made fun of it, says I married a women’s libber.”
I stared at his ringless finger. I was filled with a sudden rage that flashed like a bright quarter. This couldn’t be possible. Who was this man sitting next to me? It wasn’t Gauguin. I stared straight ahead, trying to compute. I looked at him again. I was right. It wasn’t Gauguin. It was George Howard. I’d married the wrong person. Right then and there, I let out a terrible scream. Then I gave it words. “What does the fucking ring have to do with my name? You’re nuts!”
I grabbed his right arm below the elbow with my two hands and squeezed as tight as I could. “I’m not changing my name,” I yelled. “You said it didn’t matter to you.” I wanted to get out of that car before we reached the Minnesota border.
“Nell, let go of my arm,” Gauguin said in a low, measured tone. “I’m trying to drive. I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve changed my mind. Changing your name
is
important to me.”