Banana Rose (3 page)

Gauguin and I were finished picking rose hips. We walked home with our bags full of those hard fall nuggets that used to be pink wild roses. It was late afternoon. When we got back, we decided to take a nap. We covered ourselves with a yellow wool blanket on my single mattress on the floor. The narrow bed seemed plenty large.

With the heaviness of sleep on our eyelids, I said, as though confessing, “Gauguin, my real name is Nell Schwartz.”

“Yeah,” he murmured, his head on the pillow.

“You see, I was with a group of friends, toasting marshmallows around a campfire near the Rio Grande. I forgot what we were talking about, but for some reason I said, ‘Y’know, I like to look normal. I don’t want people to think I’m a freak.’

“This guy named Neon looked up from the fire. ‘You never fooled anyone, Nell. We all know you’re bananas. I know! Let’s call you Banana—no, Banana Rose, because right now is that time of rose sunset.’

“The name stuck.” I smiled at Gauguin.

We fell asleep right after that.

We woke in the early evening. Gauguin said he’d been up for several minutes, looking around my room. “Why don’t you show me some more of your paintings?” he asked. “And what’s that fat black pillow over in the corner?”

“That’s a sitting cushion. For meditating. Sometimes we all sit together. Neon, the man who named me, taught Happiness, and she taught all of us.” I yawned and then answered his first question, “I’ll show you more paintings later.”

He moved a bit away from me so he could see me better. “Will you teach me how? I tried to meditate when I was living in the woods in northern Washington, but I wasn’t sure what to do.”

“Sure, I’ll show you. What were you doing in Washington?”

“It was four years ago. I wanted to learn the trumpet and kept trying to talk myself out of it. Finally I saw one for two hundred dollars in a hock shop, and I bought it. I said to myself, ‘You spent the money for this, you’re going to go off and learn it.’ I had about fifty dollars left. I bought a bunch of supplies, lots of oatmeal, and headed for an abandoned shack I’d heard about. I practiced all day and ate simple.”

“Did you ever have any lessons?” I asked. “How did you know what to do?”

“I just figured it out. Me and the horn. We became friends. I brought a book along. It didn’t help much, though, because I couldn’t read notes.” Gauguin kissed my cheek. “How do you sit? Tell me.”

“I can’t tell you. Let’s get up and do it.” We threw on some clothes. I gave Gauguin the zafu, and I used pillows for myself. “Here. You cross your legs like this.” I crossed my legs. “You put your hands on your knees. Back straight.” I leaned over and adjusted his chin and shoulders. “Relax. Now you just sit this way. Watch your breath go in and out. Thoughts will come. Keep coming back to the breath. Do you want to try fifteen minutes?”

“How long did you do it the first time?” he asked.

“For thirty.”

“Well, then let’s do it for thirty,” he said eagerly.

“Okay, if you’re sure. Oh, and don’t worry if you have trouble staying with the breath. Our minds always wander.”

“Got it. Let’s go.”

I smiled. He entered it like a race. Yeah, I thought, a race that goes noplace. There, I made a rhyme. I would tell him when the thirty minutes were up. Of course, when they were finally up, I’d forgotten. I was busy thinking about how much I liked him, about a really good pizza I had a week ago at the House of Taos, about how my foot had fallen asleep. I glanced at the clock. Only fifteen minutes had passed. I wanted to touch Gauguin, but I had to wait fifteen more minutes. I remembered Aunt Ruth had once sued a five-and-ten-cent store because she found a piece of glass in her Coke. I think she collected $5,000. My nose itched. Should I scratch it? Naa, I wanted to show Gauguin how still I could sit.

“Y
OU KNOW, SOMETIMES
I think I ought to change Banana Rose. Sometimes the kids at school call me Banana Split, and when my father heard the name, he said, ‘You mean Banana Nose. You always had a big nose.’ ” I made a face and turned to Blue. “I don’t have a big nose, do I?”

“No, sugar.” She reached her hand out and touched my arm. “I can’t believe your father said something like that. I think you’re beautiful, honey. Those black curls all over your head—we ought to count them. There must be eight hundred.” Blue moved some hair out of my eye.

I looked at her. “You’re pretty beautiful yourself. I like your back best. When you dove into the reservoir once, I remember you reminded me of a leopard, lean and strong. And I like your cheekbones.” I brushed my finger along her face.

We sat on two wood stumps outside her house, throwing scraps from last night’s dinner to the chickens who pecked near our feet. Sylvester, the rooster, flew into Blue’s lap.

I leaned over and petted him. He had those dinosaur kind of feet that could do you in if he wanted to, but he didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He was so confident of his own beauty, he didn’t need to challenge anyone. I loved his iridescent blue and green feathers.

Blue smiled and said, “Banana Rose is the perfect name for you, but change it if you want. I change my name whenever I think it’s right. I’m an ever-changing identity. Once I looked up at the aspens in fall and said ‘Golden Fruit’–that became my name that autumn. When winter came, I was Barbiturate. That’s because that winter I was determined to see my own face. Every day after I dropped Lightning off at school, I took acid and crawled into the fireplace and sat there, touching the bricks, running my fingers along them.”

“How can you find your own face? What did you expect to see?” I scrunched up
my
face. I didn’t get it.

“That bricks are put together with cement.” She laughed and shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t find anything. And then you can imagine, I’d have to pick Lightning up from school at three-thirty, and he’d want his friend Shannon to come home with him—you know Shannon, the kid who always had his finger in his nose?—and then they’d want to go to Frosty Freeze. I’d sit in the car while they slurped up chocolate milk shakes. This was after I spent the whole day in the fireplace.”

We had moved to our garden and were bent over picking rocks from the soil. “Blue, do you think I’ll ever see Gauguin again?” He had left two weeks earlier for Machu Picchu.

She stood up. “Sure, sugar, have faith.”

I bent down again. That summer we had planted spinach, zucchini, garlic, onions, and tomatoes in the little plot on Talpa hill near Blue’s house, next to the long crumbling adobe coop where old Hernandez used to keep chickens. The soil was fertile from the chicken shit.

Some mornings, I went up and meditated in that garden and once in a while Blue joined me. One day we sat so still in the climbing sunlight of dawn that two magpies landed on us, one on my shoulder, one on her right knee. We didn’t move; we just let ourselves become one with them. It was in that silent sitting that I suddenly understood that Blue suffered. The pain wasn’t about her living alone with her son in a poor dirt adobe. The truth was she was a New Orleans debutante and could have had a trust fund, but when she told her rich daddy that she was going to give it to the Black Panthers, they stopped payment as quick as the light caught on a horseshoe. She didn’t care. Her suffering wasn’t about money. She just had a storm inside her that kept her from fitting into her genteel Southern upbringing.

“Blue—” I stood up, my hands full of rocks. “Oh, never mind. It was about Gauguin again.”

Before Blue moved to Taos, she’d lived with her husband in a big white colonial house. She told me once she was so unhappy, she’d tried to commit suicide. She bought a box of bonbons and went into the garage and turned on her car. As she sat there waiting to die, she carefully ate all the raspberry-filled chocolates first, because they were her favorites. Just as she was about to bite into a maple cream, the carbon monoxide started to choke her. Before that, she had been congratulating herself on what a lovely way she’d chosen to die. She’d even put on a red velvet dress with silver buttons, so she’d look good when she was found. She’d thought she might even float out over Louisiana and wave good-bye. But the carbon monoxide hurt. This was not for her. She turned off the car, got out, and went back in the house. In the living room she finished off the nut creams.

Two months later, Blue was thrown while riding her horse Guinevere. She broke her back and lay for eight weeks not able to move. During those weeks, lying so still, she realized she had to get out of the South or die. As soon as she was better, she picked up her son from school one Friday morning in her big Ford station wagon and headed west for California, where she thought everything was happening. In
Look
magazine she’d read about the hippies in Big Sur, Haight Ashbury, and Berkeley. She drove through hours of flat land, through the sagebrush of West Texas, and finally one evening stopped in Taos. She asked the long-haired attendant at the gas station, “Where’s the communes?” and never left town.

We took a break in the shade of the abandoned chicken shack. “You know, B.R., love hurts. I don’t know why it should be like that. Even if it’s good, it hurts.”

I nodded. I was twenty-six. Blue was thirty-one. I believed her. I missed Gauguin.

“Hey, what are you reading now?” I asked her. “I just finished a book by Willa Cather. Ever read her?”

“Didn’t she write about Nebraska?” Blue flung two stones across the ditch. “Never been there.”

“Me, either,” I said.

Blue read a lot: Herbert Marcuse, Simone de Beauvoir, Henri Berg-son, Aristotle, Mark Twain, Émile Zola. In winter, she spent whole afternoons at the Harwood library. Her little adobe had poor insulation, and the Harwood was warm. She’d close her eyes and run her finger along the book spines. Wherever her finger stopped was what she’d read for the week. She liked to sit me down and read me a paragraph. I could tell with each book she was realigning her thought system. But it was the novels that really caught her. She read a fictionalized account of the great Spanish matador Juan Belmonte, and sure enough, one day I found her near our garden with a red blanket, coaxing the pigweed to charge her.

She looked up from the pigweed when she became aware of my presence. “Banana, I’ve got to go to Valencia to train with the young bulls. That’s how you begin.”

I pointed at the long weeds and yelled, “Watch out! Don’t take your eyes off them. They’ll charge!”

A week later, I saw her at a party, standing by the guacamole, about to make a
quite:
legs and feet together, perfectly erect, ready for the charge of the bull. It was a dangerous moment, when the matador faced death at the horns of the great animal. Blue stood still and courageous.

The Belmonte book was thick. It took her a month to read it, so for a full month she was wholly a matador. I knew she’d finished it when I asked her one morning to tell me about the bravery of the Andalusian bulls. “Oh, I don’t really care about that anymore. Come, see the pink stone I found in the hills.” Her matador career had lasted as long as the book.

Then she read something about Stevie Wonder. Of course, she became blind. I tried to reason with her. “Look, Blue—”

“Please, call me Stevie,” she interrupted.

“Look, Stevie. Shit, you’re
not
Stevie!” I was exasperated.

“How do you know? I’m anything I want to be.” She shook her head. “I’m Stevie Wonder. Could you please lead me over to my piano? I can’t see the light.”

“But you can read. If you were blind, you couldn’t read,” I again tried to reason.

She turned to me haughtily. “Each person who has lost the use of their eyes is given another gift to compensate. For Stevie Wonder, it was music. For Helen Keller, it was her brilliant mind. I was compensated for the loss of sight with my great ability to read.”

I couldn’t wait for her to finish that book, because while she was blind, she couldn’t drive and I had to take Lightning to school each day.

Sometimes I thought Blue was nuts, but it was the kind of nuts I enjoyed. Plus I knew her kind of nuts also made her wise. I wanted so bad to believe what she said about Gauguin—that he would return. I said good-bye to Blue and walked down the hill to the Elephant House.

Gauguin had stayed with me for five days. He left on a Thursday. I said good-bye to him before I went to work. By lunch, I was surprised how lonesome I was for him.

After school that day, I went home and tried to paint. I repeated the words he had told me: “ ‘Just do it.’ ”

I painted the paper all brown, then with red stripes, then blotches of turquoise. I couldn’t get anything going.

Suddenly, Blue appeared at my door. “Geez, honey, that’s disgusting,” she blurted out, and then put her hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry.” She paused. “Well, what is it?” She cocked her head trying to make sense out of it. “Is it a dog? A cat?”

“No, it’s a helicopter,” I assured her. “You’re right. It is disgusting. It’s entitled, ‘Gauguin Left.’ ” And I began to put away my acrylics, thinking how I hated painting. I didn’t know how to do it. Whoever thought of being a painter, anyway? My mother said being a teacher and then getting married was just a fine thing for a girl to do. I wasn’t a girl, though. My mother didn’t understand. I was a monster. I didn’t fit in. I wanted to be a painter.

Blue started to laugh. I turned my head. “I’ll buy it if you come down from $2,000 to $1,500,” she said.

“Never mind,” I said, still grumpy. And then I lifted my brush and stroked a blue line across her forehead. “Ten dollars for this, please.” I held out my palm and smiled.

Blue was quick. “It goes for fifty.” She put her hands on her hips and pranced around the room.

Then she stopped and turned to me. “He’ll be back,” she said, and nodded.

“O
KAY, OKAY, MOM,
I know. I’ll be real nice to Rita while she’s here,” I said into the phone.

“Don’t just be nice. Knock some sense into her, Nell. We don’t know what to do with her. Please do something. You’re the oldest....

I’d heard this all before. I picked at the peeling green paint on the table as my mother harangued me long distance. The more she talked, the more I wanted to murder Rita. I was sitting in the staff room at the Red Willow School. I looked at the clock. In five minutes, I had to go back to my class of fifth graders.