Authors: Natalie Goldberg
“You and your brother still getting along so well?” I asked.
She perked up a little. “Yeah, and we’ve gotten even closer since my mother’s illness. Daniel seems to understand that I’m different, and it feels so good to have someone in the family who really accepts me. ’Nam gave him a broader view.”
“And how’s your writing coming?”
She shook her head. “Not so good. I’ve been too depressed.”
I grimaced. “Anna, are there any groups you could join? Lesbians? Writers?”
She shook her head. “Nell, you know I’m not a joiner.”
“Well, why don’t you join me and move back to Taos?” The idea sprang suddenly into my head, and I thought it was brilliant.
She laughed feebly. “That would be fun—but, Nell, I have responsibilities. I can’t just leave with my mother in a home.”
“But Anna, you have to save yourself—you’re going crazy again. I’m serious. Pack up and get the fuck out of here.” I stood up. “C’mon.”
She brightened for a moment and then looked down. “I’m not like you, Nell. You always act on your pain. It gets you moving. Besides”—she hesitated—“I don’t know if I want to leave Daniel. He might resent me moving away, leaving him to take care of Dad alone.”
“Oh, Anna, you and your Midwestern stoicism. ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’!” I thought I’d give her a little literary boost.
“Nell, Dylan Thomas was talking about death.” I followed her into the kitchen area. “Want something to drink?”
“Got lemonade?” I asked. “I’ll buy some if you set your booth up.”
“I’ll make some and for you it’s free.” She reached into the freezer.
“But, Anna, isn’t it a kind of death you’re living? I mean, you’re unhappy and you’re not writing. I couldn’t stand that.” I spun her around to face me. “Anna, you know what made me act? Not my pain. I decided that I was going to make it. I still don’t know how or what that means. After Gauguin left, I was so down, I couldn’t do anything. I knew I had to make something important enough to get me out of bed each day, so I gradually focused on my painting. And right now if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that I’m going to paint no matter what.”
I paused. “Wow, I never said that before to anyone, even to my self.”
Anna studied me closely. “You’ve changed.”
“My heart was pulled out of me. I didn’t think I’d live. Gauguin was so different after Taos.” All at once I didn’t want to talk about Gauguin anymore. “Do you want to go out for dinner? That place we went last time—is it open at night?”
The next morning we drove to a secluded swimming spot Anna knew on the Elkhorn River.
We put down our towels and undressed. “Anna, it’s so, so”—I looked around—“Midwestern. The summer, the trees. A wide and lazy river.”
“Let’s jump in. No hesitation.” And then she dove under, her butt shining in the sun for a moment before it submerged.
I followed. My head surfaced, hair and lashes dripping. “Anna, you little shit. It’s freezing! Why didn’t you warn me?” I was treading water.
“If I did, you wouldn’t have come in.” She began doing the back stroke.
“I’m getting out. I’m freezing.” Teeth chattering, I scrambled up the bank, grabbed a pink towel, and wrapped it around me. There were goose bumps all over my arms. A storm cloud moved over the sun. “Anna, look!” I yelled, and pointed toward the sky.
“Don’t worry. We have time.” She dove under again.
I dried off and sat down on my towel.
After a while she came out and joined me.
“Anna, quit being so athletic. Writers are supposed to be lazy and frail. You’ve got to get in the proper shape. Words have to ooze out of you. A firm body produces nothing.” I was shading my eyes with my hand. The sun had come out again.
“Let’s eat,” Anna said, reaching for her bag. She pulled out a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich.
“Hand me a peach.” I reached out my arm.
She burrowed in her bag. “Nell, I’m so glad you came. I feel like a new person with you here.”
I broached the subject again. “Anna, come back to Taos with me. You were happy there. You were writing there. People don’t care if you’re weird there. Everyone’s weird.”
She took a big bite of her sandwich. God, did I hate jelly. I don’t know how she ate it. She chewed and chewed on that one bite until I thought her teeth would fall out. “I hear you, Nell,” she finally said. “I’ll think about it. I really will. I never thought I could, but now that you’re going back, maybe it’s possible.”
“Really?” I sat up.
“Really,” she said.
I grabbed her jar of lemonade and held it high. “I propose a toast: Next year in New Mexico!” Then I unscrewed the lid and took a big gulp.
As we drove back to town, it began to pour. At one point it was coming down so hard, we pulled under a nearby bridge and just sat there.
“I try to capture what this place is like in my writing, but maybe I’m too close to it,” Anna said above the pelting water. Everything was green, greener in the rain. The wind blew and the trees bent without breaking.
“Can you put on some heat? I’m cold.” I was hugging my arms, which were covered in goose bumps again.
“Here, I have an extra shirt.” She leaned over the back of the front seat and brought forward a red zip-up jacket.
I put it on. “Anna, what’s it like to write? I mean, how do you do it?”
“I don’t know.” She flicked the steering wheel with her nail. “I guess you have to tell it so people who read it understand. Otherwise you’re not communicating. Isn’t that the way it is with painting, too? It has to communicate.
“Yeah, even if you can’t say exactly what it is you’re communicating, a person has to feel something.” Then I told her about the new paintings I had been doing back in Minneapolis. “I could hardly paint after Gauguin first left. I wanted to die. Then over time I began to paint from that place.”
“What place?” Anna started up the car. The rain had eased.
“From death. First I did dark abstracts, and then I began painting things that looked alive—a tulip, a maple in full bloom things that were alive now but that I knew could die.” We pulled out from under the bridge. “I think down in Taos I believed we were all immortal, that we’d never die. Now I know that isn’t true.”
Anna nodded. “Open your window. Everything has been washed clean. Smell it?”
I rolled my window all the way down. “Yeah, I smell it.” Leaves, road, grass, the end of July—I breathed in all of it.
I was supposed to leave early in the morning two days later, but Anna and I were having so much fun it was hard to separate. I think she gained five pounds while I was there. I kept encouraging her to eat. One night I roasted a chicken with potatoes and we ate the whole thing.
On the last day I made one more cautious stab at her moving down, and I could see she was serious about considering it. It made me happy.
I didn’t leave until late afternoon. By the time I reached Maxwell, Nebraska, it was dark and I was tired. I unrolled my sleeping bag near a cow pasture, outside of town. The earth was dark and rich. To my left spread a field of corn, and above my head a blanket of stars.
In the morning, I got back in my car and looked at the road atlas. I decided to head for Boulder. I wanted to see Eugene, and I figured I could stay with Happiness. She lived there now and was also a Buddhist.
When I got to Fort Morgan, I asked directory assistance for Jane Berg’s number. I telephoned her, and she said her roommate had gone off for a week camping, there was an extra room, and she’d be glad to have me. She gave me directions to her house. It was within walking distance from the downtown mall.
I thought of Jane as I drove toward Boulder. She was beautiful, always dressed in layers and layers of brightly colored skirts. I remembered when she named herself Happiness.
A bunch of us had been sitting around the kitchen table at the Elephant House, talking about our families. Jane came from Cincinnati. She said there were three kids in her family, and they were all happy except her.
“Yeah, right,” Carmel had called out.
“No, really. I was the only maladjusted one around. My parents have always loved each other. My father is a banker who does good deeds for the community, and my mother is an amateur opera singer. She plays
The Marriage of Figaro
and
The Barber of Seville
on the stereo all the time. Into this happy house I would walk, carrying this cloud of gloom.”
“You’re okay now, aren’t you?” I’d asked.
She nodded. Then she lit up. “Do you think I could change my name? I’m gonna call myself Happiness. This way I can be like my family—at least when I’m not with them.”
“Huh?” Tim looked confused.
“I’m happier when I’m away!” We all laughed, and then we baptized her, dripping lemon juice on her forehead.
I shook my head at the memory. We believed it all, didn’t we? Banana Rose, Happiness, Neon—I got butterflies in my stomach. I was nervous to see him. We hadn’t spoken since that day I left over three years ago. It’s okay, I told myself. Eugene and I are friends. He’s not mad at me for running off to marry Gauguin.
I passed the exit for Keenesburg. The thing about those years was that we had had so much
fun.
Everyone had wanted to play. Everyone, I thought, except Anna. Well, sometimes she would play, but she was always uptight about her novel. When she moves down, I thought, maybe I can get her to write about the hippie years instead. That will be a better subject than those damn depressing cows.
I pulled into Boulder at 8:30 in the evening. Everything seemed lush: Rose vines crawled over sidewalks; columbine, petunias, and zinnias were tangled together in gardens; and sweetpeas had draped themselves across people’s front porches. Many of the houses were oddly shaped. Looking at Boulder at that moment, I appreciated it. When I had lived there before, it was my enemy. I’d blamed it for taking me from Taos.
Jane and I sat up until midnight, sipping tea and talking.
“You know, Light’s here now too and Mark—oh, you knew him as Gum—everyone’s changed their name back. We’re all trying to be respectable citizens.” She took a deep drag from a cigarette.
“Do you ever miss Taos?” I asked quietly, hugging my left knee, my foot up on the chair.
“Oh, sure, I still miss it, but when I think about it, I feel confused. How can I want to be there and here at the same time?”
“Do you ever think of moving back?” I asked.
“That time is over for me. There’s no way I could make a living down there, and I certainly don’t want to live the way I did. I’m older now.”
“Do you think I’m crazy for going back?” I held my breath, waiting for her answer.
Jane paused. “No, in some ways I envy you. But it won’t be the same; most of the old people have left.”
“There are some still there,” I said quickly, letting my breath out in a gush. “Like Blue.”
“Yeah, she’ll always be there,” she said, crushing out her cigarette.
I paused. “I went through a hard divorce.”
“I went through one, too, once. They’re a bitch. Where’s Gauguin, anyway?” she asked.
“In L.A.”
“That sounds like a good place for him.”
“Is Eugene still here?” I asked, trying to act nonchalant.
She looked at me closely. She wore makeup now. It was becoming. Blue eyeliner and brown mascara.
“Eugene became a serious practitioner of meditation and they made him head of the whole sitting program. It’s a regular job from eight to five every day.” She paused. “Hey, you ought to call him. He’d love to see you.”
“Yeah, I think I will. Do you have his number?” I asked casually.
“It’s 555-3802. He rooms with a close friend of mine.” She glanced at the clock on the stove. “Nell, I’ve got to go to bed. I’ve got a job now in an office.”
Jane had already left for work two hours earlier when I finally got up the courage to call Eugene. The receptionist answered the phone, “The Tibetan Center,” and told me she would check, but she thought he was in a meeting. I tried to imagine Eugene in a conference room at a long table.
“Hello, Eugene here.” I heard his voice.
“Hey, this is Nell Schwartz!”
He let out a laugh of delight. “Why, hello there! Where are you?” We decided to meet for lunch. I would pick him up at his office. He suggested we go to a restaurant across the street that served New Orleans–style food, “gumbo and all.”
I waited for him on a bench in a long gold-carpeted hallway. On the far wall was a large oil painting of a black dragon spewing out blue fire. The dragon was wrapped around a gold snake and had a man’s body gripped in its talons. The line from a Buddhist chant went through my head.
I turned and was amazed to see Eugene walking toward me in a suit, even though Jane had told me he would be. And he had on brown laced shoes with a design punched in the leather. Wingtips, they were called. Wingtips! I stood up as he approached me. He had a big smile on his face, and his arms were opened wide.
“Nell!” he said, and we hugged.
“Eugene.”
He shook his head. I imagined his old curls shaking. He took my arm and steered me out the front door and down the five steps.
At Louie’s, across the street, we sat at a table on the porch with a pink linen tablecloth. The sun was on my back, and it felt good.
We settled into our seats and looked at each other. He reached his right hand up to his lapel. “Like it?” he asked. “I found this suit in a secondhand store for thirty-five dollars, had it cleaned—good as new.”
The waiter brought our drinks, and we clinked glasses, both of us laughing.
“So?” he asked me, leaning over, his elbows on the table.
I told him about me and Gauguin, about what it had been like to live in Minnesota, about Gauguin’s parents, about our divorce. It felt easy to talk to Eugene, and odd—we hadn’t seen each other in so long. Then I told him a bunch about my paintings. He nodded and just listened. I remembered he was always a good listener. I paused, looked down at my napkin, and then blurted, “Eugene, what do you think being a hippie was all about, anyway? All those years in Taos?”
“Love.” He didn’t hesitate. “It was about love.”
“Where’d it go?” I asked.