Banana Rose (6 page)

He had also told me that in junior high he’d gotten into a lot of fist fights because he was one of the only white boys in the North Minneapolis school. “Hey, White Paddy, what you up to?” Clarence cuffed him in the head. It was the sixth cuff he’d received that morning, changing classes from algebra to French to woodworking. They were on the long gray stairs heading up to the third floor. The cold light of February beamed through the high windows above the stairwell. First warning bell rang, which meant you’d better be getting to your fourth-period class.

Gauguin had flung down his Latin book, the one with a picture on the cover of Caesar wearing a toga and braided thongs, and turned to face Clarence, who stood on the stair below him. With his bony young freckled hand clenched in a fist, he hit Clarence’s small black face with all his might. “I hit him so hard, blood spurted from his nose and flew against the white wall. I was crying so hard I couldn’t see straight.”

Clarence grabbed the shoulders of Gauguin’s shirt and flung him down the stairs, but Clarence kept holding on to Gauguin, so he went with him. They were a ball on the second-floor landing when the principal arrived in his high-shined black shoes.

“ ‘Young men, what are you doing?’ ” Gauguin had imitated the principal. “Can you imagine, he called us ‘men’?”

When Gauguin’s mother arrived to fetch him in the principal’s office—he and Clarence had both been suspended for a week—he told her, “I’m not going back. That’s it.” He’d meant it. His parents knew about Gauguin’s stubbornness. In the spring, they moved out to the suburbs.

I remembered that when Gauguin told me this story, I said, “Gee, I’ve never in my whole life punched anyone.”

Maybe that was the difference between a girl and a boy, I mused as Betsy Boop continued in idle. But then I remembered Blue telling me about the mean fight she once had with her husband. She smashed a wooden chair over his head and then dove on top of it. I turned to Gauguin, sitting behind the steering wheel, and told him about Blue. “Can you imagine?” I asked.

“Sure, I can,” he replied, “but I guess I didn’t realize women did it, too.”

So that wasn’t the difference. We both could punch. I thought I’d practice punching as soon as I got home.

At that moment I hoped I would spy a golden eagle. “Gauguin, let’s get out for a while. It’s too early for the evening feeding.”

We turned off the motor and put on our jackets. We sat out in the dried grass. I yanked on some tough old dead weeds.

“You know, Banana, sometimes when you come home from work and I’ve been practicing music all day, I feel like a woman, too. Real soft and receptive.” He paused. He was staying with me at the commune. The space was small, but we liked being close. “Maybe you should support me.” Then he threw his hand across his mouth as if he had just said something dirty, but his eyes were laughing.

“Gauguin, I’m glad you feel like a woman, because I feel mostly like a man. When we get home, I want you to do the dishes.” Then I threw my hand over my mouth.

“How do you feel like a man?” Gauguin asked.

“I don’t know. Sometimes I’d like to go to war with everything—fight, punch, throw a bomb in a department store. Sometimes I walk down the street and hope someone will attack me, so I can tear them to smithereens.”

“But you’ve never even hit anyone,” Gauguin commented.

“Maybe that’s why I want to. I want to be Kung Fu King who fights Godzilla and then eats his legs.” I sat straight up, engrossed in a vision in front of me. “I want to be a guerrilla fighter in the Amazon and carry grenades in my mouth. I want to save Jews in Auschwitz and break the head of every Nazi.” My fists were clenched. Gauguin stared at me with his mouth hanging open. “I want to ride a great white stallion and go off into the hills like the Lone Ranger. I want to walk into a bar in Manila wearing green army fatigues, sit down and drink six whiskeys straight, then turn around and punch the man next to me. We have a brawl and someone gets thrown through the double plate-glass window, and I swing from the chandelier.”

I flung my head back. “I want to be a matador, a train conductor, head of the FBI, President of the United States, the King of England. Goddamn it, Gauguin” I turned to him—“I-want-to-be-Ernest-Hemingway. I-want-to-be-Miles-Davis. I-want-to-be-Picasso.” I said these last words with a staccato clarity that stunned me into reality. “I want to be the greatest writer, musician, and painter in America!”

But I wasn’t a writer, and Gauguin was the musician. I was just learning how to paint. Those were men artists anyway. Where did I fit in? I stood up and threw my hands above my head. “I am King Kong on the Empire State Building. I have the American Constitution written by all men in my mouth, and I am about to eat it.”

Suddenly I remembered where I was—the Bosque. I looked around and saw Gauguin walking down by the marsh about a hundred yards away. I called to him. A minute later, he returned.

“Come on,” Gauguin said as though nothing had happened. “We should head for the feeding grounds.”

I’d almost spoiled a good day. I decided to shut up and get in the pickup.

Betsy Boop started right up. Already we could see the snow geese and the sandhill cranes in the distance. Their great white wings flapped against the red sky at sunset. We pulled over to the side of the road. Gauguin threw himself out of the truck and clapped over his head. “What a symphony!” he yelled.

I watched as though I were a dreamer. Some of them skidded onto the surface and then settled into the water as if they were sitting down on a couch. There were Canada geese, mallards, and a few rare whooping cranes standing on slender legs and leaning over like young girls in ballet class. Swans swam around the edges like lace. This was winter. Dark blue water, white feathers, and a sky that had gone nuts with color. I could feel the bite of cold.

Gauguin returned to the truck to get his green down jacket, and I opened my door, got out, and joined him by the shore. All these white wonderful birds, and my attention was fixed on Gauguin in his green duckling jacket. I remembered a story he had told me at the top of Talpa Mountain. Not a story really, because it had no ending. More like some heat you keep in your mind, the same as if an iron pressed only one place on your shirt.

It was when Gauguin was a kid, maybe ten years old. He loved to catch salamanders. Once in late September, he was out in the back yard of his grandmother’s Iowa farm with his head down watching for a salamander to appear. He was in full concentration and wandered out past the wheat field into an abandoned orchard. Suddenly, when he lifted his eyes from the ground, he saw a tremendous yellow light at the other end of the orchard, like the burning bush Moses saw. He thought something was on fire. Instantly he began running toward it. When he got close, he stopped short and sucked in his breath.

It was a rabble of monarch butterflies, thousands of them, all feeding on the rotting pears that hung from the branches or had fallen to the ground. The monarchs filled the entire tree and all the area around it. He said his whole boyhood was in that moment. Nothing was before or after. His body opened, and the frail yellow animals fed on his heart.

Darkness moved in on the Bosque. We became cold and went back to Betsy Boop, our white bird of flight. The road out of the Bosque was long, thin, and very flat. It ended at The Crane, a restaurant where everyone went for hamburgers and to look over their bird books to count how many different kinds of birds they had seen. Gauguin and I went in The Crane, too. There was a stuffed owl standing on a ledge over the front door.

We sat at a booth with spongy red cushions and leaned our elbows on the wood table carved full of messages. One said, “I’m from Oak-la-Coma.” I nodded at it and said to Gauguin, “This person doesn’t like where he comes from.”

Gauguin reached across the table. I felt his hot hands on my cold ones. He brought my hands to his mouth and blew on them.

I smiled at him and said, “I love you.”

“Me, too. It was a great day. Wish we didn’t have such a long ride home tonight. Are you going to get a hamburger?” he asked jokingly. We were both vegetarians.

I wrinkled up my nose and shook my head. “Let’s see a menu.” I ordered a grilled cheese, and Gauguin had green chile stew. We weren’t much up for talking. A young boy with a crew cut sat next to his father at the next booth. The father had a crew cut, too. I leaned over and whispered across the table to Gauguin, “I think they are from Oak-la-Coma.” Gauguin smiled and nodded. The waitress served us. My sandwich was on a white plate with potato chips on the side.

I was halfway through eating when I held up my grilled cheese and said, “Did I ever tell you about how I learned to make one of these?”

Gauguin bit into a flour tortilla and shook his head.

“It was Christmas vacation—I guess I was about fifteen—and my parents flew me down to Miami Beach where my grandparents were spending the winter. They were staying in a one-room efficiency with a roll-out bed and a small gas stove at the Carlyle Hotel on Collins Avenue. Everyone at the hotel was old. In fact, everyone in the whole Collins Avenue area was old. It was my first plane flight and my first time in Miami. The first night I was there, I called my parents long distance and cried, ‘I’m taller than everyone here.’

“To cheer me up, my grandmother walked with me the five full blocks to Wolfie’s. Wolfie’s was a fancy delicatessen with rotating cream cakes on display in glass windows. Grandpa stayed home. He never went out to eat. He drank two-day-old coffee black and ate stale white bread. He used paper napkins that were folded and refolded many times, because he could not waste anything.

“The waitress placed a full bucket of dill pickles and a basket of poppyseed rolls at our table, even before we looked at the menu. Grandma ordered cabbage soup. She bent her small cabbage head over the bowl to bring the spoon to her mouth. I ate flanken in barley soup. Flanken’s a meat that gets real soft in soup. The waiter kept filling our water glasses, even if we took only one sip.

“When we returned to the efficiency, I smelled the boiled chicken my grandmother made every day. The smell was in the air all the time. I said, ‘Grandma, I don’t want to eat chicken.’

“Putting her hand to her mouth, she said, ‘But darling, what will you eat?’ Hot dogs, hamburgers never entered her mind. She didn’t get frantic, though. You’d think she would have, since chicken was the only thing she made in those days, and if I ever refused food, she was afraid I would immediately go into a coma.

“We put sheets on the little cot they had for me and we all went to sleep. The next morning, I was awakened by the rattling of paper. Grandma had walked to the grocery store four blocks away. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you what I bought.’ There was a loaf of white bread, Kraft American cheese presliced in squares and wrapped individually in cellophane, and a carton of milk. ‘I’ll teach you to make a grilled cheese sandwich. You can make them whenever you want.’ My face lit up. I’d never made one before. We cooked it in her thin tin frying pan and used a white dinner plate for a lid so the cheese would melt. I went mad for those sandwiches. I made at least three a day, and whenever we ran out of cheese and bread, my grandmother and I would walk to the grocer together.

“One night I woke up at midnight—we went to bed about 9:30 every night. I snuck over to the stove in my white cotton nightgown with yellow embroidered daisies, and by the streetlight coming through the window, I made a grilled cheese sandwich. This time I even used two slices of cheese. As I was waiting over the pan for the butter to melt, I heard my grandfather whisper, ‘What’s she doing?’ My grandmother said, ‘Shh, let her,’ and they turned over and went back to sleep. So there I had full permission to learn a thing and do it whenever I wanted. I waited until the cheese melted out of the sides of the bread, and with a spatula I put it on a plate and sat by the small kitchen table and looked out the window at Collins Avenue. The Carlyle Hotel sign blinked pink over and over again. I didn’t cut the sandwich in half. I ate it whole in the humid heat of Miami Beach, with the heaven of my grandparents snoring nearby. It was the most wonderful grilled cheese I ever had.”

“Better than mine? With avocado, tomatoes, and green chile?” Gauguin teased.

“Yes, the best I ever had.” I nodded.

I
T WAS A RAINY
Saturday in April, and I was acutely aware that Taos was not Brooklyn. Now, most of the time I was glad of this, but when it rained on a Saturday, I wanted a matinee movie. There was only one movie theater in Taos and that theater had a peculiar affinity to only one movie,
Jaws
, and they only played that at seven and nine in the evening. You watched the movie eating stale popcorn out of a round cardboard container. Once in a while, on a Tuesday evening out of the blue, they’d sneak in a Russ Meyer flick, something like
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
, and Gauguin and I would sit in the audience and eat our stale popcorn faster and faster.

It didn’t rain much in Taos. The Anglos of Taos couldn’t handle it. Most of us were refugees from the outside world, and a slight change in weather shook our delicate balance with the universe. If it rained, Blue headed for her fireplace and sat inside it all day, and Big Barney moved his curtain a quarter of an inch from the window, saw clouds, and went back to sleep instead of going on a wood run near Tres Piedras.

So what was I, Nell Schwartz, supposed to do with the realization that I was not in Brooklyn and it was a Saturday and Gauguin was going to practice his music a good part of the day? We were now living together in a small three-room adobe near Blue’s house. We had no running water, an outhouse, a wood stove for heat, and a gas one for cooking. Our rent was seventy dollars a month. We split it.

I ate breakfast and drove into town. Town was the plaza, stores built around a central square. All the stores were brown stucco like adobe. El Mercado was where you got nails and string, the army surplus was for wool socks, and there was the good old Rexall counter. It was so gray out that the lilacs hanging over the parking lot of the
Taos News
were like wet mops, and there was mud everywhere. You had an inkling it would be a lot sweeter missing and longing for Taos than actually living there just then.