The Oregon Experiment (19 page)

He held out a tissue and tried to sound cheerful. “See if you can blow a little more.”

Sammy jerked away from her breast with a howl. “Damnit,” Naomi muttered. She moved him to the other side and he screamed louder in between dry, aggravated smacks.

“Let’s go outside,” Scanlon said over his cries. “Come on,” he insisted, taking Sammy from her arms. “Get dressed. Now. We’ll take the cell.” And after half an hour of pandemonium—the baby inconsolable, Naomi spiraling downward even as Scanlon helped her dress, Joey chasing her around the house with cayenne pepper saying, “Just one snort, they’ve done studies”—he was lifting a sleeping Sammy, who’d conked out on the short drive downtown, from his car seat into the stroller, and they were walking in the sunshine down Lewis and Clark Boulevard to the sesquicentennial celebration.

“I think the registration for Mr. Douglas is by the library,” he murmured. Still not a peep from inside the covered stroller. “Do you want to come with me?”

“I’ll wait,” Naomi said, pointing to the benches surrounding the fountain in the park.

“How about a coffee?” Scanlon asked. “A little caffeine to jumpstart your nose.”

She was watching two teenage boys on stilts, videoing each other with their phones.

“It’ll come back,” he said, with no idea if he believed it.

“Sinus surgery cured Jill’s vertigo,” Joey said. “That plus the hysterectomy. And daily doses of cayenne.”

“It’s just a freak thing,” Scanlon said, his hand at the small of Naomi’s back.

She squeezed the bridge of her nose. “It’s the sinus infection. And maybe the antibiotics. Has to be.”

“It’ll pass,” Scanlon said. “And in the meantime …” He started to say he’d be her nose again, but thought better of it. “How about that coffee?”

“Black,” Naomi said glumly.

“Five minutes,” he told her.

“Thanks,” she said, and kissed his cheek and pushed the stroller into the park.

Joey gripped his arm, dramatically. “Do you have a halfway decent day spa in this town?” She gave him a conspiratorial nod. “That girl’s a stress ball.”

She was probably right, although Scanlon would never admit that to his mother. For Naomi, getting her nose back in this new place full of new smells was every bit as disorienting as losing it had been: for nine years a drought-stricken swath had cut through her world, and suddenly it was flooded. Plus a baby. She didn’t have the resilience.

They passed the beer garden and food stalls, enchiladas and pad Thai, elephant ears from the Women’s Service Organization, Lions Club hot dogs, wine tastings, Give Pizza Chance. All summer Douglas had been lousy with festivals. Every other weekend the streets were closed and the park filled up with booths selling black walnut cutting boards, tie-dyed onesies, pottery, hand-blown glass, redwood-burl yoga stands and gun racks, rusty old saw blades with messages stamped out in the metal:
Welcome, God Bless USA, Old Fart
. Bandstands were erected, drum circles formed. Today, an artist was sculpting a beaver from a truckload of wet sand dumped in the middle of the street, kids with flowers and flags painted on their cheeks were watching Waldorf School puppet shows, City Skippers jumping rope to “Crocodile Rock,” and Uni-dykes, a lesbian uni-cycle
club, trick pedaling in formation. When Joey set her eyes on the acre of loot, she peeled off with barely a nod.

At the registration table he wrote his thirty-dollar check and was given in return a two-page list of tomorrow’s events,
Amateur Division
printed at the top. He hadn’t said amateur; she’d simply known. A blunt verdict on his attempt at going native.

Reading the list as he wandered back toward the food stalls, still unsure what “slow-chop” was, he looked up and saw the Skcubrats booth and, behind the counter with sun in her hair, Sequoia. It had been nearly two months since the PNSM meeting, and with all the excitement of the baby and the new term, despite a few visits to the café, he hadn’t seen her since.

Under her Skcubrats banner hung a dozen signs, hand painted with rainbows and clouds, offering coffee, tempeh burgers, and tofu pancakes. Also, “Two sugars & hold the human suffering,” “The official brew of PNSM,” “Dine with dignity,” “Douglas Dollars Accepted,” “Donate here for Franklin Park Neighborhood Center,” “We Apologize to You & Mother Earth: the county health department requires that we use high-detergent, antibacterial soaps.”

Next to the hot griddle, Sequoia mixed batter with a long wooden spoon while her helper took orders and money at the counter. A little girl with dreadlocks was finger-painting at a child-sized table in back.

Long strands of dirty-blond hair hung in Sequoia’s eyes. She seemed a little dirty all over; not unappealingly, not at all, but like she’d rolled out of bed and skipped a shower. As she dipped a ladle into the huge bowl and tipped out circles of batter, their edges sizzling on the griddle, Scanlon called her name. She lifted her face to him, pushing aside her hair and leaving a smear of batter on her cheek. She stared at him for a moment—inquisitive, confused, stoned looking—before her face brightened and her radiant smile lit up.

“Scanlon Pratt,” she almost sang. “I’ve been hoping I’d see you around. How’s the baby? How’s tricks?”

She was wearing a short, tie-dyed T-shirt showing lots of belly, a long hempy-looking skirt, and sandals. She had big feet, dirty toes. She flipped a row of pancakes, then slapped two on a paper plate and moved toward him. Her long limbs easy and loose, she seemed disjointed yet somehow graceful: everything ended up in exactly the right place, though he couldn’t follow how it all got there.

“Amazing,” he said. “Beautiful. Three weeks old.”

“Hank was sorry you guys couldn’t connect.” She handed him the plate.

“Me too.”

“You’re coming to the meeting, right? Next week.”

He hadn’t noticed the thin, feline scar on her lip. “Of course I’ll be there.”

“Maybe you’ll have some good ideas for us,” she said. “Strategies.”

“I hope so.”

“Like a new name. I was talking about that with Hank. You’re so right about PNSM.” In a long silence she took a deep breath, her astounding breasts rising, floating, then settling back. She smiled. “How’s your wife?”

“Great. She’s loving every minute.”

“Really? I had the sense … I don’t know …” And as her green eyes softened, he found himself telling her about Naomi’s newly recovered sense of smell abruptly abandoning her this morning. He spilled out the whole story—antidepressants, erratic moods, painful nipples—and as he spoke, her warm griddle cakes heavy in his hand, Sequoia’s face was vibrant, her body strong. She was effervescently healthy.

“Give her this,” she said, and poured a cup of tea. “And she needs to call my friend Angel for acupuncture.” She wrote a phone number on a paper napkin and handed it to him.

He looked over his shoulder at the line of customers and reached for his wallet.

“No, no,” she insisted. “What’s mine is yours.” And then she turned back to the griddle—her blond hair gathered into a messy ponytail, the tip at the small of her back dyed dark brown.

Sequoia. Built like a tree: sturdy, lush, limby. He imagined a sticky sap smell in her hair and skin. He imagined her swaying in a powerful wind. He imagined hiding in her branches, the tickle of her aromatic needles.

Approaching the bench by the fountain he saw Naomi sitting with her legs crossed sharply away from Joey, who was lecturing the back of her shoulder. Spotting him, she raised her hands in exasperation. He’d been gone a long time.

“Tofu pancakes.” He smiled, hefting the plate. “I’ve never even heard of them, but they’re very substantial. Sort of malty. Like bark, or potting soil.”
He shook his head. “Not bad, though. Just earthy. Like a staple for the Aztecs.”

“I need to find a bathroom,” Naomi told him.

He handed her the cup of tea and the napkin with the phone number.

She took a sip. “This isn’t coffee.”

“Remember Sequoia? I hope you don’t mind I told her about your—” he glanced at the pancakes, then back at Naomi “—situation. She was very sympathetic. Acupuncture and this tea, she said.” He twirled a piece of pancake in a puddle of thick honey.

Naomi reached toward a garbage can with the tea, but then stopped and took another sip.

“So I’m telling you,” Joey cut in, taking hold of her wrist, “a mother should—”

“Sammy’s going to wake up any minute,” Naomi said. “Rock him, okay? And I’ll feed him when I get back.”

Scanlon offered a bite of pancake on his plastic fork. “Taste?”

Naomi shook off Joey’s grip. “All yours,” she told him, and walked off.

“I was trying to tell her,” Joey said, “you should let the baby have some space. A little breathing room. She shouldn’t be carrying him around like that all the time. He’ll get dependent.”

He peeked under the hood of the stroller: Sammy looked tiny in his blue skullcap. “Tofu pancake?” he said, offering his mother the fork.

She turned away. “Good God, Scanlon.”

He ate a sweet mouthful dripping with too much honey; he hadn’t realized how hungry he was until Sequoia laid the plate in his hands. He hadn’t eaten all day—from six to ten this morning had been all Naomi. He’d let himself believe over the last couple of months that these crises were winding down, that a perfect baby and a nose back on line would be enough to let her just live for a while. Maybe still, he hoped. Maybe he could lead her back.

He and Joey looked over to the edge of the park, where with a long screech of brakes a vehicle creaked and teetered to a stop. It was either an old school bus that had been converted into a camper—a silver Airstream bubble at the back, RV fiberglass clapboards on one side—or an RV that had been patched up with pieces of a school bus. A crooked stovepipe stuck out of a window and elbowed above the blue tarp stretched and tied down on the roof. Some parts were painted purple, others yellow. Plastic
toys were rubber-cemented to the hood. It looked like the home of a mad Australian living on dingo meat and lizards in the outback. Was the Northwest where all the nation’s derelict buses ended up?

“So, Oregon,” Joey said, still pronouncing it wrong. Scanlon had corrected her several times but was giving up. “It’s like—” she looked out over the crowded park, scrunching up her face “—like they’re stuck in the sixties. Hippie-dippy.” Not quite satisfied, she added, “But also ticky-tacky. A certain refinement, the sophistication we take for granted in New England, is sort of—” her voice rose up in the teenage affectation she’d recently adopted “—lacking.”

“Well,” Scanlon began. He was about to explain the radical tradition in the Pacific Northwest; the competing interests of loggers, fishermen, and environmentalists; the direct line between pioneer spirit and libertarian politics. He wanted to celebrate a truly middle-class town, where there were more people
in
the July Fourth parade than watching because every kid was riding his bike down Lewis and Clark Boulevard to the cheers of his grandparents and aunts and uncles. True populism. He thought he could explain the pleasures of a college town, like the retired poli sci professor who’d taken up furniture making: the home of every faculty member Scanlon had visited was graced with tables and bookshelves that the emeritus professor had crafted from local black walnut, alder, and oak; all across town, over his Nakashima-style dining tables daughters were telling their professor parents they were getting engaged, at his hand-planed desks essays and monographs were being written, in his Mission beds babies were being conceived (and affairs conducted). But instead, tired of his mother and resenting her for heaping stress onto Naomi’s plate, he said, “Not everyone wants to stay in East Hartford keeping track of how many invitations they get to Charter Oak Country Club for the leg-of-lamb buffet.”

“Don’t get snide with me,” she said. “Your father and I
lived
through the sixties. The
first
time. I did yoga when
that
first started. You kids have this romantic image, but let me tell you
—everyone
was on drugs. It’s a wonder the country pulled through. Lots of our friends moved to Berkeley. One lovely couple—he had a very good accounting job—moved to Tangiers, for God’s sake.”

She held up her hands to examine her rings in the sunlight. “We knew three couples who moved out to Berkeley,” she said, “and they all got
divorced. One man overdosed. One came back to New York and joined Bank of America’s corporate-training program. He was the
only
one who didn’t get arrested at some point or another, and I’ll have you know he’s presently executive vice president of the Charter Oak Country Club. Two rapes, three abortions, and the only one still living in Berkeley either works undercover for the FBI or he actually
is
a poet.”

The plastic door slammed shut, and Naomi stood outside the Porta-Potties on the edge of the park taking deep breaths. Nothing had ever smelled so good: sun-heated plastic, blue chemicals, and human waste. She stuck her nose in the cup and sniffed Sequoia’s tea, discerning cloves, cardamom, cinnamon bark, anise, ginger, and lemongrass. There was more. Orange peel? Pepper? She laughed. It was cayenne. Maybe Joey was right.

Her nose had begun to come back even before Scanlon gave her the tea. She’d smelled her own skin, her body, as she warmed in the sun on the bench, and when Joey sat down there was the scent of dry-cleaning fluid on her blouse. But when she stuck her nose in the tea—a blend she didn’t know—she let herself believe it was really happening. Thank God.

Beside the Porta-Potties in a grove of huge trees, college-age women were buckling on harnesses and hoisting themselves on colorful lines up into the branches.
Free Skool—Treesitting 101
was spray-painted on a bedsheet strung between two trees. The women swung overhead, weightless, burdenless. Nothing to Naomi had ever seemed so free.

When she returned to the bench, she reached into the diaper bag for her wallet but pulled out the camera instead. She dug deeper, whispering to Scanlon, “I’m getting a drink,” and as soon as Sammy heard her voice, his tiny cry proclaimed famine. She dropped both wallet and camera back in the bag and wiggled him out of the carrier, Sammy squeezing his eyes shut against the sun and stretching his mouth wide as a bullhorn. Cooing, Naomi slid onto the bench and hiked up her shirt, the sudden pinch of pain eased by the scent of almonds and her milk.