Our Strangers, page 13
An unspecified quantity of turnips to the tailor Jervins for the cutting of a coat and vest for son John.
One bushel of turnips for credit amounting to 25 cents with blacksmith Walker and one bushel for same with blacksmith Stone, and half a bushel for credit amounting to 12½ cents with Doctor Bates.
Sixty-eight cents’ worth of turnips to Lias Dike in exchange for him chopping George’s sausage meat.
Two bushels of turnips to Manuel Buten for his help in pulling turnips.
Two and a half bushels to J. Acox for a new beam on son George’s side hill plow, which son John broke.
Three bushels of turnips to the Irishman shoemaker who lives in the Clark house, one bushel paid for and the other two owing 50 cents.
Turnips worth 87 cents to Peases Harness Shop for a leather cover whip and buckskin lash, on trust.
To Asa Palmer, three and a half bushels that was on a contract for shoeing a horse which pays him up.
To George P. Glass factory and his workmen, six bushels of turnips, paid for in red flannel at 25 cents per yard. With bargain to carry him and his workmen more turnips and again take his pay in flannel.
Five bushels of turnips to Wm. L. Brown’s store for two gallons of molasses and five and a half pounds of sugar.
Six bushels of turnips to Lias Dike at 25 cents per, for the same credited in tallow.
An unspecified quantity of turnips to be paid to an Irishman that lives in Wm. B. Maxon’s house hired by son George to pull the wool from three dead sheep.
Half a bushel of turnips to Henry Lapum to pay in full for a previously acquired barn shovel.
A Woman Offering Magazines
* * *
I have been quarreling on the phone with a woman who in the end did not seem like a real woman, or even a real human being. I gave her a small bit of my humanity and she annihilated it suddenly, in a lightning bolt. This was disturbing to me not because she was angry when she hung up on me, but because she was not angry. She hung up suddenly only because I was no longer useful to her.
In fact, we did not really quarrel. And, really, there was no “we.” But the conversation was certainly on the phone. She did hang up on me, and it is fair to say “she,” even though by then she did not seem like a real woman, to my way of thinking.
She wanted to offer me an immense number of magazines. She was offering five different magazines, sixty copies of one, one hundred twenty of another, and so on, and also a free camera. She said she wasn’t selling anything. And she seemed, briefly, to share with me the idea that there had to be a catch to the offer somewhere, but there wasn’t. She seemed to talk to me and hear my answers, though there was sometimes a strange intonation in her voice. Then she asked me suddenly, with frightening specificity, if I already subscribed to five magazines. I said I did. And then she had no more use for me and hung up.
Marriage Moment
of Annoyance—Dinner
* * *
They have been discussing what to have for dinner.
Finally, he says she can be the one to decide what to cook.
He watches her begin to prepare their food and adds, with a frown,
“Nothing that’s going to make me sick, though …”
Marriage Moment
of Annoyance—Speculations
* * *
He says:
No, I don’t care
about your speculations
as to what was there
before the universe existed.
Unhappy Christmas Tree
* * *
An old woman believes that her Christmas tree wants to get married.
Her caretaker says:
—No, it’s just a tree. See? Come here! Feel it!
The old woman feels a branch.
—Oh, you’re right, it is a tree.
But the old woman is still worried.
—But inside … inside, there is a woman who wants to come out and get married.
The old woman will not be convinced she is wrong. She sits for an hour staring at the tree.
After an hour, the caretaker says:
—Come on, don’t worry. It’s only a tree.
—But it’s so sad, it’s so sad for her … With those little things all over her … Are they little men?
—No, don’t worry, they’re not little men. Those are your ornaments. You’ve had them for years. Every year we take them out and hang them on the tree.
—But they’re hurting her! They’re pinching her! She just wants to come out and get married.
Improving My German
* * *
All my life I have been trying to improve my German.
At last my German is better!
But now I am old and ill.
I will die soon.
But when they take me to my grave,
I will have,
somewhere in my brain,
better German.
Poem of Greeting
* * *
Hello My Dear,
how are you
i hope fine
i am janet by name
a lady
i will like you to reply me
about my relationship
with you
i will tell you more about me
Greeting from,
Janet
Two Stories About Boys
* * *
My friend Tom tells me a story. He has lived in the same house since he was a child. Until about a decade ago, he lived there with his mother, then she died and he went on living there alone. Neither when his mother was alive nor afterward was the house altered very much from what it had been in his childhood. Recently, he decided to make some changes in his bathroom, and part of the work involved removing the “surround” of the bathtub. When the builder began to tear it away, he discovered something: stacked neatly by one foot of the tub were half a dozen very old cans of tuna fish, unopened, rusted.
For a time, this was a mystery. Tom thought and thought about these cans of tuna fish that had been stacked there by the hidden clawfoot of his bathtub for so long. Then at last he remembered: some sixty-odd years ago, when he was a child, he and his friends were told more than once by the grown-ups, who watched the news every night, about the imminent danger of nuclear war. The boys were little by little instilled with a fear of this catastrophe. As a precaution, Tom’s closest friend, an enterprising boy, took the cans of tuna fish, one by one over time, so as not to be found out, from his family’s kitchen cupboard and secreted them inside the tub surround at Tom’s house, as an emergency provision in case of nuclear war.
I thought of this story when I was out in the Midwest, in Iowa City. I was walking through a historic old mansion that was now the home of a large and prosperous interior design business. I was visiting this house because it had been well known to my mother in her childhood. I was wandering upstairs and down, in and out of the rooms, former bedrooms that now contained bolts of cloth and wallpaper books, because my mother had told me many stories about it from when she was very young. It had been the home of a cousin of hers, a wealthy girl—unlike my mother, who was poor. My mother had visited her cousin there many times—the girls were close friends. I have a photograph of my mother as a little girl standing with her mother, who is dressed all in black, with this house in the background. After many years had passed, the heirs of the cousin’s family had sold the house and it had been converted into an orphanage.
I fell into conversation with the owner of the interior design firm, telling him about my mother and her cousin. He listened attentively and then in turn told me a story. During the time in which the house was used as an orphanage, the curving, broad oak banister that ran two flights up through the generous stairwell of the house had been freshly painted. One of the orphans, a boy of nine or ten, in a fit of mischievousness, had stood at the top of the stairs and cut open a feather pillow above the freshly painted banister. The feathers had floated down and stuck to the paint.
The years passed, and the place changed hands several times, the banister being repainted from time to time. Finally, the mansion came into the possession of the design firm, which embarked on a thorough renovation. The banister was to be sanded down to its original wood, and for this the firm hired a local man. He took layer after layer of the old paint off the wood until he came to the layer in which he could detect the remains of those same feathers, dried into the old paint. He knew what they were. He was the same boy who, living there as an orphan, had cut open the pillow and scattered the feathers.
Claim to Fame #5:
Rex Dolmith
* * *
In Taos, New Mexico, in 1949, my parents in their rental apartment were bothered by the constant noise from the tenants in the apartment above them. Their upstairs neighbors were, it turns out, the Taos painter Rex Dolmith and his family!
Unfinished Business
* * *
Cleaning up, in the kitchen, she goes to wipe away a small black seed from the counter.
But the small black seed moves, and then walks hastily off in the other direction.
No, I am not a seed, the little bug seems to be saying.
No, it is not saying anything, but going off on its own, reminded by her sponge that it has business elsewhere.
Lost by Yanda Hedge
(Personal)
* * *
round eyeglasses
faux tortoiseshell
somewhere
between nursery school
and sacred space,
possibly
covered by snow.
After Reading Peter Bichsel
* * *
Last spring and summer, I was reading the stories of the Swiss writer Peter Bichsel. I began reading them in Vienna. The little book—a hardcover, but small and light-weight—was a gift from a German friend at the start of my trip, to provide me with something to read in German, since I wanted to improve my facility in the language. I had brought with me from home a paperback thriller by a very popular German writer, but I wasn’t enjoying it: the plot, so far, was tiresome, the main character unpleasant, and the tone sarcastic. My friend thought she could find something better for me, and she was right. I continued reading Bichsel’s stories on the train from Vienna to Salzburg, and then in Salzburg, and then on the train to Zurich, and then in Zurich, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, and on each train I took to go from one city to the next.
In fact, Peter Bichsel regularly writes about reading and about train journeys. He will also sometimes begin a story, or remark in the middle of a story, “There are stories that are hardly worth telling,” or “There is almost nothing to say about X”, and then sometimes follow that with a “but”: “But I have wanted to tell this story for a long time now,” or “But it has to be told, because it was the first story in my life, the first one that I remember.” He then goes on to tell a lovely, quiet, modest story, a story that glows with human kindness, or love, or some combination of compassion, understanding, and honesty. (Or am I, these days, finding this quality so marked in his stories because I am seeking it?)
I was reading his stories as I traveled, but I was also distracted by all that I saw and experienced, so I did not often think about his stories when I was not reading them. But then I particularly thought of him and his stories after an experience I had in Salzburg. I wanted to describe this experience, but I wanted to say, near the beginning of my story, that there was not much to tell, because, really, so little happened: there was a scene, one that involved a peculiar character, and later a coincidence.
I had stopped for lunch at a small, undistinguished restaurant that I had picked out earlier in the day, on my way through the town and across the river to find Mozart’s birthplace. It looked to me like a reliable sort of local place, without pretensions, not expensive, not particularly attractive to tourists, but frequented by locals. Its entrance was set back from the main street and it was called Café Central. Rain was falling in the street outside, and the umbrella stand inside the door was filled with wet umbrellas. The coat tree was hung with damp jackets and slickers. The colors of the place were strikingly tan, brown, and cream. The first part of the room, where one entered, contained the bar and was partitioned off from the main room to serve bar customers at small tables. A shelf along the top of the partition held stacks of folded newspapers and magazines for the customers.
The place was quite crowded, though not yet entirely full, and noisy, since this was the height of the lunch hour. A buxom, energetic woman who seemed to be the manager or co-owner of the place showed me to a cramped spot in a line of little tables against one wall, but after she went away, and after a moment’s hesitation, I got up and walked on back to look for a more comfortable spot. I found a roomier and more peaceful seat in the far corner, at a small table between two tables already occupied. To my left was a large corner table surrounded by banquettes, and to my right, a small table for two, identical to my own.
At the large table were seated a man and a woman, evidently a couple, though for a long time they did not speak to each other. The man was calmly and very thoroughly reading a newspaper, and the woman was sitting completely still beside him and gazing off into the distance with a placid and agreeable expression on her face. I am left with the impression, now, that the man was Asian, though I can’t be sure of this. The woman was not. Try as I may, to retrieve a more exact image of the man’s face, there is no more memory available to me and I cannot do it. It is not relevant to the story, anyway, but this vague impression adds to my sense of the difference or disparity between the two of them, though they seemed comfortable and companionable.
It was the woman at the table to my right who came to interest me the most during that lunch hour, although at first, in my preoccupation with settling into my seat, putting my bags down beside me, bringing out something to read, and looking around to take in the sights and sounds of the room, I did not pay particular attention to her. It was only as I became used to my surroundings, having examined the features of the room, the customers in my part of it—the larger part—and those beyond the partition, having absorbed the sights and sounds of this place and taken note of any more unusual elements or occupants, that my attention was more and more drawn to my neighbor.
I had ample time to observe her, as well as the others in the restaurant, because, although the young waitress and the older manager both kept rushing back and forth without a pause among the tables, taking orders and carrying food, my order was very long in coming—thirty minutes, forty minutes. Since I was tired from my morning of wandering through the streets of the older parts of Salzburg on this side of the river and across the bridge on the other side, stopping to read plaques and look into shop windows, crossing back over the long bridge, I did not mind waiting.
The woman to my right was perhaps in her fifties—it was hard to tell. She was a large woman, though of moderate weight, tall and broad-shouldered, muscular, and dressed in such workaday clothes that her purse seemed incongruously feminine: plain pants and sturdy shoes, and a T-shirt with some message on it that I eventually identified as pro European Union. Her hair was short and curly and rather disordered, pressed down in one part and standing up in another. She wore glasses of no particular style, and these gave her a somewhat serious or studious look.
What drew my attention first, and then repeatedly, was the speed with which she was eating. She had ordered some kind of a chicken dish—chicken drumsticks with a pile of white rice. I later decided that it had to be one of the specials of the day, available for a good price. All her motions were quick, perhaps twice the normal speed of a person consuming a restaurant meal, even one at an inexpensive lunch place. She manipulated her utensils, wielded her knife and fork, one in each hand, constantly, industriously and busily, her elbows out to the sides. She chewed fast and swallowed fast. Some of her motions were neat, as when she cleaned a drumstick of its flesh and placed the bone at one edge of her plate, alongside another bare bone. But sometimes she overshot her aim, so that rice spilled off the edge of her plate. She would quickly reposition a drumstick to present a different angle for cutting, and occasionally give the plate a little spin to reach another drumstick or gain better access to the pile of rice. Spin, stab, slice, open mouth, receive forkful of food, chew, swallow; spin, stab, slice, etc.
After I had watched her eat for a few minutes, I noticed that she had, to her right, in front of her, facing her, and increasing my sense of the urgency with which she was eating—or more than urgency, the frantic haste—a small round-faced travel alarm clock. And yet, through the course of her lunch, she did not otherwise seem in a hurry to finish her meal and leave the place. She paused sometimes to read her newspaper, and later to make a note in a notebook.
Her newspaper was folded and laid on the table in front of her. She looked at it from time to time, or picked it up and refolded it. I had my own paper, though it was a different kind of paper, a literary weekly, also folded and laid where I could read it, though I did not read it, being too interested in the people around me. She and I may have been sitting on the same banquette that ran the length of the wall, because I remember that she had room to keep her purse next to her, and so did I. Beyond her, the row of little tables continued as far as the partition.
I noticed her purse because at one point she pulled a notebook out of it and then began searching through it for a pen, again moving hastily, now scrabbling wildly in its depths, pulling it closer to her, lifting it onto the table the better to search. When she did not find a pen, she looked up and around at the people near her, including those in my direction, and asked us all generally if anyone could lend her a pen. I hesitated, waiting for someone else to offer. I had been writing in my own notebook, though I had put it and my pen away. I did not want to lend her a pen, even though I had more than one.
