The Laboratory of Love, page 6
The Real Truth
For a long time, there was nothing solid to reach out and touch to remind myself of the real truth when Ruth swore that she’d never heard of anyone called Honey. My grandmother spit out the two syllables like something tasting bad, wondered what kind of whore’s name was that; it belonged to no daughter of hers. There was only how I remembered Honey sounded telling me about Eureka, California, while we curled together on the fire escape overlooking Spokane or above the bar in Bellingham. The way my mother’s voice turned scratchy in the Greyhound station when she wouldn’t say goodbye; this was only adieu until we reunited in Eureka one day. Diamond Lil, always the wise sidekick, shook her experienced head, swayed some more upon her heels. “He’s only eight, it isn’t right,” she kept repeating like a prayer, kissing another cigarette pink then squashing it like a burning beetle beneath her toe. A cardboard suitcase decorated with six shiny stars rode with me on the bus north, across the border to Canada, when they took me away from Honey and Diamond Lil and the Jupiter Circuit. Orbiting across Washington and Oregon was the only life I’d known. Inside the suitcase was a photo Honey made me promise not to lose. You could touch our paper features, feel my mother and I squeezed together inside the arcade booth. Making funny faces and wearing our favourite hats as quarters fed the hungry slot, during the pop hiss flash. Plus Diamond Lil gave me one of her eight-by-tens from way back when, the good old days when stripping meant show business and dancers were entertainers, smiling coy with her boas and feathers, the stilettos and the big bouffant. Also a plastic whistle from a Jupiter dancer named Jewel. “Just blow when you want me,” she liked to pucker and wink beneath her Bacall bangs. A Cracker Jack ring from the sad-eyed girl named Star who Harry was always advising to Sell it, sweetheart, with a smile. Just several things you could touch to help you believe in the truth of what wasn’t there. “Cheap goods,” muttered Ruth, pursing her mouth and unpacking the suitcase when I arrival at the trailer on the outskirts of Brale. “Cheap as cheap.” The next morning everything except my clothes was gone. I later found the empty suitcase out in the field, blistered and warped by sun and rain, hidden among those tall weeds that scratch. The six green stars were no longer shiny, but now each one as faded and sad as Star. I never learned what happened to the photographs, the whistle, the ring. “What’re you talking about?” demanded Ruth when I wondered. “Wake up, kid. You’re dreaming.” My grandmother deemed that everything I remembered from before Brale, BC, was make-believe. Those identical gyrations of the Jupiter Circuit across Washington and Oregon had never been; that once-upon-a-time with Honey was a figment of my imagination. I couldn’t rub the real truth between my fingers to feel its texture, gritty and smooth at once, like sand in the sheets at Salem. When Ruth took her bottle to bed, I would wander from the trailer, lose its lone light to distance, allow the dark to touch me everywhere. Wind shoved down the mountain, pushed a smell of rust across the river. Slowly the glitter and the rouge of before receded; Diamond Lil’s sequined shape shimmied out of sight. Now was separated by a border from then; bygone Eugene and Olympia belonged to the map of another country and not to me. All those towns where Honey still danced moved as far away as stars in the big black sky above the stumps, the brush, the thorns. A boat drifted up there, too. My daddy floated between Jupiter and Venus, traced circles among the constellations, orbited a sickle moon. His sailor cry sounded clearer than the crickets, closer than the owl up in the twisted oak. He was still a child, Honey said, just turned eighteen, another tall boy on a three-day pass. Too far from home, he stumbled in to see her dance. He never said he’d stay. So how could he know that I was breathing, folded inside such dreams, while Ruth’s TV snowed static through another winter and time scuffed by? Drop a curl of bark into the Columbia River, cold current pulls it south toward Spokane where Honey always liked entertaining cowboys, over from Idaho on a dare, their faces frank or sort of shy. The Circuit was unwavering, its rotation so fixed that I could still know where Honey was headlining this week, when it would be on to Walla-Walla again. The itinerary was written on my heart, along with messages on picture postcards that Honey never sent me. Miss you, love you, wish you were here. A lipstick kiss for a signature, sure. One night I realized that something had happened to Honey: her lilt no longer lifted to meet Daddy’s high ahoy inside my head. Abruptly the air around me lacked the singular, sweet arrangement of ions—insinuating as any aroma, subtle as some pheromone—which had wafted through my blood ever since Honey gave birth to me in Eureka, California. Now my lungs inhaled a thinner, flatter element; my tongue tasted the zinc from the smelter stacks that puffed like Lil’s cigarettes in the down-river distance. Maybe Honey and I would never meet up in Eureka some day after all. Maybe she did her bump and grind in Heaven now, burlesqued with stage-struck ghosts above. Down here, the world was holding its breath; more than ever, the landscape was formed out of longing. In Portland or Tacoma, Diamond Lil had laughed thinly with just Jack Daniel’s, or else her sad pal Jimmy Beam, about the weirdos and the creeps who filled the blackness before the stage, shifted tensely beyond the spotlight’s glare, unseen. For years Honey had sensed a bad number out there, the unluckiest one of all, anxious to stop her dance for good. She could almost glimpse his face if a blue pill didn’t work at five a.m.; that was when she would lullaby to me about Eureka or discuss the sailor until dawn. After I was ten, it got darker on the outskirts of Brale. Ruth stuffed cardboard over the trailer windows for insulation; the next spring she wouldn’t take it down, said perverts liked to gawk at her, the curtains weren’t enough. At the end of the dirt road, across the frozen mud beyond the ditch, the school bus jounced by without me. River kids flattened features against the windows; their glassy eyes slid out of sight. They liked to caw Yank go home across the playground when Ruth didn’t keep me home because Sodom and Gomorrah ruled the classroom. I didn’t need to learn more lies. “Filth begets filth,” Ruth fretted in her gumboots before I learned not to mention Honey. Her stick poked into the burning barrel, turned the trash, stirred sparks. “Flesh and fornication.” She brooded aloud about dirty boys more often as I got older; the ragged wind flapped her complaints like flags. It was always the stink, the stench of sin, enough to make you sick. No wonder Ruth’s throat retched vomit; the poison needed to get out. A rank pool of everything gone wrong beside the bed at dawn. A sharp, angry language, almost English, in the dark. In the end we couldn’t have the trailer lights on much; they would attract attention. The social worker and her fellow spies snooped plenty already and there was an abundance of Satan’s interfering agents around. Beelzebub buzzed secret code through telephone wires strung above the road to town, belched smoke signals from the smelter stacks. Something dirty over there in the sky. Ruth gurgled another prayer to her own sweet Saviour until, Damn it to hell, the bottle got knocked over again. Scotch stained more thin Bible pages, soiled the skimpy trailer air. The way things were made me picture an abandoned car rusting in some February field. I wasn’t old enough to leave the outskirts of Brale in search of the real truth. I was still too young to discover the magic door leading to how it ought to be: the secret way to all Eurekas. It wouldn’t be until I was thirteen that my daddy’s call would reach out and pull me to the cities by the sea. Late at night, I’d prowl harbour shadows in a tavern full of tars hoping to find a hungry touch that was finally his. I would lick away the anchor Honey said was tattooed on his shoulder— the left, or was it the right? Who can recall, that long ago? It was back so far, when Diamond Lil was still a reigning star. I would kiss and not forget his salty lips, I would slide inside his gap-toothed grin. Waking to receive his squint, sometimes blue and sometimes green, just like the sea we’d sail across, far from Ruth slurring to the sandman, from cramped space trying to squeeze my dreams. “Hold on,” counselled Honey in my heart. “Sustain.” To pass the time until my turn came to abandon Brale, like my mother had done before me, I strung shiny sounds into a necklace in the night; names of strippers we’d trouped with sparkled the dark like sequins. Brandy, Crystal, Ruby. Champagne, Jewel, Star. Maybe people like Ruth would say those weren’t their real names. Maybe Diamond Lil was just Louise and Honey only Hannah. But I came to believe that what is really true and more than true is always what you wish, how you hope, the way it all must be. Beyond the facts, besides what’s black and white, more lasting than anything carved in stone: the real truth shines the colour of your stars. Six green planets glittered above the trailer and the wind and the dark. Emerald islands, Honey. Pacific ports of prayer to sail toward during sleep. One day we will waken where we need to be.
Eureka, California
Until the end, I’ll believe that Eureka, California, forms the heart of every prayer sent to Heaven to describe what means the most to you on earth. Maybe that’s because of how Honey spoke about the place where she delivered me into the surprising world. Eureka was more than the backdrop to the famous year-long sabbatical she and Diamond Lil took from the Jupiter Circuit on my account and reacquainted themselves with civilian life with mixed results. Afterward, Eureka served as the setting for each one of Honey’s poems and psalms. On her lips, its name always sounded less like a ringing exclamation at some original discovery than a murmur that what’s been forgotten is now recalled.
Eureka, I remember.
“Sure, I’m coming with,” said Diamond Lil when she learned about Honey’s intent to have her child in California. She could use a break from show business herself, get that shine back in her star. She’d always wanted to play fairy godmother. For a moment Lil felt miffed at not being given any hint as to who my father was. But she couldn’t let Honey head off alone in her condition, not a chance. It had been eight years since she’d found the girl strung out on speed and spreading in the rough Red Room in Seattle. She had taught Honey costumes and music and lights, paved the way for her to join the Jupiter, shared star billing with her ever since. Although Harry didn’t appreciate the prospect of losing his headliners for so long, and sulked with his cigar over who could fill their spot, they left Seattle that October on the southbound bus. There were different stories later. Diamond Lil claimed they ended up in Eureka by chance. Their ticket money took them that far; twenty more dollars would have meant another town. According to Honey, she’d always dreamed about Eureka. It had floated inside her head forever.
They found a small wooden house, once painted green but now faded almost grey, with a deep front porch that slanted toward the sunshine and movie stars in the south. There was a living room and a kitchen and a bathroom, and two bedrooms with gable windows like curious eyes upstairs beneath the eaves. “A real house,” Honey would repeat in wonder on the fire escapes of the hotels that afterward became our only kind of home. A backyard with a crooked plum tree. A front yard surrounded by a low wooden fence, faded the same green as the house, that tilted this way or that, like it couldn’t make up its mind. On one side lived a blind old woman who wore her white hair in a long braid down her back. Her fingers read cracked photographs taken at a time when she could still see. On the other side was a family with two small children, one boy and one girl, who would have been my friends if we’d stayed on in Eureka, California. They would have lent me their tricycles and invited me to spend Saturdays in a tree house, up among the apple blossoms and the birds.
Honey would tell me about Eureka, California, whenever I felt sad or frightened on the Jupiter Circuit. She and Diamond Lil had resumed orbiting on stage six months after my birth. Other girls on the bill helped look after me. Star and Jewel and Crystal changed diapers in their G strings and pasties, shook rattles in stilettos and silver robes. Harry groused he wasn’t running a day-care, but bought me a miniature banjo for my third birthday. Sometimes things would happen in the hotels that made my heart boom, boom like the music in the bar below. That’s when Honey’s voice felt like a soft hand on my head while reminding me again that on the street where we lived in Eureka, California, no one locks their door at night. Children play hopscotch all afternoon on the chipped sidewalks, old people slowly walk arm-in-arm around the block at evening, and through the cool dark, couples dance on front lawns to the radio even when it rains. They waltz over the wet grass, one two three, they twirl beneath the dripping trees.
Honey didn’t dance a step the whole year she spent in Eureka, California. Instead she caught up on a decade of missed sleep. It was so quiet she could be out like a light all night and for most of the day. Maybe that’s why it would sound like a lullaby when Honey later told me about the place where you don’t need pills even on mean Mondays. More things my mother didn’t do in Eureka, California: paint her face into a meal for the eyes of hungry men in the dark; strap her feet into tall shoes like stilts that made her sway with each step; pile her blond hair high on her head with quantities of rhinestone pins. She wore ballet slippers and a ponytail in a rubber band in Eureka. She learned to click knitting needles while, two blocks away on Main Street, in the Rise and Shine Café, Diamond Lil waited tables to keep the wolf from the door. Breakfast shifts started at the crack of dawn, though Lil was used to stumbling to bed at that hour. She complained that her arches were falling faster than the rain that sloped past the mountains all winter; she moaned that in this two-bit town, her love life was as extinct as any dinosaur. Lil left the Diamond part of herself behind on the Jupiter Circuit, along with her sequined costumes and her love life; for a year she was plain Lil who poured coffee and served eggs over-easy and asked if you wanted pie with that. She had a polyester uniform of cheerful yellow and low white shoes like a nurse and a name tag with a crooked star dotting the i. In the evenings, she would soak her feet in a basin of warm water and sigh that the sleaziest stage was starting to look pretty good, never mind the weirdos and the creeps, while instead of scotch Honey sipped a big glass of milk so I’d grow strong and tall. If you listened, from the plum tree in the yard an owl would hoot once, twice, three times.
“It wasn’t so big in those days,” Honey would recall, as if Eureka, California, had happened long ago, as if she’d been back to see how it had since grown like me. Often I had the feeling that my own eyes witnessed the whole year there. I didn’t so much hide inside Honey for the first half of our time in Eureka as hover near her on that slanting porch where she rocked away the hours while radio jingles floated from windows as yellow as Lil’s uniform, from cars slowed by teen-aged boys wanting a look at Honey even when she was big with me. Their horns honked like passing geese. Light from street lamps had to reach and find its way through leaves of maple trees that lined the sidewalk, and from the mountain sank the smell of bears bumbling through berries while Honey muttered knit, purl, knit beneath her breath, worked the wool that would keep me warm. Eureka can be cool, though it belongs to California. You shiver when fog strays inland from the sea. It reminded Honey of a tall boy’s breath made visible by condensation, shapes of unheard words fluttering like salty flags along the shore. We must have paced the sand with the wind in our faces, Honey and I; we surely held a shielding hand above our eyes and squinted at the grey Pacific for sight of a sailor’s boat. Sometimes late, when the town was sleeping, Honey slipped from bed and through the quiet streets wandered beneath the same stars he steered by, out at sea. He was just eighteen, still almost a child, another frank boy on a three-day pass. In Tacoma, too far from home, he stumbled in to see her dance. He never said he’d stay. When he left, he didn’t know that I was floating in Honey’s saline sea, turning with her tides while the sunshine and movie stars remained stubbornly in the south, as distant as any sailor. I could see Eureka, California, so clearly as Honey described it. Every photograph in the album of your heart shows where you’ve been happy, even if you were blind.
But once in a while I suspected I was mistaken in my memories of Eureka, California. “Honey was sick as a dog the whole time,” Lil might mention. “For months after your birth she worried every minute, sat up night after night to watch you sleep. Tips at that greasy spoon were so lousy Yours Truly had to steal from the supermarket more than once. There wasn’t a decent bar in town where a girl could go for a little drink or two. The neighbours wouldn’t talk to us. The roof leaked. It never stopped raining. Don’t ask what I had to do to get the landlord to let us have that shack in the first place. Talk about your weirdos and your creeps.”
Then I would wonder, while Honey spoke about Eureka, California, if she were remembering another town instead. The red pills could make her mix things up. Maybe she was really talking about where she had lived as a girl in a wooden house painted green but now faded almost gray. While she described children playing hopscotch and dancers in the rain, Honey stared straight before her, as if she were blind as the old woman next door and couldn’t see me beside her on the fire escape above Tacoma or Portland, Seattle or Spokane. As if she were speaking about a time long before a shy sailor, long before I found my secret way inside her. “It was just any place,” she answered when I asked where she had been born. “Any place,” she echoed in the flat voice that answered the hungry men who sometimes trailed her sweetness into our room late at night. “It wasn’t Eureka, California.” She would hardly talk about a time before the Jupiter Circuit; neither did Diamond Lil, even when the sixth sticky drink made her slur secrets. After she swallowed a blue pill instead of a red, or when I asked at the wrong time about the sailor, Honey would tell me to shut the fuck up, leave her alone for once, could I please just do that? She would disappear from the hotel until the next night’s shift. I rapped on the wall five times to invite Diamond Lil over from her room next door where she was practicing bumps and grinds before the speckled mirror, doing what she could to fight off the competition. There were always more young girls coming up. “She had to go like that,” the aging star would say to explain about Honey slamming her way out of the hotel now. Or about her escape at sixteen from whatever town had been too small, too slow, too far from the sea. Honey never had a mother or a father. I knew that from the way she held me tight, whispered into my neck, licked my eyes to make me shiver. No one told her, when she was a frightened child, that there was a place like Eureka, California.
