“Not me.” My father isn’t amused.
“You at 13 maybe,” Madeleine amends.
My father turns up the volume and Madeleine knows all the words. They don’t ask me what my plans are. Or talk about the most important thing in the world, participating effectively. They don’t want distinguished certificates suitable for framing. They don’t want me to go to the rainforest the size of New Jersey. Or Lake Como, not even if the Goldberg twins take me on their yacht.
I leave my suitcases at the front door and sit on my bed in the wooden room and look out at the Maples. Even in the dark, they’re relentlessly and unapologetically green, as if no circumstance can alter their condition. Later, they’ll be burgundy and magenta, claret and bronze.
I mail Scotty an O’Hare Airport postcard. I sit on the porch, eaves entwined with Wisteria and abandoned finch nests. I watch the mail truck come and go. 8 pick-ups pass on the dirt road. I walk to the creek. I stand at the well. Then I follow the perimeter of the property and return to the house.
Madeleine is in her music room. It was the attic the band used as its official rehearsal space. My father turned it into a real music room for her, one slow refinement at a time. He glued acoustical tiles onto the walls and put skylights in the ceiling. When Madeleine plays piano and writes songs, she can look out the thermal paned glass windows and watch the forest run through its seasonal progressions.
Maples have scales and melodies. Wind sounds differently in red and yellow leaves than it does in green. It’s more like horns and brass. When leaves turn burgundy and magenta, the forest is fragile and tinny, like it’s filled with clusters of miniature cymbals. Winter is drums and castanets and all forms of percussion.
Madeleine is playing guitar, sitting on the floor, her back leaning against the wall. She’s lit incense and cranberry scented candles, but I know she’s been smoking pot. I determine this by how her body is inordinately airy and receptive to sway, even though there’s no wind in the room. She could float away but won’t. Her hair is long and falls across her face, streaked with a gray that resembles currents of silver. Her hair is a smoky mirror. I can watch her head and know what she’s thinking.
“Do you steal?” I ask.
“Everybody steals,” Madeleine says. “We all dip from the same trough, dear.”
“So you steal?” I press.
“It’s unconscious. Sounds and images live inside. They mutate. When you write a song, you don’t even realize the palette you’re really using.” Madeleine puts her Martin acoustic guitar across the pillow near her leg. She gestures for me to sit beside her. I stand where I am.
“I mean things,” I say.
“Things?” Madeleine repeats.
“Like clothes or lipsticks or boxes of candy.” I stare at her. “Or guns.”
Madeleine says, “No.”
“Why not? Because it’s wrong?” I am tall above her. I’m a sapling, intrinsic to this forest. I have my own dialect of shadow and metamorphosis.
“No,” Madeleine replies. “Things you can buy don’t interest me.” She picks up her guitar.
“Why do you keep writing songs?” I demand. “Mother says it’s ridiculous. There are no 40-year-old unknown singers. Zero.” I make my fingers form an 0. I hold this 0 in the air between us. I move my 0 up and down and jump from one foot to the other. “You’re never going to sell anything!” I scream. My voice bounces off the tiled walls.
“I’m not trying to sell anything,” Madeleine says.
“So why do you do it?” I need to know.
“It brings me pleasure.” Madeleine strums a chord progression. A minor, G and F. Then she plays C, F and G. She plays it over and over, at least a dozen times. “Those are 3 chords you could build a world on. I’d take them to another planet.”
I walk outside through acres of shoulder-high wild flowers and into the big barn. My father wears his white lab coat and washes Psilocybin Mushrooms in the sink. They’re veined with purple, as if they’re organs, pulsing and alive, waiting to be transplanted. The marijuana plants are eight feet tall. Soon my dad will cut them down and hang them up-side-down to dry from ropes strung between the rafters. As they cure, resins accumulate in the buds. He’ll sort the buds by size and quality and vacuum-seal them. The leaves are compacted into bricks, weighed and packaged in plastic and canvas.
“Mom and Marty are Republicans now,” I reveal.
“So what?” My father runs water over the mushrooms and places them on the drying mesh. His hands are steady and nothing spills.
“Don’t you hate Republicans?” I’m confused.
“I don’t hate anyone in particular. I’m an anarchist.” My father spreads mushrooms across the mesh in even rows, none of them touching.
“Why didn’t you go back to school when the band broke up? Like Marty?” I decide this is a good question, even though it isn’t directly connected to the 10 Commandments.
“I was happy as I was,” my father says.
“But you could have made lots of money. You could have been important,” I point out.
“I’m important as anyone,” my father says.
My father dries his hands with a towel. He crosses the dirt floor to where I stand. He wraps his arms around me and holds me pressed against his chest. I hear his heart beating, each individual increment of pump and flow, and I do not count them.
“Do you steal?” I finally ask.
He releases me from our embrace and stands an arm’s length away, examining my face. It reminds me of when he looks in a mirror, shaving. Then he says, “No.”
“Why? Because it’s wrong?” I’m not wearing my red lipstick with the dangerous disguised stars embedded in them. My mouth is stark and small. It’s a winter mouth now.
“There’s nothing I want,” my father says.
It’s the cusp between summer and autumn. It occurs to me that transitions can be crossed by trapeze. The grass beneath my bare feet is a soft half-asleep green like pond water. Deer are sighing and pawing between Maples. It’s the end of blueberry season. Apples redden in baskets. I hear squirrels and fox, finches and owls, crickets and frogs. There are more sounds than I can count, but I just want to listen by the pond until all the stars come out.
WHAT THE LILIES KNOW
A my Gold hears the rumor and instantaneously recognizes it’s true. She’s being denied tenure. Then Alfred Baxter Coleman ambushes her in the corridor. Alfred Baxter Coleman, the ABC of the History Department, stage whispers the terminal news to her. He executes his standard mock Indian mime, emitting a sort of emphysemic whoop, and his arthritic fingers anemically slap his thin lips, sporadically, with no discernible rhythm. Whoop whoop. He ho. He ho.
What he actually says is, “No way, Sweetie. Told you.”
He’s intimated this for months. Amy ignored him.
She stumbles into her office and reaches onto her desk to steady herself. She picks up the first object she chances to touch. It’s her phone book. She holds it in her palm like a magic stone, an amulet, a medicine bag. The pages are fragile as petals or antiquities. It’s an artifact with disasters between the lines.
On this particular morning, she dials her mother. Then she waits for her mother to answer. Raven Gold is an integral component in her arsenal of weapons of personal destruction. Raven is the core, her plutonium centerpiece. Amy needs an action to definitively express her rage and grief, something like a hand grenade or bullet. Raven can pull the trigger.
Cellular service, with static intermittent voids and uncertainties involving wind currents and angles, has finally come to Espanola. Theoretically, they can now communicate directly. But Amy Gold cannot talk to her mother. They speak as if with flags the way people do at sea when conditions are mutable, possibilities limited and primitive. They choreograph pieces of cloth. The planet is compressed into a basket of fabrics. They wave at each other with rags.