Who says magic doesn’t happen?
Nowadays they tell the story, switching off in tag-team fashion, making strangers laugh at wrap parties and in television green rooms. They stress the mud detail because it gives a self-effacing verisimilitude to the sordid episode.
And, yes, I know the meaning of verisimilitude—I can even pronounce it.
As a Somali maid had packed my suitcases, my mother checked each article of clothing for any dry-clean-only labels. Apparently people upstate did laundry by beating their dirty Vivienne Westwood basques between flat rocks on riverbanks. They didn’t have sashimi, either. Nor did they have Internet access, my mother explained. At least, my grandparents did not. Nor did they own a television. Instead, they harbored livestock. Not animals in some distant, abstract sense, like the downward-spiraling number of polar bears or the baby harp seals that lolled on some arctic ice floe, ripe for the Eskimo clubbing; no, these would be nanny goats and chick-chicks and moo-cows that I would tend as part of a daily chore regimen.
Ye gods.
No amount of pleading could stay my banishment, and I was summarily placed in the back of a Lincoln Town Car and whisked off, the whole of one smallish suitcase dedicated just to carrying my ample provisions of Xanax. That summer, at the tender age of eleven, I would learn to swallow my fear. To choke down my pride and my anger. And that would be the last time my mother could boast a skinny daughter.
DECEMBER 21, 8:51 A.M. EST
Papadaddy One
Gentle Tweeter,
Early on, my papadaddy conscripted me in his ongoing campaign against biodiversity. His strategy was that we two crouch in the harsh upstate sunshine and excise every trespassing native plant from a portion of my nana’s vegetable garden, leaving only the nonnative green beans. While we labored shoulder to shoulder, plucking, uprooting, endeavoring to create a questionable monoculture of legumes, he asked me, “Maddy? Dumpling? Do you believe in fate?”
I made no reply.
Still he pressed his topic. “What would you say if every iota of your life was predestined before you was even born?”
I continued to not engage. Clearly he was trying to enroll me in some demented existentialist worldview.
He paused in his weed pulling and turned his wrinkled face to regard me. “What do you know about God and Satan?” An upstate breeze ruffled the strands of his gray hair.
Without meeting his gaze, I killed a weed. I spared a bean plant. I felt like God.
“You know, don’t you, that God and Satan got themselves a feud going?” He glanced around as if to confirm we were alone. No one would overhear. “If I told you a secret, do you promise not to tell your nana?”
I yanked another weed. I promised nothing. Instead, I girded my girlish loins for some hideous revelation.
“What if I told you,” he continued, unbidden, “that you was born the greatest human being who’ll ever live?” He asked, “What if your destiny was to patch things up between God and Satan?”
DECEMBER 21, 8:53 A.M. EST
A Politically Incorrect Feast
Gentle Tweeter,
If you must know, my papadaddy and nana’s isolated upstate farmhouse consisted of a book-lined parlor… two cramped bedrooms… a primitive kitchen… none but a single bathroom. Of the two bedrooms one had been my mother’s, and now it would serve as mine. As I’d been warned, they did not own a television nor any sort of a computer. They did own a telephone, but only of the most rudimentary rotary-dial sort.
A typical luncheon would find me seated at the kitchen table, confronted by a plate filled with my worst eleven-year-old’s nightmare. Veal, for example. Or cheese sourced from nonunion, slave-labor Central Americans. Factory-farmed pork. Gluten. I could taste the spores of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. I could smell the aspartame tested on lab monkeys. When I ventured to ask whether the beef had come from cattle raised on slash-and-burn-decimated Amazon rain forest, my nana merely looked back at me. She lit another cigarette and shrugged. To buy some time I dropped my fork to my plate and launched into a droll recounting of what had happened to me the previous month at Barbra Streisand’s house party, really the most madcap mishap at Babs Streisand’s lavish beachfront villa on Martha’s Vineyard—
The telephone rang in the parlor, and Nana rushed to answer it. Her voice as thin as an odor, from the next room she said, “Huh-lo?” The springs of the sofa squeaked as she took a seat. She said, “Well, I don’t ever buy the cotton balls. I’m more likely to buy the cotton swabs.” She fell silent, then said only, “Blue.” After a beat of quiet listening she said, “Mint.” She said, “Married, for some forty-four years, now.” She said, “One child, our girl, Camille.” She coughed the words, “I was sixty-eight June last.” Adding, “Assembly of Brethren in Christ.”
Alone in the kitchen with my truncated Streisand anecdote, I didn’t eat a bite. I flung my tortured cutlet through the open window above the sink.
Likewise, dinner revealed a plateful of dolphin-unsafe tuna casserole. The piquant flavor of Japanese drift nets was unmistakable. Not ten words into my droll yarn about Toni Morrison, the telephone rang yet again.
My nana went to answer it, and from the parlor I heard her say, “Babette, ain’t it? Yeah, I’d be happy to answer a few questions….”
As before, I tossed the offensive meal out the kitchen window, making it a present to some less scrupulous rural mammal. The world was crowded with attractively starving children my parents could adopt, and I was not going to twiddle my thumbs upstate, guzzling gravy and getting too fat to be anything but a handicap to my mother’s public image.
That became the pattern of our meals. My Nana Minnie would serve me some creamed corn of politically dubious origin—obviously loaded with butter containing conjugated linoleic acid—and I’d tell a shaggy-dog story about Tina Brown until the phone rang with some telemarketer or survey taker. Dinnertime meant my nana sitting on the parlor sofa saying the word “radiation,” saying “chemotherapy” and “stage four” and “Leonard” into the telephone receiver. Where she couldn’t see, in the kitchen, I’d be sailing my fattening meal, meatball by meatball, mushroom by mushroom, out the open window. Thinking: Leonard?
Papadaddy Ben was seldom home, always running some errand that took longer than you’d expect. At times I thought my nana raced to the phone because she hoped he would call. Or that my mother would. But the caller was never anybody; it was merely some market research slave named Leonard or Patterson or Liberace phoning from God knew where.
Just once I beat Nana Minnie to the ringing phone. She was washing dishes, both hands plunged into sudsy sink water up to her elbows, and she asked me to pick it up. Giving a labored sigh, I left my plate of not-fair-trade, nonsustainable pecan pie and went to the parlor. I put the telephone receiver to my ear, and it smelled like cigarette smoke, like my nana’s coughing, and I said, “Ciao!” A silence followed. For an instant I thought it might be my mother calling to check up on me, but a voice asked, “Madison?”
It was a male voice. A young man, possibly a teenager. Definitely not Papadaddy Ben. Half laughing, he said, “Maddy? It’s me, Archer!”
He was nobody I knew, and I froze him out. As my nana followed me into the parlor, drying her hands on a threadbare towel and slinging it over her shoulder, I asked the phone, “Have we been introduced?”