I ask as of a not quite real nightmare: and who was the woman under the bed telling a long, almost but I have to say not funny, frighteningly unrememberable story, and who were the much-decorated twin Marines adrift in slow-motion orbit about the Moon? Yet I kept scraping, and 80- and 150- and 220-sandpapering down to the rubbed-pale, somehow distinguished paper that had been coarse- and fine-sand. Now sounding an eerie thinness of bottom that I would rap proudly, and wishing my mother or someone would come here by chance and only for a minute and look at what I had to show. It was her college cello she was playing this July day we found ourselves apparently alone, she with a touch, a lostness and sweep of elbow enough to make you smile (I could see her), it was comical, a fineness of face I could see in the wood I worked never imagining that I was being watched; and “not a musician,” she said, for she “never” played her cello; dragged it up here (in the car) along with her high school clarinet, “the easiest reed to know” (though a weakie next to piano and sax), plus her plastic recorder from primary school. Why does she play only when she “has time”? I am told I said, because I would say things.
To my father this summer of 1966: If you could find a war you liked would you go fight in it?
Grownups laughed, so my sister I believe laughed too but didn’t like it. So what has changed? (For this has not.) Say things and people will hate you. Go to your enemies for the truth, for justice. Say things and many people will pretty much love you. My father with much political chatter both about American police state and freedom I recall didn’t seem to expect much of me. I am finding the words; they, really, me. He was for freedom. He saw you as being set for life with your abilities. I mean that you couldn’t do much, you were pretty ordinary but the struggle for freedom would make it OK. But what has changed?
The woman listening nods almost imperceptibly.
From that time, that day? I add.
My mother had a policy of more or less not going into town, whereas I had two friends there, one with a Buck air rifle that shot.177 BBs who had plans for us, and one with a real bow who fletched his own arrows, and a thick red blue and white target with a stand. My mother’s wariness became mine, I weighed her words. (Why don’t I think of the house as ours? Feeling like a lodge as you went foreignly through the front door — and who knew where you would wind up, is there an undiscovered annex? What was unfixed about it, if anything? We had bought the place after renting it one summer, and I was nearly twelve and believed in ownership down to the faintly harsh or peppery peppermint smell of my mother in the hall, “extremely independent” (my father described her but it didn’t sound right).
Until, this morning, on my knees on the shed floor, tapping the flat bottom of my boat, fighting it, pampering it, blowing on it, caressing it, and fine-sanding the inside, so that with proud unconcern I heard the ajar door creak and knew someone was in the doorway of this tool shed behind me (did I need a sweep-oar instead of a tiller?), I heard the faraway inside-the-house cello and turned with my sandpaper block in my hand to see a man in green perfectly familiar to me but unexpected, ambushed (both of us), so that I looked at his dark green workshirt, a tiny American flag pin in the pocket button-hole, and turned back to my work as if he visited me often or weren’t there, or I had contempt for him or respect.
I recall because perhaps from just about that time (because it came from this very man), I had learned that no one could touch me.
It was my friend’s, my playmate’s, father, our neighbor, and he asked me if I had seen Liz. (But why was he over here?) He came and stood. “Sand and varnish, varnish and sand,” he said. “Makin’ a boat?” he said. What can you say to that? “Where’d ya find the wood?” he asked, as if he knew. Right here on the floor he was standing on, I told him and he said my toolshed looked just like when the owner his friend had lived here. Former owner, I said. “Too bad he had to sell.” I didn’t mind, I said. “You don’t mind,” this man said methodically. “He was a nice fella. Not enough work around here, it’s gone down statewide.”
Continuing with my own work, I asked what work his friend, our last summer’s landlord, did. “Whatever needed doing,” Liz’s father said. “Somebody’s playin’ the violin,” he said. I looked up at him and I nodded, and in some way new to me smiled and continued my work. But I heard the distant cello’s throat-gripping, wide, biting, caressing (I believe), string-rubbing stroke of tune deep-drawn by the bow and hung along the layers of flattened day and absorbed midsummer color.
But succeeded suddenly this time by my mother’s voice, the way the cello gives itself over to the winds, for she was singing way inside that house, and I wondered if Rob was there, her bosom buddy — could I have missed the cutting sound of his tires in the driveway coming to keep her company? I looked up at Liz’s father — his name was Whelan — who had turned toward the door hearing the singer now. Was this why he had come, though I had never heard her do just this?
Women — I thought of her as women for the first time I believe — had a bodily distance from us that we are to accept; hence, to be importantly apart from: which gives you the distance to understand them and what they and you have to lose.
The woman listening to me laughs vulgarly.
Or, to bear this after all bodily reasoning still further, that this Vermont man (though Vermonters are more intelligent, my father had said) could not tell a cello from a violin because he was not from the city; and so he did things more slowly and painstakingly; that my father did not change the oil in our car himself like this man flat on his back; that city people controlled large things they did not need to understand.
I thought I did Liz’s father an injustice. But what?
Or that we were having a visitor from a foreign country today though he was American, and that the man with me in this tool shed had had a flag July 4th which would have been fun to fly, that they had a cousin whose son had come home wounded and sick — one was like a cut, the other was like a disease inside: country people sent more men to the war than city people because country people could do things but the things they could do kept them from seeing that the war was, according to my father and mother and their friends, wrong; and this morning Liz’s father (though he said, Don’t tell her I was looking for her, he squinched up his nose in a friendly look) had really come to see or scout out my mother whom he hardly knew, or the place, because my father was not here. Though now he asked if I was going over to Montpelier with my father, burn some cloth (it sticks in my hearing much more than Whelan’s ugly, interesting face) — and I said my dad had already gone — Oh, Liz’s father knew that — and it wasn’t Montpelier, it was into town. “Oh, we know all about that too,” said my visitor, as if I were a free citizen — he was a builder, a local contractor, and there were some who disagreed with him about the war but not about flag burning, and my father was taking the briefest time out from a heavy schedule of rallies and raising money. He had been written up.
Yet this man, for some reason in my tool shed, was the father of Liz whose mother mine could never be. I leaned back on my heels and held up my boat, turned it over, ran my finger all over it, and I know the man with the much-too-pink face and positively golden pale crewcut said, “Taking justice into your own hands.” “Wartime,” I said. “How’d you know it was a boat?” I said.
“Keel.”
I said I had some work to do. I meant Still to do. “Varnishing, sanding,” I said.