Russell Banks
Trailerpark
for my mother
A certain sense of tragedy, however attractive,
Is to be avoided.
Though there is no need to make a dogma of that…
The Guinea Pig Lady
THE STORY OF FLORA PEASE, how she got to be the way she is now, isn’t all that uncommon a story, except maybe in the particulars. You hear often in these small New Hampshire towns of a woman no one will deal with anymore, except to sell her something she wants or needs — food, clothing or shelter. In other words, you don’t have a social relationship with a woman like Flora, you have an economic one, and that’s it. But that’s important, because it’s what keeps women like Flora alive, and after all, no matter what you might think of her, you don’t want to let her die, because if you’re not related to her somehow, you’re likely to have a friend who is, or your friend will have a friend who is, which is almost the same thing in a small town. And not only in a small town, either — these things are true for any group of people that knows its limits and plans to keep them.
When Flora Pease first came to the trailerpark and rented number 11, which is the second trailer on your left as you come in from Old Road, no one in the park thought much about her one way or the other. She was about forty or forty-five, kind of flat-faced and plain, a red-colored person, with short red hair and a reddish tint to her skin. Even her eyes, which happened to be pale blue, looked red, as if she smoked too much and slept too little, which, as it later turned out, happened to be true. Her body was a little strange, however, and people remarked on that. It was blocky and square-shaped, not exactly feminine and not exactly masculine, so that while she could almost pass for either man or woman, she was generally regarded as neither. She wore mostly men’s clothing, a long, dark blue, wool overcoat or else overalls and workshirts and ankle-high workboots, which again, except for the overcoat, was not all that unusual among certain women who worked outside a lot and didn’t do much socializing. But with Flora, because of the shape of her body, or rather, its shapelessness, her clothing only contributed to what you might call the vagueness of her sexual identity. Privately, there was probably no vagueness at all, but publicly there was. People elbowed one another and winked and made not quite kindly remarks about her when she passed by them on the streets of Catamount or when she passed along the trailerpark road on her way to or from town. The story, which came from Marcelle Chagnon, who rented her the trailer and who therefore ought to know, was that Flora was retired military and lived off a small pension, and that made sense in one way, given people’s prejudices about women in the military, and in another way too, because at that time Captain Dewey Knox (U.S. Army, ret.) was already living at number 6 and so people at the park had got used to the idea of someone living off a military pension instead of working for a living.
What didn’t make sense was how someone who seemed slightly cracked, as Flora came quickly to seem, could have stayed in the military long enough to end up collecting a pension for it. Here’s how she first came to seem cracked. She sang out loud, in public. That’s the first thing. She supposedly was raised here in Catamount, and though she had moved away when she was a girl, she still knew a lot of the old-timers in town, and she would walk into town every day or two for groceries and beer, singing in a loud voice all the way, as if she were the only person who could hear her. But by the time she had got out to Old Road, she naturally would have passed someone in the park who knew her, so she had to be aware that she wasn’t the only person who could hear her. Regardless, she’d just go right on singing in a huge voice, singing songs from old Broadway musicals, mostly. She knew all the songs from Oklahoma and West Side Story and a few others as well, and she sang them, one after the other, all the way into town, then up and down the streets of town as she stopped off at the A & P, Brown’s Drug Store, maybe Hayward’s Hardware, finally ending up at the Hawthorne House for a beer before she headed back to the trailerpark. Everywhere she went, she sang those songs in a loud voice that was puffed up with feeling if it was a happy song or thick with melancholy if it was a sad song. You don’t mind a person whistling or humming or maybe even singing to him- or herself under his or her breath while he or she does something else, sort of singing absentmindedly. But you do have to wonder about someone who forces you to listen to him or her the way Flora Pease forced everyone within hearing range to listen to her. Her voice wasn’t half-bad, actually, and if she had been singing for the annual talent show at the high school, say, and you were sitting in the audience, you might have been pleased to listen, but at midday in June on Main Street, when you’re coming out of the bank and about to step into your car, it can be a slightly jarring experience to see and hear a person who looks like Flora Pease come striding down the sidewalk singing in full voice about how the corn’s as high as an elephant’s eye. It can unsettle your entire day if you let it. And of course most people can’t help but let it.
The second thing that made Flora seem cracked early on was the way she never greeted you the same way twice, or at least twice in a row, so you could never work out exactly how to act toward her. You’d see her stepping out of her trailer early on a summer day — it was summer when she first moved into the park, so everyone’s first impressions naturally put her into summertime scenes — and you’d give a friendly nod, the kind of nod you offer people you live among but aren’t exactly friends with, just a quick, downward tip of the face, followed by a long, upsweeping lift of the whole head, with the eyes closed for a second as the head reaches its farthest point back. Then, resuming your earlier expression and posture, you’d continue walking on, wholly under the impression that when your eyes were closed and your head tilted back Flora had given you the appropriate answering nod. But no, or apparently no, because she’d call out, as you walked off, “Good morn-ing!” and she’d wave her hands at you as if brushing cobwebs away. “Wonderful morning for a walk!” she’d bellow (her voice was a loud one), and caught off guard like that, you’d agree and hurry away. The next time you saw her, however, the next morning, for instance, when once again you walked out to Old Road to the row of mailboxes for your mail and passed her as, mail in hand, she headed back in from Old Road, you’d recall her greeting of the day before and how it had caught you off guard, and you’d say, “Morning,” to her and maybe smile a bit and give her a friendly and more or less direct gaze. But this time what you’d get back would be a glare, a harsh, silent stare, as if you’d just made an improper advance on her. So you’d naturally say to yourself, “The hell with it,” and that would be fine until the following morning, when you’d try to ignore her and she wouldn’t let you. She’d holler the second she saw you, “Hey! A scorcher! Right? Goin’ to be a scorcher today, eh?” It was the sort of thing you had to answer, even if only with a word, “Yup,” which you did, wondering as you said it what the hell was going on with that woman?
You wouldn’t be alone in wondering. Everyone in the park that summer was scratching his or her head and asking one another what the hell was going on with the woman in number 11. Doreen Tiede, who lived with her five-year-old daughter Maureen in number 4, which was diagonally across the park road from Flora Pease’s trailer, put Marcelle on the spot, so to speak, something Doreen could get away with more easily than most of the other residents of the park. Marcelle Chagnon intimidated most people. She was a large, hawk-faced woman, and that helped, and she was French Canadian, which also helped, because it meant that she could talk fast and loud without seeming to think about it first and most people who were not French Canadians could not, so most people tended to remain silent and let Marcelle have her way. In a sense she was a little like Flora Pease — she was sudden and unpredictable and she said what she wanted to, or so it seemed, regardless of what you might have said first. She didn’t exactly ignore you, but she made it clear that it didn’t matter to her what you thought of her or anything else. She always had business to take care of. She was the resident manager of the Granite State Trailerpark, which was owned by the Granite State Realty Development Corporation down in Nashua, and she had certain responsibilities toward the park and the people who lived there that no one else had. Beyond collecting everyone’s monthly rent on time, she had to be sure no one in the park caused any trouble that would hurt the reputation of the park, she had to keep people from infringing on other people’s rights, which wasn’t all that simple, since in a trailerpark people live within ten or fifteen feet of each other and yet still feel they have their own private dwelling place and thus have control over their own destiny, and she also had to assert the rights of the people in the park whenever those rights got stepped on by outsiders, by Catamount police without a warrant, say, or by strangers who wanted to put their boats into the lake from the trailerpark dock, or by ex-husbands who might want to hassle ex-wives and make their kids cry. These things happened, and Marcelle was always able to handle them efficiently, with force and intelligence, and with no sentimentality, which, in the end, is probably the real reason she intimidated most people. She seemed to be without sentimentality.