Later, when I was an adult, someone at a dinner party played me a recording of Asian monks who could indeed split their voices, create a shattered, choral sound that was like being oneself but also so many others. It was a choir of brokenness, lamentations. It wasn’t pretty, but it reminded me again, right there at that dreary meal — everyone pronouncing on Marx, Freud, hockey, Hockney, mugged liberals, radicals with phlebitis, would Gorbachev soon have his own Hollywood Square? — it reminded me of the sound I might have managed if my efforts had succeeded. It reminded me of how children always thought too big; how the world tackled and chiseled them to keep them safe.
Certainly “safe” is what I am now — or am supposed to be. Safety is in me, holds me straight, like a spine. My blood travels no new routes, simply knows its way, lingers, grows drowsy and fond. Though there are times, even recently, in the small city where we live, when I’ve left my husband for a late walk, the moon out hanging upside down like some garish, show-offy bird, like some fantastical mistake — what life of offices and dull tasks could have a moon in it flooding the sky and streets, without its seeming preposterous — and in my walks, toward the silent corners, the cold mulchy smells, the treetops suddenly waving in a wind, I’ve felt an old wildness again. Revenant and drunken. It isn’t sexual, not really. It has more to do with adventure and escape, like a boy’s desire to run away, revving thwartedly like a wish, twisting in me like a bolt, some shadow fastened at the feet and gunning for the rest, though, finally, it has always stayed to one side, as if it were some other impossible life and knew it, like a good dog, good dog, good dog. It has always stayed.
The summer I was fifteen I worked at a place called Storyland with my friend Silsby Chaussée, who all this is really about. Storyland was an amusement park ten miles outside our little village of Horsehearts, a quarter mile from the lake. Its theme was storybook characters, and there were installations and little enactments depicting nursery rhymes — Hickory Dickory Dock or Little Miss Muffet — as well as fairy tales. Snow White. Hansel and Gretel. There were rides and slides. There was the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, which was a large purple boot you could climb to the top of, then coast down its aluminum tongue into a box of sand. There were the Three Billy Goats Gruff — an arced redwood bridge, a large plaster troll, and three live goats, who could be fed rye crisps purchased from a dispenser. There was the Jungle Safari section, with its floating rope bridges and submerged, fake crocodiles. There was Frontier Village, with its fake ghost town and the local high school boys dressed up as cowboys. Finally, there was Memory Lane, a covered promenade between the exit and the gift shop, lined with gaslit street lamps, and mannequins dressed in finery — moth-eaten bustles and top hats — then propped precariously against antique carriages. Sometimes on rainy days Sils and I would eat our lunch in Memory Lane, on one of the park benches placed along the walk. We were conspicuous and out of place — half mimes, half vandals. But most of the tourists smiled and ignored us. We sang along with the tinny, piped-in music, whatever it was — usually “After the Ball” or “Beautiful Dreamer”—but sometimes it was just the Storyland theme song:
Storyland, Storyland—
not a sad and gory land.
But a place where a lot
of your dreams come true.
Books come to life and nursery rhymes do, too.
Storyland, Storyland:
Bring the whole famil-lee!
(And Grandma-ma!)
The coda about Grandmama, hovering there in some kind of diminished seventh chord, like the comic soundtrack to a cartoon — waa-waa-waa — always made us grimace. We would sing along, our mouths full of sandwich, then open wide to showcase our chewed-up food and our horror at the thought of our grandmothers there, in the park, somehow standing in line at one of the rides. And Grandmama!
Eeek!
Sils was beautiful — her eyes a deep, black-flecked aquamarine, her skin smooth as soap, her hair long and silt-colored but with an oriole yellow streak here and there catching the sun the way a river does. She was hired by the Creative Director to be Cinderella. She had to wear a strapless sateen evening gown and ride around in a big papier-mâché pumpkin coach. Little girls would stand in line to clamber in and tour around the park with her — it was one of the rides — then be dropped back off next to a big polka-dot mushroom. In between, Sils would come fetch me for a cigarette break.
I was an entrance cashier. Six thousand dollars came through a single register every day. Customers complained about the prices, lied about their children’s ages, counted out the change to double-check. “Gardez les billets pour les manèges, s’il vous plaît,” I would say to the Canadians. The uniform I wore was a straw hat, a red-and-white striped dress with a flouncy red pinafore over it, and a name tag on the bodice: Hello My Name Is Benoîte-Marie. I’d sewn nickels into the hem of the pinafore to keep it from flying up in breezes, but besides that there was nothing much you could do to make the dress look normal. Once I saw a girl who’d been fired the year before driving around town still wearing that pinafore and dress. She was crazy, people said. But they didn’t have to say.
In summer the whole county was full of Canadian tourists from over the border in Quebec. Sils loved to tell stories of them from her old waitress job at HoJo’s: “I vould like zome eggs,” a man said once, slowly looking up words in a little pocket dictionary.
“How would you like them?” she’d asked.
The man consulted his dictionary, finding each word. “I would like zem … ehm … on zee plate.”
That we were partly French Canadian ourselves didn’t seem to occur to us. Sur le plat. Fried. We liked to tell raucous, ignorant tales of these tourists, who were so crucial to the area’s economy, but who were cheap tippers or flirts or wore their shirts open or bellies out, who complained and smoked pencil-thin cigars and laughed smuttily or whatever — it didn’t matter. We were taught to speak derisively of the tourists, the way everyone in a tourist town is. In winter we made fun of the city people who came north to Horsehearts’ Garnet Mountain to ski. They wore bright parkas and stretch pants and had expensive skis, yet could only snowplow. They screamed when they fell, wept when their skis released and sped off down the trail. We would zoom by them in our jean jackets and jeans and old tie boots. We would smirk and hum Janis Joplin songs, descend into the quiet of the trees, with our native’s superiority — our relative poverty, we believed, briefly, a kind of indigenous wit.
At Storyland, when Sils — Cinderella herself! — came to fetch me for a smoke, I would shut down my register, let one of the ticket tearers watch over it for me, and then go off with her, into the alley between Hickory Dickory Dock and Peter Pumpkin Eater’s Pumpkin, where we’d haul out a pack of cigarettes and smoke two apiece, the Sobranies and Salems that made us feel gorgeous and wise. Sometimes our friend Randi, who was Bo Peep and had to wander through the park carrying a golden staff and wearing white ruffled pantaloons and a yellow-ribboned bonnet (moaning to the children, “Where are my sheep? Dears, have you seen my sheep?”), joined us on a quick break.