all those months in Mechanic Falls where I begged Gordon to be a little more fond of television! To Sonny, who never drank, never smoked tobacco or weed, TV was his dope.
I was raring to go live on my own, maybe close to the university. I made several calls while at the adjunct office and was waiting to hear back about two fairly okay apartments within walking distance of the campus.
So I was on my way home from the university to Sonny’s place after classes late one afternoon, pulled into the IGA in Egypt, came to stand staring at the plastic see-through cartons of cheese tortellini, which I knew had enough calories for a family of brontosauruses. It was a tight mass of scarlet in the corner of one eye that made me turn and look up. Gordon. There alone. Red chamois shirt all tucked nice into his belt and jeans, old work boots, no cap, just his cowlicky hair and dark lost-at-sea-for-days scruff of beard and great thick drive-me-crazy Zapata mustache and an expression that could mean anything. He did not move a muscle. He was like a deer in the headlights. His one “crazy” eye didn’t flinch or widen or squint Tourette’s-ishly.
I wasn’t needing to wear specs yet in those days. Just my own wide eyes. See, it was as if I were looking at a skyscraper against blazing sun.
So I came to live in my own small dear cottage. He himself directed the crew that set the cement and framed up the roof, walls, and floors. He himself wired my lights. No photovoltaic panels, commercially made, nor the beer-and-soda-can ones so many other cottages had for just collecting heat, because this cottage was on the shady lane up a long rocky ledgy steeper hill. We had semi-to-barely-dependable electricity from the windmills. Then he used the table saw to groove the pine wall boards, the way I like, made me a big bed of pine, all that lathing and dark brooding stain. He painted around the many-paned windows of the tiny “sunroom” and hand-carved a tiny table in the shape of a toadstool, just enough flatness on top for a book and a cup of coffee. In one of the kitchenette windows he set colored glass, the kind you can see through, a blue world, a red world, a yellow world, a green world, pale purple, brown. Worlds of my birches and my violets outside and slopy field below.
He himself made my bookcases and built-in drawers and a cedar chest with carved bears loping across the front. The older women here whose hands could not rest, who were always tugging on a stitching needle or running a thickness of fabric under a presser foot, gave me quilts in classic patterns and stirring colors. One in all browns. And then came rugs.
At first, once I moved in, the agreement was that he would stay away from my cottage. I’d see plenty enough of him at meals and through the day when I wasn’t going to the university. But then one damp and weedy, peppery-sweet, early spring evening in the big sandy Settlement parking area, me coming home from somewhere and he coming home from somewhere, our vehicles parked end to end, we stepped out and I touched him casually on the forearm of his nice thick flannel shirt. And just like that other time at the IGA, he froze. It was a raptor’s grasp the way I closed my fingers tighter around that forearm, as far as my short fingers could reach, maybe digging in some.
And that was that.
Now I am one of them.
My mother has always been into God, Jesus, and church doin’s. But I have always been more of a thinker, more of a Big Questions person. More of an explorer. Maybe even a sort of scientist. And tough. No matter what happens, I don’t worship or whimper much. What I do is bitch. That is waaay different from worship and whimper. And with me, so much has happened that would make a grown man cry, as they say, but not ol’ Bonnie Loo. Until that day in the IGA parking lot about six years ago. I had the Volvo. A seventeen-year-old Volvo yuppie car. A kind of strained-baby-food-peas green. Seats torn up, funny brakes, but still chugging. But you know, they are very expensive to get fixed. I had Gabriel with me in his car seat. He was still nearly brand-new to this world but old enough to have a human expression on his face like he recognizes you and kinda likes you. And when you weren’t expecting it, that big grin that showed the pointy tip of his tongue. He had a nice big face, chubby arms, nice and solid, my side of the family. Well, the Bean side. Pomerleaus are shrimps. Yuh, my mum. A funny, chain-smoking, churchy little shrimp.
Anyway, Gabe was with me and I was coming back from Bridgton. Probably the dentist up there. I refused to do commerce with the rotten moneygrubbing bastard here in Egypt. Kill me first!
Anyway, I’m tootling along, speed limit, which my stepfather Reuben reminds me all the time makes cops think you’re drinking. You’re supposed to speed like a lunatic so they’ll think you’re sober. “Wake me up when things make sense,” I always tell him. Anyway, I was almost home but I turned into the IGA here in East Egypt and right behind me are the blue lights. Double Bubble, as we used to say as kids.
I stopped the Volvo between two parked cars and the cop comes over to my window and he is NOT FRIENDLY. He has a face like a photograph of a face. Hair like a boot camp marine. Smokey hat. And a voice like a computer. “License and registration and insurance,” this computer voice says and he looks at my sticker on the windshield, which is expired because of the exhaust and the rocker panels and a bunch of other shit.
I get out the license and registration with shaking hands. And then the insurance card.
In the back seat Gabe is smiling tongue and all at the cop and swinging one of his legs, thumping his little sneaker on the car seat. But the cop was NOT smiling back. Cop was a machine.
Cop says he’s going to have to write me up for the sticker. Not even a warning, which is what they usually give. And maybe it was the cold way he said it. Maybe I just couldn’t take one more cold voice out there in the world. I burst into tears.
This made the cop mad. His hand passing back my license and registration and insurance card and ticket made real thrusts, like anger, pissed-off anger. Like I made him sick. This made me cry even harder. I thought I’d choke. I did everything to stop but I was being swept away in horrid gags and gasps. My face was probably this great big red mess.
Little Gabe is by now crying, too, back there in his car seat.
I remember I was wearing my regular glasses all the time in those days and they dropped, first somewhere in my lap, then wound up on the floor. I could hardly see.
Cop keeps standing there. I thought he was going to hit me. I grabbed my sweater off the seat and held it to my face and then I was just really screaming bloodcurdlingly into the sweater and Gabriel was screaming and twisting in his car seat and I could hear his little sneakers driving into the plastic footrest of his seat, trying to push himself free.
“You all right?” the cop asks me. It wasn’t the same voice, not the cold voice, but almost an edge of feeling to it and I noticed, something I hadn’t at first, that his accent was the accent of these hills, that he sounded like me, my dead husband, my brothers, my little half sister, my mum, everybody I love. And this made me scream even harder, the soft edge to his voice and the accent of love.
I blubbered through my big square crying mouth, “My husband is dead! I loved him!!!!” The sweater I was holding flopped to the floor. Gabriel gasped, breathless. “They took my house! I can’t win! I can’t win! I can’t keep up! I can’t pay for everything! I can’t do it! I can’t just paaaaay for the friggin’ exhaust . . . just like whip out the friggin’ money like I just carry a big wad around with me!!!” I open my eyes and see him backing away and he turns in one kind of tough, arrogant, get-out-of-my-life motion and
