Banana Rose (11 page)

I nodded.

“Yeah, Dixie Sue had white stockings and a star in the middle of her face. Her eyes were deep brown and the size of golf balls. Together me and Dixie heard the sound of summer when we rode through the fields. The hills were filled with oak, scrub brush, and sumac. We commiserated over the heat as we sweated and swatted mosquitoes. We were best friends.

“My grandmother worried that I was too in love with that horse. She said only young girls loved horses that way. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I’d sneak out barefoot. I knew by instinct where in the large pasture Dixie Sue would be feeding. I’d climb on her and lean back, so my head rested on her rump. I’d just lie there and look up at the stars, a lot like tonight. They spread over Iowa like a great dark American flag.” He sighed. We both were leaning back, our eyes glued to the sky. “Dixie Sue’d just continue to eat the sweet grass, hardly moving. She knew it was me on her back.

“Sometimes we’d take off in the moonlight. I’d hold tight to her bronze mane. The bluffs along the Blackhawk River and the narrow paths between shrubs and trees were lit with a shimmering silver, and there was a guiding light.

“Once we came to the top of a ridge farther than we’d ever been before. Nell, I never told anyone this.” He hesitated. “Nell, we saw angels. Three of them. They were having a cookout below the ridge.” When he said “cookout,” I started to laugh. “No, I’m serious. They were sitting around a fire and their bodies shimmered like rippled water that you can put your hand through. Two of the angels were yellow, but the middle one, she was the color of salmon meat. She was beautiful. Dixie Sue and I just kept gazing at her. Then the angels got to realizing we were there. We could tell, because they began twinkling faster. We didn’t want to bother them, so I yanked Dixie Sue’s mane. She turned her long neck and head and we started home. The whole way back I hummed ‘Angels Watching Over Me, My Lord.’ ”

Now I was sitting erect, looking at Gauguin. “Wow,” I said. “Was that true?”

He nodded. I took his hand and tried to imagine seeing angels.

“Gauguin, I don’t think there were angels in Brooklyn. At least not when I was growing up.”

“Sure, there were,” he said. “You just weren’t looking in the right places.”

We got up and went to bed. Just as I was falling asleep, Gauguin began to talk as though finishing the conversation we were having out on the bench. “Nell, sometimes I think I am a horse. I used to watch the horse in front of me when I rode with someone, how long and graceful its back legs were. Their legs move right into their hips in a magnificent motion—”

I fell asleep just then and in my dream I was an iguana on a beach. I turned over and woke up. It was a short dream. Gauguin was still awake; his arms were up on the pillow behind his head. “Hey, Gauguin,” I said. “You might be a horse, but I’m an iguana.”

“Oh, Nell, you are bananas,” he said.

“No, really. I dreamed I was an iguana, just now. I’m an iguana!” Gauguin laughed and I hit him.

Gauguin began to make whinnying noises like a horse. I felt his hot breath on my neck. This horse began to make love to his iguana. His iguana lifted her short green iridescent front legs over the horse’s shoulder. We turned over each other as I closed my eyes. Horse and iguana. Horse of ribs and hanging flesh, old horse rolling in bed with the sharp fast body of iguana. Above us was a waterfall. Egrets hung from trees like white gardenias. Bougainvillaea were draped over the branches of a magnolia tree. What country were we in? Horse and iguana didn’t care about country. We felt the sun on our backs, and we slithered over rocks as we joined our juices together near a shallow wide river, flowing over sand embankments.

“I
’M THINKING OF
going backpacking alone in the Pecos,” I told Blue to her back. She was bent over, picking spinach from our garden.

She stood up. “Look at this, will ya?” She held up green leaves. “Right here on our own little ol’ dry land. Come, I’ll make you something fancy—eggs Florentine. Got them fresh from Henry.” She took my hand.

I sat in the window seat of her small adobe while she cooked the eggs over her fireplace. “So you’re going to the woods all by your lonesome.”

I nodded, but she couldn’t see me nodding.

“Banana, go to Heart Lake. Not the Pecos. The Pecos is too rough. This is a journey you’re going on. Go to the heart.” She turned her head from stirring the eggs.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I know.” She put the eggs in two bowls and handed me one. The yellow of the yolk stared up at me from the bed of sauteed spinach, sprinkled with orange cheese. This was Blue’s style of being gourmet. It was good, but I knew it wasn’t eggs Florentine.

“You want something, Nell Rose. It’s written all over you. You have to go find it, sugar.” She rubbed my knee. “But you have to go to the right place to find it.”

“What do I want?” I asked her.

“You tell me.” She smiled.

“I want to be a painter, Blue,” I confessed.

She nodded. “And you’re afraid. No one in your family ever did anything like that. All your mother ever told you was to get married.”

“How did you know that?” I asked.

“And you’re afraid you’ll be no good.” She paused. “I don’t sit in the fireplace all day for nothin’, honey lamb.” She tickled my arm. “My family is rich and respectable and Southern. When I was five, Elsie, the cook, smeared black soot across my forehead and said, ‘Chile, you not made fur this here world. You get out someday.’ I thought she meant I’d have to shoot myself with my granddaddy’s pistol. Then much later I heard her tell Sonny, her boyfriend, one night when he picked her up after dinner, ‘That chile’s a mystic. Mark my words.’ I didn’t know what that meant except my mother wore Mystic Blue perfume. So all that spring I walked around smelling the magnolias and the azaleas, everything that bloomed, so I could figure out how I was like perfume. Old Elsie knew a thing or two, and she gave it to me.”

I nodded. “Blue, do you think I could really become a painter?”

“If you want to,” she said, taking a spoonful of her eggs Florentine.

I went to Heart Lake near Questa, as Blue instructed. It was an eight-mile hike. I carried a red frame pack on my back and walked through sunlight and shade on a narrow dirt path. Along the way, wild strawberries grew close to the ground. I bent and picked the bittersweet red dots that hung from the dark green plants. A stream rippled nearby. I stopped several times to sit on the white flat rocks that bordered it. About halfway to the lake I took off my shoes and socks, and while the stream ran over my bare feet, I broke open an eight-ounce Nestle’s bar. It had almonds. The sugar pact that I’d made with Gauguin had gone to hell over and over again. It was a lot like meditation, I surmised. No matter how many times your mind wandered, you brought it back to the breath. No matter how many times I bit into chocolate, I remade the nonsugar vow between bites.

As I neared Heart Lake, the trail became steep and I walked almost on my toes, placing one foot directly in front of the other to go up the incline. When I reached the top, I saw a perfectly still green lake with rock cliffs at the far end, just as Blue had described. No one else was there.

I leaned my backpack against a birch by the lake’s edge and began to collect firewood. Blue had told me it rained a lot this high up, and I wanted to find dry wood before it became dark. I collected a pile of twigs and dead branches. Some were wet and green, but I figured if I got the fire going strong enough, it would dry out the damp ones. I unzipped the back pocket of the pack, took out some folded newspaper, and balled it up to start the fire. I placed small twigs and bigger pieces of wood over the paper. The wind picked up. The ground itself was wet. It probably had rained up here earlier in the day. The paper burned some, but the fire went out when it touched the twigs. The twigs were wetter than I wanted to believe. I lit ten matches and still the fire didn’t catch. I crumbled more paper. Eventually, the twigs dried out just from the heat of burning paper.

The sun was setting and night began to crawl down my back. It was cold. The twigs and then the branches finally caught with the last match of the book. I stood up and looked around. I hadn’t had one thought in my head the whole time I’d worked to light the fire.

I tied a tarp to the low tree branches and rolled my sleeping bag out under the tarp. I sat back on a rock and pulled some garlic, a small bottle of oil, an onion, a pot, some wheat bulgur, and cheese out of my pack. I peeled the onion with the jackknife I had borrowed from Blue. I threw the brown onion skins into the fire. They burned slowly. They too were wet inside. I’d always been afraid to be alone in the woods. Now that I was here, there was nothing to be afraid of.

After I ate and stared into the fire for a long time, I got into my bag and let the fire die by itself. All night the wind blew hard and the tarp rippled and jerked against its ropes. I slept intermittently, dreaming of my grandmother. She came to the woods to visit me. She had on her plaid apron, and her hands were brushed with flour. She was making a cake. “Come, mamala, don’t sleep in these woods. It’s not nice. You should sleep in a bed.”

I said, “Please, Grandma, I’m okay.”

She shook her head. “Jewish children are never safe.” She turned around and carved a heart out of the tree bark and handed it to me. “We all suffer,” she said, and nodded. Her face was kind, and I knew she meant no harm. I woke abruptly. “Grandma,” I called out. I wanted to ask her my question. She was gone. There were only the woods and me in my bag.

I was glad when the sky turned gray. I’d been alone now for twenty-four hours. As it grew paler, I sat up in my bag. I thought I’d meditate with my eyes closed.

After a few moments I opened my eyes and saw an ant crawl over a pebble. I breathed out slow. No enlightenment. The air smelled good. I breathed in. Last night making the fire I had had no thoughts. There had only been the match rubbed across rough paper, the twigs, the dirt, the newsprint. Where had Nell gone or Banana Rose? I leaned against a tree and began to cry. I didn’t know why I cried. I wanted to run home and see Gauguin. I blew my nose in my hand.

After I made breakfast I walked around the lake. Then I came back to my campsite and made a lunch of peanut butter and crackers. Then I finished my Nestle’s bar. Then I didn’t know what to do. I took off all my clothes and sunbathed, reading
Man Who Killed a Deer
by Frank Waters. It was a good book and I read for a long time. The shadows crossed me and I was chilly. I put on my long underwear. My clothes, hands, hair all smelled of fire smoke. It was still too early for dinner. I wandered into the woods, looking for more wood and keeping my eyes out for good rocks. I wanted to bring one back to Blue. Not a big one, just one that would fit real well in her hand. I imagined her hand. It was a worn hand with a small gold antique ring on her middle finger. A mystic? It figured. Blue didn’t seem to have any ambition, but she wasn’t lazy. Of course, you couldn’t be a mystic and be ambitious. A mystic’s job was to sit around and do nothing. I scratched my head. I’d better watch out for wood ticks. Blue, a mystic. I repeated it over and over to myself, as though I were rolling a rough stone around in my mouth. Yeah, it fit. I wanted to be something, too.

I threw an armful of small branches and a dead limb down by the campsite. Then I saw a small piece of pink quartz, the shape of a heart. I put it in my pocket for Blue and went to look for more wood.

I remembered the question I’d wanted to ask my grandmother in my dream. So, Grandma, how do you become a painter? I picked my nose. I really got into it. There was no one around to stop me.

It’s beautiful around here, I thought. I saw a grove of aspens. To be a painter—I got that far, and then my mind wandered to dinner. I could make brown rice, fry it in oil, and add an onion, a carrot, and two eggs I had brought. A little tamari. Hmmm. I wish I’d brought more chocolate. I planned to stay until noon tomorrow.

I sat down below a tree I liked, leaning my back against it. I didn’t want to read anymore. I was quiet. I didn’t fiddle around, and I wasn’t trying to meditate. So here I am, I thought. A chipmunk dodged in and out of the tree’s shadow. Then a second one joined the first.

The next morning, I woke early. The sky was lightening, and I could see soft pink above me. This was my second morning alone at Heart Lake. I took in a deep breath, pulled my arms out of the sleeping bag, and put them behind my head. The pink above me became a darker pink, then the sky turned steel blue and felt far away, way above the tree tops.

Suddenly, a bird called across the forest and its sharp sound made me jerk up in my bag. I sat up so quickly—meeting the cold in only my T-shirt, still clinging to my sleep-hot body—that something snapped in me. Out of nowhere, in that moment, I understood how to fly! It wasn’t my arms that were my wings—it was my heart. Of course! The two halves of your heart break open through your chest and carry the whole human body up! The sun cracked through the trees, and I was carried up through those branches, like a human raven, heart first. I landed on the top of an aspen and chirped “Amazing Grace” for the whole forest.

That afternoon I flew down the hill. The pack was light on my back. It didn’t all make sense, and I didn’t want to try and figure it out, but now I knew I could paint. Yes, and I wanted to make pictures, beautiful real pictures. I didn’t have to fight my parents for permission anymore. Trees didn’t ask the sky to be trees. I understood this now. I could be a painter.

“H
I,
N
ELL.”
I
TURNED
around. It was Anna. I was taking
Paul Cézanne’s Letters
off the shelf at the Taos Book Store.

“Hi, Anna. I haven’t seen you in a while.” I felt casual about it now, but also happy to see her.

“I was away. I got back three days ago.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Hey, do you want to get a malt at Rexall’s?”

“Okay,” I said. I paid for the book at the counter.

We sat on the swirling blue seats at the drugstore within arm’s reach of the Pepto-Bismol and Ex-Lax. “It’s my treat,” Anna said, and smiled.