Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls (14 page)

Back at the table I asked for the bill. Then I remembered where I was and amended it to “the check.” In France, you can die waiting to pay for your meal, which is something I’ve never understood.
How can they not want me out of here?
I’ll think. Ten minutes might pass. Then twenty, me watching as the waiter does everything but accept my goddamn money.

I’ll say that for China, though, offer to pay, and before you can stab a rooster with a rusty screwdriver someone has taken you up on it. I think they want to catch you before you get sick, but whatever the reason, within minutes you’re back on the street, searching the blighted horizon and wondering where your next meal might be coming from.

Dear Fellow Patriot/Patriotess,

Like many of you, I’d originally planned to carry a sign. The one I’d worked on pictured a witch doctor with the face of—it kills me to say it—
our president,
with a bone through his nose and that African-type paint on his cheeks. Under that I had written, “Indonesian Muslim Welfare Thug Hands Off My Healthcare You Kenyan Socialist Baby Grandma Killer.” I thought it looked pretty good, but then I ran it by my son, Todd. He’s the artistic one in the family. “Well, Mom,” he said to me, “it’s a little…busy.”

We got to talking about my concerns, and because I have so many of them, he suggested I go the flyer route. The last I heard, our God-given right to mimeograph has not been taken away—Chairman Obama’s left us that, at least!—and Todd assures me that this will work just as well as a picket sign. “The key, Mom, is to hand these to as many people as possible.”

He then gave me the T-shirt I’m wearing, which I unfolded and held before me to read: “Big…
Dyke?
” I said.

And Todd said, “Exactly!” A dyke, he explained, is someone who holds back the flood of encroaching socialism. And that pretty much sums me up in a nutshell! “Let’s add the word ‘proud’ to that,” I said. So out came the press-on letters, and voilà!

He’s made such a turnaround, that boy of mine. Back at college he was as liberal as they come—all “Down with Bush” and “Satan/Cheney ’08!” But that’s what our universities do now—they brainwash.

I said, “Get out into the
real
world, then you’ll see!” I said, “Pay some taxes for once in your life and you’ll be mad as hell too!”

And that’s exactly what happened. After graduating with a useless degree in Dance History, Todd got a job at our local community college, working in the admissions office, and when he saw the bite Uncle Sam was taking out of his paycheck, he came right around, I’ll tell you what. So did his roommate, Miles. The two of them met in college and have been as thick as thieves ever since. I actually sometimes call him “Shadow,” not because he’s black, which he is, but because he and my son are so close. It’s actually him who xeroxed these flyers for me.

Both Miles and Todd are familiar with protest marches, mostly from their misguided college days, but as my son said, “Walking is walking, Mom, and whether you’re
for
torture or against it, you’re going to need to drink lots of water. That’s rule number one: Stay Hydrated! You’ll also need some good, comfortable shoes and a hat that’ll keep the sun off your face.”

I got a sombrero and hung tea bags off the brim, but Todd said it sent a mixed message, like I supported illegal immigration—which I don’t! He said it was better to wear this cone-shaped thing, a wimple, he called it, though it looked to me more like a dunce cap. He said, “Mom, please. A little sophistication!”

I said, “How will it keep the sun off my face?” So he added a visor to the front of it. As for the writing that runs top to bottom, it might look like ASSHOLE, but it’s actually A.S.S.H.O.L.E., which stands for:

That might sound harsh, but it’s how I feel. His teeth, his family, the keys to his car—I want that man to be left with nothing, just like he’s trying to leave
us
with nothing. My only worry was that it was vague, and people would think that
I
was the asshole.

“Not at all,” my son told me. “It’s a very common acronym, like CPAC, and everyone will know what it means.” So now here I am in my Big Proud Dyke T-shirt. I’ve got my cone-shaped hat on, and I’m here to say that I’m mad as hell and I want my country back. I want a Christian president who was born in America, not Africa, and I don’t want a death panel telling me when I can and cannot live. Then there’s the tax business, which really makes my blood boil. The way it is now, if I win the lottery I’ll have to give the government a much higher percentage than I would have if I’d won it when Bush was in office.

“What else gets your goat?” Todd asked when he was typing up my flyer. And I told him I was sick of the president talking down to me. “Like I’m some kind of a…some kind of a…”

“Uninformed idiot?” he said.

And I told him that was it exactly. “I’m tired of being talked to like I’m an uninformed idiot. I think a lot of Americans are, but we’ll see who’s the idiot when I join that historic march on Washington!”

Todd agreed 100 percent, and then he took me to the Greyhound station, where I got on the bus for Seattle.

To those who don’t travel very often, the Courtyard Marriott might seem like a decent enough hotel. It’s clean, sure, and the staff is polite. I wouldn’t give you two cents for its pillows, though, and the tubs are far too shallow for my taste. In the deserted lobby of one I stayed at in New Hampshire, there was a coffee bar—not a Starbucks but a place that “proudly served” Starbucks, and sold it alongside breakfast cereals and prepackaged sandwiches. I noticed it on my way back from lunch, and just as I decided to get a cup of coffee, someone came from around the corner and moved in ahead of me.

I’d later learn that her name was Mrs. Dunston, a towering, dough-colored pyramid of a woman wearing oversize glasses and a short-sleeved linen blazer. Behind her came a man I guessed to be her husband, and after looking up at the menu board, she turned to him. “A latte,” she said. “Now is that the thing that Barbara likes to get, the one with whipped cream, or is that called something else?”

Oh fuck,
I thought.

“I can do a latte with whipped cream on top,” the young woman behind the counter said. She was fair and wore her shoulder-length hair pushed behind her ears. Tiny moles were scattered like buckshot across her face, which was bare but for a bit of eyeliner. “I can do one with flavors too.”

“Really?” Mrs. Dunston said. “What sorts of flavors?”

In the end she settled on caramel. Then her husband squinted up at the board, deciding after a good long while that he’d try one of those mocha something or others. And could he get that iced?

As I groaned into my palm, he wandered off. His wife, meanwhile, leaned her bulk against the counter and began her genial interrogation. “Are you from this area?” she asked. “No? From
Vermont?
Well, that’s interesting. What brought you here?”

I learned that the coffee person used to work at the town’s other hotel, which had recently closed for remodeling. “So after it’s done, will you stay put or go back over there?” Mrs. Dunston asked. “Me, I have a son at the college, so that’s what I’m doing, just checking in. He’s my second boy, actually. The first one went here too. He’s not working in his field yet, but with unemployment as high as it is, he’s lucky to have anything at all. If I’ve told him that once, I’ve told him a hundred times, but, of course, being young, he’s impatient, which is natural. Wants to set the world on fire, and if it can’t happen by tomorrow morning at nine a.m., then life’s just unfair and hardly worth living. What about you? Did you go to college?”

It’s one thing to be jolly and talkative—my mother was that way. A dry cleaner, a gas-station attendant: no one behind a counter or cash register was spared the full force of her personality. The difference between her and Mrs. Dunston is that my mother had a sense of her audience—not just the person she was talking to but others around her who were listening in. “I can see you’ve got a line,” she’d have said at some point, or, “Look at me, monopolizing all your time.”

She’d also have made her chatter more compelling. In my mother’s version, the underemployed son would sleep each day until dusk, possibly in a dank basement, with the leg of a dismembered child in his mouth. She spoke in a voice that addressed everyone and invited them to join in. Mrs. Dunston, on the other hand, was simply loud. Loud and just as dull as she could be.

After what felt like weeks, the young woman finished with the orders. Two cups the size of wastepaper baskets were placed upon the counter, and then Mr. Dunston reappeared and pointed out the plate-glass window toward a cluster of grim buildings on the other side of the parking lot. “What are those?” he asked.

The young woman said that they used to belong to the college. “Of course, that was before they expanded the west side of the campus.”

“And when was that?” Mr. Dunston asked. He was a good ten years older than his wife, midsixties, maybe, and he wore a baseball cap with a tattered brim.

“I beg your pardon?” the young woman said.

“I said, when did they expand the west side of the campus? Was it recently or did they do it a long time ago?”

WHO THE HELL CARES?
I wanted to shout.
WHAT ARE YOU, THE OFFICIAL HISTORIAN OF WHO-GIVES-A-FUCK COLLEGE? DO YOU NOT NOTICE THAT THERE’S SOMEONE IN LINE BEHIND YOU? SOMEONE WHO’S BEEN STANDING HERE ROCKING BACK AND FORTH ON HIS GODDAMNED HEELS FOR THE LAST TEN MINUTES WHILE YOU AND THAT BRONTOSAURUS RUN YOUR STUPID MOUTHS ABOUT NOTHING?

I was this close to walking away, to marching off in a huff, but then Mrs. Dunston would have turned to her husband and the girl behind the counter, saying, “Some people!” I’d gotten a similar reaction the previous morning, when I’d squeezed past a couple standing side by side on the moving walkway connecting concourses A and B. “In a great big hurry to meet that heart attack!” the man had called after me.

I wanted to remind him that this was an airport and that some of us had a tight connection, if that was okay. But, of course, I had no connection, tight or otherwise. I just couldn’t bear to see him and his wife standing side by side, blocking the way of someone who
might
have a tight connection.

The Dunstons’ bill came to eight dollars, which, everyone agreed,
was
a lot to pay for two cups of coffee. But they
were
large ones, and this
was
a vacation, sort of. Not like a trip to Florida, but you certainly couldn’t do that at the drop of a hat, especially with gas prices the way they are and looking to go even higher.

While talking, Mrs. Dunston rummaged through her tremendous purse. Her wallet was eventually located, but then it seemed that the register was locked, so the best solution was to put the coffees on her bill. That’s how I discovered her name and her room number: 302.

My only question then was what time I should arrange her wake-up call for.
Let’s see how chatty you feel at four a.m.,
I thought.

Then it was all about returning the wallet to the purse and getting that safely zipped up before taking her drink off the counter and starting in on her long good-bye.

When the two of them finally lumbered off toward the elevator, I approached the counter, hoping the woman behind it would roll her eyes, acknowledging that something really needed to be done about people like the Dunstons. She didn’t, though, so I decided I would hate her as much as I’d hated them. When she told me that her little stand didn’t serve regular brewed coffee, I hated her even more.

“I can do you a nice cappuccino,” she said. “Or an iced latte, maybe?” This last word was delivered to my back as I stormed out the door. Then it was up the street and around the corner to a
real
coffee place. The pierced and tattooed staff members scowled at my approach, and I placed my order, confident that they would hate the Dunstons as much as, or possibly even more than, they already hated me.

I don’t know why it is, exactly, but once Hugh and I settle in somewhere, we tend to stay put. All those years in France, and except for a single weekend in Arles, I never visited the lower half of the country. It was the same after our move to England. London, we knew, but everything outside it was a mystery to us, a sort of “out there” we planned to get to “one day.” That day arrived in the summer of 2010, when we visited some friends in West Sussex. They’d told us the South Downs were beautiful, but we weren’t prepared for just
how
beautiful; these massive, chalk-speckled hills so green they made our eyes cramp. The roads were narrow and bordered by trees that formed canopies overhead. All the houses had names, and that too seemed enchanting. Our friends live in what’s called the Old Manor, which is near a place called the Granary. Hugh and I stayed with them for only one night, but it was enough to convince us, in the way that horrible, childless couples can be convinced of such things, that we needed to sell our vacation house in Normandy and resettle in West Sussex as soon as possible.

After returning to London we got on the Internet and found two properties that were within our price range. The first was called Faggotts Stack and was located between the hamlets of Balls Cross and Titty Hill. Sight unseen it had everything going for it. I’d have bought it just as a mailing address, but Hugh wanted something more beat-up, so we eventually went with choice number two, a cottage. Built, they reckoned, some four hundred years ago, it had no heat except for fireplaces and portable electric radiators. Half the windows wouldn’t open, and the half that wouldn’t close let in rain that rotted the floorboards and promoted great patches of mildew that clung like frost to the crumbling walls. There’d been a pig in the backyard but it had passed away—“Died of shame,” Hugh guessed—that’s how trashed the two-acre property was, a minefield of broken crockery, spent shotgun shells, and beer-bottle caps.

Slumped on the edge of it was the two-story cottage. Originally made of stone, it had been patched with brick and then patched again with what looked like dirty snowballs. The ground-floor windows had panes the size of tarot cards, and those were nice, as were the interior walls, which were crisscrossed with beams. The ceilings had them too, all corroded by worms and beetles.

“We’ll take it,” Hugh told me, this while standing in the living room, before we’d even seen the second floor. What with such a bucolic view—sheep grazing in the shadow of these great, verdant hills—the work seemed inconsequential. “Give these people what they’re asking, and do it today so we can get started.”

If I had hesitated he would have left me. Because that’s how Hugh is. You do not stand in his way; this I learned a long time ago. I also learned to trust him, especially in regard to property. Aside from the view, he liked that the place had not been modernized: none of the Sheetrocked closets or prefabricated shower stalls you’d just have to rip out and redo. Because the house was Grade II listed, broken windows could be replaced but not double-paned, as that would keep out the historic cold. Gutters and chimneys could be repaired, but you couldn’t put skylights in the attic or even insulate the walls, as that would amount to smothering the original beams. Hugh asked if an interior kitchen door could be moved two feet to the left, and when the answer came it was not just “no” but something closer to “hell no.” It’s as though we had asked to have ice cubes in our wine, like, “Ick, who
are
you?”

We bought the house in late July and gave the previous owners three months to pack. I was out of the country when Hugh got the keys and the builders began what turned out to be a yearlong occupation. A lot of what they did was invisible. By this I mean drainage ditches and septic tanks. The ancient roof was taken off, and when it was put back on using the exact same lichen-covered tiles, it didn’t look any different. Rotten floorboards were pried up, the mildew problem was seen to, and then the plumber and electrician arrived.

While the builders worked on the cottage, Hugh lived in what used to be the stable but was later converted into a guesthouse, the kind you’d have if you wanted to either discourage guests or contain them in one spot while slowly depressing them to death. It was especially grim in the winter, when in order to get warm you had to stand directly before the fireplace. There you’d rotate like a stump of gyro meat and wonder when the next train could carry you back to London.

By the time I finally joined Hugh in the stable, it was December, and I began to notice the many things that had escaped my attention on my previous visit. For instance, there’s a gliding club a mile and a half away. On a website, its members rhapsodize about how peaceful it is. And they’re right, gliders
are
quiet. The propeller planes that tow them into the sky, on the other hand, are like flying chain saws, and on a clear day their presence could be almost constant.

What really got to me, though, was all the rubbish on the sides of the road. In London the idea is that if you put something on a wall or stuff it between the slats of a fence, it doesn’t count. Like it’s only
really
litter if it touches the ground, at which point it’s the wind that did it, not you. It’s frustrating, but I’d grown to expect trash in a city. In the countryside, though, and in such beautiful countryside, it’s heartbreaking, one of those things that, once you notice it, you can’t stop noticing.

Our property faces a winding, tree-lined lane that leads to Amberley, a village so picturesque and meticulously cared for that it seems almost false, like a movie set. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said the first time I saw it. Because it’s almost too much: the cozy pub, the twelfth-century church, and the two dozen or so perfect cottages, many with sloping thatched roofs. The center of life is a little food shop, and walking to it on that first December afternoon, I saw more litter than I had the entire fifteen years I spent in Normandy. I said to a woman I passed along the way, “Did a parade just come through?”

When I mentioned the trash to the neighbors, they agreed that it was a disgrace. “It wasn’t like this thirty years ago,” said the woman in the house to the right of ours. She couldn’t tell me why things had changed. It was just part of a general decline. In that regard it was like graffiti, something that had inexorably spread until people lost the will to fight against it. Then, to make themselves feel less powerless, they decided it was art. I tried looking at the trash that way:
Oh, how the light plays off that vodka bottle! Look at
the bright blue candy wrapper, so vivid against the fallen brown leaves.
It didn’t work, though.

On my second day at the house I got on my bike and rode to the town of Pulborough. The first few miles are on narrow roads cut through a magnificent forest, the floor of which is relatively free of underbrush. This makes it easier for the deer to run, and affords a clearer view of the trash, entire bags of it sometimes. These are sacks of household garbage that people feel inclined to abandon for one reason or another. They’ll dump appliances too: microwaves, television sets, outdated sound systems released into the woods like they’d be happier there. There’s a landfill these things could be taken to, but it costs money and you’d have to go out of your way, so why not feed it all to the foxes? They like stereos, don’t they? And panini makers with frayed cords? Building supplies are another big item—cans of polyurethane, broken cinder blocks. Joint compound. Hot water heaters.

On the other side of the forest there’s a busy two-lane road. I’d been riding on it for a quarter of a mile when I came upon a man collecting garbage into a plastic bag. He looked to be in his late forties and wore a stocking cap pulled low over his forehead. “Excuse me,” I said, “but is someone paying you to do this?”

It was a wet day, and as a car barreled past, spraying me with mud, the man told me that he was acting on his own. “I live along here, and when the rubbish gets to be too much, when I just can’t stand it anymore, I come out and collect it.”

Another car sped by, and I said the queerest thing. “Well, you…,” I told him, “you are just a…really good…citizen.”

My face burned as I rode away, but later I’d reflect upon my goofy compliment and I would be glad that I’d stopped to offer it. It’s not that I changed a life or anything, but as the weeks passed and I eventually
became
that man by the side of the road, I’d grow to understand the value of a little encouragement.

Pick up litter, and people assume that it’s your punishment, part of your court-mandated community service.
Is it him who’s been breaking into toolsheds?
they wonder.
Him who’s been stealing batteries from parked cars?
At first I worried what passersby might think, but then my truer nature kicked in, and I became obsessed. When that happened there was no room for anyone else, except, occasionally, for Hugh, who does his part but won’t pull the car over to collect every plastic bag he comes across. He can talk about litter, but when the topic shifts to the price of heating oil or the correct way to lay a paving stone, he can shift with it. For me, though, there is no other topic.

Here’s who I’ve turned into since we moved to West Sussex: On a good day—a dry one—I don’t have any mud on my clothes, just the usual dirt from crawling under fences, this to chase down empty bottles of Lucozade, an energy drink that gives its consumers the power to throw more bottles farther. My arms are scratched from reaching into blackberry bushes for empty potato chip bags, of which there are a never-ending supply, potato chips in the U.K. being like meals in space. “Argentinean Flame Grilled Steak” a bag will read, or the new “Cajun Squirrel.”

Since cleaning roadsides has become my life, my fingertips have turned black, like spent matches, this the result of prying up bottle caps. There are almost always leaves and twigs in my hair, and because I know I’m going to get filthy, I dress for the occasion: in rags, like a hobo.

“You need to get yourself a good stick,” one of my neighbors said. “The kind with a nail on the end. That’ll save you from having to bend over.”

It’s a nice thought, but adding a harpoon to the mix would only make me more of an outcast. Then too, it might prove hard to carry. When I first started trash collecting, I did it on foot. Moving farther afield, I took to riding my bicycle, tying a bag of garbage to my rear fender and balancing a second, much larger one on my basket. On my back there’s a knapsack with moist towelettes in it. These I need after picking up dirty diapers or packs of spoiled meat that maggots are living in. I say to myself,
Just leave it,
but if I did, the road wouldn’t be clean, just
almost
clean, which is the same as fairly dirty.

Pedaling home through the forest, I’ll peer over my full, teetering trash bag and review my efforts: not so much as a cigarette butt to spoil the view.
Enjoy it while you can,
I think, for by the next morning it will be defiled. Once, I found a stroller with the seat burned out, this as if the child had spontaneously combusted. Weeks later I came upon a sex magazine, but for the most part it’s the same crap over and over, the crisp bags, the empty cans of beer and Red Bull, the endless Cadbury and Twix and Mars bars wrappers. The soda and candy point a finger toward kids, but according to the Campaign to Protect Rural England, one-quarter of the population readily admits to throwing trash out the window. That’s thirteen million people I’m picking up after, and not one of them seems to appreciate it.

One afternoon while driving back from the beach, Hugh pointed out a McDonald’s bag vomiting its contents onto the pavement. “I say that any company whose products are found on the ground automatically has to go out of business,” he said. This is how we talk nowadays, as if our pronouncements hold actual weight and can be implemented at our discretion, like we’re kings or warlocks. “That means no more McDonald’s, no more Coke—none of it.”

“That wouldn’t affect you any,” I told him. Hugh doesn’t drink soda or eat Big Macs. “But what if it was something you needed, like paint? I find buckets of it in the woods all the time.”

“Fine,” he said. “Get rid of it. I’ll make my own.”

If anyone could make his own paint, it would be Hugh.

“What about brushes?”

“Please,” he said, and he shifted into a higher gear. “I could make those in my sleep.”

A few days later, returning from the butcher in Pulborough, he presented me with his goatskin-sack idea. “Everyone gets one, see. Then, if you want a soft drink or a takeaway coffee or whatever, that would be your mandatory container.” He seemed so pleased with himself. “It could even have a strap on it,” he said. “Like a canteen but soft.”

“Well, wouldn’t people just throw
those
out the window?”

“Too bad if they do, because they’re only allowed one of them,” he said.

“And how would you clean it?” I asked. “What if you wanted milk in the morning and wine at lunch? Wouldn’t the flavors run into each other?”

“Just…shut up,” he told me.

At night I lie in bed and map out the territory I’ll cover the following day. The thing that holds me back is maintenance, retracing my steps and spot-cleaning the stretches of road I’d covered the previous afternoon and the afternoon before that.
What did my life consist of before this?
I wonder.
Surely there was something I was devoted to?

With the arrival of warm weather, it became a bit easier to live in the stable. Three old friends visited from the United States, one in July and two more in August. “Want to pick up rubbish on the sides of the road?” I asked.

And all of them answered, “Sure. That sounds fun!”

I felt like the Horsham District Council should have given them something, a free tour of the Arundel Castle, maybe. It’s the local government’s responsibility to clear away the trash, but in order to maintain all the roads, they’d need a crew of hundreds. And until people change their behavior, how much can they actually accomplish?