from S P R A W L

Each new day there is the coming through of sunlight between the oaks. Things fall and because of that there is a kind of discontinuous innovation. Birds and sparkling insects fly through the backyard in the morning atmosphere, so wet, and the wings might fail, though I’ve warned them. Daily I criticize the mechanics of flight and lecture about natural philosophy in the garden. It’s all so removed from the idea of the world. It’s confusing like that—to have a double perspective producing no good effect. But my new hat, it’s a kind of originality, an accident. I wear it. I wait on the edge of the sidewalk. “Come inside,” I say. This is what happens after days of gigantic smiling. A person ought to know better. I say, “What do you mean ‘yuck’?” I say, “I saw this once on television.” Then I say, “I don’t care,” and “Probably,” and “Let’s go,” and “I did it because it felt good.” This place is as large as any other town. What influences the Richardsons? What influences the Saintsburys? The two questions go hand in hand. We belong to it. How do we cope with the privacy of various domestic characters? The letter, of course, the familiar letter, we employ it. Dear Mrs. Barbauld, It is primarily for the sake of your re-orientation to our town that I write to you today. There are more interesting letters, of course. There are no doubt letters with unreserved emotions, just as there are many ways of communicating that are, especially in retrospect, alien to one’s own individual experience. It’s difficult enough to take in the results, all the sordid aspects. Only gauge what’s arisen during old Mr. Richardson’s lifetime! The changes have imposed themselves on our features. What does it signify? Flowers, birds, churches, planes, resorts, malls, green places. Industrial clusters and country houses. Just yesterday I fell asleep in the tall grass near the old train station. It was a complete picture. A fashionable park. Yet the picture had its sordid and selfish aspect. I can’t seem to say what I mean, Mrs. Barbauld, but with some urgency I mean to inform you what a triumph the big city has become. I am a secular individual but even I can feel the shift in the horizon utterly alien to the constitution of things, the habitual. Sincerely, etc. I move in shade on the edge of a parking lot under walnut trees in the early morning around the edge of a curve in an accidental manner. I walk the sidewalk and ripple the surface of it. From this condition I have a view of the world. Magazines provide images of half-cooked food products. Glazed and slick they seduce us like any raw material. Books offer helpful suggestions about how to lead our lives (let the kitchen sparkle, become fully insured, do not approach the sidelines). On the evening news the periphery is always in decline, but we are able to project our own great men into its material present as if extending ourselves into other cultures—an archipelago somewhere west of Hawaii (and pineapple rings on grilled hot dogs make “Hilo Franks”). After this we return to normative-centralizing activities, such as the time we made a replica of our town out of sugar cubes, or when we gathered to string garland around every phone booth on Main Street. But Haywood defends himself against my moral intrusions. He stands in the kitchen holding a knife and a mushroom. He says, “Clothe your instructions in less abstract examples.” He is angry because he was raised to be a substantial Protestant with stories of utility to tell the women, and relevance. Without it he gets cranky. I prevail. I appear to be free from design or discretion. It is an easy discovery of the “feminine.” I walk through the doorway wearing my aggressively orange hat. I do it over and over. I do it as a kind of series and then I do it in reverse. I do it as an indicator of a particular lifestyle, to redefine myself and exclude others. First I do it in a red pantsuit and then I do it in the nude. I do it and I say, “I doubt it.” I twirl a little when I do it. I do it and am striking when I do it because I do it in a frilly dress like meringue. Afterwards, we eat bread, corn, cupcakes, cheese, and two chickens, and then we argue about it. We ingest liquids and a bunch of different fruits. Together we forget where we parked the car. We go into houses to witness the presentations. Domestic life appeals to us as well-rounded. When we lick each other we do it without any sense of “before” or “nowhere,” so you can see we do it as suggested. Also, we worry for money and are employed worrying about things. While it’s been proposed that we are more interesting than characters on television, one day soon we will be characters on television. The story is well told. The water tower can be taken up as a challenge to the mist. It invokes a center relative only to the imperceptible pattern I leave with my footsteps, mostly at night. Feeling like a mist, I look at things, trees. The water tower takes on sonnet form. In my dreams I embellish it with tacky Christmas decorations. I sit at the kitchen counter with the cat by my feet and watch the lights of the city in the distance and a skyscraper. Helicopters and planes revolve around it in peculiar orbit. Meanwhile, the book in my hands says we should try to hone our “sensation of of, if, the, and some as well as tree, smoke, shed, and road.” I put the book on the counter and go into the yard. I do a little dance somewhere near the fence. I raise my arms above my head and swing my hips. I lower my arms and tap my feet on the grass. I do this for a while, and then I sit on lawn furniture, and then I finishing cooking dinner. In this place, we eat chicken and peas at least once a week. Once a month we organize three weeks’ worth of leftovers and once upon a time Mrs. Richardson introduced a new trend that was very spatially interesting; it was intended to embellish our looks like poodle skirts or microwaves (an approach to history). We smoked clove cigarettes and stood in the Miller’s backyard; I refer to these as the “early times.” And other trends: we wrote poems. I wrote them with Lisle. I wrote her poems and she wrote mine. The subject matter was Egypt. We followed each other around town without looking, like tribal migrations. This was one whole epoch of my life. Later it seemed incomprehensible. Today Haywood uses language to articulate a room and I’m supposed to move inside it. I bump my hips against edges of tabletops but I’m surprised to find each detail intact and some dramatically more effective than what preceded (two eggs on a white linen tablecloth). It’s a kind of new Industrial Age and all our information is encoded or reproduced. I take three or four showers a day, but this would never make it into a biography of the town. What we want is a “true celebrity,” an automatic pop star who can supervise the details of our lives. What we lack in inspiration we make up for by public charity, like the time we bought cowboy hats for the nameless kids who wander the town, or the time we all fainted at the murder of Lucy Patterson. It’s a whole universe of suggestion. There are all sorts of trends in the hedges (pornography, garbage, toxins, booze) and all over the countryside (atomized families, robots, childrearing, etc.). Mrs. Agnew is vilified for her intake of candy, the unfortunate part she plays in American culture, her red-headed remoteness. I stare at her front yard and try not to be there at all. So I close my eyes and become lightened and shadowed by clouds in the background and the foreground. There are dirty dishes in the sink and blooming roses on the countertop. On the table is a white tablecloth, a honeydew melon, two peaches, a paper napkin, two plates, two spoons, a lollipop. Also there is a ripeness, some strange flavor, erect and curious in my mouth. So I start on foot. For a while I pass nothing but the usual ribbon of lawn, then after a while I pass something else and a dog. Soon I pass Mrs. Clare and Mrs. Audrey. I say, “This is a really nice lip balm.” Then I say, “Set the table,” then “Gems!” then “Nope.” Later, I ignore myself on purpose, which takes practice. The book in my hands offers an analysis and sometimes a celebration; it says there is an “ascendancy of private, individualized transport.” It’s true we have ample parking and this is almost impossible to reverse. In the middle of the street are several small household appliances and a round yellow cake, which must have crossed into my path like a glass plate broken in a fit, or a healthy lawn, or a jar of grape jelly at the supermarket. All these things overlap and line up at the same time. I write letters on the white linen tablecloth and the dark blue ink enhances the effect of the cloth by providing stark contrast. Meanwhile, the crows in the yard act like dogs and Mrs. Wick leans over to tell me she’s on a journey she likes to call “Mrs. Wick.” This gossip involves listening and is for my own good. On the evening news there’s a report about a national hero and a story on the two types of food: packaged and unpackaged. I learn there are many methods of preparation, such as freezing, freeze-drying, condensing, and dehydrating. I learn that last year a woman died from tuna fish, which doesn’t require mixing or cooking so it’s easy for you and your guests. The reporter says top chefs in major cities are using a new type of packaged food; they prepare the food themselves (liver, salmon, ribs, carrots), and seal it in plastic, and freeze it for up to eighteen months. One chef is interviewed. He says the whole world has been cooking the same way for over two hundred years and this has got to change. He shows his tongue to the camera to indicate playfulness and drops a lobster in boiling water. According to the reporter, this gourmet-packaged food can be served at four-star restaurants and to first-class passengers on airplanes and the armed forces defending liberty and freedom in all its forms. So I stand in front of the television holding the remote control. I aim it at myself for what must be twenty years. Then I turn south and take a long walk down sidewalks. There are a range of real activities in this place. One kid says, “Bring me an ice cream cone,” but sometimes you have to read between the lines. There are haircuts and play dates along with corporal punishment, orders, increased comforts, spinning, sleeping, eating, etc. There is love for people named Brittany and people named Jack, and most of us display some skill at pressing faces, or pressing people for information about what we like and what we find comfortable, or comforting. One way to recognize us is by our preference for styrofoam. We enjoy having lots of room, waterways, car races, immunizations, gymnastics, murals, hamburgers, vines, babysitters, policies and programs, encircling verandas, skateboards, and shrubs. Also, we like hoeing and bathing. When he returns from his job in the city, Haywood cleans his ears and asks for a drink. He sits by the fireside with a cocktail and talks to the television. He says, “I have been to the outskirts and back again several times.” The arrival of cars was one particular epoch in this place. We bought cars whole families could fit in, cars with convertible tops, and tin trays for eating, and wonderful colors, and musical horns. Today we have cars with satellite mapping systems and anti-lock brakes. Also, we have latent perversions and other luxuries and good dinners and youth movements and next year we will not feel more or less crowded or more or less confined than we do tonight. Meanwhile, we have heavenly weather and then a letter arrives. Among other things it eloquently and wittily hints at upcoming events. It’s a very warm letter, ultra-comfortable. I spend the whole day sitting prominently on the porch, sunbathing in winterish sun, watching a massive and continuous flow of migrating birds. Smashing! Large birds land on my lawn and flap their wings and shake. I associate myself strongly with them, with the way they put one foot in front of the other, and how they keep their heads aimed at the ground. They eat well. They have a huge and panoramic view of my house, yard, and automobile. We look across the wide green lawn and by the end of the day they’ve eaten several snails. I make two ribs of beef for dinner, one tuna, four omelets, one iced cucumber soup, two Chinese cabbages, two salads, five hams, one chicken liver, and for dessert I make pears in wine, one strawberry tart, one lemon tart, three apple pies, one Bananas Foster, and three chocolate cream pies. It’s important to consider the effort it takes to survive. The world actually has signs with skulls and crossbones, vermin, separation anxiety, nightmares, etc. But one highly respected tradition in this place is to get away from all that. The organization is based on the theme of American history and has fundamentally changed the feeling of this once-bucolic setting. We ignore each other when we turn corners; also, we surround our neighborhoods with motorways and dull facades. Nevertheless, everything surprises me: everything I’ve forgotten, townsmen who belong to me and townsmen who do not, hula-hoops, prudence, garlic peelers, gulls, sunsets, swimming pools, asphalt, eggs, buttons on the stove, algae, credit cards, crops. I nod and return to my book: “Take any normal street of average length and just consider all that fucking!” Different views: we look at them sideways, up and down roads, transforming trees and boulders into eloquent mini-landscapes with subtle lighting and fountains. A kid on the street says, “Rocketry.” Another kid says, “Oomph.” Then one day there’s a broccoli quiche on the edge of my dining room table. It’s like a mysterious omen. I’m aroused and I almost lift it up and take it to myself like some seed I’d already planted; but instead I walk around it, all the way around, leaving a crescented track in the carpet with my spike-heeled shoes. Meanwhile, someone is shouting at someone else in Spanish, on the sidewalk, someone in a grey truck, I can’t make it out. Dear Mrs. Baxter, Welcome. Your earnest and expensive skepticism is otherworldly. For this reason, I advise you to take two or three sheets of paper and make a journal of anything remarkable that occurs in the next few days. Idle romances, typographical reproductions, eye- and ear-witness testimony, the reality of our special community—I recommend all these pleasures to you now. You’ll need to keep track. You’ll have to be strong, Mrs. Baxter. Everything is different, but over time, to a certain extent, nothing really happens. Such is the critical authenticity of every historical moment. Focus on apprehensible objects and their previously unapprehended relationships to other objects around your house or this place (your body to fish, glass to a quality of mind). It’s a deal of fun. Yours, etc. Noise of a cat running over stiff grass, but the cat doesn’t matter so much as the feelings its tiny feet feel. It bends a sort of emptiness around. Haywood goes out very naturally and then he comes back in. He tells people there is such a thing as cultural enchantment. He presents me with all sorts of failed objects. He holds them up against my body so that I harden into wrinkles and strange postures. This is in our bedroom or at home in front of a whole shelf of very terrible books. His arm reaches out and rests on the table and I hesitate to stand and turn and look. Instead I might function on a practical level, such as people who hardly ever articulate what they know, or I might behave in a way to be admired, mounted, like a pretty hen, or a comprehensive weapon to be polished. I stand upright in the garden like a tulip in order to relearn how to speak. I stand beside lawn furniture and am more than comfortable. I warm coffee for the chickadees and call them fellers. The backyard is thick with blackbirds and squirrels. I walk the whole distance of it; if you go back and forth all day it’s like dozens of miles from one end of our house to the neighbor’s. Then I go inside and pass one coffee cup, one spoon, one cherry, eight cherry pits, a half-eaten pear, two paper towels, and a paper napkin on the edge of the dining room table. Meanwhile, Haywood plans exacting labors. We close the blinds and in this connection we cannot refute the following statement: “Oh Haywood, Haywood.” I bake croutons and stand in the kitchen. Later, I cut across the lawn and run into a dog. Once upon a time, this place was home to bears and muskrats, hunters, rum, whip-poor-wills, carts, mud-turtles, minks, ducks, loons, donkeys, rabbits, hickories, highway robbery, a stranger with a bun in her hair, and other things you can read about. Today the color blazes, the tulips in the box—violet and vivid green. Our own brand of localism is traced back to settlers of specific persuasion and beautification. These settlers expressed a particular concern for what the book calls “macho sectors of manufacturing,” as well as picture windows, pets, churches, bean fields, straight lines, long and shallow rivers, staplers, buffets. For my own part, I decide I have the power to influence change in the landscape with remarks, such as: “We’re so proud of what we perceive as our heritage.” This is the fleeting language of a day. It partakes of parks, hats, stalls, gum. Anyway it’s hard to accomplish things that so easily lose their end-in-themselves. It takes so many doors and mouths and stores. The street sings. It might be a mountain of fanned causes, or a hybrid construction, like buildings that shed themselves as they grow, or the weird flavor of onion in your mouth when you start to panic. There never was such a mighty belief-system. I dust plants and look out at backyards, at red and green playground equipment, at hot tubs and hoses. At the same time, the water delivery man moves along an S curve, around the side of the house, with water on his shoulder, within the space of a short section of path, between orchestrated gardens, purple vines, trees, birds, various dead insects, variants, variegations. He knocks on the glass in the kitchen door and waits for me to take the bill from his hand. He is a young man with auburn hair. I say, “Début!” For lunch I eat sliced turkey and a disappointingly small piece of avocado. Later, I arrange myself. I decide to take a bath in the middle of the day and stare at myself in the mirror. I observe all kinds of transformations on my skin and in my muscles. I move in different directions, with subtle variations in my eyes or knees, or I crouch by the hamper to play with the cat. Then I fill the tub for goodness knows how long and ornament myself richly with a variety of fragrances. I enjoy raising a bowl of scented water above my head. I sometimes even take an active part in anything strange. The book in my hands describes “a land of enchantment, a garden most gorgeous, a plain sprinkled with coloured meteors, a forest with sparks of purple and ruby and golden fire gemming the foliage.” The book says pearls, shells, and certain precious man-made objects can assist in scenarios of craving. I can’t wait to open them up to see if there might be something fascinating inside. I do it on a chair or with my hands or feet. I get pleasure from acquiring knowledge about everything from hands and feet to handmade wicker baskets. For instance, the arrangements around the house are meant to show my attention to such items, to things placed at an angle, or pinned up, or to religious teachings (indicated by an open book on a chair), as well as decorations and collections of plates, peaches, candy, etc. Several of my tabletops are tilted for better locating the center of my domestic charisma. It takes approximately three hours to appreciate the importance of a mislaid knife on a wooden table, an enormous stain on a white linen tablecloth, or a landscape of leftovers floating weightless around a room. Meanwhile, a copper pot on its side sends a gleaming reddish glow onto a honeydew melon and a number of objects: a glass of milk, a bowl with a knife in it, the skin of my own hands. I shift small decorative boxes from room to room and begin to feel ungainly. The small boxes glint in the half-light as I place them in specific patterns, as markers of my own personal history, or like a new museum. In all the boxes are remnants of past relationships, specific locations, like statuettes within homes, or a range of associations—letters, photographs, scraps. Dear Mrs. Roberts, I sympathize with you. I really do. Mrs. Roberts, you possess a kind of impenetrability most Americans find “smart.” I feel I know you intimately without ever having met you. You are America’s Sweetheart. You are like no other person, Mrs. Roberts. You know a lot about how a woman’s mind works. Mrs. Roberts, you know just when to start and when to stop. You are seen and heard from south to north. Also, there is a third reason: your house is your castle with its mock-Tudor exterior and precocious children. We all greatly admire your long driveway and eagle ornaments. Warmly, etc. For one whole summer, Lisle and I believed the water tower in the center of town was filled with enormous spaghetti and meatballs and that if we were rude or unpleasant a giant meatball would fall out the bottom of the tank and roll down the sidewalks and find us and crush us dead. Years later, Lisle and I applied ourselves sincerely and with tragic dignity to photographs of people long dead, or to stories of mysteries in foreign landscapes, or familiar landscapes, or murder mysteries, or stories of children locked in attics, or cheerleaders, or stickers, or public pageants, or photographs of squirrels, or turtles, or turtles’ eggs. For a period we tried to be industrious witches who could open and close doors with our minds. We rode bikes at the edge of town, through orchards and fields, collecting stray cats in baskets. Then Lisle began cutting notches on her ankles or wrists to mark the years. Needless to say, we developed a whole host of human concerns, physical mythologies, and informing personal principles regarding “natural” curls and hair that looks “sexy” or “head-turning,” or hair that is “long” and “angled in front for movement.” We learned all kinds of protocols involving “how to,” such as how to make your life “prettier” or “better organized,” or how to get “more bang for your buck,” or how to “make a splash,” or how to walk through a garden with a rosy bloom on your cheek. Haywood and I enjoy walking through the lawn equipment area in a department store in the mall. There’s a smell of chemical fertilizers and a real-life sparrow is trapped in the branches of a potted tree chirping at passing shoppers. In other sectors of the mall we pick out bathroom tiles or formal wear or pickles. We return home and change clothes or put things in cupboards. We hold hands in the dining room. We watch the evening news and learn about weather, ping-pong, hot air balloons, war, and celebrity scandals. Hundreds of people are nominated for awards. We watch the parades on television. Haywood asks, “What ever happened to real cheese?” We shake boxes of food. This method imposes a deliberation. We postpone dinner and walk the empty street searching for signs. On the sidewalk I find unfriendly footing on a section turned up by roots, yet leaf-buds delight me. Young boys run by with red fire engines in their arms and complain about the rest of their lives, but looking at the stars I take a cheerful hint and am invaded by the memorable. I whisper to Haywood with a vulgarity that seems surprising. In bed I think of all kinds of individual names, and some numbers, and other names. These aboriginal or primary thoughts are depicted as I drift to sleep. My mind clicks like a machine and I see men walking, and a chair and clock, and a stranger, and a thousand other particular things, and am suddenly bathed in the language of another person, or persons. Then I dream we have an indoor pool and I serve sophisticated snacks to neighbors poolside (hamachi tuna and rack of lamb). In the morning, the cat licks Haywood’s face before he gets out of bed. It’s an approach to nature. Haywood shaves and showers before work. He carries a cup of coffee onto the driveway and backs into the street without looking. A husband will do all sorts of things. We stare at each other. Actually, he stands next to me and puts his hand on my shoulder. We are united by all sorts of facts, a divine ordinance, or something like that, slogans. In the pursuit of milk, yogurt, progress, etc., we are long, maybe fourteen feet stretched out, and together we know thousands of miles worth of information. Also, we develop guilt feelings and interpret each other’s physical uniformity or discordances; for example, when I see a mysterious spot on his cheek, or when he would connect my breathing to what I eat for breakfast (jam on toast and a pot of tea). When we first met I stopped seeing another man so many times a week for so many years in a row. This other man lived in the city and had a habit of forcing his way into my ear, to suck out whatever was in there—air, feelings, space to oneself. This was a last straw; things were messy. He would be introverted because no one would say anything. Maybe he was right. He was certainly enthusiastic and he grabbed my arms and held them over my head when he did it. Today Haywood is tied to the bed and I am going along to vacuum the other room. I shift fruits from the floor to the heavy glass tabletop; I line them up on the edge. It’s exciting and I look forward to him telling me how surprising it is to poke and scramble about in the midst of our intimately satisfying personal relationship. On the other hand, less feminine attributes pass through my mind at times like these—everybody’s walking barefoot on Mrs. Williams’ carpet. They say, “Can you believe it?” We are given fresh glimpses of the ground: mounds of plush grey carpet, pebbles, concrete, trash. No one wants to consider the importance of this earthy destiny. Meanwhile, the kids with no names are all over town. They supply a stylish language with which to talk about serious issues; they live on the edge of my habits. I think I should be allowed to solve their problems. I think about a lot of unnecessary things. For example, I walk down the sidewalk and think about three chairs in my house. Then I get home and observe my dirty floor. A green glass bowl, a peach, a blackberry, an apricot cut in half, cake crumbs, and fallen purple petals litter the tabletop in the kitchen. And yet, in spite of these surroundings, I have friends like everyone else. I have talents and am easily dazzled and I can say “I’m sorry,” or “That’s the upside,” or “Right up my alley!” whenever the moment arrives. On any average evening I remove my clothes like anyone else. Afterward, there are a number of erotic rituals. I’m often inaccessible during such amusements. I say stupid things. I say, “Woodpile,” or “What’s this?” Then I do stupid things. There are some misunderstandings and some feathers, and later there is some irritation. Still, I can be anything I set my mind to. I can be a movie star vixen or a saucy French maid. It’s true I turn into a cleaning lady at times; other times I refocus my attention on my own movements, such as twisting or turning. I never really meant to be born at such and such a time with such and such habits; however, I was raised during the last fifty years and trained to match my outfits to the décor. There are all kinds of chronological stages. For example, there is a parade of lights each year. One townsman tells me it’s a time-honored tradition, but I don’t believe it. In this place, we once upon a time drank water from leaves and set traps for wolves and North American Indians. We invented houses with conveniences or luxuries or we sat in the open air to gather dust. Travelers passed by in herds, diligently following each other like railroad cars for safety and convenience to saloons run by men with glass eyes. The modern drawing room consisted of a divan, an ottoman, a sun-shade, and an oriental rug. Today I imagine busily dusting furniture. Then I imagine throwing furniture out a window instead of dusting it. I imagine dust gathering on broken furniture and horse shit on the ground. Meanwhile, the countertop is crammed with apple and orange peels. A half-eaten lollipop rests on its clear wrapper beside a pestle and mortar, also a white plate dirty from a slice of cherry pie, several aspirin cut in quarters, and an empty glass container. Before lunchtime, alone on the sidewalk, the world rolls by like a magical ride. The ice cream truck jingles as I pass and all the lawn gnomes offer a cheerful “Hello!” They look out with dead aim at the perfect beauty of lawn care, carpools, mailmen, etc. It’s their nature to inhabit such scenes like temple guards. Throughout the day this is more or less the quiet language of the block. It partakes of leaf blowers and competes visually with daytime television and advertisements for migraine medication and the sacred rights of citizens. I feel my instincts concentrated in my hands and feet. My feet search out the shallowness of the sidewalk like a clear stream. I follow it by degrees, in soft ripples, around children, churches, lawn mowers, dogs. I don’t even think about the permutations of violence or beatitude: plastic marigolds, stone pigs, lawn jockeys. One old man in a blue house in the middle of the street paints his sunflowers red, white, and blue every July. It’s my job to send him letters. I ask about the good and the bad. He responds by sending me books on arithmetic or old-time almanacs, but one day he drops dead without ever having entertained me, without ever having written down his wise thoughts, and without actually appearing to know anything beyond his strange whistling to himself and his painted yard. So I have lunch with Mrs. Batt. Together we have long eyelashes and remember many outings and activities, such as being upside-down on our heads, or sitting motionless like ducks, as well as ceremonies, disappearances, personal tragedies, and other stories that express whole years, if not centuries.