Banana Rose (7 page)

I took my book,
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, and plopped myself in a booth at Grandpa George’s. Grandpa George was a Pueblo Indian, an elder in the peyote church. He was married to an Italian woman from Baltimore. She had a mole in the shape of a star on her right cheek and four front teeth missing. She was twenty-three years old, and Grandpa George was eighty-two years old. She was five foot eleven, and he was five two. One day I asked her, “How does an Italian girl from Baltimore who majored in physics end up here?”

She was turning over a white flour tortilla on the wood stove. She turned to me, grinning. “I got lucky.”

I was on chapter four in the Kesey novel. I ordered chocolate cake. Some things at George’s weren’t so good, but their chocolate cake was okay. I looked up as Cassandra walked in. Cassandra was a nomad who rode her horse across the mesa in the company of five cats and eleven dogs. I said, “Hi, Cassandra.” She said hi back, but I could see she couldn’t remember my name. I wasn’t insulted, though. Hell, if a person doesn’t know night from day, I don’t mind that she doesn’t know “Banana Rose.”

Cassandra used to own a little house in Rincoñada, a small town of about eleven buildings below the piñon hills. She was always late for her job at the general store, because she had a terrible time with time. She couldn’t understand that if the clock in her house said twelve, the clock in the general store would also say twelve. How could that be? One day she sat at her kitchen table and turned her white Big Ben back to eleven o’clock and then ran down to the post office to see what time that clock said. Lo and behold, it said twelve o’clock. Then she ran home and turned Big Ben to 3:00, 8:00, 6:00. She ran to her neighbor’s. The neighbor’s clock said 12:05. She ran to Sanistevan’s car repair next door. That clock said 12:06.

Cassandra spent the whole afternoon turning the hands of Big Ben. Outside the blue morning glory petals curled in on the heat of the day. Cassandra made 12:30 happen. Then 3:30. Then 8:30. She examined all the half-hours. Then she looked at the quarter-hours. She fine-tuned minutes to 11:23, 4:23, 7:23. She turned midnight to noon, morning to afternoon. The heavens turned faster and the earth spun through stars and sunlight all in her little kitchen in Rincoñada.

Cassandra had gone through many winters and springs. By Big Ben time, she was in 1995. Things were spinning in the room. One o’clock, two o’clock. The flowered wallpaper, the pitcher on the refrigerator. Three o’clock, four o’clock, five o’clock, six o’clock. The green linoleum, the vigas on the ceiling, the light switch, the painting of a Cheshire cat sitting next to a mouse with a peace sign above their heads. It was a whole day of spinning. Did her grandmother Beulah die last year, or was she in some future life about to be born? If it were eight in the morning in Rincoñada, how could she call Peking, China, in the coin phone down at El Mercado and it not be morning in China, when it would be morning in Taos? And how was it that if all the clocks in Rincoñada—she quickly grabbed a pen and paper to calculate exactly how many clocks that was. She figured that if she included Under the Sun Art Gallery, which no one included as part of Rincoñada anymore, because they had had a For Sale sign up for the last twelve years saying, “For One Dollar Down You Can Own This Place,” Rincoñada had twenty-nine clocks. If all of them were precisely correct, so that at 11:01 they all said 11:01, when Cassandra moved her clock to 11:08, how come they didn’t all jump ahead? Weren’t they all interconnected?

The next day, when she walked into the general store at ten o’clock instead of nine, Jake started to yell at her. She ignored him and pulled out the footstool, reached up to the clock above the cans of ham, turned the little hand back to nine o’clock, and went over to the cash register and began to wait on customers. His mouth fell open. He went over to talk to her. Before he had a chance to say anything, she turned to him and said, “You know the baby I lost last year? She left time, that’s all, and spun out into another century.” Jake drew his eyebrows together and scratched his left ear.

Cassandra had never seemed so happy and relaxed. At two o’clock she stood on the footstool and changed the clock to five o’clock. She smiled at Jake as she walked out the door waving. “Is it okay if you lock up? I have some things to do.”

She went home and put a sign in her big bay window: “If you know what time it really is, you don’t need to live here.” She hammered three boards across her front door and left. Ever since, Cassandra has traveled the hills of northern New Mexico with all her animals, coming into town only if the dogs have been lazy and haven’t caught enough jackrabbits. Then she scavenges food for them. Once in a while she gets lonesome for a clock and sits in the lobby of the New Mexico Federal for a half-hour and studies the second hand moving click click across all the numbers. She sighs, seems to feel at peace again, and leaves on Sugarfoot, her beloved horse, and the whole band of animals follows her.

Jake told me all this one afternoon when I had a flat tire near his store. So now when I see Cassandra, I never mind that she doesn’t know my name, since I know she’s living in eternity.

I ate the icing between the two layers of my chocolate cake first. It was pretty good. I thought of the icing my mother used to put on my birthday cake. She’d used Bakers chocolate, and the cake shone like a slippery seal. It was still raining out. I finished the cake and paid. I didn’t want to sit in George’s. I wanted to sit in Ratner’s on Delancey Street near the Brooklyn Bridge. I was in a bad mood. I walked down to El Mercado and wandered up and down their aisles. I could get pink moccasins. No, I could get bubble gum in the shape of a toad. I could go outside.

I went outside and sat in the plaza in my yellow slicker. I let the rain fall all over my upturned face, but I wasn’t happy. This wasn’t romantic. I could go home and start a fight with Gauguin. That could be entertaining. I could tell him I didn’t like the way we made love last night. It had been fine last night, but today it could be fighting material. What other fighting material could I think up? He didn’t make enough money. I didn’t like when he played music the other night and came home at 2
A.M.
He forgot to buy me coffee yogurt when he went shopping, and he knows how much I like coffee yogurt. He made fun of the painting I did two days ago, said the circle in the middle looked like a melon, when I’d meant it to look like the world.

I began to smile. I was feeling a little better. I had real things to be unhappy about. I thought, “Gray is gray, and rain is rain. Rain is a plural word. If only one raindrop fell from the sky, would it be rain? If that raindrop fell only on me, would I be the only one who knew rain?” I decided to go to Rexall and get some chewing gum. The gum was twenty-seven cents.

I took a walk down Morada Lane, east of the plaza. It was a long dirt road, edged by Russian olives. The ruts in the road were filled with puddles. I stood in front of one and watched the rain hit the water’s surface. The puddle only reflected gray sky and a vague brown image of my face. I walked to the end of Morada Lane, but I wasn’t finished walking, so I went up past the Mabel Dodge house and kept going. Mabel Dodge Luhan was a rich woman from the east who’d moved to Taos and married an Indian from the pueblo. Out behind her house was pueblo land—miles of sagebrush, and to the left a little cemetery with a morada. Way in the distance I could see a cottonwood, the only standing tree. I headed for that cottonwood; when I got there, I was going to hug it. The earth was very muddy and sucked each of my footsteps, but it was the smell of the sage I remember most. Sage is the color of a blue line in your notebook. Don’t think blue. Actually look at the line, then water it down a bit. Make the color run over the whole page. Let it become diluted turquoise, let it mix with a touch of yellow, and let it stand against a red brown. Now let that color become smell. Fill the gray air full of rain. Let your ears go dead. There is no sound. That’s what it was like back there behind the Luhan house.

The cottonwood had just sprouted new green leaves. I wrapped my arms around its trunk. In the distance on the ridge, I saw Cassandra on Sugarfoot, her five cats and eleven dogs following her into eternity. I liked Taos again. Brooklyn was another world.

Then it dawned on me of course I knew what to do today. I didn’t need to start trouble with Gauguin. I could paint! Why had it taken me so long to figure that out? I suddenly felt sure and confident. The cottonwood gave me courage—I felt it in my body—and the sage and the mud and the rain breaking open the sky all told me I could paint. Paint something good and finish it.

I ran almost all the way back to my car through Kit Carson Park, down Bent Street. I was breathless, gulping for air, my open jacket flying behind me. I passed Blue’s truck in the parking lot, and I saw Happiness across the street in front of the Taos Inn. She waved—at least I think it was her—and I waved back, but I couldn’t stop to talk. I wanted to hold what I was feeling inside. I wanted to pour it all out into a painting.

When I got home, I could hear Gauguin in the other room, practicing scales. I didn’t poke my head in because I didn’t want to bother him and I didn’t want him to bother me. I pulled out my acrylics, but before I used them I took a piece of charcoal and drew a fat mountain, an upside down V, just like a kid would do, right in the center of the thick paper. Then I drew a star on the left and a quarter moon, low so it looked like it was receding in the distance, on the right side of the mountain. I sketched a few crooked rocks down below the moon but nearer to the mountain, and I drew a few birds in the sky. The birds were V’s, too, but right-side up, also like kids do. And as I worked, I felt things. Drawing first let me get ready for painting. I felt space inside me and the majesty of space beyond—almost as though space were time and the painting would be ancient, would have distance, going all the way back to the dinosaurs. I drew some ridges, jagged and irregular, back between the moon and the mountain and then on the other side, too, below the star. Then I added more stars.

I wet my brush and worked quickly, squeezing paint onto the palette and sometimes directly from the tube right onto the paper and then spreading the paint with the brush.

Gray on the mountain. Then purple. Then some blue. And green tinged at the base. A yellow sky the color of ripe pears. Then I made the yellow a bit brighter. The moon was gold and the stars were silver. There was a rich blue-black at the top of the ridges and a gray-black wash in the center of them. I painted the flight of the birds, the space around them, almost eggshell blue with a darker blue for the actual V’s. And at the edge where the ridges touched the yellow sky there was a thin line of flaming orange.

I hesitated with the rocks, closed my eyes, and my hand found pure shocking pink. I splashed that color on the rocks.

The painting was happening! It was alive—I was alive. I stepped back and I almost loved it. It needed a title. I grabbed a thin black pen and in tiny letters in the corner wrote, “After Rain,” and then I loved it all the way. It was complete. I was so excited I wanted to run and get Gauguin. No. I wanted to wait. I flopped on the bed. I gripped my hands behind my head and lay on my back looking at it leaning up against the back of a chair.

I heard Gauguin open his door. “Nell?” he called. “You home?” He appeared at the bedroom door.

“Look.” I pointed with glee.

He turned his head. “Hey.” He paused and stepped over in front of it. “Hey.” He reached for it.

“Don’t touch it!” I jerked up. “It’s still wet.”

Gauguin pulled his hand back and made a low whistle sound of admiration. He turned to me with a slow smile. “It’s nice, real nice.”

My heart felt like it was going to break out of my body. “ ‘Nice’? That’s too Midwestern. In New York we’d say ‘gorgeous.’ ”

“How did you do it?” he asked.

“Fast,” I said.

He grabbed me and hoisted me onto a chair, then pointed up at me. “Banana Rose Schwartz, ladies and gentlemen. Look out, world, here she comes!”

I bowed like a prima donna from my elevated position, then stood there on the chair, smiling.

The next day, I woke up early. I wanted to start painting right away, but as I walked through the kitchen, I thought of making huevos rancheros to surprise Gauguin. I checked the refrigerator. We had blue corn tortillas. I was glad. I loved that color against the yellow of the fried egg and the red of the chile. Then I thought of adding fried potatoes—they’d be good—and baking corn muffins. Pretty soon it was ten in the morning, and Neon was at the door.

“Do you want to eat with us?” Gauguin offered.

“What a question.” Neon smiled and slipped into the chair at the side of the table.

I placed the hot muffin tin on the wooden table, and Gauguin whistled. “Wow, this, too, Nell?”

Neon shook his head. “You’re sure lucky to be with her.”

Gauguin split open a muffin and its steam rose up. He smoothed apricot jam over it. I could tell he was thinking. “Neon, why don’t you go out with Blue?”

“She wouldn’t have me,” he said, biting into a potato.

“Maybe if you’d wash more often,” I said bluntly, sniffing exaggeratedly at the air.

We all laughed. Neon hit my knee. “C’mon, Banana.”

After breakfast the three of us went out to the river and didn’t return until almost dark. It was too late to paint then, and besides, I was too tired anyway.

“H
EY,
N
ELL, WHERE
are you going?” Gauguin yelled after me.

“Never mind!” I screamed, and slammed the screen door and dove into my car.

It was the middle of May. I looked out the sideview mirror and saw Gauguin standing at our front door, trumpet in hand, wearing a pair of old khaki cutoffs, naked from the waist up.

There was orange still on my hands and it smeared on the steering wheel. I’d left the palette out with chunks of paint on it. They could dry, and I’d take them off with a razor later. What a waste of materials, I thought. What a waste of time, too. I hadn’t been able to get anything right since that one Saturday a month and a half ago. Now I hated painting again. All my pictures were either ugly or I didn’t finish them.