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Liana Scalettar The Day We Lost Linneta |
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The day we lost Linneta was a hot day when chestnuts hung in spiked green
sacs from their branches. Collars melted against necks, snapdragons at the
florist melted, ice cream cones melted down the hands of brightly clad
children. Linneta
started her day as usual, by taking a walk down We followed her as she made her
way past pink-clothed tables in Chinese restaurants, past realtors’ crowded
windows, and to the flea market. She wandered among the stalls, picking up
and putting down cut-glass tumblers, amber beads. On an old typewriter she
typed her name with one finger. The metal arms flew up at her touch. When we
tried to type, the keys stuck. We circled around the stalls, the old camera
man, the woman with a million postcards beginning Dear Aunt Polly. We buzzed
and wept from the heat. We lingered by the rug man, who said, “You can have
it for twenty,” so we unrumpled $6.60 each and
arranged to come back later for the small kilim
runner. Carrying it would have made us too obvious. Linneta
walked on, past the hardware and houseware stores,
the post office, the broad shaded block of Third Street that led up to the
park’s entrance. We followed her. We didn’t want to lose track of her. As is plain, there were three of
us, and we all had good socially conscious jobs and we read magazines and in
summer we sat on our stoop drinking iced coffee or lemonade made laboriously
with raw sugar and organic lemons by a local child. None of us had ever
fallen for someone in quite this way before, and when we saw what we were up
against—Linneta’s absentmindedness and charm, and
her dogged search for a husband—we banded together to conserve strength and
to strategize. We all had old Left parents and grandparents who had impressed
upon us the benefits of collective efforts as opposed to untrammeled
competition and, left to our own devices, we had to admit that they had a
point. That summer, whenever any of them called from the Berkshires to ask
how we were, we invariably bleated, “Linneta says-,”
and soon they all stopped calling. When in early July, Linneta sat on the stoop with us and said, “I always
wanted to go to Tanglewood,” we berated ourselves. We
had all turned down our parents’ invitations to the country, insisting that
we liked the city in summer. “You have everything to
yourself,” we’d said. “No lines, the green market, the park.” Now we were
dismal and silent, picturing the happy effect of manicured lawns, lavish
picnics, and the Boston Symphony on our musically inclined friend. Something
of a fantastic nineteenth century adhered to her too; she collected old
buttoned boots, and we suspected that she washed her hair with plain glycerin
soap. She was also the only person we knew with two diaphragms. One was a
back up, like a disk. At “I was just thinking about you,”
Linneta said. We became very bashful and stared at
our feet. We didn’t believe her. We had just seen her the day before. But we
loved her and so we let her lie to us, as sweat slipped down our hands and
our soles stuck to the glinting pavement. “Let’s go get Italian ice,” said
Linneta, and so we did—we always did whatever she
wanted. We clustered in the shade of the shop’s awning, slurping lemon ice
from its sweet paper cup. Around us the heat condensed and buildings wavered
in it, their edges fading out into the air. “This is the best place for
ices,” one of us said. “The place on “There are only two acceptable
flavors for ices, I think,” said Linneta. “Chocolate
and lemon.” When we were finished and
sticky, Linneta, who carried linen handkerchiefs
and was thus never caught unprepared for anything, said, “I have to go, girls.
I have an appointment.” She smiled at each of us in turn and walked south on
the avenue again. After she had gone, we stayed
under the awning for a few minutes. One of us gathered the cups and threw
them out; another asked the man from whom we’d bought the ices for some
water, which she poured onto her head. We had a certain grace, standing there in
the shade. We might have looked solemn, rather than despondent; cool, rather
than hot; placid rather than unhinged. But the minute we stepped from shade
to sun, the illusion vanished and we became again what we were: three women,
of average build and average income, on an average summer day in the city,
ravaged by infatuation with someone who, like the horizon, was always
receding. “What does she have against
grape?” asked the one who liked grape. But none of us could think of an
answer. Linneta
wanted very badly to get married, have children, and buy a house in Lenox or Sometimes, against our better
judgment, we tried to discuss these needs with her. “A house by itself can’t make
you happy,” we warned. “A husband and children won’t automatically make you
happy if you’re unhappy,” we continued. We were poorly qualified to lecture
someone about the virtue of being satisfied with what you have, and Linneta knew it. “If I had a house with wide
planked floors, I would be gracious and serene all the time,” she said. “If I
had a husband, I could be a wife, and if I had children, I could be a mother.”
Linneta’s mother, we should mention, owned exactly
the type of country house that Linneta wanted, in
which she gave gracious afternoon parties of the kind we had only read about. Soon we set out again: heat made
us weave as we walked and the green in the trees deepened as the day
progressed. The traffic lights pooled beyond their usual limits, the colors
wavering like glassy floating lakes. We walked at a glacial pace, one behind
the next in a file of three. The one who’d poured water on her head caught
the remaining drops on her palm and dabbed the backs of our necks, generous
but ineffectual, how she was. Hot water steamed on our napes. Everyone we
passed walked in the opposite direction, and how cool they all seemed, how
lucid and how self-contained, as if they’d sprung from a spacious well-fanned
room that we might reach if only we walked far enough. “Where do you think she went?”
asked one of us, swatting away a mosquito. She turned her head over her
shoulder to make herself heard—she was in front. “We don’t know,” chorused the
other two of us. We began our habitual list, in heat-slurred voices, one
picking up where the other left off. She’s gone to the dentist, the
chiropractor, a palm reader, an old friend, her mother for tea at the
Carlyle, the lake in Someone who looked like Linneta—who had her high forehead, and measured gait—approached
us. “Linneta,”
we said. “Linneta.” The figure drifted up to and
past us: a young boy in linen clothes, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
The head of the line stopped short in misery, rubbed her hand over the front
of her throat. We two collided with her. Our spirits, which had not been good
to begin with, sank further. We lay in a hot heap on the sidewalk, with
scraped bare knees, pinked. “Linneta,” we whispered.
We had never lost her so thoroughly before. We each claimed to have seen Linneta first, to have first learned her name or first
spoken with her. From one: a vision entered the park at Grand Army Plaza, but
before entering the park proper, she stood under the cherry tree there, by an
abandoned stroller, and the tree’s petals fell around her in browning pink
stripes, and she looked at the stroller for a long time, as if she saw
something. From another: a woman I didn’t know checked me out at the co-op, and,
while weighing wild rice, looked me so directly in the eye that naturally I
became confused. From the third: she smiled at me in front of the token booth
and a small door swung open inside. This was in early June, said the
first; mid-May, said the second; I remember her in a wool hat and mittens,
said the third. In public, we presented a united
front. In private we squabbled. We leaned against the fire escapes attached
to our back windows, piling empty seltzer bottles into light towers. Whoever added
the bottle that caused the whole to collapse became the object of the others’
scorn, and she had to retire inside, or go buy ice
cream, or invent a mildly placating cocktail. While the unlucky one shopped
or was banished, the remaining two gossiped about her poor chances for
success. “Linneta
doesn’t like redheads,” we’d say. “Linneta never
held her hand in the movie theater,” we’d say. “Linneta’s
away for the weekend with Sam the nonprofit guy,” we’d say. If as sometimes
happened the third came back sooner than expected, the two who’d stayed would
busy ourselves with transplanting zinnias or reading
advice columns out loud. We acted as if the returned third didn’t know what
we had said about her: she did, of course. We were all living with the same
portion of hope and hopelessness. As the sky blued, and the ivy on the walls
of the houses opposite began to rustle and glow, we would subside into long
silences. Our camaraderie would creep back in little half-gestures, a refill,
a giving up of the choicest seat. Woozy and staggered, we three
stood up. We brushed ourselves off, checked our bleeding knees, and walked on.
Past Around seventeenth street, one
of us said, “Wait.” We waited, looking at her accusingly. A brother and
sister zoomed by on tricycles—no such thing as too summery for them, they
zoomed and their hair streamed back. “I’m thirsty,” said the one who’d
called a halt. “My knee hurts, it needs peroxide.” The other two pictured the
trickle of peroxide onto the scrape, the sizzle. “We should be in a movie theater
with air conditioning,” she continued. “We’re walking—we’ve walked nearly
three miles, ninety degrees.” “Cricket color,” said the one
who liked grape ice. “Linneta said the chestnuts
are cricket color.” The thirsty one was charmed,
briefly. She swiveled her head around as if she thought Linneta
was behind her, in a blind spot. We waited. We were thirsty too, but we
wanted to keep walking. “Let’s make a deal,” said
Thirsty. “Let’s walk back to the circle at Thirsty opened her eyes wider
and narrowed them. Come on, she meant, you’ll see. We turned
around and trailed her—she became the new head of the line. It was too hot to
argue. From the summer’s start, the
thought of Linneta had given us butterflies in our
stomachs. None of us had ever felt that before. Feeling it, we understood the
expression and thought it was right. We held our stomachs gingerly—fear of
damaging monarch orange, iridescent blue wings. In the park, families crouched
by low grills over smoking meat. Dogs loped by; a cotton candy vendor with a
candy pink pole balanced on the back of his neck stood forlornly. The reins
of our carousel horses lay slack, wet and cracking, in our hands and the
horses’ tongues lolled out as we rode. Last time, Linneta
had appeared in time for us to wave to her at each pass, and we had waved
like mad, besotted with glee; small children looked at us, we were happier
and wavier than they. Linneta waved at us each time
we passed, easy, tolerant. We had never seen her on the merry-go-round, or on
any ride, or playing any game. We pictured her sidesaddle on an unmoving gray
horse, not from prudery, not Linneta, but from love
of line. We rode around to the tinned
music, we and the others. The floor beneath us was a sunned gray, splintered,
and it creaked as the ride turned and the brassy poles revolved. The liter of
water we passed between us was tepid in its bottle, plastic-tasting in our
mouths. Mothers in heels and others with bristly blue hair leaned on the
railing that circled the ride: they waited, they were patient. When they saw
their children, they waved. Their children brightened and waved back, as if,
each time, the mother’s appearance was a surprise. For us there were no
surprises, no Linneta. At the end of five minutes the
merry-go-round slowed and then stopped. We climbed down. We walked along a
narrow dirt path that took us over a small meadow, past an old copper beech,
and through a paneled tunnel under a never-used aqueduct. At “Look,” one of us said. She
pulled on our shirts for emphasis. “Look, that’s Linneta.”
We looked to where she pointed, in front of the Blue Moon fish stall. Someone
with hair cascading from an old tortoise-shell comb, a long back sheathed in
white lawn. We stood at the end of the fish line. “A pound of butterfish,” said a
man with wonderful eyes. “A dozen steamers,” said the
woman. Not Linneta. Again and again, not Linneta. “She might have called,” said
Thirsty. “Let’s go home and check.” All the window boxes we passed were
planted thickly with yellow and purple pansies. All the children we passed
had long brown running limbs. Linneta
had a handbag, Linneta had a home. Linneta kept a sparkling hearth beneath a skylight dome. We
made up rhymes and acrostics for her, sometimes. Sometimes we said her name
to ourselves and were filled with startling glee. In our apartment we crowded
around the machine. Its red light blinked one, two, three times. The one of
us closest to it touched the button with the tip of her finger. The other two
of us dragged our forearms over our foreheads and exhaled through heat-pouted
lips. We finished the warm water. Our movements slowed, and we waited without
moving the tiniest bit. We stood perfectly still, as if our sudden docility
might be rewarded. The messages were all from
someone inquiring about a club called Octagon. What kind of crowd? What
kind of trance? What kind of list? Two of us curled into opposite
ends of the couch and dozed. Thirsty, still concerned about her scraped knee,
ran a cool bath and sat with her legs drawn up, and touched her tongue neatly
to the forming scab. We’d run out of peroxide. When she came out of the bath,
wrapped in a waffle towel, water dripping from her hair, we two opened our
eyes. “Linneta
didn’t call,” we said. She stood in a small pool, water beading above the
knot at her breast. “So,” she said coolly. “It was your idea to come home,”
we said. We were half-standing, kneading the rough cloth on the pillows for
reassurance. “So,” she said again. The bath
had changed her, and the blood on her tongue. She seemed, we thought, to be
speaking to us from very far away. “I’m sleepy,” she said and
before we could speak she had arranged herself on top of the towel, her head
cradled on her arms. The two of us looked at her
stretched out on the floor. Water ran off her hair into the wood. She was
resolute and motionless. We settled back into the bright
soft corners of the sofa. “You’re crazy,” said one. “Loopy,” said the other. “Shut up,” said Thirsty from the
floor. “I’m trying to sleep.” We closed our eyes then, too, each one with our
soles flat against the other’s. The cotton cushions propped behind us
deflated under our weight and the heat; we became imperceptibly lower and
woke up groggy, parallel to the floor. A clock’s ticking sounded, a distant
siren, cello from the back window. “Siren, cello, clock,” said
Thirsty, who was sitting up now on the towel. “House creaks, a child’s laugh,
tires,” I said. It was one of the games we played to pass the time, to take
our minds off Linneta. Name everything you see. Name
everything you hear. Name everything you smell, taste, touch. “Old coffee, old lemon ice,
water, spit, hope,” said the other on the couch. Thirsty crossed her arms into an
x, a hand at each shoulder, covering her breasts. “Hope isn’t a taste,” she said. “It is to me,” said the one on
the couch. “What does it taste like?” I
asked. “Light and salt,” she said. “That’s right,” said Thirsty. She
came over to us and kissed us each and went to get dressed. When she
reappeared it was with a shawl and leather shoes, a long black sundress
sprouting brilliant red petals. “I’m treating,” she said. Forgive
me, she meant. We all get very cranky when we forget to eat. In the past, when we had
followed Linneta down Linneta
would smile in her grave way, in a manner that made us sit up straighter. Once
she asked us to comb out her hair, which had been pinned into an impeccable
pompadour for several days. In our midst she seemed quite tall, but she was
supple and whenever she leaned in any direction she looked as if she were on
a stage. The hairpins—we held them in our mouths as we worked, taking turns
with the heavy comb and shaking—we later saved on a copper tray. We sat in the restaurant’s
garden, where lanterns flickered. Dim faces, round as plates, came into view
and then faded. From our corner table we could see new patrons as they
arrived, how they sank into their plastic chairs with relief, glad to be in
darkness after the brightness of day. The heat came in surges now, little
eddies that pressed the skin and burst. We patted our cheeks with water,
which evaporated at once in the sultry air. And we lapsed into inchoate
murmurs, our voices thick with hunger and heat. “She,” said Thirsty. “Garlic
knots,” we said. Ivy grew in abundance in the
corner of the garden wall, and we watched the moths studding it. With wings
folded they clung to leaves, soft patches against the night green. We ordered copiously, appetizers
and main dishes, a bottle each of red and white wine. The waiter wrote in
silence, not looking up. A luminosity
at the garden door made us all, everyone already seated in the garden, turn
our heads. It was Linneta with stars in her hair. A
wire diadem, tulle train. We didn’t know the man who accompanied her. We’d
never seen him before. They paused on the threshold,
framed by the old pine doorway. And then they entered, looking neither to the
left nor the right, but heading straight for the adjacent table. We
brightened, lengthened, lifted our chins, widened
our eyes to indicate a greeting. Candlelight and shade ticking our faces,
rendering them perhaps uncertain. Linneta looked at
us as she floated into her seat. Her face, under its starry nest, betrayed
nothing. After a long moment without any word or acknowledgement—we seemed to
be scenery for her, another kind of nocturnal and silent thing—she looked away. |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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