The House on the Hill; or, Hey. That Was Kind of Scary.

“Tell me a favorite story of yours that you haven’t told yet,” she says. 

I look off to the left, slightly upward, and think.  “I have one,” I say, “I don’t know if it’s my favorite or anything, but I have one.”

I take a drink of my Diet Coke, lick my lips.  “It was 1981,” I say, “and I was 19 years old.”

The House on the Hill

Art’s got a cherry car.

“What year is this?”

He walks to the hood, pats it fondly.  “1967 Camero Convertible.”

“It’s beautiful,” I say.

“Canary Yellow,” he says, “The color, I mean.”

I run my hand along the top of the driver’s seat.  “Is this leather?”

“Mm-hmm.”  There is a slight pause as he hits upon a thought.  “You want to drive it?”

“Me?  Drive this?”  I turn to look outside, past the open garage door.  It is late June, and Minnesota is postcard pretty, all blues and greens. 

There isn’t a cloud in the sky.

“Yeah,” he says.  “Why not?  You got a license.” 

I open the car door, throw my purse onto the front seat.  I turn to him, and he tosses me the keys.

The lakes are beautiful.   We crawl, 15 miles an hour, as is befitting the stature of the car, along with the other beautiful cars on the tree-lined, sunlight-dappled parkway circling Lake Calhoun.  Art leans over, touches my hair.

“Hey!” I laugh.

He straightens up, puts his back to the passenger seat, smiling.  “It’s pretty,” he says.

There is a heavy, rumbling to our right.  We both turn to look. 

“Halleluiah,” Art breathes.

“What is that?”

“That’s a 1967 Pontiac GTO.  360 horsepower.  Hey!”  Art leans toward the car.  “Great car, man!”

“Thanks, man!”

The light changes, and the two cars inch forward together.  There is talk of engines and paint jobs, glass etching and lift kits.  I ignore it all. 

I am awash in the feeling of the sun on my shoulders.

“Hey.”

Art is talking to me.

“Huh.”

“You want to go up to these guys’ place?  I said we would.”

I frown at him.  “Then what’re you asking me for?”

He grins.  “Follow them.”

And I do, follow them to some neighborhood somewhere on some street.  Who knows where it is?  Summer is here and the sky is so blue.

The Pontiac turns right and up a long driveway.  I pull over at the front of the house.  The yard is large, surprisingly large for the city, and slopes upward to a house.  It is a plain house with a large porch at the front.  It is beige, or maybe white. 

I stare at it.

And Art stares at me.  “Are we going up?”

“You go,” I say. 

He gives me a look, then shrugs and opens the door.  I watch as he trudges up the front yard, as he mounts the porch stairs.

A heaviness has settled on my chest.  I watch as they talk, as the men from the GTO point in my direction, watch as Art shrugs.

My father tells the story of driving in a blizzard in the late 50s, hours of dark, lonely road with nothing but the driving snow hitting his windshield, a one-colored spinning kaleidoscope.  After coming close to falling asleep, he spots a man’s open hand coming toward him, flying down the road, larger and larger until the hand is directly in front of the car.  And so he did, my father will tell you, exactly what the hand commanded.  He pulled over, and he slept two hours under the backseat blanket he kept for just such an occasion.

And I am reminded of my father as, before my eyes, a shadow falls over the porch and everything and everyone on it.

The sky is blue. 

The porch is dark. 

Art is on the porch, and he is nodding.

He trots down the sloping front yard.

“Hey!  Pearl!  Come on up.”

I shake my head.

He leans on the passenger’s door.  “They want you to come up.“

“No,” I say.  I shake my head.  “There’s something weird up there.”

“You can’t just sit out here.”

“I can,” I said.  “And I will.”

Art is taken aback.  “What’s going on?”

I shake my head again, serious as death.  “I can’t go up there.  I can’t explain, but I can’t and I won’t and if you try to make me go up there I will dig in my heels and try to pull one of your eyeballs out.”  My mouth goes dry. 

“Whoa!  Whoa!”  Art laughs.  “OK, OK, I get it.”  He looks up toward the porch.  “Yeah, I don’t care.  I’ll just go up there and tell them we’re takin’ off.”

I start the car as he lopes to the house, then turn to dig through my purse for the stick of gum I hope is there.

There is a murmur of voices – wheedling, insistent voices that get louder, louder until --   

“NO.  SHE SAID SHE AIN’T COMIN’ UP!”

I look up.  Art is charging down the hill. 

He climbs into the car.  “Burn rubber, baby. They can get bent.”

I don’t need to be told again, and I don’t look back.  “Bent?” I say, pulling away.  “Why can they get bent?”

He is breathing heavily.  “They didn’t want me there, they wanted you there.  I mean, they didn’t really say anything I can put my finger on, but I don’t think those guys were right in the head.”

I can feel him staring at the side of my face.

“What did they want?” he says.  “Pearl.  Was that weird?”

I shake my head.  “We’ll never know what it was,” I say.   

And I shudder.

Suspect is Believed to be Driving a Car. Yes, a Car...

I stood on my front steps last evening, talking to my neighbor, a woman as vigilant in her park surveillance as I am.

You see, there’s a public park across the street from our properties, a lovely green spot with big trees. There’s soccer and baseball in the summer, hockey in the winter, large intra-mural colored-tee-shirt-wearing competitions between teenagers of different churches (“Current standings: Lamb of God has walloped Christ Our Lord at the three-legged race; House of Mercy has trounced Abundant Life in punt/pass/throw! Up next: The Church of the Nazarene against 34th Street Southern Baptist. You have two minutes to the starting gun! Two minutes!”)

Screaming/laughing kids, bull-horned announcements, and cars.

Sometimes there are cars.

Sometimes the cars pull up, cut their engines, make phone calls, wait for other cars. Thug-Life tattooed men move things from one trunk to another and then speed away.

And there I am, on my second-floor porch, watching, trying to get a license plate number.

Difficult to do, but the binoculars I got for my birthday help.

And no one ever looks up.

Those aren’t hotdish recipes they’re trading.

I call every time, but the cops haven’t made it in time to catch them yet.

The cars – who can describe them? That’s the problem when you can’t get the plate number.

“Ummm. It was a white car. It had four doors and tinted windows. I’m pretty sure it had tires. And there was chrome. Lots of chrome. Oh, and I believe “Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle” was on the DVD player in the back, but I might be wrong about that.”

Have you seen that car?

When did I stop knowing things about cars? I like to think it was when, at least in my eyes, they stopped being distinctive and interesting; but it could actually be about the time I didn’t have to know anything any more, aka after me and the Lug Nut broke up.

I think I became willfully ignorant after that, just because I could.

Ha! Take that, ex-boyfriend! I refuse to remember what you taught me!

That’ll teach him to, uh, teach.

Anyway, what I know about cars would fill a thimble, and get your thimble ready because here it is: You absolutely can flush your own radiator by following the directions on a package; if you’ve just changed your oil and yet nothing registers on the dipstick you might want to check if you put the plug back in; no matter what anyone tells you, your Van Allen Belt is not loose; and there’s not been a single recorded instance of someone being dangerously low on blinker fluid.

And when you absolutely can’t tell a Honda Accord from a Honda Civic, you keep your camera at hand.

Bring on the arms traders.

Inside My Head, It’s Warm and Dry

Having been forecast to begin raining at 5:00, the clouds oblige; and at 5:04, it comes down, raindrops the size of dinner plates.

The general downtown population responds as if martial law has been declared; and a couple in a vehicle the size of a team of Clydesdales, lured by the seduction of a yellow light, has wandered into a ped-xing zone, where they find themselves engulfed in pedestrians, all of whom are thinking of hitting their hood with an umbrella but don’t. 

We board our buses, slightly moistened.  The man who sits down next to me, a perpetually unsmiling, grizzled sort I’ve seen every work day for at least five years, promptly closes his eyes. 

It’s been raining for days.  The sky hangs low and heavy; and the Mississippi River rushes to meet it, throwing itself over the falls near the bridge and up into the air in a mist that mingles with the clouds.

On both sides of the bus, we turn to watch.  One day frozen over, one day free of ice, time is marked by the river. 

The river is wide, I think. 

Pleased with this thought, I turn to my seatmate, then quickly turn away.  He is sleeping, and I am struck by this intimacy.

I steal another look.  Eyes closed, face slack, he is vulnerable and touchingly human.    It’s just me and this guy on the bus, I think.  We’re going to make it work, whatever it takes.

I look back out the window.

It’s been raining for days. 

Just Where are You Lookin’, Buddy?

The man on the corner of 9^th and Nicollet is standing on an overturned milk crate.  What is probably a bible of some sort is held overhead, with one hand, while the other gesticulates wildly at the throngs of people passing by him.

It is summer in Minneapolis, a glorious and brief three- to four-month fete of green Green GREEN, of dresses, of sun-hungry skin and ridiculously thin-soled shoes. We spread our arms and fly through the long days, our eyes open, the corners of our mouths up.  Bright-eyed and brimming over with the unfettered simplicity of summer, our shoveling/car-engine jumping/have-you-seen-the-heating-bill exhaustion of winter behind us, we breathe in every moment of warm air as if it were a gift.

We are light-headed and woozy, in love with the easiest of seasons.

It is the lunch hour, more or less.  My heels click on the sidewalk as I approach the corner of 9^th and Nicollet and the man on the milk crate.

“Cover your shame!”

I look up, point at myself:  Who?  Me?

“Yes, you!” he shouts.  “Cover your shame!  For the Lord sees your shame and knows your wantonness!”

I frown, pausing, the click of my heels slowing.  Wantoness! I think, Holy moley, what’s he lookin’ at?   I glance down at the front of my shirt, at the length of my skirt.  This skirt, after all, tends to slowly rotate, clockwise, when I walk.  Too long a walk, and eventually that cute little slit in the back works its way to the front…

I reach to feel the seam that should be running down my backside. 

It’s still there.

There is nothing wrong with this outfit.

I look up at him as I pass. 

“It is upon the flock to bring the wayward woman back, to call her to return!” he shouts. “Cover your shame!”

I give him a thumbs-up, call out to him.  “You’re doin’ a helluva job!" I say.

But he has moved on already, and I am just another nameless, errant woman.  “Cover your shame!” he bellows toward the woman behind me, another woman in a skirt.

And switching her attention from her phone to where he stands on his milk crate, the woman behind me flips him off.

The Bus Stop on a Summer's Day; or Puff-Puff-Give!

Meanwhile, somewhere in the heart of a snow-encrusted Minneapolis, a lone woman, thoughtfully bug-eyed with distraction at the new operating system installed on her computer, drifts back to a simpler, warmer time…

It is July, and I am waiting for the bus.

Minneapolis in the summertime!  Is there a sweeter place?  Winter has come and gone, the last of the city’s monstrous top-secret snow pile, Mount Sears, swirling, clockwise, down the grates and moving south.  Women in skirts, freshly freed from their layers, strut in heels, their naked knees blinking in the sun.  Men saunter, sans snow shovels, heads bare, like seasonal parolees.  Hanging flower baskets the size of kiddie pools hang from lampposts, a profusion of color and scent.

Above us, the sky is a deep blue of the postcard variety, a warm and endless expanse of giddy, temperate love.

Winter is over; and we are utterly grateful.

The bus stop at 7^th and Nicollet is a bustling, ever-changing menagerie of folk; and at this time of day, primarily made up of nine-to-five-ish commuters.

This does not bother Stephanie, the Tattoo-Faced Woman. 

Have you met Stephanie?  Stephanie has tattooed herself right out of gainful employment.  A slender, attractive woman with surprisingly little compunction against going door-to-door begging for change, she is often seen on her bicycle in my particular neck of the woods. 

And there she is now, sitting on one of the large raised flower beds that populate Nicollet Mall.  She is passing a joint to an Hispanic man with the build of a bowling ball and the secret smile of the Buddha.  Next to him is a floor lamp, minus a shade but still sporting a light bulb. 

He picks up the electric cord to the lamp, attempts to plug it into Stephanie’s ear.

They laugh.

And I laugh, too.

 I am not wearing boots.  I am not wearing a coat that reaches mid-calf.  The weather today does not make my eyes water or my skin hurt.

And that is all that matters.

The bus comes.  Smiling, I climb the steps, and move to the back of the bus.

The Bus Stop at 24th and Nicollet: I Still Got It

When the furnace cracked, the CO2 levels in the attic reached a level that actually seeped onto the/our second floor.  This explains the sore throat and the headaches!  The furnace was turned off and “red tagged” by the gas company – and so we were without a furnace from Friday morning to sometime Monday afternoon (today). 

Join me, won’t you, as I think back to summer, to the bus stop on a warm day that required neither furnaces nor large amounts of cash…

I am standing at the corner of 24^th and Nicollet, waiting for the bus.  I have just left George’s house.

Minnesota has days – made all the more precious for how clearly delineated they are, in the overall course of the seasons – that are perfect.  The sky is a high, clear blue, the temperature is comfortable, the humidity at neither science-experiment-hair nor at frizzed-tropical.  The sun will go down soon, and the light is warm and tinted. 

I stand with my face to the sun.  A sweet season made sweeter by its brevity, I close my eyes, feel the sun settling on my eyelids, pressing on the top of my head, my hair.  I feel wonderful, sophisticated.  In a charcoal pencil skirt, a salmon, belted knit top, my pointiest heels, I feel put together, I feel “city” in the best possible way.

I feel someone staring.

I open my eyes to see a man in front of me.  He is wearing baggy sweatpants and a tee-shirt advertising a 5K run held at a golf course in 1997.

He smiles at me, and I smile back.

“Mama, you lookin’ good today.  You comin’ from work?”

I nod. 

He nods appreciatively.  “Oooh, mamacita, you no eat more, you no eat less.  You is perfect, right now.  Total respect.”

I laugh politely, pull my phone from my purse.

Two minutes until the bus comes.  I look up the street – and there it is, maybe three blocks away.

The man is pressing his hair down with his hands, tucks his tee-shirt into the elastic of his sweatpants.  “So where you stayin’ now?”

I tell him that I live in Minneapolis, with my husband.

“You geev me your number, right?  We go to the park, sit and talk.  Total respect, you gnome sayin?”

I frown.  What did he say about a gnome?

“I want to geet to know you, gnome sayin’?”

Ahh.

Now I gno what he’s sayin’.

I smile at him.

And the bus pulls up.

The door opens and I step toward it, second in line.

“You know where to find me,” he calls out.  There is a slight pause.  “Mm-mm-mmm,” he says, almost contemplatively.  “You eat no more, no less.  You is my perfect woman right now, mama.”

Late Afternoon Minneapolis; or Who WAS That Dapper Young Man?

It is 96 degrees outside, the humidity firmly anchored amongst numbers considered “tropical”.  The heat rises from the sidewalk in wavy stink lines, seemingly bending the air. 

The pigeon on the ground in front of me walks, slowly, the very picture of inner-city, bird-related heat exhaustion.

The bus arrives and we line up, eager and grateful for the cool, dry air. 

The bus is full today, and I move to the back, back to the last available seat, just beyond the rear exit.  I like this seat:  you take two steps up to it so it’s raised, just slightly, and there’s a camera not far from away. 

I like to think that if anything strange were to happen, it would be caught on film. 

Once I have reached the seat, however, I am forced to stand there for a bit.  I give a small smile to a middle-aged woman in a Tinkerbell tee-shirt, and she grudgingly moves her backpack from the last seat on the bus, something she does with a small sigh. 

I consider pursing my lips at her in a show of stern, Minneapolis-style disapproval and then decide against it.

Nobody wants trouble.

Especially if it will be on camera. 

I sit in the newly vacated seat, adjust my lunch bag, my purse, on my lap.  I pull out a small decorative handkerchief, mop at the sweat moustache I’ve developed. 

The bus continues to fill.

A young man stands in the space next to the rear exit.  This means that because I am on a raised seat just beyond that space, he and I are at eye level.

But rather than doing the polite thing on a bus, which is to look forward, toward the driver, he is looking toward the back, in my direction.

But he’s not looking at me.

He’s looking at himself.

He reaches up, adjusts the fish-eye mirror positioned over the backdoor.  He turns his head, grins at himself from his good side, holds his phone/camera up, captures this special moment between him and himself.

He grins up at himself, points a finger into the mirror:  you.    

I don’t know where to look, so I continue to look at him.

He readjusts the mirror, checks his teeth.  Satisfied with what he sees, he grasps the shoulders of his tee-shirt, snaps it out several times in what passes for “jaunty” these days.

The bus comes to a stop just outside the post office, and with one final check in the mirror, our debonair, commuter-about-town de-buses.

I turn to my seatmate.

Tinkerbell smiles at me.  “Now that was a good-lookin’ man.  Mmm-mmm-mm.”

Remind Me of This in February; or Don’t Make Me Write About Swamp Butt Again!

I am, I fear, only hours away from either bursting into hot, public tears, or from active hallucinations.

Honestly, I can’t tell which one I’m rooting for.  They both have their draws.

Temperatures in the Great State of Minnesota, ladies and gentlemen, the part of the country that brought you the forecast for “wind chill”, snowfall that will collapse a domed football stadium, and Prince, is in the damp, red-faced embrace of a heat wave.

Mid- to upper-90s for two weeks.

Sales of talcum powder are booming.

I cannot, however, afford the amount of talcum powder required to make the nights bearable.

You see, I have no centralized air conditioning.

Oh, I can hear you now, you cool, comfortable people. 

Horrifying!  My dear, how DO you live?

You should get Central Air!  Dude!  It makes sleeping totes easier!

and

No Central Air?  Whadda youse?  Crazy?

That’s right.  I have reached the point where the people in my head with access to centralized air conditioning have taken on distinctive voices. 

I rationalize, of course.  Tough it out, lady, I say to myself.  You grew up without air.  Don’t be a baby. 

The things I say to myself in response, however, are horrible.

Really.  You should hear me. 

The truth is that I am not completely without technology.  There is a window unit being used, an appliance called upon to struggle valiantly against the odds of cooling even the rooms that have not been closed off; and while the second floor of the 110-year-old house I live in is cooler than, say, the street, one finds oneself getting two, three hours of sleep a night.

One finds that that is not enough.

Look.  I enjoy the way I can close my eyes and actually nod off in the cool, fluorescently lit confines of my cubicle as much as the next guy.  I’ve become fascinated with what I believe may be the sound of my hair growing and have, even, a fascination for the imaginary bug bites that I insist on scratching.

Heck.  I think I may even be developing a facial tic.

Anyway, I thought you should know.

You know.  Before the hallucinations set in.  

In My Mother’s Garden, or Late June, Middle America

I can feel the sun in my hair.  I reach up.

Warm hair feels like summer. 

We are walking through the gated garden off to one side of the house.  I tease her about the kind of vegetables that require a gated enclosure.  She suggests to me that the local woodchucks are thieves.

“Oooh, look at this, Pearl.  Just look at this broccoli!”  My mother shakes her head in wonder.  “It was half this size yesterday.” 

The broccoli in question reaches greenly toward the bright blue sky of a Minnesota summer.  A barn swallow swoops in, lands on a nearby shed to keep a beady eye on us. 

I look down at my sandals, my purple-painted toenails, think about the four feet of snow that was at this very spot just three months ago.

I move on to the next row of plants.  “Green beans?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says, but she is not looking at me.  She is bent over the strawberry beds. 

My father wanders on to the scene, grins at me.  “You two looking at the plants?  Mumma, you showing Pearl the garden?”

He states the obvious just to get a rise out of her, and she obligingly takes the bait.  Married just a few months short of 50 years, on a good day their banter is the stuff of a stand-up comedy routine.

She looks up, squints into the sun.  “Paul, so help me –”

She turns her attention back to the plants, gently palms a large strawberry, pale green on one end, red shading into pink on the other.

“Isn’t she a beauty?”

Funny Face wanders into the garden.  A known mouser, a tortoiseshell cat with the demeanor of one who is well loved, she smiles at my mother and flops onto one side.

Even the cat loves summer.

I smile.  “How big would you say that strawberry is, Mom?”

My mother, the woman who once described a rusty nail that had been driven up into my brother’s foot as “a strange way to get a new pair of shoes”, grins up at me. 

“Oh,” she says, “I’d say that’s a good ‘un.”

A good ‘un.

Describes a lot.  

But She Had a Letter from a Church!; or Who Do I Make the Check Out To?

We were sitting in the backyard, Willie, Jon, Mary and I.

And we were pretty happy.

Happy laughing, happy talking, happy drunk.  And why not?  It was summer, after all, the summer of 2005.

There had been people in the backyard all day, one of those spontaneous, joyous days when coupons are suddenly worth double, the car stops making that annoying “tick-tick-tick” sound, and friends drop by unannounced.

Mary is describing the time that Jon used a front-end loader to ensure that his neighbor had enough snow in his front yard – an escapade that filled said yard to the top of the fence – when a woman opens the gate and walks into the backyard.

“Excuse me? Ma’am?”

I turn to see a small woman rapidly approaching.  Perhaps five feet two, her hair has seen too many sloppily applied box dyes, her skin too many days in the sun. The word “wizened” comes to mind.

“Ma’am?” she says.  “Are you a Christian woman?”

Mary leans forward, grins at her.  “She sure is!  Have a seat, why don’t ya!”

If the woman had been wearing a hat, she’d be clutching it now, perhaps in a wringing motion at the chest.  “Oh, no, ma’am.  I couldn’t intrude.”

The thought she that she both could and has intruded enters my brain. 

I crack open another beer and we stare at each other.  I give in rather quickly.  “What is it that you want?”

“Well, you see, ma’am…” and here she pulls an envelope from her back pocket and hands it to me.  I pull a letter from the envelope.  It has been folded and refolded many times, the creases worn shallow and weak.  “To Whom It May Concern”…

I look up.  “What is this?”  I say.

“Just read it, please, ma’am.”

It is a letter on the letterhead of one of the churches just a block away.  It endorses the bearer as having cancer, as requiring medications that neither she nor her seven children can afford.  It declares that she is a good citizen of Minneapolis, that she has skills as a tile and bricklayer.

And that she needs $42.45.

“Forty-two forty-five,” I say thoughtfully.  “That’s pretty specific.”

“Yes, ma’am.  I’m not a beggar, ma’am.  I’ve worked all my life, and when I’m in good health, I do a really fine job of laying tile.  But I’ve got cancer, and I’ve got seven children, and it’s all I can do to keep a roof over our heads let alone afford my medicine.  The $42.45 is what I need a week to keep up with my meds.  ”

Mary looks at me. 

“Without my medication,” the woman goes on, “I’ll die, and who will look after my children?”

I look back at Mary.  I jerk my head toward the alley.

“Excuse us for a moment,” I say, and Mary and I take a walk behind the garage.

“What do you think?”

“I think it could be a scam.”

“A pretty specific scam.”

“True.”

“And she has a letter from the church.”

“True.”

I look back toward the house.  “And she certainly looks sick.”

“Also true.”

“So what do you think?”

Mary shrugs.  “I think I’m flat-busted and that you’re not and that no one wants to see seven mother-less kids.”

I walk back to the umbrella-ed table, to my friends and my beer and my checkbook.   I write a check to “CASH” (“I no longer have a bank account, ma’am”).

“Thank you, ma’am”, she says, walking backwards.  “Thank you so much!”

She disappears around the front of the house.

Whereupon we go back to our beers.

And over the course of the next couple weeks, that check begins to weigh on me.  I was scammed, wasn’t I?  Was I?  Did a person really come into my backyard for the purposes of taking my money?

I call the church on the letterhead. 

“Oh, no,” says a gentle, slightly amused voice on the other end of the line.  “Those in need are always welcome to come to us and we’ll help where we can, but we would never hand someone a letter that was basically a license to beg.”

Think of it as a tax on the drunk and gullible.  I have.