Jeanne Larsen

SALLY PARADISO

A Brown Fedora Book

Copyright © 2009 This book may be downloaded, printed, and read for personal use only, and only with the author’s name attached.

OTHER BOOKS BY JEANNE LARSEN

Willow, Wine, Mirror, Moon: Women’s Poems from Tang China (literary translations)
BOA Editions, Ltd., 2005

Manchu Palaces (novel) Henry Holt & Co., October 1996; Authors Guild/iUniverse 2009
abridged audiotape version: Audio Literature, 1997

Bronze Mirror (novel) Henry Holt & Co 1991;, Book of the Month Club 1991; Fawcett
(paperback) 1992; Mondadori (Italy) 1992;Centrum (Denmark) 1992; Authors Guild/iUniverse 2009 [Bronze Mirror, an opera based on this book, libretto & score by Milton Granger, was premiered by the Georgia State University School of Music, April, 2002]

Silk Road (novel) Henry Holt & Co. 1989; Heinemann (U.K.) 1989; Book of the Month
Club 1989; Fawcett (U.S. paperback) 1990; Mandarin (U.K. paperback) 1991; Centrum (Denmark) 1990; Rizzoli (Italy) 1990; Heyne (Germany) 1991; Divisione Euroclub Italia (Italy) 1991; Authors Guild/iUniverse 2009

Brocade River Poems: Selected Works of the Tang Dynasty Courtesan Xue Tao
(literary translations) Princeton University Press, 1987
James Cook in Search of Terra Incognita: A Book of Poems University Press of Virginia
(Associated Writing Programs Poetry Series), 1979

ART BOOK: These Gardens (poems by Jeanne Larsen, drawings by Jan Knipe)
privately printed limited edition, 2003

BOOK CO-EDITED: Engendering the Word: Feminist Essays in Psychosexual Poetics
Temma F. Berg, ed.; co-ed.s, Anna Shannon Elfenbein, Jeanne Larsen, Elisa Kay Sparks University of Illinois Press, 1989

SALLY PARADISO

Author’s note: I am grateful for support from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the
Eastern Frontier Society, and Hollins University. Thanks for help at various points along the way to: T. J. Anderson III, John Bollard, Geoff Christe & R.G. Wickline of the Richmond office of the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, R. H.W. Dillard, Deb German, Ian German-Mesner, Renee Godard, Jean Gould, Jean W. Gregory, Cathryn Hankla, Beth Lohman of the Roanoke DEQ office, L. Wayne Markert, Martha Mayo of the Lowell Historical Society and the Center for Lowell History, Annette Sampon-Nicholas, Michael Sitton, Edwina Spodark, Derwin Sisnett, and Millie Willis. Also to many teachers, including John Daido Loori, Irene Malachowsky, Konrad Ryushin Marchaj, Mu Soeng, Debbie Stevens, and Randal Williams. But don’t blame them.

As always, deepest gratitude to Tom Mesner, for all he is and gives.

A section of this book appeared in Appalachian Heritage XXXV: 2 (Spring ‘07).

Barring one imaginary subspecies of salamander, the natural history in this novel is as true to life as I can make it. The geography and geology are actual, except for the Alloway Valley and Mount Sophia, which are not. Nor is Naniquaben, Massachusetts, a place to be found on this earth. I imagine it existing somewhere near the smallest of four towns in the Swift River valley which have in fact for years now lain beneath the 411,000,000,000+ gallon Quabbin Reservoir. “Sister Amity” is my invention, but the Peace Pagoda, like the Paradise Diner, is as real as any place I’ve ever been. Everything else—institutions, characters, events—is also sheer fiction, fabrications, lies, stuff that I made up.

SALLY PARADISO: A Novel

CONTENTS

Book I:
DRIFTING PLATES: FUNDAMENTALS OF TECTONICS

Book II:
WOMAN IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Book III:
TREES OF THE GREATER APPALACHIAN REGION

Book IV:
AN INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN ROMANTICISM

Book V:
PRINCIPLES OF GEO-PHYSIOLOGY

Book VI:
LIFE IN THE WOODS

Book VII:
PLANETARY MINDFULNESS: A PRIMER

BOOK I:
DRIFTING PLATES: FUNDAMENTALS OF TECTONICS

Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive…. If you had been looking for a very long, geologic time, you could have seen the continents themselves in motion, drifting apart on their crustal plates, held aloft by the fire beneath.

—Lewis Thomas

1.

“Dickie Paradiso! You horrible. Ignorant. Peckerhead. You come on out now!” That’s what Sally Paradiso will be yelling in thirty-seven minutes, although she was not raised to talk like that.

In thirty-six, she’ll move like a five-foot-zero, hundred-three pound shooting star across the arsenic-injected lumber of her backyard deck. In thirty-five, the life she’s lived so far will fracture. On fiery currents, it will slide away. Come August, she will occupy a platform in a colossal white-limbed sycamore, sitting on a cushion like someone sitting Zen. Plate-sized leaves will rustle round her head. Cameras will snatch glimpses of her freckle-ish, chin-up face. A courteous reporter will shout questions. A crowd will cheer. At the moment, Sally’s walking home on what was once a country lane alongside Tolliver Creek. She steps out smartly in the sweet late April sunshine. Red curls tumble past her shoulders; she wears a pale-pink cowgirl shirt. She scrutinizes deathless plastic bottles, tender shoots of poison ivy, a two-dimensional squirrel. Scrutinizes everything. Everything but—oh, anything but—that creek. Here, where there are no other human beings to see her, the way she walks is purely up-and-at-‘em. Then her eyes swing toward the rumpled water. A child’s ball bobbles, sea blue swirled with cloudy white: caught against a fallen branch. Litter, or a replica of Eden? Last year, last month, Sally would have scrambled down the bank and

rescued it. Today, however, she sets her jaw and walks on toward her deck. Right foot,
left foot, in the rough-mown grass. Thirty-one minutes now to go. Sally’s always been determined that whatever life brings next, she will get through it. But it now seems she’s on a somersaulting tumble into Ga-ga-land. For three weeks she’s been pestered by what have got to be hallucinations. Or maybe just a trick of light, she tells herself. No need to get yourself all wrought up, Sally Ellen. Still, she
cannot ease her mind. The creek, the creek. Then there is her husband. Dickie claims that she’s been flat-out wack-o—and show-offy besides—ever since she started taking courses at the college. Yet he’s the one, as Sally sees it, who’s spinning out of orbit. Useless, trying to talk with him. Today, her U.S. Studies class was canceled. That means, if she sneaks safely past this stretch of moving water and presses on through the brick-veneer-and-vinyl landscape, why, then she’ll have an hour of bonus time to settle in her favorite spot, the top step leading to her deck. She will sit and, finally, face up to her dilemma. Maybe, she thinks, lots of people see things (water spirits, misty men, whatever), only no one tells. Maybe she is perfectly okay. A clay-spattered four-by-four swishes past her, close, as if the driver can’t believe that someone’s really walking at the asphalt’s edge. “Watch it, honey,” the driver yells, although the road is plenty wide. He turns off where the creek turns, taking the road into Elysian Meadows, a gaggle of houses built by Dickie Paradiso, by his first company. Sally stretches one arm toward the dirty behemoth, twiddles her fingers like a duchess dismissing a silly maid—but only after it is out of sight. Twenty-six minutes left.

She marches straight uphill, past ill-proportioned mini-mansions recently slapped
up by Paradiso Brothers Contracting, which means Dickie and his big-butt older brother, Arjay. It’s the palindromic year 2002, and the real-estate bubble’s starting to pick up speed. Once, this land was pasture, cedars greening fence lines, steers converting grass to flesh. Before that, forest. No more. The sun on Sally’s arms is too warm, really, for mid-morning near the end of April. That’s how it is in mournful, pivotal 2002: more record-breaking heat for Alloway County, for all the western mountains of Virginia. Same off east of the Blue Ridge—hot and dry.
Sally can’t take on that problem, though. Too much close at hand to fret about. Anyhow, her mama always told her to rise above unpleasant things. Eighteen minutes. Sally nears the crest and keeps on walking. She shortcuts up her downhill-neighbors’ driveway, passes their dog pen, tool shed, and two birdbaths, enters her own back yard. Climbs the stairs to sit twelve feet above her patio, atop a hillside underlain by rock that once was seashells cozied in a tropical throng. Honestly, she asks herself because she can no longer keep from asking, is she about to lose her mind?
The limestone underneath the deck supports has no evident opinion on human craziness. Molecules of arsenic from the treated lumber leach wordlessly into the topsoil. The planet moseys on. Sally Paradiso rubs a spot between her eyebrows, shakes her thick hair, squints.
From here, she sees the downhill houses far too well. One flaunts a row of fanlights, dollops of Victorian gingerbread. Another could have been designed by Ozma,

Princess of Fake-Colonial Oz. All at once it comes to Sally that she does not want to
look at them for the next half of her life. What I want, she thinks, is to go to glory. But I can’t even see my way to glory’s garden gate. A buzzing snap cuts the springtime air. Sally’s head whirls. A small brown form plops at the base of a utility pole. She hustles down the stairs. A flicker. A yellow-shafted flicker—Sally’s never seen one so close up. The bird lies still, wings pressed to its soft specked body, gold-lemon spines of the strongest feathers illuminating their dappled brown. It must have run into a power line. No, it must have drilled in search of insects into what seemed a nice dead tree. The moist black globe of one eye stares at Sally. She feels a mighty urge to press the poor thing to her heart. But if she approaches, she will only frighten it. Up on tiptoe, her body vibrates, leaning toward, away. She can’t go forward, can’t move back. So much in her life is like this. The black globe’s light goes out. If there were no houses here, she thinks, there would not be electric wires strung up on fake trees. Sally treks up to her step and sits again. Is she crazy? What’s going on? She has absolutely got to get her head around this mess. Five and one-half minutes from yelling Dickie’s name, she gazes westward, toward the higher Appalachians. She loves these relics of a crustal pulse and rebound that lifted sharp peaks, let their stumps erode, then heaved the rockbeds high again. To be worn down once more. That old booger-eater Entropy, thinks Sally. It is bound to have its way. If only she could step across the valley! She’d glide by creek and houses, over the well-groomed island of the Caledonia College campus, past the shrinking reservoir

beyond. Stride airily westbound from her deck, skimming range after folded range.
Fat chance, honey, Sally Paradiso tells herself. Those blue mountains might as well be circling a different star.
Then, from an open window, her bedroom window, Sally hears a chuckle. It’s Dickie, Dickie’s particular chuckle. She knows this sound: telltale as the bedsprings creaking or the rhythmic bang of their Shaker headboard on the wall. She freezes. It would have been her girlhood style to charge—arms pumping like a small, persistent oil derrick—directly into action. Practice, though, has trained her in self-squelching.
Or perhaps it’s shock. The haze today. Those words wash slo-mo through her head. Gone thicker. Sally doesn’t know this, but the indigo mist that tints the mountains is made of particles released by breathing leaves—and more and more, these days, of nasty sulfates from coal-fired power plants and factories. A thin high giggle lances out on the aerial trail of Dickie’s chuckle. “Awesome!” a female voice cries. “Ohmigod! Good job!” Well, that gets Sally moving, her bookbag dumped, her size-four feet drumming across the pressure-treated pine. Moving into the house and through the gingham- curtained kitchen, where a flowered plate (her mother’s mother’s china) somehow drifts into her hand. Moving to the bedroom doorway, where she stops dead. Sally is, she realizes, about to be unladylike.
Approach? Avoid? She thinks of the rude man in the spattered four-by-four, down near the troubling creek. She thinks of the electrocuted flicker. Her legs have turned to sandstone.

And yet: as if ruled by the force that rules the earth’s continual reshaping of its
skin, the porcelain plate glides forward. It frisbees up against the room’s far wall. It shatters, India smashing northward to form the Himalayas, only faster. “Dickie Paradiso!” Sally opens her mouth so wide her eyes shut almost naturally. She does not, however, step into that bedroom. The bright fire at her core is buried under layer on layer of things that she’s been taught. She can yell, our Sally Paradiso
can,
but
she
can’t
bear
to
see.

2.

“Elysian Meadows”—whatever was I thinking? I was six years out of high school when I came up with that name, sleep-deprived since my son was born, pregnant again, and in my heart an English major, though I’d committed to staying home. Dickie was building houses on land from his mama’s homeplace, bound and determined to get ahead. I nosed round the thesaurus from my one semester at Alloway C. C., and reckoned I was what my daddy used to say. A right smart thing. Elysian Meadows! Why not call it that?

The name of the development is not why Dickie’s little company went belly-up back then. Water from a treatment plant a good ways off seeped underground along the rock layers, tainting the Elysian Meadows wells with sewage. I did not know much about Elysium or Shangri-la or the green isle of Avalon, even though they lived all chunked together in my thesaurus and I was already halfway longing for some place along those lines. But I can truly say the situation did not resemble them in any way. Proud new homeowners sued Dickie’s hind end, fast. No one else was fool enough to buy there, house or lot. This left him out a pile of money. Come to think of it, it was about then that things between the two of us took a downward turn.

He and the Elysian Meadows Community Action Coalition both went after the county government, yowling in the newspapers like cats tossed in a washtub. Made them fix things at the sewage plant. Made them pipe in water from the reservoir. But all that fixing happened after Dickie had to go through bankruptcy. So, no choice about it, he

asked his snake-mean brother Arjay to partner up with him. Then had to work with
Arjay, which he purely hated, for the next twenty years. At least, he thought he had to, and it looked like they’d be Paradiso Brothers Contracting for the rest of their mortal lives.

Not that I was in any mood to be pitying Dickie, not after I caught him cheating on me. Life can be a bee-itch, but that plainly does not justify him playing snuggle-uglies in our danged bedroom with his danged new personal trainer from his danged new fitness kick. It did not help that she was barely older than Paradiso Brothers, Inc., or our daughter Ess. Or that she’d sounded like she was getting more of what I’ll call attention than Dickie had given me in years.

Not when I thought something in my chest had smashed like my grandmama’s china plate.
I am not one for therapeutic shopping, but that afternoon I drove right straight to Vistabuster Mall—that is Ess’s name for the valley’s biggest, and at other times it has amused me. I bought bedsheets, blankets, a real pretty made-in-China quilt with matching pillow shams. I chose the Sun-Star pattern over Double Wedding Ring. Really, it was not about the sex, not deep down, anyway. Dickie and I, we had not paid each other serious attention of such a kind in quite some while. Even so, I walked into the bedroom, stripped off the rumpled sheets and covers, took them to the dumpster in the carport, shoved them in. Thinking: I should probably hunker down first and pee on them, to make my point real clear. Then I found Dickie in the TV room, on the big recliner, watching ESPN Classics with the sound off. Soon as he heard me coming, he jerked his back up straight. He is

not a tall man, Dickie, and he moved forward on the seat to plant both feet firmly on the
floor. He looked good in his plaid shirt and his khakis, and I could feel my stupid self begin to soften. I stood in front of him and said, “What do you think happens now?” My husband stared at his hands, which lay all tangled in his lap, like they were some brand-new part sprung up from his body. It came to me all of the sudden that I did not belong in this place or this moment. Not in any way. “I am sorry as I can be,” said Dickie in his steady voice, “to hurt you, Sally.” As usual, he needed a shave, which, as usual, irritated me no end. “Well you have done it. A real good job.” I squinted at him, trying for one time in my life to look real mean, and thinking do not, absolutely do not cry. “Good job!” Used to be, when Mama got her feathers ruffled, she’d tell me I had a smart mouth. I think sometimes my smartness got to Dickie too. He leaned back then. Said we both should think things over. Said he had to leave now. He’d be home in a few hours.
“Home?” I said, because I could find no other word inside me. I walked out to my garden so he could not see my face. Started pulling weeds, although they were few and pitiful, from the drought. Figured I knew what Dickie would be saying soon. He hadn’t played his Tammy Wynette tape for years, but I remembered how she spelled the D-word. Or maybe, maybe, I would be the one to spell it out. That night, I pretended like I was asleep when Dickie eased into our bed. I saw no reason I should take the couch. If his pride allowed him a strip on the far edge of our queen-sized, what was that to me?
Around sunrise, I got it. He was long ago long gone. I soon after realized I truly

did not care about it all that much. Except. If we split up, I did not think I had it in me to
build another life. My papaw, my daddy’s daddy, told me when I was not but a little girl that we can live in heaven any time we choose to, just by opening our eyes. But that notion was seeming like the opposite of sane. The alarm buzzed. “Morning, sugar bear,” said Dickie. He did not meet my eyes, just stumbled to the shower like it was any old day. I was making coffee when the phone rang. We didn’t call it a landline back then, and no one in the family, except for Arjay, had a cell yet. As I picked up, I heard Dickie call out that he had to hit the work site early. “I’ll grab myself a biscuit on the way,” he shouted as the front door creaked. “Bye now.”
I had no idea how I ought to handle this. But I would be unflappable. “Good- bye,” I said. And then into the phone, “Hello?” “Hey, sweet Maah. That is efficient. But you got it backwards, no?” My daughter’s laugh quick-stepped into my ear. Now, I am ordinarily pleased as punch to hear from Ess, although lately we’d been getting on each other’s nerves some. Still, even with her living right down on the Caledonia campus and me a student there myself, we did not talk often enough for me. But today did not feel ordinary. I rushed through our usual how-you-doings. I did not express surprise that she was up before eleven. I told her, yes, surely, she could drop by and do her laundry tomorrow afternoon—the washer and the dryer would be free. “Free and free, hey Maah? Cool. Thanks. And I might bring along some stuff of Junie’s? She’s broke too, till the work-study office bozos mail our checks.” That is when I blew it, offered to lend each of them twenty dollars, insulting her

precious independence and her roommate’s too. Worse, I said I’d picked up some
deodorant on sale at SupaPharma, and Ess could get it when she came up to the house. I surely did hear the big fat sensitivity lecture then. Did I know that rat’s-ass bogus consumer crap—her exact words and I did not care for them—rat’s-ass bogus consumer crap like car wax, detergent and cosmetics were putting way more smog in the air than most factories even? I should think about that before I bought spray deodorant like I got last time.
I was feeling too puny to remind Ess that the detergent I pay extra for is pretty near as environmentally friendly as Smokey the Bear. Or that car wax is strictly Dickie’s dealie. That I have not used hairspray since my senior prom. I also did not tell her that the spray deodorant I bought had been a one-time slip. I told her there was someone at the door.
“Bye, punkin,” I said and possibly because I did not say those other things Ess added in a rush that she was sorry if she’d maybe been a little crabby. It was only because I’d taught her, like, values. “Sure, punkin,” I replied. At least, I thought, I am not thinking about Dickie. “See you tomorrow, then. Take care.”
I plunked the phone down. I took a long pull from my cup of coffee. Ess sorely needed to cut herself loose from her mama for a while. Yet where did that leave me? I’d been a wifenmom too long. I had no plans except for getting my bachelor’s. My son Val is a real good boy—but he was in med school way off in New Mexico. Lose Dickie too and I would lose the last true guy-rope of my connectedness in this world.

Also, finals started in two weeks. Also, I’d been seeing things. One thing. A

man standing in mid-air, a gray-colored man, and naked, right over Tolliver Creek.

3.

The first time Sally Paradiso saw the gray-man, he stood barely more defined than steam
that rises from the asphalt after a summer shower sails across Alloway. April’s first day, it was, nearly a month before she found Jhayne and Dickie in her marriage bed. The temperature was just getting comfy for a species that evolved on African savannas, the valley leafing out despite the drought that carried over from last year and the ones before.

Really, the encounter starts at the highway crosswalk outside the Caledonia College gate. The traffic’s running thick. Sally’s head clangs, full of what her North American Nature Writing professor just now said: how the unfolding leaves, the fresh blades, nodding stems and fragile flowers, are sucking up the recent scanty rain. The problem is—he said, and chortled, savoring the irony more than she felt he
really ought to—all that groo-oovy burgeoning keeps the moisture from sinking to the subsoil, where it could help restore the ground water. Not good, gang. Not good at all.

Sally hits the pedestrian-crossing button. The lights turn red. Cars and pick-ups and noxious eighteen-wheelers stop. She figures their idling engines are pouring more junk into the atmosphere than she saved by not driving. But she likes it, making those dinos halt. She needs to feel in control of something somewhere, doesn’t she?

It really is a choice, to use the crosswalk. Sally could turn instead along the highway shoulder, cutting down to catch the sidewalk through the underpass where Tolliver Creek flows from the campus toward Elysian Meadows. She could take that

echoing tunnel underneath the highway, past dank trash docked on blobs of dumped
cement.
She prefers, however, to press the silver button and cross straight-spined as the little green fellow on the pedestrian signal. Let those monstrous trucks and swanky mini- vans sit and wait.
The prof, thinks Sally, had one thing right. The stretch of road along Tolliver Creek has become a sudden emerald, heedless of groundwater deficits, of human wells and human needs. But now it bothers her: what lies beneath her feet—a drying cave, a dwindling river underground?
A quiet hum slides through her. It seems to pull her toward the creek. She stands stock still in the strip of grass beside the road, cuts her eyes toward the water running shallow over stones. This is her favorite part, the stretch between, near Dickie’s mother’s family’s farmhouse, now the flashily renovated home of ham-hearted Arjay and his grin- and-bear-it wife. Where the creek-bank’s trees and a tiny bluff of limestone make it possible to pretend that Caledonia Road is still a forest trail. She blinks. Now what in holy Hades—
A man, translucent, beyond the fringe of stalwart willow trees and new-green ashes. Or a pearl-gray vertical streak of mist. She steps a little closer. The slim figure wavers. Yet it stands clear enough, above a riffle in the creek. The liquid torso flexes. His facial features will shift somewhat in later sightings, but today as always, his ears are long and the eyelids rest calm and heavy halfway down his eyes. Expressionless, she thinks, a word she read the other day. Fiercely lambent. Is he the WALK sign’s shining strutter come somehow to life, full sized? Sally

eases one step backwards. Then: No, she thinks. No way.
She shakes her head. Just water vapor, surely. And—look!—gone. She was up too late last night, getting the reading done for class. She hurries on. The second time she sees the gray-man, three days later, he looms a little sharper—arms and legs now differentiated from the rest of him. But he stands so liquiform that Sally tells herself she has no call to be afraid. Same place, more or less. A little darker this time maybe. A fleeing unseen smoke-colored shape. She does not want to think about this…creature, not in those words, not in any. A flickering in the corner of her eye, a quiver within her skull. The wraith is gone. She considers driving to the campus from now on. But the creek’s old tale of wildness is often the high point of her day. This scrap of country circumscribed by suburb has been the real reason she goes on foot whenever possible. Sally reminds herself that her aim for the past five years—ever since poor Mama finally died—has been to be brave. Not all Get-Them-Terrorists steamed-up like Arjay got after 9/11. Just: tough. Resilient. But she’ll admit she has a considerable way to go. At the third sighting, she takes another a little fright, seeing that the mist-man hovering over Tolliver is nude, to boot. But she can’t be going crazy, can she? Surely a truly crazy lady would not notice her hallucinations are growing more precise? Sally pretty much ignores that naked part of him, however—easy enough, given all his shimmering in and out of focus. Easier, oddly, after the late-April afternoon when she runs across her deck and learns the reason for Dickie’s sudden interest in personal fitness, when their Diplomatic Sexual Relations (as she’d been privately calling them) degenerate into a full embargo.

Easier still, it will be, after the arrest of their daughter Ess, and then Ess’s biggest-
ever fight with Dickie, seize her attention. But what Sally can’t ignore or set aside, even in the turmoil that floods her life in May, will be the time (the new month’s first day, and she’ll be heading toward campus only hours before the county police take Ess downtown and book her) when the gray-man lifts his arm, and his fingers assume their long thin shape. From the temperate morning shadow of the creekbank, he’ll hold that hand out toward her, palm turned upward. In supplication, she’ll ask herself, or as invitation? And for what, to what? This time too, she’ll hear a hum, a muffled gurgling, almost indistinguishable. Something flowing deeply, underground.

4.

Beneath the subsoil, as the centuries skid by, acidic water slips through carbonate stone,
dissolving it along the fracture joints. A cavern forms, floored by the layer of shale
below. Stalactites drip.
It fills with water. Someone, maybe, drills a well. Maybe many people do. They
drink. They reproduce. They prosper. Or they don’t.

5.

I soon decided more than likely Ess spoke truth. I could not do one thing about her
father. Two days after I found out about that Jhayne, Ess did come home to do her laundry. Caught me having a little cry, and wormed the story out of me in no time. Actually, she wormed out that her father and I had “hit a little bump in the road,” then made what I took for a lucky guess. “Oh Maah,” she said, throwing her arms around me and nuzzling her face down in my shoulder. “He’s boinking some bimbo, isn’t he? Oh, oh, Maah.”

Seemed like she decided in about one-quarter second what I should do. Half her friends had parents who’d split up, she claimed. The stable, well-adjusted half. “At least compared to girls whose rents are sticking together till death doth part them.” She shook her head. Her dreadlocks jostled like a friendly nest of plump caramel-colored snakes. “Hint, hint.”

I told her that I truly thanked her for her support but it was not her job to handle this one and how was Junie? Not much I felt like I could really do in this world back then, but I knew how to be a mom.
Ess looked relieved. Also, annoyed. She compromised by getting busy, made us some of that chamomile tea she liked. While we sipped, she talked about her courses, which I knew she knew was the nicest distraction she could give me. “Chill, sweet Maah,” she said as I refilled her cup. “No one in that class ever turns their portfolio in by

the so-called deadline. I’ll get it done. Slam dunk.” She poured me the last splash of
tea.
That night, she sent an e-mail saying I still looked totally bootylicious and that pop’s deal is just pop’s midlife nut-job deal. Ess and I had been communicating that way
a fair amount—sweet-talk zaps that crossed the mile-and-a-half from house to campus, and the two dozen years between us, better than we’d been managing face to face. Still, was she not supposed to want her parents to stay together no matter what? Why such an all-fired rush to take my side? Maybe, I thought, it was those crazy fights Ess and Dickie started having when she hit ninth grade. I felt at least part-way responsible for the rift in my family. It was me who pushed for having a second child, and I did not take a single college course until she started high school. Maybe I did spoil her, like Dickie said. Things might have gone better if she’d left Alloway for college. Yet I had not wanted Ess to coast through some big state school—and I wanted her close to home. To me. So I promised that if she accepted her Virginia Valedictorians’ scholarship to Caledonia, she could live on campus and never know I was going there myself.

“Oh, Maah,” she wailed, the day I said that. “Maah, I’m not, like, ashamed of you. And I’m cool with Caledonia being a women’s college. I just don’t know if I can handle Alloway for four more years.” Her last year in high school, that was—she had already started with the dreadlocks. When she twitched at the thought of staying on where she had lived her whole entire life, they shimmied like they’d caught a chill.

She went there, though, to Caledonia. Moved into Arts House, ran with the smartest, most outlandish girls on campus. Kids running high on a new century’s worth

of possibility, maybe still a little bit in shock from 9/11, but certain they could take their
1990’s edge and do—Do something. They’d decide what soon. I swear I do not get it, how my daughter turned out so worldly-wise. I do not mean the pasty make-up of her goth year, ninth grade. Or even how quick she took to Unitarian-Universalist ways when she was ten and I could not stand the pastor at Rolling Hills Baptist one minute longer and Dickie said, “Go where you want—I’m done with church.”

Partly, I mean how she believed in herself, believed she might someday make a life out of photo-journalism or set design. Not like me in my high school time, working my hind end off to disguise myself as everybody else. The one thing I was known for at South Alloway was dating Dickie Paradiso, who lettered for the Colonels, then played special teams at Tech my senior year—till his left knee put an end to his football days.

But that same feistiness and arty energy was what got Ess in fights with Dickie. Got her into trouble with the Caledonia administration and the Alloway police, and then with Dickie, big time.
Also, there was the example I had set for her, back in March. My breakthrough, I’d been thinking that was, and all through that horrible April I believed I’d done myself real good with it. Up till Mayday, when I started feeling guilty. So: I was basically the one accountable for Ess’s arrest. That is how I came to look at things.

6.

Yet feisty energy is precisely what Sally has as well. Or: used to have, although for years
she’s had it just in tiny spurts, when it manages to escape its well-wrought cage.

“Hey, Maah,” Ess said once, back before spring term began, “you ever going to take an art class?” So Sally signs up for an Imagination Studies course, and one Sunday in March, for her mid-term project, she spends five hours clutching fat sticks of sidewalk chalk, gilding the Caledonia campus with shards of poetry. It’s quite against the rules, that chalking. She can’t believe she’s doing it. It’s hugely fun.
Sally writes everywhere. Lines from Dickinson in fuchsia, Rich in lavender. Coleridge, lime green. She edges the walkway to the Admissions office with sharp orange words by Muriel Rukeyser, bright blue for Frank O’Hara. In one way or another, every syllable she inscribes is about saying what must be said. Near the first-year students’ dorm, she copies bits of Yusef Komunyakaa and Wilfred Owen in drab olive— sending troops to Afghanistan to get Osama was one thing, but lately there’s been TV- talk about Iraq, and Sally can’t see why. Not that she says as much to anyone. Sally believes she isn’t one for politics. Didn’t vote back in 2000, and felt for the next year or so like the long month of uncertainty after the election somehow made that okay. But there’s been a lot of political hullabaloo on campus this year—Tidiness vs. Freedom of Expression Sally calls it in her head. First, maintenance workers blotted out

student graffiti in the pedestrian tunnel underneath the highway. Then all flyers not
approved by the Communications and Public Relations Committee of the Student Congress were ripped down. On Family Weekend, the Associate Vice-President for Material Resource Management had two banners (bedsheets painted to say Make Global Warming Less Bad and U.S. Out of the Solar System NOW!) torn from the porch of
Founder’s Hall.
What’s more, chalking announcements and the like anywhere on campus has been specifically prohibited.
Sally Paradiso has never bothered herself about freedom of speech. Hot-faced talk of constitutional rights is more her brother-in-law Arjay’s style. But the First Amendment’s been discussed a lot of late at Caledonia. This, she figures, guarantees her project at least a B.
Dialoging with the silencers, she hopes the prof will say. She’s going to tell him,
when people turn their projects in tomorrow, that hers is titled “First Amendment Meta- Text.” Then she’ll sweep her arm out, claiming authorship of what she’s done. If she gets an F, she’ll take it. This is not a thought she’s ever had before. Early on, a campus cop strolls up to Sally as she contemplates the tabula-rasa plaza in front of the admin building: A few choice words from R.H.W. Dillard? she is thinking. Any chance someone in there is smart enough for Julia Johnson’s poems? Founder’s Quad is campus-Sunday-morning silent. High-vaulted shades of long-departed elms drape over younger trees. The leaves of the boxwoods shine. The stocky cop, her hair chopped into what in Sally’s childhood was called a pixie cut, raises one eyebrow. “Morning, miss,” she says.

“Morning, officer.” Sally looks up, stares the other woman in the eye, sees it
register that, surprise, surprise, this short slight being is not seventeen years old. “Nice day. Hear they’re calling for rain, though. Not that we don’t need it.” Her fingers tense around the fat anthology she brought along to work from, but she holds her bucketful of chalk before her, where it can’t be missed. No way out but through. This throws the cop—a fairly new one, maybe only the second woman the Chief has hired. But she too is an Alloway County girl. She knows the script for this exchange, expresses her hope that it’ll rain right soon. Then her eyes glint. “But I reckon rain might not be the best thing for—now, what is it you are doing there, ma’am?” she asks. Polite as pie, but the glint frosts over. “Class project.” Sally smoothes her heavy hair back behind her ears. She’s pleased by the firmness of her voice.
“Class…project?”
Sally jabbers pleasantly, casting out the name of the man who teaches the course, calling him “Doctor”, even though he laughs at the few on the faculty who use the title. “But I simply can not decide—would you mind, officer, if I read you a couple poems? No more than half a dozen, promise. There’s so many to choose from.…” She ruffles the thick sheaf of poetry like a shaman-exorcist rattling a dried gourd. Officer Pixie Cut eases back. Steps off on her rounds. That gives Sally time and space. Fueled by a thermos of coffee and four Fig Newmans, freed by Dickie’s day-trip over to Roanoke County for some big auction of architectural salvage (come late April, Sally will recall this absence, wonder where he really went, with whom)—freed, she inscribes concrete.

Since it’s midterms-season, the women of Caledonia College—the thousand or so
who live on campus, which is nearly everyone—stay mostly where they are: squinting in the computer lab, or swilling coffee and shooting billiards in The Cave, or off visiting their boyfriends, or studying with their girlfriends in their rooms. Still, a few pass by. Some look blank: Hunh, short girl—no, lady—in purple sweatpants, chalking up the sidewalk. Hunh. Some stop and read and smirk.
Sally brought an old handkerchief of Dickie’s. Now she ties it across her mouth, a gag. Performance art: she simply shakes her head and points to the words she’s written out. She wishes Ess would happen by.
Her fingers start to ache. Nonetheless, in Sally’s eyes the sight is glorious. Unwilling to leave campus even after her chalk is down to nubbins, she strolls over to the creek. She needs to watch the water run, let it clean her brain. What if she’s gone too far? What, the well-worn tape recording asks, will people think of her? She eats the last Fig Newman, spots a ruffly-headed kingfisher on an outstretched branch. Its glance takes her in, then lets her go. Now look, thinks Sally. That bird is parked there, going about its business, and I sit worrying that I am wrong to speak up and maybe rock the boat, and all the while I am surely of no more account to it than one of these old sycamores. Am considerably less. Breathing in the creek bank’s damp aroma, she almost misses the blue flash. Into the water the kingfisher drops, headfirst. An instant later, it rises through the surface— back and shoulders pulling wing-bones, nape, the crown of its head right after. Then belly, wingtips, face and tail, all break out backward into air. The bird flies off, a skinny fish held tight in its long bill. It has done what needed

doing. Like Sally herself, today at least. Somewhere off across the creek, another bird
sings out. It comes to Sally Paradiso that she has a few more words to write. She heads back to Founder’s Quad.
POETRY FOREVER, she wrote where two walkways cross in the center of the
quadrangle. She stoops one last time. SAY IT NOW, she adds. Not great art, but it’s hers. And uppity. An uncommon rush zaps through her creek-cooled nervous system. On impulse, with the last of the Dickinsonian fuchsia, she signs a small and definite “S.P.”. Should have videotaped this, she tells herself. Indeed she should have. Life is short and art is long, but Sally’s chalkings last no more than eighteen hours. Thirty minutes after the security chief lumbers onto campus Monday morning, twenty after the Associate Vice-President for Material Resource Management and his briefcase trot in, a squad of groundskeepers starts unreeling hoses. When Sally Paradiso arrives for her eleven o’clock, every sidewalk glistens damply, tidied, clean.

7.

Dickie said, long as I got credit for my poetry-inscription project, what was my problem?
“Those peacocks you got teaching you down there,” he snorted. “Bet he gave you the A because it fried the Security Chief’s hide.” He used what I called his Arjay-voice for that, all mean-spirited and smug. I could not stand up to either of the Paradiso brothers when they talked that way—took every breath right out of my sails. Dickie could have been right. The new chief had been cracking down, asking any male he met who did not wear a necktie to show him some I.D. Young black men come for a date or to hear a speaker got major interrogations. “Cap’n Inbred,” students called him.
Ess e-mailed to say my project was the talk of Arts House, especially after the grounds-crew washed it off. an in-freaking-justice, maah, she wrote. security and the suits around this place are seriously out of control. someone ought to let the presi-nator
know the Third Reich already fell.
I would remember that, come May Day. Of course, I guess that what she learned in the meantime about her father’s little fitness program likely had something to do with what-all happened, too.
The morning of May first I spent in the library, not-thinking about the gray-man, not-thinking about Dickie, either. I alternated working on my Louisa May Alcott paper and messing with an application I was filling out mostly just to keep myself even busier.

Dickie had taken to breakfasting at Hardee’s—part of our unspoken Mutual
Assured Avoidance pact—so I grabbed a banana before I left the house at seven. Around eleven-thirty, the longing for a cheeseburger seized my soul. Or maybe, I thought, I should give those garden-burgers Ess likes another try. More mustard might do the trick. I took the sidewalk leading to Founder’s Quad, heading for The Cave. But as the library fumes started lifting, my brain clicked in. Something was sure as shooting up. People stood clumped-up on the weedless grass: students, antsy faculty, office staff with arms folded across their chests. Girls hung halfway out their dorm-room windows. Half-a-dozen dance-major types formed a semi-circle in front of Founder’s Hall; one played a harmonica. Everyone was looking toward the administration building. A thin voice, unintelligible, trying to move in long waves like call-and-response led by a good black preacher, scratched though the air. The mike released its stress in jagged screeches. I rounded the corner, saw the rest. The steps beneath the admin building’s columns were now bleachers for fifty students. Another fifty clustered down on the plaza, where a junior Political Philosophies major, a white girl I once took a class with, kept mumbling into the mike, trying to find that swing. An ironic-looking black girl in tights and a giant t-shirt hovered near her, holding a piece of poster-board that said, S-U-Vs S-U-K. “Hey, Sally. How you doing? They think they’re having a demonstration.” That came from another commuter student—Nonnie Bee Somebody, a Sociology major I’d met when we both volunteered at the food co-op. “These chicks need to get their protest shit together. Need to work on focus.” She wore her thick hair in a graying braid. I knew she drove an SUV. I raised the

corners of my lips and nodded.
Then she shrugged: “But political action here at Caldonia?” she said, shaking her head like she could not believe it. “Is that not far-out? These kids’ll let those money- grubbing vipers in D.C. get away with anything, especially now, and I guess they never heard tell of the World Bank. But here they are, all riled up and letting loose. Right awn, I say. Right ever-loving awn.”
Simple politeness to agree. Still, Nonnie Bee had always made me nervous, the way she up and spoke her mind, when and wherever. Not what I was brought up to do, that is for sure. Besides, it jumped into my head that whatever she thought, no way anyone was going to demonstrate against the U.S. government that particular spring. Moving on, I skirted the quad, listening, collecting dabs of information. The protesters had been sitting on the steps since ten this morning. The Chancellor, a true ninny, had come out briefly to sprinkle sympathetic language on the crowd. I heard the college president made her do it. I heard she’d blushed real red. The issues? I picked up a flyer with someone’s footprint on it. Quite a list: immediate campus-wide recycling; no more watering the lawns until the drought broke, and stop using pesticide; no male students, ever; better vegetarian entrees in the Caf; no plastic forks at college events; a copy of the First Amendment to be posted in every classroom; guaranteed-renewable funding for the Afra-American Alliance; same for Arts House; same for Queer Union and some group called H.O.P.E.; stop rounding up the feral cats on campus and shipping them to the pound; start selling beer in The Cave again. Across the front of the English building, someone had hung a large black banner. Spray-painted on it, two words loomed bright red: ANARCHY RULEZ.

I did care for the environment, I told myself, and what folks like Nonnie Bee call
social justice too. Here was my issue at the moment, though: I’d thrown away the sheets my husband screwed his personal trainer on, but I was still sleeping in that bed. Sally Ellen, I said to myself, this summer you are turning forty-five, your marital situation could get you onto Jerry Springer, and you are trying to finish college with a GPA of 3.6 or better. Now, plastic forks are worse than tacky and wasting water during a drought is pure evil. But your driver is not in this race. Back off. That felt bad, but it was a bad I was real familiar with. I headed for The Cave. The lunch crowd was carrying on like chickens at a carnival, mostly hourly staff and older faculty, sitting at their separate tables, swapping opinions, counter-opinions, counter-counters, smart remarks. By the time I’d gnawed through my garden-burger and visited with a couple people, I’d been handed one real juicy bite of information. Twice. Rumor swore some professor in Division Five, the social sciences, had started the whole demonstration as a course requirement. Heaven have mercy. That would mean the protesters, or at least the organizers, were doing this for academic credit.
I never did learn the truth of the course-requirement theory. It would be more believable if it had not had a different teacher’s name attached each time I heard it. But I was in the bathroom, washing mustard from my fingers, when a thought came to me— electric yellow, sour and sharp. Ess was taking classes that semester from both profs. In a place between my stomach and my heart, something began to burn.

8.

As water works the surface of the planet, so does fire. The fires of volcanism, for one:
consider the up-heave and spill of magma, lava, to be reborn as rock.
Other fires do their own work. Brief conflagrations take a forest down, leaving
hillsides to regenerate—or wear away more quickly. Now and then, a meteor makes a
full-length plunge, gouging into Earth and kicking up great climate-wrenching dusts.
Those blazes that are the wantings to which human beings attach themselves—
they also flare. Are quenched by this thing, that thing. Then return. They too have their
effects.

9.

No one on the Caledonia College campus that May Day smells smoke. At present it’s
only metaphorical, anyway. Besides, they’re all quite thoroughly distracted.

Things start popping right before Sally Paradiso leaves the library to get her lunch. Three of the protesters have agreed to take their freedom of expression to a higher level. This school-year’s First Amendment foofaraw invites an un-ignorable response. The planet has rights too. There are statements to be made on its behalf.

It is sometimes so annoying, being children of the children of the sixties and the seventies. Especially if you’re of an idealistic, hell-raising bent of mind. People like Nonnie Bee Goode, who felt themselves at age nineteen quite competent to critique U.S. policy in Southeast Asia, now critique your efforts to critique the complex global fuckings-up and -over that your eyes have opened to.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t still raise a little idealistic hell.

So shortly before Sally emerges from the library, these three young women retire into Arts House. Then (about the time she’s slathering the mustard on her soy-and- sawdust burger) they stroll out, cross Founder’s Quad, take a casual turn around the plaza before returning to stand boldly on the administration building steps. They aim their faces toward the figure at the microphone (it’s the anti-SUV speaker’s turn now), assuming postures of calm attentiveness. Part of the larger effort, they indicate. That’s all we are.

In some ways, the trio resembles Botticelli’s three graces, although one is slight
and shallow breasted and one a little stooped and one a wee bit plumper than would have suited Sandro’s taste. They are shorter-haired than the painter’s version of those charming ladies, but they are just as lovely: young proud healthy modest animals, purely present to the eyes of those beholding them. Supple. Smooth of skin. Also, except for the leafy crowns upon their heads, completely nude. Or not. That will soon become a point of hot contention. Is a person naked if she’s wearing body paint?
For the plumpest of these three who protest the recent repressive and anti- environmental atmosphere on campus is covered, widow’s peak to toenails, with body paint in forest green, streaks of bark-brown branching through it. The stoop-shouldered girl is sky-colored, oceanic. The third (the shortest, slimmest) wears a coat of paint somewhere between silvery and white. Maybe she is running water, maybe air. But beyond a doubt, she’s Ess.
Sally observes this last fact rather quickly upon returning to Founder’s Quad. Her breath stops. Something like a bell chimes deep within her head.

10.

Later, when I went up north, someone said that I did not seem southern. The peculiar
part is, she meant this as a compliment. After that, I noticed my accent shifting some, and not in the direction she would call toward normal. Truth is, I am southern from the get-go—as southern as anyone who grew up with the same TV that ran in Bangor or in Beverly Hills, with classmates moved in from Ohio and upstate New York. Southern as anyone who was ten when Martin Luther King was murdered off in Memphis and recollects how some grown-ups got upset but most just did not want to talk about it, period.
Mountain southern, I have to say, like my daddy and the other long-time Alloway County people, which is not cotton-fields-and-camellias style—although Mama did not like to hear me talk that way. I am proud of how we take time to be neighborly, how we’ve made do through more hard times than most in this country have had to put up with. How we can be real persistent about our notions of what is right. Naturally, I loved Alloway, but (did this come from my Richmond mama, always telling me things were nicer over east of the Blue Ridge?) I sometimes felt a little out of place. A little restless every now and again, like I knew the mountains that ring the valley are a big piece of who I am, yet I was meant to do some moving—although nothing in my raising taught me how.
Maybe that is part of why I married a man whose father grew up speaking Italian

at home, up in New York City. I did not much care for Poppa Paradiso in the few years
of our acquaintance, before his bad heart took him. Still, him being Italian-American, and Dickie being half—that seemed downright exotic when I was a high-school girl. But I am here to tell you “restless” does not begin to describe the way I felt when I saw Ess wearing nothing in the world but body paint, in front of all those people. I thought my socks would fall off, then and there. I sat down on the grass real fast. I told myself: At least one of us is wearing socks.

Dickie called me head-strong about going back to college. But my daughter. My stiff-necked quick-mouthed more-or-less buck-naked daughter stood smiling before a couple hundred people. The number grew as word spread and folks found all kinds of errands requiring them to cross Founder’s Quad. Mama would have perished on the spot. The crowd applauded someone’s speech. A single yee-HAAAW lifted above the commotion.
That sound hit me like a ball-peen hammer. Ess was standing up for something— lord knows what, but something—she believed in. It might be as doomed as the fight to put Bonnie Prince Charlie on Scotland’s throne shortly before half my ancestors lit out for the New World. But my daughter had a Cause. She had a Beulah Land to aim for. I swear I had no idea if I should cheer or weep. There was my baby, at the far end of the quadrangle, showing herself the way no lady would dream of doing. And—I knew her—as ruled by her notions of honor as Robert E. Lee himself had been, for all he had a couple or three wrong ideas about certain things. I would not, could not, walk away.

So I picked a blade of grass. The root end tasted sweet. The other watchers kept

on swapping stories, insights, indignations. Trying to catch the language tangled in the
P.A. system’s noisy pain. Someone had her sketchbook open, documenting. Now and then I heard a burst of laughter, another raspy cheer. Behind me, the dance majors started chanting, May Day, May Day, May May May Day, hey-ya, hey-ya, May Day, Maaaaaaay.

I might or might not be truly head-strong, but my daddy used to say I have a vein of iron. I would not run up to Ess. Would not ask her if she’d lost her common sense entirely. Would not thrust my bookbag in front of that silver-smeared dark triangle of pubic hair. Would not throw my arms around her and pull her close.

For one thing, there was the matter of the paint. Give her that hug, and I would ruin the Buddha t-shirt Ess herself had given me for Christmas. For another, I have some notions about what the mother of a twenty-year-old must not do. For yet another, I simply was not brought up to be the kind of person who makes a public fuss.

So I did not see any action I could take—not the me I was back then. After maybe fifteen minutes, I began to wish I had not left the notecards for my paper in my library carrel. Another half hour passed. More speeches. More screeches. I decided it was pointless to skip my one o’clock. Picked up my books, and left.

In retrospect, I have to say that this was probably just as well.

11.

So Sally Paradiso misses it. Not ten minutes after she heads off to her Nature Writing
class, Treewoman declares her blood sugar issues require her to eat.

It’s also true that she and Ocean-Sky and water-colored Ess feel it would be interesting to up the ante. If you’re a gadfly, and the first sting doesn’t net you a reaction, why then, you sting again. They know this. They’ve read books.

The three graces hit the Caf and load up at the salad bar: garbanzos, well-oiled pasta, a tiny clearcut broccoli forest. Word spreads fast. The Vice-Chancellor for Student Development and Support Systems, a prim-lipped henna job with perpetually bleeding cuticles, confers with Cap’n Inbred. They call the county cops.

Freedom of expression is well and good: that’s the line they’ll take—in its proper place. Once the three graces left the protest area, however, they became indecently exposed. (What “protest area”? Nonnie Bee will snort. So they should dump tea only in the part of Boston Harbor that King George declares an approved tea-dumping zone?)
Also, the argument will continue, once those young women parked their fannies on the cafeteria chairs, they are in gross violation of the public health code. “Caledonia could have lost its license to serve food,” the V.C.S.D.S.S. will explain in a letter to the student paper, the Calvinist. “Furthermore, if blatant nudity is speech, then it was offensive speech. Consider the damage to our reputation. Consider the negative PR.” Truth to tell, the PR—increased mightily by the fact that Caledonia authorities

turned unclothed students over to the legal system, exposing them to real dangers and
substantial ogling—will spark a slight rise in applications for admission. Any ink is good ink, the Associate Chancellor for Institutional Image Advancement will say, nodding
briskly.
Cap’n Inbred, Officer Pixie Cut, and the V.C.S.D.S.S. do find it in their hearts to hand two snappy uniform jackets and one pink blazer to the arresting officers, so the graces can shroud their nakedness. Treewoman and Ocean-Sky and Ess are glad, in time, to have these polyester fig leaves. But alas, for Ocean-Sky, tallest of the trio, even the security chief’s jacket is too short to do what one might hope. Most students and faculty will be on the graces’ side; feelings among the staff are mixed. As Coralene Beale, thirty-seven year veteran of the cafeteria serving line, will put it, I do not need to see some skinny little rich gal’s backside waving itself around my steam table, uhn-unh. As her friend Dodie Jenks will sing back, They so all fired up to
make this world a better place, how come they ain’t doing church-work? How come they
ain’t down to the homeless shelter, helping, steada showing off they stuff?
So much for a small martyrdom’s sweet smack. Political action entails a karmic cost: political analysis.
And then the windy groan that is end-of-semester work and finals, will supercede discussion. Five months later, two bio majors will set up a campus-wide recycling program. Meanwhile, an epidemic of distemper will put paid to the issue of the feral cats. Coralene and the rest of the low-wage kitchen crew will run extra batches of non- plastic forks through the dishwasher every now and then. Dandelions will start to bloom across the Caledonia lawns. Cap’n Inbred’s forces will, come the sunny morn of

Commencement day, patrol at full alert, lest anyone try to substitute for gown and
mortarboard a little body paint.
There is this, however: the V.C.S.D.S.S. will sit down, bite her cuticles, search her soul. And Cap’n Inbred? He’s piled one too many fascistical straws on the Caledonian camel’s back. In June, his contract will not be renewed. Officer Pixie Cut will rise up singing, take his place.
More immediately, all legal charges will be dropped. This will happen, some say, because: A. Treewoman’s sister is a top-flight lawyer in Atlanta, and; B. Ocean-Sky’s grandparents are what the vice-president for fund-raising calls in husky tones, Potential Major Donors.
But how does this come about?
Ah. On May Day, after zooming down to the Alloway Police Station, after talking with all three imprisoned graces there, Sally Paradiso returns to campus, bearing these same two noteworthy bits of information. In the college president’s ante-chamber, his administrative assistant’s jaw drops when Sally zips right past her. But Sally doesn’t stop the way she stopped a few days back, stock-still at her bedroom door. Am I really doing this? she wonders. But her love for Ess beats out her niceness,
her timidity, and her eyes are open wide. She remembers what she chalked on Caledonia’s sidewalks: some things must be said. She marches up to the president, who is sitting at his desk.
The man is none too tall himself and he doesn’t swell up like hefty Arjay. Sally finds the courage to look at him straight on. He blinks. She draws in one deep breath. “Good afternoon, sir,” Sally says, holding her voice steady. “I am a Caledonia student

and I am here to share with you two facts I truly believe you need to know.”
“Oh?” the president inquires. His face shines high-pressure bright. “Do tell.” She does. The president winces. On his forehead, a sunbeam shatters. He picks up the phone. The three graces are released from the hoosegow within the hour. Perhaps the greatest effects of all the shenanigans will be these. Treewoman’s G.P.A. will take a major nosedive, but she will have more sex with more people in the next three weeks than she’s had in her entire life to date. Ocean-Sky will transfer out, to Hollins University. And Ess?
There’s big trouble with her father coming. But today, May Day, daughter and mother (face to face in the lobby of the Alloway County jail, where Sally has returned to give the just-released girls a ride back to the campus) both burst into tears. Then— because really, what else is possible?—they both start laughing. “Sara Esperanza Paradiso,” says Sally, relieved, and stunned, and a little angry now that relief has freed her. “What am I going to do with you?” “Sally Ellen Fincastle Paradiso,” Ess replies, irked, and grateful to see her mother, and irked at being grateful. “What are you going to do with you?”

12.

From:
ess@mactavish.caledonia.edu
To:

sallyp@gritweb.net
Subject:
you rock my planet

maah—you are too cool. i want you to know that. okay, maybe sometimes i don’t totally love that we’re both going to caledonia & you know that if you ever sign up for a class i’m taking, i will drop it like pop oughta drop his dim bimbette. but i love you. promise me you will never EVER deal with the administration on my behalf again (oh yes, i heard, nothing’s secret at camp caledonia, & i was plenty cheezed at first) & you can have your birthday present super-early. better take it now, my leo-maah. i could be seriously cashless by the time the real day rolls around. go look for an envelope in your campus-mail box in the day students’ lounge. you’ll be glad
see you for uncle arjay’s b-day deal. won’t that be freaken fun? not not not not not. the man makes everybody in the family do just what he wants, and it’s all because he hates himself so much. you do know that, don’t you? lol, ess

13.

Ess was safe, or so I thought. And if I could bust into a college president’s office
uninvited, surely I could break out of my not-thinking. I would drive to Campbell’s Cove, walk in the woods around the reservoir. Turn my mind to the Dickie situation. Figure what to do.
I took off after handing in the final that finished out my junior year. I surely had been keeping myself busy-busy: not just school work, plus taking my first yoga classes with the pre-paid card that was my early birthday gift from Ess. The application I started on May Day was done with too. So except for the strings that tied me to Ess and Dickie and my son Val, except for my sad memories of my daddy and my sharp-edged sadder ones of Mama, and about a thousand other things, I was…but I could not call it free. Daddy died the autumn after I turned twelve, shot in a hunting accident by a two- bit lawyer from Lexington. Small wonder, you might be thinking, that I married the third boy I ever dated, the second one I slept with. I am not sure it is that simple. But it was my future needed contemplating that day. Turning onto the reservoir road, I passed an old-timey store—boarded windows, Cheerwine sign, a falling-apart front porch. My marriage had been on hold for a month, almost. For the past dozen years, if I looked right straight at the truth. Forgive him, or give him the boot? The sight of beat-up little houses round a neat wooden church seized hold of my mind. Campbell’s Cove Road runs through a community of people mostly descended

from former slaves of Caledonia students, and mostly working at the college now. From
the churchyard, it is not but ten-minutes’ walk to campus, on a short-cut footpath through a patch of woodland. A footpath that has been traveled for quite some while. I kept my VW close to the inside of the curves, starting the snakelike climb across the little ridge. When people come to Alloway from up north, they act real shocked to see this neighborhood. Well, I have been to Philadelphia, and senior year in high school, I saw the South Bronx. This is where the U.S. is on the footpath we call history, I told the invisible Yankee fidgeting in the vinyl seat beside me. It is not like the whole country does not have its string of cabins down behind the big house.
The trailers and the boxy single-stories thinned. I’d soon reach a sprinkling of Country Living dream homes from the seventies. But first came the scrappy woods between, a place I did not like one bit. I passed creeper and brambles come right up to the asphalt, and honeysuckle twisting like barb-wire between skinny trees. Also, a dirt road. Off that road, where the ridge bent back into itself and you could not see it, lay a ravine near filled up with piles of tires. The Paradiso Brothers’ tire dump. Thank all that’s holy that there was no sign to call it that.
The dump was Arjay’s baby, really. A way to make a little money out of land that had no other prospects. I did not fully understand things: it used to be legal, permit and everything, and then in 1987 the legislature decided it was not, that no tire dump could be. Except, in 2002 they still had not said what people ought to do with their old tires.
As Dickie pointed out, we all drive cars, we all use things that come by truck, and

cars and trucks need tires, and tires wear out. Dickie and Arjay and Mister Calloway, the
tire dump manager, were providing a public service, Dickie said. Now the government was insisting dumps like this one had to be cleaned up. I had no idea how much that would cost. Also, no idea leaving the old tires in the dump was dangerous. I mostly knew my husband got real tight-faced whenever I mentioned the whole shebang. And there was no way on this green earth I was going to find the nerve to bring the subject up with Arjay. Something about that man—his beefy hands, his browbeating ways, his trick of spreading poison stories about any person he had turned against—kept me quiet as a yard-dog with a mouth full of peanut butter. The VW started chugging. Maybe (I believe that day was the first time I gave this thought breathing room) maybe I did not want to understand too much. I shifted gears. I slid over the ridge, swooping down on sharp curves into the public land around the artificial lake. I was determined to figure things out about the marriage and my future. I truly had to. The Campbell’s Cove reservoir stretched long and shining between the hills. My own breath stretched long then, too. Not future, and not past, I thought. But another thing I had no idea of waited for me there. Something I’d be running into right away.

14.

While Sally Paradiso scolds the pallid tangle of defensive guilt and righteous outrage
riding shotgun there beside her, you might as well find out those heaps of petro-rubber are quite thoroughly against the law. The equally pallid, Johnny-come-lately law. The
one that wasn’t enacted till after the dump had acquired half its hundred thousand tires.

Arjay Paradiso cut a deal with an old man (far from pallid: he could claim mostly West African lineages, with a touch of Monacan) who wound up on paper as head of a corporate entity that apparently owns the land. The old man’s name is Calloway, Mister B. Calloway. No one still living knows his first name. B. Calloway lives in a rat-hole set back from Campbell’s Cove Road. His job title is “manager”, for which Arjay and Dickie pay him cash; he has (what with the drinking and a small cerebral accident) become a little addled, and tends to think the land is his. He’s the one who meets with the government people when they come poking round with papers and their talk of legal action this and environmental that. Enforcement of the clean-up order? State and county funding have been tight— and there are fears, in more than one official’s mind, of looking racist if prosecution of B. Calloway hits the news. The feds have their hands full, or tied, or both: after all, it is 2002. Then there’s the issue what’s called property rights. Landowners tend to vote. But a deadline’s been laid down at last. Removal of the tires shall commence in six more months. Given B. Calloway’s financial status, the taxpayers will pay.

Dickie feels he’s laying down a heavy load. When the law changed, Mister
Calloway did not stop carting off quiet truckloads from local tire dealers; those good citizens pay a buck for every ugly doughnut he makes disappear. When the county started turning up the pressure, Dickie told the others they had to cut it out. Besides, said Dickie, it’s plain wrong. His brother clapped him on the shoulder, hard, said, Right, kid. Still, Dickie thinks Mister Calloway’s kept on dumping. He wonders if that manager’s salary isn’t hush money. It has occurred to him that the old man might be working the Paradiso brothers more effectively than they are using him. Dickie’s ready to let the land just go for taxes, ready to get shut of it. Only, that would trigger a title search.
Wouldn’t you be tense if you were Dickie? His worry about some smart lawyer tracing the paper trail that leads to him and Arjay, his vision of the rage of overworked government agents when they learn the pathetic old coot they haven’t prosecuted is front man for a couple white guys who live in nice big houses; the penalties for getting caught: oh, it’s time to dissolve that little collusion. Time to let it float away, like ashes rising from a pile of burning leaves.
At the moment Sally is the one who’s floating. Or something inside her is. She stands by the boat ramp at Campbell’s Cove. Only the reservoir separates her from Chestnut Ridge and glimmering Bearwallow Marsh. A band of dried lake-bottom marks the contour between the normal shoreline and the shrinking water, wide as Sally’s ever seen it. But the hills are purely beautiful. She sighs. Too long since she last stood here. She starts along the trail to the dam, where water glissading down the spillway chute forms Tolliver Creek. Sally’s

eager to get the endorphin-dolphins leaping in her brain, get herself deciding what her
aim is, for her marriage and her life. Certainly she wants something better than the present mess.
Twenty minutes down the trail, on a section where in wetter years small springs gush over moss, Sally pauses to fix her shoelace. Dickie’s starting to look at turning fifty, she thinks. What’s one slip-up after all these years of marriage? He would never
miss her if I worked on it some. Lord knows I’d like a little more to happen in the
bedroom too. The knot tugs tight.
In one eye’s corner, something flashes. A human-looking figure hovers above the placid water with its oddly scalloped edges, this flooded valley, this fake lake. A figure wavering out there above the reservoir. A figure darker than the gray- man—tending toward a somber-silver iron-like color, although Sally would be hard put to say it had much actual color at all. Mercy. Sally squats down, staring, right there in the middle of the trail. Will she
be seeing these beings, spirits, hallucinations, everywhere now? Is she that far gone? She thought her sightings of the gray-man had ended. She didn’t take into account that—between the schoolwork crunch and her new yoga classes—she hasn’t walked along the creek much. She never once saw him from the car. Like the shape above the creek, this one over the reservoir quivers undefined. But Sally sees three things that can’t be doubted. First, this is a woman. Second, a pair of branching forms—like thin forked sticks, or maybe antlers—rise up from her head. And, already, she is holding out her hand. A hand marked (faintly, brightly) with an eight-spoked wheel.

15.

In water, there are presences. The indisputably living—fish, crustaceans, worms,
protistans, plants—their structures varying with time and place. Also, the by-human-
reckoning dead.

Fallen trees, for instance. These become the substance of other life-forms (ask
anyone who fishes), enriching the biota so markedly it’s hard to say they are not part of
“life”. And perhaps there are drowned emptied houses of, say, the settlers who built
their lives in a glen called Campbell’s Cove, before a dam rose up to make an artificial
lake.

What’s more, there is in any lake another presence: the occult abiding of still
water. It differs in character from the rapidity of water given over into motion—rivers,
creeks. A thing not of quick reflections, not of active surface, but of solemn depths.
Potential, harbored, not kinetic.
Yet those two states are only aspects of a unity. Each can change into its
alternate. Each holds the other in its arms.

16.

Later, I decided maybe Ess set Arjay and her daddy off on purpose. I have never asked.
Arjay’s birthday picnic was a Paradiso tradition, going back before my time. Dickie and I were not talking over-much, but the day after I finished finals, he and Ess and I drove to a pull-off on the Blue Ridge Parkway, toting lawn-chairs, coolers, charcoal. Arjay’s wife Juanita made Jell-O ambrosia and her buttery lemon squares and a mayonnaise-y pasta-pepperoni salad. I volunteered to bring the burgers and the chicken and a big old relish tray. That way, having vegan stuff for Ess would not cause a hoorah. Dickie bought a sheet cake. Dickie always got his brother a fancy-decorated cake. This year, it was NASCAR flags. He and I had kept on tap-dancing round each other—me all involved in writing term papers, him offering lame excuses for time spent with that Jhayne. I elected not to care about it. Let him be the one to break the ice-jam. But that Saturday, I was pleased he brought along a sizeable quantity of beer. I was sipping on my second (a wild fling for me) while Juanita rattled on about the Alloway Academy PTSA Here-Comes-Summer Carnival she was heading up for their daughter Chelsi’s school. What chance Val will phone us Sunday? I kept thinking. I surely loved to hear from my sweet boy. We had left the valley heat behind. I felt almost contented, really, a feeling I’d pretty near forgotten. Dickie and Arjay, both a couple beers downstream of me, stood over by the grill, hooting and carrying on in a real good imitation of two men having fun.

From where I sat, the view was toward the piedmont. The sun had eased down behind us
far enough to bring out the roll and pucker of the land. From the day we met, I never cared much for Arjay—truth is, I felt flat-out scared of him sometimes. But Juanita had a streak of cannot-help-but-be-herself lovability that felt real comfortable to me. Ess lay sprawled out on a quilt, talking to her eight year old cousin Chelsi. Ess loved to make up stories, and Chelsi (who elsewise likely would have thought entertainment only came on TV screens) surely loved to listen to them. I’d been half- hearing my daughter’s voice, but I was not tuned in to the words. The men came over. “Either you ladies care for another brew?” Arjay, looking down on us like a disgusted wrestling coach. “Because we are fixing to serve up the meat in about two minutes. Oh, and anybody wants it, we got one chicken-fried cardboard vegetarian-burger too.”
I never reckoned Arjay had it in for Ess in particular. But her not bothering to muffle over her smartness had made for little ruckuses between them for the most part of her life. And he surely did enjoy what he called “giving you a hard time,” even if he was just passing on what some of what Poppa Paradiso used to give to him. To him, this counted as humor, part of the good old tussles and arm-noogies and general wolfpack- setup essential to his view of human life: the more people you could put down, the fewer you had to suck up to, if you will excuse my French. In school, he’d made a regular thing of giving wedgies to the smaller boys. So, just normal Arjay. I figured Ess would ignore him, but my attention zapped toward her. I guess everybody’s did. “Next, Princess Julep bent over the amethyst coffin,” she informed Chelsi, smooth as if she had not heard a word from Arjay, “and kissed Princess Bide-a-wee’s ruby lips.

Princess Bide-a-wee woke up and breathed a three-part breath to get her energies re-
balanced, glad as glad could be to find herself awake. She jumped on the back of Princess Julep’s palomino pony, and wrapped her arms real tight round Princess Julep’s waist, and the two of them rode off toward the rest of their long and mostly happy and very interesting lives together.”
Ess had plenty of time to finish her story without interruption. In fact, even after she stopped, a silence glided on the stir of almost-evening breeze that had sprung up in the wind-gap of the ridge.
“The End,” Ess said, sitting cross-legged now and bowing from the waist toward Chelsi. Bird-boned Chelsi gave one of her eentsy bloodless smiles. I expect you pretty much know the kind of thing that Arjay, first to speak as usual, said after that. It started with “my daughter” and soon went on to “wasting your time with them college-girl lezzbos” and wound up at “mine, I’d give you a whupping you’d remember.” Lucky thing he had not had more to drink. His main dealie was nasty talk, or using money to buy people’s loyalty. But I had seen him smash a whole shelf of Juanita’s china angels, and Dickie told me once that Arjay killed a cat when they were little boys, because he thought the cat had sassed him. I felt like I ought to try to calm him some, but my throat was choked so tight I could not say one word.
“Don’t worry, Arjay.” Ess spoke right up, cool enough for a couple dozen cucumbers. “It’s okay Chelsi knows there’re gay people in the world, and most are nice as those pretty princesses.”
Chelsi kept that dreamy story-listening look Ess brought out in her. Thinking

back, I figure I might have been looking a little blank myself. Juanita hunkered down
beside her daughter. This was not an easy thing, what with the ballast poor Juanita carries—her people are all Hofstettlers and Heatwoles from up in the Shenandoah and they do run heavy.
She started talking real intently. “Remember what I tole you, Chelsi? How some people do real-bad naughty things, but Jesus wants us to hate the sin but yet love the sinner?” Her voice held soft. Her perfectly manicured squeeze on Chelsi’s arm held firm. Chelsi’s eyes looked larger than I had ever seen them. “Golly, Juanita,” said Ess. “Could you please be just a little stupider?” It came into my head to say, Sara Esperanza, mind your mouth! That is downright common. And you should say ‘Aunt Juanita’. ‘Uncle Arjay’ too. I did not. The situation
had already rumbled a considerable ways beyond good manners. For the rest, well, Juanita could not help it that the lord gave her a no-thank-you serving when he was dishing out the brains. Later I would talk to Ess about picking on the too-easily picked-on. Still, I had figured out quite some time ago that what they call homophobia nowdays is nothing but pure hatefulness. I could not award my daughter any points for her bad timing, or for being disrespectful. Could not blame her for wanting to save Chelsi from thinking that kind of ugly talk was normal and decent, either. A late-seventies Camero squealed by, doing sixty in a forty mile an hour zone. “Hooo-eee,” said Dickie, the first word he had spoken. “Crazy kids.” He took a pull of beer—Dickie always did have a fine sense of rhythm. “Nice car, though.” He turned toward his brother. I’d gotten used to the salt in Arjay’s salt-and- pepper, but all at once I saw how the white had sprinkled itself into Dickie’s half-Italian

waves, the hair I loved so powerfully in our early years. “Arjay,” he said, “Chelsi don’t
take made-up stories serious. And you’ll have to excuse Miss Sara for acting too big for her britches. She is that age. Don’t I recollect a certain someone standing up to the old man and telling him no more of that domestic v-i-o-l-e-n-c-e the day that someone turned sixteen? Thirty-five years ago today. Changed our mama’s life, that did.” For the first time in weeks, I threw Dickie a genuine smile. He nodded at his beer and kept on talking. “Now, let’s quit all this fussing and get us some chicken.” “Different situation.” Arjay’s face was ruby-colored with anger and the beer. And from Dickie’s praise. Hard as he leaned on Dickie, much as Dickie resented always playing back-up to him, the two of them had a bond. I expect their daddy’s ways, or their poor mama’s gentleness, had something to do with that. Then Arjay shot a look at Ess that made my innards tie themselves into macramé. “Well now, brother, I suppose it might could be.” Dickie turned back toward us, moving slow.
Me, I was ready to bounce over fake-smiling and start dishing up and passing out paper napkins and filling ice-tea glasses, surprised but willing to find myself teamed up with Dickie. Willing till he opened his mouth and looked at Ess and added, “So before we dig into this fine food Sally and Juanita have cooked up for us, I believe you owe us all a little apology, young lady.”
“Apology for what, Pop?” Still cool.
Dickie wasn’t. Not now. Not me, either. These two, I could handle. “Drop it, Dickie. Drop it, Ess.” I hopped up from my chaise lounge. “Time to eat. Chelsi, honey, come help your Aunt Sally fix you a plate.”

Dickie wasn’t buying it. “Apology for sassing, Sara. And apology for talking
smut at a family get-together.”
I will say this for Ess. She heard my thought-waves tell her how to grab the high ground. Only, she did not stop with that. “Aunt Juanita, Uncle Arjay, I apologize for not using your, like, titles.”
She sucked in air—seemed like there was a shortage all round right then, up there on the airy parkway. “But I was not talking smut. And I wasn’t just talking about other people. Sometimes I sleep with women and sometimes I sleep with men. It’s about love, Uncle Arjay, sir, not about anatomy. Or—” I could see her jaw twitch like her daddy’s as
she decided she’d go all the way with this one. “Or sometimes a, like, celebration of desire.”
Her eyes cut over toward her cousin, whose face had switched to TV-watching mode, locked in but less involved than her story-listening look. “I’ll tell you about Princess Safe-Sex some time real soon, sweetie-pie.” Then she glanced toward me and grinned, but her face got kind of shady: Okay, Maah? I know I’m hitting you with a lot. That she surely was. I had not been thinking my twenty year old daughter was a virgin, but this was one big chunk of news. Sometimes with—? A celebration—? My chaise lounge wobbled, but it did not tip. “Sounds like a real good story, punkin,” I choked out. Whatever else, I would stand by her here and now. Arjay’s eyebrows clenched down harder, which made my breathing clench. Juanita was looking like a large vanilla soft-serve cone, and not a bit more talkative. By this time, Dickie too had caught his breath. “Hold on now, missy. You got kinky friends, that’s your look-out. But getting yourself arrested for running around

bare-bottomed used up your last chance. I will not allow my daughter to sleep around.
And I for damn sure will not allow her to be a—” He held his hand up, like he was stopping traffic. “Be a lesbian. Not if you want me to pay your way at college.” “So, be straight and in a, like, committed relationship—and then cheat big-time, huh, Pops? You think I ought to join you on Team Hypocrite? Sir?” “Sara—” “Ess—” For the second time in the same five minutes, Dickie and I were right in tune.
Arjay stood stock still, plunged into a half-drunk fuming, picking at something on his Redskins t-shirt, looking locked-down and yet threatening as the shiny black three- thousand dollar Liberty brand gun safe in his den. Juanita shook her glossy hair and blushed. But my attention was pretty much all on Ess. She kept rolling. “Better if I was married but ready to sneak around with any little ho who shakes a well-toned ass in my direction, Pop? It’s not like this is the first time you cheated on us. On Maah. Third woman I know about. How’s the scorecard looking, really?”
Third? I thought. Sweet Jesus.
“Sweet Jesus.” That was Dickie. His voice hit me like a starter’s pistol. My beer can jumped out of my hand, flew right straight at him. No—I threw it. The sploosh across his polo shirt gave me more satisfaction than it had any reasonable reason to. Now Dickie too stood frozen. Time to get us away from Arjay, before he came to. “Ess,” I croaked. “In the truck. Now.” Sometimes a good mama has to yank the leash. It held. A blessing is what that was. In seconds, we were inside the cab of

Dickie’s truck. Ess sat beside me, silent, twisting a dreadlock behind her shell-pink ear.
As God is my witness— I thought. These words made the part of me that had
been watching the whole movie from the front row laugh out loud. My daughter cut her eyes at me. My sassy, worried, pretty, idealistic, bisexually active daughter.
Well, holy Hades. Why not? I would stick by my little girl—my big girl now, I reckoned. Her life. My daughter.
I patted her hand and turned the key in the ignition. Not one affair, but three? My sheltered life was collapsing like a shack in a hurricane. It was beyond me, what I would do next. It really was. But as God and Scarlett were my witnesses, I would come through this unpleasantness head held high. I would not let Ess get penned up by always trying to please others and not having the courage to speak her mind. “Hang on, baby,” I said as we pulled out onto the parkway. It was like we two were on a chunk of land that had sailed off from a continent, half of California putting out to sea, trying to join up with those who-zie islands. The Hesperides. I hit the accelerator hard.
So we were off. Main thing I felt when I looked at that fact straight on was one hooting big relief. Come to find out, my feelings would not stay that way, but what did I know then? Leaving scary old bully-boy Arjay and his ugliness behind me, leaving Chelsi and Juanita, yet leaving with my daughter beside me, I drove Dickie’s little red pick-up down to Alloway like it was a super-charged Camero. My first hour on the road.

BOOK II:
WOMAN IN THE 21ST CENTURY

who wants to know
the precise chemical composition of depression? can’t there be mysterious forces
and the loss of shimmer?

—Patricia Spears Jones

17.

The slab of planetary crust beneath the bulk of North America continues on its west-by-
southwest drift. Above a forest where the central Appalachians melt into the southern hangs: the moon.

Sally Paradiso hunkers on a log, brooding over the note she left on Dickie’s dresser. In the nearby fire-ring, embers glow. She’s your daughter, Sally wrote. You can’t cut her off. And: Back in a week. We have to talk. She weighted down the paper
with her wedding ring. Who knows what comes next? Not Sally, that’s for sure.

She figures she reached this campground before the others finished dinner, crammed everything into Arjay’s Lincoln Navigator with its FOREVER FREEDOM bumper sticker, drove back to Alloway. She doesn’t know for sure that Dickie’s spending the week at Jhayne’s, but she knows. Sally telegraphs her house plants: fare thee well. As if, she thinks, he’d notice they needed watering, wherever he sleeps. The
hound.

Arcady Creek, behind her, gurgles. She’s nabbed a campsite washed by the sounds of water over stone. Her tent hadn’t left the basement in maybe a dozen years, but she told herself she just plain had to pitch it single-handed. Then she did.

Ed and Verna, the Volunteer Campground Hosts, look in on Sally twice a day. She takes long walks. She reads, builds campfires, picks bouquets of Queen Anne’s lace. Surprise: she likes it here, alone.

Now, desire arises. She wants to see the creek by moonlight. Sally stands up, sets her feet the way her yoga teacher said to, stretches tall. She picks her way on small stones to a flat-topped midstream boulder. Cross-legged, comfortable, she tests herself: can she summon up that sentence she read this afternoon? Now I… What comes next?

Now I remember: the state of my Mind was pure water before I was born; at birth
the sediment defilements of the evil passions troubled it. The amazing Mr. Kerouac.

That’s worth remembering, even if she’s not so sure about the evil part. Anyway, she will not let that sorry stinker Dickie keep her from doing her Summer Independent Reading project. She needs the credits if she’s going to graduate next May.

And graduate as planned, she is determined she will do. That’s one thing she’s gotten clear on, these past three days. She only has to figure how she’ll pay for it. No way she’ll take some giant loan, even if she could get one at this point.

Overhead, a spaceborne chunk of iron and nickel enters the earthly atmosphere. Flares into nothingness. But Sally’s staring at the creek.

Her note to Dickie said nothing of money for herself. Despite the dignified townhouse of her mother’s Richmond childhood, despite all Mama’s lingering pretensions, when it came to cold cash, Sally married up. And that Richmond-genteel pride, her daddy’s Appalachian self-respect: both mean she’d rather do without than ask.

Maybe she and Dickie should stay married. They could cut a deal.

A hollow plonk-splash sounds. A turtle, at this hour?

Then the tall figure coalesces, settles on the boulder-top beside her. Sits cross- legged, just as she is sitting. Gray and wavering and present. i greet you. Plonk-splash of words inside her head.

She’s hearing voices? In the moonlight, Sally’s eyes go wide.

18.

Partly, I was low on groceries. But first thing the morning after the gray-man greeted
me, I said to myself, Whoa, girl. Time to get out of the woods a while. Swap a few words with someone who was not Verna, with anyone who was not Ed. My hallucination had followed me here. Or lived here too. Or his twin brother did. I’d told myself the woman-one at Campbell’s Cove had been the grand finale. Now I truly had to face it. I might be crazy as a bedbug.

So I climbed into the truck. Maybe the store outside the National Forest boundary sold something over-the-counter for galloping psychosis. Booming actor-voice over long shot of daisy-sprinkled meadow: Feeling twitchy? Having conversations with water-
spirits in the nude? Ask your pharmacist about Seenomore.

But I reckoned I would have to settle for more instant noodles and canned soup. Firing up the engine, I crunched over the gravel toward Ed and Verna’s campsite, slow and quiet so as not to waken anyone. Only reason I’d replied to the gray-man last night, I decided, was out of pure politeness. I greet you too, I said inside my head. Surely decent manners proved I was not cuckoo?

The words got through to him, I knew it. His far hand glided toward me, wrist bent back this time, palm forward, fingers pointing toward the sky. Another greeting, like a Star Trek thing, an alien aloha? Or…maybe somewhere once I’d seen a Buddha-statue holding up a hand that way? After a moment’s wait, he

reached his near hand through the air, wrapped his fingers round my wrist. They still
looked shimmery, but I am here to tell you I could feel them, sure as if someone poured a stream of water on my skin. Like a teacher showing me something simple but real important, he brought my palm to meet his.

How can I explain it? His body was liquid, but it wasn’t wet. My skin—it didn’t melt, it opened. No wall between us. My breathing moved in time with his. Then, between one exhale and the inhale, he was gone.

Ed, however. Ed just naturally sat real solid here and now, wherever his here, his now, might be. And he just naturally assumed the rest of us would want to sit there too. I rolled the truck up to the site that held a big old trailer, a hummingbird feeder, their wood-burned sign—“Campground Hosts: Ed & Verna Winkler”. All summer, they traveled from place to place, volunteering in two-week stints. Ed hitched his body up from the slingback chair where he’d been greeting the rise of day. “Morning, Little Bit,” he rumbled. I had dropped quite a few facts signifying grown-up status into my Q&A sessions with him and Verna. I did not mention that I had recently read a bunch of The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, or that for five years I chaired the Caring
Committee at my church, which is pretty serious work. But they knew I had a son in med school and that my baby one, my daughter, had graduated first in her high school class. This, believe me, did not persuade old horse-faced Ed to treat me any differently from how he’d treat a fourteen-year-old granddaughter, of which I knew, believe me, he had two.

“Morning, Mr. Ed.” I swear, payback is sweetest when floats right by the one

whom you are paying back.

I handed him one night’s campsite fee—it felt more in-charge, somehow, to be staying day by day. I asked if he and Verna needed anything from the store. Ed did not choose to take my money yet. He leaned his arm on the rolled-down window of the truck cab, holding me in place. I knew I should turn off the engine, stop burning gas, but that was risky. Ed could surely talk. Not that he was likely to get the point of a running engine. He let his own pick-up idle forever to pump the generator that fed their fridge and their security spotlight and their TV. “Old Verna ain’t got up to fix my breakfast yet,” he said. “All’s I need,” he lifted his plastic glass with a gesture that said take a sip, “is a little sweetening for my tea.” People say I have a tell-tale face. Ed jerked his arm back, made the sounds of a laughing man. “Aw, don’t mind me, Little Bit. I don’t mean nothing by it. You just remind me of our third girl, Lee Lynn, when she was a tiny thing. I’d always git her to put a little sugar in whatever I was drinking. When she was a kid, Lee Lynn had a head of hair on her like a house a-fire, same as you.” My hair is not red. It is bright auburn. “Ed,” I told him, my voice level as Campbell’s Cove reservoir on a calm day, “I’ll be forty-five on my next birthday.” My arm shot out. I thrust the money on him, giving him no choice. “Well, you still look mighty good.”
I put the mini-truck in gear. Why, thank you kindly, Mr. Ed. “So you-all don’t need anything from Scooch’s?”
“Lee Lynn died when she was twenty-seven. Female troubles.” A sad fact, but I’d already heard the tale from Verna, and once before from Ed. Breast cancer is what it

was. Ran in both their families.
Looking back, I still cannot believe he’d use his own child’s death to make me feel bad for standing up to him. But maybe I had it wrong. Maybe once the memory of Lee Lynn got triggered, he could not stop it from replaying all the way. Maybe he was one of those men like Dickie who keep their emotions so walled-off (for their own safety, seems like they believe) that we ought to judge their actions on a different basis, same as not giving the death penalty to anyone below a certain level of I.Q. I did not see things that way then, however. What I saw, beyond Ed’s shoulder, was a well-fed skunk. Gleaming black with patches of white, just rounding off another fine night’s scavenging, and feeling fairly pleased about its life. Now, I admit it. What I did was flat-out wrong, even though months later I would see this moment as a kind of dry run for something a whole lot more important. But that morning in the campground, I was sitting on a pile of anger, hot coals fanned by this married man’s flirtation.
I did not form an actual plan, I swear. I did keep talking quietly at Ed—poor, obnoxious, grieving, sweeten-my-ice-tea, fix-my-breakfast, bossy-as-Arjay, Dickie- stand-in Mister Ed—while the Toyota rumbled. So Ed, not one to resist a confab, even if occasionally it had to be someone else who did the talking, kept his eyes on me as he stepped back. Kept his eyes on me as I eased my foot off the brake, on me as the skunk (near-sighted, bumbling forward nose to the ground, and surely more than half-tamed by a lifetime in this happy hunting ground of campers and their yummy garbage) moved in close.
“Ed! Look out! Behind you!” He whirled. I laid into the horn.

Which could have been intended to scare the skunk away. What did a little bit of
a female thing like me know about how a wild critter might react? “Oh Ed,” I said to him, right after. “Oh oh Ed. I am so sorry. You know, I believe if I had not tried to scare it off it might not have squirted you. But all I could think was, that nasty little thing might have rabies. I truly do apologize. I’ll hurry on to Scooch’s and pick you up a whole case of tomato juice.” Polite as polite could be. And awfully surprised, deep down inside, at what I had just done.

19.

Some species die off, others prosper. Shoot the wolves, the deer will overrun the food
supply. Observe coyotes moving in to fill the niche for predators, and see how not only
sheep and cattle, but cats, and the remaining foxes too will disappear.
In fact, as those wily canines have made their comeback, they’ve been aided by
the hunters and the poison-bait: kill the alpha female in a coyote pack and only then will
the lesser females start mating. They’ll bear many more pups.
It requires great confidence, the science of “Wildlife Management”. A
confidence perhaps unmerited.
Wherever the human tribe starts moving in, the large mammals and the slowest
birds and tasty tortoises and easy-pickings shellfish start to go. Madagascar, New
Zealand, Hawai’i, to pick a few more recent invasion sites, show how it happens. The
local system has to cope. Always, the rats do fine.

And in the Appalachians, as the forest has been logged off, farmed over, the small
mammals who favor open areas have, in certain ways, done well. Crowd raccoons, and
they’ll still manage if you give them juicy dumpsters. But few tribes swagger like H. sap.
Except of course, the fearsome, fearless, half-blind, limber-fingered skunk.

20.

Her last full day at the campground. The gray-man has not returned. Ever since the
skunk event, a coolness shadows Ed and Verna’s campsite like a plastic awning. The only part of this that bothers Sally is that it bothers her. Right now, for instance, naughty would suit her more than nice. Naughty like she hasn’t been in months. Or, really, years. She heads to the pump for water, heaves the handle up and down, hard and fast as she can. Maybe, she tells herself as she walks back, she’s caught a glimmer of why Dickie does what Dickie’s secretly been doing. Maybe good boy wasn’t his glass of tea.

She plops down on a shaded log. It’s cooler than in Alloway, up here not far from Goshen Pass, but the day is growing warm. She can’t forgive him for hurting Ess, even though he didn’t know their daughter knew.

Poor Ess. On their wild ride down from the Blue Ridge Parkway, Sally learned some things. The summer after eighth grade her little girl found a note to Dickie from Shaunna, the office manager at Paradiso Brothers back then. A passionate break-up note revealing all, and telling him it was hurtful—tantamount to racism—his unwillingness to talk about the difference in the colors of their skins. About the enormous differences that trivial difference made.

Ess had kept her mouth shut about the note, but this revelation had explained to her a puzzling incident with a pink-faced lady back in her kindergarten days. Telling

Sally these things, Ess maintained an unnerving cool. Still, a few tears leaked.

A slender four-winged fly wafts through Sally’s gaze, a crumpled daddy-longlegs caught tight in one pair of skinny legs. Lunchtime.

The fly’s front legs hook onto a twig, the daddy-longlegs held in front of his dangling abdomen. Sally shifts forward, squinting. Another fly—a female, drawn by the scent the male has just released—comes up to him. This one finds her own twig, seizes it, hangs close: underside toward underside. The male lifts the daddy-longlegs forward. The female dips her head, slipping the tiny straw of her proboscis into the crumpled body. She sucks nourishment, accepting…his lure? His gift? Sally shakes her head. No, his fair share of the energy required to make offspring. The female curls her body toward the male. They link.

This sight drives Sally (she wouldn’t like this idiom right now, not with the gray- man halfway on her mind) crazy. Up she jumps. Where to? Where to? Too hot for hiking. She’d chop wood, if she had a hatchet. Off to the shower house she goes. Next day, Saturday, she drives home and dumps the houseplants in the trash. Dickie rolls in shortly after, greets her with a nod. “Sally,” he says. “Hey.”

They talk. Side by side on tall stools at the breakfast bar, at last they try to talk. Sally hooks her feet beneath a cross-brace as if it were an anchor, and she an ascension balloon.
“I been studying on the situation,” says Dickie, using one of his mother’s phrases in the half-ironic way he picked up in college. He props himself on his elbows, staring forward, visible in profile only. So strange now—older, tighter. So familiar. He too isn’t tall enough for his feet to reach the floor, but he sets them squarely on the breakfast

bar’s low step. “I know I haven’t done right by you—”
Sally sees the steadfastness that attracted her, the stability she’s always thought she needed. But she’s madder than she thought. “Or Ess,” she says. “Or for that matter, Val.”
“Or Ess, I reckon. Don’t know about Val. But, Sally, I am who I am.” “You think I am going to let you move back in here, Popeye?” She feels her face warm. “I looked in the closet. You were right to take your clothes.” “I never expected you would.” He’s still gazing straight ahead, as if the kitchen were a TV screen with the game tied late in the final quarter. “I might want to, to be honest with you, but I know things’ve went—have gone too far.” So it’s never really clear to Sally if he walked out, or she showed him the door. Nor clear to Dickie either. But he believes her when she says she’s through: he knows better than most people about the strength of will beneath her eagerness to please. Besides, losing Sally because of Jhayne (he thinks of Jhayne and not of pretty plum-skinned Shaunna, or the thing with kindergarten aide who flushed bright pink when she warmed up, or his one other affair, in the months before Ess was born)—losing Sally has made him want to hang on to this new woman. But Sally and Dickie hold the traces of one another’s youth. “Let’s see how it goes,” says Dickie. “Let’s not set the lawyers loose just yet.” They work out how much he’ll deposit in the bank for her each month, decide to decide more later on. Sally keeps making herself mint tea, cup after insipid cup. Dickie sips slowly at his one beer. Her tuition for Caledonia never quite comes up. They both know that subject’s loaded; neither wants a fight. But Sally will stay on in the house—something Dickie’s

sense of honor requires. Fine, thinks Sally. Let him be the one who has moved out.
The one who flies away to offer a daddy-longlegs to another female. He takes the mini-truck, of course. Sally cries all night and sleeps all morning. She spends half of Sunday afternoon cruising the aisles of SupaPharma, an excuse to get herself to move. But back home, her brand-new SupaPharma Pure Protection water- filtering pitcher turns out to be cracked. She marches to the big black trash tub in the carport, throws it in, box and warrantee and all. Which reminds her: Monday is collection day. Sally blazes into the kitchen, takes out the garbage, then grabs the plastic bag she brought back from the campground. It’s full of cardboard, bottles, cans. Her plan was, bring it home, rinse and sort, toss these treasures in the bins she takes to the recycling center once a month or so. But…ick. Sardine-reek. Dried beans sticking to the bottom of jagged-edged tin cans. Sticky residue of V-8. No way. That bag plops atop the plants, the pitcher, week-old picnic remnants.
Wheels rumble on the driveway as Sally pushes the black tub out for pickup. For once, the top won’t lie flat—it’s held up by the sheer bulk of the rubbish. But hey, she thinks, her very life’s about to be recycled. How can she be responsible for the whole world? The neighbors toss this much every week. It’s well into Sunday evening before she thinks to check her e-mail. Well after the hanging flies (and Jhayne and Dickie) have settled down for the night. It’s several hours more before she sleeps.
Sally wakens on a sandbar, a barrier island trailing in the continent’s wake. Waves whoosh in, whoosh out, as if they were eternal. Eastward, nothing’s visible but

that gray-green moon-tugged motion.
Something nudges against her foot. The soaked stiff body of a gull, tangled in the whitish mesh of a six-pack’s rings. Its eyes are gone. She jumps back, heels bumping something spongy, and she wheels. A dolphin, is it? Yes, fins held tight against its torso by a tangle of discarded fishing line. She turns her head, sees how the tideline is littered with rigid bodies, how more wash up with each surge of the surf. A host of seabirds, intestines blocked by plastic pellets they took for fish eggs. A turtle with a popped balloon clogging up its stomach. A small whale who’s eaten a flotilla of sandwich bags that looked like jellyfish. As if her awful x-ray vision weren’t enough, an iceberg floats by, miraculous. Ess is standing on it, silent, waving as the white hulk drifts away. Sally observes its trashy necklace of two-liter bottles, polystyrene instant-noodle cups, a scrap of fishing net sporting the drowned bodies of three diving birds. She tries calling to her daughter, but no, Ess is no longer there.
When she wakens again, alone in her own wide ice-floe of a bed, she knows what she saw was sheer illusion. Was no more than a brief and shoddy working-out of guilt and worry. Her trash goes to a landfill, not the ocean. Ess…well, Ess. It is not an easy night.

21.

From:
ess@mactavish.caledonia.edu
To:

sallyp@gritweb.net
Subject:
destiny

maah—first thing you need to know: i’ve got a nest egg. working graduation weekend & reunion has fixed my checking account. second thing, even though they throw us out of dear ole artz houze monday, i’ve got a place to live this summer. with val. new mexico—is that not supreme? i’m riding off into the sunset. junie too. so i won’t be hanging around jobless to pester you. it’s not like i could work for pops & arjay now.
in fact, brace yrself maah, we’re going to keep sharing the apartment with val next fall. we’re on official leave of absence & they’ll hold my scholarship & don’t start with me about momentum. please. i’m not you. i can take a course on latino studies or islam or whatever in the c.c. there, transfer the credits back here. pops will chill, I know him, but he needs to understand i can’t be bullied, so i’m making it impossible for him to hold my caledonia room & board over my head. junie & i have been talking for months now about taking a little time out, anyway. don’t tell him. i’m sending a letter snail mail to his office. he’ll get it after we hit the road. monday: i’ll swing by the house to say good-bye.

so now you know why you got your birthday present while i was still sure i’d
have the moolah. val’s cool with this. it’s all cool. if nothing else is shaking, i’ll wait tables for a while.
got a buzz-cut, maah, so you can see me off without the dreads, yr own baldish baby sara once again. junie says I look like a buddhist nun. maybe you should get one too?
breathe easy. i love you tunz. i’ve just got to do this. ess

22.

What would it be like, I asked myself as Ess and Junie tootled into the driveway in
Junie’s oil-burner, to just up and go? To have that much courage? I stepped out the door. Junie pretended like she was fiddling with the carburetor, gawky and competent and pushing back her dyed-black hair. Ess ran up and hugged me. She latched onto my shoulders—she’s taller than me now, a good two inches—telling me that she felt bad for leaving but she knew she couldn’t fix things for me and I’d be better off if I didn’t have her around to worry about and could concentrate…

I cut her off. It did me good to know she felt a need to make excuses. But I’d be no kind of decent mother if I tried to hold her when she had to go grow up. My mama taught me that much, even if it was by accident and the wrong way round.

Still, I am Ess’s mother. And I knew she had not done the language part of her Exploring World Diversities requirement. “Vaya con dios, punkin,” I said. “Maybe in New Mexico you can take a Spanish course.”

Ess’s grin veered. “Oh Maah,” she mumbled into my shoulder. “Oh darling classic Maah.” Something changed between us then. She stepped away. Junie bent to bump Ess lightly with her forehead, as an affectionate rhino might. “We got to go now. Sorry.” She gave me head-ducking good-bye half-smile. “You take care now, Junie,” I sang out, automatically doing what I could to keep things smooth between us. She smiled again, big-time. If she’s who makes Ess happy… I

remember thinking. And a sweet child, really. But how long till Ess has a ring hanging
from her eyebrow, too?

Now I will not pretend like learning my daughter’s roommate was her girlfriend went one hundred percent easily for me. But it had been quite some while since it hit me why my Great-Uncle Ashley—who told such funny stories and sent pretty dolls from Richmond every Christmas—had been a bachelor gentleman. Since then, when it comes to sex and love, it has not made much sense to me, expecting everyone to act alike. Not when we do not even all agree on chocolate-strawberry-or-vanilla.

And, truly, I liked Junie. I kind of liked the look of her silver eyebrow ring, too, once I got used to it. I would just assume there were no other piercings on either of them, anywhere, which spared me from asking. Which spared me from finding out. The girls climbed into that clunker, wearing twin pink baby-doll t-shirts that said KISS YOUR BLISS. They waved. I waved. Ess waved again, getting smaller. I waved
back.
Then my little girl was gone. I waved once more at the empty air. I went inside and lay down on the sofa for a nap. This was the start of my decline.

23.

Sally Paradiso naps for most of the next ten days. Some are daytime naps; some take
place at night. Most are on the sofa. She discovers that the public radio station plays jazz from 10 p.m. till 6. Rolled-up sheets of woodpulp, The Alloway Advance, pile in the paper-box two and three days deep.

As a child, Sally was what her mother called real sociable. Before she and Dickie married, she’d hang out while he shot pool, talk to the rest of the watching women. Later, she play-grouped with other mothers, and passed the time with a loose-knit gang beside the Elks Club pool. When Ess started school, Sally found Fitness City aerobics regulars who’d swap cheery remarks. She joined committees at Second Baptist and then UU. But how thin the threads in the web-work Sally spun around herself! When Val went off to U.Va., Sally started in part-time at Caledonia. Now and then she’d sit a while in the day students’ lounge, getting grapevine on the faculty from the unofficial sorority of Non-Traditional-Aged Students—a club she hadn’t been too eager to join, since age seemed to bar them from the secret center of college life. Anyway, there’s no one among them she wants to talk to now. She is learning, from departed Dickie and from distant Ess, how disconnectedness brings suffering. Once she dreams briefly of the gray-man, but he’s opaque, lacking shimmer, a mere neuro-chemical discharge of a memory. Another time she sees Arjay standing large and fierce, holding a bucket of some horrible breath-stopping goo, over

Val’s curly head. Val, age twelve or so, clutches an infant who, she realizes, is Ess. Or
maybe she’s Sally’s as-yet-unconceived-of grandchild? She wakens with a sick fear in her stomach. At least her nightmare of the seashore haunts her only when she’s awake.

What finally helps her isn’t something she sees while napping, or a road-trip west across the country, or a meeting with some hero-guru kinsman of the sun. It’s a groundhog.

24.

It was just pitiful, my post-Dickie crash. I got to be too tottery to hoe a row. My
children? Shoot, I’d done a real good job of raising them. They were strong enough to up and leave me too.

Ess called to let me know that she and Junie got there. Also, she got her eyebrow pierced near Graceland. I had already talked with Val, but my first-born got on the line to say again he’d be keeping an eye on his sister and that, again, he was certain she’d be fine. So I knew he was worried about her too.

I likely would have been half-pleased if Ess had called in tears so I could buck her up. Instead, we swapped e-mails. But once she found work at a coffee shop, we did not have that much to say. Naturally, I’m a little down, I wrote. But it’s just a stage.

It took all morning to get myself to the computer, to compose that lie. I’d stopped filling the birdfeeder. I let the garden—Dickie’s tomatoes, the rhubarb bed, zucchini, lettuce, carrots—curl up and die for lack of water. I could not read. TV did not even cross my mind.

What made me start to move and shower and eat again? It would rub me wrong if someone else suggested this, but I expect it helped some that my period started. On the other hand, that meant cramps. Enough to needle me. A walk would help. It was evening, I discovered, still sticky-warm but bearable. No way I was going toward Tolliver Creek, and Arjay and Juanita’s house, and Caledonia. So I scuffed down

the back slope of the hill.
I’d been watching traffic grow on the road through that narrow valley. Once it was a wagon road, before that, an Indian trail. Every year, more four-door pick-ups and SUVs whooshed to new developments south of the county line. North, toward town, a warehouse squatted where an apple orchard used to be. I turned the other way: little old country houses covered in aluminum, a stretch of pasture land, a double-wide.

Not half a mile along, I heard a rustling in a tree. Squirrel?

No. More the size of a small dog.
Then I got a clear view of a tail-stub stuck on a wide-load hind-end—on a branch about seven feet up. The back legs splayed, hanging real tight onto the bent-down branch.
A tree-groundhog? I’d never seen the like. It struck my eye like a moccasin flower blooming on a dry ridge, an indigo bunting against a stand of pines. One of those casual wonder-ments we get tossed at us now and then. A sneak-peek at the celestial city, which is surely more interesting than streets of gold. At least as interesting as earth itself.
The furry creature must have heard me. It stopped dead. Then—a gold-brown scurry. It took no more than a tumble of eighteen inches to dash from branch to ground on the far side of the tree, which grew right up against the road-cut. Waddling like a big old gander on a tear, the tree-groundhog streaked through the brush to a normal hole in the ground.
Later, I heard a story about a groundhog scrambling twelve feet up a tulip poplar to get away from some fellow’s dog. Might be true. And lord knows they do go for the

food. So if there was anything at all up there worth eating (a bit-into apple tossed from a
car, could be), it made sense old Tubby would show up on the spot. But something about the sight of this cave-dweller among the leaves, something about the sturdy rear end that testified like a born-again to the joys of fleshly life, something about Tubby’s determination to do what needed doing—namely, dig a mess of tunnels, and stuff in the food—made me think. Tubby, being a groundhog, lived alone and managed fine that way. Except briefly in the mating season, but I slapped that thought aside. Tubby did not depend on bank deposits from a former spouse. Tubby alone took care of Tubby’s needs. My cramps had eased off. The air was cooling. I walked on around the bend. A split of red-orange earth lay across what used to be a pasture, last time I had looked. Now this piled-up ramp ran through it, wide as a two-lane road, sides rough with chunks of rock, top bull-dozed smooth. Up ahead, a heap of trees, all broken branches and clutching roots, waited to go up in smoke. The bypass. I’d gone to a community feedback session back in January. Too late.
The meeting was just a steam-valve, about as real as silicone spilling out the top of an evening gown. The big new road would be put through. Day after the meeting, Dickie said that even though Paradiso Brothers had nothing to do with this project, it would not help his standing with the other contractors if word got out his wife had joined up with the fossil-brained anti-growth greenie-weenies. I should remember my life was part and parcel of the building industry. I shrugged. He shrugged. We had neither one of us wanted to butt heads, so that was it. Now I stared at the tiny gullies cutting down the side of the clay ramp. The food I

ate was paid for by the work of bulldozers. My belly clenched.
Despite the drought, the pastureland beyond the red-clay ramp showed almost green as spring. The dump trucks and steam-shovels and such lined up, all bright yellow. A shingle-y slope of cut-through rock added a streak the color of a rifle barrel. The ramp curved, frozen mid-swoop toward a drop-off into nowhere, and the steel-blue hills behind the shrunken pasture swelled, and awful as the scene was, it was beautiful. I turned away. Turned back and passed the groundhog hole again. Saw a second one farther on, in a ditch thick with kudzu. Tried to imagine the underground rooms, the side tunnel and emergency exit, and what would become of Tubby when the machines ground forward to widen this stretch of road. Tried all night. But what could someone like me do?
Well, when Ess and the other two graces were arrested, I had walked right in to the president’s office and said the words that got the charges dropped. And never mind if that was nice or not.
So, come morning, I drove to the Alloway County Animal Control. The man there looked to be Ed the campground host’s double-cousin. He did not consider a groundhog that wasn’t tearing up an Alloway County garden worth fussing with. Besides, Animal Control does not hand out Hav-a-Heart traps to anyone who asks. You call, they handle the situation, lady, you step back. That was not what my Inner Groundhog was crying out for. The Ed-like fellow could not get over how grown-up and persistent the small person confronting him could be. Seemed like I needed to do this not so much for Tubby as for myself. I smiled and promised and called him sir.

He caved. I left with a borrowed Hav-a-Heart, and advice on how to bait it.
Next morning, I found myself pushing a surly caged-in groundhog up a ramp of plywood leading to my VW’s hatchback. He scrabbled like a baby kitten on linoleum. I froze. I could lose hold of the cage if he kept throwing his weight around. He steadied, though, or decided to aim for invisibility. I got him in, drove west to where the farmland runs up to the National Forest, and people have little old summer cabins on wooded freehold patches. A dented Chevy passed me, doing sixty on the back road. HERITAGE, NOT HATE its owner wanted me to know. This tight-lipped explanation ran across the car’s back window, below a diagonal star-struck blue cross on a flag of red. The sight of it zapped me back to high school, to the high-windowed classroom where I met Dickie. To the day the two of us, pumped with teenaged certitude—and, I will say it, ordinary common sense—took a stand. Never mind what-all the Confederate battle flag used to signify, I remember saying one September afternoon in Civics class. Yes, I surely did know lots of folks intend nothing hateful by it. But what it means had gotten twisted. Seeing the thing plain hurt some people’s feelings. Flashing that flag had come to be bodaciously ill-mannered. I think I’d maybe had a run-in with Mama that morning—for once, I did not care about fitting in. Where-all my thinking came from, I am not sure, except that she and Daddy (each of them about as purely of the Old Dominion as it is humanly possible to be) had raised me to know courtesy requires taking a glance at matters from other people’s points of view. So I held my ground like Stonewall Jackson, while the I-got- my-rights crowd came back at me, and the one black girl in the classroom—the smart, silent daughter of a preacher—looked down at her desk, refusing to make our difficulty

hers.
I could tell the teacher, fresh out of Oberlin but a Southern boy himself, was on my side, which probably had a lot to do with me speaking up. He’d started the whole thing, trying to rile us on a sleepy day. Yet I felt an urgent need for reinforcements. Then Dickie surprised us all by speaking without being called on. “My mama’s family’s been in Alloway County near two hundred years,” he said. “My great-great- grandpa came back from Gettysburg without an arm and his one brother died at Bull Run and another died in a prison camp up north. And I say Sally here is right.” That was Dickie’s way, to take up for the underdog. Southwest Virginia people regard fairness as a serious matter, and his mama’d been against Jim Crow, even if she only ever said her piece real quiet. Anyhow, I believe that moment’s when I fell in love with Dickie Paradiso, like one shared rebellion from the herd of kids around us was enough to build a marriage on. Two days later, he asked me out. But just now I did not want to think about him, not at all. I parked in a likely looking spot, opened the cage, stepped back. The groundhog huddled motionless. “Go on,” I whispered. “Git.”
Claws clicked on metal, and then I said, “Go build yourself a, a New Jerusalem.” I will not forget the sight of that spry fat gold-brown bottom, tearing out of there. But—now what? I asked myself.
Now was high time I got some backbone. High time to dig myself a whole new
burrow. I used the spurt of post-Tubby cheer to haul myself down to the Co-op for some groceries, which I sorely needed. That is when I spotted the Help Wanted sign. CHECKER / STOCKER needed, the slab of cardboard said. “Checker” and

“stocker” were written in the curled-together halves of one of those yin-yang swirls.
Below, in purple, smaller: Re-channel your energies. Build community. Make not-so-big bucks. Come on: apply within.

25.

When earth is moved, we too are. The scission of rock along its cleavage-planes, the way
slate shingles off after the force-through of a road cut, shows how we bleed (invisibly,
internally) when the blasting caps explode. The slicing away of topsoil with its trove of
roots and burrows and microorganisms is an incision into what we are.
We eat the planet. Drink it, breathe it in. Our bones are made of minerals. Of
atoms that had long existence in earth’s body before the first blink into being of organic
life. What molecule that gives you substance has not passed—over and over—into, out
of, dirt?

26.

The Earth Wisdom Whole Foods Co-operative Society’s grocery market bears a marked
resemblance to a groundhog’s multi-chambered refuge. Having outgrown one storefront from the booming 1920’s, the co-op took over its narrow neighbor, and its neighbor’s neighbor, then colonized the back room of a building across the alley. Walls got knocked out. Doors were cut. The result’s a warren. Battered shelving thick with whole-grain this-and-that, coolers chock full of soy-based pseudo-sausages, Plexiglas trail-mix bins and racks of rainforest chocolate next to herbal oils. Today is Sally’s third as cashier/stocker at Earth Wisdom, and she’s dragging. Last week, in the flush of having just been hired, Sally lifted her chin and returned to the House of Yoga, where Ess sent her back in May. She bought herself a one-month Frequent Yogi Pass. The classes feel good, but they’re, well, a stretch. Just now, Sally’s behind her register, glad to have an idle moment. She’s watching an old woman with a headscarf (in this heat!) lean on her shopping cart as she inches toward the check-out area.

“Poor Biddy’s got the buggy with the fucked-up wheel,” breathes Noah into Sally’s ear. “Take her all week to get here.”

Sally startles. The creaking cart is a Winn-Dixie castoff. Noah is a ponytailed twenty-nine year old who’s worn the same loose t-shirt since she reported in on Monday. He evidently doesn’t sweat. NO JUSTICE, NO PEAS the faded t-shirt says.

Yvvie, the cat-eyed co-op manager, assigned Noah to be Sally’s trainer. Mostly,
he just tells her she’ll find her path. Grins and says she’ll get bored if she learns it all too soon. Prefers to talk about the stupidity of trucking in food from California, of using rivers for our garbage cans.

Sally has the co-op’s basics pretty well figured out. Her experience as a Working Member has paid off: thanks to her years of putting in eight hours a month, she knows how to stock. The Peace ‘n’ Grits Café, in the rear of this, the original building, she doesn’t have to bother much about. Noah proved quite willing to introduce her to the two registers, each with its own quirks. It’s just that he stands so close. And looms so tall. Biddy’s buggy halts in the quiet of the mid-June Wednesday afternoon. The flower-strewn headscarf swings from right to left as its wearer ascertains that both checkers wait at the one open register, and zeros in.

Sally fumes. She’s due for her fifteen-minute break and Noah’s here to take her place, only it’s clear he won’t until the headscarf has been handled with the requisite patience. He smells, a little, of American Spirit cigarettes—he smokes exactly three a day. He smells like a warm animal. She has to pee.

But she will in no way say so, and will no way hand Biddy over to him, as if she couldn’t deal. She knows he knows this. Noah’s charming, but there’s an air about him, of being loosely yet unshakably in control, that Sally finds, well, discomposing. Isn’t her goal for this new phase of her existence to learn to be the one in charge of herself?

A squawk of complaining metal. A tiny aching near her bladder. With a slip-slap of her flip-flops, Yvvie bustles in from Building Two. Noah shifts a step away.

“Tomorrow’s Midsummer Eve, Sally.” Soft smile from Noah. Not a leer: low-

key and comfortable and warming, like his quiet voice. “Come for a hike with me, would
you, after we get off work? There’s something I want to do with you.”

27.

At the top of Mullins Mountain, Noah swerved his pickup onto the shoulder. Tiny letters
marched across the trunk of the primer-patched Subaru in front of us: Flight 93 fought back. Across its rear window, rainbow teddy bears line-danced. A couple middle-aged
sedans, a van, and two red Jeep Cherokees were parked beyond the Geo across the road. Most had U.S. flags stuck on them somewhere, most half-faded. Free Tibet and Listen to Leonard, the Geo’s bumper urged.
Noah nodded like he was checking names off of a list. “Already getting started up there, Sally. This’ll open up your eyes.” I reckon he called that one. In a way. We’d gotten off work at six. Noah’s buddy Pete, who worked the café, slipped us a couple shiitake sandwiches. We ate as we drove west. “Pete’s an outlaw,” Noah said. “The man’s been known to toss liverwurst in the food processor with the hummus—keeps the Food-Prissies flexible, he says. I’m not going to tell you what-all’s been snuck into Madame Yvvie’s salad wraps.” Pete would be there too, up on Mullins Cliffs, where we were going. I had made Noah tell me that much, our destination and that it was some kind of celebration. We would not be back till late but I should not worry myself, he said. He’d tote along a couple flashlights in case the moonlight did not do the job. “Midsummer Eve, Sally gal,” he’d told me. “Days gonna start getting shorter now. We need to dance around a bonfire, keep the witches from hexing the crops, give

the sun goddess our support.” Then he winked, actually winked in a way that said, It is all
a joke, and I am the one telling it but ‘s all good, Sally—you’re included.
Now I was stepping up behind him on the trail. The walk would take us maybe forty minutes (years since I’d been here, but I remembered) and the trees and the mountain air and the time of day looked to keep us about as comfortable as you can be outdoors in Virginia in late June. I prefer to hike in long pants, being no great fan of ticks, but on a day hot as this one I went with my oldest, thinnest cut-offs and high socks. Noah wore old cut-offs too. So old the seat had worn through, leaving a fringed slit covered over with white threads. I watched the backs of his lean brown legs and then I saw he was wearing nothing underneath those pants. Watch your footing, Miz Sally, I told myself. He is not but a child, compared to you. Also: a real good hiking partner, maybe holding back some on his natural long- legged pace yet not making any kind of deal about it. Every now and then he would step aside, bow, and wave me on to lead the way. I took to doing the same. The bows got deeper, fancier. I had to laugh.
Thirty minutes into the walk, Noah called out, “Detail….HALT!” There was a spring on the mountainside below us, he said. A magical place, one I had to see. I scrambled down after him. A mighty long scramble, I was thinking, to get to water I was not about to drink. But when we entered the little hollow I felt its coolness— coolness enough that groundpine and club moss clustered round a pool where, even in drought time, clear water welled.
Nothing to lose, I thought. He surely thinks of me as his mom already anyway.
“Noah,” I said. “Noah, we can’t drink that—we could get real sick. I do not want to

wreck this for you, but nowadays…”
Noah dropped flat on his belly, sipped lightly from what his hands scooped up. “I drink here all the time. Maybe someday some brainless yo-yo will dump their germs in the wrong spot, but hey… All-good if you don’t drink it, though.” He rustled in his pack, pulled out a water bottle. “Here.”
That was Noah Moore, second-generation hippie: clear on how life ought to be, but not one to insist.
Or not directly. He’d called me out instead. I plunged my hands into the spring-pool. It tasted like it had a drop of sourwood honey in it, and a touch of iron.
Noah clapped his hands, real quiet, flashed a smile. “Long’s I’ve got the pack off,” he said, “you get a little reward. Check this out.” A couple times at high school parties, someone handed me a joint. I would take a sociable baby toke and pass it on real quick. Except for some truly spectacular fits of coughing, I never got much by way of results. Then I started going out with Dickie, whose every sentence back in those days started with Coach says. Coach said users were losers. Coach talked about what any kind of smoking did to a football player’s wind. Coach asked the team why anyone would want to spend an entire evening staring at his left hand.
Coach, of course, was right.
Still.
Still, marijuana too was part of human experience, I reckoned. And I had a mission now, did I not—to become someone who dug herself a whole new network of

tunnels she could live in. So when Noah filled the little wooden pipe, I scooped another
drink to cool my throat and sucked the rough smoke down. The spring-pool calmed. Water spilled over moss-green stones. Time stretched the shadows of the trees. We sat in silence broken only by the rustle of Noah’s daypack, the striking of another match. That little hollow, a sweet abode. The rest of the walk to Mullins Cliffs was either very short or very long. Right before we broke out of the woods and onto the rock-shelf jutting out toward where the sun would set, I heard an angel start to sing.

28.

The angel of the cliffs, in fact, is a nineteen-year-old called Anji. Her voice rises high
and pure. She’s accompanied by a heavy-set woman playing a recorder—one of the few among the two dozen present, Sally notes, who is also over forty. A pyramid of logs stands in the center of the sweep of sandstone that forms the ledge.

Noah catches Sally’s hand. The western sky is going pinkish. Nothing overhead but air.

“Hola!” Pete lopes over when the angel’s finished. “The frolic begins!” He gives them one large dented cup, brimful of red wine. Sally can’t be sure if the tinny taste comes from the vessel or the vintage. And she doesn’t quite get his t-shirt: something about a fire-watch tower. Soon neither matters. Soon the wine tastes exactly right. Anji and another girl—who also wears a loose dress hanging almost to her knees, an odd choice for hiking, Sally thinks, but surely breezy—begin another song. A leprechaun-looking man takes up a tambourine. People mill around, talking now. Occasionally someone bursts out with a yowza or a laugh. The drums begin. “Time to bid farewell to Sol,” one woman shouts. Cups are refilled, a very large spliff begins to make the rounds, and people gather near the cliff-edge, facing west. Boredom, curiosity, distaste for the culture that at present rules the landscape: these are some of the motives of various participants. Also: a thirst for finding meaning in time’s passing, or a play-pretend belief that human action affects the annual cycle of

fertility and rest, or a real faith in the same. An urge toward ritual or toward diverting life
from the worn river-bed of the quotidian. That old itch for unbridled license. A teenaged boy reads a poem, inaudibly. Chants begin, die off. The recorder- player offers up a prayer to Gaia—the earth as living being, Sally’s not too dizzied to figure that much out. “Hail, Mother of Buddhas,” the hefty woman intones. Sun touches the horizon. Earth spins and the illusion of solar motion yields. Sally Paradiso feels the planet rushing backwards as it carries her line of vision up across the face of that distant scarlet disk. Pete throws back his head and howls. Sun vanishes. No: earth spins on. “Quick, Sal gal!” Noah murmurs. He seizes her hand again. He leads her through a savanna of blueberry bushes, to a cloven chunk of stone thrust up above the wider shelf. Not easy, the scramble, the trusting step across the cleft, but worth it: the view here whirls around, 360. “Look east,” Noah says. A curved band of shady blue-gray lies over the horizon, fringed with rosy light. “That’s earth’s shadow,” Noah tells her. “The haze in the air is catching it, like a movie—only dark, not light—on a screen. And the pink’s the Belt of Venus. That’s the sunlight, all refracted or whatever. Cool?” Cool, Sally agrees, dumbfounded by the beauty and the fact of what she’s seeing, a revelation of the planet’s rondure. Really is a globe, she thinks muzzily. Round, a globe of rock and molten goo and air in space.
Soon the two are trying to work it out, exactly how the shadow reveals itself to them. Sally’s small fist models the planet—Sol III, Terra, Gaia, Mother of Buddhas, Earth. Noah’s hand wraps around to signify the atmosphere. He twiddles his other

fingers for the sun’s rays, tells Sally to lift her forearm to be the shadow and then they are
laughing, laughing till they can’t stand up. Soon: “Check that out.” They’ve caught their breath and sit side by side, legs a- dangle, gazing westward once again. Sally looks, as bidden, down to the cliff. Below them, Recorder Woman holds a torch aloft. The teenage boy ignites it. The crowd moves to where the wooden pyramid waits. A wailing almost other-worldly rises. Pete has lifted a large sea shell (conch, Sally remembers the name now, conch) to his lips. He tries to use it as a trumpet, but the notes keep breaking off. The fire soars. A dance begins, first a hands-joined circle round the flames, then small groups, couples, solo dervishes. Sally recollects the nymphs and shepherds of her Renaissance Lit class. A flute descants over the recorder. The tambourine’s shivery rattle stops, returns, as the leprechaun goes to join the dancers and someone else takes over. The drummers carry steady on.
Noah and Sally sit close. She’s happy with their slight remove from all that action.
Fireglow darkens the air outside the circle. Anji twirls as she skips round the central light. How graceful, Sally thinks. Then Anji drops her arms, lifts her dress in a liquid motion, flings it off above her head. The flames’ light catches her breasts. Sally’s muscles tense.
“Easy, gal pal,” Noah half-whispers. “There’s no weirdness here. We can leave whenever. Easier if we wait till after moonrise, though.” No weirdness, Sally thinks. She can hear Noah’s hippie mother comforting her
children with those words. She decides she will be comforted. She nods. Yes.

Anji, it turns out, wears a sky-blue thong. Her skin is pale, her body lithe. When
her friend too discards her dress, the thong she’s wearing twinkles with the violet of the sky’s last light.
“They look…chaste,” says Sally. No one gawks, or not overtly, except the poetic teenaged boy.
“Sure do. Don’t know the other girl, but these days Anji pretty much is that.” Pete whoops, removes his t-shirt, tosses it into the fire. His chest gleams, sweaty. Sally wants to tell Noah about Ess and the demonstration, about all three graces, but she’s not inclined to talk right now.
The bare-skinned graces. Her brain sends forth a solar flare. Could it have been the sight of those three painted bodies on Founder’s Quad that caused her visions of the gray-man and the lake woman?
But no. She’s mixed-up. She first saw him weeks before the demonstration. Theory collapses like a burning log. When Noah says, “May I?” then wraps his arm around her, she only smiles. It grounds her, balancing the heady swirling of the dance. Maybe later, Sally tells herself, she’ll ask Noah if he’s ever had a vision. No, not vision—a hallucination. ’S not those girls down there I need to worry about. She
squeezes the thin bridge of her nose.
“Water, Sally? A little weed?” She accepts both, feels herself relaxing farther. She vaguely thinks again about the gray-man. Sally doesn’t know she could have seen him on the hike up, in the shade around the spring. He hovered there, half-dim, half-shining, but her mind had taken itself away. She and Noah had stirred the waters, muddied them.

Her new friend nudges her, points out the leprechaun slipping off around a laurel
thicket with the recorder player. “I have to tell you, gal pal. I don’t think they are being chaste.” They laugh together then. It’s all remote but sweet in Sally’s eyes. The darkness grows. The music varies, but it never stops. First Pete, then the teenaged boy, then a man with a bandana pirate-tied atop his head, all run and leap across the fire. Sally tilts back. Overhead, behind them, golden Saturn shines. When Sally hears a rustle in the shrubbery, she breaks away, peers down on the rock’s far side. Somebody’s doing something in the shadows. Two some-bodies. She beckons Noah. What she expects to see is maybe a little smooch-and-hug. Then she and Noah, having had another laugh, can pull discreetly back. It doesn’t feel like peeping. More like the first giggle in the uproarious rib-tickler, the fine monkeyshines of sex.
Away from the firelight, their eyes adjust. Each of them can now make out some kneeling person’s curly head (no telling whose by this point, in those shadows) nuzzling the pelvis of the man with the bandana, working with zealous delectation at his crotch. The brown curls bob. The blue bandanna nods in enraptured counterpoint. The two heads alternate their swaying like paired toy ostriches that dip down to sip then swing back up and then dip down again.
Sally jumps up, averts her eyes. It’s not that she— It’s just— Sweet Jesus. “Sally,” says Noah. He doesn’t touch her. “Come sit down again. Forget them. Come. I want to try something.”
He sits easily, cross-legged, expectant, in the center of their rock. He pats his opened thighs. “Come sit. No weirdness. We know about restraint.”

She tiptoes closer, stops in front of him. Noah is flexible, astonishing—his thighs
lie almost flat. He’s told her, light and diffident, that he does a little yoga too. Now he reaches out to place a palm on either side of Sally’s hips. He does not pull. He guides her till she nestles, facing his torso, on his lap. Her legs wrap around his waist. The soft cloth of Sally’s cut-offs brushes the soft cloth, and the hardness, that is Noah underneath her. Closer. Her eyes squeeze shut. Noah’s breaths are slow now, slower than Sally’s anyway. She can sense the measured expansion, the controlled retreating, of his belly. She herself does not feel easy.
“Mind within Phenomena,” he mutters, two times, three times. Silent, she puzzles over what he means. Then he moves his hands down to her hips again. He starts to urge her, lift her back to standing. Her breathing stops entirely. “Thought we’d fit together, Sally,” he tells her. “I was right.” A panic shoots its acid through her. He’s expecting her to remove her cut-offs? Does she want this? She wouldn’t get pregnant tonight, she’s sure, but—condom! condom! No, I can’t— I’d be like Dickie. I have to work tomorrow with this boy. No
way.
Noah exhales loudly now. “We surely do. Hoo-eee—this is tough. But I don’t know what you think, Sally, but I’m thinking, not tonight. Restraint.” A group whoop rises from the dancers. “Right.” Sally forces the word out through a throat as tight as the tightest, rustiest wheel on the Co-op’s lamest shopping cart.
Restraint. He’s twenty-nine years old and sinewy and easy-talking. He wants

her. From now on, naturally, she’s wild to have him. It’s not that the passions defile our
minds: the problem’s that we give ourselves over to them so entirely.

29.

From:
esperanza@mailRus.com
To:

sallyp@gritweb.net
Subject:
minor uproar

oh, maah, don’t worry. i won’t be working at javarooni forever. (i know you’re worried, even if i haven’t heard from you for days. whazzup with that, maah? you’re supposed to be the one who writes 3 times for every 1 from me.) & for sure don’t worry if val does his goody-goody sneak act & calls you behind my back. whatever he says, the only hassle with my life now is that his spare room’s pretty small for three. but i think i love owen as much as i love junie. they love each other. they love me.

val does seem pissed. i guess he’s working too hard. or he’s a prude.

i guess owen better start paying rent. sweet guy—i’ll tell you bout him if you ever call.

i’m happy. i’m living honestly. the world is a gift of possibility. ess

30.

It is true what Flannery O’Connor said about good men. Also, what nearly everybody
says about a split-up: friends choose sides. What friends Dickie and I had, our couple- friends, were really his. Three guys he’d gone to Tech with, and whoever they were living with or married to or dating as the years passed. An Elk or two. A few folks he knew through business. Arjay and Juanita, in a got-no-choice-about-it way.

So when Dreama Bomar left voice mail asking me to come celebrate the Fourth with her and Burt, I figured they’d tried Dickie first. Busy with Jhayne, no doubt. Or else—and knowing Dreama, this was not what you would call a shot in the dark—they’d already gotten Dickie’s story and she wanted to pump me for mine.

Me, I did not care much. I’d go: why should I roll belly up? But my mind was mostly thrashing in the deep waters around Ess. I’d picked up e-mail when I got home from Mullins Cliffs. I called that crowded apartment in New Mexico right away, catching Val alone on a Friday night. But as he said, what could he do, what could I?

Not tell his father, we agreed. Not throw the threesome out—and we both knew evicting Junie and this new Owen fellow meant Ess would go too.

How much could it help me that Val swore Owen seemed basically all right, basically nice? He did dishes. He hung his bath towel on the rack. It was just that, yes, he and Ess and Junie were all sharing a king-sized mattress on the floor of Val’s back room.

At very least, I said, Owen had to be the kind to take whatever he could get.
“Most people are, Mom,” Val answered in his steady-going voice. I tried to feel relieved my sensible child was there to look out for his sister. But my baby in bed with a woman and a man? It just seemed so—unstable.

Do not poke your nose into her business, Sally Ellen, I told myself. Do not get on
an airplane. Wait and see.
And Wait-and-see, the morning of Midsummer Day when I woke up an hour too early, after very little sleep. Wait-and-see, for the hundred-year-long ten minutes from nine a.m. till Noah slipped in, whipped his head around, acting out a panicked search for Yvvie as he took his place behind the other register, then did a jokey brow-wipe of relief, a jokey stretch and yawn.
He smiled and waved across the aisle between his register and mine. I waved back. My first check-out plunked five organic bananas on the scale.

I waited, but did not see, all morning—during opening rush, and a New Member Orientation Meeting, and while I showed the newbies around the storage areas. Avoiding Noah was not hard.

He had gone for early lunch when I finished the tour; Yvvie was covering check- out, sulking like I’d forced her into it. When he walked back in, she rushed up to him and said, “I need to talk with you, Noah. Sally, you can take your lunch break now.”

Mid-afternoon before his hand fell on my shoulder. I was restocking salsas, spreads and chutneys, devoting my powers of not-thinking to my baby girl. “No weirdness, right, Sal?” he said. I nodded. He disappeared.

Me, I acted cheerful, chipper. Super-chipper, chipper as a chipmunk on espresso,

after Anji and her dress-flinging amiga dropped by to joke around with Noah, twitching
their thongs, ignoring Yvvie’s cat-glare, treating me like one of those concealed-identity people on TV whose faces are computer-blurred.

Or maybe they truly did not recollect that they’d laid eyes on me. Anyhow, it was a real relief, I told myself, that Noah seemed to want to drop the thing between us. I had no call to jump into what any ding-a-ling could see was all about my split from Dickie. Only, Noah’s body had felt so good when we moved close. And I would surely rather be the one who— Wait and see.

The next day (Saturday, the busiest), I had to clean a mess around the peanut- butter maker. Someone had let about a pint of peanut sludge ooze over the table top, the floor. I was squatting to rinse out my sponge, mentally revising my cautious note to Ess and pretending like I was saving puffins from a tanker spill, when I heard a footfall.

“Hey, whatup, girlfriend?” Nonnie Bee. “Hear your marriage took a dive.”

I shaped half my mouth into a smile. The Non-Traditional-Aged-Students’ Natter-Net surely did work fast. Juanita had a couple friends who took courses at Caledonia now and then. One of them must have assigned herself the job of spreading the word.

“Don’t bring yourself down over some old husband, Sally.” Big-boned Nonnie Bee transmitted tenderness like a radio tower. “Can’t live with ‘em—can’t live with ‘em, that’s what I say.” Her hands settled into the ample pockets of her ample paisley shorts. “Hey, maybe someday we’ll grab lunch? Haven’t seen you in the lounge. No courses this summer?”

I explained I’d worked out an Independent Reading for a couple credits. At that,

the vise of guilt clamped down on me (reading? what reading?), so I got Nonnie Bee to
do the talking. This was about like asking a year-old beagle if it wanted to go for a walk. She’d been out buying a bathing suit, she said—her three youngest and her ex-step- daughter had just persuaded her to take them for a week at Myrtle Beach. “I tell you, Sally,” she said while I rinsed my sponge for the seven-thousandth time, “there is no thing in human life as downright horrible as trying on bathing suits.”

…at least for some of us. Not that you’d know.

I waited to hear it. Waited for the smiling-stiletto look a skinny woman knows real well. Got neither. Good old Nonnie Bee. Maybe I liked her better than I thought.

Then she was off, she said, to pay her dues to corporate America, heading over to Winn-Dixie to pick up milk, which Earth Wisdom had run out of. “Gotta be sure I get my daily hit of bovine growth hormone.” She waggled her finger like a guru. “Hear the withdrawal’s a downer.”

“And the flashbacks? Mondo bummer.” One advantage of my years of niceness training is that I am a conversational chameleon. I can talk TV-normal and I can talk pure Grit—Mama’s well-bred Richmond style or Daddy’s good country people’s, take your pick. Put me in an English class, I drop literary allusions like I was Hugh Selwyn Mauberly. Hear me face to face with Nonnie Bee, you’d think it was 1969.

She snorted happily. “And the flashbacks. Lunch?”

Why, sure, when I got settled, I said vaguely, feeling my Yvvie-sensors twitch. “Gotta run,” I said, and left to dump the bucket of peanut-broth.

A couple hours passed before a lull came and it finally looked like Noah or I one could go on fifteen-minute break. “You go, Sally gal,” he said. “You’ve never worked a

Saturday. Some fun, huh?” His grin was pure devilment.

Fun, I thought, and I did not grin back. That is all it is about for these kids.
These Noahs, Petes, and Anjis. These Junies and Owens. And my Ess. Well, I am not
that kind. I was feeling old, like I had been around more blocks than even Nonnie Bee.
Feeling confused. Feeling something else, that I did not have a name for.

Noah had not finished. “You feel like coming over to my apartment to visit me tonight?” he asked next, voice a little lower. “I just scored two Thai-tofu sandwiches from Pete.”

It was like he stuck a skinny little electrode into some center in my brain. Anji and Owen and Junie could look out for themselves: the bonfire was blazing now.

The next part of the story cannot be real hard to guess. I went home, showered, put on a sundress, the closest thing I owned to Anji’s disposable number. Then I went out to the deck and sat on the top step. Yes, I thought. Why shouldn’t I? Then No.

Then Maybe, but it would be truly stupid. Then Absolutely not.

And then I drove to Noah’s.
When Noah pulled out his pipe, I shook my head. He tossed it back into the drawer. I did accept a glass of wine.

When he patted the space beside him on his big futon, I was on my second glass, sitting in the rocking chair across the room. He lounged, head propped on one arm, his rangy country-boy body relaxed as some French odalisque draped across the screen in an Art History class.
I stood up, stepped toward him, then all of the sudden turned on my heel and walked over to the window. “You think I’m acting like a high school girl?” I said,

glaring down at the street.

He said maybe that’s what I was feeling like, and what was wrong with that? He called me “sweetpea” and I thought of Ess but I did not get into all that because I started crying and there is no way you can not figure how things went on from there.

Only, there is also this: sometime around midnight he put on more music and lay back, watching while I danced for him by candlelight, no jaybird ever nakeder—or, I felt then, bolder. I was what you’d have to say was kind of drunk at that point, but not so drunk I did not know what I was doing. If you’d been peering down at us, and slipped me a note to ask how it all seemed to me, I’d have told you that night was like giving a starving person a plateful of homemade ham biscuits. I would have told you it was a glimpse through the pearly gates, a balm in Gilead, a drink of water from a mountain spring. Also, that it was purely fun. Which is what I knew a Fourth of July evening at Burt and Dreama’s most certainly would not be.

31.

Underground, the water table lowers. Not as much in Alloway as in, for example, the
Great Plains. But continued loss of forest cover and city trees, more consumption by
more people, the new evaporation rate caused by the planet’s warming: in the
Appalachians, too, these all exact their price.

At Campbell’s Cove, life-forms hunker down in pockets on the cracked-mud
margin of the reservoir. Leeches sensibly go dormant. Aquatic eggs dry out till insect
feet or wind or the feather-tips of bathing birds take some of them to water. Certain
flatworms alter their bodies’ configurations. Shrink their stomachs, jettison genitalia.

With the return of rain, they can regenerate. Meanwhile, reduced need might be
their salvation.

In woods, box turtles belly down in cooler dirt where moisture lingers, burrowing
under shelter of old leaves. They wait. Only those poor dumb cows, the white-tailed
deer, seem not to get it. They breed and breed. They search for browse. They can take
out whole species (wild lilies-of-the-valley, sugar maples), turning a young forest into
grassland: hard luck for the birds who need those plants for food or cover.

Lawns brown out in Alloway—unless the lawn-owner has a well, decides to take a
chance on emptying the unplumbed reserve it draws on. So, some lawns gleam.

In time, some wells go dry.

Those poor dumb cows, one deer might murmur to another.

32.

The reality-TV show episode that Dreama’s masterminded will start off with bowls of
M&Ms, red-white-and-blue, and gooey blobs she honestly believes are nachos. Driving over, Sally Paradiso feels unsettled about more than the prospect of the food: ten years ago, Dreama’s husband grabbed her in the very kitchen where the canapés are being perpetrated, called her Miz Pretty Tits, and tried to kiss her. Her temper shot loose, followed by her right knee. Burt folded over. He backed off.

Sally buried the incident deep within the landfill of her mind. So far, the rubber lining holds: no leaks. They see each other around the Elks Club now and then.

Still, she feels uneasy as she stares at the brass pineapple door-knocker, the wooden teddy-bear angel welcoming her to Burt and Dreama’s. That unease is soon as nothing, though—not by comparison. Sally follows her hostess to the kitchen, where the beers and the first of the evening’s disagreeable surprises wait. “Arjay!” she cries. “Juanita! Well, now—how you two doing?”

How useful, the liturgies of Virginia social intercourse! Sally praises Juanita’s silky flowered blouse, her strappy slides; Juanita coos over Sally’s new wrist-beads, the platform flip-flops Noah gave her for a joke. Arjay mostly nods his head, sucks on his first official beer. A few feet off, Dreama fusses with a tray of half-raw mini-sausages on toothpicks. She listens with a thousand ears. Sally senses the same interest from most of the half-dozen others clustered in the

mega-kitchen (built by Paradiso Brothers, Inc.). Word about her marriage is, beyond all
dispute, out. Even Burt and Dreama’s daughter in her flag-draped photo, wearing fatigues and squinting in front of a sand-colored mosque, seems intent on hearing all she can.
Yet how useful, and how merciful, that the intricate self-regulations of Mother Gaia allow people to talk about the weather. Sally and Arjay and Juanita jump to agree: the drought is awful, just plain awful. The structure of the liturgy requires a couple more exchanges. But: what? Sally begins to catalog all she cannot say. So, Arjay, you old coon hound, tell me: your little brother still getting him some poontang from his personal trainer?… Val? Fine, fine.
Hear tell things are a mite crowded in his apartment though…Oh, Juanita, Ess plumb
loves it out there on the far side of the continent from me and you. And guess what? She
may be making a full dime over minimum wage by the time fall semester starts—you
know a mama can’t help bragging… Why, she is purely blossoming in her new ménage à
trois, seems like. Sweet of you to ask. Instead, Sally remarks that they might be calling for thundershowers later in the week, and Juanita suggests that maybe the country people are right and the fireworks could bring down rain, and Arjay tells Juanita not to talk like a mentally handicapped citizen, then snickers as if he’d made a joke. He explains to the women that there is this weather situation called El Neen-yo. Dutifully, they ask questions. Arjay says it’s too complicated to explain.

Then, most merciful of all, Burt booms in, rounds up his guests and holds them on the deck while he displays his new Down-Under grill—47,000 BTUs in that baby, with

electronic ignition and a deluxe side burner too.

Lord, thinks Sally, leaning on the deck rail while Burt wows the men and a couple of the women. If they could read her mind.

Seeing Dreama bear down on her, she lifts the stone-cold nacho in her left hand, smiles brightly. So yummy, Dreama! but I have one right here already. She reviews her mental catalog of the three additional nights (and the remarkable Sunday afternoon) she has spent on Noah’s wide futon.
This requires precision of thought, as there are copious details to be recollected. She and Noah haven’t yet made love in the position they test-drove on the high rock at Mullins Cliffs. He calls it yab-yum. “We’ll save that one, pal gal,” he said. “We’ll work up to it. First, we want to know each others’ bodies perfectly.” They’re making headway in that direction. The love-making’s full-out and (as Ess would put it) mutually respectful, and shot through with corporeal joy. It is a gift of comfort in a universe defined by loss and death. Interviewed separately or together, Noah and Sally would agree on all of that.

There is one little oddity, however. One quirk on Noah’s part. Nothing Sally’s really bothered by.

They made love the first time in the position most common in their culture, Noah’s torso lifted over Sally’s, his long spine flexed so their lips could meet. Later, after her little round of dancing and some sleep, she (feeling rather unlike her Mrs.- Dickie incarnation) found herself astride his hips, lowering herself to take him in.

“Excellent! That one was most excellent!” said Noah when they’d finished. Then, in the filmy early morning, he explained with both assurance and reassurances what he

wanted. Showed Sally a glossy-photo book called Kama Sutra Secrets for New Age
Lovers. Said they could go through it page by page. Position by position.
“Or in any order really, Sal gal. If you want to.” He rubbed her back slowly, lightly. “Might be better to stick with the flow, though. But whatever.”

Why not? He tells her she’s amazing. That they’re both amazing, how they fit together, him tall and her so tiny. This is true. She doesn’t mind when he mentions how small her body is, how light. He says it floats his boat, how she’s every bit as limber as she looked to be. The only thing he asks, the only precept he lays down, is that they won’t repeat a single posture.
Not much of a quirk, really, as quirks go. “Then when we’ve done all the others, we can be Buddhas together, Sally. Doing the yab-yum one for real, in the buddha-realm.” He teaches her a word of Sanskrit, mahasukha, which means, he says, great bliss.
So her mind does wander during Burt’s Down-Under info-mercial. When someone admires Dreama’s dahlias, Sally smiles benignly while their bald-faced hostess explains she’s brought in water (as would be legal, despite the rationing here inside the Alloway City limits) from a no-longer-potable country spring. Sally nods blank-eyed, as Burt begins to bluster about the deer menace. The valley’s herd is at the high point of its population cycle: 5,280 known deer roam the streets, dropping ticks, denting cars (and dying messily), damaging hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of hostas and azaleas and the like. “Oh, but Dreama,” Juanita says just one beat late, “yours are looking good.” Burt plows on. The City Council should extend the hunting season; the two city

sharpshooters can’t do it all alone. “You people out in the county,” he pronounces, “you
don’t know what it’s like when there’s no place for the goddam deer to go. Wait till Bambi smashes your front bumper. Wait till his mama stuffs her face on your landscaping. They’re varmints, is what they are.” Sally wakes up a little. Who was here first? she asks herself. “I just hope,” she says brightly, “the cougars will come back and help out.” Burt makes a crack about Sally and her hippie-dippy notions, but Arjay (is he being chivalrous? protecting the Paradiso family honor?) jumps in. “Not legally they ain’t. Not legally varmints. We got to change the law, so’s they can exterminate em.” Burt chafes Arjay about his new love of Big Guvmint. Arjay sputters. Sally edges away, afraid her burly brother-in-law will blow. Her mind wafts off again: her father loved the woods because he hunted in them. Or vice-versa. He died because an idiot mistook him for a deer dressed in blaze orange. She has nothing against hunting, really; it’s only some of the hunters she does not take kindly to. Ah! Heads swivel away from the two contesting stags. Dreama’s bringing out dessert.
After the pie’s served (butterscotch-raisin in a store-bought crust—Dreama claims she didn’t like the look of Food Lion’s peaches, but Juanita swaps glances with the woman next to her: they know how labor-intensive fruit pies are), the show begins. Arjay’s brought over three hundred dollars’ worth of fireworks. Sally can lean back, push her pie around her plate, check out the display. She re-reviews her Noah-catalog, wonders what is coming next. She tosses in occasional
oooohs
and
aaaaahs.

Mahasukha.

Supreme
Bliss.

33.

I know a good deal more now than I used to, about the draw of pleasure. But shoot, the
real learning had not even started, that evening at Burt and Dreama’s house. The Roman candles, and my favorite of the fireworks—Big Kahuna and the extra- fancy one called Flying Phoenix Twisting Dragon—died away. I yawned. But I would not leave. No way the explosion of my marriage was going to be the subject of the party’s wind-down conversations.

I did slip off to the bathroom: locked. So I pressed on round the corner and down the hallway toward another. This took me past the TV room. Arjay’s voice blared out above the buzz of racecars, talking to a couple brother Elks, I guessed.

“…never seen Dickie as riled as these two women got him,” he was saying. “I thought Sally had him purt near pussy-whipped, but now he’s carrying on about how they should not of gotten married in the first place. And he’n the new one keep fighting something terrible.”

Should not have…? I went rigid as Bambi’s mother staring at a Dodge Ram’s
bumper. Someone asked a question I did not catch. The men guffawed. Arjay boomed again. “Naaaw, getting plenty and loving every smidgen. Hear him talk, that ain’t the problem. Maybe they fight so’s they can have a good time making up—hell if I know.”

Step away, Sally, I told myself. Move on now.

Fat chance, girl.

I only caught the tag end of Arjay’s next sentence: “…not like when he was screwing that,” (I could almost see him take a swig from yet another tall-boy in a silence pregnant as a doe with twins) “Af-ro-Uh-mer-i-kin gal.” Die, Arjay. Have a heart attack. Get crushed by a pile of sheet-rock on the site
tomorrow. Please. I figured my one chance for dignity was to haul myself on down the
hall real quick-like, before my stars-n-stripes flip-flops and I stomped in to tell him off. Although I don’t suppose I really could have done that, being who I was. Being more than a tad scared of Arjay, if you want to know the truth. Papa Paradiso must have hurt him more than Dickie, him being older. He surely did turn out to be the mean one.
I stayed in that bathroom for some while, throwing water on my face, trying to finger-comb my hair. Finally, I stood in tree-pose for a couple minutes, just to settle myself. So Arjay had known what Ess knew about Dickie’s ways. Evidently these other Elks had too: last thing I heard from them was reminiscent chuckles. Looked like I needed to have a little chat with Dickie soon, find out if what Arjay said he’d said about our getting married was true. But first I had to stick the party out. No way I’d take Arjay on. But nor did I care to slink off like a runt puppy bested by its litter-mates.
Easing past the TV room and round the corner toward the kitchen, I nearly ran smack into my sister-in-law. We swapped apologies. She floated, real casual on her usual cloud of Shalimar, out to the main party on the deck. Funny, I thought, that I had not heard her. Juanita usually walked with such plumped-up disappointment that it was hard to miss the sound. And come to think of it,

her delicately made-up face had looked more than a little flushed.
Burt was leaning on a counter in the kitchen. Hearing my footsteps, he pivoted fast, pivoted away from me. When he did turn back, as if he’d just then realized someone else was in the kitchen, he too was flushed. He too, real casual. He did not look like a man who’d been kneed or slapped or fussed at for a kitchen-grab. He looked like a man who had grabbed and been rewarded. Or, for all I know, who’d been grabbed. He looked somewhere between all worked up and starry-eyed. “Hey, Burt.” I squatted down to the cooler, snagged a lite beer, moseyed out to the deck. My two obligatory mouthfuls of butterscotch-raisin pie took to mud-wrestling in my stomach. This Burt-Juanita thing, new or old? Did Dreama have a clue? Arjay did not. I would have bet the farm on that, if I had one. But thinking on it, I began to feel my sister-in-law had reason to try for something that made her what she took for happy, even if that thing was godawful Burt. Go, girl: the words burst in my head like the Big Kahuna.
That evening’s discoveries had another effect on me. Next time Noah asked me (laid- back as always and always, I had noticed, in exactly the same words) if I would be coming over to his apartment to visit him that night, I said no. I actually claimed I was signed up for a special starlight-yoga workshop. “Cool,” Noah said.
This did not last of course. My sudden butterscotch-and-raisin distaste for sex dried like a puddle of lake water in the July sun. Noah and I were not thick-headed Burt and clueless Juanita. We were not Junie-Ess-and-Owen. We were not Dickie and whoever. We were not the old married Sally and Dickie either, going through the motions once in a

long while. He was Noah. I was me.
He waited. I began to thirst. He asked again. We did positions eleven and twelve, one at night, one in the early morning. Seems like, now, I might have seen how I was following a trail pretty much entirely of his choosing, but I did not. Seems like I might have noticed how little I was noticing what I really needed to be doing on this planet, but that too slipped right past me, like a river I could not see. Anyhow, things took a new turn soon enough. I cannot call what he and I got up to a waste of time. After all, it was what the younger Caledonia students call it—hooking up. Connecting, that means. Letting go of the fool-headed notion that we are meant to be separate little mes. And besides, the pleasure made the whole room seem to shimmer.

BOOK III:
TREES OF THE GREATER APPALACHIAN REGION

…in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary to talk about trees.

—Adrienne Rich

34.

On Venus, ocean basins languish, all their water turned to steam. Aitch-two-oh’s the
greenhouse gas that held in heat and cooked that planet’s surface dry. On Mars, what could be dried remains of deltas, floodplains, seem to warn us: biomes die.

Here on generous Earth, however, things look relatively good. Many trees— maybe half the forests that used to wrap the globe—survive. True, an extra-terrestrial observer might note that some now line up in dull rows. True, the green bits do shrink daily. But even desert ecosystems can hold up, if the creatures living there are sparse, and very tough.
Val’s apartment in arid New Mexico, however, is an environment gone badly out of balance. Here’s what’s happening: Ess’s heart is being broken. Wide-eyed Junie likes what Owen whispers in her ear. Ess holds on to the portion doled out by her bedmates, as a desert rat hangs on to seeds. She’s started going to meetings—Greenpeace, H.O.P.E., and others. This gives her, she jokes gamely, something she can write her mom about. No meetings for Sally, though, not beyond the ones required at the Co-op. No chat yet with Dickie about Arjay’s revelation: she’s building her interior reserves. Besides, she’s got to make more progress on her summer Independent Reading project— can’t afford to lose the credits now. So when Nonnie Bee next rumbles through Earth Wisdom, Sally says thanks, but really, she can’t take off work for lunch. Yet, like Ess, Sally feels bereft. On impulse, she suggests a Sunday brunch.

“Far out,” cries Nonnie Bee. “Chez moi? Bring something heavy on the carbs.”
Turns out, Nonnie Bee Goode and her tribe of young have settled on the very street where Sally lived until the day she married Dickie. Where Sally’s mama kept on living, till Sally and the home health-care lady could no longer handle all that needed handing, and Mama went to the dementia ward at Sunset View. Come Sunday, Sally drives by her former habitation. Glances at its neighborly porch, the wide and shabby eaves. Warm perfume from the pecan crumble coffeecake resting on the backseat teases at her—Mama’s recipe. Not half a block away, she passes the tremendous sycamore smack in the middle of France Street. Mama often wandered to it after the bad time started.
As she eases her VW around the trunk, Sally reaches out to pat the old survivor. The bark drags rough and solid beneath her fingertips. Hello, she says inside her head. Nonnie Bee serves scrambled tofu, and cup after cup of maté tea. They swap anecdotes about professorial high-jinks. Then Dickie is compared to Nonnie Bee’s past consorts. Kids, teenagers, her twenty-something carrot-haired twin sons: all the household comes and goes while the two women linger at the kitchen table. Sally tells what she heard Arjay say that Dickie said, how her husband wishes they had never married. Nonnie Bee gives forth a mighty raspberry—not what Sally expected. But what the hey…she emits a small and cheerful pbbbbt herself. Soon (must be the maté talking, Sally thinks) she spills the story of the gray-man. How he linked her palm and his. Then about the woman-figure over Campbell’s Cove. Sally takes a small shelf-fungus from a bowl atop the table, filled with objets de caprice: river pebbles, a god’s-eye made from toothpicks, three hemlock cones, a Liberty

dime, two red dice, an odd-shaped black one. She stares at the dried fungus as she talks.
“Been a while now since the last time, Nonnie, but—multiple hallucinations. I have lost it, right?”
Nonnie Bee picks up the curious black die. She tosses it, peers, reads. “Not as I see things,” she intones. “Now, it does concern me that you’re only talking to the guy, not to the sistah. But otherwise—” She smirks a kindly smirk. “What’s that?” Sally chin-points toward the black plastic oracle. “A duodecahedron. You haven’t squandered a semester on Math Concepts for Non-Majors yet? No way you’re getting out of that requirement, baby.” Nonnie Bee laughs and resettles herself, letting her heavy gray-brown braid fall behind the chair-back. “No, no—I get you, Sally. You know those Magic 8-Balls? One of the twins dropped mine. I kept the sibyl’s heart.” She lobs it back into the bowl. A child bursts in; she needs a ride. “Okay, puppy,” says Nonnie Bee. “Get your little sister rounded up. We’re on our way.” Then in the same tone, to Sally: “Two things you need to do, if you ask me.” Her eyebrows rise and Sally nods permission. “One, go rap directly with the husband-person. You gotta know what’s coming down. And two…” She sets her gaze on Sally’s: “Two, I’d find out what’s up with this gray-man. Take yourself on a vision quest. Go someplace like Chestnut Ridge.”
Vision quest? Oh please. But Sally forces her face to signal, Sure, a vision
quest—I’ll think it over. To cover, she picks up the black die, shakes it hard, releases.
The tiny words are barely easier to read than mist. “Why not?” the sibyl says. It’s four more days (and one more night in Noah’s room, two more positions by

candlelight) till Thursday, Sally’s day off this week. She absolutely will not go to
Jhayne’s. But she can try to catch Dickie at the new SupaPharma Homefolks’ OmniMart he and Arjay are subcontracting for.
Her luck runs good: as she drives up to the site, she sees him leaving the office- trailer at the edge of the remolded acreage. Looks like they can have this out in private. She kills the engine of her VW. “Yo, Dickie!” she calls and can’t suppress a buzz of pleasure when he jumps: that’s new. But then, so is the firm beat of her voice. “Dickie, you told Arjay we should not have gotten married? That really what you think?” Dickie strides over, short and nowhere near as beefy as his brother, but looking a little thick-set to her now. A vision quest’s the last thing on her mind.

35.

“Aw, Sally,” Dickie said the morning I found him at the OmniMart site. “I just let loose a little steam with Arjay once, asked if he thought I’d been a fool to tie myself—and you too, Sally—down so young. Why’d he have to go and shoot his mouth off?” We were sitting on lawn chairs around back of the office-trailer, where there was still a strip of shade. “And for cat’s sake, why’d you take him serious?”

Zap. We telepathed the same notions about Arjay that we’d hardly ever said
aloud. Almost like old times is how it felt for a moment there, sharing the last coolness before heat swept in from the red-clay lake of fire they were making into OmniMart big- box and three-truck loading dock and godforsaken dumpster islands in the gravelly crater of a parking lot a-borning. But it got my goat, how Dickie was turning the blame in my direction. Like I was a ninny for trusting what his big-talking older brother said. Of course, I maybe was. “Those your tomatoes, Dickie?” I asked, cutting my eyes toward the bitten-into hill in front of us. A row of plastic tubs staggered along its crest, filled with dirt and weedy vines. Looked like they’d been planted late.

“Three Big Boys. Three Better Girls. One Roma, and the rest is peppers. I can give you—” His voice shut down. “But I don’t reckon you would want ‘em.”

Had he been by the house when I was out, seen the shipwreck of the garden? Sally, you yo-yo. Yes. So I said nothing, just thought how typical of Dickie that was, not
to talk straight-out. Big Boys and Better Girls? I got the message.

“Anyhow,” he said. “I’m kind of ticked at Arjay. He’s been jerking me around on that dump. Mister Calloway’s still taking tires and come to find out, Arjay knew it.” The last words came out in a harsh near-whisper. I felt a little sorry for him, if you want to know. Who else could he talk with about that mess? But when I tried, he shut right up. “Aw, no big thing,” he said.

We went on a little about this and that, news I had from Ess—some of it, anyway—and how Val was doing fine, calling each of us by turns. When I asked Dickie how he was feeling, he just shrugged.

A pitiful piece of business. Next thing you knew, I’d be writing a little note to Jhayne: Thank you, my dear, for taking him off my hands. Good luck and god bless.

He got in his red Toyota truck, drove on into the site. Walking to my car, I passed another tomato plant out front of the trailer. Bushy. Bigger. He must have planted this one earlier—back when he first set out the tomatoes in our yard.

His little extra garden on the side. Quicker than thought, I pulled off one green
globe and stomped it. That felt real good, about the way a goddess must feel when she wipes out a planet gone too far wrong. So good in fact that I fingered into the earthy- spicy greenery, picked four more and turned them into dirt-and-green-tomato chutney. I wish I had not done that, but I did. I wish it had not made me want to dance. Yet it felt better than skunk juice. Good as getting my baby out of jail.

I acquired new worries soon enough. Day after my little interview with Dickie, Yvvie called me into the office at Earth Wisdom. Waved me to sit in the computer- station chair. But it was piled with a landslide’s-worth of pamphlets. “Oh, I’m fine, Yvvie,” I said. “Really.” Truth is, I felt better standing.

Yvvie’s green eyes glinted. She didn’t have complaints about my work. It was a matter of personnel issues. How I was fitting in to the staff dynamics. She just wanted me to know that she’d more-or-less caught a vibe.

“A vibe?” I was fingering my wrist-beads. Forced myself to stop.

“Hard to explain, Sally. Really—” She unscrewed a gleaming tube a little smaller than a lipstick, rolled its end around her temples. Peppermint and lavender sliced toward me. Yvvie sighed like she was carrying a burden too cumbersome to share— “all I can do is advise you to, well, pull your socks up. Keep your mind on your work.”

“Sure will, Yvvie.” If Alloway were Mayberry, I thought, I’d be scratching my head like Andy’s dumbbell deputy, trying to figure what is what. Skinny Timm, the guy in charge of the produce section, walked in, said “Oops,” and walked out fast. I gave up. I muttered, “Okay, thanks then, Yvvie,” and zipped out.

“Why, thank you, Sally,” her mouth said to my back. I spent some while guessing what might have got Yvvie chucking horse apples at me. Also, recollecting times my daddy’s daddy took me walking on Chestnut Ridge. Funny, that Nonnie Bee picked that particular place. Not that I saw myself going there anytime soon.

Then I got distracted by the letter that came four days later. I recognized the stationary right off, naturally. I’d designed it myself, years before.

36.

PARADISO BROTHERS’ CONTRACTING
since 1983

new construction . remodeling
commercial . residential
Make your home or place of business a genuine paradise!

Dear Sally,

I think I have never written you a letter, only notes on the kitchen counter. I am trying this because of what you said, how the e-mail lets you and Ess tell each other what you can not say straight out. You and her were always so tight anyway. Leaving Val to go read a book. Leaving me, if you will be honest with yourself. That is what I meant when I was sounding off to Arjay about how you and me should not have tied ourselves down so young. I should have dated alot of girls before settling down, is all I was saying. You should have stayed in college. I should have tried to get into the architecture school.

None of this means I am not sorry for making you feel bad. Those women had nothing to do with you. But I am sorry you had to find out about them, I tried to keep it private.

This letter is to tell you I am moving out on Jhayne. I know it is pointless, trying to come back to you, we would both be unhappy. What I do not know is how long a man like me can live alone. But I am going to give it a shot.

That will cost alot, keeping up the house payments for you, plus my new place. I
will keep my promise on the bank account, you can count on the deposits until what you called our marriage sabbatical is over. We both know what is coming, but I will stick to my word.
But, I can not see my way clear to paying your tuition for Caledonia any more. There is a limit to what I owe you. Take a sabbatical from college. Take out a loan. Good luck, Sally. I swear I am not doing this to be ugly. I am giving you a roof over your head. I am doing the best I can.

Sincerely yours,

D.

37.

Each species suits its situation. In every site where life is possible, some branch of some
genus reshapes in accordance with the niche. To eat what’s there to be eaten. To evade
death, reproduce. Forms, colors, strategies shift as necessary; new twigs—new species—
spoke out from the family tree. Adaptive radiation, it is called. We all do what we can.

Atop the cool solitary islands of the southern Appalachian mountaintops, split off
from one another, new kinds of salamanders have emerged. Also in isolated valleys, and
in small heaps of talus here and there. Salamanders green or striped, red-backed, red-
legged, red-cheeked, black-chinned. Salamanders who’ve found homes in limestone
caves, and the woods-dweller salamanders, and the others in ravines. Dusky, long-
tailed, pigmies. Shovel-nosed. Wandering offspring get sorted out to fit new
neighborhoods; the survivors’ descendants make each neighborhood distinctive.
That’s just one example. The uncountable divergent communities of varying
animals, plants, fungi, in their manifold locales, have given rise to the pre-Darwinian
argument from design. But consider now an argument about effects, not causes.
Here goes. The diversity of species and subspecies reveals, enhances, the
particularity of their places, right? Similarities, relatedness, exist. But, no two alike.
Therefore: this odd tree, that endangered fish, every local ecosystem or larger
biome—each set apart by difference—has the capacity to testify: look! Look here. Like
sacred places revealed in mystic visions, they mark eruptions of the extra-ordinary into

the smoke-shrouded same-old-some-old that blinds and binds us. Yo, they say, wake up.
Then let us waken. In this varied particularity, this rich mélange, in the never-to-
be-repeated suchness of this species, this habitat and its inter-dependent residents, in all
these calls for liberating attentiveness, lies what might as well be holiness. Why not treat
it so?

38.

I stood in the droopy shade of the willow by the mailbox, reading. My forehead
tightened. I felt hot. I folded the letter, thought shoot. I sneezed, and felt my itchy tonsils, and then I thought well, shit. I took about a ton of vitamin C, lay down to read the letter again. By 9 p.m., I thought my skull was going to bust wide open. Come morning, I called in sick. In the end, I was out—too achy to go get groceries even—for an entire week.

Noah dropped off juice and echinacea. Once I e-mailed to New Mexico, the kids called. Val recommended I drink fluids and stay in bed. My son, the M.D.-to-be. At least he gave me credit for knowing there was such a thing as aspirin. Of course, I am the one who told him, years ago, that those magic pills owe their origin to aspen bark. I will say I needed aspirin so desperately that week that if I’d run out, I’d have started gnawing trees.

I listened to disembodied voices on the radio. One day I recalled the truly spectacular case of mono I had at age thirteen.

Yes, it might have come from kissing. I had just discovered that enjoyable recreation—at a party in someone’s basement, a party where the occasional tenth-grade boy took the occasional eighth-grade girl into some big old closet and introduced her (if she’d been watched over like I was, if her daddy had died the year before and she’d spent way too much of the time since then sitting by her mama in a room with all the curtains

drawn) to the brighter side of living in the flesh.

Anyway, that mononucleosis truly made me sick. Only, the danged doctor Mama took me to blew it—said it was strep throat. The antibiotics he gave me, marching though my internal ecosystem like Sherman’s soldiers toward the sea, did improve the situation somewhat. Or postponed it. Till the slumber party, anyhow. Six of us girls watched a movie on TV—Gone with the Wind, as I remember. When it started, I felt almost fine. Then Atlanta burned. By the time it ended, my temperature was well above one hundred. I could not swallow anything at all.

Three days in the hospital for dehydration. My lips cracked so deep they bled. I gasped. I hid my face in the pillow. I saw things. Nothing clear as the gray-man or the lake woman. Just shadows looming in the air. In some other time and place, I expect I’d have taken them for ancestral spirits, or my clan’s totem animal. One kept pressing closer, till the heat of my body melted it away.

Was it the gray-man, way back then? The idea hit me—the grown-up, post-
Dickie, flu-struck me—as I opened a can of chicken-barley soup. That is to say (I revised the notion quick as I could), had my recent visions just been me plugging into memories from Teen Sally’s fever, the way they say a dream is old perceptions re-released?

But as I punched the button on the microwave, the first thought returned. Had I truly seen the gray-man years ago? Had there been an outstretched arm? Just possibly, had those shades around my hospital bed been early attempts—

Nonsense. I had not seen him, not one flicker, since the tail end of May.

Yet in the way of sick folks, I kept brooding. Watching my glass of ginger ale go flat. Trying to remember I had not always ached like this. Wishing this obsession with

the gray-man would go away.

Really, that flu was nothing. I still cannot say why it made me think that sometime in August, if I got my energy back, maybe I would do what Nonnie Bee suggested. Maybe I could clear my head out if I pretended like I was giving in to all that nonsense. Chase him off by proving him unreal.

Or maybe, maybe, find him. Anyway, I would go questing up on Chestnut Ridge.

39.

From: esperanza@mailRus.com To:

sallyp@gritweb.net
Subject:
breaking news

maah, you’re honestly feeling better, right? i’da sent you an e-bouquet, but waiting for one to download on yr cheez-brained machine would only give you pain.

i’m doing great. told junie & owen yesterday they have to go.

started to tell them it was val’s idea but then i spoke truth, straight up. they make me feel like a sidecar & i can’t stand it. good thing i’m the lease-holder’s sister, yo.

pop’s okay? i got on the phone last time val called him. he’s departed bimboland (way ta go, dood) but he sounded, i dunno, tight. imagine that.

the universe wants us to walk a new path: that’s what junie told me back when she started going crazy over owen. yesterday in our big scene, i said, the universe wants you to get fucked….but not by me. ‘cuse the language, maah. but you’ve have been proud of my delivery. sometimes a grrrl has just got to stand up and say what needs saying. the universe, maah—does it ever really tell us what it wants?

big hugs & a sloppy germ-free kiss from: ess

40.

In Sally Paradiso’s lifetime, the grayed remnants of the American chestnut trees, lost
tribe of the Appalachian forest, have largely passed away. Chestnut ghosts her grandfather called the blight-stricken snags. Papaw used to take her walking, when she was eight and nine and ten—got her to spotting barkless relics in the woods. Sometimes the rims of the broken trunks looked blackened, burned. But it’s simply that during the twentieth century’s first five decades, a fungus worked its way, tree to tree along the mountains, out from its entry port. Exuberant Cryphonectria parasitica choked the chestnuts’ internal waterways, damming the flow of nutrients within.

Sally’s papaw would sip a little from his hip-flask and describe how in his boyhood he went out chestnut-ing in autumn. He used to brush dry leaves aside, looking for the fallen nuts, making slow concentric circles outward from each trunk. Then he told about the springtime, when chestnut blossoms spread yellowy whipped cream over half the trees on certain long rich slopes.

One years-ago day, up on Chestnut Ridge with Papaw, Sally saw three huge ghost-colored stumps among a young crowd of trees. Suddenly, they stretched tall, then taller. Invisible branches shot out to form a canopy a hundred feet or more above her head. In an eyeblink they were gone. But how airy the light-shot woodland beneath them would have been, before the blight!

Only one more, that strangling fungus, of the forces driving Sally’s planet toward

a global almost-monoculture. Only the pushiest few species will persist when all the
temperate lands host kudzu and Amazonian fire ants and killer bees from Africa and the stink-scented tree-of-heaven and Southeast Asian tiger-mosquitoes and those Norway rats. Imperialists of sameness, each of them, like the gaudy North American goldenrod that’s crowding out subtle native grasses in Japan.

But at the moment, it’s the year 2002: a warm, half-cloudy early August day. Sally switchbacks higher, climbing above the shrunken artificial lake in Campbell’s Cove, on a half-embarrassed quest to find the gray-man. She missed the chestnuts by two generations. Now even the hollow stumps are rotting into the soil; while the kids were young, she missed the fade-away of the ghosts. She’s heard that a couple breeding programs have sprung up, seeking a resistant strain. (Also, that they’re poorly funded, since the corporate grant money goes for fungicide development. That’s where the chance of profit lies.) But nothing’s going to bring the lost groves back. Her foot slips, catches. She breathes out hard. The air is thick. Sally’s half-sad, remembering that day with Papaw when she saw—no, thought she saw—the flourishing chestnuts, full and grandly grown. She’s also half-excited: what will night bring? She passes a lone hemlock sapling near a boulder. Sally’s barely aware of what a newly imported insect’s doing to the hemlock trees and so, to species that depend on them. She knows nothing of the decimation a certain Asian beetle’s started wreaking on hardwoods a few states to the west: ashes, maples, tulip poplars, and more. She’s also missed seeing this year’s flame azalea flowering, the rangy trumpet-bursts of gold or coral. She let the forest’s rhododendron bloom-time pass unnoticed. And the earlier grand succession (bloodroot, spring beauty, trout lily, mayapple, showy orchis) too.

The jack-in-the-pulpit berries won’t flash red for weeks, but Sally’s too late for
those fine green blossoms. A blister’s growing on one of her heels. She’s thirsty. Lord god, she thinks, this wild-goose chase proves it. I have gone one-hundred-percent insane.

She carries water, and her old sleeping bag. But Sally’s more than a little hungry; the only idea she had for making this overnight a vision quest was to leave food behind. Maybe I’ll catch myself a couple salamanders. Chow down like a weasel does, a jay.
But no. Joking must be bad quest-attitude. Who knows? She could not bring herself to ask Nonnie Bee for vision quest advice. Or Noah.

Noah. There’s been some…weirdness there. Sally was back from her illness a full week before he asked his usual question. Actually, that suited her, still rising slowly from her post-flu low. Then he did ask, the silent interval unmentioned. Evening arrived. They lit the candle, he did the things that made her go so needy- wet, she stroked and nuzzled, they slid into position seventeen. This one was difficult, but in a way that made her ravenous for the pleasure it held her on the edge of for so long.

Then she came, with great intensity—transported yet half-angered by the force of her own coming, the way that it possessed her. She also felt relief. Maybe, she thought, I have been angry with myself for getting sick. For living in a body. Now I’ve let that go. They slept. He roused her in the pre-dawn for number eighteen, breathed into her bare shoulder as he reached across her, re-lighted the candle, turned the book to the next clay-slick page. “Think we can handle this one, Sal gal?” he said, voice husky. Sally burst out laughing. Not the high-spirited laughter they had shared before. She laughed because the couple in the photo looked plain silly. Noah shrugged when she

explained. But she could tell he wasn’t pleased.

Tactless, Sally thinks again as she nears Chestnut’s crest, breathing deep and
even. They managed to do the pose, he a little petulant, or anyway, determined in his rhythms, she keeping silent. When she came, it felt good enough, but really, it wasn’t much. Not compared to seventeen.

Who can say what a nice girl’s to do in that situation, after all? The etiquette of sexual gymnastics is not a topic Mama covered in her years-long lecture series on appropriate behavior. Sally and Noah still get along just fine. At work, all’s usual. A little gossip, a few jokes, his perpetual sales talks for bio-diesel cars and products local- grown. If only he had everything as right as he’s got that. The path starts leveling out. Day’s heat is breaking. Frond-like leaves of a young tree-of-heaven waver beside the trail. She’s made it to the ridge top—with time and light to spare.
If the gray-man’s real, she thinks, then let him show up soon. Tonight. A.S.A.P.

41.

I slid a mitten-shaped sassafras leaf under the pokey beetle crossing my look-out rock.
The eastern sky was darkening, but Campbell’s Cove still caught a valley-ful of light. This might not be a proper sort of vision quest and I might have money problems coming down the pike, yet things were looking up.

Item: I was sorrowing for my marriage. Yet I had been stuck for years in a lonesome, buried sadness. Now I could get shut of it. (The beetle wriggled.) Item: Ess and Val were pretty much okay. (The leaf started wriggling too.)

Item: Caledonia tuition. Now, that was an issue. (I froze my hand, trying to stop the leaf from shaking.) But I’d been genteel and poor before. With my job, which Dickie did not need to know about, I could codge up the money for one fall course. Then when we got to the lawyers, he would pay. I would graduate. (The beetle scrambled. I turned the leaf so there’d be a place it could scramble to.)

Item: Noah was not the great love of my life. (The beetle tumbled from its fidgety elevator, hit the ground.) But I was learning I was not so different from the creatures who slept and mated here in the woods. And maybe tonight I would learn more. Or decide to dump him. (The beetle bumbled off, unfazed.)

Enough Noah. Enough Dickie. Did the beetle blame itself, its scrambling, for the tumble—or blame the giant operating that peculiar leaf?

I shifted into half-lotus. Too bad the blueberry season was over. Surely it is

allowable to eat what you find around you when you are on a vision quest.
No way I would really dine on salamanders, though, even if I were in a damp place, with a chance of finding some. For one thing, it would be disloyal to my papaw.

Papaw was discoverer of the Dixie salamander, a subspecies he named Plethodon cinereus dixii. Its back is fox-red with one long bluish stripe. A few of the light spots on
its belly are also sprinkled along its spine. I watched the eastern sky start getting dusky, and thought how shocked I’d been in high school—Papaw had passed away by then— when I read up on salamander mating for a biology report.

For starters, I learned the females have a single body opening for reproduction and excretion. I was just then spending some intense private lab-sessions with my first real boyfriend, exploring my own reproductive opening, and I was (as I put it to my friend Charlotte, studying beside me at a table in the Alloway city library) super-grossed by the salamanders’ lack of feminine daintiness.

On the other hand, up there on Chestnut Ridge it came to me that you could see what Nonnie Bee called female empowerment in the way they did the deed. The males, who have no penises, exude their come-hither courtship scent (Brut, Charlotte and I decided, stifling wild hoots), then make their moves (the book was vague here), and dump a little capsule filled with sperm onto the ground. The female—if she thinks he’s the fellow she wants her kids to look like—picks up the capsule with that all-purpose opening. (Look Ma, no hands! I hissed. Charlotte’s reaction got us thrown out by a librarian we’d pushed past all endurance.) When her eggs are ready, she’s got sperm stored, neat as pie.
So was I here to get away from men and all their dealings, or to seek the gray-

man? I was not here—most certainly not—to yield to him like some channeler or medium
or whatever he could boss around, take over, have. But was my real goal to just plain leave behind all the complicated body-stuff that started back in junior high? Not likely. For one thing, my body had to pee and it would be considerably easier if I did it now. Soon the whole sky would turn well and truly dark. I used the foremost of those oh-so-evolved openings between my legs, then did a little stretching, back on the rock in deep dusk, and lay down. The gray-man. And that lake woman: his mate? His sister? His doppelganger, his own shape-shifted self? What did it mean, that he had pressed his palm to mine?
I felt the slide-away coolness of his touch again. Almost. Please, I heard my mind call out. I want to see you. That pulled me up short. Was it not pure lunacy? Yet all night I called him, then slapped the words down, then fell myself call out once more. No response. At last, the sky began to brighten. My stomach gurgled. A theory dawned.
No such thing as this gray-man, obviously. But no reason to think of my longing as shocking, crazy. I must have picked up unconsciously on Dickie’s cheating early in the spring. Which gave rise to some kind of, well, fantasy—a sexy suitor come for me from Tolliver’s Creek—that got a mite too vivid, was all it was. Now that I was going to bed with Noah I could see how the years of lifeless sex with Dickie played a role in my hallucinations too. Built-up frustration—that is what they’d been. And Noah was why the phantoms stopped. The birds’ early chorus started. Forget romantic notions about praise-songs,

songs of joy. The birds knew what was what. Yo! You! Off my turf! Off! Or: C’mere,
bay-bee. C’mere, here, here. I saw things real clear now.
So: to…Halifax with all of it. The darn-fool idea of a quest. The gray-man. Also to any notion of giving up on Noah.
We would play by candlelight. I would do my job and care for my kids and keep on track as best I could at school. I thought of Papaw’s little hip-flask. Well, Noah was my hip-flask. I needed nothing more. I had climbed up here, gone hungry, and not one thing had happened. Questing for a water spirit! Sally Ellen, whatever were you thinking, girl?
I remembered the beetle, forging on. I remembered position seventeen. It never occurred to me that—just as if I’d come to search out moisture-loving salamanders—by coming to the dry rocky crest of Chestnut Ridge, I had come looking for the gray-man in exactly the wrong place.

42.

Not all spots within a single ecosystem are the same. Nor may they be reshaped at whim.

We can try, of course. In Campbell’s Cove, a valley’s made into a lake. In
central Asia, the Aral Sea—its tributary waters dammed, or siphoned into irrigation—has
lost half its area. Result? Choking duststorms roil up from the Aral’s sun-cracked former
bed. Two dozen species unique to that great fresh pool are gone.
Now, some good news: at the far tip of Virginia, a road across the Cumberland
Gap has been more-or-less restored to the trail it was in Daniel Boone’s day—or: in
some of the days of the Cherokee. Loads of earth have been trucked in. An attempt’s
been made to reproduce pre-highway contours suggested in old journals, on old maps.

Yet the subsoil and the humus aren’t the same. Nor the plant life. There’s mown
grass now. The Thunder People and the Immortals have, its seems, departed. The
alleged trail is a walk-through diorama, a phony park.
And look at the bypass growing like a melanoma near Sally’s house. One sparse
line of young white oaks un-bulldozed (third growth that shot up crowded, fast) stands
silhouetted, their neighbors stripped away, between two raw swaths of clay.
Exposed, they’re far more vulnerable to windstorms. Denuded, they stretch lank
and scant, laid bare as if for bullying, against the sky.
Another consequence of human action. A change that cannot be undone.

43.

After Sally’s barren quest on Chestnut Ridge, after another night with Noah (nineteen,
twenty), she’s driving home from the House of Yoga. She zips past the straw-strewn ramparts of the bypass-to-be, the fragile ruined trees. The radio announcer reports wildfires in the Gloriana River Wilderness Tract. Tinder dry, he says. Pulling in the driveway, Sally tells herself she’s got to e-mail her advisor at Caledonia. She won’t take out a loan she might not be able to pay back. It would go against her rearing. So she’s forced to take a leave of absence. Maybe quit for good.

The phone rings. “Hey, Sally,” says Nonnie Bee. “Weren’t you in the day student lounge the time a bunch of us got talking bout when those spamheads at Caledonia put in that comical new campus gate?”

“I guess so. What—”

“Remember how steamed up you got about the clump of sycamores they lunched so they could landscape with those pathetic lined-up-straight whatevers? And the big old red oak they cut down? Had rings back to 1865?”

“Magnolias, Nonnie. Puny little magnolias. Died within the year. When they shifted the campus road, the underground water flow—Hold up. You okay?”

“I’m fine. Just riled. As riled as you’re about to be—I’ve seen your flames, girl. Sally, the city wants to chop down The France Street Sycamore.”

Sally can hear the capital letters in her friend’s throaty voice.

Here’s what’s up: in order to repave France Street, Sally’s old home address and now Nonnie Bee’s, the transportation department intends to remove the gigantic tree that street has always split around. Modern paving equipment simply won’t, they say, accommodate the tiny island between two narrow lanes.

But Nonnie Bee will not, no way, accommodate the destruction of the most interesting living thing for blocks around. “You’re about to be inducted,” she tells Sally, “into the Save-The-France-Street-Sycamore League. If you accept.”

“Viva l’sycamore!” cries Sally.

Soon she’s curled on a saggy couch in Nonnie Bee’s living room, legs tucked beneath her. She’s sipping a Red-shift Red, a murky malty brew made by the twins.

The Save-The-France-Street-Sycamore League now has five members: Nonnie Bee, her carrot-haired twin sons Beauregard and Rainbow, their half-brother Gabe— who’s taking off a year from forestry school in Blacksburg—and Sally. “Five’s exactly right,” says Gabe, nodding in agreement with himself. “That way, no one’s got only night duty, or gets stuck out there sweating every afternoon.”

Stuck where? thinks Sally. Duty?
“But we’re still tight.” Nonnie Bee’s fist gestures solidarity. “No splinter groups!” cries Rainbow. “Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk!” A flurry erupts: Beauregard calls Rainbow a knothead and Rainbow tells Beauregard he’s barking up the wrong tree and Gabe shakes his black silk curls, declaring ‘tudes like theirs are the root of the problem so would they please leaf the whole thing go and Nonnie Bee, obviously tickled, groans out loud. Sally soothes her throat with another sip. “Night duty?” It’s as if the others had

boarded a spaceship and were zooming away from her, approaching the speed of light.
Oh yes. Sally doesn’t know about the platform yet. Beauregard pats her arm as if she were a younger sister. Him, too? she thinks. Direct appeal to City Council having failed, Gabe has designed a reused-plywood platform, to be guerilla’ed up into the big tree, secured without harming the host, and occupied. Room aplenty on it for a cushion, a candlestick, a boom box and a person. The league members will take turns sitting there in six-hour stints. Midnight to six a.m., six a.m. to noon, and so on. Until the City Council concedes. “Six hours into twenty-four equals four shifts, girlfriend,” says Nonnie Bee. “Math Concepts, right? With five of us, we can occupy the tree around the clock, but nobody’s stuck with any one time of day.” She locks eyes with Sally. “Still with us? Your mama’s favorite tree?”
Shameless, but shrewd. What can Sally do save nod? And truthfully, she’s ready to climb on board the spaceship this very minute. Maybe the universe has decided to tell her what it wants. Anyway, here’s something she can do. “Treeward Ho!” she cries. “Right awn, right awn!” says Nonnie Bee. Glasses clink. Gabe shows everyone the press release he’s drafted.
“I’m calling Hank Quesenberry at the Advance,” he says. “Plus, we got an e-mail list all set for updates—the radio stations, AP, like that. My boyfriend’s doing a summer internship at Channel Three. We won’t be up there long.” “Well, then,” says Sally, blinking and admiring the dulcet mahogany of her Red- shift Red. “I reckon we are cooking, aren’t we?”

44.

From:
rvp2@med.unm.edu
To:

sallyp@gritweb.net
Subject:
Confidential

Dearest Mom:
I don’t wish to alarm you. And I hope you’ll forgive this form of communication, but it helps me thinks things out. Besides, I find it difficult to use the telephone in my apartment, knowing I could be walked in on. By Sara herself.

By Ess, I mean! The negative reinforcement when I forget her name-preference is powerful. She gets right het up, Granny P. would have said.

As for her other preferences, we must remember that a certain amount of experimentation is common at her age. I remain convinced that she’ll settle down. I can only repeat my observation that both Junie (yes, she really is quite charming) and Owen seemed decent enough, despite their lack of any sort of life plans. I’m sure it’s for the best, however, that they’ve moved out.

But to my point: a life plan. Mom, I would far rather have my little sister here than roaming the country aimlessly. Yet my concern for her is growing. Ought you, really, allow her to drop out of Caledonia? Do you think you could talk some sense into her about this rescue-the-planet kick she’s gotten on?

I’m afraid your daughter is in danger of going off the deep end. Don’t worry: I don’t see psychosis here; I’ve reviewed my textbooks and she does not fit the diagnostic criteria for, e.g., a late-adolescent schizophrenic break. Yet she comes back from her environmentalist meetings talking like—well, like a worked-up late adolescent. Surely you, who have always set such high value on proper manners, on being a contributing member of society, and (by your own understandably-belated good example) on the value of formal education—you can set her straight?

Just some late night brooding after a tough session in the lab! Please don’t worry! I’m delighted that you, like all of us, are handling the separation from Dad so well. I continue to take comfort in the thought of the stable, secure foundation you represent to me. And to Sara, as well.
much love, Val

45.

The whipsaw swings in my view of the world—the whole bipolar ball o’ wax—were not
easing off. What happened at Earth Wisdom the day after the League’s inaugural meeting did not help one speck.

I was due to start work at noon but I got stuck in a traffic backup where they were putting in the bypass. I swear I could have covered the distance faster on a mule. Funny thing was, Yvvie did not seem to give a whoop when I showed up five minutes late. She just said, “Hey, Sally. Before you come take this register, how about bringing some dried papaya up front? Should be in the far-back.”

The far-back was the storeroom across the alley. But as I hit the alley door, in came Anji the angel of Mullins Cliffs, smoothing her hemp-cloth shift across her stomach. Behind her, Noah hefted a small box on one shoulder. Tropic Treats Dried Papaya, it said. Sweetened with all-natural Cane Juice.

Anji blinked, smiled at me real vague-like, as if she allllllmost remembered…

“Hey, Sal pal!” Noah cried. “Look who’s here. Anji!”

Hello-hello. Anji fixed her shoulder strap. “Well,” she said. “Later, dudes.”

“See ya round, Anji girl,” said Noah. And I said, because I felt like saying it, “Later, dude,” to Anji’s half-bare back.

So what did I see? Nothing. Only a jump in Noah’s eyes when he first spotted me. Only the creases on the front of Anji’s shift. Only the possibly-swollen look of her

lips.

He is not Dickie, I told myself. Also, not your husband.
Right: I was either paranoid or possessive. Both stank like old roadkill. So I launched into swapping-time-off negotiations, with Noah and then with Skinny Timm. I went to Yvvie for her okay. They all supported the Save-The-Sycamore action—Skinny Timm let out a reedy yee-HAAAW!—and everyone swore to keep it secret till the League occupied the platform, come Saturday night. Something good was going to happen, something that would make a difference. Also, it would get my mind off sex. Off Ess’s present and her future. Off my pie-eyed night of longing for someone who was not a real person even, up on Chestnut Ridge. I was restocking in Supplements when I decided a little incident at the House of Yoga yesterday had likely been what set up my feeling there’d been funny stuff, possible funny stuff, with Anji and Noah.

It happened in my favorite afternoon class, Spiritual Re-Alignment. I admit I got there full of what my papaw called botheration. I’d taken a shortcut past Fox Chase, a townhouse complex slapped up where there used to be an alfalfa field. I spotted Dickie’s red Toyota mini-truck parked on Tallyho Trail. His new home, had to be. Fox Chase? Why not go on and call it Nookie Valley?

But just seeing my teacher, Anna, calmed me. We had a visitor, Anna announced. Her name was Shanti Jennifer Eckdahl, and she stood tall and lean and flaxen-haired. At first, I thought the red dot on her forehead was a zit. Turned out, she’d been Anna’s teacher at the Mount Monadnock Spiritual Wellness Center up in New Hampshire. Anna beamed.

Shanti Jennifer Eckdahl—“You must please call me Shanti,” she murmured in an accent that whisked a splash of Delhi or Calcutta into a base of pure Wisconsin—circled the room, stopping to press her palms together before each one of us. Anna, who was born in Seoul but adopted by an Alloway couple in her toddler days, watched, all eyes. Maybe, I thought, it was Anna’s shortish legs, her round post-baby hips, that made Shanti Jennifer look stretched-thin. Maybe it was Anna’s warm gold skin that made Shanti Jennifer’s look skim-milk blue-white. Maybe it was the ratcheting up of Anna’s glow that had me watching my teacher’s teacher with a dab of wariness. “Namaste,” Shanti Jennifer said to everyone she greeted. It is a real nice thing, those prayer-style hands, the divine in one person recognizing the same in another. Yet I had not yet got used to it, so it looked like playacting back then.

Finally Shanti Jennifer got to me. I fixed my eyes on that red dot painted on her forehead. What part of India you say you come from, honey? I did not ask. What is that last name again?

“You and I,” she said, “we have business in the future.” My first thought (and given what-all had been going on, I suppose this makes considerable sense) was: sex. Sweet Jeez—she was coming on to me.

But no. I have to say I expect she was tolerably attractive, if you are one to take up with Nordic women, but I surely had that wrong. My second theory ran like this: Why, the sly thing’s drumming herself up some business. Wants me to follow her to New
England, take some expensive yoga workshop.

That is how I remember it. I also remember she was a teacher who knew her stuff. Still, that first flash of thinking she wants something from me—could it not be (I

told myself next afternoon as I set vitamin bottles in their celibate rows, restocking) that I
had carried the antsy-ness from it over into the run-in just now with Anji? Noah eased into the Supplement section, dropped his hand down on my shoulder. “Break time, Sal,” he said. “Yvvie’s off to her rolfing session, and I’m done for the day. Skinny Timm’s covering the open register. A quick fifteener—cool?”

Well, sure, it was. I just plain liked it when his hand fell on my shoulder. No wonder I was lusting after will-o-the-wisps up on the ridge. No wonder I thought total strangers were luring me. Thanks to Noah, I was swimming in a river I had never known.

“Come with me,” he said, turning toward the far-back. “’Kay?”

Odd—if he was about to ask his usual question, he could have done it there in Supplements. Still, spending another night together soon made sense. My schedule would be shot to pieces once the Sycamore League took the tree. I followed.

Oh lord. Anji. Was he leading me to the storeroom for a confession?

“Noah,” I said firmly as I could manage, trying to go with what I was trying to believe in, trying to ditch the lands-sake-don’t-make-a-ruckus-missy rules that had let Dickie wall himself away from me. “If this is about— You don’t need to—”

He wheeled as I shut the door. Light streamed in through a dusty window. “Sally,” he breathed, his voice going lower. Not “gal pal,” not “Sal gal.” Sally. His hand shot out, seized my upper arm. “Sally, this one time, won’t you kiss me here?”

It was true we never kissed at Earth Wisdom. But this was due to common sense from both of us, I figured, mixed in with a touch of shyness, of not wanting to go public.

His hand slipped beneath my t-shirt, honed on my nipple. Hot day in August: I’d skipped a bra. His fingers flicked. For an instant, all I could think was, now the other

one.

But I pried my eyelids open and looked right at him. Yes, his pupils spread out dark and wide, but that could simply be the lighting.

He bent. The kiss stopped all my analyzing. Then he set his hands on my hips and started to pull me up. “Come on, gal,” he said, leaning back against a stack of boxes. “Wrap your legs around.”

Not the yab-yum pose he wanted us to build up to. Not any position for sex at all, since I was still wearing my cut-offs, the same soft pair I’d worn on Mullins Cliffs. And, hold on. We’d already done the position we were heading for. Strange. He was so intent on not repeating, on moving though the sequence, one, two, three. “Noah?” I said. “You sure—?”

I ought to add that as I said that, I lifted myself up. I wrapped my legs around his hips, fit my cozy parts into his.

“Come on baby,” he muttered, like in a bad movie. “Just once, don’t be uptight.”

Uptight? Any rational woman would have walked out there and then. But I have noticed how desire tends to beat the tar out of reason, ten times out of eleven. I leaned in for a kiss.

Then Noah stopped. Just stopped, the way a firebreak can stop flames in a line of burning trees from jumping to the next ones. “Hoo-eee—” he exhaled. “Hoo-eee!” He leaned back. He shook his head.

“My bad, gal pal,” he said. “A little slip.” Another head shake. “But we know about restraint.” He smiled indulgently. “Come on. Hop down.”

I jumped down, all right. But wet hen does not do justice to how I sputtered. I

did everything but stamp my foot, and I swear if it were a little bigger, I might have. On
top of one of his size-twelves.

Noah could not have been more apologetic. He was majorly sorry, he said. He just saw me squatting, stocking the lowest shelf and something about my cute little bottom—well, that was no excuse. He knew it.

The man did everything but tell me I was beautiful when I was angry and he implied that mighty well. We didn’t want to waste ourselves on a back-room quickie, did we? When we could travel so much farther? We should honor our vital energies.

He ran one finger—one finger—along my forearm.

Heaven above: I bought it. Or anyway, I figured I would keep to what we’d started. He wanted to run the sequence? Fine with me—I surely knew how monotony could kill a couple’s sex life dead.
Noah stopped me before we walked back into Building One. “Sal,” he said. “I was just thinking— Well, no, I’m thinking ahead to twenty-one and twenty-two. You coming over to my apartment to visit me? Tomorrow night?”

The planet underneath me kept on whirling. Wednesday had been Shanti. Thursday, Noah and Anji, then Noah in the storage room. Friday night he wanted to spend in bed with me. Saturday would be The France Street Sycamore. It was not Ess that Val should have been worrying himself about. I was like a tree so parched dry it exploded from the heat when a forest fire got close. “Sure thing,” I said.

46.

In the first flush of her new life in the passions, both carnal and political, Sally goes
farther than another night (twenty-one, twenty-two) with Noah. Things escalate with the taking of The France Street Sycamore.

Saturday evening, they hoist the platform. Rainbow makes the first official swarm up the rope ladder. The watch is his till midnight. The four groundlings wave at passersby, and post their signs:

Viva l’France Street Sycamore!

WE SHALL NOT BE MOVED.

Mayor, SPARE THIS TREE!

RALLY TIMES: SUN, 10 a.m.; MON, 5 p.m.; TUES, 7 p.m.

After corn-and-olive pizza in Nonnie Bee’s kitchen, after singing practice and high fives, the arborous company disperses. They’ll return to France Street for tomorrow’s rally, ten a.m. Except Sally, who’s scheduled to relieve Beauregard at six.

It’s only while driving home that Sally twigs, as Rainbow would say, to this: all three rallies have been scheduled for her shifts. Coincidence?

Well, given the employments of the others (digital freelancing, wearable art) it’s Sally obligations that must be scheduled round. Why fault Nonnie Bee, veteran of a hundred demonstrations, if the tree-hugger-in-residence for the rallies happens to be the one among them who out-cutes the average bug?

Next morning, Beauregard scurries down the ladder. “Back at ten for the rally!” he hisses to Sally in the leafy quiet. “You missed an awesome bat!”

Sally blinks. She settles into her home on high. The early air is cool and sweet. The band whose CD occupies the boom box she’s never heard of. She brought the Dixie Chicks and Linda Dunn. But, not yet. Angled belly down across the platform, chest and head at rest on the flat square cushion, she enjoys the peace. No bats. A few birds twitter.
This lasts nearly sixty minutes. The Sunday Alloway Advance is stuffed into curbside boxes, zoop, zoop, zoop. Sally slides into her book, Thoreau for her Independent Reading course: There is a slumbering subterranean fire in Nature which never goes out, and which no cold can chill.
A couple joggers pass, heads down, hearts well-conditioned, blind. She remains as if invisible. Is this what it’s like to be the gray-man, the lake woman? Is her body wavering, translucent? Has she transformed into a dryad?

Hamadryad, technically: not the spirit of a forest (though all these stolid lawns and basements were rolling woodland once) but the anima of one particular tree. Yet on such a morning—night’s freshness clinging to this valley wreathed with mountains, no hint yet of mid-August heat—who could quibble?

And after a further thirty minutes? Gabe’s e-mails and phone calls did their work. The first journalist arrives. “Ahoy!” The shout comes up through the wide-spread sycamore leaves. “Is someone there?”

Sally resists the urge to call out No. She drops her head down over the platform’s edge. “Hey,” she says lightly. “There’s a rally at ten.” She softens her voice in hopes

whoever this is will get the hint. “We thought people could stop by on their way to
church.” Her old home block looks new-minted, when viewed upside down. Hank Quesenberry, reporter for the Advance, allows as how he saw the sign. He shoots Sally his most winning grin. “I’m hoping to get some background. What’s your name, miss? Would you please spell it? Mind if I come up?” Sally sticks to the League’s decision: no pirates may board the quarterdeck. But Hank Q (as he signs his weekly column) keeps shouting a bit too loudly for early Sunday morning and she finds herself leaning farther, farther down. When he points out the risk of falling, she yields—partway. “Well, Mister Quesenberry, how about you shinny up to that big branch? Then you won’t have to shout.” “Hank,” he says again, “please,” and hauls himself up into the tree. He doesn’t shinny, but he does a leap and grab, swings into a pull-up. First Hank thanks heaven he plays a little tennis, then he vows to do pull-ups every morning. Finally—umpf-ah!—he straddles the branch.
He asks questions. Sally describes the perfidy of the mayor and City Council— their refusal to listen to Nonnie Bee or Gabe, the way they ignored the petition drive. Hank, who’s a little acrophobic, discovers he’s happier with his eyes closed, listening. When he lifts his eyelids to take notes, he has to squelch a giddy rumba inside his head. Too bad, he thinks. This Sally Paradiso is worth looking at. Older than he first imagined. Oh, come on now, Hank, you’re forty-one. Besides, she sure shoots sparks. He thanks her for her time and goes, promising to be back at ten. “For the Sally rally,” he says, already working on his copy. Sally frowns. When the rest of the League arrives, she’s flat on her back, contemplating those

first spunky little tree shrews, how they gave rise to all of mammal-kind. Cars pull up.
People drift out of houses. Several approach no nearer than their flowerbeds, which perhaps they always weed on August Sundays at ten a.m. Hank Q returns with a photographer. She tries to make the crowd look big as possible: definitely pro-tree. Even so, it’s not a large group. Despite Gabe’s boyfriend’s efforts, the local TV people and the radio reporters are evidently sleeping in. Noah must be sleeping, too, and the others from Earth Wisdom, which gives Sally her own twinge. But Hank is pleased; he’ll have an exclusive for Monday’s paper. Songs are sung and pithy speeches made by Gabe and Nonnie Bee. (The twins have been banned from taking up the mike. That’s oak-kay with us, said Rainbow. Yeppers, said Beauregard. We won’t pine away.) Every now and then, Sally waves. In thirty minutes, the show is over, and word begins to filter out to greater Alloway. Monday, she relieves Beauregard at noon. Warm though it is, they’re lucky, given what it could be like, in August in the valley. No doubt the break in the weather swells the crowd for the rally at five. Not one member of the City Council shows. But thanks to the article bylined Hank Quesenberry, aides mingle round the sycamore at five, dressed in their idea of
mufti: business casual. Nonnie Bee chortles as she picks the mini-politicians out of the crowd. Which (she will say later) is about as hard as spotting a posse of blowfish come to swim in her gray-water barrel. Far-out, how they’re upping the numbers of the rally- ers.
Noah does show up this time, with Pete. The Midsummer Eve leprechaun also appears, holding the recorder-player’s hand. Two women Sally knows from the Elks

Club pool. Some Co-op regulars. Anna from the House of Yoga. Anji, in a floaty
flowered dress, a button pinned to it cryptically reassuring the world that Leonard Lives. She slips up to Pete, wraps an arm around his waist. The crowd keeps singing: “Just like a tree that’s planted by the wa-a-ters, we shall not be moved.” Alloway’s TV station has sent a truck. Ditto, the two from Roanoke. Nonnie Bee deposits a note in the League Communication Bucket, which Sally hauls up and reads: there’s a local NPR reporter too! In Sally’s heart, elation wells. She waves like a queen—of England or of homecoming, it doesn’t matter. But, Hold up, she thinks, this tree’s not a parade float. And no way it is a throne. It is older
than any person here, any human on the planet. It is the ocean. I am foam.
Hank Quesenberry waves back; everybody does. And one leaf stirs. By chance, of course. Yet the very moment Sally spots that splayed leaf, quivering as in affirmation—the moment her face opens with a smile so powerful she thinks her skin might split like the outer layer of sycamore bark, revealing a smoother shining skin beneath—it’s that same moment two of the TV stations choose as lead-off shot for their slow-news-day local news. Sally misses it, but she catches the next version of the story, with some mayoral hem-and-hawing added, at eleven. Her image sits in half-lotus, right there on the clever little platform, long curls a-tumble. Waving. Smiling hugely toward the telephoto lens. Enwreathed by sycamore leaves.
The tree must love her; she loves it. The camera loves her too. The Sally-Rally crowd cheers behind the announcer’s voiceover. Sally Paradiso’s riding high.

47.

Suppose your camera had a lens that showed you only water. You could train it on a
tree. You’d see the whole thing—roots, trunk, branches, twigs, and leaf-stems—traced
out in tiny cell-tubes. Maybe silver, maybe gray.
The leaves (like the wood, made more of water than any other substance) would
almost shiver with their wetness, mist given shape by the web-work of cell walls. Each
leaf would show how it is carpeted inside with tiny rounded reservoirs, like upland lakes
that pour their wealth downstream.
Your camera’s map would suggest a river system. A sycamore, or one of the
other primordial species (say, a ginko), would reveal a single central channel; newer
genera—like, the maples—fork more deeply. Yet in all trees, small streams feed into
larger ones, as twigs lead into branches. Gravity pulls the leaf-made nutrients down.
Capillary action, powered by leaves’ exhalations, draws the root-net’s contributions up
the river, where there’s need.

Water is the transport system, the mainstay of the vital fluid that gives each tree
life. Water makes itself the nurturing sap, the laden blood.

48.

Public exposure. Some folks pay press agents to get it for them.

Come Tuesday, I was set to work at Earth Wisdom, then start my sycamore-shift at six p.m. Madame Yvvie herself yawped a little cheer when I walked in the store. Pete pumped his arm and yelled out “Yes!”

Noah loped into at noon, cinched real tight inside. Not high, and not unfriendly. But, his laid-back aura? Lost. We did our jobs.

Skinny Timm posted stuff from the morning paper on the co-op’s bulletin board, between a petition about some place called Mount Sophia and a flyer for a meeting— Come learn what H.O.P.E. is. The Advance’s front-page photo showed the sycamore all
back-lit. The platform and I, praise heaven, were not but a smudge among the leaves.

But the article on page one of the Virginia section—that got me fretting. “Don’t call it a Sally rally,” says this sparkling Allowegian. But Monday afternoon, some fifty
people turned out to support this spokesperson for the Save-The-France-Street-Sycamore
League. Sally Paradiso, of south Alloway County, and her fellow tree-lovers have vowed
that someone will remain on guard in the monarch of France Street until….

Lord almighty. What else might this Hank Q fellow take into his grinning head to write after this evening’s rally?

Still, I am real sure I stopped short of wishing him bad luck. I just got through the day, showered, changed into my turquoise Buddha t-shirt, and was up in the sycamore by

the time seven p.m. squeegee’d in.

A few words from Nonnie Bee and the rally started rocking. The sound from the twins’ band’s amplifiers slid smooth as syrup on a biscuit. Old Mrs. MacAfee—I grew up smack dab across the street from her—recited Joyce Kilmer’s greatest hit. The cheers took off like Flying Phoenixes on Independence Day. Nonnie Bee’s sense of timing surely did pay off: a couple hundred people turned out. Seven o’clock meant not too late to bring the kids along. Folks could buy lemonade and roasted sunflower seeds from the stand Nonnie Bee’s three youngest had set up. We sang, led by her Emmylou Harris voice. Gabe took the mike, reminding us that every year we trash the air to the tune of six billion tons of carbon from burning oil and gas and coal. “The trees can’t do it all,” he said. “But they help soak up that junk. They soak up that carbon and they keep it out of your lungs!” “Help this sycamore help you!” yelled Beauregard. Gabe told us that a chlorophyll molecule differs by just one atom from a molecule of hemoglobin. “Swap a little magnesium for a tad bit of iron,” he said, white teeth flashing, “and we’ve got ourselves…One. Red-Blooded. All. American. TREE!” His siblings took up the chant. The rest of us joined in. One. Red-Blooded. All. American. TREE! we cried, and cried again.
The cameras snapped. The cameras rolled. My heart rose with every sound-bite: we were getting coverage and, never mind Hank Q’s foolishness, it was not about me. Then I saw that fellow Quesenberry had let the dogs out. Unintended—I could tell the man did not have a mean bone in his loose-moving body. But here is what popped my balloon: I spotted Dickie standing behind the back fringe of the rally crowd.

He was not happy. Happy men do not glower.
Took me a minute to make out what he was doing, besides leaning against a curb- side Bradford pear tree, lips pressed tight. Then I got it. Back in September of Dickie’s sophomore year in college, his knee got wrecked in football practice. I have come to think that is the real reason he wanted to get married; he was flat-out miserable. Anyhow, when the doctor said he had to give up football, he started smoking. He quit soon, thank the lord. But that first dark sad angry winter he got into the habit of playing with his lighter. Just playing. Flicking it on, letting it flap shut. Flick-flame-flap-snuff, flick- flame-flap-snuff, his thumb working while his mind went someplace else entirely. I had seen him go back to this routine—during the bankruptcy mess, was one time. And after, if Arjay gave him grief and someone left a lighter around, Dickie would pick it up and start, no more able to call Arjay’s hand, to make him stop bullying, than I was. So I knew my kind-of husband was fuming, in his locked-down Dickie Paradiso way. I knew why, too. Not just mad because I had a job—Hank Q put that tidbit in his second article, about me working at Earth Wisdom—but because my name was pasted all over something the local pavers and building contractors were not going to like one bit. His name, he’d be calling it. Paradiso Brothers’ Contracting’s name, too.
Well, after all those years I do believe I had earned some rights to it myself. But I could say good-bye to any hope he’d feel guilty enough to cough up my Caledonia tuition now. This was pretty near to funny, considering how little Earth Wisdom paid. A loud, long wave of chanting dragged me back to what was going on below me. Mayor Benton had arrived.

Now, Benton, unlike some on City Council, I always liked—a man with country
roots, willing to take on what in Alloway passes for gentry, working for ordinary folks, white or black or the refugees in various browns who wash into the valley after every war. He just was not real involved with trees. He was involved with keeping his job, however, and his instincts had kicked in. He stood between Gabe and Nonnie Bee, pure geniality in striped suspenders, one shirtsleeves-rolled-up arm draped round each of them. Before the movement got more column-inches and more airtime, before those amusing yokels down in Alloway, Virginia, became the nation’s dog-days media darlings (and he the nation’s crass tree- murderer), the Mayor was embracing the cause. An executive order had been issued. We had saved The France Street Sycamore. If only the next twenty-four hours could be wiped out of existence, the way the plans to repave France Street with maximum efficiency got wiped.

49.

Sally figures in a flash she’s got to get Paradiso out of the media’s buzz-vocab. She
owes Dickie that much—and she’d like to keep him thinking he owes her. She scribbles a note and lowers the bucket. NONNIE BEE—TRUST ME ON THIS, it says at the top. Then, SAY: The France Street Sycamore thanks Mayor Benton
for his wisdom and compassion. The League will finish out the current watch alone, in
silent commemoration of what we’ve all accomplished here today. We’ve won! We’re
done! Viva l’sycamore!
Nonnie Bee complies. The crowd goes nuts. (Goes acorns, Rainbow’s heard to say.) Sally waves fast, double-handed, crisscrossing her arms before her face to foil the cameras. She bellies down on the platform, lying low, while the final words get said. People drift off. The lemonade crew posts a Sold Out sign. Beauregard escorts Mrs. MacAfee to her front door. Sally sends another note, volunteering to return at dawn to help get the platform down.
But Gabe writes back—he and his brothers will be up past midnight anyway, and with the streetlamps they can remove it then. Take us ten minutes, no worries. I liked it up there too. Decided I’m going back to forestry school. Work to be done.
France Street clears out fast. Except, that pesky Hank Quesenberry hangs around. Sally figures he’s out to get more color for the wrap-up story. But not from me, she vows.

“Hey, Sally!” Hank calls up from the deserted street. “Just a quick talk? Please?”
“Can’t,” she says. “Sorry. So long. I’m pledged. Bye now. Take care.” He yells that he admires her commitment, but he wants to talk. About carbon- dioxide. Emissions. Snows of Kilimanjaro—going! The shrinking. Polar ice? ‘S bouncing less heat! Back to space! The permafrost… Sweet Jeez, thinks Sally. But she replies, “Say what?”
“The permafrost, Sally!” he yells louder. “’T’ll soon be muck! ‘S not just coastal cities! Switzerland’s hurting! ‘S not just warming! More hurricanes! And what about! This drought? And—Sally, can I? Come up?” He takes a big breath. “May I? Please?” Why not? Clearly, he’s on the right side. But Sally’s unaware of Hank Quesenberry’s little problem with high places. She tells him he can climb back to the big low branch he used last time. “Or that one,” she adds, pointing at one closer to the platform. “That one would be okay.” Biting his lips, Hank swings himself up. He makes the first branch and stands on it, reaching for the one she pointed out. Watching, it comes to Sally that he probably didn’t do a lot of tree-climbing as a kid. Even so, if he hadn’t gasped and closed his eyes, he’d have been just fine. As it is, instead of spending her evening in the sycamore’s white arms, Sally spends it in the emergency room of Alloway Memorial. If Hank had been less lucky, he’d have more than bruised ribs and a comminuted fracture of the ankle—the ER doc makes that clear. “Maybe a couple shattered vertebrae,” she says. “A snapped spinal cord.” She runs a finger up the back of the reporter’s sinewy, tanned neck, frowns Sally- ward.

Sally winces: does the doctor think that she’s Hank’s girlfriend? How absurd!
The cast he finally gets is only knee-high, but the ER doc decides to keep him under observation overnight. Maybe she likes his looks, the supercilious wench, and wants to make a move on him? But no, that’s…absurd! Hank gets a pain pill early on. He keeps saying Sally’s wonderful to sit with him, purely wonderful. Another pill. His grin goes lop-ish. She can hardly leave him. She learns he recently got dumped by a long-time girlfriend, and his one real friend in town. His parents live in Mississippi, so there’s no one for him to call, not at this hour. Sally’s doing what’s only decent, since he fell trying to interview her. She dons her My-I’m-Interested mask. She nods, even when he tells her—dopey and fervent, knowing nothing of Ess and Val—about his vasectomy and why he had it. Lord almighty, why-ever is he saying that? Is he really so idealistic? So ready to spread the word on over-population?
Must be; the poor goofball couldn’t be making a play. He starts quoting Jack Kerouac, of all people, on his plans for the last of his life: hermitage in the woods, quiet writing of old age, mellow hopes of Paradise (which comes to everybody anyway). Sally
finds this intriguing. Hank is a fan of Kerouac being Henry Thoreau’s fan. “You’re a good listener,” Hank says, blinking. “Thanks. Guess I’ve been needing one of those.” He looks at her carefully. “Good talker, too, when I give you a chance. You surely are.”
Home at last, Sally lies in bed, head full of the rally, of the tree itself. Siberia’s great forest is being chopped away (guess who told her this?) by maybe ten million acres every year. People need every tree the earth has got, Guess Who said, his gray eyes

shining, even if trees alone can’t stop the shredding of the ozone layer.
Discouraging. Yet Sally’s proud. She got some people thinking about not knuckling under to the planet-gougers—Hank went on and on about that. She’s a citizen of the world’s most polluting nation, but she was also a loyal companion to that sycamore. She pictures Beauregard, amazing Gabe: one red-blooded, truly awesome tree.
Morning. Sally rises early, melt-away dreams departing as her mind perks up. A giant cactus raising long arms out and up like bat wing-bones. The lake woman, or the gray-man, dancing with a stick-thin girl, all-over green. Ess’s body-painted friend? she half-thinks, moving toward the shower. The word hamadryad does not cross her mind.

After a call to Nonnie Bee, it’s getting on toward time for Earth Wisdom. Sally’s truly sleepy; she wants to phone in sick.

Instead, she drops by the hospital. Hank has a reporter’s notepad propped against one bent-knee leg, the one that doesn’t have a cast. “Graphomania,” he says as she walks in, then twirls his pencil beside his brain: nutty! “Appears to be the only way I know how to think.”
Sally hands him daisies from the lobby giftshop—just common courtesy to bring flowers. He lies there, taller than Dickie, not as tall as Noah, looking plucky as a man can look in a nightgown sprinkled with small blue polka-dots. His tanned face seems very smooth; he must shave close.
Hank says his editor will pick him up when he’s discharged; he’ll call Sally to let her know he’s out. “I don’t believe a lady ever gave me flowers,” he adds, then smacks his head and grins. “A woman, I mean. Wow.” He raises one eyebrow, smiling.

“Anyway,” his voice warms, “I honestly appreciate all you’ve done. Hope I
didn’t carry on too much last night.” He shakes his head in a fine blend of apology and charm.

Hank does call soon. Oh, he’s great, terrific, thanks—ribs still sore but he’s okay. His biggest problem is having to use his little hybrid car to get around; except for story assignments, he’s stuck to his bike and public transport for the past three years. Once the cast’s off, he’ll be fine.
It seems to both of them there must be more they should be saying. But neither one can quite think what. Sally’s stomach tightens; she ends the call: it’s his appeal that makes her nervous.

Before then, when she walks into Earth Wisdom on the morning after the last rally, Noah greets her with a tight gorilla hug. “Gal pal!” he cries, ebullient.

Pete presents her with a free extra-shot soy-milk shade-grown fair-trade iced jamocha latte. “You are a fireball, girl,” he says. Yvvie beams, benign. The sycamore is saved. Mama would not approve of how they made it happen, but would she not be pleased with the result? And Daddy. Papaw, too. Sally twirls up on her toe-tips, curtseys deep.

She could blame that rush of egoism and caffeine for what happens next. Better, in all fairness, than blaming Noah. She goes freely with him to the far-back, after all.

50.

From:
esperanza@mailRus.com
To:

sallyp@gritweb.net
Subject:
whatever

maah—zup with pops? he called & val & i both thought he sounded totally out of control. in his control-freak pops-man way. more like uncle arj on a rant-roll than my popster— not cool.
are you really living in a treehouse?
yo, i’m getting married. spike’s a sweet guy, once you get beyond yr prejudices about ex-offenders. he learned a lot in rehab. oh & I’m not supposed to tell you, but val’s pregnant.
golly, maybe we should talk. think you might ever be home someday? love ya, esperanza

51.

“Come on, Sal gal. I don’t know why I’ve been so—weird. About the sequence.” In the back storeroom’s dim light, Noah’s baby blues shone like a patrol car out to fill its monthly ticket quota. “I mean, no reason we can’t have a good time now and shoot for sex-buddha nirvana later, right?”
His hand teased my nipple through the cotton of my t-shirt. “We’ll celebrate your triumph. You looked so fine up there. A little good time?”

A celebration. I had not checked my e-mail in days and in spite of the long half-
night in the ER, I felt mighty good. Grown up and free to do whatever thing I wanted. If I did not try this now, when would I? I counted the days since my last period. We’d had the HIV-talk weeks ago. I dropped my shorts. Soon we were both naked from the waist down. My legs wrapped around his waist. He set me on a pile of burlap bags. I held on to him like he was a tree. Then he eased in. How can I say it? A wild river carried us away?

That is truly how it seemed: a wild river. It was not quite position seventeen, but I have to say I loved that moment—the lack of blueprint, the tiny shiver of risk. By then, I knew his sounds and rhythms. He got there fast. His hips jerked and I was hovering aloft, about to cross the river Jordan, as Dickie used to say.

“Shit!” Light shot from the alley doorway. “Shit. You stupid stupid shits.”

The door slammed. The bare florescent overhead bink-bink-binked to ugly life.

“Yvvie!” Noah said. “Oh, man.”

The next few minutes blur when I try to recollect them. But not as much as I wish they would. “I tried to warn you,” Yvvie told me. And then, her voice like cracked glass, “Let’s see now. Position nine as I recall—that right, Noah? But from what Pete says, you two have gotten a good ways farther. You broke your goddamn sequence, you kinky asshole. Sally, want to know what happens if you make it all the way to yab- yum?”

The blur got stronger then. “I thought you got it,” Yvvie went on, sad-eyed, “the day he was back here plowing that slut Anji. Thought you figured him out, moved on.”

Anji. In the far-back. Yvvie. Get-some-dried-papaya. Anji’s wrinkled shift.
What I felt was not betrayal. Not betrayal by Noah, anyway. Five long minutes earlier, I was feeling just the teeniest speck dirty, naughty-dirty, fun-dirty, happy-sexy- dirty. Now I felt as dumb as dirt.

Noah said, “She’s not a slut. Anji, I mean.” Then, after half a second, “Or Sally.”

I stepped into my pants.

“Yeah, well,” said Yvvie and her eyes went back to cat-eyes then. “No one’s a slut except you, Noah honey, but I’m a bitch. And I’m the bitch in charge and I don’t have to spend my time looking at people who make me feel bad just to see them. Ms. Paradiso,” she said, the cracked glass of her voice glued together now by a glaze of ice. “Mr. Moore. I’ll work both registers at once if I have to. But you two are out of here.” “Yvvie, gal—” said Noah.
“I’ve got a list of your extra breaks, the food rip-offs, the lateness. Don’t think I can’t make it stick. Although it would be fun, describing this little dereliction of duty

before the Co-op Board. Those people eat the rice you were fucking on, you know.”

So I lost my job. Lost it less than two days after my definitely-estranged husband found out I had one. Any hope for even one course’s worth of fall tuition flew out the window at that moment, flapping its dollar-bill wings, and right on the bedraggled tail of my self-esteem.
Looked like I really had to get in touch with my academic advisor now.

52.

It takes Professor Augenblick a week to set an appointment, but eventually Sally walks
down to campus—first time since she finished finals. Whatever else he is, that bozo Quesenberry can be inspiring: Sally thinks this as she nears the highway. Maybe gestures are important. Maybe it does her good, even if it doesn’t do much for the atmosphere, to walk instead of drive.
At the crossroads in front of the campus entrance, she takes the underpass where the creek flows, gurgling, cool. Not one wisp of the gray-man shows. Not that she expected…
Surely not. Her mood’s improved. Driving home from the co-op, she buried hurt and shame as quickly as her mother would have. Tomorrow’s soon enough to think about all that. Then she picked up her e-mail, phoned Ess fast, found out she’s not getting married, really. There is no Spike. Also, no one’s pregnant, not even Val. Whatever Dickie’s problem is, the kids know nothing. “Oh, Maah,” Ess said. “I think he’d had a bad Arjay day. Popped a couple beers and called us. He was upset about your tree thing. But I think it was brilliant. Chill.” Sally has lowered her colors, handed over her sword, registered at Eidelhans Temp Agency. They warned her, though: no telling when she might get work. Dickie just deposited another check for her to live on—so she knows he still feels guilty, as well as mad. But that can’t last. So, good-bye, college. This seems unbearable.

And good-bye, Noah Moore. They’re done. 10-4. Over and out. The worst part
will be buying her groceries elsewhere. Pete and Yvvie, she does not need to see. No, the worst (she’s crossing Founder’s Quad now, savoring the shade beneath tall ashes, star-leafed sweet gums), the worst is how she feels about herself. About the woman she was in the far-back, the one without a lick of sense. About the dim-brained trusting one who spent those tender, over-regulated, nights with Noah. Are they, am I, two people? she wonders. Three? Or are we one?
Nonnie Bee, she knows, would encourage her to laugh. An ironic snicker rings out as Sally opens the door of Tipaught Hall, set in the swampy dell where a sulfur spring burbled healthfully a hundred-fifty years ago. Professor Augenblick stands in a corridor narrowed by a church pew stacked with dusty graded papers, by a bright-red wooden hobby horse on springs, by boxes filled with issues of Ellipses—the annual student lit mag—and Hard Return, the spasmodic alternative one. She’s yukking it up with Bette, the department secretary. “Sally!” cries Augenblick. “What brings you— Good god. We’ve got an appointment, don’t we? Glad I’m here.”
“Me too,” says Sally, with the same generic good cheer. A leave of absence will be easy, Augenblick promises, rummaging through her desk drawers for a form. “Trust me, Sally. A student of your caliber will be welcomed back.” The prof’s chair squeaks as she leans back. “If the, ah, divorce happens— Look, I have to say I’m sorry, but maybe it’s— Anyway, if your financial picture changes, that— It opens up possibilities for financial aid.” She waves one long arm as if to underscore the high point of a lecture. “Schools like Caledonia needn’t be— Well. I do hope you’ll be

coming back.” She nods, satisfied it’s all been said.
Then jumps up. “Forgot to turn the fan on. Scusi! Maybe we should talk about your long-term— Hang on.” She stretches across her desk to reach the window fan. “Can’t believe we’re still the only office building on campus without— Ah, there we go.” The fan starts whirring. The air’s rush cools the office, slightly. For an instant, Sally thinks she smells a trace of smoke. But Augenblick seems to notice nothing, so Sally settles back in the shabby armchair on which all visitors are enthroned. Her advisor scrabbles through another drawer. “I should have your student— Yep. So you can finish up in— Oh god, I knew there was something I—” The professor plops the opened folder on her desk. “I don’t mean to pry here, Sally. And I understand now that your summer’s been— I’m just wondering why you haven’t, ah, let us know your answer? About the Evelyn Small Grakatt?” “The—? My—?” Contagious. And then, Oh Jeez. Jeez Louise. The Evelyn Small Grakatt ’33 American Travel Fellowship, which Sally applied for back in May, provides funding for one rising Caledonia senior—who shall be characterized by idealism, perseverance, and a zest for the life of the mind—to spend
four weeks pursuing experiential research in one or more of the donor’s best-loved fields of study (geography, literature, and natural history), on condition that her journey take
her to a region of the country which she has never visited, and on further condition that
her plan of study be the one among those submitted which best demonstrates, in the
majority opinion of a committee comprised of one faculty member from each of
Caledonia’s five academic divisions, a coherent and enriching relationship to her major.
It is, in other words, one terrific boondoggle, funded by a blessedly eccentric

alum. Or: a lovely spot of whim in a drably pragmatic world.
And this year (backwards-forwards round-the-bend 2002), Sally is the lucky one. Questions erupt from Augenblick. Sally never received the notification letter? Has she been checking her mail-pigeonhole in the day student lounge? Ah— “Anyway, Sally, all’s ending well. Now, you know the thought was that the person, you, could do her Grakatt project over January Term. But if you’re not taking classes this fall—” Professor Augenblick beams. “No reason you can’t go sooner, and be more leisurely about it too, if you can make the money last. I can tell you now I was on the committee. Better than being stuck on— But my point is—” She runs her hand through her disheveled frizz. “I fought for you, and we won.” Her chair squeaks decisively. “Congratulations, Sally. If you’ll write a letter of acceptance, I’ll get the Business Office to cut the check. Let me ask Bette—” Then, as Sally prepares to grope around on the worn fake-Persian carpet seeking her jaw, which seems to have dropped down there, Bette’s head pops in the door. “Lou?” Her eyes dart toward Sally. “I mean, Professor Augenblick? Excuse me. Security just called.”
“Bette! Perfect timing! Wait. Security?” “There’s a fire in the woods along Campbell’s Cove Road.” Her face, that of a beauty queen turned grandmother, projects reassurance. “Don’t get worried. It’s a fair piece from campus. But Security did say we should close up all windows.” “Windows?”
“Someone’s got beaucoup stinky old car tires dumped out there. The burning rubber must be pouring some nightmare stuff into the air.”

The tire dump on the road to the reservoir! If Sally were the heroine of one of the
novels she read for Augenblick’s Victorian Narrativities class, she’d swoon. Instead, she gets a ride home. “Nonsense,” says Lou Augenblick when Sally demurs. “I’m decamping anyway. Can’t have you out walking in this smoke—not if you’re planning to inhale while you do it. Just e-mail me your formal acceptance for the Evelyn Small Grakatt. I’ll make sure you get that check.”

From Sally’s driveway, the loose black column of oily acidic ashy smoke can be seen rising like a signal from an angry deity. Her advisor pulls in, engine running, finishes an ardent list of more places around Boston that Sally must visit, really must. “Oh, and Sally, one last thing. I noticed in your student folder—well, I don’t believe you’d consider this intrusive. Anyway, I hope not.” She takes a breath, then coughs and wipes her teary eyes, the engine of her shabby Yugo coughing with her. “Happy birthday, Sally! And congrats again. Ciao-ciao!”

53.

From:
hankq@gritweb.net
To:

sallyp@gritweb.net
Subject:
urgent, please

Dear Ms. Paradiso:
I’d rather write “Sally” but I’m afraid this is business. It’s important that we talk.

I remember our conversation at the hospital about cell phones. I still agree. But with this job… I left my number on your machine. I never answer when I’m driving, or on my bike.

Here’s what you need to know: I’ve been assigned to help cover the big fire at the tire dump. Would you be willing to speak to me for a few minutes, at your convenience? I really think it would be a good idea.

Thanks in advance for your time. All very best, believe me—Hank Q.

54.

I spent the next three days looking out my windows at that awful smoke. Also checking
websites for all kinds of places in New England. Two more days waiting for the dean to get back from vacation. Another meeting with Prof. Augenblick. By the time the other students started edging onto campus, my plans—such as they were—were laid.

The tire fire had been contained, though it still smoldered. As did my conscience. As did my heart.

The authorities kept reassuring us about the smoke. Unless you had allergies, or asthma, or were old or young or wanted to exercise, or worked outdoors, or had one of a long list of illnesses, no problem. That is, well, yes, the first couple days the levels of “airborne particulate matter” were several multiples of what’s officially safe. (Particles of what—free-floating belted-radial petroleum? tiny charcoal briquettes?) Just keep those doors and windows closed, folks. Just stay locked in.

I imagined domed cities on a planet with a chartreuse atmosphere. A gas mask hanging from a hook by my umbrella stand. Melted rubber in my lungs. I also thought of the houses near Dickie and Arjay’s dump. Most all the people living there bailed out for a week or two. I saw a woman on the news, wet handkerchief tied across her mouth, lugging a pink pillowcase full of things she loved or needed.

The drought turned out to be a blessing. In the dried-up woods, the fire burned hot—so hot, those authorities told us, that no truly toxic gases were released. All over

Alloway, people ran on about complete and incomplete combustion. Word was, by the
time a little rain fell, workers had already put in containment devices to catch the poison runoff. The groundwater was saved.
The fire-crew heroes wore special masks. Benzene, xylene, sulphur did not get talked about all that much. But I read those noxious names in one of Hank Q’s background articles. I could see the man, all polite determination, stumping right to the police line, one leg in a cast up to his knee. Breathing was only risky right around the site, said the authorities. So was he stupid, or courageous? Hank Q.: there was a problem. Another Advance reporter did a story on B. Calloway, cranky pitiful pseudo-owner of that land. It did not give a hint of anyone else as actual title holders—no little chain of corporations that should have been named Paradiso Brothers’ Fake-Out, Ltd. Should have been named Responsible Parties, Inc.
Now, anyone acquainted with the Paradiso boys would bet big bucks this dump was Arjay’s project. And heaven knows I had never felt like I had any control, not even over Dickie, let alone his bro. Yet I could not douse my conscience, could not find a gas mask that would filter out my sense of guilt. Worse, was this: I pictured Dickie leaning against that pear tree at the Save-The- Sycamore rally. Flick-flame-flap-snuff. Evidence had turned up, the paper said. The fire was set. A rumor surfaced about a gang of kids messing around, but nothing came of it. Speculation flashed its eyes toward B. Calloway.
Hank Q kept covering the environmental angle. Then—according to his second e-mail, which I also did not answer—he needed to go interview folks off in Roanoke and

Frederick counties about tire fires they had dealt with, needed to check out some of the
three hundred other illegal tire dumps around the state. But he still would very much like to talk. Please. About a lot of stuff: had I read Walden? A book, I thought, about getting away from things. What kind of lah-dee-dah hint was that? My blood ran cold as Tolliver Creek in wintertime. My skin turned hot as melting rubber. I think most everyone who ever changed a tire in Alloway County was responsible, in a way. But my sensitivity zeroed in a fair ways closer to home. Looking back, I don’t know if the awful sickness of that smoke had contaminated my thinking the same way rainwater runoff from the burned-over dumpsite could have slipped along the rock layers, tainting the entire reservoir. But if there was any chance at all that Dickie might have done it, I most surely did not intend to gab with some reporter all cranked up to save the world from its polluters. One notion kept coming at me: get out of town. In my crazy fearfulness, Hank Q’s hint seemed to make sense.
I had the money now. Prof. Augenblick said if I kept a reading journal, wrote a big essay, she’d fix the registration once I got back in school. We could finagle a course’s worth of credit from my travel project, call it a spring-term overload, she said— tuition free. The only thing I needed was…Dickie’s little truck. Why go car-camping in a sedan when I could lay hands on a pretty-good-gas- mileage mini-truck with a little aluminum top on back to keep my gear safe? Legally, half that truck was mine. But how was I to get it? While I pondered, I took care of other business. Had a word with Boo, the fellow who cut the lawn for us. Bought plug-in timers, set lamps to bink on and off. Baked my

first lemon Jello-O cake in years and took it to Mrs. Elsing across the street. She keeps
an eye like a turkey buzzard’s on the whole block’s doings anyway—why not make it official?
Val and Ess had heard nothing of a fire in Alloway, and they did not hear an awful lot from me. They were nice-as-peach-pie about the fellowship, my peach-pie children. Way to go, Maah. Pops? Oh, he sounded fine, last time they’d talked. I wrote a letter, draft after draft. Dear Possible Arsonist. Dear Jackass. No. I had visions of his mail being read by secret agents building up a case
against him. Of a subpoena being slapped on me, and Arjay turning state’s evidence. Of Dickie in the penitentiary, which truly did seem worse than he deserved. Innocent till proven guilty, Sally. I ran those words around my head like a mantra in the House of Yoga. I could not see it as my duty to tell someone what little I knew about the ownership of the land. From the way he looked on the TV news, grimacing and shaking, B. Calloway was not long for this world. And there had been no word of legal action beyond the EPA moving in to clear out the leavings of the dump. If they arrested the old man, I’d do the right thing—but not now. My letter, in its final draft: Dear Dickie, I got a little travel money from Caledonia. It’s not much (and it does not pay tuition). But it gets me what you said last
May you needed: a chance to figure out my life…
I let him know I was still a tier-one household manager. I said I knew he hated using e-mail but if need be he could send a message from his office; I’d check as often as I could. I addressed the envelope, ready to drop in a mailbox once I crossed the county line. I said nothing at all about the fire. I apologized for commandeering—no,

liberating—no, taking—his truck. The truck.
Our truck. The registration lay tucked beneath a floor-mat, I knew that. Dickie’s turn was over, that was all.
But I will say it. Maybe I was still a tiny bit ticked off. Maybe I enjoyed the thought of him reading that letter, running to the window, seeing my VW sitting where his truck had been. Now I was the one who was breaking away. That is not why I nabbed the fancy rainproof jacket I gave him five years back, hoping we might start to get outdoors together again. Up north, the weather could turn wet, and I had nothing right for hiking. He’d never worn it anyway, not once. I threw it on the pile of stuff I was making in the foyer. A smart thing, that turned out to be. One last class at the House of Yoga. A quick good-bye to Nonnie Bee. Gabe was back in school, all fired up now for sustainable forestry, which made me feel the League did more than save one tree. Rainbow? No one seemed to know when I dropped by. “Not in prism, anyway,” his twin brother said. “Nyuk, nyuk.” Oh, Dickie, I thought. I promised I’d come back, but I did not promise when. Val and Ess I e-mailed at the last minute, saying I’d phone my first night out. Right before bedtime, I called Dreama, giving myself the pleasure of asking her to spread the word about my little trip. As if she would do anything but. No one at Earth Wisdom, I reckoned, cared.
I felt bad not talking to Juanita, bless her, yet I did not dare give Arjay or Dickie the chance to block my plans. Next day at dawn, I drove the VW to Fox Chase, hoping. Yes. The night had been sleepless, twisty-dreaming. But my head cleared real
quick. I parked, pussy-footed over, then hopped into the truck and turned my key,

hightailing it before Dickie could wake up and look out his window. Spent no more time
back home than it took to load my stuff. Except one thing. It seemed important. Who knows why? I’d already bought the can of tomato-colored spray paint, though my plan had been to wait until I crossed the Mason-Dixon. Yet I took ten minutes’ risk—a thing that six months earlier I would not have had the gumption for. Excited, yawning, moving fast, I painted out the “TO” and “TA”, those big white letters on the little red truck’s rear end. Now only the middle two shone forth, my greeting to the world.
I was forty-five and lighting out for new territory at last. Funny, I thought as I drove along Tolliver Creek, that after all this agitation, I still felt a longing for the gray- man. His outstretched hand had stirred my night of apparitions. It held a whirling crystal ball, sapphire-colored as I remembered, with an emerald (or maybe it was an apple orchard ringed by mountains) at its heart. Good-bye, I thought. Fare well. The red light on the dashboard broke through to my busy-buzzy brain. The emergency brake was on.
Releasing it, I turned onto the highway north. Like a branch being carried along real easy by a high-water creek, the needle on the truck’s speedometer floated off to the right.
“On to Avalon,” I sang out like a genuine lunatic, to no one. “On to Shangri-la.”