Monday, May 27, 2002
Letter to Roy Conboy
Roy,
Did you say to write a ten minute piece, or a ten page piece? Yipes! I did ten pages, then I got into it so much that I wrote another piece to go with it that's 5 pages long, since I owe you a coupla more pieces anyway, I hope you don't mind...otherwise I'll have to toss out every other word....who knows, it might be more interesting that way...
I tried to salvage my Sept 11 dialog...that I was too shy to turn in as I thought it was a buncha crap...and it ain't improving with tinkering....I think I can only write about what really happens to me...in mea maximum culprit confessional mode... that's why I love this monologue process.
It's just hard trying to find a venue where I can develop multiple voices outside of myself...(other than becoming schizophrenic or a Gemini, that is). Any suggestions on who to read? I've a few playwritng books I'm looking at. I think I'm panicking over structure here. I know how to do it in a poem, which is organic—it just happens, but it seems dialogues need another approach. More distant, more removed, more LOGICAL! (My brain rebels...)
But what really moves me are those quirky, if sometimes historical monologues. I love anything from Billy the Kid (Oandatje)—the cannibal spaniels, or the monologue from the Long Day's Journey (O'Neill) where the character gets hypnotized by the sea and discovers God and everything enroute to Buenos Aires, and the one from East (Osbourne?) where the penny drops and the character realizes he gets what he deserves, the scrubbers, not the bird he's clocking. Or Maureen's speech in the Beauty Queen of Lenane..when she's crossed over reason after murdering her mother...It's not like I haven't been exposed to the theatre...
Maybe it's the epiphany of self-realization that moves me, I think, but it seems I have to blunder up onto it, which means going back to the piece again and again until I discover what it is I want to say as I'm usually the last to know. Ah well...
Maureen
DRIVING LESSONS
DRIVING LESSONS
West county back roads 45
minutes from anywhere gives you time to think.
Behind the wheel since I was
13, w/o a license, pedal to the metal, swinging my rear end
around curves with a permit
for black ice & road rash, it goes with the territory.
I get some real writing done
on back roads. A friend kept driving cross-country,
it was the only way she
could write novels. Gas was cheaper than rent.
Busted by the CHP at 17, it
was a matter of pride to see how far I could get w/o a license.
Before that, it was the
horses I was addicted to at an early age.
Never did learn to ride a
bike but my quarter horse, she was fast,
a Three Bars mare, from a
long line of Preakness and Derby winners.
She was the fastest animal
on four legs except maybe a cheetah,
not many cheetahs in west
Marin, it’s a veldt thing.
Once I saw a servil in a
dumpster—escaped from a wildlife preserve.
Poor thing was declawed and
defanged, and surviving on garbage.
I thought I was having a
flashback on account of being up so early.
But it was sitting on that
garbage heap with tufted ears the size of a jackals’
like an Egyptian god
greeting the dawn, thin and long as a journey.
That’s how I knew it wasn’t
a bobcat mutating in the imagination.
For starters, it didn’t have
spots. I’ve seen bobcats and mountain lions a plenty.
I kept looking around to see
if I was on Candid Camera or Publisher’s
Clearing House,
or something like that. Not
likely living out in the sticks.
Big cats. One time I saw a
lion drag a deer across old man Schivo’s meadow.
The doe outweighed me, with
only a barb-wire fence and a walnut orchard between us. . .
And a black catamount used
to patrol the ridge. Terrified, we thought it was a jaguar.
Just melanistic. Someone
shot it, I guess. We watched a cougar drag cubs to a new den
on Mt. Barnabee. Never could
get the binoculars to work, a big hairy eye in the middle.
The servil made Eye
Witness News. Guess I was the last
one to see it alive, poor thing.
Seems like I’m always
catching the tail end of things, as if I was born stradding eras.
Coming home from grade
school, we had the afternoon session
on account of Lagunitas
School being so crowded and all—
There were no other little
kids on my road, so the bus dropped me off on the highway
at the bottom of the hill. I
had to walk that mile fast to make it home before dark
as it was mid-winter. Up the
canyon, under the canopy of trees,
fallen trunks glowed with a
ghostly phosphorescent in the leaf mold—
I told Billy Joe—he was in
high school. I told him they were silver snakes or fairy paths.
Anyway, as I was saying, my
horse was the fastest in the valley at the quarter-mile.
Fast as my math teacher,
Archie Williams who shook Hitler’s hand at the Olympics.
We used to race along the
old railroad bed that ran through Taylor Park
and slalom through ravines
so fast, no one could catch us, not the ranchers,
or even a cheetah, not that
there were cheetahs in west Marin.
Once a cougar leaped in
front of Mr. Lindsey’s palomino, Lady, she did the splits
never having seen a lion
before; it’s not exactly something you can train for.
Our ponies were Sherman
tanks, no fire road or gate was safe from us.
I used to win armloads of
blue ribbons and cheesy trophies on Gymkhana Day.
I always took the dollar
race, the bill clamped nicely between thigh and horse.
I come from a long line of horse whisperers. It’s in the family. So’s wanderlust.
I come from a long line of horse whisperers. It’s in the family. So’s wanderlust.
My great-grandfather had a
brute of a red mare—red as Peig’s hair.
She (the horse) was sweet as
could be to him and he did well by her at the races.
But she reared up and took a
chunk out of my granny’s arm for no reason at all—
that’s why she’s so afraid
of horses. But I’m getting off track.
My truck is older than most
of the kids I go to school with.
I call it Blue Lazarus
because it just keeps on truckin’.
The odometer is approaching
the 300,000 mile marker,
most of those miles spent
between Bolinas and Fort Bragg.
I’m thinking of throwing a
party for it, now that it’s old enough to drink.
My uncle used to have us
kids breathe into the breathalyzer lock
attached to his ignition so
he could start the car.
A proper drunk knows all the
back roads home.
When I was 18, my dad—he was
an ex cop—looked me up to see how I turned out.
He let me drive his sports
car and here I was, heel-toeing the gas & brake
double-clutching, double
shifting the curves down Highway One.
He wanted to know who taught
me to drive. Boyfriend? No.
Said, that’s the way he
drove the race car. In the blood, I guess.
Remember when personalized
license plates came in in the ‘70s? when Nixon got impeached?
I was driving over Waldo
Grade and the car in front of me said “FCK NXN”
and so I decided to
customize my mthers’s license plate. She had this old Rambler
that said 456 SEK; well,
with a little paint, I modified the K into an X
and she got great mileage
out of it—until the cops pullede her over and said it was stolen.
She said the cop who took
down the plate, he shaking his head.
Couldn’t believe that one
got by the censor board. I don’t think he wanted to bust her
but the car got impounded.
She said it was junk anyway. She was pretty cool. You know, turned on?
It really bugs me the way
people drive in this city, they’re always lost
head up their ass in a
nicotine cloud, brain dead, or worse—on their cell phones,
always picking their noses
and generally wasting time lollygagging.
I’m stuck half-way between
gears like a buggery turd, lugging it.
All this open road going to
waste and they’re guarding their lanes
like jealous dogs worrying a
bone, not about to let anyone else take up the slack.
One time I crammed the gear
shift to get around some cow hogging the road,
and it just came off in my
hand. I was in third gear, a steep grade ahead,
I’m holding the stick shift
like a cattle prod, wondering what the fuck to do next,
and the whanker ahead of me,
oblivious to the world, was prospecting
his nostrils like he just
struck a rich vein in the Sierra Madre.
People tell me to slow down.
Stress kills. They equate it with speed.
I consider it a dance.
Following some whank stresses me out.
I grew up on roads with
dangerous curves, it was a matter of pride
to see how fast we could
take Dead Man’s Curve or White’s Hill.
Fast women in loose cars, we
out-raced the cops on Lucas Valley Road
trimming curves like a
seamstress shortening the distance between two points.
It comes down to this: some
are born to burn up the miles, living
in the fast lane, others hug
the slow lane, afraid of commitment.
Like the man I’m currently
involved with, or not involved with,
depending on who’s asking.
He’s so afraid of love, he straddles
the white shoulder line as
if his sanity depended upon it.
I once had a boyfriend who
spent a lot of time on the road
and I kept finding these
dirty rolled up socks in the van.
I couldn’t figure out why
they were falling out of the laundry basket
and then he finally spilled
the truth, he was whacking off on the road.
Should’ve seen the writing
on the wall: when sex goes, it’s a matter of time.
Bases loaded and the fat
lady singing. Only I couldn’t make out the words.
Hey, you got a license for
that thing? That I was the one with the seven-year-itch
is beside the point. Back
when we were dharma bumming it on the road,
I used to come down on him
on those long empty highways.
It was a matter of pride to
see how far we could go.
My neighbor George, this
cat, he really was a dharma bum.
I can’t remember his name in
the book. Something like Jep,
but that was Gary Snyder’s
literary name. You know, Kerouac?
Anyway he and Janis, yes,
THAT Janis, were in the back seat balling.
What a word, that really
dates me, doesn’t it? He was just in it for the drugs.
When we used to walk home
from school she’d be waking up—
Big Brother and the
Holding Company took over Barbano’s
summer camp
after old man Barbano shot
himself. I saw them take him away.
Seems he couldn’t bear to
live after his daughter was murdered.
It was in all the magazines
and newspapers. But we were the last to know.
Janis was burning the candle
pretty hot at both ends by then
and she’d get up around 4 PM
and crank up the amps.
We’d hear her crooning to
herself between sips of Southern Comfort.
Oh Lord
won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz. My friends all drive Porsches, I must make
amends. . .
My best friend was a groupie
and we used to score from the musicians.
But my horse would throw a
tizzy every time we rode past Jefferson Starship’s place.
They had this toy twin prop
biplane in the oak tree that spun like a hornet.
You know, the one on the
album cover? Rock musicians moved to the valley en masse.
We were outside
civilization—the suburbs and the city were far away.
One day my little cousin
wandered into Jerry Garcia’s house on Resaca Ave.
to play doctor, and she took
all the pills in the medicine cabinet.
God only knows what was in
his cabinet. He sure as hell didn’t.
We had to get her stomach
pumped. Jerry never really left the valley.
He died trying to kick the
habit at the Gregg’s old summer camp.
Linda Gregg became a poet,
her old man challenged Jack Gilbert’s manhood
and handed him a chainsaw;
Jack climbed the Doug fir, the tree snapped his back.
She drove that wheelchair of
his as far away as she could from that valley.
Sweet old Bob, you know, the
guy who had a thing for his socks?
Yeah him & my cat! He
used to drag me to all these Beat readings in the City.
I heard this cat Gary Snyder’s
poem about my valley and said: I can do that!
I didn’t know I was in for a
life sentence. I took up writing, but the SOB
said I needed a poetic
license, then wondered why I ran off with the poet
who said some pretty fast
words in my slow lane. It was an easy conquest:
four on the floor, we
tailgated on soft shoulders and dangerous curves.
I yielded to oncoming
traffic. I let him look under my hood, but the poet
got cold feet at the bridge.
Here I was, knocked up, and no place to go. . .
So I slept in the back seat
of a VW bug in Safeway parking
lots—made me feel safe.
The words, they just kept
coming down the line. I never thought to look back.
Saturday, May 25, 2002
EXTRA! (Why did Google flag this blog entry as a server redirect error?)
EXTRA!
I came back from the fields of West Marin
having spent 2 long days with a thousand others—
an untrained army of first timers like myself.
Come as you are, we were not actors
the logistics of moving us in geometric formations
when we’ve had no formal training, or never stood in bread
lines.
Across the potholes, the stars arrive in a stretch limo
and a woman in a pink bathrobe and curlers steps out
to join the Basque herder with his sheep
and the Japanese business men bow low.
People hover like guardian angels to powder and primp them
while we, AT&Ts legions of feudal peasants,
the ordinary, the mundane, we are left
to fend for ourselves against the elements.
My lip doubled in size from windburn and a spiderbite
As we stood in countless formation,
conversation wandered from boundary to boundary.
The young woman Shauna, who’d beaten childhood cancer and
won
was fey and could see my well-dressed wounds;
Santa Claus (you recognize him from the magazines and
catalogues)
limps from a bad car accident down the Grapevine.
Those having survived near death experiences shed a
different light,
a homing beacon to others, tribe within tribe.
As the camera crew aligns us for the nth take
the ‘copter again swoops up the valley.
In this setting, conversation takes on epic proportions
and people’s lives become poignant,
reduced to five-minute fragments,
shaped by location and group consciousness
despite the fact that we were doing a commercial for cell
phones
where we too were far away from civilization for real
cell phones to work
we reach out and touch the Basque farmer (really from
Tomales).
The idea being one small planet appeals.
Cards and stories were traded like a swap meet or stockbrokers.
We had transcended the mundaneness that is the death of art
the prize was the sky and wind.
5/25/02
Chileno Valley
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Wednesday, May 15, 2002
Promised Land (monologue)
(revision iii)
SETTING: In the near future—say, in the year 2025—an old woman in a run-down rest home waits for visitors—any visitors, including the staff, but what is eventually revealed is that her ultimate appointment is with death. She makes do with whoever drifts into her perimeter. She spends all her time sitting in a chair.
The rest of the stage is black; scrims could be used to suggest the public nature of institutions where the idea of privacy is a relic of the past. Suggestion of patients in other beds being administered to behind scrims, being removed with increasing frequency and urgency towards the end of the piece.
The old woman’s garrulous and could talk the legs off a chair. She’s bored and she isn’t interested in listening to anyone. I envision a Jessica Tandy type in “Fried Green Tomatoes” telling the story. Various caretakers drift in and out at intervals, but her conversation continues on unabated as if she was talking to one person. We are meant to be put off by her. Yet she intrigues us in a Beckettian sort of way. What we don’t quite realize is that she is a mirror of our future selves.
Towards the end of the monologue, mirrors facing the audience could be unveiled to drive the metaphor home. (A possible rewrite could feature two old ladies chatting it up, trading war stories, thus making the stakes higher, perhaps desiring to hurry death up by hoarding pills, Kevorkian style.)
CHARACTERS:
OLD WOMAN in a nursing home
NURSE(S), caretaker
(OLD WOMAN in a roll-up bed to a nurse who drifts in and out of the monologue.
(Spotlight on OLD WOMAN, Wherever there’s a beat, the spotlight could dim, as if it was another scene.)
OLD WOMAN
What’s your name girl? Pearl? Now that’s a real nice name. I know we’ll get along real fine. You know, I used to know a Pearl once. She was a real gem from Louisiana. Never been to Louisiana. You from Louisiana? You could be. You got the right look for it... Lord, how I hate all this waiting. So boring. Gimme my cards. That’s a good girl.
(OLD WOMAN plays a game of solitaire.)
Pearl. Pearlie Mae we called her. Let’s see, I first met Pearlie Mae Timberlake—when was it? Right before the Summer of Love. Pearlie Mae’s family moved in soon after the Scotts did. Right next door to the Schivos who’d been coming here every summer for a coon’s age, they were practically neighbors. We knew them from church. Italian, see?
You Italian? No. Guess not. The first Italian word I learned was “manja-manja” from Mary Bianchi. She and my grandma were great friends. I loved watching the way her hands grated hard cheese as she talked. She’d feed us raviolis or sponge cake when we’d come home from school. It was a long walk up that road. When Mary Bianchi’s first husband died of mushroom poisoning, a brother come out from Italy to marry her and take care of her boy but he died from a weak valve in his heart, my grandma said. If he had lived, I guess the boys would’ve been brother-cousins. They didn’t think it incestuous or anything. See, in Italy, that was how things were done. She was a widow on her own in a strange country.
My grandma said there was a big Italian-Swiss colony moved in up our road around the turn of the century. So most of the year-round neighbors were Italian. I guess the narrow valley felt a little like home to them though we were far from the Alps—Italian or Swiss. But my grandma said it looked like Ireland. How could this place be so many other places in the eyes of all the beholders? And the city folks fleeing the city like rats, why were they always trying to recreate the place they just left? We had a lot of summer people. From the city. See? They’d come migratin’ like birds to better pastures. We didn’t mix much with them unless they went to our church.
(beat) (NURSE exits).
I went to Switzerland when I was a girl, you know. Younger than you. Worked there one summer as a waitress in a resort but I was positively starved for friendship or even a kind word. But the Swiss, they wouldn’t have anything to do with us—see, to them, we were summer people. Now the tables were turned. I was so homesick—I even missed Mrs. Decker’s damn dogs barking. That was the first year I quit going to church.
The Schivos, they were summer people, their place was up the hill from the Bianchis and right next door to the Scotts. At first we thought the Scotts were summer people too but one year they stayed on. Sometimes that would happen. One fall, a summer family would defect and stay on for the winter. But the lack of amenities and the rural isolation usually drove them back to the city the following year. You wouldn’t see the Scotts in our church, so we didn’t know too much about them.
But they had a real cement swimming pool with a diving board at the deep end. A pool with a bright chrome ladder with three steps to get out of the deep end. Not like the Schivo’s wading pool which was filled in with pond scum and tadpoles. Mrs. Schivo going on like how it was pure as a baptismal font. And with Gail —a grown woman—peeing in it, mind you!
It was a cryin’ shame about the Schivo’s daughter, Gail. Sometimes I used to play with her. Or I tried to. She wasn’t right in the head. I overheard my grandma telling Mary Bianchi that the cord was wrapped twice around Gail’s neck when she was born. That was why. I didn’t know what cord they were talking about. But she was sort of like Lindsey’s brother. They said it was a fall from a horse when his mother was pregnant that made him so strange.
I think Mrs. Schivo was desperate for someone—anyone—to play with her poor demented Gail. Mrs. Schivo would bribe us with lemonade and candy, calling us little angels and whatnot about our goodness and inheritin’ the kingdom of heaven. But it was too weird to be wading in a slimy fountain or to play dolls with a grown woman with the mind of a child. No, I was a child and her mind was anything but angelic.
And if we complained, Mrs. Schivo would deny it. Said we were making things up. Twisting the heads off dolls and then moving up to lizards and the like. And then, the poor kitten. She denied everything of course. We were afraid of the water snakes and the frogs were exempt on account of not having any necks, I guess. She said that we did it. Said it was an accident and we couldn’t come over any more. Mrs. Schivo, she’d claim black was white... oh I didn't mean anything by that to you girl... I didn’t understand her loneliness. Not yet. Well, it made me feel defiled but it was so hot that summer and the Scott’s pool yard—well, it was a siren call just to watch it.
I used to look through a crack in the weathered fence board that kept us from that clean, shining pool. I once heard about a precious stone called Tears of Allah. Like an opal, that pool. It was a jeweled oasis set in a dull matrix of summer grasses. We were out hiding out in the scrub brush. Hissing crickets and sizzling greasewood and acrid dust rising up around our ankles teasing our noses nearly gave us away. Stray water from the cannon balls made us the most jealous. We were positively green with envy.
I loved listening to the dull smack of feet against that diving board. You’d see a head rising up over that fence as they practiced winging it with birds and angels against that blue vault of a sky. Their feet jumping against the board reminded me of something I saw in a movie—a fist slamming into a side of beef. And then that sound off that board right before the splash cut through us like a door stopper spring. We were just dying to get in. They must’ve known we were out there torturing ourselves all summer long, but they never invited us in. Not even once. Not for years. It took Old Man Barbano’s death and my friendship with Pearlie Mae to change all that.
Yep. The slap of feet on that diving board was a real summer sound. Not like the board across the Inkwell on Papermill Creek—so deep, they said it was bottomless. They said divorced couples used to throw their wedding bands in it. So us kids was always trying to get to the bottom of it. See if they could get a ring. Or drown tryin’. They said someone found a real diamond solitaire. I bet it was real rhinestone paste. Every time I tried to swim across the Inkwells, I was so scared, I nearly drowned for lack of breath. It was practically a religious experience. Gasping for air I was. Never did find any rings. You like my rings? I’d give you one but they’ll have to cut ‘em off when I’m dead. Won’t be long now.
(The NURSE enters and takes OLD WOMAN’s pulse. Gives her a glass of water to take her pills in a small paper cup.)
Ptooy! Did you get this from a goldfish bowl? It tastes like sump water. Or pond scum. No, no, no I am not an expert in bouquet du pond scum! I don’t want any more of them pills. They make me all fizzy. (She falls back into her reverie).
(beat) (NURSE leaves).
When I was a girl, I was a regular water dog, yessiree. I spent summers submerged in the Scott’s pool. Once they invited me in, there was no turning back. I was like a stray turned up at the doorstep one day and come to stay. My hair turned blonde, then green. That was before it was hip to be punk with all that spiked hair and all. Or whatever you call it these days. Seems like fads are always changing but the types stay the same. I was brown as a nut so you couldn’t see the dirt anyway. I don’t think I ever had a bath the whole summer—which was useful.
Our spring went dry most every August. But we had these two big wine tanks. See? So we were on water vigil most the summer. Besides I hated being last in line for the bath. My grandma got first washing, then me, then my brother on account of him being the youngest. That bath water, it was as gray as the water in the ringer washer after the last load. My grandma would use the same water for all the loads, see? Real gray water. And the bath tub for rinsing. We didn’t wear much white clothes. Too hard to keep ’em clean. Real washing machines, dishwashers and swimming pools were rare as hen’s teeth because you had to be on a county water line in order to fill them.
Most of us were dependent upon wells or springs. The water company wasn’t interested in piping it to us. Not enough money in it. So they sat on the water. Kent Lake wasn’t used for drinking. Nor was Nicasio Lake for that matter. I remember when they drowned that poor valley, And every summer the bridge poked its head out if there was enough of a drought, that is. It just sat there evaporating all summer long; it was for a fire or just “in case,” only we didn’t rate as a “just in case.” It was really for future expansion—they had an eye on planting a subdivision but it was too far from town, thank God.
Our revenge was to swim our horses in the back side of those lakes. And to steal water from the fire line with long hoses. The pressure was so great from those fire lines, we were able to run water uphill to the tanks at night. Ready for a fire we were—or a phoenix on the rise.
(beat) (NURSE enters and turns on a light, fusses with things and leaves).
Speaking of fires. at my mother’s memorial service, we had ringsides seats on the front steps of St Mary’s church. It was a grand fire. B-52 bombers sliming the ridges, helicopters scooping tarp-loads of water from Nicasio Lake like dragonflies... and a camera crew filming cowboys in a big rig creeping around the Nicasio baseball diamond like Indians circling the wagons. The cops closed off one end of the road because of the movie in progress and the other end because of the fire in progress.
So we sat there that hot afternoon watching helicopters spilling payloads of water—waiting for folks to drive around the horn to San Rafael and up Lucas Valley. But nobody came to her funeral. My mom was too crazy for them anyway... Except for Billy. Even in a wheelchair, he got there all the way from LA to pay his last respects to his new-found mom. That’s what made her crazy, the State taking him like that while he was napping in his crib. I’ll tell you that story another time. But let me tell you, she would’ve liked being upstaged by a fire and by Hollywood. I never went back home much since my mom died. The kids I went to school with. Few from our end of the Valley escaped alive.
(beat)
Mrs. Scott took over teaching all us kids to swim after Old Man Barbano shot himself at the summer camp down the road. I guess Mrs. Scott was thrilled to get all of Mrs. Barbano’s old students by default. See, Mrs. Barbano, she originally had the market on swim classes because she salted her pool instead of using chlorine—which meant us lead-bottom swimmers could float and maybe even learn to swim. It was like having the great Salt Lake, the Salton Sea, or even the Dead Sea right down the road from you.
All that salt—we were like corks on a fishing net but I think it also gave us such a strange thirst for wanderlust that distance never quenched. I learned late to swim—I was going on ten—so I needed all the help I could get. But I couldn’t float in Mrs. Scott’s pool—even if my life depended on it. I used to cheat on the Red Cross lifesaving tests—sculling with my hands under my butt and holding my breath so I was tight as a balloon.
Mrs. Scott stood there with a timer timing us on hour long swims and floats in case we ever capsized in the ocean—not that any of us had a reason to be out in a boat to begin with. Except for poor Jim Ahola. But he died from exposure sailing back from Hawaii the summer after we graduated from high school on The Spirit, it was called. Funny name for a boat. Well, it took theirs' all right. Didn’t it? Poor Jim, God’s gift to women, drop-dead gorgeous—feeding all the fishes of the deep. I got my Red Cross card all right, but I still can’t float. Not even in the tub. ’Course, all I get nowadays is a sponge bath now and then.
Where was I? Oh! Mr. Barbano. We were walking home from school when they wheeled Mr. Barbano out on the gurney—he was draped all in white and the bullet left a red carnation at his temple. It matched the ambulance. I’d never seen one before, but it had a big red cross just like on my CPR card. I never did figure out what Switzerland had to do with the Red Cross.
You see, Old Man Barbano went crazy in the head after his daughter was killed. Yep, murdered. See, she got a strange case of wanderlust from that same pool—just like Linda Gregg, you know, the poet? You never heard of her. Linda, she wound up in Greece after her man Jack what'shisname? he fell out of the tree, trying to top it to prove how macho he was to her redneck father, and he wound up in a wheelchair. Handsome man, he was, with legs like twigs. She stayed with him out of guilt, I expect. Mrs. Barbano’s daughter—I can’t remember her name—she was traveling in Switzerland, or was it Mexico? when it happened. In those days, it was a big event—it even made Time magazine. Mrs. Barbano—well, she just gave up on life after that. Lost a daughter, then a husband—see, she’d lost the center of her heart...it just couldn’t float any more. Salt in the wound.
After that, Mrs. Barbano retreated from life, and to get by, she rented out the dorms to rock musicians who turned it into a sleazy commune. You’re too young to know the Sons of Champlin or Big Brother aren’t you? You remember Janis Joplin? She lived there. Yep. Got up about the time we were coming home from school, walking up the road—Pearlie and Abe. Me and Billy Joe—I was plumb crazy about him. Pearlie Mae’s brother John was back in LA for the school year. Nine months was too a long time to wait.... Janis would get well oiled on Southern Comfort and be warming up to the mike, singing, Come on and take it, take another little piece of my heart now baby...Lordy, how she could croon. How that girl could croon...like the Darkies.
(beat) (NURSE enters, pulls the curtains. Leans against the table to listen.)
We didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning of the end. After the Summer of Love, more people began to stick around year-round, buying up all the summer places for dirt cheap, then reselling them to folks from LA and New York. Soon all of Marin was changing hands so fast, it was a real sleight of hand. We locals were all either left homeless or land poor after the taxes skyrocketed through the roof from all that buying and selling, buying and selling. That’s why I’m here, dearie. Taxman got the family home.
But some of the old timers, they managed to hold onto their land. Like my grandma and Mary Bianchi. Neither of them was American. They was immigrants from the Old Country so they weren’t eligible for public assistance. You know, welfare. Old ladies with next-to-nothing, they were left to starve. Starve in the richest county in the nation. But they still had their victory gardens from the war. Mary Bianchi, now she had three gardens. She used to put rags up in the orchard at night and then next morning, empty the rags loaded with earwigs—pincher bugs—into the chicken pen. The chickens went clean mad for the earwigs. So I guess we were living off chard and earwigs by extension of their eggs.
Billy Joe Bianchi, Mary’s grandson, he wasn’t particularly handsome. But I loved the way he smelled. One time he called me up on the telephone out of the blue—we just had a phone put in and so the novelty hadn’t worn off. It wasn’t the courting tool it is now. No cell phones. See, the telephone company finally decided to run poles up our road so everyone was getting phones but we were all connected to party lines.
(OLD WOMAN gathers up the cards, reshuffles, and deals a hand of solitaire, no one’s in the room. She’s talking to ghosts. Maybe Pearlie Mae. NURSE dims lights as she makes to leave.)
Damned cards. Seems I can’t get enough of them. Sill use real ones. None of that virtual solitaire for me....
(beat)
I knew it was wrong but I loved listening in on the party line. Old Man Latinfdorf’s thick German accent and Mrs. Decker’s spinster whine. Neighbors at the end of the road—they didn’t speak to each other except to tell each other to get off the line. Now Mrs. Decker, she worked at Guide Dogs for the Blind. Damned dogs barked their heads off the minute you stepped outside to fart. I could hear them barking morning noon and night. It even echoed down the stovepipe when I built the morning fire. We didn’t have none of this interior heating stuff. It seems I was always growing up between eras. Hauling wood and whatnot.
Where was I? Billy Joe. His mama—her name was Bobbie Joe—there was a real fondness for Joes in that family. Maybe johns would’ve been more appropriate. Bobbie Joe, she was drop dead gorgeous. A Tennessee woman. Came west to escape the stigmata of the Blue Ridge mountains, but Joe Senior, he couldn’t hold her. Just long enough to breed the kids, Billy Joe & Cottie Joe.
And then their mama got wanderlust—maybe she swam in Barbano's pool—and was off to God-knows-where with little Cottie, my best friend, in tow. I was ten and I was heartbroken. We used to play solitaire, hearts, crazy eights till dawn whenever I slept over. Later,we migrated to strip-poker and spin the bottle. I guess we had our own Appalachia festering right here in West Marin. But Bobbie Joe had bigger plans and skedaddled. Never did hear what happened to her but I hear Billy Joe wound up in Virginia.
(NURSE comes in bringing a straggly bouquet of flowers on the breakfast tray.)
Oops! Hand me that card will you? Why it’s the Queen of Hearts. Why thank you for the flowers. They’re real lovely. No one ever brings me flowers.
Bobbie Joe drew on her eyebrows like she was always surprised. With her Betty Boop lips she was the Queen of Hearts. Everyone was mesmerized when she wore those tight cowgirl shirts—the kind with the fringe along the vee yolk acrost her boobs—she was so stacked—even the weaner calves were lovesick. My mind keeps wandering. Where was I? Would you look at that dawn breaking. I never can get enough of it. So gorgeous.
Billy Joe said he wanted me to come on down and visit one night but I was to come to the back door. But there wasn’t any back door. I knew it wasn’t right. But I went on down the road like a sheep to the slaughter. Fog was rolling in over Mt. Barnabee—Barnabee was Samuel Taylor’s pet white mule. Buried near Devil’s Gulch, he was. Why call a jackass Barnabee anyway? Maybe Barabbas. They say a first kiss is supposed to be charmed. You know, remember it forever? But he damn near got more than a piece of my heart. I was scared stupid, all I could think of was an umbilical cord wrapping around my neck. There goes my life. No escape from the babies and poverty ’cause the men always left eventually. That was for certain.
Aha! Won the game. Finally. You know the real cause of carpet tunnel syndrome? Electronic Solitaire. All them millions of mouse clicks on Jokers and one-eyed jacks. Not word-processing. Why we’d be rich and living in Monte Carlo if we got a penny for every mouse click squandered on solitaire. They ain’t getting my money. That’s why I use real cards.
(beat)
Billy Joe was a real jock in high school....
(beat)
Course cheating’s always a problem with real cards....
(beat)
My neighbor Agnes, now she loved the cards—she used to cheat at solitaire and she'd cheat on her husband Lucien when he was out at sea. And there is always the danger of losing your real cards. She was the type to roll doughballs until they were good and gray and feed them to the dog, and play solitaire till all hours. I found one of her cards lost behind a dresser. Apparently she didn’t mind not having a full deck as long as the bourbon bottle was full. But I guess he was cheatin' on her too on account of the fact that he gave her a disease and didn’t even tell her. She wanted kids so bad and compensated by drowning her sorrow in the bottom of the bottle. But she was a real mean drunk. I kept away from her. All that poison in her. She eventually swelled up like a big frog. They said the uterus turned black and all kinds of things slithered out.
(beat)
The door to Billy Joe’s room was on the 2nd floor of the farm house. He lowered a ladder down and hoisted me up. Fog made my hair curly. Like an angel, he said as he touched it. And closed the door. Cat and mouse or cat and dog—more like it. I was treed and I sure as hell wasn’t going to make it out the front of the house without getting noticed. His granny and mine, they were good friends. You’d think that would’ve protected me. But I was too ashamed to call out for help.
Kissin' wasn't fun. How my jaw ached—his stubble cut my face like knives. He was wearin’ gray sweats. One thin drawstring between me and...it was poking out like a tent. I couldn’t stand the tension. Why is it men always think if they get you off alone they have the right to take advantage? He was like that dog barking, barking, barking. If only he didn’t rush it, things might have been different, I might have had a family to take care of me instead of living in this hole of a room playing solitaire with ghosts.
Or I suppose I might have wound up like Bobbie Joe or my mom dropping a litter and always looking beyond the next ridge for a man splayed out in greener pastures. You know, sometimes when I’m playing a good hand I get a faint whiff of after shave, as if some man was lazily stirring under summer sheets in the next room. But I think he started going after the married women after that. Never saw him with a girlfriend the whole time we was in school.
(beat) (NURSE enters, checks OLD WOMAN’s pulse, lines up her morning pills.)
Where was I? What’s your name again, dear? Oh that’s right, Pearl. I was telling you about Pearlie Mae, wasn’t I? But I didn’t finish up with Mrs. Scott. I hate leaving things undone. Makes me uneasy in my soul. Now, Mrs. Scott, just like my mom, she went off the deep end herself after they moved to Vashon Island in Washington State in order to save their family—on account of the fact that it was a regular Peyton Place with everybody wife-swapping. And they thought us kids didn’t know a thing. But Christian Burkhardt—he was a strange one— had this telescope in his tree house, see? (Laughs.) People started putting up curtains after that.
But in the end, Mrs. Scott, she couldn’t save her family or her mind, for that matter. They said they found her naked as a jay bird—draped naked on a small rock right in the middle of Puget Sound. Imagine that! Loneliness made her crazy, they said. She must’ve been swimming in that frigid water for hours. What was she escaping, where was she going to anyway? The deep? All that prolonged baptism in the Straits of Juan de Fuca couldn’t cleanse her soul. Must’ve been some big Red Cross card she was carrying. I heard she later died. Was it by her own hand I wonder? I never did know.
You leave my bed sheets alone girl. They don’t need no changing...what is it with you people changing the sheets every other day like we was in some fancy hotel? All stiff and scratchy. They’re just getting comfy now. Besides I like my own smell. Makes me feel more secure. Lord knows, it gets so bad that I can’t sleep at night with you moving bodies in and out at night, all night long, when we’re trying to sleep.
(beat) (NURSE leaves.)
Where was I? Let’s see. That’s right, You wanted to know about Pearlie Mae. Now Pearlie Mae’s mother, she was cross-eyed as their Siamese cat. Did I tell you about the cat yet? Pearlie Mae’s mother talked kinda funny ’cause she was from the bayous of Louisiana. She was remarried to this Inca guy from Peru who wore a lot of gold and had gold teeth. Like a pirate. He was a waiter along with Pearlie Mae’s mother—they worked nights in the city—only he called it mayter-dee. I believe that’s how they met—and they raised little chinchilla rats on the side. They had big plans to harvest the skins and to strike it rich.
Pearlie Mae’s stepdad was always scheming on how to get rich, but the chinchillas—they looked like lemmings—had different plans. They were so timid, some always died of fright whenever Pearlie Mae cleaned their cages, no matter how quietly she moved. They never got a chance to live out their destiny as a fur coat on some rich woman. Usually it was the mama chinchillas who croaked—Pearlie Mae would flush ‘em down the toilet hoping her parents wouldn’t notice, as if they’d come down and count them—then we had to feed the orphan babies with tiny toy baby bottles, which was kinda cute. Them nursin’ away like real babies.
From what I could gather, Pearlie Mae’s mother thought Pearlie Mae was heaven-sent in order to be a slave to cook and clean house. She worked that poor girl so hard, I never saw a house so clean. If there was one speck of dirt anywhere, Pearlie Mae would get it—with a strap from her stepdad. I think her mother had a past—though they were religious now, Jehovah’s Witnesses—but she wanted to make sure Pearlie Mae grew up right—even if she was from outside her own kind, which was a bit of a mystery. So Pearlie Mae was forever cleaning up and bleaching for germs. And keeping out of the sun. But she never got any lighter.
Sometimes we’d get into the liquor cabinet and she’d crank up “Exodus” real loud on the stereo and mix ammonia, cleanser and bleach together like a mad scientist and this greenish vapor would creep out of the toilet and, if luck would have it—gas the poor cat who liked to perch on the toilet seat on account of those dead chinchillas—sometimes when Pearlie Mae flushed them they wouldn’t go down. And he’d reach down into the toilet bowl and snag a little meal. While he was perched up there on the rim, sometimes he’d do-do his thing if he wasn’t gassed, that is.
The cat, he was a very sensitive Siamesie. Didn’t like the sound of dirt between his toes, I guess. I secretly suspected that Pearlie Mae trained him not to use the litter box on account of the dust. Poor cat, he’d circle the seat 'cause he had to go and then he'd and get a good whiff of that concoction of hers, and then he'd go tearin’ out of the house like his tail or his asshole was on fire and we was laughing and crying and coughing until our lungs turned inside out, and we’d have to run out of the house too in order to breathe.
My aunt had a Himalayan Siamese named Mest-up-o-fleas, he was a real axe murderer, he was. Always letting rodents & lizards go in the house, then giving them the coo-coo-de-graw right in your bed in the middle of the night. And if he didn’t wake you, you’d find these little heads and feet or a tail on the bedcovers. My aunt, she was always wantin’ me to Believe so that when the time came to go upstairs, I would be saved. Bit I was a heathen. Not like now.
There was always some mystery around Pearlie Mae’s real parentage as she was “adopted.” Like I said, I could never get any farther than the fact that she was from Louisiana—I knew she had a younger brother who lived with his dad in LA during the school year; he was the spitting image of his mother—blond-haired and blue-eyed. I lost my heart over him. he was the first one, you know. You never forget them no matter how awful it was.
Pearlie Mae had this big wild hair and huge brown eyes and skin the color of old honey. I’m sure people speculated, but Pearlie Mae’s mother was always saying that she was just doing her Christian duty by taking the baby off the hands of that poor, unfortunate unwed mother—barely more than a girl herself. About the only thing she left out of the story was the barefoot part.
Poor Pearlie Mae would roll her hair up every single night in orange juice cans because they were bigger and did a lot better job at straightening her hair than the store-bought pink, jumbo-sized rollers that were supposed to give her hair the straightest possible look—only she didn’t need to rat her hair out into a big flip afterwards. It was that way naturally. This was in the days before Big Hair.
I don’t know how she ever slept with her head suspended three inches above the pillow with those cans like that. It made her neck look so scrawny, like a bird’s. Most of us never even had orange juice out of cans, let alone, had enough cans to collect in order to set our hair. If there was rain or fog when we had to walk a mile down Arroyo Road to the bus into school, the rain would undo all the hard work those cans had accomplished during the night, and she’d spend every recess hiding out in the girl’s bathroom with a scarf over her head. Poor thing. Marin was a white county in those days. Except for Marin City, it was a WWII development—labor for the shipyards—but they kept to themselves. Now half of Central America’s waiting on the rich Arabs in their hillfort mansions.
As I said earlier, Pearlie Mae liked ’Tino—that’s short for Valentino—a whole lot. He melted her butter. You know the hard guy in the tight jeans and white shirts I was telling you about who looked like a Latino James Dean? Yes, that really was his real name. And if Pearlie Mae’s hair was looking especially good, she’d abandon me for the hard guys in the parking lot at school. I don’t know how she managed to go out with him, but one time she did. See, we were bussed into town like in Alabama, and most kids didn’t have cars, so it was hard to get home after school and we weren’t supposed to hitchhike, but if you had to stay after school, there was no other way home as it was way too far to walk and too dangerous to go over White’s Hill on foot.
Anyway, she did stay in town after school, and I was left pretty much out of the detail loop, walking that long mile up Arroyo Road all by myself. But during one of the rare times when she did come home with me, she let slip about having some little white pills that made her feel so fine. She offered me one. It looked like saccharine and probably was, but it seemed like Pearlie Mae was wild and getting wilder by the minute. So we sorta drifted apart, as I was a virgin and planned to stay that way in high school—a promise I actually managed to keep, even if I was the last virgin over ten years of age left in the county. I mean, it was the Summer of Love era and all that. I didn’t want to be up at the altar rail Expecting, like everyone else. I bet it was her little baby half-sister Lisa who finked on her. She was born a full-grown little bitch. And Pearlie Mae was the one who took care of her like a mother as her mother was always off in the City working. I never had any sisters, I never learned to catfight like that. Mean, spiteful and related—so you can’t escape.
Pearlie Mae was getting so wild, I didn’t know whether to look for razors in her hair, or what. Must’ve been ’cause she was sorta back with her own kind, whatever that was. Maybe Cajun. I think it liberated her from herself. But she must’ve gotten caught sneaking home late—her parents must’ve come home early from work one night— ’cause her freedom was curtailed. I suspect home was more like boot camp, and anyways, we sorta drifted back into each other’s lives.
Living rural like that, there’s less variety, you takes what’s there. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” my grannie would say. All the other girls were paired up ever since childhood: Wasps with Wasps, Catholics with Catholics—with fine-tuned color gradations from the Scandanavians to the Portuguese and Mexicans, etcetera, etcetera. See, I’d lost my best friend Miranda, she ran off with the hippies in seventh grade—I guess they was really Bohemians ’cause it was before the Summer of Love. So there I was an orphan, so to speak, and so was Pearlie Mae. So we just teamed up to weather high school together. See, we was all called Valley Rats, and the Townies wouldn’t have anything to do with us.
This time Pearlie Mae found religion too. Or her parents found it for her, more likely, so she pretended to be devout just to get a little slack rope. After that, about the only real freedom we ever had was at prayer meetings. Prayer meetings were special because they got us Over the Hill into Town and out of the Valley. But she had this wicked sense of humor and she would roll her eyes as everyone was singing about salvation and we’d be snorting and shaking, and sobbing into our prayer books like holy rollers. I guess folks might of thought we were being saved except for the fact that I went lobster-red and was practically peeing my pants, trying hard not to laugh.
By that time, she’d set her eye on Abe Rezonski, who was tall dark and, well, sorta geeky on account of religion. Abe wanted to be a preacher man, he was the eldest son of a new family that moved onto Arroyo Road. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses too, so this time her parents didn’t exactly mind the connection. I got stuck with his younger brother, Dork Rezonski who was a grade younger than me and spoiled rotten. A real booger-flicker type. The families, they all kept working me over, trying to get me saved, but I wasn’t so easily caught on that hook. Pearlie Mae and me kept up the pretense for almost three years before they got wise to the fact that I wasn’t about to be saved under any circumstances.
See, when I was in catechism for First Communion, I gave the nuns apoplexy ’cause I insisted that God wasn’t crying like they said, ‘cause we were talking in church and it was raining, but that he was really peeing on us. I mean, THEY were talking in church too. So they flunked me. I’m sure I was the only kid who ever flunked First Communion. Aside from the humiliation, it made me suspicious of everyone. Imagine them trying to tell me that the rain was God’s tears! I’m sure Pearlie Mae’s parents thought I was responsible for her getting into so much trouble because of my worldly ways—when it was really the other way around. But who was going to believe me? They made her shun me after that. Biblical shunning means you’re dead, you’re invisible, you don’t exist.
What made it so difficult being shunned was that I was still madly in love with her little brother—who I only got to see during summer and holidays as it was. I used to get the news from Pearl and we'd speculate on every little thing. John and me, we were pretty deep into physics during that fall. He was my first kiss and my first big bang too. That’s why I always get so melancholy during the fall, all those rites of passage. Thank God it cured me of him for good. He was a bad boy. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Pearlie Mae, she had a party shack set up in the chinchilla shed at the bottom of the stairs as they all had pretty much died off by this time, not wanting to be saved. Or maybe it was because of all that racket we made. I guess getting rich off of chinchilla skins no longer mattered if the world was going to end so soon (I suspect they were duly dispatched to chinchilla heaven). Besides, people were beginning to boycott fur after they saw those cute baby seals being slaughtered on TV. And her brother, well, John made the chinchilla shed into a clubhouse when he moved up here full time, having gotten himself into some kind of trouble down in LA…but I‘m getting off track…
And after the Jehovah’s Witnesses had “outed” me, everyone had to pretend I was invisible. They all had to turn their backs on me whenever they saw me. It was especially hard to act like nothing was wrong at the bus stop. And when the other kids saw them shunning me, they figured something was up, and so they all did the same thing. They shunned me too. Like sheep.
It was like the time with my first best friend Stephie—in order to keep her friendship with Rebecca Wilson, Stephie, who was a grade younger than me, had to pretend not to like me. I don’t know why I ever went along with it, what was I thinking of? But it backfired at school and there I was all lonely again. And when she was all friendly again after school, it just didn’t matter any more. My heart was broken. It never dawned on me to say anything either, but then, I always had a hard time sticking up for myself.
What is it that makes us go through life accepting small injustices and never questioning or challenging them? They pick away at us until we believe we’re no good at all. That’s what happened to me and most of the dads in the Valley, when they turned to drink. Or the older girls—all knocked up, following in their mothers’ footsteps. I guess sometimes you just have to get mad enough in order to change things—you know, like Rosa Parks at the back of the bus? But first, you have to see there’s an injustice being done. I just knew I had to escape the Valley, I didn’t know how or why.
(beat) (NURSE enters.)
Anyway, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, they were really getting ready to face the end of the world, which was supposed to happen sometime in July, 1974, which was practically another lifetime away—five whole years— but they wanted to be ready well in advance. They were all being especially holy so as they could all be saved together, like lemmings, in the Promised Land.
It was a time of potlucks and feverish prayer meetings. I figured we had plenty of time to still be friends, but Pearlie Mae—she cried, she begged me to join, saying she wanted me to be saved too, as I was her best friend. Who would she hang out with in the Promised Land? And I wanted to be saved too so that I could see her brother as well. But it didn’t happen like that.
We were moving light years apart: Pearlie Mae towards her goodie-two-shoes preacherman Abe, and me towards a real bad boy, the first of a long line of many. I loved her, but for the life of me, I couldn’t have saved myself if I wanted to. I guess she’d long since given up on ’Tino. And of course 1974 just came and went. No end in sight. So they thought they had miscalculated the time. And they kept on praying. By that time the escalating Vietnam war was like Armageddon, so I could sorta see their point.
Then the Jehova's Witnesses began to focus on the coming millennium. Just like the monks did during the last millennium. The irony is that in those days, people had no clear notion or even a consensus as to what day, what week or even what month it was until quite recently. Did you know clocks and calendars were invented by the monks so that people would know when to worship? It got me to thinking about how we measure time. But time wasn’t as precise 200 years ago, let alone 2000 years ago. Not like now when we have digital clocks and atomic clocks. Everybody planning out and fine tuning every last minute and millisecond of the day and still they don’t have enough time. It’s like that nightmare painting of clocks melting all over the landscape like candles.
Reminds me of that joke about the farmer who had a tap-dancing pig that won all the ribbons at the county fair. The reporters all wanted to know how the farmer found the time to teach his pig how to dance. Seems they were worried about all the time it took. And the farmer answered, What’s time to a pig?
What’s time to a pig? It seems everybody’s been wanting extra time through the ages. Have you seen the comet yet? I don’t even know its name. A thousand years ago, the monks thought comets meant disasters. The end of the world as they knew it. A new age but no new year. Sometimes I cry for no reason. Remember Kahoutek and Halley’s Comet? My grandmother saw Halley’s Comet. After Kahoutek, someone said to me, “There is no comet, you’re imagining it out of the corner of your eye.” It was like a tear straining the darkness.
(beat)
No, I never had children, it wasn’t a hard decision made after the birth of the Age of Light. The idea of time being measured by atomic clocks had to do with it. Too bright to see. We split the atom and there was all this extra light left over. See?
After that, I heard Pearlie Mae finally got married to Abe and started having babies, and when the world didn’t end as was promised, I heard rumor that they got the wanderlust—must've been the salt in their pool—and went off preaching to heathens in the jungle just like Katrina Larsen. What were they trying to do? Were they embracing their fate or were they running away from the world? No matter how I put it to myself, it just wouldn’t add up.
Blaming natural events like earthquakes and wars on apocalyptic nightmares and horses and retribution. Who wants to believe in a world with a God like that anyway? Worse, who wants to go to a heaven that unjust? All that savin’ of the heathens who just didn’t want savin’. Shoulda just stuck to their own kind.
All these religious types playing poker with God, self-righteously handing you face cards saying “Believe.” Believe like they got a private line to God. Believe in what? What gives them the right? My grandma was always going on about seeking heaven on earth. But I was too busy trying to escape the past to notice. It was never about the meek inheriting the earth. And waiting for your reward in kingdom come! When I think of the wasted lives of all those people abdicating their natural riches and birthright like the Duke of Windsor for Mrs. Wallis. An empty marriage with life. So they can collect their just rewards in the Hereafter. What’s the point?
And here I am sitting here playing cards and waiting like a jilted bride for the Promised Land myself. Only I’m in no hurry to get there. Sure, it’s time to go upstairs. Everyone telling me: Just you wait till you’re on your deathbed. When the time comes. Then you’ll believe in God. You’ll see. Well, it hasn’t happened yet. It’ll be another waiting room like all the rest. That’s what purgatory is, a waiting room. Like Godot. With time suspended from an umbilical cord wrapped three times around your neck. You’ll see. Hand me those flowers Nurse, there’s a good girl.
( NURSE gathers up a vase of wilted flowers and hands them to the OLD WOMAN who climbs out of bed and walks to the front of the stage and tosses bouquet to the audience. NURSE walks into audience as if to retrieve the flowers)
Catch the bouquet? Why, you’re the next one in line, dear. Welcome. Welcome.
(Blackout on the OLD WOMAN. Spotlight comes up on the house, the front of the stage is lined with mirrored tiles facing the audience.)
© 2002 Maureen Hurley
Final project for playwright Roy Conboy's MFA monologue class... we had to use elements of three monologues we'd written previously and combine them into a longer piece. Transitions changed the nature of the work. This is autobiography as memoir in an imagined future. The consistent tone of the voice was my main focus, I had to resist the very real urge to dumb my character down, by making her too uneducated. It was a struggle for me to keep her intelligence without being didactic. Alas, the playwriting elements of storyline and dramatic tension continue to elude me, for I'm a poet at heart. But I learned a lot from playwrights Roy and Brighde Mullin when I had to use pieces of my own life story and transform it. Of course, we were also seeing a play a week and writing on them as well. Michael Oandatje's "Billy The Kid" was somewhat of a model for this piece.
Disclaimer: this is fiction. I drew on stories I had heard as a child. Apologies to the real people whose names I took in vain and the events that occur in this piece, I stretched the truth a bit (in some cases, a lot) in order to make it more dramatic. I suppose I could change names (I did once), but there's so much more power in using the real names. II'm not sure what that's about. If you've an objection to your name being used in this piece, please let me know in the comments section and I'll delete it.
SETTING: In the near future—say, in the year 2025—an old woman in a run-down rest home waits for visitors—any visitors, including the staff, but what is eventually revealed is that her ultimate appointment is with death. She makes do with whoever drifts into her perimeter. She spends all her time sitting in a chair.
The rest of the stage is black; scrims could be used to suggest the public nature of institutions where the idea of privacy is a relic of the past. Suggestion of patients in other beds being administered to behind scrims, being removed with increasing frequency and urgency towards the end of the piece.
The old woman’s garrulous and could talk the legs off a chair. She’s bored and she isn’t interested in listening to anyone. I envision a Jessica Tandy type in “Fried Green Tomatoes” telling the story. Various caretakers drift in and out at intervals, but her conversation continues on unabated as if she was talking to one person. We are meant to be put off by her. Yet she intrigues us in a Beckettian sort of way. What we don’t quite realize is that she is a mirror of our future selves.
Towards the end of the monologue, mirrors facing the audience could be unveiled to drive the metaphor home. (A possible rewrite could feature two old ladies chatting it up, trading war stories, thus making the stakes higher, perhaps desiring to hurry death up by hoarding pills, Kevorkian style.)
CHARACTERS:
OLD WOMAN in a nursing home
NURSE(S), caretaker
(OLD WOMAN in a roll-up bed to a nurse who drifts in and out of the monologue.
(Spotlight on OLD WOMAN, Wherever there’s a beat, the spotlight could dim, as if it was another scene.)
OLD WOMAN
What’s your name girl? Pearl? Now that’s a real nice name. I know we’ll get along real fine. You know, I used to know a Pearl once. She was a real gem from Louisiana. Never been to Louisiana. You from Louisiana? You could be. You got the right look for it... Lord, how I hate all this waiting. So boring. Gimme my cards. That’s a good girl.
(OLD WOMAN plays a game of solitaire.)
Pearl. Pearlie Mae we called her. Let’s see, I first met Pearlie Mae Timberlake—when was it? Right before the Summer of Love. Pearlie Mae’s family moved in soon after the Scotts did. Right next door to the Schivos who’d been coming here every summer for a coon’s age, they were practically neighbors. We knew them from church. Italian, see?
You Italian? No. Guess not. The first Italian word I learned was “manja-manja” from Mary Bianchi. She and my grandma were great friends. I loved watching the way her hands grated hard cheese as she talked. She’d feed us raviolis or sponge cake when we’d come home from school. It was a long walk up that road. When Mary Bianchi’s first husband died of mushroom poisoning, a brother come out from Italy to marry her and take care of her boy but he died from a weak valve in his heart, my grandma said. If he had lived, I guess the boys would’ve been brother-cousins. They didn’t think it incestuous or anything. See, in Italy, that was how things were done. She was a widow on her own in a strange country.
My grandma said there was a big Italian-Swiss colony moved in up our road around the turn of the century. So most of the year-round neighbors were Italian. I guess the narrow valley felt a little like home to them though we were far from the Alps—Italian or Swiss. But my grandma said it looked like Ireland. How could this place be so many other places in the eyes of all the beholders? And the city folks fleeing the city like rats, why were they always trying to recreate the place they just left? We had a lot of summer people. From the city. See? They’d come migratin’ like birds to better pastures. We didn’t mix much with them unless they went to our church.
(beat) (NURSE exits).
I went to Switzerland when I was a girl, you know. Younger than you. Worked there one summer as a waitress in a resort but I was positively starved for friendship or even a kind word. But the Swiss, they wouldn’t have anything to do with us—see, to them, we were summer people. Now the tables were turned. I was so homesick—I even missed Mrs. Decker’s damn dogs barking. That was the first year I quit going to church.
The Schivos, they were summer people, their place was up the hill from the Bianchis and right next door to the Scotts. At first we thought the Scotts were summer people too but one year they stayed on. Sometimes that would happen. One fall, a summer family would defect and stay on for the winter. But the lack of amenities and the rural isolation usually drove them back to the city the following year. You wouldn’t see the Scotts in our church, so we didn’t know too much about them.
But they had a real cement swimming pool with a diving board at the deep end. A pool with a bright chrome ladder with three steps to get out of the deep end. Not like the Schivo’s wading pool which was filled in with pond scum and tadpoles. Mrs. Schivo going on like how it was pure as a baptismal font. And with Gail —a grown woman—peeing in it, mind you!
It was a cryin’ shame about the Schivo’s daughter, Gail. Sometimes I used to play with her. Or I tried to. She wasn’t right in the head. I overheard my grandma telling Mary Bianchi that the cord was wrapped twice around Gail’s neck when she was born. That was why. I didn’t know what cord they were talking about. But she was sort of like Lindsey’s brother. They said it was a fall from a horse when his mother was pregnant that made him so strange.
I think Mrs. Schivo was desperate for someone—anyone—to play with her poor demented Gail. Mrs. Schivo would bribe us with lemonade and candy, calling us little angels and whatnot about our goodness and inheritin’ the kingdom of heaven. But it was too weird to be wading in a slimy fountain or to play dolls with a grown woman with the mind of a child. No, I was a child and her mind was anything but angelic.
And if we complained, Mrs. Schivo would deny it. Said we were making things up. Twisting the heads off dolls and then moving up to lizards and the like. And then, the poor kitten. She denied everything of course. We were afraid of the water snakes and the frogs were exempt on account of not having any necks, I guess. She said that we did it. Said it was an accident and we couldn’t come over any more. Mrs. Schivo, she’d claim black was white... oh I didn't mean anything by that to you girl... I didn’t understand her loneliness. Not yet. Well, it made me feel defiled but it was so hot that summer and the Scott’s pool yard—well, it was a siren call just to watch it.
I used to look through a crack in the weathered fence board that kept us from that clean, shining pool. I once heard about a precious stone called Tears of Allah. Like an opal, that pool. It was a jeweled oasis set in a dull matrix of summer grasses. We were out hiding out in the scrub brush. Hissing crickets and sizzling greasewood and acrid dust rising up around our ankles teasing our noses nearly gave us away. Stray water from the cannon balls made us the most jealous. We were positively green with envy.
I loved listening to the dull smack of feet against that diving board. You’d see a head rising up over that fence as they practiced winging it with birds and angels against that blue vault of a sky. Their feet jumping against the board reminded me of something I saw in a movie—a fist slamming into a side of beef. And then that sound off that board right before the splash cut through us like a door stopper spring. We were just dying to get in. They must’ve known we were out there torturing ourselves all summer long, but they never invited us in. Not even once. Not for years. It took Old Man Barbano’s death and my friendship with Pearlie Mae to change all that.
Yep. The slap of feet on that diving board was a real summer sound. Not like the board across the Inkwell on Papermill Creek—so deep, they said it was bottomless. They said divorced couples used to throw their wedding bands in it. So us kids was always trying to get to the bottom of it. See if they could get a ring. Or drown tryin’. They said someone found a real diamond solitaire. I bet it was real rhinestone paste. Every time I tried to swim across the Inkwells, I was so scared, I nearly drowned for lack of breath. It was practically a religious experience. Gasping for air I was. Never did find any rings. You like my rings? I’d give you one but they’ll have to cut ‘em off when I’m dead. Won’t be long now.
(The NURSE enters and takes OLD WOMAN’s pulse. Gives her a glass of water to take her pills in a small paper cup.)
Ptooy! Did you get this from a goldfish bowl? It tastes like sump water. Or pond scum. No, no, no I am not an expert in bouquet du pond scum! I don’t want any more of them pills. They make me all fizzy. (She falls back into her reverie).
(beat) (NURSE leaves).
When I was a girl, I was a regular water dog, yessiree. I spent summers submerged in the Scott’s pool. Once they invited me in, there was no turning back. I was like a stray turned up at the doorstep one day and come to stay. My hair turned blonde, then green. That was before it was hip to be punk with all that spiked hair and all. Or whatever you call it these days. Seems like fads are always changing but the types stay the same. I was brown as a nut so you couldn’t see the dirt anyway. I don’t think I ever had a bath the whole summer—which was useful.
Our spring went dry most every August. But we had these two big wine tanks. See? So we were on water vigil most the summer. Besides I hated being last in line for the bath. My grandma got first washing, then me, then my brother on account of him being the youngest. That bath water, it was as gray as the water in the ringer washer after the last load. My grandma would use the same water for all the loads, see? Real gray water. And the bath tub for rinsing. We didn’t wear much white clothes. Too hard to keep ’em clean. Real washing machines, dishwashers and swimming pools were rare as hen’s teeth because you had to be on a county water line in order to fill them.
Most of us were dependent upon wells or springs. The water company wasn’t interested in piping it to us. Not enough money in it. So they sat on the water. Kent Lake wasn’t used for drinking. Nor was Nicasio Lake for that matter. I remember when they drowned that poor valley, And every summer the bridge poked its head out if there was enough of a drought, that is. It just sat there evaporating all summer long; it was for a fire or just “in case,” only we didn’t rate as a “just in case.” It was really for future expansion—they had an eye on planting a subdivision but it was too far from town, thank God.
Our revenge was to swim our horses in the back side of those lakes. And to steal water from the fire line with long hoses. The pressure was so great from those fire lines, we were able to run water uphill to the tanks at night. Ready for a fire we were—or a phoenix on the rise.
(beat) (NURSE enters and turns on a light, fusses with things and leaves).
Speaking of fires. at my mother’s memorial service, we had ringsides seats on the front steps of St Mary’s church. It was a grand fire. B-52 bombers sliming the ridges, helicopters scooping tarp-loads of water from Nicasio Lake like dragonflies... and a camera crew filming cowboys in a big rig creeping around the Nicasio baseball diamond like Indians circling the wagons. The cops closed off one end of the road because of the movie in progress and the other end because of the fire in progress.
So we sat there that hot afternoon watching helicopters spilling payloads of water—waiting for folks to drive around the horn to San Rafael and up Lucas Valley. But nobody came to her funeral. My mom was too crazy for them anyway... Except for Billy. Even in a wheelchair, he got there all the way from LA to pay his last respects to his new-found mom. That’s what made her crazy, the State taking him like that while he was napping in his crib. I’ll tell you that story another time. But let me tell you, she would’ve liked being upstaged by a fire and by Hollywood. I never went back home much since my mom died. The kids I went to school with. Few from our end of the Valley escaped alive.
(beat)
Mrs. Scott took over teaching all us kids to swim after Old Man Barbano shot himself at the summer camp down the road. I guess Mrs. Scott was thrilled to get all of Mrs. Barbano’s old students by default. See, Mrs. Barbano, she originally had the market on swim classes because she salted her pool instead of using chlorine—which meant us lead-bottom swimmers could float and maybe even learn to swim. It was like having the great Salt Lake, the Salton Sea, or even the Dead Sea right down the road from you.
All that salt—we were like corks on a fishing net but I think it also gave us such a strange thirst for wanderlust that distance never quenched. I learned late to swim—I was going on ten—so I needed all the help I could get. But I couldn’t float in Mrs. Scott’s pool—even if my life depended on it. I used to cheat on the Red Cross lifesaving tests—sculling with my hands under my butt and holding my breath so I was tight as a balloon.
Mrs. Scott stood there with a timer timing us on hour long swims and floats in case we ever capsized in the ocean—not that any of us had a reason to be out in a boat to begin with. Except for poor Jim Ahola. But he died from exposure sailing back from Hawaii the summer after we graduated from high school on The Spirit, it was called. Funny name for a boat. Well, it took theirs' all right. Didn’t it? Poor Jim, God’s gift to women, drop-dead gorgeous—feeding all the fishes of the deep. I got my Red Cross card all right, but I still can’t float. Not even in the tub. ’Course, all I get nowadays is a sponge bath now and then.
Where was I? Oh! Mr. Barbano. We were walking home from school when they wheeled Mr. Barbano out on the gurney—he was draped all in white and the bullet left a red carnation at his temple. It matched the ambulance. I’d never seen one before, but it had a big red cross just like on my CPR card. I never did figure out what Switzerland had to do with the Red Cross.
You see, Old Man Barbano went crazy in the head after his daughter was killed. Yep, murdered. See, she got a strange case of wanderlust from that same pool—just like Linda Gregg, you know, the poet? You never heard of her. Linda, she wound up in Greece after her man Jack what'shisname? he fell out of the tree, trying to top it to prove how macho he was to her redneck father, and he wound up in a wheelchair. Handsome man, he was, with legs like twigs. She stayed with him out of guilt, I expect. Mrs. Barbano’s daughter—I can’t remember her name—she was traveling in Switzerland, or was it Mexico? when it happened. In those days, it was a big event—it even made Time magazine. Mrs. Barbano—well, she just gave up on life after that. Lost a daughter, then a husband—see, she’d lost the center of her heart...it just couldn’t float any more. Salt in the wound.
After that, Mrs. Barbano retreated from life, and to get by, she rented out the dorms to rock musicians who turned it into a sleazy commune. You’re too young to know the Sons of Champlin or Big Brother aren’t you? You remember Janis Joplin? She lived there. Yep. Got up about the time we were coming home from school, walking up the road—Pearlie and Abe. Me and Billy Joe—I was plumb crazy about him. Pearlie Mae’s brother John was back in LA for the school year. Nine months was too a long time to wait.... Janis would get well oiled on Southern Comfort and be warming up to the mike, singing, Come on and take it, take another little piece of my heart now baby...Lordy, how she could croon. How that girl could croon...like the Darkies.
(beat) (NURSE enters, pulls the curtains. Leans against the table to listen.)
We didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning of the end. After the Summer of Love, more people began to stick around year-round, buying up all the summer places for dirt cheap, then reselling them to folks from LA and New York. Soon all of Marin was changing hands so fast, it was a real sleight of hand. We locals were all either left homeless or land poor after the taxes skyrocketed through the roof from all that buying and selling, buying and selling. That’s why I’m here, dearie. Taxman got the family home.
But some of the old timers, they managed to hold onto their land. Like my grandma and Mary Bianchi. Neither of them was American. They was immigrants from the Old Country so they weren’t eligible for public assistance. You know, welfare. Old ladies with next-to-nothing, they were left to starve. Starve in the richest county in the nation. But they still had their victory gardens from the war. Mary Bianchi, now she had three gardens. She used to put rags up in the orchard at night and then next morning, empty the rags loaded with earwigs—pincher bugs—into the chicken pen. The chickens went clean mad for the earwigs. So I guess we were living off chard and earwigs by extension of their eggs.
Billy Joe Bianchi, Mary’s grandson, he wasn’t particularly handsome. But I loved the way he smelled. One time he called me up on the telephone out of the blue—we just had a phone put in and so the novelty hadn’t worn off. It wasn’t the courting tool it is now. No cell phones. See, the telephone company finally decided to run poles up our road so everyone was getting phones but we were all connected to party lines.
(OLD WOMAN gathers up the cards, reshuffles, and deals a hand of solitaire, no one’s in the room. She’s talking to ghosts. Maybe Pearlie Mae. NURSE dims lights as she makes to leave.)
Damned cards. Seems I can’t get enough of them. Sill use real ones. None of that virtual solitaire for me....
(beat)
I knew it was wrong but I loved listening in on the party line. Old Man Latinfdorf’s thick German accent and Mrs. Decker’s spinster whine. Neighbors at the end of the road—they didn’t speak to each other except to tell each other to get off the line. Now Mrs. Decker, she worked at Guide Dogs for the Blind. Damned dogs barked their heads off the minute you stepped outside to fart. I could hear them barking morning noon and night. It even echoed down the stovepipe when I built the morning fire. We didn’t have none of this interior heating stuff. It seems I was always growing up between eras. Hauling wood and whatnot.
Where was I? Billy Joe. His mama—her name was Bobbie Joe—there was a real fondness for Joes in that family. Maybe johns would’ve been more appropriate. Bobbie Joe, she was drop dead gorgeous. A Tennessee woman. Came west to escape the stigmata of the Blue Ridge mountains, but Joe Senior, he couldn’t hold her. Just long enough to breed the kids, Billy Joe & Cottie Joe.
And then their mama got wanderlust—maybe she swam in Barbano's pool—and was off to God-knows-where with little Cottie, my best friend, in tow. I was ten and I was heartbroken. We used to play solitaire, hearts, crazy eights till dawn whenever I slept over. Later,we migrated to strip-poker and spin the bottle. I guess we had our own Appalachia festering right here in West Marin. But Bobbie Joe had bigger plans and skedaddled. Never did hear what happened to her but I hear Billy Joe wound up in Virginia.
(NURSE comes in bringing a straggly bouquet of flowers on the breakfast tray.)
Oops! Hand me that card will you? Why it’s the Queen of Hearts. Why thank you for the flowers. They’re real lovely. No one ever brings me flowers.
Bobbie Joe drew on her eyebrows like she was always surprised. With her Betty Boop lips she was the Queen of Hearts. Everyone was mesmerized when she wore those tight cowgirl shirts—the kind with the fringe along the vee yolk acrost her boobs—she was so stacked—even the weaner calves were lovesick. My mind keeps wandering. Where was I? Would you look at that dawn breaking. I never can get enough of it. So gorgeous.
Billy Joe said he wanted me to come on down and visit one night but I was to come to the back door. But there wasn’t any back door. I knew it wasn’t right. But I went on down the road like a sheep to the slaughter. Fog was rolling in over Mt. Barnabee—Barnabee was Samuel Taylor’s pet white mule. Buried near Devil’s Gulch, he was. Why call a jackass Barnabee anyway? Maybe Barabbas. They say a first kiss is supposed to be charmed. You know, remember it forever? But he damn near got more than a piece of my heart. I was scared stupid, all I could think of was an umbilical cord wrapping around my neck. There goes my life. No escape from the babies and poverty ’cause the men always left eventually. That was for certain.
Aha! Won the game. Finally. You know the real cause of carpet tunnel syndrome? Electronic Solitaire. All them millions of mouse clicks on Jokers and one-eyed jacks. Not word-processing. Why we’d be rich and living in Monte Carlo if we got a penny for every mouse click squandered on solitaire. They ain’t getting my money. That’s why I use real cards.
(beat)
Billy Joe was a real jock in high school....
(beat)
Course cheating’s always a problem with real cards....
(beat)
My neighbor Agnes, now she loved the cards—she used to cheat at solitaire and she'd cheat on her husband Lucien when he was out at sea. And there is always the danger of losing your real cards. She was the type to roll doughballs until they were good and gray and feed them to the dog, and play solitaire till all hours. I found one of her cards lost behind a dresser. Apparently she didn’t mind not having a full deck as long as the bourbon bottle was full. But I guess he was cheatin' on her too on account of the fact that he gave her a disease and didn’t even tell her. She wanted kids so bad and compensated by drowning her sorrow in the bottom of the bottle. But she was a real mean drunk. I kept away from her. All that poison in her. She eventually swelled up like a big frog. They said the uterus turned black and all kinds of things slithered out.
(beat)
The door to Billy Joe’s room was on the 2nd floor of the farm house. He lowered a ladder down and hoisted me up. Fog made my hair curly. Like an angel, he said as he touched it. And closed the door. Cat and mouse or cat and dog—more like it. I was treed and I sure as hell wasn’t going to make it out the front of the house without getting noticed. His granny and mine, they were good friends. You’d think that would’ve protected me. But I was too ashamed to call out for help.
Kissin' wasn't fun. How my jaw ached—his stubble cut my face like knives. He was wearin’ gray sweats. One thin drawstring between me and...it was poking out like a tent. I couldn’t stand the tension. Why is it men always think if they get you off alone they have the right to take advantage? He was like that dog barking, barking, barking. If only he didn’t rush it, things might have been different, I might have had a family to take care of me instead of living in this hole of a room playing solitaire with ghosts.
Or I suppose I might have wound up like Bobbie Joe or my mom dropping a litter and always looking beyond the next ridge for a man splayed out in greener pastures. You know, sometimes when I’m playing a good hand I get a faint whiff of after shave, as if some man was lazily stirring under summer sheets in the next room. But I think he started going after the married women after that. Never saw him with a girlfriend the whole time we was in school.
(beat) (NURSE enters, checks OLD WOMAN’s pulse, lines up her morning pills.)
Where was I? What’s your name again, dear? Oh that’s right, Pearl. I was telling you about Pearlie Mae, wasn’t I? But I didn’t finish up with Mrs. Scott. I hate leaving things undone. Makes me uneasy in my soul. Now, Mrs. Scott, just like my mom, she went off the deep end herself after they moved to Vashon Island in Washington State in order to save their family—on account of the fact that it was a regular Peyton Place with everybody wife-swapping. And they thought us kids didn’t know a thing. But Christian Burkhardt—he was a strange one— had this telescope in his tree house, see? (Laughs.) People started putting up curtains after that.
But in the end, Mrs. Scott, she couldn’t save her family or her mind, for that matter. They said they found her naked as a jay bird—draped naked on a small rock right in the middle of Puget Sound. Imagine that! Loneliness made her crazy, they said. She must’ve been swimming in that frigid water for hours. What was she escaping, where was she going to anyway? The deep? All that prolonged baptism in the Straits of Juan de Fuca couldn’t cleanse her soul. Must’ve been some big Red Cross card she was carrying. I heard she later died. Was it by her own hand I wonder? I never did know.
You leave my bed sheets alone girl. They don’t need no changing...what is it with you people changing the sheets every other day like we was in some fancy hotel? All stiff and scratchy. They’re just getting comfy now. Besides I like my own smell. Makes me feel more secure. Lord knows, it gets so bad that I can’t sleep at night with you moving bodies in and out at night, all night long, when we’re trying to sleep.
(beat) (NURSE leaves.)
Where was I? Let’s see. That’s right, You wanted to know about Pearlie Mae. Now Pearlie Mae’s mother, she was cross-eyed as their Siamese cat. Did I tell you about the cat yet? Pearlie Mae’s mother talked kinda funny ’cause she was from the bayous of Louisiana. She was remarried to this Inca guy from Peru who wore a lot of gold and had gold teeth. Like a pirate. He was a waiter along with Pearlie Mae’s mother—they worked nights in the city—only he called it mayter-dee. I believe that’s how they met—and they raised little chinchilla rats on the side. They had big plans to harvest the skins and to strike it rich.
Pearlie Mae’s stepdad was always scheming on how to get rich, but the chinchillas—they looked like lemmings—had different plans. They were so timid, some always died of fright whenever Pearlie Mae cleaned their cages, no matter how quietly she moved. They never got a chance to live out their destiny as a fur coat on some rich woman. Usually it was the mama chinchillas who croaked—Pearlie Mae would flush ‘em down the toilet hoping her parents wouldn’t notice, as if they’d come down and count them—then we had to feed the orphan babies with tiny toy baby bottles, which was kinda cute. Them nursin’ away like real babies.
From what I could gather, Pearlie Mae’s mother thought Pearlie Mae was heaven-sent in order to be a slave to cook and clean house. She worked that poor girl so hard, I never saw a house so clean. If there was one speck of dirt anywhere, Pearlie Mae would get it—with a strap from her stepdad. I think her mother had a past—though they were religious now, Jehovah’s Witnesses—but she wanted to make sure Pearlie Mae grew up right—even if she was from outside her own kind, which was a bit of a mystery. So Pearlie Mae was forever cleaning up and bleaching for germs. And keeping out of the sun. But she never got any lighter.
Sometimes we’d get into the liquor cabinet and she’d crank up “Exodus” real loud on the stereo and mix ammonia, cleanser and bleach together like a mad scientist and this greenish vapor would creep out of the toilet and, if luck would have it—gas the poor cat who liked to perch on the toilet seat on account of those dead chinchillas—sometimes when Pearlie Mae flushed them they wouldn’t go down. And he’d reach down into the toilet bowl and snag a little meal. While he was perched up there on the rim, sometimes he’d do-do his thing if he wasn’t gassed, that is.
The cat, he was a very sensitive Siamesie. Didn’t like the sound of dirt between his toes, I guess. I secretly suspected that Pearlie Mae trained him not to use the litter box on account of the dust. Poor cat, he’d circle the seat 'cause he had to go and then he'd and get a good whiff of that concoction of hers, and then he'd go tearin’ out of the house like his tail or his asshole was on fire and we was laughing and crying and coughing until our lungs turned inside out, and we’d have to run out of the house too in order to breathe.
My aunt had a Himalayan Siamese named Mest-up-o-fleas, he was a real axe murderer, he was. Always letting rodents & lizards go in the house, then giving them the coo-coo-de-graw right in your bed in the middle of the night. And if he didn’t wake you, you’d find these little heads and feet or a tail on the bedcovers. My aunt, she was always wantin’ me to Believe so that when the time came to go upstairs, I would be saved. Bit I was a heathen. Not like now.
There was always some mystery around Pearlie Mae’s real parentage as she was “adopted.” Like I said, I could never get any farther than the fact that she was from Louisiana—I knew she had a younger brother who lived with his dad in LA during the school year; he was the spitting image of his mother—blond-haired and blue-eyed. I lost my heart over him. he was the first one, you know. You never forget them no matter how awful it was.
Pearlie Mae had this big wild hair and huge brown eyes and skin the color of old honey. I’m sure people speculated, but Pearlie Mae’s mother was always saying that she was just doing her Christian duty by taking the baby off the hands of that poor, unfortunate unwed mother—barely more than a girl herself. About the only thing she left out of the story was the barefoot part.
Poor Pearlie Mae would roll her hair up every single night in orange juice cans because they were bigger and did a lot better job at straightening her hair than the store-bought pink, jumbo-sized rollers that were supposed to give her hair the straightest possible look—only she didn’t need to rat her hair out into a big flip afterwards. It was that way naturally. This was in the days before Big Hair.
I don’t know how she ever slept with her head suspended three inches above the pillow with those cans like that. It made her neck look so scrawny, like a bird’s. Most of us never even had orange juice out of cans, let alone, had enough cans to collect in order to set our hair. If there was rain or fog when we had to walk a mile down Arroyo Road to the bus into school, the rain would undo all the hard work those cans had accomplished during the night, and she’d spend every recess hiding out in the girl’s bathroom with a scarf over her head. Poor thing. Marin was a white county in those days. Except for Marin City, it was a WWII development—labor for the shipyards—but they kept to themselves. Now half of Central America’s waiting on the rich Arabs in their hillfort mansions.
As I said earlier, Pearlie Mae liked ’Tino—that’s short for Valentino—a whole lot. He melted her butter. You know the hard guy in the tight jeans and white shirts I was telling you about who looked like a Latino James Dean? Yes, that really was his real name. And if Pearlie Mae’s hair was looking especially good, she’d abandon me for the hard guys in the parking lot at school. I don’t know how she managed to go out with him, but one time she did. See, we were bussed into town like in Alabama, and most kids didn’t have cars, so it was hard to get home after school and we weren’t supposed to hitchhike, but if you had to stay after school, there was no other way home as it was way too far to walk and too dangerous to go over White’s Hill on foot.
Anyway, she did stay in town after school, and I was left pretty much out of the detail loop, walking that long mile up Arroyo Road all by myself. But during one of the rare times when she did come home with me, she let slip about having some little white pills that made her feel so fine. She offered me one. It looked like saccharine and probably was, but it seemed like Pearlie Mae was wild and getting wilder by the minute. So we sorta drifted apart, as I was a virgin and planned to stay that way in high school—a promise I actually managed to keep, even if I was the last virgin over ten years of age left in the county. I mean, it was the Summer of Love era and all that. I didn’t want to be up at the altar rail Expecting, like everyone else. I bet it was her little baby half-sister Lisa who finked on her. She was born a full-grown little bitch. And Pearlie Mae was the one who took care of her like a mother as her mother was always off in the City working. I never had any sisters, I never learned to catfight like that. Mean, spiteful and related—so you can’t escape.
Pearlie Mae was getting so wild, I didn’t know whether to look for razors in her hair, or what. Must’ve been ’cause she was sorta back with her own kind, whatever that was. Maybe Cajun. I think it liberated her from herself. But she must’ve gotten caught sneaking home late—her parents must’ve come home early from work one night— ’cause her freedom was curtailed. I suspect home was more like boot camp, and anyways, we sorta drifted back into each other’s lives.
Living rural like that, there’s less variety, you takes what’s there. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” my grannie would say. All the other girls were paired up ever since childhood: Wasps with Wasps, Catholics with Catholics—with fine-tuned color gradations from the Scandanavians to the Portuguese and Mexicans, etcetera, etcetera. See, I’d lost my best friend Miranda, she ran off with the hippies in seventh grade—I guess they was really Bohemians ’cause it was before the Summer of Love. So there I was an orphan, so to speak, and so was Pearlie Mae. So we just teamed up to weather high school together. See, we was all called Valley Rats, and the Townies wouldn’t have anything to do with us.
This time Pearlie Mae found religion too. Or her parents found it for her, more likely, so she pretended to be devout just to get a little slack rope. After that, about the only real freedom we ever had was at prayer meetings. Prayer meetings were special because they got us Over the Hill into Town and out of the Valley. But she had this wicked sense of humor and she would roll her eyes as everyone was singing about salvation and we’d be snorting and shaking, and sobbing into our prayer books like holy rollers. I guess folks might of thought we were being saved except for the fact that I went lobster-red and was practically peeing my pants, trying hard not to laugh.
By that time, she’d set her eye on Abe Rezonski, who was tall dark and, well, sorta geeky on account of religion. Abe wanted to be a preacher man, he was the eldest son of a new family that moved onto Arroyo Road. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses too, so this time her parents didn’t exactly mind the connection. I got stuck with his younger brother, Dork Rezonski who was a grade younger than me and spoiled rotten. A real booger-flicker type. The families, they all kept working me over, trying to get me saved, but I wasn’t so easily caught on that hook. Pearlie Mae and me kept up the pretense for almost three years before they got wise to the fact that I wasn’t about to be saved under any circumstances.
See, when I was in catechism for First Communion, I gave the nuns apoplexy ’cause I insisted that God wasn’t crying like they said, ‘cause we were talking in church and it was raining, but that he was really peeing on us. I mean, THEY were talking in church too. So they flunked me. I’m sure I was the only kid who ever flunked First Communion. Aside from the humiliation, it made me suspicious of everyone. Imagine them trying to tell me that the rain was God’s tears! I’m sure Pearlie Mae’s parents thought I was responsible for her getting into so much trouble because of my worldly ways—when it was really the other way around. But who was going to believe me? They made her shun me after that. Biblical shunning means you’re dead, you’re invisible, you don’t exist.
What made it so difficult being shunned was that I was still madly in love with her little brother—who I only got to see during summer and holidays as it was. I used to get the news from Pearl and we'd speculate on every little thing. John and me, we were pretty deep into physics during that fall. He was my first kiss and my first big bang too. That’s why I always get so melancholy during the fall, all those rites of passage. Thank God it cured me of him for good. He was a bad boy. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Pearlie Mae, she had a party shack set up in the chinchilla shed at the bottom of the stairs as they all had pretty much died off by this time, not wanting to be saved. Or maybe it was because of all that racket we made. I guess getting rich off of chinchilla skins no longer mattered if the world was going to end so soon (I suspect they were duly dispatched to chinchilla heaven). Besides, people were beginning to boycott fur after they saw those cute baby seals being slaughtered on TV. And her brother, well, John made the chinchilla shed into a clubhouse when he moved up here full time, having gotten himself into some kind of trouble down in LA…but I‘m getting off track…
And after the Jehovah’s Witnesses had “outed” me, everyone had to pretend I was invisible. They all had to turn their backs on me whenever they saw me. It was especially hard to act like nothing was wrong at the bus stop. And when the other kids saw them shunning me, they figured something was up, and so they all did the same thing. They shunned me too. Like sheep.
It was like the time with my first best friend Stephie—in order to keep her friendship with Rebecca Wilson, Stephie, who was a grade younger than me, had to pretend not to like me. I don’t know why I ever went along with it, what was I thinking of? But it backfired at school and there I was all lonely again. And when she was all friendly again after school, it just didn’t matter any more. My heart was broken. It never dawned on me to say anything either, but then, I always had a hard time sticking up for myself.
What is it that makes us go through life accepting small injustices and never questioning or challenging them? They pick away at us until we believe we’re no good at all. That’s what happened to me and most of the dads in the Valley, when they turned to drink. Or the older girls—all knocked up, following in their mothers’ footsteps. I guess sometimes you just have to get mad enough in order to change things—you know, like Rosa Parks at the back of the bus? But first, you have to see there’s an injustice being done. I just knew I had to escape the Valley, I didn’t know how or why.
(beat) (NURSE enters.)
Anyway, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, they were really getting ready to face the end of the world, which was supposed to happen sometime in July, 1974, which was practically another lifetime away—five whole years— but they wanted to be ready well in advance. They were all being especially holy so as they could all be saved together, like lemmings, in the Promised Land.
It was a time of potlucks and feverish prayer meetings. I figured we had plenty of time to still be friends, but Pearlie Mae—she cried, she begged me to join, saying she wanted me to be saved too, as I was her best friend. Who would she hang out with in the Promised Land? And I wanted to be saved too so that I could see her brother as well. But it didn’t happen like that.
We were moving light years apart: Pearlie Mae towards her goodie-two-shoes preacherman Abe, and me towards a real bad boy, the first of a long line of many. I loved her, but for the life of me, I couldn’t have saved myself if I wanted to. I guess she’d long since given up on ’Tino. And of course 1974 just came and went. No end in sight. So they thought they had miscalculated the time. And they kept on praying. By that time the escalating Vietnam war was like Armageddon, so I could sorta see their point.
Then the Jehova's Witnesses began to focus on the coming millennium. Just like the monks did during the last millennium. The irony is that in those days, people had no clear notion or even a consensus as to what day, what week or even what month it was until quite recently. Did you know clocks and calendars were invented by the monks so that people would know when to worship? It got me to thinking about how we measure time. But time wasn’t as precise 200 years ago, let alone 2000 years ago. Not like now when we have digital clocks and atomic clocks. Everybody planning out and fine tuning every last minute and millisecond of the day and still they don’t have enough time. It’s like that nightmare painting of clocks melting all over the landscape like candles.
Reminds me of that joke about the farmer who had a tap-dancing pig that won all the ribbons at the county fair. The reporters all wanted to know how the farmer found the time to teach his pig how to dance. Seems they were worried about all the time it took. And the farmer answered, What’s time to a pig?
What’s time to a pig? It seems everybody’s been wanting extra time through the ages. Have you seen the comet yet? I don’t even know its name. A thousand years ago, the monks thought comets meant disasters. The end of the world as they knew it. A new age but no new year. Sometimes I cry for no reason. Remember Kahoutek and Halley’s Comet? My grandmother saw Halley’s Comet. After Kahoutek, someone said to me, “There is no comet, you’re imagining it out of the corner of your eye.” It was like a tear straining the darkness.
(beat)
No, I never had children, it wasn’t a hard decision made after the birth of the Age of Light. The idea of time being measured by atomic clocks had to do with it. Too bright to see. We split the atom and there was all this extra light left over. See?
After that, I heard Pearlie Mae finally got married to Abe and started having babies, and when the world didn’t end as was promised, I heard rumor that they got the wanderlust—must've been the salt in their pool—and went off preaching to heathens in the jungle just like Katrina Larsen. What were they trying to do? Were they embracing their fate or were they running away from the world? No matter how I put it to myself, it just wouldn’t add up.
Blaming natural events like earthquakes and wars on apocalyptic nightmares and horses and retribution. Who wants to believe in a world with a God like that anyway? Worse, who wants to go to a heaven that unjust? All that savin’ of the heathens who just didn’t want savin’. Shoulda just stuck to their own kind.
All these religious types playing poker with God, self-righteously handing you face cards saying “Believe.” Believe like they got a private line to God. Believe in what? What gives them the right? My grandma was always going on about seeking heaven on earth. But I was too busy trying to escape the past to notice. It was never about the meek inheriting the earth. And waiting for your reward in kingdom come! When I think of the wasted lives of all those people abdicating their natural riches and birthright like the Duke of Windsor for Mrs. Wallis. An empty marriage with life. So they can collect their just rewards in the Hereafter. What’s the point?
And here I am sitting here playing cards and waiting like a jilted bride for the Promised Land myself. Only I’m in no hurry to get there. Sure, it’s time to go upstairs. Everyone telling me: Just you wait till you’re on your deathbed. When the time comes. Then you’ll believe in God. You’ll see. Well, it hasn’t happened yet. It’ll be another waiting room like all the rest. That’s what purgatory is, a waiting room. Like Godot. With time suspended from an umbilical cord wrapped three times around your neck. You’ll see. Hand me those flowers Nurse, there’s a good girl.
( NURSE gathers up a vase of wilted flowers and hands them to the OLD WOMAN who climbs out of bed and walks to the front of the stage and tosses bouquet to the audience. NURSE walks into audience as if to retrieve the flowers)
Catch the bouquet? Why, you’re the next one in line, dear. Welcome. Welcome.
(Blackout on the OLD WOMAN. Spotlight comes up on the house, the front of the stage is lined with mirrored tiles facing the audience.)
© 2002 Maureen Hurley
Final project for playwright Roy Conboy's MFA monologue class... we had to use elements of three monologues we'd written previously and combine them into a longer piece. Transitions changed the nature of the work. This is autobiography as memoir in an imagined future. The consistent tone of the voice was my main focus, I had to resist the very real urge to dumb my character down, by making her too uneducated. It was a struggle for me to keep her intelligence without being didactic. Alas, the playwriting elements of storyline and dramatic tension continue to elude me, for I'm a poet at heart. But I learned a lot from playwrights Roy and Brighde Mullin when I had to use pieces of my own life story and transform it. Of course, we were also seeing a play a week and writing on them as well. Michael Oandatje's "Billy The Kid" was somewhat of a model for this piece.
Disclaimer: this is fiction. I drew on stories I had heard as a child. Apologies to the real people whose names I took in vain and the events that occur in this piece, I stretched the truth a bit (in some cases, a lot) in order to make it more dramatic. I suppose I could change names (I did once), but there's so much more power in using the real names. II'm not sure what that's about. If you've an objection to your name being used in this piece, please let me know in the comments section and I'll delete it.
Irish Poem ToC chaphook for Brighde Mullins (I think)
Irish Poem ToC chaphook for Brighde Mullins (I think), Or for Laurie Fadave
House of Memory (Play)
This is a backstory based on the play, “The Steward of Christendom,” by Sebastian Barry (1995), about a Dublin Castle policeman who is senile; his wife and son are ghosts. He was called a traitor by the Catholics in 1922. when the Irish Free State was formed, because he had worked for the British Crown. It drove him insane. Like King Lear, two of his three daughters have abandoned him.
Only ANNIE, whose back is deformed by polio, visits him.
HOUSE OF MEMORY is about a ghost wife of the Dublin policeman, CISSY who died in childbirth ca. 1904.
The events recounted are of W.W.I. Willie is their dead soldier son. The play is set in a cottage in Dalky, near Dublin, Ireland, during two time frames, 1922 and 1932.
CISSY’s story stops in 1904. Though she is still present, she unable to communicate with her family. Cissy is house-bound, tied to the place where she lived and died in childbirth.
ANNIE’s mother CISSY, is talking to her, but ANNIE, not hearing her, has her own monologue about life treating her unfairly, being a spinster, wanting a family, feeling abandoned, feeling guilty about committing her father to the asylum...
LIST OF CHARACTERS:
CISSY, Thomas’ dead wife, a ghost who died in childbirth in her late 20’s.
ANNIE, her daughter, her spine crippled from polio, she hobbles, she plays two time periods, at the age of 19 years and age 29.
THOMAS, a deranged retired policeman (offstage voice)
Two men carrying straitjackets
ACT I
Scene 1
A cottage near Dublin, 1922
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