Boarded Windows (9 page)

Some afternoon about a month after Martha had moved in, the largely forgotten Barry came by to say that Martha’s brother had called the co-op. “Frankly, it sounded mortal,” he told Marleen, and that night Martha learned that her parents had died a full three weeks earlier in a car crash. Marleen held Martha most of the night, stroked her hair, handed her toilet paper since there were no tissues. The other roommate watched them silently and creepily. The next morning Marleen and Martha walked together to the bus station, taking turns carrying the heavy Samsonite, into which Martha had earlier snuck Marleen’s copy of Gérard Zwang’s
Le sexe de la femme.

Marleen didn’t hear from Martha for over two years, didn’t expect to hear from her ever again, didn’t, after a while, think of her often. Then one weekend day in July of ’71, Martha put a call in to Richard and Esther Deskin of Palatine, Illinois. Yes, he was Marleen’s dad, Dick told Martha, and in fact she was back home for the time being and was already coming to the phone.

“I’m in bad shape,” Martha said over the phone. “I’m in super fucking bad shape.” She sounded drunk or high, slurry and tearful. She said she’d tried to start a small clothing line but it hadn’t worked, and now she was broke and incredibly sad. She said she had a beautiful, three-month-old boy whose eyes played the music of the spheres, but that she couldn’t take care of him. “I need you to help me, Marleen,” she said. “I know I haven’t kept in touch, but last night it struck me like lightning that you were the one, the one who could help me. It came to me as a voice, a totally external voice, your voice. It didn’t sound like your voice, but it was, it was your voice.” Martha started sobbing, and was still holding the phone sobbing when Marleen arrived two days later at a little rented house in Enswell, North Dakota. This time of course Martha was on the phone with someone else, but it seemed to Marleen as if the drive, which she’d alertly enjoyed, hadn’t happened, as if she’d made it from Palatine to Enswell like a voice through phone wires.

Martha really was in bad shape, foul-smelling, Cubistic, often incomprehensible, constantly smoking PCP-enhanced grass or dropping acid, crying and talking to illusions, lying on the floor, sweating a lot, hearing the wrong things on Van Morrison’s
Astral Weeks,
which she played over and over, often forgetting to place the needle after the skip near the start of the first band. Sometimes Marleen would come into the living room to find Martha lying on the floor listening to Morrison sing, “in the ditch, in the ditch, in the ditch, in the ditch, in the ditch, in the ditch,” until Marleen, holding the baby like a football, walked over, turned down the volume, and with her left hand advanced the needle slightly, even though she was sick of the album and didn’t think it was helping. Only recently did I realize that Morrison in truth sings “
and
the ditch.”

One afternoon Marleen and the baby came home from Piggly Wiggly, and Martha, who hadn’t left the house since Marleen’s arrival two weeks earlier, was gone. She’d left most of her things, but Marleen knew she wouldn’t be back. “I was sad for Martha,” my mother told me, “but I was happy for me, because I really, really wanted to keep you.” A year or so after Martha left, Marleen legally adopted me, and a few years after that Martha died of an accidental overdose somewhere in California.

O
N THE EIGHTEENTH OF OCTOBER 1991, I WAITED with expanding hunger and impatience for Wade and Wanda to pick me up from work. From there we were going to the Great Perusal, a St. Paul bookstore where an obscure poet named D. Michael Tauber was reading. I’m sure of the above date because this morning I found a calendar listing for Tauber’s reading in the archive room of the Twin Cities’ surviving alt-weekly. Wade’s forty-fourth birthday, then, would have been the previous day; I’d given him a Nicholson Baker book that he received with some skepticism, in turn received with some defensiveness, though I hadn’t read the book yet either. Anyway, I waited forty-five minutes or thereabouts for Wade and Wanda to pick me up, pacing on the sidewalk while my coworkers occcasionally looked on in entertained sympathy. This lateness doomed our plan to go out for dinner before the reading. When Wade’s car finally approached, I had a few seconds to watch them through the windows before they stopped at the curb. He was talking enthusiastically, slapping the steering wheel for emphasis; Wanda was laughing, one of her clownishly large-soled shoes tapping the dashboard in time, I think, with her laughter. When I got in the backseat I almost sat on a rusty car jack, and they apologized without remorse for their tardiness and explained the flat they’d caught on Lyndale and Franklin. There was a short but possibly telling pause when I asked which tire had deflated, and then Wanda handed me a somewhat mollifying bag of barbecue ribs. Bolling Greene’s underappreciated
Greenehouse
was playing on the tape deck.

While I ate, Wade and Wanda returned to the conversation I’d glimpsed through the windows, about the democratization of connoisseurship or the pornography of yoga, biological determinism or the extent of Browning’s influence on Joyce, animal liberation or whether Heidegger, writing on Van Gogh’s peasant shoes, had described something profound and far-reaching about art’s power to unconceal truth (Wade’s view, as I’ve reconstructed and distilled it), or whether the exhausting Nazi had misread the shoes and used his misreading to reframe a silly agrarian romanticism that undercut his larger and rather commonsensical point (Wanda’s view). These at least were things they talked about during Wade’s time as our lodger (Wade always dominating the discussions), though to be honest I don’t recall what they talked about in the car that evening, only that I felt a bit childlike and superfluous in the backseat.

In front of the bookstore, Wade, in one easygoing attempt, parallel parked into a space that would have deterred some motorcyclists. A passerby applauded; the passerby, I gathered, was crazy, but the applause wasn’t. Wade was so facile that night, so at one with everything; he was a raindrop on a sidewalk gingko leaf. I couldn’t sort out my admiration from my envy from my jealousy. Wanda went inside the bookstore to get seats (“which I’m sure are in high demand,” Wade said sarcastically, though it was his idea to come to the reading), but I stayed outside for a few minutes with Wade, who was doing squat-thrusts on the sidewalk while studying the store’s window display. He was wearing close-fitting, boot-cut Erizeins, faded to stratus-cloud white-gray. There were a few stores with selective inventories of used jeans near our apartment. I watched him for a few seconds, then turned to look at his hatchback. “Your spare is the size of a regular tire, huh?” I said.

“That’s right,” he said.

“I thought the Leveret came with a doughnut.” An affinity for the doughnut wheel might have led me to some expertise on its history, but I was bluffing, trying ineptly to catch Wade in some lie.

“Nope.”

I turned again to face his back. “Are those jeans new?”

“Do they look new?” he said, turning around while still in a squat. The jeans were particularly bleached at a quarter-sized spot to the right of the zipper’s end point, I noticed.

“I just haven’t seen them before,” I said.

“These are my reserves. You like them?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But the other night you said you only had the clothes off your back and all that.”

“And a few other items, such as those in my pillowcase, where I’ve been holding these jeans. I never said the clothes off my back et cetera made up the whole of my wardrobe, just that they were notable among my monkishly few possessions. Sixty-two,” he said, finishing his exercises.

The reading had already started when Wade and I joined Wanda in the back row of folding chairs, two or three empty rows between us and the next clot of attendees. When we sat down, Tauber paused briefly to acknowledge us with an appreciative smile. He had Redford-like hair and a trim, cheek-proud beard. He couldn’t have been much more than forty, though according to Wade he’d been publishing since the late sixties. His reading tone: self-satisfied; my attention: sporadic. After the reading, the three of us browsed separately for half an hour. In the music section I found a used copy of 1979’s
The Rolling Stone Record Guide,
and with a
Greenehouse
melody circling my mind turned to Frank Thiesan’s summary of Bolling’s work up to that point: