My cigarette tasted like insecticide. My stomach shot to my ears. Me in the shade of the trees in the Quad, saw them herding her along through the suns of hell, between Quonset huts and mills, Ms. Media, who I knew would fuck with us. Her cute little artsy outfits and tropical fish tattoos circling her little upper arm. Her laugh was a foghorn, which was tricky because you’d assume here’s a person who is just one of us, not the smooth snooty type, but then you see the permafrost blue eyes.
I scraped the ash off my cig on the underside of the picnic table. I rose. I was going to cut her off at the pass.
I look back with shame. For here was mass media’s great ruthless blue eye inside the very heartbeat of our home and I was being some showtime master of ceremonies, throwing out an arm and an open hand, oh, view this fortress of cookstoves and kettles and bubbling stuff!!
Admire the canning crew and supper crew, svelte teens in shorts and aprons, soft shoulders. And the tykes on stools, half naked, burned and nicked and bruised. Feeling the food with grubby appendages, wagging their heads like inchworms, watching, mimicking, feeling their futures in their palms. Many with that nose, those cheekbones, the likeness, a species particular to this location, this altitude, cradled by these certain surly hills and the arms of too many mothers.
We worked nearly a dozen hardwood-topped tables in that summer kitchen. Acres of glinting still-hot canning jars, the quart kind, the sixty-four-ounce kind, and the widemouthed, twelve-ounce kind, bulging with deep green leafy, or seedy red. June’s harvest.
The reporter curled a small hand around the handle of one of the tall green hand pumps at the end of one of the slate sinks. When she looked up her mouth was smiling. Her cold-blistering eyes studied everything.
Gordon has always fussed over the danger of the media. So of course, some of us here asked, “Why did he invite her here?” For he had agreed to an interview alone with her at the farmhouse, but then he panicked and talked in riddles and . . . well, none of that matters. The question is: Why did he say yes in the first place? Was it the sound of her hearty wiseacre-yet-letdown voice on the phone?
Had his spine of resolve, usually thick like one of the monster tree supports of our summer kitchen, buckled under the weight of something so nimble and invasive as yet another fertile female?
Ivy Morelli turns away from some chitchat with a small doleful little boy named Rhett. She stares in resplendent wide-eyed discomfort at the hulkingly too close voluptuous Bonnie Loo.
Ivy’s small clover-pink mouth flattens against her teeth, an attempted but fizzled smile.
Bonnie Loo smells like cigarette smoke. And that queasy weedy ointmenty smell of all the Settlement candles and soaps and salves that Ivy’s tour has highlighted, the vats and kettles of witchy Lee Lynn St. Onge’s corner of one Quonset hut, and kids too little to stir scalding stuff stirring away. But the smell is especially now wafting from Bonnie Loo’s two-toned whorish-looking hair and body.
Okay, her eyebrows are comely. One has just arched. Like a question. How gleamy the eyes, contact lenses for certain, and out of those eyes seems to come the mile-wide gusty voice, speaking to Ivy Morelli, “Thirsty from your tour?” No waiting for a reply, just leans over one of the steel sinks, braless, the damp, filled-out green T-shirt a quickening exhibit of obscenity as if it were part of the tour, somewhat literary, somewhat theological, somewhat instructive, like Never look this floozyish or you will be eternally damned. But there’s no stopping Bonnie Loo, the wagging Atlas breasts, if Atlas were a woman, she cuffs at a bulky tin cup that leaps to her other hand. Now dips water from a speckled kettle. That black and harshly orange topknot of hair tosses around from left to right shoulder. She straightens up, cup in hand. This, too, is a demonstration, this one on how to operate the Settlement plumbing? Yes? The cup is held such ’n’ such a way.
The little reporter asserts, “I’m okay. I had plenty of beverage at lunch.”
But Bonnie Loo now throws her shoulders back as humans do who are not expecting blows to the gut from the enemy, but showcasing her vulnerable parts because the enemy izzzz weak.
Again Bonnie Loo’s hot orangey eyes are driven into Ivy’s.
Ivy almost lowers hers, just the merest flicker.
Ah hah! Bonnie Loo the victor!
But I am your friend, Ivy’s inner voice pleads. Well, I am Gordon’s friend. Cringing friend, shuddering friend, I-vow-not-to-write-a-single-word-on-you-guys friend.
But Bonnie Loo stands back reproachfully, some grudge grander than the victim-seeking-mass-media betrayal on the horizon, the seconds ticking away, her upper-body dimensions unclouded by the T-shirt fabric, as thin as paint.
Nobody in the whole crowded room makes a helpful wisecrack or cheerfully scolds in order to end the tension. Everything weird about this flow of seconds is unweird to the onlookers.
Ivy keeps her eyes on the big enamel cup as Bonnie Loo dashes the water from it into the flared opening on top of the tall dark green pump, raising the pump’s impressively long arm and clenching the fingers of her broad hand around it, works it hard. And Bonnie Loo’s own arm, yellowy dark from her Maine mix of bloods, heritage that whispers of peoples stirred and shuffled, blurred and ruffled up together because of ships, because of snowy trails between lodges, jammed ice in big rivers, then jammed logs, the blur of big woods greener than the heart can stand, gray waters, green waters, human heat, and myriad hungers. Then Bonnie Lucretia Bean was someone’s foxy-orange-eyed black-haired infant, chubby little doll arms, but now grown, now a towering brute, now holding not the pump-priming cup but a pretty little ceramic one, maybe nearby is a matching saucer, the Colonial America carriages, ladies and gents, preening blue and mauve.
The cup is ever so suddenly overfull, drizzling. But the great pump’s arm proceeds. The little dainty cup gasps. The lake under earth rises to swallow Bonnie Loo’s golden hand and slim silver wedding ring in a blur. Up, down, water pound-punches, making a cold breeze on Ivy Morelli. The cup, the unending overflow, that terrible abundance from so deep under the Settlement’s granite footings, how can it not be polar?
Now there! The dripping cup is thrust into the mass media’s hand.
“Here. Drink up,” Bonnie Loo commands.
And Ivy Morelli herself overflows with her deepest “HAW! HAW!” but doesn’t draw the cup to her face for she is locked in a pause like the solstice.
Bonnie Loo, now with her hands on the hips of her long skirt, one with intricately embroidered flora and elfin faces around the hem, says low and moltenly, “Good God, it ain’t poison.”
By August, the yearnings of the Record Sun enterprise were grander, less complex, and with more grasp than that friendship notion of little Ivy Morelli. And so her hand was forced. The big-spread feature came with no warning, just pow! It was not hostile. In fact, it was becoming to us. But as my crow says . . . my crow, you know, the one who is different from all the others, the one who comes to my cottage’s sunroom window for cracked corn . . . someone’s abandoned pet, he ducks under the open window or flaps in ahead of me as I open the back door.