The Great Spring

  Each night she patiently helped me with my dressing. After she went to sleep, I’d open the shade of my bedroom window and smell summer through the screen and see the moon reflected on the thin square of wires that kept out the flies. “The Midwest,” I’d whisper, “the Midwest,” and I’d feel the corn in distant fields turn out its seeds.

  I sat in the suburbs of Minneapolis all day, alone, while Carol went to work. Sometimes I lay on her front lawn and looked up at the elms and maples. Big ones. I walked to the mailbox, down those asphalt streets, the early afternoon so still and empty. A man looked out his window, his lawn perfectly trimmed, his shutters white, his sprinkler poised for action. The sunlight waved the tree leaves in shadows across me. The mail was picked up at 2:15 every weekday, and on Saturdays pickup was at twelve. “Noon” was written on the inside lid of the blue metal mailbox.

  I hobbled to the Lincoln Del each day—five blocks away—for matzo ball soup. On Wednesday they had a special: a bowl of soup and half a sandwich for $4.95. As I leaned my head over the steaming bowl, I noticed that the same old people were there every day. There was a retirement community four blocks away. A few days earlier, I was in France, land of Manet, Monet, Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh, Cézanne. Now I was in the suburbs of the Midwest with old people, an ulcer on my leg, glad for my chicken soup. I remembered an old Jewish joke whose punch line was “I know where I want to go, but I don’t know where I’m going.”

  I walked back to Carol’s, looked for the mailman, did a few paintings the size of postcards. One was of a small dog with a large mouth. I wrote on it, “Un chien n’est pas grand, mais la bouche est grande.” Another was of a traffic intersection with the signs saying SLOW and YIELD, ending at Heaven Café. In the foreground were three ducks and a green lawn, and it was raining on them. “Il pleut tres bien,” I wrote below them.

  Carol had a day off in the middle of the week. “Let’s go to Lake Rebecca,” I proposed.

  “Nat, where’s that?” she asked. She loved anything new.

  I told her it was nearby. I would direct. She should just drive and not remember the directions. It was a secret place, I told her.

  We put down the back of the passenger seat so I could remain horizontal and my foot wouldn’t swell. As we rode through the green countryside, past fruit stands and gas stations, I told her, “You’ll see, no one will be there. Minnesotans are chauvinistic about their state. Yes, there are good things here, but they miss what the real good things are. For twenty years Katagiri Roshi lived here in a little zendo on Lake Calhoun. Hardly anyone ever came! What they missed!”

  I loved to carry on about Minnesotans. The people I loved and hated, how could they be so good? It drove me crazy when I lived here for six years. I always had the strange urge to take off my clothes and run down their streets screaming. But when I went away from them, moved to another state—where the license plates herald the Land of Enchantment—I missed the Minnesotans, their rootedness; their sincerity; their gentle, easy openness; their good old American virtues of truth, honesty, and justice that the rest of us have just about forgotten.

  I went on to tell Carol about the bank in Owatonna, two hours south. “Everyone thought I was nuts. ‘A bank?’ they’d ask. It was designed by Louis Sullivan. He called it a color form poem, and it’s one of the most magnificent buildings I’ve ever seen. It has a beautiful mural of cows inside.”

  “Cows?” She laughed. Carol was brought up on a farm in North Dakota.

  “Precisely,” I said. “Cows. You midwesterners don’t know what you’ve got.”

  We drove through the town of Maple Grove. I lifted my head from my horizontal position to look over the bottom edge of the window. This was the town Neil and I drove out to in order to get a special chocolate wedding cake for our marriage a zillion years ago. A woman baked them out here in her home. Six tiers, a plastic man and woman on top, yellow fringe hanging from each layer, the chocolate icing dark and laid on thick, packed with sugar to keep it stiff.

  Carol parked the car. I was right. The park was empty. I slung her old blue bedsheet from the trunk over my shoulder, and we walked down the path that brought us to swans in a far-off pond, to an old white barn with a black roof, through prairie grass, past beehives standing in fields.

  My pace slowed down more and more. Neil and I used to come here all the time and lie naked in the open fields. I remembered walking hand in hand, slightly bored, relaxed, no beginning or end to the afternoon. He would hum a tune, his thin, red, freckled hand in mine. Sometimes he would tell me a story about his grandmother Chloe, in Kankakee, Illinois. I loved that man, I thought. I loved him deep and long, and it would be forever, though we had divorced twelve years earlier. I felt sad and happy that we had known the kind of love we had together. Something pure in its innocence—the kind of innocence that eventually destroys itself.

  Carol and I walked on and on in silence. The sky was a big gray, and a slow wind moved the tall grasses. I spread her bed-sheet on the ground and we lay down.

  At the end of two weeks, I had my third visit with the plastic surgeon. I felt so confident that the flap had gotten enough blood and was healing that I told Carol I’d go to the doctor by myself. I’d see her after work.

  I took a taxi to the medical building. Two weeks earlier, I knew nothing about dog bites. Now I thought I was an authority.

  The nurse took off the bandage. I looked at it all the time now—when I first arrived in Minneapolis, I was afraid to look. The stitches were in the shape of a tongue, but larger—the size of a coffee mug. And just like Frankenstein, with his stitches accentuated across his face, those stitches that the French doctor had given me were visible. You could count each one and even see the knot where he ended. The thread was black. He’d had a regular sewing bee in the operating room.

  I said to the doctor when he walked in, “It’s my professional opinion that it’s doing really well. Carol and I conferred. Her only concern is that the flap skin is a little yellow.”

  “Let’s have a look.” He bent over it. “Hmmmm.” He tapped and poked. “It’s not making it. We’ll have to cut it out.”

  Everything blurred. A nurse assisted him. It happened fast. The whole flap was cut out, all that the French doctor had sewn back in. It didn’t survive. “You’d better look,” the doctor said. “You are going to have to dress it every day.” I told the doctor I didn’t want a graft from my hip. I’d forget being Miss America and live with the big scar after the gash healed.

  “No, I can’t dress it.” I had my head turned to the wall. “I just can’t look. I’ll do it some other time. Carol will look at it.”

  “It would be better to look at it now, while I’m here.”

  I heaved my head around. “Oh, my God!”

  The plastic surgeon actually held me. I felt his comfort flow into me. He understood my fear. He had a tenderness that amazed me. Carol had told me that he had fought cancer and survived.

  I went back to Carol’s in a cab. She was home. All I said to her was, “Please take me for a malt.”

  We sat outside on the patio of an ice-cream parlor near Lake Harriet. I spooned the chocolate malt into my mouth. I began to sob. I fell over the table and cried and cried.

  This was another miracle. I’d been living right there with everything in front of my face, moment by moment, since I had been bitten by the dog in France. But now, who was I crying for over my malt? Not for me, though I was scared. Inside me, like a column of white light, I felt overwhelming gratitude and tenderness for that doctor. I could walk out of his office with a bad leg. There wasn’t a question of life and death.

  I also felt the life of my teacher, Katagiri Roshi, who had gone in and out of the hospital right across from the medical building I had just been in. Chemotherapy treatments, radiation, infection. Life and death. Life and death. I felt him in his car after a treatment, exhausted, dauntless, a Zen student driving him back through the winter streets of Minneapolis to his apartment above the zendo,
his wife of thirty years in the backseat next to him. She told me once that for that whole year, they were never outside. In hospitals, in cars, in beds, in bedrooms, away from harsh weather, drafts, breezes.

  When I quieted down, Carol asked quietly, “How are you doing?”

  “Roshi didn’t make it.” I pushed the malt away from me. “I am so lucky to be alive.”

  . . .

  The Saturday before I left Minnesota, Carol and I drove down to the Zen land on the bluffs of the Mississippi near New Albin, Iowa. A portion of Katagiri Roshi’s ashes were there. We arrived at midday, the sun hot, the air thick and humid—it had rained earlier that day. I told Carol I needed to go up there alone, and I climbed the high hill where his monument was. I went slow, my right leg bandaged, the grass tall, thigh high.

  There is a ceremony you’re supposed to do when you visit the memorial—with water and thick scrub brushes, incense and offerings. You are supposed to carry all of this up. I carried it all maybe a quarter of the way; then it became too hard. I dropped the buckets of water, let go of everything else, and hobbled up the rest of the way empty-handed. I collapsed on the smooth granite on which his name was carved.

  I looked out over the valley. The spruce trees we had planted for future generations ten years ago, as soon as we bought the land, were now way above my head. I could see the brown tar paper roof of the zendo and the porch around it, the bell, the kitchen beyond it, the slow Winnebago Creek, the supply room, Roshi’s cabin.

  I sat on the memorial of my great dead teacher, looked out on the great world.

  Then I turned to him. “Roshi, you know I’m a fuckup.” Then I began to laugh. What a terrible and devoted Zen student I had been. He knew all about me. I’d been his student for twelve years. “Sorry, I don’t have the incense and the scrub brushes.” I laughed some more and felt a bitterness too. He wasn’t in the flesh to laugh with me.

  Then I just sat there for a while. I began to get up, and then I sat down again. “Roshi, what do you think about love?” I asked.

  A slow joy, a trickle of heat entered my chest. “To love is a good thing,” I heard him once say.

  I began my slow walk down the hill. A moment later I heard a terrible snorting. I flung my head around—a deer! A beautiful chestnut-colored deer leaped out from behind Roshi’s hill. I would never have seen her if she hadn’t snorted. She ran like a dancer, all four hooves in the air, and then she disappeared into the forest.

  I whistled the rest of the way down the hill and picked up the buckets and brushes near the bottom.

  11

  Iowa

  The plane drops down into Cedar Rapids and the snow is falling thick and at an angle. The flight attendant announces it is eighteen degrees. Monday, February 11. The next day my new book Old Friend from Far Away will be on sale and I will read at the independent Prairie Lights bookstore. The publisher has forgotten to assign an escort or tell me how to get from the airport to the Sheraton in Iowa City, thirty miles away.

  I explain this to the woman sitting next to me. She has high heels and thick legs, is wearing nylons and a black skirt. She tells me that she and her husband are driving to the Quad Cities, and they can drop me off. Her big husband in the next seat says nothing.

  “If you don’t mind,” I say, looking straight at him. He looks ahead.

  The alternative is to grab a shuttle, which I learn in the terminal won’t be running for an hour. There’s a blizzard outside.

  I ask the woman to watch my bag as I go out to a yellow cab.

  “Seventy-five dollars,” he tells me. I look in the cab at his long stringy hair and very big belly. “Nope, too much,” I say, and go back through the electric door.

  “I’ll get the car,” the thick-legged woman says, and walks off into the blizzard in her heels.

  Her husband is in khakis and a straw hat. They have just returned from Mexico, and he is not ready to bundle up.

  We wait a long time. “I think she can’t get the car started,” he says.

  I see another yellow cab, grab my suitcase, and take my chance. “Iowa City?” I hop in with a college girl and we split the fare.

  What am I doing here in the middle of winter?

  As we pull onto the highway, I remember: the Midwest.

  The tires are bald, but the driver is fearless. He says he knows snow, and I believe him. The white of the sky reaches down to the white of the land, broken on the horizon here and there by a few bare trees. I can’t help it—I love this place. Barren and beautiful.

  The cab drives down a rutted alley and swings in front of my hotel. The bellboy in a navy-blue overcoat that’s way too big for him steps out to take my luggage.

  I move quickly into the revolving door, then stop. I swivel my head. “How old are you?”

  “I’m older than I look—twenty-two.”

  “You can vote?”

  Everything is distilled down to that these days. Obama had won this state in the primaries a few weeks earlier. I watch political coverage on television now, want a glance of Hillary’s daughter, of Barack’s wife, Michelle. “So who’d you pick?” It’s not American to ask, I know. Voting should be a private thing.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Please,” I say. “You don’t want a Republican again?”

  He’s not sure; I can see it in his face. Then he takes a leap. “Oh, no, ma’am.”

  “Promise me you’ll vote on election day.”

  He promises. I give him a dollar for bringing up my bags—I should have given him two. He tells me there is an escape map behind the door in case of fire and points to a thermostat across from the bathroom.

  “You promised,” I remind him. He backs out the door.

  From my fifth-floor window I can see all of downtown: the green walking bridge; the clock tower with the wrong time; the two bank clocks, a half hour apart; the thickened steam filling the air from the heat exchangers on the roofs; the shoveled paths on the sidewalk; the brick buildings. A café across the street. I can walk everywhere if I don’t mind the weather.

  A block away a clutch of pedestrians crosses the street together. A light must have changed.

  The people who live here were born here. Not everyone, but many. Who else would live here? Refugees from Vietnam and Somalia filled Minneapolis in the last years I was there. From jungles to glaciers. That’s painful. I’d rather it be the other way around. But Minnesotans like their cold and their snow.

  The Midwest was good to me. I learned to be a writer there, where writers were organized—classes, jobs, grants, fellowships, bookstores, publishing. When I left for the wilderness of New Mexico, the only thing that made me a writer was the brute force of my pen on paper. No comfortable café to chat about the new book or magazine or the grant to apply for. I either reached a New York publisher or moved into oblivion. I was lucky, and my first book met America at a pivotal place. It was the years in the Heartland that made me ready, gave me the foundation. But I couldn’t live there forever. I didn’t belong. People there made their friends in grammar school.

  I called the front desk. “It’s awfully dry here and I’m fighting a virus. Do you have a humidifier?”

  No, they didn’t. The young girl is sorry.

  Forty-five minutes later the phone rings simultaneously with a knock at the door. “Humidifier,” a man calls from the hall, while from the receiver a voice says, “We found it in the basement.”

  They’d been looking all this time? Only in the Midwest.

  The next morning I see the bellhop in the lobby. “Today they are competing in Maryland, Virginia, and DC. Your job is to stay abreast of the count and keep me informed.”

  He is delighted and salutes me.

  I go out into the frigid air, my head wrapped in a wool shawl. The hairs in my nostrils freeze. The first two women’s shops I pass display mannequins in bareback sleeveless dresses and shorts. I enter the third shop. “What’s with the bathing suits?”

  “It’s our spring selecti
on.”

  “You’re kidding. Isn’t it a little early?” It is six below outside and no one is walking slow.

  The salesgirl shrugs her shoulders.

  I stop to check my e-mail at a coffee shop. My college friend Carol’s mother had a stroke and will likely die within a week. I remember her clearly. She swam laps, wore short hair, and drove a fast car.

  My mother had died six weeks earlier, on December 24. I can’t wrap my mind around her death. It follows me like a ghost. But every time I turn around to look at it, it vanishes. I have a lot of crying to do, but it isn’t coming. Something is over, but I don’t yet know what it is.

  My book is out in bookstores today. The one I wrote the year I broke up an eleven-year relationship.

  I’m afraid that if I think too much about my mother, I’ll drop this book tour and fly to Florida, go to the small house she lived in alone for the last eight years after my father died. The one with her yellow blouses still hanging and her bras in the top drawer and her hearing aid on the snack table by the big blue chair. Afraid I’d move in there and try to figure out what my life was all about, free of her barbs and criticism.

  Instead, I’m back in the Midwest. The Mississippi, the bluffs, the stands of trees, white clapboard houses. I want to belong somewhere. The Midwest gives you that illusion of home, especially when you’re lost and looking in the wrong places.

  When I return to the hotel, the bellboy pounces on me. “Clinton’s ahead in Maryland.” He gives me the numbers.

  “Check again soon. Not for long.”

  I didn’t give a damn if the youth were inspired by Obama. I wanted my generation to have one more chance to do right. When it was my turn to vote in the primary, I went for Obama. It felt right—in the spirit of my generation. A week later the ballots in New Mexico were still being counted. How embarrassing. What a backward state. Maybe I should move to Iowa.

  Despite the blizzard, a hundred people come to my reading. I’m going to be interviewed on the radio for an hour in front of the audience. Next week it will be broadcast all over the state.