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Travel Literature

GIRL AFRAID OF HAYSTACKS (A STORY OF TRAVEL AND EXILE) (p. 2 of 3)

1 | 2 | 3 | MAR

Once a year, on Valentine’s Day, her mother made a cinnamon cake for breakfast and set the table with special glassware that retained the green underwater glow of the shopping centre on the outskirts of Milwaukee where it had been purchased. Her father set out heart-shaped boxes filled with candy, which for years afterward retained the lingering perfume of chocolate, and he got the children out of bed before he had to drive to work, when it was still dark and cold in February, and the family sat down at the breakfast table at their usual places indicated by name cards with hearts drawn on them the night before by the girl in this story, who would become an editor and a building contractor and a comix artist later in life. The other special day for the family was the Fourth of July when they drove into Milwaukee to see the parade of antique circus wagons and the animal shows that reminded her father of his childhood, and to listen to the marching bands play tunes from the Civil War. Her father was a horn player and a pianist and she remembers him in the evenings at the piano in the living room playing "Rhapsody in Blue" with no sheet music in front of him. She took piano lessons from a woman who lived with a poodle and a husband who studied butterflies in a house in a distant neighbourhood filled with cases containing the corpses of butterflies pinned onto cards; when she began winning prizes for her playing she stopped the lessons to avoid having to think about the butterflies during the long walk home.

Her mother was a bright, flirtatious woman whose father had been a collector of first editions until the stock market crash of 1929; her own mother, whose name was Ida, had owned an automobile called a flivver, which she drove up to Montreal on weekends to drink cocktails and play bridge with members of an organization called the Eastern Star. When she was seven years old the mother of the girl in this story had posed as the smiling girl in bonnet and clogs for the Dutch Cleanser label. She never adapted herself to housework and grew resentful of a role that seemed to have been thrust unfairly upon her. In a photograph taken when she was nineteen she is smiling eagerly in a flowery dress and tilting her head to the side with her arms open and she seems to be anticipating something wonderful about to happen. She was known to put an onion in the oven to make the house smell like there was a meal cooking and she often cleaned house in the company of the family cat, a ginger named Pokey, who relished having the nozzle of the vacuum run through her fur so that it stood right up on end.

When the girl in this story was twelve years old her father’s younger brother, who was referred to mysteriously by her parents as an inner ear man at the space centre, drove her with her cousin at high speed through the night and the next day to Pensacola, Florida, to spend a summer away from home for the first time. In Florida she found a world in which there was nothing to fear in the heat of the lower latitudes, the huge clattering cockroaches, the stinging jellyfish, the terrific snapping beetles, the scorpions, the sharks, the snakes. Not even the alligators were to be feared in the world that she found at the home of her Florida uncle, perhaps because he allowed her to read comic books and drink soda pop and eat Fritos and bologna sandwiches made with Wonder Bread, a material that her father despised for its inability to spring back into shape after you crushed a loaf in your hand, as he once demonstrated in the aisle of the neighbourhood supermarket. About this time her father began taking treatment for cancer at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He continued working for another eight years and driving to the Mayo Clinic for surgery and radiation, and when he came home from these visits the girl in this story would help him apply healing ointment to the burns on his chest and his back. She was nineteen years old when her father drove home for the last time in the robin’s egg blue Ford Fairlane, and he died early in the morning on Valentine’s Day, in his sixtieth year. Twenty-six years later, on the Fourth of July, her mother died in St. Mary’s hospice in Milwaukee, as people were setting up for picnics on the beach at Lake Michigan; in the afternoon a thunderstorm tore open the sky above the city and that night the girl in this story and her brother and sister sat up drinking wine and looking through the family photographs that their mother had kept in boxes and albums, and which she had only rarely brought out in the presence of guests, as the Fourth of July fireworks exploded over the lake.

1 | 2 | 3 | MAR