DECEMBER 17, 2011
Come, let’s go for a ride,” Deb says to Vale, nodding toward the door. “The nurse is here for the evening. We deserve a break, me and you. Plus, the news is unbearable. Too many repetitions of the same thing.”
Vale nods. Two days ago, Tropical Storm Washi hit the Philippines: eight inches of rain in twelve hours. Flash floods and landslides: 1,200 people reported dead, half a million without homes. In Europe they are smothered under Winter Storm Joachim: 400,000 in France without power. Trains derailed. Ships destroyed.
They take back roads along Silver Creek, cross a bridge, pass farms and double-wides and new houses not yet wedded to the ground.
“Where to?” Vale asks.
“Ginny’s place. Farther Heaven.”
“The commune?”
“Yes. The commune! The landscape of my naïve youth.”
She tells Vale that Ginny bought out the others years ago and lives there alone, solitary and stoic and dirt poor, “like the rest of us ex-hippies. Ha—success not our forte. But you’ll like Ginny. She’s fabulous and fierce, an absurd misfit.”
DEB TAKES A RIGHT UP A LONG AND STEEP AND DEEPLY rutted driveway, the shape of a bent arm. At the top of the hill is a large farmhouse, an old school bus sitting on stumps, stone cairns, a snow-covered garden—kale rising from the sea of white. Vale smiles. She thinks about the United Nations Climate Change Conference, finished last week in Durban, looking at that garden of winter kale. They didn’t manage to create a treaty but agreed to establish a legally binding deal comprising all countries by 2015. Vale thinks how maybe the slow arc of progress is untrackable: all of these back roads, good-hearted efforts, twists and turns, gardens full of kale.
They get out of the car and walk up the path.
Along the south side of the house sits a long porch. There’s a couch covered in wool blankets, a collection of mud-caked boots, wind chimes, and a peacock—male—tail feathers spread wide—standing in front of them.
“Peacock?” Vale says, her eyebrows raised.
“Yes.” Deb laughs. “Several.”
Ginny opens the door and steps out. She’s striking—nearly six feet tall in blue jeans and a black T-shirt frayed at the hem. Her silver hair flows halfway down her back. Her face is full of lines, and when she grins Vale’s surprised to see two of her front teeth missing. Long turquoise earrings dangle from her ears.
“Friends,” she calls out. “Welcome. What gorgeous incarnations!” She throws her arms out toward them, smells of lavender and woodsmoke.
She kisses Vale’s cheek, pulls her body close, says into her ear: “I am so sorry. So sorry about your mother.”
Vale whispers thanks. The peacock walks in the open door, and Ginny motions for them to follow.
Vale’s never been to one of the old communes before, but their stories have resonated around these parts her whole life: babies born in school buses, rotgut cider in basements, too much fucking.
But this house has a wonderful light, shimmers as Ginny does. The kitchen counter and table are covered in books, ceramic mugs, jars full of peacock feathers. The walls are covered in art—drawings, a collection of clay sculptures, a large painting of a naked woman holding a pistol, a hushed landscape of trees and mist and sky behind her.
“Excuse my mess,” Ginny says, going to the wood stove where a kettle simmers. “One can take up a lot of space when one lives alone.”
“More majestic by the day,” Deb says.
On the wall behind Ginny’s table are some sketches: a deer, a stingray, a guitar with the words “This machine kills fascists” scrawled across it.
Ginny brings them unmatching stemmed crystal glasses filled to the brim with box wine. “What is one to do! Shit, I’m growing old, losing my teeth. Ah, well. But look at this,” she says, passing Deb a print she’s been working on. It’s a woodcut of a creek, feathery hemlocks, a fox passing under a rising full moon, with a line from a Wendell Berry poem at the bottom: PRACTICE RESURRECTION.
“It’s the age of doing so, no?” Ginny says, looking into both their eyes and taking a sip from her glass. She passes the print to Vale. Vale can still smell the wet ink—nearly smell the feathers of the hemlock tree and that fox, too.
“Practice resurrection,” Ginny says, closing her eyes. “That’s what I’m working on. Jesus, the storm,” she says, her voice suddenly low. “My neighbors lost their double-wide. Everything.” She looks at Vale, her eyes brimming. “I’m sorry, Vale. I read recently that in Cree one does not say, ‘I am sick,’ but rather, ‘The sickness has come to me.’ There’s power in that, no? Our sick world to blame for so much suffering.”
Vale nods, reaches her hand into her pocket and rubs the beads of Bonnie’s blue rosary.
“But let’s not talk about the storm,” Ginny says, going to the wood stove and pulling out a loaf of steaming fresh bread. “Deb,” she says, turning, “we thought we were saving the world, and we were wrong! So very wrong! We hid out in the woods here, growing our tomatoes and our green beans while the apocalypse brewed. Cut this bread, will you?” Ginny sets the hot loaf on the counter, reaches for a knife.
The peacock is wandering around by Vale’s feet. She’s never been this close to one before; she’s mesmerized by its tail: iridescent jade and turquoise eyes and swords.
The bird shits on the floor next to Vale’s boot and Ginny laughs.
“Apologies. My birds are tactless. The world goes back to wildness every day,” she says, downing her wine. “I’ll clean that up later. Oh, but my stew. Beans, leeks, potatoes, kale, rosemary. My stew is practicing resurrection.” She goes to the cupboard and pulls out three white handmade bowls.
Vale takes a sip of her wine and looks around at the books littering the table. Langston Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Monique Wittig, Edna St. Vincent Millay. She wants to crack each and every spine. She imagines what it would be like to live a life surrounded by books like this; to grow old in a house that tells the story of your life—your early idealism, your found eccentricity wedded to pragmatism, a life of too many people, and then too few.
“Our idealism wasn’t entirely for naught, was it?” Deb asks, going to the bread.
Ginny shrugs. “I don’t know. But art,” Ginny says. “Where would we be without art? We have to show other ways of living, right? Write the stories for the future. Do so, blindly, and with love. Offer solace when and where we can.”
Vale thinks of Neko and his photographs—not solace, but truth telling. A necessary act of art, too. She thinks of her body moving, with intention and fluidity under lights. What is her story to tell? What language will she tell it in?
Ginny serves the stew into bowls, brings them to the table. “Here,” she says. “My humble offering.”
Deb brings the steaming bread and a bowl full of soft butter.
Vale lifts a spoonful to her lips. Closes her eyes and breathes in. The woods; the soup smells like tree bark and balsam and woods.
“Délicieux,” she says. “Thank you.”
Ginny looks up from her soup, her eyes sparking, a rosy drunk shimmer in her cheeks. “Dried chanterelles,” she whispers. “Dried chanterelles.”
AFTER DINNER THEY CLEAR THEIR DISHES AND MOVE into the living room, a large space with a vaulted ceiling. “This room used to be an attached barn,” Ginny says. “Before the hippies came.”
The peacock follows them, suddenly greeted by two more: a male and a female in the corner, shuffling around in a pile of leaves.
There is a second wood stove in this room; Ginny goes to it and puts a log on, opens the damper. She puts a record on the turntable in the corner, and Edith Piaf’s voice rises into the rafters.
Vale smiles; Piaf’s voice reminds her of earthy French wine, of cigarette smoke. She thinks of her mother dancing barefoot to Patti Smith in the darkened kitchen. Of Shante singing in French in her apartment in New Orleans. The voices of these women: strange medicine.
From the ceiling hang clutches of drying mint. Under the table in the far corner sit baskets of apples, potatoes, winter squash. “This room stays cold enough all winter—ideal cold storage,” Ginny says, refilling their glasses with wine. “I’m preparing for the post-oil world. I’ve been doing so for forty years. Who knew my skills would turn so phenomenally useful?”
“The hippies were right,” Deb says, falling into an ancient mustard-colored couch, tipping her head back and closing her eyes.
The hippies were right, Vale thinks. Maybe this is the answer. This honing. Going inward. These root vegetables and wood stoves and drying herbs. She would not mind being like these women as she approaches and enters sixty—their gray-haired ferocity and resilience. Life didn’t go how they’d imagined, and yet they hung on, made lives here, quixotic prisms.
“And look here,” Ginny says, pulling a long piece of purple fabric from the wall that’s attached to the highest point of the ceiling with a bolt and a ring. “I’ve taken up trapeze.”
Deb guffaws from the couch. “Trapeze?”
“Don’t laugh,” Ginny says. “I may be wrinkled and losing my teeth, but I am practicing resurrection.”
She slips out of her shoes and takes off her T-shirt. She wears a loose, silk tank top, no bra. Her shoulders are freckled, aged, brown, strong. She propels herself upward, twenty feet into the air, abreast this purple fabric. The muscles of her arms flex and quiver up there at the highest point. She tips her head back, a cascade of silver hair falling down her shoulders, lets out a long throaty laugh.
“A queen!” Deb calls out. “That’s what you’ve been reborn as, Ginny. A fucking queen!”
Edith Piaf sings “La Vie en Rose,” and Vale smiles. Feels an odd shiver. Hopeful: that’s what she feels right now, watching Ginny up there at the top of that fabric, this sixty-five-year-old woman living a life of continuous trying. “You want a shot?” Ginny says, lowering herself to the floor, turning toward Vale.
“Yes,” Vale says.
She strips off her sweater and grabs onto the fabric. Ginny shows her how to knot it around her foot. How to pull herself up. How to climb. Vale’s dancing muscles put to work.
“You’re a natural,” Ginny calls out. “Be safe.”
Vale keeps climbing, all the way up to the top of this barn turned living room—cobwebs amid the rafters, Ginny and Deb grinning below her, the fabric slowly spinning.
“You’re amazing,” Deb hollers from below.
“Goddess!” Ginny crows.
Vale twines in slow motion and wishes Bonnie were here. Bonnie would have liked these women, this night, this house, this music. She throws an arm out into the shape of a star and listens to Edith Piaf sing words she doesn’t understand in a nightclub in Paris. The motherfucking art of good company, Vale thinks, a pain she can’t explain rising in her chest.
My mother will not see this, Vale thinks. Bonnie will not knock on the door and come in, see her daughter spinning, phenomenally high, head tipped back, a rare and extraordinary bird among the rafters.