Winter Tale

When did it start?  January, I guess.  When I discovered the ice creeping up the inside of the second floor windows.  That’s when I began hearing it like a quiet whine.  When I started looking for ghosts in the hallway and somehow expected to run into one sipping tea or swishing skirts, but just generally going about its business like she knew all along.

It never was a ghost.  I cursed my way through another session of scraping the windshield of my pickup.  Shivering violently, I waited ages, ages for the fucking engine to warm up.  How could the sky be so grey but the snow shine bright enough to sting my eyes?  Somewhere past the backyard the river was still flowing.  I would get these elaborate ideas in my head that I would walk down there in boots and coat and mittens to watch the icy current.  Maybe they would see me from the street and think how tortured I must be, how picturesquely tragic.  But it was too cold for anyone else to be walking around near the park anyway, so I just got into my truck and drove to Meijer. 

We had started out that winter watching Hitchcock movies in the front room.  Vertigo.  Rear Window.  Rope.  I used to think I hated old movies.  Assumed they were yet another affectation of the people I knew who prided themselves in being moderately counter-culture. 

Then one day, I was paging through my roommate’s art appreciation book and I settled on a street scene.  It was an early photograph of a street I know I had been on when my parents took us to the City in the 8^th grade.  All those men wearing hats.  The fruit stands and the dogs sniffing around for discards.  They never thought they were going to be art or history or anything to be appreciated.  Not like that.  They were just living their lives.  I got the dizzy pit in my throat I used to get when I would think about outer space and I had to slam the book shut and walk around the library. Digging nails into palms and biting the insides of my cheeks, pain reminding me I’m still inside of my flesh.

I started noticing them as much as I could. Not the storyline or the dresses.  But the eyelids.  The individual teeth.  Things these long-dead actors didn’t give a passing thought, but that proved to me they were once as alive as I am.  And how someday I’d be equally dead.

Those weeks of hot panic have passed.  Now I’m just moving through the house, watching the street through the curtains.  Perking up when the heater clicks on from the ancient basement.  Not thinking of the wet boots I pull on and off throughout the day. 

Image:  Lake George Window, Georgia O'Keefe 1929

Evie Jo

Evie Jo Becker ate glue.  Not paste, which I could almost understand.  My mother bought me some once for preschool.  It came in a little bucket with a smiling cow’s face on it and the lid held a little white paste spatula for spreading.  It smelled fresh and heavenly.  But I didn’t taste it and it eventually dried up into flakes.

No.  Evie Jo ate glue.  Right there at our work tables.  Mrs. Shea would come to each one and dump a blob of Elmer’s on a piece of paper in the center for us all to share.  There were popsicle sticks that we were supposed to use to spread the glue onto our first grade craft project.  Some of us used our fingers.  But Evie Jo  – every single time –  would take a finger full of glue and pop it right into her mouth.  Some at our table would squeal, tattling to the teacher that Evie Jo is eating glue!  She’s eating it!  And Evie Jo would smile and say, “It’s good.” 

The whole thing was almost overwhelmingly undignified to me.  On top of the shared – and now contaminated by Evie Jo – glue blobs there were the shiny square wax crayons that came in boxes.  I hated that we were expected to use these oily, subpar crayons with corners that hurt our fingers and didn’t grip the paper the same way Crayolas did.  I couldn’t wait until second grade when you could bring your own box of crayons from home and store them in your very own desk with a lid, instead of sharing these impotent sticks that some of the boys would brace between their ring and pointer fingers, middle finger over the top and then *snap* down on their knee, breaking them in two.  They got in trouble for that, but the rest of us still had to use the greasy leftover nubs. 

Evie Jo was one of the gross kids.  Not just because she ate glue, but that was part of it.  She also had round, very thick glasses with pinkish brown plastic frames.  Dirty blonde pigtails tied with yarn ribbons.  She smelled like some of the farm kids, some combination of distant manure, wood smoke and vagina.  And she couldn’t speak very well.  She had to be broken of “ain’t” and “gots” and “them colors.”  She would address you loudly, embarrassingly. 

I don’t know what happened to Evie Jo.  She disappeared sometime around third or fourth grade.  What’s most likely is that her family moved.  Some of the gross kids stayed on through high school.  Looking back at them now, I can see that poverty and developmental delays and neglect were their real problems.  But who knows what drove Evie Jo to eat glue?

Classing Up the Joint

Have you ever noticed how, in European films, the protagonists usually have pretty menial jobs?  Amelie was a waitress in a cafe.  Penelope Cruz was also a waitress in Volver -- and in that movie, Penelope's sister does ladies' hair in her apartment.  In these movies, the main characters live in small, efficient apartments and take the bus everywhere.  When I was in college, my best friend K. studied in Scotland for a semester, and used to tease them endlessly about their British soaps.  "Don't you know TV is supposed to be about glamorous people???  Like 90210!  Who wants to watch regular people live their lives?"

I did my taxes last week, and there's nothing like TurboTax to make you call into question your life choices.  Its handy step-by-step formula asks you a series of questions.   

"Did you get married in the last year?"  No.   

"Did you add dependents or otherwise change your dependent status?" No. 

"Did you buy a home." Um, no, Turbotax.  How about you lay off me?  Damn.

At the end of the session, TurboTax illustrated for me, in helpful bar graph form, just how much less I earned in 2009 vs. 2008. (hint: a LOT less) 

To cheer myself up, lately I have been pretending I am European.  Tonight, that meant having a friend over for Arroz con Pollo, drinking tons of wine, and eating after 9pm.  Also, there was cake.  Delicious, simple cake with whipped cream. 

Orange-Yogurt Cake
adapted from Martha Stewart
Unsalted butter for pan
1 cup all-purpose flour, sifted
1/2 cup plus 3 Tablespoons granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon baking soda
pinch of salt
1/2 cup plain whole milk yogurt
1 teaspoon grated orange zest
1/4 cup plus one Tablespoon orange juice
1 large egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 large orange, zested and cut into segments
Powdered sugar, for dusting
(Martha says add 1/4 cup vegetable oil. I totally spaced on adding it, and loved the cake anyway)


Preheat oven to 350.  Butter an 8 inch round cake pan.  Stir flour, 1/2 cup plus 2 Tablespoons sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt, yogurt, orange zest, 1 Tablespoon orange juice, egg and vanilla in a bowl.  Pour into pan.  Bake until tester comes out clean (25 minutes).  Let cool on a wire rack.

Put zest in a bowl.  Stir in 1/4 cup orange juice and 1 Tablespoon sugar.

Dust cake with powdered sugar.  Serve with orange mixture and whipped cream.