A Kind of Daydream (a Billie Holiday essay)

A Kind of Daydream

Lady Day’s voice dips and drones and flattens the back of my throat as we open the summer together.  I’ve waited a whole year for this.  My car coasts so easily on the black road that climbs up and swoops down green hills, as if I’m not even driving but simply along for the ride.  The heat comes in from all directions; it radiates through the glass and wilts the lilacs on the dashboard; it blows in the front windows and weaves out the back.  I’m sweating but I welcome it as much as I welcome this annual tradition.  Somewhere deep within the miles of trees, our cabins await us (along with about two dozen other family members) on clean, clear lakes just beyond Delta in BayfieldCounty.

White clouds and treetops scroll across the silver hood and up the window.  Shadows dance across my arm as I steer the wheel.  Through muffled static, the notes from the piano lightly dance up and down scales, and the trumpet sounds miles away –backdrop rhythm.  The bass clarinet’s riff sways and blunts my spine, taps my sandal on the pedal.

    …like a summer with a thousand Julys…you intoxicate my soul with your eyes…

Her voice is the long, velvety cord that laces all the different sounds together in a lovely, melancholy song.  I reach to turn her up.

CountyE slopes intoCountyH and disappears behind a wall of oaks around a bend.  This is where the road begins to wind and zigzag throughout the countryside, taking its sweet time to reach Delta.  A series of sharp angles skims us past Benson’s Horse Ranch, where horses graze fearlessly close to the fence, barely looking up at the flash of chrome and blaring trumpets.  Another turn and we ease parallel with a grove of maples and pines behind the familiar old fence that is becoming less and less visible in the overgrowth of bramble and daisies.  I wonder if it all looked the same sixty years ago.  I wonder if someone drove through here in a shiny black 1940s Coupe –my dream car –listening to Billie Holiday crooning out of the radio.  I imagine the reflection of leaves rolling over its rounded surfaces, the quiet whir of the white-walled tires, my fingers curled around the slender wheel.

…all of me…

            Everything is alive and bursting green.  I drive well below the speed limit; I am in no rush to get there.  I have carried the same thought every year since childhood –the faster we get there, the faster the long-awaited week of camping will be over.  But now that I’m older, the drive has become one of my favorite parts.

Pavement gives way to fine rocks and ruts, and we are swallowed up by the national forest, hidden from the sun beneath the canopy.  I look in the rearview mirror and see my toddler sound asleep.  Her plump cheeks are pink from the sun, and the gentle breeze that floats through the open windows cools her skin.  Strands of golden hair wisp this way and that around her face, which has lolled to the side of her car seat.  Life is good.  If I could choose my heaven, it would be this drive, unending through this country on a bright summer day, just Emma and me.

…I see your face in every flower…

We reach the sun-bleached “Fresh Farm Eggs 4 Sale” sign, and I know we are almost there.  The car rambles across the rickety bridge over a shallow creek and into cylindrical beams of sunlight pouring through the leafy ceiling.  Burning campfires waft in through the windows, and there is a blinding flicker through the leaves –sun on the open water.  The road again bridges a small river and then skirts the very edge ofDeltaLake.  I gently brake and look around: everything is just as I remember it.  The few cabins here have been dusted out and families are unpacking coolers or resting in their lawn chairs.  Pink flamingos and windmills line their private lanes and encircle their summer homes.  We nod and smile at each other as I roll by.  On the other side of us, the lake gradually opens wide to the sky.  Just a few yards out, a boat sits still on the glaring ripples with two men, black against the sun, puffy in their fishing vests.  It’s time to turn off my music.

We drive on, and the music comes from outside now.  There are birds singing high above us somewhere, and gravel spits from beneath the dusty tires.  I hear the echoes of branches breaking and laughter from hidden campsites.  I suddenly remember the frogs and become more cautious of the little bodies that love to hurl themselves across the road.  The water ends and we are bordered by Birch trees that hide yet another campsite–Scenic Drive Resort.  I take us further in, left up the hill, where the pines grow thickly.  The welcoming sign to Flying Eagle Resort comes into view.  I’m almost reluctant to turn, but I take us down the bumpy drive that will wind its way around the wooded resort and bring us to our cabin.

“‘…It’s just the thought of you…the very thought of you, my love…’” –I look back to see her cheeks jiggling with the bumps.  She stirs.

“Emma, we’re here!”

Lady Daydream

My First Travel Essay

A Kind of Daydream

Lady Day’s voice dips and drones and flattens the back of my throat as we open the summer together.  I’ve waited a whole year for this.  My car coasts so easily on the black road that climbs up and swoops down green hills, as if I’m not even driving but simply along for the ride.  The heat comes in from all directions; it radiates through the glass and wilts the lilacs on the dashboard; it blows in the front windows and weaves out the back.  I’m sweating but I welcome it as much as I welcome this annual tradition.  Somewhere deep within the miles of trees, our cabins await us (along with about two dozen other family members) on clean, clear lakes just beyond Delta in Bayfield County. 

            White clouds and treetops scroll across the silver hood and up the window.  Shadows dance across my arm as I steer the wheel.  Through muffled static, the notes from the piano lightly dance up and down scales, and the trumpet sounds miles away –backdrop rhythm.  The bass clarinet’s riff sways and blunts my spine, taps my sandal on the pedal.  …like a summer with a thousand Julys…you intoxicate my soul with your eyes…  Her voice is the long, velvety cord that laces all the different sounds together in a lovely, melancholy song.  I reach to turn her up. 

            County E slopes into County H and disappears behind a wall of oaks around a bend.  This is where the road begins to wind and zigzag throughout the countryside, taking its sweet time to reach Delta.  A series of sharp angles skims us past Benson’s Horse Ranch, where horses graze fearlessly close to the fence, barely looking up at the flash of chrome and blaring trumpets.  Another turn and we ease parallel with a grove of maples and pines behind the familiar old fence that is becoming less and less visible in the overgrowth of bramble and daisies.  I wonder if it all looked the same sixty years ago.  I wonder if someone drove through here in a shiny black 1940s Coupe –my dream car –listening to Billie Holiday crooning out of the radio.  I imagine the reflection of leaves rolling over its rounded surfaces, the quiet whir of the white-walled tires, my fingers curled around the slender wheel.  …all of me…

            Everything is alive and bursting green.  I drive well below the speed limit; I am in no rush to get there.  I have carried the same thought every year since childhood –the faster we get there, the faster the long-awaited week of camping will be over.  But now that I’m older, the drive has become one of my favorite parts.   

            Pavement gives way to fine rocks and ruts, and we are swallowed up by the national forest, hidden from the sun beneath the canopy.  I look in the rearview mirror and see my toddler sound asleep.  Her plump cheeks are pink from the sun, and the gentle breeze that floats through the open windows cools her skin.  Strands of golden hair wisp this way and that around her face, which has lolled to the side of her car seat.  Life is good.  If I could choose my heaven, it would be this drive, unending through this country on a bright summer day, just Emma and me.  …I see your face in every flower…

            We reach the sun-bleached “Fresh Farm Eggs 4 Sale” sign, and I know we are almost there.  The car rambles across the rickety bridge over a shallow creek and into cylindrical beams of sunlight pouring through the leafy ceiling.  Burning campfires waft in through the windows, and there is a blinding flicker through the leaves –sun on the open water.  The road again bridges a small river and then skirts the very edge of Delta Lake.  I gently brake and look around: everything is just as I remember it.  The few cabins here have been dusted out and families are unpacking coolers or resting in their lawn chairs.  Pink flamingos and windmills line their private lanes and encircle their summer homes.  We nod and smile at each other as I roll by.  On the other side of us, the lake gradually opens wide to the sky.  Just a few yards out, a boat sits still on the glaring ripples with two men, black against the sun, puffy in their fishing vests.  It’s time to turn off my music.

            We drive on, and the music comes from outside now.  There are birds singing high above us somewhere, and gravel spits from beneath the dusty tires.  I hear the echoes of branches breaking and laughter from hidden campsites.  I suddenly remember the frogs and become more cautious of the little bodies that love to hurl themselves across the road.  The water ends and we are bordered by Birch trees that hide yet another campsite–Scenic Drive Resort.  I take us further in, left up the hill, where the pines grow thickly.  The welcoming sign to Flying Eagle Resort comes into view.  I’m almost reluctant to turn, but I take us down the bumpy drive that will wind its way around the wooded resort and bring us to our cabin.

“‘…It’s just the thought of you…the very thought of you, my love…’” –I look back to see her cheeks jiggling with the bumps.  She stirs.

“Emma, we’re here!”

Limbo

          A palm reader told Nikki that you were caught in Limbo.  I listened to her guilty cry from the other end of the line and imagined you in a hazy purple space where only your eyes existed—looking away, stirring with something.  I imagined you in this blank, vast nothingness without form, waiting. 

            The night you fell and died on the floor of a bar, I was dancing in another city—wasted.  You used to pull us behind the tractor—us three bouncing in the wagon around and around the old farmhouse.  Grandpa sat at the kitchen window drinking Old Style, staring at the humming birds.  You breathed beer in our faces as you put band aids on our scrapes or shushed us until we forgot our hurts.  I searched for treasures in the dirt driveway—round beer tabs, pennies—beneath the pink blossoms that fell like snow from the apple trees.  You climbed one of them and roped a swing around one of the branches as we stood below, catching the petals on our eyelids.  I sat on your long lap of faded denim while you let me steer the old mower.  I held onto the skinny wheel, arms spanning its perimeter.    

            On the weekends that you had us, we’d wake you up on Sundays, jumping on your bed.  You were fresh smiles and morning kisses, reaching for us and laughing.  An itchy, beige blanket divided the one room we shared on the second floor of the farmhouse; it glowed in the sun that filtered through the yellow shade.  You were the kind of dad that waited until we were in the tub, covered in bubbles, before you came in to wash our hair.  I brought you a cassette tape of me singing Patsy Cline—I was five and knew all of her songs by heart.  You said you loved it and played it every time we came.  You took us out on a country ride in the brown boat of a car.  Nikki and I sat up front, Jodie sat in the back.  You held a beer and my door swung open when we drove through a pothole that made my feet hit the dash.  Gravel and green blurred by; Nikki held onto me and John Denver sang.  At dusk we’d walk through the fields where the broken barn fades and we’d weave around the hay bales high as mountains, taking turns holding your hands.  These were the years that sopped and soaked into your memory.  These were the girls you knew us by—toddlers clinging to your knees.

            You became persistent and sidetracked when, a short time later, we got a new last name.  You were being replaced.  We stopped calling you daddy.  We trailed behind you in the garden giggling your name “John, John, Daddy John”.  It was the only time we saw you mad and we giggled even harder.  Then we started seeing you every other weekend.  Then it was once a month.  Then maybe Easter.  They told us you were “slow” and “simple”.  We didn’t know what that meant; we knew you were like one of us, and you quietly did whatever we would say.  We knew you loved us.  You showed up crying and pleading after a few months had gone by, begging to take us for the next weekend.  They gave you another try, and we waited in our pretty dresses by the front window.  Mom watched us as the time slipped away “Goddamn him” and we went upstairs to change.  We were told what was wrong with you, “He’s…an alcoholic.”  “He’s…mentally slower than…”  “He’s…stuck.”  I had wished you would’ve understood what was wrong with me.  I wanted to crawl in your lap and tell you our new dad was the monster under my bed.  I’d imagine what you’d do—the look that might’ve flashed through your big blue eyes, the fall of your sheepish posture, broad shoulders sinking—you with your helpless hands, embarrassed; passive hands, scared, your brain slowly mushing into a sponge.  I learned you could never save me.  You slinked away to the bars for good, every day, at ten a.m.. 

            At fourteen I sought out your apartment on one lousy Sunday.  I knew you had been living out of your car but then moved in with your brother.  You didn’t know my face when you opened the door.  “You looking for Francis?” you asked politely.  Well it had been seven or eight years.  Frightened and nervous after I said my name, you offered me a quick seat at the little kitchen table.  I stared at its gray, marbled top and at the laundry and boxes and rotten food strewn about.  You caught hell though I didn’t really want to give it to you.  I had mixed up all your intentions and put them under my bed.

            Weeks later, I broke into your house in a fever.  I dashed up the stairs and found your bedroom where I rummaged through your things, not caring to put anything back.  I was disappointed to see you hadn’t thrown our things away.  Our pictures covered the cracked walls and the letters we’d sent you over the years lay in neat piles around a bare mattress.  You still had the cassette tape of me.  Auntie Carol later told me you played it all the time—in those lost years.  I knew that smell of you—I still do.  If filled the dank, yellow house with the lonely hallways.  I wanted you to come rushing for me.  You would’ve repeated things you’d heard like “there’s no such thing as monsters” and I would’ve persisted like a child that there was.  You’d be drunk.  You’d never fill that void.  I wanted to cry for you when I stole out the front door.

            We were in our twenties when we looked over at you in the funeral home.  Your lashes were long and waxen.  Your eyes bulged beneath their lids.  Your large hands with the bitten finger nails were gray.  Random thoughts shot through my mind in that cold room where they released all of the alcohol from you.  As your children, we were to go through your house and choose what we wanted.  They gave us your address and it took us to a different side of town, near the lake.  This place was hollow and empty aside from the trash.  No food, no laundry basket, no towels.  Old Style sat warm in the refrigerator.  The same clothes you wore when we were little still hung in the closet, reeking of you.  I kept a shirt.  An old, beige blanket was nailed up over the window.  Letters were found here and there in the laundry and newspapers across the floor.  I searched for treasures—keepsakes.  Beer tabs and pennies.

            You called me Salt because of my white-blond hair.  Nikki was Pepper.  Jodie was Paprika.  “I love yous’, I love yous girls” you used to always say.  You never tried to teach me to be tough—you always let me cry until I was better.  So alone, so alone, and did you realize that in the end?  Did you feel it in those short hours before you were drunk again?  Did your brain sop all that away?  The bartenders said you carried pictures of us three in your wallet and showed us to them every day, bragging about where we worked and how we were doing.  Somehow you kept up on us.  Nikki can’t stop holding your shirts.  She shouldn’t have paid the five bucks to the gypsy.

The Nothing Caper

It came in the night. We were all sleeping in the house and I woke to it lifting my sheets; it made my nightgown bleed. My doll saw it all so I ripped out her eyes the next morning before breakfast. Then it started coming in my dreams, and I thought there was a monster beneath my bed gathering my dolls and things. On the scratchy carpet where the sun comes in, it branded my skin with its tongue, so I gave it my voice. Mother and father swallowed it up.

They found me in corners and closets and they didn’t hear their words running from my mouth. I didn’t know so I swallowed the words whole; they fed me spoonfuls of throbbing aches that echoed deep in my belly, burning my insides until it dulled and smoothed over.

I began to sweat them out my pores like a broken fever. I washed and raked my skin. Something curdled and clotted the mainstreams of my heart as I took their pieces and ate them. I choked and spewed out a doll that didn’t have eyes. Her messy dress had burned away so they stitched her a new one and kept it inside and I ran away, hungry.