Icy Conditions
The moon is half-an-ornament, a battered paper lantern, dangling over the foothills.
Alex and Marcus and Shirley, three residents of a “seniors-only” apartment complex
(“the Latter Days,” by name) in Boulder, Colorado, are standing in their apartment lobby
looking out the large, lobby windows. “This is zombie weather,” Marcus declares.
“One must shuffle like a zombie from place to place, to stay safe.
The zombie shuffle will keep the maximum surface area of your shoe soles, at all times,
in contact with the ground. Think of it this way:
On the ice, you do not want to be a light-footed ballerina, you want
to be a lead-footed zombie. So, let’s all do the zombie shuffle, shall we,
and be safe out there today.”
A few twinkling snowflakes are making slow descent.
Like someone threw a handful of glitter down from the sky.
Everything is sparkling in the sharp early morning light.
Everything is glazed with ice.
Car windows. Sidewalks. Benches. The streets and handrails.
Marcus can envision broken bones and traffic accidents. Sudden frights of slippage.
Spilled drinks. Spilled food. It is like looking into a crystal ball.
Alex has happened to be in the lobby, just as Shirley was heading off
on her weekly trek to the nearby post office.
Every Monday Shirley mails out tailored correspondences to different companies
requesting coupons toward purchase of their products.
Shell Global recently sent her a gas car worth $10.
Somehow their public relations personnel got the idea that Shirley is a car owner.
Bird’s Eye Vegetables sent her a voucher for two free packages of frozen vegetables.
It might have been the case that many in the last bag of peas Shirley had purchased
were barely globular. As a senior citizen on a fixed income
this had been upsetting. Surely, one could empathize?
Palmolive dish soap. Keebler cookies. Crest toothpaste:
Shirley has conjured all of these. It is a battle against her conscience, however.
A battle in the trenches, against the trolls, as some droll figure once put it.
Shirley has wit and imagination but should she really be using it
to manipulate corporate entities? It is hardly sporting.
These corporations are so innocent and trusting.
“Oh,” Shirley had exclaimed, upon entering Alex’s living quarters,
on the occasion of a visit, and realizing
a “cat tree” is merely an indoor climbing structure for cats,
“I imagined it as an actual tree that grew cats like fruit or leaves.”
Shirley is as gullible as a child. Or is it Alex who is gullible?
“I am senile. What do you expect?” offered Shirley,
when Alex gave her a skeptical look.
“Have you forgotten all your biology?” Alex asked.
“I never learned any,” Shirley argued. “As I told you, I was married off at 14.
The last thing anyone wants to teach a girl who is to be married off at 14 is biology.
She’d be frightened out of her wits.”
Shirley’s colorful past. She had shown Alex the marriage certificate. Dated 1948.
Signed, in witness, by her mother and her father. “It had gone the same way for them,”
Shirley declared. “They truly believed it was the best thing one could do for a daughter.”
The marriage had lasted two years. Shirley ran away from it and from her family.
“I wound up in Rome. Not Rome, Italy. Rome, New York; outside Syracuse.
I found work at a restaurant called The Coliseum.
Our menu included “lion’s meat” which was actually a tender cut of prime beef sirloin.
Our cooks were referred to as gladiators. I will send your compliments to the gladiator,
I often told a satisfied customer. We served a drink called Martyr’s Blood.
It was identical to a Bloody Mary except the celery stick came skewered
by a plastic martini-pick in the specific shape of the short dagger called a pugio.”
It was hard for Alex to determine how much of any of this was meant to be believed.
He hadn’t any commensurate experiences against which to weigh the viabilities.
“I envy you,” Alex declared.
“I have never had adventures or misadventures of any kind.
I worked in the basement of a library, for 25 years, like a mole in the ground.”
Shirley: “You married, you had two children.”
Alex: “Yes, indeed. achievements unprecedented
in the recorded history of human events.”
Shirley: You read ever so many books.
Alex: Acknowledged. Much I have traveled in the realms of gold, to quote Wordsworth.
Shirley: So you will agree, at least, to having had that much adventure?
Alex: Yes, I will.
Before leaving Alex’s apartment, and its hypoallergenic cat tree,
Shirley had promised Alex she would write to the Fancy Feast
people for cat food coupons. “An old lady and her cat companion, bonding
behind the strictures of a fixed income,” Shirley had declared. “A sob-story
from the hackiest ink pot. The letter will write itself.”
Shirley’s apartment—with every other apartment in “the Latter Days”—
is being governmentally subsidized (at the municipal level)
to make it affordable to lower income Boulder County denizens.
“Wish me luck,” says Marcus. His winter hat is jammed so low on his head
and his scarf wrapped so high over his mouth,
all you can see of his porcine face are his nose
and the bottoms of his Climb Mount Everest sunglasses. He gives a final demonstration
of the zombie shuffle. “Community service is community spirit,” he calls out, merrily,
through the weave of his scarf. Shirley and Alex, graciously impatient, return his shuffle.
What else is one to do? Marcus is tedious. His language is so pedestrian,
so pedantic, so patronizing. What else is one to do but
reflect his signals back to him and be glad when he is gone.
“People who know things are very tiresome, don’t you find?” declares Shirley,
After Marcus has departed.
“I feel the same about people who wish to be comical,” Alex replies.
The cold air that had rushed through when Marcus activated the automatic lobby doors
is lingering in the lobby like a spirit animal.
“What is your subject, these days?” asks Shirley.
“What rocking horse are you riding to what finish line?”
One year, Shirley had been a student in the creative writing program
at Syracuse University.
Her favorite professor was Charles Olson. “That pop-eyed, gnomic, wordsmith,” Shirley
called him. “He was so drunk on language he thought he was a mystic. When
he made words dance he acted as if he had made love with a starlet
and went about offering ribald boasts.”
A young Hayden Carruth was one of the visiting poets Shirley met that year.
“Hayden was a porcupine,” declared Shirley.
“He had quills but would not throw them. A lovely human.”
Another poet, nameless, however,
she declared “a possum. With a possum’s predilections.”
When Alex couldn’t remember what those are, Shirley had enumerated:
“omnivorous, but will also eat garbage.”
Shirley’s colorful past. Alex had seen a photograph of Shirley
and some of her Syracuse classmates with John Berryman who is holding up a bird cage
inside which, Shirley said, was a northern red cardinal, a so-called “redbird,”
with a crest like a brightly burning sail. Shirley said
Berryman believed this creature to be the very bird of inspiration itself
and would not let the cage out of his grip.
“I am writing about the various dignities of aging,” Alex offers.
“How graciously aging treats the aged. How spry and wry it leaves them year by year.”
“In that case,” Shirley declares. “I had best present myself in a manner
more in keeping with your stated objectives.”
“Please, don’t do anything on my account,” argues Alex.
“Not even so as to not make a liar of you?” asks Shirley.
Alex wishes Shirley safe passage. “This is the SS Shirley shoving off,” Shirley declares.
The double lobby doors open wide. Shirley glides through.
On the sidewalk, Shirley performs a short, controlled slide. She looks back to see
if Alex is watching her. He is. She extends one arm, elegantly, over her head,
reflecting the graceful curve of a swan’s neck. She nods to Alex.
Then she executes a neat spin like Sonja Henie. Pauses. Takes a dancer’s breath.
Then, another Sonja Henie spin, equally neat, for herself, only, and for her ancestors,
and for the jesters and masters to come.
Then off she goes into the world like she is the one who has dreamt it all up.
Something else Shirley had said about Hayden Carruth: “He was a talented
jazz musician. He could improvise on piano like nobody’s business.”
“I can believe that from the music of his poems,” Alex had replied.
“His conversation was enthralling,” Shirley declared. “He himself was magnetic.”
“That must have made things difficult for him
when he brushed against anything metal,” replied Alex.
