Undercover

We happened to stop and rest in a small shadowed plaza, where park benches lay scattered about and weird modern sculptures splayed against the sky and fountains -- so much prettier -- splashed. The tall buildings loomed about us. It was a hot day.

While we sat among the crowds, five or six young black kids all dressed in jeans and plain white t-shirts came racing around a corner and sprinted down a corridor which led like a small canyon off the plaza. They disappeared up some wide steps.

All this time, a street performer had been setting up on the curb nearby. He was a black man wearing sweat pants and a shirt. We watched him put out a big boom box and a drum.

He took off his sweats. Underneath he wore a skin-tight, multicolored spandex bodysuit. He leaned over, switched on the boom box, and stood up on the drum as if it were a stage. His music blared, raspy, something funky and nondescript.

A uniformed cop on a bicycle rode slowly past him, up on the sidewalk. The performer said nothing but pointed gracefully in the direction the boys had run. The cop rode that way, and the performer began. He contorted himself, pulled a narrow plastic hoop over his body, balanced remarkably. I noticed there was a clear plexiglass box on the ground beside him, the kind contortionists fold themselves into on t.v.

While he stood on his drum, acting, playing to the crowd, he also watched where the cop had gone and where the boys had gone. He stood handstands while watching. Then one of the boys came back, the youngest and smallest. He settled in quietly among the crowd. The performer did not take his eyes off him.

I hissed in Aunt Laurie's ear that I thought the street dancer was an undercover cop. She gave me that arched-eyebrow glare, which usually means “Really? How interesting, you’re so wrong.” After a few minutes more, she was ready to move on.

We left. The man was still balancing and contorting and his music still pumped and thundered as we made to cross the street beside him. I was tempted to compliment him quietly on the fine job, but I thought this might blow his cover. On the other hand, I don’t see how the young kid who came back -- was sent back -- could not have known full well what he was.

Helen

I’ve lost a set of neighbors whom I liked, and whom I lived beside for a good fifteen years. They were a strange couple, or perhaps I should say strangely coupled. It was a second marriage for both of them. She was a thin little thing, all arms and diminutiveness and enormous eyes behind her glasses. She talked endlessly about her first husband, and his beautiful black curly hair. She also talked endlessly about her father, who had been a policeman in Omaha and was killed in the line of duty when she was six years old. They had never told her, she complained, exactly how he died. She only knew something about his being in the back of a patrol car.

For his part, the husband was an active, wiry, handsome old man with thick, wavy gray-white hair. He didn’t so much talk endlessly as think endlessly about his service in the Navy. His car’s license plate bore the name of the ship he had served on. One day I spotted him at the grocery store. He had not noticed me. While waiting in one cashier's check out line, he tapped gently on a metal display rack to get the attention of another cashier nearby. Helen was prim and pixie-like, with perfect, short, iron grey hair. She turned to the sound, saw him, thrilled, smiled, and looked away.

My neighbors never traveled, not even to see their children (they each had two from their previous marriages, and the step-siblings never got along). The wife grew foggy in her later years, and was a bit of a trial to talk to. She would come over on summer days and look at my garden, and then move into the shade and tell me she had to stay out of the sun because she tinted her hair. It was the same faded coppery-salmon color that so many older women choose, the faint non-shade of a tabby kitten's nose -- I wonder if the Clairol box assigns it an actual name. Then she would ask what plant that was, and say it looked like a weed, and then ask what it was again. She wore nylon stockings with shorts even in the worst heat – said it was nothing like New Orleans, where she had lived with her first husband for twenty years – and did not wear earmuffs in winter, because her current husband didn’t like them.

One winter they both kept indoors suddenly, and for months into the spring I saw strange cars in their driveway. It gradually occurred to me that there must be something wrong with him, for if she had been ill or injured, it would not have prevented him from going out. And there was something; he had cancer. I saw him a few times. He was thin, his eyes deeply hollowed out. He kept as busy as he could. "I'm not going to sit around asking 'why me?' " he said. In July, he died. That summer morning, fresh and sunny, quiet and beautiful, his live-in nurse emerged from the house, smiling, tired, but fulfilled and relieved. "It's over," she repeated to a neighbor who had crossed the street to ask just that. Later his ashes, at his request, were scattered over the Pacific.

A few days before, his wife, completely gone in her mind, had been taken away to a nursing home by her children. They soon reported her to be in much better spirits and eager for visitors. Helen disappeared from her job at the grocery store, too.

The ballet

Catherine and Grace attended the ballet for the first time on a January night at the local university, to see a Russian dance company perform Swan Lake. It was Catherine’s idea. The university’s theater guild had sent out advertising brochures about it to the local libraries as well as to their own subscribers, and Catherine had seen a copy on the circulation desk as she checked out books. The brochure claimed the Russians were much renowned, and it included quotes from reputable big-city newspapers' rave reviews. And this was the only ballet, Catherine frankly reasoned, she was ever likely to bother to go see.

So she bought a ticket for herself and her mother, and they wound their way to Matteson, past the neat small suburban houses amid their stiff, bristle-brush, brown winter trees, along the acutely angled darkening winter streets whose layout probably reflected haphazard pioneer trails of a century and a half before. They wound their way around that new supermarket with its parking lot and the nearby, newer houses plunked just in the middle of the old trail-streets but otherwise nowhere in particular, and then they drove up and over small rises and hollows in the old farmlands until they reached the big, open, prairie campus. Once on the school's premises, the road turned broad and beautifully paved. They passed the obligatory large, ugly public art sculptures, giant copper two-by-fours assembled any which way and left standing -- after the honor of their being chosen, when, twenty, thirty years before? -- in pointless anonymity. When they pulled into the parking lot the night was fully black, and cold. The school buildings stood all around them, large, floodlit brown brick boxes. Inside them was the hush of scholarship perhaps, but also the hush of emptiness and money.

The theater was small, and so Catherine and Grace and everyone else had excellent seats. Catherine looked carefully at the stage. There was no orchestra pit. Where was the music to come from? She looked around at the audience, and remarked in a whisper to Grace at all the well dressed Oriental people taking their seats. She was accustomed to a most “diverse” world filled with blacks, whites, Mexicans, a new influx of Poles and Lithuanians, the occasional Arab, but not to soignee, suddenly mysteriously abundant Chinese or Japanese. She settled back, glad she had worn her lime green silk sweater, and her brightest green sparkling earrings.

The lights dimmed and the audience listened to a tedious speech given at center stage by the director of the theater’s board, an excited lady who wanted to acknowledge the family whose generous donation had made this performance possible. Everyone applauded. Then a hissing spurted from two large black speakers embedded in the walls high up at either side of the stage. So the music was to be canned, and the dancers would have to dance to that. Did they suffer this as amateurish, needlessly difficult, un-Russian? The curtains parted, and the ballet began.

As Catherine watched she had the new experience of understanding an artwork slowly, grasping a story slowly, without words. Words came to her sometimes, but when they did they surprised her by their presence and their aptness. It was as if someone else really was speaking inside her head. The main male dancer was lost in one scene, for example, amid the women’s tutus dipping and fluttering, amid a running flurry of white swans. Catherine thought, or the observing voice spoke: she’s there somewhere, but he can’t find her. At other scenes she thought: she’s lost, or he’s tired. She thought, I must love ballet.

About halfway through the production, during a long crowd scene with many dancers onstage, one particular ballerina came to the front and danced. She began to turn about on one pointed foot over and over again. Catherine concentrated on this, and as the ballerina turned, and turned, and seemed never to stop turning but finally stopped, she thought: that must have been over thirty turns. She said as much, in a tiny whisper, to Grace, who agreed.

Later she would do some hunting at the library and find out, in books on ballet, that these were the famous fouettes en tournant which all ballerinas dancing Odile must do, because Pierina Legnani did them at the 1895 premiere choreographed by Petipa, where they caused such a sensation. Indeed there are thirty-two of them.

For the moment, she relaxed in her seat while the applause died down. She watched the rest of the ballet. More words came to her head. The nation happened to be at war. And there had been a documentary on television the week before, full of horrible film clips of old suffering, in fact of Russian suffering. Imprisoned men fighting over bread. She watched the silent dance, watched its fluttering costumes and colors on the golden-lit stage, remembered the ballerina turning. And she thought, or the observant voice spoke: this is why God permits the world to go on existing.

Security

He has an odd looking face. It looks almost as if it had been split in half and then put back together again, rudely, too much flesh used to paste it together across the forehead and the bridge of the nose. Olive-dark, pockmarked, beginning to go jowly with his sixty-odd years, teeth rarely showing even in a broad smile because they are flattening and hollowing down a little with age; short, swept-back, crinkled graying hair that roughs up at his collar – all in all, with his strut and his black leather coat and his take-no-prisoners demeanor, he looks like someone whom you would not want to meet in a dark alley. Certainly you would not want to feel his grip on your arm and hear his raspy gravelly voice in your ear as he caught you shoplifting. Is he armed? It took a month’s acquaintance, and a careful study while talking to him, to notice that his small, deep set eyes are blue.

Mr. Lincoln

One mild, windy night in February, when a breath of spring is in the air and the moon stands unseen above the lights in the parking lot, a man who looked exactly like Abraham Lincoln walked into the grocery store. He did not just resemble him; he looked exactly like him. He had the same startling height and thinness, the same sunken cheeks, the same jawline and lips. He had the same eyes and neck and hairline, and the same thick hair. He had the same expression of wisdom and patience, and did not even bother with a beard. The resemblance was not merely strong or arresting or unmistakable. It was dumbfounding. Literally: people in the grocery store were struck dumb as they looked at him.

He went to the customer service desk, and had some sort of business taken care of. No one except the clerk waiting on him could hear him speak. The store was busy, five or six checkout lanes open, and there were lines of customers two or three deep at each lane. An average night. The whole store shone brightly in reflection in the big plate glass windows shielding out the dark night: young women ringing up sales, young men bagging groceries, people fetching and pulling the big silver carts, managers in mauve smocks observing things and writing things on clipboards, signs and lights, “Deli Department” and “Produce” in the distance, racks of candies and magazines up close, all caught and trembling in the big black windows at the front of the store. The flare of headlights from cars in the parking lot occasionally swept in, as if from another dimension. There was rain on the windows.

As the man who looked like Lincoln conducted his business, more and more people noticed him. The front of the store remained busy but grew quiet. Everyone wanted to comment to his neighbor, but any comments would have seemed so ridiculously obvious that no one did. It seemed disrespectful. Cashiers looked, looked away, and scanned things and made small talk with their customers, and then looked quietly again. Baggers did the same. But no one looked at each other. No one went up to the man and said, you know, I’ll bet you’ve heard this before, but you look incredibly like Abraham Lincoln. He not only knew, but was dressed in somewhat old-fashioned clothes – a kind of frock coat and a small floppy tie – that seemed to show he must have been at some sort of historical re-enactment, or perhaps in a play at a school. He knew.

One black man especially stared at him, half-smiling in wonderment as he accepted his bag of groceries. That was the feeling that had descended over the whole front of the store. A strange happiness and wonder pervaded the hush; it was as if a father or a protector had miraculously come back.

And then the man who looked like Lincoln took up his plastic bag of groceries, and walked out of the store. His business at the customer service desk was finished. People tried to take one last look at him, tried to see him as a modern man, as somebody who must have a job and a family. It was impossible even to guess how old he might be, certainly impossible to imagine him in jeans and a t-shirt, or with a three-day growth of beard. He walked off into the mild night, probably got into a car and drove away. No one talked about him as the store got back to normal, got noisy again, because it all seemed so obvious.

White light

This lady has led an interesting life. She has two master’s degrees and has lived all over, including in a monastery for a while. Her husband is a minister and a therapist, and they keep ferrets and she is a successful artist and she plays the mountain dulcimer in a local folk music society. People who meet her often find themselves wishing they had more hobbies.

Anyway she says that if you are disturbed by a long-lasting negative memory -- if! -- you should think of that memory, and then imagine something positive – a white light, a flow of good energy – traveling up your spine to your brain. Because the brain can’t handle two different thoughts at once, the white light going up your spine will blot out the negative memory that you are holding in your head. Then, as you imagine the white light or the positive energy knocking the bad memory from you, you tap your clavicle five or six times, right where the neck joins the chest. That “gets rid of it,” she says.

Only one man, listening to her, asked, how do you know you’ve gotten rid of a negative memory if you can’t remember it? They didn't become friends.