Whatever Lola Wants
Read Whatever Lola Wants Online
Authors: George Szanto
PRAISE FOR GEORGE SZANTO
“Szanto â¦is a real writer.” â
New York Times
“Exquisitely rendered.” â
Gabriola Sounder
“Szanto has a deft hand with characterization.” â
Times Colonist
“Genuinely heartbreaking â¦Vividly described â¦Szanto is acutely, almost painfully, sensitive to the world outside his front door.” â
National Post
“Memory is one of the rare privileges of age. With compassion, wise humor, and a poet's eye for the telling detail, George Szanto has given us a sort of Pilgrim's Progress from one man's intimate story to a dazzling meditation on history and nature.” âAlberto Manguel
“Szanto writes with wonderful lucidity, never leaving the reader, always circling back to the essence of things.” âSusan Crean, author of the award-winning
The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr
ALSO BY GEORGE SZANTO
FICTION
The Tartarus House on Crab
Friends & Marriages
Duets
(with Per Brask)
Not Working
Sixteen Ways to Skin a Cat
Â
The Conquests of Mexico trilogy
The Underside of Stones
Second Sight
The Condesa of M.
Â
The Islands Investigations International series
(with Sandy Frances Duncan)
Never Sleep with a Suspect on Gabriola Island
Always Kiss the Corpse on Whidbey Island
Never Hug a Mugger on Quadra Island
Always Love a Villain on San Juan Island
Â
PLAYS
The Great Chinchilla War
(with Milton Savage)
The New Black Crook
The Next Move
After the Ceremony
Â
ESSAYS, CRITICISM, MEMOIR
Bog Tender: Coming Home to Nature and Memory
Inside the Statues of Saints: Mexican Writers Talk About Culture and Corruption, Politics and Daily Life
A Modest Proposition to the People of Canada
Narrative Taste and Social Perspective: The Matter of Quality
Theater and Propaganda
Narrative Consciousness
For Kit, for all the past and all the future
Seven: THE GRANGE AND THE STREAM
SPRING EQUINOX
2003
Lola sat down next to me. I like it, her here at my side.
I've been watching Merrimac County and the surrounding countryside for near to three years. The people down thereâfamilies, lovers, a few enemies. Mostly a peaceful part of the planet.
Lola was studying my profile. I could feel it.
I survey my patch of world from some middling white clouds over Mount Washington in New Hampshire. Clouds are easier than vacant ether. Ether's like the open sea; on clouds you get your bearings better. I take in a solid chunk of geography, from the Connecticut shore and most of Massachusetts up to the Laurentian Mountains in Quebec, from the central Maine coast, Boston, and Cape Cod across to the other side of Lake Champlain. Mount Washington isn't some Olympus but it gives me pretty good perspective. Haze, the oncoming blizzard, a dazzle of sunlight? I look through them all.
Lola can't see like that. She's a God, higher caste than me. Gods can't observe what's happening in the down below, just as they don't remember the names and places from the lives they've lived. But we lesser types, we Immortals, we can; compensation, I suppose. It's as if Lola's so nearsighted, time like distance goes all blurred and glazy.
“Ted?” She smiled now. “Is the week up?”
“Just about,” I said.
“You ready?”
“I am.”
She nodded. “I could see it.”
“Oh? How?”
“Something in your eyes. Like you're looking far away. Where they are.”
I nodded, glanced for a moment over an edge of cloud, a slanted glimpse down to the west, and turned her way. She was still studying me, her lovely face so near.
She spoke softly. “Will you tell me?”
It pleases me, her wanting to know like that.
â¢
1.
In maps of the down
below, the straight border of northern Vermont is broken by an extension of Merrimac County, a fist-shaped bump of woods, fields, and two streams, reaching fourteen miles north into Quebec's Eastern Townships. This acreage, depending where your sympathy lies, was rescued from Quebec in 1790 for freeborn Vermonters by the patriot Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, or stolen from the very bosom of Lower Canada by Allen the land venturer. Map lines show the border jagging up, around and down again. From where Lola and I sit, those demarcations don't exist.
One chunk of Merrimac land, two extensive properties. The western piece belongs to John Milton Magnussen, direct descendant of Jack Magnussen, whose Tory cousin was smithereened while trying to blow up a Green Mountain gunpowder cache. Milton and his wife, Dr. Theresa Bonneherbe, moved into the family farmhouse there, Magnussen Grange, their base for thirty-four years. And out again after her stroke, to an easier house at the edge of Burlington.
The other place, the old Fortier Farm, was bought five years ago by John Cochan. Cochan had come to explore the land and there found his ideal site, the place to build his city of tomorrow. The hills, fields, and waters flowed well; the geology that gave them shape was ideal for his hopes and purposes.
Milton and Theresa exchange equinox tokens twice a year, over breakfast. Once, they had celebrated the solstices too, with long hikes in the woods, December on skis, June smeared with bug repellent. Since her stroke two years backâthe first year of the new millennium, and Theresa understood a treacherous revenge had been inflicted upon herâthey've honored the days, summer and winter, spring and fall, at dawn with a glass of fresh orange juice, sunset with fine cognac.
Milton helped Theresa get dressed, aid she loathed but couldn't do without. He'd learned to plait her long white hair into a single braid. She allowed this, her affection and her impatience near equal. Now she lunged her wheelchair along an invisible path toward the stairs; Theresa at this precipice daily scared the shivers out of Milton, but she permitted no assistance. Deftly she rolled onto the platform of the electric haul-ramp, clamped the chair in place, and clicked to
DOWN
. With a taut whine the cables lowered the platform to the entryway below. Milton followed.
She released the chair. “Silly motor gets slower every day.”
Her disability reduced her, angered her, but her voice sounded clear, the tiny sibilant slur undetectable, unless one had known Theresa before, a tall strong woman with a commanding ring to her speech. He'd never see or hear that Theresa again.
Her chair rolled along the hallway and its book-lined walls, past the sitting room and more shelves of books, by the dining room into the large white kitchen where only cookbooks, and birding and insect guides, were allowed. Beyond the windows lay the garden and the seven acres of their new home. Mount Barton rose in the distance. Left from the kitchen, the door to her study stood closed. She gave Milton a twitch of a grin. “I need to go in there.”
“You're going to work on equinox morning? Come on, Tessa.”
“For one minute.”
He scowled. “Okay.” He opened the freezerâ“Sixty seconds”âand took out the coffee beans.
She muttered at him but without rancor, wheeled to the door, turned the knob and glided in. Built out into the room, five stacks of bookshelves. Journals and magazines lay heaped along the wall, newsÂpapers in piles on two chairs. File cabinets, more files by the side window in half a dozen boxes. No typewriter, no computer. A trail of bare floor led to her desk.
From a drawer she took a package, her equinox present for Milton, wrapped in newsprint and decorated with flower shapes cut from the Sunday comics. He'd like it but it wasn't enough. She could never thank him fully for his fundamental gift, bringing her back from where that lance out of hell had sent her to. The hospital announced she was done and over. “They gave me up for dogmeat,” she'd told Milton weeks after he had found her tottering at the edge of her mind.
Now she fingered the paper flowers. She turned the chair and darted back.
“âfifty-six, fifty-sevenâ”
“I'm back, be reasonable. Here, this is for you.” She reached out the package.
“When I've got breakfast on, Tessa. What, you want to destroy order everywhere?”
“Depends on the kind of order,” she growled.
He smiled. She was only half joking. He heated the scones he'd made yesterday evening, poured coffee and the orange juice. “Good wrapping, Tessa.”
“Feasie did it. Made the flowers too.” Their daughter Feodora, the married Noodle, had also located the present, driven into Burlington for it, all the way from the Grange.
Milton opened the package. A handsome book,
Nature in Winter
, animals and insects hibernating, sketches by the author, descriptions of their sleep patterns, their waking processes. Milton flipped through it. “I'll start it this afternoon.” He bent down and kissed her dry lips. “Thank you.” She stroked his cheek.
His present to her, wrapped in a bookstore bag and tied with September morning-glory vine, was
A Ton of Cure
, by C. Carney.