Chapter 14
From the desk of Kate Fair who’s at the Evergreen Mobile Home Park so she’s using this old yellow notepad for stationery
3/18/92
Dear Frida,
Thanks for sending a picture back. I imagined you with long messy-wavy hair like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman , but you’re Demi Moore in Ghost . I could never look that great in a pixie.
I’m jealous of your description of your hotel. You said you can see everything I describe, but I can feel everything you describe. Like “history shaking loose and doing a cool jazz scat down in the streets.” I wish I knew how to do that. (And I don’t mean to talk about things I don’t know, but it’s the truth that I had to look up Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Juliette Gréco, AND Miles Davis.)
I’m at Bumpa’s place for a few days. He lives in Bothell about half an hour east from me across Lake Washington. I had to borrow a car, which is part of the reason I’m here. He works these car auctions, and he thinks I can get something decent for a couple hundred bucks. I didn’t used to mind the bus. It can get stinky, but funny things happen sometimes. Like when I found a bus pass, and I tracked down the old woman to return it. She gave me a pair of L’eggs pantyhose to thank me. How random is that? But last week a lady sat down beside me and saw me reading Anna Karenina . I’ve been reading it for over two months. The woman opened her big mouth and said, “My heart dropped into my stomach when Anna…” I won’t say it in case you haven’t read it. She totally ruined it for me. I can take the bad smells, but I can’t risk someone spoiling another book like that.
I also need a car so I can come over here more often and write down Bumpa’s stories. I’m interviewing him now, and I’m trying to look at his world like a writer would, since he’s going to be my main character. I’m not sure what details I’ll use yet, but I want to be able to describe whatever I do use perfectly. Even if it’s just the drive into his mobile home park. The park is surrounded by towering evergreens, and I know it’s big, but it reminds me of The Secret Garden , the way it feels hidden from the outside world. All the trailers have miniature front yards, and people care a lot about their flowers. This is the prettiest time of year to be here because the rhodies are starting to bloom.
Really examining this place got me thinking about your boat theory. Just like the boat was always the same, there were some harbors like here where everything stayed the same, too. I mean, when I drove under the canopy beside Bumpa’s trailer yesterday, he was already waiting on the porch beside the lilac bush. How does he do that? How does he know I’m about to pull up? There are lots of bigger trailers here, but his is a single-wide. It’s snug, and I think he likes it because it’s long and narrow like all the different ships he worked on. Here’s another thing that never changes. As soon as I got out of the car, the first thing he said was, “Hey Punkin, that’s a snazzy green velvet fedora you’re wearing.” I pretended to tip a hat and replied, “Why thank you. I really like your pink polka-dot waistcoat.” I have no idea when we started that, but we do it every time we see each other. It’s even funnier because I’m definitely not a crazy dresser, and he almost always wears brown slacks and one of his brown plaid shirts with a white t-shirt underneath. He even still uses the same Timex we gave him for Christmas when I was little.
His trailer is pretty much no-frills, too. That makes the things he does have stand out. Like the candy dish on the coffee table. It’s one of those old-fashioned kinds made out of green glass, and he keeps black licorice in it because Franny and I love black licorice. He only ever had an old painting of a schooner on the living room wall until I graduated from college and then Franny last year. Our graduation pictures are hanging over the couch now. He left school after the eighth grade, and he used to say the only thing he wanted in life was for us to get college degrees.
It’s interesting analyzing what parts of him might belong in a novel and how I’d do it. He made our usual canned tamales for dinner, and when we played gin rummy afterward, he told me one of his stories about when he was first mate on the Brown Bear. That was a University of Washington research vessel up in Alaska. He worked on it a few summers when Mom was in junior high, and he says she was so horse crazy, she’d stay at his brother Ralph’s ranch to ride horses all summer long. This seemed like a perfect opportunity, so I asked Bumpa what it felt like being a single dad in the 1950s. It’s hard to explain the look he got on his face. It was kind of confused, and he said, “I never thought about it, Punkin.” I waited for him to say more, but he kept playing cards and went back to talking about the Brown Bear.
Later on in bed, I started wondering if it was weird that Bumpa never thought about it. What do you think? Is his not thinking about it relevant to my story? Not that I know what my story is. I tried to imagine what trendy authors like Susan Minot or Barbara Kingsolver would consider important. I mean, if I’m going to write this novel, I need to get everything just right.
You know how it is after midnight when your mind can’t rest? Time felt kind of furry. Plus the buzzing started up. Quietly, but I can sense when the bees are coming now. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be getting back to sleep anytime soon. The book I’ve been reading ( If You Want to Write ) was in the living room, and when I got up to get it, Bumpa was bent over the dining table with a bunch of radio parts spread out on a newspaper. All the lights were off except one lamp so he could see what he was doing. He’s always buying old broken electronics at garage sales so he can tinker with them. He looked up and said, “Your mom used to wake up in the middle of the night, too. She’s a night owl like me.” I got myself a cup of coffee. It had that burnt taste because he’ll keep turning the coffee maker on and off so he can drink the whole pot before starting another, even if it takes a couple days.
I wanted to try asking him about raising Mom again. Maybe I didn’t ask the right way before. But I wanted to just sit there with him, too, and watch him hunt through trays of vacuum tubes and resistors for the right parts. I don’t know why, but I’ve always loved looking at his hands while he works on one of his projects. Even though his jobs were on ships all his life, his hands aren’t rough, and he has long, elegant fingers with nails that are perfectly curved like polished shells.
He asked if I wanted to help, and he reminded me how to use the little machine to test the tubes. It’s easy to putter in silence with Bumpa, and we worked together for a while until the bees settled down. I was getting a little hungry, and I didn’t feel like having any licorice, so I made us some scrambled eggs. When I handed Bumpa his plate, he smiled at it and said, “It sure is nice to be awake with someone else when the rest of the world is asleep.” I could picture him and Mom in the middle of the night when she was growing up, probably playing canasta, and I wondered if she felt the same way I did. Outside in the velvety darkness, the pine trees whispered in the breeze, and the lamp made this kind of golden cocoon around us, like Bumpa and I were the only two people in the world. Maybe it’s not the kind of interesting thing people want to read about in a book, but he’s right, Frida. It is nice.
Love,
Kate