In the Heat of Summer

(continued)

By Marta Palos

With the rent Cora found on a street also called Maple just like ours in Raytown, she put me right back into the working class neighborhood of my childhood. The same green and dirty-white houses line the sidewalks, and in the few feet of space between them the same piles of dogshit in various stages of mummification are waiting to be washed away by the rain.

I begin to hate all this, but Cora doesn't mind. She filled the house with furniture from yard sales, and set up her battered wooden easel in the pantry-like room next to the kitchen she happily calls her atelier.

As far as my own workplace goes, I call the mailroom at the post office a deadly bore. The minute I'm back from my route, I wrap up things as fast as I can. I fill out my trip report, and throw the handful of letters collected on my route into the special tub, to be mailed later by the clerks upstairs. If there's time, I help with the sorting of the afternoon mail from Denver, then I'm out of there before someone would ask in a mocking tone, "How's it going, McLure? Read anything interesting lately?"

The consensus in the mailroom is, at twenty-eight I should spend my free time with friends. Drinking beer, wasting time with chatting about nothing.

I don't care about their consensus. At the used books store I found a thick
volume called The History of Philosophy, a truly entertaining thing, though a bit long. I skipped most of Europe, but got hooked on the ancient Greeks and Romans. The Greeks were a more serene bunch, I like them a lot better. I imagine myself walking among the sunlit pillars of Athens, my body wrapped in a loose, comfortable garment called chiton, discussing things with wise old men, taking our sweet time.

Brian always liked to read, but since we settled down in Fairview, his nose is forever in books. And not only that. When he gets home from work, he talks about little else but his Olympus Road customers on his route. He envies them, I guess, for their degrees and nice homes and what not. I think he's caught the bug of sophisticated living.

In Arizona we climbed the San Francisco Peaks, explored the Painted Desert, the rounded stones of subtle pastel colors rolling miles and miles into the distance like the waves of a frozen sea. On shorter trips Brian carried my easel, and while I painted, he went on a hunt for pottery shards left behind by the Anasazi.

We walked with beauty all around us, as the Navajo chant goes. In Fairview
we don't go anywhere, we have no friends. When one of his coworkers invited us to a party, Brian wasn't interested. I reminded him that in Flagstaff his colleagues often dropped by for a beer and a chat.

"I was in a different frame of mind in Flagstaff," he said.

"What does that mean?"

"I think I'm widening my horizons."

"And I think you're turning yourself into a social snob. You're looking down
on your own kind."

"Not true. Nobody prevents the working class from opening a book. Lack of money is no excuse. The public library is free."

July

Cora shows me the painting she worked on all day. The old fan we found in the attic does little more than recycle the air in her so-called atelier, but I like the smell of oil paint and turpentine.

Her paintings are stacked against the walls. A Hopi village at the foot of a mesa is my fa-vorite. Yellow clouds zigzag across the huge sky, play hide-and-seek among the small shacks painted in burnt sienna. The shacks seem to float among the clouds, giving the haunting effect of an uprooted place about to fly away. I can't imagine how Cora did this, already finished when we met in Flagstaff. A gallery owner there offered two thousand for it, but she refused to sell.

She takes her work seriously. When two years ago I asked her to marry me, she said no, she wanted to devote as much time as she could to painting.

On her easel stands what looks like a tropical landscape, a tangle of vines and leaves curling in green, purple, yellow, and orange. The bright red, spiky spots bursting forth from the black foreground give the scene a hellish feel. As much as I admire Cora's talent, I don't like her latest creation.

A shimmering gray ribbon runs through the tangle of plants, looking like a snake slithering along the wet forest floor. The thing reminds me of the winding Olympus after a rainstorm.

"It's not finished yet, but what do you think?"

I think it's a scary mess, but what do I really know about painting?

"The picture needs a human figure, I guess. Or a face. How about putting your grand-mother's face above those purple vines?"

"Why hers?"

"Because this is an exotic jungle, and Indian faces are--" I stop, looking for the right word.

"Indian faces are what?" Cora shoots a glance at me.

"Well...exotic. Colorful and exotic."