Free Bigfoot Dreams by Francine Prose Page B

human one on the stairs.
    Kenny even brings her mail up and slips it under the door. Now, on the hall floor, directly under a giant, framed photo of Mount St. Helens erupting, Vera finds a phone bill and a letter from Louise. She remembers ordering the Mount St. Helens photo through the cryptobiologists during one of those times when Lowell was leaving and she was doing her best to prove she would still lead an interesting life without him. Now it seems mainly a sign of how quickly you can get to the point of walking past an exploding volcano and hardly noticing.
    Louise’s letter is postmarked from the small town in Washington where she lives on a farm and supports herself by teaching at a community college. Vera wonders if Louise still writes poetry. She certainly has the same typewriter, its keys so mired in ink the b’s and o’s print solid. She also wonders why Lowell writes to her at the office, Louise at home. Among other reasons, it’s probably that Lowell wants to reach her first thing in the morning, while it’s more in Louise’s nature to know Vera needs a letter to keep her company while she’s mixing and drinking her cocktail-hour vodka tonic.
Dearest Vera,
    This morning I was out picking raspberries. Everything was wet and the low warm sun hit the berries so the red in them glowed. I thought of Monet and Gerard Manley Hopkins and that this was the light they saw. Then I thought how much better it was to be seeing it than trying to teach it to Olympic Community College students who didn’t give two shits. And then I thought: if I’m seeing that kind of light, why do I still feel the need to justify what I’m doing? It all made me think how long it’s been since I wrote you. You would be the first to tell me: Light doesn’t necessarily translate. That lovely Victorian parsonage meadow and the gardens at Giverny are a long way from forty miles northeast of Seattle.
    I can’t remember when I last wrote you. Was it before or after my brief, stormy interlude in therapy? A few months ago my parents wrote offering to pay for therapy, and I thought: Well, why not? It’s like somebody offering you free dance lessons. I thought maybe it’d get me off the antipsychotic drugs which anyhow make me pee every fifteen seconds.
    So I started going to this guy somebody recommended in Seattle. Fortyish and kind of cute. I said I was afraid that if I told him everything and he found out who I really was he’d reject me and he said, why did I think that? So I told him everything and he found out who I was and he fell in love with me and then he rejected me! He said nothing like this had ever happened in his whole professional career and what it most likely meant was that his own analysis wasn’t complete etc. etc. etc….So once again my heart’s broken.
    Rereading this, I think: No wonder! Here’s a woman who can experience rapture among the raspberries and then come home and use the words “think” and “thought” sixty times in two paragraphs! No matter what—acid, the Maha Deviants, lithium and Stelazine and God knows what—the right brain cells never seem to be destroyed. I mean right cells, not right brain. And nothing’s happening here, nothing to distract me, nothing in the mailbox…in other words, write immediately!
    All my love and kisses to you and Rosalie,
    Louise
    Vera picks up the phone and dials Louise’s number. “Listen,” she’ll say. “Wait till you hear this .” She lets it ring long enough for Louise to come in from milking the cows or feeding the hogs or whatever she does on that farm, then hangs up.
    Sipping her drink, Vera shuts her eyes and sees the kitchen drawer stuffed with old letters, phone numbers, bills, and, if the cockroaches haven’t smoked it, her emergency Camel, kept there the way a spy risking capture keeps the cyanide pellet. If only she could just inhale, exhale, smell the smoke, and not have to think about fountain-of-youth lemonade, let the nicotine hold her