Spillway Review
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Folktales
an excerpt from a longer work
   
by  Zan Nordlund

Goddamn Gladys Kaufhauser.  She's, after all, the one who started it – or at least the memory of her did. Everything was fine until I thought of her. She was standing there - right smack dab in the middle of 1972 in her perfectly ironed peach and pale yellow gingham house dress swatting at mosquitoes. Even though she looked like she’d mugged Donna Reed at the Salvation Army to get the thing, she’d taken the time to hem it in accordance with the latest fashion trend. It hit her just above the knee – enough to reveal her bowlegs and heavy cotton-knit stockings. She just rolled them up – a nice contrast to her sensible brown oxfords, which always sported a full inch of mud, well-caked over the heel.

She topped the entire outfit off with a once-white, lace-trimmed apron, a hairnet, and two permanently brown-stained and tattered remnants of buck teeth. They were flanked on either side by large gaps that allowed spit to fly without regard from her mouth in all directions. Her breathing was labored and heavy and she evidenced intensive wheezing when she spoke – as though she'd been mining asbestos or coal all of her life. A person didn't have to get close to her to know she was going to reek of garlic and burnt onions.

Now Gladys lived in what used to be the old train station, according to the people in the town of Brookline old enough to know. It was on the opposite side of the railroad from everything else, near a swamp. The building itself, a shack really, may not even have had indoor plumbing.

Gladys stuck to herself, for the most part. She always seemed a bit sad and almost everybody said she was crazy. She spent her days caught up in the artistic adornment of her home. She used the items she'd fished out of the swamp over the years to accomplish her goal. There it stood: a ramshackle palace in full testimony to the power of recycling. Various hubcaps lined up across the top of the door like Pennsylvania Dutch Hex Signs warding off evil spirits. Dozens of cowbells swayed in the wind as it blew past the eves. Multiple lawn ornaments seemed to grow out of the ground – they managed to lend a surreal sense to the entire property.

The one feature no one could miss, however, was "The Bottle Tree," a living piece of stained glass. Everyone in town knew of it, and most admired it – in their hearts, anyway. You see, Gladys had decided long ago to place all of her used bottles into the crevices of this tree. It had now grown up and around them, in an artful sort of way, and the bottles and the tree had become one. Over time the tree grew, Gladys added bottles, and it was hard to tell where one began and the other stopped. It was her legacy and she was proud of it. Gladys, in her 1940's-style dresses and sensible shoes, felt she needed to make a statement. And she did. She was Brookline's first "hippie." Long before bell bottoms and belly shirts were common place, before anyone had heard of Timothy Leary, and before those who created "recycled art" and "bottle trees" sprang up almost everywhere the Grateful Dead could be heard, Gladys was an original. Two weeks after her death, the town fathers plowed her property over and into the creek, bottle tree and all. Somehow Gladys wouldn't have minded. She'd have seen it as another form of "recycling," a returning of the items to their source once their purpose had been served, if you will.

Now her sister Daisy was a different story all together. She lived just down the street from us. Even crazier than Gladys, or so the townspeople said, she'd been in "the hospital" several times, though my mother told me it wasn't polite to talk about it. Although she was well into her mid-forties, she liked to skip a lot and always wore a T-shirt with a big daisy on the front so she "wouldn't forget who she was." She often smelled of urine and stale cigarette smoke.

We taunted her at times and called her "Crazy Dazy," but we would sometimes let her play dolls or jump rope with us, if nobody was around who would hit her for it later. She had steel blue eyes that always looked joyful and glassy and two large teeth that stuck out like those you see on cartoon characters. They, too, featured wide spaces between them. She delighted in showing off for us by placing the stick of a lollipop right down the middle of one of those spaces, with room to spare. Her wispy blonde hair was always wrapped tightly around her head in a braid, like Heidi's, and her skin was so fair she often had sunburn, even in the dead of winter.

Dazy had a "special friend," one only she could see, and he sometimes interfered with her ability to get along with others. She often insisted no one sit in the best seat or eat the best apple because "Fred" wanted it. Dazy could throw quite a tantrum at two- hundred- and- twenty pounds, and nobody who’d ever experienced this event, even once, wanted to piss her off again. They tended just to give in to her demands. Dazy got used to this, and it ultimately led to her undoing.

It happened the day she threw herself on the floor at the main register at the Price Clobberer. She started her usual screaming and hooting and hollering, the likes of which could make you sweat butter, if you were of a fragile mind yourself. Seems the Price Clobberer hired a new manager, and Dazy hadn't broken him in yet. He wouldn't sell her a $2.50 package of cookies for the $1.75 she had leftover from her allowance, like they always did. She'd come to expect this kind of thing of people, knowing they would make allowances for her, since she was going to have to share with Fred and all, and since they'd heard her scream before and, well, we've already discussed that.   This new fellow saw things a bit different – he didn't think discounts for Dazy fell into the category of "accommodations for the handicapped," and he made himself perfectly clear on the matter. Instead he called the police, and they carted Dazy away in a straight jacket right in front of half of the town. She kicked and hollered so loud you could hear her clear across the street at the Newbury's. On her way to the car she was sure to remind Fred not to forget to bring home the cookies. I guess she thought if she was going to have to go through all of this, she ought to at least get her treat.  Lots of folks agreed with her. They refused to shop at the Price Clobberer for quite a while and drove instead an extra twenty minutes to the next town over to the One Stop Market, even though things there were a little more expensive, and the produce wasn't quite as nice.

To this day, people around town still remember the event and they still refer to the man who caused the ruckus as "The New Manager." He's going to retire with thirty years of service next week. People in Brookline can sure hold a grudge. Well, anyway, after that, Dazy wound up with all kinds of "social workers" and "advocates" and other strangers who were all of a sudden involved in her life and making decisions "for her own good."  Before long, she lived in a group home, way out in the suburbs with nine other people who had imaginary friends and who cried just like her when they wanted cookies at the Price Clobberer. She had all kinds of "routines" and "schedules" and "goal sheets" where she could earn points to get to do things she used to do just for having a fit, like go to the movies, or watch Saturday morning cartoons. They put her on a diet over there because she was "morbidly obese." They said it would improve her health. She lost fifty pounds in six months. She was dead in nine.