“No,” Director Denial says. Brushing cat hair off her sleeve, she says, “Just some of us.”
And Miss America says she doesn't mean just here, in the Museum of Us. She means life. Is the whole world just people eating up other people? People attacking and destroying each other?
And Director Denial says, “I know what you meant.”
The Earl of Slander writes that down in his notepad. The rest of us, nodding.
The Mythology of Us.
Still holding the soup, looking at her own reflection in the grease on top, the Baroness Frostbite says, “I used to work in a restaurant, in the mountains.” She dips a spoon into the bowl and brings it steaming toward Miss America's face.
“Eat,” the Baroness says. “And I'll tell you how I lost my lips . . .”
Absolution
A Poem About the Baroness Frostbite
“Even if God won't forgive us,” says the Baroness Frostbite, “we can still forgive Him.”
We should show ourselves to be bigger than God.
The Baroness onstage, she tells most people, “Gum disease,”
when they look too long at what's left
of her face.
Her lips are only the ragged edge of her skin,
greased red with lipstick.
Her teeth, inside:
the yellow ghost of every cup of coffee,
and every cigarette in her middle-aged life.
Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:
The shifting, falling color of snow flurries.
No two of the tiny blue shadows the same shape or size.
The rest of her is goosedowned, quilted and insulated,
her hair tucked under a knitted hat,
but never again
warm enough.
Standing center stage, the Baroness Frostbite says, “We should forgive God . . .”
For making us too short. Fat. Poor.
We should forgive God our baldness.
Our cystic fibrosis. Our juvenile leukemia.
We should forgive God's indifference, His leaving us behind:
Us, God's forgotten Science Fair project, left to grow mold.
God's goldfish, ignored until we're forced to eat our own shit off the bottom.
Her hands inside mittens, the Baroness points to her face, saying, “People . . .”
They assume she was once gorgeously beautiful.
Because now she looks so—bad.
People, they need some sense of justice. A balancing act.
They assume cancer, her own fault, something she deserved.
A disaster she made happen herself.
So she tells them, “Floss. For God's sake, floss before bed every night.”
And every night the Baroness, she forgives other people.
She forgives herself.
And she forgives God for those disasters that just seem to
happen.
Hot Potting
A Story by the Baroness Frostbite
“Come February nights,” Miss Leroy used to say, “and every drunk driver was a blessing.”
Every couple looking for a second honeymoon to patch up their marriage. People falling asleep at the steering wheel. Anybody who pulled off the highway for a drink, they were somebody Miss Leroy could maybe talk into renting a room. It was half her business, talking. To keep people buying another next drink, and another, until they had to stay.
Sometimes, sure, you're trapped. Other times, Miss Leroy would say, you just sit down for what turns out to be the rest of your life.
Rooms there at the Lodge, most people, they expect better. The iron bed frames teeter, the rails and footboards worn where they notch together. The nuts and bolts, loose. Upstairs, every mattress is lumpy as foothills, and the pillows are flat. The sheets are clean, but the well water up here, it's hard. You wash anything in this water, and the fabric feels sandpaper-rough with minerals and smells of sulfur.
The final insult is, you have to share a bathroom down the hall. Most folks don't travel with a bathrobe, and this means getting dressed just to take a leak. In the morning, you wake up to a stinking sulfur bath in a white-cold cast-iron claw-foot tub.
It's a pleasure for her to herd these February strangers toward the cliff. First, she shuts off the music. A full hour before she even starts talking, she turns down the volume, a notch every ten minutes, until Glen Campbell is gone. After traffic turns to nothing going by on the road outside, she turns down the heat. One by one, she pulls the string that snaps off each neon beer sign in the window. If there's been a fire in the fireplace, Miss Leroy will let it burn out.
All this time, she's herding, asking what plans these people have. February on the White River, there's less than nothing to do. Snowshoe, maybe. Cross-country ski, if you bring your own. Miss Leroy lets some guest bring up the idea. Everybody gets around to this same suggestion.
And if they don't, then she brings up the notion of hot potting.
Her stations of the cross. She walks her audience through the road map of her story. First she shows herself, how she looked most of her life ago, twenty years old and out of college for the summer, car camping up the White River, begging for a summer job, what back then was the dream job: tending bar here at the Lodge.
It's hard to imagine Miss Leroy skinny. Her skinny with white teeth, before her gums started to pull back. Before the way they look now, the brown root of each tooth exposed, the way carrots will crowd each other out of the ground if you plant the seed too close together. It's hard to imagine her voting Democrat. Even liking other people. Miss Leroy without the dark shadow of hair across her top lip. It's hard to imagine college boys waiting an hour in line to fuck her.
It makes her seem honest, saying something funny and sad like that, about herself.
It makes people listen.
If you hugged her now, Miss Leroy says, all you'd feel is the pointy wire of her bra.
Hot potting, she says, is, you get a gang of kids together and hike up the fault side of the White River. You pack in your own beer and whiskey and find a hot-springs pool. Most pools stand between 150 and 200 degrees,
