Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 16 (6 page)

Yours, A Seeker After Truth

A: Dear Seeker:

It is true: men possess a brain! One sole brain that is shared among them, a hive mind!

Okay, I've never really cared for those kinds of jokes. I've discovered that having separate bathrooms and a dishwasher are the keys to any successful marriage. It's best just to let them do the lawn-mowing. Science fiction conventions are excellent places to spend the landmark anniversaries in your relationship. Three bicycles are enough.

Also, you can make them do anything you want by threatening to get a buzz cut. It's just like dads and the word “stripper."

Love, Aunt G

Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda,

Many of my family members are Republicans. What can I do about this?

Fondly, Perplexed.

A: Dear Fondly Perplexed,

If you're Southern, the answer is easy: the time-honored tradition of disowning the unsavory members of one's family. It’ s a genteel excommunication. Should their status change, you can just bring them back into the fold.

On a practical level if you're not willing to disown them, there are still a couple of things you can do. The most important—the very key to your sanity—is this: stop listening to them. You must never pay attention to anything that comes out of their mouths. Just nod and murmur, “Uh-huh.” Leave the room should anyone mention George W. Bush, the Pope or Dennis Miller. If pressed, say, “That Ann Coulter doll was pretty hot.” Leave the room while they are still befuddled.

The third method of dealing involves some fraud. But I've found that in most states they don't require a photo ID when you change your party affiliation, just a social security number. Get someone the same gender as your R relation to go down to ye olde courthouse and change them from R to D. If you're too chicken, get some forms and do it via the U.S. Postal Service, decreasing your physical exposure and increasing your legal exposure at the same time. Your family members may still act like Rs, but you'll have the sense of serenity that comes from knowing they are not. Fraud heals the soul. No good R will argue with that.

Love, Aunt G

Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda,

My roommate is so quiet I never know whether or not I'm alone. I'm used to being the quietest person around, and her quieter-than-thou ways are unnerving me! How am I supposed to talk to myself if I can't be sure I'm the only one who's listening?

Invisible

A: Dear Invisible:

Have you read Carol Emshwiller's story “I Live With You"? You should. I think you're in it.

What you need is a puppet. You can talk to your puppet then and make it talk back to you. This will create a much bigger problem to deal with than Silent Roommate Stalks With Wolves, because you will be suddenly insane.

Love, Aunt G

Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda,

I am the proud owner of two Chihuauas that don't know their own (barely measurable) strength. They always try to pick fights with the biggest dogs in the neighborhood, and today they barked at a woman who was clearly on her way to karate practice—the belt around her waist was black! How do you let a small dog know just how small it really is?

From,

Lilliputian Pooch Papa

A: Dear Lilliputian Pooch Papa:

Do you have asthma or something? Is this Paris Hilton pretending to be a man?

I kid: I love the Chihuahuas.

Small dogs yap at bigger ones. It's the way of the world. Deal with it or buy a Mastiff for your precious princesses to ride on top of, rhinoceros-tickbird style.

Love, Aunt G

Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda,

Why aren't all books as good as Geoff Ryman's
Air
?

A Devoted Reader

A: Dear Devoted:

Not all books are written by Geoff Ryman, therefore most suck.

Love, Aunt G

Q: Dear Aunt Gwenda,

Will you tell me a story?

Love, An Annoying and Small Child with a Runny Nose

A: Dear Annoying and Small Child with a Runny Nose:

One day an annoying and small child with a runny nose found out that runny noses signal deadly cancer, especially in small children. The child was soon dead.

Love, Aunt G

[Back to Table of Contents]

Scott Geiger

We believe it was in the middle of May, while our lawns greened and the red-orange eyes of daylilies debuted, that the graffiti first appeared in our lakeside Ohio town. Mere vandalism, we thought at first, nothing more. Just those two curious words scribbled across a restroom wall in black marker. Or the initials “AG” written in crabbed miniature on doorframes or haphazardly along the undersides of restaurant tables. Someone's private nonsense, we thought. Nothing more. So who can say how many of her signatures we scoured from bathroom stalls, phone booths, lampposts, and sidewalks before we understood? Then there was the German Club Toilet Paper Roll, that lone survivor of the early days. Now it's under glass in Bill Bliss’ attic museum. Found on the morning of the second last Saturday of May by a janitor at Etna's German Club, the Toilet Paper Roll is what you might call the legged fish of Artemisiana, the amphibian forebear of those dinosaur messages to come. “Artemisia Guile” appears on the Roll's double-ply tissue twenty-seven times at intervals of six-point-five spins. Where the ink bled through to underlying layers of paper, those are called “ghosts."

"It's got this monkish quality,” Bliss likes to tells his visitors. “It's spooky but really neat. Like, what would make you sit on the can and write on the TP then roll it all back up again?"

Notwithstanding the popular belief of those like Bliss, a few dissenters argue the Water Street Bridge Message came first. Copycatting and forgeries occurred in its wake, they say. Their charge is a reminder of this key point: our affair with Artemisia Guile didn't start with May's flirtatious prelude but exactly on the first Thursday of June, the day we woke up to the Water Street Bridge Message.

A Lake Erie fog caught Etna that morning. The world outdoors went opaque, as if our windows had cataracts. When Bliss backed his car out of the garage, he found himself adrift in a cloud. Most of us lingered over our breakfasts, letting our coffee cool while we nursed primitive feelings about uncertainty. We wrung our hands until we could only call in late to the Cusco offices at the Merwin Building on Huron, to the GeoPlastics plant and the machine shops by the airport, to the fulfillment warehouses along the highway. But down in the marina below Water Street, Tate Malcolm and Bernie Vargas, both in their seventies, began another day of maritime retirement together. That is, a day at anchor way out on the lake, alone, shirtless, drunk on Canadian whiskey. Through the thinning fog, Vargas piloted the yacht toward the harbor's mouth, over which spans the Water Street bridge. At some point the pair looked up. And there across the bridge's southern profile in broad white letters ran an imperative: “ADORE ARTEMISIA GUILE."

No colors, no cartoons. None of what you sometimes imagine when you think of graffiti. Just the words and nothing more. By afternoon, when the fog had furled back into the sky and word spread through town, a crowd gathered on the pavilion where Water meets Mercantile. From there you could see both the marina and the southern side of the bridge. We peered down at the strange words in uneasy silence, not knowing what exactly they asked of us. But when the utility workers came out the next morning with power washers we felt the faint disappointment of a missed opportunity, a misinterpreted gesture.

News of the Water Street Bridge Message appeared on the metro page of the
Sun-Gazette
. Our own Randy Michaelmas reported, “In yesterday's briefing, Police Chief Bob Neuget expressed a disinterest in the meaning of the vandalism. ‘Our concerns here rest solely in identifying the perpetrator or perpetrators of this act, bringing them to capital-J justice, and punishing them appropriately,’ he advised. At this time police profilers are seeking anti-social teenagers with signage typographic templates, large quantities of industrial spray paint, and the kind of suspension scaffolding window washers are seen using."

Immediately suspect was the antisocial and acutely sensitive Archie Idlewilde. Never seen without his olive overcoat (he called it a
balmacaan
) and slightly wall-eyed behind thick, black-framed glasses, Archie was Etna's most conspicuous high-school student. He drove one of the town's two hearses (the other belonged to the funeral home on Sandusky Street). He had an overbite. He was in a one-man band called Mersey-on-Manchester. And about once a month Archie targeted the shortcomings of our town and our abysmal culture in an editorial for the
Sun-Gazette
. To corroborate his points, he often turned to Dylan Thomas ("Rage, rage against the..."). Industry wed to eccentricity, we thought. We formed pointed suspicions, but the police refuted them. Archie Idlewilde was cleared of any connection to the Message. He had been in Baltimore at the annual conference of the Esperanto League of North America. Archie spoke the failed language fluently.

Deprived of the obvious culprit, we bred our own hypotheses about Artemisia Guile, and as we did, the vaguest inkling of anticipation seeped into our blood. Daylight now outlasted our sons’ evening little league games at Deerfield Park, and walking home, we saw each other pause amid the dusky lawns to search the houses, the maple trees, the street lamps, the contrail-thatched darkling skies. Then the moon would appear, aloft over Etna like an open secret. Two weeks hadn't gone by since utility workers erased the Water Street Bridge Message, when we heard rumors of insomnia. Cigarettes winked between fingers in Etna's nighttime yards. We saw ourselves wandering our patios late at night, hands in pockets or arms folded across chests. Long after we'd put the kids to bed, we dragged our dogs out for walks around the block. Surely something was being kept from us.

Then Frank O'Connor found on the underside of his trashcan lid a message written in metallic silver ink. Slightly scribbled, it read, “AWAIT ARTEMISIA GUILE.” Beetle-like garbage trucks had just that morning collected the trash from more than a quarter of Etna. Our trashcans had stood out at the curb overnight, vulnerable in the darkness for hours. We wondered if it could be possible.... It was. Hundred of lids, almost all of them, bore the same phrase, “AWAIT ARTEMISIA GUILE.” Bliss calls this the Lid Note of June 18.

Like the Roll, the Lid Note was executed crudely but on a bewildering scale, while the Milwaukee Banners more closely resembled the Water Street Bridge Message. The following Tuesday morning, June 23, Milwaukee Street's residents woke to find two giant banners strung between their curbside oaks. They were the kind we'd seen at car dealerships and strip malls. Where Milwaukee met Avon, a banner read, “YOU CAN'T DO WITHOUT ME—AG.” Its partner at Edison Avenue told us, “NOT LONG TO SALIVATE NOW—AG.” The utility workers were obliged once again to take her from us. But before the utility crew came for them, all of Etna must have visited Milwaukee Street. Alone, in pairs, and as families we stood under the oaks and stared like we were scrutinizing the knots and cables. A few of us lost track of time and lingered there without speaking to one another until the sodium street lamps shivered to life. We were astonished to see how it had grown so late. Feeling foolish, we hurried off, fighting against the urge to turn and take one last glimpse.

Donning his animadversion cap, Archie Idlewilde turned out to be the loudest opponent of Artemesia Guile. He had just graduated second in his class from Etna's Oliver Hazard Perry High School and won a scholarship to a prestigious eastern university. He planned to study a subject called “Intellectual History.” But still he busied himself with Etna's weaknesses. Following the Lid Note, the
Sun-Gazette
printed the first in a bitter arc of letters to the editor that stretched across the summer. “She,” wrote Archie, working from the assumption that Artemisia Guile was a
she
rather than an
it
, a woman not a thing, “is an elaborate manipulation. The invention of someone loose in this town who has made up their mind to tempt us with bizarre, meaningless signs. Do they want to excite curiosity? Whip up anxiety for financial gain? Could this be a radical advertising strategy? To everyone in Etna who finds this hullabaloo charming: please know that there are historical precedents for this sort of thing and not one in the batch has a happy ending."

We read Archie's paranoid article with one eyebrow raised. It was past eleven on a Monday night. Our sons and daughters were asleep upstairs. Reclining in white wicker chairs on screened-in porches, we folded the papers and set them aside on the lacquered coffee tables. Behind us, inside our houses, we heard our husbands and wives on the phone with Elizabeth Bliss. They were laughing. Beyond the thin screen, a chorus of field insects sang their crepuscular code. These were mild days, we thought drowsily to ourselves. A breeze stirred the leaves overhead, masking the sound of the lake in the distance. Still we listened, straining our ears. The odor of mulch and cut grass hung in the air like a question posed to an obtuse student. We had just begun to doze when, suddenly, we blinked our eyes open and saw a tremor pass through the bluely dark yards. We swear we saw it, something moving the way we've seen air behave over asphalt on the hottest days. We blinked again and the shimmering air was gone. But there was a consolation prize: a golden tabby stalking some unseen prey, appearing there and there and there again in the light of the kitchen windows.

Bill Bliss reported this lightheadedness, too. This tremor in the night air. Some have observed that this lightheaded tremor is reminiscent of the moment one realizes one has fallen in love. To Vera Rosentraum and her circle, such an observation is supremely important. Their salon holds that our ever-aroused curiosity is an erotic force. But that's getting ahead of ourselves.

In the days after the Milwaukee Banners, her messages fell across town like snow. Stepping out to water her lawn, Ellen Cole found “I SEE YOU! DO YOU SEE ME?—AG” chalked on her driveway. Ty Legan woke to find the windows of his new Ford truck clouded up with cursive A's and G's drawn in soap. At Cusco General's Claims Processing Center, in the bee-hived Merwin Building, and on the floor of the GeoPlastics plant, we all began our days with the question, “Seen anything new?” We intuited her presence multiplying, just as we were sure the humming of our street lamps increased in volume with each passing night. We found her taunts and commands in restaurant booths, waiting rooms, the drug store; on telephone poles and tree trunks and sidewalks; under desks, under bleechers, under manhole covers.