Goats and mushrooms

Laurie
Goats and Mushrooms
New Paltz, November 22, 2006

After I left Yaddo, I stayed with my friend, Amy, an artist, in her house in New Paltz, New York. Richard and I spoke on the phone and emailed each other furiously, but on this day Amy and I wroter together after a walk in the woods.

Amy and I encounter three goats. The youngest, with bright eyes and a twist of black fur on his crown, jumps up and puts his legs on the fence, stretching his head toward me.

“He’s the most aggressive,” Amy says.

“He wants love.” I rub his forehead, as we look into each other’s eyes. The fur under his chin is green from eating grass. It reminds me of my dog, Sasha, the way his head smelled of perfume from my kisses. The other goats prop their legs on the fence.

“They’re a family,” Amy says.

It’s obvious, but I miss it. Gray fur threads the parent goats. One of the horns on the male is broken and the other missing. The female has tawny stripes along her face. Long, soft rabbity ears curtain all their faces. If we had petted them forever, they would have stayed.

We tramp through woods. Amy says, “I hope you can get us back. I have no sense of direction.” I don’t care if we got lost. I am already lost with a man I barely know. We’re supposed to be drifting, hunting for something to burn to release us into the irrational. Earlier, in her studio earlier, Amy has shown me a painting of a bull stretched out on a pointillist pattern. Its legs are rampant, and it stares straight out like a goat. “That’s where I want to go,” Amy has said, ”to a place without a story. We’ll eat magic mushrooms.” Her fish-shaped eyes became slits as she laughed. Her black bangs shimmered like a hawk’s wing.

We come to a stream. Amy wonders if we should cross it. I see a house in the distance that needs investigating. We look through the fence. Two men are talking, and a little boy named Marley is playing with a golden retriever named Patty. Marley’s father is exceedingly handsome with a tall, athletic body and dark curly hair that sticks out of his backwards baseball cap. We say hello through the fence, and he opens the gate. He says he’s a builder, that he designed his log cabin house, that his son is named after Bob Marley. His wife, a teacher, spends her days in another town. I wonder how many other curious women find their way to the beautiful, secluded home of the dazzling, stay-at-home dad. When Amy and I are alone, I ask if he is the type she falls for.

“I don’t think men like that will be attracted to me,” she says, and I don’t know how she can think that. I think everyone is attracted to her because she is lithe and stylish, but she sees herself with a broken horn.

We walk on until we came to a thicket of exploding pods. Silky white fluff is poking out of spiky brown husks. The pods are ugly and exquisite, dead and alive, repellent and irresistible, as if some misshapen and not quite born things were trying to emerge. “This is what we should burn!,” we say in chorus. Gathering the stalks, we already feel unreasoning.

In the car, Amy talks about a lover she stayed with even after seeing his movies and thinking: “You are a man I want to strangle.” The women in his films could have been exploding pods, for all the sense of them he had. I wonder what kind of man Richard will turn out to be.

After dinner, Amy places the magic mushrooms on the table. I’ve seen them in her fridge and unaware of what they are have considered throwing them into a pot of soup. She isn’t sure how many we should eat. I remember Richard saying he’d picked magic mushrooms on the Haworth moors and that he’d nearly been drawn into a brawl with a friend. They were drinking in the pub where Branwell Brontë, ne’re-do-well brother of the genius sisters, boozed himself to death. Richard’s friend was jealous because after years of no-hope jobs Richard had gotten himself to university. The friend must have felt the way Branwell did, knowing that his sisters, and not he, were going into the world. I call Richard, and he guesses an amount we should eat. Amy breaks three dried caps and a few stems into powdery bits. “Just eat them,” she says, caterpillar-like. I pop an earthy-smelling morsel in my mouth. It doesn’t taste bad. We divvie up the pile, licking dust from our fingers.

As the stoned feeling comes on, Amy plays a “Talking Heads” CD, and we make a list of intentions to burn. We pledge to be softer, welcome in more joy, offer more of ourselves to others. “Fat chance,” I think of me. We place the list and the pods in a ceramic bowl. Amy lights a match and as the pods flare we dance around, Amy’s taut, strong body twisting and jutting gracefully. I think she is magnificent. I am in love with whatever I see. She says we should eat more mushrooms. She wants colors to be more vivid, sounds more intense. She wants her senses to unfurl like awnings. An hour later we are very high.

Amy says that being with people is hard and so is being alone. She says her sadness is old. She can’t remember herself without it. We stand on the lip of her sadness and look into its crater. We are walking on the moon, and the crater turns into a sea lapped by wavelets, and Earth is reflected in the water. White tailed deer drink at the edge and velvety moss with the geometry of snow flakes grows on dead rocks. Larger growth spills up from the land. Heavy trees arise entwined with glossy leaves we can see ourselves in.

The next morning Amy cries while cutting vegetables for Thanksgiving dinner. She is back from a yoga class where she’s run into a former student who herself now teaches art. The student has embraced her and reported that she and two friends have just been remembering what a marvelous teacher Amy is and that, separately, have used the same words to describe her.

“What did they say?”

“I didn’t ask,” Amy says. “It would have been indiscrete. She would have told me if she’d wanted me to know.”

How could she not ask?