Chronicles of a Radical Hag (with Recipes) Read online

  Chronicles of a Radical Hag

  (with Recipes)

  Also by Lorna Landvik published by the University of Minnesota Press

  Best to Laugh

  Mayor of the Universe

  Once in a Blue Moon Lodge

  Chronicles of a Radical Hag (with Recipes)

  A Novel

  Lorna Landvik

  University of Minnesota Press

  Minneapolis | London

  Copyright 2019 by Lorna Landvik

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published by the University of Minnesota Press

  111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290

  Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520

  http://www.upress.umn.edu

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Landvik, Lorna, author.

  Title: Chronicles of a radical hag (with recipes) : a novel / Lorna Landvik.

  Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2019] | Identifiers: | LCCN 2018026646 (e-book) | ISBN 978-1-4529-5961-0 (e-book)

  Classification: LCC PS3562.A4835 (e-book) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024155

  The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

  To all dreamers and doers

  Contents

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Part Two

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Part Three

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  Part Four

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Part One

  1

  July 15, 2016

  Minus what that vicious lying mirror tells me, and the knees that crackle like kindling every time I take the stairs, and the ear canals that have muddied with silt of late, eighty-one feels an awful lot like twenty-nine. Okay, maybe fifty-three.

  “You don’t stop laughing when you grow old,” George Bernard Shaw is credited with saying. “You grow old when you stop laughing.”

  If I liked those cutesy pillows cross-stitched with pithy sayings, I’d cross-stitch what Mr. Shaw said on one, but I don’t, so I won’t. It’s not as if I’ll forget something I agree with so completely; really, I believe laughter is like collagen for the soul. I myself try to have a good laugh at least once a day, although in these trying times we’re living through, I wish there were a product, a “laffative” of sorts, I could take to ensure mirthful regularity.

  Having survived the hoopla of last year’s surprise party, I chose a quieter celebration yesterday with my friend Lois, one that included a drive by the construction site of the new downtown library (bigger than the old one by 3,000 square feet!) followed by dinner at Zig’s Supper Club, even though Lois wanted to go to that big chain restaurant out on the highway because they have two-for-one margaritas on birthdays.

  “They can afford to do that,” I told her, “because they pay their workers so poorly.”

  Lois rolls her eyes as a default expression in response to much of what I say, but honestly, if I weren’t around acting as her social conscience, she would always choose a free drink for herself over fair wages for the bartender pouring it.

  My grand-niece Angela—she’s the adventurer who’s living in Paris and rides a little scooter that takes her along the Seine to her Pilates studio—sent me a lovely card, whose message was written in French because, well, she’s in France.

  “Joyeux Anniversaire!” are the words in the cat’s thought bubble, and when you open the card, “le chat” is drinking champagne with a group of mice, one of whom (according to Angela’s handwritten translation) is saying to another, “Drink up. Tomorrow the party’s over and it’s back to the same old cat and mouse game.”

  It’s funny in that esoteric French way, je suppose.

  Our server, guaranteeing himself a big tip, asked me to what I attributed my youthful appearance. Not wanting to give him a glib answer like Oil of Olay or “a diet of younger men,” I expounded on the restorative power of humor.

  “And curiosity,” Lois said when I finally took a break to attend to my gin gimlet. “Haze here is the most curious person I know.”

  She was treating me to dinner, but this pronouncement was a little gift itself.

  “Thank you, Lois,” I said, and to the server I added, “I just want to know more.”

  More about him (he was studying environmental science at Bemidji State and was going to spend half of his senior year on the Galápagos Islands!); more about the couple whose heated argument about her out-of-control shopping and his inattention rose from their corner table like a storm cloud; more about Lois’s date with her chiropractor’s father, and whether she’ll now be getting free adjustments.

  As a gangly kid, I’d position myself on my sister Vivienne’s bed, my finger idly tracing the patterns of the chenille bedspread while she sat at her desk writing love letters to her beau overseas. Before putting pen to paper, she always spritzed the thin airmail stationery with Jungle Gardenia perfume.

  “It brings me close to him,” she would say. “Harold can hold the paper to his nose and pretend he’s holding me.”

  How did she know how to do something like that, I’d wonder, to send along with her words a little bit of herself to her boyfriend dodging torpedoes in the Pacific?

  Vivienne’s been gone for over ten years now, and my visits to Harold are getting harder and harder as he falls backward into that black hole of Alzheimer’s, but I’m always heartened to see on his bedside table, along with the family Bible he can no longer read, a half-empty bottle of his wife’s Jungle Gardenia.

  Oh, pooh. This was supposed to be a celebratory column, and here I am doing what I’ve promised I won’t do in my dotage—which is not to be in any kind of dotage!

  July 18, 2016

  Dear Readers:

  It is with great sadness that we here at the Granite Creek Gazette announce that Haze Evans suffered a massive stroke on Saturday evening, shortly after viewing a production of Guys and Dolls at the newly refurbished Lakeside Playhouse. After the show, she complained of a headache to friends but, typical of her generous spirit, made a point of assuring them it had nothing to with the actors’ performance.

  On the car ride home she slumped forward in her seat and was driven immediately to the hospital, thankfully just two blocks away.

  Haze was hired by my grandfather (“one of the smartest moves I ever made,” he told me more than once) and wrote her first column in 1964. I can’t count how many people have told me her columns are their favorite part of the Gazette or how they consider her a trusted friend. She still receives the most mail, snail and electronic.

  Haze has done much for our community, and it is our fervent hope that she will soon recuperate and continue to do more. We’ll keep you posted.

  Sincerely,

  Susan McGrath

  Publisher

  “THE PHONE’S BEEN RINGING OFF THE HOOK,” says Shelly Clausen, the newspaper’s recept
ionist, her voice weary, as if she’d been toting barges and lifting bales instead of punching buttons and taking calls.

  “I figured it would be,” says Susan. “There’s no one people care more about at this paper than Haze.”

  “It’s beyond me,” mutters Shelly, jabbing a lit-up square on the phone console and barking, “Granite Creek Gazette.”

  In the hallway, the publisher accepts a hug from Mitch Norton, the managing editor, who considers it part of his job description to always be the first one in the office.

  “As you can hear, Smiley’s got her work cut out for her,” says Mitch, who has a host of nicknames for the dour receptionist.

  The day before, just past dawn, he had been arranging his fishing lures in his tackle box, preparing for a sweet Sunday morning in his boat (he jokes that while his wife, Lucy, is a devoted member of St. John’s by the Lake, he prefers to worship on the lake), when Susan called him with the news of Haze. Shifting into management mode, Mitch appeared at the hospital twenty minutes later, armed with a thermos of coffee.

  “By the way,” he says now, “Lucy and her garden club are wondering if they should send flowers, or would Haze even be aware of them?”

  Susan shrugs, wincing as the buckled strap of her heavy bag digs into her shoulder.

  “I don’t think you can go wrong with flowers.”

  In her office, she shuts the door and sags against it, the energy she had summoned to get herself out of bed and to work used up. Staggering to her desk like a marathoner nearing the finish line, she collapses on the old office chair that had belonged to her grandfather. Its black leather is so worn and cracked that it’s pale gray at pressure points, and a brocade throw pillow gives her the cushion its deflated seat cannot.

  It’s been a long weekend of snarly telephone conversations with a husband whose title may soon include “ex,” of sullen texts from one teenaged son and an e-mail request for money from the other, with a hospital vigil and conferences with doctors, with the shock that she might lose not just the newspaper’s institution but her dear friend Haze.

  Even though it’s squeaky, the chair is made so well that it still tilts back easily, and Susan rests her head in the basket of her entwined fingers and perches her crossed ankles on the desktop (her assistant, Caroline, once rightly noted that few women are able to relax in that classic executive pose, mainly because too few women are executives). The position, however, is not helping to generate any deep thinking; her thoughts are like fleas, jumping directionless, with no intention but to irritate. She is so rattled that in response to the short knock on the door, she nearly yelps.

  “Susan,” says Caroline Abramson, entering her office. “OMG. Are you all right?”

  The chair squeaks as Susan flexes herself into a fully upright position.

  “From the tone of your voice,” she says to her assistant, who despite her occasional abbreviated text talk, is smart and canny and, best of all, helpful, “I gather you think I don’t look so hot?”

  “Forget hot—you look terrible.” Caroline sits down and opens her iPad. “So what do you need?”

  “Whoo. That’s a loaded question.”

  Caroline levels a gaze at her. For being so young (twenty-six), she’s a master at leveling gazes.

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” she says. “First of all, any new news about Haze?”

  Susan shakes her head. “I’m going to stop by the hospital after work. Unless I hear something before.” She grimaces, not liking the implication of the word something.

  “I’ll go with you,” says Caroline.

  Bowing her head, Susan presses a thumb and forefinger against the rise of tears in her eyes. For the past thirty-six hours, she has been on the verge of tears, has passed the verge of tears, but as yet has not had the full-bodied cry fest into which her body and soul are ready to surrender. It would be so easy to give into it now, but there is too much to work to do.

  Lifting her head slowly—it feels as if her skull were made of lead—she settles her filmy gaze at her assistant, whose warm and questioning face almost triggers a sob, but instead, Susan clenches everything that needs to be clenched and says, “I just can’t believe it.”

  Caroline’s head bobs in a nod. She too feels like crying but understands that it would be engaging in an unending game of tag—“You’re it!” “No, you’re it!”—that her boss does not want to play.

  “So,” she says, “you last saw her at Happy Tea. She was fine there?”

  Susan’s smile surprises herself. It’s an expression that hasn’t been in frequent rotation lately.

  “When wasn’t Haze fine?”

  IN THE TUMULT OF THE LATE 1960S, the atmosphere in the newspaper office had become so rancorous (Betsy Colvin, the features editor, and Roger Czielski, the metro editor, regularly exchanging names like “Fascist” and “Bleeding Heart Ignoramus”) that Haze had initiated in the conference room a Friday afternoon “Happy Tea,” whereby staffers were encouraged to enjoy cheese and crackers, a selection of teas Haze brewed up in the office kitchen (by the third week, Bill McGrath had contributed two bottles of brandy, and Ed Dyson, the sports editor, had found an enthusiastic audience for the elderberry wine he made in his basement) as well as civil, and only civil, conversation.

  “I don’t mind debate,” Haze had written in her interoffice memo, “but I do mind not giving each other simple courtesy.”

  It had been a big hit and went on for several months in the conference room until the cleaning crew complained that it was getting harder and harder to get the wine stains out of the carpet, and a suggestion was made that Happy Tea transfer to the nearby Sundown Tap.

  Just as her mother, Jules, the original proprietor, had done, Chris Johnston still brewed a pot of nearly superfluous tea for the newspaper group who gathered every Friday after work, and it was she who greeted Susan and Haze at the Happy Tea just three days ago.

  “Is this it?” she asked as the women settled into the center of the big, red semicircle booth. “Where’s Mitch? Dale? Caro—”

  “Seems everyone else has other plans,” said Susan.

  “Which means more scintillating conversations for us,” said Haze. “As well as appetizers—Chris, why don’t we start out with the CheeZee Bites—and by the way, I love the way you’ve done your hair. You look just like that woman in the insurance commercial.”

  Susan was once again amazed at the older woman’s ability to give the perfect compliment. With her new updo, Chris did look like the woman in the ubiquitous ads, and Chris blushed, obviously pleased with the comparison, enough so that she announced the CheeZee Bites were “on the house.” But a free appetizer was superseded by what Susan considered the real highlight: an hour of Haze all to herself.

  As always, the columnist asked about Susan’s boys.

  “Jack’s been pretty good about e-mailing,” Susan said of her eighteen-year-old, who’d just left to spend his “gap” year traveling abroad. “He’s only been gone a week, but I’ve heard from him four times already. Nice long e-mails too. He’s loving London. He says he’s got the “tube system” down pat.”

  “And Sam?” Haze asked, to which Susan shrugged.

  “Honestly, Haze, he’s either mad or sullen or eating a whole quart of ice cream.”

  “Well, he is a teenaged boy.”

  “He’s taking Phil’s and my breakup a lot harder than Jack is,” she said and sighed before shifting the conversation to safer territory, to gossip about co-workers and mutual acquaintances: did Haze know, for instance, that Stanley Walpole, the bank president, had gone down to Minneapolis for a hair transplant and a tummy tuck?

  “A tummy tuck! I didn’t know men got tummy tucks.”

  “I read somewhere that men are having more plastic surgery than women,” said Susan, pouring into her cup of tea a dribble of bourbon from the shot glass Chris had delivered. “Things like calf and bicep implants. No matter how old the man, he still wants to show off his muscles.”


  “No matter how old the woman,” said Haze, “she still wants to show off her sex appeal. That’s why I got my boob job when I turned seventy-five.”

  They laughed (the only time Haze subjected her body to a plastic surgeon’s knife was to remove a mole on her shoulder), and Susan confessed that it was her goal to age as well as Haze.

  “Age,” said Haze. “I hate when that word’s used as a verb. People don’t describe kindergarteners as ‘aging,’ and yet we all are, I suppose, from the moment we’re born.”

  When the Sundown Tap’s most popular appetizer was delivered, conversation became secondary as they attacked the worth-every-calorie deep-fried cheese curds.

  “Oof,” said Haze, finally sitting back in the booth and holding her hands up in surrender. “Do not let me touch another one of those.”

  Susan pushed to the table’s edge the small platter, whose two remaining CheeZee Bites slumped in sloughs of grease. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

  “Speaking of ‘aging,’” said Haze, “did I ever tell you your grandfather wanted me to go into syndication?”

  Susan in fact had heard this story but was always delighted to hear Haze’s reminiscences about the newspaper—especially ones that had to do with her grandfather. She said, “Tell me more.”

  “He sent samples of my columns to a couple syndicates,” said Haze. “One said, ‘Too regional and way too confessional,’ and another said, ‘Is she trying to be Erma Bombeck or H. L. Mencken?’

  “Frankly, I was glad, and told Bill I didn’t want him to query any others because I thought syndication would have changed the way I wrote. I never wanted to sit down at the typewriter and worry about things like subscription demographics or tailoring my columns to this audience or that audience. I just wanted to write what I wanted to write.”

  “Okay,” said Susan, “but just for clarity’s sake, how does ‘aging’ fit into the topic of syndication?”

  “Well, syndication would have given me more power, and power is one of the many things you lose when you get old.” After a big sigh, Haze shook her head. “I guess I’ve just got the birthday blues. I’d like to think I’m not getting older, that I’m getting better—but am I? It’s hard to think so when the world has such fixed opinions about older women.”