The Ninepatch Variation

Growing up in a small town,

bigness is where important things happen, meaning somewhere else. Movies are big—big heads, big bodies, grand gestures, finer nuances. Elizabeth Wyndham Pease, Libby's mother—Charley’s too, though she has less enthusiasm for her younger child—with her fuzzy duckling children takes in the matinees at the Willipaq Cinema where, eight rows past the loge, William Powell as The Thin Man speaks directly to young Libby Pease, aged six. William Powell debonairly gestures, a long-stemmed martini glass casually depending from his sensitive artist's fingers, never, never spilling a drop.

“Dry, dammit, dry dry dry. Nora my delirious cupcake, you are the most beautiful, charming, cosmopolitan woman in the world, the mother of my children-to-be and I love you passionately and as often as possible we can escape the servants; but in spite of all this my passion flower, my night-blooming cirrus, my succulent eucalypt of desire, why, why, why, are you the only woman in the so called civilized world who knows how to make a dry martini? It is not enough to tell Daisy the correct proportions; these things require the hand of the artist, finesse. Make a full silver shaker for us yourself for I feel a case coming on...”

The angle at which Libby the child holds her head is a posture of awe. The angle allows her jaw to gape unattended, but the theater is dark and after all, she is there to see the stars not they her. Libby the adult reflects on this. All great art was meant to be up there—up there with William Powell and Myrna Loy—not locked up in a fusty Vatican basement. The Church of Rome hoards art; Libby has heard this. Art is splendid and not for hiding in a crypt. Not as lying at her feet now in the form of a shabby, failed nine-patch. The Ohio Star was the nine-patch all beginners did.

It is Libby’s habit to watch the ongoing parade of Willipaq, Maine from her parlor windows. When Libby is six, peering on tiptoe for the iceman with his horse, her chin barely reaches the sill. The iceman feeds his horse what Libby figures are oats from a nosebag attached with leather loops behind the horse’s ears. The horse climbs the hill to the Pease house by memory. Libby runs to the door past the hall coat rack with the peg reserved for her mother’s net shopping bag. She waits as she will later wait for her cat’s announcement of self. There is no cat here today—this is the iceman’s door. Libby the child holds the door for Vern Lightfoot and his billowing aura of horse and man smells, the huge square cake tight in his tongs high up on his stained shoulder apron.

“Iceman.” Big booted feet clump up the wooden steps. A whinny from the street. What was that horse’s name? What was the name on the can of peas with the pixie and his mirrors?

Libby remembers her girlhood as a litany of lost visitors. First the iceman stops his deliveries, then the coal truck stops coming to the Pease house. Profitt Pease, Libby’s father, owns a modest woodlot where he cuts and splits the winter wood. Her father puts in an oil tank and then there is a new visitor, the oil man come to fill it.