18. Ordinary Meanings

“How can it be both the case that words and other elements in a fictional story have their ordinary meanings and yet the rules that attach to those words and other elements and determine their meanings are not complied with: how can it be the case in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ both that ‘red’ means red and yet that the rules correlating ‘red’ with red are not in force?” —John Searle

Jen thought in poems as she walked through the woods. The scene around her brought poetic words to her mind: dark recesses, slanting rays of light, the smell of pine and rotting leaves, and the ripped gash in a tree trunk, bleeding dark sap.

There was a lot to notice at first. Little mushrooms sprung up around the bases of the trees, and mice and rats darted out of her way as she walked. There were small grey birds with orange marks on their wings, and large black crows everywhere, huddling in ominous packs. She saw an actual chipmunk, an animal she had never encountered before except in cartoons, but whose tiny striped tail was unmistakable.

The road into town was long, and dark, and at first very beautiful. Jen walked on the side of the road. There were no sidewalks, and in places the pavement broke, revealing stretches of packed dirt and rocks until the concrete resumed. She didn’t hear any human noises, just the rustling of animals in the trees and bushes. She walked for what seemed like quite a while—she would guess half an hour—without being passed by a single car. I am really the only person out here, Jen thought, wishing for a moment that she were staying right in the center of town. But no, she remembered, that wasn’t possible. She hadn’t chosen this vacation; she had accepted it as-is. The lake house was part of the package.

When her legs began to get tired, she stopped to sit on a tree stump by the side of the road. Leaning forward, she narrowed her eyes and tried to guess how far she still had to walk. She thought she could see the end of the forest from here, a hopeful glistening light that appeared to be some immeasurably long distance down the road, although she knew it was only three miles total from the lake house to Main Street.

She lay her backpack heavily down on the ground beside the stump and reached inside to pull her book out. She spread it across her lap and began to read. The first chapter after the introduction began with a haiku. The sparse poem blended in well with Jen’s surroundings.

Ugly, some will say.
The toad wears its ugliness
Like a holy robe.

Without reading further, Jen closed the book and thought about the poem. Wearing ugliness like robes. She turned the words over in her mind, and they made her happy. She liked the image of the ugly toad, and even more, she liked the idea of wearing one’s ugliness with pride and dignity.

As she sat, thinking of the toad, she heard the sound of a car approaching, coming from the same direction she had just walked from. She reopened her book and pretended to be reading so the driver wouldn’t catch her staring blankly into the trees.

The car slowed as it passed her. It was an old, worn-down looking red sedan, the kind that would have been marketed as an “economy car” when it was manufactured ten or fifteen years ago.The driver rolled down his window—by hand, she noted, watching the cranking motion of his left arm corresponding with the lowering of the window. He was a middle-aged Asian man, very modest and nondescript in his appearance, except for his eyeglasses, which seemed oddly stylish and sleek.

“You need a ride?” he asked, in the confident but accented English of someone who had immigrated many years ago, but definitely as an adult. “I’m going into town.”

Jen almost wanted to say yes. Her legs were tired, the beautiful scenery had grown tedious, and she was lonely walking by herself through the endless, dark woods. Still, even in Michigan, even with the rules of her old life on indefinite hold, she couldn’t imagine getting into a car with an unknown man. Besides, the purpose of this walk was to fill time and make her feel self-reliant; accepting a ride would undermine both of these goals.

“No thanks,” she said, flipping the book over on her lap so it wouldn’t snap closed while she talked. Then, feeling bad for rejecting the friendly offer, she added, “I’m enjoying the walk.”

The man didn’t answer her. She wondered if she had offended him. Then she saw that his eyes were turned to the cover of the book lying on her lap. He squinted at it, raised one eyebrow in a look of sardonic recognition, and then looked up to meet Jen’s gaze.

“You like it?” he asked Jen.

“The book?” Jen asked, unsure of his meaning. He nodded his head very slightly. “Well, yes, so far,” she said. “I just started it.”

“Hmm,” he said. She waited for him to add some further thoughts or explanation, but he was evidently finished with their conversation. He had returned his arm to the window-crank and was rolling it up. When it was two-thirds of the way from the top, he shouted through the opening, “Have a nice walk.”

“Thanks,” said Jen, unsure if he could hear her. The car was already resuming its trip, bumping violently along the uneven ground. Jen stood up, placed the book in her bag, and began to walk again. She could see the rear of the car, jostling down the road ahead of her, until finally it merged with the spot of light in the distance and disappeared.

She wondered now if she had made a mistake by not taking the ride; it would have been a chance to meet somebody, perhaps one of her few neighbors. The road ahead of her seemed endless. She couldn’t imagine when she would ever get out of these woods. And even then, it was still a good distance into town, and then a few more miles to the Snail Plant. Had she really planned to do this walk more than once, maybe even every day? She wanted to stop, collapse, and give up at the enormity of the task that awaited her, in these woods, and once she emerged, and after that.

Persevere, she told herself. Persevere until the end. She began to time the mantra to her footsteps. Per-se-vere. To-the-end.

One step at a time, she told herself. And appreciate where you are right now. She looked down and saw something moving just ahead of her: a little striped yellow and black snake. It slid across the pavement as though moving through water and disappeared into the brush at the side of the road. Jen stopped in surprise, and watched its odd movements until it was gone. She had never seen a real snake before, at least not outside of a cage. It was really quite beautiful, its little scales each a distinct tiny diamond of shiny polished black or sunny yellow.

Slipping past my feet, the snake startles me awake, like a new idea.

Jen kept walking, reciting her perseverance mantra, and falling into a trance-like rhythm whose regularity carried her to the end of the woods in what seemed like no time at all. The trees ended decisively, a clear line demarcating forest on one side, suburban neighborhood on the other. Jen turned onto Main Street, taking comfort in the fact that she was now on the street of her destination, headed straight into town. It was sunny and warm here. She stopped for a moment to reach into her backpack and pull out her hat and sunglasses, which she had removed in the dark depths of her forest walk.

The houses here all had the same design, with the same protruding living rooms and large picture windows, the same recessed doorway, the garage alternately on the left or right side so that the driveways were paired side-by-side in twos. They reminded Jen of the new developments in LA where a lot of her friends’ parents lived. In a kind of reverse empty-nest syndrome, these middle-aged couples had decided they needed larger houses once their children had moved out, houses with libraries and offices and guest rooms and swimming pools, the kind of houses that could be bought affordably if only one were willing to move outward, away from the schools and the stores and the dance clubs and the gang violence and the crime, and into the peaceful calm of a neighborhood with nothing but houses, rows and rows of identical, tan-colored houses, and nothing but those houses to even identify that this place was a neighborhood at all. Jen had always invented excuses to avoid Thanksgivings and Christmases in those neighborhoods; she found them unbearably grim.

But something about the setting here lacked the subtle terror of those barren, characterless neighborhoods. As she walked, Jen tried to figure out what it was. The trees, she decided, noticing a particularly attractive one whose pink blossoms were just peering out of their buds, decorating the front lawn of a tastefully groomed, dark brown representative of the familiar house-frame. Almost every house had a tree or two in its front yard, different trees, with flowers in various stages of spring blooming. And there were trees between the houses, tall trees rising up in the distance, deciduous trees that seemed to be spilling out of the forest behind Jen and into the cracks and empty spaces of the civilized neighborhood.

That was what was wrong in the LA suburbs, Jen thought—no trees. She wondered where the trees had gone in those sprawling, prefabricated neighborhoods. Had they cut them down when they built the houses, or had there been no trees in that barren desert to begin with? Did they instead clear fields of cactuses and sagebrush, like those on the sides of the freeway far out of town, on the way to Palm Springs? Jen realized that she had no idea what the native ecosystem of LA looked like, how it looked back before the cookie-cutter subdivisions had been assembled, even though that couldn’t have been so long ago. How scandalous, she thought, to live in a city for over ten years without ever considering what its natural landscape was like. Here, on this tree-lined Michigan street, she could tell exactly how things had looked a hundred or two hundred years ago, because she had just emerged from that landscape, the forest which still hovered ominously around the edges of the town as though threatening to take it back if it wasn’t vigilant.

As Jen progressed down the block, she noticed that, while the underlying structure of each house was the same, they differed greatly in their outer décor and landscaping. One had faded green paint and a scrappy lawn; the next one was freshly painted and had a little Japanese garden of carefully-placed stones and mini-bridges in front. The one after that was Midwestern in its stenciled edging and faux-needlepoint welcome sign. And after that, the oddest one, a miniature Spanish villa, looking cramped in its little allotment of yard. That was something else different from a Los Angeles subdivision; here it seemed that people had been customizing these houses for years, so that they had had time to develop individual character. Jen wondered what it was that prevented the LA residents from this kind of personalization. Where there regulations against it? Or had the owners simply not been in the houses long enough? Or perhaps it had to do with the sort of people who would buy a house in a Los Angeles suburb. Maybe they enjoyed that all of their houses looked the same. Maybe the soothing homogeneity was part of the neighborhood’s appeal. Or maybe, Jen thought, architects had gotten cleverer, developing designs that would thwart all updates, sloughing off change like mud from plastic siding.

Thinking of those characterless houses, Jen was surprised to find herself comforted by something so grotesque as a Midwestern tract-house plastered in superficial stucco and Spanish tiles. What’s worse, she wondered: to search for individuality through superficial trappings—which seemed horrible—or to just accept one’s own uniformity—which also seemed horrible?

It’s the same thing as our bodies, she thought. Whatever we try to do to distinguish ourselves in our appearance or behaviors, our bodies and brains are all built just the same way.

The ant doesn’t care whether the lizard eats him or another ant.

Jen walked and thought. Soon the houses on Main Street ended, replaced by the more industrial stretch leading up to the college. Almost there, Jen told herself, feeling that she really had earned the lunch she would eat when she arrived at the co-op. There were more cars here; she could feel them whizzing by, the car-vibrations in her body reminding her of home, as did the broad sidewalks with nobody but herself walking on them. The buildings here were all small business offices and old-fashioned houses converted to small business offices. Some of the offices were connected to the university, bearing the now-familiar MNCMU logo on their signs. Other signs displayed inscrutable names like "Strategic Management Solutions" and "Technical Development Systems." Jen wondered what type of business went on in those offices. She envisioned little cubicles filled with generic people filling out forms and typing on computers.

Jen had never had a job like that, but she had always been curious about them. None of her friends had ever had a job like that either, a job working for a company. She had pretended to have a job like that a few times, in movies, sitting in a fake cubicle, which was, oddly, the same exact thing as a real cubicle except on a sound stage. Even then, she could not imagine what this job would be like in real life. What would she be typing on her computer? What would it say on the forms she filled out?

Maybe, thought Jen, I should actually get one of those jobs, just for a few months, to fill the time here. She could meet some people, find out how normal people lived, figure out what everyone was doing all day at their computers in their offices. It would be an adventure, a new kind of life. A life of dedication to a company; of routine tasks done faithfully, attentively, even lovingly; of repetition and practice. It would be a monastic life of service and self-denial. Jen felt ready for something like that, for a radical change.

Stacks of paperwork, crisp and tidy as sea-cliffs, line the pressboard desk.

With the graceful simplicity of a poem, a bird swooped down to the sidewalk in front of her and pulled a tiny dried weed from the sidewalk. The bird carried the weed up to a tree on the side of the road, where she was building a small nest. Jen admired the beauty of the nest, its walls twisted with dead brown sticks, fresh green plants with leaves and torn-up roots attached, and even some bits of tin foil and ribbon. She decided that she did not want to go work for a company after all.

She scaled and descended a small hill that she had never noticed all the times that she had driven down this road. The business offices had ended, replaced by a long stretch of tall chain-link fence, protecting a wide, green field. As she walked further, she passed a paved basketball court and behind it, an industrial-tan building. A school, she thought; and sure enough, a moment later she could see a dozen or so blondish teenagers up ahead of her, just on the other side of the fence, talking in small groups, laughing and cursing loudly.

One group of boys was huddled in a crooked little circle as she approached. Two of the boys were shooting hostile looks at each other. One had a red face, freckles, and sandy hair. The other one was even blonder, his hair a messy golden halo above his bad teenage skin. Their tawny hews matched the muddy yellow of the school buildings behind them.

The tension built between the two glaring boys until someone from the circle pushed one boy, the less-blond one, towards the other. As he crashed into the blonder boy, that boy took a fighting stance, his hands raised to face-level, fists facing loosely forward, knees bent, feet one-and-one-half shoulder-widths apart. Seeing this, less-blond boy assumed the same stance. The other students began to back up, forming a wider circle with the blond boys, like beige bookends, standing in mirror images across from one another. Other students wandered over from their own little groups, other sandy-looking boys, and some girls whose white-blond hair had evidently been bleached at home.

In the center of this growing circle, less blond boy pulled his weight to his back leg and tapped his front foot in a threatening manner. Blonder boy stared squarely into his opponent's eyes, angled his body perpendicular to him, and thrust out his left shoulder.

There was a small, silent pause as less-blond-boy bent both knees ever so slightly. Blonder boy leaned back, nervously, and lifted his hands towards his face. Less-blond-boy sprang into the air, spinning in a full 360 degree turn as his body hurled forward, flying feet-first into blonder boy’s stomach. Blonder boy's feet slipped forward and his bottom hit the ground hard. He curled his chin to his chest just in time as his upper back slammed into the concrete. Less blond boy refreshed his original stance, now looming over his victim.

The small crowd cheered and rushed in to congratulate the winner. A few of the girls were helping the blonder boy up from the ground, fretting over him, while he attempted to brush their pitying hands from his shoulders.

Jen realized that she had stopped walking and was now standing still, gaping on the sidewalk. She had not moved from the spot where she was when the fight began, about five feet away from the group of students. One of the students was staring at her through the fence. Jen resumed walking quickly, avoiding his gaze.

As Jen passed, the student, a boy with light brown hair, turned his head to follow her progress. From behind her, she could hear him say quietly, in a voice directed just at her departing ears, "Hey, aren't you..."

He didn’t finish. Jen pulled her hat down farther over her face and sped her pace into town.

Chapter 19:
http://kickoutofyou.blogspot.com/2009/02/19.html