Tales of the Banana Belt

We came through the channel under power, following the pelicans on their way to wherever it is they spend the night. Off the point, I shut down the motor, and Alison put the anchor over the bow. She waited for it to hold. Then she went below and came up with a Pepsi and a beer. She handed the beer to me. She sat on the halfdeck. She crossed her legs.

"So, she was before my mom?" Alison asked me.

"Long before."

"Was she before Jessica?"

"Before Jessica."

"Who was she?" Alison asked.

"Questions, questions," I said.

"Who was she?"

"I could tell you that," I said. "But then I'd have to kill you."

"Who was she?

"You won't like it."

"Come on," said Alison. Then, "Uh-oh, wait a minute," she said. "Vermont. This is going to be a Vermont thing again, isn't it? She was a Vermont girl?"

"Not exactly," I said.

"But it's a Vermont thing, anyway, isn't it?"

"You bet," I said.

"I knew it," said Alison.

The Banana Belt

Many years ago, I found myself living alone in a teepee in the Banana Belt of Vermont. At the time, that kind of dwelling was, not commonplace in the district, perhaps, but by no means unique. There were people, mostly young, living in teepees all up and down the state. But most of them were in couples or larger sets, and most of them probably thought it was a good idea to be living in a teepee. I was on my own, as I have said, and I would have been just as glad of a house or even a trailer, but neither was on offer.

The Banana Belt: name given in fun by the rest of Vermont to the state's southernmost latitudes—the region, roughly, between Bennington and Brattleboro. A neglected section far from the political gravitation of the state capital, far from the state's center of population, far from the Alpine beauty of the big ski country to the north and from the open, agrarian landscape of the Lake Champlain valley to the west—a section to be driven through on your way to someplace else, a section exhibiting, it was suggested, a kind of inferior, adulterated Vermontism that authorized the region's dismissal as little more than an outholding of Massachusetts, two of whose northern counties the Banana Belt in fact adjoined.

I had come to the Banana Belt in the spring with a girl, a cello player from Juilliard. Her family had a place in Vermont, it seemed, a place she longed for. We had things carefully planned: we were going to live in her family's house, make love, bake bread. I was going to do—something—and she was, I guess, going to play her cello among the green hills.

We arrived on April Fools' Day to find the green hills under two feet of snow. Other things were also not as expected. By June the cello player had had a better offer, and since the house was hers, I stood in need of a place to live. Hence the teepee, which was just on the other side of the hill and, it happened, belonged to an uncle of the cellist.

The teepee was, in that setting, an anomaly. It was after the plains Indian mode, a ten-foot cone of stout poles swathed in canvas and having as its base a circle of about twelve-foot diameter—the kind of structure that might have given shelter to Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. It had been one of several teepees built in an ex-cow pasture by students at a small liberal arts college in the neighborhood and occupied off and on in good weather over a number of years. But the college went out of business, the students went away, and the teepees were dismantled or burned, all but one. When I first looked over the place with a view to renting, there was a family of skunks living in it in a burrow under the floor...