Silent Night
When I get up to the seventh floor of the Hotel Fort Des Moines, I inhale and think, “grandma’s house.” Not my grandma, though not unlike my grandma—it’s the essence of grandparents: dark, out-of-date colors and most of all that smell, like baby powder, Neutrogena hand soap, and something else—is it aging wallpaper paste? It’s been two months since my last visit, and I’m so glad to be back.
I love it here. I love the mottled green carpeting, the luxurious down-at-heel-ness of the rooms. The way it’s hard to find the light switch and when you do there’s the floral bedspread, the wallpaper with its ticking stripe, the few spots of rust on the sliding door of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. I have waited all day to take my things out of the green backpack, hang some of them in the closet and spread the others out on the luggage rack. To take my toiletries out of the ziploc bag; they’re all in tiny little bottles (thanks, Muji); I’ve gotten so good at traveling in the last eight months, shuttling back and forth from New York City to Des Moines, and a few other fun trips but this is business. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t fun too, unloading the books and folders and power cords from my handbag, placing things in neat stacks with plenty of right angles before going downstairs for dinner. The guy at the front desk greeted me in the fashion of someone who isn’t overtaxed by human interaction, and I appreciate that after New York. He has short hair, wears tiny studs in his ears, and seems genuinely pleased to welcome me.
There’s a storm front coming across the country. My weather widget warned of a Wednesday low of zero degrees. It isn’t that cold yet but the snow is expected. I am a little frightened of the possibility of intense cold but maybe excited even more than that. I unpacked the black long johns that I can wear under my jeans if necessary, set them on the luggage rack. Walking home from the office, the lights of town and the Christmas lights look sensational in the cold. Our courtesy driver from the airport says the only sign she’s had of global warming in her own life is that when she was a girl there were municipal skating rinks at some lagoons downtown, and that the same lagoons no longer reliably freeze. Yesterday in New York felt seasonably cool but it’s been a sickeningly warm November. And so the cold is bracing, seems right. I read the paper on the airplane and I’m thinking about Copenhagen, wanting to read more, trying to hold onto a diffuse sense of hopefulness.
As I unpack the clothes I feel so relieved to have a little space and time in this room with the floral bedspread, the wooden clothes hangers. With two tiny closets and a bathroom and a microwave/coffee maker nook and a sitting room distinct from the bedroom, the space is almost enough to describe as a warren. I feel like myself again, after not feeling especially like myself all day, and it’s mostly good. I think about loneliness and/or aloneness, and my relationship with it; I think about my grandmother, and I don’t believe in ghosts but if I did, now would be a good time to; she’s been on my mind a lot lately. And she stayed here once or more, I found out, at the Hotel Fort Des Moines (other people who stayed here, according to the Hotel Trivia inkjet-printed on vellum in the information binder: Walter Mondale, Richard Nixon, Nikita Kruschev, the first George Bush, Charles Lindbergh, Woodrow Wilson). My father told me she did, after I told him about staying here the first time, and mentioned that I’d found out that some people who travel to this city on business avoid the hotel because they don’t think it’s modern enough, but it makes me feel at home. And maybe it’s the snow, or something, that has me remembering how my grandmother liked hotels, how my father says that when there was a snowstorm in Washington, where she lived, something that would make getting home from work difficult, she used to get a room for herself at the Mayflower, one of her favorite places on earth, and stay there overnight. I’m wondering what she did, what she thought, how she felt during those times. I’m thinking that if I could do it, I’d come to a hotel on purpose, too, when I needed to get some work or some thinking done. Like Bob Dylan. Like my grandmother. The grandmother I look like, the one I wish I’d gotten to know better. Sometimes I wonder whether I’m on to something with this sense of similarity between us. Maybe we would have understood each other.
The fitness center in the hotel is two treadmills and an elliptical trainer shut into a room the size of a walk-in closet. The swimming pool exists but is closed for renovations; it was closed for renovations last time I was here and something tells me that even then it hadn’t closed recently. It is hard to square the small, spare fitness center with the idea that this is a hotel that’s hosted heads of state, and trying to do so makes me think about how big the country is, how there’s more to it than my own bloated metropolis. “The breadbasket,” I thought today, as the plane descended through the clouds long enough for us to see rectangular fields outlined in light snow. Where did that phrase come from? Elementary school?
“I think you’re an East Coast girl,” said my sister, when we were talking about places to live. “Or Portland. But—”
“But what?”
“But you’re kind of—”
“Too uptight to live on the West Coast?”
“Yes!”
We had a laugh. It feels good to draw my imaginary oval smaller.
Three times ago when I came to Des Moines I had a cab driver take me to the airport on Sunday after a weekend of very few people. The last thing I was expecting here was to meet an African immigrant who had only been in town for two weeks. He had just moved here from New Orleans or Tampa or something unlikely. I forget why. He did not like Des Moines very much, yet. He asked me where I felt at home. He told me something about feeling at home, in the abstract, about the soil, about there being some soil that you want to fall down on, to touch, to mix with. It did not sound ridiculous when he said it. There was a place that had made him feel this way. It was not Des Moines and it was not the place he was originally from or the place he had just come from, either. I couldn’t bring myself to ask why, having the beliefs he had about places, he was no longer in the one whose soil had felt just right to him. Neither of us knew how to get to the address where I was going, and when we finally did arrive there, I was late. He scribbled his name and his dispatcher’s number on the back of a card and told me to call him if I ever again needed a ride in Des Moines, that we could continue our conversation about dislocation, home, and the purpose of life. I kept the card but I have not called him again yet. I have not given up thinking that I might still. Maybe we’d get it all figured out.
I wish I had all night. Des Moines has a soporific effect on me. I’m sure I’ll be in bed by 11. But there are things I want to do, pieces of work in the folders and notebooks. They’ll stay there, at their right angles, and my thoughts and words will grow less precise as the half-hours pass. I feel good, I told my friend in an Instant Message earlier in the day; there’s a storm front coming, and I have a warm hotel room in a building with a French bistro attached. I went, I had dinner. All the servers attentive yet somewhat awkward, and me too, and what is that? Is it weird to be alone, or weird to act French in the middle of a chilly, windswept continent? A man in a big party at the table behind me made an awkward joke about how he ended up married to one rather than another of the women in the party. Someone told someone it had been nice to meet them. “Thanks for coming out,” she said, as they all stood up and tossed down their napkins. There are enormous copper-colored Christmas balls on ribbons hanging from the ceiling, and on the wall, soft lights wrapped around real pine boughs. There’s 12-year-old Laphroaig scotch on the menu. Her favorite. Tastes like bandages. Maybe tomorrow night, I think, I’ll come down after working on projects, and have one for Lois. I’ll sit there and try to figure out what she used to feel.
[Thanks for the image, Seattle Stranger. I am in love with the elevators, too.]
No Comments Yet