America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  Where’s he going to university?

  Not.

  He’s not? She looked back and forth to each of her parents. But he’s so bright.

  The plates.

  I’ll tell you what, Daddy. You can send me to college if you send him, too.

  Their border collie, red and white, got up and padded away, taking with it all the shine and warmth of the room. Libett was finally gone. Claudette was a shape on the balcony. He made a fist around his daughter’s right hand, obscuring it completely, tightening it until he could feel it seizing.

  What is this? What exactly do you think this is? Are you very proud of yourself for taking this little political soapbox? It doesn’t suit you. You look like a fool. You look like someone who needs to be let out into the world and ruined some.

  He was speaking low enough that only Fay could hear him. They looked almost like lovers, his hand keeping hers, his neck locked in the angle that put his mouth near her ear. She stayed there until he released his grip, her last obedient act as a daughter.

  He found Libett still in the kitchen late that night and let her go, waiting until her head was hidden in the cupboard where she was putting things away to actually say the words. She had worked for the family nineteen years.

  FAY HAD SPENT THE WINTER writing letters they didn’t understand, eating only almonds from the dry pantry, behaving in general like a kind of rodent, her light always on, her face never at rest, her old happy industriousness changed into something leaner and unbecoming. She was at the library every day, doing what they didn’t know, walking the three miles there, insisting on it. Though she was careful about always giving her outgoing mail to the postman, Lou, whom she called by first name and with whose ailments and hobbies she was familiar—an embarrassment to James that presaged the rest—there was a day she left a letter to be sent wedged into the flag of the mailbox that sat at the head of the long, curving driveway. He removed it without fully stopping the car.

  She was posing as—what? A scholar, a journalist, somebody documenting the education of women. The note was at least the third in a series of letters, and he skimmed it looking for the thing she wanted, his wicked and resourceful daughter, which he knew was hidden in the language of her perfect cursive. Any syllabi you could enclose would be most appreciated, it said, as I assemble the compendium that will capture this unique pedagogical moment in our country, a time when the minds of girls are being nurtured as never before.

  If she could not go to college on her terms, she would make it come to her. He read the letter in the parking lot of the bank and punched his horn.

  The books listed on the papers returned by professors she sent away for in droves, and they arrived tied in cruciform and wrapped in brown paper, so many that in the rare glimpse of her room they could see the texts becoming pillars before her closet. At Easter, Claudette bought Fay a dress and hung it on her bedroom door, which was where it stayed.

  Deep in the summer, the fallen purple of the jacaranda trees already thick underfoot, the vendors on the side of the road selling sculpted mango dipped in chili powder, there was a visit from her sister. The artifice in these returns of Christine’s confused him. Arriving with souvenirs and descriptions of exotic birds, a telegram the day before if they were lucky, she never acknowledged that her departure had been something less than a choice. They did not notify anyone of Christine’s presence and were careful to keep it from the papers. Claudette accepted the brash, woodsy perfumes Christine brought in boxes of taffeta and wore them, for the few days her older daughter was back, to the table.

  He had seen what would happen before it did, woke up the third morning she was there and heard it in how they laughed, a sound that had too many parts and was everywhere in the house whose design he had so carefully overseen, spilling down the tile of the arcaded covered porches, from the top of the rounded stairwell, where they sat with Fay’s bare feet threaded between her sister’s. By the fountain in the rear courtyard at midnight, he caught them before an audience of lilac bushes, tossing a log of ham like it was a football. She’s going to leave with her sister, he told Claudette, removing his cuff links from a velvet drawer in their bureau. His wife, a mannequin in the half hour before she had her coffee, sitting up against four tasseled pillows in the canopied bed, did not or would not hear him.

  THE WEEK BEFORE HE AND Claudette left, a house where they had lived thirty-odd years, a part of the state where their lives were written up in the society pages, he pinched the bridge of his nose and whispered at the woman they’d finally hired to pack up Fay’s room. Was there a thought in your mind, he said.

  She had put the church dresses with the ski jackets and summer camp pinafores, and there was no way, when his daughter needed something, she would be able to find it.

  8.

  They lasted two and a half years, existing to each other only on Tuesdays they made outings, hikes that she took in old oversized boots of Charlie’s until he brought her a new pair, mail-ordered to his office, the length of her feet guessed perfectly by how he remembered them on his dash. She told him what she was reading, what it made her think and feel, and he gave her the names of things. Cirrus, ponderosa, osprey. He was working on a paper, alternatives to parachutes, a frame not unlike a bicycle. Once she mentioned that she loved him and he nodded as one does at a child who has made an understandable mistake.

  In the Angeles National Forest they ate sandwiches she’d made up high on granite ridges, or down in view of the pool of a waterfall, everything they could see coated in moss that ranged from olive to sylvan, everything they could touch changed by water. As though his vision could cut through the covering of green to the flat, dry places where he might press her down and unbutton her ill-fitting clothing, he had a strong sense of where to deviate from the trail. He had been a Boy Scout, he never let her forget, and seemed almost to wish for the minor disaster that he might cope with in a programmatic way. When she took a deep, crooked step into a sudden concavity in their path and cried out a little, he insisted on a series of tests that would diagnose any sprain or fracture. It was almost, she thought, like he wanted to see her compromised, but then she ignored it, that beginning of hatred, banished it.

  There was a line from a poem she wanted to understand, and on a day her life felt possible she repeated it aloud as they passed from shade to sun. “‘Except for us the total past felt nothing when destroyed.’” “Total nonsense,” he said, laughing. “I wouldn’t buy a used bike from your friend Wallace Stevens.” Their infatuation was not with what they made together but an astonishment at their differences, how far each had to travel even to reach the other’s thinking. On the drive back he was silent except to point out a circling eagle. There was no one on the road, serpentine curves dictated by mountains, and he was already, she refused to see, halfway gone.

  IN THEIR SECOND NOVEMBER SHE violated their terms, unspoken rules he’d made her suss out like the inclinations of an animal, where not to scratch or press. Fay had called him at home, and he was punishing her, and she was not going to be punished. It was remarkable how easy it was to decide. It made her whistle, songs she’d known long before him, in the shower and out riding Lloyd, bright, vicious.

  Her crime had transpired in thirty seconds, less. A slow shift, few orders of liquor, no one on the piano, everything already wiped down twice. She was in a mood, or a mood was in her. It was a change other people could notice. Her sentences were faster, or they took three ways to the same point, and her usual six o’clock gin, no ice, no tonic, had no effect. There was a story she wanted to tell him, a pilot who had used the word gargoyle when he meant argyle. You wouldn’t believe her in this gargoyle sweater, he had said. It was as if the alcohol couldn’t find purchase in the channels of her body. She was more interested in mirrors than usual, the pocket of hip visible at the crook of her overalls. When her mind felt sharpest was when she most wanted it obliterated: the thoughts rendered null by his body behind her, the mouth that would speak them
stuffed with a pillow.

  She called him at home.

  The sense she had, the sense he’d given her, was that his wife did not exist, and so she had actually not considered the possibility of her voice, her good evening. Somehow she asked for him, whether he was in. Immediately she wanted to sever the connection to that room where his wife stood—she imagined it as yellow, she imagined a wedding ring on a dish-soaped finger—and never think of it again. The babel of the bar behind her, she followed the first idea that came to her and didn’t wait for an answer. Are you happy with the overall condition of your appliances, she had said, and then she hung up.

  He had not come in on her day off, no call since then, no letter taped to her window predawn that began Dear Bess Rainy or To Whom It May Concern, Pertaining to the Matter of the Hole in Your Bucket. Charlie took her shift when Fay asked, the first request of this kind, and slid the car keys down the bar. “All I require is that you don’t die,” she said. “If you die, I’ll kill you.” Fay kissed her goodbye on the mouth and slid the metal loop onto her ring finger.

  She would not be punished; his absence was not that if she failed to note it. Los Angeles appeared through the windshield sooner than it should have, buildings with rounded corners of milky glass windows, neon arrows that curved, an hour and fifteen flat. She’d gone ninety most of the way, smoking her sister’s Luckies.

  Under an eight-foot-wide donut mounted on a twenty-foot pole she parked, the truck at a sharp angle in the painted lines, its wheels still fixed in a turn. Nobody knows where I am, she thought, walking into the diner, and it was a sharp, chamfered kind of thrill. After two cups of coffee she switched to liquor. She was wearing one of two dresses she owned, sleeveless dark green linen with buttons down the middle and a tie belt she knotted.

  He looked at her first but she returned it three times over.

  His name was Raymond and he was closer to her age, not handsome or charming but clearly observant of people who were, their habits and gifts, and he came over when she smiled. A comb in his back pocket, Korea tags down his chest, dark blue felt jacket buttoned once at the neck. She could smell the starch coming off his shirt and it was a taste in her mouth alongside the rye. Removing his pocketknife was a nervous habit and he showed her all the different parts, describing the benefits of a blade’s shape, testing the point on his index finger. She had little to say, only his face to watch. He suggested his apartment, and on this point she remained noncommittal.

  “I’d love to see your car,” she said.

  But the quickness of her feeling, the competing voices of the coffee and whiskey, had caught up with her, and the whole time in his front seat she felt like her mouth was a loan, a borrowed thing whose limits and quirks she didn’t know yet. Even as it occurred she was forgetting it, the hairy knees, the moth-eaten military blanket, the eight-ball gearshift in her spine. She cried once but covered it with a sound that meant the opposite.

  It was the first time someone put a hand on her throat, and also the last. “I thought I was paying,” he explained after. “I apologize,” she said, buttoning her dress, not knowing for what. His car was out of the lot before hers was unlocked.

  9.

  Vincent’s interest in the program had not begun as a little dream, but occurred to him like an injury does, sudden, impossible to ignore.

  It was a quarter after ten on a morning that had begun at four thirty, and he edged an X-15 with a violent jerk onto a patch of sand, the voices in his ear going whoa-ho and joking again.

  —I’m not saying you have to act like a ballerina, Kahn, but maybe not like a toasted hillbilly throwing a punch, either.

  They tended to treat his stoicism like an invitation, the fact that he would almost never respond an encouragement to continue.

  He climbed out, squinting, waiting for the truck that would take him back to the base, listening as the life went from the engine. He’d lost his follow plane, probably on purpose. The pinch of morning was gone from the weather already, and he was forty miles south of where he had meant to land. He was tired of Edwards, of the broad-backed Air Force monkeys who hated him and the pencil he carried, of the commute back up the mountains to his listless wife, and he was going to apply to become an astronaut, a title that was sweet on the tongue of the American public before they even knew what it would become. The organization that employed him had quietly changed its acronym, subbing an S for a C, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics transmuted into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and he was going to follow it up the rest of his life.

  They radioed to say there was a delay in retrieving him, a flat on the way out, and he said no problem and there wasn’t one. He wasn’t eager to explain why he’d overshot by so much, why he’d failed to lower the nose when it was crucial that he do so, where his mind had been when he’d roared past the landing site at two thousand miles an hour.

  Elise had been stunned into grief when she lost the baby, it was true, but it wasn’t as though before that they were happy, spending the mornings in bed making long plans, taking road trips documented in Kodachrome. They had never hosted a dinner party and told stories in unison, the ends of his sentences courting the beginnings of hers. She had become pregnant on one of the few times they had come together in that way, and it was a shock, some cosmic slap on the wrist that said there were consequences for feigning love. They had begun to curate that waiting life together, pinky-sized yellow socks and wooden rattles, and then it was gone, then it was a great deal of blood, in the bathroom of the rented house, that he scrubbed and bleached. The smell of ammonia became a taste in his mouth, then a clawed pain at his temples.

  It was not long after that the offer from the High-Speed Flight Station at Edwards had come, and he had sold it to her as a new start. The word California had seemed to reach her, if briefly, seemed to make a tender swipe at the lines around her mouth. He could already imagine how she would age, which tics of despair would become permanent. She didn’t sleep or smile enough, and that was going to come through.

  The whole long state was a mistake, he thought now, for them and in general. Elise was not the type of person who did well when left with her own head, not a girl who found peace in the bigness of the natural world. She needed a parked row of polished cars on the main drag, a town where people watched her run errands, friends who dropped by to remind her of who she was. An annotated calendar, a telephone that woke you ringing.

  He considered this as he waited, walking the periphery of the plane, surveying the damage one more time. It would be weeks before it flew again. In truth he had already come so far from the first machines he loved, the propellers, a comprehensive taxonomy of jerks and shudders whose meaning he knew. The X-15s hardly gave a shiver. Through the windshield you couldn’t see any part of the machine, only sky, as though the goal were to make a pilot forget that the thing he flew, by extension himself inside, was separate from it at all.

  By the time the truck pulled up his decision was made, and in his head he was already making the necessary phone calls and coughing for the doctor during one of many examinations and packing, again, the mementos he brought with him everywhere. A photo of his grandmother, a young wife in a new country. Postcards from Ernie, who had become a widower and set out to camp in all fifty states. A violet sock that belonged to the baby they didn’t have. It had somehow evaded the box of donations he’d put together, and it was a thing he hated and needed to keep, its precious, evil irrelevance.

  He thought of the two of them as though he’d known them in different times of his life, Fay and Elise. To meet Fay he arrived with a head full of facts and anecdotes, with plans for an ideal viewing of the eclipse or a rock-polishing kit for the limestone and citrine they’d found hiking. To come home to his wife was to drop into another kind of attention, passive, absolute. In the trunk by their bed were the wool blankets he had folded, in the kitchen window the lemon jam he’d jarred. He solved, he arranged, he repaired.

  Som
etimes he believed he had become better with Elise for the hours he spent with Fay. It was as though the exuberance he gave to Fay—the pressure he put on the gas pedal to see the thrill on her face, the sweat-dampened time he spent licking her and trying to break her porcelain look—abraded him of his oldest wish, a life that was always becoming bigger. He came home softer, carved out of ardor. For the first time in their marriage, he was the man his wife needed. She built a trellis and he brought her grapes as she painted it, telling her it was beautiful, touching the back of her neck.

  He knew it was not a long-term solution, that if he made the cut for the next class of astronauts, extrication would be delicate. The break with Fay would have to be firm and certain: he would do it just before he left.

  Vincent thought he could pull it off, two women, for the little bit longer that was required, and in the truck back to the base that day the resolution of it made him cheerful, amenable to the banter of his escort. As they pulled up he slapped the exterior door.

  It was not the first time he had underestimated Elise, what she could gather from small changes in him, where she was driving at that moment in her car.

  10.

  He had never described his wife, but Fay knew who Elise was the moment she folded her hands on the bar. Something essential changed about a person, Fay thought, when they belonged fully to someone else, as particular as a color. A certain softness in the shoulders, a diminished curiosity that came from no longer performing for potential futures. She was disgusted by it, she was envious.

  It was early on in the evening, the bar still partially lit by sliding sun, and though two men had recognized Elise from her brief residency on the base and tipped their chins and raised spread hands, her eyes stayed ahead. She was a person without periphery.

  Elise was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, even the most beautiful animal, shaming the cougars Fay had caught flashes of in the mountains, though the green eyes recalled them. Her posture sharpening, she was immune to the piano becoming louder, the report of shot glasses slamming the bar in unison.