America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  At first it seemed like a mistake to me that the green of that long table in the caucus room was the same color as the felt you’d find in a pool hall. I remember saying so, what is this, the national billiards tournament, an attempt at humor with my new family. Sam Ervin’s drawl was the soundtrack of those months, something that I left on in my bedroom on the portable color set they’d surprised me with, and maybe you remember how you could hear it change. In the beginning the slowness of his speech was in the service of jokes, just a country lawyer he said so often in the beginning, but then the protracted way he talked became about something else. He stopped mentioning North Carolina, a saying they had there. He started speaking only about that room, their reasons for being in it.

  I was amazed by how living that room seemed, how there was always a cigar smoldering in an ashtray, or a wife of one of the witnesses adjusting her earrings where they kissed her fat chignon, or a photographer ducking to tie his shoe before he set up a shot. There was food and water and even, in the way people dressed—formality ratcheted down for the sake of the heat—weather: the top aides to the president with their summer buzz cuts and no suit jacket to speak of. I was twelve, about to be thirteen, and the hearings made me happy, even giddy, I guess because they made the country seem less like an oath and more like a conversation, one that could go dark or light or turn around and surprise you. On either side of me, Claudette and James looked forward to the clarification that would put the unfounded rumors to rest, and in the beginning they watched with the patient faces of people watching a child solve a simple equation, hiding what they knew well to allow him his moment of understanding. They were bored as they waited out the spectacle.

  There was the map of the complex that the detective touched with a pointer. There was the phone with its organs exposed, McCord demonstrating, with his fingers light on the wires, how to implant a bug.

  By the end of the first month, the solution had not come, and we stopped watching together. James would shut off my television if he passed by my room and I wasn’t in it, and the minute I returned I would snap it back on. The faces of the witnesses had fallen into two camps by then, roughly along age lines, under and over forty, people who believed their life might change and those who refused to. There were the younger men, responding to the senator’s questions in complete answers, aware of the left they had taken a while back and pleading with it, looking damp in a way that seemed permanent. They had been, just months before, men who had walked up their lives like a staircase, an easy and inevitable ascent, but now they were locked out. When they reached for their water it sometimes made me want to cry, because you could see it was the most relief they’d gotten from their rotten selves, the privacy of the moment formed by the glass and their tongue.

  These were the witnesses I had a harder time watching, but I think it was the older men that got to James. I could hear from my bedroom the involuntary noises he made, sounds that were low and digestive. The facts that had gathered were rendering them and their way of thinking obsolete, and they wouldn’t see it. What did the president know, and when did he know it? That Baker’s question was so simple, and that their rejoinders were so acrobatic, so semantically complicated, was all anyone really needed to understand—if they hadn’t already—that there would be no recovery. But they were close enough to dying, the attorney general and the chief of staff, their noses red and ruined enough, that they would not budge, contrition a way of living they had no interest in. They already seemed like things in a museum, taxidermied to teach a lesson about foolishness.

  Even after James had lost hope, which I knew by the fact he had stopped watching entirely and had started visiting the kitchen in the middle of the night, hoping hunger had been what woke him up and not plain old loss and fury, I held out some on his behalf, or the parts of the child that persisted in me did. This was a dull counterfeeling to the awe I had for that room and the men in it, who had taken apart corruption just by speaking sensibly and at length. Still, for his sake, a part of me wanted some astonishing, improbable reversal, a joint revelation from the members of the Committee to Re-elect the President that would return my grandfather to the safety of his own thinking. How moved he had been, in the months after the re-inauguration, in the landslide against McGovern, a happy tear in his eye more than once over the morning paper in the cornflower-blue kitchen where the windows were never open. He had behaved like someone who, after being long deprived of people who knew him, walked into a room full of them. “The silent majority” was a phrase he took from the president’s mouth and kept with him, something he would say with an index raised, the three words representative of a long argument about the resistance that had ravaged the country for a decade and the sensible citizenry who’d had enough. But the neutrality of Cambodia, I would say, for instance, and he would shrug and lift a finger and say, The silent majority, and smile in the way that is the same as a closed door. I forgave him or tried, understanding his choice had been made less because of any speeches or headlines than because my mother had kept him from sleeping. He needed to believe the revolution that had taken his daughter was a corroborated evil, thought of that way by most reasonable men. The other answer was untenable, an understanding that would have undone him in the few years he had left.

  James stopped watching around the time that the eighteen minutes of tape showed up missing and the president’s secretary tried and failed to shoulder the blame. That photo on the cover of Newsweek was a punch line for all of it, her body contorted to reenact an impossible accident, a foot on a pedal beneath her desk and a hand on a red button on a telephone three feet away and her middle-aged torso trapped in a dress that could barely accommodate the gymnastic twist. Her face feigning normalcy above the strain was as perfect a symbol for the government as we’d see.

  The view from my grandparents’ house was pleasant enough, made everything look far enough away, that it seemed maybe Claudette and James could ride it out in their fortress, sitting out on the porch where red rufous hummingbirds took those J-shaped plunges that seem like averted suicides. Stopping to look at the framed photos of their old life, they argued over the details—years and meals, guests and holidays. But even syndicated television, that reliable time travel, was no longer a comfort, given that on any day reruns might be interrupted with footage of the hearings. What had changed about the country was hidden everywhere, a joke shop trick ready to pounce from the can.

  They had tried to keep it from me, but I knew, from the women picketing the grocery store and the gas station lines that sometimes snaked around the block they had driven down just to avoid them, that we were not living like other Americans. Claudette had Miranda purchase flanks of pork that cost as much as she would earn in four days, and once a week James sent her, in the beloved Mercedes he’d previously barred anyone else from driving, to fill up the tank. I hated seeing her in that car, perched on a stack of unread newspapers to see over the dash. I recognized the fear in the way she sat. It was how I’d behaved my first months in that house, frightened by all the things, century-old chaises you weren’t supposed to sit in, abstract sculpture of glass and wire, each of them worth more money than I could imagine holding in my hand. Why are you always marching around like a soldier, Claudette had asked, her first tease, and I didn’t say that I had decided moving through the rooms in straight lines, taking only clean, ninety-degree turns, was the way to keep from touching or breaking any of it. They called me Little Old Tank and I laughed with them, bewildered, some animal cornered and honking.

  There was a week where Miranda couldn’t get the gas. Her son was sick and she needed to leave early and Claudette had said, Don’t worry about it. It can wait. There was an ease she’d adopted that ran in opposition to how formally she dressed and how carefully she cut the things on her plate. It was not some new-sprung generosity, I know now, but a strain of defeat. She would not be running out to meet the world and its plans anymore. It could make its way to her or it could not.


  She didn’t know about the day James had in store for me, a swim in the Russian River an hour north and some barbecue after, part of an ongoing program to make me an All-American Kid that embarrassed both of us, each pretending to enjoy it for the other’s sake. It was a war of attrition that had often reduced me to a wobbling center of panic and James to an old man in a parking lot, waiting for me to come out of whatever bathroom I’d locked myself into. He was going to teach me to dive that summer, an act that would have seemed absurd in the jungle tributaries where I had grown up, which had a way of arranging your body any way they wanted to. The goal was not to enter them separate and gleaming, in perfect human form, but to feel what was happening inside the water and mimic it as best you could. I was dreading all of it, the drive, the ugly pineapple-print swim trunks, the restaurant where he would make a point of calling me son in front of the waitress. What’ll it be, son.

  He saw the level on the tank as we coasted down the hill and became, in his seat, an inch taller, the only indication of his clipped annoyance. We’ll be making a little stop, he said, as we passed through the light that came lacy through the patch of buckeyes. I could look longer at his face when he was driving, when he would not tell me staring was impolite, and as I studied him, I thought of Randy. Of all the differences, it was the ways they inhabited their anger I noticed the most. Randy had been transformed by it, a sketch of himself rendered in broken lines, reduced only to a furious shape, but James just lowered his voice and narrowed his eyes, limiting the visual intake of the environment that had wronged him, calling whichever malfeasance close to listen carefully.

  The line for gas was twenty cars long, more. On the back of a hay-colored convertible, a young mother sat up, twirling her baby in the sun. From a dented sedan that was mostly bumper stickers, boys not much older than me rolled down windows to bleed smoke from their mouths. A couple in their early twenties had laid out a picnic in the bed of a pickup and were waving around red licorice like wands, touching it to each other’s ears and collarbones. There was the war between three different radio stations, and the crescendo of an argument between two unseen men named Mel and Finn, fucking Cheetos in the mattress again one was yelling, and from somewhere behind us a child singing the alphabet incorrectly.

  We waited there close to an hour, James not cutting the engine like everyone else did, turning it on every ten minutes to pull slightly up, but instead acting as if he were in the middle of an urban intersection at rush hour. What are you checking the side mirrors for, I finally said, a turtle that might pass you, testing out a sense of humor I wanted to adopt, but the weak joke died the second it hit the clotted air, and his foot stayed on the brake, ready to spring off.

  In our town there were some enterprising individuals who capitalized on the gas line, guys with coolers on their shoulders saying ice cream, saying cold beer cold water, cold beer cold water. I could feel James conducting heat when they passed, not budging his jaw an inch when they knocked on the window that he had rolled up the moment they appeared at the front of the line. Don’t look at them, he said to me. At the juncture when what he needed to believe was that the political moment was an exception—the diplomatic hiccup responsible for the oil embargo, the wobbly craven face the president made in all photos now—the capped-teeth men with their drumsticks and Budweisers and economy creamsicles, profiting from the waiting that defined that summer, suggested a normalization that he couldn’t abide.

  The car in front of us, a Volvo 240 in baked orange, was the only other in the interminable line that seemed apart from the microeconomy formed by the string of cars, also with its windows up, also emitting no sound. I could see what was happening in it perfectly, the heads and torsos framed through the back like a television. The woman in the driver’s seat, whose fine black hair fell nearly to the gearshift, was wearing a red scoop-back leotard and bracelets of bells and wicker. She was intermittently kissing a man in the passenger seat, who would disappear one hand in the hair at her neck and slip the other down toward the pedals. In between bouts of writhing they didn’t speak or touch or fiddle with the radio, just settled against the blond-wood beaded seat covers.

  We were third in line when the guy with the cooler came around again, a veteran, I thought, because of the way he had of looking at the people he took money from, too long and as if he were owed much more. He tapped the window of the couple, who had returned to a taffy of hair and color and fingers. When they didn’t react, he started for us.

  A strange side effect of anxiety, Mr. Kahn, is a kind of clairvoyance. What I mean is that when so much of your mind is devoted, at all times, to the worst-case scenarios, when you become a factory of troubling permutations, once in a while you will get it right: if not the exact unfurling of events, the inciting incident or pitch of a complaint or unhappy end result. A thousand monkeys at a typewriter, et cetera. So that day I saw the rough heft of everything that happened a second before it did, the vet knocking on the window just as a station wagon left a pump and the kissing couple who didn’t pull up to take it, James seeing this and honking again and narrowing his eyes as the knocking came quicker. This time the guy with the cooler had looked in long enough to identify me as part of his prime demographic, a young teen not yet welcomed to his vices and still settling for sugar, and perhaps felt if he stayed long enough I’d do his job for him, insist to James that he cough up the dollar. By the third rap my grandfather’s finger was already on the handle, and he pulled it and swung the door open with his face fixed ahead, probably already imagining the argument that of course he wouldn’t have looked to his left before doing so, because he would never imagine a person standing right next to it, illegally, in what was technically the middle of traffic. He lived his whole life like this, inside a series of logic proofs that were sturdy and formidable so long as you didn’t admit desire or iniquity.

  The guy jumped back, hit hard. Popsicles in blank plastic sleeves and sweating Budweisers in their Fourth of July packaging dove for the oil-saturated pavement. The couple through the window were bent away from any outside noise: she had a knee up on the middle console to twist into the passenger seat, and he was sitting way back to receive her, seat reclined, his knees in cutoffs spread as far as they would go. More horns were honking now, a sign that my grandfather took to mean he was right.

  James moved around the vet with a lightness in his step I hadn’t seen, some old version of himself. The man was bellowing about the loss of inventory, about what right do you have, looking like a horse in the way his teeth seemed to multiply as he got angrier. When James got to the driver’s-side window he removed a handkerchief from his back pocket and wrapped it around his knuckles, and then he knocked. The spectacle of this was not lost on the line behind us, hungry for entertainment, and a horn sounded out—shave and a haircut, two bits. I saw her arm fly backward from the knot their bodies had made, the middle finger rise up, and then, without entirely understanding what I was seeing, another hand, my grandfather’s, flying in through the door he’d opened, taking that profane gesture and literally crushing it. I didn’t watch his face, the way his eyes moved as he did this, just how the way he had grabbed her reached other parts of her body, the vertebrae in her back scared very straight. When his hand took her hair, I turned the radio on and put my head between my knees. She’s fine, he said, when the police came, look at her, believing as he always had that everything about a person could be known in a glance. He said the same thing to me, more than once. Look in the mirror. You’re fine.

  Wealth being a kind of wicked fame in small towns, my grandfather’s name was known to at least one person in that line of cars. In the weeks after, teenage waitresses would seat but ignore him, the post office line would move around him to cashiers who claimed to be unsuited to the task his mailing errand required. Neither the headline that showed up in the local section, nor the letters to the editor it encouraged, were kind. Like the news of the White House, he refused to read it, and by the end of the summer they
had canceled all their subscriptions. The rest of my time there I bought newspapers in town and shoved them down the back of my pants. Near the base of my spine there was always an ashy halo of print, a word or two my sweat had sucked off the page.

  When I left their house at seventeen the mounting relief was a secret they couldn’t keep. They bought my train ticket to school in August by April, all possible dormitory supplies by June. I caught James whistling in my empty room. What a pleasure it must be to enter that agreement with yourself, when you get to a certain age, to say no more adjustments will be necessary. That two people could look so eagerly toward the end of their lives was an astonishment to me then.

  If I write you these letters and you never read them, am I better off or worse? In the offices of guidance counselors and therapists, the emphasis was always on my past. If I could come to terms with it, I could be on my way forward. But why is it my job to understand what happened to me? Shouldn’t that be the work of the people responsible for bringing me here? You and my mother were more similar than either of you would probably care to admit, each given over to your program or movement, leaving very little of who you were for anybody else. Tell me about yourself, said the college psychologist I was forced to go to, on account of truancy, three purple weeks that turned over in my twin-sized bed.

  There was something I read about you, in a gossip magazine I stole from the grocery store checkout, how when Elise divorced you it took your mother visiting and seeing your wife’s things gone for her to even find out. This they painted as the nobility of your heartbreak, but I know it was something else. You believe it’s possible to live entirely inside yourself, Mr. Kahn. I know because you gave that to me.