by Jane Smiley
“Peter,” said Kate at dinner, after Axel had asked him three times for the milk with no response, “is preoccupied because he’s having a terrible time with MacDougal. Henry, pass your father the milk.” Axel smiled his thanks at Henry, and tried to fill his glass nonchalantly. His interest in pursuing discussions with Kate on the equestrian progress of his children was nonexistent.
“Peter,” Kate went on, seeing that Axel was fidgeting in his seat and desiring to pin him there, “is making no headway that I can see.”
Really, she had such a lovely voice. Axel was tempted, as usual, to submit to the truth of everything the voice uttered, to the justice of every claim the voice made. He looked at Peter, but Peter looked at neither of them. He did not appear even to have heard his own name, or to know that he was under discussion. He showed now, as he always had, lithe obliviousness that was a quality of genius or idiocy that Axel had always admired, but it was the same quality that kept him from feeling much kinship between them. “Peter, wake up. Your mother is talking to you.”
“It’s no use talking to him,” said Kate. She picked up her knife with the air of having dropped the subject, as if she had been unwillingly betrayed into bringing it up in the first place.
“Pray for him,” said John.
“Pardon me?”
“Pray for him.” Axel put his napkin to his mouth, hiding his smile at the alteration in John’s tone from mockery to sincerity. Kate lifted one eyebrow, but said only, “I pray for you all.” A draw.
“I think . . .” Axel emphasized himself, knowing that she could not fail to resent his having an opinion at all.
She did not fail, and spoke immediately, as if to preclude it. “If I hadn’t seen his temper with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it. MacDougal is especially sensitive, and he picks up on it. Every day. No improvement at all. But I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Which is why you brought it up.”
Sarcasm, however, was lost on Kate. She went on. “It’s hard to tell who is riding whom.”
“Ask him, not me. He’s been forming whole sentences now for almost fifteen years.”
“I asked him. He doesn’t know.”
Six words, seven syllables. Definite, clear, musical. Axel wanted to sigh, but at the same time, he knew what “asking him” would have involved. He said, “I can hear it now: what’sa matta witchew, kid?” John snorted, Margaret choked on her cheese sandwich, and Kate blushed. Bingo.
It always surprised him when he defended the children, because they had nothing of the power over him that his wife did. Years of some kind of moral discipline made him contradict her even when he yearned for the pleasure of agreement. And it always surprised him when she showed the effects of him; a blush, a pregnancy, each thing seemed impossible, and none of them convinced him that it could happen again.
Just then Peter put his elbow in the butter. He grazed it, hardly denting the yellow oblong, but his noise of surprise was enough to draw the attention and laughter of everyone but Kate. Even Axel sputtered for a moment. Peter turned crimson, and was overcareful about wiping the butter from his sleeve.
“It’s getting bet . . .”
“If you wanted to control that temper, you could,” interrupted Kate.
“I want to.”
“Daddy,” said Margaret, so ready to draw any fire from Peter that it had become a habit with her, “do you want the last of the baked beans?”
And of course it worked. “Margaret,” said Kate, turning her head with a snap, “I want you to clean out the front hall closet before you go to bed, and the boys are each to do two bridles in addition to their saddles. Your father and I will do the dishes.” Axel smiled. Angular and shining, Kate seemed to him at her foolish best when enumerating chores.
He stood by the sink, running the water hot, certain that the previous conversation was but preliminary to something long planned. Kate seemed to be twirling and bowing on the periphery of his vision, but when he turned in surprise, of course she wasn’t. She was merely removing some plates from table to counter. Still, he had looked at her, and she took advantage of it to speak without having to use his name. He longed for the engagement, but when she said, “We need to have a talk,” he pretended that her words had been muffled in the roar of the water. He cocked his head inquiringly. She stepped up to him, smelling of sun and hay and horse medications. “Axel” (she said it!) “we need to have a talk about the children.” He turned off the water, and she finished too ringingly for the intimacy she desired. Miraculously, she blushed again, and Axel smiled.
At once, in a precipitate change of mood that was characteristic of his feelings about her, he grew ashamed. All their married life he had succumbed to the temptation of badgering her earnest nature (he sometimes marveled to think of her giggles when she still loved him and the teasing of her was a glad joint ceremony). Then he hated the sadism this testified to in his nature. Of late this teasing was so subtle and her notice so firmly directed elsewhere that she didn’t see it. It was like juggling in a closet. His shame made him speak without sarcasm. “They seem busy and healthy and fine to me.”
“They are. There’s nothing wrong with them.”
“Then what’s there to talk about?”
“Well, what is to become of them?”
Axel scrubbed vigorously, pretending to be thinking of his answer and not to be savoring this, the first moment in ten years that Kate had given voice to an existential fear. He wanted her to amplify, to express, for the first time, doubt (of herself, of reality, of God or the Church; the most sophomoric loss of courage would suffice). She was thinking. She found the lid to the butter dish under Henry’s chair and replaced it. Even as she wedged the dish into the full refrigerator, he said nothing, waiting. He felt the blood pounding in his wrists where they were plunged into the steaming water. She spoke.
“Well,” she said, “that’s silly. What I really mean is what’s Margaret going to do?”
He was breathlessly, surprisingly disappointed. In realizing his disappointment, he realized that he must have hoped for some great turning to him that would signal the rebirth of their marriage.
“I’d hate to see her get into this business for lack of anything better to do. She used to be so interested in . . .”
“She’s too sensual for the convent. I’m sure she’ll go back to college.” He spoke brusquely.
“Pardon me?” She grew dignified now, setting the dried dishes in the cabinet with offended care.
“She’s too sexy for the convent. She could go to college around here, for that matter, and there’s no reason that she can’t live at home for a while, if she wants to.” He pretended to be talking about Margaret’s education, but knew the words Kate had really heard. Her stiffening gladdened him, but then his mood changed again.
Kate said, “I see.”
“Katherine,” he said, serious, kindly, “she’s eighteen. She cries all the time. She needs a boyfriend.”
“I would hate to see her get into this business for lack of anything better to do.”
“Just think how nice it would be to have four normal American kids. Margaret (we’d call her Peggy) doing her nails, chewing gum, and waiting for her boyfriend to come pick her up. His name would be Eddy, I think. Pete would have spent the afternoon tinkering with the car . . .”
“Nobody’s had children like that in ten years. It’s much more dangerous than that now. They all have cars. That boy in Peter’s class who was killed . . .”
“I think he was a couple of classes ahead of Peter.”
“What’s the difference? I’m glad ours are safe at home.”
“Kate, do you realize how old they’re getting to be?”
“Of course I do.” She had gotten impatient. “Things are very different now from when we were growing up. Their little friends are allowed far too much leeway, as far as I’m concerned. Anything could happen.”
Axel didn’t answer. Did there exist a family of children
whose agonies were simple? He had been an only son whose ready ambitions had sounded in the usual modes. The Kate he had fallen in love with had been, and still was, obsessed, which was why he had been and still was in love with her. They had occasionally congratulated themselves that, unlike most parents, they had no worries with drugs, liquor, and unwanted pregnancy, but now he feared for his quiet, farmbound children. He sometimes laughed at Kate’s anxieties about car accidents (she was impossible to drive with), but he had acquiesced to the measures she took to keep the children off the road; he acquiesced to everything, in fact. What was to become of them?
“Sex, sex, sex,” said Kate. “Sex is not the answer to Margaret’s difficulty.” Axel shook his head, trying to remember what this was a response to. Kate went on. “She has to have some kind of work and you know it as well as I do.”
“Yes, you’re right.”
“People may think they can reduce life to sex, but they can’t.”
“I know.”
“There’s much, much more.”
“She must be interested in something.”
“The Lord Himself only knows what it is.”
Down in the basement tackroom, John was singing. “’Twas a dark and stormy night and the sun was shining bright, and the flowers they were drooping in the mud.” He went repeatedly to the sink, either to take a swallow of water or to rinse out his sponge. “And the doctor he decided that to save our darling child, he must stop the circulation of his blood. God, I hate this.”
“Yeah,” said Peter, though really he didn’t hate it at all. The dark, ancient leather had a half-liquid feel in his hands that satisfied him, and there was contentment in the fragrance of soap, dried horse sweat, wool, and damp.
“So we dipped his darling head in a pot of boiling lead and we laid our darling Willie down to rest, and the robbers came that night and they came without a light and they stole the mustard plaster off his chest.”
“I’m tired of that song.”
“Just let me finish. No more on the mat will he tease poor pussycat, no more twang her teeth or pull her tail, no more rub her nose on the red-hot kitchen stove, for our darling little Willie’s kicked the pail! You want ‘Oh, Tomatoes’?”
“An old favorite.”
“Henry can come in on the chorus. I’ve taught him everything he knows. Blind Boy Karlson, they call him.” Henry had tried fruitlessly to avoid cleaning tack on the grounds that he wasn’t riding any longer, but to Kate the question was much simpler than it was to him. Tack needed to be cleaned, Henry had two free hands and knew how to do it. “Anyone can forgo privileges,” she told him, “but no one can forgo obligations.”
“Hey,” said John.
“Hey, what?” said Peter.
“Hey, you. What do you think they’re talking about?”
“You heard them at dinner.”
“I didn’t think you did.”
“I did.”
John began to hum but did not sing, while Peter buckled his first bridle neatly together and took down another. Every movement he made was graceful and exact. He seemed slow but was not, and always completed jobs more quickly than John, who had only the air of compact quickness, or Henry, who never worked hard except for profit.
“Hey,” said John.
“What now?”
“You’re going to win your division at Barrington, huh?”
“How should I know? You heard her at dinner.”
“Well, Mac is the best horse, and you’re the best rider. It’s only preliminary division, huh?”
“Let’s not talk about it, O.K.?”
“He’s a lot better-looking than The Train, that’s for sure. And he doesn’t fart all the time.”
“All horses fart.”
“When Teddy starts to fart all his joints will burst apart.”
“How cute.”
“I hope you win.”
At this Henry, who had been calculating the number of square inches of leather he still had to go that night, looked up. John was halfway to the sink, watching a pattern of drips his sponge was making on the floor. Henry rather wished John would win. He offered, “Somebody from Chicago will win. They always do.”
“All mothers fart,” said John, and laughed loudly.
“Terrific,” grunted Peter, and there was only the silence of sponges and leather again.
“Hey,” said John.
“May I help you?”
“Let me do your saddle before Barrington.”
“What?”
“Let me clean your saddle before Barrington.”
“Nothing to do, huh?”
“Sure, but let me do yours. Maybe it’ll be good luck.”
Peter looked at his brother quizzically, then smiled and shrugged. “It’s all right with me.”
“I’ll do it Friday night.”
“Fine. Say, thanks.”
“Any time.” He paused. “Well, not any time . . .”
“Yeah, right.”
John took down another bridle, and Henry began to buckle up his first one. He had his eye on one of the lesson bridles, with web rubber reins, two hundred and forty fewer square inches, if you counted both the insides and the outsides of the reins.
“Hey,” said John.
“What now?”
“Have you spent any of your money?”
“I gave mother eighteen dollars for entry fees. I think she’s charging me for those braided reins too.”
“We’re lucky she doesn’t bill us for dinner.”
“We’re lucky she paid us for haying.”
“There are people who get allowances, you know.”
“Yeah,” said Henry. “Larry Murphy gets five dollars every week, and he told me that his brother gets a clothing allowance. A hundred bucks, the first of every month.”
“Shit,” said John. “Just let her try to get her sticky . . .”
“How is the Old Locomotive, anyway?” put in Peter.
“O.K.” In his hand John held the cheek strap of Teddy’s bridle, which was nearly black with use. He began snapping it against the palm of his hand, first the strap end, then the buckle end. Peter was not watching, but Henry saw that, as John became interested in this amusement, he flicked the strip of leather harder, and winced a couple of times. Looking up and seeing his brother watching, John displayed his hand. The palm was bright red, somewhat bruised, and bleeding in two small places. When Henry started, John barked a raucous “ha ha.”
“Hey,” said the fifteen-year-old.
“Hey,” replied Peter.
“What’s it like to ride him?”
“What’s it like to ask so many questions?”
“It’s intelligent.”
“Look who’s talking,” said Henry.
Henry was to go along as well, and actually he did not mind, although he made a show of irritability for Kate’s benefit. The Barrington horse show was one he rather liked, because the concessioners were from Chicago and brought to their four days in the country a carnival air. Though Henry didn’t speak of the cotton candy, the Sno-Kones, and the foot-long hotdogs, he anticipated them richly, and the anticipation rendered him willing, if somewhat slow, in the completion of his appointed tasks. John, though he was riding in both the show and the combined event, was more cantankerous. Kate was going through a note phase: the usually barren bulletin board on the back door was covered with neatly made work schedules, verdicts on each day’s riding performance, and reminders. Thereupon she issued John a bill, which read, “John Robert Karlson, entry fees, $22, payment for new black boots, $28.” Against such authoritative impersonality there was no argument, and no defense except silence. This silence John maintained with rooted determination, but nonetheless, the fifty precious dollars became a bundle in his imagination, a bundle that was not his. He thought he saw the complacency of ownership in every look she gave him, and he wanted to kill her.
She wanted him to do very well in the horse show and thought that he might. “You took th
at fence like a hunchback,” she would shout. “Look where you’re going!” His face grew red, but he got better. All according to plan. About her own excellence as an instructor Kate was modestly pleased. “Who’s in the driver’s seat there? Be the boss for once!” A monologue of instructions and admonitions pursued him everywhere, and he began to share Peter’s frequency as an object of ridicule on the bulletin board. One day, when Teddy refused the logpile on a second try (a logpile he’d been over countless times), John broke a crop over his rump. Teddy approached the obstacle again and cleared it handsomely, almost with style. Kate smiled. She could see that a serendipitous virtue of her “rigorous” methods was that John had grown sufficiently energetic with his mount. She felt vindicated, victorious. She glanced at him in pride and desire for his approval, but he was embarrassed, she decided, and therefore he turned away.
The huge blue van was moved from behind the barn into the driveway. For each child, one dress shirt was taken to the cleaners and two more were thrown into the laundry. Margaret aired and brushed the black coats and velvet caps; the boys found all the ties they had wadded into their jacket pockets. Black belts were searched out, and thin, cool nylon socks. Margaret was allowed to take the car into town and buy hairnets, talcum powder, safety pins, metal polish, and a new toothbrush (for stirrup pads and buckles, not teeth). The big van was swept out, lightly bedded with straw. Flakes of hay were tied into nets, the gangway was laid, and Herbie, Teddy, and Mac spent an hour practicing entry and exit. Only Herbie, surprisingly enough, balked at the dark interior of the vehicle but there was no telling what MacDougal would try when time was short and tempers edgy.