The Year We Left Home

by Jean Thompson

  More praise for The Year We Left Home

  “One of the best and most memorable books of the year . . . Thompson is a master at mining the most ridiculous of human foibles while never losing compassion for her flawed characters. . . . Enlightening and quietly brilliant.”

  —Connie Ogle, The Miami Herald

  “Thompson is a writer of resonance, humor and insight shrewdly attuned to the deep and absurd conflicts that fracture everyday life, and she has never been more on-target than in this compelling, Iowa-based, multigenerational family saga.”

  —The Kansas City Star’s Top 100 Books of 2011

  “Put down the Franzen and pick up Jean Thompson’s absorbing saga of an Iowa family coming to terms with the end of one century and the start of another, bookended by the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Some of the characters do expected things, some don’t; it’s Thompson’s use of perspective that allows each of them to surprise readers.”

  —Bethanne Patrick, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

  “Rich, detailed, resonant, emotionally spot-on . . . Thompson has a light, exquisite touch. . . . By the end of the novel, the reader knows more about the Ericksons than even the Ericksons. The effect is enormously satisfying, allowing the reader not only to connect the dots but to fill in the blanks the author shrewdly leaves wide open.”

  —Bill Eichenberger, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  “The Year We Left Home invites, and withstands, comparisons to Evan S. Connell’s novels Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, two of the great American fictions of the last century. . . . An extraordinarily warm-hearted novel.”

  —Jonathan Dee, The New York Times Book Review

  “This compelling chronicle of the subtle and grand departures that constitute a life is alive with incident and told by a cast of likable characters who are as uniquely drawn as they are recognizable.”

  —More magazine

  Contents

  Chapter 1: Iowa

  Chapter 2: Iowa

  Chapter 3: Seattle

  Chapter 4: Iowa

  Chapter 5: Iowa

  Chapter 6: Chicago

  Chapter 7: Iowa

  Chapter 8: Reno, Nevada

  Chapter 9: Iowa

  Chapter 10: Iowa

  Chapter 11: Chicago

  Chapter 12: Iowa

  Chapter 13: Veracruz, Mexico

  Chapter 14: Iowa

  Chapter 15: Italy

  Chapter 16: Iowa

  Chapter 17: Iowa

  Reading Group Guide

  For Discussion

  A Conversation with Jean Thompson

  Enhance Your Book Club

  About Jean Thompson

  To everybody who left home

  Iowa

  JANUARY 1973

  The bride and groom had two wedding receptions: the first was in the basement of the Lutheran church right after the ceremony, with punch and cake and coffee and pastel mints. This was for those of the bride’s relatives who were stern about alcohol. The basement was low-ceilinged and smelled of metallic furnace heat. Old ladies wearing corsages sat on folding chairs, while other guests stood and managed their cake plates and plastic forks as best they could. The pastor smiled with professional benevolence. The bride and groom posed for pictures, buoyed by adrenaline and relief. There had been so much promised and prepared, and now everything had finally come to pass.

  By five o’clock the last of the crowd had retrieved their winter coats and boots from the cloakroom and headed out. It was January, with two weeks of hard-packed snow underfoot and more on the way, and most of them had long drives from Grenada, over country roads to get back home. The second reception was just beginning at the American Legion hall, where there would be a buffet supper, a bar, and a dance band.

  The bride’s younger brother had been sent to open the Legion building so that the food could be brought in ahead of time. He drove his pickup truck the mile from the church, playing the radio loud to shake off the strangeness of the day. He’d been an usher at the wedding and he still wore his dark suit and blue-tinted carnation boutonniere, clothes that made him feel stiff and false. The whole import of the wedding embarrassed him powerfully, though he could not have said why. Many things had been disquieting: his sister in her overdone bridal makeup, his mother’s weeping, the particular oppressiveness of anything that took place in church, the archness of the female relatives who told him how tall and handsome he looked. “Pretty soon we’ll get to dance at your wedding, hey?” He’d shrugged and said, Well, they could at least dance, which had made his girlfriend mad.

  She was still back at the church and still mad, which was why he’d managed to get away by himself, if only for a few minutes. As he was leaving, she’d whispered that he should see what they had in the liquor cabinet over there. He guessed that that was what it was going to take to get her back in any kind of a good mood. A bottle they could show off as a trophy, then drink some night while they were out driving around.

  The radio was playing “Horse with No Name.” He turned it up and sang along:

  I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name

  It felt good to be out of the rain

  He wished he was out there right now, in some desert, instead of smack in the middle of his family, who, because they knew his origins and his history, thought they knew everything about him. He couldn’t account for this feeling when a wedding, after all, was supposed to be this big happy thing. He guessed he must be some kind of freak.

  The gray afternoon was already shutting down when he pulled into the Legion parking lot, got out, and fumbled with the stiff lock. It gave way and he stepped inside.

  The hall was a big bare space with a much-buffed tile floor. Gloomy light reflected from it in pools. To one side was a kitchen with a large stainless steel double sink, two restaurant-style wall ovens, and a pass-through to the main part of the room. Long tables covered with white paper tablecloths were set up to receive food, and stools and hightops were stacked in the foyer. He tried the bar closet but as expected it locked with a separate key. Then he heard another car pull up. He turned on the overhead lights and went back out into the cold.

  His Uncle Norm and Aunt Martha were unloading their station wagon. “Ryan,” his uncle said by way of a greeting, and handed him a foil-covered metal pan. “Careful, this one’s heavy.”

  His aunt said it had been a beautiful wedding, hadn’t it, and Ryan said it had. That was the extent of the small talk since there was all the food to manage, work to be done, and with Norm and Martha, work came before everything else. There were a dozen or more big pans to carry inside, and two coolers, and a cardboard box full of paper towels and pot holders and other useful items. “Just set everything out on the table,” Martha directed, hanging up her coat and putting on the apron she’d brought from home. Ryan, peeking under the foil, found sliced ham with raisin sauce, a macaroni-and-tomato casserole, a green salad, potatoes topped with shredded orange cheese, beef in gravy, chicken and biscuits, corn pudding. There were sheet cakes too, and bags of dinner rolls.

  He guessed that Norm and Martha had organized the supper, collecting the prepared food from different country relatives. It would have been a very Norm-and-Martha thing to do. They were not, technically, his aunt and uncle. They were his grandmother’s cousins, his mother’s mother’s people. Tall, freckled, rawboned, they seemed not to have aged since his childhood. His mother had been a Tesman and her mother was a Peerson, and the Peersons were the scariest of the old Norwegian families. They lived out in the boondocks, what his dad called Jesus Lost His Shoes territory, and their church still held services in Norwegian the third Sunday of every month. Most of them farmed. They believed in backbreaking labor, followed by more labor, and in
privation, thrift, cleanliness, and joyless charity. If you wanted a tree taken down or a truck winched out of a ditch or a quarter of a cow packaged for your meat locker, you called a Peerson. If you wanted lighthearted company, you called someone else.

  The boy, Ryan, thought of them as part of some grim, old-country past that laid claim to him without his consent. Ever since he was a little kid he’d heard instructive things about Norwegian this and Norwegian that, like postcards from a place he’d never been and none of it any use to him, not flags nor fjords nor rotten jellied lutefisk, which nobody made anymore and nobody even pretended to like. Maybe if you poked around in the gene pool all the way back to the Vikings, you’d find some worthy ancestor. But all that had been beaten out of people long ago, or maybe it was just that the tamest and most boring Norwegians had settled here in Iowa, where they devoted themselves to lives of piety and sacrifice and usefulness.

  But he wasn’t going to spend any more time thinking about all that, since what really counted was the life you made for yourself, and the person you decided to be.

  Once the food was brought in, he and Norm began setting up the hightops and stools around the room’s edges. He guessed it about killed Norm and Martha to be in a place where drinking would go on, but they saw it as their duty to be helpful, and both the duty and the disapproval would be part of the occasion for them.

  “So this fella,” Norm began, and Ryan understood that Norm meant the groom, Ryan’s new brother-in-law. “What’s he like?”

  “Jeff? He’s OK.” He was kind of an asshole.

  “Ah.” Norm nodded, as if this was convincing information. He reached for a rag and slapped it across a tabletop. Norm’s hands were big and chapped and had been gouged and nicked and scarred and healed over so many times that the skin was as full of history as an elephant’s hide. “Where’s he from, out West someplace?”

  “Yes, sir. Denver.”

  Norm received this in silence. Ryan wondered what was bugging Norm about Jeff, who was your basic bullshit artist, all fake smiles and manly handshakes. You figured somebody that straight and narrow would be a hit with the home folks. But guess again. Ryan knew better than to ask any kind of direct question, so he kept on with his work, carting the stools and tables out into the room so Norm could place them in groupings.

  Martha was busy running pans in and out of the warming ovens. The smell of the food was making him hungry. Pretty soon the band, or what passed for a band, would arrive to set up. It was just four guys from Ames in leather vests and striped shirts and some pitiful attempt at psychedelic effects generated by a strobe light. And then the guests would come, a mix of his sister’s friends and Jeff’s, and any of the local invitees who wouldn’t miss the chance for free food and drink. His girlfriend too, though he hadn’t been thinking about her until now and he guessed that was one more thing he’d done wrong without even trying.

  The tables were in place. Norm went to the front door and peered out. “No snow yet. I don’t suppose we’ll stay that lucky.”

  Ryan, looking out from behind Norm’s angular shoulder, saw the gray gauze sky and a pink sunset behind it glowing like a lamp. House lights were beginning to come on along the street, small and bright, and Ryan registered that the scene was beautiful, without thinking the word itself. “Yeah, I guess it’s supposed to start in later.”

  “June’s best for weddings,” Norm said, sounding unexpectedly decisive. “Then you can have your flowers and your pretty weather. They didn’t want to wait for June, hah?”

  “I think this was the only time Jeff could get off, you know, for the honeymoon.”

  “Oh, sure.” Norm nodded and, turning away, gave Ryan a look he couldn’t read, or maybe he was just imagining it in the light reflecting off Norm’s eyeglasses. Embarrassment? Apology? It came to him that Norm thought his sister might be pregnant, and this was one of those hurry-up weddings. Oh, please. His sister Anita would probably still be a virgin three years after her wedding night because it would take that long for the industrial glue that held her legs together to wear off. But it was a weird thing to have to think about, or to imagine old Norm thinking about, or to witness him thinking about, and he was glad when Martha called to him, “Ryan? I need you a minute.”

  She was standing at the oven, poking at one of the pans inside. “Can you slide this out a little ways and hold it? Here, careful not to burn yourself.”

  He took the hot pads she gave him and supported the weight of the pan—beef, it was—while Martha lifted the foil and stirred and prodded the contents. She scooped some out into a crockery bowl. “All right, put it back now.”

  She fetched a knife and fork and a paper napkin, put two dinner rolls on a plate, and set it, with the beef, on the counter. “I expect you’re hungry. Go ahead, it’ll tide you over.”

  “Thanks, Aunt Martha.” He didn’t wait to be asked twice. He ate standing, filling his mouth with beef and bread. Martha took a Coke out of the refrigerator and he opened it and drank it down. “I bet you cooked this, didn’t you.”

  “You like it?”

  “S’great.” He couldn’t get enough of it.

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  The room was quiet. Norm had gone out back to get something from the car. Martha ran water in the sink and looked around for something else to do, now that the food was ready and waiting for the guests. She was almost as tall as Norm. The two of them were like a pair of trees. And just like Norm, she wore plain, plastic-framed eyeglasses. Ryan couldn’t have said if they’d grown to look alike, the way old married couples were said to, or if they’d started out as pretty much the same model, your standard Norwegian giant. She said, “I guess you’re excited for your sister.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “She was just beautiful in that dress. Like an angel on a cloud.”

  “Sure.” He’d thought she’d looked more like an explosion of tissue paper, but kept this smart-ass notion to himself.

  “I’m so glad they got married in the church, even if that boy is what, Church of Christ?”

  “I forget, exactly.” He didn’t think that Jeff was much of a church guy; Anita would probably make him baptize their kids Lutheran and send them to Lutheran Sunday school and everybody would be happy.

  Martha said they made a nice-looking couple, and Ryan agreed with that too. He hoped she wasn’t going to start talking about how pretty soon it was going to be his wedding, blah blah blah. People acted like weddings were contagious, like it was your duty to go out and get infected.

  “ . . . because you never can tell, looking at it from the outside. How miserable people can be in a marriage.”

  Ryan, still occupied with the beef making its way into his stomach, looked up, uncertain of what he’d heard. He hadn’t been paying attention, he’d missed something she’d said, some explanation. Who was she talking about? Who was miserable? Did she mean herself and Norm? Any of their grown children, all of whom had married and produced further legions of stoic, insensible, hangdog Peersons? He didn’t want to believe that any of them had the capacity for misery. He wanted to keep them as they had always been, fixed and reliable components of his world. Or was she talking about Anita and Jeff, was there something she knew that he didn’t? He tried to catch Martha’s eye but she was looking away from him, embarrassed, maybe, at what she’d said. He was on the outside looking in. For a moment, he felt knocked off-center, no longer knowing what he had always known . . .

  . . . and then the back door opened with a cold gust, and the band came in lugging their equipment and he went to help them. And not long after that the first guests arrived and one of the Legionnaires unlocked the bar and began putting ice in buckets and taking drink orders, and everyone waited for the next big moment in a series of big moments, the entrance of the bride and groom.

  Ryan’s mother came in first, taking short little steps in the shoes that hurt her feet. “Here they come, here they come!” She was in one of her wound-up states, where
she might do anything: start crying again, or decide it was a good time for some uncomfortable, goopy talk. He moved to stay clear of her. His father and little brother and sister followed, and a few stray relatives. The guests lined themselves on either side of the room and a ragged clapping started up.

  Called upon to register excitement one more time, Ryan set his face in a pleased, vacuous expression, just as his girlfriend crossed the room to stand next to him. She had another kind of look on her face. She could have bit nails, people used to say, a way of speaking, and he understood what they meant by that now, he surely did.

  “You were supposed to come back and pick me up,” she hissed, and nothing he could say to that, not really, except Sorry, which he tried, sending it her way as a kind of mumble. But he hadn’t known he was meant to go back for her, or hadn’t paid attention, and then he realized he didn’t care, although he had not known this until just now.

  “I waited and waited and I was almost the last one there and I had to get a ride with Mrs. Holder, God!”

  “I had stuff to do here.”

  “I could have come with you.”

  “You didn’t want to,” he reminded her, which was true, even though saying so wouldn’t help him.

  “Well you didn’t exactly act like you wanted me here.”

  He shook his head fast, like a horse trying to get rid of flies. He couldn’t win, arguing with her.

  “What’s the matter with you lately? You act like you don’t care about anything. Not me or . . . anything.” She flicked a hand to indicate the universe of anything. He guessed she meant the future she had mapped out for them, where they’d both head off to St. Olaf’s for college in the fall, and she would continue to dole out limited portions of sexual gratification until such time as he could offer her a ring that would seal the deal.

  He watched her tight little face as she went on and on about his despicable and inadequate behavior, keeping her voice low because there were people all around them. And because he must have sensed that she was about to disappear from his life in all the important ways, he was able to detach himself, consider her with cold curiosity. She’d done herself up for the occasion in a hard-edged, glamorous style, with a pouf of blond hair sprayed and clipped into place, and a shiny dress that left her arms bare and goose-bumped. Looking down, he was afforded a view of her small breasts in a brassiere of pink lace.