The Unreal and the Real - Vol 1 - Where On Earth

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Well, I’m glad. I seem to have more and more trouble talking with Easterners.”

  Sue Shepard laughed, probably not understanding, and pursued; “So you went to school in Ultimate?”

  “Yes, until high school. Then I came to live with Aunt Josie in Portland and went to old Lincoln High. The nearest high school to Ultimate was thirty miles on logging roads, and anyhow it wasn’t good enough for Father. He was afraid I’d grow up to be a roughneck, or marry one…” Sue Shepard clicketed on her little machine, and Rita thought, But what did Mother think? Did she want to send me away at age thirteen to live in the city with her sister-in-law? The question opened on a blank area that she gazed into, fascinated. I know what Father wanted, but why don’t I know what she wanted? Did she cry? No, of course not. Did I? I don’t think so. I can’t even remember talking about it with Mother. We made my clothes that summer. That’s when she taught me how to cut out a pattern. And then we came up to Portland the first time, and stayed at the old Multnomah Hotel, and we bought shoes for me for school—and the oyster silk ones for dressing up, the little undercut heel and one strap, I wish they still made them. I was already wearing Mother’s size. And we ate lunch in that restaurant, the cut-glass water goblets, the two of us, where was Father? But I never even wondered what she thought, I never knew. I never know what Mag really thinks, either. They don’t say. Rocks. Look at Mag’s mouth, just like Mother’s, like a seam in a rock. Why did Mag go into teaching, talk, talk, talk all day, when she really hates talking? Although she never was quite as gruff as Gret is, but that’s because Amory wouldn’t have stood for it. But why didn’t Mother and I say anything to each other? She was so stoical. Rock. And then I was happy in Portland, and there she was in Ultimate…“Oh, yes, I loved it,” she answered Sue Shepard. “The twenties were a nice time to be a teen-ager, we really were very spoiled, not like now, poor things. It’s terribly hard to be thirteen or fourteen now, isn’t it? We went to dancing school, they’ve got AIDS and the atomic bomb. My granddaughter’s twice as old as I was at eighteen. In some ways. She’s amazingly young for her age in others. It’s so complicated. After all, think of Juliet! It’s never really simple, is it? But I think I had a very nice, innocent time in high school, and right on into college. Until the crash. The mill closed in ’32, my second year. But actually we went right on having a good time. But it was terribly depressing for my parents and my brothers. The mill shut right down, and they all came up to Portland looking for work, everybody did. And then I left school after my junior year, because I’d got a summer job bookkeeping in the University accounting office, and they wanted me to stay on, and so I did, since everybody else in the family was out of work, except Mother finally got a job in a bakery, nights. It was terrible for men, the Depression, you know. It killed my father. He looked and looked for work and couldn’t find anything, and there I was, doing what he was qualified to do, only of course at a very low level, and terrible pay—sixty dollars a month, can you imagine?”

  “A week?”

  “No, a month. But still, I was making it. And men of his generation were brought up to be depended on, which is a wonderful thing, but then they weren’t allowed ever not to be depended on, when they had to depend on other people, which everybody actually does. It was terribly unrealistic, I think, a real whatdyoucallit. Double time?”

  “Double bind,” said young Sue, sharp as tacks, clicketing almost inaudibly away on her little lap computer, while the tape recorder tape went silently round and round, recording Rita’s every maunder and meander. Rita sighed. “I’m sure that’s why he died so young,” she said. “He was only fifty.”

  But Mother hadn’t died young, though her husband had, and her elder son had drifted off to Texas to be swallowed alive so far as his mother was concerned by a jealous wife, and her younger son had poured whiskey onto diabetes and died at thirty-one. Men did seem to be so fragile. But what had kept Margaret Jamison Holz going? Her independence? But she had been brought up to be dependent, hadn’t she? Anyhow, nobody could keep going long on mere independence; when they tried to they ended up pushing shopping carts full of stuff and sleeping in doorways. Mother hadn’t done that. She had sat here on the deck looking out at the dunes, a small, tough, old woman. No retirement pension, of course, and a tiny little dribble of insurance money, and she did let Amory pay the rent on her two-room apartment in Portland, but she was independent to the end, visiting them only once or twice a year at the University, and then always for a full month here, in summer. Gret’s room now had been Mother’s room then. How strange it was, how it changed! But recently Rita had wakened in the deep night or when it was just beginning to get light and had lain there in bed thinking, not with fear but with a kind of frightened, lively thrill, It is so strange, all of it is so strange!

  “When were you able to go back to college?” Sue Shepard asked, and she answered, “In ’35,” resolving to stick to the point and stop babbling.

  “And then you met Dr. Inman when you took his class.”

  “No. I never took a class in Education.”

  “Oh,” Sue Shepard said, blank.

  “I met him in the accounting office. I was still clerking there halftime, paying my way. And he came in because he hadn’t been paid his salary for three months. People used to be just as good at mistakes like that as computers are now. It took days and days to find out how they’d managed to lose him from the faculty payroll. Did he tell somebody that I’d taken his class and that’s how we met?” Sue Shepard wasn’t going to admit it; she was discreet. “How funny. It was one of the other women he went out with, and he got his memories crossed. Students were always falling in love with him. He was extremely attractive—I used to think Charles Boyer without the French accent—”

  Mag heard them laughing on the front deck as she came through the hall, edging around her husband. A gooseneck lamp standing on the floor near him glared in his eyes, but he was holding his book so that its pages were in shadow.

  “Phil.”

  “Mm.”

  “Get up and go read in the living room.”

  He smiled, reading. “Found this…”

  “The interviewer’s here. She’ll be staying for lunch. You’re in the way. You’ve been in the way for two hours. You’re in the dark. There’s daylight six feet away. Get up and go read in the living room.”

  “People…”

  “Nobody’s there! People come through here. Are you—” The wave of hatred and compassion set free by her words carried her on past him, though she had checked the words. In silence, she turned the corner and climbed the stairs. She went into the southwest bedroom and looked for a decent shirt in the crowded closet; the cotton sweater she had worn from Portland was too warm for this mild coastal weather. The search led her into a rummage-out of summer clothes. She sorted, rehung, folded her clothes, then Phil’s. From the depths she pulled out paint-stiff, knee-frayed blue jeans, a madras shirt with four buttons gone which had been stuffed into the closet unwashed. Even here at the beach house, her father’s clothes had always been clean, smelled clean, smelled of virtue, virtú. With a violent swing she threw the madras shirt at the wastebasket. It draped itself half in, half out, a short sleeve sticking up pitifully. Not waving but drowning…But to go on drowning for twenty-five years?

  The window was ajar, and she could hear the sea and her mother’s voice down on the front deck answering questions about her husband the eminent educator, the clean-bodied man: How had he written his books? When had he broken with John Dewey’s theories? Where had the unicef work taken him? Now, little apple-cheeked handmaiden of success, ask me about my husband the eminent odd-job man: how did he quit halfway through graduate school, when had he broken with the drywalling contractor, where had his graveyard shift at the Copy Shop taken him? Phil the Failure, he called himself, with the charming honesty that concealed a hideous smugness that probably but not certainly concealed despair. What was certain was that nobody else in the world knew the d
epth of Phil’s contempt for them, his absolute lack of admiration or sympathy for anything anybody did or was. If that indifference was originally a defense, it had consumed what it had once defended. He was invulnerable, by now. And people were so careful not to hurt him. Finding that she was Dr. Rilow and he was an unemployed drywaller, they assumed it was hard for him; and then when they found that it wasn’t, they admired him for being so secure, so unmacho, taking it so easily, handling it so well. Indeed he handled it well, cherished it, his dear failure, his great success at doing what he wanted to do and nothing else. No wonder he was so sweet, so serene, so unstrained. No wonder she had blown up, teaching Bleak House last week, at the mooncalf student who couldn’t see what was supposed to be wrong with Harold Skimpole. “Don’t you see that his behavior is totally irresponsible?” she had demanded in righteous wrath, and the mooncalf had replied with aplomb, “I don’t see why everybody is supposed to be responsible.” It was a kind of Taoist koan, actually. For Taoist wives. It was hard to be married to a man who lived in a perpetual condition of wu wei and not to end up totally wei, you had to be very careful or you ended up washing the ten thousand shirts.

  But then of course Mother had looked after Father’s shirts.

  The jeans weren’t even good for rags, even if they would sell in the Soviet Union for a hundred dollars; she threw them after the shirt, and knocked the wastebasket over. Faintly ashamed, she retrieved them and the shirt and stuffed them into a plastic bag that had been squirreled away in a cranny of the closet. An advantage of Phil’s indifference was that he would never come downstairs demanding to know where his wonderful old jeans and madras shirt were. He never got attached to clothes; he wore whatever was provided. “Distrust all occasions that require new clothes.” What a prig Thoreau was. Ten to one he meant weddings but hadn’t had the guts to say so, let alone get married. Actually Phil liked new clothes, liked to get them for Christmas and birthdays, accepted all presents, cherished none. “Phil is a saint, Mag,” his mother had said to her shortly before they were married, and she had agreed, laughing, thinking the exaggeration quite forgivable; but it had not been a burble of mother love. It had been a warning.

  She knew that her father had hoped that the marriage wouldn’t last. He had never quite said so. By now the matter of her marriage, between her and her mother, was buried miles deep. Between her and her daughter it was an unaskable question. Everybody protecting everybody. It was stupid. It kept her and Gret from saying much to each other. And it wasn’t really the right question, the one that needed asking, anyhow. They were married. But there was a question. No one had asked it and she did not know what it was. Possibly, if she found out, her life would change. The headless torso of Apollo would speak: Du musst dein Leben ändern. Meanwhile, did she particularly want her life to change? “I will never desert Mr. Micawber,” she said under her breath, reaching into yet another cranny of the closet and discovering there yet another plastic bag, which when opened disclosed rust-colored knitted wool: a sweater, which she stared at dumbly till she recognized it as one she had bought on sale for Gret for Christmas several years ago and had utterly forgotten ever since. “Gret! Look here!” she cried, crossing the hall, knocking, opening the door of her daughter’s room. “Merry Christmas!”

  After explanations, Gret pulled the sweater on. Her dark, thin face emerged from the beautiful color with a serious expression. She looked at the sweater seriously in the mirror. She was very hard to please, preferred to buy her own clothes, and wore the ones she liked till they fell apart. She kept them moderately clean. “Are the sleeves kind of short, a little?” she asked, in the mother tongue.

  “Kind of. Probably why it was on sale. It was incredibly cheap, I remember, at the Sheep Tree. Years ago. I liked the color.”

  “It’s neat,” Gret said, still judging. She pushed up the sleeves. “Thanks,” she said. Her face was a little flushed. She smiled and glanced around at the book lying open on the bed. Something was unsaid, almost said. She did not know how to say it and Mag did not know how to allow her to say it; they both had trouble with their native language. Awkward, intrusive, the mother retreated, saying, “Lunch about one-thirty.”

  “Need help?”

  “Not really. Picnic on the deck. With the interviewer.”

  “When’s she leaving?”

  “Before dinner, I hope. It’s a good color on you.” She went out, closing the door behind her, as she had been taught to do.

  Gret took off the orange sweater. It was too hot for the mild day, and she wasn’t sure she liked it yet. It would take a while. It would have to sit around a while till she got used to it, and then she would know. She thought she liked it; it felt like she’d worn it before. She put it into a drawer so her mother wouldn’t get hurt. Last year when her mother had come into her room at home and stared around, Gret had suddenly realized that the stare wasn’t one of disapproval but of pain. Disorder, dirt, disrespect for objects caused her pain, like being shoved or hit. It must be hard for her, living, in general. Knowing that, Gret tried to put stuff away; but it didn’t make much difference. She was mostly at college now. Mother went on nagging and ordering and enduring, and Daddy and the boys didn’t let it worry them. Just like some goddamn sitcom. Everything about families and people was exactly like some goddamn sitcom. Waiting for David to call, just like a soap opera. Everything the same as it was for everybody else, the same things happening over and over and over, all petty and trivial and stupid, and you couldn’t ever get free. It clung to you, held on, pinioned you. Like the dream she used to have of the room with wallpaper that caught and stuck to you, the Velcro dream. She reopened the textbook and read about the nature of gabbro, the origins of slate.

  The boys came back from the beach just in time for lunch. They always did. Still. Just as when her milk would spurt and the baby in the next room cried at the exact same moment. Their clomping in to go to the bathroom finally got Phil off the hall floor. He carried out platters to the table on the front porch and talked with whatsername the interviewer, who got quite pink and pleased. Phil looked so thin and short and hairy and vague and middle-aged that they never expected it till whammy! right between the eyes. Wooed and won. Go it, Phil. She looked like an intelligent girl, actually, overserious, and Phil wouldn’t hurt her. Wouldn’t hurt a fly, would old Phil. St. Philip, bestower of sexual favors. She smiled at them and said, “Come and get it.”

  Sue Student was being nice to Daddy, talking with him about forest fires or something. Daddy had his little company smile and was being nice to Sue Student. She didn’t sound too stupid, actually. She was a vegetarian. “So is Gret,” Gran said. “What is it about the U these days? They used to live on raw elk.” Why did she always have to disapprove of everything Gret did? She never said stuff like that about the boys. They were scarfing up salami. Mother watched them all loading their plates and making their sandwiches with that brooding hawk expression. Filling her niche. That was the trouble with biology, it was the sitcom. All niches. Mother provides. Better the dark slate levels, the basalt plains. Anything could happen, there.

  She was worn out. She went for the wine bottle; food later. She must get by herself for a while, that bit of a nap in the morning hadn’t helped. Such a long, long morning, with the drive over from Portland. And talking about old times was a most terrible thing to do. All the lost things, lost chances, all the dead people. The town with no road to it any more. She had had to say ten times, “He’s dead now,” “No, she’s dead.” What a strange thing to say, after all! You couldn’t be dead. You couldn’t be anything but alive. If you weren’t alive, you weren’t—you had been. You shouldn’t have to say “He’s dead now,” as if it was just some other way of being, but “He isn’t now,” or “He was.” Keep the past in the past tense. And the present in the present, where it belongs. Because you didn’t live on in others, as people said. You changed them, yes. She was entirely different because Amory had lived. But he didn’t live on in her, in her mem
ory, or in his books, or anywhere. He had gone. He was gone. Maybe “passed away” wasn’t such a whatdyoucallit, after all. At least it was in the passed tense, the past tense, not the present. He had come to her and she had come to him and they had made each other’s life what it had been, and then he had gone. Passed away. It wasn’t a euphemism, that’s what it wasn’t. Her mother…There was a pause in her thoughts. She drank the wine. Her mother was different, how? She came back to the rock. Of course she was dead, but it did not seem that she had passed away, the way he had. She went back to the table, refilled her glass with the red wine, laid salami, cheese, and green onions on brown bread.

  She was beautiful now. In the tight, short, ugly fashions of the sixties, when Mag had first looked at her from any distance and with any judgment, she had looked too big, and for a while after Amory’s death and when she had the bone marrow thing she had been gaunt, but now she was extraordinary: the line of the cheek, the long, soft lips, the long-lidded eyes with their fine wrinkle-pleating. What had she said about raw elk? The interviewer hadn’t heard and wouldn’t understand if she had heard, wouldn’t know that she had just been told what Mrs. Amory Inman thought of the institution of which her husband had been the luminary, what indeed she thought, in her increasing aloofness, her oldwomanhood, of most human institutions. Poor little whatsername, trapped in the works and dark machinations of that toughest survivor of the Middle Ages, the university, ground in the mills of assistantships, grants, competitions, examinations, dissertations, all set up to separate the men from the boys and both from the rest of the world, she wouldn’t have time for years yet to look up, to look out, to learn that there were such bare, airy places as the place where Rita Inman lived.

  “Yes, it is nice, isn’t it? We bought it in ’55, when things over here were still pretty cheap. We haven’t even asked you indoors, how terrible! After lunch you must look round the house. I think I’m going to have a little lie-down, after lunch. Or perhaps you’d like to go down on the beach then—the children will take you walking as far as you’d like, if you like. Mag, Sue says she needs an hour or two more with me. She hasn’t asked all…” a pause, “the professor’s questions yet. I’m afraid I kept wandering off the subject.” How sternly beautiful Mag was, her rock-seam mouth, her dark-waterfall hair going silver. Managing everything, as usual, seeing to everything, the good lunch. No, definitely her mother was not dead in the same way Father was dead, or Amory, or Clyde, or Polly, or Jim and Jean; there was something different there. She really must get by herself and think about it.