“Geology.” The word came out. Spoken. Mother’s ears went up like a cat’s, eyebrows flickering, eyes and mouth impassive. Daddy acted like he’d known her decision all along, maybe he had, he couldn’t have. Sue Student had to keep asking who was in the Geo department and what you did with geology. She only knew a couple of the professors’ names and felt stupid not knowing more. She said, “Oh, you get hired by oil companies, mining companies, all kinds of land-rape companies. Find uranium under Indian reservations.” Oh, shut up. Sue Student meant well. Everybody meant well. It spoiled everything. Softened everything. “The grizzled old prospector limps in from twenty years alone in the desert, swearing at her mule,” Daddy said, and she laughed, it was funny, Daddy was funny, but she was for a moment, a flash, afraid of him. He was so quick. He knew that this was something important, and did he mean well? He loved her, he liked her, he was like her, but when she wasn’t like him did he like it? Mother was saying how geology had been all cut-and-dried when she was in college and how it was all changed now by these new theories. “Plate tectonics isn’t exactly new,” oh, shut up, shut up. Mother meant well. Sue Student and Mother talked about academic careers in science and got interested comparing, colleaguing. Sue was at the U but she was younger and only a grad student; Mother was only at a community college but she was older and had a Ph.D. from Berkeley. And Daddy was out of it. And Gran half asleep, and Tom and Sam cleaning up the platters. She said, “It’s funny. I was thinking. All of us—the family, I mean—nobody will ever know any of us ever existed. Except for Granddaddy. He’s the only real one.”
Sue gazed mildly. Daddy nodded in approval. Mother stared, the hawk at bay. Gran said in a curious, distant tone, “Oh I don’t think so at all.” Tom was throwing bread to a seagull, but Sam, finishing the salami, said, in his mother’s voice, “Fame is the spur!” At that, the hawk blinked and stooped to the prey: “Whatever do you mean, Gret? Reality is being a dean of the School of Education?”
“He was important. He has a biography. None of us will.”
“Thank goodness,” Gran said, getting up. “I do hope you don’t mind, if I have just a bit of a lie-down now I’ll be much brighter later, I hope.”
Everybody moved.
“Boys. You do the dishes. Tom!”
He came. They obeyed. She felt a tremendous, a ridiculous surge, as warm and irresistible as tears or milk, of pride—in them, in herself. They were lovely. Lovely boys. Grumbling, coltish, oafish, gangling, redhanded, they unloaded the table with efficiency and speed, Sam insulting Tom steadily in his half-broken voice, Tom replying on two sweet notes at intervals like a thrush, “Ass-sole…Ass-sole…”
“Who’s for a walk on the beach?”
Mag was, the interviewer was, Phil was, Gret surprisingly was.
They crossed Searoad and went single file between the dunes. Down on the beach she looked back to see the front windows and the roof above the dune grass, always remembering the pure delight of seeing it so the first time, the first time ever. To Gret and the boys the beach house was coeval with existence, but to her it was connected with joy. When she was a child they had stayed in other people’s beach houses, places in Gearhart and Neskowin, summerhouses of deans and provosts and the rich people who clung to university administrators under the impression that they were intellectuals; or else, as she got older, Dean Inman had taken her and her mother along to his ever more exotic conferences, to Botswana, Brasilia, Bangkok, until she had rebelled at last. “But they are interesting places,” her mother had said, deprecating, “you really don’t enjoy going?” And she had howled, “I’m sick of feeling like a white giraffe, why can’t I ever stay home where people are the same size?” And at some indefinite but not long interval after that, they had driven over to look at this house. “What do you think?” her father had asked, standing in the small living room, a smiling sixty-year-old public man, kindly rhetorical. There was no need to ask. They had all three been mad for it from the moment they saw it at the end of the long sand road between the marshes and the sea. “My room, OK?” Mag had said, coming out of the southwest bedroom. She and Phil had had their honeymoon summer there.
She looked across the sand at him. He was walking at the very edge of the water, moving crabwise east when a wave came washing farther in, following the outwash back west, absorbed as a child, slight, stooped, elusive. She veered her way to intersect with his. “Phildog,” she said.
“Magdog.”
“You know, she was right. What made her say it, do you think?”
“Defending me.”
How easily he said it. How easy his assumption. It had not occurred to her.
“Could be. And herself? And me?…And then geology! Is she just in love with the course, or is she serious?”
“Never anything but.”
“It might be a good major for her. Unless it’s all labs now. I don’t know, it’s just a section of Intro Sci at CC. I’ll ask Benjie what geologists do these days. I hope still those little hammers. And khaki shorts.”
“That Priestley novel in the bookcase,” Phil said, and went on to talk about it, and novelists contemporary with Priestley, and she listened attentively as they walked along the hissing fringes of the continent. If Phil had not quit before the prelims, he would have got much farther in his career than she in hers, because men got farther easier then, of course, but mainly because he was such a natural; he had the right temperament, the necessary indifference and passion of the scholar. He was drawn to early twentieth century English fiction with the perfect combination of detachment and fascination, and could have written a fine study of Priestley, Galsworthy, Bennett, that lot, a book worth a good professorship at a good school. Or worth at least a sense of self-respect. But self-respect wasn’t a saint’s business, was it? Dean Inman had had plenty of self-respect, and plenty of respect, too. Had she been escaping the various manifestations of respect when she fell for Phil? No. She still missed it, in fact, and supplied it when she could. She had fallen for Phil because she was strong, because of the awful need strength has for weakness. If you’re not weak how can I be strong? Years it had taken her, years, until now, to learn that strength, like the lovely boys washing the dishes, like Gret saying that terrible thing at lunch, was what strength needed, craved, rested in. Rested and grew weak in, with the true weakness, the fecundity. Without self-defense. Gret had not been defending Phil, or anybody. Phil had to see it that way. But Gret had been speaking out of the true weakness. Dean Inman wouldn’t have understood it, but it wouldn’t have worried him; he would have seen that Gret respected him, and that to him would have meant that she respected herself. And Rita? She could not remember what Rita had said, when Gret said that about their not being real. Something not disapproving, but remote. Moving away. Rita was moving away. Like the gulls there ahead of them, always moving away as they advanced towards them, curved wings and watchful, indifferent eyes. Airborne, with hollow bones. She looked back down the sands. Gret and the interviewer were walking slowly, talking, far behind, so that she and Phil kept moving away from them, too. A tongue of the tide ran up the sand between them, crosscurrents drawing lines across it, and hissed softly out again. The horizon was a blue murk, but the sunlight was hot. “Ha!” Phil said, and picked up a fine white sand dollar. He always saw the invaluable treasures, the dollars of no currency; he went on finding Japanese glass netfloats every winter on this beach, years after the Japanese had given up glass floats for plastic, years after anyone else had found one. Some of the floats he found had limpets growing on them. Bearded with moss and in garments green, they had floated for years on the great waves, tiny unburst bubbles, green, translucent earthlets in foam galaxies, moving away, drawing near. “But how much Maupassant is there in The Old Wives’ Tale?” she asked. “I mean, that kind of summing-up-women thing?” And Phil, pocketing his sea-paid salary, answered, as her father had answered her questions, and she listened to him and to the sea.
Sue’s mother had died of ca
ncer of the womb. Sue had gone home to stay with her before college was out last spring. It had taken her four months to die, and Sue had to talk about it. Gret had to listen. An honor, an imposition, an initiation. From time to time, barely enduring, Gret lifted her head to look out across the grey level of the sea, or up at Breton Head towering closer, or ahead at Mother and Daddy going along like slow sandpipers at the foam-fringe, or down at the damp brown sand and her grotty sneakers making footprints. But she bent her head again to Sue, confining herself. Sue had to tell and she had to listen, to learn all the instruments, the bonds, the knives, the racks and pinions, and how you became part of the torture, complicit with it, and whether in the end the truth, after such efforts to obtain it, would be spoken.
“My father hated the male nurses to touch her,” Sue said. “He said it was woman’s work, he tried to make them send women nurses in.”
She talked about catheters, metastases, transfusions, each word an iron maiden, a toothed vagina. Women’s work. “The oncologist said it would get better when he put her on morphine, when her mind would get confused. But it got worse. It was the worst. The last week was the worst thing I will ever go through.” She knew what she was saying, and it was tremendous. To be able to say that meant that you need not be afraid again. But it seemed like you had to lose a good deal for that gain.
Gret’s escaping gaze passed her mother and father, who had halted at the foot of Breton Head, and followed the breakers on out to where the sea went level. Somebody had told her in high school that if you jumped from a height like Breton Head, hitting the water would be just like hitting rock,
“I didn’t mean to go on telling you all that. I’m sorry. I just haven’t got through it yet. I have to keep working through it.”
“Sure,” Gret said.
“Your grandmother is so—she’s a beautiful person. And your whole family. You all just seem so real. I really appreciate being here with you.”
She stopped walking, and Gret had to stop, too.
“What you said at lunch, about your grandfather being famous.”
Gret nodded.
“When I suggested to Professor Nabe about talking to Dean Inman’s family, you know, maybe getting some details that weren’t just public knowledge, some insights on how his educational theories and his life went together, and his family, and so on—you know what he said? He said, ‘But they’re all quite unimportant people, aren’t they?”’
The two young women walked on side by side.
“That’s funny,” Gret said, with a grin. She stooped for a black pebble. It was basalt, of course; there was nothing but basalt this whole stretch of the coast, outflow from the great shield volcanoes up the Columbia, or pillow basalts from undersea vents; that’s what Mother and Daddy were clambering on now, big, hard pillows from under the sea. The hard sea.
“What did you find?” Sue asked, over-intense about everything, strung out. Gret showed her the dull black pebble, then flipped it at the breakers.
“Everyone is important,” Sue said. “I learned that this summer.”
Was that the truth that the croaking voice had gasped at torture’s end? She didn’t believe it. Nobody was important. But she couldn’t say that. It would sound as cheap, as stupid, as the stupid professor. But the pebble wasn’t important, neither was she, neither was Sue. Neither was the sea. Important wasn’t the point. Things didn’t have rank.
“Want to go on up the Head a ways? There’s a sort of path.”
Sue consulted her watch. “I don’t want to keep your grandmother waiting when she wakes up. I’d better go back. I could listen to her talk forever. She’s just amazing.” She was going to say, “You’re so lucky!” She did.
“Yeah,” Gret said. “Some Greek, I think it was some Greek said don’t say that to anybody until they’re dead.” She raised her voice. “Ma! Dad! Yo!” She gestured to them that she and Sue were returning. The small figures on the huge black pillows nodded and waved, and her mother’s voice cried something, like a hawk’s cry or a gull’s, the sea drowning out all consonants, all sense.
Crows cawed and carked over the marshes inland. It was the only sound but the sound of the sea coming in the open window and filling the room and the whole house full as a shell is full of sound that sounds like the sea but is something else, your blood running in your veins, they said, but how could it be that you could hear that in a shell but never in your own ear or your cupped hand? In a coffee cup there was a sound like it, but less, not coming and going like the sea-sound. She had tried it as a child, the hand, the cup, the shell. Caw, cark, caw! Black heavy swoopers, queer. The light like no other on the white ceiling boards. Tongue and groove, tongue in cheek. What had the child said that for, that Amory was the only real one of them? An awful thing to say about reality. The child would have to be very careful, she was so strong. Stronger even than Maggie. Because her father was so weak. Of course that was all backwards, but it was so hard to think the things straight that the words had all backwards. Only she knew that the child would have to be very careful, not to be caught. Cark, ark, caw! the crows cried far over the marshes. What was the sound that kept going on? The wind, it must be the wind across the sagebrush plains. But that was far away. What was it she had wanted to think about when she lay down?
Ether, OR
For the Narrative Americans
Edna
I never go in the Two Blue Moons any more. I thought about that when I was arranging the grocery window today and saw Corrie go in across the street and open up. Never did go into a bar alone in my life. Sook came by for a candy bar and I said that to her, said I wonder if I ought to go have a beer there sometime, see if it tastes different on your own. Sook said Oh Ma you always been on your own. I said I seldom had a moment to myself and four husbands, and she said You know that don’t count. Sook’s fresh. Breath of fresh air. I saw Needless looking at her with that kind of dog look men get. I was surprised to find it gave me a pang, I don’t know what of. I just never saw Needless look that way. What did I expect, Sook is twenty and the man is human. He just always seemed like he did fine on his own. Independent. That’s why he’s restful. Silvia died years and years and years ago, but I never thought of it before as a long time. I wonder if I have mistaken him. All this time working for him. That would be a strange thing. That was what the pang felt like, like when you know you’ve made some kind of mistake, been stupid, sewn the seam inside out, left the burner on.
They’re all strange, men are. I guess if I understood them I wouldn’t find them so interesting. But Toby Walker, of them all he was the strangest. The stranger. I never knew where he was coming from. Roger came out of the desert, Ady came out of the ocean, but Toby came from farther. But he was here when I came. A lovely man, dark all through, dark as forests. I lost my way in him. I loved to lose my way in him. How I wish it was then, not now! Seems like I can’t get lost any more. There’s only one way to go. I have to keep plodding along it. I feel like I was walking across Nevada, like the pioneers, carrying a lot of stuff I need, but as I go along I have to keep dropping off things. I had a piano once but it got swamped at a crossing of the Platte. I had a good frypan but it got too heavy and I left it in the Rockies. I had a couple ovaries but they wore out around the time we were in the Carson Sink. I had a good memory but pieces of it keep dropping off, have to leave them scattered around in the sagebrush, on the sand hills. All the kids are still coming along, but I don’t have them. I had them, it’s not the same as having them. They aren’t with me any more, even Archie and Sook. They’re all walking along back where I was years ago. I wonder will they get any nearer than I have to the west side of the mountains, the valleys of the orange groves? They’re years behind me. They’re still in Iowa. They haven’t even thought about the Sierras yet. I didn’t either till I got here. Now I begin to think I’m a member of the Donner Party.
Thos. Sunn
The way you can’t count on Ether is a hindrance sometimes, like when I got
up in the dark this morning to catch the minus tide and stepped out the door in my rubber boots and plaid jacket with my clam spade and bucket, and overnight she’d gone inland again. The damn desert and the damn sagebrush. All you could dig up there with your damn spade would be a God damn fossil. Personally I blame it on the Indians. I do not believe that a fully civilised country would allow these kind of irregularities in a town. However as I have lived here since 1949 and could not sell my house and property for chicken feed, I intend to finish up here, like it or not. That should take a few more years, ten or fifteen most likely. Although you can’t count on anything these days anywhere let alone a place like this. But I like to look after myself, and I can do it here. There is not so much Government meddling and interference and general hindering in Ether as you would find in the cities. This may be because it isn’t usually where the Government thinks it is, though it is, sometimes.
When I first came here I used to take some interest in a woman, but it is my belief that in the long run a man does better not to. A woman is a worse hindrance to a man than anything else, even the Government.
I have read the term “a crusty old bachelor” and would be willing to say that that describes me so long as the crust goes all the way through. I don’t like things soft in the center. Softness is no use in this hard world. I am like one of my mother’s biscuits.
The Unreal and the Real - Vol 1 - Where On Earth Page 24