by Jane Smiley
“Is that the end?”
“If only it were. No, we’re only fifty minutes into the movie. We have an hour to go. Just as she and her buddies dealt with the rocket attack on the other vehicle earlier, someone else in the convoy shows up and deals with J. Lo and her buddies. Three are dead, blown to pieces. We see that. One is basically okay. Miracles happen. The one who was sitting next to J. Lo, a black guy, let’s say Will Smith, is alive, but most of his midsection is blown away.”
“An hommage to the scene in Catch-22 where Snowden the gunner dies in Yossarian’s plane?”
“Yes, okay. J. Lo herself is a mess. Her face is okay, and her trunk. But the rest of her is a bloody mess. The rest of the movie is about her trip out of Iraq. About the hospital where she goes at first. With scenes of the surgeries. Of what they save and what they can’t save. Of the hospital where she goes after that, and the beginnings of rehab. Of the wheelchair. Of how shocked her parents and boyfriend are when they see her for the first time. You can tell by the look on the boyfriend’s face that he isn’t planning to take care of her for the rest of her life. He doesn’t quite know what his excuse is going to be, but he’ll come up with something. Her thirty-first birthday in the rehab center. Someone feeding her her birthday cake and holding a glass of 7-Up up to her lips. We see the others who are with her in rehab, some better off, some worse off. We see how she gets back to California. Then, of course, at the end, there would be a reprise of the Judy Collins song, with a lengthier section of the whales singing, and then that tapering off as the credits end. It would be a simple movie. No love interest. No cuts to George Bush or Dick Cheney or peace rallies or her family worrying about her back in Los Angeles. Nothing but J. Lo doing her job, living her life. Almost a documentary, but not quite. That’s my movie.”
Max didn’t know what to say, in part because he could actually see this movie, and it was a sobering movie. As far as he was concerned, it was a movie that could bring the war in Iraq to a dead halt, except that, of course, like all antiwar movies, it would come way too late. If he got up off the bed right now, drove down the hill, and began writing and casting this movie this very day, not to mention trying to find the money, it would still be out of date when it came out. For that matter, J. Lo would be way too old to play the lead. The lessons to be learned from it would be abstract and of mere historical interest, only generally applicable to the circumstances of the time when it would, certainly with some fanfare, have its premiere. Max lamented the utter futility of it.
Elena said, “You would have to star someone big like J. Lo, because you would want the audience to already have a relationship with her. You would want it to be just like seeing someone you know and care about go off and get blown up.”
“You show good instincts.”
She sat up and stared at him. “Then why am I in the minority about this war? Why, when it seems so obvious to me that there are no weapons of mass destruction and that our supply lines are too long, not to mention the odds of victory and of pacifying the populace? I mean, Saddam is a cruel dictator, but the country is not engaged in a civil war, so we have nothing to offer them but civil war—why don’t others see this?”
“I don’t know,” said Max.
Elena burst out of the bed and went into the bathroom. As always, she was naked. As always, she looked lithe and graceful, a neat, un-self-conscious little package, handsome rather than beautiful, and yet evidently the mother of Simon, at whom it was hard to stop looking. They were an interesting pair, Max thought, purely from a casting point of view. You could cast and costume either one of them convincingly as a member of the opposite sex—Simon had the rich grace of a beautiful woman, and Elena had the self-contained, dry skepticism of a young man. And she was right about the violent impact of blowing up J. Lo, and the very thought had evaporated his morning good humor. After all, what were they going to do when they departed this haven in twenty-four hours? It was impossible to tell, and, he thought, impossible to anticipate with any feeling other than dread.
Here he had been so confident that a life in Hollywood had prepared him for any betrayal, any cruelty, any despicable human act, but of course that conceit was as illusory as all the other illusions. It was like when he watched the final cut of A Very Bad Day, his one and only blockbuster. Here was Royce Hall at UCLA (in the middle of a student performance of Medea, since it was a theater) tilting and tipping into the yawning tar pits, with people fleeing and screaming and dying as the plaza in front of the building caved into a rapidly expanding sea of oily, flaming blackness. After the credits rolled, he and Pete, his cinematographer, and Dom, the producer, and Jerry and the studio execs had all sat quietly for maybe ten seconds, then they had burst out talking and laughing. How great it was! That last scene was fantastic! How did you do that? No one’s ever seen anything like that! Wow! Already counting money, and rightly so, since it earned $103 million when $103 million seemed like a lot. A movie like that did shock you—the tornadoes ripping apart the Beverly Center, and the Hollywood Bowl being crushed by a meteorite did shock you. But how did it prepare you, even if you were the director? The real source of his dread, of course, was that he suspected he was doomed to find out.
Elena emerged from the bathroom again, her face set. She stared at him, then said, “But that is us, you know.”
“Who is us?”
“The parents. J.Lo’s parents. More or less, now, they’ve made sure that all our worries for our children will be unceasing, and realistically so.”
He knew who she meant by “they.” And he knew what she meant by “worries.” She pivoted and went back into the bathroom.
As she moved about the elegant bathroom, Elena knew she had done it again. The fact was, she said that she couldn’t help it—at least, she said that to herself. Every morning, she woke up thinking about Iraq after lying awake at least part of the night thinking about Iraq. She had expected that moving up to this house and avoiding the war would relieve her, especially as the others did now talk about the war less. But she thought about it more last night than the night before, more the night before than Sunday night. It took place in her head no matter what. She was marooned in a mental cul-de-sac compared with Max, compared with Isabel, compared with everyone.
And yet she did not believe in the words “I can’t help it.” She knew all sorts of techniques that were intended to enable you to put a stop to, or at least to control, intrusive thoughts. For example, she had thought that their conversation was going to come around to Isabel and Stoney, to what was going on between them and what it meant. She had been watching them, and they showed all the signs of a long-term connection. She saw Paul watching them, too, and she could read his mind—Isabel and Stoney were synchronized. The night before, while everyone was watching a movie called Ghost World that Simon had found and recommended (“God, Mom! Don’t you care about my generation?”—but with a teasing laugh), Isabel and Stoney had gotten into a rhythm. He ate a handful of popcorn, she took a sip of Pellegrino and then offered him one. He took a sip of her Pellegrino, then she picked a few kernels out of the popcorn bowl. Elena had planned, right then and there, what advice she would be giving Max when he noticed this: “Let her bring it up, then tell her exactly what you think. All of what you think. But only one time. She’s twenty-three years old. You can make sure she hears you, but you can’t make sure she listens to you.” But even though he hadn’t brought up Isabel, when he invited her to tell her movie she could have told another one, a romantic comedy about a big, loosely knit family, where the beautiful, promising daughter (Nicole Kidman, playing very young) brings home the nerd (Bob Balaban, playing even younger), and some funny and heartwarming things happen, and the father is reconciled. But she could not help herself, and now both of them were depressed.
Her favorite cousin, Lucy, had once retraced a three-hundred-mile drive from Chicago to Des Moines, stopping and checking under every bridge abutment and in every deep ditch and at every rest stop for the inju
red man she was sure she had hit with her car. It had taken her six hours to make the original trip and two days to retrace her steps; she had slept in her car over the night so that she could begin at first light. Their grandmother, the one she and Lucy shared (Granma Edith), ironed her husband’s shorts and undershirts, set the table every night with a freshly laundered and pressed tablecloth. It wasn’t until Elena was an adult that she realized that not every grandmother owned a mangle and did her fine laundry in distilled water with homemade soap scented with home-grown lavender. Another cousin, Eloise, known as the careless one, who cooked and cleaned with notoriously hard water, nevertheless weighed her ingredients rather than measure them by volume, as most people did. In fact, Eloise’s Joy of Cooking (she showed it to Elena) had been entirely notated, in pencil, with conversions in the margins of ingredient measurements, between volumes and weight, but also between English and metric, which Eloise considered finer, and therefore more accurate. Could they help themselves?
And then, when Lucy had been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder and had informed everyone that you could help these sorts of things with counseling and drugs, everyone in the family had been offended. But, Elena thought as she was carefully drying her hands and laying the damp hand-towel across the warmer rack, Lucy’s experience showed that you could help any and all intrusive thoughts, including ones about soldiers getting blown up and ones about politicians having secret agendas and ones about a coming age more violent and fearsome than any she had ever experienced. During her treatment, Lucy had become quite strict—prohibiting her from using the term “obsessed” unless she was, say, measuring the overhang of her bedspread on all three sides with a tape measure to make sure it was even, or holding her junk mail up in front of a bright light before she opened it to make sure it carried no mysterious powdered substances. Elena could not, therefore, describe herself as “obsessed.” The term was “preoccupied.”
Perhaps a valid difference, according to Lucy’s rules, would have been that when Lucy was obsessing it was images she could not get rid of. The image of a man who was holding a traffic sign at the site of some road construction, and whom Lucy had seen, still standing, in her rearview mirror after she passed him. And yet, because of the way the sunlight hit, or the angle of the hood of her car as she passed him, or simply a mistaken thought, she could not dislodge from her mind the sight of him right there, right on the other side of her hood, too close. Perhaps she had brushed him? Perhaps she had hit him, and the view she had of him in her rearview mirror was wishful thinking? Perhaps she was mixed up and she had hit someone else somewhere else, which was why she felt such conviction? When Lucy’s friend in Des Moines said to her, “Well, you didn’t feel a bump, did you? You would have felt a bump,” the idea of a bump lodged in her mind, too. Had she really not felt a bump, really not? And so she had driven back to Chicago and then back to Des Moines, looking for the body, and remembering that elderly couple she had heard about, in upstate New York long ago, whose car had slid over an embankment in the snow in the twilight, and not been seen, and the couple had been pinned, and had frozen to death before anyone realized they were in the ravine. And as soon as she thought of that couple, the man she had not hit in the summer became pinned in his car and had to be found before he froze to death. It was after this experience that Lucy had decided she needed treatment.
But it was not images that preoccupied Elena, it was arguments. She thought about this as she flossed her teeth. For example, when she had awakened the night before, she had said to Condoleezza Rice—in her mind, of course, because she didn’t want to wake Max—“How are they going to get that mushroom cloud here? By ship? By plane? By car? Are you saying that Iraq has or will soon have the same nuclear and air-force capability that the U.S. had at the end of World War II? That they can build and drop a bomb that will create a mushroom cloud? Or are you saying that it would be like a nuclear test in the New Mexico desert? That they are going to build a framework somewhere, install a nuclear device, and detonate it from afar? If they did get some yellowcake uranium from Niger, are you saying that they are capable of all the steps it takes to transform that uranium into a mushroom cloud, precisely and exactly a mushroom cloud?” She had said all that, and then, the bad sign, she had said it again. “It’s remotely plausible that a suitcase full of dirty material could be carried to some American city, be exploded with an improvised explosive, and succeed in contaminating that city, but would that result in a mushroom cloud? Do you, Condoleezza Rice, truly believe that such an act of terrorism would indeed result in a mushroom cloud rising thousands of feet in the air over, let’s say, Los Angeles, and if so why?” She had been preoccupied with this argument for more than an hour, between about one and a little after two, before getting back to sleep. Condoleezza, in her mind, had no answer for this argument, but didn’t have to, because the image had done its PR work whether Condoleezza believed it or not.
Elena washed her length of floss under the tap and then ran it between her fingertips. It was, she thought, still usable. She wound it up and tucked it inside the cap of the floss package. Normally, she got five or even six flossings out of a single strand, but that was because she flossed at least twice a day, sometimes three times, and her floss never encountered much resistance. She had been weighing whether to put a paragraph about correct flossing in her book or not.
The night before last, she had been preoccupied with the argument about Israel. This argument was with Israelis. It ran: “You know that your supporters in the American right wing are supporting you because they want the final battle to take place in Israel, and then for you to have one last chance to convert, or die and spend the rest of eternity in a burning lake in hell. You know, because they have been open about it, that your destruction is their salvation. They will certainly act if they can, at least unconsciously, to accelerate their salvation and your destruction. And the history of Christianity is of fanatics acting out their fanaticism, so why would you trust and support them? Why would you even take the risk, whatever you think about how deluded they are? Is this some sort of higher-level suicide wish? Is it mere cynicism? Is it blind faith? Isn’t what these right-wingers imagine and foresee a version of the Holocaust?” All of these questions ran through her mind as if written out, again and again, not images but words, why why why, sometimes attached to other phrases, like “What in the world is wrong with you that you would think such thoughts or take such risks?,” though she tried to maintain, even in her internal preoccupations, a reasonable level of discourse, and not to sink to mere abuse.
The arguments went on simultaneously with everything else she did, everything else she said, which reminded her that when she and Lucy had talked about the history of Lucy’s OCD, Elena had been amazed to discover just how long that history was. So many times when she had thought they were just driving down the street looking for an open gas station or shopping for bathing suits, Lucy had been reviewing her day and wondering if, by some inadvertent act, she had injured or killed someone. Somehow, Lucy could say to her sister Lily, “I can’t believe you actually wore that outfit out in public,” while at that very moment worrying that she had run over a child with her shopping cart without realizing it.
Elena opened the cosmetics closet and took out some French wrinkle cream scented with lavender and began applying it to her temples with the tips of her forefinger and middle finger. It disappeared into her skin instantly, leaving only that floral fragrance in the floral atmosphere of the bathroom. What Elena especially loved about the bathroom was that the green tile floor was edged with elaborately hand-painted tiles of different flowers, almost as detailed as botanical drawings. Right in the center of the floor was a tile bouquet of tiger lilies that you could almost smell, if tiger lilies could be smelled, which they could not.
Perhaps the best argument, though, if not the most logical or even the most moral, but the most effective, was the argument she had made in her movie. The argument of this was: “Wha
t happens in war? Is this the price you want to pay? Who is going to pay it? What will you get for it? How close to this high cost are you going to position yourself? Will you pay this price with your own body? With that of your child? (She thought of Simon.) That of your father or mother? That of your daughter? (She thought of Isabel.) How about if the daughter is beautiful? What is the highest price you are willing to pay to secure the abstract benefits of having your way in the Middle East? Amputation? Madness? Blindness? Paraplegia? Quadriplegia? Lifelong institutionalization and helplessness?” (Simon, Isabel, Simon, Isabel, Simon, Simon, Simon.) Obviously, none of the war-makers minded if the Iraqis paid a high price, so she could not make her movie about an Iraqi being maimed. J.Lo might work, though. She capped the bottle of cream and set it back into the cabinet and closed the cabinet door, then she looked around the bathroom. It was clean and neat. The more arguments she made, the cleaner and neater everything around her became. It was a byproduct of the excess energy that the arguments generated. And it was also true that Lucy had always been a demon of activity. Not only was her house perfectly clean, she was a wonderful seamstress, whose every hem and zipper and dart and design was perfect.