Long Division

by Jane Berentson

  Roger called today. Mary Rose was so excited to tell him about losing her first tooth.

  Five months down! Three to go!

  Thank you to everyone for all your prayers!!!!

  Their [sic] are times when I don’t think I can do it, but I just turn to his picture and remember the commitment he made to our country and the commitment we made to each other and then I know that I have to be brave.

  Am I the only psycho who fantasizes about my lover’s death and gets pissy when he writes short, boring, no-meat e-mails? Well, I guess I can’t blame a woman for not posting that kind of confession on the Internet. But still. Nothing to learn really. Generic, weepy crap.

  Level 3: Guilt for Severely Passing Judgment on Bloggers for Properties Listed in Level 2

  Generic, weepy crap is a horrible thing to call someone’s real life. Especially someone with whom I share a common risk and situation. Our hearts are all cast across the same fat ocean and dangling from the same wimpy fishing line with the same incompetent Texan holding the reel.75 I shouldn’t scoff at their woes. And I shouldn’t feel superior because I think I’m approaching this in a different, more creative, more analytical way. Because I’m not really. They’re raising humans. I’m raising a chicken and learning to play pinochle. Big whoop.

  Level 4: Eighty Pounds in Eight Months

  So pretty much all of the blogs have wedding pictures. The husband decked out in his dress blues, the now-blogging wife radiant in a sweeping white gown. Her arms are sleek, tapering down to a modest bouquet of lilies that nearly covers the span of her feminine waistline. And then there’s the now photos of Mrs. Blogger standing behind her twin three-year-olds on the swing set. The kids are smiling for Daddy. She’s smiling for Daddy. But there’s a whole lot more of Mommy behind those swings. A stomach bulging out of an elastic waistband. Mounds of flesh draped over her cheekbones. Thick arms and thunder thighs. She’s too busy wiping off drool and washing peed-on bedsheets to get to the gym. She’s eating the Tater Tot and taco casseroles, rich with creamy condensed soups and kindly delivered by a member of the church ladies’ guild each week. A few of the bloggers even discuss their deployment weight gain on their sites. They are all good-natured about it, owning up to stress-eating and whatnot. Dare I ponder if it’s from lack of S.E.X.? P.S. None of the blahgers mention anything about S.E.X. on their blogs, which I guess I get, because their mothers probably read them.

  So that’s why I quit writing for a bit. David and I don’t have any children. I’m not praying or thanking anyone else for praying. Everything I say is probably Generic Weepy Crap. And thank Jesus and Helen that my protein-rich, poverty diet has kept me fit as a fiddle. What do I have to complain about?76 slkdfjf slkdjhfskldj fskldjfh sdkjnv,xmnseduiskjhsd. !!!!!!!!!!!!!! fuck.

  But first, the fishing trip.

  Gus invited me to join Gina; himself; and his college buddy, Stephen, on a five-day fishing/camping trip at the Potholes State Park in eastern Washington. The Potholes are this smattering of tiny lakes (some are natural volcanic leftovers; others are manmade reservoirs used for crop irrigation) nestled at the eastern side of the Cascade Mountains and the Columbia River. Their plans coincided with my spring break, and I couldn’t think of a more lovely way to spend it.

  The weather was perfect. And in Washington State, perfect weather permits incessant commentary. It’s not considered lame or master-of-the-obvious to say things like Oh, it’s so gorgeous or What an amazing night several times an hour. So we did. We packed up Gus’s van on a Saturday morning that was crisp and clear enough to necessitate sunglasses. I rolled my dorky cargo pants up to midcalf and we listened to a cassette tape of Aesop’s fables that Gus brought along in the van. We cracked our windows and slipped our fingers outside to curl over the lip of the cool glass. Stephen turned out to be a great guy. Not that I expect Gus to have lame friends, but I was skeptical when he told me of Stephen’s prep-academy upbringing and present enrollment in dental school. Yes, he was a bit soft and delicate-looking, but he jabbed that first earthworm on his first fishing hook with a fearless, devious smile that both impressed me and scared me a bit for his future patients. Stephen was big into making up songs about fishing77 and looking for animal tracks. The way nature can set city folk78 reeling in raw wonder is beautiful. It’s like when I show my students a simple crystal of salt under a microscope or this one video about deep-sea creatures that look so much like aliens. He had that same stunned appreciation for things. Stephen is fantastic.

  The four of us had long talks around the campfire. Gus and I told embarrassing stories about one another from our teen years. Once he went off about how I got my eyebrow pierced junior year and that it got so infected that my eye swelled shut and he had to build a dam out of a playing card and masking tape to prevent the pus from leaking down and seeping into my eye socket.

  “Yeah, I drove her to the emergency room, where all the doctors wanted to take pictures for their medical textbooks. It was that gross. Do you remember the names of the books that published the photos, Annie? Didn’t they give you free copies?” The fire had dwindled down to a few glowing embers, and it was too dark for Stephen or Gina to see my hand wrapped across my face holding in the laugh.

  “No way!” Stephen said. “I bet we have those books in the Harvard Medical Library!”

  But then Gina asked, “Did you ever get any other piercings?” and Gus and I both lost it.

  “Sorry to disappoint, guys,” I spit out after finally allowing a laugh to escape my lips. “None of that never happened. Gus is full of shit.” Stephen threw a beer cap in Gus’s direction and Gina cursed him playfully.

  “Full of macaroni and delicious lake trout, to be precise,” Gus said. But now that I’m in analyzing/writing mode, the story about my pus-filled eyebrow could have happened. Gus told it so well I nearly believed it myself. I’ve known Gus for so long, and we have so many dumb stories about one another, that we can fictionalize small bits of our past without it feeling artificial. I very well could have pierced my eyebrow. (I did dye my hair black twice junior year.) And if I had pierced it, Gus and I both know that I wouldn’t have been too great at remembering to swab the healing hole with alcohol and keep it sterile. And when the pus started to brim and swell, Gus would certainly have put his perfect-SAT-math-score brilliance to work and constructed the described apparatus. So as humorous as the fireside fable may have been, it just as easily could have been fact. When you know someone well enough to properly portray their character, what’s the harm inserting that personality into an alternate reality? Not factually true, but pretty much actually true. Annie, you need to home in on this theory a bit before you attempt to present it to the critical reader. Yikes.79

  I shared a tent with Stephen, and he slept still and silent like a corpse. We stayed up late each night talking about worthless things like the prices of certain magazine subscriptions and the social patterns of kids at sleepaway camp. And it felt so rich and siblinglike. Stephen has four brothers and two sisters and endless tales of their hair pulling and high jinks. I always thought that Gus was so brotherly, but now that I think about it, that idea makes very little sense. He’s as much nobody’s brother as I am nobody’s sister. How could he possibly fit the bill? But Brother Stephen, he teased in a way that was so totally avuncular; without a hint of flirtation and with this underlying wisdom that I completely trusted. Occasionally, we could hear Gus and Gina giggling from their tent (and nothing more than that, thankfully), but every time my hearing picked up the deep tones of Gus’s unique laugh, I honestly couldn’t help but innocently wonder who was spooning whom.

  The last morning of the trip, I woke up super early. I swear there was a bird perched right outside the tent, brushing his beak up to poke the nylon wall and coo straight into my ear. I looked over to find Stephen stiff as stone, smiling peacefully and probably dreaming of rugby or tight, clean gums. I heard someone walking around outside, so I slipped on my sneakers and zipped myself out of the tent. Gus had jus
t sat down on a stump and was doing something with his hands. I assumed he was fussing with a lure.

  “Going fishing?” I whispered. Our campsite was the most remote corner of the Potholes State Park. No outhouse. No running water. A three-mile hike from the last human. The reward for schlepping in all our stuff was our own mini, but glorious, lake—flat and round like a shiny tin plate. We’d christened it Hobo Lake because it reminded Gus of something a hobo would eat beans off. I thought hobos didn’t bother with flatware, but the name stuck. Whispering was in order because the water made everything so darn loud. Gus simply shook his head, and I walked over to see what he was doing.

  “I woke up this morning and remembered that I brought these. We have to use them before we head out.” Gus was snapping together little pieces of balsa wood: the wings and rudders of mini planes. Gliders. Gus has always been into aviation. I think I may have mentioned the rocket-building phase before. “Let’s go to the clearing up there.” We’d set up camp about fifty feet from the lake’s edge, at the foot of a gentle hill of volcanic gravel and pale green shrubbery. At the top of the hill was a fairly level patch of land the size of a baseball diamond, where the vegetation was substantially thinner. When we found it on the first day, Gus said we could play cricket there. Gina said we could dance. Stephen said we could perform ritual sacrifices to the gods.

  There was no need to talk as Gus and I launched our planes, watching them loop and swirl and lift with the morning breeze. At first we stood side by side, throwing and chasing the toys in tandem. Keeping silent track of whose plane was floating further and whose was making the more dramatic dives. Then, without either one of us giving instructions or announcing the idea, we took to different sides of the clearing and threw our planes in each other’s directions. Awkward enemies with clunky missiles. First, we’d simply chase them until they landed, scoop them up, throw them back. But then Gus got all fancy and starting trying to snatch the planes from the air midflight. He was actually quite good at it—obviously the Ultimate Frisbee type. I’d never seen him so graceful and athletic. Leaping over plants, boosting off a rock to gently snag the plane by its nose, his body seemed so comfortable and harmonious. Balanced, clean lines, his flannel shirt never pulling too tight. Everything was so quiet except for the occasional bird, my heavy breathing, the red gravel crunching under our feet.

  So then I tried to catch the planes too. The first couple times I’d outrun them and they’d be bumping along the earth behind me as I turned to nab them at eye level. But I got better at judging the distance and I finally managed to snag one out of the air. “Yesssssssss!” I shouted as I felt my fingers latch around the light, almost cardboard-like wood. The momentum of my leap pulled me down to the ground, and when I stopped hearing my “yesssss” echo across the hills and glide along Hobo Lake, I noticed that I’d completely crushed the main axis of the plane. And these were my thoughts, in chronological order:1. Gus is going to be so pissed I broke his plane.

  2. David flies in planes80 all the time and could easily be crushed like this.

  3. I should have thought 2, then 1.

  4. Why am I thinking 3? What does this mean?

  And then Gus noticed that I wasn’t getting up and came over.

  “You alright, Harper?” He put a hand on my shoulder. Its warmth surprised me.

  “I busted it. I’m sorry.” I must have looked so ridiculous, looking up at him like I was delivering the news of a loved one’s death.

  “No worries, Annie. I got these for ninety-nine cents. Besides, we should probably head back to camp and make breakfast. Gina doesn’t know that I brought blueberries for pancakes. Her favorite.” Gus smiled and wiped his hands on his pants before helping me up. As we sidestepped down the incline I almost lost my footing because the clear sky kept luring my vision away from the earth. “It’s so nice out,” I said. Twice.

  I slept almost the entire drive home. I woke up because my cell phone was vibrating in the pocket of my jacket. I had turned it on as we were leaving, knowing that we’d roll into a service area at some point and maybe I’d have a message from David. (Un?)surprisingly, it was kind of the first time I’d thought about David since I’d laid eyes on the gloss of Hobo Lake. Having the phone off and the Internet and the newspaper and the rest of the universe on the other side of the Cascade Mountains, the camping trip was both a breath and a release. I didn’t worry about David. I didn’t have to get mad at myself for getting mad at him and not being accepting enough of our standby excuse: “It’s the War zone.” I left no breadcrumbs for anxiety to follow and gobble the fun out of my perfect, sunny campsite. Once I noticed the phone shaking, it took too long for me to lift my head off the fogged-up window, wipe the drool from my chin, and fumble with the zipper of my pocket; I missed the call. I saw that it was my parents’ house and that they didn’t leave a message. So I called back. They knew I was going out into the sticks, and I figured they simply wanted to know I wasn’t returning with only seven and a half frostbitten toes. My dad picked up.

  “Hey, Annie. Where are you?” There was that exact pitch in his voice that said Something is wrong but I’m trying to manipulate my voice to sound like Nothing is wrong. Very few people can fool someone they love with deftly hidden concern. Even on cell phones. I told him that we were heading back from camping. About fifteen minutes outside Tacoma. He asked if I could stop by the house.

  The environs of Tacoma are not pretty. Strip malls, strip clubs, strips of freeway speckled with soggy trash. If you’re already scared or depressed or pissed off, the suburban scenery will do little to assuage your mood. If you’re lucky, you’ll pass a cheery billboard about winning the lottery. I tried not to stress out too much on the way home. To distract myself I started asking Gina a bunch of questions about vegan living. She did an amazing job of describing the process of making soy yogurt. And I never knew that spelt was such a versatile food.

  American flags kept popping out at me from the gutters of car dealers and the side windows of 18-wheelers. It can’t be David, I thought, trying to be the kind of positive that would prevent me from vomiting in Gus’s van. Nothing wrong with David Peterson! As we rolled into city limits, I asked Gus if he could drop me off at my parents’ house. “They said they have some sort of news,” I said. “Sounds dire.” And then the four of us exhaled at once. Almost a scripted sigh.

  “No problem. I need to pay my old man a visit anyway.” My parents and Gus’s dad have lived in the same West Tacoma neighborhood since the late eighties. Our two split-level houses are near replicas of one another, but mirror images. They each have an attic window that makes for easy access to the gentle incline of the shingled roof over the garage. Gus’s roof gets sunrises, which was great during his old yoga days.81 And I had the sunsets. His dad paints his place a new, interesting color every few years. There was the Pepto-pink of late elementary school, the blue bubble gum ice cream of junior high. I remember this past summer when Rex just finished the topcoat of a striking, almost metallic light gray. “Chromey and homey,” Gus had said at his coming home from the Peace Corps party. My house has always been a very dull beige. Typical Taupe. Ordinary Oatmeal or Banal Baby Puke.82

  As Gus pulled the van into the driveway, I leaned across the bench seat to hug Stephen and then up to the front of the van to offer a teetering half embrace to Gina, then Gus. “What a trip,” I said, but it didn’t sound right. Because I was freaking out inside, I couldn’t infuse my voice with the zeal and earnest gratitude that our adventure deserved. It was a great trip. I promised Stephen to visit Boston over the summer, and he made a joke about remembering to keep my mouth shut.83 As I heaved my pack over my shoulder and slammed the sliding door of the van, Gus snaked his head around to where I could see it through the window. He made the universal hand sign for “call me if you need to.”

  I busted through the front door and threw my pack at the foot of this gnarly coat tree we inherited from a dead aunt. It’s something I did every day with my gym bag in hig
h school: the kind of thing that drives every mother nutso. “Just take it five more steps to your room.” That’s what she would always say. This time when my parents came shuffling out of the kitchen to greet me midfling, my mother said nothing.

  “So, what?” I asked. “Is David dead?” And I said it in this weird tough-guy voice. This grisly shield I’d never heard myself use before. Like I was pulling a sleek gun from my shoulder holster, telling my darling parents not to fuck with me. But my mom was too quick. Before I had a chance to widen my stance and lift that gun to eye level, Mom-dawg was rolling.

  “Oh goodness, Annie. No. We knew you’d be thinking that. David’s fine—he actually e-mailed me this morning. Sit down. This is a lot and I hope that we—” I flopped onto the sofa and burrowed into the smooshy back cushions: the unaffected, apathetic slouch of a teenager. I rolled through possibilities in my head. All my grandparents were reasonably healthy. My father’s a veteran union worker on the path to retirement—couldn’t be laid off. My mother was just boasting about her perfect mammogram last month. I thought that if David was fine, then there was nothing else they could get me with. Perhaps Helen was killed by a pack of wolves? My dad interrupted my mother.

  “It’s Alden, Annie.”

  “Baby Alden?” I asked stupidly. Like there’s ever been another one.

  “Yes. He’s dead.”

  “Brother Alden?”

  “His grandmother Barbara called yesterday.”

  “Bless Her Heart, Barbara?”