“You get out and stick your thumb out and that driver’ll pick you up,” Tom said in a low voice.
Buddy wrenched open the door and stepped out of the pickup and slammed the door shut behind him. Slinging his bags quickly to the ground, he waved up at the driver of the lumber truck hissing to a stop and showed him his thumb. The driver waved him up, and Buddy climbed aboard. Tom let the truck pass, then turned slowly around in the road and headed back to town.
Politics
DRIVING BACK THROUGH A COLD OCTOBER RAIN, somewhere near Rockingham Park racetrack and the New Hampshire state line, Nancy Hubner tried to decide to tell her husband Ronald that she wanted a divorce. But that’s soap opera, she told herself, because what she really wanted was a separation—phrasing it carefully in a sentence, however, as if she could be heard by Moses. Moses was her doctor, her psychiatrist. His real name was Dr. Norman Moses, but Nancy, even when talking to him face to face, enjoyed referring to him as Moses. He wore a shovel-shaped beard, salt-and-pepper, was tall and broad-faced, had blue eyes and was in excellent physical shape. She’d had no difficulty mistaking him for Charlton Heston, especially in the liquid-eyed manner he used in listening to her every Thursday afternoon, and after six months of therapy, she had developed the habit of thinking in complete sentences that she felt would make sense to Moses, the way you do when you’re first in love or when you have made a new, deep friendship with a person you admire very much.
She was not in love with Moses, of course, but she did admire him very much. Her problem, the one she had brought down to Boston with her six months ago, was that while she was in love with her husband Ronald, she did not admire him very much. As a matter of fact, she did not admire him at all. Moses apparently had no difficulty believing that part. Instead, what he seemed to question was the part about her being in love with Ronald in the first place. She had presented her problem to him, as if bearing a gift, smiling with her characteristic, slight self-effacement, and he had looked at her problem somewhat casually from several angles, and then had asked, “What makes you think you love your husband?” It was like asking the price of a gift.
Now, she said to herself, gratitude thickening the tone of her imagined voice, now, he was presenting her with a gift, for now her problem was solved. She not only did not admire her husband, she did not love him either.
She buzzed north on the Turnpike, and the rain slopped heavily down. It was dark, though still late afternoon, and traffic was thin, so she cruised at nearly eighty, driving the car without thoughts about the car or road, as if both could take care of themselves. She would like to tell Ronald tonight, just sit down at the kitchen table and tell him that she wanted a separation, and by next Thursday afternoon, when she saw Moses again, she would have told the children and her parents, would surely have told several of her friends. She may even have moved out by then. She would be the one to leave. She had been able to decide that much. It was only fair. Ronald loved the house—it was properly his. He ran his business, insurance, from the house. He had renovated and even decorated the place without much interest or special cooperation from her, converting it from a run-down, long-empty farmhouse on the edge of town into an attractive, modern dwelling fit for an attractive, modern family. It was her life that was changing, had changed, would go on changing—not his. And it was unfair of her to impose any more change on his life than was absolutely necessary for her survival. My emotional and spiritual well-being, she said to herself.
When a man and a woman have been married for two and one half decades and have raised or nearly raised three children together, they necessarily will have become different people at the end of those decades. Everyone knows that. Frequently, however, the single path they have been following together for so long, like Hansel’s and Gretel’s, does not come out at the same place for both Hansel and Gretel, and surprised, often confused, they find themselves standing in the clearing alone. Or so it seems to them. They can rejoin, but only if they go all the way back to the beginning, where they first entered the forest years ago. But that only happens in fairly tales. In real life, if you have not reached the clearing yet, you must go on. And if you have reached the clearing, you must live there.
Nancy believed that she had reached the clearing. She had become “political,” she said. She said it to everyone, to Moses, to Ronald, and to her daughter Noni, the only child still living at home, a fifteen-year-old, blond, self-absorbed child who gave the impression to strangers of being soulless. The other two children, her sons Chip and Ron, Jr., one in law school, the other working for a prestigious law firm in Washington, had such hidebound ideas of what “political” meant that Nancy did not try even to mention it to them, for they would have obliged her to explain it precisely, which she could not have done to their satisfaction, and they would have teased her about it then. To them, her “politics” would have seemed nothing more than the self-indulgent expression of middle-class taste refined by years of idleness. Naive, they would have called her. Sentimental. Woolly-headed.
But that was not true, she knew, for she had beliefs, she had principles and she had positions that she did not have when she was a younger woman and that she had acquired only after great thought and some reading and a considerable amount of conversation with people who shared those beliefs, principles and positions. She believed, for instance, that as a child of the 1940s and ’50s she and her entire generation had suffered from the sexual restrictions imposed by her parents in particular and society in general, and further, that the guilt used to enforce those restrictions complicated and extended the suffering long after one’s parents had died and society in general had changed its mind with regard to such crucial human activities as masturbation, foreplay and orgasm. On principle, then, she could say that a casual, sexual relationship between a man and a woman, so long as it was experienced without feelings of guilt, was a positive and enlarging event. And an example of a position Nancy held might be that society in general and individual citizens in particular have no right to judge in moral or legal terms the sexual activities, proclivities or technologies employed for pleasure between consenting adults.
She was, therefore, for vibrators. The sale of them, she meant. Just as she was for pornography, though she herself had never actually seen any. After all, as the middle-aged wife of a small-town insurance man, she did not find sexual paraphernalia and pornography easily available. On the other hand, as a direct result of her principles, she had enjoyed, really enjoyed, a casual sexual relationship with a man, an exceedingly attractive young man named Dino whose attentions to the details of her body had strengthened her beliefs concerning the injustices her generation had suffered at the hands of its parents. Dino was a carpenter who specialized in building houses the old way, without nails and with hand-hewn, mortised and pinioned beams. He abjured the use of power tools, and probably for that reason had taken from April to late November last year to build Nancy’s solar greenhouse. Dino lived in the woods in a cabin with his wife Bliss, who wore gingham dresses that trailed along the ground. She had a tattoo of a rose above her right breast which she revealed fetchingly by leaving the top buttons of her dress undone at all times. Nancy’s “relationship” with Dino had taken place over the summer, while Dino was building the greenhouse, and had ended in October (almost exactly a year ago today, Nancy said to herself) when she discovered that Bliss was five months pregnant. “It would only have complicated things,” she had explained to Moses. “And ours wasn’t the kind of love that could have endured complications and still provide us with pleasure.”
Moses had listened, smiled, and then had asked, “Do you want happiness, Nancy, or pleasure? Or do you think they’re the same thing?”
It was that question, Nancy realized afterward, that had started her movement toward the decision that she wanted to make today, this afternoon, driving back home to Catamount in the rain. Moses had made her think about the Basics, she said to herself. A sudden blast from the horn of a huge, eight
een-wheel truck cut into her silent monologue, showed her that she was out in the left lane and that an enormous, roaring vehicle, switching its headlights from low beams to high, wanted to pass her. The truck, seen in her rearview mirror, seemed almost close enough to touch the flimsy rear bumper of her Datsun coupe, and terrified, she wrenched the steering wheel to the right. The rear wheels of the Datsun let go of the road and the car started sliding. It happened too fast for her to hit the breaks, which, according to Ronald later, probably saved her life, because, as the nose of the low, silver-gray Datsun swung slowly to the right, the rear end followed, bringing the car into the right lane altogether and facing the opposite direction, while the truck roared past in the outside lane, its horn blasting one long wailing note into the rain and the dark.
She sat in the car, her entire body shaking, and after a few seconds realized that she was facing oncoming traffic, should there be any, so she backed the car around, turned it toward the north again, then drew it off the road onto the shoulder and shut off the motor and lights. She lit a cigarette and watched the rain slop down the windshield in skeins.
I could have been killed, she said to herself. I very nearly was killed! She pictured Ronald’s round, reddish face, his small eyes, wet and blue behind horn-rimmed glasses, his calm, rational, nearly expressionless face that twenty-five years ago had seemed masculine and warmly protective to her—and suddenly she saw his face breaking into pieces, shattered by grief and loss, tears swarming over his cheeks. The children, too—she thought briefly of their faces, heard their groans, let their pain flicker past for a few seconds—but Ronald’s face wouldn’t go away. Her chest lifted and then settled beneath a great weight.
She rubbed out the cigarette butt, started the motor, switched on the lights and eased the car back onto the road. The rain was coming down more heavily now, and even had she wanted to, she could not drive over forty. She had to concentrate and squint to see farther than a hundred feet ahead, and she kept the car carefully in the right lane. Now and then a truck passed her on the left, splashing water and road-film over the tiny silver Datsun, shoving the car aside with its wake, so that she had to hold on to the steering wheel fiercely with both hands to keep the car from luffing off to the right.
Frequently, in her talks with Moses, she had described her life as a prisoner’s. The walls of her prison were constructed of obligations to others—to the children, to Ronald, of course, even to the damned dog, and because of those obligations she was further obliged to please whoever was important to the children, Ronald and the dog, which meant behaving in a way that was acceptable to the families of the other small businessmen in town. In recent years she had let her dissatisfaction with the life of a prisoner reveal itself—bumper stickers against nuclear power plants and for the burning of wood, involvement with a dozen young couples in the formation of a cooperative nursery school and day-care center (which was where she had met Dino and Bliss), demonstrating outside the capitol in Concord during the ERA and, later, abortion hearings. These gestures and expressions of her discontent, she knew, were pathetic and, in the end, harmless, for she still entertained Ronald’s local business associates in precisely the manner he had long ago grown accustomed to, she still cleaned up after and cooked for whichever members of her family slept and ate at home, she still kept her mouth shut and smiling in the face of conversations that she regarded as ignorant, narrow-minded, provincial, even cruel. And gradually, she had become a sullen, utterly self-centered, deeply pessimistic prisoner.
“Who’s the warden in your prison?” Moses had asked her. She had thought about that one for a week, and then, the following Thursday, had begun their session by announcing her discovery that she herself was the warden.
“Ah,” Moses said, clearly pleased. “Then you have the keys to unlock all the cells, don’t you?” That remark had led her directly to the understanding that all of them were prisoners, not just she, but Ronald too, and Noni. Even the dog. She could release them all, if she dared.
It would be a wonderful new life for them all. Ronald would be free to live and work just as he always had but without being obliged to deal with a surly, disapproving, somewhat embarrassing wife, and Noni would be free to choose which of her parents’ lives seemed more coherent and honorable to her, choosing in that way the shape and direction of her own life, which, at fifteen, she was certainly eager to do. And the dog, well, the dog would receive a kind word now and then when it got fed, for Ronald was damned well going to have to take care of his beloved Irish setter himself now. And Nancy herself? Nancy at last would be free to live and work, to think and speak, to hate and love in all the ways she had wanted for years now. She would rent an apartment in town, or better yet, a small house or cabin in the woods, where she could grow her own vegetables, organic vegetables, maybe raise a dozen chickens, for eggs, not for meat, because as soon as she got settled, she meant to become a vegetarian. She would work, at first on a volunteer basis, than as a paid organizer, for the Clamshell Alliance against the construction and any further development of nuclear energy. Or maybe she could work for one of the small organizations interested in researching and publicizing the virtues and values of solar energy. She would live modestly, simply, honestly—alone, she assumed, but in time she would have a lover, a man younger than she but who nonetheless would be able to explore with her the intricacies of her wonderful new life, for he would have to be someone who shared with her the beliefs, principles and positions of her politics.
A few miles north of Manchester, she left the Turnpike and continued on toward Catamount through Hooksett and Suncook on Route 28. The towns were smaller now, villages and old, decaying mill towns squatting alongside the rivers in the rain and cold darkness of October. North of Suncook, at the edge of a gray circle of fluorescent light cast by a filling station, she caught sight of a figure standing by the side of the road. It was a girl, she realized as she sped past, or a woman, and she was hitchhiking. On the ground next to her was a backpack, soaked through from the rain, and the girl was wearing an orange, stiff-looking, plastic poncho. Nancy slowed the car, feathering the brakes so as not to slide, and came almost to a stop several hundred yards beyond the girl. In the rearview mirror she saw the girl lift the backpack from the ground and start running in a clumsy, off-balance gait toward the car, which was still moving slowly ahead, a few miles an hour. The girl struggled along behind, splashing through deep puddles, until she had drawn to within a hundred yards of the car, and still Nancy kept the car moving forward. Finally, the girl stopped running. She dropped her pack onto the ground beside her and stood peering into the darkness at Nancy’s car. In the mirror, as the car moved back into the roadway and increased speed, Nancy saw the girl jab her hand at her in a gesture of disgust and contempt, and then the car went around a long, slow bend in the road, and the girl was gone.
Nancy did not understand what she had done, because she did not know why she had done it. She drove the last twenty-five miles to Catamount puzzling over the event, replaying it and rephrasing her description of it as she drove, thinking, as if saying it to Moses, I stopped to pick up a hitchhiker in the rain but I didn’t do it, but I don’t know why I didn’t do it. She tried several explanations—that she suddenly, inexplicably, had become frightened by the hitchhiker, since she might have made a mistake, the girl might actually have been a man; that she was still addled by the close call with the truck back on the Turnpike; that she had suddenly realized that the hitchhiker would break into her solitary thoughts, which at this time more than at any other she treasured and needed—but none of the explanations told her truly why she had tempted and then rejected the girl, why, by slowing almost to a stop, she had offered something she was not ready or willing actually to give.
She drove quickly along Main Street in Catamount, the tall elms and maples alongside the street shedding their last leaves in the rain, the stores and offices darkened and empty, except for the Copper Skillet, where, as she passed, she could see a f
ew solitary diners at the counter. At the far side of town, she turned right toward home, uphill for a quarter mile, and there it suddenly was, the white Cape farmhouse and attached barn, the neatly trimmed lawn and flowerbeds, the bony, leafless oaks by the side of the road.
She turned into the drive and parked the car in front of the barn door. She would have to run no more than twenty feet to reach the breezeway and the kitchen door, but she knew she would be soaked through by the time she got there, so she sat for a few seconds, hesitating to leave the dry, smoky warmth of the car. She wished she had brought an umbrella. She decided that from now on she would bring an umbrella with her on Thursdays. Then she decided that she would not leave Ronald, and stepping from the car, she ran into the house.
The Right Way
THE BOY STEPPED OUT OF THE HOUSE to the porch and from the porch into the glare of sunlight off the snow. The boy was fourteen years old, exactly, for it was his birthday. Tall and somewhat awkward, his height was coming early and in bits and pieces. First his hands and feet, then his legs, followed a few months later by his arms, so that his body seemed to be made of parts from several different-sized bodies, which made him look fragile and graceless, a long-legged bird walking on rocky ground.
He moved down the straight, wide, freshly cleared path in the snow, gazing at the path from different angles, as if admiring his work, for it was he who had shoveled the path earlier and then the driveway, from the barn all the way to the road, where he had diligently chopped away the hardpacked snowbank made by the town plow, tossing the huge, heavy chunks of snow over his shoulder, deliberately constructing with them neat, conical gateposts on either side of the driveway. Now he stood in the middle of the driveway and studied the crisp, dry snow, studied the way it smoothed the world, softened the fields and yard almost into abstraction, abruptly to break off where, with the shovel, he had cut cleanly into it, had carved out blocks of snow that got deposited in a rumpled row a few feet back from the cut, as if the snowfield had risen slightly into a rough wave before pitching over a low fault in the earth’s crust.
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