by Reed Karaim
She had gone back to work, placing the first strip of copy on the page. I watched her, the movements always simple and precise, no wasted motion. A kind of artistry.
“Little girl?” I said. “Your son is older.”
She shook her head, pulled the strip off the page, and repasted it.
“What did I say? My son. My oldest.”
If you are a journalist, which is what I’ve been for a long time now, lots of people will tell you their stories, and you will forget almost all of them. The ones you remember live in a particular detail, an image or incident that carves its place in your memory. Anna had told me nothing about her marriage before, and now it would be forever fixed to a vision of her bent over a sink full of raw meat, pummeling away at it helplessly, losing a piece of herself in the effort. That evening I only knew I had presumed too much, carried a joke too far.
“Listen, I—”
“Remember that night you were talking about America’s wars?” Anna asked with her small smile.
I felt a flush of embarrassment and nodded.
“Marriage was my Vietnam, Eric. Never again.”
Chapter 11
IN THE BRIEF SPRING THAT WAS LEFT before summer, the high school held its graduation and we went together, Anna to take pictures, me to interview students for the story. The ceremony was in the gym, then the newly minted graduates of Shannon High School filed outside onto the grass to shake hands and accept congratulations. Caps had been thrown in the air earlier and they were bareheaded now in their dark blue robes. Mostly blondes and coppery redheads, the descendants of phlegmatic Norwegian and Swedish farmers and Irish railroad workers, lightly carrying the bright crowns of their youth on this day of sun-filled promise.
One of the boys said something to Anna. He seemed to know her son Stephen, although Stephen was much younger. I watched her stiffen slightly, a moment of awkwardness and something that seemed to resemble fear, and then I heard her laugh. She took his hand and placed it lightly on her hip, taking the other one in her own, and they took a sudden graceful turn around the grass while the kids nearby in line applauded.
“That was a waltz?” I said when she wandered over after I had finished my interviews.
“What? Oh, that. More or less.” She laughed and I was surprised by the happiness in her voice.
“He lives down the street and he used to babysit for me a couple of years ago, when Stephen was too young to take care of his sister.” Anna hesitated. “He caught me dancing one night, and I promised I’d teach him.”
“Caught you dancing? It’s a crime in North Dakota?”
“Not if you polka.”
“Seriously.”
“Caught me dancing. Alone.”
“Wait—what? Does that mean—I mean—is that a metaphor?”
Anna was staring at me as if I had started speaking Chinese. She blinked and blushed. “Dancing, Eric. Dancing. He left and realized he had left his jacket and when he came back he didn’t knock and I was dancing alone in the living room. And . . . it was embarrassing to both of us, but I told him I’d teach him someday.” She smiled. “He reminded me I never had.”
“Okay. Wait, he caught you waltzing?”
Some parents Anna knew came by and she shook their hands and congratulated them.
“Not really.”
“What, then?”
“Just dancing.”
I became suspicious. “To what?”
“Well, uhmm . . . Bread.”
“Bread.”
“Yes, Bread, the band. You remember Bread?”
“Oh, yes, I remember Bread. Which song?”
“Does it matter?”
“It really, really does.”
“I believe it was ‘Lost Without Your Love.’”
“You believe it was.”
“It’s just a song.”
“You were dancing alone to ‘Lost Without Your Love’?”
She waved briefly at someone on the far end of the high school lawn.
“I was dancing alone to ‘Lost Without Your Love.’ Are you happy?”
“I am. Much is becoming clear to me.”
“Oh, I’m sure it is. Men don’t dance alone, I know.”
“Sure we do. We go crazy. But to Led Zeppelin or the Who. ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again.’ Rock and roll.”
That made her smile.
“That’s not dancing. That’s just exercise. Jumping around.”
“Well, yeah. Dancing.”
Anna considered me with a look that was already becoming familiar, as if I had handed her a small, unexpected present.
“I can hardly wait for the next Christmas party,” she said.
“So you never taught him?”
A faint stiffness came into her posture. “No, of course not.”
Done with men. Done with men of all ages, young and old. But dancing to Bread.
“They were a truly terrible band,” I said.
“They were,” Anna said. “And they were great.”
The reception line was breaking up and she stepped onto the grass to take a shot of three girls skipping onto the grass, then running, one holding her mortar board, their hair all flying back, their blue robes flaring as if they might be about to take flight. Radiant and slightly dazed smiles. The exhilaration of an end and simultaneous beginning.
I remembered that feeling. It really hadn’t been that long, and for a brief moment, I could feel again the sense of stepping out into an infinite future, of freeing yourself from something big you didn’t quite understand to reach toward a buoyant, half-formed image of something even larger, brighter.
“Freedom.”
Their backs were to us now, figures framed in a trot across fields of green and blue, robes ballooning behind them. Anna snapped a quick series of final shots.
“For today,” Anna said, but I could see they made her happy.
We walked back to the office together. The day was clear, warm. I had started the morning by throwing on my first polo shirt of the season, but Anna wore a long-sleeve blouse tucked into black jeans.
“You don’t like the sun much, I guess.”
“I love the sun,” she said. “I love days like this. I love spring. I love summer.”
I glanced down at her long sleeves and, as she noticed, she tugged one of them slightly farther down.
“I burn easily,” she said.
Down the sidewalk Art and Louise were heading home. They walked as they always did, side by side, a couple of feet separating them, as if they each had a small bubble of self-contained space. They only very rarely touched each other. No hugs. Old people, I thought.
Louise was half a head taller than her husband and every third step or so, she took a small half step to stay beside him. It was a surprisingly girlish skip, and it made us both smile.
“I’ve been informed that there are no worthwhile men on the planet and you’re officially done with us,” I said, because I am the kind of person who cannot help but touch a sore tooth. “But how can you resist that kind of happiness?”
I thought Anna hadn’t heard me, but she was fixed on what was happening ahead of us. Art and Louise had stopped and were facing each other, maintaining the same slightly formal distance, the half-moon of his stomach pointing at the cliff wall of her hips. Art was talking and Louise did not look happy. She looked as if something were being taken from her, cruelly and for no reason.
“It’s just a chance to escape,” I heard Art say. “I need it now and then.”
We slowed as we approached. Anna said to me, a little too loudly, “The tradition is a kegger out by the river. High school kids.”
“Okay,” I said, only mildly baffled before also speaking loudly. “I guess we won’t worry about it, then.”
Art turned and fixed us with a gentle smile. “They’ve been doing it for a hundred years, and every senior class somehow thinks it’s a secret. There’s a glen down by the river. I still remember our graduation party. Don’t you, Louise?�
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There was something slightly broken in her gaze and she struggled for a moment before managing to rearrange her features into their customary Mount Rushmore–like visage. “Hell, yes. Bobby McIntyre tried to pick me up.”
“I’m sure he did,” Art said. “He’s in prison now, I believe.”
They started walking with us.
“That was Bobby’s career path from day one,” Louise said. “I think we voted him most likely to commit a class-one felony.”
“Now, dear, I’m pretty sure we didn’t even know what a class-one felony was,” Art said.
“Ah, the innocence of youth,” I said, and, yes, I understood why they all laughed. Or I did after a moment, anyway.
We strolled to the office, where Art and Louise peeled off to their small house across the street, still in their individual bubbles of space, like friendly strangers on a long journey.
“What was that about?” I asked quietly.
They were too far away to hear us, but Anna waited until the door shut behind them. She glanced sideways at me. “How can I resist, Eric? Really?”
“Okay,” I said. “Now you really have to tell me what we’re talking about.”
She had a surprisingly throaty laugh; maybe it was all the cigarettes and coffee. “No, I don’t,” she said. “There are some things you have to figure out for yourself.”
I would, but on that clement May afternoon, with the light hanging in the air as if suspended in time, I was briefly stuck in place. Anna walked on ahead of me, her trim figure moving with its farm-girl sense of purpose, as I tried to sort out the afternoon: what I had just missed, yes, but more than that, this woman who was done with men turning so beautifully on the grass while all the boys applauded.
Chapter 12
SHANNON WAS TURNING 120 THAT SUMMER, and a three-day celebration was planned, the kind of party small towns are always throwing for themselves: an all-class high school reunion, a carnival, a downtown street fair, and a host of silly contests: best beard, best old-fashioned dress, best authentic-period kid’s costume. It was still a couple of months away, but Louise and Art were deeply involved in the planning, so the Sentinel was already running breathless weekly updates, written by Louise after a couple of stiff shots of sixty-proof inspiration.
I had started to make changes in the paper. Nothing major, a loosening of the rules: a photo spread of the last day of school stretched across the top of the front page, a long story on the damage to the city drainage system from the flood and the city’s difficult options, both lighter stuff and more serious stuff. I had no articulated vision, no master plan. I was just doing what felt right and trying to have fun because Louise was right, it was supposed to be fun. Looking back, I would say if I had any governing idea it was an aversion to the deadly middle—the great middle space of dully responsible journalism, the county commission and city council reports, the pro forma stories of every kind. We couldn’t abandon them completely, but I cut back to the minimum required for civic responsibility. I had earned a measure of trust from Louise and even ever-fretful Art with the coverage of the flood, and with the careless profligacy of youth I spent it on whatever caught my fancy.
The middle space is a good place to hide, and I was worried Anna, who’d found comfortable invisibility in the least inspiring work, wouldn’t like her new assignments. But I think she did. If nothing else, they got her out of the office. She had a natural eye as a photographer, and when I discovered that, I sent her out with the paper’s battered Nikon more often. Sometimes on a beautiful day, with nothing much pressing on us, I would send her out with orders no more specific than to come back with something good.
She always did. The town going about its lazy summer business. A sweet-faced bag boy at the grocery store helping to load the car for an older couple caught leaning against each other with the quiet intimacy of age. A fish at the end of a line, frozen above the mirrored surface of the man-made lake at the edge of Shannon. The men at the Midwestern Forge factory, lined up outside the entrance with their cigarettes burning holes in the dusk. Not that it was all mood and revelation. We ran pictures of children, always plenty of children doing adorable things, and the occasional pet, too. Wet dogs were a big winner; a dog in a kiddy pool with some kids was absolute gold. We were a small-town newspaper, after all.
Those were my days—a job I had stumbled into, a temporary occupation, I was sure, but one that kept me busy enough. The nights were where a sense of purposelessness sometimes stole back into my head like an unpleasant friend settling into your favorite chair.
Todd and I started playing pool on a regular basis at the Buffalo Bar, especially on the nights after the paper had been printed. We were evenly matched and played each other or as a team against the old men who felt as much a part of the Buffalo as the scuffed stools and cracked mirror behind the bar. They always beat us, but we were good enough to make it close.
Todd had abandoned vacuum cleaners, but had taken up model trains with a kind of unblinking focus that was slightly unnerving. Some nights we watched the Twins in his living room with a miniature Baldwin Class R steam locomotive circling the furniture, the yellow light at the front chasing past the steep bluffs of the couch, the torturous turn by the ottoman, the floating alien spaceship of the television, round and round and round, while Todd and I sat in the dark and watched Gary Gaetti launch another ball high into the artificial twilight.
We waited in suspended disbelief. An outfielder raced toward the wall. The train chugged through the dark. In the stands, bodies rose, hands reached toward a spot of white. A roar erupted in some distant Elysian field. The train’s bright eye searched the corners of the room.
• • •
I WAS BENT OVER the pool table, focused on a gleaming crescent sliver of the seven ball, when Anna stepped into the light around the table. She was with her friend Christina, the waitress at the café. I knew Anna’s son was old enough to take care of his sister and Anna did go out every so often, but I was still surprised to see her at the Buff, an establishment where both Todd and I were considered such reputable citizens we were allowed to run bar tabs. I pulled back the cue and missed.
“Tough shot,” she said.
“Not really.”
“Well, tough enough, I guess, huh, champ?” Christina said, winking at Todd, who smiled shyly and sank the eight ball, ending our game.
We played partners, the four of us—Anna and I the “college team,” as Christina called us. Anna played better than I would have thought, leaning over and considering each move carefully, her dark eyes catching a reflection from the narrow lamp above the table as if a piece of lost silver were reflecting up from the bottom of a whiskey-colored pool.
She made some nice shots, but Christina had clearly been born on a pool table. She was too good, and Todd coasted in her wake as they beat us three straight times.
“All that education and you still can’t find a side pocket,” Christina said as we sat down at the bar and let the old men have the table for a while. She had wheat-blond, razor-straight hair she kept pushed back behind her ears in a kind of too-busy-to-worry-about-it cut. She was trim and athletic-looking, taller than Anna, the kind of outdoorsy Dakota farm girl who has been through just enough to pretend to lose her illusions.
“I’m not a side pocket kind of guy,” I said. “Straight and true is my motto.”
“Of course it is,” she said, turning to Todd. “Men are uncomplicated creatures, don’t you think?”
“I have no idea,” Todd said, sipping his beer a little too quickly.
“There you are,” Christina said. “Did I ever tell you I like your tattoo?”
Anna was watching her. Anna, the watcher. She saw me watching her watch and, as Todd flexed his tattooed bicep to Christina’s admiration, smiled. “Are there any uncomplicated people?”
“Billions.”
“Really?”
“Well, at least two.”
“Heard that,” Christina said, an
d then to Todd: “Can you make him jump by popping your muscle?”
Anna choked on her beer and, as she raised her hand to cover her mouth, her long sleeve slipped, and I saw briefly a perfect white circle of skin around her wrist, as if it had been kept from the sunlight forever.
• • •
I KNEW BY NOW that her marriage had been bad and I knew that she had been hurt by it. But I’d heard only a very little more. They ran away when Anna was just barely seventeen and were married in South Dakota by a justice of the peace. The strange thing is my parents did the same thing, but then they rode on out of the Great Plains, taking the Greyhound bus down to Las Vegas and on to the bright promise of Los Angeles. When they finally came back the world had opened up, and it would never close down again, despite all the years teaching at a small private school in a small Minnesota city. They had seen beyond the pencil-drawn Midwestern horizon and came back because they knew their home from both inside and out now, and they still loved it.
But Anna and her new husband, barely a year and a half older than she was, turned around and came back to the oil fields two days later. The company had trailers scattered throughout the country, situated so the men could keep an eye on the equipment in the staging yards tossed up alongside the narrow dirt roads that snaked off to the wells. They were given one of those.
Wild and lonely country, country burned long ago into Anna’s blood, but lonely country at night in a beat-to-crap oil company trailer. No one else around for miles. The sky and the broken, brown land, tossed up like a jumble of old teeth. Was she happy? Was this what she wanted, this brief stretch and snap back to the same small abandoned patch of the universe she had known since birth? I have no idea, but they were young and they had the passion of youth to keep them busy in their tin bedroom, and in no time at all she was pregnant. The fact that she wasn’t pregnant before they were married, that no baby came from the inevitable fumbling in the back of his Firebird, was probably the true miracle in the marital equation. But they were having a baby before they knew it, and because they had chosen to be married and could still believe they were making a life together, it came without guilt or confusion, at least for Anna. She told me once that the news she was having her first child was the most uncomplicated moment of happiness she could remember.