Plains Song

by Wright Morris

  “You’re not Miss Gaylord?”

  “I’m Sharon Atkins.”

  “Are you sure? You’re not here to meet me?” She wheeled slowly to look about her. “I’m so seldom mistaken. Would it be Hayden something, instead of Gaylord?” She stooped to grope in her flight bag. “You’re not Mrs. Chalmers? No, no, that’s in Lincoln. I’m so sorry. Will you forgive me? I just can’t believe that I’m mistaken.” It was clear from her gaze that she did not believe it. A long lantern-jawed visage, unmistakably British, but no sign of it in her brusque speech. A person of impulses. What would she think of next?

  “You mentioned Lincoln,” said Sharon.

  “Yes, yes. Lincoln, Nebraska.” To assure herself, she referred again to a letter.

  “Why,” said Sharon, “that’s where I’m going.”

  “You see!” she cried. “I knew it! We came here to meet each other!” Her mouth widened to reveal the gap where a tooth was missing. The others were widely spaced, tusk-like. Had she so little interest in her appearance? On Sharon’s right shoulder she had rested her large left hand, gripped it firmly. Sharon’s impulse to withdraw, to disengage, her most habitual and salient characteristic, seemed to be neutralized by the current of emotion that flowed between them. Long ago, on a similar occasion, she had asserted her independence. “Your fear of being beholden,” Lillian had written, “is really just a fear of your own emotions.” Never mind now what her emotions had been; had her fears been real? They no longer aroused the same emotions.

  “Come!” Miss Selkirk said, and led her by the arm toward the gate to their plane.

  Experienced with travel, experienced with people, she arranged that Sharon should sit beside her, on the aisle. “I’ve got to nap,” she said. “I left London at midnight. My biorhythms are in confusion.” She had a lecture to give—she paused to search in her bag for the room reservation—in Grand Island that evening. Where was Grand Island? Sharon explained. Alexandra asked the stewardess to tilt back her seat, then slipped about her head a pair of black eyeshades, held in place by a piece of elastic. Her face, with the eyes covered, was that of a corpse. Had she no idea how she looked? Sharon could not have exposed herself in this manner. A pleated upper lip, the pores of her nose like those of ripening berries, furrows everywhere, a curious absence of wrinkles, flesh as loose as gloves on her large-knuckled brown-splotched hands. Beneath the left jawbone, a slight swelling and discoloration, characteristic of violin players. Sharon might have guessed it. A woman of such emotion would have nourished herself through music. What music? She thought it might be Vivaldi, the strings urgent and vibrant, the rhythms coming at you like a change in the weather. Sharon would have liked to cover the large idle hands. They were scarless, but insinuating. A similar pair of hands had gripped her in such a manner that she could still feel them. Alexandra Selkirk napped, as if drugged, until they landed in Chicago, where two cups of black coffee revived her. From her purse she took a tin of mints, which she shared with Sharon, and a letter addressed to her in London confirming her reservation at the Crossways Inn. Crossways. How right that was! Women from all over the world would be there. Against her better judgment—and little it mattered—she had been persuaded to fly from England and keep the midwestern momentum going. That had been their appeal. Their momentum! Her laughter set her to choking; the stewardess brought her a glass of water.

  She confessed to Sharon that she gave freely to strangers what she hesitated to admit to herself. Man’s culture was a hoax. Was there a woman who didn’t feel it? Perhaps a decade, no more, was available to women to save themselves, as well as the planet. Women’s previous triumphs had been by default. Men had simply walked away from the scene of the struggle, leaving them with the children, the chores, the culture, and a high incidence of madness. In a brief résumé of her forthcoming lecture, Alexandra touched on the high points of woman’s bondage and her emerging liberation. What saddened her was that she didn’t believe it: not a word of it.

  She was the daughter of an Army officer and mining engineer exiled in Casper, Wyoming. Her mother had died at her birth. Guilt, surely, had led her father to try to recover that loss in Alexandra. At nine pampered years of age she had been sent to school in the east. Still hardly more than a child, at a school in Geneva, she had married the son of a wine merchant and gone to his home in Grenoble. A darling boy, really, but his home had been her first internment camp. Nevertheless, she liked him as a person. It was the custom of the tribe that had made him a jailer. It had taught her that if you could change the customs, you could change the world. Just recently the flower children had done it, with results she found nauseating. But it had been done. More change in ten years than in the previous five centuries. Was it a flaw in her argument to find that customs indeed might change, but not women? A cat was a cat, a dog was a dog, but who could say what it was to be a woman? Without an image of who they were, who were they? Hadn’t Sharon noticed? Many were seized with the mania to be many people. A curious fact. God knows where it might lead. Alexandra’s discourse was punctuated by gasping inhalations of cigarette smoke. Her mouth open wide, her eyes lidded, the cloud of smoke would be visible in her throat the instant before inhalation. It seemed to Sharon little that went in found its way out.

  Never before had Sharon felt drawn to such an aggressive, possessive person. One of her talon-like hands gripped her by the wrist, holding her like prey. A coincidence, surely, but Sharon was reminded of the confrontation with Cora, who had gripped her by the wrist as she whacked her with the hairbrush. Before their arrival in Lincoln, Alexandra took sodium pills to avoid possible heat prostration. She dropped silent as suddenly as she had begun to talk.

  A portly matron, wearing owl-eyed tinted glasses, a driving cap with a duckbill visor, had recognized Alexandra from her pictures and identified herself as Mrs. Lura Chalmers, her host and chauffeur. Was there somewhere she could drop Sharon? Mrs. Chalmers’s white face had no visible eyebrows; her smile was that of a performing minstrel. Sharon explained that she was waiting for one of her nieces. Why couldn’t her niece, Alexandra asked, return Sharon to the Cross-ways Inn, in Grand Island, from where they could return to Boston together? Sharon didn’t know. She heard Mrs. Chalmers offer to reserve her a room and look forward to the pleasure of her company on the drive back to Lincoln. Sharon preferred to be alone and collect her jumbled thoughts. She watched Alexandra, as did many others, cross the lobby with her cape billowing behind her, the portly matron trailing with her flight bag. Alexandra would prefer to take the wrong way, on her own, than be led in the right one. Moments passed before Sharon was aware of the woman at her side, staring at her. The way her right hand gripped the left arm, above the elbow, caught Sharon’s attention before her face. She wore plaid-patterned loose-fitting shorts, freshly creased across the lap.

  “You’re Sharon Atkins?”

  “I am,” Sharon replied. Behind the large square-framed glasses, the round face seemed familiar. Sharon had previously remarked that feminist-type women were often of an indeterminate age. There were pencils and cards in the pocket of her blouse. The largeness of the glasses enhanced the smallness of her eyes.

  “I’m Caroline Kibbee,” she said.

  Sharon blurted, “You are?” She had anticipated Sharon’s surprise. She released her grip on the left arm to place both arms across her front. Sharon thought it a very unattractive posture. Caroline had been a brash button-eyed tomboy, the pride of her father, the despair of her mother. Insofar as possible Sharon had ignored her. She now had her mother’s figure, her heavy thighs, but her father’s dark hair and complexion. When she stooped to pick up Sharon’s flight bag, the backside was unmistakably familiar. Dark hairs were visible on her bare legs.

  “It’s been so long!” Sharon prattled, but Caroline did not reply until they approached the exit, and she had it calculated.

  “Thirty-three years,” she said.

  Sharon thought that impossible. She had been back, briefly, during the war
, following Madge’s first severe illness. Perhaps Caroline had not been there. She would have to think. Still, she might have said something further if the blast of heat at the entrance had not caught her breath. A shimmer of heat and light outlined Caroline’s figure, the lumpy shadow that moved beside her. She turned to glance at Sharon, her lips compressed, then proceeded ahead of her across the parking area. Sharon lidded her eyes against the metallic glare. She almost thumped into Caroline, who said, “I left Carl and Crystal in the car. They came along for the ride.” Sharon did not trouble to ask whose children they were. They walked with bowed heads to a car with a dented front fender, a child’s face at one lowered rear window. Both children had perspiring faces, protruding teeth. “Let it air out,” Caroline said, and cranked down the front windows. On the driver’s side, a crumpled ironing pad covered a hole in the seat cushion. Curls of Blue Chip stamps were strewn across the dashboard. The short walk had left Sharon faintly dizzy. “Eileen don’t like it much,” Caroline said, “but Bryan says he can’t buy both cars and tractors.”

  “Bryan?”

  “He’s their daddy,” she replied, looking at the children. “They just come along for the ride.”

  “We come along for the ele-funt hall!” the girl hooted. Her unblinking button eyes seemed to challenge Sharon. The boy was less assured. Both wore T-shirts with faded football emblems.

  The movement of air, as the car started, cooled the film of moisture on Sharon’s face. “Lincoln’s grown,” said Caroline. “On football weekends it’s got almost two hundred thousand people.” Sharon registered disbelief. Through the grime-smeared windshield she could see little of the city. To miss the football traffic Caroline drove east, entering town on a street that skirted the fairgrounds. Sharon recognized nothing. Why were the elms so drab and rust-colored? “It’s the blight,” Caroline said. “All the elms have got it. If they can’t do something, they’re going to have to destroy them.” Sharon would not have been able to say that. She would have said, “Something has to be done,” and left it at that. “If there’s no parking,” Caroline went on, “I’m going to let you out and just drive around, then come back and pick you up. They want to see elephants, dinosaurs, or whatever.”

  The boy said, “I want to see the saber-toothed tiger.”

  “Their daddy tells them these stories,” said Caroline, “but he won’t take the time to bring them down here.”

  “They were here before we were,” said Carl.

  “Yes, and they’ll be here when we’re gone,” replied Caroline. The edge in her voice surprised Sharon. What were the children to think? In the Hall of Elephants they would see monsters that would be here when they had vanished—not merely part of the past but most of the future. Wouldn’t it give an imaginative child nightmares? Sharon thought briefly of Alexandra Selkirk: the pleasure she would feel in Man’s extinction—her sorrow at Woman’s loss.

  Just as Caroline had feared, there was no parking place, so Sharon was dropped off with the children in front of the elephant hall. Thanks to the football game, they had the exhibit to themselves. An elephant was there, remarkably lifelike, with long curving tusks, the trunk raised like a trumpet, but the huge creature was dwarfed by the world’s largest mammal. An ancestor of the rhinoceros, this colossus was not from the plains around Lincoln, but from the vast wastes of Siberia. Whatever impression it left on the children, Sharon was transfixed. It had simply not been brought to her attention that the world contained such creatures. More than sixty feet long, twenty feet high, it was here among smaller monsters because no other hall was large enough for it. It was Sharon’s impression that the beast bulked as large as the head seemed small. For millions of years, a mind-numbing abstraction, it had waddled about waiting for extinction. In due time it had come. This message—and it was a message—weighed upon Sharon like the heat. In displays along the walls were the skeletal remains of smaller creatures, one with tusks like the woolly mammoth. As a background the artist had depicted what might have been the appearance of the plains at that time, a fanciful landscape in pleasant somewhat muted fall colors, like those worn by Sharon. Here and there a strange beast might be seen wandering in a zoo of animal crackers. Also exhibits of bones, as the diggers had found them; exhibits of the tracks left by a vast reptile, the dinosaur. What had destroyed him? A change in the weather? Was he too well adapted to a marshy climate? Who could not see in this—it occurred to Sharon—the future of man in a world of women. This startling thought she owed to Alexandra Selkirk. A flight through time. Even at this moment the males were gathered in one of their primitive ceremonies, blind as the dinosaur to what was happening. It pleased Sharon to note that the girl, Crystal, showed the effects of an experience she would long remember, while her sniffling little brother wet his face at the water fountain. In the diggings of the future, the football coliseum would be the interment site of an extinct species. But why—she would ask Alexandra—had it taken so long?

  A short visit proved to be long enough. Sharon bought them each a packet of arrowheads, and stamps, then they stood at the front waiting for Caroline. She had bought gasoline and had the windshield of the car cleaned. A few minutes later, north of the east-west freeway, Caroline turned in the seat to say, “Look back!”

  The city of Lincoln, a shimmering mirage, rose from the rolling plain as Cora might have dreamed it. Dinosaurs had roamed here. The saber-toothed tiger had hunted the river canyons. At this moment a sampling of the state’s population was watching a game of football. Sharon’s mind was a jumble of confusing impressions. She let her head loll back on the seat. Now and then a lark’s cry, distorted by the car’s movement, fell on her ear as cool and liquid as water. In the back seat Crystal read aloud from the comic book spread on her lap. To keep her hair from blowing, Caroline had put on a straw hat, the elastic chin band puffing out her cheeks.

  “How is Blanche?” Sharon asked. In Madge’s letters she had always been “well,” or “fine.”

  “You’ll see her.”

  “She never married?”

  “Aunt Sharon,” Caroline said with emphasis, “we don’t get married anymore unless we want to. We all had your example.”

  Her lips parted, Sharon let the wind dry her mouth. After a moment she said, “My example?”

  “Was it boys you didn’t like, or marriage?”

  “I don’t remember being asked.”

  “Mom said you could’ve married almost anybody.”

  Only Professor Grunlich came to Sharon’s mind, along with a sigh of relief. “I wanted my independence,” she said, “like you.”

  The answer appeared to satisfy Caroline. How much did these brash young women know? It startled her to think they might know more than she did. Caroline drove with one hand, her head tilted back, her free hand surfing on the air at the window. What was she thinking? That Sharon Rose had not feared to act, but feared to speak out? In the dark field they were passing, a huge piece of machinery, like a giant insect, sprayed the earth with revolving sprinklers, the spray blowing like smoke. A rainbow immaterial as a dragonfly’s wing hovered between Sharon and the sky. The heat and shimmering light drugged her senses, weighed on her eyes. Unaware that her lips had parted, she heard the gourd-like sound of wind in her mouth. Dreamily disembodied, she eagerly held on to this fragile impression. Ned Kibbee was driving, the side curtains were flapping, Fayrene and Madge were talking, and in the fields rows of shocked corn basked in the diffused fall light. The wires dipped and rose, the poles and trees flicked past, and in the fabric of this fancy, like a patterned design, she sensed both something lost and something gained. Cora Atkins was dead. Madge had called her to say, “She went in her sleep. I hope I’m as lucky.” Sharon did not believe in pain, but she had bridled when Madge had taken comfort from her death in sleep. After a long and humiliating illness, Lillian Baumann had died, her mind and soul wide awake.

  “Aunt Sharon?” Caroline said.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever see
Wanda?”

  Nobody of that name came to Sharon’s mind. “Wanda who?”

  “It’s a movie.”

  “I see so few. Was it a good one?”

  “It was horrible.” At the thought of it, she grimaced. Her lips were set in a thin tight line.

  “As bad as all that?”

  “This woman. She’s been married and had a baby. She’s so beat and depressed she doesn’t care about it, or anything else. She’s so beat she’s hardly human. A man picks her up. She’s like a stray dog.”

  “Why did you go to see it?”

  “It was on the TV.”

  “You couldn’t turn it off?”

  “No.”

  The finality of the no was disturbing. Sharon could not think of anything so appalling she wouldn’t turn it off.

  “That’s where we’re different,” said Caroline. “If that’s how it is, I’ve got to look at it.”

  If startled, Sharon might suck in her lip, hold it fast with her teeth.

  “You turned it off because you couldn’t face it, didn’t you?”

  “What are you saying? I couldn’t face what?”

  As plain as gospel, Sharon understood this as an accusation. What had she failed to look at? At the back of her eyes, where she couldn’t avoid it, where, indeed, she had to confront it, she saw the iron frame of the bed, the sagging mattress evenly divided into two compartments, as if invisible bodies lay there, beneath the bed the gleaming, lidless night pot, and above it the dangling cord to the shadeless bulb. “It’s not so hard to turn it off,” Caroline said. “What’s hard is to admit it.” In her voice, in her gaze, Sharon felt Cora’s inflexible will. Were they so much alike? Just in time, she cried out, “Watch the road!”

  One wheel had edged into the ditch grass, sweeping the weeds. The car zigzagged wildly, the tires screeching, toppling the children about like pillows. They shrieked with pleasure. Perspiration filmed Sharon’s face and throat; her lips and mouth were dry.