Later, when I went to college, he developed the habit of calling me long distance when my mother and grandmother had gone to bed and he was alone downstairs with a drink. “Are you getting enough protein?” he asked me once at three in the morning. It was against dorm rules to put through calls after midnight except in cases of emergency, but his deep, commanding voice was so authoritative (“This is Gemma Jackson’s father, and I must speak with her immediately”) that it was for some time believed on my corridor that the people in my family were either accident-prone or suffering from long terminal illnesses.
He died the summer I received my master’s degree. I had accepted a teaching position at a high school in Chicago, and I went home for a month before school began. He was overweight and short of breath. He drank too much, smoked too many cigarettes. The doctor told him to stop, my mother told him, my grandmother told him.
My grandmother was upstairs watching television and my mother and I were sitting on the front porch. He was asleep in the green chair, with a book in his lap. I left the porch to go to the kitchen to make a sandwich, and as I passed by the chair I heard him say, “Ahhhh. Ahhhhh.” I saw his fist rise to his chest. I saw his eyes open and dilate in the lamplight. I knelt beside him.
“Are you okay?” I said. “Are you dreaming?”
We buried him in a small cemetery near the farm where he was born. In the eulogy he was remembered for having survived the first wave of the invasion of Normandy. He was admired for having been the proprietor of a chain of excellent hardware stores.
“He didn’t have to do this,” my mother said after the funeral. “He did this to himself.”
“He was a good man,” said my grandmother. “He put a nice roof over our heads. He sent us to Europe twice.”
Afterward I went alone to the cemetery. I knelt beside the heaps of wilting flowers—mostly roses and gladiolus, and one wreath of red, white, and blue carnations. Above me, the maple pods spun through the sunlight like wings, and in the distance the corn trumpeted green across the hillsides. I touched the loose black soil at the edge of the flowers. Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog. I could remember the beginning of the alphabet, up through Mike and Nan. I could remember the end. X-ray, Yoke, Zebra. I was his eldest child, and he taught me what he knew. I wept then, but not because he had gone back to Ohio to read about the Eskimos and sell the artifacts of civilized life to homeowners and builders. I wept because when I was twelve years old I had stood on a snowy riverbank as he became a shadow on the ice, and waited to see whether he would slip between the cracking floes into the water.
Sweet Talk
Sometimes Sam and I loved each other more when we were angry. “Day,” I called him, using the surname instead of Sam. “Day, Day, Day!” It drummed against the walls of the apartment like a distress signal.
“Ah, my beautiful lovebird,” he said, “My sugar-sweet bride.”
For weeks I had been going through the trash trying to find out whether he had other women. Once I found half a ham sandwich with red marks that could have been lipstick. Or maybe catsup. This time I found five slender cigarette butts.
“Who smokes floral-embossed cigarettes?” I said. He had just come out of the shower, and droplets of water gleamed among the black hairs of his chest like tiny knife points. “Who’s the heart-attack candidate you invite over when I’m out?” I held the butts beneath his nose like a small bouquet. He slapped them to the floor and we stopped speaking for three days. We moved through the apartment without touching, lay stiffly in separate furrows of the bed, desire blooming and withering between us like the invisible petals of a night-blooming cereus.
We finally made up while watching a chess tournament on television. Even though we wouldn’t speak or make eye contact, we were sitting in front of the sofa moving pieces around a chess board as an announcer explained World Championship strategy to the viewing audience. Our shoulders touched but we pretended not to notice. Our knees touched, and our elbows. Then we both reached for the black bishop and our hands touched. We made love on the carpet and kept our eyes open so that we could look at each other defiantly.
We were living in California and had six university degrees between us and no employment. We lived on food stamps, job interviews, and games.
“How many children did George Washington, the father of our country, have?”
“No white ones but lots of black ones.”
“How much did he make when he was commander of the Revolutionary Army?”
“He made a big to-do about refusing a salary but later presented the first Congress with a bill for a half million dollars.”
“Who was the last slave-owning president?”
“Ulysses S. Grant.”
We had always been good students.
It was a smoggy summer. I spent long hours in air-conditioned supermarkets, touching the cool cans, feeling the cold plastic stretched across packages of meat. Sam left the apartment for whole afternoons and evenings. He was in his car somewhere, opening it up on the freeway, or maybe just spending time with someone I didn’t know. We were mysterious with each other about our absences. In August we decided to move east, where a friend said he could get us both jobs at an unaccredited community college. In the meantime, I had invented a lover. He was rich and wanted to take me to an Alpine hotel, where mauve flowers cascaded over the stone walls of a terrace. Sometimes we drank white wine and watched the icy peaks of mountains shimmer gold in the sunset. Sometimes we returned to our room carrying tiny ceramic mugs of schnapps that had been given to us, in the German fashion, as we paid for an expensive meal.
In the second week of August, I found a pair of red lace panties at the bottom of the kitchen trash.
I decided to tell Sam I had a lover. I made my lover into a tall, blue-eyed blond, a tennis player on the circuit, a Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford who had offers from the movies. It was the tall blond part that needled Sam, who was dark and stocky.
“Did you pick him up at the beach?” Sam said.
“Stop it,” I said, knowing that was a sure way to get him to ask more questions.
We were wrapping cups and saucers in newspaper and nesting them in the slots of packing boxes. “He was taller than you,” I said, “but not as handsome.”
Sam held a blue-and-white Dresden cup, my favorite wedding present, in front of my eyes. “You slut,” he said, and let the cup drop to the floor.
“Very articulate,” I said. “Some professor. The man of reason gets into an argument and he talks with broken cups. Thank you, Alexander Dope.”
That afternoon I failed the California driver’s test again. I made four right turns and drove over three of the four curbs. The highway patrolman pointed out that if I made one more mistake I was finished. While daydreaming, I drove through a red light.
On the way back to the apartment complex, Sam squinted into the flatness of the expressway and would not talk to me. I put my blue-eyed lover behind the wheel. He rested a hand on my knee and smiled as he drove. He was driving me west, away from the Vista View Apartments, across the thin spine of mountains that separated our suburb from the sea. At the shore there would be seals frolicking among the rocks and starfish resting in tidal pools.
“How come you never take me to the ocean?” I said. “How come every time I want to go to the beach I have to call up a woman friend?”
“If you think you’re going to Virginia with me,” he said, “you’re dreaming.” He eased the car into our numbered space and put his head against the wheel. “Why did you have to do it?”
“I do not like cars,” I said. “You know I have always been afraid of cars.”
“Why did you have to sleep with that fag tennis player?” His head was still against the wheel. I moved closer and put my arm around his shoulders.
“Sam, I didn’t. I made it up.”
“Don’t try to get out of it.”
“I didn’t, Sam. I made it up.” I tried to kiss him. He let me put my mouth against his, but his
lips were unyielding. They felt like the skin of an orange. “I didn’t, Sam. I made it up to hurt you.” I kissed him again and his mouth warmed against mine. “I love you, Sam. Please let me go to Virginia.”
“ ‘George Donner,’ ” I read from the guidebook, “ ‘was sixty-one years old and rich when he packed up his family and left Illinois to cross the Great Plains, the desert, and the mountains into California.’ ” We were driving through the Sierras, past steep slopes and the deep shade of an evergreen forest, toward the Donner Pass, where in 1846 the Donner family had been trapped by an early snowfall. Some of them died and the rest ate the corpses of their relatives and their Indian guides to survive.
“Where are the bones?” Sam said, as we strolled past glass cases at the Donner Pass Museum. The cases were full of wagon wheels and harnesses. Above us a recorded voice described the courageous and enterprising spirit of American pioneers. A man standing nearby with a young boy turned to scowl at Sam. Sam looked at him and said in a loud voice, “Where are the bones of the people they ate?” The man took the boy by the hand and started for the door. Sam said, “You call this American history?” and the man turned and said, “Listen, mister, I can get your license number.” We laughed about that as we descended into the plain of the Great Basin desert in Nevada. Every few miles one of us would say the line and the other one would chuckle, and I felt as if we had been married fifty years instead of five, and that everything had turned out okay.
Ten miles east of Reno I began to sneeze. My nose ran and my eyes watered, and I had to stop reading the guidebook.
“I can’t do this anymore. I think I’ve got an allergy.”
“You never had an allergy in your life.” Sam’s tone implied that I had purposefully got the allergy so that I could not read the guidebook. We were riding in a secondhand van, a lusterless, black shoebox of a vehicle, which Sam had bought for the trip with the money he got from the stereo, the TV, and his own beautifully overhauled and rebuilt little sports car.
“Turn on the radio,” I said.
“The radio is broken.”
It was a hot day, dry and gritty. On either side of the freeway, a sagebrush desert stretched toward the hunched profiles of brown mountains. The mountains were so far away—the only landmarks within three hundred miles—that they did not whap by the windows like signposts, they floated above the plain of dusty sage and gave us the sense that we were not going anywhere.
“Are you trying to kill us?” I said when the speedometer slid past ninety.
Sam looked at the dash surprised and, I think, a little pleased that the van could do that much. “I’m getting hypnotized,” he said. He thought about it for another mile and said, “If you had managed to get your license, you could do something on this trip besides blow snot into your hand.”
“Don’t you think we should call ahead to Elko for a motel room?”
“I might not want to stop at Elko.”
“Sam, look at the map. You’ll be tired when we get to Elko.”
“I’ll let you know when I’m tired.”
We reached Elko at sundown, and Sam was tired. In the office of the Shangri-la Motor Lodge we watched another couple get the last room. “I suppose you’re going to be mad because I was right,” I said.
“Just get in the van.” We bought a sack of hamburgers and set out for Utah. Ahead of us a full moon rose, flat and yellow like a fifty-dollar gold piece, then lost its color as it rose higher. We entered the Utah salt flats, the dead floor of a dead ocean. The salt crystals glittered like snow under the white moon. My nose stopped running, and I felt suddenly lucid and calm.
“Has he been in any movies?” Sam said.
“Has who been in any movies?”
“The fag tennis player.”
I had to think a moment before I recalled my phantom lover.
“He’s not a fag.”
“I thought you made him up.”
“I did make him up but I didn’t make up any fag.”
A few minutes later he said, “You might at least sing something. You might at least try to keep me awake.” I sang a few Beatles tunes, then Simon and Garfunkel, the Everly Brothers, and Elvis Presley. I worked my way back through my youth to a Girl Scout song I remembered as “Eye, Eye, Eye, Icky, Eye, Kai, A-nah.” It was supposed to be sung around a campfire to remind the girls of their Indian heritage and the pleasures of surviving in the wilderness. “Ah woo, ah woo. Ah woo knee key chee,” I sang. “I am now five years old,” I said, and then I sang, “Home, Home on the Range,” the song I remembered singing when I was a child going cross-country with my parents to visit some relatives. The only thing I remembered about that trip besides a lot of going to the bathroom in gas stations was that there were rules that made the traveling life simple. One was: Do not hang over the edge of the front seat to talk to your mother or father. The other was: If you have to throw up, do it in the blue coffee can; the red one is full of cookies.
“It’s just the jobs and money,” I said. “It isn’t us, is it?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
A day and a half later we crossed from Wyoming into Nebraska, the western edge of the Louisiana Purchase, which Thomas Jefferson had made so that we could all live in white, classical houses and be farmers. Fifty miles later the corn arrived, hundreds of miles of it, singing green from horizon to horizon. We began to relax and I had the feeling that we had survived the test of American geography. I put away our guidebooks and took out the dictionary. Matachin, mastigophobia, matutolypea. I tried to find words Sam didn’t know. He guessed all the definitions and was smug and happy behind the wheel. I reached over and put a hand on his knee. He looked at me and smiled. “Ah, my little buttercup,” he said. “My sweet cream pie.” I thought of my Alpine lover for the first time in a long while, and he was nothing more than mist over a distant mountain.
In a motel lobby near Omaha, we had to wait in line for twenty minutes behind three families. Sam put his arm around me and pulled a tennis ball out of his jacket. He bounced it on the thin carpet, tentatively, and when he saw it had enough spring, he dropped into an exaggerated basketball player’s crouch and ran across the lobby. He whirled in front of the cigarette machine and passed the ball to me. I snagged it and threw it back. Several people had turned to stare at us. Sam winked at them and dunked the ball through an imaginary net by the wall clock, then passed the ball back to me. I dribbled around a stack of suitcases and went for a lay-up by a hanging fern. I misjudged and knocked the plant to the floor. What surprised me was that the fronds were plastic but the dirt was real. There was a huge mound of it on the carpet. At the registration desk, the clerk told us that the motel was already full and that he could not find our names on the advance reservation list.
“Nebraska sucks eggs,” Sam said loudly as we carried our luggage to the door. We spent the night curled up on the hard front seat of the van like boulders. The bony parts of our bodies kept bumping as we turned and rolled to avoid the steering wheel and dash. In the morning, my knees and elbows felt worn away, like the peaks of old mountains. We hadn’t touched each other sexually since California.
“So she had big ta-ta’s,” I said. “She had huge ta-ta’s and a bad-breath problem.” We had pushed on through the corn, across Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, and the old arguments rattled along with us, like the pots and dishes in the back of the van.
“She was a model,” he said. He was describing the proprietress of the slender cigarettes and red panties.
“In a couple of years she’ll have gum disease,” I said.
“She was a model and she had a degree in literature from Oxford.”
I didn’t believe him, of course, but I felt the sting of his intention to hurt. “In a few years, she’ll have emphysema.”
“What would this trip be like without the melody of your voice,” he said. It was dark, and taillights glowed on the road ahead of us like flecks of burning iron. I remembered how, when we were undergraduates atte
nding different colleges, he used to write me letters that said: Keep your skirts down and your knees together, don’t let anyone get near your crunch. We always amused each other with our language.
“I want a divorce,” I said in a motel room in Columbus, Ohio. We were propped against pillows on separate double beds watching a local program on Woody Hayes, the Ohio State football coach. The announcer was saying, “And here in front of the locker room is the blue-and-gold mat that every player must step on as he goes to and from the field. Those numbers are the score of last year’s loss to Michigan.” This was just before the famous coach was fired for trying to punch a Clemson football player during a nationally televised game. There are still people in Ohio who remember Woody Hayes with such fondness that they will tell you that that Clemson player was actually reaching down with his neck to hit the coach’s hand. I was saying, “Are you listening? I said I want a divorce when we get to Virginia.”
“I’m listening.”
“Don’t you want to know why I want a divorce?”
“No”
“Well, do you think it’s a good idea or a bad idea?”
“I think it’s a good idea.”
“You do?”
“Yes.”
The announcer said, “And that is why the night before the big game Woody will be showing his boys reruns of the film Patton.”
That night someone broke into the van and stole everything we owned except the suitcases we had with us in the motel room. They even stole the broken radio. We stood in front of the empty van and looked up and down the row of parked cars as if we expected to see another black van parked there, one with two pairs of skis and two tennis rackets slipped into the spaces between the boxes and the windows.
“I suppose you’re going to say I’m the one who left the door unlocked,” I said.
Sam sat on the curb. He sat on the curb and put his head into his hands. “No,” he said. “It was probably me.”
Sweet Talk Page 3