by Carol Anshaw
“Well, but, it’s an idea to consider,” Rob said, one of his lame jokes; he was a master of the form.
That night they had dinner at the lodge. Heather ordered a Caesar salad with the dressing on the side.
The waiter said, “Would you like that with or without halibut?”
They went to an orientation lecture in the sod gathering house. They were told that if they encountered a bear while out walking they were supposed to cluster around each other and begin singing, so the bear would think they were bigger than he was, also merry, not threatening.
“Right,” Heather said. “You’ll see me clustering and singing.”
The next morning they took a guided nature walk, the easiest of three offered. They picked wild blueberries. They stepped lightly, as cautioned, on permafrost.
“It’s like the scrubber side of a dish sponge,” Gabe said.
On their third day, they were flown in a tiny prop plane up to the face of Mount McKinley. The plane was made of metal the thickness of a license plate. The sound inside was deafening. All of them wore headphones and microphones to talk with one another. The mountain was coming at them. They were about to crash into it.
“You could turn anytime,” Carmen told the pilot. She was in the copilot seat, in charge of the fire extinguisher.
“We’re still a ways from the mountain,” the pilot said. “Distances can be deceiving up here.”
No one else said anything. They just stared at the mountain. Finally Rob took charge.
“I think we’ve all seen as much of the mountain as we can stand,” he said, and the pilot turned and for an instant they were all happy—happy together.
And in the end, Rob was proven right. The trip, once it was over, was a shared experience. A stamp in the beginning of a collection book. The frost between the kids seemed to thaw. Carmen found them in the kitchen together in the late summer mornings, Gabe eating a mixing bowl of Cheerios and a quart of milk; Heather having a piece of dry toast and tea with lemon, or saltines and a Diet Coke. The two of them talked in an encoded adolescent way, employing the nasal inflections all their friends used. They themselves were becoming something like friends! Carmen and Rob congratulated each other with little high-fives. Then in early August Carmen tagged along with Rob to the annual MarcAntony style show in Atlanta. Four days later they came back to things having shifted yet again. Gabe and Heather were back to avoiding each other, but in a different way.
The two of them hung out around the house a lot, not so much interacting as hovering, circling. Carmen kept her suspicions to herself and watched for clues. Eventually she resorted to room inspections and a little journal reading. What she came up with were some entries in Heather’s diary about “G’s” crush on her, and how she was “pimping it.” Then Carmen came home from work a little early one afternoon and found them together on a blanket, tanning.
Carmen brought the matter out of the realm of the unspoken, shutting the bedroom door one night, putting her forearms on Rob’s shoulders, butting her forehead lightly against his. “Houston, I think we have a problem.”
“No, he’s way too young for her.” As though this was the relevant factor, the thing that made it impossible. “And I’m not sure about this, but I think she’s still a virgin.”
“She is not a virgin,” Carmen said. “She has been in three eating disorder places and one drug rehab. Somewhere in the middle of some unsupervised night, I can assure you she slept with someone. And at the moment she is taking advantage of Gabe’s innocence.” She told him about the journal entries.
Rob listened in a serious way, so she thought he was getting it, but then what he said was, “So nothing has actually happened?”
“Yet.”
“At the salons, we usually leave the stylists to sort out these sorts of issues on their own. Crushes as well as fights.”
“What are you even saying?! We aren’t talking about comb poaching, or adults dating. These are our children. This is our family. Gabe is twelve years old!”
From there the argument careened around in bumper cars. Rob thought it was a phase and they should just wait it out, until it passed. Carmen thought Heather needed a talking-to.
“That’ll only turn it into something she can rebel against,” Rob said.
Up to now, Carmen had always thought of Rob as a smooth operator, managing temperamental stylists and bitchy clients. Now she saw that his indirect approach to problems was not a superficial mode, but rather, at bottom, deep passivity. She realized she had never seen him discipline Heather. Also, until this, the two of them had never had a fight. He was totally non-confrontational. Non-confrontational but intransigent. An unbeatable combination.
“We can’t let this go on,” she said. “It’s too backwoods. If you won’t help me, I can’t negotiate with them alone. I’ll have to send Gabe to live with his father.”
This was a false threat and they both knew it. Sending Gabe to live with Matt and Paula would mean letting them know what had been going on, and Carmen wouldn’t be able to bring herself to that. So instead she stewed awhile. She gave Rob the silent treatment while she tried to figure out what to do.
On the third day of being not spoken to, Rob gave in, sort of.
“I still think this will pass on its own, but I can’t take any more of this silence. I’ll stand behind you. But you’ll have to do the talking.”
This was not what she’d been hoping for. She’d been hoping for a meeting of the minds and this was only a weak concession. But she said okay even though it felt like giving in.
The talk with Heather went very badly. She was indignant that her privacy had been violated.
“Look,” Carmen said. “The problem is your having done this, not our confronting you about it.” She paused, waiting in vain for Rob to chime in while he sat off to the side, like an unwired stereo speaker.
Heather sighed in a stagey way and stormed out. Storming was one of her main modes of transportation.
“I think that went pretty well,” Rob said later, when he and Carmen were alone.
She realized that in the long run this would just be a speed bump. She had driven a wedge between the kids; knowing their parents were watching would put a damper on things. Gabe would get past his crush on Heather. Heather would go off to college to get into some more major-league trouble. And Rob would continue to massage away every problem. And Carmen would stay with him and accept this. But inside, she had begun the process of losing her religion, the certainty of her own assessments. Also, from here on she would always consider the marriage a small mistake.
She got up and opened the kitchen door for Walter, who had been patiently waiting for her to reshuffle her worldview so he could go out and pee.
emma goldman’s grave
Walter was sacked out at the foot of the bed, on his back, four paws splayed up in the air, snoring in a small, wheezy way. Although he was edging past middle age, sometimes—when he was sleeping, or playing, pretending that a rawhide chip was a mouse, backing up as though he was scared of it, then pouncing—he could still look like a puppy. Mornings after showing off, though, boxing with Gracie, he would look like a guy with a hangover. His muzzle had gone white, a big tooth was missing on one side of his mouth. Carmen could see this when he was upside down as he was now, the leathery edge of his mouth flopping onto the quilt.
She rolled over and got stared down by Emma Goldman, from the cover of the invitation propped on the nightstand. Today was her birthday. Every year on June 27th, a small contingent of anarchists in Chicago held a memorial at her grave. Jean and Tom would be there singing union songs. Carmen had persuaded Alice to come along. Rob was at work; Saturday was the biggest day of the week in the hair business. Carmen vaguely remembered hearing him leave earlier. Today he was grading stylists on their way up the ladder, making surprise visits to three local salons, which were inspections really, but he tried not to give off an inspection vibe. Stylists could be prickly.
Since t
he episode with Gabe and Heather (off at college, but who knew how long she would stick with it) last year, she had scaled back her expectations of him. She had accepted that their marriage was not a merger of beliefs. They were not de Beauvoir and Sartre. Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. What she had with Rob was nothing like that. Seeing the marriage as a mistake took the pressure off it and freed her up to see what he did offer her. An enormous amount of kindness for one thing. And she was able to be physically intimate with him in a way she hadn’t with anyone else. He also provided something less definable; his presence was something like a weighted vest, holding her more firmly to the ground. When she came home, she was always happy when he’d gotten there before her. She saw that all this added up to something.
“Hey.” Carmen stretched to shake one of Walter’s limp paws. “Let’s see what’s cooking.” Still half asleep, he hopped off the bed and groggily followed her downstairs. They both got a happy surprise. While they were asleep, Gabe had slipped back into the house from his overnight at his father’s. He had taken over the kitchen table, simultaneously eating a plate of toast slices with peanut butter and working on a paint-by-number landscape. He had been doing a lot of these lately. He picked them up at junk shops then followed the pattern, but transposing the colors, not in any obvious scheme like red skies and blue lawn—rather an alternate order, but an extremely subtle one. A code.
Alice said he was creating an ironic parallel geography. Carmen was not so sure about the irony. His own paintings, which he worked on in his room here, also over at Alice’s studio, were almost comically dark. An alley with a Dumpster, eyes peering out from its slightly opened lid. A midnight junkyard, its gate swung open, someone inside waiting. She decided not to bother worrying about this, that it would pass and something else would turn up to worry about.
“How come you’re not still over there?” she asked him, opening the door to the backyard for Walter. She ran a hand through Gabe’s hair. It was filthy. She let this go. She didn’t want to start his day with nagging. She counted herself blessed. At thirteen, he was still an extremely decent person. A little lazy, a little dreamy, a little self-absorbed, but hey, he was a teenager. Sometimes Carmen luxuriated in thinking of all the ways he could be terrible, but wasn’t. Silent. Sarcastic. Arrogant. None of these worries had materialized. Not yet anyway. She had found a magnet school specializing in visual arts, where he was just ordinarily talented, and would have trouble getting an inflated notion of himself.
“I kind of slipped out early.” He looked up at her, his eyes enlarged by the lenses of his glasses. “You know. Before the pinball machine really got rolling.” By arrangement, Gabe spent Saturday nights with Matt and Paula. The twins were big on setting booby traps for him, also big on food fights. Plus he got conscripted a lot to try to find what might interest his sorrowful Romanian stepbrother, who was indifferent to play of any sort.
Of course Carmen was delighted any time Gabe opted to bail out of there, even if his preference for here was based on a search for dullness, sameness. Also, Sundays here did not entail a long morning spent in church. It was pathetic, she knew, that she still counted moments like this—when he came back early—as winning. Doubly pathetic because while she was still pissed off at Matt for leaving, he was so far along another path that when circumstances forced them into each other’s company, he seemed kind of fuzzy on the fact that they were ever married. He had a superficially chummy manner toward her, as though they used to work in the same office.
Matt and Paula were no longer, if they ever were, a scandalous May–December match. With all her responsibilities, Paula was acquiring an ageless worn-out look. Now the two of them just looked like every other couple with young kids. And then they were further worn out by their good deeds. The adoptions were just the start of it. They also tithed their modest income. Every year they played one of the three kings (Matt) and Mary (Paula) in a giant outdoor Christmas pageant put on by their parish. Before they got the kids, they stuck out their year in the fly-covered mission in Nigeria, proselytizing natives and putting in a water filtration plant for the village. This was good for the villagers, not so good for Gabe, who was without a father for that time.
In the fridge she found a can of food for Walter, a bagel for herself.
“Hey,” she said to Gabe, “maybe you want to come with me today to the Emma Goldman thing?” Although she tried not to show this, it mattered that Gabe came along. She wanted him to move into adulthood, not just along some artistic path or into some happy marriage, but also instilled with the history of the American left, and with a sense of his part in it.
“Bo-ring,” he said.
“No, not boring. Inspirational. Alice is going to take us. We’re making a little outing of it. We need to get her outside today. Lately she looks like she lives in a crypt.”
“Crypt dweller,” he said in a horror movie voice, still painting.
Alice was in the crypt because she had mono (the kissing disease, she liked reminding everyone), and on doctor’s orders had put her life on hold for a couple of weeks while she laid on her sofa. Gabe adored Alice and so Carmen knew he’d say okay.
“Okay,” he said.
Upstairs, Carmen took a long shower next to a window propped open with a paint stirrer. A hawthorn tree just outside was in its white blossom phase, which lasted only a couple of weeks. Although the morning sun was benevolent, the breeze that sifted through the branches and then through the window screen was still a little sharp and sour, sighing out the last of a wintery spring. She shivered and turned up the hot water.
She made her bed, first scooping up her glasses and the paper she’d been reading last night. A long report by Human Rights Watch on the aftereffects of rape and sexual mutilation on the women of Rwanda. Two years after the genocide, Rwanda still weighed Carmen down.
Two years ago, she spent every Saturday through the spring, in front of one or another Jewel or Dominick’s, gathering signatures on a petition urging U.S. intervention. Accomplishing absolutely nothing. Clinton, Madeleine Albright—dithering, worthless. The U.N. mission hobbled. Humanitarian workers fleeing for their own lives. Eventually she was sunk by the futility of standing in front of a supermarket in Chicago, trying to get shoppers with long grocery lists and little time to care about tribal people in a small country in Africa whacking their neighbors to death with machetes.
She tried to explain to whoever would listen what was happening, how the Hutus were obedient, docile killers egged on by propaganda coming off the radio. How they learned to kill efficiently, practiced on those left for dead, then graduated to the fully alive. Some they killed by cutting off their hands and feet, leaving them to writhe to death. Tutsi victims willing to pay could ask for a bullet, the quickest way out. Babies, for the sake of ammunition economy, were just thrown against the wall. Carmen had photos, blown up and laminated. She taped these to the front of her card table. No one looked at them. No one wanted to see piles of hacked-up body parts, human junkyards.
She couldn’t talk with Rob about this, of course. Before she corrected him, he thought there were seven Supreme Court justices. He’d never heard of Mao’s Cultural Revolution or Rosa Parks. He was an extremely decent person within his limits, but these did not include Rwanda, which he had called—only a couple of times, but still—Rhonda.
And now the killing had ended, but there was all this aftermath, women degraded, ashamed of having been raped, now raising the children of their rapists. Carmen worried this period was only a lull. How would the Tutsis forgive neighbors who murdered their whole families? She used to think in terms of discrete issues, but now saw the worst problems as long narratives. She studied the mechanics of genocide, to try to understand. She lectured occasionally on the subject. Everyone, she thought, must keep a sharp eye out for another mass killing, to get in its way before it began. Her belief was waning, though, in the sort of enlightenment that would save history from repeating itself. W
hen she read lately that Mother Teresa had said she was unable any longer to hear or see God, Carmen thought: well, yes.
They brought Walter along. Carmen and Gabe had just read a book by some monks who raised German shepherds and the book said bring your dog along, wherever. It also said to sing him a song with his name in it. They were pulling together a tortured lyric that rhymed Walter with “never falter” and “not a hair would we alter.”
When they pulled up to Alice’s building, the converted laundry, she was waiting outside for them. Carmen had always loved her sister, but since the moment Alice rushed her out of the crowd at the abortion clinic, one hand on Carmen’s shoulder, the other holding her detached ear, Carmen had come to be—in a grave and profound way—in love with Alice.
“Let’s take the ragtop,” she said.
“Are you sure you’re up to driving?”
“I can drive. I just can’t kiss.”
Even sick she looked great. Wearing jeans and a worn green T-shirt, she was sitting on the hood of her new car, which was someone else’s old Mercedes convertible. The top was down; the car was ready for adventure. Alice looked, Carmen thought, like an ad for something, but not the car. A jazzy cologne, maybe. Some kind of tampon for women too active and important to be bothered with bleeding. A big part of Alice’s appeal was that she traveled with the slightly sheepish air of someone much plainer. Everything about the picture—the old car, the fragile, early summer day, the industrial decay of the neighborhood—set off a light envy in Carmen. Recently she figured out that she herself had put on about a pound for every year since she left grad school. These sneaky pounds had not made her fat so much as sturdy, also in possession of a butt to reckon with, to obscure with long jackets and pleated trousers. Alice hadn’t put on an ounce, not even when she finally quit smoking. She could still, in the middle of her thirties, sit on a car hood in a thrift shop T-shirt and jeans and look only a slightly different kind of great than she did in her early twenties. Carmen considered re-approaching the stationary bike in the basement, which she had been using for some time as a rack to dry sweaters.