by James Tate
When a year had passed without a single invitation to their new home, I pretty much let go of Dan in my mind. Mary was calling the shots, and Dan jumped when she said jump. I knew from Patrice—our Nigerian Marxist philosopher friend—that Mary was not pregnant, that Dan had postponed his paternity leave, and that Mary had traveled to over seventy-five cities to deliver her pitch since they were married. Beyond that, he didn’t know much, except that they were still trying to get Mary pregnant at every possible pit-stop. And Dan was in charge of overseeing all the elaborate renovations of the mansion while Mary traveled. Given what I knew of Dan’s lack of domestic experience and his hitherto faulty sense of responsibility, my imagination strained to complete this picture.
And then late one night Dan called. I didn’t feel that warmly at first, but when he announced that Mary was finally pregnant I let down my protective shield and tried to match the jubilation in his voice. “Congratulations, Danny-boy, you’ll make a great father.” There was a moment of silence, then a kind of sardonic laugh. “Thanks, John.” It seemed we didn’t have that much to talk about—the house, Mary’s travels, the baby. Dan asked about my work, but I didn’t feel like dwelling on it, what with the importance of his own news. So, rather clumsily, we apologized for not being in touch, promised to change all that now.
I ran into Dan’s mother at the supermarket some time after the call. I congratulated her, I don’t know what for, for bringing Dan into the world, I guess, for playing her part in this birth-chain. Dan was an only child, and of course she was pleased and proud, but seemed to dwell more on Mary’s success and the impressive cost of their new house, the changes and lack of change in her son. She had seen them only twice since the wedding and seemed pained by this, but would have never admitted this. Dan had sponged off his parents well into his thirties, and this sudden flaunting of riches must have stirred mixed feelings. Nonetheless, all bitternesses aside, she was to be a grandmother at long last, she had nearly given up on Dan ever settling down. There had been some sweet and attractive prospects along the way, but Dan had always let them go, had always insisted on his right to have some “sidekickers,” as he called them, to complement his current “main squeeze.” But now, Mrs. Jacobson fully believed his claim of complete loyalty to Mary and all that she stood for. At this point I couldn’t help myself and asked, “And what does she stand for?”
Mrs. Jacobson took the question, which could easily enough have been interpreted as rude, in stride, having, apparently, already asked herself that question. “Oh, I don’t know. I think Mary believes in success, hard work rewarded by material gain.” I agreed with that, I couldn’t have agreed more, but Dan’s mother spoke the words with a careful smile, as though this indeed summarized the best of the American work ethic, and wasn’t that what all good families were built on?
But, for me, a mild sense of loss persisted. I didn’t really care about Dan anymore and, while I never confessed this to any of the guys, I sensed some distancing on their parts as well. His name came up only if someone chanced upon him in town doing errands. The reports got thinner and thinner. Willy, Dan’s old baseball buddy, told us that Mary was going to have twins. None of us betrayed much interest, except to say that she had probably been taking fertility drugs since they had had so much trouble conceiving. Dan, father of twins!
My own life drifted or bounced along without major incident until one spring day I paused to assess my situation and found, without any great surprise, that I had dug myself into a rut that was beginning to stifle and suffocate. I was married young and stayed married through my twenties; divorced and stayed divorced through my thirties. Maybe my clock was running out, I chuckled to myself. I talked to Sal about this several times. Finally, he too decided to “liquidate,” sell what assets we had, and make a last stab at the Grand Tour. I quit my job at the magazine, successfully advertised and sold my old Peugeot in one of the local papers. My boss at the magazine told me I might have my job back if I didn’t stay away too long. She didn’t say how long was too long.
Sal and I lasted a little over two months in Amsterdam. It was one continual party, and we seemed to be handed about from one group to another, never paying rent, sleeping with more women than I had known in all of the past decade, with no strings, no promises, just the convenience of ready flesh and desire. We acted like a couple of twenty-year-olds just out of the Navy. Occasionally, we even paid prostitutes just to do our part in stimulating the economy of our tiny host nation. We sat up all night with bands of squatters smoking hashish and drinking strong beer and coffee.
Something had definitely been reawakened in both of us. Sal was already talking of permanently settling there, though work permits were a problem. Our new friends promised to help. Hugo and Jan, both journalists, knew people who could help.
Just being on the continent and meeting so many new types of people had already had a tonic effect on me, and I longed to see more. I already sensed that there were possibilities I had never before even considered.
“I want to head south, to Spain, maybe Morocco, Sal. You coming or staying?”
But Sal had found himself a girl and something seemed to be developing between them. He was staying home with her more in her apartment the past few weeks, and it was good for him. I hadn’t seen him as happy in years.
We made our goodbyes at the train station and, though I couldn’t have known it then, I would never see Sal again.
I spent the next sixteen months in a small fishing village in Southern Spain, letting a lifetime of tensions pour out from the bottoms of my feet onto the Mediterranean sands and, in general, reflecting on how good life could be. The food, the people, the sun, all healing. The gypsy woman who lived in the ruins next to my modest house had thirteen children and no plumbing or electricity, and yet she sang from morning until night and loved those half-naked, crazy, filthy kids. One of the middle-class Spanish ladies I had gotten to know asked her one day if the children weren’t a terrible burden, if they weren’t just too much for her to feed and keep out of trouble; and the toothless old hag (she was actually only 36 but appeared a well-worn 72) replied with a cackle that God loved her because He had given her so many children who would look after her in her old age.
Each day I drank the local wines with fishermen and affable smugglers or shopkeepers. I wrote each day in a journal and read my secondhand paperbacks left behind by previous English-speaking travelers. Very few people back in the States knew where I was, and that was fine with me. I thought less and less about what I had left behind, just as I thought little of the future. If the sun was out, that was enough. What new flower bloomed in the garden colored my day, along with Angelica’s singing.
I could have let go, cut the string to the kite of my life, and never returned to the scene of my former life. But after a year and a half, I knew I was drifting away to become something unrecognizable and, ultimately—hateful word!—unuseful. Enough had changed, enough had been shed, and I couldn’t help but hope this time had been more than an escape, it had also signaled a new beginning.
Maisie, my former boss, was my boss again. She and my other former colleagues remarked on the changes in me. And, though I was loathe to admit it, I welcomed the structure of working back into my life. It wasn’t long before I was stopping by for drinks at the old haunts. Old friends looked new, even those who hadn’t changed that much.
“So how old would Dan’s twins be by now?” I asked Willy.
“I guess they’d be . . .” he paused, “you know I haven’t seen Dan once since before you ever left the country. So how would I know? He’s dropped all his old friends, as far as I know.” I detected more than a note of bitterness. Willy and Dan had been the closest friends in the group. I found myself really wanting to know how Dan was, what had become of his life. I imagined him thriving in the mansion with full-time nannies looking after the twins. But this kind of imagining was no longer built on anything.
One morning, a few days later, I called Mrs.
Jacobson on the phone. At one time I had thought she liked me, thought I was a positive influence on her slothful son, but at first it seemed as though she barely remembered me.
“I was living in Europe for a while,” I explained, “and I was just wondering how Dan and Mary were doing, I hadn’t heard anything . . .”
“Oh, I suppose they’re doing very well. They have bought a hideaway somewhere in the Caribbean, I can never remember the name of the island.”
“And the twins, what did Mary have? How are they?”
“I’ve never seen them myself,” she said, and I knew I had struck a sore spot.
“Never seen them? How could that be?”
“Well,” she said, “They sent me one picture, but I don’t believe it. Neither Dan nor Mary are in the picture to prove it’s their twins, and I just don’t believe they ever had anything but money, twins of money.”
WELCOME SIGNS
Ever since her return home from the hospital, Mrs. Norris found herself taking extreme delight in the observation of birds and other little creatures that visited her yard. The goldfinch that perched on her bed of daisies each morning and early evening nabbing small insects brightened her spirits and helped her to forget her still-nagging pain. And the day a scarlet tanager flittered from tree to tree in plain view of her kitchen window Mrs. Norris felt no pain at all. It was heaven-sent, as bright and shining as hope itself.
She called to her only daughter, Susie, to come quick.
“He’s come to visit us all the way from Peru. Look, Susie, he’s our first scarlet tanager. Have you ever seen anything redder than that?”
Susie had pouted in her room the whole time Mrs. Norris was hospitalized, and was now sensitive to any change she sensed in her mother.
“He changes color in the autumn. He doesn’t want to be seen in the winter wearing that bright red coat of feathers. Isn’t he smart?”
Susie pulled away from her mother’s arms and clutched her doll.
When Mr. Norris came home from work at five, Mrs. Norris told him about the visitation of the tanager. Mr. Norris did not know what a tanager was, but was happy she had had a good day.
“What’s for dinner?” he asked, as always, pleased that a semblance of the old routine was returning.
“Fish and corn-on-the-cob. Did you have a good day? Did Garrett get his report in on time?”
“Oh, you know Garrett. It was on time, but I think he made up some of the figures. His mind’s on baseball this time of year. The rest is just going through the motions. Lydia does a pretty good job of covering for him.” Mr. Norris picked up the newspaper and scanned the front page. “They say it’s going to rain tomorrow.”
“I saw the skunk again last night, Clifford, after you went to bed. He’s not afraid of me. I was standing five feet from him for the longest time. I followed him around the yard with the flashlight. I think he would have let me pet him, really. He’s beautiful.”
“You better watch yourself. You get yourself sprayed and you’ll be sleeping in the tent for the rest of the summer.”
Susie, who was playing in her room, thought it strange that her mother should follow a skunk around the yard late at night. She hoped nobody else would find out. She was certain nobody else’s mother had ever done such a disgusting thing. A skunk, p.u.
“By the way,” Mr. Norris said, “I’ve invited the Cummings over for dinner on Saturday. Are you up to it? They’ve been asking about you and I thought it might be good for you. Okay?”
“I’m sure I’ll manage.” But, in truth, Mrs. Norris wished her family wasn’t in such a hurry to get back to normal. She liked living in the twilight world with furry and feathery friends. The family of wrens in the birdhouse on the front-porch was more riveting to her now than all the dinner-guests she had ever cooked for in the past. Their little ones were about to fly from the nest any day now and she didn’t want to miss the event. She had witnessed many families raise their chicks in that house, but this year it was especially important to her that all go well. After dinner Susie asked permission to go across the street to play with her friend Tamika. Mrs. Norris cleaned the dishes while Mr. Norris puttered with a table he was making in the basement.
She saw something moving on the edge of the woods that abuts their property. It was something large and unfamiliar and she called to Mr. Norris in the basement. “Come here, Cliff. There’s an ostrich out here. Come see!”
“What the hell are you yelling about? I can’t hear you.” She was always yelling at him when he was working in the basement. It was one thing that had annoyed him for years, and that hadn’t changed.
“An ostrich, there’s an ostrich in the woods.”
“Are you out of your mind, woman?” Reluctantly he put down his tools and climbed the steps to the kitchen. “Now what is it?”
“Here, look.” She handed him the binoculars that she seemed to carry everywhere since she had gotten back.
“By God, it’s a wild turkey. Well isn’t that something. That’s the first time I’ve seen one of those since we’ve lived here.”
The huge bird could have been mistaken for a small ostrich, he had to grant her that. And now that he thought about it, it was pretty funny. “An ostrich,” he chuckled. “You’ll be seeing elephants soon.” And then he returned to the basement.
The sun was setting as Mrs. Norris finished the dishes and polished the counter. It was going to be a beautiful sunset, the air had a slight chill to it, her favorite weather.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” she shouted down the stairs at Mr. Norris.
“What? What is it you want now?”
“I said, do you want to go for a walk? Just a short one while Susie is at the Smiths?”
“I want to finish the table tonight. You go on, maybe I’ll catch up with you.”
The sky in the west was pink and lavender and shot through with drifting tangerine islands. Mrs. Norris walked the road with a sense of purpose, knowing the best vantage-point from which to view the final sinking of the sun. It was a meadow, just twenty minutes by foot from her home. A single, dappled grey horse grazed there through all the seasons of the year, and today she positioned herself so that the sun would set directly in back of the horse. She had no name for the beast, but she was fond of him, especially now. He stared at her and whisked his tail back and forth, scattering flies.
When there was nothing left but a faint orange glow on the horizon, Mrs. Norris turned and continued her walk in the other direction. She was sorry Mr. Norris had not joined her. They had walked together in the evenings for many years, but then he began to find excuses. And Susie was afraid of the dark.
A slight breeze rippled the silvery birch leaves. The grim and tedious weeks in the hospital drifted through her mind like a half-forgotten dream. She would breathe this air, here, now, and be grateful to be alive. She winked at the little bunny watching her from crazy old Mrs. Parks’ vegetable garden.
Mrs. Parks’ two goats leaned their heads over their wooden fence and neighed greeting to her as she passed. She stopped to pat their heads and scratch their noses. “What a funny world we live in,” she said to them, half-expecting some form of agreement from them, and then getting it. When she returned from her walk, Mr. Norris was propped up in bed reading a mystery novel. “I wish you would have come,” she said to him, situating herself on the edge of the bed beside him. “The sunset was gorgeous, and I had the funniest thing happen.”
“Yes,” he said, lowering his reading glasses.
“It was just down at the corner. I was walking along and I spotted a little field mouse by the side of the road. The moon was very bright or I wouldn’t have seen him at all.”
“A mouse, yes. You spotted a mouse.”
“Yes, and it was munching on something. I could see that. And it was sitting up munching on something.”
“Yes. Quite fascinating. Go on.”
“Well, you see, it looked right at me and didn’t seem to be afraid one bit.”
/>
“Yes.”
“And, well, I decided to try to get closer to him.”
“You wanted to get close to this mouse, have I got this right?”
“And so I got down on my hands and knees and started crawling toward him.”
“This is quite a story, if you don’t mind my saying so. Most women are terrified of mice, and my wife is crawling toward one on her hands and knees in the gravel.”
“And, Clifford, you wouldn’t believe it. I put my face within inches of his and he wasn’t in the least nervous. He just kept munching on what turned-out to be a dried worm, very sandy, I would think. And I crouched like that for fifteen minutes, just watching him. He was the cutest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. His tiny little paws washing his face between bites, and his tiny pointed nose, his whiskers and eyes and ears. Really, I was completely enchanted by this little fellow.”
“Well, I’m speechless, Winnie. That’s quite a story. Meanwhile, Susie was wondering where you were. I put her to bed, but she’s upset about something. Tamika hit her or something. Anyway, it appears they had some kind of fight or other. You had better go say goodnight to her.”
Mrs. Norris agreed.
The next afternoon Mr. Norris called Bill Cummings from the office to cancel the dinner they had planned on Saturday.
“I don’t think Winnie is up to it yet,” he explained. “She’s still a bit fragile.”
DESPAIR ICE CREAM
The Annual Arts and Crafts Fair was set up in the town park, six or seven large tents busy with potters and painters and musicians and story-tellers and everything you could ever want. People came from all around in campers and vans plastered with bizarre bumper stickers. It was really some kind of collection of humanity that is better left undescribed, backwoods mall-people with unhygienic habits, people with barely lawful fetishes, aggressive hats, and overweight children. Still, arts and crafts can be elevating.