“Yeah,” Jon says glumly. “That’s probably it.”
It’s the last home game. Larken’s obligation to her dead father—at least as far as the 2003 season of Husker football is concerned—ends in approximately sixteen minutes.
She’s had mixed success filling these seats, and she’s never yet managed to fill all six of them. The obvious, first-string choices are her family members. She’s invited them, repeatedly, but Gaelan won’t give up his Saturday marathon workouts at the gym, and Bonnie is deeply involved in some new doomed-to-failure entrepreneurial effort. As for Viney, she came to the first two games but was strangely subdued, and spent most of both afternoons sitting with her body inclined slightly forward in the seat, chin resting in her upturned, cupped palm, sleeping. She’s politely declined Larken’s subsequent invitations.
“I’m very involved in planning Fancy Egg Days this year,” she explained. “I’m sorry, honey, but I’m sure there are lots of people who’d love to go with you.”
Not true. There just aren’t that many people Larken wants to spend a Saturday afternoon with. She invited Arthur and Eloise to the Texas A&M game—they brought their two oldest grandchildren—and at the Iowa State game she was joined by Kris and her husband, Dennis, and their eight-year-old son. And now she and Jon are not watching Nebraska get trampled by Kansas State. It’s the first home game they’ve lost all year.
Everyone seems so remote.
“I can’t believe it’s mid-November, can you?” Larken says, feeling her own spirits downslide and making another effort to use small talk as levitation. “Where’s the hot chocolate? Where’s the brrrrr?”
Jon pulls a section of longish hair away from his scalp and starts twirling it with a slow, restrained compulsiveness. Larken wonders if she’s watching the nascent development of a dreadlock. She’s always wondered how they’re made.
The seats are part of Larken’s family legacy. Her father purchased them sometime in the 1970s and for a while, before Hope started using a wheelchair, they came up as a sixsome on football Saturdays: three adults—Mom and Dad and Viney—and three kids. If Larken thought about it, she might realize that her precise sense of color was developed on Saturdays, in the streets of Lincoln and in the stadium, where a thousand or more shades of red collide against one another. Even the drinks the adults poured from thermoses on those Saturdays were red: Bloody Marys for the adults, and for the children, Virgin Marys.
That lasted only a couple of years though. Hope’s MS disabled them all. Things like jolly road trips to Lincoln on football Saturdays were only one of the casualties of having a mother in a wheelchair.
“Did you ever think about the end of the world when you were a child?” Jon asks. He’s still staring at the mass of Husker fans on the other side of the field. This may be the first time all afternoon that he’s initiated a conversation.
Larken follows Jon’s gaze and notices that groups of people are starting to leave; she feels both envious and censorious of these deserters. “It was hard not to if you grew up here in the sixties,” she says. “Civil aid defense sirens going off every Monday. The shelter signs. And then when I saw Fail Safe and found out about Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha …”
“Oh, right,” Jon murmurs, nodding.
“… If there ever was a nuclear war, Nebraska would be the first place to be blown off the map. Not even a president who looked like Henry Fonda could save us.”
Jon clasps his hands and sits forward in his seat. “I used to think about the end of the world constantly.”
Larken has to mirror his posture in order to hear what he’s saying; the band has launched into another performance of the Nebraska fight song and everyone around them has stood and started clapping.
In spite of the setting and the noise, an odd sense of privacy envelops them; the standing bodies surrounding them form the walls of a long, rectangular, doorless, skylit sanctum.
Jon goes on. “I used to pray as a child, to ask God every night: ‘Please, please dear God, if there’s a nuclear war let me be in a bomb shelter with Mum and Da and my brothers and sisters.” He pauses, smiles, looks at her. “I envisioned a spacious bomb shelter.”
“Of course,” Larken says. The walls of their little room are still standing. They could live here and never leave. Don’t stop, she implores him.
“I remember being at rugby games with my dad and wondering, if the rest of the world ended, right now, and the only people left on earth were the people in this stadium … would there be someone here who would love me, someone for me to love?”
Larken studies him. She judges it to be more important to tell a small, harmless lie than to speak the commiserating—and possibly dangerous—truth.
“That’s funny,” she says. “I’d be wondering if there’d be enough to eat.”
Her lie reaps the desired intent: Jon laughs, convivially. He stands and stretches; the walls of their room sit down. “Speaking of which,” he asks, “do you want anything from concessions?”
Don’t do it, she thinks, because she knows it’s a ruse. He’s going to call Mia again. Why? Why? When he was feeling better. When she’d succeeded in cheering him up.
“There’s still a lot of food in the cooler,” Larken offers, and then regrets it. Of course there’s a lot of food; she packed for five, not two and now she’s successfully reminded him once again of absent friends.
He gives her shoulder a brief squeeze. “I’ll be right back.”
The cooler is full of potato salad and cold fried chicken and veggie sticks and raisins and apples and drinks and sandwiches she made especially for Esmé: soy cream cheese and cucumber and olive; tuna and capers and dill; peanut butter and pickle and jam. The sandwiches have been cut into little shapes: stars and ponies and even bells and Santas and Christmas trees because Larken believes strongly that when children are involved it’s never too early to start thinking about Christmas.
The score is 38 to 9. If she hears “There Is No Place Like Nebraska” one more time, she’ll go mad.
And yet, here it comes again.
In lieu of madness, she opens the cooler and rifles around until she finds the family-size bag of Lay’s Potato Chips.
She pulls it out, rips it open, eats.
Season tickets to University of Nebraska football games are to Nebraskans what rent-controlled apartments are to Manhattanites.
They are rare. They are coveted. Their sudden appearance gives rise to a unique form of desperation among civilized citizens—nice, up-standing people who have never given any previous indication that they are deeply opportunistic.
After Larken got back from her father’s funeral celebration, she started receiving baffling phone calls from folks in Emlyn Springs, most of whom she barely knew. They delivered polite, rambling monologues in which the caller recounted numerous stories revealing their intimate friendship with her father—You may not remember me, Larken, but your dad used to invite me to at least one home game every season. Of course I don’t have to remind you what a generous person he was. I tell you, the two of us, we used to have a blast! Why I remember one time—Larken listened and made monosyllabic responses whenever responses seemed called for; often she was able to engage the speakerphone feature and work during these conversations: post her online daily communiqués to students, grade papers, write exams. These phone encounters were often quite lengthy.
Eventually the caller would come around to the subject of Larken’s weekend plans: Your Saturdays must be pretty full, what with grading papers and so forth. I can only imagine how demanding a university teaching position can be. You probably don’t have much time for socializing. Has the university got you taking any trips this fall?
Viney had to explain.
“They want the tickets.”
“What tickets?”
“Your father’s football tickets. They’re hoping you’ll sell them to them instead of relinquishing them back to the university.”
“I don’t understa
nd.”
Viney sighed. “Call the UNL ticket office, honey. They can explain it better than I can. Just let me know what you decide so I can tell people. They’re driving me crazy. Bye, sweetie. Love you.”
Tell what people? Larken wanted to ask, but Viney had already hung up.
And so Larken spent almost an entire hour one afternoon in early September talking on the phone with a remarkably intractable woman at the University of Nebraska Athletic Ticket Office. Much of the time Larken was on hold, listening to an endless looped recording of the Nebraska fight song, complete with hand clapping. The woman never introduced herself, but knowing that she would eventually shape this surreal encounter into an anecdote for Jon’s entertainment, Larken realized that the other main character would need a name, and so she christened her.
“You must show up in person to collect the tickets,” repeated Mrs. Petra Tabatchnick. “Under no circumstances do we put season football tickets in the mail.”
“Because you’re worried someone might steal them.”
“That would be a concern, yes. These tickets are very valuable.”
“So you’re telling me I can’t just give you permission over the phone to release the tickets?—to friends, say, or my siblings, or my stepmother? I have to come down there. Physically.”
“Yes.”
“With a notarized copy of my father’s death certificate.”
“If you are the POA designate, yes. You’ll also need to bring a notarized copy of the POA document as well as two forms of photo identification.”
Mrs. Tabatchnick’s professionalism was impressive. Larken felt a perverse temptation to test the limits of her implacability.
“I can’t believe this!” she said, attempting to emulate the melodramatic tone she’s endured from slacker students over the years. “My father is dead. He’s dead! Are you really going to make me come down there to take care of this?” Larken hoped that her vocal performance was causing Mrs. Tabatchnick to envision a pale, consumptive young woman crippled by the lassitude of grief, prostrate on a rumpled, un-made chaise and draped in a dressing gown: a kind of final-act Mimi from La Bohème.
In fact, Larken was still wearing her bathrobe and she hadn’t made her bed, so that part of the picture wasn’t far off.
“These are football tickets we’re talking about!” Larken-as-diva continued, trying to work up an I’m-about-to-CRY-I’m-so-distraught sound in her voice. “It’s just plain ridiculous to put people—especially people who have just lost a father—through this kind of …”
Larken faltered. Authentically upset as she was, she couldn’t bring herself to assault Mrs.Tabatchnick with the word bullshit, and besides, Mimi would never say bullshit. If anything, she’d say Merde and Larken couldn’t be sure that Mrs. Tabatchnick was conversant in French, although given Mrs. T.’s articulate poise, it certainly wouldn’t be surprising.
“Well,” Larken concluded huffily, “it’s just crazy.”
Mrs. Tabatchnick would not be moved. “I’m sorry, Ms. Jones. Could you hold please? I need to answer another line.”
“Yes,” Larken said, sighing theatrically. “Fine.”
Oh, there is no place like Nebraska, dear old Nebraska U …
By this time—nearly a month after her father’s death—Larken has learned that POA means power of attorney. Along with BA, MFA, and PhD, POA is her newest credential.
… where the girls are the fairest, the boys are the squarest, of any old school that I knew …
As POA, Larken has become well acquainted with a specialized type of Post-it note: transparent around the edges so that it seems to magically emerge from the document to which it’s adhered, it is shaped like an arrow and bears a faint yellowish tinge at its center overlaid by the red-lettered words SIGN HERE.
Somewhere among the endless lines of legal-speak, subsections, clauses, addendums to clauses, etcetera, these self-important, specialized Post-its hide, mischievous. Those SIGN HEREs could really be hard to find.
Still, whoever designed them was very perceptive. He or she must have realized that people who are recently bereaved would rather not be required to read. A human being can only hold so much, and grief occupies a large piece of real estate. When it arrives, grief abides by the laws of manifest destiny. Uninvited but entitled, it takes up residence in every seen and unseen part of a person. Reading comprehension is only one of the many countries that grief defeats, oppresses, and occupies.
… There is no place like Nebraska, where they’re all true blue …
It was fatigue that ultimately caused Larken to hang up—that, and the suspicion that Mrs. Tabatchnick had reached a breaking point in their relations and was keeping that pain-in-the-ass Ms. Jones on hold longer than necessary.
… We’ll all stick together, in all kinds of weather, for dear old Nebraska U …
Is she a football fan? No. Did she want this burden? No. If Larken Jones, POA, so concluded, that six-seat block of season tickets at the fifty-yard line in Husker Stadium could go up for general sale. After almost thirty-some years, the territory that had been claimed and defended and occupied by Dr. Llewellyn Jones of Emlyn Springs, Nebraska, could be relinquished. Anyone could have it, and someone would have it, eagerly and soon and no matter what the cost, if Larken chose to sign it over, and those six empty seats would be out of her life and held by happier hands.
But she couldn’t do it. She knew she’d regret it forever.
There is a small country that forms on certain Saturdays in the autumn within the city limits of Lincoln, Nebraska. On those Saturdays, hundreds of thousands of people gather to cheer on a football team called the Cornhuskers.
In the end, Larken couldn’t SIGN HERE—not today, maybe never, because selling her father’s small territorial holdings within that Saturday country would be exactly like selling the family farm.
When Jon and Larken arrive back home, they see Mia’s car parked on the street. Jon helps Larken haul the cooler out of her car and into her apartment and then bounds up the stairs. Larken puts on a pot of coffee, turns on her computer, and starts sorting today’s stack of mail.
Ten minutes later, Mia’s voice erupts in a roar: “You just don’t get it, do you? You just don’t fucking GET IT! I have to have some space. I have to have some time away from you, from her. I don’t know who I am anymore besides Professor Schwartzmann’s wife and Esmé’s mommy.”
Larken hears a muffled reply from Jon, then heavy footsteps down the stairs, and then a knock at the door.
Jon stands there with Esmé, half-asleep, in his arms.
“I’m so sorry, Larken, but … could you take her for a while? We’re having a … well, no secret is it? Anyway, she was napping—”
“Is she sick?” Larken asks, reflexively putting a hand on Esmé’s forehead. Esmé hasn’t taken afternoon naps since she was two.
“Just tired, I think,” Jon says. “The heat, you know. I think she’ll go to sleep again if it’s quiet. I know this is a lot to ask, you’ve already given up a whole day and I know you have work to do …”
“Jon. Of course.”
“She’ll be very quiet, won’t you princess?
“I will,” Esmé murmurs, her brow furrowed. “I’ll be very quiet so that Larkee can do her work.”
“Here,” Larken says. “I’ll take her.”
“No,” says Jon. “I’ll do it.”
“Da, put me down,” Esmé insists. She walks to the sofa, sits, tucks her feet beneath her, opens her Babar book, and starts to read.
Larken isn’t sure which is more heartbreaking: Esmé’s listlessness or her docility.
“Jon,” Larken says quietly, “please, please, don’t ever hesitate to ask for help. She can spend the night too if you need more time. It’s fine. I love having her here.”
They must not must not must not must not break up.
“Thanks again,” he says, turning to go back upstairs without bidding a further good-bye to his daughter.
&nbs
p; Larken closes the door and turns to face Esmé, who seems troubled by the goings-on in Babar’s jungle. “Would you like something to eat? I have some special treats in here.”
“Yes, thank you,” Esmé replies, not looking up from her book. Larken opens the cooler and fills one of the paper plates with a sampler of sandwiches: Santa, reindeer, tree, star, bell, heart.
“Here you go, sweetie,” Larken says, delivering the plate to the coffee table in front of the sofa. “Maybe we can read together later. How would that be?”
Esmé looks up. “Daddy says you have to work.”
“I do.” Larken moves to the TV. “So how about if you watch a show for a while?”
Esmé frowns and resumes reading. “That would be fine.”
Larken doesn’t approve of using television as a babysitter, but she’s got to get some work done. She turns the TV to the PBS station and then settles down at her desk to start grading a stack of essay exams. By the time she looks up, Kratt’s Creatures is over, Miss Frizzle is piloting the magic school bus through the human circulatory system, and Esmé has fallen asleep.
Larken tiptoes across the room and turns off the TV. As she tucks an afghan around Esmé’s sleeping form, she notices tiny nibbles around the edges of the sandwiches, nearly imperceptible. Esmé must have just barely applied her teeth to the bread: a nervous dormouse in fear of discovery. And yet she was compelled, in spite of her perilous situation, to nibble every single sandwich, just a little, searching for the right ingredient, hoping to taste the magic potion, the pill, the painkiller, the anodyne. Giving up finally, not finding it anywhere.
Hope’s Diary, 1965:
Gravida
I can’t believe how long it’s been since I’ve visited these pages. Where has the time gone?
The biggest news to report is that I’m pregnant again.
Note the lack of an exclamation point at the end of that sentence.
I’m trying to hold my emotions in check and not get my hopes up, given how many of Larken’s older siblings never made it to term. So, no baby showers, no shopping sprees in the layette department of JCPenney, no sitting around making lists of possible names … I’m not telling anyone, not even Viney. It’s hard to be so sedate, but I can’t bear the idea of falling in love with another baby only to lose it. I just hope whoever’s in there doesn’t feel neglected.
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