Moo

by Smiley, Jane

  63

  Golden Arches

  THE CHOICE WAS pretty stark: after McDonald’s put a franchise in the commons, everybody who worked there could either quit or go to work for McDonald’s. Lilian, who was the kitchen shop steward, didn’t have to point out that McDonald’s was not a signatory to any contract negotiated by AFSCME. McDonald’s was McDonald’s, and there would be no more bar-b-qued beef on bun w/ slaw cup or, for alternative eaters, noodle-cheese bake w/ pumpernickel slice.

  Marly knew what they all were thinking—she was the anointed one, Cinderella, who would be moving into the big brick house when the jobs ran out, living the leisure life while the rest of them rustled up Big Macs or else looked on enviously at the Big Mac rustlers from the perspective of long-term unemployment. And on top of that, there was talk about giving work-study students the McDonald’s jobs—that way there wouldn’t be any possibility of an inconvenient benefits snarl. It was a progressive plan that everyone loved from the governor on down. O.T. had in fact been quoted in the State Journal as wondering aloud whether McDonald’s would like to franchise every state-run eating establishment. Longtime capitol-watchers were well aware that “wondering aloud” about ludicrous ideas was Governor Early’s method of trying out new policies—he was a strong adherent of the theory that a well-prepared public could gag down anything, and would, in fact, clamor for it if you suggested it often enough and kept everyone waiting long enough.

  McDonald’s, it was said, would be in by the end of March, so Marly went to Lilian and remarked that she had three weeks of paid vacation coming, and she wanted to take it now, while it still existed. “So when are you leaving?” said Lilian, and Marly said, “Tomorrow.”

  When five a.m. rolled around, Marly got up as usual and made Father’s breakfast, which she set on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator under a cloth napkin, just the way he liked it, cup of coffee and all. Father was a great promoter of the microwave oven, because of the health benefits of double-cooking your food. Marly had not told him about leaving her job. The sun came up on the aftereffects of the previous day’s storm just as she was folding and stacking her underwear.

  She was surprised to note that she didn’t have a suitcase, but then, she had never actually left town, had she? Out of a nation of restless movers, travellers, seekers, she alone, perhaps, had never gone anywhere that she couldn’t return from in time to sleep in her own bed. Even Father, in his wilder days, had been to Chicago, Denver, and Fort Wayne. Even her brother had been to Houston for a Billy Graham crusade. She put her clothes in a plastic bag from the market, tied the handles together, and put that bag inside another. Into her purse, she put her Bible, the three hundred dollars she had gotten out of her account the evening before, the hat she was knitting for her niece, and a Snickers bar. She did not have a credit card or any photographs of Father or the other members of the family.

  Twenty minutes later, she was carrying her plastic bag of clothes down Red Stick Avenue. She passed the university easily enough. Years of proximity had mingled her essence with that of the university even less than she had thought. With the coming of McDonald’s, the institution had popped her out, intact and undigested, unaffected by critical thinking, the scientific method, empirical inquiry, or reasoned disputation. With reciprocal relief, she trudged past the scene of fifteen years of working life without a single pang or lingering thought.

  When she passed her church ten minutes later, though, things were entirely different. She knew the cars in the parking lot—Mary and Eileen and Rita were there cleaning for the Wednesday service. She could easily turn her steps into the plowed driveway and join them. They would be laughing—the three of them were great laughers—but after all, when they saw her, their laughter would turn into smiles—more polite and more respectful. As Nils Harstad’s wife-to-be, she had long ago become a degree untrustworthy. This whole winter, the more she tried to insert herself back into the slot she had once so easily fit—just Marly—the more the behavior of the other women had pushed her out of that slot and into another one—big shot, lucky duck, first among equals. She had tried to accept and not resent their changed attitude, to give that resentment to Jesus to deal with, but now, as she walked slowly past, craning her neck to see into the windows (stained glass was coming next year, promised their pastor), she knew for a fact that the mix was different inside her, too—resentment did color her feelings toward them. Were she to walk in and pick up a broom, things would be awkward, and that would annoy her, and her annoyance would prove to them that she had changed, and later they would compare notes and when and how and how much she had changed would become a piece of knowledge about her that everyone shared.

  Well, she had changed. Ten minutes later, on the outskirts of town, she felt a still greater rush of sadness as she surveyed the snow-covered fields and the wide, enamelled sky than she had at any moment before. She had changed because she was tired of Jesus, the way He came to you and sat with you, the way He had to be a man in order to be human. Everybody in her church was always talking about how happy it made them that Jesus was right there, at your elbow, helping you along and keeping you on the right path. What could be better than a personal savior? But Marly resented the way Jesus counted on you needing Him like that. He never stepped back. He always wanted something from you. You always had to do something to please Him.

  She came to the top of the hill. The road beside her continued up, over the bridge. The snowy drift at her feet spread away like a giant apron past the highway below and into the dark filigree of the woods beyond. The pattern of it was rather grand—the rounded shapes of the hills and the horizon carved by the precise parallels of the highway, the quiet blazing azure, white, and black of the natural world animated by the hurtling bright colors of cars and trucks, and Marly herself the only visible human. The grandeur of it was peaceful and soothing. She felt invited into the picture, perhaps noticed, but not focused on. Jesus, she thought, was back in town, nosing into everybody’s concerns but God was here, large and beautiful and satisfyingly impersonal.

  Marly turned her head at the sound of big gears downshifting. A green tractor-trailer had pulled off the highway and was rolling up the access ramp. As she looked at it, the driver sounded his air horn. Marly pushed the strap of her handbag higher on her shoulder, and ran to meet him as the big diesel idled to a stop at the sign.

  The door was already open when she got there. She threw her plastic bag upward onto the seat, and clamored into the cab.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Been waiting long?”

  “Just got here. What time is it?”

  “ ’Bout eight. I left Ann Arbor about four.”

  He eased the truck across the road and down the on-ramp. As they picked up speed, Marly’s heart began to lift and expand like a balloon. She said, “I forgot to ask you where we were going.”

  “How about San Francisco, that sound good?”

  “Travis,” she said, “that sounds like heaven.”

  64

  A Little Deconstruction

  CHAIRMAN X PREFERRED to think that as a young man he would have pressed on no matter what. That Nils Harstad was filing charges, that the board of governors had reprimanded him, that his own department had censured him and stripped him of his chairmanship as of June 30 (“Professor X” didn’t have much of a ring, he thought), that he had been vilified in the press (“well-known campus hothead,” “called by some, a ‘space cadet’ ” were only two of the quotes)—all of this would have only spurred him on in the old days, a little resistance he could use like weights to build greater strength, greater effort.

  As a middle-aged man, though, he was distracted by his students (the cloud forest being saved, they thought their work was over), his children (divorce—a lot they knew—was bad enough, but would he lose his job? Would they have to move out of their house? They couldn’t stop asking him about it), Cecelia (wanting sex), Beth (wanting meaningful conve
rsations). With lawyers, there were meetings, depositions, late-night phone conversations. With administrators and faculty and students, there were more meetings. With the children, there was an overabundance of quality time at Burger King, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s, where they ordered cheeseburgers (“Hold the meat”), and no Beth to help him through it. With Cecelia, there were arguments. With Beth, there were knowing looks and nods, as if she had been predicting something like this all along. With everyone, there were endless explanations which each of these people tried to steer toward the personal, when clearly the issues were social and environmental. He couldn’t help it if in order to understand why he had attacked Nils Harstad (and everyone agreed that he had, even though he couldn’t remember a single delicious moment) he had to explain the whole history of Third World agricultural development.

  And so it was pleasant to think of how resolute and uncompromising he would have been as a young man if he hadn’t been the way he really had been, which was hopeful and well-meaning, always expecting people to come to their senses and devote their means and their lives selflessly to the common good.

  At any rate, the result of it all was that when the crane with its clam bucket came and bit down Old Meats, he didn’t have the heart to order his troops to lie down in front of it, or, indeed, to lie down in front of it himself. About all the heart he had was to stand in the middle of Ames Road and watch.

  The dump trucks with their loads of brick and mortar rolled over the frozen beds, no doubt compacting the hitherto friable and springy soil into a species of rock. Their wheels spun through the snow and found purchase in the most valuable thing Chairman X had ever produced—a whole world of fertility, a delicate structure of clay, sand, humus, air spaces, water molecules, phosphorous, potash, and nitrogen. Loamy, black, and mounded carefully up. Chairman X liked to think of it as a many-chambered mansion sheltering an unknowable variety of life-forms that worked away in the darkness outside all attempts of the human mind to classify, simplify, objectify. Now he watched as knobby tire treads rumbled over countless spots that he and his helpers had never dared to step on; diesel exhaust settled over raised beds that had never seen a pesticide or a petrofertilizer. Bulbs and roots and corms and rhizomes that he had left to winter over, carefully protected with a layer of compost and another of leaves, whose shoots and stalks and leaves and flowers he had looked forward to seeing in the spring, found themselves uncovered, pulverized, and thrown into the air by the heavy grinding wheels.

  The clam bucket bit through brick, mortar, and living peach and apricot wood indiscriminately. There was no saving the trees, much less the flavor of the fruit, which depended as much on the circumstances of the trees as their genetic endowment. That warm red south-facing expanse of weathered brick wall, that particular type of soil, and that perfect microclimate for growing peaches and apricots this far north was gone forever.

  The cloud forest he had never seen was saved (the Costa Rican government had even decided to buy up the cattle ranches around the forest, and, strapped for cash, TransNational had decided to sell them), but the garden he had spent most of his adult life tending was destroyed.

  The demolition went fast. Just about the only feeling he experienced besides numbness was surprise at that.

  • • •

  WITH DR. Bo JONES in Frunze, Kirghizia, negotiating in English for horses to ride into the mountains after wild hogs with people who only spoke Turkic and a little Russian, no one had bothered to mention to Bob Carlson that Old Meats was slated for demolition or that the outlook for both his hog and his job was clouded at best. Having stayed up late completing a three-page English paper entitled “Yukio Mishima and Ernest Hemingway: A Comparative Study,” Bob had visited Earl Butz around six, when all was quiet and apparently eternal around Old Meats. The first thing he noticed at ten, when he came in sight of the building again, was that two of the walls were already gone and that in addition to the clam bucket, they had brought in a wrecking ball and begun on the concrete floor.

  The change was so enormous that it was stunning, and Bob stood there, stunned, for a good five minutes. After that, he ran toward the first dump truck, and then toward the clam bucket crane, then toward another dump truck, shouting and waving his arms, but there was so much noise that he couldn’t attract any attention. The snowy ground was slippery, and he fell and scraped his gloveless hands, but he scrambled up again, only to be confronted by a large man in coveralls and a hard hat shouting, “Didn’t you see the sign, kid? Get out of here! This is a restricted area!”

  “Wait!” cried Bob. “Wait! Where’s Earl? Where’s the hog!”

  The man turned away. “Don’t know, kid, but you gotta get outta here. If you got a problem, go over to the physical plant or something.”

  Bob ran toward the building, or he ran two steps toward the building, but big hard hands grabbed his shoulders and turned him around. The man’s face, which he stuck right in Bob’s, was red and angry. It shouted, “Get the fuck out of here, kid!”

  “Listen to me! There’s a hog in there!”

  “He’ll be bacon soon enough, kid. If you get in the way again, I’ll call the cops!”

  Bob backed away.

  MRS. LORAINE WALKER COULD HEAR the demolition from her office, even with the windows closed. Old Meats was, after all, right in the center of the campus. When she glanced out the window, which was newly reglazed since the riot, she could see a puff of dust in the otherwise clear air above the demolition site. Mrs. Loraine Walker knew that the horticulture garden was falling victim to the budget cuts that had required the destruction of Old Meats, but that particular horticulture garden, pleasant as it was, was unauthorized. The authorized site had remained, through the years, flat, untended, arid, ignored despite any number of directives addressed to that little man, sent by Mrs. Loraine Walker over Ivar Harstad’s signature.

  She spoke aloud to herself. “He was warned,” she said. Which did not mean that she felt no regret about the garden. One thing she had learned lately, something she had mentioned to Martha only the night before, was that sometimes it was necessary to suspend two or more contradictory thoughts in your mind at the same time. What it led to was a degree of softening, didn’t it? Someone who acted on principle all the time, as Mrs. Loraine Walker was in the habit of doing, inevitably felt uncomfortable with this blurring, this softening. Mrs. Walker squirmed in her chair.

  To tell the truth, everywhere she turned lately she was confronted by something that made her uncomfortable. Safe herself because of her investments and her job tenure, she saw clearly that Ivar was not safe. A fugitive fondness for him prevented her from retreating wholeheartedly into the argument that those were the wages of the job he’d taken on willingly. And there was Nils, too, a bland, complacent, provoking man, the sort whose self-satisfaction always seemed to be asking for it, but now that he had gotten it, Mrs. Walker couldn’t uphold her moral standard. Every time he shambled into the office, looking despondently for his twin, she softened yet again. She got him coffee, she listened for the umpteenth time to the news that the Hellmich woman had sent him a letter from Bolinas, California, she gentled her voice instead of sharply setting him straight when she said, “Well, Dean Harstad, perhaps the relationship was doomed from the beginning—” and patted his shoulder when he said, “All my dreams—” in that pathetic way. And then there was Elaine Dobbs-Jellinek. Given Mrs. Walker’s carefully thought through and extremely well founded antipathy to the woman, you would have thought that the sight of her felled by a rioter’s stone, which Mrs. Walker had seen through this very window, the sight of the woman lying still and white on the steps, splayed out in her red coat, her hands spread in surprise so that her red fingernails throbbed against the snow like so many drops of blood, well, you would have thought such a sight would have carried an element of satisfaction, but Mrs. Walker had felt only horror. Mrs. Walker glanced at the window as if, like a movie, the scene might suddenly flash across it again.

  Th
en she stood up and reached for her coat. Perhaps there was a reason she wanted to go have a look at the demolition of Old Meats, but for once in her life she didn’t know what it was; for once in her life she acted on simple desire.

  ALL KERI WAS THINKING about was getting to her 11:30 statistics class. She hadn’t even bothered to button her coat or put on her mittens, and her neck and fingers were tingling in the cold. She dodged right, then dodged left, avoiding the seething streams of students rushing to classes on the side of the campus that she was just leaving. Then, of course, there were other clots of students, talking, kissing, teasing each other, and flirting. There were professors with briefcases striding right down the center of the walks and people on bicycles shouting, “On your left!” as if, were you to step into their path, your injuries would be your fault. Even though the walks were partly covered with ice, there were also Rollerbladers—one swept around Keri from behind and zoomed ahead—he was in her class, in fact, and always wore his skates right onto the elevator and into the room. Ahead, in the distance, she could hear the rumbling collapse of bricks and mortar, but she didn’t register the noise, much less wonder what it was.