The Optimistic Decade

by Heather Abel

  “No!” He turned and stage-whispered to a rangy little juniper that waggled amiably at the attention. “But she makes me wait. For what are we waiting?”

  There was something she wanted to establish first, besides mutuality of desire. How, she wondered, had the past turned into the present? Where had he been? She hemmed: “It’s like I know you. Because I knew you forever. But honestly, I don’t know anything about you.”

  He held his hands wide. “Ask me. What do you need to know?”

  What she needed to know was this: Was he the same David who tried to teach her to bounce or catch or hit a ball in his cemented backyard while the parents argued inside because something terrible and irrevocable was happening with Russia? Who slept with a Chewbacca doll? Who showed her a book with photos of the shadows of people blasted onto the sidewalks in Hiroshima after the people themselves had dissolved?

  Of all the questions she had—What had happened that time they saw each other at the pier? Had he really not remembered her? And all the times they’d seen each other since, him with his headphones on, barely looking up to wave hello, what had he been thinking of her then?—she blurted, “Where do you want to go to college?”

  “College? College, Rebecca? I’m not going to college. Look, I can’t exactly tell you what I’m doing instead, but how about I put it this way—I’m going to the glorious of gloriousness. To the heart of the matter. Trust me, it’ll all become clear soon enough.”

  Cryptic and exaggerated. All that was clear was that he didn’t care about anything she did. And yet.

  “Now can we proceed?”

  But no, they couldn’t. How did people change, and what remained after? How did the interior change, and what about the exterior? She was still ready for a fight. “Don’t you want to know anything about me?”

  He smiled like crushed tin. “I know you. You’re Rebecca.”

  Rebecca, daughter of Ira and Georgia. The same, but with boobs. And he was so tall. When had that happened? She looked around for anyone who might witness this. Nobody was anywhere. She grabbed his bare arm to pull him down. Lips collided once, then twice, then she pulled back. “I have to go.”

  “Of course you do. You’re Rebecca. You’re on the go.”

  For a moment, before she walked away, when they were still half-smiling and staring at each other, it felt like they were in his childhood, predivorce house again. Like that stucco cube was perched on this mesa, like they were in the living room with its Ho Chi Minh flag, a yellow star against red, the newspapers piled on top of the record player, the Nicaraguan woodcuts spelling cohen, and the parents arguing in the other room.

  David reached the Overlook in a state of distraction. He held his glass jar under the cooler spout but didn’t turn it on. He was remembering the time—he must’ve been seven or eight—when they’d all watched Reagan defeat Carter, on a TV rented for the day from the library. Ira had placed it on a pile of books and plugged it in. David sat next to Rebecca on the floor. Georgia walked back and forth between living room and kitchen, taking spoonfuls of yogurt, saying something like We’re doomed, we’re doomed—he couldn’t remember the exact phrase. But he knew precisely what Ira and Joe, the two gods on the couch, shouted as they pointed their wrathful fingers at the TV. Motherfucker, motherfucker. David remembered thinking about the words “mother” and “fucker,” then combining them into what he’d learned was a compound word like “buttercup” and “firefly,” and then unwittingly conjuring the image of it. Judy was on the rug, legs spread, leaning this way and that—her legs spread so that she could remain limber as the world burned. Motherfucker.

  Most of the time at the Silvers’, however, Rebecca and David were alone in the house— dropping imitation vanilla extract into oval mounds of sugar and calling it ice cream, listening to Ira’s Tom Lehrer records. Now he remembered the way Rebecca would rush ahead of him to push the crusts of peanut-butter sandwiches under her bed before he entered her room, along with her flowered underwear, but she always left out her 100 percent spelling tests—Fantastic work, Rebecca—so that he could see. And sometimes they could hear Georgia shout from the garage, “Goddamn it all to hell, Ira,” like she hated him, but it was Joe and Judy, who’d seemed so content, who split, his dad moving to Marina del Rey with sexy Monica, Joe not a motherfucker anymore.

  To stem this march of images, David pressed the cooler spout, filling his jar. He considered what might be the mitzvah of water. In a place as dry as Llamalo, surely saving water was holy. The dishwater came from the well, and the drinking water came from the cistern in Caleb’s truck, refilled in town and poured into large coolers, which were set around Llamalo. When you needed a drink, you brought the jar assigned to you. No matter how many times you washed it, the jar smelled like salsa or peanut butter. The water was the temperature of your mouth or warmer. Sometimes you’d see something floating. A small shape, less defined than a fly, but with a skeletal outline, the curve of a shrimp. You’d look away and keep drinking. He wished he had his notebook with him to write this down now, while the mitzvah was fresh in his mind.

  And what if, he considered, looking around him with an inadvertent smile, as if someone might read his thoughts and corroborate, there was a mitzvah of increased attractiveness at Llamalo? What would Zacky’s rabbi say about that? At thirteen, David had kissed Daniela in the darkroom. At fourteen, he’d felt up Mara, lying on top of her until she’d said, “Move. I don’t want to get pregnant.” As if his sperm, as eager as the rest of David, would swim from the mess in his boxers, inside her shorts, underneath the elastic of her panties, and, glorious, inside her. To amend whatever he’d clearly done wrong, he’d pointed out Pleiades and Cassiopeia, but she’d refused to put her glasses back on. Fifteen was a hand job from Heather L., and sixteen was making out and making out and making out with Aura, and then the day after her period, to be safe, sex that lasted only the length of “Go Tell Aunt Rhody,” in a culvert outside the Gathering, coming as seventy voices sang, The old gray goose is dead.

  Last night, he’d thought that Rebecca wasn’t into him, that she could only see David as he was in Santa Monica. But no. That wasn’t it at all. The mitzvah of David’s increased attractiveness worked on everyone on Aemon’s Mesa. It was simply that she didn’t know how to kiss. Rebecca, who knew everything, who dropped HUAC (all one word, like “hew-ack”) into low-level conversation, didn’t know how to do this, and it made him like her even more.

  Caleb had her number now, scribbled on an invoice. Like a lock picked, the teeth sliding into place, the bolt sprung. San Francisco? He couldn’t imagine her there. She’d always claimed to hate cities, so it seemed more than coincidental that she’d chosen to live where he’d lived before Colorado, as if she’d followed the shadow of him.

  All he wanted was to hear her voice on the answering machine. It was noon on a Wednesday. Who would be home?

  “Hello?” a woman said. “Hello?”

  Her voice had the familiar low rasp, as if she always had a cold. He found himself smiling, the way one’s mouth responds automatically to a baby’s smile. “Is this Suze, by any chance?”

  “Speaking.”

  “It’s Caleb.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I know, I know. A blast from the past, huh?”

  “Caleb. Caleb Silver.” She sounded amused.

  “Just thought, it’s been years, but I thought, why not? Find out what’s up with Suze. So how the hell are you?” His jaw ached from smiling.

  “This is so strange. I was just thinking of you yesterday.”

  Of course she was. Of course. How could he think of her so often without reciprocation?

  “Wait, are you calling from camp? Are you at Llamalo?”

  “Where else?”

  “Oh, Llamalo—I miss it.” No mention of how she’d walked out on him, saying she couldn’t stand it there anymore. But of course she missed it.

  “It’s so different. You’d be amazed.” In a rush, he told
her about the Meadow, how there was actual grass now, and four new platforms, a darkroom, a ton of kids—he rounded up to eighty—and last night was 1982 Night, which he knew she loved, and could she imagine the morning of silence with eighty kids?

  The question wasn’t rhetorical—could she imagine it?—but she just said, “Wow, really great.” He could hear water turning on, metal banging against metal. All these years waiting for her and she was just a voice, a voice in San Francisco, of all places, doing dishes.

  “Actually, this morning had an interesting twist.” He was throwing this out as bait, trying to hook her attention. “Don showed up. Five in the a.m. Just walked across the field.”

  The water shut off with a whinny. All quiet in San Francisco. “Don came to the 1982 story?”

  “Stood there with his hat in his hands. Can you believe it?”

  The low blast of a train whistle, the most familiar laugh. “No, no, no. God, Caleb. You must’ve been losing your shit.”

  He laughed with her; now, he could see the humor in it. “When I saw him walking toward us, I froze. Completely forgot what I was going to say. Thought about changing the story, because of course Don knows how it really happened, but then everyone who’d been hearing it for eight years would find out I’d been lying.”

  “But you said it, right?”

  “Same way I always do. Condos, developer. How Donnie begged me to take care of his land.”

  “And Don? He didn’t say anything, did he?”

  “Not a word.”

  “He gets it. Okay, no, what am I saying? He doesn’t get it, but he’s probably already forgotten about it. He’s thinking about the ditch. Is he really ever not thinking about irrigation?”

  “But wait. That’s not all.” Caleb told her about Donnie’s letters, to catch hold of the golden strand of her interest, to pull her closer. He told her about Donnie’s insinuations that there was something illegal about the land sale. The weird phrases he’d used. Custom and culture.

  “Donnie, Donnie, Donnie, Donnie. Such an angry young man.” It was immensely gratifying to discern no lingering affection for Donnie in her voice.

  “There’s this threatening tone.” He aped a cinematic Germanic voice: “I vill find a way to get it!”

  “Get out.”

  “Freaked me out, actually.”

  “He’s all bluster. What could he do? Demand his ranch back? Him and what army?”

  “An army of Craig. Remember him? He can show up with Craig.”

  “My god, Craig! With his mullet. Is he still around?”

  “Still driving the malathion truck. Still spraying every living thing with poison in order to kill the menacing mosquitoes.”

  “Oh, Escadom—will that town ever join the modern world?”

  Her sentence was interrupted by the tonelessness of call-waiting, a periodic abeyance of noise. “I have to go, but wow—great talking to you. Weirdly easy, don’t you think?”

  “So let’s do it again. I’d love to find—” But she’d crossed over to the other call.

  He replaced the phone in its cradle—an ingenious invention—and walked outside.

  On the ground was grass, and above was sky. A jay flew from one branch of a juniper to another, and the boughs bobbed with weight gained or lost. Outside the barn, Mikala squatted in front of six white waxy boxes from the post office, sorting mail by platform. Mikala. She had three syllables in her name, and Suze only had one.

  Noticing his gaze, Mikala turned. “Hey, what about those gold-panning sifters? You find them?”

  He laughed, because it was years earlier that he’d gone to look for them. “Right! I’ll get them for you.”

  He enjoyed each step, the smooth scissoring of one leg and then another, heel hitting, then the toe. His body was light as balsa wood. The first lunch bell rang out into the thin air, a perfect note, trembling.

  He paused on the Meadow to watch the kids arrive for lunch. They crossed the footbridges unhurriedly, talking in clusters or walking solitarily and dreamily, and all of that delighted him. When he saw Tanaya, Shauna, and Nicole cross the Meadow, he called out to them.

  They turned their sullen and disdainful faces toward him, and at last he could see their pain and the way they worked to hide it, how they’d learned at fourteen to conceal so much.

  He crouched, one knee on the grass, as if proposing to the trio. “Okay, so tell me. What is it you like about Fiddler on the Roof?”

  Shauna remained skeptical. “Really want to know?”

  “I really do.”

  “God, everything,” Tanaya said with exasperation. “Like, I like the songs.”

  “Sure, the songs are catchy,” Caleb said. “But why this particular story?”

  “It’s about the generation gap, you know?”

  “Like how our parents want us to be one way and we want to be another way,” Nicole added.

  “Okay, this is good.” Caleb was excited now. His job was to be patient, to bring them around the slow way, to love the JAPs as well as the farters, and he was good at his job. “It’s a timeless story. Even I can relate to it. My mom doesn’t approve of me living out here, running this camp, this ‘freak camp,’ as you called it last night.”

  Tanaya smiled sheepishly. “I mean, not exactly.”

  “So, I have a challenge for you.” They stepped closer to him. “I’m going to let you perform your thing, your Fiddler on the Roof thing, but . . .” The girls began jumping and clutching each other. He continued, imagining Suze listening. “But there’s more. The catch is, I want to see it reflect who you are here. You’re not the same girls as you were when you left Saint Paul. I can see that already. You’re more aware of what’s around you. You’ve changed just by being here.” He couldn’t see this, of course. But his job was to make it happen by saying it.

  The second bell rang, and he sent the girls around the house to the eating platform. He entered the house to pick up the sifters from his desk, his office holding an erotic echo, because that’s where he’d spoken to Suze, despite the glum mien of the girl who had resumed her position among the invoices at his desk. He tossed the sifters up and caught them again as he headed into the kitchen, through the cloying fog of garlic and steam.

  He pushed open the door to the eating platform and held it, waiting a moment in the doorway as if on the cutwater of a ship, studying the ocean for its tidal answers. He noticed Don, who was invited to join all the meals, sitting next to Scott, and surely Suze was right. Don’s mind was on irrigation. Caleb noticed Rebecca looking over her shoulder at something, and her eyes were radiant, her mouth barely hiding a smile. So she was happy here, after all. He felt a thrill course through his own body. He remembered how contagious it had been when his dad was on, lit up. Being with Robbie when he was happy was like jumping a train, moving that fast.

  When he came to his table, everyone on the eating platform stood and silenced, even Don. They would stand, holding hands, as long as he did. He never took advantage of this, allowing for only a quick moment of contemplation, but now, in his contentment, in his joy, he kept them standing for a long time while he thought of Robbie. Kids started fidgeting, coughing. Flies buzzed on the food. Counselors glanced at him. But he let himself remember everything he could about his last night with Robbie.

  They’d been camping in the Poconos when it had started raining and Caleb said, “Let’s put up the tent.” “What tent?” Robbie said. “We don’t need a tent. We don’t need sleep.” They sat up all night under a tree, Robbie telling him again about the year he’d spent on a kibbutz and how kids were free there, living away from their parents in the children’s house, how childhood was a sorrow everywhere else. Whenever Caleb asked him why he did anything—why he moved from Massachusetts to Wyoming and from Wyoming to Utah, why he quit graduate school, why he worked in a tire factory, why he didn’t have a phone number where Caleb could call him—Robbie would answer in enthusiastic Hebrew. “Llamalo! Llamalo!” And no, they hadn’t stayed aw
ake all night, or at least Caleb hadn’t. At some point, despite rain dripping from the leaves above, he’d fallen asleep against Robbie’s shoulder, and when he’d opened his eyes, it was light and all the green grass and leaves shook with green water. Robbie was still awake, his shirt dark with rain, his hand on Caleb’s hair, saying, “Look at this beauty, all this beauty.”

  Caleb sat, and the meal began.

  The Reagan Years: April 1983

  Caleb, new landowner, was walking beside his irrigation ditch, thinking that this would be the day he’d set fire to it.

  The ditch, which had been empty of water since November, was all anyone in Escadom talked to him about once they learned he’d bought the Double L. They told him stories, the same ones Donnie had told him—about a rancher collapsing with a heart attack at the headgate, who hadn’t been found until he’d bloated like a beluga; about the boy who fell into the ditch and was resuscitated by his uncle but retained brain damage from lack of oxygen—repeating each other in a transpersonal old-fogey-ism, until it seemed the ditch was the collective song of the place.

  These days, every time Caleb drove to town, someone would remind him of his responsibility to burn away the brush in the ditch so it wouldn’t clog anyone’s dividers when the water flowed again. Soon, they said, the snowcaps would begin to melt, pouring into the high-altitude streams, which would spill down the mountain, filling the Upper Escadom Reservoir, which was what Aemon’s lake had been turned into in the 1930s. The reservoir would slosh over its retaining wall, and Press Sorger, president of the ditch company, would turn a metal wheel and allow water to flow into the canals once more.

  Caleb had already bought for this purpose a propane tank with a rubber hose extending from it and a steel nozzle at the end of this hose. Of course, he couldn’t do it alone. The Talcs worked for him now. He’d found them last month in Escadom’s trailer park, which sat on the dry spit between the slosh of the sewage treatment plant and the river, and he’d asked them to build the wooden sleeping platforms and train him in irrigation and well maintenance and general ranch management until the counselors arrived in June. He’d hired them as a way to help them stay in town. It was seven months after the oil shale bust, and Escadom was still shedding jobs, shrinking, becoming ghostlier each day. And he’d hired them with the daring hope that, with the land purchase behind them, he and Donnie could resume their friendship.