The Optimistic Decade

by Heather Abel

Donnie sat back down and cracked his beer. “And then Amy-Lynne, when she came by yesterday, told me that before the party Charlene told everyone not to say anything, but she had to tell me now. This Denise person lived up here with you. Said she never saw one of you without the other in an evening. Said that in the wintertime, when Kebler Pass is all icy, you’d drive her over to Snowmass and wait in the car all day while she cleaned condos. Am I getting this right?”

  Don looked back at him, his right eye melting, left eye blinking.

  “Said the two of you kept mostly to yourselves, but she’d see both of you with Caleb at the Motherlode on Fridays. Said that you were great friends with him all along. You and Denise and Caleb sitting at your own little table. All of you lying to me.”

  But he couldn’t mess with his dad, not like this. “You want to know what I think about that? Hot damn, Dad.” He slapped the table. “Hot damn.”

  He imagined a woman with them in the trailer doing the womanly jobs. A woman Cloroxing and changing Don’s diaper, but not just that. A woman kissing on Don, lying next to him, loving him. Denise—whoever she was.

  It was the best fucking news Donnie had ever heard.

  With the bunched-up tissue, he wiped at the cheek again. “But the thing is, nobody knows how to reach her. I even walked up to Caleb’s this morning, woke him up in his tent to ask him. He said Denise is at her sister’s in Casper, but he didn’t have the number. Nobody does. So now you and I’ll sit here until we find a way for you to give it to me.”

  He held the beer can to his dad’s lips, brown liquid dribbling down his chin and onto his shirt. Then he picked up a pen and wrapped his dad’s left fist around it. “You can try to write with your good hand. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll come up with some secret code, some number of blinks. Somehow, you’re gonna give me this lady’s phone number and I’m gonna call your girl. I’m gonna call your lady.”

  All the way to Glenwood Springs, Ira felt proud of the extravagance and selflessness of this gesture. Rebecca wanted a ride from one state to another? Was there no bus? But she’d sounded like hell on the phone, claiming emergency. He’d set off directly, drove twelve hours with a rolled towel shoved behind him, spent $39.99 on a motel, woke at five to drive the rest of the way, all with an expectation of gratitude he only realized when, at the rendezvous—noon, Sunday, Antler Lodge parking lot—she wasn’t grateful. She was sullen, greeting him with a perfunctory hug and then getting in the car and untying her boots, pressing her bare feet against the glove compartment and staring out the window, as if she were bored by her father and could not get enough of the landscape of Colorado, where she’d spent all summer.

  “Well, my drive was long and tedious, I won’t lie, but the best part,” he said, as he joined the meager traffic toward the highway, “was stopping in this town Fruita. Typical American diner—waitress had no idea how to make iced coffee, even when I said, give me a cup of ice and pour coffee on it. All this small-town hoopla, all adorable, almost makes you nostalgic for somewhere you’ve never been—why can’t life be this simple, et cetera—until I realize why I know the name Fruita. It’s where the uranium was mined. Above thy fruita planes. America, America, et cetera. And then on the way out of town, I see a billboard paid for by the John Birch Society: ‘Get the US out of the UN.’ Jesus, the ignorance. Anyway, how are you?”

  It was an affable invitation for conversation that she declined. In the silence that followed, he felt superfluous, his sciatica electric. There was no reason she couldn’t sit in similar silence on a bus, leaning against her backpack to sleep, like he’d done so many times. And then he realized she didn’t have a backpack. No bags in the trunk. Where was her stuff?

  She turned to face him. “I forgot it at Caleb’s camp.”

  “Forgot it? Are we supposed to buy you new stuff?”

  “It’s fine. I hardly had anything.” She bit her lip until the skin blanched. She was so lovely. “Stop it,” he wanted to say. “Not that lip. Don’t bite that lip.”

  Unhappy with the gas prices in Colorado, he held out for cheaper offerings in Utah, where it turned out there weren’t any gas stations at all. His gauge hovered on empty, and the alchemy of dusk made the desert around them look more water than rock. He turned off the highway onto a ranch road and cut the engine. To the south, snowy peaks rose from the flat expanse, looming judges. “So, we’ll sleep in the car,” he said, careful not to admit any misstep. “An adventure!”

  They ate the peanut-butter sandwiches he’d packed, and darkness colored in the windows, and then there wasn’t anything else to do but recline their seats. He unfurled the Mylar earthquake blankets from the trunk and handed one to her.

  But before he allowed her to hide behind the isolating scrim of sleep, he said, “Want to tell me what the emergency is? Why you’re not on Greyhound as planned?”

  “I really don’t.”

  “Actually, I think you owe me an explanation. You made me drive this far.”

  “I just want to know why.” She was flicking the flashlight he kept in the glove compartment off and on, irritating his eyes. “I wanted to hear it in person.”

  “Why what?”

  “Why’d you shut down the paper, Dad? And don’t tell me everything I already know.”

  Ira hadn’t expected this. “The paper? Call it a heart attack. Doctors tried all they could, but Western medicine is its own musty gamble, controlled as it is by the pharmaceutical industry.”

  “Really, no bullshit. Please.”

  “No bullshit?” He turned to her but could only see her outline. “Jesus, Rebecca. It was me. You know that. Mom wanted to keep going, same thing every week, but for years I was bitter. A constant state of rage because the world hadn’t gone the way I told it to, over and over, week after week, editorial after goddamn editorial!” He shouted this to the air around them, to the cows sleeping standing up, to the lizards scurrying, to the fossils wedged in the shale beneath the car. “The superiority I would feel every time I saw one of the inane bumper stickers. ‘May Peace Prevail on Earth.’ ‘War is not the Answer.’ And for what? What was I doing differently?”

  “But all those years you could do it, and then suddenly you can’t?”

  “Obviously, I’ve given this plenty of thought. And you know”—he sighed—“I’m just not sure. But I have thought this. I’ve thought that maybe everybody has one decade, call it an optimistic decade, when the world feels malleable and the self strong. And then it’s over. It doesn’t come back.”

  “A decade? Like ten years exactly?”

  “Well, a metaphoric decade.”

  “Oh, one of those.” He loved making her laugh.

  “Maybe mine lasted longer than ten years, but not much. I was going through the motions.” It was a strange way to talk, side by side in a dark parked car, and he felt the tremendous intimacy of a long airplane flight; night and the tectonic plates below, and nobody mattered but the two of them.

  “You know, there was this guy living up at Caleb’s.” She paused for a long time, and he worried she wouldn’t continue. “Donnie. A miner—as in gold, coal, et cetera. Not underage. Anyway, he wore this USA shirt. Flying eagle, red, white, and blue sleeves. And it always made me think of that song.” She began to sing: “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation! Arise, ye wretched of the earth!”

  He smiled at the surprise of it—this song he knew so well. “Okay, okay. I know the words, hon.”

  But she didn’t stop singing, and there was nothing to do but join her, belt it out for all cows to hear. “For justice thunders condemnation: A better world’s in birth! No more tradition’s chains shall bind us; arise, ye slaves, no more in thrall.”

  He trailed off in order to listen to his daughter. “Something, something something something thing thing thing . . . The international working class shall free the human race!” How had she known to call him for a ride? Had she guessed how badly he needed this time with her?

  “But, okay,” she said, “w
ill the international working class arise? No. Will it ever do anything but collude with industry? And will the result of this collusion be anything but the increase in every conceivable measure of suffering?”

  “Well, sure. That’s the other option. Maybe optimism as a whole has ended. But honestly, Rebecca, I’ve thought about this, and I don’t know. Is it there’s no true intervention possible, or have I stopped being able to see how to intervene?”

  “And?”

  “And what did I conclude?”

  “Yeah.”

  It was so kind of her to care about what had happened to him, the great rift in his life. He wanted to give her something more than his confusion, but what could it be? He reached for her hand across the stick shift, and it comforted him. “Let’s get some sleep,” he said, squeezing her fingers. Maybe in the morning, he’d know. Maybe when they woke hungry and sore and had not even the most American of substances to take them home, maybe then he’d have her answer.

  nineteen

  Winter

  four weeks before the Persian Gulf War, six out of the seven members of Students United for Justice committed a misdemeanor by unfurling a banner from an overpass on I-80. Rebecca, who had, back in May, conceived of this Action—everything done by SUJ was called an “Action”—was not among them. At the time, Rebecca was eating dinner with Michelle, the roommate assigned to her in late August, when Rebecca had told the dean of students that she could no longer move into the Peace and Justice Cooperative because each of the three nouns in the name of the Peace and Justice Cooperative held a promise that could never be fulfilled. Similarly, Rebecca had changed her major from Third World Revolt and Media Studies to English and had been surprised to find that her new classmates cared deeply about made-up people and their made-up problems.

  The dinner Rebecca and Michelle were eating during the Action was dinner only in the temporal sense. It was dinnertime. Michelle, who was premed, had taught Rebecca many things, including the practice of bringing plastic Baggies to the dining hall at breakfast, filling them with cereal, and eating this cereal dry for all other meals. They were sitting on the floor of their room, half a dozen Baggies between them, as Michelle talked about Christmas. Only six days away and she hadn’t bought anything for her aunties or her two nephews. Michelle’s side of the room, usually neatly stacked with organic chem textbooks and color-coordinated flash cards, had lately been overtaken by gifts and wrapping paper. Michelle had, on several occasions, announced that she loved Christmas so much. The lights! The love! The presents! Michelle was a woman of surprisingly intense passions. She loved U2 so much! She loved Peanuts so much! She loved her little figurines of Peanuts characters wearing Santa hats! She loved the Gap so much, although she believed the Gap in Berkeley was a pale imitation of the Gap in San Jose, which was the best Gap in the world.

  Rebecca had tested this theory herself when she went home with Michelle for Thanksgiving to avoid seeing David, who, along with Judy, had been invited to Ira and Georgia’s. What could Rebecca possibly say if she saw him? I tried to save Llamalo for you, and instead I ruined it? Sorry the guy you idolize is a liar? Sorry I caused your fall by wanting you to be in pain? She’d left him dozens of messages—first with Judy and then, when he moved out, at the number Judy gave her—but he’d never called back. He didn’t care about their time together, those minutes in the barn. Swimsuits and the light coming through. So instead she went to San Jose and bought, at Michelle’s urging, khakis and a red V-neck at the best Gap in the world. When she wore this outfit, she felt as if she were in disguise, although, as Luke had explained to her, all clothes were costumes, everyone was posturing, there was no true, immutable self beneath these consumer choices. “We are each only the sum of our signifiers,” Luke liked to say. Luke was a senior she’d met in a seminar on postmodernism. After he’d eviscerated a paper she’d written—“Who Is the Dreaming Animal Really?: Representations of the Other in Kingsolver”—he’d asked her out to coffee, where he explained that all politics was aesthetics. Protest was an aesthetic choice. Capitalism had subsumed rebellion, making it just one more thing to purchase. Now, they were dating, which meant that every week she’d sit on Luke’s floor, his Panasonic cassette player between them, and he would lecture her. It was important to him that she learn which was the best Sonic Youth album, exactly when Nirvana was “dialing it in.” At some point in the evening, he would put on Galaxie 500 and they’d have quick sex on the floor, a jabbing in the general direction of her clitoris, a frantic humping. The main erotic actions, as far as she was concerned, had to do with the condoms. Luke standing with a foolish and gorgeous erection, searching for condoms in his dresser drawer. Luke sitting on his bed with a serious expression, tongue peeking through his lips, as he unfurled the rubber slowly down the length of his dick. Luke on top of her, the smell of condom on his fingers. Luke dexterously tying the knot in the spent, baggy condom, tossing it overhead into the trash basket, after which Luke would take a short nap and then the music tutorials could resume.

  Sometimes, she would say that she liked a song and Luke would say no, that song was derivative and once she knew more, she wouldn’t like it. It was somewhat funny what you needed to go through to see the erection. The first time he visited her room, Luke had complimented her minimalist vibe, calling it “a bold move.” She hadn’t taped any photos to her walls, although Mikala had sent thirteen from the summer, through which she’d looked hopefully for David and found only a blur of blond hair and red headband in one shot. Nor had she hung any of her posters, not nuclear power? no, thanks! or atomkraft? nein danke! or aтомная энергия? нет, спасибо! or 原子力？さようなら! She did still have her five albums autographed by Pete Seeger, hidden from Luke’s derision under her bed, but she understood now that any emotion she felt while listening to them was just familial sentimentality, not a response to Pete’s call to action. If she’d been born to different parents, she would no doubt feel an equal upsurge listening to these parents’ apolitical favorites—“What a Wonderful World” maybe. Or “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.” Or the Bobs—Dylan or Marley. Still, some evenings, despite her determination to be a sophomore with sophomoric concerns, she’d tell Michelle she was too tired to study with her in the library, and she’d lie in bed and listen to Pete. Not the records; she didn’t own a record player. But she’d slip a cassette into her Walkman, pull on her headphones, and listen as he said, “And the most important verse was the one they wrote down in Montgomery, Alabama. They said, ‘We are not afraid.’ And the young people taught everybody else a lesson. All the older people who have learned how to compromise and learned how to take it easy and be polite and get along and leave things as they were, the young people taught us all a lesson.”

  Then everyone would sing, We are not afra-aid, we are not afra-aid, we are not afraid, today! Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day.

  “I just can’t decide,” Michelle was saying now. “I mean, I pretty much figured out that I’ll get Jake a Nerf basketball and Troy one of those cars that you control. You know, with a remote?” But for the aunties, she was torn between scented candles or gloves, a conundrum that must have been presented as a question, because she looked accusatorily at Rebecca. “Are you even listening?”

  Rebecca wasn’t, not really. She’d noticed that it had started raining, hard patter hitting sideways against the glass panes of this fourth-floor window. She was thinking of the other six members of Students United for Justice. There was nowhere in the world she’d rather be than on that I-80 overpass with them in the rain and wind.

  They would tie a sheet to the chain-link. no blood for oil, it would say, “blood” in red, “oil” in black. They’d all wear black sweatshirts to feel like renegades, and they’d tie kerchiefs over their mouths to look like revolutionaries. The wet white sheet would cling to itself, and the writing would begin to bleed, washing the cars below with pink raindrops. Three weeks later, it would still be t
here, twisted, faded, because nobody cared, because all the drivers underneath were still driving, because even if they did care, none of them could prevent the war, and the cops had more important things to do than pull down torn sheets. Nothing would happen.

  Michelle was waving her hands. “Earth to Rebecca! Earth to Rebecca!”

  Deep in her heart, Rebecca was afraid. “Well, the candles would be beautiful,” she said, reaching for a bag of Chex. “Buy them candles.”

  Four days before the war was supposed to start, American flags flew from all the commercial buildings in Escadom, except for the Motherlode, which flew a grand opening flag and was no longer called the Motherlode. In Escadom’s Town Park, each leafless cottonwood and maple had been banded with yellow ribbons in support of the waiting troops.

  Up on Aemon’s Mesa, the ranch manager of Coyote Junction Ranch was walking from his trailer across a field sheeted with snow. Already, the barn had been demolished; the garden fencing was down. Soon, it would all disappear, even the house. And then, come spring, Caleb had been told, construction would begin on the spec houses, the gate around the gated community. The DeWitts had hired an architect from Aspen who specialized in modular modernism with a Western flair. They’d hired a building manager from Snowmass who really understood their vision. “What’s my job then?” Caleb had asked. “Energy and enthusiasm,” Anders said. “Keep things on track.” It was a made-up job, an act of generosity, as was allowing Caleb to stay in the trailer, to live up here on the plateau, where he needed to be.

  On the porch, skis and kayak paddles leaned like poplars. Lacey answered the door wrapped in a towel, her hair in another. “Caleb! You’re early. That’s great,” she said in a tone that implied it wasn’t. “Anders! Caleb’s here.”

  A voice shouted, “I’m on the phone, baby.”

  Lacey stepped back to allow Caleb to enter. “Wait in the kitchen? I guess you know where it is.” She laughed abruptly, as if to say Sorry for the change in fortunes! and then disappeared upstairs.