Peaceable Kingdom

by Francine Prose

  Greg was very helpful throughout this terrible time. Six months after my father died, Greg and my sister got married. By then he’d graduated and got a marketing job with a potato-chip company. Mother and I lived alone in the house—as we’d had, really, for some time. My father and sister had left so gradually that the door hardly swung shut behind them. Father’s Buick sat in the garage, as it had since he’d lost his vision, and every time we saw it we thought about all that had happened.

  My sister and Greg bought a house nearby; sometimes Mother and I went for dinner. Greg told us about his work and the interesting things he found out. In the Northeast they liked the burnt chips, the lumpy misshapen ones, but down South every chip had to be pale and thin and perfect.

  “A racial thing, no doubt,” I said, but no one seemed to hear, though one of Mother’s favorite subjects was race relations down South. I’d thought my sister might laugh or get angry, but she was a different person. A slower, solid, heavier person who was eating a lot of chips.

  One afternoon the doorbell rang, and it was Jimmy Kowalchuk. It took me a while to recognize him; he didn’t have his beard. For a second—just a second—I was afraid to open the door. He was otherwise unchanged except that he’d got even thinner, and looked even less Polish and even more Puerto Rican.

  He was wearing army fatigues. I was glad Mother wasn’t home. He gave me a hug, my first ever from him, and lifted me off the ground. He said no, he was never dead, never even missing.

  He said, “Some army computer glitch, some creep’s clerical error.” My father’s death had made it easier to believe that people made such mistakes, and for one dizzying moment I allowed myself to imagine that maybe Jimmy’s being alive meant my father was, too.

  “You got older,” Jimmy said. “This is like The Twilight Zone.” And he must have thought so—that time had stopped in his absence. I invited him in, made him sit down, and then told him about my sister.

  Jimmy got up and left the house. He didn’t ask whom she’d married. He didn’t ask where they lived, though I knew he was going to find her.

  Once again I waited, counting down the hours. This time, although weeks passed, it was like counting one two three. Four—the phone rang. It was Greg. He had come home from the office and found my sister packed and gone.

  A week later my sister called collect from St. Petersburg, Florida. She said Jimmy knew a guy, a buddy from Vietnam, he had found Jimmy a rental house and a job with a roofing company. They had hurricanes down there that would rip the top of your house off. She emphasized the hurricane part, as if that made it all make sense. In fact, she seemed so sure about the sensibleness of her situation that she made me promise to tell Mother and Greg she’d called and that she was fine.

  Mother had less trouble believing that my sister had been kidnapped than that she’d left Greg and taken off with her dead boyfriend from Vietnam. It was a lot to process at once; she’d seen Jimmy buried. Greg had never heard of Jimmy, which made me wonder about my sister. I thought about Reynaldo, how forcefully she had seized him, how easily she’d let him go.

  My sister had called from a pay phone. All she’d said was “St. Petersburg.” Mother telephoned Mrs. Kowalchuk and got Jimmy’s address from her. Afterwards Mother said, “The woman thinks it’s a miracle. The army loses her son, she goes through hell, and she thinks it’s the will of God.”

  Mother wrote my sister a letter. A month passed. There was no answer. By now Greg was in permanent shock, though he still went to work. One night he told us about a dipless chip now in the blueprint stage. Then even Mother knew we were alone, and her eyes filled with tears. She said, “Florida! It’s warm there. When is your Easter vacation?”

  We took my father’s Buick, a decision that almost convinced us that some reason besides paralysis explained its still being in our garage. I sat up front beside Mother, scrunched low in the spongy seat. States went by. The highway was always the same. There was nothing to watch except Mother, staring furiously at the road. Though the temperature rose steadily, Mother wouldn’t turn off the heat and by Florida I was riding with my head out the window, for air, and also working on a tan for Jimmy.

  It was easy finding the address we got from Mrs. Kowalchuk. They were living in a shack, but newly painted white, and with stubby marigolds lining the cracked front walk.

  “Tobacco Road,” said Mother.

  Then Mother and I saw Jimmy working out in the yard. His back was smooth and golden and muscles churned under his skin as he swayed from side to side, planing something—a door. Behind him a tree with shiny leaves sagged under its great weight of grapefruit, and sunlight dappled the round yellow fruit and the down on Jimmy’s shoulders.

  Jimmy stopped working and turned and smiled. He didn’t seem surprised to see us. As he came toward us a large dog roused itself from the ground at his feet, a longhaired white dog so much like the one my sister spoke to in our yard that for a moment I felt faint and had to lean on Mother.

  Mother shook me off. She hardly noticed the dog. She was advancing on Jimmy.

  “I wasn’t dead, it was a mistake.” Jimmy sounded apologetic.

  “Obviously,” said Mother. Then she told me not to move and went into the house.

  I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted. Every muscle had fused, every tiny flutter and tic felt grossly magnified and disgusting. I had never seen Jimmy without a shirt. I wanted to touch his back. He said, “I got my grapefruit tree.”

  “Obviously,” I said in Mother’s voice, and Jimmy grinned and we laughed. On the table lay a pile of tools. He wasn’t stabbing them between his fingers. He must have gotten that out of his system, dying and coming back.

  Even though it was Jimmy’s house, we felt we couldn’t go in. Every inch of space was taken up by what my mother and sister were saying. Where was Jimmy’s Malibu? We walked to a cafeteria and stood in a line of elderly couples deciding between the baked fish and the chicken. Jimmy couldn’t be served there, he wasn’t wearing a shirt. The manager was sorry, it was a Florida law. Jimmy had gone to Vietnam and been lost in a computer and now couldn’t even get a cup of cafeteria coffee. But I couldn’t say that, my head was ringing with things I couldn’t say—for example, that I had waited for him, and my sister hadn’t.

  Haifa block from Jimmy’s house, we saw an upsetting sight—my mother and sister in Mother’s car with the engine running.

  “Going for lunch?” Jimmy said. But we all knew they weren’t.

  Mother told me to get in back. Jimmy looked in and I saw him notice my sister’s suitcase. He did nothing to stop us—that was the strangest part. He let me get in and let us take off and stood there and watched us go.

  I never knew, I never found out what Mother said to my sister. Or maybe it wasn’t what Mother said, perhaps it was all about Jimmy. Once again I thought of Reynaldo and my sister’s giving him up. If I never knew what had happened with that, how could I ask about Jimmy? You assume you will ask the important questions, you will get to them sooner or later, an idea that ignores two things: the power of shyness, the fact of death.

  That should have been the last time I saw Jimmy Kowalchuk—a wounded young god glowing with sun in a firmament of grapefruit. But there was one more time, nearer home, in the dead of winter.

  Before that, Greg took my sister back. They went on as if nothing had happened. Greg got a promotion. They moved to a nicer house. I saw my sister sometimes. Jimmy was not a subject. I never asked about him, his name never came up. I would talk about school sometimes, but she never seemed to be listening. Once she said, out of nowhere, “I guess people want different things at different times in their lives.”

  I was a senior in high school when my sister was killed. Her car jumped a divider on the Sunrise Highway. It was a new car Greg kept well maintained, so it was nobody’s fault.

  On the way to the funeral Mother sat between me and Greg. When my sister went back to Greg, Mother had gone back to him, too. But that day, in the funeral car, sh
e was talking to me.

  “What was I doing?” Mother said. “I knew I couldn’t make you girls happy. I was just trying to give you the chance to be happy if you wanted. I thought that life was a corridor with doors that opened and shut as you passed, and I was just trying to keep them from slamming on you.”

  The reality of my sister’s death hadn’t come home to me yet, and though my father’s dying had taught me that death was final, perhaps Jimmy’s reappearance had put that in some doubt. Guiltily I wondered if Jimmy would be at my sister’s funeral, as if it were a party at which he might show up.

  Jimmy came with his mother, a tiny woman in black. He was gritty, unshaven, tragically handsome in a wrinkled suit and dark glasses. He looked as if he’d hitchhiked or rode up on the Greyhound.

  I went and stood beside Jimmy. No one expected that. After the service I left with him. Not even I could believe it. All the relatives watched me leave, Mother and Greg and my sister’s friend Marcy. I wondered if this was how Jimmy felt, driving out onto the ice.

  Jimmy was driving a cousin’s rusted Chevy Nova. We dropped his mother at her house. Jimmy and I kept going. I could tell he’d been drinking. He must have given up on his rule about endangering other people. Finally I was alone with him, but it wasn’t what I’d pictured. I wondered which friend I could call if I needed someone to pick me up.

  I was starting college in the fall. I had some place I had to be. A new life was expecting me with its eye on the clock and no time and no patience for me to run away with Jimmy.

  Jimmy drove to a crowded strip somewhere off Hempstead Turnpike. We stopped at the Shamrock, a dark, beery-smelling bar. Jimmy and I sat at a table. The bartender took our order. The regulars seemed too relaxed to pay any special attention to a Charlie Mansonesque Puerto Rican and a girl, below the drinking age, nervously sipping her beer.

  Jimmy put away several boilermakers. He was getting drunker and drunker. He kept talking about my sister. He said some very unlikely things but nothing too strange to believe, especially when he repeated it, each time exactly the same.

  He told me that the white dog had shown up the first day they moved to Florida. It ran up to my sister in the yard; they seemed to know each other. The dog, said my sister, had come to her after Jimmy died and personally guaranteed it that Jimmy was still alive. Jimmy said, “I had to wonder how the goddamn dog found out our Florida address.”

  The light in the Shamrock was fading. Jimmy blamed the war. He said, “I died and got through it halfway all right. But it gets you no matter what. I came back but it was too late. Your sister was talking to dogs.”

  I pictured Mother setting out silver platters of roast beef for the relatives who would be coming back after the funeral. I saw light wink off her coffee urn and the plates of little iced cakes and for one shaming moment a bright bubble shone and popped in the dusty fermented air of the bar.

  It hadn’t scared Mother but it had scared Jimmy, my sister talking to dogs. I remembered how unresistingly Jimmy had let Mother take her, as easily as my sister had let Reynaldo go. I had a vision of people pulling at each other, and of the people who loved them letting them slip through their hands and almost liking the silky feel of them sliding through their fingers.

  Jimmy said my sister blamed herself for my father’s death. She’d told Jimmy that when she realized he was looking at slides of dead dogs, she wished for something to happen so he would have to stop it. No matter how much my father told us about his disease, my sister believed that somehow she had caused it, and she had this pet iguana that was the only one she could tell. She told Jimmy the iguana had died in her arms and she blamed herself for that, too.

  Tears welled up in Jimmy’s eyes. He said, “The woman had powers.”

  For a fraction of a second I thought I might still want him. But I didn’t want him. I just didn’t want her to have him forever. I was shocked to be so jealous when death meant it could never be fixed. I didn’t want it to be that way, but that was how it was.

  I wanted to tell Jimmy that my sister didn’t have powers. I wanted to say that her only power was the power to make everyone look, she’d had nothing, nothing to do with my father going blind, and she had lied to one of us about what happened to that iguana. I wanted to say she’d lied to us all, she’d faked it about the dog, as if it mattered whether the animal spoke, as if love were about the truth, as if he would love her less—and not more—for pretending to talk to a dog.

  CAULIFLOWER HEADS

  EUROPE WAS CRAWLING WITH adulterous couples. Mostly, for some reason, one saw them at ruins, respectfully tripping over the archaeological rubble. Just like regular tourists they seemed to be under some terrible strain, but unlike regular tourists they hardly looked at anything, so that when, say, a lizard streaked across their path they’d jump and fall into each other with apologetic smiles, more like awkward teenagers than adults risking the forbidden.

  In the ruins of Herculaneum, Susanna saw the quintessential adulterous couple leaving one of the underground rooms just as she and Jerry were entering. The couple started as if they’d been caught embracing, as if they often met in the cave-like room and were shocked to see anyone else. They looked vaguely Eastern European—raincoats in the summer heat and frumpy business suits. The woman was pretty, in a frizzy way, with oddly colorless eyes and hair. She carried a leather briefcase and wore sensible, mannish shoes. The man was tall and also had colorless hair combed to cover a bald spot.

  Later, when Susanna and Jerry stopped at a trattoria down the road, the couple were eating lunch there, or rather chain-smoking through it. A haze hovered over the plates of food they ordered and didn’t touch. Once, when the woman lit up a smoke, her lover pushed back her sleeve and pressed his cheek to the inside of her forearm.

  Watching, Susanna felt something inside her chest go soggy and expansive, like that trick when you pleat a drinking-straw wrapper and then drip water on it. Across the table Jerry was happily tucking away his penne al’amatriciana. Jerry and Susanna had only been married three weeks. Susanna wondered: Wasn’t one’s honeymoon cruelly early to be envying the adulterous?

  Of course she couldn’t ask Jerry. That would have been cruel, and even if he managed not to take it personally, he’d think she was silly for worrying about this when the planet was dying.

  When Jerry saw a lizard in the ruins he took a picture of it. He was very aware of how many species were disappearing. If he and Susanna ever had children, he wanted to show them animals that by then might no longer exist. Susanna couldn’t picture the children she and Jerry might have, and certainly not a cozy scene around the lamplit kitchen table: Jerry showing the children photos of vanished animal life.

  And yet Jerry’s hobby—elegiac nature photography—had deeply moved Susanna when they first fell in love. They’d met when Jerry came to speak at Susanna’s college; Jerry lived near the college and was brought in at the last minute after the scheduled speaker, a former cabinet member, tried to get off a plane in mid-flight when the movie ended.

  Jerry was a consultant on radioactive waste disposal. When your town dump glowed in the dark, your mayor called Jerry. Jerry gave Susanna’s class the global bad news with such deep personal grief that she was overcome with longing to protect him from what he knew. He told them to look to the right, then the left, and imagine the people on both sides with giant green cauliflower heads. Then he said they were kidding themselves, because this would never happen; they would not evolve into toxic creatures capable of thriving on environmental poisons. They would die and the earth would die and turn into a radioactive desert glowing in the sunless sky. Then the college students were filled with shame for having imagined that they could be saved.

  Jerry had said, “It’s up to your generation to make sure it doesn’t happen.” And Susanna had thought: Well, obviously. Jerry would show her how.

  Perhaps this was the reason their courtship was so intense: it was as if the bomb had dropped and they had fifteen minutes to
live. All through Susanna’s last semester they met in a dark bar near campus where married professors met girl students, though Jerry was single and didn’t teach, so really there was no need.

  Susanna had forgotten to think about her future beyond graduation, which made it easier, when school ended, to move from the dorm to Jerry’s house. On summer evenings they frequented the same dark bar near campus. The girls had gone off to glamorous internships, the professors home to their families and the books they’d been meaning to write. Leaning so close their heads touched, Jerry told Susanna stories: twice his office had been burglarized and strategic files stolen. In July he heard some hopeful news and gripped her hand till it hurt: some PCB-eating macrophage had looked good in the lab.

  But after they’d lived together that winter he seemed to forget about her saving the world, and even that she was in it, so that often he seemed surprised and pleased to find her in his house. Susanna tried to see this as a positive sign. Perhaps if he overestimated the chance of her vanishing from his life he might also be mistaken about the ozone layer. She herself was worried about the future of the planet and so felt petty and ashamed when the subject began to seem like an annoying tic of Jerry’s. If you took pleasure in a sunny day, he brought up global warming. Several times she’d caught herself on the edge of saying that she would rather the world end than have to think about it all the time.

  But anyone could see that Jerry was right. That spring a toxic dump site turned up in their back yard; well, not actually their back yard—two or three miles down the road. Susanna and Jerry stood on a bluff overlooking the devastation. Acres of muddy bulldozer tracks, glittery patches of broken glass, strips of bloody gauze unfurled like a vampire fraternity prank.

  Jerry cleared his throat and said, “Probably we should get married.”

  It bothered Susanna a little—proposed to at a dump site!—but she told herself it was perfect: the marriage of the future. At once dedicated and resigned, she had told Jerry yes.