by Jane Smiley
“I didn’t earn many letters, it’s true.”
“But you must have read Joe’s.”
I shake my head.
Michael says, “Oh.”
Joe turns elaborately from the bookcases to me. “I didn’t realize I was supposed to be passing them around. They seemed pretty personal.”
“Well, not too personal for Mom.”
“Oh,” says Joe.
“Who’s hungry?” I say. “It’s nearly five. I’m going to step into the shower for a moment.” Anxiety accumulates, one grain at a time, in my chest.
In the shower, I think some more about Michael’s remark. On Thursday the federal government brought suit against the state to repair some roads in the southern part of the state, and to build a new four-lane connecting the Naval Weapons Support Center to Interstate 68. It is a remote and beautiful part of the state—good-sized hills and a number of national forests. The rumor is that the navy plans to store disintegrating chemical weapons there. It will be my job for the DOT, maybe as early as Monday, to say that we don’t have the money. This is a budgetary fiction on the order of imagining that I control a large jar full of cash, and that I can tell by counting the cash what the state can afford. Money (or at least the figures in my department’s computers) seems to the public and even to the politicians to be a fact they can appeal to that will tell them what they really want. The fact is that they can have anything they really want. That’s what the lawyers in Washington know. They know that they can make us build the roads, that they can even make us want the roads, and that the way to do that is to sue us. If we come up with sufficient strength of argument against these roads, then they will see that making us want what they want is too difficult, and they will store those chemical weapons elsewhere.
It is finding out what we want that takes time, effort, and money. From the top right down through my department and the environmental groups, no one knows what we want or how much we want it. I happen to know that the rumors that the navy intends to store something dangerous at the facility, and thus transport it over our roads and through our towns to get it there, originated in the office of one of the lawyers pressing the federal suit. I know that the environmental groups knew about the suit the day it was filed, because two of my accountants called people they knew from college and told them about it. Is this corruption? Is this conscience? I think it is a way that Americans have of discovering what they really want. On Monday I will probably say, “I don’t see how the DOT is going to afford seventy miles of new interstate with the state budget in the shape it’s in,” and everybody will be reassured by the figures, the facts. But the decisive questions are: How much does the navy want it? How much does the state not want it?
In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principles contain it or stand against it. The rumor was that it took my mother’s cousin nine years to save up the money for her escape to Denver, and she did it in a world where women carried no money. Another cousin of my mother’s persuaded her father to let her go to the local day college during the Depression. She got a scholarship for tuition, and found another student who was willing to drive her to school, but the uncle in question refused all money for books. She would stand in the stacks of the library, near the study carrels of students she recognized from her classes. When they got up to take breaks or chat, she would read the textbooks they had left lying open. When I used to tell this story to the children (demonstrating how much someone could desire an education), they would each try it, declare it impossible. But there was no doubting Cousin Maia. Even as a child, I never questioned the power of desire.
When I come down from my shower, Joe and Michael are on the floor by the stereo, going through Joe’s new records (he combs the secondhand stores). Michael is animated and appreciative, and I can see that Joe is pleased. He plays songs from different albums, but listen to this, wait till you hear this one, and Michael peruses the jackets. They are enjoying themselves in an utterly serious way, trading information. Pretty soon they will be on to baseball. They don’t notice me as I step past them into the kitchen, except to move out of the way.
Eagle Point Park is one of my favorite places, and if there is something I have been looking forward to about Michael’s return, it is this pleasure. When the hot weather broke last week, my first thought was that it would be nice for this picnic. When I saw that Kroger’s had fresh blueberries and late raspberries, I thought, Homemade berry ice cream for the picnic. Maybe because of my farm childhood, I always feel relieved, lightened, in the out of doors. Real festivities, for me, take place alfresco, and I think that, when I am sitting in my favorite stone park shelter, across from Michael on a hard wooden bench, then I will realize that he is back, that there are dangers he has encountered and overcome, and I will throw off this practical caution about his return and be exhilarated.
I begin to feel it as Joe drives through the stone gates and turns down one of the park roads. He says, “The usual, Ma?” The usual is in a glade overlooking the creek. The path along the creek winds past it. “You bet,” I say.
Joe says, “Mom is such a creature of habit.”
We hurriedly pile the picnic things on the table and set out down the leftward path, toward a small series of waterfalls in an especially shaded and pleasant stretch of woods. Two can walk on the path abreast. I follow them. After I have paused a few times to identify flowers with the book I am carrying, they are well ahead of me, chatting comfortably.
It is obvious from a distance that Joe is cheering up. His surprised, barking laugh sounds once, then again and again. Although he specializes in irony and rue, he can give himself up to fun quite suddenly and completely, and in fact one of the things Louise said in the letter I read was that she’d never had so much fun with anyone as with Joe. I stop and let them get out of sight, then slip off my shoes and step into the water. It is shallow and warm, but glassy. My toes look large and bleached against the ancient bronze pebbles of the creek bed. The creek has that perfect peaceful flow—without turbulence and clear, almost silent. When a twig or a leaf scoots past, its velocity seems improbable. The creek on my mother’s farm was a rope of water winding through turf, visible from the distance as a dark loop in the tawny landscape. Here and there, cottonwoods clumped beside it, and on the neighboring farm, it widened into a small slough. Every year, in the slough, there were waves of ducks and geese and pheasants and prairie chickens, but even the creek on the farm was teeming with insects and birds and rodents and rabbits and foxes. This creek is more like a photograph, with artfully scattered rocks, arching green limbs, and a stone bridge built by the CCC. Except for water spiders and midges, I’ve never seen any wildlife, but it is always refreshing to come here. I wade to the middle of the creek and climb onto a flat rock that gives me a view down the tunnel of leaves. Two weeks ago they were still and dusty with summer, but rain last week appears to have perked them up. I am satisfied with this.
I never thought I would be. What I longed for on the farm was not Chicago, not streets or the lighted windows of Marshall Field’s, but vertiginous landscape; certainly mountains, necessarily waterfalls, and preferably dazzling icecaps and crashing surf. I had a list of places I would not die without visiting: New Zealand, Norway, Alaska, Japan and the mountains of southern China, Peru. When I was fourteen, a discontented age, I carried this list in my pocket, and spent a lot of time fixing upon just the right order for my visits, and just the right amount of time to spend in each place. It was never less than three months. I envisioned myself drinking in the landscape day after day, never failing to respond to it with every nerve ending. Sometimes during my marriage this longing would reassert itself, though Pat felt that it was decadent to long for the picturesque, and I would plan trips, and even make reservations, for places like Kyoto and Auckland. We did get to the Grand Canyon, Pike’s Peak, and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Since the divorce I haven’t gone anywhere except for business trips to Washington and campi
ng here and there in some of the state parks. In the last few years, I have even had the money, at least for a tour to Norway.
I could say that the terror of my divorce and its aftermath tamed me, made me an accountant to my very soul, when I could have become a bush pilot or a naturalist, or I could say, like most people, that I simply couldn’t get away. The truth seems to me more delicate, having more to do with how lovely this spot is, how I need to see it develop through the seasons, and not only this spot but three or four others, all within an hour’s drive of my house. The joke is on me, who has turned out to have that farmer’s attachment to familiar places, after all.
When I get back to the shelter in the dusk, Joe and Michael have set out the food and are ready to eat. Michael, in fact, is already eating.
Michael is saying, “So here was this guy, classic math nerd. The operative variable with Stanley was that he had gone through the New York City school system, and so he had skipped all these grades, and when he got to our school in India, he was about nineteen. He talked a lot about how he was going to be a hard grader, and a rigorous teacher, so the kids were pretty scared, and about the time of his final exam for the term, people began coming to his office, or students would catch him before class, and they would give him a brass plate, or a dish of mangoes. Stanley didn’t see anything unusual in this. I guess he’d gotten presents all his life, and he was in the habit of feeling entitled to them. So he gave the exam, and graded hard, and prided himself on separating the friendship he felt for the students from professionalism, and the day after the grades went out, there was practically a riot in the school when all the parents showed up in a rage. And the guy never understood. He never understood that he’d accepted bribes and not upheld his end of the bargain.”
Joe says, “Didn’t you tell him?”
“Oh, by his time I wasn’t doing much with the Americans. And anyway, he was such a know-it-all that, when you tried to suggest anything to him, he just got red in the face and started panting. He hated me.”
“I had this girl in my history of science class,” says Joe, “who always sat in the front row, right in front of me, and one day she just started to unbutton her blouse. She looked right at me and pushed the buttons through the holes like they were lollipops or something.”
“Or something.” They laugh.
“I was standing at the board, and when I sat down behind my desk, she gave me this big smile, like I’d gotten an erection all of a sudden.”
“Had you?”
“Well—” They laugh.
I say, “So what’d you do?”
“I waited until she was all done, and broke the class into small groups. You never saw a shirt buttoned so fast in your life.”
Michael dishes some fruit salad onto my plate, then unwraps a marinated-tofu-and-avocado sandwich for me. He says, “I bet life in the bureaucracy is pretty tame compared to this.”
“There was the shoe guy.”
“Who was that?”
“No one knew, actually. Every so often this well-dressed man would appear, and he would go up to women in back hallways or get them alone in the elevator and beg to lick the bottom of their shoes. He wasn’t threatening or anything, but he would just plead and whine, until these women found themselves letting him do it.”
Joe says, “It was probably the governor.” We all laugh.
“No one ever knew if it was even a state employee. No one recognized him, and it only happened three or four times. There was a plan about what we would do, but he never showed up after we made it.”
I eat. Michael tells another story, then Joe tells one. Dusk is gathering, and I can hear the creek running under the sound of their voices. The exhilaration of Michael’s homecoming begins to grip me. It is wonderful to converse like this, as if there were no underlying expectations supplied by the filial relationship.
I look away from them, out into the darkness under the trees, maybe to look away from the thought I have just had, which is that I may never see that phenomenon again that always struck me in the old days, that even their bodies, especially their bodies, were duplicates. I didn’t think about it much until they were about three and their little nakednesses began to take shape. Moles on the left side of their necks, square chests, thin calves. Later, when they were seven, pigeon breasts, long arms, big hands, big feet. Always two or four of everything. They were handsome little boys, who stood up straight, did not fidget. I would have been proud of one, as I was proud of the other ones. But I admit it, my pride was magnified by how identical they were. As I sit on this hard bench, I suddenly yearn for one last long look, and not only of the phenomenon of little Joe and little Michael, but of the others, too: Ellen, four, and Annie, seven months, sharing a peach; Daniel, two or three, rolling from one end of the living room to the other until he was dizzy, then standing up and shouting, “There she goes!”, meaning that the room was spinning. As I watch Joe watch Michael shovel in the food, that fact that I will never see their toddler selves again is tormenting.
“You know,” says Joe. “I looked up this condition of yours in the encyclopedia while you were sleeping. It’s not something I want to share, all things considered. It can go to the liver, or even the lungs.”
“In India, people have it all their lives. It’s not the worst thing. I do need a prescription, though, because you can’t buy the right drugs over the counter here like you can there.”
“I take it these drugs suppress the symptoms without really getting at the little buggers.” Joe sounds annoyed.
“I don’t know.”
“Go to the doctor.”
“I said I was going to, didn’t I?”
Talk subsides. The evening insects have begun to buzz and saw. A light breeze begins to sound in the leaves, drowning out the sigh of the water. I roll up my paper plate and fold the ends over.
Joe says, “So, we’ll go get Barbara and Kevin, and try Caruso’s? They have a good pianist Saturday nights. There’s a jazz trio at Handy’s, too.”
“Sounds good. Did you call Barbara?”
They are going out.
Why not?
But it takes my breath away all the same.
“Just for a few hours, Mom. No big deal, okay?”
“No big deal.”
Michael looks up from his bowl of raspberry-blueberry ice cream. They are staring at me, gauging whether they have hurt my feelings. They have, though I didn’t expect them to, and I would rather they didn’t know it. I say, pushing up from the picnic table, “Michael, you should call your father, too.” The fact is that, though I now feel envious and excluded, after they go I will be myself again, alone in the silence of my house, books, knitting, TV, bed, laundry, for that matter. I was an only child who grew up on a farm. I have been entertaining myself successfully for fifty-two years. Actually, I will put on some music of my own. It will be an old recording of Jussi Bjoerling singing famous tenor solos. And in places, I will sing along. A thin plan. When people leave, they always seem to scoop themselves out of you. I wonder why I pay so much attention to my feelings, why Joe does, why Michael and Ellen do. We are like those scientists that Joe talks about, always stopping in the road to contemplate boulders, except that the boulders aren’t anything interesting, like the speed of light or the nature of gravity, they are only the rubble of our own feelings.
My punishment for having reacted is to endure Joe’s apologetic scrutiny all the way back to the house, then his oh-so-careful help putting away the picnic things.
Michael is on the phone with the controversial fifth man. There is the scrape of a chair as he sits down to talk. I climb the stairs and feel a sudden weird contentment at the familiarity of this, as if I could cherish the last twenty years after all.
The fact is that Pat and I did not part peacefully. We did not behave well in any sense. The opening scene of the long drama that was our parting took place just about exactly twenty years ago. We were in the newly remodeled kitchen of our house in the count
ry. The cabinets were new. The flooring was new. At my insistence, windows had been cut into the walls on the southern and eastern exposures. The ceiling and the appliances were new. I had been conducting this remodeling for seven months—I thought then, to give our life a suitable domestic container. Five months into the remodeling, I fell in love with a neighbor, a writer who was home a good deal during the day. His entrance onto the scene, I thought at the time, was unaccountable, for the simple reason that with five children, a demanding husband, a mother in ill health, and a major remodeling, I couldn’t possibly have had time for him. I made time for him. Then, one Saturday night in the kitchen, with the younger children in bed and the older ones sleeping out for the night, I saw that what I had been building was a set for the play that was about to begin. Pat and I were the main characters, the writer, whose name was Ed, had a crucial part, and the kitchen, the kitchen represented, in its passing moment of completeness, what was about to be dismantled. What was about, I should say, to be detonated.
Michael and Joe were five and a half, and were about to enter kindergarten. The older children had been in school until three every day before the summer, and were now in summer day camp. All day long, every day, for almost a year, it had been the boys and me. The house and the five-acre yard made up a world for us, and it seems to me that I remember from my own childhood that thick, surrounding quality that such worlds have. The yard was full of old plantings—flowering bushes, beds of tiger lilies, lilac trees, patches of iris, spirea bunched everywhere. A stream ran not far from the house, and there was a long sledding hill between the house and the road. For an entire year, between eight and three every weekday, my sons and I lived an idyllic domestic life. The fall was colorful, the snow was deep, the spring wet, the vegetation just at eye level for them. The world was full of secure hiding places, the demanding older children were gone, they had me, they had each other. Passing completeness. It was no fiction, this complete daily world. For those hours of the day I was happy and productive and as pleased with my sons as they were with me. Two mornings a week that summer they went to nursery school—Pat’s idea, to encourage other friends and the beginnings of independence from each other. I left the contractors in the house and walked down the gravel road to Ed’s place. It was an old, old house, three rooms and a summer kitchen out back with a potbellied stove cast in 1884. Ed was winterizing it, and to me it had the austere glamour of temporary shelter, like a tent pitched at fourteen thousand feet.