The Age of Grief

by Jane Smiley

  Well, I didn’t call my brother, then my sister, then my mother. I think that resurrection should be prepared for rather carefully. I don’t mean mine. They can’t prepare for mine. I mean theirs. I’m not sure that I could bear it, bringing them to life again.

  I do long, with a sort of physical itch, to tease my mother, to sit at the dinner table, aghast at what she has put before us, and say, “Mom! This is slop! What is this? Don’t you go into D’Agostino’s by the front door, with the customers?” My brother would be laughing. My sister would be laughing. My mother would lift her fork with dignity, and say, “It’s fine, it’s good. You children are so persnickety.”

  Those dynamite operations manuals were the first manuals I ever looked into, and I loved the flatness of the prose, the elementary school drawings. And that is where my life began. The fact is that I am a happy person. Now that I know the lingo, I might call those banks and supply depots “randomly selected containment buildings” and the explosions themselves “very sudden chemical reactions.” Maybe one of my bombs did kill someone, maybe one did, though none of the newspaper accounts ever reported such a thing, and the wanted poster doesn’t mention a death. All of them went off after midnight, or in deserted military installations. But I often wonder, what if someone died? I look around my kitchen, out at the garden, down the hall at the oval glass in the front door. I feel the love that I feel every day for the simple objects of this solitude, for the spacious silence mid-continent, and I think, that’s one price to pay for this, that life for this one. In college I would have been ashamed to think such a thought, but now, every day, with every safety check, every cost-benefit analysis, every decision about what maintenance to order first, I consider the comparative value of life, money, and time. I glorify the one over the many, this one over that one. Sometimes I look at my twenty-year-old face on the post office wall and wonder about that blank expression. Maybe it was terror, the terror of only being able to imagine what I had already known. Missouri is a place I could not have imagined if I hadn’t been forced to.

  • • •

  After Scott died, I did not know what to do with the dogs or the cats, or the weeds in the garden, or the produce from the garden. I did not know how to cook myself dinner or check the oil in the truck we had bought together, or how to answer the door if an unexpected knock came. At the time, I thought that I was not especially sad, not sad enough, maybe. But I see now that it is the ultimate sadness for a smart person to become stupid, for a competent person to wring her hands, for a person full of thoughts to go blank. In the summer I fell into the well. When I was building bombs I was never inattentive for a moment, but I sometimes think about the well accident, wondering about how I could have gotten so careless. I was standing in front of the pump, filling a jug, and the well cover broke away beneath me. I threw out my arms and caught myself at ground level. I looked down at the surface of the water, some twelve feet below. It was July 20, my mother’s fifty-ninth birthday. That was what I thought of as I clambered out of the well. I began shivering uncontrollably in the middle of the night, and shivered for five hours, because if I hadn’t caught myself, I would have treaded water until I died of exhaustion.

  Last night, Michael brought an expensive bottle of wine for dinner that he had gotten in Kansas City, and I served homemade cannelloni. The pine nuts alone cost me eight dollars a pound. We didn’t have much to say to one another. When the wine bottle was about a third full, Michael picked it up to refill our glasses, but instead of pouring anything out, he blew across the rim of the bottle. Then he poured some in his glass and blew across it again. I find this sort of thing tedious, so I held my hand out with a put-upon air. He poured some into my glass. I made a face. He blew again, and said, “Wait a minute.”

  “For what?”

  “An idea.”

  “Personal or professional?”

  He blew again, then he said, “Don’t you have an old recorder or something around here?”

  “It’s on the mantel.” He brought it to the table and began blowing into it, covering holes. Then he handed it to me and said, “Play a note.”

  I played a G.

  “Hmm.”

  “What’s the idea?”

  “Why couldn’t you tell whether there was a leak in a pipeline by the pitch of sounds going through it?”

  “You mean the ammonia pipeline?”

  “Or natural gas. Any pipeline. Blow another note. Put all your fingers down and lift one finger off at a time.”

  I played C, D, F, on up the instrument. He said, “You could even tell where it was, if you had the proper acoustic equipment.”

  “And you wouldn’t have to turn off the pipeline to locate it, only to fix it. The pitch would locate it.” I sat up and smiled. This was why Michael and I were together. “And you wouldn’t have to send any special sound through it. In fact, you could test it regularly with just the pumping noise as your sound. You could rig up a computer program that would test it automatically, every thirty seconds.”

  “What if it were a branching pipe?”

  “The branch would act as another leak. It would just change the base line pitch.”

  “Maybe.” He poured out the wine and pushed back the food. I reached over to the sideboard for some graph paper. “Shit,” he said, “I wish I remembered more acoustics.”

  “You’re a genius,” I said.

  By midnight we had worked out all the variables we might find in the pipes at our own plant—multiple branching, length, diameter, acoustic interference, where to attach the sound-testing machines, how often to test, how many people would be put out of work (my contribution), how long production had been shut down for leak detection in the last year (Michael’s contribution). By midnight, Michael was sitting very close to me on the couch, his shoulder against mine and his thigh along my thigh. When he finished his peach pie, I got up and carried his dish into the kitchen, and when I came back, I saw him. He has long legs, and he was sitting deep in the couch, so his knees jutted out above the coffee table. His blue jeans stretched around his thighs so that I could make out the hardness of the muscles. He scratched his full head of hair and pressed his beard down with the flat of his hand, the way he does. He is a good specimen. I like him to be a little distracted, and he was, so I sat down beside him again.

  He squeezed me around the shoulders, and I looked around the room. The walls are a sort of rosy gray, the shades are Japanese rice paper. Hardwood floors, Scandinavian throw rugs, things my mother wouldn’t have spent her money on. I love this room, the circles of light spreading and joining, the neatness and quietness of it, the fact that it is mine, and the doors are closed and locked and the shades are drawn. Michael said, in a voice that showed that he thought he had earned something by the ingenuity of his idea, “Talk to me. Let’s have some news of your inner life.”

  I leaned against his knee and said, “I’ve told you that I don’t have an inner life. There is no inner life.” I kissed him. “I may look pretty, but it’s just natural chemical engineering.”

  He smiled and said, “Reactor design, huh? Ever heard of sympathetic detonation?”

  I smiled, and said, “That’s purely a problem of distance.” His flesh gave off a steady warm glow. I could not resist sliding my arms beneath his and laying my head against his chest.

  After Michael left, I sat down to write my mother a letter. I addressed the envelope first, just to try it out. There is no reason at all to believe that she still lives where she did. She likes to move. She doesn’t decorate, and she arranges the furniture the way it was in the previous apartment, but she does like the rooms to have different sizes and floor plans. We used to hate this moving habit of hers. Miriam would say, “Mom! We just got settled.” I would say, “Mom, the landlord hasn’t even managed to lose the deposit in the stock market yet!” and Avie would say, “Mom! What could be worse than this place? Let’s stop here and not tempt our luck!”

  But my mother would sigh and look aro
und and say, “I just feel like I’ve lived this one out. It’s too familiar. When I look at the dado on that wall, I get depressed.”

  “That’s because it’s dirty and needs painting! Let’s just paint it another color. Avie and I will do it.”

  “If you spend money on a rented place, it’s just thrown away.”

  “If you leave before the lease is up, it’s thrown away, too.”

  “But that money’s already gone. No one’s counting on it. There are a lot of nice neighborhoods in Brooklyn that we’ve never tried.”

  Then Avie would say, “You can’t live all those lives, Mom. You can only live one life.” His voice would get patient and slow. “You want to move all the time because you want to try out other lives, but you can’t.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Avram. I just don’t like the space to be the same shape all the time.”

  “Why not? Why not?” He was angry.

  “I don’t know, Avram. People are different. They should accept people’s differences.”

  I wrote “Dear Mom,” then “Hi, Mom,” then “Dearest Mom,” then “Hey, Mom!” all in a row, on the same sheet of paper. The fact is, I have never written my mother a letter. I had never lived out of local calling distance before the bombings. I left the piece of paper next to the envelope on the kitchen table. I found a stamp and put it on the envelope, then I turned out the light and went to bed.

  Once, Scott and I were having breakfast. He was looking at me, and then his eyes shifted and looked past me, out the window. All of a sudden, he jumped up and ran out the back door, grabbed the .22 on the back porch, and came around past the window. At the corner of the house, he dropped to one knee and let off a shot. Then he went out into the garden and came back with the rabbit that had been eating our lettuce plants. It was dead. He was proud of the shot, proud of its quick wit, I see now. Then, I just kept saying, “It was loaded? That gun was loaded? There was a loaded gun on our porch? I can’t believe there was a loaded gun on our back porch!” When I remember that, I remember the shrillness of my voice. Finally he shouted, “Goddammit, would you go to school?” After the accident, I found that gun. He had loaded it again. I don’t know why. He didn’t hunt, even rabbits. Mutual silence got to be a position with us, something to be defended.

  I couldn’t sleep. Michael’s idea was brilliant, a concrete example of how well we work together. He isn’t very practical, and I could already see how he would get discouraged about the logistics of testing it without me. With the memory of his flesh against mine, the sense of our parallel tracks beginning to converge toward the horizon didn’t entirely displease me.

  At dawn, I was wide awake and itching to work in the garden. “The back forty,” as Michael calls it, occupies the crown of a south-sloping hill, and I want to begin building terraced beds in the fall, perennial flowers and herbs, walls about four railroad ties high. If you stand far enough away, you will see a triangle of daffodils spreading down the hillside, then, later, a mass of red climbing roses growing over the terrace walls. As a rule, I live much more in the future than in the past. I crawled around the garden, clearing mulch from the paths and smelling the dewy odor of tomatoes and nasturtiums. I have only had one tomato so far this year, and no peppers. The vines are loaded, though. I crawled along next to the onions, and bent the tops down one by one. When I got up to go inside, it must have been about seven, and I was surprised to see a car pulling into the driveway. It was a late-model American sedan, dark blue. I followed my habit, which now doesn’t have much to do with fear, and hid behind the bushes of tomato vines in their cages. The driver’s door opened first, and a thick man in a sport shirt got out. He craned his neck toward the house, then wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. He didn’t come out from behind the door, but stood, staring, then said, “Well, I don’t know.” Now the other door opened, and the gray head of an older woman rose above the roof of the car. She closed the door and walked toward my front steps. She had had her hair done, and she carried a very large purse pressed against her stomach, both hands gripping the clasp. She went up the steps and knocked, then, after a minute, peered in the window. She turned. “Doesn’t seem to be anyone home.”

  The man said, “Truck’s here.”

  “Is this the place, you think?”

  “No telling. Want to look around?”

  “Ought not, I don’t think.”

  Nothing was recognizable about this couple. There was no one in my family who could have been transformed by any amount of time into either of them. Of the license plate, I could only see that it was out of state, white. The woman stood on the porch, her back to the door. She sighed, clicked the clasp of her purse. He said, “Come on, then.” I didn’t want to look at them any more, and so I lay down among the vines and listened for the departing crunch of their wheels. It came soon enough.

  At ten o’clock I staggered into bed, exhausted at last. I woke up in the middle of the afternoon, disoriented and with the sound of the television in my ears, which frightened me. The sense of someone else in the house when I am waking up always frightens me. I always imagine that it is the FBI, making themselves at home, looking at my stuff, eating my food. I know that they don’t do this, that in fact it was my fellow leftists who always did this back in the old days, but it is not rational, of course. Scott used to wake up shouting if one of the cats got under the covers. He thought it was a rat, and that he was in Khe Sanh again. Sometimes if thunderstorms began while we were sleeping, he would wake himself all the way up and listen to make sure that no whistles preceded the booms. War wounds. Now I realized that Michael was watching the baseball game in the living room, and I relaxed in bed and looked out the window.

  If I had broken up with Scott and he had moved away, I would now be able to call him on the phone from time to time and ask him how he is. This is literally my only conscious wish. He would be smoking a cigarette, and he would inhale audibly, and I would imagine him taking his mustache between his lip and his lower teeth, biting it a little. Then he would say, “Sandy.” We would be uncomfortable, too ready to prove, by talking fast, that we were both fine, happy, and productive, that we didn’t miss each other. He might have a wife to show me up with, and kids. I would be exactly as I am now, turning over in this very bed, reaching for this very telephone. No molecule of the scene I am looking at now would be different, except that Scott would exist somewhere. The more that Michael comes around, the more I have this wish, the more I let myself indulge the fantasy of it, of saying, “Did we love each other? Did I love you?”

  It is the third inning, and Michael is pounding the couch as I come into the room. An error at second, the Cardinals. Herr makes it, dropping the ball right out of his glove. “Shit!” yells Michael. “Did you see that dumb fucker?” His eyes follow me across the room. He says, “Do you mind that I’m here?”

  “I told you you could come over, didn’t I?”

  “I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. I’m fine.”

  He doesn’t say anything to this, turns his eyes back to the game. He is hurt by my manner. He says, “When I saw you were sleeping, I knew I should just go home.”

  “Don’t, Michael. It’s my fault. I was up at dawn, and now I feel really terrible,”

  “Why were you up at dawn?”

  “Don’t quiz me.”

  “I’m not quizzing you. I’m just asking.” He stands up and goes over and turns off the television.

  “Are we having a fight? You know I hate fighting.”

  He says, “I don’t think we’re having anything as promising as a fight.” He goes toward the screen door and opens it. I am distracted by the color of the grass as the late afternoon sun falls across it, a hot, stark summer green, the way it gets only here, mid-continent. I turn my eyes to his face consciously, and he says, “You were so relaxed last night.”

  “I wasn’t rel
axed.” He waits for me to say what I was, but I can’t go on. And those are the last words we speak. He goes out to his car, gets in, and drives out of the driveway, pulling a tail of fine dust, and I go into the silent house. I sit on the couch where he was sitting.

  My grandfather watched the Yankees on television every Saturday. My grandmother was under five feet, my grandfather not much over. My grandmother would be knitting an intricate and brightly colored outfit for one of those plastic dolls they had before Barbie dolls. This was for me. I hated dolls, and I would be pretending not to notice. Ringing through the apartment was the sound, not of the Yankees’ announcer, but of Rigoletto, because part of watching the Yankees was turning the sound off and listening to the Texaco opera broadcast. My grandfather called himself a “Yankee,” Yiddish pronunciation, “Yahnkih.” The afternoons were long, and I was thinking, always, about something else, half bored, looking at the dust motes in the sunbeams, running my eyes across the titles in the bookcase and making objects of the long words. An opera is actually just about as long as a baseball game. I close my eyes now, and I look at my grandfather in his chair. He has thick hair, mink-brown, and his ears jut out of it like sails. His foot is up on a cushion, because he has gout in his big toe. He glances from the game to my grandmother and smiles. She is not looking at him. A socialist, an American, a Yahnkih, a man happy in his self-contradiction. I open my eyes, and I am in Missouri, and everything is collecting in my head, light and heavy, animate and motionless, bright and dark. Of my life it could truly be said that all is lost, except these things.