Homeland and Other Stories Page 10

  The pain in my head was subsiding. I knew when it was gone I'd be left with a migraine aftermath, the sense that my brain had been peeled like a fruit. And there was another sensation too, which might stay with me for days--an animal feeling, a need to hide and rest somewhere, and think.

  I wasn't sure I felt like going out to the ruins with Peter. I knew that would be all right with him; the hike was no longer an important point on the agenda. There was still no moon to speak of and we had, after all, already made love under the stars. Peter's interest in Wupatki was at this point more archaeological. He brought my pea jacket and draped it around my shoulders, telling me to sit and take it easy. He could be a family sort of man at certain moments. He brought me a tin cup and the bottle of brandy.

  I slipped my arms into the coat sleeves and sat on the picnic table with my feet on the bench, and drank brandy in hopes that it would warm my hands. I hadn't thought to bring gloves. It is impossible to foresee, in hundred-degree weather, that you'll ever want gloves. I'd done well to think of bringing along my pea jacket.

  I had a sudden thought, and reached into my pocket for the pebble, to see if it was obsidian. I held it in the lantern light. It wasn't. It was an ordinary smooth gray pebble with white lines running through it. There was also in my pocket a piece of folded paper. I unfolded the note and read:

  MOM, I KNOW YOU LOVE PETER. WHATEVER YOU WANT TO DO ABOUT DAD IS OKAY. JUST YOU AND ME IS OKAY. I YOU.

  Peter was off somewhere outside the circle of light. I could hear him crackling quietly through the woods in search of fallen timber. He returned to camp with an armload of branches and set about breaking them into lengths and stacking them according to thickness.

  Eventually he was ready to go. "I think I just need to sit here awhile in the peace and quiet," I told him. "Till my ears stop roaring from the car. You go on without me."

  "I will," he said, "but I'll miss you."

  He kissed me and left the flashlight, teasing that I'd need to look out for bears, before he set off like a cheerful German hiker to find the trail head. He promised that even if he made it to Wupatki, he wouldn't stay long.

  When he was gone I turned down the lantern until the white flame hissed and died. I sat on the picnic table hugging my knees, out there in the pitch dark with nothing familiar over my head but my mother's garden of stars. The roaring in my ears, I knew, wasn't going to stop. It wasn't from the drive. It was the crashing of the petrified forest. Stone limbs were dropping heavily and straight to the ground; trunks crumbled, and granite leaves splintered like glass. When it was over, there would be only Julie and me left standing in the desert, not looking back.

  Survival Zones

  MILLIE ORMSBY IS TRYING to tell her friends Roberta and Ed the joke she heard from her thirteen-year-old grandson, Clay. The joke is about why the punk rocker crossed the road, but she can't remember the punch line.

  "Well, now it's slipped my mind," she says, annoyed. When she deals the cards she loses count and has to start over. "It had something to do with an animal."

  "It probably wasn't any count," Ed says. "They all ought to go in the army and get a decent haircut. That would be funny." Ed is in a bad mood because they're playing three-handed hearts instead of Buck Euchre, boys against girls, which is the normal routine on Saturday nights. Tonight Darrell is in bed with the stomach flu. Every so often he lows like a calf from the bedroom and Millie has to go get him some more Seven-Up.

  Millie can't stop worrying over the joke, and is going through a list of every animal she can think of. "What animal would you all be, if you could be anything?" she asks. Millie is a reasonable person, but easily sidetracked.

  "I'd be one of them dern ear worms eating my corn," Ed says, pulling in another trick of hearts. "They've eat better than us this year."

  Ed's wife, Roberta, knows he would like to have said "damn." "You'll get the last laugh on them," she says. "As soon as we get a good hard freeze."

  "Isn't that the truth," Millie says. "You'd just as well be a turkey, long about this time of year, Ed." It's the Saturday before Thanksgiving.

  Roberta passes off another heart to Ed. "I'd be a kangaroo," she decides on impulse. "I've always wanted to see that part of the world."

  Ed snorts. "You ought to be a cola bear," he says, in a tone that indicates he knows more about it than his wife. "They live in that part of the world."

  "Oh, that's what I'd be," cries Millie. "They're real cute. We seen them on TV the other night."

  Now that she's mentioned it, Roberta thinks her friend actually looks something like a koala bear. She and Ed saw the same Wild Kingdom show at their house. The koala bears sometimes spend their entire lives in a single tree. "No, I'd want to be bigger than that," she says. "A kangaroo could get around. There's one for you, Millie. A kangaroo'd get across the road."

  "Why, it was a chicken, of course," Millie says, suddenly stricken with memory. "It was because he had a chicken stapled to his ear." When she sees their empty faces she pinches her right earlobe. "The punk rocker. Right here, you see? Like it was a earring, I guess."

  "Ha ha," Ed says. "So funny I forgot to laugh."

  Millie is flustered and a little embarrassed. She accidentally lays down the Black Lady when she could have made someone else take it. "Oh, that one was bad. I never would've told it if I'd remembered how it ended up."

  Roberta is still thinking about the joke. "But it doesn't say why the chicken crossed the road, in the first place."

  "Everybody knows that," Ed tells her. It seems that way to Roberta too, but when she really thinks about it she doesn't know the answer. She doubts that Ed does, either.

  On the way home in the car she says to Ed, "Listen to us talk," although they aren't talking. "We sound like a bunch of old folks. Talking about what animals we'd be. We don't even understand our own kids' jokes anymore."

  Ed has had enough of playing cards with two women and is in no mood to talk about being old. He is five years older than Roberta, crowding fifty, as they say.

  Their family has missed out on a generation, it seems to Roberta. Their daughter Roxanne is still in high school, and Millie already has an adolescent grandson. Roberta and Ed waited awhile before having Roxanne, thinking they would have plenty of time for family, but it didn't work out that way. Two years later they'd lost a boy. He was due on George Washington's birthday but came on Thanksgiving instead, the wrong holiday. He was perfectly formed--Roberta had wanted to see him, even though Ed thought she shouldn't--and as she lay in bed bleeding out the rest of what her uterus no longer needed she could only think of that one word: perfect. Inside his chest he had two tiny, perfectly flattened lungs, like butterfly wings--pushed out before he was ready to fly. Roberta was shocked that her body could have let them all down this way. It was like taking a bad fall on level ground: an unexpected thing for a body to do, and not easily forgiven. After that she'd lost heart for the family project. Roxanne, she'd decided, Roxanne who confronted life confidently on solid little legs, would be enough.

  Roberta is going through the change of life now. It's a bit early but no special cause for concern, her doctor says. He made light of the whole business, in fact, pointing out that women rarely have children after forty anyway, if they can help it.

  Their car passes through town quickly because all four of Elgin's stoplights are set to stay on green after ten o'clock. Ed turns onto Star Route I, which will take them home to their farm. On a portion of the large piece of land that was once Ed's family's farm they raise livestock and feed corn and have a small apple orchard.

  Although the road is just barely blacktopped now, it makes Roberta feel old to remember when it used to be dirt. She and her brother Willis rode their bikes out this way often when they were children, exploring the routes by which they would lead their parents and friends out of Elgin when the Russians dropped the H-bomb. Later they learned that if this were to occur, people would be coming into town, not going out. Elgin was in what was called
a "survival zone": a band of small communities around Cincinnati to which people from the populated areas would flee for sustenance and shelter.

  An H-bomb is what it would take, Roberta thinks. She has lived in Elgin for more than forty years, and during that time no one she knows of has ever moved here from Cincinnati.

  When they pass by the drive-in Roberta notices the movie that's playing, something called Octopussy. She pays attention because Roxanne has gone to see it with her boyfriend. Roxanne will graduate in the spring ("If I don't flunk math," she tells everyone), and is going with a very polite boy on the football team who is also a senior. Since there wasn't a game tonight, they went to the drive-in and are probably still there. Or they may be home now, necking on the davenport with the lights out and the front curtains open, so they can see the car lights come up the driveway.

  Sure enough, when Ed and Roberta pull up she sees the drapes snap together and then glow yellow as the light comes on behind them. She is pretty sure Ed doesn't notice this, nor will he see the flush on Roxanne's face when she greets her parents inside, looking happy.

  Danny is just getting ready to leave as they come in. He's a quarterback; Roberta has seen him on the ball field in tight football pants, spinning around with the ball held high over his head, as graceful as one of the male ballet dancers on educational TV. But when he's in their house, in their presence, Danny pulls at himself as if he's suddenly outgrown his clothes. It makes Roberta sad. But he's a Talmadge, she tells herself, and Talmadges are shy. When she was in high school she dated Roland, Danny's father, for a time. It took him six months to get up the nerve to give her a dry, woody-tasting peck on the mouth. Ed Gravier, even though he was a Methodist, was older and had seemed fast by comparison. The same pompadour he wears now had given him a worldly air back then, like James Dean. If James Dean had lived, Roberta supposes this would be his lot now. Slicking his hair into a kindly, old-fashioned style while his teeth go bad and his children ignore his advice.

  Roland Talmadge had gone on to marry the most timid girl in Roberta's class. Roberta has secretly joked to Millie that it's a miracle her daughter's beau was ever born. In this respect Danny seems to have made progress beyond his parents' generation.

  Roberta turns on the late movie. Roxanne has gone to her room and Ed has turned in for the night, too, but Roberta has been having trouble falling asleep. Ed says she should take a shot of Old Grand-dad, but that only causes her heart to beat fast and make her anxious.

  The movie is The Way We Were. Roberta saw it at the drive-in years ago. She enjoys the movie more because of this; she's able to fill in the colors, even though they only have black-and-white. She knows, for instance, that Barbra Streisand's fingernails are red. Roberta remembers clearly how she ran them over Robert Redford's back in the bedroom scene, but of course they've cut that part. One minute they're kissing and the next minute they're in the kitchen, with Barbra fixing breakfast. Roberta feels that her own life has been like that, with the exciting parts cut out. She will soon wake up and be old, with no inkling of what she missed.

  She would love to go out and see real movies but Ed says no, wait a few years and it will be out on TV. He doesn't seem to miss the colors or the bedroom scenes. They could probably afford a color set now, but Ed claims to be able to see the colors perfectly well in black-and-white. Sometimes to prove it he'll call them out. "That's a green shirt he's wearing," he says. "That girl's hair is red." Sometimes Ed is wrong, though. For years he thought Peter Graves on Mission Impossible was blond, until one evening they watched it at Darrell and Millie's and saw that his hair was snow white like an old man's. "Well, that just don't look right," Ed had said. "You've got it adjusted wrong."

  She turns off the set and stands at the front window for a long time, looking out. A tall azalea bush stands like a spook by the front door, spreading its dark hands out under the greenish porch light. It was planted by Ed's old mother--Roberta remembers her as old, anyway--when she first moved here from the South. Roberta loves the azalea in the spring when it's covered with white blossoms, but it gives her a good deal of trouble in the winter. She has to remember to cover it before frost comes. This year she has about decided to let it go. She doesn't believe anyone else will ever bother with protecting it, so eventually the azalea will die anyway: either before Roberta or the first winter after. She's running out of energy for unwinnable battles against nature.

  She goes into the kitchen and is surprised to find Roxanne sitting at the table in her yellow terry robe. There is a full glass of milk in front of her, untouched, and it reminds Roberta of times in Roxanne's childhood when she would go through stages of refusing to eat or drink certain things she'd always liked, for no good reason. Roberta discovered over the years that it generally meant something was bothering her.

  "I thought you were in bed, hon. How was the movie?" Roberta asks.

  "Oh, it was dumb. It was one of those James Bonds, where he goes gallavanting all over the world with women dripping off of him. I don't think Danny cared for it either."

  Roberta often thinks Roxanne sounds mature for her age, stuffy even, and wonders if she has suffered for having older-than-average parents. She begins to put away the supper dishes that were left in the drainer. "Well, maybe the next one that comes will be something better."

  Roxanne gets up to help her mother, drying out the insides of the glasses, which are still fogged. This has always been Roxanne's job because she has such slender hands, "piano hands" people call them, though Roxanne has never learned to play any instrument.

  "Mama, Danny and me are talking about getting married."

  "Now? Before you even graduate?"

  "No, not now. Right after, in June."

  "What's your hurry?" Roberta watches her daughter's back as she reaches to put away a glass. She wonders if Roxanne would be able to tell her if she were pregnant.

  But that doesn't seem to be it. "He's going away next year, most likely to Indianapolis," Roxanne says, in a tone of voice Roberta can't quite decipher. "They're giving him a football scholarship to IUPUI."

  "Well, honey, that's real exciting."

  "I know it. But I'm scared to death. What in the world would I do in Indianapolis?"

  "You'd do just fine, I imagine. Nothing ever slows you down."

  "No I wouldn't, Mama. I'm so stupid. Remember that time you and Daddy took me up to Cincinnati to see the Christmas lights? And I cried? I get all bewildered in a city."

  "You weren't but nine, Roxanne. You're a lot different from what you were then. There's only one person in the world I ever heard say you were stupid, and that's Miss Roxanne."

  "But see, Mama, I'd have to do something. I couldn't just be Danny's wife. I don't think they're paying him that much."

  "Well, you could wait awhile. You could always stay here and work at Hampton's for a year or two, till everything's situated." Hampton Mill, just outside of Elgin, produces men's knitwear; it's the largest employer of women in the Ohio Valley, and virtually the only one in the vicinity of Elgin. Roberta worked there before she married, and off and on for many years after because the income from farming is so unpredictable.

  "I thought about Hampton's," Roxanne says. "I know I could stay, but it's scary; he might meet somebody else. Or I might." She looks at her mother, checking to see if she understands. "You know the way things happen."

  Roberta is drying a wooden spoon and notices that the bowl of it has begun to go to splinters. "Do you know, I never told you this, but once upon a time I had the chance to marry Danny's daddy. Now, where would we all be if I'd gone and done that?"

  "Danny's daddy? Roland Talmadge?" Roxanne makes a face.

  Roberta shakes the spoon at her, laughing. "Just you watch. Give him twenty years and Danny will be just as bald and just as much of an old string bean. If you're married to him all those years, you'll never even notice. And, if you're not, you'll run into him one day and say to yourself, "Thank goodness I threw that one back in the river!"
/>
  Roxanne looks upset. "That's enough to scare you out of marrying anybody."

  "Honey, what I'm trying to say is, things generally work out for the best, whichever way they go. Don't do something just because you think it's going to be your last chance in the world at being happy. There's lots of chances. You've got time." Roberta believes this is good advice, though when she listens to her own voice it sounds doubtful.

  In any case, Roxanne isn't paying much attention. "But that doesn't help me now," she wails. "I've still got to decide." She polishes off her glass of milk and wipes off her white mustache with the sleeve of her robe, looking so young it makes Roberta's chest hurt. "Mama, I'm just so petrified about the whole thing."

  In the years since her daughter developed a woman's body and a magazine-cover face, Roberta has seen Roxanne become self-assured, coy, serious, and occasionally angry, but never truly afraid, though she frequently claims to be petrified. Roberta suspects that this time it might be genuine.

  "What would you do, if it was you?" Roxanne asks her.

  Roberta has no idea what she will say. She feels as though a part of her is standing back with crossed arms, listening. "The way I've been feeling lately, I'm inclined to say I'd catch any train headed out of Elgin," she says. "But you know I wouldn't mean it. Look at me, born right down the road, and after all these years of chasing my tail doing nothing, here I still am."

  Roxanne's lips are pursed. She is too absorbed in the difficulties of being seventeen to want to hear the confusions of forty-four. Roberta gives her daughter a hug, and feels like crying. By the time they ask you what they ought to do, she thinks, you're too old to know what to tell them.

  On Thanksgiving morning Ed and his younger brother, Lonnie, watch football while Lonnie's wife, Aggie, helps in the kitchen. "Glued to the tube," Aggie says, rolling her eyes. "You'd think two grown men could find something constructive to do."