Homeland and Other Stories Read online

  "Okay then, pot pies it is," Miriam says. "Okay."

  Stone Dreams

  WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN my mother found birth-control pills in my sock drawer and declared that early promiscuity would ruin me psychologically. She said I'd been turned loose too young in the candy store and would go spoiled, that later in life I'd be unable to hold down a monogamous relationship. She said many things, but that one stayed with me. At the age of thirty-nine I was going on vacation with a man who wasn't my husband. There we sat in his Volvo, bald proof of my psychological ruin, headed north on the interstate along with the crowd of holiday travelers breaking the speed limit slightly.

  My lover's name was Peter, which we felt to be ironic because of my husband's great knowledge of rocks. Also, our destination was the Petrified Forest. None of this irony was intended, though. Life always provides me with better jokes than any I could invent.

  Peter was an intellectual and custom cabinetmaker with a lean body and appealing hands and a head of hair like some sweet, dark animal doomed for its pelt. The first time I saw him, his muscular abdomen set my fingers to wondering how it would like to have them go rippling across it. He'd shown up at our unfinished house to conceive the cabinetry, and was fully clothed, as you would expect, but I have a sixth sense about pleasing men in ways that aren't my business. I'm rarely wrong. My mother would say I can't help it, that my moral fiber decayed in adolescence like a twelve-year molar.

  I settled my neck into the soft leather headrest of my lover's car, letting my hair blow out the window. Peter's Volvo was old but the seats were reupholstered in an unbelievably soft material that he claimed, with a straight face, to be kitten leather. The car had everything except air conditioning, which in his opinion put an artificial distance between the passenger and the passage. Men can say things like that; they don't have to put up with hair whipping in their eyes for hours on end. I was hoping I looked attractively disheveled, and not browbeaten. I'd dressed for this adventure in a black tank top and a pair of jeans whose most striking feature was a zipper that ran all the way from front to back. Technically I suppose you could zip them right in two. I'd bought the outfit at my daughter's insistence on one of our afternoons in the mall. The real name of this style, she informed me, was "drive-in pants." I had grave reservations. "Nobody but Cher ought to be wearing an outfit like this at my age," I said.

  "No, Mom, it's great," she said. "You look sexy."

  Julie is thirteen, a dangerous time, I'm told, because soon she'll discover sex, just as surely as she learned ten years ago to pull the protective caps out of the electric sockets and toy with the powers lying hidden in the wall. I look at Julie's long flying hair, her coltish gait, and refuse to believe it. She and I are close. She leaves me notes, sweet things decorated with hearts, in places where I'll discover them as I go through the business of my day: in my change purse or the pocket of her jeans in the clothes hamper. Where would she hide sex? And how could she urge me into vampish clothes, if she truly understood the implications for family disaster? Still, her sock drawer I'd begun to avoid like the plague.

  "Julie wants to be a linguist," I told Peter, needing to alter my train of thought. For two weeks each summer Julie visited my mother in Kentucky, and in the early years would come home with cheerful reports of butter-and-sugar-on-bread for dessert, but more recently she'd brought back a fascination for country speech. "I'd knock you down for that shirt," my daughter will cry, and "Just a minute? I'll just-a-minute you over the head with something!" Last year she filled up a little notebook, studying Mother and her rook-playing cronies like Margaret Mead among the Samoans. I was floored to see my mother, policewoman of my adolescence, reduced to a list of quaint phrases.

  "A linguist?" Peter, who was tall, leaned back from the steering wheel as if its only purpose were for resting his hands.

  "That's what she says. She just made the announcement, and it's been one big argument between her and Nathan ever since."

  "Why is that?" he asked. "Does he want her in the family cornea business?" My husband is an eye surgeon. Rocks and minerals are just a consuming passion.

  "Oh no, I don't think there's anything he especially wants her to be. He just has to tell her what not to be. He says Noam Chomsky is a socialist. And Julie says that's the point, linguistics is a truly egalitarian science." The Upper Sonoran Desert was ripping by us at 3,000 rpm and my right ear was roaring from the wind. I was relieved to see Peter put on his blinker for the scenic route through Sedona. If scenery was an objective, he'd need to slow down. "Did you know phrases like that when you were twelve?" I asked, forgetting she'd turned thirteen.

  "Perhaps. But I'm not a fair example." It's true, Peter was probably not a fair example of anything, linguistically speaking. He was born in St. Louis but carried a trace of German accent, having been raised in a part of the city where, he claimed, you'd go for weeks hearing no English other than "Coca-Cola" and "Scram." Julie was fascinated. Whenever he came over on his visits, feigning interest in the woodwork--hugging us all and exclaiming, "Nathan, Diana! How is that veneer holding up?"--Julie would make him repeat her favorite phrase: "Varoom nicht?"

  "Well," I said. "I'm scared to death she's going to say something like that to me one morning at breakfast. A truly egalitarian science. That's exactly how she is, you know? She'd expect me to carry on a conversation on the same intellectual level as Nathan does."

  "But you would agree with her, and that would take the sport out of it. So there's no danger."

  "I suppose that's true," I said.

  Nathan and Julie and I live in a new house that is too large and dramatic for a family of three. There's lots of plate glass, with views of mountains and canyons if you're feeling naturalistic, or of the twinkling, seemingly distant lights of the city if you're feeling superior. In the living room are expensive copies of pre-Columbian art and genuine fossils--delicate fish that look like etchings--on slabs of pink and beige stone that harmonize with the carpet. I think the drama of the house gets to us, forcing us to rise to occasions we'd all rather just let pass. Nathan and Julie stalk around each other with faces like tragic masks. She's going through a stage in which she claims to hate Nathan. He really was good with her when she was a baby, but now that she's threatening to turn into a woman he seems to feel a great need to boss her around.

  I take classes in things that go well with Danish Modern--weaving and natural dyes, for instance, but never macrame--and envision myself writing poetry in some other, probably smaller house. Three days a week I teach steno and typing to junior-high students without an ambitious bone in their bodies.

  Now, I have a sister Eva, six years younger, who of all things works as a reporter for Japanese TV. They say she is the Jane Pauley of Japan. She has a Japanese boyfriend and can use chopsticks without giving it a thought, her mind totally on something else. I'm not sure how Eva got from here to there; I was already in Phoenix when she finished high school. We have the same features, everyone sees her picture and thinks it's me in a kimono, and yet Eva has gone so far in her life whereas I have only traveled. I'm the oldest and, according to all the books, should be the achiever, but there you go. I've never quite gotten over my hometown's limited expectations of me--of any girl, really. "Marry a millionaire" was the best they could come up with, "or teach school." I expected to settle for the latter, there seeming to be too much competition for the former.

  I went to college on my dead father's Social Security and did try adventurous electives--pre-Columbian history and modern poetry--but I never left home until I married Nathan and moved to Phoenix. Deserts of the world have a high incidence of cornea disease. Mother felt I'd chosen Nathan purposefully as part of an overall scheme centering on her abandonment, but the truth is I met him at a fraternity mixer and couldn't turn him down once we saw how perfectly I fit in with his plans. I would have sex with him now, marry him later, and type his way through med school. After that would come residency, and Julie, and Phoenix. It was as much a sur
prise to me as to Mother. I could only tell her it was lucky we didn't end up in Saudi Arabia--eye-disease capital of the earth--and then give her Julie for two weeks a year, the way the Aztecs every so often offered up to the grumpy gods a human heart.

  Apart from that first decision to submit to the pressures of a high-school linebacker and go to his family's doctor for birth-control pills, I don't believe I'd ever acted in a bold or decisive way. I have wished for a womanly friendship with my mother. I'd like to confess to her my doubts about who's in the driver's seat of my life, but she thinks I am Jezebel. That discovery of hers in my bureau really started us out on the wrong foot.

  Technically, Peter has pointed out, I'm not promiscuous. I'm serially monogamous. I hadn't consciously made love with Nathan in over a year, and my earlier affairs took place during similar dry spells. There had been a good number. Nathan didn't know about Peter, but I had a feeling he wasn't altogether in the dark either. We stayed together because he didn't seem to have other plans, and because I couldn't picture myself as being husbandless. There was my daughter to consider, still young, in need of years of shelter.

  Peter had two grown sons. People my age, I've found, can turn out to be the parents of children anywhere along the way from cradle to college, but this doesn't necessarily tell you the first thing about them. Peter's wife and boys barely made a dent in him. Now he was interested in Jung and Nietzsche and lived alone in his workshop, a rented studio with sawdust in the kitchen. He ate cold baked potatoes for breakfast. And he did not, by any means, wish to be saved. He wasn't someone I could marry.

  But we were in love by modern standards, and had been planning this trip for months--our first opportunity for daytime adventures and whole nights together. It was Memorial Day weekend: Julie was off to Mother's and Nathan to an eye-surgery meeting. Normally I might have gone along, but I'd begged off. There was my weaving class, I pointed out. Our answering machine had beeperless remote so my plan was to check in and answer calls as needed, pretending to be home. It would work as long as there were no catastrophes, no calls in the middle of the night, but then that's only life's ordinary degree of risk.

  Really I wasn't worried; I felt free. At that moment Peter and I were driving through the impressively inanimate landscape of Sedona; all that red, and it had nothing to do with blood. "Iron," Nathan would have announced. I could almost picture him in the back seat. "When the seas first learned to breathe oxygen, a carpet of rust was laid down over the face of the earth." I made fun of his way of talking, but in sixteen years I'd picked up his penchant for dramatizing things, and I did it better. Peter loved it. In Peter's presence my stories took on mythic significance. He called them "Diana's legends."

  "I think the happiest afternoon of Nathan's and my marriage was last Thanksgiving," I said, reminded by the cliffs. "When I found the petroglyph." Whenever Peter was driving, the burden of conversation fell to me. I settled back, looking out the window. "We'd eaten too much, and drunk too much, and these people I'd invited Nathan couldn't really abide so they'd left already, and Nathan and I went hiking up the arroyo behind the house. We hadn't hiked in years, I don't know what got into us. I think we felt like after all that food we had to do something virtuous."

  "After this trip," Peter pointed out, "you will have to hike the Grand Canyon."

  "Or the Himalayas," I said. "With ankle weights. But only if Nathan's flirting with a hula girl in Waikiki." His meeting was in Honolulu. If you move in the right circles you'll know that discussing torn retinas within a hundred yards of the pounding surf is not an unusual thing.

  "You're laughing," Peter said. "But it might be true. Don't you ever wonder if he's having affairs?"

  "Oh, God, if only he were. I really do wish he would."

  "Why, because you would feel less guilty?"

  I'd thought about this. "No. Because then we'd have to do something, he and I. About us."

  The sun was beginning to set on the red rocks of Sedona, firing them to a crimson exactly the color of Peter's Volvo. If this were a family vacation we would stop now and take a picture: with a red scarf draped theatrically around my neck, the crimson cliffs in the background, Nathan and I would pose in a contrived arrangement of passion on the hood of the red car. Julie would snap the shot.

  "And you can't do anything about you by yourself?"

  Peter really didn't know me. Our relationship was not primarily based on conversation. "I am a non-mover," I said. "An immobilized person."

  "He does have that effect." Peter had told me he was bored by only about eight things on earth, including Nathan.

  "No, I can't blame it all on him. It's me. I was that way before I met Nathan. I cling to steady things, like a barnacle clings to a boulder."

  "A barnacle will cling to anything," he said. "Flotsam and jetsam."

  "Only if it thinks those things are a boulder."

  "Nevertheless," Peter said. "That's something you ought to keep in mind." I wondered what he meant by that, until he added, "When you write poems about barnacles."

  He knew I didn't write poems about barnacles or anything else. I only read them. I fiddled with the radio. We were gradually losing the public radio station from Phoenix, so that the strains of Schubert's Trout Quintet were interspersed with what seemed to be a call-in show about garden difficulties. "You don't believe me, about being a barnacle, but it's true," I said. "When I went to college, which was supposed to make you feel, you know, uplifted, I felt like my loafers were screwed to the floor. The other students would ask these questions that made the professors pause and reflect, and they'd see symbolism without having it pointed out, but I just couldn't conceive of anything beyond what I saw on the page. I kept thinking there was some explanatory brochure I'd forgotten to pick up during registration. Or maybe it was because they all lived in dorms and I lived at home. Those other girls probably sat around in the halls with their hair in rollers and talked about symbolism."

  Peter laughed. "So let's go back to Thanksgiving," he said, in a laid-on-thick accent like Dr. Freud. "The happiest afternoon of your marriage." He knew it was not going to be a happy story.

  "Okay, we'd had this huge dinner. We were hiking up the arroyo, and we'd stopped for some reason. Oh, I know, Nathan had these new seventy-five-dollar running shoes and they weren't wearing right. He said if they weren't broken in correctly they would be no better than shoes from K-Mart. Believe it or not, there was something on those shoes you could actually adjust. So I was standing there looking up at the rocks. It's that part where it's narrow, like a little canyon. You know where I mean?"

  Peter nodded. He'd spent a good deal of time on the land where our house was built. He said he needed a sense of the topography before he could build cabinets that would complement the home's natural setting. I believe that some of his topographical devotion had to do with our kissing and kneading of each other's thigh muscles between the boulders.

  I shifted my hips on the kitten leather. "So there it was, I just saw it," I said, trying to concentrate on the dramatic core of my story. "The petroglyph. It was one of those, I can't think what they're called--the way a child will draw the sun, with the rays sticking out."

  "A sunburst."

  "A sunburst. But a child hadn't drawn it, it was carved there by the Indians hundreds of years ago as an act of worship, or whatever. The personal statement of an Indian, back when it wasn't vandalism to carve on the rocks in Camelback Park."

  Peter said, "In a time when personal statements were more scarce than rocks."

  "Yes," I said.

  It hadn't been our first, by any means--petroglyphs were an avid hobby of Nathan's, along with rocks in general. Prehistoric rock carvings, he said, were the aesthetic bridge between humans and the earth. But this makes him sound metaphysical, whereas the truth was he collected petroglyphs, the way birders will fiercely accumulate a life list. We were lost for seven hours once in Arkansas looking for a state park that was established on the basis of one decorated rock. W
hat we finally found was a boulder pathetically cordoned off like the Plymouth Rock, out of its element, and miserably defaced. The teenagers of Arkansas had immortalized their current passions alongside the holy artwork of the Osage. We'd made out lizards with tails like corkscrews, and something that looked like an umbrella, but the carvings were overwritten like a brutally graded essay test, in Nathan's opinion too damaged even to photograph. He blamed the Park Service, and pouted for days, though it wasn't unexpected. We'd had more than one vacation ruined by this form of vandalism.

  But Peter had heard that story. "What was so beautiful about finding that petroglyph," I said, "was that we hadn't even been looking. There it was, perfect, maybe nobody even knew about it, and I could just present it to him like a gift. Peter, you wouldn't have recognized him--you wouldn't believe Nathan could be that joyful. He didn't even run back to get his camera. Because it would always be there, two hundred yards from our living room. For weeks and weeks he made almost this show of postponing going back to photograph it. I think it gave him a thrill to be so casual."

  "As if he owned it," Peter said.

  "Exactly."

  Peter was waiting for the rest of the story.

  "But then what happened is, he got busy and forgot. He didn't remember until just a couple of weeks ago. They're putting in a new split level up there above the arroyo, and the blasting for the foundations split the face right off the rocks. Nathan had a fit."

  "Poor inconsolable Nathan."

  "Poor me! You're not going to believe this, now he's accusing me of having carved it there, and pretending to find it that day. He says I go out of my way to ridicule his avocation."

  "I'll bet you did," Peter said. "You climbed up there in the dark of night with a cold chisel and carved a petroglyph, to make a mockery of his avocation. That's something you would do."

  I laughed. The whole point of these stories, I knew, was to betray Nathan. I never mentioned his kindnesses or his broad intelligence, it was the unreasonable parts of our marriage I needed to pester and pick at like a scab. It wasn't that Peter wanted that, really. He was a generous human being, unusually self-assured, not requiring constant favorable comparisons with the husband the way some men do. After all, I was there in his Volvo instead of in Waikiki. But Peter understood, I think, that in some way these stories kept my head above water. As if I were really that far removed from my life, that much in command.