Homeland and Other Stories (10 page)

Back in the tent I couldn't sleep. Like the pea princess I was aware of every stone underneath the air mattress and the down sleeping bag, and I felt myself growing bruised and old while Peter breathed heavily in a distant, happy land. I knew we would never really be together; we needed different things. I loved the time I spent with him, but felt in some other chamber of my
heart that it was time wasted. That I ought to be doing something else while there was time.

Sometimes I get this way, letting my mind run in frantic fast-forward like a videotape gone wild. In a year, I say to myself, I will be forty. In a decade, fifty. Peter may be the last man ever attracted to me purely on the basis of sex. I wonder what else there is to me, what will become of me, and of Julie. I can't see staying in my marriage, but neither could I ever be the one to bring it down just to please myself. Nathan would say I was selfish, and he would be right. All I can imagine for certain is Nathan's anger, the roof caving in and plate glass flying as the house implodes on itself the way a light bulb will when the vacuum inside is disrupted.

 

I woke up in the heat, with morning sun on the tent and Peter tasting my ear. Peter's sexual appetite was surpassed only by his supply of condoms, which seemed to swarm around him in their bright yellow wrappers like a hive of personal bees. Sometimes they surprised me in my purse or the glove box of my car, lying dangerously close to the little folded notes in which my daughter the linguist had declared, “
I ? MY MOM
.”

I turned over and ran my tongue along his collarbone. He rolled me onto his chest and bingo, we were connected. Peter's body and mine were like those spacecraft that lock or dock, moving together all of their own accord. I've heard that up there in the absence of air molecules objects develop their own gravity.

Peter turned his face into my hair and whispered, “The Boy Scouts are here.”

Mother of God, it was true. I could hear sounds of hatcheting and seventh-grade swearing and, I imagined, of two sticks being rubbed together, all in the near vicinity of our tent. They
had arrived early this morning, obviously, or very late last night. The man at the front gate must have thought we were the first wave of Scouts.

Peter began to roll under me like the ocean and I had a good deal of difficulty being quiet. We were lying right out on the same ground where boyhood industry was getting fires built and kindling split; copulating, very likely, in the middle of a merit badge. The only thing between them and our nakedness was a membrane of blue nylon, and it seemed so thin.

Peter's hands held the small of my back like some piece of maple or walnut they understood. “Peter,” I pleaded, about to laugh out loud, or cry, “have pity on the children. They're trying to remain clean in thought, word, and deed.”

“How do you know?”

I tried to hold my breath. “I'm sure of it. It's one of their laws.”

“Girl Scout laws,” he said, his fingers sending chills up my spine that threatened to disturb the peace. “I don't think the Boy Scouts have that one.”

 

On the way to the Petrified Forest we had a fight. Peter drove faster and faster as we argued, and my ears were roaring so ferociously that I demanded we roll up the windows and sweat until the argument was over. We were back in the low country, in the heat.

It started when I found a condom in my purse. I wasn't really angry, but we'd talked about this. “I've asked you not to put them in there,” I said.

“You put it there. Three weeks ago. Remember, when we met at the bicycle race and walked down to the river?”

Men will make fun of you for lugging around a purse, and
then the minute you've set off for somewhere they'll ask if you could just stick in for them this little thing or that.

“Just try to keep them out of my territory, okay?” I asked. “That's all Julie needs, to find her own mother's illicit contraceptives.”

I felt the weight of last night's depression moving back into my chest. Also I was getting a headache, an actual migraine—something I'd rarely had since Julie's birth rewrote the recipe of my body chemicals. As a teenager I'd had them like clockwork. First came the aura: an arc of blue lights strung across my field of vision. Slowly it would curve around into circles, so I'd see the world as if through two long glass tunnels in a sparkling ocean. Then the pain would clamp down.

“It wouldn't be the end of the world if Julie found a condom,” Peter said. “She would probably think they were for you and Nathan.”

“She knows about Nathan.” Nathan had had a vasectomy, performed for free by a colleague in exchange for his mother's cataract operation; Nathan felt he'd gotten the short end of the bargain. “She knows way too much,” I said. “Sometimes I think she reads my mind.”

“What do you mean when you say, ‘That's all Julie needs'? You talk as though she's constantly about to step over a cliff.”

“I just think there's enough stress in her life right now. For example, she thinks she hates her own father.”

“Why do you deny the validity of her feelings? Maybe she really does hate him.”

“She can't really hate him. He's her father.”

“He is her biological father, which doesn't prove he is good for her. Male guppies eat their children.”

“He's cold-blooded, but he's not a guppy.”

“Children,” said Peter the authority, who hadn't laid eyes on
his sons in a month of Sundays, “have excellent instincts about what is good for them.”

“Children need their parents.”

“Do you think your mother was good for you? You're always saying she robbed you of self-confidence.”

“She was all I had. Daddy couldn't do a whole lot for us.”

My father was killed in a train derailment when my sister was still too young to know him from any other man without a beard. After that, Mother had a career behind the soda fountain at Woolworth's. On weekdays you could see her there drawing out sodas with no expression on her face, or standing at the juicer making orange juice, stacking up the emptied-out halves like a display of bright beanies, their cheerfulness lost on her. The franchise was owned by a Mr. Fuller, who people said was a philanderer. Mother told us this meant he gave away his savings. His wife threw herself off a bridge and lay at the bottom of the Licking River for nine days before they dragged her out, the reason being that she had tied a whole cement block around her neck with binder's twine and it took her down like an anchor. She was a small, weak woman, and people speculated about how she'd lifted the thing up in the first place. She must have made a great effort. On the day of her funeral, my mother got the job.

She worked there still. I had the crazy idea—I knew I wouldn't do it—of sending Mother a postcard from the Petrified Forest.

Peter was still involved in winning the argument. “But what if you
had
had a choice?” he insisted. “As Julie does.”

“What do you mean?”

“What if you'd had two parents, one who was good for you, and one who was not?”

It seemed unfair of him to egg me on like this. He certainly wouldn't be there to offer her fatherhood, if I bailed out of my marriage.

I sighed and rolled down the window. “I don't know what people do when they have choices,” I said. “I don't think I've ever had any.”

 

I don't suppose I had honestly expected whole trees, standing upright, but really there was so little to see. A young Navajo woman in a Smokey Bear hat at the park entrance handed us a brochure. “There's a map of the auto route in your brochure,” she said. “There are nine stops. Please stay on the trails, and have a great day.” She sounded as if she would willingly surrender her job to progress, if a robot could be found.

At each stop we parked the Volvo and hiked the hundred yards or so through the desert to the vista, hoping every time that we were about to see the real petrified forest. Peter tried to make it seem more impressive by reading passages from the brochure about the mineralization process, how actual living tissue had over the millennia turned to stone. But it wasn't trees, just trunks, scattered here and there over the desert. Not even whole trunks, really, just short lengths of log toppled over and broken into parts. “Take Nothing but Pictures, Leave Nothing but Footprints,” we were instructed by signs at every turn, but if there had ever been anything to take it must have been carted off long ago. At the later stops, some people weren't even getting out of their cars. A giant mobile home hummed like a vibrator next to us in the Stop Eight parking lot, its windows rolled up to hold in the air conditioning. High up in the passenger seat, a woman in a sun visor sat petting a cocker spaniel, waiting while her husband went out for one more try.

I hated to admit Nathan was right, but they had no business calling this a forest. It reminded me of a Biblical disaster area—a tribe of toppled-over women who'd all looked back and got turned into pillars of salt.

 

Finally, on our way back, something went right: we found the Wupatki campground. Peter bustled around setting up camp, pleased with himself. He lit the lantern and built a fire and pitched the tent while I slowly wrapped each ear of corn in aluminum foil. He buried them in the coals like little mummies, making a ritual of it, saying that by the time we returned from our hike to Wupatki it would be done to perfection.

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:

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.

M
ILLIE
O
RMSBY 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!”