Marry or Burn (5 page)

“Melanie was our woodworking teacher,” Tom said. He was explaining to Francie and no one else. “Chip and me.”

“Your teacher, no kidding. Is she older than you?”

“I am twenty-five,” said Melanie, with a sad smile. “I am older than he is.”

Tom, who never bragged, said, “The students thought she was fifteen.” She looked fifteen.

“So . . . how many years have you been doing this stuff?”

“In Korea, I started when I was a child, with my father. Like Tom. My father was a builder of shrines.”

“Korea. Did you have a name in your language?”

“I have the name Young. But it does not mean
young
.” Melanie laughed, a laugh of such sweet apologetic lightness that it dug a splinter into Francie.

When no guesses came to her, even mean ones, Francie said, like a lawyer pressing forward, “What does it mean?”

“Oh, you will laugh, it means
eternal
,” said Melanie.

“Why would I laugh?”

“I've told Melanie about your sense of humor,” Tom said.

“Yeah,” Francie said. “If something's funny.” She heard the mean sound in her voice.

“Are you doing all right?” Dale asked, sitting close to her on the bench.

“I'm fine.” She was near the wall, the drywall she and Tom had just finished sanding. Let the others mill around admiring the work of months, the pine sills, the flush baseboards.

Patrick was clearing away the chili bowls. Dale patted Francie's leg and got up to join the circle the women were forming around Tom and Melanie so Georgette could bless them too. They had lit more sage and the smell bloomed up again in the room, like the pulse off the table saw when the wood fell in two.

After a while Francie got up dizzily. Chip was still on the floor, sorting through his CDs. He hadn't crowded in like the others to hug Tom and Melanie. Maybe he had wanted Melanie for himself. Or maybe he knew something about her. Something he couldn't warn Tom about because they were all friends. He worked with Melanie every day. You knew everything about a person you worked with. Almost everything.

“I'm sorry about Tupac,” she said to him.

“Yeah.” He looked up at her like a kid. “Why did they do it?”

What a shock to Tupac. How much did you see, in that second? How much did you know? Did you know your life was over? Did you know in that second that others were going to go on just as they were, but you were dead? “I'm sorry,” she said again. She thought of the day she had killed Gary. After he hurt her. Was it that? Was that all? And then, yes. She got the gun. She shot him. Shot him in the neck. With that neck, his coach used to say, Gary could drag a truck. He would pick Francie up
and carry her out of the room. That was when she weighed a hundred pounds herself. They were going to get married in a few years. Nobody warned them not to. A suds of blood and something else pumped out of his neck. And then what? Nothing, after that. For him nothing. For her, this. This life. If she closed her eyes she might see what was going to let her live it.

T
HESE WERE NOT the captions under the three faces chosen for our daughter by Lali of DataMate. They were our captions.

The first: a blurred picture taken from some distance away of a tall blond man standing in front of a tractor:

The second: no photograph.

“Look, she misspelled
entrepreneur
,” said my husband Sam.

“It's a typo,” Meg said.

“You can always run Spell Check,” said Sam, who knows little or nothing about computers.

The third: no photograph.

Of course we were uneasy. That recurring stuff about “this nation.” Admittedly this was just after the planes hit the towers and stirred feelings of unity among unlikely allies. Patriotism was coming around again, Sam said. Looking back, he said, he remembered detecting a hint of it some time before, in the phrase
the power of place
. That was the title of a course at the community college that our daughter had taken over for her friend Stacey when Stacey had her baby.

But who was this Lali? We knew she was from India; what did she know of American dating customs?

“Her site isn't for dating,” Meg said humbly. “It's for marriage.”

And too we had to wonder what Meg had typed in about herself to produce this particular list of three. She
is
lovely. With her thick brown hair and big eyes she's a very pretty girl, but shy. In college she did well and had boyfriends, one of them serious, but in the next ten or twelve years the men dried up. Now she was at that stage between all the good ones being taken and the return of those same men, divorced, like salmon coming back up the river.

But what, Sam wanted to know, was the algorithm? Had Meg specified Stable Provider, Easygoing Ways, and the Outdoors? Or had she merely revealed her gentle, practical, perversely kind nature to Lali of DataMate?

Meg took them in order, one, two, three. The farmer was Lali's first choice for Meg.

From the dinner with him, Meg came back with muddy shoes and a sad mouth. She had not met him in a restaurant, she had driven out to his farm. When she found it, a big piece of land near the airport with an ACREAGE FOR SALE, ZONED COMMERCIAL sign on it, she parked on the shoulder, crossed a field on foot, and knocked on the door.

Here I tried to keep my breathing even. What was she thinking, driving out there alone to see a man she had never met? “Were you . . . apprehensive?” I said. At thirty-four she was too old to be screamed at.

No, it was in the daytime. Lali had visited beforehand. Lali e-mailed, telephoned, met in person, and visited the home of every person on her list. She was bonded. The agency was her own; she had founded it, and kept it a small enterprise. She was careful, dedicated, and, because she was a Bengali, attuned on a personal level to the subtleties of matchmaking. Meg had complete trust in her.

Lali had made an exception to the rule that the first meeting between her clients must be in a public place, because this man
Marcus (not Mark) could not be lured from his house. She herself, Lali, had gone there to meet him. Never, I said to Meg silently, Never, Never Go Unaccompanied to the House of a Man You Don't Know and Get Out of the Car and Go In.

He opened the door as if he had been standing with his hand on the knob. After a careful look at him and a handshake, Meg stepped into his house.

What did he look like? Oh, it wasn't his looks—he was better looking, she realized, than she had expected, tall and fair-haired. It was his loneliness. His standing there in the half-light cast not by candles but by a computer left on in the dining room. He was lonely. Lonely and dejected beyond her powers of description. Oh, she would, our daughter, have given anything to be able to help that man. Except that the only thing givable at that point was herself. At first he was unable to enter into conversation. Now and then he would dive deep and come up with a sentence in his teeth, while Meg talked easily and at length, as she would not ordinarily do, being shy despite her years of teaching.

True, they sat so long on the porch, she on a rusty glider and he on the step so she couldn't see his face, that they witnessed the sunset. They saw a horse plod along the fencerow throwing its head up and back as if to take a pill, and another one follow it with slow, fated steps. She asked if they were his horses. “Some are, for now,” he said. “The two fellas at the fence, the bay over there with the herd.” There were cattle in the field as well. “Some of the horses you see are boarders.” She felt, as it got darker and he seemed to have dived for good, that she was in the presence of an almost-departed spirit making one last effort to stay in a human body.

His 4x4 was a pickup with a rifle rack in the back window. “At least,” said Meg, who is a pacifist vegetarian, “the rack was empty.”

“How did you know the rifle wasn't behind the door?” her father said, wringing his hands. “How do you know people weren't buried in the back yard? Who is this Lali that you would put this kind of trust in her?”

With the sunset over, Meg rose and took the man's cold hand in hers for the second time. Every mound had a callus, because he really was a farmer, had been growing alfalfa and pumpkins and keeping horses for ten years, and boarding horses and ponies owned by people in the city. Meg loved horses, though she knew them only from books. She loved cows as well, probably, she explained, because the brown-eyed white face of a stuffed animal from her childhood was stuck in her memory. A soft, floppy cow. Or possibly because the country had seen a mass production of china cows in her youth. They were everywhere; they were salt shakers, pitchers, key rings. People felt a love for the cow, Meg said, love for something a cow stood for or memorialized. This was the result—not the cause, which was commercial—of the herds of china cows. Meg could speak as an anthropologist while having a china cow on her desk.

Marcus had lost a wife, two years before. The wife had not died, she had left. She had turned her back on fields, horses, husband. One of her jobs had been to run one of those pumpkin patches with bales of hay, scarecrows, hot cider in an open kettle, and prizes for the kids who came out on school trips at Halloween. That's what the painted wagons were for, two of them beside the shed. Pulled by a garden tractor, the kids rode out into the rows of vines and came back with pumpkins on their laps. Marcus and his wife had had no children of their own.

Bit by bit Meg got all this out of him. The computer on the table had belonged to his wife, who had left so fast she didn't even take it, and one day he had been just fiddling with it and
somehow run across Lali's service, DataMate. He didn't realize, as Meg did, that the site must have been something his wife had bookmarked. Later Meg had Lali look for his wife around the matchmaking sites, but Lali didn't find her.

“Goodbye, Marcus,” Meg said. Goodbye. She felt she had known this man for many years, getting only as far in that time as she had in this one evening. It was all she could do not to offer him the friendship of e-mail, or a phone check-in. But something in his sealed lips kept her still.

The candles he had made were mud-colored things hardened in orange juice cans, from the melted stumps of other candles. There were so many on the windowsills and arrayed on the tablecloth and on the top of the refrigerator that she saw the candle-making was not a hobby but a tether to action, active life, life.

He had a lot of money available to him, and a college degree. How did she know? He told her. She had a sense of the complete truth of everything he claimed. He had been selling off prime land, but there was enough of it left, good grazing land, to lease to his neighbor while he was making up his mind what he was going to do. The sun had gone down but there was still light. Following her into the field of deep, wet grass to her car, he pointed out the driveway she could have taken, a few yards from where she had parked. She rolled her window down and said, “It was a lovely sunset.”

“Dawn's where you see the real color.” He punched a thumb at the mountains across the road, and then he faded back into the semidark as she backed and turned and waved. Finally he too waved and walked off in the direction of the fence where they had seen the horses.