The Bradbury Report (18 page)

I'd lived in that house, in that town, more than forty years, and
I had to acknowledge there was no one for me to say good-bye to, no one whom I would tell (if I could) where I was going, or even that I was going.

 

“I remember that day we spent driving around Iowa in your old Volvo,” Anna said. We were in her truck, on Interstate 89 in Vermont just the other side of White River Junction. It was ten in the morning. We'd just gotten started. We'd been on the road half an hour. Anna was driving. She was eager to talk, nearly irrepressible. Mostly, she wanted to talk about her husband. I would have preferred to sit quietly, and if we were going to talk, to talk about the clone. I had any number of questions.

“I took you to _____,” here she named her town, “showed you around. We went for steaks and sweet potato fries at the roadhouse in Le Mars. You paid. You were very gentlemanly.”

“I remember,” I said. “That was a good day. I enjoyed myself.”

She'd arrived in New Hampshire the day before, Thursday, August 20, late in the evening. She was exhausted. That day she'd driven five hundred miles—it had taken her twelve hours—all the way from Dunkirk, on Lake Erie, in far-western New York, most of the way in a pelting rain.

“That place is still in business,” she said. “If you can believe it.”

“I can't,” I said.

We had a good day for the trip to Montreal. The rain had quit, the sun was out, it wasn't too hot, and the traffic was light.

“It is,” she said. “My husband and I went there often. On Tuesday nights they had a salsa band. We'd go with friends and we'd dance. Did you and Sara dance?”

“We didn't,” I said. “Sara was serious about her dancing. She'd done ballet.” I'd never been to a ballet; I'd seen only snippets on television and in movies. About salsa dancing, I had only cartoonish notions.

“Did you ever see her dance?”

“She wouldn't dance with me.” I said. “She hated to be clumsy.”

“I mean ballet.”

“No,” I said. “I never saw her dance. Did you?”

“Once. She was beautiful.”

Anna reached across my lap and opened the glove compartment. She took out a pair of sunglasses and put them on, then looked at herself in the rearview mirror.

“How do you look?” I said.

“I'd say, pretty darn good.”

“I'd say so, too.”

“That's a lie,” she said. “We all took some lessons, so we didn't make complete fools of ourselves. I wasn't very good. Though I wasn't the worst of us by a far cry. My husband could dance. Big as he was, he could dance.” She turned to look at me. I couldn't see her eyes behind the dark glasses. “I know how and when and where you met Sara. You know nothing about my courtship.” She smiled. “Does anyone still use that word?”

“I would use it,” I said, “if I needed to.”

“You would,” she said. “We were in high school together. He was three years ahead of me. I didn't really know him. I knew
of
him, everyone did, because he was the star of the various teams. He was recruited in two sports, football and baseball. He went to the University of South Dakota for one year. He didn't like school. He didn't like being so far from home. His father had died in the Second Korean War, and his mother was failing. He came home, took a job in town, helped out coaching at the high school. He and his mother took care of one another until she died. He inherited the house, and that's where we lived after we were married. It's where I live still. I remember your mother died at Thanksgiving the year I knew you.”

“She did.”

“And you lost your father when you were young. Like my husband.”

“Yes,” I said. “Not to the war.”

“I was lucky in this way,” she said. “My parents were divorced. I didn't see much of my father, but I had my mother close by until I was into my fifties. She was there when my kids were born, and she got to see them grow up. My father never saw them. He had died by then.”

“That's too bad,” I said.

“You think so?” she said. “I'm not sure.”

There was nothing I could say to that. Anna took a breath, then continued.

“My girlfriends and I had crushes on the older boys, but my husband wasn't one of the ones we dreamed about. He was too big, and intimidating. He had a man's face, a man's body. He was old-fashioned. He dressed like a man. Anyway, he paid no attention to us. We were too young, too silly. I was always a big girl, as you know, what we called in Iowa a rawboned girl. I didn't do well, romantically I mean, with boys my age, though I had some friends who were boys. I was clumsy, ungainly. You know?”

“No,” I said. “I don't know.”

“You're being kind.”

“I'm not.”

“Well,” she said. “I was bigger than most of the boys and was shy around them. It wasn't until my second year in college that I had my first boyfriend, my first sexual experience. A really bad guy. I probably told you about him. He was confused and angry and very cruel. I stayed with him more than a year, thinking he was the best I could do. I was frightened the whole time. I did things with him I can't believe now I did. Do you mind me telling you this? Do you want to hear this?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“Since I've already started,” she said. “It was he who decided to call it off. I begged him not to leave me.”

She was quiet for a few moments. I closed my eyes, hoping the silence might take. Then she said: “You understand, Ray, that when you came along, and we seemed to hit it off, and you appeared to be kind and sensitive and appreciative of me, how I might have got my hopes up.”

“I wasn't kind or sensitive,” I said. “But I was appreciative of you.”

“
Maybe
you were,” she said.

I couldn't resist. She had brought the subject up, if obliquely. I took my chance.

“Anna. Will you tell me what you did with the clone?”

“What do you mean?”

“In your journal,” I said. “What you did that made you feel creepy.”

“Oh,” she said. “That's what you want to know.”

“Not just that,” I said. “But I do want to know that.”

“Why?”

“Because I'm neither kind nor sensitive,” I said. “Because I'm curious.”

“I won't tell you,” she said. “Not now.” She thought a moment. “It was no big deal.”

“All right,” I said. “Forget I asked.”

At eleven o'clock, Anna declared she was hungry. I was hungry, too. Neither of us had eaten anything that morning; Anna had been anxious to get out and going. We stopped for breakfast at a small café in Montpelier. The café was cool and bright with big windows that looked out on the State House. There were, maybe, a dozen tables, only two of them taken when we got there. At one there was a middle-aged couple. Younger than we were. Obviously married. They were in a booth, sitting side by side, studying a road map spread out before them. They were both wearing khaki shorts and walking shoes. They seemed happy. Wouldn't they, I thought, looking at Anna and me, think the same—that we were married, happy? There were four teenage boys sitting at a square table in the middle of the room. They were eating eggs and pancakes and dressed in uniform—red baseball hats, gray baseball pants, red stirrup socks, red T-shirts with a number on the back and the name of a local sponsor across the chest. They had not worn their cleats into the café, but their mitts were on the floor beside their chairs. One of the boys had lampblack under his eyes. You could tell they hadn't played yet that day, because their uniforms were clean.

We took a table by the window. We could see the granite State House, its gold dome with the sun on it. When we sat down, Anna indicated the statue that appeared to guard the front doors of the capitol. “Who's that?” she said.

“This is Vermont,” I said. “It's probably Ethan Allen.”

It was Anna's first time in Vermont.

“It's beautiful here,” she said.

“It is.”

Over the years, on trips with my parents, and later with Sara, I'd passed the exit for Montpelier—usually we were on the way to or from Burlington—but I had never been in the town. For all but six years of my life, New Hampshire had been my home. I felt sad to leave it. I have to say, at the same time, I felt capable and free. I wasn't giddy or optimistic, but inside I was light, or lighter. I couldn't have articulated it then, sitting in the café in Montpelier, where these thoughts had just started to gather, but I think I thought that what had just begun was a kind of coda, or encore, to what had been a mostly dull and plodding performance.

And I was glad to be with Anna. We were companionable. This was a great surprise. On her first visit to New Hampshire, it was like being with a stranger. Though she was, at all times, a considerate guest, I'd found her presence in my house oppressive. When she showed up for a second time, after a ten-day break, it was different. I can't explain the change. When she came back, it was as an old friend. Someone I'd known and very much liked a long time ago. Someone I was happy to see again.

I didn't know what to think or feel about the clone. About meeting him. No categories of thought or feeling seemed to apply.

Anna was just finishing her coffee. I was drinking tea, which I preferred to coffee, on doctor's orders decaffeinated.

“I'll tell you now,” she said. “But I don't want to talk about it.”

“Tell me what?” This was pure coyness. I didn't need to ask.

“I serviced him,” she said.

“The clone.”

“Yes.”

“What does that mean?”

“Don't be dense,” she said. “I serviced him. With my hand.”

I was neither surprised nor shocked. It was roughly what I expected to hear. Clumsily, stupidly, I looked at her left hand, palm down, on the table. Her fingers were long, a bit thick, the knuckles pronounced. Her fingernails were clean, cut short so that the tips of her
fingers showed above them. The back of her hand was spotted, the skin waxy and thinning, the veins prominent. I couldn't help myself. I imagined being touched by her hand, as the clone had been touched. I remembered noticing her hands when I first met her in graduate school, and not liking them. I was more sympathetic now. Her hands were old. They were, one could say, full of character. No doubt they'd been tender, solicitous, astute. No doubt they'd done good and loving work. She saw me looking at her hand, but she did not take it away.

 

At one o'clock we were north of Burlington, not more than five miles east of Lake Champlain, the Green Mountains farther to our east. Though it was Friday, and you would have expected weekenders to be out in force, the traffic was negligible. That far north the day was still cool and the air perfectly clear.

“The air is wonderful here,” she said.

“I'm used to it,” I said.

“And the light. Clean and sharp. Fourth dimensional.”

“Sara said that to me once,” I said. “ ‘Fourth dimensional.' We were in Scotland, on our honeymoon.”

“We used to say that about days like this.”

“You and Sara?”

“No,” she said. “My mother and I. I may have said it to Sara.”

When we'd set out that morning, back in Lebanon, I'd expressed a hope that we might drive north through New Hampshire, in order to pass by, or near at least, the places I'd gone as a boy with my father. Failing that, I suggested we take the less-traveled route, Interstate 91 north through Vermont, and cross into Canada at Derby Line, where the business of customs would be quick and easy. Anna was determined we take the most direct route, I-89, and that we make the border crossing at Highgate Springs, a busier station.
Because
it was busier.

“Did you notice the couple in the café?” she said.

“The map readers.”

“Yes,” she said. “They were sitting side by side. They looked happy.”

“I thought the same thing.”

“I like doing that,” she said.

“Sitting side by side?”

“Plotting a course. I'm good at it. Whenever we took trips in the car, I was navigator. My husband did pretty much all of the driving, no matter how far we were going. I had to wrestle the wheel from him. He didn't like being a passenger.”

Before we left Montpelier, I'd offered to drive, but Anna had refused. Now I said, “Will I have to wrestle you?”

“I'd win,” she said. “Are you flirting with me?”

“No.”

“Don't,” she said. “Because I'm oblivious to your charms.”

She reached over and touched my wrist, to let me know she was joking. Which I already knew.

“When we were first married and without children,” she said, “we spent a lot of time in North Dakota. Whenever we could get up there. With the kids it was a bit far to drive, and after they came along we stayed closer to home. We took them to South Dakota, and did all the touristy things: Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse, Deadwood, the Black Hills. Were you ever there?”

“No,” I said.

“The government claims it maintains the important sites, but there's no knowing what they do. In Las Vegas . . . Have you been?”

“I've not been anywhere,” I said.

“On the strip,” she said, “outside one of the hotels. They've built a gigantic mock-up of Mount Rushmore.”

“I heard about that,” I said.

“Which,” she said, “I plan to die before I see.”