Homeland and Other Stories (4 page)

Lydia remembers this conversation, she realizes, with unusual bitterness. Tofu had what was called an open marriage, which became so open that it more or less lost its clasp. Her husband Bernard, as far as anyone knew, was still up in Washington picking apples. One of Tofu's numerous affairs was with Whitman during their brief experiment with non-monogamy. There was much talk about the complexity of human nature and satisfying different needs, but in the end Lydia sat on the bed and downed nearly a bottle of peppermint schnapps, and when Whitman came home she met him at the door demanding to know how he could have sex with a person named after a vegetable product. Lydia thinks of this as the low point of their relationship, before now.

 

Over dinner they argue about whether to drive into Sacramento for the weekend. They should be thinking about firewood, but Whitman complains that they never see their friends anymore.

“Who'd have thought we'd
survive
without them,” Lydia says, distressed at how much they sound like ninth graders. After so many years together it's as if they've suddenly used up all their words, like paper plates and cups, and are now using the last set over and over.

“If you didn't like my friends why didn't you say so? Why didn't you have your own friends?” Whitman swallows his dinner without comment. It's a type of chili Lydia invented, based on garbanzo beans, and it hasn't turned out too well.

“I don't know.” She hesitates. “I don't think you ever understood how hard it was for me. All those people so absolutely sure they're right.”

“That's your interpretation.”

She tries salting her chili to see if this will help. Once Lydia
was given a lecture on salt, the most insidious kind of poison, by a friend who'd come over for dinner. He would rather put Drano on his food, he said. She'd had half a mind to tell him to help himself, there was some under the sink.

“Whitman, I'm just trying to tell you how I feel,” she says.

“Well you should have said how you felt back then.”

“And you should have told me you didn't want to move here. Before I applied for the job. You sure seemed hot on the idea at the time.”

Whitman scrapes his bowl. “It's only an hour. I didn't know we were going into seclusion.”

Lydia goes to check the refrigerator, coming back with some carrots she harvested that morning. “I don't make the rules,” she says. “The way your pals glorify the backwoods life, don't you think it's interesting they've never come up here for a visit?”

He picks up one of the carrots, its wilted tassel of leaves still attached, and bites off the tip. He looks like Bugs Bunny and she wishes to God he would say, “What's up, Doc?” Instead he says, “We don't have room for them to stay with us here. They're just being considerate.”

Lydia laughs. As big as it was, the house in the city never seemed big enough for all the people passing through. Once for two months they put up a man named Father John and his “family,” four women with seven children among them. They parked their school bus, in which they normally lived, in the backyard. The women did everything for Father John except drive the bus: they washed his clothes, bore his children, and cooked his meals in the bus on a wood stove with a blue mandala painted on it. They had to use their own stove because Lydia and Whitman couldn't guarantee the Karmic purity of their kitchen. At one time, in fact, Whitman and Lydia had been quite the carnivores, but Whitman didn't go into that. The people were friends of a friend and he didn't have the heart to throw them out until they
got their bus fixed, which promised to be never. Lydia pitied the bedraggled women and tried to strike up cheery conversations about how pleasant it was that Whitman shared all the cooking and cleaning up. One night at dinner Lydia explained that she'd first fallen in love with Whitman because of his Beef Mongolian. Several members of Father John's family had to be excused.

But it was true. Whitman had been a rarity in their circle, the jewel in the crown, and Lydia understands now that most of the women they knew were in love with him for more or less the same reason. Really, she thinks, they ought to see him now. The water-fowl crockery set, handmade by Earth, she's left sitting in the sink unwashed for days, as a sort of test. Not unexpectedly, Whitman failed. Without an audience the performance is pointless.

 

On Saturday Lydia goes to see Verna. She carries two empty cartons which she'll bring back full of eggs. Verna's hens lay beautiful eggs: brown with maroon speckles and a red spot inside, where, as Verna puts it, the rooster leaves his John Henry. The food coop in Sacramento sold eggs like these for $2.50 a dozen, a price Lydia thought preposterous and still does. She once had a huge argument with one of their friends, a woman named Randy, who acted like fertile eggs were everything short of a cure for cancer. “The only difference between a dozen fertile eggs and a dozen regular ones is twelve sperms,” Lydia had explained to her. “That's what you're paying the extra dollar-fifty for. It comes to around twelve cents per sperm.”

Later that same evening Randy had been in the kitchen helping Whitman make spaghetti, and Lydia overheard her complaining that she, Lydia, lacked imagination. Whitman had come to her defense, sort of. “Well, she's a science teacher,” he said. “She probably knows what she's talking about.”

“Don't I know
that
,” Randy said. “She even dresses like a schoolteacher.”

The next day Lydia had gone to the Salvation Army and bought some fashionably non-new clothes.

 

She's surprised to find herself confiding in Verna about her problems with Whitman. Verna's kitchen has an extra refrigerator dedicated entirely to eggs, stacked carefully in boxes of straw. She listens to Lydia while she places eggs gently in cartons.

“I guess we're just getting on each other's nerves,” she says. “The house we had before was a lot bigger.”

Verna nods. They both know that isn't the problem. “Once you've got used to having more, it's hard to get by on less,” she says.

Lydia is amazed that Verna can handle so many eggs without getting nervous.

On the way back she stops by the stone outbuilding Whitman has converted into his shop. It's lucky that his special kind of woodworking doesn't require electricity, although if the building were wired she could read out here at night without disturbing him. This strikes her as a provident idea, which she'll suggest when he's in a better mood.

She stands well out of his way and watches him plane the surface of a walnut board. She loves the dark, rippled surface of the wood and the way it becomes something under his hands. He's working on a coffee table that's a replica of an Early American cobbler's bench. In the niches where shoemakers used to keep their tools and leather, people can put magazines and ashtrays. These tables are popular in the city, and Whitman has sold six or seven. As a rule he makes each one of his pieces a little different, but he no longer changes this design, explaining that you can't beat success.

“I was talking to Verna this morning,” Lydia says uneasily. “She thinks it's understandable that we'd have trouble living in such a small place.” Whitman doesn't respond, but she continues. “She says we ought to forget the past, and pretend we're just starting out.”

“So Verna's a psychologist, on top of being a civil engineer.”

“She's my friend, Whitman. The only one I've got at the moment.”

“These country people are amazing, all experts on the human condition.” His back is to Lydia, and as he pushes the plane over the board in steady, long strokes, she watches the definition of the muscles through his damp T-shirt. It's as if the muscles are slipping from one compartment to another in his back.

“They don't knife each other in study hall,” she says quietly. “Or take their neighbors hostage.”

Whitman speaks rhythmically as his body moves forward and back. “With enough space between them anybody can get along. We ought to know that.”

“There's more to it than that. They know what to expect from each other. It's not like that for our generation, that's our whole trouble. We've got to start from scratch.”

The plane continues to bite at the wood, spitting out little brown curls. Whitman makes no sound other than this.

“I know it's not easy for you up here, Whitman. That everybody doesn't love you the way they did in Sacramento, but…” She intended to say, “I still do.” But these are less than words, they're just sounds she's uttered probably three thousand times in their years together, and now they hang flat in the air before she's even completely thought them. It's going to take more than this, she thinks, more than talk, but she doesn't know what.

“But this is where we are now,” she says finally. “That's all. We're committed to the place, so we have to figure out a way to go on from here.”

“Fine, Lydia, forge ahead. It's easy for you, you always know exactly where you're headed.” Every time he shoves the plane forward, a slice of wood curls out and drops to the floor, and she wonders if he's going to plane the board right down to nothing.

 

The rain starts on Sunday night and doesn't let up all week. The old people in Blind Gap are saying it's because of those bomb tests, the weather is changing. It's too warm. If it were colder it would have been snow, rather than rain, and would come to no harm.

After Tuesday, school is shut down for the week. So many bridges are out, the buses can't run. One of the bridges washed away in the flood is the new one Whitman built on their farm. Lydia sees now that Verna was right, the design was a mistake. The flood loosened the ground under the roots of the sycamore and pulled it down, taking the bridge with it. Whitman blames the tree, saying that if it had been smaller or more flexible it wouldn't have taken out the whole bridge. Lydia can see that his pride is badly damaged. He's trapped inside the house now, despondent, like a prisoner long past the memory of fresh air. The rain makes a constant noise on the roof, making even the sounds inside her skull seem to go dead.

She wonders if everything would be all right if they could just scream at each other. Or cry. The first time she saw him cry was when David had parvo virus as a puppy and they expected him not to make it. Whitman sat up all night beside David's box on the kitchen floor, and when she found him the next morning asleep against the doorsill she told herself that, regardless of the fate of the puppy, this was the man she would be living with in her seventies. Forty years to go, she says aloud into the strange, sound-dead air. She can't begin to imagine it. Now Whitman doesn't even notice if David has food or water.

As she pads around the cabin in wool socks and skirt and down vest, Lydia develops a bizarre fantasy that they are part of some severe religious order gone into mourning, observing the silence of monks. Industrious out of desperation, she freezes and cans the last of the produce from the garden, wondering how it is that this task has fallen to her. Their first week here they had spaded up the little plot behind the cabin, working happily, leaning on each other's shoulders to help dig the shovel in, planting their garden together. But by harvest time it's all hers. Now Whitman only comes into the kitchen to get his beer and get in the way, standing for minutes at a time with the refrigerator door open, staring at the shelves. The distraction annoys her. Lydia hasn't canned tomatoes before and needs to concentrate on the instructions written out by Verna.

“It's cold enough, we don't have to refrigerate the state of California,” she shouts above the roar of the rain, but feels sorry for him as he silently closes the refrigerator. She tries to be cheerful. “Maybe we ought to bring back the TV next time we go into the city. If Randy would give it back. Think she's hooked on the soaps by now?”

“Probably couldn't get anything up here,” he says. He stands at the windows and paces the floor, like David.

“Bedroom,” she commands, wishing Whitman would lie down too.

On Monday it's a relief for both of them when school starts again. But the classroom smells depressingly of damp coats and mildew, and after nearly a week off, the kids are disoriented and wild. They don't remember things they learned before. Lydia tries to hold their attention with stories about animal behavior, not because it's part of the curriculum but because it was her subject in graduate school and she's now grasping at straws. She tells them about imprinting in ducks.

“It's something like a blueprint for life,” she explains. “This
scientist named Konrad Lorenz discovered that right after they hatched the baby birds would imprint on whatever they saw. When he raised them himself, they imprinted on him and followed him around everywhere he went. Other scientists tried it with cats or beach balls or different shapes cut out of plastic and it always worked. And when the baby ducks grew up, they only wanted to mate with those exact things.”

The kids are interested. “That's too weird,” one of them says, and for once they want to know why.

“Well, I don't know. Nobody completely understands what's going on when this happens, but we understand the purpose of it. The animal's brain is set up so it can receive this special information that will be useful later on. Normally the first thing a baby duck sees would be an adult duck, right? So naturally that would be the type of thing it ought to grow up looking for. Even though it's less extreme, we know this kind of behavior happens in higher animals too.” She knows she's losing her audience as she strays from ducks, but feels oddly compelled by the subject matter. “Most animals, when they're confused or under stress, will fall back on more familiar behavior patterns.” As she speaks, Lydia has a sudden, potent vision of the entire Father John family, the downtrodden women at their mandala woodstove and the ratty-haired children and the sublime Father John himself. And standing behind him, all the generations of downtrodden women that issued him forth.