Homeland and Other Stories (6 page)

“It's beautiful,” Lena said, “but we're just out for a stroll today, really.” The young man gave us a hostile look from his folding chair.

“We didn't bring our checkbook,” I added for emphasis.

“That business about my eyes was just a ruse,” Lena told me once we'd gone on our way. “I do feel sorry for the way they must have to live, but you can't buy things on that basis alone. And that hokum about auras! When half the people around here are completely torn up about one thing or another.”

“Old Jacob looked like he was ready to hit the high road back to civilization,” I said.

“I guess what I resent is the manipulation. You notice she handed the necklace right to you.”

If Lena hadn't spoken up I might have bought it, and not because I felt I had to, either. “It was true about your eyes,” I said. “At least that much was sincere. The color was an exact match.”

“Really,” Lena said. “That blue.”

We didn't speak for a while. Then I said, “I know ‘azul' means blue. The blue…what? What's ‘lapis'?”

My wife works the
New York Times
crossword puzzle without fail, and knows about the roots of words. She has worlds of knowledge that amaze me. At one time she was torn between a career in poison or something more literary.

“Stone,” she said. “It's Latin.”

“Of course. Like a lapidary shop.”

We walked past an unattended pile of pumpkins. “Lapidary,” she said, nodding. “And dilapidated.”

“Unstoned?”

She laughed. “I guess it means the stones are falling out. Like an old rock fence.” There were fences like that by the legion in southern Indiana. If we wished to do so, we could probably spot half a dozen from where we stood.

“Did you know that Ron Emerson and Gracie are separated?” she asked. She knew Ron from the hospital, and Gracie had worked as a secretary in my department before taking maternity leave.

“That's something new,” I said. “A baby
and
a split-up.”

“I know. It's almost like divorce is some kind of virus going around, and there's no vaccine you can take. For a while it looked like babies might be the antidote. But I know that isn't true.” We were in sight of the covered bridge now, and the long row of trees that marked the course of the Eel River.

“Lots of people are like Ron and Gracie,” Lena went on. “If they're in trouble to begin with, then after a baby they don't have a prayer of working things out. There's never time.”

I didn't offer an opinion. I was content to walk beside Lena and hold her hand while she thought this through to the end. My own thoughts were completely different. I was thinking that I belonged in this place, among these fields and rivers and covered bridges. I have spent my entire life in small Indiana towns: I grew up in one, was educated in another, and settled at last in a third. My sisters come to visit from far-flung cities where they enjoy extraordinary foods and philharmonic orchestras—Seattle, Atlanta, Cleveland—and they say that, looking back, they can't imagine how they lived with such limited opportunities.

I suppose I accept these limitations without much question. There are always surprises. I was raised in a home of harsh religion and more children than there should have been, and I grew up expecting little in the way of affection, much less Lena. To my mind, a life spent among burgeoning fields is not always, is not
necessarily
, a life of limitation.

“On the other hand,” Lena said, “it's scary to think of being old, and having missed the chance. I guess it's reasonable to want to pass yourself on. It's the nearest thing to living forever.”

“In a genetic manner of speaking,” I said.

“But then, I'm sure my parents thought three kids were enough to guarantee them immortality, and it may not turn out that way.”

Lena was her family's only hope of passing on its DNA. There
was the sister who had died, and a much younger brother who became sterile in his teens as a complication of mumps. He and his wife recently adopted Korean twins. To the great credit of my in-laws, though, they never put pressure on Lena. They are uncommon people who love their children without possessiveness or a need to interfere. They astonish me continually, and yet Lena doesn't seem to appreciate what she has. She reads the books, like everyone else, on how to overcome the heartbreak of a dysfunctional family, and says things like “Well, you know my Grandfather Butler did drink.” I suppose it's like being beautiful; when every other woman on earth is lamenting this or that physical flaw you can't very well admit you don't have any. But it bothers me sometimes that she takes this love for granted. As if everyone in the world had parents who'd call up while you're out for a birthday dinner and sing the Happy Birthday song in three-part harmony, counting the dog, into your answering machine.

My own parents are still living, like Lena's, but they do not communicate. They once communicated over issues surrounding their children, and then they communicated over which channel to watch. Now they have bought a second television set, smaller than the first, and the two stand side by side. My father sits in a chair next to my mother's in the evenings and watches the sports, without sound.

We reached the bridge. Lena dropped my hand and walked ahead of me without speaking. When a bridge reaches this age, it's important to listen to what it has to say to you, as you walk through it. The river below our feet made a wistful, continuous sigh, and our steps were like whispers. The wood of the floorboards was soft with age and had the dusty smell that carries for me all the confused nostalgia of youth, and barns. When we came out the other side, the day seemed brighter. Sunlight picked out the colors of the trees on the opposite bank of the river.

“Look at this,” Lena said, “beauty and the beast, all rolled into one.” It was a remarkable caterpillar, the size, shape, and color of a bright kosher dill, with blue suction cups for feet and yellow knobs on its back. It was creeping up one of the bridge's structural timbers, and Lena was entranced.

“What's it going to be when it grows up?” she asked. Insects were not my department, but Lena always placed absolute faith in my knowledge of the natural world, and for this reason I read a great deal.

“A cecropia moth,” I guessed. “I don't know anything else that would warrant a caterpillar that big.”

She looked up. Over our heads were unpainted eaves, sheltered by the tin roof of the bridge, and a full archaeological record of barn-swallow nests. “Do you think it's going up there right now to make its cocoon?”

I assessed the caterpillar's rate of speed. “Maybe by tomorrow afternoon.”

She watched it with intense concentration. “I wish I could weave a cocoon around myself and change into something beautiful,” she said at last.

I looked at Lena's profile, framed by an auburn halo of honey locust and red oak leaves, and the Eel River running forever away. “In heaven's name,” I asked, “what would you change yourself into?”

“Somebody more definite,” she said. “The kind of person who's very sure, on the inside, of what she wants to be.”

 

As we walked back toward town her spirits seemed to lift again. A dog ran up to us from nowhere, and Lena spoke to it in such an encouraging tone I was sure it would follow us home. It did follow us, but only until a family with young children crossed
our path going out toward the bridge. The dog was fully grown and even showed some gray around its muzzle, but it tripped and panted and seemed to have the intelligence of a puppy.

“Can dogs be retarded?” she asked me, laughing, and then suddenly looked thoughtful. “Could Melinda be, do you think?”

“No, I don't think so. They're just showing natural concern. Everybody is afraid their child will have something wrong with it.” MacElroy had told me that before Melinda was born his wife forgot to turn off the electric blanket one night, and spent the next three months worrying about brain damage to the fetus.

“I think I could handle it. Really, I do, don't you?” With the toe of her boot she kicked an apple that lay in the road. It rolled in a wide arc into the weeds. “What we're looking at is the prospect of a new person coming to live with us, right? And, if we were placing an ad for a roommate, we wouldn't say, ‘Imperfect or handicapped people will not be considered.'”

“I never thought of it that way,” I said.

“What would be hard, though, is that it would take so much more effort than I've ever counted on, over the long term. A lot more than a regular baby. One of us would probably have to give up our career. I suppose me.”

“Why you?”

“Is it something you'd be willing to do?”

I thought about this. “Yes,” I said. “If we'd decided to commit ourselves to the project, then yes, I would.”

Lena looked at me with such surprise I was overwhelmed by the wish that she knew me better. It isn't as though I hold back information. Usually I don't quite know how I feel about things until Lena asks, and often not even then. “It's only logical, isn't it?” I reasoned. “If it comes down to a choice between teaching Bryophyta and Lycophyta or saving the lives of our youth, there's just no contest.”

“And you would do that.” She put her hand into my hip
pocket and leaned on my shoulder as we walked. “No matter what ever happens, I'm so happy you told me that.”

The Lapis Lazulis had packed up and moved on by the time we reached their spot, but we resolved anyway to buy something to commemorate the day. We would acquire the two-headed Yolo Wonder at any price, if it was for sale. Lena stopped at each table, weighing in her hands the acorn squash and noble ears of corn, and holding up small maroon apples for me to bite. She was wearing purple, a color that nearly glows when she puts it on. A purple sweater, and a turquoise and lavender scarf. As I looked at her there among the pumpkins I was overcome with color and the intensity of my life. In these moments we are driven to try and hoard happiness by taking photographs, but I know better. The important thing was what the colors stood for, the taste of hard apples and the existence of Lena and the exact quality of the sun on the last warm day in October. A photograph would have flattened the scene into a happy moment, whereas what I felt was gut rapture. The fleeting certainty that I deserved the space I'd been taking up on this earth, and all the air I had breathed.

There are a few things that predictably give me joy. Watching Lena's face while we make love is one. The appearance of the first new, marble-white tomatoes in my garden is another, and the break of comprehension across a student's face when I've planted an understanding that never grew in that mind before. I'm told that seeing one's own child born is an experience beyond description, but knowing these things, I can just begin to imagine.

 

That evening, little Melinda might have been enlisted in a conspiracy to make us parents. She ate her dinner without complaint, then rubbed her eyes in a dreamy and charming way, and went to bed.

In the morning she awoke transmogrified. She sat in the
middle of the living-room floor and displayed her vocabulary in a dizzying, vengeful series of demands. Her dark hair was wild and her temper fierce. Most ferociously of all she demanded Mommy, and over and over again some mysterious item called Belinka. My will was soon crushed like a slave's, but Lena held on bravely. She brought out the whole suitcase of Melinda's animals and toys, which we had been instructed not to do (just bring the things out one by one, her mother had advised, so she won't know this is all there is), and put on a puppet show as earnest as it was extemporaneous. Melinda was a cruel critic. She bit Lena on the hand, and crawled off toward the kitchen.

By noon we were desperate. “Kids are always soothed by the outdoors,” Lena said, and I did not dare doubt the source of her knowledge. I packed cheese and fruit and cans of root beer into a picnic basket, and would have thrown in a bottle of Jim Beam if we'd had it, while she called Ursula. “She'll love the idea,” Lena assured me. “She's always complaining how she never sees her grandkids.” Ursula lived sixteen miles away on a declining apple orchard and cattle farm.

It cost us several damaged fingers to get Melinda into her car seat, but she gratified us by falling instantly to sleep.

“Do you think maybe it's different when they're your own?” Lena whispered as we drove. I did not hazard a guess.

The rural setting did seem to do some good. Melinda was no longer belligerent, only energetic. We carried her kicking and squirming, and providing commentary on the cats and cow flops, out to what Ursula called the “June orchard.” She'd hired a neighbor to keep a picnic spot mowed all summer for the benefit of her grandchildren on the remote chance that they might visit. Ursula led the way in her stout garden shoes, swinging the picnic basket and pointing out blighted trees, their knotted trunks oozing sweet sap and buzzing with insects. Lena was right, she needed company.

We spread the blanket and laid out the food, cracked open soda cans, and bribed Melinda with grapes. Her speed was a problem. Having postponed walking for so long, her crawl was proficient beyond belief.

“Honey, stay in the short grass. There are blackberry briars and stickery things out there,” Lena warned. But Melinda continued to streak out for the high brush like a wild thing seeking its origins. Between every two bites of my sandwich I dragged her back by the legs.

“Well, here's to the new generation,” Lena said, raising her root beer. She drank a long gulp, throwing her head back. Then she stood up suddenly, gazed at me with a look of intent misery, and spat out something that twitched on the grass. Ursula and I both leaned forward to look. It was a hornet.

We watched, stupefied, as Lena sank to her knees, then sat down, and then lay full length on the ground. The valves of my heart slammed like doors.