Homeland and Other Stories (8 page)

“No. It's just a picture.”

“What would you like for supper?”

“Pot pies!” Rennie shouts. Frozen dinners are her favorite thing. Miriam rather likes them too, although this isn't something she'd admit to many people. Certainly not her mother, for instance, or to Bob, who associates processed foods with intellectual decline. She wonders, though, if her privacy is an illusion. Rennie may well be revealing all the details of their home life to her nursery-school class, opening new chapters daily. What I had for dinner last night. What Mom does when we run out of socks. They probably play games along these lines at TenderCare, with entirely innocent intentions. And others, too, games with a social-worker bent: What things make you happy, or sad? What things make you feel scared?

Miriam smiles. Rennie is fearless. She does not know how it feels to be hurt, physically or otherwise, by someone she loves. The people at TenderCare probably hear a lot worse than pot pies.

“Mom,” Rennie asks, “does God put things on the TV?”

“What do you mean?”

Rennie considers. “The cartoons, and the movies and things. Does God put them there?”

“No. People do that. You know how Grandpa takes movies of you with his movie camera, and then we show them on the screen? Well, it's like that. People at the TV station make the programs, and then they send them out onto your TV screen.”

“I thought so,” Rennie says. “Do you make them sometimes, at the library?”

Miriam hears a siren, but can't tell where it's coming from. “Well, I organize programs for the library, you're right, but not TV programs. Things like storybook programs. You remember, you've come to some of those.” Miriam hopes she doesn't sound irritated. She is trying to slow down and move into the right lane, because of the ambulance, but people keep passing her on both sides, paying no attention. It makes Miriam angry. Sure enough,
the ambulance is coming their way. It has to jerk to a full stop in the intersection ahead of them because of all the people who refuse to yield to greater urgency.

“Mom, what happens when you die?”

Miriam is startled because she was thinking of Lute's poor cousin. Thinking of the condition of the body, to be exact. But Rennie doesn't even know about this relative, won't hear her sad story for years to come.

“I'm not sure, Rennie. I think maybe what happens is that you think back over your life, about all the nice things you've done and the people who've been your friends, and then you close your eyes and…it's quiet.” She was going to say, “…and go to sleep,” but she's read that sleep and death shouldn't be equated, that it can cause children to fear bedtime. “What do you think?”

“I think you put on your nicest dress, and then you get in this glass box and everybody cries and then the prince comes and kisses you. On the lips.”

“That's what happened to Snow White, isn't it?”

“Uh-huh. I didn't like when he kissed her on the lips. Why didn't he kiss her on the cheek?”

“Well, grownups kiss on the lips. When they like each other.”

“But Snow White wasn't a grownup. She was a little girl.”

This is a new one on Miriam. This whole conversation is like a toboggan ride, threatening at every moment to fly out of control in any direction. She's enjoying it, though, and regrets that they will have to stop soon for some errands. They are low on produce, canned goods, aluminum foil, and paper towels, completely out of vacuum-cleaner bags and milk.

“What I think,” says Miriam, after giving it some consideration, “is that Snow White was a little girl at first, but then she grew up. Taking care of the seven dwarfs helped her learn responsibility.” Responsibility is something she and Rennie have
talks about from time to time. She hears another siren, but this one is definitely behind them, probably going to the same scene as the first. She imagines her sister Janice's three children bundling into her life in a whirlwind of wants and possessions. Miriam doesn't even have time for another house plant. But she realizes that having time is somehow beside the point.

“So when the prince kissed her, did she grow up?” Rennie asks.

“No, before that. She was already grown up when the prince came. And they liked each other, and they kissed, and afterward they went out for a date.”

“Like you and Mr. Bob?”

“Like Bob and I do sometimes, right. You don't have to call him Mr. Bob, honey. He's your friend, you can call him just Bob, if you want to.”

Instead of making the tricky left turn into the shopping center, Miriam's car has gone right, flowing with the tide of traffic. It happened almost before she knew it, but it wasn't an accident. She just isn't ready to get to the grocery store, where this conversation will be lost among the bright distractions of bubble gum and soda. Looping back around the block will give them another four or five minutes. They could sit and talk in the parking lot, out of the traffic, but Miriam is starting to get her driving nerves back. And besides, Rennie would think that peculiar. Her questions would run onto another track.

“And then what happened to the seven dwarfs?” Rennie wants to know.

“I think Snow White still took care of them, until they were all grown up and could do everything by themselves.”

“And did the prince help too?”

“I think he did.”

“But what if Snow White died. If she stayed dead, I mean, after the prince kissed her.”

Miriam now understands that this is the angle on death that has concerned Rennie all along. She is relieved. For Miriam, practical questions are always the more easily answered.

“I'm sure the dwarfs would still be taken care of,” she says. “The point is that Snow White really loved them, so she'd make sure somebody was going to look after them, no matter what, don't you think?”

“Uh-huh. Maybe the prince.”

“Maybe.” A motorcyclist dodges in front of them, too close, weaving from lane to lane just to get a few yards ahead. At the next red light they will all be stopped together, the fast drivers and the slow, shooting looks at one another as if someone had planned it all this way.

“Rennie, if something happened to me, you'd still have somebody to take care of you. You know that, don't you?”

“Uh-huh. Lute.”

“Is that what you'd like? To go and live with Lute?”

“Would I have to?”

“No, you wouldn't have to. You could live with Aunt Janice if you wanted to.”

Rennie brightens. “Aunt Janice and Uncle Paul and Michael-and-Donna-and-Perry?” The way she says it makes Miriam think of their Christmas card.

“Right. Is that what you'd want?”

Rennie stares at the windshield wipers. The light through the windshield is spotty, falling with an underwater strangeness on Rennie's serious face. “I'm not sure,” she says. “I'll have to think it over.”

Miriam feels betrayed. It depresses her that Rennie is even willing to take the question seriously. She wants her to deny the possibility, to give her a tearful hug and say she couldn't live with anyone but Mommy.

“It's not like I'm sending you away, Rennie. I'm not going to die while you're a little girl. We're just talking about what-if. You understand that, right?”

“Right,” Rennie says. “It's a game. We play what-if at school.” After another minute she says, “I think Aunt Janice.”

They are repeating their route now, passing again by the Burger Boy where Miriam had lunch. The tables and chairs inside look neater than it's possible to keep things in real life, and miniature somehow, like doll furniture. It looks bright and safe, not the sort of place that could hold ghosts.

On an impulse Miriam decides to put off the errands until tomorrow. She feels reckless, knowing that tomorrow will already be busy enough without a backlog. But they can easily live another day without vacuum-cleaner bags, and she'll work out something about the milk.

“We could stop here and have a hamburger for dinner,” Miriam says. “Or a fish sandwich. And afterward we could stop for a minute at Ice Cream Heaven. Would you like that?”

“No. Pot pies!”

“And no Ice Cream Heaven?”

“I don't need any more angel stickers. Leslie Copley gave me twelve.”

“Well, that was nice of him.”

“Yep. He hates bananas.”

“Okay, we'll go straight home. But do you remember that pot pies take half an hour to cook in the oven? Will you be too hungry to wait, once we get home?”

“No, I'll be able to wait,” Rennie says, sounding as if she really will. In the overtones of her voice and the way she pushes her blond hair over her shoulder there is a startling maturity, and Miriam is frozen for a moment with a vision of a much older Rennie. All the different Rennies—the teenager, the adult—are
already contained in her hands and her voice, her confidence. From moments like these, parents can find the courage to believe in the resilience of their children's lives. They will barrel forward like engines, armored by their own momentum, more indestructible than love.

“Okay then, pot pies it is,” Miriam says. “Okay.”

W
HEN
I
WAS SIXTEEN
my mother found birth-control pills in my sock drawer and declared that early promiscuity would ruin me psychologically. She said I'd been turned loose too young in the candy store and would go spoiled, that later in life I'd be unable to hold down a monogamous relationship. She said many things, but that one stayed with me. At the age of thirty-nine I was going on vacation with a man who wasn't my husband. There we sat in his Volvo, bald proof of my psychological ruin, headed north on the interstate along with the crowd of holiday travelers breaking the speed limit slightly.

My lover's name was Peter, which we felt to be ironic because of my husband's great knowledge of rocks. Also, our destination was the Petrified Forest. None of this irony was intended, though. Life always provides me with better jokes than any I could invent.

Peter was an intellectual and custom cabinetmaker with a lean body and appealing hands and a head of hair like some sweet, dark animal doomed for its pelt. The first time I saw him, his muscular abdomen set my fingers to wondering how it would like to have them go rippling across it. He'd shown up at our unfinished house to conceive the cabinetry, and was fully
clothed, as you would expect, but I have a sixth sense about pleasing men in ways that aren't my business. I'm rarely wrong. My mother would say I can't help it, that my moral fiber decayed in adolescence like a twelve-year molar.

I settled my neck into the soft leather headrest of my lover's car, letting my hair blow out the window. Peter's Volvo was old but the seats were reupholstered in an unbelievably soft material that he claimed, with a straight face, to be kitten leather. The car had everything except air conditioning, which in his opinion put an artificial distance between the passenger and the passage. Men can say things like that; they don't have to put up with hair whipping in their eyes for hours on end. I was hoping I looked attractively disheveled, and not browbeaten. I'd dressed for this adventure in a black tank top and a pair of jeans whose most striking feature was a zipper that ran all the way from front to back. Technically I suppose you could zip them right in two. I'd bought the outfit at my daughter's insistence on one of our afternoons in the mall. The real name of this style, she informed me, was “drive-in pants.” I had grave reservations. “Nobody but Cher ought to be wearing an outfit like this at my age,” I said.

“No, Mom, it's great,” she said. “You look sexy.”

Julie is thirteen, a dangerous time, I'm told, because soon she'll discover sex, just as surely as she learned ten years ago to pull the protective caps out of the electric sockets and toy with the powers lying hidden in the wall. I look at Julie's long flying hair, her coltish gait, and refuse to believe it. She and I are close. She leaves me notes, sweet things decorated with hearts, in places where I'll discover them as I go through the business of my day: in my change purse or the pocket of her jeans in the clothes hamper. Where would she hide sex? And how could she urge me into vampish clothes, if she truly understood the implications for family disaster? Still, her sock drawer I'd begun to avoid like the plague.

“Julie wants to be a linguist,” I told Peter, needing to alter my train of thought. For two weeks each summer Julie visited my mother in Kentucky, and in the early years would come home with cheerful reports of butter-and-sugar-on-bread for dessert, but more recently she'd brought back a fascination for country speech. “I'd knock you down for that shirt,” my daughter will cry, and “Just a minute? I'll just-a-minute you over the head with something!” Last year she filled up a little notebook, studying Mother and her rook-playing cronies like Margaret Mead among the Samoans. I was floored to see my mother, policewoman of my adolescence, reduced to a list of quaint phrases.

“A linguist?” Peter, who was tall, leaned back from the steering wheel as if its only purpose were for resting his hands.

“That's what she says. She just made the announcement, and it's been one big argument between her and Nathan ever since.”

“Why is that?” he asked. “Does he want her in the family cornea business?” My husband is an eye surgeon. Rocks and minerals are just a consuming passion.

“Oh no, I don't think there's anything he especially wants her to
be
. He just has to tell her what
not
to be. He says Noam Chomsky is a socialist. And Julie says that's the point, linguistics is a truly egalitarian science.” The Upper Sonoran Desert was ripping by us at 3,000 rpm and my right ear was roaring from the wind. I was relieved to see Peter put on his blinker for the scenic route through Sedona. If scenery was an objective, he'd need to slow down. “Did you know phrases like that when you were twelve?” I asked, forgetting she'd turned thirteen.

“Perhaps. But I'm not a fair example.” It's true, Peter was probably not a fair example of anything, linguistically speaking. He was born in St. Louis but carried a trace of German accent, having been raised in a part of the city where, he claimed, you'd go for weeks hearing no English other than “Coca-Cola” and “Scram.” Julie was fascinated. Whenever he came over on his
visits, feigning interest in the woodwork—hugging us all and exclaiming, “Nathan, Diana! How is that veneer holding up?”—Julie would make him repeat her favorite phrase: “
Varoom nicht
?”

“Well,” I said. “I'm scared to death she's going to say something like that to
me
one morning at breakfast. A truly egalitarian science. That's exactly how she is, you know? She'd expect me to carry on a conversation on the same intellectual level as Nathan does.”

“But you would agree with her, and that would take the sport out of it. So there's no danger.”

“I suppose that's true,” I said.

Nathan and Julie and I live in a new house that is too large and dramatic for a family of three. There's lots of plate glass, with views of mountains and canyons if you're feeling naturalistic, or of the twinkling, seemingly distant lights of the city if you're feeling superior. In the living room are expensive copies of pre-Columbian art and genuine fossils—delicate fish that look like etchings—on slabs of pink and beige stone that harmonize with the carpet. I think the drama of the house gets to us, forcing us to rise to occasions we'd all rather just let pass. Nathan and Julie stalk around each other with faces like tragic masks. She's going through a stage in which she claims to hate Nathan. He really was good with her when she was a baby, but now that she's threatening to turn into a woman he seems to feel a great need to boss her around.

I take classes in things that go well with Danish Modern—weaving and natural dyes, for instance, but never macramé—and envision myself writing poetry in some other, probably smaller house. Three days a week I teach steno and typing to junior-high students without an ambitious bone in their bodies.

Now, I have a sister Eva, six years younger, who of all things works as a reporter for Japanese TV. They say she is the Jane Pauley of Japan. She has a Japanese boyfriend and can use chop
sticks without giving it a thought, her mind totally on something else. I'm not sure how Eva got from here to there; I was already in Phoenix when she finished high school. We have the same features, everyone sees her picture and thinks it's me in a kimono, and yet Eva has gone so far in her life whereas I have only traveled. I'm the oldest and, according to all the books, should be the achiever, but there you go. I've never quite gotten over my hometown's limited expectations of me—of any girl, really. “Marry a millionaire” was the best they could come up with, “or teach school.” I expected to settle for the latter, there seeming to be too much competition for the former.

I went to college on my dead father's Social Security and did try adventurous electives—pre-Columbian history and modern poetry—but I never left home until I married Nathan and moved to Phoenix. Deserts of the world have a high incidence of cornea disease. Mother felt I'd chosen Nathan purposefully as part of an overall scheme centering on her abandonment, but the truth is I met him at a fraternity mixer and couldn't turn him down once we saw how perfectly I fit in with his plans. I would have sex with him now, marry him later, and type his way through med school. After that would come residency, and Julie, and Phoenix. It was as much a surprise to me as to Mother. I could only tell her it was lucky we didn't end up in Saudi Arabia—eye-disease capital of the earth—and then give her Julie for two weeks a year, the way the Aztecs every so often offered up to the grumpy gods a human heart.

Apart from that first decision to submit to the pressures of a high-school linebacker and go to his family's doctor for birth-control pills, I don't believe I'd ever acted in a bold or decisive way. I have wished for a womanly friendship with my mother. I'd like to confess to her my doubts about who's in the driver's seat of my life, but she thinks I am Jezebel. That discovery of hers in my bureau really started us out on the wrong foot.

 

Technically, Peter has pointed out, I'm not promiscuous. I'm serially monogamous. I hadn't consciously made love with Nathan in over a year, and my earlier affairs took place during similar dry spells. There had been a good number. Nathan didn't know about Peter, but I had a feeling he wasn't altogether in the dark either. We stayed together because he didn't seem to have other plans, and because I couldn't picture myself as being husbandless. There was my daughter to consider, still young, in need of years of shelter.

Peter had two grown sons. People my age, I've found, can turn out to be the parents of children anywhere along the way from cradle to college, but this doesn't necessarily tell you the first thing about them. Peter's wife and boys barely made a dent in him. Now he was interested in Jung and Nietzsche and lived alone in his workshop, a rented studio with sawdust in the kitchen. He ate cold baked potatoes for breakfast. And he did not, by any means, wish to be saved. He wasn't someone I could marry.

But we were in love by modern standards, and had been planning this trip for months—our first opportunity for daytime adventures and whole nights together. It was Memorial Day weekend: Julie was off to Mother's and Nathan to an eye-surgery meeting. Normally I might have gone along, but I'd begged off. There was my weaving class, I pointed out. Our answering machine had beeperless remote so my plan was to check in and answer calls as needed, pretending to be home. It would work as long as there were no catastrophes, no calls in the middle of the night, but then that's only life's ordinary degree of risk.

Really I wasn't worried; I felt free. At that moment Peter and I were driving through the impressively inanimate landscape of Sedona; all that red, and it had nothing to do with blood. “Iron,”
Nathan would have announced. I could almost picture him in the back seat. “When the seas first learned to breathe oxygen, a carpet of rust was laid down over the face of the earth.” I made fun of his way of talking, but in sixteen years I'd picked up his penchant for dramatizing things, and I did it better. Peter loved it. In Peter's presence my stories took on mythic significance. He called them “Diana's legends.”

“I think the happiest afternoon of Nathan's and my marriage was last Thanksgiving,” I said, reminded by the cliffs. “When I found the petroglyph.” Whenever Peter was driving, the burden of conversation fell to me. I settled back, looking out the window. “We'd eaten too much, and drunk too much, and these people I'd invited Nathan couldn't really abide so they'd left already, and Nathan and I went hiking up the arroyo behind the house. We hadn't hiked in years, I don't know what got into us. I think we felt like after all that food we had to do something virtuous.”

“After this trip,” Peter pointed out, “you will have to hike the Grand Canyon.”

“Or the Himalayas,” I said. “With ankle weights. But only if Nathan's flirting with a hula girl in Waikiki.” His meeting was in Honolulu. If you move in the right circles you'll know that discussing torn retinas within a hundred yards of the pounding surf is not an unusual thing.

“You're laughing,” Peter said. “But it might be true. Don't you ever wonder if he's having affairs?”

“Oh, God, if only he were. I really do wish he would.”

“Why, because you would feel less guilty?”

I'd thought about this. “No. Because then we'd have to do something, he and I. About us.”

The sun was beginning to set on the red rocks of Sedona, firing them to a crimson exactly the color of Peter's Volvo. If this were a family vacation we would stop now and take a picture: with a red scarf draped theatrically around my neck, the crimson
cliffs in the background, Nathan and I would pose in a contrived arrangement of passion on the hood of the red car. Julie would snap the shot.

“And you can't do anything about
you
by yourself?”

Peter really didn't know me. Our relationship was not primarily based on conversation. “I am a non-mover,” I said. “An immobilized person.”

“He does have that effect.” Peter had told me he was bored by only about eight things on earth, including Nathan.

“No, I can't blame it all on him. It's me. I was that way before I met Nathan. I cling to steady things, like a barnacle clings to a boulder.”

“A barnacle will cling to anything,” he said. “Flotsam and jetsam.”

“Only if it
thinks
those things are a boulder.”

“Nevertheless,” Peter said. “That's something you ought to keep in mind.” I wondered what he meant by that, until he added, “When you write poems about barnacles.”

He knew I didn't write poems about barnacles or anything else. I only read them. I fiddled with the radio. We were gradually losing the public radio station from Phoenix, so that the strains of Schubert's
Trout Quintet
were interspersed with what seemed to be a call-in show about garden difficulties. “You don't believe me, about being a barnacle, but it's true,” I said. “When I went to college, which was supposed to make you feel, you know, uplifted, I felt like my loafers were screwed to the floor. The other students would ask these questions that made the professors
pause
and
reflect
, and they'd see symbolism without having it pointed out, but I just couldn't conceive of anything beyond what I saw on the page. I kept thinking there was some explanatory brochure I'd forgotten to pick up during registration. Or maybe it was because they all lived in dorms and I lived at
home. Those other girls probably sat around in the halls with their hair in rollers and talked about symbolism.”