Authors: Jane Smiley
When she got off the plane, Cecelia realized that she had never in her life come to L.A. from any place cold. She was not in the habit of finding delight there, but the palm trees outside the airport, which she had hardly ever noticed in the past, now struck her as a positive marvel. Of course there was grime (she thought as they turned east out of the airport) and the air was yellowish with smog, but it wasn’t gray and low and permanent. In fact, the salient characteristic of the Midwest, uniformity, was precisely what L.A. had the least of, had nothing of, to tell the truth. There were shocking spots of color—ragged bougainvillea draping scarlet over a sagging fence, hibiscus big as stop signs at the corners of porches. In her parents’ backyard, she strolled among the lemon, orange, and grapefruit trees, inhaling the sweetness and palming the weighty fruits. Her father’s avocados were black on the glistening jade branches, too numerous for the family to eat.
She kept meaning to mention to her father what both Chairman X and Tim Monahan had told her—that some big corporation with one of those bland megalomaniacal names was planning to mine gold in the Tierra del Madre forest, but between his work schedule and all the Christmas preparations, she didn’t get it said. And he was in a bad mood—there was something going on between him and her mother, one of those periodic angry times, where they seemed fed up with one another and willing to fight on the smallest pretext. Perhaps as a result of her quiet life, Cecelia’s tolerance for conflict was lower than it had been. Why add fuel to her parents’ conviction that their lives—and the world—were steadily devolving? There was nothing they could do about it except take it out on each other. They would learn about this latest example from the newspaper or from relatives back in Costa Rica soon enough.
But what about her? Didn’t she care about the largest virgin cloud forest in Central America? Tim expected her to. He’d brought her Gift’s report practically on a platter, eager in a very un-Timlike way, and she hadn’t responded as he’d expected her to, and she’d felt guilty,
the way she’d felt once when her ex-husband gave her a black lace teddy for Christmas instead of the dictionary of medieval Catalan that she was expecting.
Well, it was not clear what she did care about anymore, was it? Now that she was back home, it was easy to see how she’d once directed her life, and easy to see how she’d fallen away from that, too. Here was her room, with her pink bedspread, her white walls, her white furniture, her sax in the corner, her New York City Ballet poster of pink toe slippers on the wall. Collections of books from every phase of her childhood since she’d learned to read at age four filled the bookcase.
Don Quixote
, for example, was well thumbed. She had read it five or six times. When she took it down now and opened it to the adventure of the knight of the mirrors, she could remember reading the words, and remember a sense of being lost in pleasure, but she couldn’t imagine how her seven-year-old, or even her fourteen-year-old, self had understood it, either in Spanish or in English. Now it seemed that all she could remember was an effort to establish her virtue, to transcend her circumstances, to be the daughter her doctor-father-turned-gardener and her accountant-mother-turned-bookkeeper relied on her to be. Elevating herself had been both her virtue and her reward.
Now it felt like she had dropped to all fours and was roaming the old locations nose first. The house was full of smells—cinnamon and allspice and cloves, not to mention peppers and garlic and limes and oranges and the apple blossom soap her mother favored in the bathrooms. Oil frying. Emilio’s wife’s perfume, which was an alien whiff of Nieman Marcus suddenly presenting itself. The house was full of flavors, too, because she was always hungry, and went from room to room eating cookies and chocolate and pieces of fruit, or drinking juice. Always something. If she wasn’t eating, she was wondering when the next meal was coming, or helping her mother to prepare it. The hardest thing was to lift herself out of these present moments and actually think of anything. Or rather, to think of anything other than having sex with Chairman X. She was thinking about that so fully and so constantly that she might as well have been having sex with him. How could she pursue the transcendence and virtue of the intellectual life when her mind had disappeared into her body like a sponge into a basin of ink?
Which did not mean, apparently, that Chairman X had imprinted her with his convictions. If he had, she would have told her father
weeks ago about the gold mining plan. Chairman X’s fervor on this subject was not like anything Cecelia had ever experienced before. He was already talking about it as he walked through her door, and continued talking without cease, with only a pause like a musical rest when he orgasmed, until he left. Every day, sometimes more than once, he called her, and without saying hello, he would begin, “They have scarlet macaws there, did you know that? The only other place in the world that serves as a habitat for scarlet macaws is in New Guinea, and that habitat will be gone by 2005 if the Japanese don’t stop cutting down the hardwoods there. Have you ever seen a scarlet macaw?”
Her reply didn’t matter, really. He was continuing, “And forty-eight species of toads and frogs! and 123 species of butterflies!” Then he would hang up, only to call later about the tapirs.
Once, just once, she had said what she knew her father would say to her—“It doesn’t surprise me. It happens all the time,” and Chairman X had nearly imploded right in her apartment. He had said, “Are you on their side, then?”
“Well, no—”
“If you think they can’t be stopped, then you’re on their side!”
For the sake of her own safety, she had soothed him. But did he go on like this at home, over the bean loaf? While bathing the toddler? Cleaning out the closets? Did he exclaim and exclaim, an ever-surging, never-ebbing tide of outrage? If so, how on earth did SHE, the nonwife, stand it? Over the years, he must, Cecelia thought, have turned his nonwife into an unfeeling stone. That’s the only way you could live with someone like him. Cecelia herself had no illusions—there would be no living with Chairman X, no making a future together. There would only be fucking (she glanced at her father across the breakfast table as she thought this word. Well, that was another reason she hadn’t told him, wasn’t it? That she was afraid of her father knowing how this man had made an animal of her), only fucking, only fucking. She got up from her chair and went into the bathroom and splashed her face with cold water.
All the presents under the tree were for Emilio’s and Carlos’ children, mostly Barbies for Kelly and Ninja Turtle equipment for Derek, Danny, and Alex. Cecelia had ordered her mother a silk robe from Victoria’s Secret and bought her father an expensive book that her mother said he wanted on the theory of Zen gardens. Emilio and
Carlos had nothing for her—their wives were too busy with the children to shop. But then there was something after all, way at the back (Cecelia’s mother was grinning). Kelly, who could read her name and not much else, crawled under and pulled it out. She read the tag and said, “This isn’t for me. Who’s this for? Is there anything else for me, Grandma?”
Cecelia’s mother said, “Kelly, that is for Tía Cecelia,” and Kelly, who admired Cecelia and wanted to be her friend, presented it with a grin.
It was an album. Before Cecelia even opened the cover, her mother was discounting her own care and thoughtfulness in her usual fashion—“This house is so crammed, I had to get something out of here. You have your own place out there now.”
The photos had been lovingly pasted in and labelled: “Cecelia, aged fourteen months (Christmas, 1964), with Tía Luisa, Grandpa’s farm”; “Cecelia, aged two, and Tía Norma, 1965. The pony’s name was Paco”; “Mama Juana, Tía Luisa, Tía Norma, Tía Angelita, Easter, 1956, with Grandpa, on the porch of the hacienda. Hats from DIOR!”; “Grandma and Grandpa, just married (July 1934), with their first car, a Ford from the U.S., downtown San José.”
Her mother said, “I had those old photos copied for each of you, but the ones just you are in, those are the originals. Each book goes up to when you were twenty-one. I gave Emilio and Carlos theirs on their birthdays, but you weren’t here then.”
“Mom! This must have taken forever!”
“Well,” said her mother, “sorting through all the pictures and finding ones without the heads cut in half, that took forever!”
Cecelia laughed. She turned the first pages deliberately, looking at the faces, but also at the indistinct gray backgrounds, trying to divine the greens, yellows, reds, and purples of her imagination. She said, “I can’t remember a thing about being there! I wish I could.” Her mother sighed. The photos of L.A., of this house, of grammar school and high school were without mystery—she could remember, in fact, every hideous and outdated dress she was pictured in. She leafed through those pages until she got to the end of the book, then turned back to the beginning again, to Grandpa and Grandma standing in one of their orchards, which was flowering. In the small black and white photo it was impossible to tell the variety of the trees, but the young couple looked confident and strong already, even as young as
they were, much more confident and strong than Cecelia’s parents or any of her aunts and uncles had ever looked. They looked at home, and strengthened by that knowledge.
Cecelia glanced at her mother, who smiled back at her, pleased that Cecelia was pleased, but Cecelia wasn’t thinking precisely of the album. She said, “Mom, why did you and Tia Norma ever come to L.A.?”
“Oh, well, your father and Uncle Emilio …” Her voice trailed off.
“What?”
“They had big hopes. Or they said they did.”
“But what?”
“Oh, the real thing was, there wasn’t much going on there.” She shrugged.
Cecelia felt a third presence enter the room, a presence she recognized. It was her mother’s unspoken disappointment. She made herself sit calmly with it, something she had never been able to do before. And she let herself think a thought she had always avoided, that all their lives would have been better if they had stayed at home rather than coming to L.A. If their homes had been worth staying at. And then she felt a fourth presence enter the room. It was her own sadness. She closed the album and looked up. The rest of the family could be heard outside, flying the radioplane Emilio had given to Alex. Cecelia’s mother began picking up wrapping paper and smoothing it over her knee. Cecelia said to her, “Say, you know what I heard?”
“What?” said her mother.
And Cecelia felt the story bubble up, as unobstructed as a fresh spring. “Listen to this,” she said.
E
ARL’S REAL PROBLEM
was how sudden the change was. One night Bob was forking dirty straw into the wheelbarrow and Earl was gazing at him through half-closed eyelids, and the next morning the door was slamming shut (Bob never let the door slam) and an entirely new person was unceremoniously dumping feed into the trough. Earl contained his usual impatience for the morning feeding and stood back in the corner. “Hey, Sooie,” this guy said. “Wanna eat?” The feed mounded higher than usual in the trough, and the guy said, “I ain’t hauling my tail over here five times a day, that’s for sure. Two is what I got time for, and since it’s Christmas Eve, you’re lucky to get that. So here’s enough to get you to dinner.” Then, without even waiting for Earl to approach his trough and sample the day’s offering, the guy wheeled the barrow into the pen and started flinging rather than laying the dirty straw into it. Earl found the noise disturbing and the sight of his products flying around rather embarrassing. The guy did a haphazard job, too. Earl could have pointed out any number of spots that he’d missed, but clearly the guy was anxious to be off—he set the pitchfork by the door rather than hanging it in its place, and he forgot to clear Earl’s automatic waterer. No scratching, no fellowship, no conversation, no radio, which Bob turned on for him in the mornings. Abruptly, Earl lost his struggle against depression, and instead of beginning at the trough, which he had been all set to do, he went over, kicked his straw into a mound, and lay down.
Recently, Earl’s reasons for getting up in the morning had gotten rather less compelling. At bottom, he was still the hog he had always been, the hog he was bred to be, and he was bred to eat. That was his genius and his burden. Whether or not he was hungry before Bob’s arrival, the sight of feed in the trough was guaranteed to stimulate his appetite, and he was thereafter guaranteed to eat to capacity. He experienced this as a deep driving need, and he accepted it. Sometimes, even if his stomach felt full, and almost achy, his mouth just kept on going. Well, okay. But other than eating, he mostly got up to greet
Bob. He was happy to see Bob. It went beyond the eating, and the care, and even the scratching. To tell the truth, Earl Butz had gotten attached to Bob, almost dependent on him. He appreciated his relaxed and considerate ways, and he appreciated the respect and fondness he sensed that Bob felt for him. These were quiet virtues, to be sure, but the debacle of the morning had only redoubled Earl’s gratitude.
But it went even beyond that. Pundits (of course there were none of these, since Earl’s very life was largely a secret) might have doubted Earl’s capacity for sincere feeling, given a hog’s naturally sociable disposition combined with an unusually isolated upbringing that could have given him sociopathic tendencies, but actually, his isolation deepened Earl’s pleasure in his and Bob’s relationship. There was little he could do anymore to show Bob how he felt—he was too big and maybe too old to play with the toys Bob had given him. With his bulk, he couldn’t get around the way he had done. Getting up in the morning and then going at his job with apparent enthusiasm was all he had to offer, and every morning he offered it, full of the assurance that though Bob didn’t say much, he did understand.
Not this morning. Earl resisted jumping to conclusions. But that didn’t mean he would exert himself today the way he did other days. Today he would give in, lie down, doze, let the ugly mound of feed just sit there.