Peaceable Kingdom (12 page)

There is a long silence. No one seems able to speak. They finish their vodka and Ada pours another round. Then Ada says, “Look. The sky.” Outside, the clouds have turned lavender. Ada and Frank and Jenny gaze fixedly out the window; it is something that’s easy to stare at with more interest than they feel.

Suddenly a voice says, very clearly, “Did you miss me?” And all three of them turn, a little fast, a bit startled—as if they don’t know that it’s Philip, murmuring to his cat.

A
LL SPRING I WAITED
for something to save me from working that summer. That was how I wound up at Potato World. A sixtyish Frenchwoman named Yvette owned the franchise at the mall. She interviewed me for two seconds and said, “You are my new sous-chef!” My job was to scrub the potatoes and preroast them in the microwave. Ronnie, the counterman, finished them off with the customer’s choice of topping. I was shocked by how many people ordered ratatouille-stuffed baked potatoes; maybe that was because I’d seen the industrial-size ratatouille cans.

Yvette came in at the end of the day to empty the cash register. Otherwise, Ronnie and I were pretty much on our own. Ronnie had a double mohawk: two parallel brushes down his scalp, like a tool for de-icing car windows. When I asked him what the color was called, Ronnie said, “Fiberglass pink.”

Ronnie wore two thin copper bracelets to block the toxins in the potatoes from creeping up his arms. I often wanted to borrow them, but I was embarrassed to ask. The potatoes came in fifty-pound sacks, and each time I reached in, clouds of powdery dirt and pesticide puffed up into my face.

Around lunchtime my boyfriend, Jason, came in, his face still messy from sleep. He and Ronnie and I smoked dope in the back of the kitchen. Jason said, “
I’ll
say potato world. This whole town is potato world.”

“Potato planet,” said Ronnie.

We had a phone near the cash register that no one ever called in on. So when it rang in the morning, I’d know it was Jason for me. He called on his bedroom phone; he was working on his dreams. He claimed this was his summer job; his mother and father were rich. Jason was into the Iroquois, who told the whole clan their dreams, and an African tribe who encouraged you to go back into your dream and face the tiger that woke you the last time. Jason was experimenting with dream communication; he’d tell me what he’d dreamed and ask if the images matched anything I’d been thinking that morning. His idea was to program himself to dream about eco-disaster and nuclear strikes and then he would dream through them and wake up with a solution. I closed my eyes and let his voice stream over me like rain. I said, “Will you still like me when I turn into a potato?”

He said, “There isn’t time for that. We’ll be back in school before then.” As we talked on the phone, I studied the sign above the counter, hand-in-hand smiley international potatoes in serapes and coolie hats. This was definitely not my idea of what a potato was. I was becoming increasingly weird about the potato sacks. There was something about the powderiness, the darkness deep inside—half the time I was positive I’d reach down there and grab a rat.

One afternoon I was steeling myself for a dip into the potatoes when I heard a familiar voice order a giant fries. I looked around and said, “You might want to rethink that.” Though my father looked young and trim, he’d had a giant heart attack. Ronnie looked puzzled until I said, “Relax, it’s only my dad.”

“Who’s My Little Pony?” my father whispered when Ronnie turned his back.

I said, “His name is Ronnie. We’re engaged. You’re not invited to the wedding. What are you doing here?” Though we talked sometimes on the telephone, I hadn’t seen him in weeks.

He said, “I’ve come to lift you up and over Potato World.”

I said, “Go ahead. Try it. Lift me.”

My father said, “The choice is clear. Potato World or Paris.”

When I got home that night my mother said, “Oh, thank God you’re safe.”

I said, “Why wouldn’t I be?”

My mother said, “This morning going to work I was walking down Tenth Street, I saw something strange in the middle of the block, at first it looked like one of those pottery chicken cookie jars, then maybe a stuffed chicken, but when I got close I saw it was a live chicken, on the pavement against a building, hardly moving, just blinking very slowly, like it was in some kind of coma, and then I saw that all its tail feathers were off and I thought, This chicken’s been sexually abused, and I felt this cold chill like something awful was going to happen and naturally I’ve been worried all day that it would happen to you. That mall is full of serial killers.”

I thought: No wonder I can’t grab a potato without expecting rat teeth. I said, “I’m not surprised. You should see the awful shit they fry up at Beak ’n Biscuit.”

My mother said, “Don’t say shit.”

I said, “Guess who came in today.”

My mother said, “Charlie Manson.”

I said, “Close. Try: Dad.”

My mother said, “Perfect. The class place to bring your teenage sweethearts. What’s he down to now? Nineteen?”

I said, “He was alone. He wants me to go to Paris with him.”

My mother was silent. Then she said, “A woman in my office just got back from Paris. She got dysentery from couscous.”

I said, “Be reasonable. Paris isn’t Casablanca.”

She said, “Believe it or not, it cheers me up that you know the word Casablanca.” She said, “I wish you wouldn’t go.” Then she said, “When are you leaving?”

Yvette said, “Oh, Par-ee.” She seemed so excited I asked if she was from there. She said, “No, we are not.” Only then did it dawn on her what this meant for her. She and Ronnie exchanged quick looks, like parents I’d disappointed. I said, “It’s only Monday. I can work through Friday night.”

The next day Ronnie said, “I’m with you. Another week or two here and I’m potato history.”

I said, “Ronnie, you can do better than this. You’re really smart. I mean it.”

He said, “Don’t buy a leather jacket there. They’re all American-made. They export $149 cheesy mall pieces of shit, and they get these retarded French kids to buy them for fifteen hundred bucks.”

I stared dumbly at Ronnie. I couldn’t do the arithmetic. I said, “I didn’t sleep last night.”

Ronnie said, “You look it.”

I’d been arguing with Jason, he’d driven somewhere in the country and we’d sat in his car. Finally, all I could think about was how frantic my mother must be, so we went home and continued it on the phone all night. We kept repeating ourselves. I’d say, “What would
you
pick: three weeks in Europe or three weeks scrubbing potatoes?” He’d say, “How would you feel: your girlfriend just disappears.” Asking each other to imagine being us made it clear that we weren’t each other, though there had been moments that spring and summer when it had seemed that we were.

When I called Jason to say goodbye, he said, “Fine. Don’t blame
me
.”

We sat three across on the airplane, my father, Robin, and I. My father had introduced us at the airport. He said, “Robin joined the firm around the start of last year. The guys whose heads we brought her in over are totally pissed off.”

Robin was tiny and startled-looking with spiky stand-up blond hair that didn’t quite go with her business suit and $200 high heels. As soon as the no-smoking light went off, Robin pulled down her tray, perhaps to hide what I’d noticed before: her hands just shook and shook. Her fingernails were airbrushed with swirls, top-of-the-line Korean. At least Robin wasn’t twenty, my father’s favorite age. He could let her be older than usual; she was smaller and more afraid.

When Robin went to smoke a cigarette, I said, “She reminds me a little of Mom.”

He said, “Do you know how long it would have taken me to talk your mother onto this plane? Everything just got to be too goddamn labor-intensive.”

Robin ate the high-cholesterol stuff off my father’s food tray—quietly, efficiently, she just vacuumed it up. She said, “I have an insane metab,” and her hand shot up like a rocket. She said, “Obviously, so do you,” and then, “I’m sorry. Don’t you hate it when strangers act like they know about you? I mean, about your metabolism.”

I said, “What’s your job, exactly?” My father was in advertising; he’d done the ad with the conga line of pineapples with little Carmen Mirandas on their heads. Now he was going over to tell the French how to make the American consumer stop associating mustard with hot dogs.

“I’m a lawyer,” Robin said, “I can’t believe it, either.”

“She’s my translator,” said my father. “She grew up in Quebec.”

“What translator?” said Robin. “The mustard people speak English.”

The movie was
Fatal Attraction
, which all of us had seen, a funny choice for them to show—there were little kids on the plane. Robin watched without the sound. My father read. I fell asleep. I had a dream about Jason. It was a kind of erotic, melting dream though nothing sexual happened. The general feeling of the dream was like getting a suntan.

On the expressway into the city, I fell asleep again. I woke up thinking that I was back home and that I’d missed the whole trip. It took me a while to focus and see the French traffic streaming around us.

The air in Paris was like airport air, complete with the fuel-oil smell. Walking outside was like being stuck behind a fucked-up Rabbit diesel. Hot as it was, all the kids wore leather, just like Ronnie had said. All I had were jeans and Jason’s big men’s shirts. I’d told Jason, “I couldn’t find someone else. I’ll be wearing your clothes.”

My father and Robin were out all day. I slept till eleven. I liked the empty garden café on the hotel roof where I could spend an hour over breakfast and sign for coffee and croissants. I got a map, I walked miles, I took the Métro, it was easy. I went to Notre Dame and the Louvre. Afterwards I sat in the park and imagined a letter to Jason. “Today,” it said, “I saw a museum of Japanese tourist haircuts.”

The next day I went to the Cluny Museum. There was almost no one there, except one punk girl near the carved stone tombs with the stone people lying on top. It was cool and quiet, with a damp cavey smell I liked. I began to go there every day as if it were a job. I sat with my back against the stones and wrote letters in my head. I went over every word until I had it perfect. I wrote Jason that when I closed my eyes I felt totally medieval; the world got slower and colder till it dropped off the edge of my brain. I hallucinated a chorus of monks, singing solemn hymns. It gave me a yawning, wide-open feeling, like after a shower or sex. The outside seemed to disappear, the cafés I’d had to pass, the tables of kids and glamorous grownups leading cool lives without me in them.

Sometimes I’d go to cafés and order by pointing at people’s drinks. The green ones tasted like mouthwash, the brown like herbal cancer cures. I hoped someone would join me, even a scary Moroccan. I felt I could handle anything because I didn’t know French.

One day two Haitian guys sat down, Jean Luc and Baptiste. They were young and pretty and had big Rasta hair. Jean Luc wore a flowing white shirt and pants and wanted to be a designer. Baptiste spoke the most English; he was a musician. Jean Luc commented on the passersby—he could tell where everyone got their clothes and exactly how much they’d paid—and Baptiste translated for me.

When two policemen walked by, Baptiste said, “You must be very careful.” Then he told me a story about a girl they knew who’d been picked up by two gendarmes and taken for a ride and forced to give one cop a blow job, but she was smart, she had a paper cup in her purse, and after they let her go she spit the cop’s come in the cup and brought it in for protein analysis and the cop got busted. All this was surprisingly easy to say in Baptiste’s bad English. He asked me if things like this ever happened at home. I asked why she had a cup. Baptiste translated for Jean Luc and they looked at me and shrugged. “Be careful,” they told me when I left. I smiled and said I would.

I went back to the hotel and watched a soap opera in French. The camera ping-ponged back and forth between an arguing man and woman. I went out of focus and fell asleep and had another dream. I dreamed Jason and I were in his bed; his parents were off at work. In my dream I kept waking up and going back into the dream.

Finally Robin woke me, knocking on my door. She asked if I wanted to come next door and have a drink with them.

My father had his jacket off. He was lying on the bed, his head propped up at the very same angle it always had at home. Seeing him, it was as if nothing had changed, or everything were interchangeable, Robin and my mother, Dan Rather and the news in a language I didn’t understand. I wondered: If I went back to sleep, would I dream about Jason again?

Robin took off her heels and put on enormous furry brown slippers with plastic claws, like a bear’s. “From the Anchorage airport,” she said. “I take them everywhere. I’m terrified of flying.”

My father said, “Jesus, it’s only an hour till we have to go out again.” To me he said, “You might
like
seeing a bunch of squeaky-clean French mustard yuppies.”

“What kind of restaurant?” I said, though I had no intention of going. “Trendy couscous,” said Robin. “Isn’t that insane?”

The minute they left I went back to my room and lay down and turned off the lights. I concentrated on Jason and got into my dream. Though maybe I should have done something healthy, gone out with my father and Robin, because now the dream changed, and Jason and I were the French TV fighting soap-opera couple. Only this time I knew what the argument was about: he had found someone else. There were no events in this dream either, it was only a feeling—as if the world were turning its back, shutting like a clam. I woke up sad and furious and reached for the phone.

Jason and I had both had dreams in which the other person betrayed us. But it was completely different when you woke with the person beside you, or reachable by telephone, a local call away. I gave the operator Jason’s number. I didn’t care what time it was, he had his own phone. It rang twice and he answered. I said, “I had one of those horrible dreams, you left me for someone else.”