The Portable Veblen (15 page)

Further, the doctor and I both feel that having her sleep outside in your camper to foster independence is not the answer. She feels isolated and punished and she is a young girl. This must never happen again.

We also feel it is not proper for her to go with you when you collect money, as she has heard you yelling at people and finds it frightening. It is also against my wishes that you ask Veblen to work while she’s staying with you, selling those cards door-to-door. She informed me of this only recently and reluctantly, and I was quite shocked. It is not safe for a child to go door-to-door selling things, even prayer cards. It is also hypocritical because she knows as well as I do that you are not religious.

Further, Veblen told us that you frequently ask a man in a brown suit whose name she does not even know to watch her on days you work, and she feels uncomfortable with him. He has given her a wallet and a few other gifts and I don’t think this is appropriate, whoever this man in the brown suit is. Who is this man?

Last but not least, Veblen loves to swim and dive. But please do not take her to the high dive at the Plunge anymore and throw her from the diving board.

Please be more relaxed with her and try to avoid judging her. She’s interested in her family history and Norwegian customs—why don’t you tell her more about that? As you know, she is a lovely, intelligent, and affectionate girl. If you can’t curb your temper around a ten-year-old girl, then you shouldn’t see her until you can.

Sincerely,
Melanie

Rudgear got so mad when he received this letter that he called up and shouted at Melanie and that was it. Veblen was never sent to see him again. For the time being Veblen was hugely relieved, but also couldn’t help wondering why he didn’t try to make up somehow. Well, he just wasn’t strong enough, is what she figured out in time. It wasn’t until Veblen moved to Palo Alto years later that she wrote to him and reestablished contact, without her mother in the middle of it.

•   •   •

I
N THOSE CHILDHOOD DAYS,
Veblen had several methods for calming her nerves, such as riding her bike as fast as possible, holding her breath under water as long as possible, climbing trees as high as possible, and typing as fast as possible. One thing she typed a lot was this:

MAYBE YES

MAYBE NO

MAYBE YES

MAYBE NO

Really, really fast. As if weighing all options.

She began typing the lyrics to songs, to remembered conversations, whatever sprang to her fingertips. She typed with the satisfaction of a pianist on a grand in Carnegie Hall. She knew her fingers by the words they commanded. Her hands had lives of their own, her servants, her ten-horse team pulling her dray.

When she typed she felt great freedom, like a wild mustang galloping across the plains.

Later, learning Norwegian with Mr. Bix Dahlstrom in the care facility, the whole world would magically disappear, leaving them alone in an enormous cavern that they could wander through nearly forever, always finding new chambers to explore. When you entered the cavern of another language, you could leave certain people behind, for they had no interest in following you in. You could, by way of translation, emerge from the cavern and share your adventures with them. You didn’t have to be an intellectual in a black beret smoking clove cigarettes to be a translator, not at all. You could become one in your blue flannel pajamas, your face smeared with Clearasil.

You did.

      6

A
RT
I
S
D
ESPAIR
WITH
D
IGNITY

A
fter Paul left for work on Monday, Veblen rolled her bike from the garage and heard the rubbery leaves of the magnolia shiver. Leaping from bough to bough went the squirrel, as if it could fly. Curious how the squirrel stuck around, even with a mean-looking trap in the attic.

Curkcuuuuurikieeeeecururururucuriii!
The squirrel flew from the branches onto the garage roof, every spiky guard hair on its tail gathering sunlight.

“Hey, what’s up?”

Seeforyourselfforyourselfforself,
it seemed to chatter.

“Up in Cobb, was that you?”

His reply formed a rhyme in her head:

Whiskery day, whiskery do

No one knows me and no one knows you!

“Did you stow away in the car? Did you flatten yourself like a pancake?” she asked him. He must have laughed merrily at the
pinch he’d been in, as it kept a fellow from going soft, to find himself in a pinch now and then.

The squirrel twitched and ran.

“See you later!”

Spring had come. Bright-headed daffodils elbowed through the soil, yellow acacia fanned the rooftops, humming with trains of bees. Tender young buds could be chewed on everywhere, as could those easily damaged new leaves that had the feel of baby skin. Out on the bike path, snaking around the bends in the creek, the breeze tousled her hair, morning cool and redolent of the bark of tall trees. At the railroad tracks she detoured south to University, under the sandstone archway, to enjoy the passage down stately Palm Drive, lined with parallel columns of the majestic Canary Island species. From eucalyptus to redwood to oak, sparrows, towhees, juncos, thrashers, and jays all whistled and dipped. Ground squirrels raced back and forth over the path, barely escaping her wheels. She avoided the basking earthworms on the shores of rain puddles. Her tires crunched the russet husks that had fallen from the palms in the rain. Nature was irrepressible, and should be. If a squirrel took note of her, as if to say she was a human worth knowing, as if to say (and you couldn’t help but take it this way when singled out by an animal) that she was a human worth marrying and loving, then let him have his say!

•   •   •

H
ER MOTHER CALLED,
during her morning round of transcription; Veblen called back when her break came, under an oak in the sun.

“Hi, Mom,” said Veblen, swatting at a mosquito near her face.

“Veblen, did you take the typewriter from your room?”

“Yes,” Veblen said.

“What made you think you could do that? Why didn’t you ask me?”

“It was just sitting there. You don’t need it, do you?”

“You know that typewriter is special to me! You know that!”

Veblen took a deep breath. “Okay, so I took it. Now what? Do you want me to ship it back?”

She could hear her mother swallowing some kind of liquid.

“No, Veblen. Keep the damned thing. I wonder why you did it, that’s all. It seems as if you did it to hurt me.”

“Hardly. Why are you so touchy about the typewriter?” Veblen wanted to know.

Her mother spoke in a near whisper. “Because it was given to me by a brilliant man who saw my potential. That was a special time for me. You know that.”

“What was so special about it?”

Her mother’s voice shrank further. “I don’t need to justify my attachment to that machine. I’m merely asking that you’re careful with it.”

“What am I going to do, throw it off a building?” Veblen looked up at the roof of the hospital.

“I suppose not.”

“Watch out, maybe I will,” Veblen said, with actual malice.

“All right. Tease me all you wish. It’s your typewriter now.”

“I know it’s mine. I used to take it all over.”

“But you never took it away before,” said Melanie.

“I took it away now.”

“Yes, you did.” Her mother sniffed, and adjusted her tone to
sound upbeat and agreeable. “Anyway. Linus and I were talking about your desire to further your Norwegian, and we wondered what you’d say if we offered to help you take that time in Norway you’ve always wanted.”

Veblen was a fool sometimes, but she was no fool the rest of the time, and she crushed an old acorn beneath her shoe.

“Why are you saying that?”

“What, dear?”

“Why are you saying that right when I’m about to get married?”

“Oh! Don’t you remember, you said it yourself—right here in the bedroom next to me—that you wished you’d had the chance to spend time in Norway.” Melanie was a bad actress.

“So what you’re really trying to say is that you don’t want me to marry Paul!” Veblen cried.

“No, I’m not,” said Melanie.

“I wanted to go on that study abroad program ten years ago! You said you needed me at home. And then I managed to raise the money later, and you went into the hospital a week before I was supposed to leave so I didn’t go.”

“Oh, I’m sorry I inconvenienced you!” her mother jeered, and Veblen scanned the skies.

By now she recognized the patterns in her mother’s behavior that were triggered by any forward progress in her life. When Veblen finally made her move to Palo Alto, her mother fell into a horrible snit as Veblen finished packing that last day, throwing something at her while she zipped up one of her bags.

It was a patchwork cover for her computer, perfectly fitted, finely finished, made of scraps of Veblen’s childhood dresses, just like the one her mother made for her typewriter once upon a time,
an otherwise loving gesture except that her mother pitched it at her head and ran from the room in tears.

“Mom?” she called.

“What?” yelled her mother.

“I love it!” Veblen said.

Melanie screeched, “Go on, get out of here!
Go, go, go, go, go!
”

“Why is she yelling at me?” she asked Linus.

“Because she loves you so much. She’s going to miss you.”

Veblen began to cry too. “I wish she could just give me a hug.”

“Give her a call as soon as you get there, okay?” Linus said, patting her on the back. “That’ll make her feel much better. Good luck, babe.”

This was her send-off, and as she drove away, eyes still red, she vowed that the only way to break free from the grief her mother caused her was to make something out of it—but what?

Art is despair with dignity,
she thought, and scribbled it on a scrap of paper in her car. If only she were an artist!

Now Melanie said, “Why not do your thing in Norway
before
you get married. There’s no hurry, is there? Paul can keep on with his work, then you can come back and get married anytime you want. You’ll never get a chance to do this again, believe me.”

Everything had gone so well. Paul had brought up the roof of the chicken house and almost got scratched to death. Her mother had seemed so happy.

What went wrong?

What always went wrong?

She was supposed to thank her mother for the offer, play along without subtext. “Did I tell you what a great time Paul had?” she tried instead. “He loved you and Linus. He loved our house.”

“Is that so? We’ll see how long that lasts.”

“Yeah, especially if I tell him you want me to go to Norway right now.”

“I don’t know if I’d mention that, unless you decide to go.”

“I’m not going to go,” Veblen said.

•   •   •

T
HERE WERE FAR
more important things to do than get married, of course there were. There were exploration, discovery, all kinds of challenges to be had.

Girls who dreamed only of marriage were doomed, mentioned her mother at regular intervals throughout Veblen’s life.

•   •   •

B
ETWEEN UPDATING
Dr. Chaudhry’s calendar and making some copies, she fell into a reverie about married life involving her cottage on Tasso, but the daydream rejected her attempt to have it because Paul had his eye on bigger, “better” houses, so she switched channels to an old daydream in which she had a job as a foreign correspondent in Jakarta, based on seeing
The Year of Living Dangerously
at an impressionable age.

There she was in sweaty khakis, there was her Linda Hunt–like friend taking her into the seamy underground, where they supported a sickly child with bags of stolen rice. There they were, ranging through the smoke of riots, bold and unstoppable, sending back reports on the hour. She used to imagine meeting a male reporter, maybe an Australian, with manly arms who grew up on a sheep station, who’d take her home to meet his family, a short hop
across the Torres Strait, where she’d jump in with the chores, unafraid of the work, and they’d soon see she was no stuck-up American. They’d marry and take over the sheep station and her sweet old in-laws would live out their days on the veranda, watching them canter up in the evening after a long day mending fences, the shepherd dogs right behind, waiting to be fed.

Wait a second, that wasn’t going to happen—she’d chosen Paul, a doctor who experimented on brains at a veterans’ hospital in California, who probably didn’t like sheep, and definitely would never have his parents living with them.

Probably not a good idea to fantasize about that anymore.

•   •   •

I
T WAS REFRESHING
to continue on with Paul as if she existed independently of her parents, but wasn’t she misleading him?

He had no idea.

After she’d completed some filing and mailing, made a trip to the drinking fountain, and performed a stretching session behind her desk, she received a call from Bebe Kaufman, the head nurse at her father’s mental health facility in Paso Robles.

“Veblen, your dad needs some new pants and all the rest of his usual supplies. When can you make it down?”

“How’s he doing?”

“No change. No problems. That’s the kind of news you want, right?”

“Thanks for everything you do for him,” Veblen said. “I’ll come soon, I promise.”

“Good girl,” said Bebe Kaufman.