America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  “Mom?”

  “Yes, my sweet.”

  “Who is Randy writing to all the time?”

  “Friends, family.”

  “But before he said his friends all died. Before he said he didn’t have a family—”

  Wright wouldn’t look at Fay but he could feel, beneath him on the mattress, that she was firming up her posture to deliver a statement. He had introduced the question too soon, knew the answer would be too short.

  “He’s writing to some people in the States, a group of men and women with similar ideas about how our country treats other countries and how it treats its own citizens.”

  “Has he met them?”

  Slipped in the wooden seam of the mirror opposite them were photos he’d taken with the camera Randy was teaching him to use, and he stared at them now—Lucinda on a phone call with someone she believed to be an idiot, her eyes mostly their whites and her fingers spread taut on the counter before her. Fay’s soapy heel on the lip of the tub, a book splayed and puckered on the bath mat.

  “No,” she said, “but he was connected to them through a friend who is also a veteran and who also opposes the war. There is a whole group of them, young men who were drafted to fight and are dealing with the consequences now. And there are others, people who didn’t go to war but want to end it, people who want to end the way America polices other countries just for having different ideas.”

  She was speaking to him too slowly, as though describing a view that was blocked from his vantage, relating only vague impressions of shape and shade.

  “But so they’re writing every day? They’re best, best friends? What are they talking about?”

  “Mostly about change.”

  “Change how?” It was completely dark now and when she bucked her hips he would not let her rise toward the lamp. He thought of all the ways he could recognize his mother, by scent, by the shape of her ankle, gemlike, sharper than any other part of her. He believed this would be important someday, that there would be an occasion on which his understanding of her would be tested, and he was going to be ready, to prove that before anything else she belonged to him.

  “Okay, okay. Change on the most fundamental level, how Americans think about other Americans, how they think about the rest of the world, whether they think about the rest of the world. How to get people to see past their front lawns. How to get people to think about how their lives unfold on the backs of others.”

  “How does Randy think he can change that?”

  “Well, there are a number of ways, all of which involve getting people to think. There’s education, there’s demonstration, there’s symbolic action.”

  “What’s a symbolic action?”

  “It’s an act that summarizes something much bigger or longer, in a very public way, so that people who might not otherwise think of that something will begin to.”

  “An example being . . .”

  He had learned the shortcuts through the airy way she had begun to speak, and he deployed them like the politician all his mother’s secrets had made him. Certain turns were required in a conversation with her, from ignorant to mindful, from son to something else.

  “Do you know you are the only nine-year-old who says ‘an example being’?”

  “An example being—”

  “Okay, an example being—I’ve told you about teach-ins, where a group of people set up in a public space and lecture and distribute information through pamphlets and what have you.”

  “And that’s a demonstration.”

  “Right. A symbolic action, an example of one, is called a die-in, which is when a lot of us get together and we wear costumes and makeup that bring to mind the Vietnamese people who have been killed in the war.”

  “Why do you say ‘us,’ Mom? We’ve never done that. You and me have never pretended to be dead.” As he spoke he tried to cover fear with emphasis, but the boil of his body stepped in front of his speech, making his talk quicken.

  “Us and we are pronouns that help to emphasize the global nature of all these problems. Saying ‘they’ is the same as saying ‘not me, not my problem.’”

  “I understand,” he said, the phrase he had learned to use when he could not.

  “We can talk about this as much as you want.”

  “How about as little,” he said, a minor fury coming to his mouth now, remembering things he’d heard Lucinda say. “It’s weird how your voice sounds like his voice. It’s weird how you forgot to wash your own ass without him around.”

  She was silent, then conciliatory, treating him like a boy much younger. Her bribes he declined, a story, a bath floated with flowers. She could run to the kitchen and caramelize some chocolate. He wouldn’t answer, only set up on his own bed with a basket of scrap paper and began practicing a new design of a plane, the Dragon, thirty steps he’d memorized. He could feel that his mother was watching him, her arms crossed, her tangled hair pushed all to one side, brown and red and blond, could hear how her breathing had quickened. She swung her feet over the side of her bed and strode to the bureau, the wide sleeves and skirt of her kimono creating a slight wind that moved his papers around.

  “Goddamn, woman,” Wright said, echoing a refrain of Randy’s. “On your way to the hospital? I’m doing stuff here.” She was placing a hunk of pot in a grinder, the snap of her wrists gone sharp with anger. He knew what was coming, the voice she would use.

  “I feel sad and unloved when I’m spoken to with sarcasm. I would appreciate, in the future, if you expressed any frustration with sincerity.”

  It was called an I-message, a device for the discussion of feelings that she had decreed as rule in the room the three of them shared. Okay, babe, Randy had said, 4–0 on the cry message. Wright had laughed until he saw his mother’s face. It seemed that she had slipped into Randy’s politics totally, his way of thinking, but with hers he could pick and choose. In the adult world where they argued, the male mind was a cathedral, cool and stony, and the female a colorful junk sale, surprising but inconsistent.

  She leaned darkening on the dresser, her hair tied up in an ugly knot, the smoke filling between them until she began to cough and displaced it. He hated the smell of it, hated the way she looked as she inhaled, her eyes shut to everything, hated how after nothing could interest or upset her. He began to throw the planes at her, first in gentle arcs, then angry lines. It didn’t take long for her to go, less than a minute, and she left the joint smoking in the ashtray. He brought it into the bathroom and pissed on it.

  IN BETWEEN DREAMS THAT NIGHT were the sound of their voices, the flint of the lighter catching again, a Stones record she asked he turn off. “—action met by action. No more protests, no more slogans on paper. If our government continues to destroy, then we must destroy the government.” Wright woke to the sun rising and his mother on the floor, her hand moving fast across a page, the inn’s stationery spread around her like a corona, the thin papers catching all the light.

  12.

  What persisted about the tours, 237 countries, the palms and fingers of a thousand diplomats meeting his, the view out the window prairie or alpine or smog choked, was the game Rusty had about telling women’s ages. Vincent could see it from across a ballroom or down a table all busy with crystal, the look on his face just before they submitted. “You know, I can tell certain things about a woman by her hands,” he would say. “Would you like to see?” Probably they imagined appealing vagaries, a line down the middle that meant luck in property, the prominence of a vein that revealed a stubbornness in love, and anyway who would say no to this American, whose face that summer was ubiquitous as water or money.

  “Of course,” they’d say, and remove their hands from where they sat folded on the table, or gesture to the passing caterer and set down their empty champagne flute on a platter, their beaded clutch on an elbow-height table. They were politicians’ wives, mostly, relegated to the side, the colors they wore chosen based on the colors their husbands did, and it mus
t have been a welcome question, Rusty’s, some trick that considered them as individuals, that would say you personally are, you clearly have, you likely want. They always agreed, wearing wedding rings and Bakelite bracelets, their cuticles pushed back to emphasize the purity of their lunulae, the pads of their palms treated with shea and paraffin and vitamin C.

  He would look awhile, cupping the wrists and tracing the indexes, transferring their palms from one of his hands to the other while the color of their cheeks deepened in happy embarrassment, and then he would say a number. Sometimes it took a moment, sometimes they waited for a possible amendment, thirty-seven what, exactly. Possible grandchildren in your future? But if they looked at his face they knew immediately. It was a kid who had Saran-wrapped the toilet seat on April Fools’, left plastic dog shit on the family kitchen floor. Thirty-four, thirty-three, forty-eight, fifty.

  “The hands don’t lie,” Rusty would say, delighted, always the same line. Then there was the moment they had to giggle like the girls they weren’t, hinge a hand at the wrist in mock admonishment. Smile like how clever, smile like what fun. Vincent saw more than one leave the room after, feigning illness or actually ill. A hand low on the stomach, a knuckle pressed to a temple.

  It occurred to him often, the polarity of it, how what he had been hired to do required precisely the opposite skill set that these rooms did. He remembered the things Elise had told him, yardsticks for small talk. If it’s Wednesday or later ask about the weekend coming up, if it’s Monday or Tuesday ask how was your weekend. Before you make a statement think if it can be a question. The spouses didn’t come on every trip—the others had children—and when he called her, which he tried to often, she would sometimes say, bothered, vicious, “Are you nodding? You know I can’t hear it if you nod.”

  Elise had told a story that wasn’t entirely true about an inability to conceive, and Life had latched on to it, captioned a lilac-washed image of her looking into the distance. She had become a celebrity in her own right, making guest appearances on call-in radio advice shows, saying This is Elise Kahn as though she were saying I have loved you forever. There were the ads—a rouge company had asked for her endorsement—in which she held a phone to her ear and a pointer finger under her elbow. Shouldn’t You Look Like You’ve Just Gotten Some Good News? He knew she would leave him when the publicity died down. It was a feature on her face now, a part of how she ate and moved and slept. The worship was gone, how she had always said Do you like this dress, Are you excited for tomorrow, Can I take your jacket, Have you had your vitamins. “Sorry it’s later than I thought,” he said, one night, from the Netherlands. She said, “Not a problem.” She said it too quickly.

  “I have to tell you a story,” he said. “A Jeanie.”

  That was the way they were referred to, by everyone who knew him. I’ve a got a real Jeanie to tell you, a Jeanie that out-Jeanies them all. He lived for others, learned how to tie balloon animals for his children’s parties, kept birthdays in a daybook that was with him on the way to the moon, knew the piano, knew the guitar, had once stopped a scuffle in some Cocoa Beach bar by walking across it on his hands. Even Vincent loved a good Jeanie. Sam had introduced the term without explanation: none was necessary.

  “You know this rule that your head is never supposed to be taller than the queen’s?”

  “Elise?”

  “Which?”

  “Which what?”

  “Which queen?”

  “Any queen.”

  “I don’t know it, but I don’t doubt it.”

  She was smoking and painting her nails, he could hear it and almost smell it. How many times had he asked her to keep the windows open, but she must have loved it, the chemical bite of smoke on plastic, and couldn’t he have just avoided that room?

  “So tonight we are leaving this ballroom where the ceremony’s been, and of course Rusty’s had too many, but Jeanie also. The sort of thing where you’re served some mysterious liquor in little cups, and no one is telling you what it is or what’s in it except that it’s a local specialty. So Jeanie was doing his usual act but a little bubblier. I heard him threaten his acrobatics, which thankfully the handler caught and nipped in the bud. Poor Susan, God bless Susan.”

  He had his toes knit into the carpet of the room and was talking to fill the distance, the dread of coming back to that house that belonged to her now. He no longer knew where anything was at home, a Band-Aid, the hot-water bottle, some souvenir he’d held on to for reasons unclear. The only room she hadn’t touched was his office, and it was cut off from all other rooms, untouched by the cleaning woman, riddled with ancient to-do lists and books he’d only ever begun.

  “And the queen,” she reminded him. Talking to Elise now was to be a walked dog, pulled back from distraction by a snap of her wrist.

  “Right. Susan finally gave Jeanie and Rusty this look, Enough is enough, and we all said our goodbyes and headed toward the stairs up to our rooms, Jeanie in front because he’s a little top-heavy, and then there at the foot returning from who knows where is the queen. She is incredibly old and incredibly tiny, and Susan’s face takes a hard left into fear when she sees the queen is also ascending. It’s clear this is to have been avoided at all costs, because to follow the etiquette is nearly impossible, while walking, given the disparity in height. But Jeanie, who apparently has not forgotten this stricture, and who is pretty loose from the liquor and lest we forget a college acrobat, just takes this as a challenge. I have never seen a body move this way, Elise. An animate noodle. His knees and hips were sort of skewed in a Z, and then his trunk hunched way over and his head knit forward to listen to her. He had to keep the posture from step to step or the top of his hair would rise above hers. Finally they get to the first landing, marble columns, brocade benches, you know, and she turns down the hall and we all wave until she’s out of sight. Then he says it, very quietly, ‘Kahn, my ankle, it’s snapped like a twig.’ I had to carry him the rest of the way and Susan’s still in there with the ice, and the thing three times its size and Jeanie’s going, ‘Goddamn the queen! Goddamn the queen!’”

  She refused to laugh. The silence was clean. A decade before it would have delighted Elise, the debutante in her, this story in particular, absurdity in the name of politesse. She was committed now to a kind of remoteness that was an imitation of his. Of all the things he had given her, his cruelty. The way he had treated her was reified here, finally, in the yes-and-no answers, the delay in her reaction not unlike that of the CAPCOM, far away on another planet.

  The tours passed like this, the main events the personalities of other people, the tide underfoot her unhappiness on the phone. He knew, it beat at him, that on the other side of this was a life without a center, and so he tried to approach time slowly, as if to trick it—turning fruit in his hand before he ate it, singing out the song that came into his head in the string of rooms where he slept, for the first time in his life, without his watch on.

  BACK IN THE COUNTRY AND deep in the fall, they had five more stops and even Susan was deteriorating, emerging one morning with cold cream dotted in mounds under her eyes. At a college where the masonry was tawny and spotted with moss, in an auditorium that smelled of old graham crackers, the three of them sat on metal folding chairs and took questions from the meadow of hands. The answers were as automatic as the sensor in his garage, the light that appeared when needed. Pauses built in, punch lines demographic tested. Between speaking he took sips of water, held it in his mouth. He made a game of hours like this, how deeply could he retreat, how involved could he become in his digressive train of thought. He remembered every bed he’d ever slept in, moving systematically back in time, pillows and sheets, quilts and windows. He alphabetized his records, Debussy, Dvořák.

  He surfaced to a changed room, Rusty and Jeanie canted at their trunks, looking back into the wings for the person who would correct the mistake. $24 BILLION THAT DIDN’T GO TO WITHDRAWAL, a sign coming toward him said, held so squarely aloft
it seemed to approach on a track. They wore masks, synthetic hair on rigid plastic, brown and haloed in orange, backlit in the flare of afternoon, the primate features exaggerated at the cheeks and teeth, and moved in formation, four rows of two. WELCOME, NIXON’S MONKEYS. As they began to charge, the auditorium lighting caught the teeth of their zippers and the metal of the pins on their jackets. THEY ALSO DIE WHO STAND AND WATCH. The security officers flowed from the sides, let wild into purpose.

  It felt like something that happened without him, the water glass, what he did with it. A hand closed around his ankle, pale and freckled and with dirt under the nails. He had only tipped the thing from its place on his knee. It could have been an accident, he thought, as he watched the shocked fingers unlatch. A baton already out, he saw, ready to fall on the pale line of the neck.

  Susan was ushering the three of them off almost immediately, her hands up like a traffic guard, as if she might easily separate the future of the men from the anger of the students.

  IN THE MAKESHIFT GREENROOM OFF the auditorium, among racks of period costumes and props, papier-mâché boulders and a canoe leaned up against the wall, Rusty gestured with a Styrofoam cup. Leaving the stage had been an admission of guilt, Rusty thought; youth hysteria was a disease they shouldn’t be tolerating. Jeanie, hands in the pockets of his suit, would not stop nodding, would not wait for the conclusion of a thought to agree with it. Rusty closed his hand around what was in it. When the Styrofoam split, the coffee came through the seal of his fingers. “Fuckit,” he hissed, shaking the scalding drops off his hand and onto the brown carpet.

  There was no car scheduled yet so Vincent stayed, listening to them rage, quiet as he was famous for being, on god, on his family, on the death of his friend.

  No respect, they were saying, since when did reaction replace discussion, the trigger-happiness of protesting now, the college students automatons. If his muteness before had been a fence around what mattered to him, the questions he wanted to speak with alone, today it was otherwise. When he faced those masks, when he saw those signs, he had felt utterly unequipped, somewhere very close to obsolete. He knew there was some conviction he was meant to articulate, but he could not imagine what his walk on that planet, unpeopled and soft with slate dust, had to do with the pain or yelling on this one. What his mind brought him, in that dusty back room, was the tinny sound of a stall warning in the first plane he ever flew.