America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  “Somebody keeps calling and saying he’s your son,” she said, her voice as flat as the teal of her polyester pants. He waved this away, changed her number and made sure it was unlisted, and surprised her on her birthday with a cordless. She brought it to the grocery store and showed it to the checkout clerk.

  In terms of the letters, it was a matter of practicality, he thought. What was the other option? Some PO box that he’d need to regularly empty of the letters? No. When the forwarding began NASA stopped boxing them, so he put them instead in the plastic bags from the supermarket that had accrued under his sink, and when those had run out and a new supply had yet to build up, he put the letters in loose and closed the door to the room. It was the one area of his life that defied organization, the place he would rather not look. The year before the landing, when the letters had begun swimming in, he had been told that they mostly contained suggestions, directives on what he should say when he set foot in that new place. He had never had any interest, not because he believed he knew explicitly better what should be said, but because he thought no one was more or less suited to know.

  It had come to him on a run one day, as he pushed past the hoariness of sleep deprivation, a phrase that he heard as he came to a field of grazing cattle. It was almost as though they had supplied it, the bigness of their eyes. Anderson had asked about it often, wanting to run it by some committee. Vincent knew for months, what he would say, but told no one.

  His mother lost her mind in the space of a summer that was arid and unyielding, even bemoaned by the little boys on bicycles, who could be seen on the side of the country roads taking breaks en route to the same destinations he’d sought out once, the creek bottom, the quarry, their radios sputtering from where they were tied with twine to the Ts of red and blue frames. There was no wind. She began calling him and posing questions that were like koans, rhetorically impervious but hiding some candor.

  He was in the garage, the first time, sorting winter clothing, bagging some sweaters for donation, when the phone rang, and though he had decided to let it go it went on a long time, twenty rings, thirty. Finally he put down the turtleneck in his hand, navy, Scandinavian wool, a gift from Elise, and ascended the two steps inside.

  It seemed there was no one on the other end, at first, but then she was there, his mother who had never asked him a question about the divorce, just opened the furniture catalogs she subscribed to and begun to leaf through them with a pen in hand. She had read out prices like possible names for babies. Blinds and sectionals, lawn chairs and ottomans.

  “The clock is talking too much,” she said.

  “Do you mean,” he said, “the bedroom alarm or the kitchen wall? That the minute hand is loud? Should we replace it?” She hung up. The next came two days later, five A.M. sharp, early even for him.

  “No space for a tree in a house,” she said.

  He ran the three blocks there and found her in the living room with one piece of white bread in her hand, curled like a tube. No butter, no plate, no knife. She performed a girlish annoyance at the breach of privacy and he left on her insistence, but on the next visit there were eggs in forgotten bathwater, coupons stapled to a jacket. His mother had always treated him the same, had insisted, two days after the quarantine was lifted and she saw him for the first time back from the moon, that he comb his hair again before dinner. He wanted to afford her the same privilege, despite how far she had traveled—much farther, he thought, than he’d ever been. When she told him, the last afternoon in August, during the middle of the game show that was her favorite, that she was very late, that her ride would be in front of the movie theater any minute, he reassured her that her dress was perfect, there was no need to change, and then they got in the car. On a bench under the marquee, his hand on her neck when she let him, they waited two hours.

  “Your son,” she said, and he patted her hand.

  She died without much awareness of it, bothered by any ceremony around her, swatting the pastor Vincent had invited when he tried to take her hand. The pastor, sitting with his scrubbed hands spread on his knees, called her by her name, Andrea, something that had thrilled her once, and made reference to her many years as a Sunday school volunteer. At the close of ten minutes, in the middle of one of his careful sentences, she tottered up and turned off the lights. They laughed, Vincent and his sister and the pastor, the way they might at a child who has said a taboo word without knowing it, but not for very long. The last thing his mother said aloud in this life was: “The ladies’.” As in, I need to use the ladies’.

  The matter of the letters was raised in her dying, because she left so much to be kept, much of it the story of who he was, the newspaper clippings and the locks of his baby hair. It had to go somewhere. His sister laughed meanly at the suggestion she take it all, her hands on her hips in their childhood kitchen where she had once, in private curiosity, chewed some dog food and then tried to put it back in the bowl. Sophie had been the first to idolize him, spelling her own name wrong months after she’d perfected his, and also the first to give up trying to know him. She had exploded during the Thanksgiving following his divorce, nearly a full year after, when she asked where Elise was and had to glean the answer from the ashamed look on their mother’s face. Please pass the rolls, he had said, and she had, not before unscrewing the salt shaker and emptying it on the one golden lump remaining. Even this provocation he had not taken. He got up and announced he thought he’d take a walk, and she had said, as he pulled on a jacket, You know, I used to call you a mystery, but even a mystery rewards you some for trying to understand it. My son got more out of his pet snake.

  Now, in the light of the open refrigerator, squatting in loosely laced running shoes and jeans that were too young for her fifty-six years, pulling out the crisper bin and passing a hot bleached cloth over it, she was less nasty, tied only loosely to the situation and its questions. She hadn’t even looked up at the suggestion, which he had voiced without really thinking, that she take the boxes of clippings and grade school photos, the proof of his life their mother had saved. He had forgotten or never really known she was unlike the other women who had appeared in his life, pliant, just to grow around it.

  “Why would I hold on to your childhood? What do you think I care about those scrapbooks? You’re not famous to me.”

  He found her weeping, later, crouched over a box in the bedroom, a photo of herself in a hand-sewn costume of a plane, six years old, a bid for his attention that their mother had architected. As he turned to go she caught him leaving, and she threw him a look as though he were a chore too long postponed, some filth that had spread and changed.

  It seemed preposterous to him that we should all be so beleaguered by our lives’ arcana, have to decide about the college yearbook and the wedding reception album. How could we possibly determine their worth, he thought, and weren’t we damned either way, cold and unsentimental if we let them go, hamstrung by nostalgia if we didn’t. At the end of her month packing up the house he accepted her invitation to breakfast, a diner where they had gone as children, a place with high-backed booths and a wall of celebrity photographs that included nine of him. He could not understand why she became so furious when, after ten minutes of their sitting there in silence, he opened the newspaper. “Your things are boxed by the back door,” she said as she got up. “Once you’ve got them, you can slip the keys in the mail slot for the Realtor. Thank you for breakfast.” The bill had not been received or discussed. She was passing through the glass door and agitating the string of bells, she was making her way to her scratched-up car in the lot, she was adjusting her bangs in the mirror, she was pulling out, she was gone.

  When he brought them home, the thirty-two boxes that she had carefully taped and angrily annotated, Marriage-Edwards, the only place for them was the spare room where the envelopes with strange handwriting already lived, and so he decided one evening, after days of stepping around them in the hall, with a hand on the back of his neck and a forkful
of overcooked pasta in his mouth, that he had no choice but to take care of the letters.

  He was of the age now that his admission to the movies was discounted, but he paid full price. On his bedside table were books in stacks, in his wallet no photos or ticket stubs, and he had begun knocking wood when he passed it, cabinets or tables, for luck in what he didn’t know.

  8.

  YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO, 1986

  He is sixteen, this boy from Ohio, hired by the astronaut, and before this he walked dogs and threw papers and daydreamed of his girlfriend, not even nude, just alone with him in a house, any house, just pale and tall and his. For a few years now he has delivered the groceries, always the same, leaving the bags by the screen door where his checks are pinned once a month. He has never seen another car in the driveway.

  When he took this job it was with some imagination of social capital, of people in the hallways sidling up and wanting to know what Vincent Kahn was like, and also of some mentorship the specifics of which he could not imagine—exquisite one-liners the astronaut would deliver in reaction to some reported crisis of the boy’s, advice so lean and infallible you would bend yourself around it. Every week he hopes for some deviation indicated by a Post-it, I’m craving a Popsicle, surprise me, could you ride out to the bakery with the marbled rye and buy the biggest loaf they have. But there is only the Cream of Wheat, the cans of soup, four tomato and two mushroom, only the sensation of the screen door like all other screen doors, wire that feels made of pressure-packed dust. He has begun, if he’s honest, to resent this job, the total and impersonal mundanity, how it’s eroded his ideas about this man and men like him. He grew up loving this town, riveted by the fistfights at the lasagna feed, well versed in the folklore of certain abandoned buildings—the house where the newlywed had sleepwalked off the third-story porch and died. He was proud to come from the place that had formed Vincent Kahn, but now he cannot help but feel that whatever remarkable civic element had assisted in making this man did not outweigh the smallness it must also have instilled. He will not, this boy, Sammy to his friends and in his own mind Sam, be living here a day more than is necessary. Every part of who he is will be by his own design.

  He has secured admission to a university in a city where he has never been, Chicago, and knows at all times how many days of 1986 are left to live through before he will board the train there. Repeatedly, furiously, he has declined the offer of the family station wagon. He will arrive for the rest of his life alone.

  On the day Vincent Kahn opens the door, he has sixty-three days, and he imagines all of them will be empty, an unendurable waiting room. Even his girlfriend has become a kind of redundancy, someone who loves a person he no longer wants to be, Sammy of the yelling cannonball and the joke bicycle with the clown horn. He knows this hurts her, that he can barely respond to her placid questions, would he like to go outside and see the moon, see the neighbor’s Lab dyed lilac in a prank. Stephanie. In the spring he came in her mouth. It was an event long talked over and planned, but he wouldn’t kiss her in the hour after, and also wouldn’t apologize.

  Sammy, soon to be Sam, is placing the bags on the two concrete steps of the side porch. For reasons unclear, to fuck with the astronaut in some small way, he is arranging them in an elaborate and nonsensical fashion, a V that straddles the three levels. Last week it was a circle. Maybe Vincent Kahn will fire him, which would at least require some departure from the script. This is certainly a note he could pin up in his dorm room, a dismissal from the first man on the moon. He is goose-stepping over them to leave, his Chuck Taylors laced in that special way that makes them look like isolated rungs, when he hears a sound he has not before.

  Vincent Kahn does not speak. He waits for Sammy to acknowledge him. Later, alone in his bedroom, drinking a beer pilfered from the garage refrigerator, Sammy will note the power in this and decide to adopt it in his new life. Appear in a door, in a room, cast a shadow, wait.

  Standing with a hand tented on the screen door to keep it open, the sleeves of a thin shirt rolled up, Vincent Kahn could almost be another middle-aged man in Sammy’s way, someone telling him not to park or talk or smoke here, were it not for the eyes, their two different colors. He has read enough of his father’s old Lifes, has been indoctrinated with the myth, to know how much has been made of this, a rare condition that flagged him from the start. The words printed and broadcast are a part of how he sees Vincent Kahn, superimposed on the normalcy of the kitchen behind them, mustard yellow, the eyes of two different colors that marked his destiny to belong to two worlds, the outdated high-waisted denim belted around a visible gut, the green of the earth that bore him and the gray of the moon he would conquer.

  The words are out of his mouth before he has thought them:

  “Hey, coach!”

  Not only does he call him coach, but as he does so his hips do this unexplainable buck, a pelvic thrust like an unwieldy toddler trying to shake the piss off. Why, why, why.

  “Come in for an iced tea.”

  It is not a question. Inside he sits at the dine-in laminate counter on a stool that spins slightly, willing himself not to abuse this feature although to do so feels like a betrayal of the self. To spin on a stool, to shorten the name of anybody you know into something foolish and mocking, to leap up and brush your fingers on arched white entryways with your new height, to take a hill at full speed and black out the headlights as you crest it. He wants these things before anything else, food even, money.

  “I thought you might take on another kind of work for me for the rest of the summer, Sammy.”

  “Sam,” he says. It is the first time he has spoken it aloud.

  “Sam. I had a dear friend named Sam.”

  There’s a peculiar look on the astronaut’s face as he says this, one that seems to possibly move from outside the body in. There’s a silence. Sammy kills it with an ice cube he takes in his molars, a reflex the urbanity of which he has not considered. This snaps the astronaut back to the conversation and it crosses the boy’s mind that perhaps he is reconsidering.

  Vincent Kahn, from behind the cutout window that bridges living room and kitchen, threads his pointer finger through it and over the counter.

  “See those boxes?”

  A nod.

  “Full of letters. Fifteen years and change. No idea what’s in them. I can’t bring myself to read them.”

  On the counter the boy knits his fingers together, trying to present as thoughtful and composed, but it reads he thinks as prayer, so he separates the hands and lets them fall open. It has the look of supplication now. Vincent Kahn seems to forget this is an exchange he has initiated. In his pocket is a handkerchief he removes and makes a point of and dots along his hairline, which Sammy is disappointed to see has crawled halfway back his head. He wants the man in the photos, waving from a motorcade, the worshipped center of ten thousand hands. He wants the snowy voice broadcast in every home, narrating morning on another world.

  “Well?” Vincent Kahn says.

  Sammy’s tongue does not seem to belong to him. What has he missed, why is he here, where was the question? Sam makes eye contact now, longer than he has been able to before. The astronaut has the kind of discomfort, communicable, that transfers immediately to its witness. The boy sees now it is his task to prompt him, that the conversation has been abandoned, with its few belongings, at his door.

  “The letters are from fans?”

  “I assume. And the opposite. And some lunatics. Probably a good section of those in both categories.”

  Sam gropes for the man’s intent, sort of pleading with it.

  “You don’t want to read them, but you don’t want to throw them away?”

  “This is correct.”

  “You want me to read them?”

  “This is correct.”

  “And do what, exactly?”

  “I had a thought.”

  He disappears for reasons unannounced and Sam opts not to move at all, not to survey t
he house he already understands as a disappointment. He doesn’t want to note the lack of photos framed on the walls, the living room that seems devoid of life. No pets, no smells, no sounds.

  Vincent Kahn returns with a document of some kind, creaseless as sky in a stiff envelope, and slips it across the counter. The incongruous ceremony of this, urgent and official in a situation that is anything but, is not lost on Sammy. For the first time in months he misses Stephanie, who threads her filthy Reeboks with glitter laces, whose face hides nothing. The feeling there, inside the two of them, is as far from this room with this man as possible—facile, riddled with punch lines and rolled-down windows. He wants Slurpees at the 7-Eleven, perfectly two-toned in a helix twist, cherry and Coke, pink panties, blue condoms, golden beer.

  He wipes his hands on his jeans and takes the single piece of paper from the envelope. It is graph paper that has been run through a typewriter, the letters boxed perfectly by the squares.

  “Just a start,” Vincent Kahn says. “I would make more.”

  Profession, the text says. Age.

  Current state.

  Home state (if different).

  Sane. (Y/N)

  Unstable. (Y/N)

  Summary of letter.

  Most telling remark.

  “Quarter a letter,” says the astronaut. “Lunch included. Two hot dogs, one apple.”

  He has not once asked, but what can Sammy say? Can he say no? Two hot dogs, one apple, he will tell his friends, finding a real thrill in mocking this famous man.

  Later that night he climbs the tree to Stephanie’s room, new with feeling for her. She squeals when she hears this update, of all the boys, you.

  She is on her period so he doesn’t undo her pants but keeps a knee high and a little rough up between her legs. In between the feelings of her tongue in his mouth he looks out at her room, the transparent plastic phone she uses to call him, all colorful gears and mechanisms revealed. He leaves her earlier than he otherwise might, Stephanie with her hair a little oily and her shirt still off, to start in the morning.