An American Tune

by Barbara Shoup

  Nora might even have told Jo the real reason she didn’t want Claire to go there. Everything. She’d always known she could tell Jo the truth about her life, always assumed Jo would be there to tell if she ever decided it was what she needed to do. Jo would listen, her blue eyes brilliant with tears. She’d say, “Oh, Honey, you never had to keep this a secret from us.”

  This morning she was propped in her recliner, The Price Is Right blaring on the television. She was dressed in one of the half-dozen jogging suits Nora had bought her on the recommendation of the nursing staff when she couldn’t dress herself anymore. Easy to get on and off, they said. Jo didn’t seem to mind them, or the weight she’d put on being so sedentary. But Nora never failed to see her that way without remembering Jo as she had been up to her eightieth birthday just a few years before, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, running the dogs in the meadow or rolling out the dough for a pie crust in the kitchen, a force field of energy buzzing around her.

  When she tapped on the open door, Jo turned and cocked her head slightly, blinked as if to bring her into focus. Then her face clouded over like a child’s might. “Nobody lives in this place anymore,” she said in a wobbly voice. “Nobody’s been in here to see me all day. I haven’t eaten a single thing.”

  Nora dropped to her knees beside her, took her hand. “Your breakfast tray is in the hall. It looked like you had eaten most everything they left you.”

  “Oh,” Jo said.

  “Are you still hungry, though? Mo left you some apples yesterday. There, on the dresser. Or I could go down to the kitchen and see what kind of snack I can find.”

  “I don’t think so,” Jo said. “I don’t think I’m hungry. I just thought I hadn’t eaten and, you know, that I should.”

  “It’s okay,” Nora said. “You don’t have to worry.” She moved to sit on the side of the bed and began to tell Jo all about the trip to Bloomington, but Jo looked confused, as if she wasn’t quite sure who had taken the trip or why, and she soon nodded off. Nora sat a while, waiting to see if she would wake into a lucid moment as she sometimes did, then gently readjusted the recliner to a position better for sleeping and went on into her day. But making her way through town to do her errands, stopping here and there to chat, she couldn’t shake the image of Jo from her mind, and it struck her quite suddenly that she was now almost the same age that Jo had been the summer she came to Monarch, nearly half of her life ago.

  She’d been heading for Saginaw, having spent several years drifting her way town-by-town back to the Midwest from California, all alone. Why Saginaw, she wasn’t sure. Maybe the Simon and Garfunkel song. Maybe the fact that it was just another medium-sized city where it would be easy to find a crummy job, a small apartment, and just blend in for a while.

  She came across Lake Michigan on the car ferry, landing in Ludington and, on a whim, decided to drive north along the coast. It was July, beautiful. If she camped, if she was careful with her money, she could afford a week’s delay in her plans. The little lake towns smelling like water, their ice cream and souvenir shops, vacationing families tired and pink from a day at the beach made her feel at the same time calmer and sadder than she had felt in a long while.

  Monarch was where her car gave out at the end of that stolen week, where she sat in the Hummingbird Café, her head in her hands, the meal she’d ordered still untouched before her. She didn’t have the money to have the car repaired; the smart thing would be to leave it behind and hitchhike. Fine. She’d done it before, though the thought of it filled her with dread. You didn’t know who might stop to pick you up. What they might want from you, or wonder. And she was so tired, she realized. More tired than she’d known. At that moment, she simply could not imagine standing up, gathering her bedroll and duffel and walking in the hot sun back to the highway in hope of finding a ride.

  Then Jo slid into the booth beside her. “Curt down at the filling station told me about your car,” she said. “You by any chance looking for a job? Because I’m really shorthanded here. Darn college girls. They say they want to work, then –” She laughed. “They want you to schedule around their beach time. I’ve got some shifts, if you want them. There’s a little apartment upstairs. It’s not much, but you can stay there if you want. Couple of weeks, the worst of my summer rush will be over and you’d have enough to fix the car and be on your way. Wherever you’re going.”

  Nora had just looked at her.

  Jo smiled, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to save someone’s life. “You’d be doing me a favor,” she said. “Really, you would.”

  Nora had awakened the next morning to the smell of coffee wafting up the stairs to the tidy little apartment where she had slept. The sky was still pink, glittering through the eyelet curtains, and when she stood and went to the window she could see Lake Michigan, blue-gray and calm, dotted with fishing boats, a long black tanker out on the horizon. It was so quiet here, nothing like the places she’d stayed in before. Down on the street, fishermen gathered near the bait shop – dads on vacation, she figured, sharing tips, telling stories. The real ones had been out before dawn. There was a produce truck backed up to the grocery store, a woman sweeping the steps of the ice cream shop. Pinwheels and whirly-gigs fluttered, catching the sun, along the sidewalk leading up to an antique store.

  That morning, she’d been determined to earn what she needed to repair the car and be on her way. But it was still high tourist season when the day came and Jo still needed help in the café, or so she said. Okay, Labor Day, Nora told herself. Then Labor Day came and the tourists left, but so did the college girls. There’d be the fall color before they knew it, Jo said. The skiers after that. Could she stay? And so she had.

  At the time, she told herself she was just too tired to move on. Why not spend six months in this place, as she had in others before it? Now, of course, she knew that it was because of Jo that she had stayed, just being with Jo who was always smiling, always thinking of some small thing to do for someone else but who knew how to keep her distance, too. Never once did she ask Nora to elaborate on what she had told her after working at the café for several weeks: she was an only child, her parents had died in a car crash not long before she graduated from high school, and she’d been on her own ever since. Nor did Jo mention the sadness surrounding her own life: her young husband, killed in a hunting accident just months after returning from World War II, her only son a virtual recluse since coming home from Vietnam.

  Even now, she could not think of Charlie as he had been in those first months she worked at the Hummingbird Café without feeling overwhelmed by tenderness. He’d been painfully shy the few times he came into the café, barely able to carry on a conversation about the weather. But the first time Jo asked her to dinner at the farmhouse, he took her out to the kennels and she was charmed by the transformation she saw in the presence of his animals. There, smiling, his hands held out to receive the dogs’ squirming affection, he talked to her about his childhood, how he’d always had a whole houseful of pets and, by the time he was ten, he’d made up his mind that he wanted to be a veterinarian.

  When he asked her to see a movie with him, she said yes. Two lonely people. What could it hurt to keep each other company from time to time, Nora had thought. In the next months, they went to movies, to concerts at Interlochen. Sometimes, on her days off, she would drive over to the clinic and help in the kennels. She enjoyed the dogs and surprised herself by being quite good at the office work: scheduling appointments and keeping the books up to date.

  “What if I asked Mom if I could steal you to work for me?” he asked one spring day.

  “I think I’d like that,” Nora said.

  That summer, nearly a year after she arrived in Monarch, they were sitting on the beach, watching the sunset, and he lifted her hand from the blanket, kissed it, then drew her to him, wrapped her in his arms. No man had touched her in a loving way since she left Tom, and it was her first impulse to pull away. But she could feel Char
lie’s heart racing. She knew how shy he was, how lonely – and what the gesture had cost. To pull away, to say no . . .

  And it was so lovely to be held by someone safe and kind. Not to be alone.

  For just an instant the next morning, waking, she had thought it was Tom sleeping beside her and was filled with such gladness that it took her breath away. But it wasn’t Tom, never could be Tom again. Then Charlie stirred and turned toward her, his face naked with longing, and she realized what she had done. Leave now, she told herself. Get up and walk away from him. But she couldn’t. Who would she be without Jo and Charlie, without this place she’d grown to love? If she left, where would she go? In time, she stopped thinking about leaving at all.

  Life, any life, created its own force of gravity, she saw now. Each kiss and heartache, each meal cooked and consumed, each possession, no matter how small, each garden planted and harvested pulled you toward your own shared center of habit and memory. You couldn’t know it would be like this when you started out. You couldn’t know what would be expected of you.

  And it wasn’t as if she regretted staying. No. She loved her life; she’d been grateful every second of every day for it. What she regretted and, increasingly, feared was the secret at its center, which had lain dormant for so long that she had foolishly come to believe it had lost its power to harm her or anyone she loved.

  The recent arrest of a Philadelphia woman who had lived underground since participating in a bombing in the 1970s had unbalanced her and brought with it a rush of memories she thought she had put to rest. The impending war in Iraq frightened and enraged her – as much for the way it, too, had begun to dredge up memories of that other time as for the arrogance, the reckless myopia with which it was being pursued. In the last week alone, bombings in Iraq had “accidentally” killed a wedding party, warships were gathering in the Red Sea and now, on the radio, the nasal, self-righteous voice of the Secretary of Defense was asserting, “Measures above and beyond air strikes are necessary to rid Iraq of its supply of weapons of mass destruction.” What measures, he didn’t say. Or how he knew, for sure, the weapons were even there.

  “It scares me,” Diane said that evening. They’d finished the meal she and Monique had prepared and the four of them had taken their coffee out to the screened gazebo that overlooked the lake. “My brother’s boys are that age,” she went on. “Gung ho, the way teenage boys are. Yeah, they’d go in a New York minute, they said after 9/11. And Larry, Jesus! You’d think he’d do everything in the world to convince them not even to think about it. But he’s like, ‘If that’s what we have to do . . .’ ”

  “It won’t happen,” Charlie said.

  Diane raised an eyebrow. “Are you kidding?” she said. “We’re bombing them already. I’m serious. And the army’s holding –” She held up her hands, the first two fingers on each curved like quotation marks. “Exercises. In Jordan. What do you think that’s about?”

  Charlie didn’t answer.

  Monique gave Diane a stern glance, then in a chirpy voice turned the conversation to the clinic. Old Mrs. Grimes had been in with the awful, yappy Gabrielle, in a panic about a spot on her ear that turned out to be an insect bite. And Bonnie Cato’s terrier had eaten three library books. God. Should her stomach be pumped, Bonnie wanted to know?

  Diane got up, gathered the empty coffee mugs and took them to the kitchen while Mo chattered on. Music and laughter drifted over from the public beach, where Nora knew Claire and Dylan were playing volleyball – the River Rental team against the wait staff of the Friendly Tavern. Afterward, couple by couple, they’d wrap their beach blankets around their shoulders and hike to a quiet spot to be alone. Her heart ached to think of Claire and Dylan, lying in each other’s arms. Would the war happen? If it did, how would it change them?

  Claire was proud of her father for having served in Vietnam, though she had been virtually unaware of the controversy surrounding the war until her junior year in high school, when her American History teacher assigned a research project on it. In her late thirties, the teacher had vague childhood memories of the sixties, a nostalgic view of the troubles confronting the veterans when they returned from Vietnam, and she believed that by interviewing local men who had served there students could, at the same time, learn firsthand about the war and, belatedly, honor the men through their interest in their experiences. The vets would be invited to a “Welcome Home” party at the high school when students had finished with the unit. They’d be asked to sign an American flag that would be placed in the trophy case in the front hall.

  “I don’t talk about Vietnam,” Charlie said when Claire approached him with the set of questions the teacher had handed out. He had never denied her anything, yet he was adamant in his refusal, immune to her pleas for help. “I put that behind me a long time ago,” he told her. “Most of it, I don’t even remember. I don’t want to remember. And if your teacher hassles you about it, you tell her I said she has no business assigning kids to dig around in people’s personal lives.”

  It was so unlike Charlie in every way that Nora was alarmed. “It’s for school,” she said when they were alone. “Can’t you just give her something – basic?”

  “Basic?” he said. “Basic, like – ?” He shook his head.

  “Like what?” Nora asked.

  “Like standing outside a surgery tent listening to a couple of intelligence guys torture a Vietnamese kid who’d just gotten thrown 40 feet out of a Huey?” he said. “Listening to the kid scream? Doing nothing? That I think of this every fucking day of my life? I could start there.”

  She stood in shocked silence, let him walk away from her.

  He hadn’t been the only one to protest the project, and it had fizzled. Instead, the class had a Sixties Day, complete with Beatles music, psychedelic posters, and tie-dye tee shirts. The subject had not come up again, but Nora thought of it now and wondered why she hadn’t pressed Charlie to tell her more that day. Why she had let what he did say – the first true, deeply personal thing he had ever told her about what happened to him in Vietnam – just float there between them and dissolve.

  I didn’t want to know, she thought. And, the truth was, Charlie wouldn’t want to know what she’d done either. She looked at him, laughing at some long story Monique had launched into, so easily, happily diverted from even the slightest suggestion of conflict or disagreement, and she felt suddenly scooped out, empty to her core.

  It won’t happen, Charlie had said of the impending war.

  It didn’t happen, he’d convinced himself of Vietnam.

  As if she hadn’t done exactly the same thing herself for more than twenty-five years. Believed only in the moment. Now. As if Vietnam had not happened to her, either. Iraq, though, she saw – as she’d been incapable of seeing Vietnam in the beginning, when she was young.

  15

  “Good Day Sunshine”

  That night she dreamed of Bridget again. Not the nightmare from long ago that had returned, with different variations, ever since Claire had sent her acceptance to Indiana: Bridget caught in flames, wheeling backwards. But Bridget appearing in the doorway of her dorm room as she had that very first day, suntanned, freckled grinning. She’d dreamed following her up the stairs that opened onto the roof of the dorm – but it was Lake Michigan she saw when she looked over the wall, the view that greeted her each morning.

  “Is this groovy, or what?” Bridget said.

  Hours after waking, Nora still hadn’t shaken the dream.

  “Are you all right? Charlie asked at breakfast.

  “Fine. Tired,” she said.

  The tired part was not a lie. Later, walking through the woods with Astro, her legs felt heavy, her breathing was labored. The first glimpse of the lake didn’t lift her spirits, but oppressed her. She was Jane looking out at it from the roof of the dorm, shocked to find that the campus had vanished, leaving nothing but water and sky. She cut the walk short, despite Astro’s urgent barking when she turned back at less than h
alf their usual distance and was about to give in to a nap when the phone rang.

  “Want to float?” Diane asked. “Don’t even think of saying no. It’s August first. A gorgeous day. If we don’t get our float in now, the whole freaking summer is going to get away from us. Do you want a summer without a float in it?

  “Nora?”

  “Yes,” Nora said. “I mean, no I don’t want a summer without a float. I’ll meet you at the launch in twenty minutes.”

  She threw on her bathing suit and a pair of shorts, stuffed a tee shirt and sunscreen into a beach tote, filled a little cooler with drinks and snacks, and left a note on the table for Charlie: “Floating with Diane. I’ll do the bills this evening. N.” Monique looked up quizzically from the entry of the clinic, where she was emerging, watering can in hand, to water the window boxes outside Charlie’s office window, but Nora just waved as she drove past – still a little aggravated by the way Mo had manipulated last night’s conversation away from the Iraqi controversy as if to protect him.

  She reached Riverside Rental before Diane got there, signed them up for two of the oversized inner tubes with plastic bottoms, then sat on the deck of the little general store in a puddle of sunshine. The store had been built in the forties, Charlie once told her, and had been added on to so that there was an assortment of nooks and crannies inside, stuffed with fishing tackle, sunscreen, beach toys, groceries, and every kind of tacky souvenir. Outside, it looked like an overgrown cabin, with cedar siding and a stone chimney. A life-size wooden Indian, its paint chipped from years of weather, guarded the front door with the help of a huge, motley teddy bear sitting on a blue deck chair. There was a big white ice chest, a stack of neatly bound bundles of wood for campfires. There were bins of flip-flops and water toys and Frisbees in garish colors. A strawberry ice cream cone the size of an eight-year old child tipped out from the roadside Riverside Rental sign.