An American Tune

by Barbara Shoup

“I’m not prepared to talk about my . . . sleeping arrangements.”

  “Well, what are you prepared to talk about?” Nora asked. “We can’t keep on this way. I’ve said I’m sorry, Charlie. I am sorry – for the hurt I’ve caused you. But I can’t take back what you know; I’m not sure I’d take it back if I could. It was wrong trying to pretend what I did never happened. It was there all the time, anyway. I didn’t even realize what it was doing to me, to us until I –”

  “Spare me the therapy, okay?”

  “It’s not therapy,” she said. “It’s true. It’s also true that this is the way it is now, and we have to deal with it.”

  “You deal with it,” he said. “Or talk it to death with Diane. Or –” He shrugged again. “Whatever his name is.”

  “Tom. His name is Tom, but this has nothing to do with him. It’s about us – you and me and Claire.”

  He picked up a magazine from the clutter of them on the coffee table and leafed through it. Claire’s Seventeen. It would have been funny, Nora thought, the sight of him reading a magazine with the photograph of a teenage fashionista on the front – except nothing was funny between them right now. She went and put a log on the fire, watched it flare up. By the time she returned to her chair, Charlie had put down the magazine and was on his way upstairs. She heard the door of Jo’s room close behind him.

  She sat awhile by the fire, then put her jacket on and went outdoors, Astro yipping at her feet. He leapt through the knee-deep snow like a dolphin, circling around her as she walked toward the edge of the forest. She had tucked her jeans into her boots, but they were quickly soaked through. Her feet freezing.

  It was so beautiful, though. The night was clear, moonlight illuminating the snow in the meadow so that it glittered like a field of stars fallen from the sky – and the old farmhouse, her home, in the center of it all. Though it could not feel like home again until she was right with her daughter in it.

  It was just past nine o’clock, hours before Claire would return. Nora walked back to the house in her own tracks, showered to warm herself. She put on her nightgown and robe, made a pot of tea, and sat alone by the fire to wait for her. She felt calm for the first time in a long while, grounded in the moment. It was right, what she meant to do. Necessary. Regardless of what might come of it. It seemed strange to her to think that she’d ever considered any other option.

  “Sit, Honey,” she said, when Claire came in. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “What?” Claire said, alarmed. “Where’s Dad?”

  “Sleeping,” Nora said. “It’s not that. He’s all right.”

  “Then –”

  “Honey, sit down. Please.”

  Claire sat on the edge of Charlie’s chair. “You and dad aren’t –? I mean, you’ve been so weird since I’ve been home. Are you getting a divorce?”

  She looked so fearful that, for a moment, Nora thought she couldn’t go on.

  “Mom –” Claire said, urgently.

  “No,” Nora said. “It’s something about myself I need to tell you. I’m not sick,” she added quickly. “I promise. It’s something about –

  “Remember, I got so . . . upset about your wanting to go to IU?”

  “Of course, I remember,” Clare said. “But what’s that got to do –”

  “The thing is,” Nora said, “I went there myself. I never told anybody. Because –”

  “You went there?” Claire asked, leaning forward. “Mom, what do you mean you went there?”

  “To college,” Nora said. “When I was a girl, when I was your age. I know. You thought I didn’t go to college, but I did. There.”

  “And you didn’t tell anybody?” Claire said. “But why? And why were you so, well, shitty about it when I decided it was where I wanted to go?”

  Nora flinched at her words. “I –” She had not meant to cry, but suddenly tears were streaming down her cheeks. “Because I was afraid to go back there,” she said. “Because I knew if that’s where you decided to go, I’d have to go back.”

  She paused, collected herself. Claire watched, a wariness in her expression that Nora had never seen.

  “I was involved in the antiwar movement in the sixties,” she went on. “I got caught up in something that, well, it turned out very, very badly. And I ran away from it. From my life. I thought I could really do that.”

  “Mom,” Claire said. “What are you talking about? What did you do?”

  Nora told her, briefly, and Claire stood, lurching, as if she’d been hit.

  “You’re not –” she began. “I mean, who are you if you’re not –”

  Nora stood to go to her, but she stepped back. “Honey,” she said. “Claire.”

  “No. Don’t talk to me. Don’t tell me anymore. I don’t want to hear!”

  “Claire, please.”

  But she turned and fled up the stairs to her bedroom.

  “I’m going to Dylan’s,” she announced in the morning. Her voice was cold, firm. “I got my ticket online last night. I’ve got a ride to the airport in Traverse City. Right now, I just need to be with him.”

  “Now see what you’ve done?” Charlie said, when she’d gone – and refused to say another word about it. Claire’s anger Nora could accept, and even the precipice of silence she slipped into once she’d gone to be with Dylan. But the quiet distance Charlie so determinedly continued to put between them, the sense that she had become invisible to him, she did not think she could bear.

  A week passed. Though the final report of the weapons inspectors would not be in until the end of the month, there was news of troop deployments to Kuwait, aircraft carriers moving toward the Persian Gulf. Rumors of air squadrons departing for bases in Al Jaber, something else Charlie refused to acknowledge, along with the fact that Jo had grown weaker, more distant since her illness in December. She slept more and resisted getting out of bed when she woke, curling away from the nurse or from Nora herself, covering her face with her gnarled hands.

  “Charlie, talk to me. Please,” she finally said.

  But he stood and walked out to the clinic, his breakfast left half-eaten on the kitchen table. Watching through the window, Nora felt as she did in the relaxation part of her yoga tape, no more than the sound of her own breath, uncertain where the edges of her body met the air. But the sensation was not a happy one, as it had seemed when she was using the tape – a reason to do yoga. Instead, it frightened her.

  She walked, thinking the feeling would dissolve. But it didn’t. She longed to talk to Diane, but didn’t want to call her in Chicago, where she’d gone to be with Carah in this last week before the baby’s birth.

  By lunchtime, she felt a headache coming on and lay down on Claire’s bed. Snow had begun to fall and she was grateful for the way it dulled the daylight, darkening the room so that it seemed almost like evening. She slept awhile, dreamed herself, Jane, shouting at her own mother, “I can’t be here. I can’t listen to you anymore. Don’t you see that Bobby died for nothing? Nothing, Mom. Nothing at all.”

  Jolting awake, she thought of Claire. She got up and went to the computer to see if she’d sent an e-mail. No. Nothing since the brief message she’d sent to say she’d arrived safely in Cincinnati. Had she talked to Charlie, Nora wondered – perhaps called him at the clinic during the time she knew her mother took her morning walk? Had Charlie called her? Nora had no idea what either of them might do. How they might be, who they might be without her. That was when she made a new e-mail account and wrote to Tom. Because he was real, because she knew he would answer her.

  FROM MIJB65@aol.com

  TO TGilbert@gilbertlaw.com

  SUBJECT No Subject

  DATE SENT Thursday, Jan 9, 2003 12:46 PM

  I told both Charlie and Claire everything, and it was a terrible mistake. Claire left the next day and went to be with her boyfriend; Charlie won’t talk to me. I can’t think. I don’t know what to do, just what I can’t do, which is to keep on as if I’d never had a life
before I came here.

  FROM TGilbert@gilbertlaw.com

  TO MIJB65@aol.com

  SUBJECT RE: No Subject

  DATE SENT Thursday, Jan 9, 2003 1:07 PM

  Do you want me to come?

  FROM MIJB65@aol.com

  TO TGilbert@gilbertlaw.com

  SUBJECT No Subject

  DATE SENT Tuesday, Jan 9, 2003 1:10 PM

  Yes.

  FROM TGilbert@gilbertlaw.com

  TO MIJB65@aol.com

  SUBJECT RE: No Subject

  DATE SENT Thursday, Jan 9, 2003 1:15 PM

  Heading for Traverse City as soon as I wrap up a few things here. I’ll find a place to stay there. Let me know where/when to meet you tomorrow. You’ve got my cell number. Call if you need to talk before that.

  FROM MIJB65@aol.com

  TO TGilbert@gilbertlaw.com

  SUBJECT RE: No Subject

  DATE SENT Thursday, Jan 9, 1:25 PM

  Drive to the public beach at Monarch. Walk south, and in about fifteen minutes you’ll see a downed tree near the water, and just after that, just before the lake curves, some weird little stone sculptures up on the sand. I always walk in the morning around eight. That’s where I’ll be.

  PART THREE

  Unfinished Days

  JANUARY–JULY, 2003

  25

  “Stand by Me”

  The sky was blue and cloudless, the sun shining – warm on Nora’s face, despite the cold air. She came down from the woods, Astro following, and picked up a stone as she did every morning. Light gray, smooth, and egg-shaped, it fit perfectly into the palm of her hand. When she’d walked a while, she took off one glove so she could feel the stone against her skin, as if it could ground her in this place.

  She’d been sleepless the night before, knowing Tom was nearby. She lay in bed thinking of him driving from Traverse City to Monarch this morning, on the two-lane highway that wound up and down through woods and farmland. It was a road she loved in every season – especially spring, when, coming down a hill into blooming cherry orchards, it seemed as if huge pink clouds had fallen from the sky. Today the bare branches of the same trees would be iced with snow, the dried grasses in the meadows bent and broken. The big, white farmhouses along the road always looked the same, cozy and inviting, each with an apple-red silo next to the barn, topped by what looked like a big, round piece of red-and-white striped peppermint candy. Would Tom smile at the sight of them as she always did?

  The minutes on the digital clock on her bedside table had whispered away – but so slowly. Moonlight shone through the dark windows, revealing icy patterns on the glass. Near four, Nora threw back the comforter and stepped, shuddering, into the frigid air. She wrapped her robe around her, padded down to the kitchen and sat, drinking coffee, the radio turned on low.

  In time, night drained from the window and the edges of the meadow grew pink with dawn. Classical music morphed to news: “Citing inspectors’ discovery of twelve empty warheads and documents related to a failed nuclear program’s attempt at laser enrichment of uranium, critics of the Bush administration’s planned invasion argue that the inspections are working and that they should continue under the terms of 1999 UN Security Council Resolution 1284. They contend that if Iraq still possesses illegal weapons it can be peacefully and effectively disarmed by the inspections process, thus making the argument for war moot. But the Bush administration argues instead that the inspection process has demonstrated that Saddam Hussein is not willing to disarm . . .”

  Now, at the shoreline, she picked up her pace, imagining Tom starting toward her from Monarch Beach. Astro trotted along beside her, occasionally stopping to bark at the waves, splashing into the water to chase a seagull, oblivious to the freezing water. He ran around her sometimes, leaping at her knees – which meant he wanted her to find a stick and throw it, she knew. But she kept on.

  She slowed when she came to the place, near the point, where there were dozens of huge rocks just beyond the shore, set in place by glaciers thousands and thousands of years before. Sun dazzled them this morning, bounced off their shiny wet surfaces. Rocks the size of basketballs or melons could be seen just under the surface of the clear water, some had washed up, tangled in bright green seaweed, along the shore.

  Early last summer, she had passed a young man, nineteen or twenty, wrapping them a dozen or so at a time into a blanket, then dragging it down the beach a ways to dump the stones on the sand. She had thought he was making one of the sculptures that had been mysteriously appearing on the beach in the last year or so, but on her way back she saw that he had lined the rocks in vertical groups and was in the process of forming each group into a letter.

  She stopped, curious, and asked, “What in the world are you spelling?”

  He grinned, bending to ruffle Astro’s wet fur. “Will you marry me?” He waved his arm toward the southernmost letter. “See?”

  Nora had thought it was an “M,” facing the water, but now saw that it was a “W” facing the lookout point at the top of the steep dune, high above them. Next to it, “I-L-L. Then Y-O-U M-A-R.”

  “How long have you been here?” she asked.

  “Couple of hours,” he said. “I still have to get the stones for the rest of the letters, so I figure it’ll take me at least another two. Man, I’ll tell you what. I’m bringing my girlfriend up here this evening. She better say, yes!”

  But he knew she would, Nora could tell, and it had made her feel weepy to think of the girl’s first look at the words on the beach below, how she would turn to him and in his face see that they were meant for her.

  “Take a picture to show your grandchildren,” she had said to him, lightly as she could, and walked away, thinking that he couldn’t imagine how quickly the time would pass, how the grandfather he’d become would be, in part, the kid he was now: tanned, strong, crazy in love.

  Astro barked once, jarring her back into the present. She’d stopped without quite realizing it, and he’d brought a stick and laid it at her feet. She laughed, threw it. Then started forward again, preparing herself to see Tom when she rounded the point.

  But he wasn’t there. She walked a little further, to the sculptures she’d described, and sat on the hollowed-out tree trunk to wait for him. This was farther than she usually walked, so she was not surprised to see that the sculptures had changed since the last time she passed. They were always different, though they didn’t change as much in the winter as they did in summer when sunbathers ventured to this remote part of the beach, came upon them, and stopped to add a few stones or take some away.

  There were two today, maybe twenty feet apart. They were shoulder-high, pillar-like, made of big, flat stones laid carefully one upon the other – eight or so at the base, narrowing to a single flat stone with a round boulder perched on top, like a head. Their rounded planes suggested facial features, and they had been turned so that the two figures seemed to be looking at each other across the distance between them, rooted there, yearning.

  She looked at her watch. Five past eight. What if Tom had changed his mind? She hadn’t checked her e-mails this morning. A message could be there, waiting for her: thinking it through, he’d realized it was not a good idea for him to come.

  She fixed her gaze on the waves coming in, hoping the enduring rhythm would help bring her mind into a state of calm. But her thoughts raced and soon she gave up, took the birding binoculars she kept in the pocket of her coat and trained them toward Monarch Beach.

  There he was coming toward her, head down against the cold, his hands jammed into the pockets of his parka. He disappeared into a scoop of shoreline then emerged again, jogging now, coming closer and closer until she dropped the binoculars because she didn’t need them to see him anymore, and just stood as still as the sculptures behind her until, reaching her, he opened his arms and took her in. Astro barked once, then wagged his tail, observing them with a quizzical expression.

  Tom laughed, bent and ruffled his fur. “Fuck, it’s
cold,” he said. “Beautiful, though.” He stepped back and looked at her. “You, too. You look beautiful.”

  “Don’t,” she said, tears springing to her eyes.

  “Sorry,” he said, drawing her close again. “Jane, I’m sorry. Nora. What can I do?”

  “I have no idea,” she said. “Be real? Convince me I’m not invisible?”

  “Hey,” he said. “What’s not real about the two of us on this fucking freezing cold beach together?”

  Which made her smile, made her feel real, fully present in her own life for the first time since Claire had gone away.

  They sat down on the log and watched the sun play on the water for a long time, Astro at their feet. When she finally spoke, it was to tell him about the young man on the beach spelling with the stones. She wasn’t sure why.

  “Why didn’t we get married?” Tom said, when she was through. “I mean, it wasn’t like I didn’t know you were the person I wanted to be with forever. I knew that the first day. Why didn’t we ever even talk about it?”

  “I thought about it sometimes,” Nora said. “Thought, eventually, we probably would. But those couple of years after graduation, when everybody else was getting married, Bridget was so miserable about Pete and it seemed to me that our getting married, too, would have made her feel even worse. That was partly it, for me. Then there was the idea of having a wedding. What were the options there? Your parents meeting my family? Not inviting my family at all? I felt so horrible already about just . . . abandoning them the way I did, and to get married and not invite them to the wedding –

  “I felt married to you – which I convinced myself was what really mattered.”

  “I know,” Tom said. “It never occurred to me that we wouldn’t stay together. So, why hurry – right? We had all the time in the world to make it legal.” He smiled, ruefully. “Jesus, we were stupid then. Anyway. Tell me what happened with Charlie and Claire.”