An American Tune

by Barbara Shoup

  Surely, everyone felt this way to some degree by the time they’d reached their fifties. Surely, everyone had memories they tried to avoid. But if you’d led a life in which the same memories were free to float up again and again, maybe the edges wore away, the worst parts receding over time. It seemed impossible to her now that she had been able to forget so much for so long. Would she have just died someday, all those painful memories still buried inside her, if Claire had made a different choice?

  She thought of the guilt she’d felt at Claire’s age, insisting that her parents give her something they could not afford, how she couldn’t forgive her mother for the sacrifice she’d made so she could to college. For the small, struggling life she led that made such sacrifice necessary. She shivered, not only from the cold. What if Claire never forgave her letting her have what she wanted, when she had known full well all that might be lost because of it?

  Knowing, too, what – who – she might find.

  At Starbucks, she bought a large latte and held it in her hands for the warmth. A table opened up near the window and she sat down, rubbing a circle on the glass, hoping Claire might walk Diane to the gates and she might at least catch a glimpse of her. It was foolish to hope that the two of them would appear and walk, smiling, toward the café together; still, hope flared up and she could not quite extinguish it.

  She breathed in the smell of coffee and cinnamon, held her gaze on the gates until Diane appeared, alone, and made her way across the street. She put her palm on the cold window, as if this would somehow focus her thoughts, then drew it back again and put both hands in her lap.

  “I’m sorry,” Diane said, sinking into the chair beside her, unwinding the scarf from around her neck. “I didn’t say so, but I thought I could get her to come talk to you. I was sure of it. Shit. Nora, I’ve probably only made you feel worse.”

  Nora shook her head.

  “Because you couldn’t feel worse,” Diane said. “Believe me. I know.”

  “Exactly why I’m glad you came, no matter what,” Nora said. “You’re the only one who has any idea what this is like. Tom doesn’t. He can’t.”

  Diane leaned toward her, eyes brimming with tears. “The thing is, Nora – she’s going home; Dylan’s taking her this weekend.”

  “For spring break? I knew they had it early, but –”

  “No. To stay. Well, for now.”

  “Stay?” Nora asked. “But she can’t do that. Her classes –”

  “She dropped out the first week, moved out of the dorm,” Diane said. “She’s been staying with Dylan. He came, after we’d been talking for a while – he was probably there all along and I just didn’t see him. He told me she’d already made up her mind to do it before she got to Cincinnati. Poor kid, he looked beat. He tried to talk her out of it, he said –”

  “And Charlie’s letting her do this? Goddamn him,” Nora said. “He’s the one who insisted she had to come here in the first place. It was so perfect for her. No other place would do. Now he’s just going to let her throw it all away.

  “What’s wrong with him?” she went on. “It didn’t have to be like this. If he’d helped me when I said I had to tell her – but no. He refused to deal with it at all. Like it would just go away if we –”

  She stopped when she realized that the women at the table next to theirs had stopped talking and were staring at her.

  “He doesn’t know,” Diane said, quietly.

  “Oh.” Nora put her hands to her face. “Oh, God. What should I do?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything you can do. She’s determined to go. You could come back with me.” She looked at Nora. “But unless you think you and Charlie might get back together, there’s a good chance it would make things worse. I don’t know, maybe it would be a good thing for just the two of them to be together right now. Dylan will stay through spring break; he’s coming again for the summer; and Claire’s planning to come back to Bloomington with him in the fall. By then –”

  “What?” Nora asked. “By then, what?”

  “You’ll have a better idea of what your life is going to be – and maybe Claire will be more willing to consider where she can fit into it.”

  “Maybe not, though.” Nora said.

  Diane sighed. “Come on. You knew this part wasn’t going to be easy.”

  Tears streamed down Nora’s face and she blotted them with a napkin. “I know,” she said. “I know. But it never once occurred to me when I decided to come back to Bloomington with Tom that Claire wouldn’t be here. Near me.”

  29

  “MacArthur Park”

  Nora remembered a summer evening, dusk, lightning bugs flickering all around her. She was nine, maybe ten years old, standing in a vacant lot at the edge of her neighborhood, watching cars go by on the interstate, her hand lifted in a wave, imagining that a nice car with a happy family in it would pull over, and someone inside would open the door and beckon for her to come with them. It didn’t matter where they were going. Just one step away from where was now and she knew, in time, she would be able find her way into the world she’d read about in books. She was sure of it. New York, Paris, London, Rome. The watery streets of Venice. Cathedrals, pyramids. Fields of heather, snow-capped mountains. Tulips as far as the eye could see.

  Later, when darkness fell, and her parents sent her to bed, she propped a library book against her bent legs, pulled the covers up into a tent and read with a flashlight. She did this almost every night of her childhood, traveling by words. She made lists of things she didn’t know or understand in a notebook and looked them up in the encyclopedia at school. What, exactly, was a moor? Were unicorns real? Was a hair shirt really made of hair? She puzzled over how whole civilizations could just get buried. How long did it take, she wondered? Didn’t people living nearby notice? Now the answer to this question seemed perfectly clear. They were buried by life itself, as it proceeded relentlessly forward.

  In the weeks since Claire left Bloomington, Nora had spent whole days, still in her nightgown and robe, just sitting in Tom’s leather chair in a kind of dream state, fascinated by the workings of her own mind. At any given moment, her brother might appear, grimy and annoying; her sisters, their blond heads bent, doing their homework at the dinette table. The four of them might be crowded together in the backseat of the family car, the kids in their pajamas, their hair still wet from their baths, on their way to the Dairy Queen where they went sometimes on summer evenings. Her father driving, her mother, happy in the moment, her bent arm resting in the open window to catch the breeze. She’d feel claustrophobic, if it were her turn in the middle; agitated, not knowing herself until the last moment whether she would ask, as she too often did, for a sundae or milk-shake or just settle for the nickel cone she knew her parents could afford. The perfect curl of ice cream at the tip of those cones, she remembered that – and the pleasure of licking it off, at the same time thinking the curl on a ten-cent cone would have been bigger, thus an even greater pleasure.

  She would get away from this small, stupid life, she had promised herself again and again. She would not live as her parents did. Her father, his music on the radio all that was left of whatever dreams he might have had; her mother with no apparent dreams at all, except the happiness of her children. If she had only known then how hard it was, what it felt like to have a child upon whose happiness so much of your life hinged, Nora thought, she might have been kinder to her mother all those years ago. If she could have known how foolish she would turn out to be. How she’d just walk away from her dreams because she was afraid to face up to what she’d done and, in the end, settle for a life every bit as small as – and so much less honest than – her parents’ had been. And worse, having made that life with its implicit commitments and promises, she’d be seriously considering walking away again, knowing it would wreak havoc in her daughter’s life. Something that, for all her failures, Nora knew her own mother never would have done. It would have been inconceivable to her. />
  Sometimes, lost in her thoughts, Nora didn’t even hear Tom come home from work and he would find her in the darkening living room, a cup of coffee grown cold in her hands. He would kneel beside her, place his hand on her shoulder, as if to ground her.

  “Nora,” he’d say.

  But his voice speaking her name sounded strange to her; she could tell he still felt strange saying it. He would always think of her as Jane.

  The foreboding she felt as war in Iraq grew closer, more inevitable, deepened her confusion and despair. Massive peace demonstrations around the world, petitions against the war flooded the internet, claims of faulty intelligence made by imminently trustworthy people did nothing to stop the clock ticking toward the showdown that most believed, for better or worse, had been planned for in the days after 9/11.

  When it finally came, Nora and Tom watched, mesmerized: the president at the podium in his dark business suit, behind him a long, empty, red-carpeted corridor. Clever planning, they agreed: the image of him framed by the doorway, strong, silent, completely alone. When he spoke, the arrogant, in-your-face tone of the past months was gone and in its place the voice of reason. No smart-ass comments about “Freedom fries,” no bragging about shock and awe, no threats about evil empires.

  “My fellow citizens,” he said. “Events in Iraq have now reached the final days of decision.” Then, lying as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had done before him, made his case for war.

  In the morning, Nora turned on The Today Show to find that, though the war had not officially started, a logo had been assigned to it – and, beneath that logo, flanked by a huge map of the Middle East, Katie Couric, in a black suit, interviewed two generals, who touted amazing, “intelligent” bombs and, with obvious difficulty, restrained their enthusiasm describing the MOAB: “Mother of All Bombs.”

  “A last resort,” one said.

  “Of course, we hope not to use it,” said the other.

  They made Nora think of watching Apocalypse Now with Tom a few nights before. Robert Duvall waxing eloquent about the smell of napalm in the morning.

  The whole broadcast mirrored the surreal quality of that movie as it proceeded. Duvall himself was on the show, teaching Katie how to tango – revealing spike heels and lacy black tights beneath the surprisingly short skirt of the black suit she’d worn in the presence of the generals. There was a feature on Saddam’s luxury bunker, another on arms brokering – dozens of men in a Baghdad gun store testing the heft of shoulder-held weapons, one of them cocking a pistol toward the camera “USA,” he said, grinning. Another on a Chinook-flying grandmother with gray, coiffed hair, an American flag pin on her Army fatigues.

  In Rockefeller Plaza, the usual screamers competed for a moment onscreen.

  “Hey, Al! I’m twenty-one today!” a kid called.

  His friend held up a cardboard Wisconsin Badger.

  But Al headed for a woman holding up a baby in a pink snowsuit.

  “This is an antiwar baby,” she said into the microphone, and he backed away.

  Back in the studio, Elmo reassured the children. “Do you ever feel upset when you see or hear something scary?” he asked in his sweet, scratchy little voice. “Elmo does, too! Talk to a grown-up! Draw a picture! Tell a story! Or –” He waved his fuzzy red arms wildly and hollered, “Wubawubawuba!”

  “Stay calm,” a human citizen of Sesame Street advised parents. “Keep a routine.”

  “Give them a big kiss, too!” Elmo said.

  Perhaps strangest of all, there were regular updates on a Today employee undergoing a colonoscopy. “She’s under conscious sedation,” the doctor said. “Relaxed, comfortable. But she thinks she’s awake, she wants to talk.” He smiled. “That’s what conscious sedation is.”

  Nora made herself get up, get dressed, and she took Maxine for a long walk. It was quiet on campus, students home for spring break. A lone girl stood, coatless, shivering, at the university gates holding a piece of poster board on which she’d written in black magic marker:

  “Bush lies. Remember Vietnam.”

  It made Nora furious. And ashamed. If she’d been better, smarter – if their whole generation had been better, smarter, more committed to doing what was right – there’d be no need for the girl to be standing there in quiet, lonely protest of what they’d allowed the world to become. She walked on until she was so exhausted that she came back to the house and slept until the sound of Tom’s key in the door woke her that evening.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She told him about seeing the girl that morning.

  “And you felt ashamed about that?” he asked.

  She looked up sharply at the undercurrent of anger in his voice.

  “She shouldn’t have been the only one. I should –”

  “You should what?” he asked. “It certainly went well the last time you decided to try to stop a war. And now you think you should do it again? For Christ’s sake, would you quit this?” he went on, before she could try to explain. “You always did this, always indulged yourself in it. Stupid shame and guilt. And over what? Wanting something better than what your parents had, that’s where it started –”

  “My parents,” she said. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about getting your shit together,” he said. “I’m talking about . . . oh, fuck.”

  He went to the refrigerator, got a beer, and twisted off the cap. “As far as I can tell, the only thing you’ve done since Claire went back to Michigan is sit here all day and relive every single thing you’ve ever done wrong in your whole life.”

  “I’ve done a lot wrong.” Nora took a deep breath, tried to get control of her voice. “I’ve got a lot to think about. I have to figure out –”

  “What?” Tom asked. “How you’re going to punish yourself for it? For how long?

  “Jane –” The anger drained from his voice when he spoke her true name, and when he came to her, wordlessly drew her to him, Nora’s tears finally came. They ran down her face, soaking Tom’s shirt, her hair. Maxine came and sat at their feet, her head on Tom’s knee, and he petted her to reassure her.

  “Listen,” he said, eventually. “We haven’t talked about your family. Whether your parents are still alive, whether you might want to try to contact them. You’re probably nowhere near ready for that. Maybe you never will be. But you need to think about all that stuff with your family. I mean it. You did this when you were eighteen, this . . . beating up on yourself over what you wanted. Come on, everybody wants a better life than what their parents had. Parents want it for their kids. You do, for Claire. Your parents wanted it. They were proud of you for going to school –”

  “Don’t say that,” Nora sobbed. “Please. Don’t.”

  Tom disentangled himself from her, got up, and turned on every lamp in the room, as if this might make her see what he needed her to see. But the light hurt her eyes, and she held her hands against them.

  When he spoke again, his voice was hurt and weary, and she kept her hands to her face to avoid looking at him. “All these years, I’ve never, ever doubted what I felt about you,” he said. “I never doubted that we’d have stayed together if Bridget hadn’t come that Christmas, if things hadn’t come down the way they did.

  “But, man, I don’t know. Lately, I find myself thinking maybe we wouldn’t have made it, after all. The way you were so determined not to be happy. The way you felt guilty about everything. What happened to Bridget was your fault. Vietnam was your fault. Now you think this stupid war is your fault, too.

  “It’s not your fucking fault!” he said. “Okay?

  “You can wreck the rest of your life over it if you want. You can indulge yourself, being guilty and ashamed. But, you know something? Punishing yourself the way you did when Bridget died – not coming back – punished me, too. It wrecked my life for a long time. Which is okay. I mean, I understand it – and I’m fine. Or I was, until I saw you.”

  He sank back to the couc
h, beside her, but did not touch her this time. “I love you,” he said. “You still, still have no fucking idea how much I love you. But I’m in way over my head here. I can’t do this again. I can’t watch you do it. I won’t.”

  She sat in stunned silence at what had just passed between them, watched him hunch over and begin to cry, his shoulders heaving. Images of the gathering war flickered on the television: people milling in the streets of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein looking defiant, bombers lined up on an airstrip in Kuwait. Twenty-four more hours, and the bombing would begin. Tom was right: there was nothing she could do about it. He was right about the other thing too: they could not go on as they were.

  “Tom.” She touched his shoulder and he turned to her. “I have to go back to Michigan. For now, anyway. I can’t just walk away from my life again.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’ll take you in the morning.”

  30

  “Carry On”

  They set out, news of the war on the car radio. The bombing had begun; you could hear the rat-tat-tat of gunfire, Baghdad exploding behind the measured voices of reporters describing the city now under siege. Nora felt numb to it, though. She was remembering how she’d felt, years ago, riding home on the Greyhound bus after the weekend at Pete’s house, thinking of Tom, of making love with him for the first time. Thinking that if she could just stay in that moment she wouldn’t miss him so desperately, she wouldn’t think about how long it seemed before school started and they would be together again.

  She glanced at him, lost in his own thoughts, and remembered making love with him last night, too – so fiercely and for so long that when it was over they both lay back, exhausted, spent. She had never felt the way she felt then: there and not there in the same intense measure. Her body an instrument with which she felt, finally, she had said to Tom all she had wanted and needed to say. Whatever happened, she would have the memory of that, she told herself. But it didn’t seem anywhere near enough to her.