by Jane Smiley
I pushed my hair back, wiped my nose on my sleeve, and sat up, only to discover Jess Clark sitting across the corner of the garden from me, smiling. He had on a pair of shorts and those expensive sneakers with soles like inverted soup plates. I remember how automatically I thought of him as a younger man, somehow relatively unformed, and that gave me a kind of ease with him that I don’t often feel with strange men. I said, “So, tell me more,” just as if no time had passed since we talked Sunday. He looked at me carefully, I thought, then said, “Loren keeps saying, ‘No wife or kids, huh? I heard they have nice-looking girls out west. Nice-looking girls.’ ”
We laughed.
Jess watched me for a moment, then said, “I did have a fiancée. She was killed in a car accident.”
“When was that?”
“Six years ago. She was twenty-three, and her name was Alison.”
“That’s a pity. I’m sorry.”
“Well, I drank myself silly about it for two years. If you want to drink in Canada, you can find a lot of company.”
“That’s true anywhere.”
“In Canada there’s no undercurrent of shame. You just drink.”
“I saw at the pig roast that you didn’t seem to be drinking anything.”
“On the second anniversary of Alison’s accident, I drank two bottles of rye whiskey and nearly died of alcohol poisoning, so I haven’t had a drink or a beer since.”
“Oh, Jess.” I felt sorry for him. Everything he said about himself revealed the sort of life that I had always been afraid of.
I picked up the second box of tomato plants and moved down the row. I troweled up a big hole and dumped in the bonemeal mixture, then stripped off the tomato plant’s lower leaves and coiled it gently in the hole—with tomatoes, roots grow out of any part of the stem that’s underground, so a mature plant can stand a lot of weather. When I looked up, Jess’s gaze was serious and intent. I said, “I’d like to hear more.”
He said, “You know, Alison saw things very darkly. Her parents lived in Manitoba, and they were extremely religious. When she went to live in Vancouver, they repudiated her in specifically biblical terms. The conviction that they truly thought she was damned dragged at her more and more as time went on. The fact was that she was a very kind person, generous and sweet and careful of people’s feelings. Actually, we never really knew whether the accident was an accident. She pulled into the oncoming lane of a two-lane highway, into the path of a semi. She had been depressed, that made it look like suicide. But she endangered someone else. That was very unlike her.”
I sat back on my heels and looked at him, but he smiled and said, “Please keep planting. It makes it easier to talk.” I dug another hole. He said, “I used to call her parents from bars and threaten to come to Manitoba and kill them. They always listened to me. Sometimes one or the other of them would get on the extension. While I was raving, they would be praying for me. I don’t think they ever felt remorse. I stopped doing that when I stopped drinking.” I looked up. He smiled more broadly and said, “I’m all sweetness and light these days. Life affirmed.”
“I believe in that.” I dug another hole, then hazarded, “You look younger than Loren in some ways, but your face looks older. Harder. Or maybe just more knowing.”
“Really?”
“I think so.”
“I think you look younger than Rose, too.”
I didn’t have a reply for this, since it scared me a little to think of him looking at me at all. I said, “What did your—Alison look like?”
“Most people would have said she was rather plain. Square and solid, rather a long face. She was transformed by love.”
I glanced at him sharply, to see if he was making fun, and he caught my look. He said, “I’m not joking. She had beautiful eyes and nice teeth. When we were making love and other times, too, when she was very happy and excited, the expressions on her face made it beautiful. She could also be very graceful if she wasn’t thinking about her body or feeling self-conscious about it.”
“I’m impressed that you noticed.”
“We worked together at the crisis center. I watched her a long time before I fell in love with her. There was plenty of time to notice.”
“That’s the homely woman’s dream, you know. That someone will see actual beauty where others never have.”
“I know.”
I planted three or four more plants before we spoke again. Then I said, “Rose usually looks better, but her operation took a lot out of her.”
“What was that?”
“Loren and Harold didn’t tell you?”
“That Rose had an operation? No.”
“How irritating.”
“Why?”
“Because it makes it seem as if it wasn’t worth talking about. She had breast cancer. She just had the operation in February.”
“I doubt if Harold, or even Loren, has ever let the words ‘breast cancer’ pass his lips.” He smiled.
I looked deep into the hole I was digging. “Well, what did they tell you about your mother?”
“They just said cancer.”
“Well, it started out as breast cancer. Later on, it was just plain cancer. Lymphatic.”
“Now it’s your turn to tell me some things.”
“Like what?”
“About my mother.”
Disapproval of Jess Clark’s absence throughout Verna’s illness and death was a neighborhood article of faith, so my voice was a little tight when I said, “Are you sure you want to know?”
“No.”
“Well, think about it.”
“It was that bad, huh?”
“The lymphatic cancer actually wasn’t that bad, as cancers go. She felt kind of under the weather for a month or two, but would not go to the doctor, then Loren kind of abducted her into the doctor’s office, and he made the diagnosis. She died within two weeks. It was quick, and she was pretty active until the diagnosis.”
“What would be hard for me to hear, then?”
I could taste the dust on my lips. “All she talked about was you. According to Loren, she was convinced that at the last moment you would come or call.”
“No one told me anything about it.”
“She wouldn’t let them. She was relying on some kind of psychic communication. She said that when you were a little boy, you always came before you were called, just when she was thinking of calling you, and that you were a very loving little boy. She was depending on that. I thought maybe Harold or Loren should call you and engineer a little psychic communication, but they said they had no idea where you were. Once Loren called a Jessie Clark in Vancouver, but it was a woman.”
“How, uh, how was the end?”
“How do you think? Awful, of course. She was very sad.”
He didn’t say anything for some minutes, and I kept planting. I could tell by the sun that it was getting toward late morning, and I still had twenty-five tomato plants to go. I pushed them farther into the shade and spilled a little water over the dirt they were rooted in. I had been a little hard with him, maybe. On the other hand, my own mother had died when I was fourteen. Rose and I nursed her for two months, in the living room. I missed two hours of school in the mornings; Rose missed two hours in the afternoons. If there is anything more difficult or more real than the death of one’s mother, I don’t know what it is. We all thought Jess Clark should have come, no matter what sort of jail sentence might have been awaiting him for crossing back into the US. It was something Harold had said all the time, and I still agreed. I licked my lips, which were dry from the sudden heat of my angry thoughts. After a moment, I said, “No psychic communication, huh?”
“She died in November of ’71?”
“Two days after Thanksgiving.”
“Not a ripple. I was living on a pretty remote island that winter. I didn’t even have a phone.”
He spoke in a flat voice, but he had a terrible look on his face, full of pain and anger. Finally he said
, “That’s the trouble with telepathy, you know. Most of the time, the lines are down.” He laughed with a kind of mirthless bark. He breathed heavily, almost panting, and arched his head back. I stared at him. His face was marvelously expressive, more expressive than the face of any man I knew. The lines around his nose and eyes deepened and the corners of his mouth curled downward. His eyes seemed to darken and disappear beneath his eyebrows. He muttered, “Oh, Jesus.” I said, “Jess? Are you okay? It’s been nearly eight years.”
He exclaimed, “I was so furious at her. I wrote her twice, you know, that first year. I told her I didn’t believe in the war and I knew she didn’t either. I just wanted a single letter, or a postcard from her saying that she understood, or at least that she was thinking about me. There were all sorts of draft refusers in Vancouver, and refugees from the army, and lots of their families treated them like heroes, or at least accepted what they did, and sent letters and presents. I didn’t expect anything from Harold—I knew how he felt—but I thought she would send me something on her own, anything. I was fucking eighteen when I left here! I look at kids now, and I can’t believe how young I was! I still had an inch and a half of growing to do, and twenty pounds! I wasn’t even filled out! She knew where I was in 1971, or she could have found out, if she’d called the addresses on those letters. She was forty-three, for God’s sake!”
He stood up, then came close to me, into the garden row where I was working, and squatted down right next to me. When I began to say something to defend his mother—she was fighting breast cancer at some point, after all—he interrupted me, staring me down. But he spoke softly, as if telling me a secret. “Can you believe how they’ve fucked us over, Ginny? Living and dying! I was her child! What ideal did she sacrifice me to? Patriotism? Keeping up appearances in the neighborhood? Peace with Harold? Maybe to you it looked like I just vanished, but I was out there, this ignorant farm kid! I’d never seen a fucking checkbook, never owned anything in my own name, never touched a stove or washed my own clothes! I met kids in training camp. One of them had a heart attack on the drilling grounds. The last night of training camp, there was this kid who persuaded our sergeant that he had a blinding headache. He kind of staggered down the aisle between the bunks and went into the bathroom and collapsed. The sergeant started yelling at him that he was faking it, and the guy was moaning and groaning. Some of us crept out of bed and were watching. Anyway, the sergeant was trying to kick him a little, to get him up, and he just rared back and started beating his head against the wall as hard as he could. He must have hit the tiles about six times. The sergeant was struck dumb, just like the rest of us. Then we got to him, and stopped him, and pretty soon they came with a stretcher and carried him off, and all I could think of was that that guy didn’t have to go to Vietnam with the rest of us. I was sure that was why he did it. He didn’t even have any fucking hair on his chest!” He put his hands on my shoulders and lowered his voice again. “Don’t you realize they’ve destroyed us at every turn? You bet she was sad, of course she was sad! But why didn’t she give me a fucking chance?” He put his face in his hands.
After a minute, I mustered the gumption to say, “I don’t know, Jess,” but I was shaken and afraid. When I went to take the next tomato plant out of the flat, my hands were trembling so much that I broke the stem in two. Jess, meanwhile, got up and walked around, heaving. Finally he took off his T-shirt, which read, “CASCADES 10K RUN JUNE 4, 1978,” and wiped his face and neck with it. He said, “I’d better go home.”
“You haven’t offended me. Anyway, I’m not sure you should see Harold in that mood.”
“I mean back to Seattle. Ah shit.” He sat down again, took some deep breaths, and managed a smile. “Ginny, none of this is new. It’s very old, I’m used to it, and most of the time, I’m better at cultivating inner peace. I stopped being mad all the time when I stopped drinking. I mean, that was when I realized that maybe Alison and I wouldn’t have lasted together. I loved her, I really did, but what I loved most was being mad at her parents for her. Being on her side, when nobody else had been that I could see. I can’t believe I’m getting upset like this now.”
After a minute, I said, “Don’t you think it had to be, whenever you learned about your mother? Now it’s been. How am I going to believe that life is good and change is good if you don’t?”
“I do think that.”
We smiled at each other. I couldn’t believe that I had ever found his smile merely charming. Another lesson in that lifelong course of study about the tricks of appearance.
9
IT HAD BEEN MORE THAN three months since Rose’s operation, and she was making a good recovery. The chemotherapy was over and she had that large-eyed, astonished-but-not-surprised look about her that I’ve since seen on other cancer patients. They had taken her right breast, the muscles on the right side of her chest, and the lymph glands under her right arm, a traditional radical mastectomy. I was still cooking for her fairly often, and, of course, seeing her every day, but she would pass into a state of irritability if I mentioned her health, so I didn’t; but I did watch her closely, looking for signs of fatigue or weakness or pain. The day after my talk with Jess Clark, I drove her to Mason City for her three-month checkup. We hardly spoke on the way there. She was annoyed at little things—the belt of her jacket getting closed in the car door, having to stop for gas, running into a little traffic about ten blocks from the hospital, and then being five or six minutes late for her appointment. Our plan was to shop a little after the hospital, then go to the Brown Bottle for dinner, but our unspoken agreement was that it all depended on the doctor’s appointment. If the news was bad, there would be no telling what we would do—the future would lie before us as a blank, and, somehow, we would honor that.
In fact, the appointment went beautifully. The moment we walked in the door, the nurses greeted her with happy warmth, and it was hard not to be comforted by just that, as if they already knew good news, and all they had to do was tell it to us. The doctor found nothing at all suspicious, and congratulated Rose on how much movement and strength she had gotten back in her arm, “in so short a time.” Rose smiled at his wording, and I did, too, but just hearing him say it lightened those long, heavy months, somehow, the worst months of the year in our part of the country, when the sky is like iron day after day, and the wind is endless, chill, and hostile, even on those days when a little weak sunlight blossoms through the clouds. It was easy, while he was giving us the good news, to marvel at how depressed we’d been, almost without knowing it, easy to regard his round pink face with affection, easy to feel transformed as we came out of the hospital into the pleasant May air, which was sweetened and colored by the flowering crabapples and beds of tulips and Dutch iris that flanked the entrance, a display we hadn’t even noticed upon going in. “It is a nice day!” exclaimed Rose, inhaling deeply, and for once her left hand didn’t stray to the lost muscles just under her arm. This was a habit she had fallen into that hurt me to see, just a light touch, the fingers asking, feathering across, discovering anew. Her hand never went anywhere else—it was as if the other, the breast, the chest muscles, were okay, well lost, an acceptable sacrifice, but this, too? She said, “Hey! Let’s eat meat!”
“They’ve got meat at the Brown Bottle.”
“No, I mean, let’s go somewhere expensive, like the Starlight Supper Club. Remember when we went for your tenth anniversary? They had three kinds of herring on the salad bar and some kind of garlic toasts that had been fried slowly in butter until they were as hard as canning jar lids, except that they fragmented and vanished as soon as you put them on your tongue?”
“I can’t believe you remember the food like that. It was six years ago.”
“I haven’t thought about it since, I bet. It’s just that I really believe him, you know? I really believe everything he said, and now I want to drink it all in, all the stuff I was going to miss, that I’d pretty much made up my mind not to think about.”
&nb
sp; We came to the corner, waited for the light, and crossed. I had no idea where we were going. I said, “I didn’t realize you were so depressed.”
“I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more like closing up shop, or, say, having a big garage sale, where you look at everything you’ve bought in your life, and you remember how much it meant to you, and now you just tag it for a quarter and watch ’em all carry it off, and you don’t care. That’s more like how it was.”
I looked at her without replying. For me it had been more like being a passenger in a car that was going out of control. For three months we’d been swerving across the road, missing light poles and oncoming vehicles. Now the car was under control again, and unimaginable disaster was averted.
She stopped when we got to the opposite corner and ran her hand through her hair. She said, “Anyway, Ginny, I know this was only the three months exam. There’s the six months exam and the year exam and five more year exams, and then I’ll only be forty. I haven’t forgotten that, but I still want to do something special. Something that would scandalize Daddy. Just to mark the occasion.”
“I don’t think there are any male strippers in Mason City.”
“Did you see that on Phil Donahue?” Rose grinned.
“Last Wednesday? Where they were wearing about three square inches of shiny blue underwear?”
“The one guy was in black.”
“The blond guy.”
“I didn’t know you were watching that. I was kind of embarrassed to be having it on.”
“I turned off the picture and listened to the sound, like it was on the radio.”
