Since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at Christmas—which he had also known was imminent—Dennis had been aware that an embargo would be forthcoming. No way in hell could U.S. troops be sent in. Vietnam had just ended, for goodness’ sake. The draft was kaput. But now the threat was nuclear. Why not let food do the work of weapons?
Still, the announcement had shocked him. He hated to be so selfish in the face of global starvation, but he couldn’t help himself; what after all would become of him? His trips to the Soviet Union would be canceled; even the diplomats were being sent home. The consequences to trade would be disastrous, the effects global; devastated farmers were probably hanging themselves deep in the Midwest just as Dennis was leaving the office for home, but for a moment all he felt was a preemptive ache for Moscow—Stalin’s skyscrapers, spiked spires illuminated by ruby stars, the twirled-candy tops of cathedrals, green borscht in the Ilyinka, and blini and caviar in the Garden Ring, near the Ministry of Agriculture, where Dennis took most of his meetings. He knew now where to get everything he needed in Moscow, and after a few potentially dangerous slipups, Dennis could now pace himself when socializing with the thick-necked men from Exportkhleb who bought U.S. grain. He knew how much vodka to drink and how quickly, and the way to tell real vodka from the crap (if it tasted like diesel, most likely it was. And as Viktor Uspensky, his counterpart in Moscow, had told him, it was probably Polish).
Food as a weapon. Perhaps this was what had made him think of his mother, her borscht practically nuclear, each dense little kreplach as dangerous as a grenade. And those meringues were no good either; they were misshapen, and often burnt and hard. His older sister used to pelt them off the fire escape at the Italians passing beneath. Once, Dennis had taken one from the tin and had bitten into a piece of paper, as if his mother had just thrown the recipe card or the top of the flour sack in with the batch.
Carter had said an unbreakable chain of events would be needed for the embargo to be successful. But who could know what was to come? If anyone had told Dennis that Bobby Kennedy would be shot, and in some kitchen, he would have laughed at him. And as brutal as the war had been, who could even have imagined such a travesty as My Lai taking place? No one could have conceived of it. Nor could Dennis have predicted most of the events in his own life, its smallness pasted over the life of the world. As well as he thought he’d known his children, he could never have foretold Benjamin’s obsession with sports, and then how he’d just ditch that training the moment he’d set foot on a college campus. And perhaps Dennis had been warned that girls fall out of love with their fathers, that he would one day wake up and that love would suddenly be as unavailable as this wheat and corn sitting on trains, the Russians waiting, iron fists hovering over black communist checkbooks, but Dennis had never believed that would be his daughter. And so he could not have determined that one day, as sudden as a car wreck, he and Vanessa would face each other at the kitchen table as strangers.
He’d left work early thinking that Rock Creek Park would be clear, but still he got stuck in traffic. What would it be for him then, he’d thought, a temporary transfer from the Soviet Union to the North Korea or Japan desk? Or worse, staying in Washington generating more paper until the embargo was finished. The wooden gristmill along Beach Drive still turned, even though it no longer provided power, just as it had all those times he’d walked along the path leading to the falls with Vanessa high on his shoulders, his hands wrapped tightly around her tiny ankles.
How long before he might travel again? Carter never listened; this was his big problem. He was single-handedly paving the way for the Republicans again. Though Dennis loved to go to the Soviet Union, and also, frankly, to leave Washington, something about Dennis’s trips was disquieting. He was selling grain in the very country his mother had fled, the same country his father’s parents thought they’d run back to as soon as the Bolsheviks had taken over. Leaving the ministry building and the arguments over prices and terms, he’d pull his coat tight and wonder, if the Soviets bought up everything and drove up the price of grain, with food in such shortage, how would the United States get wheat to those poor drought-wrecked countries in Africa? He’d walk out into the freezing street, and his mother would appear to him then, a tall woman with black eyes, deep red hair, skin lit from within, somehow superimposed over the Kremlin, her stoic face hanging above Borovitsky Hill, hovering over the Moskva River, far in the distance. Often Dennis felt sliced open by the memory of his mother’s face, or her hands, always beating eggs or shaking a phonograph needle onto a recording, her fingers trilling the air in agreement with his father as he read aloud about the unions from the Forward, her hands reaching to touch his face. In Moscow, though, he saw her high-boned face in the sky.
On his way to and from the Ministry of Agriculture, Dennis would fantasize about what it might have been like to grow up a little Russian boy. What if his grandparents had returned, if all the streets below Grand Street, where he had spent his childhood, had been empty of all the Jewish socialists, nowhere on the East Side to buy so much as a pickle or a crust of black bread?
Dennis finally pulled his little red Beetle into the drive behind Sharon’s blue Volvo. He slammed the car door and, looking up at the house, a Colonial, when his style was more modern, in a suburb so close to the city, no one could really call it suburbia. Suburbia was down the Pike in Columbia, Maryland, where every new aluminum-sided house came equipped with its own mini-pond, a real swan gliding on the smooth surface. Ticky tacky, ticky tacky, he’d think, the Pete Seeger song an obsessive loop spinning in his head, no matter how he tried to turn his focus to the Seeger he saw strumming his guitar at the Mall singing “We Shall Overcome.” That was the day they had all stood up for civil rights, and he had held his son high above the crowd and spun him around so Ben could witness the protest. We shall overcome some day ayayay. Sharon had run off with her college roommate to egg on the police, but he had still felt the magnitude of all those people marching together to right an injustice, singing as one; he had felt it so deeply. He had thought then that the world would be brought closer together, not blown apart.
When they’d bought the house on Thornapple Street, the wooden floors had purple pineapples on them, hundreds stamped across the entire first level, and when the carpenters came to strip the floors, Vanessa had screamed and cried.
“Van,” Dennis had said, kneeling down to put his arm around her, “beneath these silly things are beautiful floors! You’ll see.”
“But the pineapples are beautiful too!” she’d sniffled.
She is the (pine)apple of my eye! he’d chuckled to himself—he really had—as he’d watched the tropical fruits disappear beneath the stripping machine. No matter how Vanessa had changed, her face now thin and drawn, her jaw always set forward in anger, rarely at night did he walk in the front door and not remember those purple pineapples, erased before their eyes.
Dennis often wondered what the previous owners might have felt about his obliteration of their handiwork. Would they find a way to punish him? He believed in ghosts. His college roommate Len Ford had bought a weekend house in a tiny town in Virginia, in Skatesville, not long after graduation, and the house was haunted. A reporter from the Washington Post had written a piece about the strange occurrences in the old place—slammed doors, split fences, shaking china cups on windless days. For some unfathomable reason the ghost was called Gloria, a friendly spirit who didn’t instill fear but merely appeared to make her presence known.
Should he have left those pineapples, if only because his daughter had loved them? It would have been impossible; Sharon had despised them. Erasing them had been a condition of purchasing the house. And besides, back then Vanessa adored anything pink; everything purple! And anything Barbie too, though dolls were verboten. Sharon was entirely against dolls of any kind for Vanessa, as well as nail polish and makeup (though for Ben, she thought this was all to be encouraged). And while his wife’s rules seemed to stem from all her consc
iousnessraising sessions and reading Ms. magazine, Dennis agreed with her because he wanted to keep his daughter from growing up too soon.
Sharon’s mother, Helen, painted Vanessa’s toes pink and her eyelids blue, but her worst offense was the purchase of a terrible Barbie head, this giant blank face for little girls to slather with makeup. Helen kept it in her closet in Los Angeles and would proudly bring out the decapitated head nestled on a pink plastic platter as if she were serving up this hideous head for one of her insufferable Shabbos dinners. The way that woman blatantly defied certain non-negotiable household rules was only one of the reasons Dennis couldn’t bear to visit. Now there was all this business with the Friday candles, Helen leaning over the flames with some schmata on her head, and Herbert chanting this over the bread, that over the wine, a prayer at every goddamn meal. It was worse than the old Jews in his old neighborhood, and it was bullshit. Those bald, shriveled men wandering the streets looking for the ninth or tenth man for minyan. The streets were so crowded, but still there were never enough men for services.
For a four-day visit to the in-laws in goddamn Beverly Hills, Dennis usually brought two joints, just enough to get through it. One evening, when the kids were maybe six and eight, it was pouring rain and they’d all been stuck inside, which meant Dennis hadn’t been able to do his usual sneak-out-back-and-light-up before dinner. Instead, he used the guest bathroom, inhaling deeply, then holding his face up to the vent, blowing out, and feeling very much himself now, in this uptight version of Southern California, so contrary to every image he held of hippies running barefoot from bed to bed in the canyons. He’d waved the smoke around and wetted his finger to tap the joint out, then spilled his Old Spice around the sink.
This was when Vanessa tapped on the door. “Hi, Daddy,” she said.
Dennis looked around the small, sterile room in a panic, and then, because he could think of nothing better to do, he slid his back against the door. “Hi, sweetie,” he said from the bathroom. He held the door closed with his foot while frantically pushing smoke toward the vent with both hands cupped together.
“What’s that smell?” Vanessa said.
She’d said it so loud!
Dennis opened the door suddenly. Then, willing himself calm, he said in a screaming whisper, “It must be the maid!”
He could hear Sharon coming out from the kitchen, her leather sandals slapping the marble corridor until they stopped at the bedroom. Dennis stood frozen in a stare with his daughter in her green corduroy jumper, a V sewn with a quilted yellow fabric on the front, her hair in two perky pigtails at each side of her head. What, he wondered, did she see when she looked back at him?
“Everything okay? You guys ready for dinner?” Sharon asked from the hallway.
Benjamin was in the living room talking sports with Herbert. Baseball. It was always baseball with Herbert, and all Dennis knew about baseball was that Herbert had actually gained enthusiasm for the Dodgers since the team had moved to Los Angeles, and that this probably had to do with Koufax. Dennis was sure Herbert fell in love with the Dodgers the day Koufax wouldn’t pitch on Yom Kippur.
Dennis was high—very fucking stoned actually—Len had gotten the stuff from some crazy West Virginian with GOP connections, and it was unusually strong. Dennis’s heart raced with paranoia. He imagined his father-in-law’s long, droopy face, his slavering mouth, a skullcap pinned to the few wisps of hair he smoothed down with pomade, assessing the situation. Looking at Vanessa, Dennis wondered what she might do. Then he felt something outrageously sinister. Perhaps, Dennis thought, his daughter was Helen’s secret agent sent to discredit him altogether.
They could both hear Sharon humming in the hall, detained perhaps by some stain on the wall, or a speck of dust on one of the hanging Chagall posters, framed in ornate gold.
“Everything’s fine, Mommy,” Vanessa said, meeting Dennis’s eyes.
He let out the breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding and smiled meekly at his daughter, who turned and went to grab her mother’s hand before Sharon crossed the threshold. And soon Dennis heard them making their way toward the living room.
Where had that Vanessa gone? When did the little girl in pigtails he’d placed inside a blossoming cherry tree to photograph, pink blossoms bursting behind her, the photo he still kept on his desk at the office, become an enigma to him, her thoughts and feelings blurred? Yet her physicality seemed to be moving into clearer focus, her baby fat erased, her body terribly slim, the features emerging abruptly from her face and the lovely bones below her neck.
“Hello?” Dennis called up the stairs now, his hands on the banister. “Sharon? Vanessa?”
“I’m here.” Sharon came into view. “Here I am.” She was rubbing in lotion, but it looked as if she were wringing her hands.
Dennis placed his briefcase on the landing. “Did you hear?”
“Please don’t leave that there.” Sharon pointed to the landing. “I almost broke my neck on it the other day. And then Vanessa thinks it’s fine to leave all her stuff there.” Dennis watched Sharon’s mouth tense, and then, as if she thought better of it, she heaved a sigh and relaxed her shoulders a little. “What?”
“The embargo’s on.” Dennis picked up his briefcase and headed upstairs, his head down. “Carter just announced it.” He understood that the Soviets could have bought up enough grain to feel none of the embargo’s effects had they known in advance—and perhaps they had despite Carter’s claim that the Soviet harvest had fallen by 48 million tons—but still the lack of warning was humiliating.
“Shit,” Sharon said. “I’m sorry, D.”
But she’d been thinking positively! again, Dennis knew it. God, the feel-good bullshit she brought into this house with that self-empowerment program. More than the religion, which he supposed was steeped in the past, and more than the women’s groups, which was, he had to admit, a long time coming, this more recent grasp at outside help seemed truly suspect. Why can’t you see me? she’d screamed last night when he’d shut off one of her paths-to-transformation tapes. Her face was so close to his he’d had to look away, which of course gave Sharon all the ammunition she’d needed.
Maybe she was gone and that’s why he couldn’t see her. Maybe she was a ghost, like Gloria, only hardly as benign. He missed that girl he’d taken to Skatesville eighteen years ago. Len had lent him the place, and it was the first night he and Sharon had made love in earnest. Afterward, Sharon had gone downstairs to the refrigerator in only her underwear—white, cotton, with a little bow below her belly button—and Dennis had followed several minutes later to see her leaning into the refrigerator, her panties riding up a bit to reveal two cheeks smiling up at him. He had almost gone to grab her by her hips from behind, then she turned toward him, the light from the fridge illuminating her lovely body. Dennis had wrapped his arms around her and she had fervently kissed him back, the taste of the onion dip she’d just eaten still strong on her tongue. Then the dishes started rattling madly in the cupboards and they’d split apart, Dennis holding Sharon by the shoulders, explaining exactly who Gloria was and that she meant them no harm.
He did not want to see her or hear any more of that cult crap, this constant me me me. It was the start of a brand-new decade! We were not going to think as much about ourselves as we had been. The thought of history—its constant change and the way it undid the present—exhausted him utterly. He thought of his father’s ardent belief that socialism would provide utopia. Also bullshit. Utopia, schmutopia, Dennis thought as he headed into the bedroom. He loosened his tie, kicked off his shoes, and lay back on the bed, looking at the ceiling. All that grain just sitting there, silo after silo of it, he thought, grain elevators churning to a slow halt. Clearly Carter had not been thinking about the economics of all this, because there was going to have to be some kind of a bailout to the farmers and exporters. This year’s harvests had been bin-bursting. The farmers had, after all, been told to plant fencerow to fencerow. Now the prices were dropp
ing so fast and the developing world would soon swoop in, more than happy to purchase cheap U.S. grain. Carter had been a peanut farmer, for goodness’ sake! What a disaster.
Of course he’d be jostled from the Russian desk. Only in the U.S. government was it a plus to have as little experience as possible; no one was to get too comfortable with one culture, with one country’s politics, its people. With its secrets. They would be happy to know he was no expert on Asia; Dennis saw himself getting off a plane in Tokyo and being met by the bright lights of foreign letters and polite round faces.
Dennis watched his wife in the mirror of her vanity. Her eyes were large and brown, and looking into them now, he saw the girl across the room at a potluck to mobilize the vote in the South. One man, one vote! they were chanting that night when Sharon had shown up in a miniskirt and a turtleneck sweater with a med student, who later talked incessantly about preventing venereal disease. Dennis would have to have been blind not to have noticed the two of them.
“Why’d you leave early?” she asked him through the mirror.
“Out of embarrassment,” he told the reflection.
He hadn’t wanted to see his colleagues. Food as a weapon, he’d thought, nodding at Glinda, his secretary, as he slinked out of his office toward the elevator. Glinda. How many times had he imagined his heavy Jamaican secretary arriving to work in a pink bubble with a glittering wand to grant all his wishes? Now he remembered hearing his mother on the other side of the bedroom wall on the nights she sought to punish him for some misdeed by sending him to bed with no dinner. She’d hovered, her palms, he knew, flat against the door. The prospect of his not eating hurt her far more than him. Dennis could sense her bones then, her hips, her knees, her cheeks, pressed against the wooden door, and he would turn the dial of his transistor so the zap and fizz of the radio would reassure her. Denny, she’d say. Okay, my darling?
Something Red Page 5
