The Unreal and the Real - Vol 1 - Where On Earth

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Don’t question the Providence that offers shelter. Was it also Providence that put the gun in her hand? Or in his?

  She and Jason have a little apartment, an add-on to the Hanningers’ house on Clark Street. I imagine that she keeps a photograph of her daughter Dawn in her room. A framed five-by-seven school picture, a smiling seventh-grader. Maybe not. I should not imagine anything about Ava Evans. This is not ground for imagination. I should not imagine the child’s corpse on the rug between the coffee table and the TV set. I should not have to imagine it. Ava should not have to remember it. Why do I want her to get a better job, nicer work, higher wages—what am I talking about? The pursuit of happiness?

  “I have to go clean Mr. Felburne’s cabin,” she said. “The tea was delicious.”

  “Now? But you’re off at three, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, he keeps funny hours. He asked me not to come and clean till after four.”

  “So you have to wait around here an hour? The nerve!” I said. Indignation, the great middle-class luxury. “So he can go running? I’d tell him to go jump in the creek!” Would I? If I was the maid?

  She thanked me again for the tea. “I really enjoy talking with you,” she said. And she went down the neatly raked path that winds between the cabins, among the dark old spruce trees, walking carefully, one foot in front of the other. No sudden movements.

  Hand, Cup, Shell

  The last house on Searoad stood in the field behind the dunes. Its windows looked north to Breton Head, south to Wreck Rock, east to the marshes, and from the second story, across the dunes and the breakers, west to China. The house was empty more than it was full, but it was never silent.

  The family arrived and dispersed. Having come to be together over the weekend, they fled one another without hesitation, one to the garden, one to the kitchen, one to the bookshelf, two north up the beach, one south to the rocks.

  Thriving on salt and sand and storms, the rosebushes behind the house climbed all over the paling fence and shot up long autumn sprays, disheveled and magnificent. Roses may do best if you don’t do anything for them at all except keep the sword fern and ivy from strangling them; bronze Peace grows wild as well as any wild rose. But the ivy, now. Loathsome stuff. Poisonous berries. Crawling out from hiding everywhere, stuffed full of horrors: spiders, centipedes, millipedes, billipedes, snakes, rats, broken glass, rusty knives, dog turds, dolls’ eyes. I must cut the ivy right back to the fence, Rita thought, pulling up a long stem that led her back into the leafy mass to a parent vine as thick as a garden hose. I must come here oftener, and keep the ivy off the spruce trees. Look at that, it’ll have the tree dead in another year. She tugged. The cable of ivy gave no more than a steel hawser would. She went back up the porch steps, calling, “Are there any pruning shears, do you think?”

  “Hanging on the wall there, aren’t they?” Mag called back from the kitchen. “Anyway, they ought to be.” There ought to be flour in the canister, too, but it was empty. Either she had used it up in August and forgotten, or Phil and the boys had made pancakes when they were over last month. So where was the list pad to write flour on for when she walked up to Hambleton’s? Nowhere to be found. She would have to buy a little pad to write pad on. She found a ballpoint pen in the things drawer. It was green and translucent, imprinted with the words hank’s coast hardware and auto supplies. She wrote flour, bans, o.j., cereal, yog, list pad on a paper towel, wiping blobs of excess green ink off the penpoint with a corner of the towel. Everything is circular, or anyhow spiral. It was no time at all, certainly not twelve months, since last October in this kitchen, and she was absolutely standing in her tracks. It wasn’t déjà vu but déjà vécu, and all the Octobers before it, and still all the same this was now, and therefore different feet were standing in her tracks. A half size larger than last year, for one thing. Would they go on breaking down and spreading out forever, until she ended up wearing men’s size 12 logging boots? Mother’s feet hadn’t done that. She’d always worn 7N, still wore 7N, always would wear 7N, but then she always wore the same kind of shoes, too, trim inch-heel pumps or penny loafers, never experimenting with Germanic clogs, Japanese athletics, or the latest toe-killer fad. It came of having had to dress a certain way, of course, as the Dean’s wife, but also of being Daddy’s girl, small-town princess, not experimenting just knowing.

  “I’m going on down to Hambleton’s, do you want anything?” Mag called out the kitchen door through the back-porch screen to her mother fighting ivy in the garden.

  “I don’t think so. Are you going to walk?”

  “Yes.”

  They were right: it took a certain effort to say yes just flatly, to refrain from qualifying it, softening it: Yes, I think so; Yes, I guess so; Yes I thought I would… Unqualified yes had a gruff sound to it, full of testosterone. If Rita had said no instead of I don’t think so, it would have sounded rude or distressed, and she probably would have responded in some way to find out what was wrong, why her mother wasn’t speaking in the mother tongue. “Going to Hambleton’s,” she said to Phil, who was kneeling at the bookcase in the dark little hall, and went out. She went down the four wooden steps of the front porch and through the front gate, latched the gate behind her, and turned right on Searoad to walk into town. These familiar movements gave her great pleasure. She walked on the dune side of the road, and between dunes saw the ocean, the breakers that took all speech away. She walked in silence, seeing glimpses between dune grass of the beach where her children had gone.

  Gret had gone as far as the beach went. It ended in a tumble of rusty brown basalt under Wreck Point, but she knew the ways up through the rocks to the slopes and ledges of the Point, places where nobody came. Sitting there on the wind-bitten grass looking out over the waves bashing on Wreck Rock and the reef Dad called Rickrack and out to the horizon, you could keep going farther still. At least you ought to be able to, but there wasn’t any way to be alone any more. There was a beer can in the grass, a tag of orange plastic ribbon tied to a stake up near the summit, a Coast Guard helicopter yammering and prying over the sea up to Breton Head and back south again. Nobody wanted anybody to be alone, ever. You had to do away with that, unmake it, all the junk, trash, crap, trivia, David, the midterms, Gran, what people thought, other people. You had to go away from them. All the way away. It used to be easy to do that, easy to go and hard to come back, but now it was harder and harder to go: and she never could go all the way. To sit up here and stare at the ocean and be thinking about stupid David, and what’s that stake for, and why did Gran look at my fingernails that way, what’s wrong with me? Am I going to be this way the rest of my life? Not even seeing the ocean? Seeing stupid beer cans? She stood, raging, backed up, aimed, and kicked the beer can in a low, fast arc off the cliff into the sea unseen below. She turned and scrambled up to the summit, braced her knees in soggy bracken, and wrenched the orange-ribboned stake out of the ground. She hurled it southward and saw it fall into bracken and salal scrub and be swallowed. She stood up, rubbing her hands where the raw wood had scraped the skin. The wind felt cold on her teeth. She had been baring them, an angry ape. The sea lay grey at eye level, taking her immediately now into its horizontality. Nothing cluttered. As she sucked the heel of her thumb and got her front teeth warm, she thought, My soul is ten thousand miles wide and extremely invisibly deep. It is the same size as the sea, it is bigger than the sea, it holds the sea, and you cannot, you cannot cram it into beer cans and fingernails and stake it out in lots and own it. It will drown you all and never even notice.

  But how old I am, thought the grandmother, to come to the beach and not look at the sea! How horrible! Straight out into the backyard, as if all that mattered was grubbing ivy. As if the sea belonged to the children. To assert her right to the ocean, she carried ivy cuttings to the trash bin beside the house and after cramming them into the bin stood and looked at the dunes, across which it was. It wasn’t going to go away, as Amory would have said. But she went on out the gar
den gate, crossed sandy-rutted Searoad, and in ten more steps saw the Pacific open out between the grass-crowned dunes. There you are, you old grey monster. You aren’t going to go away, but I am. Her brown loafers, a bit loose on her bony feet, were already full of sand. Did she want to go on down, onto the beach? It was always so windy. As she hesitated, looking about, she saw a head bobbing along between the crests of dune grass. Mag coming back with the groceries. Slow black bobbing head like the old mule coming up the rise to the sagebrush ranch when? old Bill the mule—Mag the mule, trudging obstinate silent. She went down to the road and stood first on one foot then the other emptying sand out of her shoes, then walked to meet her daughter. “How are things at Hambleton’s?”

  “Peart,” Mag said. “Right peart. When is whatsername coming?”

  “By noon, I think she said.” Rita sighed. “I got up at five. I think I’m going to go in and have a little lie-down before she comes. I hope she won’t stay hours.”

  “Who is she, again?”

  “Oh…damn…”

  “I mean, what’s she doing?”

  Rita gave up the vain search for the lost name. “She’s some sort of assistant research assistant I suppose to whatsisname at the University, you know, doing the book about Amory. I expect somebody suggested to him that maybe it would look odd if he did a whole biography without talking to the widow, but of course it’s really only Amory’s ideas that interest him, I believe he’s very theoretical the way they are now. Probably bored stiff at the idea of actual people. So he’s sending the young lady into the hencoop.”

  “So that you don’t sue him.”

  “Oh you don’t think so.”

  “Certainly. Co-optation. And you’ll get thanked for your invaluable assistance, in the acknowledgments, just before he thanks his wife and his typist.”

  “What was that terrible thing you told me about Mrs. Tolstoy?”

  “Copied War and Peace for him six times by hand. But you know, it would beat copying most books six times by hand.”

  “Shepard.”

  “What?”

  “Her. The girl. Something Shepard.”

  “Whose invaluable assistance Professor Whozis gratefully…no, she’s only a grad student, isn’t she. Lucky if she gets mentioned at all. What a safety net they have, don’t they? All the women the knots in the net.”

  But that cut a bit close to the bones of Amory Inman, and his widow did not answer his daughter as she helped her put away the flour, cornflakes, yogurt, cookies, bananas, grapes, lettuce, avocado, tomatoes, and vinegar Mag had bought (she had forgotten to buy a list pad). “Well, I’m off, shout when she comes,” Rita said, and made her way past her son-in-law, who was sitting on the hall floor by the bookcase, to the stairs.

  The upstairs of the house was simple, rational, and white: the stairs landing and a bathroom down the middle, a bedroom in each corner. Mag and Phil SW, Gran NW, Gret NE, boys SE. The old folks got the sunset, the kids got dawn. Rita was the first to listen and hear the sea in the house. She looked out over the dunes and saw the tide coming in and the wind combing the manes of the white horses. She lay down and looked with pleasure at the narrow, white-painted boards of the ceiling in the sea-light like no other light. She did not want to go to sleep but her eyes were tired and she had not brought a book upstairs. She heard the girl’s voice below, the girls’ voices, piercing soft, the sound of the sea.

  “Where’s Gran?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “This woman’s come.”

  Mag brought the dish towel on which she was drying her hands into the front room, a signal flag: I work in the kitchen and have nothing to do with interviews. Gret had left the girl standing out on the front deck. “Won’t you come in?”

  “Susan Shepard.”

  “Mag Rilow. That’s Greta. Gret, go up and tell Gran, OK?”

  “It’s so lovely here! What a beautiful place!”

  “Maybe you’d like to sit out on the deck to talk? It’s so mild. Would you like some coffee? Beer, anything?”

  “Oh, yes—coffee—”

  “Tea?”

  “That would be wonderful.”

  “Herbal?” Everybody there at the University in the Klamath Time Warp drank herbal tea. Sure enough, chamomile-peppermint would be wonderful. Mag got her sitting in the wicker chair on the deck and came back in past Phil, who was still on the floor in the hall by the bookcase, reading. “Take it into the light,” she said, and he said, “Yeah, I will,” smiling, and turned a page. Gret, coming down the stairs, said, “She’ll be down in a minute.”

  “Go talk to the girl. She’s at the U.”

  “What in?”

  “I don’t know. Find out.”

  Gret snarled and turned away. Edging past her father in the narrow hall, she said, “Why don’t you get some light?” He smiled, turned a page, and said, “Yeah, I will.” She strode out onto the deck and said, “My mother says you’re at the U,” at the same time as the woman said, “You’re at the U, aren’t you?”

  Gret nodded.

  “I’m in Ed. I’m Professor Nabe’s research assistant for his book. It’s really exciting to be interviewing your grandmother.”

  “It seems fairly weird to me,” Gret said.

  “The University?”

  “No.”

  There was a little silence filled by the sound of the sea.

  “Are you a freshman?”

  “Freshwoman.” She edged towards the steps.

  “Will you major in Education, do you think?”

  “Oh, God, no.”

  “I suppose having such a distinguished grandfather, people always just expect. Your mother’s an educator, too, isn’t she?”

  “She teaches,” Gret said. She had got as far as the steps and now went down them, because they were the shortest way to get away, though she had been coming into the house to go to her room when Sue Student drove up and she got caught.

  Gran appeared in the open doorway, looking wary and rather bleary, but using her politically correct smile and voice: “Hello! I’m Rita Inman.” While Sue Student was jumping up and being really excited, Gret got back up the steps, past Gran, and into the house.

  Daddy was still sitting on the floor in the dark hall by the bookcase, reading. She unplugged the gooseneck lamp from the end table by the living-room couch, set it on the bookcase in the hall, and found the outlet was too far for the cord to reach. She brought the lamp as close to him as she could, setting it on the floor about three feet from him, and then plugged in the plug. The light glared across the pages of his book. “Oh, hey, great,” he said, smiling, and turned a page. She went on upstairs to her room. Walls and ceiling were white, the bedspreads on the two narrow beds were blue. A picture of blue mountains she had painted in ninth-grade art class was pinned to the closet door, and she reconfirmed with a long look at it that it was beautiful. It was the only good picture she had ever painted, and she marveled at it, the gift that had given itself to her, undeserved, no strings attached. She opened the backpack she had dumped on one bed, got out a geology textbook and a highlighter, lay down on the other bed, and began to reread for the midterm examination. At the end of a section on subduction, she turned her head to look at the picture of blue mountains again, and thought, I wonder what would it be like?—or those are the words she might have used to express the feelings of curiosity, pleasure, and awe which accompanied the images in her mind of small figures scattered among great lava cliffs on the field trip in September, of journeys, of levels stretching to the horizon, high deserts under which lay fossils folded like tissue paper; of moraines; of long veins of ore and crystals in the darkness underground. Intent and careful, she turned the page and started the next section.

  Sue Shepard fussed with her little computer thing. Her face was plump, pink, round-eyed, and Rita had to make the interpretation “intellectual” consciously. It would not arise of itself from the pink face, the high voice, the girlish manner, as it would from the pink fac
e, high voice, and boyish manner of a male counterpart. She knew that she still so identified mind and masculinity that only women who imitated men were immediately recognizable to her as intellectuals, even after all these years, even after Mag. Also, Sue Shepard might be disguising her intellect, as Mag didn’t. And the jargon of the Education Department was a pretty good disguise in itself. But she was keen, it was a keen mind, and perhaps Professor Whozis didn’t like to be reminded of it, so young, so bright, so close behind. Probably he liked flutter and butter, as Amory used to call it, in his graduate-student women. But fluttery buttery little Sue had already set aside a whole sheaf of the professor’s questions as time-wasting, and was asking, intently and apparently on her own hook, about Rita’s girlhood.

  “Well, when I was born we lived on a ranch out from Prineville, in the high country. The sagebrush, you know. But I don’t remember much that’s useful. I think Father must have been keeping books for the ranch. It was a big operation—huge—all the way to the John Day River, I think. When I was nine, he took over managing a mill in Ultimate, in the Coast Range. A lumber mill. Nothing left of all that now. There isn’t even a gravel road in to Ultimate any more. Half the state’s like that, you know. It’s very strange. Easterners come and think it’s this wild pristine wilderness and actually it’s all Indian graveyards underfoot and old homesteads and second growth and towns nobody even remembers were there. It’s just that the trees and the weeds grow back so fast. Like ivy. Where are you from?”

  “Seattle,” said Sue Shepard, friendly, but not to be misled as to who was interviewing whom.