Ten Days in the Hills

by Jane Smiley

  It gave Elena a chill just to imagine this. She said, “That reminds me of when I was in college in Wisconsin. I lived for a year or so in a farmhouse that was going to be torn down, and toward the end of my lease, the water pump in the basement broke, so there was no water in the house. I didn’t have the money to fix it, and the landlord wasn’t going to, so I got into the habit of taking containers outside to the well and filling them. I guess I’d been doing that for a couple of weeks. The weather was okay but not warm by any means. One night, toward dusk, I was standing in front of the spigot, and the well cover I was standing on, maybe two and a half feet across and three feet from front to back, just broke away under me. What I had thought was lawn was really just vines that had grown over an old wooden cover. Without even thinking about it, I threw my arms out to the sides and caught myself before I fell in. I remember how I looked down in the kind of dim late-afternoon light and I could see the dark surface of the water about eighteen feet below and the smooth concrete sides. I would have just treaded water until I drowned, I guess, since I was living alone and it was almost night.” Thinking about it now made her more nervous than it had then.

  The other women were looking at her. “My goodness,” said Cassie, sympathetically.

  “Oh,” said Zoe, “I never know what to think about close calls. One time, I tried to write a screenplay called Close Calls, but I couldn’t decide whether it was going to be a thriller or a comedy. It was when Isabel was about two and a half, and she was a big, heavy baby, you know, and when I would carry her around, I kept thinking there should be a movie about a woman with two children, a two-and-a-half-year-old and a one-year-old, not mobile children at all, and this woman has to perform all sorts of feats in order to both escape and to foil the villains, but at the same time she has to keep her kids quiet and calm. As she was making her escape, I thought, she would get a lot of dirty looks from people who didn’t want her kids to make a noise or a mess. All I had was the title and the first scene. When I pitched it to a studio, they said it was a nice idea but that women with small children don’t go to the movies. I was going to star someone much more petite than I am as the woman, I think Sissy Spacek, and put Isabel in as a really big baby.”

  “She would have been good in that,” said Delphine. “She would have kept a straight face the whole picture. I had a close call in a plane once—”

  “Someone else’s fault,” said Zoe.

  “—that time I went back to Miami to visit old Mrs. Disantis before she died. We were coming in for a landing, and we were just about to touch down, and suddenly the plane sped up and took off again at a steep angle. I had a window seat up front, so I saw there was a bus on the runway. We missed it, but not by much. That was right after Ronald Reagan busted the Air Traffic Controllers Union.”

  Elena said to Zoe, “You must have had close calls on movie sets,” even though she would have preferred not talking about any more close calls. There was always the chance she could end up telling about her closest call—running off with Simon’s father, William McCracken, her adjunct assistant professor of Marxist literary theory and a former Weathermen hanger-on. Simon looked a lot like Bill, only with blue eyes and no hair for the time being. The close-call part was that he had left her while she was pregnant for Miranda Moser, who was taller and better-looking than she was, and he had never contacted her again. No one, least of all Elena, knew what had happened to Bill, but, given his tyrannical predilections, she suspected that he had changed his name and his academic specialty and become a neocon. He had the perfect psychological profile for that sort of thing, but even though she sometimes scrutinized the faces of neocons she saw in the newspapers, she had never seen anyone who looked like Bill McCracken twenty-two years on. Surely he was in a right-wing think tank somewhere. What a relief to know, she had thought lately, that through no fault of her own she had avoided a life with William McCracken.

  “On a movie set, the higher your negotiated salary, the fewer close calls you have,” said Zoe. “Anyway, Paul would say that close calls are actually moments when the different dimensions of the universe happen to brush against one another. The thing you thought you avoided actually happened in one of those other universes—at least, it happened if you imagined that it might have. If you’re truly enlightened, thoughts of bad things don’t even occur to you, and you don’t even think you had a close call. What time is it?”

  “We never figured that out,” said Delphine. Now all four of the women looked up toward the top of the aviary, which was shining in the sun. “After eight for sure,” said Cassie, “maybe nine.”

  “It’s eight-fifteen,” said Elena.

  Cassie went on: “I thought I would spend the day looking at the pieces in all the rooms. Joe Blow said we could enter any room that has an unlocked door. I think we should go ahead and be bold about it. I definitely want another look at the so-called Vermeer. And there are lots of Russian artists I never heard of that are quite impressive. Delphine has some pictures of birds in her room that are by a guy named Kamil Bekshev. Beautifully detailed pairs of tropical birds like parrots perched in front of snapshots of objects that are also nicely rendered. One was a ’68 red Mustang.”

  “The bird manager said he would identify all the birds for me,” said Delphine. “He said a fellow came here with his clarinet a few weeks ago and got one of the lyrebirds to sing a duet.”

  “I wonder if the bird knows ‘Simple Gifts,’” said Zoe. “I always thought that sounded like a bird’s song.” She whistled a series of notes that Elena recognized, but no birds answered or joined in. After a moment, she said, “I read that Russian book since we talked about it. Taras Bulba,” said Zoe. “It’s very dramatic.”

  “Max told me he was going to keep an open mind,” said Elena. The others gazed at her. “Or, rather, Stoney asked him to keep an open mind, and he said he would, if that’s the same thing.” She turned her plate around and rearranged her fork. “I guess he’s not too happy with Stoney right now. But he said he’s committed himself to talking to the Russians, so he’s going to talk to them.” It was not clear from their demeanor what Zoe or Delphine thought about the new sleeping arrangement, Isabel-wise, and Elena didn’t have the courage to say anything more. Max had been restless all night long. It didn’t help that the Amber Room was three doors down from the Flower Room, too close for comfort but too far to stumble toward, feigning sleepwalking, or whatever Max was thinking of doing, which he did not confide in her. And then, after he seemed to forget about it, or else to resign himself to it, he stayed awake, patting her and, it was clear, worrying about this erection thing that had been going on since the first day of the war. Of course, he had pretended not to worry, just to be patting her and from time to time adjusting himself, and, of course, she had presented him with her breasts, her ass, not obviously offering anything, but offering it anyway. She had kissed him and returned the tickling and pretended that she wasn’t worrying, either. But of course she had been wondering whether it was time to make that behavioral connection—war–angry woman–impotence—that would show that the failure was her fault, traceable not to geopolitics but to the archetype of the emasculating harridan mother as represented by her, etc., etc. Somehow, this house and the Flower Room intensified what had seemed minor and fleeting in the other house. Although it was also true that she was personally relieved that Simon was safe under the same roof she was under, without his car. She had four things to worry about—the war, the meaning of Max’s impotency, Simon, and her feminine failures—and in the course of the night, she had canvassed all of them.

  “He’s got to do something,” said Cassie. “Next thing, he’s going to want to make a movie in his own bedroom.”

  “He already does,” said Elena. They laughed. They thought she was joking.

  The conversation was very pleasant, and yet was unbelievable to Elena, as if it had been manufactured just for the scene they found themselves in. Its very pleasure seemed to hint at the fact that e
lsewhere, or everywhere else, the vast and the horrible loomed. These three women seemed happy enough without the papers, but Elena was not. For them, the bad news was intrusive, unwelcome, maybe sometimes even surprising or shocking. For her, the specific items of bad news measured, in their particularity, the even worse things that had not, or not yet, happened. Once, as a child, she had seen a headline in her local paper, “Tornadoes Bypass Town.” Right now, on the table in front of her, she would like to see a headline in today’s L.A. Times: “World Unchanged.”

  Cassie said, “So the name of your book is The Idiot’s Guide to Doing Everything Correctly?”

  “No,” said Elena, “that’s a different series. Our series is called Here’s How! My book is called Here’s How: To Do EVERYTHING Correctly! We use a lot of caps and exclamation points, but I don’t mind that, actually.”

  “What sorts of things are we talking about?” said Zoe.

  “Well, it can be almost anything. The editor wants more rather than less. Obviously, there’s what you would consider the usual stuff about how to vacuum and launder your lingerie and clean the fixtures in your bathroom so that they don’t have water spots, but there’s also a chapter on how to be a congressman. That was actually easier to write than the cleaning chapter, because the issues are more cut and dried. We know instinctively how to get to the end of the day with a good conscience, but we don’t know instinctively what good cleaning products are or what their larger ramifications are in the environment. If we discover that infants under a year old have detergents in their bloodstream, then what does that mean about correct cleaning? But if my basic principle for a congressman is ‘First, do no harm,’ then that cuts out a whole category of potential votes, contacts, conflicts of interest, and all.”

  Delphine said, “But you’ve cleaned lots of rooms, so you know the ins and outs of cleaning. You haven’t ever been a congressman, so how would you understand their day-to-day dilemmas?”

  “That’s true, but the chapters about Congress, the presidency, running a multinational corporation, being Pope, and organizing the Pentagon are mostly for comic relief. They’re even going to be printed differently, on gray shaded paper. And I doubt that I’ll have much of that sort of readership, when all is said and done. I just want the average person who is cleaning her bathroom to have the feeling that her actions have larger consequences and are significant.”

  “Who do you think is your audience?” said Cassie.

  “Oh, definitely people, probably women, who are anxiety-prone. But whose anxiety can be relieved by knowledge, at least temporarily. People like I was twenty years ago, when Simon was a baby, who just don’t have a clue, really.”

  “So what’s another chapter?” asked Zoe.

  “Transportation is a big chapter. How to buy a bike, how to change the oil in your car. What to do with the oil after you’ve changed it. Transportation proved to be rather a knotty problem, and I had to wrestle with lots of issues. But I have to say, that’s been true of nearly every chapter. When I signed up for the project, I thought that I instinctively knew what to do in almost all situations, because my goal has always been staying out of trouble, and my parents were naturally very systematic and trained me the same way. But it’s really been a can of worms. At first the title of the project was Here’s How: To Do EVERYTHING Properly, but that was a true nightmare, because doing things properly implies either conforming to social codes or achieving excellence. Doing things correctly is more about following instructions. If you’re doing things properly, you’re wanting to impress someone. If you’re doing things correctly, you’re just wanting to get them done. It’s more inward-looking and task-oriented. I thought that was a more manageable subject.”

  “But why are you including recipes?”

  “Because people have to eat. If they are supposed to learn which knife and fork to use, they should have something good to use them on. It’s like the voting chapter. You can’t just vote off the cuff anymore, if you ever could. You have to educate and prepare yourself to vote, because lots of Republicans are in the business of making it hard for you to vote and then afterward trying to steal your vote. So, if you are going to have a good conscience at the end of election day, you have to have learned how to correctly request an absentee ballot, or pull the lever on a lever machine, or punch out a chad on a punch card, or whatever. But you also have to have understood your candidates and issues. Correct procedure is one thing, but it makes no difference if there’s nothing worth using it on.”

  “How far along are you at this point?” said Cassie.

  “Maybe halfway. But I was just thinking last night that I have to add a chapter at the end called ‘How to Correctly Go Down with the Ship.’ That would be about if all attempts failed and there you were, stuck in an inescapable disaster not of your own making. I think a lot of that chapter is going to be about how to leave a record so that survivors will know that the whole mess was more complicated than it looked.” She knew she sounded as if she were making light of this idea, when in fact it was an idea that she thought about most of the time. “And then, of course, the previous chapter is about how not to go down with the ship. Being prepared for disaster, and all. I mean, did you know that Max had only one working flashlight at that house, and had brush growing right up against the stairs? He had given some thought to using the swimming-pool water to save the house in case of a fire, but I didn’t consider him at all prepared for an earthquake.”

  The other women looked at each other. Zoe said, “Who is? No one I know.”

  “Well, I’ll give you that chapter from my book. It isn’t that hard to do, but you have to actually do it.”

  Simultaneously, they all looked up at the pergola, then at the golden house, then at the aviary, perhaps to see whether anything was shaking, if only slightly. Cassie said, “I slept through the Northridge earthquake, in 1994. I had just flown in from Hawaii, and I was so tired I didn’t feel a thing.”

  “Woke me up,” said Delphine.

  “I was in New York,” said Zoe.

  “I felt it,” said Elena. “I woke Simon up, and we went out and pitched a tent in our backyard. He thought it was fun.”

  “That is what you’re supposed to do,” said Cassie. But then the energy that had been so bright died away, and Elena suspected that, once again, it was she who cast a pall over the conversation with her obsessions, or (she knew it was better to call them) her preoccupations. If someone had the SPF-45 sunblock for sensitive skin ready at hand, it would be her. If someone knew where to get a good bone-scan for incipient osteoporosis, it would be her. If someone’s eyes could pick out, in any mass of shrubbery, the varieties of plants most likely to go up like a torch, or to cause contact dermatitis, those eyes were hers. When Simon was a toddler, she could walk into any room and note without thinking the sharp corners, the unshielded electrical outlets, and the proximity of any pointed metal object that a child could pick up and apply to those electrical outlets. Her parents and her family on both sides were the same way. Over the years, they had taken very seriously strontium 90, DDT, PCBs, PBBs, fluoride, the military-industrial complex, racketeering, civic corruption in Chicago, algae levels in Lake Michigan, exactly what lakeside resorts to stay in when they vacationed in Wisconsin. They left nothing to chance. But such care did not make her a desirable companion.

  She looked at Zoe, Cassie, and Delphine in their silence for a moment, thinking that, actually, her problem now, here in the Russian house with everything perfectly managed, was that there was nothing at all she could do to offset the momentum of history as it gained downward speed.

  Then Cassie said, apropos of nothing except the very thoughts Elena had been keeping to herself, “I wonder if Mike knows anyone on the Council on Foreign Relations.”

  Delphine rolled her eyes.

  Zoe said, “That think tank?”

  Cassie cleared her throat and then lowered her voice. “The think tank is just a front organization. They run things. They are
the shadow world-government.”

  Delphine said, “Why would the shadow world-government need a front organization?”

  Cassie turned pointedly to Elena. “It was them who had the Kennedy brothers killed.”

  Zoe said, “I thought that was a combination of the Mafia and some Cubans.”

  “Maybe at the lower levels. I mean, Jack Ruby had Mafia ties, but, really, there isn’t anything that goes on that the Council on Foreign Relations doesn’t know about. They are tremendously powerful and in some ways control everything.”

  “Well,” said Delphine, “I can’t say they’re doing a very good job, all things considered.”

  Zoe smiled.

  Cassie said to Elena, “She and I have had this argument before. I said they are powerful, I didn’t say they are omnipotent. And they have their internal battles and struggles about what to do and how to do it, just like everyone else. My view is—”

  “Do tell,” exclaimed Delphine.

  “Okay, I will.” Cassie tossed her head. “The Council on Foreign Relations was started by the Rockefellers and the Carnegies and some of their counterparts in Germany and Japan. The Rothschilds. I think it was started in 1900. Anyway, they control so much money, and so many governments, and so much media, that basically the world we all think we live in is really the world they have given us. The money and investments go here, there, and everywhere, and countries rise and fall more or less in line with how these people invest, and politics conforms to their requirements, too. Or most of the time it does. Not lately, I don’t think. I think they thought Bush and Cheney were going to go along and do what they were supposed to do, but then the administration slipped the leash, as it were, and now it’s a mess. Because, I’ll tell you, one thing capitalists at the top don’t like is a real mess. Little messes here and there, so there can be some buying low in order to do some selling high, and some war profiteering, but the money has to keep flowing, and the investments have to pan out. When things are a real mess, investments are at risk.”