Very Far Away from Anywhere Else

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  I might as well say here that at fifteen I still didn't know what "scoring with a girl" meant. I thought it meant you'd gone out and had a good time at a movie or a party or something. I knew the facts of life, all right, but I didn't connect that phrase with them. So that when Mike, who was way ahead of me physically, started telling us that he had finally scored with this girl, I said, "Yeah, what did you do?" And he gave me this look and said, "What do you think we did?" and I have never felt so stupid in my life. I am getting red talking about it into this tape recorder. Mike had to go tell a lot of other fellows about me asking, "What did you do?" It was good for lots of humor. However, they forgot about it eventually, and I kept a good string of dirty jokes worked up, so that I could talk with Mike and Jason. It beat eating lunch alone, I guess.

  But one more thing about humor and seriousness: it doesn't necessarily go on like that. Older women sometimes say the funniest things, and older men often get deadly serious. My father has no sense of humor left at all. He is a kind man, but nothing ever strikes him as funny. And I've heard my mother and her friend Beverley laughing in the kitchen till they were bumping around like drunks and gasping. They were laughing about something dumb Beverley herself had done. Just listening to them whooping in there made me laugh, for nothing, for pleasure.

  Well, anyhow, it was really neat to have this girl laugh like that at my feeble jokes, so I went on. "Sounds to me as if what you need is two aspirin tablets and a tourniquet. Bring the leg in to me tomorrow. We have a three-legged centaur that needs a transplant." And so on. I mean feeble. But she laughed at me till I ran out; and then I said, "But how come no time? You got a job?"

  "I give some lessons."

  I couldn't remember what instrument she played. It would be uncool to ask. "You like it?"

  She shrugged and made a face. "Oh, well, it's music," she said. Like people say, "Oh, well, it's a living." But the implication is different.

  "That's what you want to be, a music teacher?"

  "No," she said, the way she'd said "Bah."

  "No teacher. Just music."

  She was so fierce she sounded like Tarzan, but it wasn't directed at me, exactly. She had a nice voice, clear and soft, with that fierceness in it. I went into an ape act. "No teacher. Urgh, urgh, kill teacher. Good teacher, yum yum. No teacher. Good tummy, fat, full of teacher." Natalie said, "Teacher lousy, all bones!" The man across the aisle was giving us Send to Siberian Prison Camp Look No. 12. That kind of look can create a bond between you. "What are you going in for?" Natalie asked.

  "Urgh, urgh, professional gorilla. Taking Advanced Grooming now, in Home Ec," and I showed her how to groom my knapsack and eat the fleas neatly. Then I said, "I'm going to be a teacher." That seemed funnier for some reason than the ape act, and we both laughed.

  "Honest?"

  "No, I don't know. Maybe. Something. Depends on where I go to college, I guess."

  "Where do you want to go?"

  "MIT"

  "Mental Institute of ... Texas..."

  "Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Or else Cal Tech. Science. Laboratories, acres of laboratories. White rats. Dedicated men in white coats laboriously sneaking up sideways on the secrets of the Universe. Frankenstein's monster. All that."

  "Yeah," Natalie said. She didn't say it questioningly, or agreeing-without-understanding, or mocking, or meaning nothing. She said it firmly. That's it. Yeah. "That's neat," she said.

  "It's also expensive."

  "Oh, well," she said, "you can always handle that."

  "How?"

  "Scholarships—working—That's why I'm giving lessons. So I can get to Tanglewood this summer."

  "Tanglewood, New South Wales?"

  She gave a laugh-snort and said, "It's a music school thing."

  "Near the Mental Institute of Texas. Yes."

  "Right."

  It was my stop. I got up and said, "So long," and she said, "So long," and I got off in the rain. Only after I got off I thought I could have ridden on two more blocks with her, to her stop, and we could have sort of finished the conversation. It had ended so fast. I jumped up and down in the rain doing the ape act as the bus started up again, but she was on the other side of the bus; nobody saw me but the Director of Siberian Prison Camps, and he looked away quickly and winced.

  THE REASON I HAVE reported that conversation on the bus with Natalie Field so exactly is that it was an unimportant conversation that was extremely important to me. And that's important, that something unimportant can be so important.

  I guess I tend to think that important events should be solemn, and very grand, with muted violins playing in the background. It's hard to realize that the really important things are just normal little happenings and decisions, and when they turn on the background music and the spotlights and the uniforms, nothing important is going to happen at all.

  What stuck in my head after that conversation was just one word, the most commonplace, meaningless word. It wasn't the way she looked, or the way she looked at me, or my acting like a clown and making her laugh, or it was all that, but all sort of compressed into one word, "Yeah," the way she said it. Firmly, certainly. Yeah, that's what you're going to do. It was like a rock. Whenever I looked into my head, there was this rock.

  And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn't know where I was at all.

  It was really getting bad. It had been coming for a while, for a long while I guess, but it was the car that really brought it on.

  You see, in giving me that car my father was saying, "This is what I want you to be. A normal car-loving American teen-ager." And by giving it to me he had made it impossible for me to say what I wanted to say, which was that I had finally realized that that's what I wasn't, and was never going to be, and I needed help finding out what I was instead. But to say that, now, I had to say, "Take your present back, I don't want it!" And I couldn't. He'd put his heart into that gift. It was the best he could possibly give me. And I was supposed to say, "Take yourself back, dad, I don't want you"?

  I think my mother understood all that, but in a way that wasn't any use to me. My mother was and is a good wife. Being a good wife and mother is the important thing in her life. And she is a good wife and mother. She never lets my father down. She rides him about some things, of course, but she never sneers at him or cuts him down, the way I've heard women do to their husbands; in all the big things she backs him up—what he does is right. And she keeps the house clean and cooks really well and makes extra stuff like cookies and granola, and when you want a clean shirt there is one, and when Muscular Dystrophy or March of Dimes wants a coordinator or a door-to-door collector she does it. And if you think all that, running even a small family and house so that things are decent and peaceful, is a small job, maybe you ought to try it for a year or two. She works hard and uses her head at it. But the trouble is, she's afraid of doing anything else, of being anything else. Not afraid for herself, I think, but afraid that if she did anything except look after us, she'd be letting us down—letting the side down, not being a good wife and mother. She feels she's got to be always there. She can't even take off the time it takes to read a novel. I think she doesn't read novels because if she got really interested in one, absorbed, then she'd be somewhere else, by herself: she wouldn't be with us. And that's wrong, to her. So all she ever reads are some magazines about food and interior decorating and one about extremely expensive holiday travel to places she doesn't want to go to. My father watches a lot of TV, but she never pays much attention to it; she may be sitting there with him in the living room, but she's sewing or doing crewelwork or figuring out household stuff or working on March of Dimes lists. Ready to get up and do what needs doing.

  She didn't spoil me, more than an only kid always gets spoiled by being the center of attention. She used to try to keep me from reading so much, but she sort of ga
ve up when I was twelve or thirteen. As far back as I can remember, I had to keep my room straight and do garden jobs. I do the lawn and carry out trash and so on. Male jobs only, of course. I never learned how to work the washer and dryer till the time she had to have an operation and couldn't climb stairs for two weeks. I don't think my father knows how to work them yet. That's woman's work. It's funny, really, because he's nuts about machines. All our appliances have to have about twelve different cycles and all possible attachments. If he ever bought the plain ordinary model of anything he'd feel he wasn't treating her right. But if they're household work machines, she runs them. And when they break down, she calls the repairman. My father doesn't like to hear about things breaking down.

  That's why I couldn't say anything about the car. Because it had really broken me down. It just was the end, the last stop. I had to get off. But there wasn't anything outside the bus but rain and fog and me jumping up and down doing an ape act and nobody looking or hearing.

  I came in from the bus stop that day. My mother was in the kitchen blending something in the blender. She yelled something over the scream of the machine but I couldn't hear what. I went up to my room and dropped my knapsack and took off my coat with the wet collar and stood there. The rain was whacking on the roof. I said, "I am an intellectual. I am an intellectual. I am an intellectual. And the rest of you can go to hell!"

  I heard my voice and it sounded unbelievably feeble. Big deal! So I was an intellectual, and what else is new? That's when the fog closed in completely. And that's when I found the rock. It was actually like that, as if my hand closed around a solid, round rock. The girl on the bus saying, "Yeah," in that solid, round voice. Yeah: good. So go ahead and be what you are.

  So when I had rubbed some of the rain out of my hair with a towel, I sat down at my desk and started to reread Ornstein's The Psychology of Consciousness. Because something like that, thinking about how we actually think, how our heads work, is what I would like to do.

  But it didn't last. I dropped the rock. At dinner my father got going about how you break in a new car. You should drive it at moderate speeds every day, and going to and from school would be perfect for it. "If you want me to take it to work for a week or so, of course I'll be glad to," he said. "It's not good for a new car just to sit there."

  "OK," I said, "you do that."

  That blew it. His face got tight. "If you didn't want the car, you might have told me."

  "You never asked me if I wanted a car."

  His face got tighter, like a clenched fist. He said, "It's been driven very little. I suppose the dealer might take it back. Not for the full cost, of course. They couldn't resell it as new."

  "Oh rubbish, what a notion," my mother said. "How is Owen to get back and forth from State every day next year without a car of his own? It would take him an hour each way on the bus. For goodness sakes, Jim, don't expect him to start living in the car right off! If you want to drive it to the office, do. But it'll get plenty of use next year!"

  That was fine. My mother is a highly intelligent person. She had just given my father his first practical reason for giving me a car—his excuse, his justification. State University is clear on the other edge of our city, about ten miles from where we live. I would certainly need a car to get to classes there next year. The only trouble was that State was not where I wanted to go to college.

  But if I brought that up, if I said, "What if I go away to college?" I'd have blown it again. We'd have had two quarrels going instead of one. Because it was my mother who was dead set on my going to State. And I do mean dead set. Shed gone there, she met dad there, she quit as a junior to get married. Beverley, her best friend, was a sorority sister. She knew State. It was safe. The places I wanted to go weren't safe. They were far away, and she didn't understand what went on at them; they were full of communists and radicals and intellectuals.

  I had applied to MIT, Cal Tech, and Princeton, as well as State. My father had filled out the scholarship applications and paid the application fees. The forms were incredible, all in quadruplicate, but being a CPA, he rather enjoyed filling them out clearly and honestly, and he didn't mind the fees because I think he took some pride in my shooting for the moon. I expect he mentioned to his friends at the office that his son was applying to Princeton. That was something to be proud of, especially if I didn't actually go there. But he said nothing about it to my mother, as far as I know, and she said nothing about it to either of us. If we wanted to throw away ninety dollars on fees, all right. But her son was going to State.

  And she had a practical reason. A very sound one. They could afford to send me there.

  I didn't say anything. I couldn't. My jaws locked. I couldn't swallow the piece of pot roast I'd been working on, either. It just lay there in my mouth, a fibrous sort of lump. I couldn't chew it. I worked it over to one side, and drank some milk around it, and after a long time I managed to chew it some and swallow it. After a longer time dinner was over. I went up to do homework.

  It was no good. Why should I study? What for? I could get to State without studying. I could probably get clear through State without studying. I could probably go on and become an accountant or a tax auditor or a math teacher and be respectable and successful and get married and have a family and buy a house and get old and die without ever studying, without ever thinking at all. Why not? A lot of other people did. You think you're so special, Griffiths.

  I couldn't stand the sight of any of the books in my room; I hated them. I went downstairs and said, "Going out for a drive," around the ghost of that piece of beef, which still seemed to be in my mouth; and I went out and got into the new car. I had left the keys in it, Sunday. Even Dad hadn't noticed. It could have been stolen any time during the last two days. If only it had been. I started it up and drove very slowly down the street. Breaking it in.

  At the end of the second block I passed the Fields'house.

  OK, now I know I was sick—really sick, a little past the breaking point—that night, because of what I did. I did what any normal car-loving American teen-ager would do if he'd met a girl he liked. I stopped and backed up and parked in front of the Fields' and went up to the front door and knocked and said to Mrs. Field, "Is Natalie here?"

  "She's practicing."

  "Can I see her for a minute?"

  "I'll ask her."

  Mrs. Field was a good-looking woman, older than my parents. She had the same severe expression Natalie had, but she was handsomer. Maybe Natalie would be that handsome at fifty. Kind of worn and polished like a piece of granite in a creek. Mrs. Field wasn't friendly or unfriendly, welcoming or off-putting. She was calm. She just stated the facts. She stood aside—it was still raining—and let me into the hall; didn't ask me in any farther; went upstairs. As she went, I heard Natalie practicing. It must be a violin, I thought. A tremendous noise, even though the Fields' house was bigger than ours and older, with thicker walls. A big, sweet, hard, rushing noise, rushing down the scales like a creek over rocks, bright and fierce—and then it stopped. I'd stopped it.

  I heard Mrs. Field upstairs say, "It's the Griffiths boy." She knew us mainly because mother had hooked her last spring for the March of Dimes, and she'd been at our house for the planning meeting.

  Natalie came downstairs. She was frowning, and her hair was all messed up. "Oh hi, Owen," she said from a distance roughly equivalent to the orbit of Neptune.

  "I'm sorry I stopped you practicing," I said.

  "That's all right. What's on your mind?"

  I had been going to ask her if she'd like to drive around some in my new car, but I couldn't. I said, "I don't know."

  And the ghost of the piece of pot roast came back and filled my entire mouth.

  She looked at me, and after this long, horrible silence she said, "Is something wrong?"

  I nodded.

  "Are you sick?"

  I shook my head. Shaking it seemed to clear it a bit. I said, "I'm upset. It's something to do with my pare
nts. And stuff. It's not terminal. But I. But I wanted to talk. But I. But I can't."

  She was kind of floored. She said, "Would you like a glass of milk?"

  "I just ate dinner."

  "Camomile tea," she said.

  "Peter Rabbit," I said.

  "Come on in."

  "I don't want to interrupt you. Listen. Can I sit and listen to you practice? Would it bother you a lot?"

  She hesitated, and then she said, "No. You want to? It's dull."

  We went to the kitchen, and she poured me a cup of extremely weird tea, and then we went upstairs to this room. What a room. All the walls in the Fields' house were dark, and it all looked kind of bare, kind of calm and severe like Mrs. Field, but this room was the barest. It had in it one Oriental rug worn down to the warp or whatever you call it so you could hardly see what colors it had been, and one grand piano, three music stands, and a chair. There were some stacks of music under the windows. I sat down on the rug. "You can sit in the chair," she said "I stand up to practice."

  "I'm fine here."

  "OK," she said. "This is some Bach. I have to cut an audition tape next week." And she picked up her fiddle off the piano and injected it under her jaw in that peculiar way violinists do—only I figured out from the size that this one was a viola not a violin—and rubbed her bow with rosin and stared at the music on the music stand and started playing.

  It wasn't your standard concert performance. For one thing the room was so high and bare that it made the noise loud, hard, so that it sort of rang in your bones (she said afterwards it was a perfect room for practicing because she could hear all her mistakes). And she made faces and muttered a lot. And she would play the same bit over and over and over. That crashing run she'd been doing when I came in, she must have done it ten or fifteen times, sometimes going on from it, but coming back to it again, starting over. And every time it was slightly different. Until finally it came out the same twice in a row. She'd got it right. Then she went on. Then when she played the whole movement over, that part sounded the same the third time in a row. Right. Yeah.