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 garden 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 face, 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.
“Well, I’m glad. I seem to have more and more trouble talking with Easterners.”
Sue Shepard laughed, probably not understanding, and pursued; “So you went to school in Ultimate?”
“Yes, until high school. Then I came to live with Aunt Josie in Portland and went to old Lincoln High. The nearest high school to Ultimate was thirty miles on logging roads, and anyhow it wasn’t good enough for Father. He was afraid I’d grow up to be a roughneck, or marry one. . . .” Sue Shepard clicketed on her little machine, and Rita thought, But what did Mother think? Did she want to send me away at age thirteen to live in the city with her sister-in-law? The question opened on a blank area that she gazed into, fascinated. I know what Father wanted, but why don’t I know what she wanted? Did she cry? No, of course not. Did I? I don’t think so. I can’t even remember talking about it with Mother. We made my clothes that summer. That’s when she taught me how to cut out a pattern. And then we came up to Portland the first time, and stayed at the old Multnomah Hotel, and we bought shoes for me for school—and the oyster silk ones for dressing up, the little undercut heel and one strap, I wish they still made them. I was already wearing Mother’s size. And we ate lunch in that restaurant, the cut-glass water goblets, the two of us, where was Father? But I never even wondered what she thought, I never knew. I never know what Mag really thinks, either. They don’t say. Rocks. Look at Mag’s mouth, just like Mother’s, like a seam in a rock. Why did Mag go into teaching, talk, talk, talk all day, when she really hates talking? Although she never was quite as gruff as Gret is, but that’s because Amory wouldn’t have stood for it. But why didn’t Mother and I say anything to each other? She was so stoical. Rock. And then I was happy in Portland, and there she was in Ultimate. . . . “Oh, yes, I loved it,” she answered Sue Shepard. “The twenties were a nice time to be a teen-ager, we really were very spoiled, not like now, poor things. It’s terribly hard to be thirteen or fourteen now, isn’t it? We went to dancing school, they’ve got AIDS and the atomic bomb. My granddaughter’s twice as old as I was at eighteen. In some ways. She’s amazingly young for her age in others. It’s so complicated. After all, think of Juliet! It’s never really simple, is it? But I think I had a very nice, innocent time in high school, and right on into college. Until the crash. The mill closed in ’32, my second year. But actually we went right on having a good time. But it was terribly depressing for my parents and my brothers. The mill shut right down, and they all came up to Portland looking for work, everybody did. And then I left school after my junior year, because I’d got a summer job bookkeeping in the University accounting office, and they wanted me to stay on, and so I did, since everybody else in the family was out of work, except Mother finally got a job in a bakery, nights. It was terrible for men, the Depression, you know. It killed my father. He looked and looked for work and couldn’t find anything, and there I was, doing what he was qualified to do, only of course at a very low level, and terrible pay—sixty dollars a month, can you imagine?”
“A week?”
“No, a month. But still, I was making it. And men of his generation were brought up to be depended on, which is a wonderful thing, but then they weren’t allowed ever not to be depended on, when they had to depend on other people, which everybody actually does. It was terribly unrealistic, I think, a real whatdyoucallit. Double time?”
“Double bind,” said young Sue, sharp as tacks, clicketing almost inaudibly away on her little lap computer, while the tape recorder tape went silently round and round, recording Rita’s every maunder and meander. Rita sighed. “I’m sure that’s why he died so young,” she said. “He was only fifty.”
B
ut Mother hadn’t died young, though her husband had, and her elder son had drifted off to Texas to be swallowed alive so far as his mother was concerned by a jealous wife, and her younger son had poured whiskey onto diabetes and died at thirty-one. Men did seem to be so fragile. But what had kept Margaret Jamison Holz going? Her independence? But she had been brought up to be dependent, hadn’t she? Anyhow, nobody could keep going long on mere independence; when they tried to they ended up pushing shopping carts full of stuff and sleeping in doorways. Mother hadn’t done that. She had sat here on the deck looking out at the dunes, a small, tough, old woman. No retirement pension, of course, and a tiny little dribble of insurance money, and she did let Amory pay the rent on her two-room apartment in Portland, but she was independent to the end, visiting them only once or twice a year at the University, and then always for a full month here, in summer. Gret’s room now had been Mother’s room then. How strange it was, how it changed! But recently Rita had wakened in the deep night or when it was just beginning to get light and had lain there in bed thinking, not with fear but with a kind of frightened, lively thrill, It is so strange, all of it is so strange!
“When were you able to go back to college?” Sue Shepard asked, and she answered, “In ’35,” resolving to stick to the point and stop babbling.
“And then you met Dr. Inman when you took his class.”
“No. I never took a class in Education.”
“Oh,” Sue Shepard said, blank.
“I met him in the accounting office. I was still clerking there halftime, paying my way. And he came in because he hadn’t been paid his salary for three months. People used to be just as good at mistakes like that as computers are now. It took days and days to find out how they’d managed to lose him from the faculty payroll. Did he tell somebody that I’d taken his class and that’s how we met?” Sue Shepard wasn’t going to admit it; she was discreet. “How funny. It was one of the other women he went out with, and he got his memories crossed. Students were always falling in love with him. He was extremely attractive—I used to think Charles Boyer without the French accent—”
The Unreal and the Real, Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin Volume 1: Where on Earth Page 23
