She remembers it that morning, remembers even, how he had one hand on her ass and the other on her hip, and how he squeezed her hip as he whispered to her. When she thinks of them, together, if she admits it, if she is not afraid of any sentimentality and the vulnerability that might imply, she will think of that moment and say, That’s Don and me. That’s totally us.
And then, the answer comes to her, too clear: perhaps we aren’t us anymore.
PART III
And at once I knew,
I was not magnificent.
—Bon Iver, “Holocene”
1.
You bring your parents into your marriage. You don’t mean to do it, but one day, you amble into what Dante calls the dark wood, midway along the journey of your life, and you find them there, waiting to participate in your miseries. You might say to them, “No, thank you,” but they will lurk in the woods anyway, casting shadows, and all that you do will be haunted by them from that moment forward.
This is what Claire believes and this is why, a week later, she says to Don, “We’re not going to do this the way our parents did.”
“Do what?” Don says. He’s washing dishes—having made pancakes and bacon for the third morning in a row, as if the festive breakfasts of summer vacation might help his children not notice the serious cliff the family is about to fall over.
Claire is opening a carton of packing tape and tape guns and Sharpie markers that she has ordered online. She is switching into moving mode, the challenge of it helping to mute that sadness of it all, and she understands what she is doing when she makes a checklist a mile long and pins it to the bulletin board by the fridge. She is letting everyone know that she is in charge; she is the general of this expedition. It feels almost good.
“I called your mother and had a talk with her,” Claire says. “I told her everything.”
“Everything?”
“Yep.”
The kids are out in the backyard with neighbors, running through the sprinkler. It’s almost ninety degrees out and not yet ten A.M.
“You told her about how you skinny-dipped with a guy you just met?”
Claire assembles a tape gun.
“Yep. And I told her how you got high with a college girl and slept next to her all night.”
Don sets down the dish brush.
“What?” he says.
“And then how we got home from our skinny-dipping party last weekend and fucked each other senseless all night in the basement, stoned and drunk, while our kids slept upstairs.”
“Claire, come on.”
“And how every chance I get I go and see Charlie and it makes me feel good to talk to him, he calms me down, he gets me, he understands where I am at, that I am sick of striving, of staying afloat, and that you get so jealous you leave the house if I have left before you and you go smoke pot with a girl who likes to smoke pot with a middle-aged realtor for God knows what kind of daddy issues, and I also told your mother that you have gone crazy and you are in love with your own misery more than me and—”
“Claire, Jesus. The kids,” Don hisses.
Wendy has just walked into the kitchen.
“So, no, Don, I didn’t tell her everything,” Claire says, lowering her voice. “What do you want, Wendy?”
“Um, can we have Popsicles now?” Wendy asks.
“No, you just had breakfast!” Claire shouts. “Get out!”
“After lunch,” Don says. “After lunch, baby.”
“Everyone wants them now. The Hellengas are over and they didn’t have breakfast!” Wendy protests.
“They’re not cheap Popsicles,” Claire says. “They are the good ones. And we can’t afford fruit pops for the whole town anymore.”
“Here,” Don says, going to the freezer and getting out the fruit pops. He hands Wendy the box. “Wendy, here. Go play.”
“Are you guys fighting?” Wendy asks.
“Go play,” Claire says.
“No, we’re not fighting, Wendy,” Don says.
Wendy rushes out the back door, but not before stopping, turning around, and shooting them a burning, accusatory glare.
“This is what we’re going to avoid. These moments in front of the kids. I told your mother about the foreclosure. I told her we were separating.”
“We can’t even afford lawyers.”
“I told her that we need a few days alone. That is all I told her.”
“The kids hate going there,” Don says.
“We need a few days to regroup, make a plan, and then when the kids come back, we’ll present them with a cool, calm, and optimistic plan for the family.”
“What?”
“For moving. Or something bigger. I don’t know. I’m confused.”
“They’re bluffing,” Don says. “We won’t lose this house. I know everyone involved. I played football with the sheriff. I was a pallbearer at the bank president’s brother’s funeral. I have ties here, Claire. People aren’t going to throw me under the bus. I’m Don Lowry.”
“Us under the bus,” she says. “Us. It’s not just your battle, it’s ours. You’re not fucked, we’re fucked.”
“Right. Whatever.”
“The letters have been quite clear,” Claire says. “As of July first, Don, it’s no longer our house.”
“Let me come up with something.”
“You have twelve days, Don! Even if you sell a house, you won’t get the money in twelve days. It’s over.”
“So why do the kids have to leave tonight? Shouldn’t they get to enjoy the last two weeks in our house?”
“Don,” Claire says. “We need to spend some time talking. I know you fucking hate talking. I know you’d rather die than talk to me about anything real, Don, but we have to find out what we need to do and do it. We need a place to live, we need to pack, and we need to figure out what each of us is going to do for a job starting next month. I just applied at the dining hall to work summer conferences. It’s temporary, but with all the students gone, they need the help.”
“You’re gonna wash dishes in the dining hall?” Don says. “Claire, you used to teach here. You were a visiting professor! You can’t wash dishes.”
“Sure I can. Lots of writers and artists take menial jobs when things are slow. I haven’t published a book in over a decade, Don. I’d say things are pretty fucking slow.”
“And you want me to take a second job too? Because real estate is slow.”
“I think so. I think you have to do that, Don.”
“I am, of course, willing. I could probably get a job at the hardware store.”
“Good! Now we’re talking about real life—doesn’t it feel sane?”
“It feels sad.”
“Admit it, Don. You like to feel sad. For so long, I thought you were sad at home because your life is hard and you work too hard and your childhood was fucked up—but now I see things clearly, after spending time with someone who is actually happy. You like being sad, you sick fuck, you give the world your jokes and your smiles, and you bring home your sadness! And you make me sad!”
“Who makes you happy? Charlie Gulliver? What the fuck is going on, Claire?”
Claire leaves the room and Don goes back to the dishes, washing the electric skillet and drying it with an old kitchen towel, one of the kitchen towels they’d bought at the Ikea outside Chicago after they’d bought their first house. Why Don thinks of this, he doesn’t know, but he also remembers walking through the never-ending housewares section at Ikea, following Claire, who was wearing this simple black cotton tank dress and flip-flops, and he remembers wanting to go home, he was so done with the endless shopping and he wanted to head back to Iowa. His mother was watching the kids and she would be getting tired.
He rounded a corner and saw Claire, who looked over her shoulder and then lifted her dress nonchalantly so he could see the thong she was wearing. She did a little curtsy like that, in front of a display of spatulas, and later, they went into the family restroom, and fucked l
eaning against the sink, him behind her, her panties down around her ankles, his pants falling down his thighs. She was so flushed afterward, her whole chest and neck and face stayed bright red until they checked out, and well after that, and Don’s thighs burned with exertion and excitement. They ate two soft-serve ice-cream cones on the way out to the parking lot, both buoyed incredibly, spirits held aloft by the important milestone: it was the first kinky thing they’d done since they’d had babies.
“So, I’ll take the kids around four, I guess,” Claire says. “I’ll probably swing by Trader Joe’s, since I’ll be in West Des Moines anyway, get us some easy frozen food for the week of packing. We won’t feel like cooking, but it’ll be cheaper than ordering in.”
Don nods.
“Are you listening?” Claire says.
“I was thinking of that trip to Ikea,” Don says, “when we bought these dish towels.”
“Don.”
“Are you in love with him?” Don asks.
“Don. I told you. I haven’t fucked him,” Claire whispers. “Please stop.”
“I didn’t ask if you fucked him. I asked if you were in love with him,” Don says. “Tell me.”
Already, she knows she will soon crush his big, complicated, shadowed heart. She wants out. But he never will want out. He is too Midwestern, too stoic, too hardworking to quit on anything. Wild fucking horses wouldn’t drag him away.
So she says yes. “Yes, Don. I’m in love with him.”
She watches a shadow come over his face.
2.
The son of Russell Lowry, maintenance engineer at the Maytag plant in Newton, and Annie Dobrow, a part-time nurse at Grinnell Regional, Don Lowry had, until he was twelve, a happy childhood. He was good at sports—the boys in Iowa were divided, roughly, into the jocks and the 4-H kids (the ones who won ribbons for pigs at the fair)—and this made things easy for him. He was well liked by his pals before puberty, and also well liked by girls after it. He had a near photographic memory and enjoyed reading, so school was not a problem for him. It was rare that he did poorly on a test or a quiz; he never had to worry about studying.
At first, Russell Lowry was distant in the way all fathers were distant back then: he simply worked and came home. Nobody paid him much attention. You had to be quieter when he was home, but that was about it. The wick of his temper was a short one, and once lit, he could be angry for days, though a young Don associated this with maleness rather than mental instability. He assumed all fathers yelled, the way he assumed all fathers got so drunk on Friday nights that they often fell asleep in the foyer, shoes and coat still on and the door half ajar, letting in the cold.
On Saturdays, while Russell’s wife, Don’s mother, picked up a shift at the hospital, Russell, no doubt hungover, did maintenance work on the house—lawn mowing, snow clearing, roof fixing, lightbulb replacing—all with a cigarette hanging from his mouth and slugging, between chores, scalding coffee from a singed pot. On Sundays, he went to the Catholic church with his family for the ten o’clock mass and joined the family—Don had a sister, Rosie—for a lavish Sunday supper at two (after, he always washed the dishes, “So your mother can rest,” he’d say). He attended all of Don’s baseball games, all of Rosie’s piano recitals, and church. He ate dinner with the family every night (except for the aforementioned Fridays). He hunted birds on occasion and went up to Minnesota for four days every deer season but never seemed to kill a deer. This was all rather standard behavior for that time and that place and Don never wondered about it. It was what dads did. He had no reason to try and understand it and he certainly never asked questions about his father’s happiness or stability.
And then the Shadow came. This is how Don’s father described it, years later, maybe nine years later, when he had already made up for his mistakes the best he could, which was not all that well. The mistakes were rather straightforward: Don’s father had started to drink too much, and not just on Fridays, which heightened his temper, and had begun to spend more and more of his time at the bar. The family fell behind on its bills because Russell began to spend liberally. When he was home, Don’s father was misery personified: no longer simply a tired and mildly dissatisfied dad, but a brooding, snarling wreck in front of a blaring television, the floor at his feet littered with crushed beer cans. His kids were older by then—Don was twelve, Rosie was ten—and it seemed as if they were well on their way to being fine human beings. Impressive on some levels, even, which was something Don’s father might express in his rare moments of clarity. They’d be fine without him, he used to tell them, somewhere around that time, because he was going over a dark edge and would soon fail them completely. He knew this with a sharpness and fatalism that, in hindsight, was chilling to Don. It was chilling how he spoke about his coming crash with an almost prescient vision.
Don’s mother had started to work full-time at the hospital when the Shadow arrived. Though this was no reason for Russell to do what he did. But he did it: he began an affair with a married coworker, a fellow drunk, an assembly-line worker named Dottie Good, fifteen years his junior and married to one of the meanest men who worked at Maytag, Matt Good. Dottie and Russell left at lunch for a quick beer at Porter’s Stop, something they’d been doing regularly now that they’d bonded over their addictions. This was a small tavern near the factory, and one afternoon, Russell and Dottie got a little carried away. The Shadow never seemed to follow Russell to the tavern. Soon, Russell and Dottie, laughing, staggering in the dusty heat, found themselves six beers in and entangled in lusty sweat in the back of Dottie’s Dodge Omni, parked behind some Dumpsters. When Matt Good came in after his shift, about two in the afternoon, he must have been wondering why his wife had ditched work again and went to look for her car. He found Russell undoing his wife’s bra, taking her big breasts into his dirty hands.
Matt Good had a pistol in the glove compartment of his truck, and within sixty seconds that day would become the day that Matt Good killed his wife, and then killed himself, but for some reason he spared Russell Lowry. According to bystanders, including Russell Lowry himself, Matt Good had, before taking his own life, said to Russell, “You got kids. So I can’t. But you’re a bad man. You’re a fool. And this blood is on you.”
And then the final shot of the pistol went into Matt Good’s own mouth. The sirens were already wailing by then.
Don Lowry was twenty-two when he went to see his father one afternoon after the final classes of his college career. Russell was living alone then, in a rundown apartment in Gilman that was next to the gas station. Don had just finished his fourth year. He’d driven out to Gilman to invite his father to his graduation. His father was still a drunk, disabled by alcoholism, and he stayed alive on meager disability checks and some handouts from his corn-farming brother and Don’s mother. Don almost never went to see him; it just wasn’t expected. Russell had never met Claire, for instance, whom Don had been dating since freshman year.
“Aw, Donnie,” Russell said. “It’s not for a guy like me. I wouldn’t know what to do at it.”
“It’s not that fancy, Dad,” Don said.
“I know it,” Russell said. “I went one time when your cousin Buster graduated from there.”
“See?”
“It’s just—I know I couldn’t do it,” Russell said. He was drinking from a pint of Jim Beam.
“Couldn’t stay sober for one morning? It’s in the morning. Ten o’clock on a Monday.”
“It’s important to you?” Russell said.
“Yeah, Dad. You’ve never even met Claire.”
“You ain’t ashamed of me?”
“I sure the fuck am,” Don said, and Russell and his son wheezed out a congested laugh together, Russell because his lungs were wrecked from cigarettes and Don because he was crying.
“But she’s something else, Dad. She’s amazing.”
“I’ll be there.”
Don Lowry and his skinny old man walked across the street then, and Don bought a stack
of frozen pizzas and a tub of ice cream and a thirty-pack of Busch and a few packs of Winstons for his old man.
“You don’t have to do that,” Russell said.
“Sure I do,” Don said. “I’m staying for supper.”
They made a pizza in the filthy apartment’s oven and ate outside on a picnic table near the Dumpsters. Mostly, Russell drank and smoked while Don ate. Don told him that he and Claire were moving to New York City in August.
“Who’s gonna look after your ma? And your sister?” Russell asked, and Don said it wasn’t his responsibility. The underside of that statement was clear even to a drunk. Russell Lowry had no right to make Don feel responsible for his mother and sister. Russell chewed on his lip for a bit before lighting another smoke.
“I should put the extra pizzas and the ice cream bucket in the freezer,” Don said.
“Don’t work,” Russell said. “They let me use the ice machine across the street.”
So they walked over to it together and Russell took a key from the ring on his belt and opened the ice machine in front of the Kum & Go. They loaded in the remaining pizzas and the rest of the ice cream.
“You be sure you eat all that,” Don said.
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