“Did you ever . . . ,” Ryan began, but he stopped himself because you didn’t want to say something stupid, like, you guys didn’t really do shit like that, did you? Or find out just exactly what they had done.
And Chip must have heard the question Ryan didn’t quite ask, because he started talking louder as if to drown him out. “Yeah, you want to learn a few things? I got all kinds of books I can loan you, like I. F. Stone’s white papers that rips into what a big fat fraud the Gulf of Tonkin incident was, you know what I’m talking about? No? We need to educate you. Ever hear about Dien Bien Phu? You want to understand Vietnam, you start with the French. I thought everybody knew that. Shit, Ry, it’s all out there, you just got to read up on it.”
“Yeah, I could do that.” But it was just something to say because it reminded him of Chip back when he was bragging about his comic books: “What do you mean, you don’t know who Stan Lee is?” In other words, another load of bullshit, but this was different just as Chip had come back different, and it frightened him to think he might come to know all the things he didn’t know and then there would be no place in the world where he would feel at ease, no place he would not judge or measure, no place that would be his true home, and just when he couldn’t bear sitting there another moment, Chip muttered that he’d kill for a cigarette and got out of the truck and Ryan turned off the engine and followed him.
The snow had slackened though it was still falling at a steady, sifting pace. If it kept up all night they’d have to shovel out in the morning, and his dad would make sure Ryan did his share and more. It wasn’t anything to look forward to. Chip was strolling along as if he didn’t feel the cold anymore, sniffing the air as if falling snow was just another stoned treat. It was a pretty safe bet that Uncle Ray didn’t wake him up early these days to tell him there was a shovel with his name on it.
They stopped at the door of the Legion. “You coming in?” Ryan asked, though he guessed he knew Chip wouldn’t.
“Nah. I’ll probably go on back home. I can only handle so much excitement.” He laughed his unsteady laugh and slapped Ryan on the back. “Go on in, man. Join the party.”
It’s not my party, Ryan wanted to say, because it both was and it wasn’t, and the people inside would welcome him and draw him in and he both would and would not want them to. “Hey, thanks for the . . . ,” he began, but Chip was already walking away down the snowy street, raising his arm in a backward wave.
Ryan opened the door just wide enough to step inside. And because he was still high and he was afraid it showed, and also because his girlfriend might still be in play somewhere, he hung back.
The band was taking a break. People were sitting down and haw-hawing over their drinks, and his sister had taken off her veil and perched it on the table next to her like a doll or a pet, and her new husband was off somewhere Ryan couldn’t see, probably being talked out of shooting himself in the head now that he’d gone and signed his life away.
Through the pass-through he saw the kitchen, wiped down clean, every pan washed and scrubbed and stacked. The band straggled back to the microphone, ready for one last set. They started in playing something fast and swingy Ryan didn’t recognize, something with no words in it, nobody getting up because they didn’t know how to dance to it.
Then an amazing thing: his Uncle Norm came out of the kitchen with a can of Dance Wax, sprinkling it over the scuffed floor. Little powdery flakes, like snow falling inside. Then Aunt Martha joined him, and the two of them clasped hands, Norm’s arm around her waist. They stepped together, stepped and twirled and glided, up and down and round and round, some fast step they must have learned back when they were kids and had been practicing ever since in some unsuspected secret life that included fun, moving in perfect time with each other and the jazzy music.
Who would have thought it? People at the tables clapped for them. Norm was smiling. Martha, flushed with heat, almost pretty, smiled back. It was like the perfect heart of the snow globe, and Ryan guessed rightly that he would remember the moment forever.
Iowa
APRIL 1975
The drive from Iowa City was 150 miles and Janine said there were 150 redwing blackbirds, one on every milepost. She was from Chicago and she had these ideas about nature, which meant she got excited about ordinary things.
“You know what they’re all singing? ‘I’m the best bi-ird.’”
“Yeah, always a lot of blackbirds, this time of year.”
“They look amazing. That one little red-and-yellow patch. You think they know how amazing they look?”
“Sure.”
She made a fist and nudged it against his chin. “Don’t get excited or anything.”
“I promise I’m not.”
“Hayseed.”
“Snob.”
“Boy, you’re just trying to pick a fight, aren’t you?” She wore a lot of silver bracelets. They made a busy noise when she moved.
“Hate to tell you, but blackbirds ruin crops, so farmers shoot em, or—”
She squealed and flailed at him, until Ryan caught both her hands in his free one, the silver bracelets jangling, and she twisted away and collapsed with her head in his lap, still laughing.
“Whoa.” Ryan got both hands back on the wheel and steered around a slow truck. Janine arched her neck and smiled up at him. Did girls know what they were doing when they did shit like this to you? Sure they did.
They were on their way to Rocky Mountain National Park, where neither of them had ever been. They would camp in the snow, hike, swim in a cold stream. But on the way there they would spend a night at Ryan’s parents’, so they couldn’t complain he didn’t visit at all over spring break.
It would be the first time he’d ever brought a girl home from school, not to mention one they’d be pretty sure he was having sex with. They’d be able to tell. It would be all over them, a layer of happy guilt.
They were quiet for a time. Janine sat upright, though she still kept one hand in his lap. “It’s just the one night.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Parents. Mine would ask you every stupid question in the world.”
“Oh, mine’ll do that too, don’t worry.”
“What if they don’t like me?”
“They’ll like you just fine.” His mom and dad would fall all over themselves with manners, while his brother and sister made google eyes behind his back. Janine wouldn’t be expecting grace before supper, and she wouldn’t offer to help with the dishes afterward, and she wasn’t an education major and she didn’t go around talking about how much she loved children. She had long, straight dark hair and a smutty sense of humor. She was the third girl he’d had sex with, and she was the crazy best. There wasn’t much they hadn’t tried these last few months. It had been just incredible.
And now all that weighed him down with dread. Janine wore a rawhide lace and some beads around one ankle, which would probably strike his parents as indecent, although they would not be able to say why, and she would be just one more way in which he had disappointed them.
They were almost to Ames. It wouldn’t be long now.
This road was so familiar to him that he no longer saw it, only registered its landmarks—newly green overpasses and embankments, the Stuckey’s off to one side, the billboard advertising a motel that had closed down before he was born. The car seemed to be pulling to the right. It was Janine’s car, an obnoxious red Nova, and it irritated him to be driving it. But his truck couldn’t handle the mountains, and the Nova was at least new and the carburetor wouldn’t crap out when the air got thin. That didn’t console him for the total embarrassment of it all.
“You ever get this car aligned?”
She was looking out the window again and she turned to give him one of her blissed-out, aren’t-we-having-a-good-time looks. “What’s that?”
“Alignment. It’s so you don’t wear the tires out faster on one side than the other.”
“I don’t know. I had some stuff
done at Christmas. Oil change and whatever else the book said.”
“You have to keep it aligned. It’s stupid not to.”
“Then I guess I’m stupid,” she said lightly. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s some kind of big deal, that I didn’t get whatever done to the car? Chill. I want this to be a nice trip.”
“It will be. We just have to get past this here family thing.”
She swung her long hair around and studied him. “What’s so hard about them?”
“I don’t know. They worry about me.”
“That’s what parents are supposed to do,” she pointed out.
“They don’t know me anymore,” he said, but Janine had found something new outside to look at and exclaim over, lifting her mood, and she didn’t hear him. And he was glad for that, since the instant the words left his mouth he felt them to be babylike, or worse, girl-like, by which he meant whiny, injured, and self-pitying.
They were passing the Ames exits now, the Conoco station, the Case Implements store, everything familiar and drab, and which like everything about home, including his own sulking, made him feel impatient and shamed, as if he’d been discovered at something unworthy.
Back in his room in Iowa City was a letter from his cousin Chip. It had arrived just after Christmas. It was the only letter Chip had ever written to him. Nothing the whole time he’d been in the army, and nothing else before or since. The letter had been tossed aside and had occupied a shifting place in the room’s architecture of crud all this time, then yesterday Ryan had come across it again. It was mashed and wadded and oddly faded, as if written in disappearing ink. Ryan lay back in bed to reread it. The windows were open and the noise of his roommates playing a stoned game of basketball reached him, along with the layered sounds of traffic. It was one of the first warm, lazy-making days. A green branch had unfurled itself just outside his window. He’d been living here since classes started last fall, and he hadn’t even noticed there being a tree.
Chip was supposed to be in Minneapolis, studying electronics. At least, that was the word at Christmas. But he hadn’t put in an appearance at any of the family gatherings, nor had anyone given an explanation for his absence. His letter was postmarked Seattle and didn’t say anything about Minneapolis.
Hey Lambchop,
How’s the college boy? You any smarter now?
Strange days have found us. Yes indeed.
I won’t lie to you, there have been some skanky goings on recently. I’ve seen amazing sights and had some rotten nights. Not everybody out there is a child of God. Plenty of people who take real pride in being lowlifes.
But enough of the sad songs. I’m doing pretty good here in Seattle. Was staying with an old Army pal for a time, but we had a parting of the ways, and now I’m living with this girl I met. Her name is Deb and if it ain’t love, it’ll have to do until the real thing comes along. She works at a home health care place and she’s trying to get me on as a driver, delivering oxygen tanks and wheelchairs and crutches. Me, your friendly neighborhood wheelchair guy. There’s even a uniform.
So that’s the news, but mostly I wanted to tell you about this time a few months back when I wound up in the middle of exactly nowhere, some big brown field in one of those big brown states, either Montana or Idaho, anyway, one of those places that sound more interesting than they really are, and I won’t bore you with how I got there or how I got out, but I can tell you there’s this moment of purity, that’s absolutely the right word, when you realize how alone you are in the universe.
Come out and visit sometime. There’s things you ought to see.
Chip
Ryan hadn’t written him back. He figured Chip wouldn’t expect him to. It was the kind of letter you sent when you got tired of talking to yourself.
Janine opened her purse and took out her makeup things. She looked into a mirror, poked and smudged. Her face was too round to be beautiful in any ordinary sense, just as her body was too short-waisted and low-slung. But guys always noticed her. He certainly had. She said, “Jesus Christ, I look like a hag.”
“You look all right.”
“Oh, thanks. You silver-tongued devil, you.”
They were on the outskirts of Grenada now, though the town’s borders were so ragged and undefined that occasional farm fields appeared in places you didn’t expect, like this one next to the elementary school. A combine chugged along, making straight rows in the black dirt. He said, “Listen, you can’t say stuff like Jesus Christ or God around my parents. Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. You know what that is, right?” Janine had been raised without any religion at all, only books that explained we celebrated Jesus’ birthday because he was an important person. In spite of himself he still thought of this as vaguely shocking. “Practice saying something else. Gosh, or golly, or Jiminy Cricket.”
“You’re shittin’ me,” she said happily, intent on having as much fun as possible with him.
“Please. Pretend you’re a nice, normal girl.”
And now he’d gone too far, and the fun went out of her. “What’s that supposed to mean, a nice girl?”
“I don’t know. A Lutheran.”
A lucky thing to say. So often with girls it felt like there was an entirely different language being spoken, words that inflamed or soothed, except you never knew which ones they were. Janine considered him for a long moment, then rolled her eyes. “It’s not like I’m your affianced, or anything.”
“My what?”
“Like we’re getting married.”
Even the thought of it was enough to unnerve him. “Yeah. I mean, no. Jiminy Cricket.”
“God, relax. I don’t ever want to get married.”
“Sure.” He didn’t believe it when girls said things like that.
“Marriage subjugates women. It’s another one of those paternalistic things.”
“You might want to keep that opinion to yourself.”
“What did you tell them about me? You better let me know.”
“Nothing. Just that you were a friend.”
“Oh, that’s great.” She shook her head. She wore Gypsy hoop earrings that went along with the bracelets. “Friend, that’s only about the weakest shit you can say.”
“I don’t tell them stuff, OK?”
“Am I at least your girlfriend? Can you hang that name on it?”
“How about, ‘If it ain’t love, it’ll have to do until the real thing comes along.’”
He thought it was kind of funny and was expecting her to make some joke, but she just looked at him, coldly now, then at the little town unspooling itself, the car slowing, the bland expanse of Main Street under the sparkling sky.
The Red and White Mart, the dry cleaners, the bank that never looked like it had any money inside. Row of false-front buildings, a painted ad for a fifty-year-old livery business sinking into a brick wall. Incongruous shiny new video-game parlor. The Grand Opera House block, a place everyone agreed was history. He waited for Janine to pronounce judgment, how small and fusty it was, or worse, how darling and quaint.
But she’d gone quiet. He’d said the wrong thing again, blundered into the trap he’d been trying so hard to avoid. It was only a few blocks to his parents’ house and there was no time to make it right. They had fallen into a familiar trough of silence and distance. Something they couldn’t help and couldn’t predict, something false, unhappy, constrained, lost. Sometimes one of them fell in first and pulled the other one in after. Neither of them knew how to do anything except suffer through it. It wasn’t exactly fighting, but a substitute for fighting.
And after such distance, how strange to make love, frightening, almost, as if everything between them, both good and bad, had been a kind of lie.
Here was the street, the block, the pinkish brick of his parents’ ranch house—already he had ceased to think of it as his own house—and Janine stretching her legs beneath her too short dress and shaking her hair out, his sma
rt-ass, hippie-slut girlfriend who really should have worn something else, because he wouldn’t be the only one looking at the shadowy territory of her thighs. He hated that he was embarrassed, because hadn’t he chosen her for just such reasons?
Ryan parked the Nova behind his mother’s station wagon. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. The house was pretty and trim and sun-bright. His dad had been after the lawn already, he could tell, everything raked and clipped. The front door was closed, the sheer curtains in the living room drawn. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where people hung out of windows or left shoes or bicycles strewn about, nor were his family that kind.
“Ready?” he said to Janine, and she said she was, not looking at him, still distant from him, and they got out and walked around back to the kitchen, where he knew they would be waiting for him.
His mother was first, pushing the door open and hugging and hugging him, and his sister right behind her, and back in the kitchen his lurking, beanpole brother. His father off somewhere, keeping out of the way. Janine was behind him and he turned to draw her in. She dodged his hand and stepped forward. “Mom, Torrie, this is Janine Pasqua. My brother Blake.”
He watched them take each other in. It went about as well as he’d imagined, everybody keeping their smiling game faces on. Janine’s alarming dress was a red-and-black print fabric with dramatic trailing sleeves. His family took in the silver jewelry and the ankle beads too. They were trying to figure out just who she was, and from just what dusky origin. His brother blushed dull red with embarrassed lust.
Janine said, “Wow, you all look exactly alike.”
Hard to tell if she meant it as any kind of a compliment. But it was true enough; him, his brother and his sister, each some gradation of blond, long-boned Nordic-ness. There was a beat of silence, then his mother said, “Oh, wait till Anita gets here and you see all four of them together. It’ll make you rub your eyes. Of course they get the height from their dad. I always say, they look like me, but stretched out.”
The Year We Left Home: A Novel Page 3
