The Year We Left Home: A Novel

by Jean Thompson

  “Anita’s coming?” Ryan asked. His sister lived in Ames now, with her banker husband, and was often busy with the responsibilities and demands of her married state.

  “She’ll be here for dinner. Jeff too, if he can make it.” Ryan’s mother led them all back into the kitchen, ever the anxious hostess. “Would you like something to drink, Janine? Coke? Iced tea?”

  “Iced tea would be great, thank you.” Ryan’s mother told them to go ahead and sit down and they did, Janine still not looking at him, and he guessed he was in for more of the same treatment until she got over it. His sister was out in the hall calling, “Dad? Dad? Ry’s here,” and then his father was standing at the kitchen door, looking down at everyone through his glasses like some big serious bird.

  “Hey Dad.” Ryan stood up and shook hands, watched his father register his shaggy hair and begin to say something, stop, and settle instead for a narrowing of his mouth. Then his eyes found Janine. “Dad, this is Janine Pasqua. Janine, my dad, Mr. Erickson.”

  Janine smiled and said Nice to meet you and his father said You too. Ryan saw little thought balloons appear over everyone’s head, like a cartoon. His father’s said, Oh mercy mercy me. His mother’s said something like Everybody settle down. His sister’s was Now what?, and his brother’s was full of the kind of confused noise and word scraps used to ward away hard-ons.

  And Janine’s was blank. He couldn’t read her and he didn’t trust her. She was capable of saying anything, and if she’d decided to give him a hard time for whatever pissed-off reason, there wouldn’t be much he could do except take it.

  Ryan’s father sat down at the kitchen table. His mother set out glasses of iced tea and a bowl of pretzel sticks, his sister was keeping herself busy looking into the refrigerator. He hadn’t thought how weird it would be to have Janine sitting at the same table where he’d eaten cereal when he was a kid. The oak-veneer cupboards were marked with years of fingerprints, scrubbed down and reappearing again and again with the persistence of ghosts. Here were the same yellow-striped plates and cloudy-glass salt and pepper shakers, the same slant of afternoon light making the air in the room turn slow and brown. Everything here was familiar, a comfort to him, but at the same time he wondered how long he’d have to sit and endure it.

  His mother asked them if they were hungry and Janine said no thank you, and his mother said are you sure, and Janine said she was positive, recrossing her legs in a careless way. His sister poured herself one of the Tabs she lived on. They seemed to be waiting for some other conversation to finish. “Camping,” his father pronounced. “I never knew you to go in for that.”

  “I borrowed the tent and the rest of the stuff, so all we’re paying for is food and gas.” He could usually get off the hook with his father by claiming economy.

  His sister leaned against the refrigerator. Thirteen years old and full of sass. “It is supercold up in the mountains. You guys are gonna freeze your heinies off.”

  “We’ll manage,” Ryan said, and because this seemed to conjure images of the two of them, him and Janine, burrowing into the same sleeping bag, everyone began talking at once.

  “How high is—”

  “I thought for supper—”

  “Where are you going to—”

  They all stopped themselves, then his mother said, “I thought for supper tonight we could grill burgers out back.”

  Janine said, “Oh, that sounds great.” She gave Ryan a flicker of a sideways glance, as if to show him how nice and normal she was being. His stomach roiled.

  His mother looked relieved. Ryan knew she’d already planned out the supper, written out lists, filled the refrigerator with her preparations. He knew that the hamburgers would be accompanied by potato rounds and three-bean salad and corn on the cob, with strawberry pie for dessert. Maybe they would get through everything with no real surprises. He began to relax a little.

  His father said, “So where are you from, Janine? We didn’t hear.”

  He stopped relaxing. They hadn’t heard because he hadn’t told them. And he knew that his father’s question was designed to try and figure out Janine’s parentage, which was an unlikely mix of Italian and Russian Jew. Janine said, “Chicago. The North Side. You know, where the Cubs are.”

  “You’re a baseball fan?”

  “Not really. It just gives people an image. A kind of cultural marker.”

  Another silence. Ryan’s mother said, in her making-conversation voice, “So what made you come all the way to Iowa for school?”

  “The Writers’ Workshop. I’m a poet.” It was about the same as saying you were an astronaut. Janine ought to know that by now. “University of Iowa has the best creative writing program in the country.”

  “Now I did not realize that,” his mother said. “Iowa, famous for poetry.” She seemed taken by the notion, as if those maps that illustrated the state’s agricultural products—ears of corn, sheaves of wheat, and smiling pinky pigs—would add little pictographs of parchment scrolls. “What kinds of poems do you write?”

  “Free verse, mostly. Just poems.”

  Janine didn’t like such questions, Ryan knew. She thought they were uninformed. He hoped she would not provide his family with any of her poems, which tended to use words like nipple.

  But it seemed they’d killed off poetry as a topic. His brother Blake, who had said nothing since they’d got here, spoke up. “I’m going to buy Ted’s brother’s ’65 Impala and get it running.”

  His mother said, “Blake, we haven’t said yes to that. It’s going to depend on your grades.”

  “Hey, my grades are good enough to work on some car.”

  “Blake.” His mother’s warning tone.

  Blake sat back in his chair with a hopeless expression. “This college thing is all your fault,” he told Ryan.

  “Yeah, right.” He was aware of Janine watching. He didn’t want to have to explain about his brother, how he’d never taken to school or books or anything that required sitting down and concentrating. Or that his sister Anita had spent a year at a community college, killing time until her wedding, and that college, in his family, wasn’t anything taken for granted, since it cost good money. Then all of a sudden he was tired of his own caution. He said, “I changed majors. From business to poli sci.”

  “To what?”

  “Political science. The study of government. Comparative politics, American and international political theory. Stuff like that.”

  “Heavy duty,” his sister remarked, then left the room.

  Blake got up from the table. “I gotta call Ted,” he said, and he was gone also.

  His father said, “Now let me get this straight. You’re not in the business school anymore.”

  “That’s right.” With Janine sitting there, nobody was going to say anything too ugly.

  “Political science, what’s that, they teach you how to tear down the government? I bet they don’t have that at St. Olaf’s.”

  It was still a sore point that he hadn’t gone to St. Olaf’s.

  “No, Dad. It’s different ideas and theories about government.” His father’s face tightened at the word theories, which was likely to dredge up another whole speech about college not being an excuse to play around, but something you undertook to benefit yourself in tangible, vocational ways. “People get all kinds of jobs. You can work for state or local governments, or even at the national level. You can do research, develop policies.”

  His mother said, “You mean, you could end up working in Des Moines. That would be nice.” His mother was also practical about higher education, but in a different way; she thought it would help her children “get ahead,” by which was meant something that could be showcased in a Christmas newsletter.

  Janine said, “It’s a good major if you want to go to law school, or into politics. Or do community work, or labor organizing.”

  The thought balloons above his parents’ heads now said Outside Agitator and Communist. Both of them were consider
ing Janine warily. It was all right for a girl to be a poet, or any other fool thing she wanted. But boys had to make their way in the world, support families. The danger of sending your children to college was that they would be contaminated by subversive forces, bad influences, and bawdy women.

  Ryan wasn’t going to tell them that Janine’s father was an orthopedic surgeon and that when she said they lived on the North Side of Chicago, she really meant one of the lakeside suburbs. It wouldn’t change their minds and would be just another example of somebody’s kid turning out wrong.

  His father got up from the table. “What time’s supper?”

  “Anita’s coming at five thirty.”

  His father said he’d check and see if there was enough charcoal. He went out the back door and they heard him out in the garage, something heavy being dragged around.

  “He gets himself all worked up,” his mother said. “I’m afraid it’s going to take him a while to get used to your news. You could still switch back to business if you wanted, couldn’t you?”

  “I don’t want to, Mom.”

  “You weren’t getting bad grades, were you?”

  “No, Mom.”

  “Of course you weren’t. Ryan was always our little star student,” his mother said to Janine. “Well, Torrie too, she gets awfully good grades. But Ryan was, what, an eighth of a point away from being valedictorian.”

  “Let’s just drop it, Mom.” He hated when she bragged about him, as if anything he’d done belonged to her.

  “The government’s kind of a sore subject around here,” his mother went on, oblivious. “’Randy, that’s Mr. Erickson, is still upset about President Nixon. He thinks everybody who didn’t like Nixon in the first place ganged up on him.”

  “There’s a sense in which that’s probably true,” Janine said.

  Stop, Ryan ordered her telepathically, but of course she wasn’t going to. She said, “I think everyone was just so hung up on getting even, that a lot of very ugly, unfortunate things happened.”

  “That’s exactly what Randy says.”

  “She doesn’t believe that,” Ryan told his mother.

  “Now how do you know what I believe or not?” Janine was hitting her stride now, charming and mean. “You have to tell me more about Ryan when he was a little kid. Did he get into trouble a lot?”

  “Oh no, Ry was my sweetheart. My little young man.” His mother leaned over to pat him on the arm. He felt himself becoming large and immobile, like a piece of furniture. “I mean, there were all the usual boy things. I’m not saying he was an angel. Now don’t make that face. I’m your mother, I get to tell stories on you.”

  “I never did anything.”

  “I wouldn’t say that, mister.” His mother’s heavy jokiness. She was the one person he knew who was never actually funny, either on purpose or by accident.

  “I meant, I never did anything that interesting.”

  “Now why would you say that? All of you are interesting. And absolutely precious and special.”

  He pushed his chair back from the table. “I’m going to show Janine around, OK?”

  “I’m driving you away.” Her feelings were hurt, which she disguised by pretending to be hurt.

  “No, Mom. I want to show her the house.”

  His mother rallied and produced a laugh. “Just don’t be too critical. I always say, my interior decorators were four kids and three dogs.”

  Ryan led Janine through the dining room, with its sideboard and ceremonial fancy plates, into the unused territory of the living room, where vacuum tracks still showed in the rug. “Sorry,” he said, once they were out of earshot.

  “For what?”

  “We should have driven straight through to Colorado.”

  Janine was looking through the layers of gauzy curtains at the street outside. He didn’t know what else he was supposed to apologize for. She said, “Your mom’s a little speedy, isn’t she?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know. Uptight.”

  He hadn’t thought about it. “I guess.”

  “You should be nicer to her.”

  He would have answered her, he wasn’t sure how, but just then Torrie walked out of the back hallway. “She’s gonna sleep in Anita’s old room,” she informed Ryan.

  “Tor, it’s rude to say she when somebody’s standing right in front of you.”

  “Sor-ry.” Torrie rolled her eyes. She seemed to have come into the room for the sole purpose of staring at them. “You screwed up about school.”

  “Yeah, thanks for your support.”

  “No prob. Why don’t you take me along with you? On your trip.”

  “Let’s see. How many reasons can I think of not to.”

  Janine said, “It’d be great if you came. We could make Ryan pitch the tents and chop all the firewood and cook for us.”

  “Drive into town and get us munchies.”

  “Catch fish and clean them.”

  “Shoot bears and skin them.”

  “You guys are tripping,” Ryan announced.

  “Ooh, druggie talk.” Torrie tossed her hair and flounced off.

  “She likes you,” Ryan said.

  “Why don’t you show me the room, stud.”

  He was glad she seemed to be in a better mood. If abusing him helped, he didn’t mind.

  Anita’s queen bed had been pushed up against one wall to make room for a sewing machine and a stack of plastic storage tubs. Luggage filled the closet. Anita’s purple satin coverlet still presided over the bed, but without any of her other possessions—frothy curtains, posters, aggressively tended bulletin board—it looked frumpish and faded. Janine surveyed the room, found nothing to remark on, and asked, “So where are you?”

  He led her down the hallway to what was still called the new part of the house, almost fifteen years after its construction, the L-wing with the den and the room where he and his brother had been segregated. “I don’t suppose my mom made Blake clean it up,” he said, without real hope.

  The bed that was his had been cleared of its usual piles of books and papers, but the room still had its funky, inside-of-a-tennis-shoe smell, its wreckage of wadded clothes and MAD magazines and damp towels and empty Coke cans and tennis rackets and museum-like boyhood relics: sports trophies and a cabin made of Lincoln Logs and books thought suitable for boys because of their active, adventurous themes and lack of female characters.

  “Looks sort of like your room at school.”

  “It does not.”

  “Missing only a hash pipe.” She seemed to think this was funny.

  The arching lines of her underpants were visible through the fabric of her dress when she leaned over to look at something. It was another hallucination-quality moment, having a real, fuckable girl here in this, the scene of so much beating off. He put a hand out, cupped one side of her ass.

  “Don’t.” She stepped away, frowning.

  “What?” he asked, genuinely surprised. She wasn’t a girl who said “don’t.”

  “This isn’t the time or place.”

  Nothing he could say to that. He just hoped that whatever she was pissed off about, she’d get over the notion that it was his fault.

  She asked for the bathroom and he waited outside until the toilet flushed and she ran water in the sink and came out. “Now what?” she asked.

  “Take a drive?”

  Janine shook her head. “I’m tired of the car. Let’s sit outside or something.”

  “And do what?” He was still mad at her big touch-me-not act. What was that all about?

  She punched him in the arm. She was allowed to do whatever she wanted. “It’s just a beautiful day, dummy.”

  The picnic table was under a tree that threw a little shade. They sat on opposite sides of it. “What are those pink flowers?” Janine asked.

  “I don’t know, you’d have to ask my mom.”

  “Not a guy thing, huh?” He muttered and shook his head. “What? Didn’t catch
that. You know, your family’s exactly like I imagined them. Exactly like you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re like the blackbirds. The blondbirds.”

  “Very funny.”

  “They’re very nice. You always talk like they’re Norwegian hillbillies or something.”

  “I do not.” She didn’t know anything about it.

  “OK, you don’t. Sure.”

  In the silence they heard a car rolling smoothly down the street beyond them, and, through an open window, a phone ringing. Janine was always the one who spoke first. She couldn’t ever let anything go. “What’s the matter with you anyway? You’re being kind of a jerk.”

  “Me? You’re the one with the bug up your ass.”

  “You’ve been acting like I’m some hitchhiker you just picked up.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” He knew what she meant.

  “Like you’re embarrassed I’m here.”

  “Yeah, well you’ve been acting like you’re at the zoo or something. Like everybody walks the earth just so you can write one of your big-deal poems about them.”

  He didn’t mean it, or he did, but he didn’t mean to say it, poems, who cared, and here was her face shoved too close to his, an angry mask, her eyes dark and staring, and if only they could lie down together, strip down to their naked selves without all the bullshit and even now he imagined himself putting his hands on her, drawing her in, making it all right, but that wasn’t going to happen because whatever she was about to say she stopped. “Here comes your dad,” she said, her voice flat.

  Ryan looked over his shoulder and saw his father approaching from the garage, and whatever he’d been doing all this time he’d worked up a sweat that turned his face and forehead pink. “Need you to lend me a hand for a minute.”

  Ryan got up from the picnic table and Janine said, for his father’s benefit, “Oh that’s all right, I’ll just wait for you,” and he followed his father back to the garage.

  His father had been trying to get to a stack of extra aluminum siding, but it was wedged in behind an old water heater, saved for unknown reasons, and now the two of them positioned themselves to grab hold of it. “Rock it forward,” his father instructed, and Ryan struggled to get some purchase on it. It felt like an iron lung. He lost his grip and the thing dropped to the cement floor with a grating screech.