“This is no good, Dad.”
“Little more and we got it.”
“No, look, let’s get a dolly and move it out to the curb and find somebody to haul it off.”
“Count of three.”
Ryan did his cursing silently. On “three” he put his back into it, budged the water heater maybe another foot, and straightened up, panting. “That better be enough.”
His father took a minute to get his wind back. “Hoo boy. She’s a pistol.”
“Why you want to keep this? You can’t even fit Mom’s car in the garage anymore.” His father’s Buick presided over the space reserved for cars, its high-luster finish the brown of a beetle’s shell. The car was eight years old and his father said it wasn’t even broken in yet.
“It’s a perfectly good water heater that somebody’s going to be glad to have someday.” His father bent to reach a length of siding and Ryan lifted the far end. “Like here I’ve got this extra siding and I can use it around the west side where the old stuff’s starting to peel.”
Never mind. “You want me to help you get started?”
“How about we just move it out to where I need it. Too late to get going anyway. With supper and all.” By this he meant the occasion of company, and while he might not actually resent such company, it was understood that they got in the way of important home-repair projects.
Janine was gone when they came out with the siding, and Ryan was just as glad. She’d find something else to do with herself and have a chance to cool down. He’d say he was sorry, kiss her ass a little. By this time tomorrow they’d be in the mountains.
It took them a few trips with the siding, and then the infernal water heater had to get wedged back into its corner. His father reached for the overhead garage door, paused, and said, “Political what?”
It took Ryan a moment to shift gears. “Political science. It’s the study of how people are governed and how they govern themselves.” That sounded pretty limp-dick, so he said, “For instance, what do we mean when we say freedom, or democracy, or justice? Or, what makes the American system different than other systems?”
“What did they decide, on that last one?”
“We try to ensure that people who aren’t privileged still have equal citizenship.”
His father considered this. He seemed to be trying to decide if it was a good idea. “History. Like, the Declaration of Independence.”
“No, Dad. It’s how people live now too. Their place in the political system. Their, ah, equal participation.”
“Their rights,” his father said with satisfaction, bringing the garage door down, a rolling rolling thud.
Ryan followed his father inside, wondering when rights had become a swear word. He guessed that to his father, it conjured up guilty-as-sin criminals hiding behind the skirts of the law, and sniveling, do-nothing intellectuals mouthing slogans.
Janine and his mother sat at the kitchen table. Janine had a bowl of strawberries and whipped cream in front of her and was busy working on it. “I got hungry,” she said to Ryan, pausing with the spoon halfway to her mouth. “These are the best strawberries in the world, you should have some.”
“No thanks. Spoil my dinner.”
“Suit yourself.” She picked up the Reddi-wip can and squirted another puffy layer over the fruit. The trailing ends of her hair got into the whipped cream; she used her fingers to wipe it away.
His mother got up to rinse lettuce at the sink. “How did you two get so filthy? Don’t touch anything before you wash up.” She looked happy, the way she always did when she was feeding people.
Ryan and his father obediently headed off. At the bathroom door his father said, “Well, if finicky eaters make poor lovers, I don’t know what you got here.”
He closed the door behind him. Ryan stood there a moment, then went out through the front door and used the garden hose to rinse himself off.
• • •
His sister Anita brought a casserole of chicken divan, the top covered with crimped aluminum foil. “This has to go in a 325-degree oven for twenty minutes,” she announced, setting it down on the countertop, thunk, using the heels of her hands so as not to break her fingernails. “Hi, Ry.” Then she pretended to be surprised to see Janine, even though she’d been told to expect her. It was a classic Anita move.
“Anita, this is Janine. Janine, my sister Anita.”
“Nice to meet you,” Anita said, and smiled. Ryan had seen that same smile on her before, that stretched and brilliant grimace. Keep Off The Grass, her smile said.
“Janine’s from Chicago,” their mother announced.
“Oh, really?” Anita was rummaging around in her purse. “Chicago,” she repeated, as if it was a place whose existence she doubted.
So my sister’s this giant bitch, Ryan tried to convey to Janine, but again, the telepathy channel wasn’t working and Janine wasn’t looking at him. He rested one hand on the back of her chair; she moved away from it. What the hell had he done, and was he ever going to be allowed to make up for it?
His mother asked Anita, “Is Jeff coming, honey?”
“He couldn’t get away. Some dumb meeting.”
His mother said that was too bad. Nobody ever actually missed Jeff when he didn’t show up. He was still an undigested lump in the family group. When he was there he watched golf on television or volunteered to go out for ice, in order, Ryan suspected, to sneak a drink.
Anita didn’t seem too broken up about his absence. She fussed with her casserole some more, then lifted her gaze to consider Ryan. “What’s with the hair?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing. Let me guess. Disco Queen comes to Iowa.”
“Very funny.” She’d permed her hair to within an inch of its life. When she moved her head, the mass of hair followed along behind her a split second later. She wore one of her outfits, a matching shirt and slacks the color of cooked shrimp, and high, clunky sandals that made her wobble a little.
“So Janine, are you a student too?” Again, that billboard of a smile. This time it was saying, I Could Care Less.
“That’s right.”
“Oh, what are you studying?”
“Agricultural economics.”
“That’s a joke,” Ryan said. “A funny.”
Both women regarded him without amusement.
“Janine writes poetry,” his mother put in helpfully.
“I didn’t know you had to go to school for that.”
“If you’re serious about it you do. If you don’t just want to be Rod McKuen.”
There was no way Janine could have known that Anita and Jeff’s wedding ceremony had featured a Rod McKuen poem.
“I was thinking we could put some brats on the grill,” Ryan’s mother said. “Anybody want brats instead of a burger?”
Torrie came in then, and his father also, and Blake returned from whatever he’d been doing with his friends, and the coals were pronounced almost ready to receive the hamburgers, and the business of the supper began. A card table was set up at one end of the picnic table. Paper plates and napkins were distributed. His mother made a little too much out of asking Janine if she liked eating this or that, and Janine answered politely that this or that was fine. It wasn’t a good sign when she was this quiet, though it might pass for normal shyness around people you didn’t know. Anita hadn’t helped anything. But then, she never did.
After dinner they could go for a walk or something, cool out, talk about the next day’s drive, the mountains waiting for them on the rim of the horizon. They could laugh about Anita (that hair! that outfit!), get back on the same side again. Or if he was lucky, she was now pissed off mostly about Anita, not him. He carried the extra folding chairs in from the den, brought his father the tongs and platter he needed to preside at the grill. Ryan guessed he shouldn’t be surprised that the two of them, Anita and Janine, had sniffed each other over and hadn’t much liked each other. Anita was what Janine called bourgeois, with her fussing a
bout upholstery samples and appliance purchases and her waterskiing weekends at the bank president’s lake house. Whatever bourgeois meant, he was pretty sure it was Anita, her constant brittle anxiety, as if she’d just missed out on some really important sale.
Janine’s family had enough money that she could pretend it didn’t matter, and people who were hung up on consumerism, another of her words, were small and pitiable.
But her new car was bought and paid for. Her out-of-state tuition covered.
Ketchup, mustard, pickles, buns. Salt and pepper, butter, mayonnaise. His mother loaded him down with jars and bottles, knives, serving spoons, plastic skewers for the corn on the cob. He moved automatically, while some distant, dreamy portion of his mind tried to formulate thought, something he’d been trying to explain to his father, the difference between people who had and did not have things, or not just things, but some other kind of ownership. There were people who felt themselves to belong to some common enterprise, and those who did not. People who took comfort in like-mindedness of all sorts, and those who had been set apart, or set themselves apart. . . .
His father put the platter of hamburgers on the table, each of them with its grid of black char lines, and announced that dinner was served.
Finally all of them were seated. Janine and Ryan were next to each other at the picnic table. Torrie and Blake complained about being at the card table, the kids’ table. Everyone quieted. His father looked around. “Blake,” he said.
“Dear Lord we thank you for the food we are about to eat and bless us this day we ask it in Jesus Christ’s name Amen.”
Ryan’s mother said, “It’s so nice to have the whole family together.”
“Except for Jeff,” Torrie piped up.
Ryan assembled his plate of food, started in on the potatoes. When his mother asked him when they were leaving tomorrow, he had to work through a mouthful of food before he could answer. “Early. It’s nearly seven hundred miles to Estes Park.” He looked to Janine, Come on, help me out, but she was taking particular care in buttering her ear of corn. Her silver bracelets clinked.
“I was hoping tomorrow we could all go up and see Norm and Martha. Martha’s not doing so well.”
“What’s the matter with her?”
“Broken hip,” Ryan’s father said. “Didn’t your mother tell you?”
His mother said, “It was last month. I did tell you, Ry, don’t you ever pay attention? She fell right in their own driveway. The doctor said she’d heal up without an operation but the bone isn’t setting the way it should and she still can’t walk and sometimes this is how it goes, one problem leads to another, her circulation’s bad, and then you get blood pressure and everything else. Of course Norm’s right there for her, and Pat and the kids, but they’re both getting up there now. Norm’s what, seventy-nine? Martha, I forget.”
“You’re kidding.” Ryan meant their age, or he mostly meant that. There was another kind of disbelief. Norm and Martha were like the carved faces on Mt. Rushmore. You expected them to weather but not really change.
His mother said to Janine, “They’re practically like grandparents to the kids. Since their real grandparents passed away.”
“I’m sorry,” Janine said to him, but he didn’t want her to be sorry. They weren’t hers to feel sorry about.
“I’ll come back the next weekend and see them.”
“I know they’d like that.”
Eating filled up the space that would have gone to talk. Everybody except Blake took some of Anita’s casserole for politeness’ sake: chicken and broccoli glued together with cheese sauce. Ryan said, “Great burgers, Dad.” Everyone agreed, yes, they were great.
“May I be excused?” Torrie asked.
She hadn’t eaten much, just dabs of salad and casserole, and half of a half of a burger.
“Don’t you want any dessert?”
“Uh-uh.”
“She’s on another stupid diet,” Blake said. “Except she gets up in the middle of the night and eats like a whole bag of vanilla wafers.”
“Blake,” his mother warned.
“Shut up, Blake.”
“Both of you.”
Torrie wore her persecuted expression and her mouth quivered. Anita said, “You should try Atkins, Tor. The weight just falls off.”
His mother said, “She is not a bit fat. She’s a beautiful, healthy girl and we love her exactly the way she is.”
“Excuse me.” Torrie grabbed her plate and headed for the back door. The screen door slammed behind her.
“Sensitive,” Blake remarked.
“You didn’t have to start anything,” his mother said. Then she turned to Janine. “They always say, girls are easier to raise than boys, but I think that’s only true up to a certain age. Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“I have an older brother. A stepbrother, actually.”
She couldn’t have just said “brother.”
His mother glided right past it. “Oh, and what does he do?”
“He’s a psychotherapist.”
“A what?” Blake asked.
“A headshrinker,” Anita told him.
Ryan said, “Psychotherapist. It’s a big word, but you can practice.”
“All right,” his father said. “Let’s drop it.”
“How many for strawberry pie?” his mother asked.
After supper his mother and Anita took over the kitchen and no one else was allowed to help even if they’d wanted to. Ryan and Janine walked around the block in the early twilight. Janine said she was cold and got her jacket out of the car.
“Better get used to it. It’s a lot colder up in the mountains.”
“Mhm.”
“Don’t get excited or anything,” he said, trying to invoke the day’s earlier mood.
“Sure.”
“Come on.”
“Come on what?”
“Can you lose the attitude?”
She was looking away, mostly to ignore him. So he guessed the answer was no.
“It looks like an old paddle wheeler.”
“What does?”
“That house with all the fancy wood trim and the lights on. It looks like an old-style paddleboat steaming down a river.”
“I guess.” He was bored with her always pretending things were something else.
“It’s pretty here. Green and all. Quiet.”
He guessed it was. He didn’t know what that had to do with anything. They walked on in silence. In the near dark Janine’s neck and throat were white, her earrings thin silver glints. He imagined he could smell her hair, hear the faint friction of her legs rubbing together as she walked. Another spasm of irritation and lust came over him. He wondered, without any real hope, if they might wait until everyone else had gone to sleep, sneak down to the basement or out to the garage. They reached the end of the street and the alley of dark and whispering trees. As if by agreement, they turned around to go back.
He found her hand and squeezed it. “Things’ll be better tomorrow. We just need to get out of here.”
She kept her hand in his for a time, then it fell away as their paces changed. She said, “I don’t see what difference that’s going to make.”
So she wanted him to crawl some more. “I’m sorry. My family always makes me a little nuts.”
“Hate to tell you, but I don’t see them doing anything that terrible to you.”
“They make me restless.”
He hadn’t found that word before, but now it came out of his mouth like a snake disgorging a beautiful golden egg.
“Or making you act like a total asshole.”
“How am I acting like an asshole?”
“Like you don’t love them.”
“Unfuckingbelievable,” he managed.
Janine shrugged. They’d reached his parents’ driveway. The darkness was nearly solid. Just outside the circle of front-porch light, he pulled her back and pressed her against the hood of the car, pulling her tight aga
inst him, and though he knew she wasn’t happy with him and would withold herself to punish him, still he hoped that she would sense the purity of his need, another strange word squeezed out of him. He put his hands beneath Janine’s jacket, found her breasts and tried to work them free. He pinched, hard, and her breath drew in as it always did and this was good, this was the two of them, who they’d always been, not the ugly, clumsy beings of the last few hours. She leaned against him for a moment, then said, “We can’t stay out here.”
“I know.”
She patted his shoulder and he followed her to the back door. Tomorrow would be so much better.
Anita had gone home, and Torrie was still sulking in her room. His parents and Blake were watching television in the den. “Come on in, kids,” his mother called, and there was nothing else to do except go in and watch whatever happy shit they were watching. His mother was in her place at the end of the couch, his father with his feet up in his lounger. His brother lay on his stomach on the floor, his head on a cushion, his shirt buttons twisted around to one side. He almost never wore T-shirts. He thought they made his arms and chest look too skinny.
Janine sat down on the opposite end of the couch but Ryan kept standing, pretending to be transfixed by The Mary Tyler Moore Show. No way was he going to squeeze in on that couch all cozy between the two of them or settle himself in the other chair. This was all too weird, too much like coming home from high school dates stirred up and mortified and hard, and so he did what he had always done, which was to announce that he was going to take a shower before bed.
He came back wearing sweatpants, his hair wet and combed. Janine gave him a smirky smile. Maybe she knew. He couldn’t tell. His mother said, “You better have enjoyed your nice hot shower now, mister. They don’t have those out in the woods.”
“Yeah, I know.” He settled into the free chair and turned his attention to the television. Out of the corner of his eye he studied them. His mother had her reading glasses on. They made her look like somebody else’s grandmother. His father’s mouth drooped. The chair always put him to sleep. You had to love your family. You didn’t have any choice in it.
The Year We Left Home: A Novel Page 5
