You Don't Have to Live Like This

by Benjamin Markovits

  The Greyhound ticket cost two hundred bucks and the whole journey took under three days. We stopped in Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC, Richmond, Raleigh, Charlotte, Atlanta, Montgomery. Staring out the window hour after hour kind of concentrates and expands the mind at the same time; but it’s also somehow liberating, it eases the heart, to realize that you don’t need anything but a few hundred dollars and a backpack to move home.

  I kept thinking about what Robert said to me, about the two sets of clothes and the laundry routine. Every time the bus pulled over, I stepped out to stretch my legs and thought, this looks like a good place to live, maybe I should live here. Then I got back on the bus. From a gas station phone box I called my mom, who promised to clear the stationary bike from my old bedroom.

  A colleague took care of my affairs in Wales—packing my room up (I didn’t have much) and selling or throwing away what I didn’t want shipped. It amazed me how little effort was required to dismantle ten years of my life. Nobody cared if I came back or not. There was still some grading left to do for the summer term, but the department secretary as a personal favor sent my exam papers to Baton Rouge. Basically, I felt grateful for the work; it kept me occupied. My dad had retired and I spent too much time that summer playing golf with him in the morning and watching the afternoon baseball game on TV.

  Sometimes I went out with high school buddies. One of them took me duck hunting in his boat, out at Pointe-aux-Chenes. This was later in the year, early November. He worked in real estate but had recently lost his job; both of us found the days and weeks hard to fill. I held a gun in my hands for the first time but there wasn’t much to shoot at. Which didn’t bother me, I had fun anyway. “This is really a long way from Aberystwyth,” I said, kneeling down in the boat, on wet knees. There were little hummocks of what looked like floating grass all over the bayou. The air on my neck felt as cold as a used towel. It was pretty early in the morning and the light grew up around us like something spilling over the rim of a bowl.

  The fact is, I don’t know where I felt more at home. Nowhere. And once we finished catching up we ran out of things to say. I called him a couple of times but was relieved when he didn’t call back. Similar things happened with other people.

  I didn’t have much luck finding a job. I started out applying for university gigs all over the country. My mother was reluctant to let me go. She said, “I’ve just got you back”—a coded way of saying she didn’t trust my state of mind. But it didn’t matter, nobody wanted an unpublished historian five years out of grad school anyway. So I lowered my sights and sent out letters to every private high school in commuting distance from Baton Rouge. No dice.

  In January, after a New Year’s resolution, I moved to New Orleans for a couple of months. My dad put me in touch with some friends of his who had a big house on one of those gated roads out by Audubon Park. Their daughters were all grown up. I rented one of the empty bedrooms and slept in a cast-iron bed, with these old film postcards Blu Tacked to the wall beside it: Hedy Lamarr, Lana Turner, Gloria Grahame. The girl whose room it used to be was now a resident oncologist at the Tulane Medical Center.

  Every day I took the streetcar into the Quarter, where I cleaned tables at CC’s Coffee House. But it became clear to me that I wasn’t coping very well, and I moved back home.

  What saved me is the election. My dad is a Clinton man and I volunteered for Hillary in the primaries, which put me in touch with a lot of interesting people and gave me something to do. My parents didn’t mind that it wasn’t paid. Probably I put too much of my time and energy into the nomination, I cared too much, and needed to set my own life in order. When she came to Louisiana, some of the volunteers got credentialed to hear her speak at a grim corporate event at the downtown Omni. But afterwards she said to one of the organizers, “I know you can have a better time than this in New Orleans,” and somehow I ended up in one of the cabs taking people over to the Acme, which was surrounded by Secret Service and fully booked. I managed to station myself by the door when she made her getaway.

  “You from around here?” she said, shaking my hand.

  “Baton Rouge.”

  “Go Tigers,” she said. “And what are you doing with yourself these days?”

  “Biding my time.”

  Whenever I couldn’t sleep, I replayed this conversation in my head. It took me about a month to forgive Obama—for beating her. But then some friends of mine from the campaign persuaded me to volunteer at MoveOn. There were people who thought they could use the Katrina disaster to turn Louisiana blue. Well, we got within twenty points. But when the votes started tightening in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, I decided to fly out one weekend to New Haven. MoveOn was sending everyone from Yale up to Claremont for a couple of days, and it seemed like a good excuse for seeing old friends.

  I knew that Robert James grew up in Claremont, or near enough, in the countryside around it. His dad had a law office in town—he represented a lot of farmers. Robert mentioned once that he went to Claremont High, which surprised me, because I figured him for a private school kid. But that’s probably just the kind of place it is, I thought. A rich man’s village. In fact, it looked tougher than that. There was a bookshop and a coffee shop on the main square, but the rest of the commercial units were either boarded up or fronting pizza chains or dime stores or pharmacies with the cigarettes prominent in the window.

  Our job was to rustle up votes in the first neighborhood you drove into coming north off the highway. Mountains surrounded us; it all looked pretty picturesque above the roofline. But the houses were cheap and run down, and we had to negotiate some ugly angry dogs before knocking on doors. The kind of people who lived there were the kind of people who wouldn’t vote for a black guy, even a half-black guy. I heard a lot of talk in the media about Obama’s slick grassroots operation, but the main thing we accomplished was to piss people off. A carful of Yalies going around saying, What are the issues for you in this election? Is there anything I can help you understand?

  That was the line we’d been told to spin by the heavily bearded and buttoned dude at Obama HQ. HQ makes it sound too grand, it was a defunct Honey Dew Donuts in downtown Claremont. The place was full of Yalies, wearing overpriced pseudo-workingman’s clothes: leather boots, tough khakis and plaid shirts. After each run we reported back; they wanted a house-by-house account of the swing-vote situation. At one point I bumped into Robert James.

  He said, “Marny, there’s something I want to talk to you about.” So he turned to the bearded guy and told him, “Phil, I’m taking off,” and led me to his car, which was parked in the square, and we drove out to his parents’ house in the woods.

  I’d heard about this place in college. Robert sometimes invited a few friends back when his folks were out of town, though I wasn’t one of them. Sometimes he just came with Beatrice, his college girlfriend. She was a friend of mine, too, she was my friend first, and maybe that’s why I didn’t make the cut. Anyway, I never got invited. It was a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse set back off a dirt road, with a one-step stoop and brightly painted shutters beside the windows. Rosebushes lined the path to the front door, and I could see around the side of the house an apple orchard falling away to a pond at the bottom of the garden. The rest of the land was covered in trees.

  Robert’s mom was as handsome as her son. Steely-haired and unmade-up, she limped around the house in a boot cast. But a broken foot didn’t stop her from bringing us coffee and slices of Bundt cake to the screened-in back porch.

  “Where’d you get that?” I said, and she smiled at me. There was still something left of the way a good-looking woman looks at a man.

  “That’s sweet. I made it.”

  “No, I mean the foot.”

  “Oh, it was stupid. We were hiking out by Ripley Falls and I slipped on some gravel. Five years ago I would have finished the hike, but I’ve got old-lady bones. One of them broke. A very small one, but it hurt.”

  When she banged her way out aga
in, he said, “I’ve been meaning to get in touch with you. What are you doing with yourself these days?”

  “Not much.”

  “Because I’ve been thinking of taking you up on that Detroit idea.”

  Obama’s success, though he wouldn’t say so, had wrong-footed him. He was late to get on the bandwagon and didn’t have the right Chicago connections anyway—he didn’t know anyone from the inner circle. Braylon Carr, the mayor he backed in Buffalo, had a difficult relationship with Obama. Bill Clinton had campaigned for him, and Carr had put his neck out for Hillary in the New York primaries. Robert knew the Clintons fairly well. He admired Obama and was trying to make up lost ground, but he wanted something to do in the meantime, something high profile, that would get the right kind of attention. Detroit was all over the news. Chrysler, Ford and GM, the Big Three, had just asked for a $50 billion bailout, and Congress was negotiating a package.

  Robert wanted to talk me through the idea.

  “I can’t buy up the city, but I can put some investors together and buy up sections of it. Nobody wants to move there alone, but you can use the Internet, you can use Facebook—what I’m talking about is a kind of Groupon model for gentrification. The question is,” he said, “who would go there and what would they do when they got there? These neighborhoods are in bad shape. It’s basically a war zone—I mean that, in the middle of America. People are burning down houses, and not just for the insurance. My friend Bill Russo took me around. It’s like driving through London after the Blitz. The city has given up on certain blocks; the fire service won’t come out to them anymore. But there are still some beautiful big houses standing empty. You could do whatever you want with them, set up any kind of society. There’s a guy who talks about plowing the land into farms. But you’d need a critical mass of people to make it work. People like you, but would people like you move to Detroit? I mean, would you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Afterwards, he drove me back to Claremont and I went out again with another carload of volunteers. The sun set around half past six, the temperature dropped, and the sky between the mountains turned a very bright evening shade of dark blue. I had that feeling you get when you’re a kid out playing in the yard and you see the lights turn on at home—outside looking in. The shape and movements of people, closing curtains and sitting down to watch TV. All these private lives. It seemed a shame to make them open their front doors. Then we drove back to HQ and Phil ordered pizza; later a few of us walked out into the cold country night looking for a bar.

  4

  Roughly six months later I set off. Obama had won, the economy was going down the tubes, it seemed a good time to try something new. My dad loaned me five thousand dollars and I spent three hundred bucks of it on a secondhand car—a ’91 Taurus, the last in the series to offer a stick shift. I figured the shittier the better. On my last night at home, after supper, my father went into the yard to smoke a cigarette. He smoked maybe one or two a month, and it always put my mother in a sour mood. She made a pot of decaf and passed me a cup across the kitchen table.

  “He’s worried about you, that’s why he’s smoking again,” she said. “You’re too old to play games like this.”

  “That’s just not true, he always smokes—a little. What I’m too old for is living at home with you guys.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “You sound like Granma Dot,” I said.

  A year before she died, after a bad stroke, my grandmother came to live with us. She didn’t want to be a burden, and if you asked her anything like, what do you want for lunch, she answered, “I don’t mind.” My father used to beg her for an answer, something specific, but she never budged; it drove him crazy. At the same time she was highly critical of everything: the heat, the people, the food.

  She died from a staph infection after hip-replacement surgery. This was around Easter of my sophomore year in high school. After the funeral, for which my mom held it together pretty well, she waited until we were alone and then broke down. I was helping her write out thank-you cards; a few friends from Puyallup had sent flowers.

  “It’s okay,” I said, feeling embarrassed. “She was really old. I don’t think she—”

  But my mother shook her head. “It’s not that,” she said. “I wanted you to like her more. I don’t think you liked her very much. But when I was a girl, she was my mother, there was no one else.”

  Of course, this was true for me, too, and here was my mother sitting across the kitchen table. Every year she looked more like Granma. Dot had bad eyes, there was a kind of film over them, like the skin on warm cream, and glasses made her eyes seem bulgy. My mother had started wearing glasses, too, and not just for reading. With her hair cut short she looked like an old little girl.

  Then my father clattered in the door, bringing some of the smoke smell with him. “Come on, kid, you’ve got a long drive tomorrow. Get some sleep.”

  He put his hand to the side of my face, so I turned my cheek against it.

  “Mom says you’re worried about me,” I said.

  “That’s our job. It’s your job not to mind too much.”

  After brushing my teeth and changing into pajamas, I came back into the kitchen to kiss her good night. She was still sitting at the table, which was covered in the bright plastic sunflowers of the tablecloth; they glared under the hanging lamp. My mother let me kiss her sitting down.

  “Greg,” she said, before I turned away. “I know you won’t do anything deliberately stupid. That’s not your style. But you’re the kind of person who could get himself into situations that you won’t be very good at getting out of. There will be people there who don’t want you there. They don’t think like you do—”

  “You mean black people?” I said.

  “That’s not what I said. That’s not what I mean. But I’ve been doing what Brad always tells me not to do, I’ve been looking things up on the computer. Detroit is the number one most violent city in America.”

  “No worse than New Orleans.”

  “New Orleans is bad enough—that’s why we moved out. But there are good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods. From what I understand, you plan on living right in the middle of the worst.”

  “You’re totally out of touch with these things, Mom. All you know is what you read online or see on TV. The news and entertainment industries in this country sell fear, it’s what they do, because people like you want to buy it. But that doesn’t make it true.”

  “Who is they? I don’t know who they is. This is starting to make me angry. You said yourself it’s a war zone.”

  “That wasn’t me, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to have this conversation now.”

  Bending down, I kissed her good night again, and then again and again on each cheek, to lighten the mood. But she only sat there, softening into grumpiness. “You’re making a joke out of it. It’s not a joke.”

  “Can I say one thing?” I said. “Don’t blame Dad for lending me the money.”

  This conversation left a taste in my mouth, because of what I said or what she said, I don’t know. It’s unpleasant to see your parents for what they are, limited people. But you get into stupid fights with them anyway, you’re all tangled up. And afterwards you have to deal with the fact that you don’t always believe your own point of view.

  My dreams that night were very near the surface, they were very plausible. I was getting gas and looking through my wallet for dollar bills. It was a full-service station and I never know how much to tip. Later, back on the road, the lanes seemed narrow, there was a problem with my headlights or the windscreen wipers. I kept falling asleep. I should have pulled over but that’s how people get killed in this country, sleeping by the side of the highway. So I lowered the window to let some fresh air in. That only helped a little, every few seconds my head jerked up. I could hear my father in the kitchen, making French toast, and then he came into my bedroom singing, Wake up, you beautiful girl, which had been playing on the
radio.

  After breakfast we loaded up the car. My mother kept thinking of something else for me to take and cluttered the trunk with a hundred odd things for setting up house—a flashlight, packs of batteries and toilet paper, her old coffeemaker. But then there was nothing else and I drove off.

  She waited in the driveway until she couldn’t see me—this is what she always does after our visits home. I watched her in the rearview mirror. When I turned the corner, and a new street slid over to replace the street I grew up on, with other houses and trees and nobody standing in the drive, I felt like you feel when you put the phone down and the room is suddenly different.

  Around lunchtime I stopped at the Walmart outside Hattiesburg and bought a gun. The guy behind the counter—a black guy, as it happens, with a dude-like mustache—was low-key, practical and encouraging.

  “What do you want it for?” he said.

  “Duck hunting. I’m just getting started.”

  “We got a Ruger Red Label. That’s a real classic gun, a nice starter gun. It’ll last you, too.”

  “Last time I went out I used a Remington.”

  So he suggested a Remington 870 Express with a compact pump and listed other specs, which I didn’t understand.

  “Will it fit under the seat of my car?”

  “What are you driving?” he said and handed me the catalog to look at while the FBI check cleared. There was a form you had to fill out—I gave my parents’ address in Baton Rouge. Afterwards, we talked about shells.

  “It depends what you want to use it for,” he said. “Are we talking home defense or hunting ducks? Because there’s different things I’d recommend.” He also suggested a couple of accessories, a TacStar SideSaddle, an Elzetta light mount, with a Fenix LD10. “That’s a strong light,” he said. “If that catch somebody in the eye, give you an extra couple of seconds. Give you a chance to see who it is.” He put everything in a doubled-up paper bag.

  I picked up some car snacks, too, chips and soda and brown bread and sliced cheese. As I pulled back onto I-59 a crowd of feelings went over me in a wave. Here we go, I thought, here we come. But I still had another fifteen hours of driving, and a night to get through at a Days Inn motel, before reaching Detroit.