by Jane Smiley
I don’t respond, and he turns off the water. “I knew I wouldn’t. I knew I’d sit around here listening to him breathe.”
The grocery store is my favorite place, a kind of meditation center that always refreshes me, but today it isn’t enough. I’m still reluctant to go home when I pull out of the parking lot, and my reluctance grows as I near my house. The easiest thing, like stepping off a high diving board, is to roll right past it and discover myself ten minutes later at another mall, melting ice cream and acidophilus milk notwithstanding.
The mirrors behind window displays reveal me, and for a while I stand staring at myself without realizing what I am looking at. In fact, an anniversary is passing this weekend—it is twenty years since Pat and I parted. If my children notice, they will undoubtedly not mention it. I won’t mention it, either, though this time of year often makes me think of that life.
I loved having twins, even though there were three children under five years old already running around the place. We lived in a huge old house on five acres of ground. My favorite moment of the day was in the morning, when I would be lying in bed, nursing the twins, one on each side, and then the other children would come and climb under the covers, and the dogs, too. I would be buried in flesh and noise, all thoughts scattered. We were twenty-seven, and drunk with the immensity of the world we had already made.
Pat’s pediatric-allergy research was celebrated. Work he did led to the discovery that the newborn’s stomach wall is a semipermeable membrane, and that nonhuman milk can cross undigested into the child’s body and set up an allergic reaction. But his great hero was Piaget. He loved the idea that a child’s brain development was orderly, a natural perpetual-motion machine that only had to be set going once. If anyone objected to this image as too mechanistic, he would say, “The mind is a palpable thing, as physical as anything else. It doesn’t create order, it is order. It also FEELS order. Order feels good. Thinking feels good. Mmmm.” (He’d rub his hands over his head, the children would laugh.) “Brains are in no danger of getting mechanical, but someday machines are going to be fleshy.” He also loved the idea of researching his own children, but he recognized that even Piaget’s sample would be considered laughably small these days. In the Guinness Book of World Records, there was a Russian woman who had sixty-nine children. This didn’t seem impossible to Pat.
No matter how busy he was, Pat insisted on a nightly family dinner, and he was sparkling at the table. No matter how young the children were, he addressed them with arresting hypotheses, pointed questions, opinions about their opinions. He was wooing them. He wooed me the same way. And, really, it was hard to take your eyes from his face, whether you were his child or his wife.
Well, in the midst of all of this, I fell in love with a man in our neighborhood. Pat sold the house and took the children to England, and my life was utterly formless, nothing, so close to nonbeing that I was surprised to find my clothes in the closet every morning. When I remember that time, twenty years ago now, the light around me seems to have been blinding. Shades could not be drawn against it. I seem to be walking down a city sidewalk and lost in the glare. I seem always to be waking up in the middle of the night, terrified to find all the lights on in my extraordinary new apartment. There is no known cause that speaks to what that time seemed like to me. It cannot be understood, really, only re-experienced unexpectedly. That sometimes happens to me.
Pat stopped doing allergy research twelve years ago, after the axle on his van broke near Winter Park, Colorado, and the van rolled over the side of the road and down into the valley. No fire, thank God. Annie, Michael, Tatty (Pat’s second wife), their two children (Sara, Kenny), and Daniel were sprayed over the mountainside like a handful of gravel. Michael, Tatty, and Daniel got up and walked away. Annie broke her leg, Sara broke some ribs and her pelvis, Kenny and Pat were knocked unconscious. The little boy came to about three days later, but Pat was out for three and a half weeks, and when he came to, thinking didn’t feel so good anymore—neither as sensuous nor as effective as before. His doctors didn’t see how he was even going to practice medicine again, much less do research, but they underestimated his will, as I had once but wouldn’t have again. The accident was a boon to me, though, because he relaxed completely about the custody arrangements. In fact, the first time in six years that Joe and Michael spent more than a few weeks together was when Michael lived with me while Pat was in physical therapy.
When I tell Joe about the old days, I emphasize what he wants to hear about, their pleasures, hoping he will ask the natural question, why did I leave? But the dazzling family photo invites contemplation and repels inquiry. When the children were younger, not having to explain was a relief, but now it annoys me that they don’t ask, that they are interested only in what they can remember, as if it hadn’t ever occurred to them that their father and I had inner lives.
When Pat and I first met, in college, we often studied together. I would be sitting across from him in the library, and I would look up from my book and say, “Here’s something.”
“What?” he would say, practically snapping to attention. What I had thought to be of passing interest would now take on profound fascination as I read it aloud, and Pat would inhale it. A few hours or a few days later, he would give it back, in talk or as gifts—books, records, tickets to a performance.
I would like to tell Joe what a peculiar and suffocating feeling it got to be, to be attended to so closely, to have every idle remark sucked up and transformed into a theory, to be made relentlessly significant, oneself and an enlarged model of oneself, the Visible Woman, always being told what she was like and what it meant.
When I get home, Joe is sitting at the kitchen table, reading the autobiography of Bertrand Russell. His field is the history of science. He is specializing in medieval technological innovations, but his private obsession is stupidity—lots of the greatest mathematicians and physicists have been slowspeaking, slow-thinking. “People,” Joe says, “who come to a boulder in the road and stop and scratch their heads and finally sit down next to the boulder and contemplate it for a long time. No one who is really stupid would ever consider just walking around it and continuing down the road.” A sign of genius, Joe thinks. He has a challenging, rather crude way of phrasing these ideas, as if they have met opposition, even if I don’t disagree. I set the bags on the counter, and he says, “Taking a nap.”
“Well, I’m sure he needs one.”
He closes the book. “I’m not getting through this very fast. I was intending to have it read by this morning.”
“Maybe we should send him back to India. I found the abundance at the grocery store awfully embarrassing.” We look at each other and smile. Joe has a pleasant face. Most mothers of identical twins assert that they have never mistaken one for the other. I assert it, too. But, inevitably, one twin is the theme and one is the variation. Michael was “aggressive,” “cheery,” “sturdy,” “harum-scarum.” Michael was himself. Joe, second-born, was nearly a pound lighter than Michael at birth, and Joe was somehow always more or less—even when Michael wasn’t around, Joe was “more frustrated,” “quieter,” “thinner,” “more studious,” “better organized.” The comparative belonged to Joe even if the terms weren’t at all the same. Then, when Joe was living with me and Michael with Pat, it was Joe who talked of himself this way, as if continual comparison and contrast would call up Michael’s ghostly presence. After this summer, though, I am so used to Joe and we have talked about so many things that I’ve forgotten, every so often, about Michael. I am sure this is a good sign, a sign that maybe Joe, too, has let him go a time or two. Now I say, and even as I say it I recognize and enjoy the intimacy of it, “Do you think you’re afraid of having him back? Of the closeness, I mean?”
He turns the book over once, looking at it rather than at me. “No. I was afraid he would go away as my twin and come back as my brother. I don’t want that.” He sighs. “He doesn’t either.”
“I’m sure
he doesn’t.”
“There are a lot of things that are unspoken between us, you know.”
“That’s always been true.” I sit at the table, groping for the most delicate kind of tact. This is an argument we have been tending toward all summer, and I don’t want to have it now. “I think it’s important that we don’t seem clinging. He went far away. He must have known he would come back different from you as well as from his old self. Maybe he intended it.”
“I think he thought it was a price he might have to pay for getting away from everything else.” He says this in a detached but definite tone, as if he isn’t going to listen to any more on the subject. We smile again, a truce, and he says, “I might have fixed the lawnmower.” He puts his hand in his pocket. “There are just these few leftover items.” He pulls out two screws of different sizes, a washer, and a bolt that will fit neither screw. “Think they’re important, or can we ignore them?” I laugh, then Joe laughs. I say, “I think you’d better go back and try again. But the leftover parts are getting smaller, at least.”
“Just promise me you won’t sneak it out of the garage and over to the repair shop.”
“Not on a bet. I want to see you rise to the challenge.”
“Haven’t thrown anything yet. Only rammed my head into the wall of the garage once.”
Now there is a shout from the living room, and Ellen appears, framed by the living room doorway, but standing back, suspicious. Joe pushes his chair back and says, “He’s asleep.” Relieved, Ellen steps into the kitchen. She doesn’t speak. She never does, right at first. She picks up Joe’s book and looks at it, then turns and looks into one of the cupboards by the sink. She takes out a glass and runs herself a drink of water. “Well?” she says.
“Thin,” I say. “Amebic dysentery.”
“Ugh. Right in the house here, huh?”
“It’s not like that,” snaps Joe.
“I was only making a joke.”
“Not funny.” They look at each other. He is glaring. She is considering. I say, “I thought you weren’t coming over.”
She throws up her hands.
I can hear Tracy and Diane in the front yard. Joe put up a tire swing for them in June, and they have been all over it, having fun, I say. “Building poignant memories,” Joe says. His nostalgia is militant, almost hard, almost a reproach.
“So how are you?” says Ellen to Joe, and he stops glaring. He says, “I don’t know.” Then he says, annoyed, “What’s the big deal? I mean, he went away and he came back. He told us he was going away, and how long he was going to be gone, and he came back when he said he would. I’m pissed off.”
“At whom?” says Ellen.
“At myself, of course,” says Joe. And he goes over to the coffeemaker and pours himself a cup of coffee and drinks it down. Then he slams out the back door, saying, “I’m going to start over on the lawnmower now.”
Ellen says, “Is he still fixing the lawnmower?”
“Fixing it again.”
“Would you just borrow ours and cut the grass? The police are going to cite you pretty soon.”
“Let them.” But before I’ve even finished speaking, she has picked up Joe’s book and started reading it. She can’t resist. She even says, “Hmm!” in a surprised and interested voice. I know the rudeness she treats me with is a habit, but is calculated, too, as a test of how much familiarity I will allow. Our conversation must always seem as if it has no breaks, is uninterrupted by formal greetings or farewells, is beyond routine civilities, is as close to mind-reading as possible.
Now Ellen puts the book down and looks at me expectantly. I say, “Smooth enough so far.”
“Curiosity got the better of me. I can’t wait to see him. Are you sure he’s asleep?”
“No. Actually, he’s probably hiding out like the rest of us. I’d like to let him come back in his own time. What’s Jerry doing today?”
“Soloing, can you believe it?” She makes a face. Jerry has been taking flying lessons. “I was trying to forget about it. This morning I sent the girls up to wake him. I sent them up in their underpants, so he could see their defenseless little bodies and have some second thoughts. But all he did was get them all excited about when they can go flying with Daddy.” She eyes me, then goes to the doorway, where she can see the girls. “Speaking of daddies, Daddy sent me a check for five hundred dollars. The network had the news to him about our car being vandalized within twenty-four hours. Does he think we don’t have insurance or something?”
“I don’t know what he thinks.”
She spins toward me. “He thinks that just because Jerry owns a bookstore we can’t afford those little amenities like collision insurance.”
“Send it back.”
“Then he would call up and want to talk about it. He watches his bank statement, too. If you don’t cash the check right away, he thinks you’re resisting.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Does he know Michael is coming home this weekend?”
“I’m sure the network phoned him the moment the plane touched down. Now he’s counting the minutes until he gets his call. It would be almost easier to have him living in town.” The way Pat seems always to know what’s going on with his children is, admittedly, uncanny. The children used to call him “the fourth man,” after Daniel read some books about Kim Philby. When Anthony Blunt revealed himself, Pat became “the controversial fifth man,” and Joe and Ellen still sometimes refer to him as “Five.”
“Anyway, I hate him having insights into me.”
I shrug. Ellen and I have talked about this, a little, but she, too, seems to drift away when I begin to allude to my life with her father. She always interrupts with a question about how I managed to get five children into snowsuits, or were there really three potty chairs in a row in the downstairs bathroom.
“Especially since they aren’t matched by any into himself.” She goes into the living room and calls out the front door after Tracy and Diane. I open the dishwasher and put some cups into it. Maybe because Michael has returned, it suddenly seems rich and luxurious to have Ellen and Joe and the girls around, a mother’s feeling that I resented when my mother thought it of me, her only child. Those days I thought nothing would stop me from going to Alaska. Or Singapore. Or New Zealand. That, even if I were to have children when I grew up, they wouldn’t really notice my absence. Unlike a daughter, a mother might slip away without saying when she would be back. But Ellen and Joe are as exacting in this regard as any parent. Ellen won’t even let me leave my car at the airport. She insists on seeing me off and meeting my plane, and Joe always has me send him a copy of my itinerary. For a long time, the first thing I did when I arrived at any hotel was ask for my mail, knowing that there would be a postcard waiting from Joe, saying something like, “Dear Mom, Here you are, sitting right across the table. You just gave me my orange-juice-egg-and-brewer’s-yeast breakfast. Now I am about to shock you by drinking it. Well, Mom, I just wanted to say hi, and enjoy your trip.” Annie and Daniel are less attentive, but they keep tabs, all the same. From all of this I know that their father must have told them I left them, and that this became knowledge for them that transcended information. When I’ve asked what their father did tell them, they can’t remember. “Something good, I’m sure,” says Joe. “Dad’s never at a loss for a theory.” From their point of view, I deserved this reputation of being ready for anything, untrustworthy, liable to slip the traces. I suppose this is my penance—always to be reminded by their care that I got away from them once.
I am not the first to vanish, though they don’t know it. My mother had a cousin. She’d be over a hundred now, but when I was about ten and she was sixty, and I suppose everyone thought her emotional life had run its course, she fled to Denver. All of the men in the family went after her, four farmers in overalls leaving their land in the middle of the summer and, what was more shocking, spending money on the train fare. She was married to her secon
d cousin, Uncle Karl, who was prosperous and sober, and didn’t beat her, so it was obvious to everyone that she must be insane for leaving him. They brought her back and put her in a state mental hospital. My father and uncles were kindly men, and got her out of the asylum after about a year. She stayed home, cured, and died in her nineties. I never talked to her about it. In fact, I hardly ever talked to her throughout my teens, because I didn’t want the men to make the criminal connection that I thought was there. But I know one thing about her. She was never left alone again. One relative or another was always assigned to her, for her own good.
I was born in 1934, into an extended family that was so hardworking and so closely knit that they survived the Depression with their farms intact, paid for, and, in some cases, improved. Scandinavian tenacity, Scandinavian silence. Pat, whose background was Chicago Irish, had a lot of insights into my family, too. Because of us, he got interested in genetics, and did an important comparative longitudinal study of recurring allergic reactions among Irish families in Chicago and Norwegian families in northwestern Iowa. He also read all the major Icelandic sagas, and conceived a fondness for Knut Hamsun and Sigrid Undset.
Everyone called him a genius, though Joe would say that he was too quick for that. Joe is a little dismissive of Pat’s “brilliance.” Joe has worked out a system, a rainbow of intelligence that runs from stupid, obvious red to subtle, mysterious violet. He envies Pat’s “brilliance” (a pure, direct blue) from the vantage point of his own just-above-average green (“bright”), and although I discourage his envy and find these rankings absurd, secretly I know better than Joe does that once there was something to envy, in those years when Pat was discovering his powers.
Though he practices medicine still, I suspect that Pat never really recovered from the accident, and of all the lost things, maybe Pat’s intelligence is the most unusual. It might have been genius, the spectrum bending, red meeting violet one impossible time. To me, it was more like a vocal timbre, movingly distinct, undefinable, fleeting. Ellen did spectacularly in school, but really none of the children have just what Pat had. It could have something to do with how inbred his Irish relatives in Chicago were—his aunts still spoke with a brogue, though two generations removed from Ireland. When he married me, Norwegian got in, another pure strain, but dogged, never scintillating, always cautious yellow, Joe would say, yellow the color of sunflowers and late-summer fields.
