by Jane Smiley
“Where would it get you?” I say. “Where has it gotten him?” Joe knows better than to allude to Pat’s accomplishments as a researcher, which are nice, but not the point, or even to his accomplishments as a diagnostician, which are nicer, because more humane, but still not the point. He always shrugs. Pat is not happy, not at peace, not possessed of much self-knowledge, not even rich, for a specialist. He has what he could have had with only average intelligence—two wives, nine children, a sense that there is something missing. Well, I have another image of the mind, any mind, no special mind. It is a wheel, like a paddlewheel, turning slowly, with a kind of ordered vastness, bigger than it seems to be, going deeper, and bringing up more unrecognizable wealth than anyone thought possible. Brilliance is like little round red reflectors nailed to the crosspieces, eye-catching, lovely, in certain lights dazzling, but little even so, pure decoration. Joe doesn’t listen to me. He has spent his whole life in school, where brilliance is prized, and anyway, I am only his mom.
Behind me, the screen door slams. Joe comes in, dripping with sweat, and followed by Tracy, who is carrying the Crescent wrench. I can see Diane through the screen, watching him. They are eight and six, his girls. He is patient with his nieces as he never is with himself, and they have been helping him, in a manner of speaking, with the lawnmower project. If one of them makes a suggestion, he will take the time to try it out, rather than declaring that it couldn’t possibly work. In return, they worry about him. Diane leaves him notes with coins folded into them, because she can see that he doesn’t have a job.
“Tracy and Diane want to come with me to the hardware store. I need to find something to loosen the flywheel.”
Ellen comes in from the living room. “Which one are you going to? That one by the liquor store?”
“That one is fine.” And so they all go out together, companionable, Ellen and Joe bumping into one another, Diane slipping her hand into her mother’s hand and Ellen squeezing it without hesitating in what she is saying to Joe. Their coming seems to have soothed him a bit.
As Joe’s car turns into the street, Michael comes down the back stairs and says, “Hey, Mom.”
“Hi, sweetheart. Did you sleep?”
“Kind of. I knew where I was the whole time, though. Any coffee made?” He stretches, sits at the table, rubs his face in both his palms. “I called Annie and Daniel. I couldn’t resist that phone where you just push a button and it dials the number for you. I just said hi, though.”
“You can talk more later. They’re coming for Labor Day weekend, anyway.” I am shocked anew by the way his thighs spread to nothing against the seat of his chair, by the hollow of his stomach. The loose cotton of his clothing folds freely against his body, as substantial as he is. I set a cup of coffee in front of him, and he reaches for the cream and sugar. Half the cup vanishes in the first gulp. I am familiar with the twin studies that show similar attitudes, mannerisms, and life patterns in separated identical twins, but it is disconcerting all the same. He sits up straight, shoulders down, only his head bent, just like Joe does. He turns and smiles at me when he catches me looking at him, and his smile is first closed, then open, like Joe’s. More than that, it communicates the same warmth and familiarity that I have seen in Joe’s smile all summer, and attributed to all the time we have spent together. “Hungry?” I say.
“Always.”
“Anything you can’t eat?”
“I haven’t eaten much meat in the last two years. Right now, you know what I would like?”
“No.”
“A big bowl of chocolate ice cream.”
I oblige him.
While he eats, I arrange things for the picnic—marinated tofu and avocado, tomato slices, sprouts, sliced chicken breast, a loaf of bread. Finally, he says, “Mom! Sit down.”
“We don’t want to start too late. It takes a while to get there, and it isn’t light all that long this time of year. I like to have time for a little walk along the creek.” I rummage for the Swiss cheese.
“Hey, Mom. You’re avoiding me.” Joe would have made it a question. I look at him, startled, and there is Joe’s smile, warm, familiar, almost conspiratorial. It is uncanny, but I sit down. After a moment, I look Michael square in the face, and his gaze is steady on mine. It is a handsome face, more masculine than when he left. The nose and chin have taken their adult size. They have the prominence that Pat’s nose and chin had. His lips are no longer as full as they were ten years ago, but they have more softness than men’s lips usually have. His eyes are thickly lashed and an almost tawny brown. There is hair curling out of the loose collar of his shirt where there didn’t use to be. Well, he is a man now. I see that his hair is like mine, straight and thick, plain brown. I look and look, as if looking at an object, and he lets me. His eyes are affectionate and receptive, and I also look at the outline of my head reflected in their pupils. He says, “Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, Michael.”
“What are you thinking, Mom?”
“I’m thinking that all your glands are fully operational now. I bet you’ve even had sex with a girl or two.”
This is something I’ve done all summer with Joe, refer to subjects usually taboo between mother and son. I would like my sons to make of me what I am, just an adult woman, but an adult woman in every way. I would like them to do me that favor, now, before they have wives. He says, “What’s a girl?” Then, “You didn’t write me very much, Mom.”
“Once a month.”
“No.”
“Every month.” He smiles knowingly. I feel sheepish. “Almost every month. I never knew what to say. I thought about you every day. And everyone else was writing you all the time.”
“I was far away, Mom.”
“Not so far.” I get up and take his bowl and cup to the sink. He says, “Well, it’s true, I was only halfway around the world. If you leave the planet you can get farther.”
“It didn’t feel far to me. You may not know this, but a mom is never alone, even if none of her kids is in the vicinity.”
“So, sit down.” His gaze is intent, almost disconcerting. He was jealous as a small child, even of Joe, but especially of anything I would do for Daniel. At two and three he tried every means of wooing me, from the most transparent flattery (Mother’s Day was his favorite holiday), to the angriest demands for favor and notice. At four he got into bed on my side every night, rolled right up to me, and put his arms around me. It got so I began wearing my robe to bed and sleeping curled up. Pat said we should draw the line, but Michael’s determination was so furious that even he dared not interfere. Finally, after about three months, I started finding Michael in Joe’s bed, the top bunk, rolled against him.
I sit down. He says, “Oh, Mom.”
“I was thinking this picnic would be fun, but we can do it another time. Would you rather do something else for dinner?”
“We could go to some restaurant and order cups of hot water, then put ketchup in them, and have tomato soup. Eat the free bread. Park across the highway behind the drive-in and watch the movie without sound.”
“We could. I don’t know that I want to.”
He is leaning back in his chair, his arm flung over its crest. His gaze is steady and considering. He sighs. “There were some people in Benares who came back for a visit about six months ago. They said it would be weird. It is. It’s almost unbearable.”
“In what way, sweetie?”
“I feel like nothing. Just nothing inside. More than disoriented. Deracinated. But I was like this there, too. For about the last four months. I don’t want to go back, at least not to India. I was so glad to leave. But I just want to cry. Is that okay for a guy to say to his mom?”
“Sure.”
“I wish we were here alone, sort of. Or that Joe and I were here alone. It doesn’t seem to me like it’s going to be smooth with him. When I was upstairs and everything was quiet, I couldn’t fall into a deep sleep, because something was too overwhelming about it. It seemed like
if I gave up and went to sleep, the walls would cave in and all sorts of darkness would just flood me. But I was so tired I couldn’t wake up completely and come downstairs. And then I heard Ellen and the girls outside and Joe and you all talking, and that scared me, too. I don’t know. I thought it would be hard, and it’s harder than I thought. Oh, shit.” He curses because it has happened, he has started crying. At first the tears are coursing down his cheeks, but then sobs start to shake him, and he fixes his elbows on the table to still his body. He shakes his head and puts his face in his hands. I think of a few moments ago, when he let me look at him, and I put my fingers in his hair and take hold, gripping, but not pulling. It is what my mother used to do to me when I was a child, and I found it oddly comforting.
But to comfort my weeping son, who went to India a boy and returned a man, makes me self-conscious. I grip his hair more tightly, and finally he says, “Ma, you’re hurting me.” His voice sounds ironic, normal. He takes his hands down from his face. I take my fingers out of his hair. He says, “Ma, that was very strange of you to pull my hair.”
“It struck me as the thing to do. My mother always used to do that to me.” We smile. Michael’s tongue comes out to lick the tears off his lips. I say, “Go wash your face in cold water.”
He goes up the stairs. When the others come in, Ellen goes straight to the phone and hits the button that automatically dials her number. The first thing she says is, “Are you still alive?” Then she laughs in relief, and says, “Don’t tell me a thing about it. If the wings wiggled on the landing or something, you have to keep it to yourself, okay?” A pause. “Seven landings? Oh, Lord, Jerry.” I take the girls into the living room. While Ellen is talking and I am listening, I am also admiring the Frisbee and the yoyos Joe bought them at the hardware store. It surprises me to discover that I am as relieved as Ellen that Jerry has survived his solo flight. Jerry, I have to say, has persisted in these flying lessons in the face of Ellen’s determined opposition. He is not much younger than I am—forty-six, I think. Like me, he has lived more than one life. He was a social worker in Cleveland for a long time. He got a master’s in public policy as a last-ditch effort to save his interest in his career, and that was when he met Ellen, who was taking a course he was assisting in. She is slightly built, with porcelain skin and full lips, so I can imagine how malleable, or even delicate, he thought she was. When she first brought him home, he turned to me once and said, fondly, “She talks tough, doesn’t she?” Now she sometimes remarks that, if Jerry had listened to what she said when she was a nineteen-year-old undergraduate and he was her thirty-five-year-old instructor, he wouldn’t be so surprised at what he’s gotten himself into. The two of them do pretty well with the bookstore, and he does a little consulting on the side. Since he is so near to me in age, one feeling I have about him is that he isn’t my type. His anxieties are displayed on the surface, and he is very talkative. I am glad Ellen is with him, though, because she is what my mother always called “a tartar” and he’s good at short-circuiting her passions before they really take hold. She hangs up and comes into the living room. “So where is he?” she says. “I came over here three hours ago, and I still haven’t seen the man of the hour.”
Joe, who is sitting on the piano bench, tying a knot in one of the yoyo strings, says, “Doesn’t he get back next week sometime? What’s his name again?”
“Actually, that guy we knew made people call him ‘Ravi’ after he came back from India, and then he took a vow of silence for three months. He was going to build this geodesic dome that Jerry was supposed to go in on with him, but he only got as far as the scale model, which he glued together out of Ohio Blue Tip matches. He would hold it over his head and look through it and say, ‘This is a much more human space.’ ”
“These things do not come solely from traveling to India.” Joe rolls up the yoyo and tries it out, making it sleep at the bottom for ten or fifteen seconds; then he hands it to Tracy.
“I guess we’ll see, won’t we?” says Ellen. She speaks cheerfully, but it’s clear she’s needling him. “After that, he took seventy-five psilocybin trips—”
“Would you shut up?”
“This was fifteen years ago, a whole other era, not to mention a whole other person—”
Joe hands Diane her yoyo and surges to his feet, saying, “Let’s go out on the porch. It’s easier to show you there.” Tracy casts Ellen a look as she follows Joe, but Diane only has eyes for him.
After they are out of earshot, Ellen puts her feet up on the coffee table and says, “Touchy, huh?”
“That didn’t seem to stop you.”
“Mom, if we paid attention to Joe’s moods, we’d be afraid to say anything.”
“He’s not that bad.”
“Joe and I know how to take one another. Our insensitivity to one another’s feelings is a cherished privilege.”
“If you say so.”
“Anyway, how long has this guy been asleep?”
“That can’t be me you’re referring to.” Michael is standing halfway up the stairs.
“Shit,” says Ellen. “There you are!” and she runs up the steps and grabs him around the waist and starts kissing him, pulling him down the stairs. Michael laughs and it is true, her abandon is delightful. She is no happier to see him than the rest of us are, but she makes us seem doubtful by contrast. She pulls him over to the couch, where she sits beside him and throws her leg over his. “Well, damn,” she says. “I lived these two years completely without you, and it didn’t cause me a moment’s pain, and now, looking at you, I can’t understand how I got through a single day. How was it? What was the best thing?”
“Well, the Himalayas were a pretty good thing. I saw two tigers.”
“You’re kidding! How was the food?”
“Good, good—”
“What was the best thing?”
“The best food? It wasn’t—”
“Well, in two years there must have been a memorable meal. When Jerry and I were in England—”
“It’s not like England, the food—”
“God, I can’t believe you’re here! Can you?”
He pauses before answering her, just looking. She says, “If you’re going to say there was no good food, I’d believe you. You look terrible.” She lifts his shirt and gazes at his abdomen, then squeezes his upper arm. He says, “You want a look at my teeth?”
“You’ve still got some?” Then she leans forward and kisses him tenderly on the cheek.
Joe reappears, sits back down on the piano bench, plays a few notes on the piano, pretends not to see Michael. He says, “How’s the picnic coming, Mom? I’m getting a little hungry.”
“It’s ready. We just have to put it in the car.”
“Where are you going?” says Ellen.
“Eagle Point Park.”
“Mmmp.”
“What does that mean?” says Joe.
“It means mmmp.” She heaves herself out of the couch. It means, I bet, that she is miffed at not having been asked along. She pinches Joe on the cheek and says, “I think you are so cute.”
He smooches his lips sarcastically at her. Then she strokes Michael on the hair and says, “Bye, sweetie. I love you.” For me, there is, as usual, no recognition of parting, not even a wave. Joe follows her out, to say goodbye to the girls.
Michael leans forward and looks at me. He says, “Hey, Mom. Have you ever seen any movies by Satyajit Ray?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I think I need to show about ten of those movies before I can talk about it.”
“But you don’t have to have anything to say about INDIA, Michael. Just about what it seemed like to you.”
“But that’s the point. It isn’t possible to have your own feelings about India, or even Benares. It’s almost not even possible to have a point of view. If I talk, I’ll just hear myself say what everyone says.” He leans back and closes his eyes, then says, “Actually, I have more thoughts about America
now than India. I mean, one weird thing about Americans is the way they talk as if what they want actually has significance.”
“Doesn’t it? I mean, Kroger’s, four-lane highways, missile silos?”
“I don’t mean significant in that what they want could happen, but that they assume it SHOULD happen.”
“Don’t Indians think that what they want should happen?”
“Not really. I mean, some think it might happen, and some think it won’t happen, and some think it better happen.”
“I don’t think that’s so different.”
“It is different.”
“What is different?” Joe flops into a chair, casual. Michael closes his eyes and drops his head on the back of the couch. “India. What else? Anyway, the worst thing about living abroad is that you spend the whole time talking about it, sort of regarding yourselves in this new place. It’s all anyone talks about for weeks at a time. People who’ve been there for years still talk about it. Nobody gets any closer to understanding it. It’s more like constantly looking in a mirror than real conversation.”
I say, “I thought you met people you liked there.”
“There were people I loved there.” He sighs.
Joe pushes his fingers through his hair and gazes off toward the bookcases. He says, “Anybody hungry?”
Michael goes on. “I mean, Ma, I don’t have many thoughts about it. All I have is this little accumulation of things that I remember saying that sounded pretty clever at the time, and most of those things I said in letters.”
