by Jane Smiley
Joe says, “There’s nothing there. We don’t think alike anymore. I am on my own now.”
“You seem to be getting along fine, honey.”
“But we thought alike. We thought the same thoughts. We both always used to say that. You know that character on ‘Sesame Street,’ the two-headed Russian guy who’s always arguing with himself?
“Joe—”
“That was us. We used to laugh like hell at that, and run around the TV room shouting in mock Russian.”
“Joe, you’re grown men. Do you want to be like those twins who dress alike and cultivate their twinship forever? I know you don’t!”
“You don’t want us to, Dad doesn’t want us to, Michael doesn’t want to, but I DO!”
“Honey—”
“Isn’t that awful? I’m a man! How can I say that? Just to say it fills me with self-loathing. I wish we were girls or something. I know some girl twins. None of this comes up with them. Separate identities is just one option with them. With us it’s the only option.”
“But it’s not healthy for any set—”
“How do you know that? How does anybody know that who isn’t one? Ma—”
“What?”
“Tell me this isn’t any big deal.”
“I don’t know if it’s a big deal. In the first place, Michael couldn’t possibly be himself right now, and I think you’re putting a lot of pressure on him—”
“That’s true.” He caves in instantly, as always, to any criticism. “After Louise broke up with me, I longed for him so much. I thought, I can’t have her, but I’ll always have him. It’s fucked. Why do I care? You’re right. Men have to be by themselves.”
“There’s something to be said for being by yourself.”
“Well, I know you think that. Don’t you remember once, when I was about four, I followed you into the bathroom and you said, ‘Joe, I like to be by myself, don’t you understand?’ and I said, ‘No,’ and I didn’t. I never did.”
“Look,” I say. “Michael’s asleep and we don’t have to be at Ellen’s until six. Remember when we went to that exhibition downtown and we said we’d like to go back and spend more time? This is the last weekend. Let’s do that. Let’s get out of the house.”
“No, Mom! That’s not the point! Just forget it!” He is out of the room before I can say another thing.
When we pull up at Ellen’s, Jerry is on a bike in the street, doing figure eights with no hands. Diane and Tracy are watching him. He’s good. Sometimes he gives the bike a calculated wobble, as if he is going to fall over, and the girls scream. They run over when they see us, and I hand Diane the cake. I see her stick her tongue out and lick the frosting. She sees me see her. We smile. Ellen comes out of the front door, carrying a pitcher of water. She says, “Hey! You’re here!” She puts down the pitcher next to the pots of geraniums on the porch, and comes over to kiss us. Her glance travels toward Jerry and away without falling on him.
After an afternoon of silence, Joe and Michael and I spoke politely to one another in the car. Gingerly. Now Tracy’s eyes flick from her mother to her father and back again; then Ellen says, without actually looking at Jerry, who has stopped his bike and put his feet on the pavement, “Dinner at six-thirty, okay?”
“Okay,” says Jerry.
“Come on in, Mom.” For us she has a smile. “I made some wine coolers, but Diane said I had to offer Kool-Aid, too, so I have lime Kool-Aid.”
We pause in the living room, looking for places to sit down, but she calls from the kitchen, “Come in here, where I can see you.”
“Kool-Aid for me,” says Joe.
She puts a wine cooler in front of me, and pauses in front of Michael with her hands on her hips. “Got any beer?” he says.
“Budweiser.”
“I’ll take it.” Diane comes in the back door with the cake. It looks okay, but I wonder what she has been doing with it for the last five minutes. I say, “Sweetie, you’d better put that in the refrigerator so the icing doesn’t drip off.”
“Can Jennifer come over and have some after her dinner?”
“Jennifer was here for thirty-six straight hours, darling. Maybe we should give her a rest.”
“She doesn’t want a rest.”
“Maybe I want a rest.”
“Oh, Mom!” Diane’s voice rises to a whine. Ellen rolls her eyes, and says, “All right, all right. Go out now, okay? She can come back at seven-thirty.”
“Seven o’clock.”
“Seven-fifteen. Give us a chance to eat, for God’s sake.”
Diane runs out.
“This one’s right up your alley, Joe,” says Ellen.
“What’s her field?”
“She seems like a generalist to me. At breakfast this morning, she memorized where everyone was sitting; then, at lunch, she made detailed inquiries about why we weren’t sitting in the same chairs, then about where I got the chairs and why they don’t match.” She laughs, sobers up. “I shouldn’t make fun of her, but it’s such a temptation.”
“Oh,” says Joe, “they need that. It tempers their sense of difference from the others.”
Ellen loves to toss off vignettes. If someone is boring, and has literally never done anything worth repeating, Ellen will make something up about him: “Don’t you wonder about Ray Bradley, Mom? He seems so bland. Just the sort of person to be a terrible dope addict—shoots it right into the eyeball now, after collapsing every vein in his body.” Every time Joe brings up one of his geniuses, Ellen teases him for the envy she can hear in his voice: “And who was Kafka? Just another guy who let women take care of him. ‘Fritzi,’ she says, ‘this way. This way into the post office.’ ” Joe likes it—his basic assumptions are unmoved—he laughs, he envisions his geniuses with faces and behaviors.
She should have gone to medical school or law school. I think we all assumed she would, especially Jerry, who once went into her file and Xeroxed all her recommendations: “Best student I ever had,” “Brilliant mind,” “First-rate intelligence, but, more than that, consuming curiosity, terrific imagination,” “A talent for synthesizing information that amounts to genius.” She told all her professors that she had her eye on some kind of professional training, and got their recommendations, but she never sent her file anywhere, never even made an application. She married Jerry, who was thirty-seven by then, and had Diane at once, then Tracy. She had excuses that almost amounted to reasons: Jerry was too old to wait long for kids, she hadn’t decided what sort of career she wanted, no money for school with the bookstore and all. “I’m just lazy,” was what she finally said, and that has been her position for years. Jerry says, “It’s a crime.”
They had this argument in front of me once—it’s more teasing now than anything else—“It’s not a crime. It isn’t even a misdemeanor. I can do what I want.”
“You’re wasting your gift.”
“I don’t think it’s of much value, frankly. Highly overrated. Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air, you know.”
“That’s in England. You can’t do that in America.” And these arguments always end in a shrug. My approach was different—children can’t stand that much attention, I said, especially when there are only two of them. They need to go unwatched in order to develop their inner lives. A shrug. “I work in the bookstore, Mother. That’s very time-consuming.” I know. What is there to say? Joe, I think, would like to trade recommendations. His always say, “Kinsella is one of my brighter students in recent years,” and Joe always says, “Thank God all the geniuses are in engineering. If they were around, I wouldn’t be noticed at all.”
Sometimes I relish a small sense of privilege, sitting around, listening to Ellen’s tales rise into the air and vanish like soap bubbles, and I remember that Pat’s conversations were like that, and I feel a little twinge of loss. Ellen says, exasperated, to Jerry and to me, “Isn’t it all right just to live and die? Why does there have to be a record?” In
the last eight years, her refusal to make something of herself has hardened into a position. I wonder why I care. Maybe there is a lingering pride, like the pride I had of Michael and Joe—the pride of producing a phenomenon. I would like the opus to be on display a little.
When I was married to Pat, I got to be intransigently and loudly unambitious. Never impressed, that was me. Lee Salk came to give a lecture, and Pat showed him around. I couldn’t have cared less. Some Nobel laureate in medicine, from England, actually came to our house for dinner. I made myself forget his name. I met Pat and this man at the door in my bedroom slippers. I had become my uncles, asking silently, “But can he castrate a hog? Build a fence? Get the cows into the barn during a blizzard?” I looked at them all with Viking skepticism. If when these great men appeared I could have had my aunts and uncles around me, talking scours and winter wheat, mud on their boots and tools in the pockets of their overalls, sometimes lapsing into the half-English, half-Norwegian dialect that they spoke among themselves when outsiders were around, I would have. And when the teachers were dazzled with Ellen in grammar school, I always diminished it. So maybe I short-circuited my own phenomenon. I wouldn’t do it now. Now I know that she is rare and valuable, but she refuses to know it.
She still sucks up information. She sits by the cash register at the bookstore on a tall stool, reading. And the bookstore has a little sign above the clock that says, “Please read the books. Don’t just break the bindings.” Now she leans back and drains her wine cooler and a shiver passes through her. Jerry crosses the deck outside the screen door and her glance shoots toward him and away. I say, “The lawnmower’s fixed. The grass is cut.”
“You going to have it baled? You can get three dollars a bale these days.”
“Let’s do that,” Joe says. “Let’s farm Mom’s yard. Let’s run hogs and turkeys between the house and the garage.”
Michael smiles a tired smile, which Joe is looking for out of the corner of his eye. When it comes, Joe himself smiles. When Joe turns toward me, I look at the tablecloth. Yes, I am offended with him. He doesn’t have to parade his every feeling. Now he gets up and lifts the lids on the stove, then opens the oven. A sharp, spicy, delicious smell billows toward me, full of cumin and pepper. Joe bends down and puts his head farther into the oven. “Mmmm,” he says, “let’s eat.”
“Cholesterol special,” says Ellen. “Cheese enchiladas with sour cream. I made guacamole, too, and beans and rice.” She leans toward Michael, pokes him in the stomach. “This is for you, bub. We might keel over at the table, but you’ll put on ten pounds.”
Michael says, “Hey, Joe, remember that girl you knew in college who gained twenty pounds one semester, but she was so rail-thin no one could figure out where she put it, so one day she walked into the lounge after dinner, when I was visiting you, and she lifted up her dress and let her stomach out, just to show everyone, and it was like she had swallowed a bowling ball?”
“LeeAnn Clapper. I always wanted to date her.”
After dinner Jerry corners me in the kitchen and says in a low voice, “Has Ellen talked to you?”
I am carrying dishes. I put them down. “What about?”
“Oh, well, a few threats passed this afternoon.”
“Which direction?”
“Both.”
“Going to be carried out?”
“Not mine. I’m not sure about hers.”
“Which threat?”
“The big one.”
“Impossible,” I say.
“It always has seemed impossible with Ellen, but she’s drawn to it. She brings it up. You know what Updike says.”
“What?”
“If it comes up, then it will happen.”
I put my hands on my hips and say, “It’s not a rowboat heading toward Niagara Falls, Jerry. If there’s something you’re arguing about, you can get help to settle it.”
“I didn’t before. Did you?”
“Did you want to before? I didn’t.”
“I don’t know what it is, exactly. We never argue about money or kids. We’ve even stopped arguing about sex. We just argue about what we suspect the other one is thinking about us. It doesn’t even have to do with love, especially. She accuses me of being angry at her for no reason; then I accuse her of not liking the way I spend my time, learning to fly and everything; and then we’re just screaming! And I think, Yes, I am angry a lot of the time, and I do get into these pointless obsessions that cost money and won’t head anywhere like a career or anything, and, yes, she is judgmental and hyperrational and expects everything everyone does to be orderly and reasonable. And then I see us as these ranting neurotics, mismatched except in the scope of our misconceptions. And THEN I go up to the bathroom and stare into the mirror and think that I am forty-six and I was never very good-looking to begin with, and maybe what she’s really telling me is that she’s gotten attracted to another man, some thirty-year-old kid whose body is absolutely in its prime.”
I look around Jerry, and there is Ellen, bright-eyed. She says, “Confiding in Mom again, huh? Go ahead. I don’t care. Ready for coffee? I don’t have time for another man.”
I smile.
“What are you smiling about?” says Ellen.
“Nothing.”
“Yes you are. You absolutely grinned. I mean, it wasn’t merry, but it was a grin.”
“Probably a wince. Nothing.”
She looks at me suspiciously, but doesn’t press me. I begin to rinse dishes. This child, Jennifer, comes through the swinging door and says, “May I have another piece of cake, Ellen?” Then, to me, “Rachel, did you make the frosting green on purpose?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because Diane likes that color.”
“But—” says Jennifer. Ellen hands her a plate with a piece of cake on it and says, “Go out and play now, Jennifer.”
“May I take the plate and the fork outside?”
“Yes.”
“Where do you want me to put them when I bring them in?”
“In the sink will be fine.”
“What if there are crumbs on the plate?”
“That’s okay. Go OUT, Jennifer.”
“Okay.” She goes out, but not without a long stare at everything in the room, including me.
Ellen says, “I speak to her in tones I would never use to anyone else. I’m sure everyone does. Sort of exasperated and overly direct. She’s only seven. How did she get this way so fast? Anyway, Diane loves her, loves the way she just plants her feet wide apart in the middle of the room and addresses all adults by their first names, even the teachers at school.” Ellen throws her head back and laughs at the thought. Then, “Okay, Mother,” she says, “why did you grin?”
“I didn’t mean to.”
“Yes, you meant to hide what you were thinking, just like you always do.”
“I say what I think.”
“You are honest. But you aren’t open. So tell me.”
“I was just reminded of something.”
“What?”
“Why are you pressing me? It doesn’t have anything to do with you and Jerry.”
“All the more reason for you to tell me.”
“Ellen!”
“Go ahead and get mad. It doesn’t scare me, and I want to know, and I am going to nag you for days until you tell me.”
“It’s something I haven’t thought about in a long time that I just happened to think about. No big deal.”
“Now you sound like Joe. Every time Joe says that, that means it’s a really big deal. I’ve got my eye on you, Mother.” She means it. She carries the coffeepot through the swinging door.
When she comes back into the kitchen, where I have almost finished the dishes, she says, “You want to know what I think we were arguing about?”
“What?”
“I mean, apart from the perennial question of whether women have sex drive, the way Jerry always wants me out of the house. I mean, I admit that
I am crabby today. But as soon as I asked him to hand me the bread this morning, he said I should go out somewhere. To the Y for a sauna, or out to breakfast. It’s like he’s afraid I’m going to do damage or something. It’s just a bad mood, it’s not a homicidal rage. Except that there he is, glancing at me and shushing the kids and muffling the rustle of the newspaper, and pretty soon it is a homicidal rage! I don’t WANT to go out. I HATE to go out. I like to be right here, or else maybe in the dining room. Why doesn’t he understand that about me? It’s him that wants to go out, and fly planes solo and ride his bike to Bloomington.”
“You’re just telling me, aren’t you? You’re not expecting me to make any reply?”
“No. No, I’m not. It’s over, anyway. Come have coffee.” She takes the pot and goes out through the swinging door.
Of course I was thinking of Ed, the way I fit him in in spite of everything. Who is the busiest person in the world, busier than a woman with five children and a kitchen being remodeled? Had I been that person, even then I would have fit him in.
In the dining room, Jerry and Michael are talking about India and Joe is sitting on the floor by the door to the living room, going through some of the stacks of books. Jerry keeps saying, “Are you kidding me?” and his continuing incredulity seems to warm Michael up. He says, “No, really. We got to about fourteen thousand feet, and it was nothing. I mean, imagine it. You’re three or four thousand feet higher than you would be in the Tetons, say, and all around you there are still peaks as high above you as if you were standing, not at the base of the Tetons, but at sea level. It’s not like anything you’ve ever seen or felt. I mean, the world is so much bigger than you think it’s going to be.”
Jerry, leaning forward on his elbows, says, “Wow. Did you take any pictures?”
“Well, it was too big to take pictures. I didn’t have good equipment, not even a wide-angle lens, and it was fucking cold, too. So I thought, Shit, I’m never going to forget this anyway.”
“I can’t tell you how envious I feel right this minute.”
Me, too.
Michael tips back his chair and looks at the ceiling, then says to Jerry, “I wonder if you should. I mean, yeah, I saw it, and it was astonishing and unforgettable, just like the whole trip. But I feel too spread out now, like I’ve been rolled out with a rolling pin and I can’t gather myself in to focus on anything. Yeah, that’s it. I’ve just figured it out. I want to go everywhere now—Japan, New Zealand, Antarctica, for God’s sake—but when you go to those places, you’re just this little pinpoint sort of pushing through them, and when you visualize them in your mind, it’s like you’re a balloon, inflating and thinning out so you can hold it all. Everything is frustrating. You can’t be there completely enough when you’re there, and when you’ve understood sort of what it’s like to be there, you aren’t there any more. I think humans are genetically programmed to stay in one place all their lives. I think one place is exactly what you can understand.”
