Ordinary Love and Good Will

by Jane Smiley

“The colors. The way you imagine colors together. When you were talking about how you were going to paint the room, it pleased me just to hear about it. I was impressed, too, at how quickly you saw the whole, and how you didn’t just solve the problem, but made something out of it. Liz and I love our life, but it’s funny how we miss color.”

  Stroke. Stroke. I like the way work relieves conversation of duty, supplies it with time to ponder what has been said. I expect Lydia to ask me about our life, but instead I ask about hers: “What sort of math do you teach?”

  “Right now, just freshman calculus and some algebra, but my field is combinatorics.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Counting.”

  “You mean like one, two, three?”

  “I mean like, if you have eight identical-looking billiard balls, and you know one weighs slightly less than the others, how can you find the one in not more than two weighings? Or if six people want seven different ingredients on their pizza, what’s the fewest pizzas you would have to order to give everyone what they wanted and no one what someone else wanted?”

  “It sounds like trying to figure out how to do two things at once.”

  “It has that pleasure.”

  “It sounds interesting.”

  “Really?”

  I look at her, and she smiles skeptically.

  “It’s not something I’m going to think about after I leave here, I admit.”

  She laughs.

  “I like the idea of something abstract and removed to contemplate, though. That’s something I probably never do.”

  Stroke. Stroke. Now it is her turn to break the silence: “I’m the only black woman mathematician I know of teaching at a college in this country.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Poor judgment on my part, no doubt. Combined with bullheadedness.”

  “I mean, why aren’t there any others?”

  “You want the racist, sexist, establishment theory or the embittered failed-socialization theory or the tribal suspicion theory?”

  “What’s your theory?”

  “Practically, it’s this. Mathematicians aren’t very socially adept, but their field demands social interaction. They take the shortest route, through who you know, to who you are, then to what you know. With women and blacks the stretch past who you are is too difficult, slows people down. I’ve been lucky to be able to use a lot of who you know to jump over who you are. They also cherish the idea of innate genius. That idea, applied socially, always engenders prejudice. I’m thirty-six, and this is my first real job. Three of my colleagues have come up to me at parties and asked if I was in the music department.” She smiles. “I envy your independence.”

  “Then you should get to know us better and find out whether it’s really enviable or not.”

  “I would like that.”

  I have noticed before that there is a category of acquaintanceship that is not friendship or business or romance, but speculation, fascination. A mystery is present, the solution is unusually important, and my most pressing urge is to question and probe. Liz and I look for the Harris house every morning—seeing it is our gauge of weather and visibility. Last night, after Tom went to bed, we sat by the fire and I recounted every detail of the day—the layout of the house, the decoration of the rooms, what was in the oven, what Lydia was wearing. It was thick and satisfying, gossip like five pounds of chocolate caramels, and afterward, in the dark of our bedroom, Liz said, “I feel guilty, as if we were conspiring against her.” I reassured her—I had done nothing remotely nosy, not even gazed too long at any single object—but I, too, felt guilty for soaking up so many observations, for the unwilled alertness of my antennae. Guilty and racist for responding to Lydia as if she were a phenomenon.

  But she is a phenomenon. She just told me so herself.

  And maybe she sat up last night, unseeing among all the glittering lights and colors, and speculated about Liz and me. Mutual fascination is as possible as mutual friendship or a mutually satisfactory business arrangement, isn’t it?

  When I invite her to bring Annabel and go skating sometime, she jumps at the chance.

  After I am finished, I choose to ski home over the fields rather than take a ride. The snow is deep and crusty, and all day long I have been promising myself these cool monochromes. On the way through town, I pass a number of good friends, people whose company, rooms, dinner tables, and conversation have given me great pleasure, but I make excuses to hurry. The fact is, more talk with Lydia Harris keeps unrolling in my head. There is nothing I don’t want to know about her, nothing I don’t want her to know about me. It feels like lust, agitating and restless, but it is not that. It is more like some judgment that I seek, on the worth of my very nature.

  As I work for Lydia, so Tom works for me, to reimburse my labor of paying for the lavender coat. Plan A was to have him in her house, helping me under the very eyes of Annabel Harris, but they didn’t want the place torn up during the holidays, and of course Tom must go to school. Plan B involves twenty hours of extra effort at three dollars an hour. Tom goes about his work without complaining, about an hour a day. He is on hour seven. He must keep a record of the hours and of his tasks, so that he can know what the coat cost him. Supervising this work, I am sober and demanding. When the work ends, I always relax and provide some treat. I shouldn’t, but I can’t resist.

  Today he is washing windows—only the insides, since the weather is cold—and I sit with him while he does it. I try to meet his chatter with cool silence. He says, “Daddy, do you think Sparkle is going to get to fourteen hands?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Don’t count on it.”

  “Fourteen hands is big for a pony. Over fourteen hands, it’s a little horse.”

  “Don’t forget that corner.”

  “Don’t you like Sparkle’s white feet? Her white socks. They don’t go above the pastern joint, so they aren’t stockings. That’s my favorite part about her.”

  “Why don’t you rinse out your rag now? It’s getting a little dirty.”

  “I think Sparkle is a very pretty pony. She has a good head, better than Henrietta’s. Do you think Mr. Halloran would let us breed to his stallion again? He’s a good stud. We could raise lots of ponies and train them and sell them, and give Mr. Halloran half the money.”

  “I want you to go right along the putty there, and get that dust off. That’s from the woodstove, and it could eat into the woodwork eventually.”

  “I love Sparkle. She’s really smart, Daddy. I had this carrot for her, and I was keeping it in my pocket, and she found it right away and put her nose into my pocket, but she was really careful and didn’t tear the pocket or anything.”

  “Sparkle is a good pony.”

  “I’m glad she’s a filly, because then, when she grows up, she can have foals, too. Can we build a cart and teach Sparkle to pull it? I bet, if we let her run around, she would stay close to the house, and then she could come to my window and put her head in and wake me up in the morning.”

  “Son, she’s not a dog.”

  “But she’s really smart, Daddy. She knows me, and she likes me, because I know just where to scratch her and stuff.”

  “How was school?”

  “Okay. I wish we could go skating.”

  School is not something he talks about, but he didn’t talk about it last year, either. When he finishes the windows, I see that he has done a good job, not only careful. I don’t compliment him or thank him, but get up deliberately and go out to milk the goats without inviting him along. After dinner, though, apropos of nothing, I suggest that we go skating in the moonlight, all together.

  The pond is hidden from the house by trees, another scenic mistake I would have avoided had I sited the house properly. It is a biggish pond, though, almost an acre, fed by a little stream. It was dammed a hundred years ago at least, and they did such a good job that all I have had to do is replace a few stones from time to time. The night is moonless and starry, c
old and still. There has been no snow since we last skated, so the ice is clear, fluorescent. Impatient, Tom skates away from us, backward, awkward but determined. This is something he has just learned this year. I watch Liz put on her white figure skates. She pulls the strings tight, ties them carefully, businesslike, but then she leans back and points her toes, as if the skates were ballet slippers, and admires them. She is the skater of us all, having taken lessons as a child. Our skates are good ones, have lasted since our marriage. Her mother was going to give us china and linens. We asked for skates as if we were taking a political position, so she gave us custom-made Canadian skates. Her revenge was that we had to go to the sports store for three separate fittings.

  On skates, Liz is not immediately transformed. Her flat-footed personality clings at first—her overalls are baggy, her old down coat makes her thick and matter-of-fact, she keeps her hands in her pockets. She cuts across the pond four times, picking up twigs and other trash. She tempts me to stop watching her, but I don’t. I might miss the moment when her arms spread, her head turns, and she suddenly slips into a big backward circle, lazy but sharp, her body as silver and definite as a trout’s. Then she is moving backward on one leg, the other leg straight behind her, toe pointed. Her head is flat, turned, her arms flung beyond her head. An invisible thread looped through her outstretched skate seems to be towing her across the ice. She finishes with a spin, and her hat flies off. Tom retrieves it and returns it to her. They embrace, and she takes his hand and twirls him around. He stumbles but keeps his feet, laughing.

  Now it is my turn. I haven’t mastered much, but I can go fast, and the acre of the pond is hardly big enough to contain me when I am really in the mood. I begin by drifting around the edge, getting the feel of the ice, of my skates, of my legs and lower back, stroking, gliding, crossing into a turn. It is soothing and stimulating at the same time, so easy that I am tempted, as always, to go off into my own arabesque and triple jump. There is no reason why not. The body is willing, tingles with anticipation. Except that the readiness is an illusion, and all I have ever done is to go forward, fast, and backward, slowly. I make myself settle down. In the middle of the pond, Tommy is practicing, staring at his feet. I skate a circle around him.

  “What are you trying to do, son?”

  “There’s a way you can turn your skates to stop so that they shoot some snow into the air. Mommy can do it.”

  “Don’t you have to be going pretty fast?”

  “I’m going fast.”

  I skate away in a big loop and return, orbit him, and skate away again. Across the pond, Liz is cutting figure eights, trying to track the same circles over and over again. Tommy continues to flail through a few big strides, slide, and then stop. He never falls, but he never looks like he is skating, either, more like he is leaping though shallow surf. I skate another ring around him, and then the phrase comes to me, “running rings around him.” I wonder if it’s possible, especially if he had some direction across the pond and no reason to limit his speed. I loop him again, this time orbiting like a planet instead of a comet, Mars, say. Earth. Venus. “Hey, watch out,” he shouts. Back to Mars. Out to Jupiter, so that he doesn’t get self-conscious. It is a strange and exhilarating feeling, circling him like this, sort of stroboscopic. The pleasure is watching his intensity revealed sequentially—in his face, his taut left arm, the arc of his shoulders, his right hip, his back again. I can even trick myself into thinking I am stationary and he is doing a slow, impossible spin here in the glinting blue darkness. I am a camera. I am a fence, a palisade, a moat, enclosing him. Now he looks up and sighs, glances at me, and begins to skate away. The real test. I turn and skate after him, one loop: I make a silly face, he laughs. Around his back, then another loop—they have to be tight, which slows me down, makes them harder. I throw my arms out, stick out my tongue. He laughs again, then speeds up. Now I am almost chasing him, the hare after the tortoise. He heads for his mother. The distance between them begins to close up. I put on speed, flatten my ring, go straight at them. “Hey, Mom,” he calls. Her arm goes out, oblivious. Between them is a doorway, a window, the eye of a needle. I shoot through it, brushing both of them lightly with the flapping tails of my coat. “Hey!” says Liz. I imagine them falling into one another’s arms.

  At the end of the pond I turn around, flushed with adrenaline. Tom is showing Liz how he has learned to stop. She is praising him. I would like to skate rings around the two of them, slow, lazy orbits lasting days, a ritual of discreet containment, nothing coercive, no fences in the open pasture, only an alert dog at one end. When we are undressing to get into bed later, Liz says, “That was fun, wasn’t it? I think the nice thing about our family is that there’s all sorts of fun going around, and it’s easy to catch some.”

  Still later, in the dark, when I am nearly asleep, she says, “Were you skating rings around him?”

  “Exactly. Are you reading my mind again?”

  “I wish I could. But I hear you have to be married for twenty years for that.”

  “Maybe we could apply for early access.”

  “I’ll call tomorrow.” I can feel her smile in the dark, against the crook of my shoulder. I am very warm.

  A brother of Liz’s worked for the post office one Christmas, and he said that they were told that, if the truck got stuck, they should get out some fourth-class mail and throw it under the wheels. That’s the kind of package we get at the end of the month: dirty pages numbered 6 through 15 in a plastic bag with a fragment of a manila envelope containing only our address and a December 12 postmark. No letter, no return address, no clue of the sender until we begin deciphering the text. It is the chapter of Tina Morrissey’s book and begins, “fish bones and heads from the nearby trout stream, as well as sheep and cattle manure, rotted hay and grass clippings, maple and beech leaves, sawdust, wood shavings, wood ash. The five heaps measure about ten feet by ten feet by ten feet, so the Millers have stockpiled some five thousand cubic feet of excellent organic compost. Bob uses it liberally, digging as much as two of the heaps into his beds each year. He has neatly solved the problem of access to such large heaps by building a kind of movable tunnel out of old boards and wheels from two children’s wagons. He rolls the tunnel up to the open side of one of the heaps and begins shoveling from the bottom. As he digs his way into the mound, the boards that form the roof of the tunnel support the mound and direct it downward toward the center.”

  Liz finds this very funny, and for the next hour keeps erupting with barks of laughter. I say, “It’s a good idea.”

  “It’s a great idea, but I have this image of you tunneling into this mountain of shit. Just a little man in a raincoat. Bye, Bob, see you in the spring!”

  “You’ve seen me get compost, and you’ve gotten it yourself.”

  “I’m not laughing at you, honey, I’m laughing at the image.”

  I read the rest by myself, remembering my fears of how she would perceive our family, our likability as personalities. But it does not read, “For a profoundly neurotic son of a bitch, Bob Miller has done pretty well.” It reads, “Miller is careful to keep his carrot seeds moist until they germinate. He covers each bed with two layers of old newspapers, and then sprinkles these layers sometimes four or five times a day with water from the spring. After seven days of this treatment, Miller gets almost 100 percent germination, rare for carrot seed, which under normal conditions offers 30–40 percent germination in two to three weeks.” About Tom she writes, “Even the seven-year-old is an integral part of the family effort.” She calls our valley “a kind of paradise from which the Millers can catch sight of the twentieth century (as it is played out in the supermarket and the branch bank in Moreton, a town of a thousand people) without having to participate in it.” Nowhere does she call me a genius, but she does remark that “Miller’s manner is not unlike that of some powerful and wealthy CEO. He does what he wants, the way he wants to do it. Surely this comes from rejecting the power of money and from cultivati
ng his ability to grow, build, catch, or find everything he not only needs, but wants.” I am not exactly flattered. Maybe there was once a letter, asking my opinion of this, or whether I would like to make changes, but it is gone now, along with the return address. The manuscript pages lie around for a few days, then disappear.

  Liz gets up on Sunday and says, “Tom’s going to church with me today. We can ski. The snow is good and there isn’t any wind, so we shouldn’t have any trouble. How would you like pancakes for breakfast?” It’s an effective speech, and leaves me perplexed. Any question will be a challenge now. I say, “Pancakes sound good,” and leave it at that. Later I plan to try the “I thought we were going to talk about this” line, because I thought we were, even though I don’t suppose we agreed on it. We clean up the bedroom and make the bed, waiting to see who will make the next misstep, and finally Liz says, “He asked to go.”

  “He’ll miss pony training.”

  “He asked me to ask you if you could save that till the afternoon.”

  “I had other plans for the afternoon.”

  “Could you be a little flexible?”

  “Pony training is in the morning. A regular routine is important, both to the pony and to Tom. The ponies will be standing at the gate, expecting to be trained and fed again. I want to encourage those sorts of habits.”

  “I understand that—” But she doesn’t go on. Over our whole-wheat pancakes and applesauce we talk about planting blue potatoes this year, and blue corn. Tom would like to know if blue tomatoes are available, and I try to explain that blue is somehow genetically related to yellow, but not to red. They exchange occasional looks across the table which I can’t read, and I sound pedantic to myself, loud and overly informative. Even so, Tom stays home and Liz skis off by herself.

  The pony foal is nearly a year old now—she was born in March—and one or both of us has worked with her every day since she was born. She wears a halter, walks on a lead, and allows all of her feet to be picked up. Her skin twitches when we brush her, and her little tail switches impatiently back and forth. Her winter coat is thick, nearly black, dull in tone. Tom lets her take an apple that he holds between his teeth, and I don’t stop him. She is careful—her velvety upper lip stretches and feels the skin of the apple, pulls it away from him almost prehensilely. He is on his best behavior with her; his hands move slowly and firmly over her coat. He stands very close to her and never moves around her without maintaining contact. He speaks in a low, definite voice. The boyish urge to supply cause and witness effect that impels him, sometimes, to blow into the mother pony’s ears or sprinkle water on the cats or walk right behind the sheep, so they can hear him but can’t see him, is absent with the pony foal. He wants her to be calm and happy and smart and pretty, to love him and obey him and grow up smoothly, as any parent does.