The Age of Grief

by Jane Smiley

  “They came last Christmas. He came by himself in the summer. To a conference on the future of the family.”

  “And so you have to put up with him, right?”

  “Harold has a three-day limit. I don’t care.”

  “I noticed you unwrapped all Isaac’s presents.”

  She shrugs, picks at the sole of her boot. She yawns without covering her mouth, and then says, “Oh, I’m sorry.” She smiles warmly, looking right at him. “I am crazy about Kristin. Crazy enough to not chance messing up Christmas for her.”

  “Today she told me that jumping off a cushion was a beautiful thing to do.”

  Leanne smiles. “Yesterday she said that it was wonderful of me to give her a napkin. You know, I don’t agree with Eric about that body stuff. I think they naturally do what is healthy for them. Somebody did an experiment with one-year-olds, gave them a range of foods to choose from, and they always chose a balanced diet. They also want to be toilet trained sooner or later. I think it’s weird the way Eric thinks that every little thing is learned rather than realized.”

  “That’s a nice phrase.” He turns his cup handle so that it points away and then back in his direction. Finally he says, “Can I tell you about something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Yesterday a friend of mine called me from Japan, a woman, to say that she couldn’t come visit me. Her father has cancer. She had planned to arrive here the day after tomorrow, and we were going to take a trip out west. It isn’t important, exactly. I don’t know.”

  Leanne is silent but attentive, picking at the sole of her boot. Now that he has mentioned it, the memory of Mieko’s anguish returns to him like a glaring light or a thundering noise, so enormous that he is nearly robbed of the power to speak. He pushes it out. “She can’t come now, ever. She probably won’t ever call or write me again. And really, this has saved her. She had all sorts of expectations that I couldn’t have … well, wouldn’t have fulfilled, and if she had come she would have been permanently compromised.”

  “Did you have some kind of affair when you were there?”

  “For a few months. She’s very pretty. I think she’s the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen. She teaches mathematics at the school where I was teaching. After I had been with Mieko for a few weeks, I realized that no one, maybe in her whole adult life, had asked her how she was, or had put his arm around her shoulders, or had taken care of her in any way. The slightest affection was like a drug she couldn’t get enough of.”

  “What did you feel?”

  “I liked her. I really did. I was happy to see her when she came by. But she longed for me more than I have ever longed for anything.”

  “You were glad to leave.”

  “I was glad to leave.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “When she called yesterday, she broke down completely. I listened. I thought it was the least I could do, but now I think that she is compromised. Japanese people are very private. It scares me how much I must have embarrassed her. I look back on the spring and the summer and yesterday’s call, and I see that, one by one, I broke down every single one of her strengths, everything she had equipped herself with to live in a Japanese way. I was so careful for a year and a half. I didn’t date Japanese women, and I was very distant—but then I was so lonely, and she was so pretty, and I thought, well, she’s twenty-seven, and she lives in this sophisticated city, Osaka. But mostly I was lonely.”

  Leanne gazes across the table in that way of hers, calm and considering. Finally she says, “Eric comes in for a lot of criticism around here. His style’s all wrong, for one thing. And he drives Harold the younger and Anna crazy. But I’ve noticed something about him. He never tries to get something for nothing. I admire that.”

  Now Kirby looks around the room, at the plants on the windowsill, the hoarfrost on the windowpanes, the fluorescent light harsh on the stainless-steel sink, and it seems to him that all at once, now that he realizes it, his life and Mieko’s have taken their final form. She is nearly too old to marry, and by the end of her father’s cancer and his life she will be much too old. And himself. Himself. Leanne’s cool remark has revealed his permanent smallness. He looks at his hands, first his knuckles, then his palms. He says, “It seems so dramatic to say that I will never get over this.”

  “Does it? To me it seems like saying that what people do is important.” And though he looks at her intently, seeking some sort of pardon, she says nothing more, only picks at her boot for a moment or two, and then gets up and puts their cups in the sink. He follows her out of the kitchen, through the living room. She turns out all the lights, so that the house is utterly dark. At the bottom of the stairs, unable to see anything, he stumbles and puts his hand on her arm. She takes it, in a grasp that is dry and cool, and guides it to the banister. Then, soft and fleeting, he feels a disembodied kiss on his cheek.

  Dynamite

  I used to not call my mother or my brother and sister because their phones were being tapped, but then I just got out of the habit. Those calls were all the same. For one thing, the phone had to ring six or eight times before my mother would answer it. “What are you doing?” I would ask.

  “I hate to talk about all of that trivia,” she would say.

  “What trivia?” This was a ploy.

  “How people pass the hours, what they are cooking or eating, or have eaten.”

  Better begin with the basics, I thought. “What are you wearing?”

  “Some clothes.”

  “That’s promising, Mom. Do you look like a bag lady today?”

  But it was impossible to get a rise out of her. “I don’t know,” she would say. “I don’t think in those terms.”

  And then, “How are you, Mom?”

  “I’m fine.” We all said that. My sister, Miriam, was throwing herself away on Methedrine addicts; my brother, Avram, only left his room to take laundry to Mom’s place, my mother had no activities she would admit to. When they asked me, I was fine, too, but I had the excuse of making bombs, something, I told myself, they didn’t want to know. I didn’t miss calling them for a long time, but now I remember our tones, how glad we were to hear from one another. I have had the urge to call, but I am still out of the habit, and I wonder if their phones are still being tapped.

  My mother was sixty-eight yesterday. She was born on July 20, 1919, at nine in the morning. Last night I was out with my friend Michael, and he didn’t know how old his mother was, or his father, even though he sees them every month or so. He does, however, know how they are. We were eating a pizza, and he said, “I don’t believe my mother. She went bicycling with my sisters, and she tried to ride no hands and fell down and broke her wrist.” He shook his head, and I nearly choked with envy, that he should be possessed of this little incident. He sent her a get-well card and a subscription to a magazine called New Woman.

  I met Michael at work. We are shift engineers at a Farm Services fertilizer plant, glamourless jobs in the chemical engineering world. When the recruiter came to campus during the last semester of my M.S., eight years ago, I was the only one who signed up for an interview, and the only woman, to boot. They didn’t look too deeply into my background. No security checks for “mud chemists.” Michael’s father and brother run a farm that’s been in the family for a hundred years, up north, and his uncle has the Farm Services coop in their town. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. From air and natural gas we make ammonia. The plant is seventeen years old, and what we do at work is check seams and tolerances and operational procedures, organize repair schedules, file reports about plant safety, and set an example of cleanliness, heed, and order for the production workers.

  Ammonia is poisonous. It should never get into the air, but it does. What we chat about is how you might jell it into long, inert strips, strips that a farmer could lay like rope in his furrows, then disk under. Strips that would contain cow manure and diatomaceous earth and alfalfa flakes, a whole meal for the soil. You’d b
uy it by the roll, like Christmas ribbon. Or you could sell, not ammonia, but ammonia-producing bacteria. The farmer would buy it in bags and spread it over the soil in the fall. With the cover and moisture of snowfall, the bacteria would go to work, and by spring the soil would be ammoniated. What we argue about is why the production workers don’t always follow safety procedures. This argument has moved into the realm of the personal and habitual. I always point out to Michael that he has the same complaint about his ex-wife and his children—they won’t follow instructions. He says of me that relying on explanations rather than discipline (“Threats!” I say. “Just call it threats!”) allows the workers too much leeway and is my refusal to take appropriate responsibility for things. There have been no accidents in six years and we have the best record of leak detection in the state. We make a good team.

  My father was an exterminator. He started out in the thirties, shooting rats with a .22. He died when I was twelve. He left my mother money enough to make it just possible for her to do nothing at all. His name was Sidney Stein. When I left New York after the bombings, I changed my name to Alexandra Day. I am still known as Sandy, though. I used to be Jewish, and now I am not. I used to be a New Yorker, and now I am a Missourian. I used to live an urban life, and now I live in the country. I used to be a history and political science major at Barnard, and now I am a chemical engineer, and I don’t open a book from one month to the next, unless it is some kind of manual. Michael started out as a theoretical physicist. He talks a lot about beauty. I don’t see a lot of beauty around me. But I think that the world is a serviceable and solid place.

  I could have told my grandfather about building bombs. His hero was Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist. For practical matters he accepted socialism, but the endless business of political meetings tormented him. He was an impatient man. When I was four, I picked all the tulips he had planted in front of his apartment in Brooklyn. I asked to have one; then, in a kind of greedy trance, I broke every crisp stem and made a bouquet. The tulips were pink and fragrant and I remember deliberately turning my back to him while I smelled them, then turning to face him. He was standing on the steps of the apartment building, and he looked down at me. He said, “You are a little capitalist, that you must have every one and leave nothing for the others?” Then he spit contemptuously into the areaway that led under the building to the trash cans. I didn’t dare throw down the flowers, though they embarrassed me now, or depreciate them in any way. Without him telling me, I knew that his trip to the flower shop, his digging of the holes, his addition of the fertilizer, his setting of the bulbs was what I had taken all for myself. The labor theory of value. I also knew what a capitalist was. I thought everybody did.

  How did Grandfather think of my father, who employed fifteen men and owned a building and seven trucks? I don’t really know. It is all very long ago. Trivia. My grandfather would have said that the life of the individual is trivial indeed. He used to rail against Freud, against novels, against hospitals and doctors, against paying too much attention to what you ate, and against talking about yourself. Glorifying the one over the many, he called it. Although he railed against religion, they had a minyan at his apartment when my father died, and he said kaddish. It was one of my father’s seven trucks that popped out of gear when he was standing behind it and pinned him against a wall, crushing him, and not quickly, to death. “Think! Do not work in restricted areas by yourself! Accidents can be avoided!” The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

  My mother, who two years from yesterday will be the age of my grandfather when he died an old man, was never Jewish. She was a singer with a jazz band during the Second World War. She had blond hair and sang with a guy who became Perry Como. She was from Asheville, North Carolina, and her mother and father had both died by the time she and the band got to New Jersey and New York. The story is very sketchy. It sounds to me now, as I think about it, that the trivia she didn’t like to talk about was her life. My grandmother thought she was too tall, didn’t know how to cook or dress, was eccentric. Our apartment was a mess. “So what does she do all day?” my grandmother would say. The eternal question. But they, and their cousins, were her only family. After my father died and then my grandfather, she lost touch with them, and had no one but Avie and Miriam and me. “Isn’t there anyone at all down south, Mom?” I would say. “No cousins? Don’t we have cousins down south?”

  “There must be, somewhere,” she would answer vaguely. “Everyone from around there is related.”

  • • •

  Now I’ve been talking a lot about those days, as if they were more important than these days, or than the days since, but they weren’t. For sheer happiness, things were best in Kansas. I lived with a guy for three years in a farmhouse on a hilltop. There was a windbreak of evergreens on the north side of the house, and the fields of wheat and sunflowers spread away for miles in every direction. I was studying Chem E., Scott was tending bar and playing in a band, we had three dogs and seven cats, and parties all the time. He had been to Vietnam and married, briefly. We agreed to forget the past, to make everything start all over. The oldest dog, a stray we got out of the pound, who was missing an ear and always snarled and snapped if you surprised him, was named Born Yesterday. We gardened and cooked and bought lots of records. We meditated twice a day and tried to overlook each other’s unusual behaviors. After a while, to conceal the silence between us, we started talking about “wordless communion.” That was the goal. It was soothing to think of. I liked my work. It got in everywhere—I would refer to the popcorn popper as a “popcorn containment building” or to the month of August as “zucchini detonation month” or our lovemaking as “the insertion of tab A into slot B.” Desperate bad jokes that Scott perceived as put-downs. He was killed on his motorcycle.

  I built more bombs than the FBI thinks I did. It’s funny what reminds me of them—clocks, of course. Penny wrappers in banks, because they are about the same color as dynamite paper was. Once I was putting up a new closet rod, and as my fingers wrapped around it, I felt a frisson of breath-catching uncertainty—closet rod is about the diameter and density of a stick of dynamite. Sometimes I am overcome with the conviction that there is something dangerous in the basement that I must get rid of, though I can’t think what it is.

  When I offered my services in the movement, I had been hanging around meetings and saying smart things for about a year. I knew how to go out to Jersey and buy dynamite at farm equipment stores. I dared to have a number eight blasting cap in my pocket, a piece of bravado that would not tempt me now, and when one of them said, “How would you cause a lot of damage to Ma Bell?” I said, “Twenty-five sticks of dynamite in the center of the building, between a couple of elevator shafts. You’d probably get the electrical system, too.” I pulled out the blasting cap and rolled it casually around my palm. He smiled. It was like a kiss. His name was Maury Nassiter, and he had a girl friend, a wispy Quaker. She thought he was exotic, but I had his number: he’d been raised about six blocks from my grandparents’ old building, and his cousin knew my aunt Tova. He was the handsomest man I have ever seen. Maury had either lost his manners, or never had any, because he wasn’t very nice to that pretty girl, whose name was Eileen Hobhouse, but he clung to her. He never made a pass at me, but I was special. I joked around. I tempted death. He treated me very respectfully, for a leftist.

  I used to watch him with Eileen, instructing her. She would turn the crank on the ditto machine and he would say things like, “The important thing in a relationship is the struggle aspect,” or “When the bosses have succeeded in forcing the worker to consume his own goods, then there’s a crash, and that’s the excuse for moving the means of production elsewhere. Do you see that?” Eileen would crank and nod. We ate communally. Maury would sit down to his bowl of rice and beans and hot sauce, and admire it for a moment, then say to Eileen, “Doesn’t this make you feel connected to the whole Third World?” To me, he would say, “Can I get it all in my backpack?” an
d I would say, “Mark should take half and go by the PATH train.” I heard that he bargained for a reduced charge, maybe in exchange for naming me, among others, but I was gone by that time, and Maury didn’t know who I’d become or where I was. Neither did anyone else.

  Last night Michael and I sat out in my garden. I think he was perplexed at how I kept questioning him about his mother. She drives a tractor, she has five daughters, she reads The New York Review of Books. He shifted around in his chair and said, “Stop looking at me like she’s some kind of phenomenon! She’s a woman who lives on a farm!” The images were wrong, which is why I kept asking for more. Nothing about her soothed me. Finally I said, “What does she cook? What’s the worst thing she cooks?”

  “Jesus,” he said. Then he leaned back in his chair and looked out into space. After a few minutes, he said, in a deep, and I think unconscious, voice, “The wheeling stars.” I smiled. I was crawling around between the rows in the garden, hands and knees, and slapping the dirt, just to feel the resistant give of the soil. The solidity of the earth was something I hadn’t experienced before I came here. Now I don’t know if I would rather see it from a distance—its curve and spread—or feel it, or smell it. There are people who eat it, I’ve heard. So I crawl around the garden, then I stand up and inhale and look, then I crawl around again. “I’m sorry,” Michael said. “What are you doing?”

  “Pulling weeds,” I said. That was sufficient. To a farm kid, pulling weeds is always an acceptable, and even ennobling, activity.

  He didn’t leave until one. Listening to Michael talk about his mother made mine seem very present, so present that to have picked up the receiver and dialed the numbers, to have overlooked the passage of fifteen years, seemed easy. But in New York it was already after two, and I didn’t have the first notion about where she was, or where Miriam and Avram were, or even whether they were still alive. I suppose that they know that I am still alive, by the presence of my face on every post office wall in the country, but maybe they don’t. Those displays have a way of going out of currency. Or if I died, or were captured, maybe it would get on the local news in New York. Others have. But they all stuck to the east coast or the west coast, went underground, tried again. I’m the only one who just left, who got to the dead center of the continent. Here’s something: when Kansas State sent for the transcript of my first two years of college, it just came. I explained the name change by alluding to a failed marriage, I searched my adviser’s face for some clue I had been discovered, I planned my getaway (to South Dakota). He nodded, the FBI never appeared, and I unpacked.