Homeland and Other Stories, Page 3

  Blueprints

  THE SOUP BOWLS SLAM against the sink, she's being careless, and Lydia wonders how it would feel to break something important on purpose. The crockery set would qualify. It has matching parts: the bowls, a large tureen, and a ladle in the elongated shape of a water fowl, all handmade by a woman in Sacramento named Earth, who gave it to Whitman last year as a solstice present. Lydia likes the crockery well enough. That isn't the problem.

  "You sleep in the bathtub," she says to Whitman. "I'm sorry the light keeps you awake. But I'm not going to do my lesson plans in the bathroom."

  The bathroom is the only part of the cabin that is actually a separate room, with a door. Lydia is standing at the kitchen sink and Whitman is still at the dining table and they are not very far apart at all.

  "Last night you were up till eleven forty-five," he says.

  "So sleep with the blanket over your head," she tells him in a reasonable voice. "For God's sake, Whitman, give me a break. It's not like you have to get up early to milk cows."

  "I don't have to get up for any reason, you mean. And you do."

  "That's not what I mean." She's about to say, "I respect your work," but instead decides she will just stop talking. Men do it all the time, she reasons, and men run the world.

  What they told themselves last summer, when they moved from Sacramento to Blind Gap, was that the cabin would be romantic. Her mother pointed out that it's hard moving from a larger to a smaller place, that she and Hank did it once early in their marriage and the storage-space problem drove her insane. Lydia smiles into the dishwater, imagining her mother wild-haired and bug-eyed, stalking the house for a place to stash the punch bowl. Can this marriage be saved? Why, yes! By storage space. It's true, the Sacramento house had had plenty of it, closets gone to waste in fact, and bedrooms enough for an Indian tribe. But Whitman and Lydia had been living under the same roof for nine years and had reason to believe they were infinitely compatible. They figured they'd make it without closets.

  They aren't making it, though. The couple they were then seems impossible to Lydia now, a sort of hippie Barbie and Ken sharing a life of household chores in that big, rundown house. Her memories from Sacramento smell like salt-rising bread--they used to do such wholesome, complicated cooking: Whitman with his sleeves rolled up, gregarious in a way that never came easily to Lydia, kneading dough and giving his kindest advice on copper plumbing and boyfriend problems to the people who gravitated endlessly to their kitchen. But when the Whitman-doll was removed from that warm, crowded place he'd hardened like a rock. Lydia would give her teeth right now to know why. She dries her hands and spreads papers over the table to prepare her lessons for the next day. Whitman hasn't surrendered his corner of the table. He leans on his elbows and works a spoon in his hands as if preparing to bend it double, and it occurs to Lydia that she can't predict whether or not he'll destroy the spoon. Certainly he is capable of it. Whitman is large and bearded and given to lumberjack flannel, and people often say of him that he has capable hands. The kitchen table is one of his pieces. He builds furniture without the use of power tools, using wooden pegs instead of nails. People in Sacramento were crazy about this furniture, and Lydia expected it would sell well up here too, but she was wrong. In Blind Gap, people's tastes run more along the lines of velveteen and easy-care Formica. They drive the hour to Sacramento to make their purchases in places like the Bargain Heaven Direct-2-U Warehouse. Whitman has to pile his pieces onto the truck and make the same drive, to show them on consignment in the Country Home Gallery.

  David, the retriever, is pacing between the kitchen and bedroom areas. The click of his toenails on the wood floor is interrupted when he crosses the braided rug.

  "Pantry," Whitman says, and David flops down in the corner behind the wood stove, sounding like a bag of elbows hitting the floor. David responds to eleven different commands regarding places to lie down. The house in Sacramento had eleven usable rooms, and the dog would go to any one of them on command. He was nervous after the move, circling and sniffing the walls, until Whitman and Lydia reassigned the names to eleven different areas of the new place. Now he's happy. Dogs like to know exactly what's expected of them.

  Whitman is spinning the spoon on the table, some unconscious derivative of Spin the Bottle maybe. Or just annoyance. "We could just not talk to each other, that's always a good idea," says Lydia. "I heard about these two guys who lived in the same cabin and didn't talk to each other for fifty years. They painted a line down the middle."

  "It was sixty-three years," he says. "You got that out of the Guinness Book of Records. The guys were brothers."

  Whitman has an astonishing memory for details. Often he will draw out the plans for something he's building and then complete the whole piece without referring again to the blueprints. This talent once made Lydia go weak with admiration, but at this moment it doesn't. She looks up from her book, called Hands-On Learning, which is about teaching science to kids.

  "Sometimes I think you try not to hear what I'm saying."

  Whitman gets up and goes outside, leaving the spoon spinning on the table. When it stops, it's pointing at Lydia.

  The best part of her day is the walk home from school. From Blind Gap Junior High she takes a dirt road that passes through town, winds through a tunnel of hemlocks, and then follows Blind Creek up the mountain to their six acres. She could have used this in Sacramento--a time to clear her mind of the day's frustrations.

  Even at the stoplight, the dead center of Blind Gap, Lydia can hear birds. She inhales deeply. A daily hike like this would be a good tonic for some of her students too, most of whom are obliged to spend a couple of hours a day behaving like maniacs on the school bus. The area served by the school is large; there are probably no more than a dozen kids of junior-high age in Blind Gap itself. The town's main claim to fame is a Shell station and a grocery store with a front porch.

  She leaves town and walks through the hemlock forest, content to be among the mosses and beetles. "Bugs are our friends," Whitman says, mocking her, but Lydia feels this friendship in a more serious way than he imagines. The bugs, and the plants too, are all related to her in a complicated family tree that Lydia can describe in convincing detail. Back in college her friends were very concerned about the Existential Dilemma, and in the cafeteria would demand while forking up potatoes and peas, "Why are we here?" Lydia would say, "Because we're adapted for survival." The way she explained it, whatever ancestors were more dexterous and quick would live longer and reproduce more. Each generation got to be more like us, until here we were. "It's still going on," she would point out. "We're not the end of the line, you know." It all started with the blue-green algae, and if humans blew themselves off the map it would start all over again. Blue-green algae had been found growing on the inside of the nuclear reactors at San Onofre.

  When she told this to her ninth grade class they just stared at her. None of them had ever been to San Onofre. They were waiting for the part about apes turning into men, so that according to their parents' instructions they could stop listening. Lydia thinks this is a shame. Evolution is just a way of making sense of the world, which is something she figures most ninth graders could use.

  If they tell her to stop teaching evolution, she decides, she'll just call it something else. No one will be the wiser if she leaves out the part about ape-to-man. They couldn't seem to understand, ape-to-man was the least important part.

  On her way up the last hill Lydia stops at Verna Delmar's. Verna is a sturdy woman of indeterminate age who owns the farm next to theirs. She has chickens and gives Lydia a good price on eggs because, she says, she had this same arrangement with the couple who owned the six-acre place before Whitman and Lydia bought it. Lydia is curious about how those people got along in the little cabin, and is tempted to ask, but doesn't, because she's afraid of hearing something akin to a ghost story.

  Today Verna details a problem she's having with chicken mites, and then asks after Lydia
's garden and her husband's furniture business. Lydia tactfully doesn't correct Verna, but expects that eventually her neighbor will find out they aren't husband and wife. She has perpetuated this deception since their first conversation, when Verna asked how long they'd been married and Lydia, fearing the disapproval of her first acquaintance in Blind Gap, didn't lie outright but said they had "been together" for almost ten years, which was true. "We both turned thirty this year," she said.

  "Lots of kids been married and divorced two or three times before they're your age," Verna had said, and Lydia agreed that ten years was longer than most people they knew. In Sacramento their friends referred to Lydia and Whitman as an institution. Now the word makes Lydia think of a many-windowed building with deranged faces pressing at the glass.

  Whitman is building a bridge over Blind Creek, and she stops to watch him work. Their house is near the road, but the creek bank cuts steeply down from the shoulder, cutting off access to all the land on the left side of the road. Verna's farm has a front entrance bridge, but theirs doesn't; they have to continue on for a quarter mile to where the road passes over an old concrete bridge, then circle back by way of the orchard road at the back of their property. The new bridge will create a front entrance to their farm. Whitman is absorbed and doesn't see her. The design of the bridge is unusual, incorporating a big old sycamore. Lydia likes the tree, with its knotty white roots clutching at the creek boulders like giant, arthritic hands. He's left a square hole in the bridge for the tree trunk to pass through, with just enough room on the side for the truck to get by. She watches his hands and arms and feels he's someone she's never talked with or made love to. She has no idea how this happened.

  Whitman looks up. Possibly he did know she was watching. "Your friend Miss Busybody Delmar was up here earlier," he says.

  "I know, she mentioned it. She doesn't think it's a good idea to build the bridge that way. She says that old tree is due to come down."

  Whitman drives a nail too close to the end of a board and curses when it splits. Unlike his furniture construction, this project requires nails and a gasoline-powered table saw. "You tell her I admire her expertise in bridge building," he says. "Tell her I'd appreciate it if she would come up here and tell me how to build an end table."

  Lydia can feel her bones dissolving, a skeleton soaking in acid. "It's a real nice bridge, Whitman. I like the design."

  For the rest of the afternoon she tries to work on lesson plans so she won't keep him up late, but she can't concentrate on the families of the animal kingdom. She finishes the dishes she abandoned the night before. Whitman has gradually stopped doing housework, and Lydia has lost the energy to complain about it. For some reason she thinks of Whitman's mother. Lydia never met her, she has been dead a long time, but she wishes she could ask her what kind of little boy Whitman was. She used to imagine light brown curls, a woman's child, but now she pictures a tight-lipped boy waiting for his mother to guess where the hurt is and kiss it away. Whitman's story on his mother is that she was mistreated by his father, a Coast Guard man who eventually stopped coming home on leave. The martyred wife, the absent husband. Lydia's own mother is alive and well but equally martyred, in her way: the overly efficient, do-it-all-and-don't-complain type. Back when things were going well, when everybody was telling Whitman how evolved he was, the cliche of their parents' lives seemed like a quaint old photograph you'd hang on the wall. Now it's not so charming. Now it looks like one of those carnival take-your-picture setups with Lydia and Whitman's faces looking out through the holes. She realizes this with a physical shock, as if she's laid hands on a badly wired appliance. This is what's happened to them. They struck out so boldly as a couple, but the minute they lost their bearings they'd homed in on terra firma. It's frightening, she thinks, how when the going gets rough you fall back on whatever awful thing you grew up with.

  The mail brings in the usual odd assortment of catalogues: one with clever household items and one called "Ultimate Forester," which sells chainsaws and splitting mauls and handmade axes as expensive as diamond jewelry. Lydia hates the people who lived here before and calls them "Betty and Paul," for Betty Crocker and Paul Bunyan. There's also a catalogue for Lydia--Carolina Biological Supply--and some legal forms for Whitman. Of all things, he's changing his name: it's Walter Whitman Smith, and he's legally dropping the Walter, which he doesn't use anyway.

  Lydia can't relate. People often find Bogtree--her own last name--humorous, but growing up with it has planted in her imagination a wonderful cypress tree spreading its foliage over a swamp at the dawn of the world. She believes now she got this image from a James Weldon Johnson poem containing the line "Blacker than a hundred midnights down in a cypress swamp." Lydia was the kind of child who knew "bog" meant swamp. The poem was about the creation of the earth. "I've always been a Bogtree and always will, don't blame me," she says, whenever her mother hints about Lydia and Whitman getting married. She knows, of course, that she could keep her own name, but even so, being married would sooner or later make her Mrs. Smith, she suspects.

  Their old friends in Sacramento had gone through names like Kleenex. A woman she considered to be mainly Whitman's friend had christened herself Tofu, and actually named her children Maize, Amaranth, and Bean. In Lydia's opinion this was a bit much. "Aren't you kind of putting your own expectations on them?" she'd asked. "What if when they grow up they don't want to be vegetarians? What if your mother had named you Pot Roast?"

  Lydia remembers this conversation, she realizes, with unusual bitterness. Tofu had what was called an open marriage, which became so open that it more or less lost its clasp. Her husband Bernard, as far as anyone knew, was still up in Washington picking apples. One of Tofu's numerous affairs was with Whitman during their brief experiment with non-monogamy. There was much talk about the complexity of human nature and satisfying different needs, but in the end Lydia sat on the bed and downed nearly a bottle of peppermint schnapps, and when Whitman came home she met him at the door demanding to know how he could have sex with a person named after a vegetable product. Lydia thinks of this as the low point of their relationship, before now.

  Over dinner they argue about whether to drive into Sacramento for the weekend. They should be thinking about firewood, but Whitman complains that they never see their friends anymore.

  "Who'd have thought we'd survive without them," Lydia says, distressed at how much they sound like ninth graders. After so many years together it's as if they've suddenly used up all their words, like paper plates and cups, and are now using the last set over and over.

  "If you didn't like my friends why didn't you say so? Why didn't you have your own friends?" Whitman swallows his dinner without comment. It's a type of chili Lydia invented, based on garbanzo beans, and it hasn't turned out too well.

  "I don't know." She hesitates. "I don't think you ever understood how hard it was for me. All those people so absolutely sure they're right."

  "That's your interpretation."

  She tries salting her chili to see if this will help. Once Lydia was given a lecture on salt, the most insidious kind of poison, by a friend who'd come over for dinner. He would rather put Drano on his food, he said. She'd had half a mind to tell him to help himself, there was some under the sink.

  "Whitman, I'm just trying to tell you how I feel," she says.

  "Well you should have said how you felt back then."

  "And you should have told me you didn't want to move here. Before I applied for the job. You sure seemed hot on the idea at the time."

  Whitman scrapes his bowl. "It's only an hour. I didn't know we were going into seclusion."

  Lydia goes to check the refrigerator, coming back with some carrots she harvested that morning. "I don't make the rules," she says. "The way your pals glorify the backwoods life, don't you think it's interesting they've never come up here for a visit?"

  He picks up one of the carrots, its wilted tassel of leaves still attached, and bites off the tip. He looks
like Bugs Bunny and she wishes to God he would say, "What's up, Doc?" Instead he says, "We don't have room for them to stay with us here. They're just being considerate."

  Lydia laughs. As big as it was, the house in the city never seemed big enough for all the people passing through. Once for two months they put up a man named Father John and his "family," four women with seven children among them. They parked their school bus, in which they normally lived, in the backyard. The women did everything for Father John except drive the bus: they washed his clothes, bore his children, and cooked his meals in the bus on a wood stove with a blue mandala painted on it. They had to use their own stove because Lydia and Whitman couldn't guarantee the Karmic purity of their kitchen. At one time, in fact, Whitman and Lydia had been quite the carnivores, but Whitman didn't go into that. The people were friends of a friend and he didn't have the heart to throw them out until they got their bus fixed, which promised to be never. Lydia pitied the bedraggled women and tried to strike up cheery conversations about how pleasant it was that Whitman shared all the cooking and cleaning up. One night at dinner Lydia explained that she'd first fallen in love with Whitman because of his Beef Mongolian. Several members of Father John's family had to be excused.

  But it was true. Whitman had been a rarity in their circle, the jewel in the crown, and Lydia understands now that most of the women they knew were in love with him for more or less the same reason. Really, she thinks, they ought to see him now. The water-fowl crockery set, handmade by Earth, she's left sitting in the sink unwashed for days, as a sort of test. Not unexpectedly, Whitman failed. Without an audience the performance is pointless.

  On Saturday Lydia goes to see Verna. She carries two empty cartons which she'll bring back full of eggs. Verna's hens lay beautiful eggs: brown with maroon speckles and a red spot inside, where, as Verna puts it, the rooster leaves his John Henry. The food coop in Sacramento sold eggs like these for $2.50 a dozen, a price Lydia thought preposterous and still does. She once had a huge argument with one of their friends, a woman named Randy, who acted like fertile eggs were everything short of a cure for cancer. "The only difference between a dozen fertile eggs and a dozen regular ones is twelve sperms," Lydia had explained to her. "That's what you're paying the extra dollar-fifty for. It comes to around twelve cents per sperm."