Homeland and Other Stories, Page 4

  Later that same evening Randy had been in the kitchen helping Whitman make spaghetti, and Lydia overheard her complaining that she, Lydia, lacked imagination. Whitman had come to her defense, sort of. "Well, she's a science teacher," he said. "She probably knows what she's talking about."

  "Don't I know that," Randy said. "She even dresses like a schoolteacher."

  The next day Lydia had gone to the Salvation Army and bought some fashionably non-new clothes.

  She's surprised to find herself confiding in Verna about her problems with Whitman. Verna's kitchen has an extra refrigerator dedicated entirely to eggs, stacked carefully in boxes of straw. She listens to Lydia while she places eggs gently in cartons.

  "I guess we're just getting on each other's nerves," she says. "The house we had before was a lot bigger."

  Verna nods. They both know that isn't the problem. "Once you've got used to having more, it's hard to get by on less," she says.

  Lydia is amazed that Verna can handle so many eggs without getting nervous.

  On the way back she stops by the stone outbuilding Whitman has converted into his shop. It's lucky that his special kind of woodworking doesn't require electricity, although if the building were wired she could read out here at night without disturbing him. This strikes her as a provident idea, which she'll suggest when he's in a better mood.

  She stands well out of his way and watches him plane the surface of a walnut board. She loves the dark, rippled surface of the wood and the way it becomes something under his hands. He's working on a coffee table that's a replica of an Early American cobbler's bench. In the niches where shoemakers used to keep their tools and leather, people can put magazines and ashtrays. These tables are popular in the city, and Whitman has sold six or seven. As a rule he makes each one of his pieces a little different, but he no longer changes this design, explaining that you can't beat success.

  "I was talking to Verna this morning," Lydia says uneasily. "She thinks it's understandable that we'd have trouble living in such a small place." Whitman doesn't respond, but she continues. "She says we ought to forget the past, and pretend we're just starting out."

  "So Verna's a psychologist, on top of being a civil engineer."

  "She's my friend, Whitman. The only one I've got at the moment."

  "These country people are amazing, all experts on the human condition." His back is to Lydia, and as he pushes the plane over the board in steady, long strokes, she watches the definition of the muscles through his damp T-shirt. It's as if the muscles are slipping from one compartment to another in his back.

  "They don't knife each other in study hall," she says quietly. "Or take their neighbors hostage."

  Whitman speaks rhythmically as his body moves forward and back. "With enough space between them anybody can get along. We ought to know that."

  "There's more to it than that. They know what to expect from each other. It's not like that for our generation, that's our whole trouble. We've got to start from scratch."

  The plane continues to bite at the wood, spitting out little brown curls. Whitman makes no sound other than this.

  "I know it's not easy for you up here, Whitman. That everybody doesn't love you the way they did in Sacramento, but..." She intended to say, "I still do." But these are less than words, they're just sounds she's uttered probably three thousand times in their years together, and now they hang flat in the air before she's even completely thought them. It's going to take more than this, she thinks, more than talk, but she doesn't know what.

  "But this is where we are now," she says finally. "That's all. We're committed to the place, so we have to figure out a way to go on from here."

  "Fine, Lydia, forge ahead. It's easy for you, you always know exactly where you're headed." Every time he shoves the plane forward, a slice of wood curls out and drops to the floor, and she wonders if he's going to plane the board right down to nothing.

  The rain starts on Sunday night and doesn't let up all week. The old people in Blind Gap are saying it's because of those bomb tests, the weather is changing. It's too warm. If it were colder it would have been snow, rather than rain, and would come to no harm.

  After Tuesday, school is shut down for the week. So many bridges are out, the buses can't run. One of the bridges washed away in the flood is the new one Whitman built on their farm. Lydia sees now that Verna was right, the design was a mistake. The flood loosened the ground under the roots of the sycamore and pulled it down, taking the bridge with it. Whitman blames the tree, saying that if it had been smaller or more flexible it wouldn't have taken out the whole bridge. Lydia can see that his pride is badly damaged. He's trapped inside the house now, despondent, like a prisoner long past the memory of fresh air. The rain makes a constant noise on the roof, making even the sounds inside her skull seem to go dead.

  She wonders if everything would be all right if they could just scream at each other. Or cry. The first time she saw him cry was when David had parvo virus as a puppy and they expected him not to make it. Whitman sat up all night beside David's box on the kitchen floor, and when she found him the next morning asleep against the doorsill she told herself that, regardless of the fate of the puppy, this was the man she would be living with in her seventies. Forty years to go, she says aloud into the strange, sound-dead air. She can't begin to imagine it. Now Whitman doesn't even notice if David has food or water.

  As she pads around the cabin in wool socks and skirt and down vest, Lydia develops a bizarre fantasy that they are part of some severe religious order gone into mourning, observing the silence of monks. Industrious out of desperation, she freezes and cans the last of the produce from the garden, wondering how it is that this task has fallen to her. Their first week here they had spaded up the little plot behind the cabin, working happily, leaning on each other's shoulders to help dig the shovel in, planting their garden together. But by harvest time it's all hers. Now Whitman only comes into the kitchen to get his beer and get in the way, standing for minutes at a time with the refrigerator door open, staring at the shelves. The distraction annoys her. Lydia hasn't canned tomatoes before and needs to concentrate on the instructions written out by Verna.

  "It's cold enough, we don't have to refrigerate the state of California," she shouts above the roar of the rain, but feels sorry for him as he silently closes the refrigerator. She tries to be cheerful. "Maybe we ought to bring back the TV next time we go into the city. If Randy would give it back. Think she's hooked on the soaps by now?"

  "Probably couldn't get anything up here," he says. He stands at the windows and paces the floor, like David.

  "Bedroom," she commands, wishing Whitman would lie down too.

  On Monday it's a relief for both of them when school starts again. But the classroom smells depressingly of damp coats and mildew, and after nearly a week off, the kids are disoriented and wild. They don't remember things they learned before. Lydia tries to hold their attention with stories about animal behavior, not because it's part of the curriculum but because it was her subject in graduate school and she's now grasping at straws. She tells them about imprinting in ducks.

  "It's something like a blueprint for life," she explains. "This scientist named Konrad Lorenz discovered that right after they hatched the baby birds would imprint on whatever they saw. When he raised them himself, they imprinted on him and followed him around everywhere he went. Other scientists tried it with cats or beach balls or different shapes cut out of plastic and it always worked. And when the baby ducks grew up, they only wanted to mate with those exact things."

  The kids are interested. "That's too weird," one of them says, and for once they want to know why.

  "Well, I don't know. Nobody completely understands what's going on when this happens, but we understand the purpose of it. The animal's brain is set up so it can receive this special information that will be useful later on. Normally the first thing a baby duck sees would be an adult duck, right? So naturally that would be the type of thin
g it ought to grow up looking for. Even though it's less extreme, we know this kind of behavior happens in higher animals too." She knows she's losing her audience as she strays from ducks, but feels oddly compelled by the subject matter. "Most animals, when they're confused or under stress, will fall back on more familiar behavior patterns." As she speaks, Lydia has a sudden, potent vision of the entire Father John family, the downtrodden women at their mandala woodstove and the ratty-haired children and the sublime Father John himself. And standing behind him, all the generations of downtrodden women that issued him forth.

  A girl in the back speaks up. "How did the scientists get the ducks to, um, go back so they were normal?"

  "I'm sorry to say they didn't. It's a lifetime commitment." Lydia really is sorry for the experimental ducks. She has thought of this before.

  "So they go around wanting to make it with beach balls all the time?" one boy asks. Several of the boys laugh.

  Lydia shrugs. "That's right. All for the good of science."

  She wakes up furious, those women and ducks still on her mind. Instead of boiling the water for coffee and oatmeal, she goes to the sink and picks up the handmade soup tureen. "Do you like this bowl?" she asks Whitman, who is standing beside the bed buttoning his shirt.

  He looks at her, amazed. They haven't been asking lately for each other's opinions. "I don't know," he says.

  "You don't know," she says. "I don't either. I'm ambivalent, that's my whole problem." She holds it in front of her at arm's length, examining it. Then she lifts it to chin level, shuts her eyes, and lets it fall on the stone hearth. The noise is remarkable and seems to bear no relation to the hundreds of pieces of crockery now lying at her feet, cupped like begging palms, their edges as white and porous as bone. Lydia, who has never intentionally broken anything in her life, has the sudden feeling she's found a new career. She goes to the cabinet and finds the matching duckshaped ladle and flings it overhand against the opposite wall. It doesn't explode as she'd hoped, but cracks like a femur and falls in two pieces. David gets up and stands by the door, looking back over his shoulder, trembling a little. Whitman sits back down on the bed and stares, speechless and bewildered.

  "I never applied for this job I'm doing here," she says. "I don't know how I got into it, but I know how to get out." With shaky hands she stacks her papers into neat piles, closes her briefcase, and goes to work.

  The walk home from school is not pleasant. The mud sticks to her boots, making her feet heavy and her legs tired. Tonight she'll have a mess to clean up, and she'll have to talk to Whitman. But his silent apathy has infected her and she's begun to suspect that even screaming won't do it. Not talking, and not screaming; what's left but leaving? She can see why people scramble to get self-help books, the same way David falls over his own feet to be obedient. Things are so easy when someone else is in charge.

  She decides she's a ripe target for a book called How to Improvise a Love Affair That's Not Like the Failures You've Already Seen. That would sell a million, she thinks. Or How to Live with a Man After He's Stopped Talking.

  David runs down the hill to greet her as she passes the fence separating Verna's farm from theirs. "Come on, David, come on boy," she says, and because of the creek between them David is frantic, running back and forth along the bank. He raises his head suddenly, remembering, and takes off up the hill for the long way around by the orchard road.

  Farther up on the opposite bank she can see Whitman's table saw where he set it up above the wrecked bridge. He is salvaging what lumber he can, and cutting up the rest for firewood. At the moment the saw isn't running and Whitman isn't around. Then she sees him, halfway down the bank below the table saw. He is rolled up in such an odd position that she only recognizes him by his shirt. A hot numbness runs through her limbs, like nitrous oxide at the dentist's office, and she climbs and slides down the slick boulders of the creek bed opposite him. She can't get any closer because of the water, stil running high after the flood.

  "Whitman!" She screams his name and other things, she can't remember what. She can hardly hear her own voice over the roar of the water. When he does look up she sees that he isn't hurt. He says something she can't hear. It takes awhile for Lydia to understand that he's crying. Whitman is not dead, he's crying.

  "God, I thought you were dead," she yells, her hand on her chest, still catching her breath.

  Whitman says something, gesturing, and looks at her the way the kids in school do when she calls on them and they don't know the answer. She wants to comfort him, but there is a creek between them.

  "Hang on, I'm coming," she says. She begins to climb the bank, but Whitman is still saying something. She can only make out a few words: "Don't leave."

  She leans against the mossy face of a boulder, exhausted. "I have to go over there." She screams the words one at a time, punctuating them with exaggerated gestures. "Or you can come here. Or we can stay here and scream till we hyperventilate and fall in the river." She knows he isn't going to get the last part.

  "Don't dive into the river," he says, or "I'm not going to throw myself in the river," or something along those lines, spreading his arms in the charade of a swan dive and shaking his head "no." He indicates a horizontal circle: that he will come around to where she is. She should stay there. He seems embarrassed. He points both his hands toward Lydia, and then puts them flat on his chest.

  They are using a sign language unknown to humankind, making it up as they go along. She understands that this last gesture is important, and returns it.

  David, who had a head start, has already made it to the road. Risking peril without the slightest hesitation, he gallops down the slick creek bank to Lydia. Her mind is completely on Whitman, but she takes a few seconds to stroke David's side and feel the fast heartbeat under his ribs. It's a relief to share the uncomplicated affection that has passed between people and their dogs for thousands of years.

  Covered Bridges

  LAST SUMMER all of our friends were divorcing or having babies, as if these were the only two choices. It's silly, I know, but it started us thinking. From there our thoughts ran along a track that seemed to stop at every depot and have absolutely no final destination.

  "Then there's the whole question of how many," said my wife Lena from the bedroom while I was brushing my teeth. "If you have one, you almost have to have another one. People act like you're a criminal if you don't."

  The subject had threaded itself completely through our lives, like a snaking green vine through the boughs of a tree. If there was no formal introduction to the subject, if she didn't say "At work today..." or "You know, I was thinking..." then I knew it was this conversation we were having.

  I rinsed my toothbrush and hung it in the brass ring next to Lena's. "Isn't that getting the cart before the donkey?" I asked.

  "I suppose."

  I came into the bedroom, where she was sitting up in bed with a book. She took off her glasses. Lena is thirty-seven, and an amazing person to see. Every man in love believes his wife is beautiful, I know, but I also know that people look at Lena, and look again. She has long, very straight black hair with one lock of white streaming out like shooting stars above her high forehead. Every member of her mother's family has this forelock, which is controlled by a single dominant gene, but in Lena that gene has found its perfect resting place.

  "Whatever else there is to consider," she said, "we both have to agree, before going ahead with it. Either one of us has veto power."

  I assumed this meant that she was leaning toward, but that I was probably leaning against, and ought to speak up. Most of the men I knew thought of their children as something their wives had produced, nurtured, and given to the world like tomatoes grown for the market. With Lena it couldn't be this way.

  "I don't know what I think," I said. "I guess I've just assumed that if you really wanted children I'd have no right to object."

  She looked surprised. "If I wanted to do it solo, what's the point of being marr
ied? I could just use a turkey baster." Lena had a friend in St. Louis who had done just that.

  "I know," I said. "But it's hard for me to say what I really think."

  Lena's eyes are a very serious, oceanic shade of blue. "What do you really think?" she asked me.

  "Well. I have to admit the idea overwhelms me. To rock the boat, just when I feel like I've finally gotten my life arranged the right way." I considered this. "From what I can tell, it's not even like rocking the boat. It's like sinking the boat, and swimming for eighteen years."

  She started to say something, but didn't.

  "But I'm really not sure," I said. "I'll think about it some more."

  "Good." She kissed me and turned out the light.

  It seemed odd to have this question arise in my life now, when other men my age were beginning to groan about the price of college tuition. I couldn't remember a time in life when I'd ever clearly visualized my own progeny. Lena and I came together relatively late in the scheme of things, without the usual assumptions people have about starting a family and a life. We bought a two-story house in the maple shade of Convocation Street and assembled our collective belongings there, but as for a life, each of us already had one. I am nearly forty, and a professor of botany. Before I met Lena, three years ago, I devoted myself entirely to opening young minds onto the mysteries of xylem and phloem. I teach the other half of the chicken-and-egg story, the miracle of life that starts with pollen and ends with the astonishing, completed fact of a fruit.

  Also, I am a great gardener. Some would call it puttering, but I feel that I commune with nature in the tradition of many great thinkers: Thoreau, Whitman, Aristotle. My communion is simply more domestic. I receive inspiration from cauliflowers. I have always had friends among my colleagues, but never a soulmate. Back before Lena, I liked to think of myself as a congenial hermit in blue jeans and Nikes, a latter-day Gregor Mendel among his peas.