Golden Age Page 7
The miracle, Michael said, was the bwi dog. Not a big dog, not a little dog; brown with a black face.
The miracle, said Loretta, was that they got home at all. There was no public transportation by that time, they had to find their way across that isthmus—
And the dog led them every step of the way, said Michael, down a winding path, through the plants that were growing behind the beach—kassy, it was, prickly and tangled—and the dog just took them. It must have been three miles.
It seemed like a mile, but probably it was only a hundred yards, at least as the crow flies, said Loretta; if they’d been sober enough to look up rather than at their feet (Michael did fall down—not once, but twice), they would have seen that Dalla left the light on in the second-story window, they could have made it; and thank God they got there before the children woke up, it would have been such an embarrassment, their clothes all torn and covered with dirt and bits of plants; Michael had lost his shoes completely, though Loretta managed to carry hers—they were ruined, though.
No, said Michael, the miracle was the dog, a dog that gave himself to them, to lead them home, and then lay on the stoop for the rest of the night, even though, when Dalla got up with Chance, Tia, and Binky, she shooed him away.
And well she should, said Loretta, since there is rabies everywhere; we just don’t think about it. But the dog wouldn’t leave no matter what she did, so she couldn’t even take the children out for a swim in the pool. Dalla didn’t like the dog at all, and Loretta didn’t blame her. None of the adults got up until after lunch, and Michael, when he did get up, kept saying, “What happened, what happened, what happened,” and complaining like a broken record that his lower back and his shoulder hurt, until Loretta and Zeke sat him down and told him about the fall and the walk and the dog.
Then, Michael said, he went outside and found the dog and petted him and thanked him, and gave him a steak from the refrigerator, and the dog wandered away with the steak in his mouth, maybe to bury it. Everyone laughed, but Michael was changed; even he said so. He got sober, he let his mom talk to him about AA, he kicked out his latest girlfriend and put the place he’d bought for her in SoHo on the market so that he could buy a bigger place uptown where Loretta could live comfortably, and not like camping out. He would have remodeled the place in SoHo, but they had to be near the schools, and those were all uptown.
Loretta said, Well, finally, he scared himself enough to wake up, but I always knew he would.
What Michael said was, You get to the point where everyone has their hooks in you, not that they always want something, even if mostly they do, but they want to prove you’re wrong or you’re an asshole, or you’ve always been an asshole, and even if you have always been an asshole, you can’t let them prove it.
What Frank said was, If you don’t realize you’re an asshole around the time you’re thirty-seven, you never will.
What Andy said was, Well, we’ll see.
What Ivy said was, Everyone has always taken Michael too seriously; most of his rants and misadventures are jokes and stunts, and everyone like that goes too far once in a while. She could perfectly imagine the thing on the boat, Michael just making hay out of it all, waiting for the laugh and never getting one. Loretta’s sense of humor was about as big as the head of a pin, and, maybe because she was raised Catholic, she was really afraid of irreverence; no one blamed her for that, because she meant well, but she and Michael were a mismatch. But Ivy only said this to Richie, as they were pushing Leo in the stroller in Prospect Park.
Richie didn’t say anything.
—
ROSANNA HAD SPENT years regaling everyone who cared and who didn’t care with tales of the Langdon children; Minnie had always listened with interest, and sometimes wondered what her mother or father would have said of her. But she was seventy-one now, and Lois was sixty, and if there had been stories, they were lost. For that reason, she wrote down entries in a small diary about Felicity, who would soon be two—nothing lengthy or analytical, only notes about what she had said or done that she would give her someday, to go along with the pictures Jen and Jesse took. One thing she didn’t write down, but did think, was that this was the child she wished she had been—not good, not agreeable, like Guthrie and Perky, who were now seven and six—but intent. When Felicity talked, she talked to herself—if you entered the room or interrupted her, she zipped her lip and stared at you, and then, after you left, she would begin again, a dialogue with two or three parts. Twice Minnie had managed to write down some of the lines in her little book—“Please do sit down. Thank you very much. Once upon a time.” Minnie supposed that she was trying out phrases, maybe wondering what they meant or consigning them to memory. When she had to communicate, she was good for her age—precise and direct.
Jen had no complaints—Felicity ate well, slept well, was potty-trained, knew how to button her shirt, sat quietly in the shopping cart when they went to Hy-Vee—but she was not a cuddler. Jen seemed surprised that Felicity was restless in her lap and always climbed down after a moment or two. And Jen seemed disappointed that when she made a playful face, the kind that Guthrie or Perky at the same age would have laughed aloud at, Felicity only gazed at her, as if to say, What next? Jen would say, “She was born suspicious. I wonder where she gets that?” Minnie had an answer, but she never mentioned it.
Minnie’s pleasure was that Felicity would sit beside her on the sofa in the breezy, oak-paneled living room while Minnie crocheted or looked out the front window at the cornfield across the road, and she would pat Minnie on the leg, rhythmically. She would look into Minnie’s face while Minnie sang her a song—“Froggie went a courtin’, he did ride.” She made an “f” and an “o” sound with her lips. “Sword and a pistol by his side.” She made a little hissing sound. Her face had a studious expression. Minnie’s diagnosis, as a woman, former teacher, and former principal, was that Felicity was going to do things her way, and she thought that single-minded was the best strategy, even if you pleased few of the people not much of the time. Two, she thought, was the most ephemeral age, the age of incipient consciousness, when personality was first chinking into place. Felicity was her last chance to enjoy this, and so she did, day after day.
—
ANDY DIDN’T LIKE waking up facing the clock, because she didn’t want to know what time it was, for example, now, when it was one-fifty-nine. One-fifty-nine was too early, and as far as she could remember, she’d had no dreams, so maybe no REM sleep. Then, even though she was careful not to move, and did not roll over (she could still see the clock), Frank’s arms went around her and he kissed the back of her neck. She said, “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“I was awake. I was watching the snow. There’s enough of a moon that it sparkles.” Frank didn’t draw the curtains; his vision was still sharp, and he could make out constellations and passing satellites.
Andy turned over. Frank was solid and warm even though the room was cold. Now that they were sleeping together every night, she’d had to buy lighter bedclothes, and a mattress firm enough to support the weight of both of them in one spot. He slipped his hand around the small of her back and pulled her toward him. She put her leg over his. Frank ran his hand down her thigh and rested it, then jiggled himself so that they were even closer. Andy kissed him on the lips, but it wasn’t going to lead to lovemaking. A pleasure of being seventy was that comfort seemed more appealing than passion.
In the last year, he had won her. He had come to Sleeping Beauty and kissed her again and again, and each time, she had awakened another degree, sloughed off another layer of skepticism. It was a surprisingly painful process. In all the stories, the prince went away, sometimes for ten years, sometimes for a hundred years. All the princess had to do was mind her own business, and that was what Andy had been doing for thirty-five years now. Sometimes her business had been trivial, sometimes her business had been misguided, sometimes her business had been useful and informative, and quite often she had been
helped in her business by people who did and did not know they were helping her. But Frank, the prince, had been on the scene the whole time, and so she had put a layer on every time he grimaced, every time he left the room, every time he rolled his eyes, every time he looked around the restaurant or the theater or the parking lot or the airport as if he were searching for someone, known or unknown, who might save him from the troublemaking boys, the clingy girl, the unloved wife.
That night she had truly been sleepwalking. It wasn’t the first time. As a child she’d done it twice: Once out into the snow in January; Sven, who was only eight to her nine, had heard the door open, looked out the window, and told their parents. The other time, she was twelve—she walked into her parents’ room and lay down on the floor between their beds. They were sound asleep, and her father stepped on her when he got up in the morning. But no one delved into the book or the story or the nightmare that had produced the somnambulism. She had done it twice in this house, once to the kitchen, where she woke up sitting at the table; once to the car, where she woke up stretched out on the front seat, staring through the windshield. But Frank had known nothing about those incidents. And so she had been dreaming about something—she liked to think it was one of the children—and had gone into Frank’s room and inserted herself back into his life.
The result was that there was this time every day, between ten at night and eight in the morning, when they were alone, sleeping or talking, the lights out. They prepared by adjusting their pillows, straightening the covers, making sure the room was ventilated and cool. They coiled together; then Frank’s breaths started ruffling within a few minutes, while Andy thought blank thoughts—the names of islands or flowers or views she had seen of scenes that meant nothing to her, like a beach in Venezuela. Andy preferred dreams that made no sense and referred to nothing. By mutual consent, they did not talk about the boys, the girl, the collapsing investment in the farm, any beloved relatives who seemed to be effacing themselves from the world despite the kind attentions of a recently discovered grandson. In their room and their bed, they regretted nothing, recalled no missed opportunities, acknowledged no loss of beauty or grace. Sometimes, Frank told a joke: Did you hear the one about the guy who went to his doctor, and after a lengthy examination, the doctor said, “I’m sorry to inform you that you are very ill. You have six hours to live.” Andy laughed—she didn’t have to wait for the punch line. Frank kissed her on the forehead, and when she turned over and pressed her derriere against his crotch, he slipped his arm under her neck, along the line of the pillow. She put her hand in his. She could feel his warmth all along her back, animal comfort.
She fell asleep between “Oahu” and “Patmos” and woke up at seven-thirty-seven from a dream that she was trying to remove a box from the trunk of her car, which she had parked on the grassy shoulder of the Palisades Parkway. As she woke, she was turned toward Frank, who was looking upward, his profile as distinct and alluring as always. She gazed at him in the extra-bright, snow-whitened, Hudson River–inflected morning sunshine, and thought that these long, perfect nights were the best thing that had ever happened to her. But wasn’t it also true that they came over her faster and faster, warm, comforting waves that made everything that she got up for in the morning seem trivial and ephemeral? Perhaps, she thought, if you were happy half of every twenty-four-hour period, your punishment was that you sped toward the end of that happiness ever more quickly.
1991
JANET HAD MEANT to leave Fiona’s place in the morning and take the 101, because, even though the 5 was quicker, it was much more sinister, and she was not looking forward to hauling the two horses over the Pacheco Pass. She also hadn’t meant to have two horses in the trailer, but Fiona had led out this Quarter Horse/Icelandic mix, named Pesky, trotted him around, and had him take two carrots from Janet’s hand with utmost politeness; Janet had not been able to resist him. Fiona was straightforward about his soundness issues—an old tendon injury, a little osteo in the hocks—but he was fifteen years old. He was easygoing and petlike; Emily would not have to ride him to enjoy him. But she might ride him. Janet was taking him home on spec. And then there was a little bit of lunch, for horses and for riders, and so here she was, and the radio was on, the highway was desolate, and Iraq and Kuwait were about to be invaded.
Through habit and concentration, Janet thought, she’d trained herself to believe nothing. She was forty now, the Peoples Temple was years in the past, she could watch her one-time-adored Lucas play a lawyer every week on L.A. Law and feel only curiosity about how he was aging (well) and whether she might run into him in an upscale supermarket sometime (that would be fine). She saw through Reagan, she saw through Dukakis, she saw through Pat Robertson, she saw through Eugene McCarthy, though she’d written him in in the ’88 election. She saw through Freudianism, she saw through Jungianism, she saw through M. Scott Peck, and she saw through Joseph Campbell. She saw through money, though she used some of it on horses, some of it on Emily’s school, and some of it on their house (a Minnesota-ish house in strangely Minnesota-ish Palo Alto, California, spacious but not pretentious, exactly what Jared felt comfortable in). She was happy to be as far from her father and her mother and her fucking twin brothers as she could be (she had lobbied to move to Seattle, but that had gone nowhere—Jared didn’t think that computer animation had a future in Seattle). Emily was a worry, but now that Janet had Sunlight, her worries were divided, and if she found herself obsessing about Emily, she would consciously shift her attention to Sunlight; with the addition of Pesky, she would probably end up giving the child room to breathe.
And so, how was it that so well-trained a person as herself—also trained by Fiona, at these clinics she took Sunlight to—driving a Ford F-350, a person who was hauling the best horse trailer money could buy (made in Iowa!), was so nervous? Why did she keep looking to the north, to the east, to the west, in the Central Valley of California for telltale signs of an invasion by vengeful Iraqis? For a rain of bombs, not nuclear, but firebombs, say, or cluster bombs? How was it that a grown woman who laughed at the very mention of George Bush, the “president,” felt a fluttering anxiety every time the radio said the words “Saddam Hussein”?
For a year now, she had been taking lessons in how to be Fiona McCorkle, which was, indeed, what most people did who took lessons from Fiona, though no one else drove as far for just a weekend. The physical part was hard enough—even mature, overweight, and sun-bleached, Fiona had a grace that you couldn’t stop staring at. Her husband rode the big jumps, but Fiona put the miles on the younger horses and the badly trained horses that came to them from other stables. She rode four hours a day, and gave lessons three hours a day, and said that if Charlie Wickett ever came their way, she would be happy to meet him, but it seemed to Janet that she viewed him like a horse that had been in the stable for a while and then gone on to another owner. When Fiona was on a horse, any horse, she settled in, made only the slightest moves, and that horse conformed happily to Fiona’s intentions. Fiona said that her nervous system took over the horse’s nervous system, and the interchange was in the small of her back—if it remained flexible and alive, supported by her abdominal muscles, then the two of them could float here and there, at any gait, doing anything, and be happy. She offered no advice about any other part of Janet’s life; in fact, they didn’t talk, as most women did, about husbands, children, clothes, hair, politics, cooking, or books. They talked about horses, flexion, strength, forward motion, tendons, back muscles, bits, and theories of horseshoeing. Was Fiona happy with her husband? Did she have a big mortgage and money problems? Janet had no idea, and suspected that Fiona didn’t even know Jared’s name, though it was right there on the checks Janet wrote for lessons and horses.
She turned west on the 152. The gas station by the side of the road at Santa Nella, small as it was, looked bright and appealing, and she was sorry, again, that she had passed the 46 without turning left and heading to Paso Robles. You missed both pas
ses that way, but she never took the 46—it was even more barren than the 152, and added to that was the fact that James Dean had been killed there (only anonymous people had been killed on the 152). The reservoir shone flat and dark under the sky, and she started up the grade. She could feel the Ford exert itself. In the trailer, the horses would be spreading their hind legs, dropping their heads, shifting their weight forward. There wasn’t a moon, so when the Ford tilted upward she could see sprays of stars rising above the ridge, quiet and still, not at all like bombs or white phosphorus, something she didn’t have to know a thing about to imagine and fear. The radio was garbled now, a good thing, so she turned it off. The engine roared. She put down the window. The chill breeze blasted her face, and she wondered if believing nothing was a victory or a defeat, if it was evident in her looks, in her actions, if it led necessarily to suicide, and whether that was a bad thing? As her eyes adjusted, the stars got more numerous. Could you believe that the stars were millions and billions of light-years away, and also believe in life, in horses, in the importance of an odd-looking quadruped named Pesky?
As Janet now remembered, the Pacheco itself was less scary than the thought of it—the intimidating parts of the pass were the rough crags to either side, the roads that turned off the highway and crept over the ridges. People lived back there, and every day this was the easy part of their drive. The Ford was reassuring; plenty of gas, too, and it was big enough to steady the trailer on the descent. No Iraqi incoming. She knew she would joke about how rattled she’d been, and Jared would give her a little squeeze around the shoulders, and Emily would say, “Mom! Even I know that isn’t going to happen!”