Early Warning (47 page)

For a week after they came home, Ivy was annoyed with Richie for being too impressed with “life in the Old West.” She said that she'd half expected there to be a shootout, just for show, and she'd taken four showers to get the dust out of her skin. Anyway, what did it matter? Michael and Loretta were planning to live in New York, just like everyone else, so that Michael could get rich and Loretta could pursue her child-development degree. Everyone had a dramatic history. Ivy's own grandfather had been rescued, as a child, from a pogrom in Odessa, had passed through Ellis Island when he was eight, had his name translated from “Dov Grodno” to “Dave Gordon.” And hadn't Richie told her his mother's great-grandfather kept his crazy wife in a tiny little cellar with a trapdoor in the apple orchard, or something like that? Compared with all of this, servicing rentals was rather uninspiring. Or safe, said Ivy. Let's just be glad we're safe.

—

ON THE DAY
Claire filed her written petition for dissolution of marriage and paid her fee, she went from the courthouse to the grocery store, where she bought a chicken and some potatoes for supper. Then she drove home in the chilly dusk, thinking of her new place downtown—in fact, she had been a little late to the courthouse because she was walking around the apartment, enjoying how quiet it was, even during the day. When she got back to West Des Moines, she parked on the street—something she had never done before, because all of a sudden even the garage seemed claustrophobic, and she carried her bag up the walk—no snow yet. Her house—the house—looked like a picture, dark, shiny front door, square panes of light to either side, and an arch of light above. She climbed the three steps to the front stoop, wiped her shoes on the mat, and extended her hand toward the doorknob.

She glanced through the window. Gray, who was fourteen, was sitting on the third step of the staircase, reading a book. As she watched, he wiped his nose with the back of his hand, pushed up his glasses, and turned the page. There was a laugh—Brad's laugh—and here he came, stretched out on his back, sliding down the carpeted stairs. Just then, Claire had her Lot's-wife moment—knowing perfectly well that she should not, could not, look into the past, and yet having the occasion of doing so come upon her like a stroke of lightning. Her hand trembled as she opened the door, and tears came to her eyes. How could this happen, she wondered, after so much preparation? Was mere familiarity that potent?

The boys, of course, greeted her as they always did: Where were the last two Popsicles? Could she sign the note from the teacher right away, before it was forgotten? Did she buy any milk? She nodded, smiled, passed them. When she got to the kitchen, she thought it was only an illusion that Lot's wife was looking backward. Really, she was looking into the future, that strange city empty of herself, and she was thinking, I know nothing else but this.

Putting away the groceries, she did what she always did, which was imagine the boys talking about her someday—out of the blue, no reason of any kind, she must have gone crazy, or, alternatively, good riddance, we never liked her anyway, never understood why he
married her in the first place, females are only good for two things and I forget what the second one is. Her hands were still trembling as she smoothed butter over the skin of the chicken and set it in the roasting pan.

But then Paul gave her a wonderful gift. She had just scrubbed the potatoes and was peeling the first one. Brad had the refrigerator door open, and Gray had brought his book into the kitchen. He was saying, “What does this word mean?” and pointing, when the back door flew open and slammed against the wall. Everyone jumped. Paul stormed into the kitchen, yelling, “I ran over a bicycle! Brad, your bicycle was lying right in the driveway, and I ran right over it, and now the—”

Brad jumped away from the refrigerator and closed the door. His mouth had dropped open. Gray moved back toward the doorway to the dining room, ready to flee. Paul yelled, “God
damn
it!”

Claire said, “Are you still on top of the bicycle?”

“No, I am not, for God's sake! I backed off it.”

“Then no harm done.” She glanced at Brad. “Except to the bike.”

“It's dark! I don't know if there's no harm done. There could be oil or gas dripping out of the underside of the car. And the car damaged, too, for Chrissakes. It could be quite a dangerous situation. Not to mention—”

She said, “Why don't you not mention it?”

Brad started for the dining room, and Paul said, “Come back here, young man!” Claire dropped the peeler and the potato and stepped between Paul and Brad, who made it through the door. Paul's voice sharpened. “Did you hear me?”

“How could he not hear you? You sound like an air-raid siren.”

And then he gave it to her—he popped her right on the chin and knocked her down.

She was lucky she didn't whack the back of her head on the edge of the table; that was the first thing she thought. She landed sitting. Her neck hurt. Paul stood above her, and she saw his face, which was red with rage, become gradually infused with disbelief. And it was true that he had never hit her before. For Claire, though, there was nothing unbelievable about it. She knew that he had wanted to—that the kicking of a door or the smack of a fist on the table was only a substitute. It could be said, though she would never say it, that her change
of tone—a bit of sarcasm for the first time in their lives—had startled him and undone his last mote of self-control. She turned her head. The boys were frozen in the doorway. She said nothing. Paul said, “Your mother fell down.”

“You liar,” said Claire. It was possible that Gray and Brad had never seen an argument, because it was possible that Claire had never talked back. Claire shook her head, leaned forward, and helped herself up with the chair. Not even the desperate look on Paul's face aroused her pity, and that was how she knew that whatever love she had once felt for him had left no trace.

Finally, Paul said, “I'm s—”

Claire stood right in front of him and said, “I don't care.” Then, “Dinner will be ready in an hour.” She went back to peeling potatoes.

She served at six-thirty; the chicken was a little dry, the mashed potatoes were good, and cleanup was easy. At eight, they watched
Barney Miller
, and at nine, they watched
Soap.
Brad came in and out with questions about his homework, and at nine-thirty, he was told to go to bed. Gray was, Claire suspected, hiding out in his room. At ten, they watched the news, and then Paul stood up from his easy chair and said, “Well, I'm going to bed. I—” But she must have had a look on her face, so he stopped, and headed up the stairs. She turned off the TV. In the late-night quiet, she glanced around and decided that she hated every piece of furniture, and she was not going to take a single one with her to the apartment. What was that furniture called that those Perronis had in California? Oh, right, Mission style, of course. She would start there. Paul appeared at the bottom of the stairs. She looked at him. His first utterance would be a final test.

He said, irritably, “It's late. I have to be at the hospital by—”

How many times had he said that over the years? He was a very prompt man. But he had failed to pass the test. He had gone on with his life, with their lives, out of habit, not daring to recognize that all was changed.

She said, “I'm getting a divorce.”

He said, “I won't allow that.”

And then she simply laughed. She saw his fists clench, and she saw him notice and unclench them. She said, “I'll sleep on the couch tonight.”

“What will you tell the boys?” Now his lips twisted, and he looked as undecided as Claire had ever seen him, torn between remorse and rage.

“I'll tell them I slept on the couch.”

He stared at her, then turned away.

Little had she known what a pleasure it would turn out to be, telling the truth at last.

W
HEN JOE GOT
the flu after Christmas, he was in bed for a week, throwing up, lost in a fever of 103 or more, and waking at odd times from dreams about snow. And there was plenty of snow—Lois and Minnie let D'Ory and D'Onut in the house. After his fever was gone, he slept for another week, and when he finally woke up, on January 7, he had lost ten pounds and was as hungry as a hog. Lois thought this was funny, and made his favorite dishes for a few days; all in all, Joe was glad that he'd gotten sick in the middle of winter and that no one else came down with it. Apparently, Annie, who was home for a few days, oversaw the quarantine and would not under any circumstances let Lois go to the doctor and get some antibiotics, not even to be safe, because flu was a virus and that was that. She even called a couple of times after she went back to her job at a hospital in Milwaukee, to make sure that Lois wasn't “going for the cefaclor behind her back.”

“So bossy,” exclaimed Lois, but they all knew she was right.

When he managed to get himself into the Volkswagen and go into town for lunch, he was the only person in the Denby Café who wasn't up in arms about Carter's grain embargo. Marsh Whitehead had a paper with him, not
The Des Moines Register
or
The Usherton Post
, but
The Christian Science Monitor
, which had an article by two men from over in Kansas about why the embargo would fail. Joe read it over
while he was drinking his coffee and listening to all the other farmers bitching about it. Here they'd thought Carter—well, peanuts, what kind of a crop was that? But hadn't his sister ridden a tractor back in December of '77, two years ago, when those farmers protested? And Russ Pinckard said, “Well, I didn't see anyone from around here down there at Terrace Hill, driving their John Deeres over the lawn, did I?”

According to the article, you could tell by the thickness of tree rings how much rain there was in the course of a year, which Joe knew, and, furthermore, these rings went in a twelve-year cycle: for six years, the rings were fatter, which meant more rain, and then for the next six years, thinner rings, less rain. Those years when the Russkies needed more grain because of less rain were over, so there was no reason to think they needed to import much this year. In addition, indications were that they had plenty on hand, left over from '78, which they were hiding in brand-new and very enormous grain-storage facilities.

Joe looked up and said, “Why is he having a grain embargo anyway?”

“Oh, you were sick as a dog,” said Marie. “Lois told me all about it.”

“Well, I guess they invaded Afghanistan,” Russ Pinckard said, “wherever that is!”

“Kinda like us invading Mexico,” said Marsh Whitehead. “Piece I read said Carter should leave 'em alone, they're gonna regret it soon enough without us lifting a finger.”

George, who was manning the register, looked up, and Marie looked over at him. George almost never said anything, but now he said, “You think he wants them to call him a sissy all over again? Those folks in Iran pulled his pants down; now the Russkies are doing the same thing.” Everyone shut up at the reference to the Iran hostages—it was something like two months now. The women and some minorities had been released, but there were still fifty-two men stuck there. Forgetting about them had been another privilege of his illness.

“And we got to pay,” said Russ Pinckard. No one rose to the bait; everyone knew that Carter's response to the crisis was a ticklish issue. Russ looked at Joe. “You pay any attention to the markets lately? Surely you weren't that sick.”

Joe shrugged. “I thought it was the middle of winter.”

“Well,” said Marsh Whitehead, “don't have a heart attack when you do, because prices are way, way down. He suspended trading for a couple of days right after the embargo, but when they opened again, the price dropped as far as it could go, and it still hasn't recovered. Best thing I think we can do this year is—”

“Shut the place and take off for Florida,” said Russ Pinckard.

Everyone laughed, but not cheerfully.

Ricky Carson, who had just come in and sat himself at the counter, said, “That's where Dickie Dugan went. They got themselves a lemon grove down there by Tampa somewhere.”

At this, everyone fell silent again. Life surely was unfair if the Dugans were thriving.

A couple of weeks later, Reagan got in trouble for telling a joke that Joe thought was harmless enough—“How do you tell the Polish one at a cockfight? He's the one with the duck. How do you tell the Italian? He's the one who bets on the duck. How do you tell when the Mafia is there? The duck wins.” A lot of people went bananas, though no one at the Denby Café. In the New Hampshire debate, which Joe watched on television, Joe wasn't impressed by him until he got to the grain issue—when he said that Carter's move was “for domestic consumption and it actually hurt the American farmer more than the Soviet Union,” Joe had to agree, and then when he said that “there could be a confrontation down the road if they continue,” he had to agree with that, too. Of course, Reagan wasn't a serious candidate, but he was pleasant—what he said about Carter came out in a genial way, as if he were chatting in your living room or something. Yes, Carter did more or less dare the Russians to cross the Afghan border, and then when they took his dare, he didn't do a thing about it, and how could he? Maybe no one in Iowa, or in Washington, either, was quite sure where Afghanistan was. At any rate, the Russkies took Carter by surprise and everyone knew it.

Of course, this guy John Anderson stood right up to Reagan, and what he said was true—why were we afraid of the Soviets taking over Iran and Saudi Arabia? Well, if they did, where would the oil come from? But Reagan smiled—the camera caught this—as if he expected that sort of talk from a guy like Anderson. (And who had heard of Anderson? Not Joe.) But that was all they said about farming
issues. Mostly it was about taxes and inflation, whether the economy needed a little shock therapy, and whether the secretary of the treasury should be investigated. Not even much about Iran. None of this helped Joe decide what to plant when he had to go to the bank a few days later and apply for his loans to buy seed. The best rate he could get was 14 percent, and if the ships full of grain were already looking for places to store the corn, beans, wheat that had been intended for the Russians, maybe shutting down the farm for a year wasn't a bad idea. If he were rich, he would plant clover and plow it under in the fall, just stay out of the market altogether. When he said this to Minnie, she laughed as if he were joking, so he didn't dare say it to Lois. All he said to Lois was that God would provide, and of course she nodded, and even quoted a Bible verse, “Therefore they shall come and sing in the height of Zion, and shall flow together to the goodness of the Lord, for wheat, and for wine, and for oil, and for the young of the flock and of the herd: and their soul shall be as a watered garden; and they shall not sorrow any more at all.” Although Joe didn't often go to church with her, and didn't quite know what he believed, he found this verse comforting, and asked her to repeat it.

—

LILLIAN WAS
vacuuming. She liked vacuuming more than any other household task, and she had gone ahead and let the door-to-door salesman sell her the Kirby, not because she needed a new vacuum cleaner, but because she liked having two, one at each end of the house. Now she was pushing it under the bed. It was heavy, it was loud, it made her feel as though she were sucking every microbe out of the carpet and smashing it to atoms. When she bent down to push it farther under the bed, she realized that the phone was ringing in her ear. She turned off the vacuum cleaner, worried instantly that someone was calling about Arthur.

But the caller was Janet, long-distance, from Iowa. Lillian looked at the alarm clock. It was only eight there. She said, “Hi, honey, everything okay?”

Janet sniffled.

Lillian sat down on the bed. She said, “How's Emily?”

“Fine.”

“How's Jared? Are you okay?”

“I'm okay. Jared had to stay at work all night to send some file to somewhere. He's okay.” Then she said, in a low voice, “I've been up all night, worrying that there is going to be a nuclear war.”

Lillian said, “You have?”

“Well, and so I've done this thing.”

Lillian felt a jolt of real fear. She said, “What thing?”

“Is Uncle Arthur there?”

“He went to work already.” Arthur was going to retire very, very soon, unless he could persuade them to keep him on against everyone's better judgment.

“Does Uncle Arthur think there is going to be a nuclear war?”

“No, he hasn't mentioned it. But what would cause it?”

“The Iranians.”

“But tell me what thing you've done?”

Janet started crying. In the two and a half years since Janet escaped those Temple people, Lillian had been thinking something was going to happen. She and Eloise had talked it over a dozen times. Eloise was more sanguine, especially since this young woman Marla someone had turned up not dead, but first in Paris, and now working in New York, at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Janet seemed to have moved on pretty well; Jared was a straightforward, kind person; Emily had had an amazing effect on Andy, who had then warmed up to Janet—they got along like sisters now. But Lillian trusted nothing, and believed far more than Andy and Eloise that underground poisons could surface unexpectedly. She shifted her position on the bed and adjusted her bra. Janet said, “I keep looking out the window. We have this window that faces west, and I keep looking out the window and imagining a mushroom cloud.”

“Why west?” said Lillian.

“Des Moines.”

“You are living in Solon, Iowa, and you worry there's going to be a nuclear explosion in Des Moines?”

“The prevailing winds are westerlies.”

Lillian didn't dare to smile, even though they were only talking on the phone. She said, “Who is going to bomb us?”

“The Iranians.”

“Oh yes, so you said…but the Iranians don't have the Bomb.”

Silence.

Lillian said, “Did you talk to your mom about this?”

“She said she wouldn't be surprised.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” said Lillian. “That is just like Andy.”

“She said I used to have nightmares about nuclear war.”

“I never knew that.”

“I didn't have them at your house.”

“Oh, sweetie.”

There was a pause. Janet said, in a lighter tone, “She thought it was a sign that I was precocious.”

They both chuckled.

Lillian said, “In 1961, you were right to be worried. Not so much anymore.”

“But I can't get it out of my mind. I look at Emily walking around, and I am just terrified something will happen.”

Lillian thought of giving her a list of terrible things that were more likely to happen, but refrained. Instead, she said, “Ask your dad about the time he went to Iran.” Lillian had gotten to the point in her life where she would talk about almost anything.

Janet said, “What?”

“Arthur sent him. There was disagreement about…” She should not have started this. “I think you were three? Anyway—”

“When I was three was when the U.S. reinstalled the Shah and overthrew the democratic election of Mossadegh.”

Of course, Lillian thought, Janet would know this. Not Debbie or Dean or Tina or 90 percent of the American population. Ninety-five, maybe. She adjusted her bra again, then said, “Mossadegh was courting the Soviets. We really couldn't take the chance. I could see it at the time. When Frank first came home from the war, he said that the Russians defied the law of probabilities—anything was possible. Arthur seemed to…” Her words trailed off.

“What did my dad do there?”