God and Jetfire (30 page)

Still lying in bed, I returned to Italy. I'd been reluctant to leave. I felt I'd started something there. A life I could love, even without Jevn, without my son. Or—with all of it, with their absences and all the complications. But time alone with Jonathan was precious, so I rolled out of bed and walked to the window. In the gray, wet warmth of early morning, he was pushing a wagon up the little lane, and then back down again.

I joined him, walked beside him, asked him how he was doing and whether he'd enjoyed his summer as much as I had. He was silent. Busy. He trudged slowly against the friction of the rough pavement, and it occurred to me he might prefer to be pushed. I felt full and happy, and I wouldn't let his seriousness intimidate me. I scooped him up and put him in the wagon. I was going to run behind him. Like a mother bird, I'd returned to him with good things I'd found far away; I wanted him to feel the wind and the dry, bumpy road beneath him, like the roads I'd run in San Venanzo. He was supposed to laugh! We were having fun! But as soon as he found himself sitting, he clasped the sides of the wagon and began to pull himself out. I stopped pushing. Gravely, he stepped over the side and returned to the back of the wagon, glancing up at me with suspicion.

I crumbled, ashamed of my sunburned skin, the Etruscan dust beneath my nails that had reawakened and revived me. While I basked in the sunset in Italy, he was here, amid the broken beginnings I'd left him. And now I was back, thinking everything should be okay, standing on the porch with banana bread. He looked at me narrowly, just like Jevn.

For the rest of the month, I visited my son after class and on weekends. Most of the time he was happy. He pronounced the words he knew like percussion.
Big!
he would say, emphatically, always in reference to a feat he'd just done or was about to do. Or as though introducing himself by a name that more fully described him. He would puff out his chest as he said it.
BIG!
And jump off the side of the couch. He would say it to get the attention of men he didn't know. Or standing tall above their Yorkshire terrier, the only thing smaller than he was.

But then sadness came suddenly, fully, and unpredictably. I'd recognize in his wrinkled forehead my own ancient and irrational sorrows. This was exactly when I would have been sent to my room, and that was where I wanted to go when I'd see it come over him. Jevn had given him a beautiful smile and a tall stature, but I'd given him clouds to overtake him without warning. And then I'd given him up and given him something to really be sad about. I wanted to hide from all of it. But Paula would grab him and pull him close and whisper something I couldn't hear. The words didn't seem to matter. What mattered was the closeness of her lips as they tangled in his earlobe. What mattered was the funny tickling, the feeling that someone was not so far away and not afraid. His eyes would explore the room as he listened, and the clouds, with the lightness and grace of water vapor, would dissipate.

*   *   *

I returned to Graham, to school, and to my final year. One afternoon, I got a call from a crisis pregnancy center where I'd left my name as a volunteer. Laura was four months pregnant and wanted to talk to a birth mother about adoption. When we met, I wanted to tell her, simply:
don't
. But then I also wanted to tell her,
do it, it will work out for the best, you have your whole future ahead of you. Everything is beautiful.
Then I would be able to watch, to see if I was right. She started taking steps. She found a few couples she liked and shared their profiles with me, but it seemed she wasn't looking very hard, if she really wanted to find someone. But then maybe she knew she didn't. I was there when her labor began, and for the delivery. And I was there when she wrapped her daughter in her arms in such a way as to make us all know what she would do. And made me wonder anew about my own strength.

I was denied internship credit for my summer abroad, and over the next few months I would find a hundred other ways to delay the delivery of my diploma. I couldn't think of a proper thesis topic, and when I was given one, I could not produce a proper building. One of my thesis advisers would pet herself nervously, from the side of her neck to her sternum, at my indecision, and another told me that my last name was a curse.

Graham began teaching me to play the mandolin, and for the last few weeks of school, we'd while away afternoons by the open windows, playing together. We practiced a fiddle tune for my sister's wedding; she'd returned from China, moved to Maryland, and found a husband, all within a year. It was a Bill Monroe tune, which, I later learned, had words, and those words warned women not to get married.

I spent the summer after my graduation at an internship practicing architecture to make up for my summer spent digging it up, and before I had my diploma in hand I was accepted to a graduate program in Philadelphia for the fall. As long as I never finished, as long as there was nothing with measurable dimensions, or clean rooflines made of materials as mundane as concrete and steel, then architecture could remain a beautiful mystery, and there was still a chance it was worth it.

 

TWENTY-FOUR

I packed a U-Haul and started driving. My cat rode atop boxes in the front seat beside me. I'd gotten her from some kids who'd found her, named her Scarlett Victoria, and were trying to get rid of her and her kittens on the corner in front of my apartment one morning. I told them I'd take whatever they couldn't get rid of by the afternoon, and she was all they had left. A mother cat without her kittens. Her long fur was gray and brown, more matted than plush, and she had one fang missing, so her jaw closed a little crooked, and her eyes were crooked to match. She was not a Scarlett Victoria. I renamed her Haystack. I petted her to comfort her, and Cincinnati disappeared in the distance.

As I drove, I undid all my doings there. Studying architecture, meeting Jevn. The amazing fortune of finding Paula and Erik, the only parents I could imagine for my son. Without them, my son might be surfing his hand out the window beside me. And Graham. Graham had found and chased me, scaled my apartment building wall, and ripped the groceries out of my hands and spilled them across the street and then chased me until my shoes fell off before I put it together that he was an alcoholic. But it was hard to let go, as the brokenness that drove him to drink was what drew me to him. Everything else was easy to leave, bittersweet; another landscape I'd loved and lost.

I bumped over the cattle guards, and the long, pocked farm road stood vertical before me. Sheep ignored me in the pastures along the sides, but the llama raised its long neck from within a dirty white cloud of them to watch me. I rose over the hump of a bridge my father had engineered to cross the creek for eternity. Beyond the crest of the hill was the house surrounded by tomato plants and bird feeders and grapevines and compost and tractors, assembled and not, and the cast iron dinner bell, mounted ten feet high on a metal post.

“Who's there?” my grandmother called from her recliner as I closed the door. I went over and bent down so she could lift an arm over me, a kind of hug.

“Good to see you, dear, come in. Sit down.”

Wheelchairs, old office chairs, once-nice living room chairs, folding chairs, all floated in aimless masses like lily pads in the brick sunroom. Grandpa came in from his work with dirty hands and pants held up by suspenders, said, “Well, hello,” and sat heavily on his chair, which was softened a little by a sheepskin rug. Sheepskin softened everything at the farm. Sheepskin on chairs, sheepskin for the dogs to lie on, sheepskins wrapped around the seat posts of the farm bikes instead of seats. Big, warm tomatoes were piled on the card tables beside giant cylinders of salt and knives of different shapes and sizes, rusty blades ground sharp enough for Grandpa to shave his arm hair off with them, as he would demonstrate with pride. Flies populated the walls and surfaces, and flyswatters, the old screen kind and new plastic ones, in different states of repair, were always within an arm's reach. Sheepdogs filled whatever space was left over.

Grandma was largely immobile, but she could put herself in her wheelchair to roll herself to the bathroom or to the computer, where she could forward good and bad and sometimes tasteless jokes to her family and friends, and she liked nothing more than a good story in return. From her recliner, she welcomed guests to sit and talk, and because her favorite topic was theology, often they were pastors or people from the church she could no longer get out of the house to attend. Whether theology or romantic dilemma, she would advise you to
broaden
your thinking. She'd grumble that phrase like faraway thunder, and she might roll into your shins in her wheelchair to show you how much she meant it. Sometimes she was blunt; she claimed she always said things with the best of intentions, but she couldn't be responsible for what happened after words left her mouth.

She was telling me about an e-mail she'd just read from one of her friends. “Some of my friends think that God has a body, but they also like George Bush!” She raised one eyebrow, glared at me, and relaxed it. “Love them anyway, even if they are totally mixed up.”

Her wardrobe was limited to a few giant dresses with wide straps but no sleeves, all of them cotton faded to lavender-gray and worn to silky softness. She'd had a hernia for fifty years she didn't think worth the money to fix, and her right shoulder continually fell out of its socket, so she'd learned to use her left hand to maneuver the computer mouse. Dirt collected in all the edges of that mouse as it sat in the sun on the card table or nested between articles from
The Washington Post
she was saving for you to read when you got there.

She didn't think I should be moving to Philadelphia. She didn't see why I needed another degree, much less one in
landscaping
.

“Landscape architecture,” I corrected her. My architecture history professor had told me that if I really wanted to understand architecture, I should start by studying the history of the garden. She told me not to worry about my accumulating student loans; they were a fact of modern life. I'd called Jevn, who was living in New York, to talk about the programs offered at different schools, and he'd helped me pick.

My grandmother speculated about how such a degree might help the homeless, which was what she had hoped my degree in architecture would do.

“I have a very unfavorable idea,” she said. “I wonder how it could be implemented. A park for the homeless.”

My grandpa breathed heavily, jaw half-open, eyes shut, head falling slightly back.

She continued, “A welcome atmosphere of benches which do not contain bars across the middle! Blankets to be borrowed and returned; comfortable seats to overlook the water. Maybe you wouldn't want to walk there after dark, but you ought to be home anyway.”

My uncle Mick came in and said hello; then he continued back to the kitchen to make lunch. He and my aunt lived a tenth of a mile up the driveway and took care of Grandma and Grandpa. Grandma could no longer get to the kitchen, her movements restricted for the past five years to the sunroom, which had been added on to the house by my grandfather. She had determined the size and shape of the room based on where she thought she would like to sit and what she would like to look at while sitting, for the rest of her life. She could see cars coming up the driveway, tomatoes growing right along the windows in wire cages. She could see people coming in the door. And she could put her washcloth over her eyes and see nothing, while she listened to books on tape.

She was probably sitting there when my sister told her about the adoption, and when she forgave me and called me to tell me so. She would begin sending e-mails to Paula and Erik from that seat, and she'd be sitting there when she finally met my son.

“A warm building containing cheap, nourishing food, at every park,” she continued. “Rice, noodles, beans sorts of things. But perhaps no fast food. Board games to be borrowed. A system of coupon payment in exchange for work done maintaining the park. Warm showers.”

Grandpa opened his eyes and oriented himself.

“Was that Mick's truck?—
Dammit
, Helen!”

Grandpa always thought that Grandma had interrupted him. From the angle of their chairs, he couldn't see that her mouth had always already been moving. Grandma ignored him and lowered her voice and her chin to capture my undivided attention.

“Have you ever been told about how I got your grandfather to marry me?”

Grandpa leaned forward and put a folded fifty dollars in my hand. “Get yourself an apartment in Philadelphia,” he said quietly, and leaned back. My grandmother's advice would be just as useful.

“I sat on him, when he was reclining on the settee, and pounded on him.” She opened her eyes wide. “And now we've been married sixty-nine years and have had four children, one of whom died at age fifty-three, and fourteen grandchildren all told. And a bunch of great-grandchildren, but I'm too befogged to count. So you see it was effective for me to sit on him and pound. Is there a suggestion here for you?” She dropped her chin, her gray eyebrows growing wild, her jowls hanging low. “Forget about graduate school! I suggest you go after a man, and get him to the altar, and let him think about it later at his convenience.”

“I'm going to landscape school, Grandma!” I said. Marriage and family were an infinity away. I couldn't possibly think about settling down and starting a family just three years after giving up Jonathan. Hadn't we all agreed I had a whole future in architecture ahead of me?

My uncle, slicing himself a tomato, weighed in. “Give me thirty thousand dollars; I can show you how to dig a hole and stick a tree in it.” Uncle Mick was a blacksmith and a mason and a farmer and an inventor. He was best friends with my father when they were kids. They spent summers taking junked cars apart; they'd saw off the roofs and throw a cupful of gasoline and a match inside to remove the paint and upholstery. They'd race those cars through the woods, ragged metal edges right at eye level, and they spent many afternoons tormenting my father's sister, who later became Mick's wife. He was always skeptical about my big ideas. Vegetarianism, architecture, landscaping.