Homeland and Other Stories (5 page)

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.

L
AST 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 married? 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.

Lena is a specialist in toxicology and operates a poison hotline at the county hospital. People from all over the state call her in desperation when their children have consumed baby aspirin or a houseplant or what have you, and she helps them. It might sound morbid, but no one could be more full of the joy of life than Lena, even where her job is concerned. She is magnificent at parties. Her best story is about a Gila monster named Hilda, which served a brief term as the pet of the Norman Clinderback family. Hilda was an illegal gift from an uncle in Tucson, and crossed our nation in a fiberglass container of the type meant for transporting cats. The Gila monster, by all rights a stranger to this part of Indiana, is a highly poisonous lizard, but is thought by most experts to be too lazy to pose a threat to humans. The incident precipitating the call to my wife involved a July 4th pic
nic in which Hilda was teased beyond endurance with a piece of fried chicken. Hilda had a bite of Norm Junior's thumb instead.

Of course, the story ended happily. Lena wouldn't make light of someone else's grief, having suffered her own. Another thing that runs in her family, besides the white forelock, is a dire allergy to the stings of bees and wasps. In childhood she lost her sister. Suddenly and incomprehensibly this child passed over from life to death before Lena's eyes while they sat in the yard making clover necklaces. Lena could die by the same sword. Theoretically, any outdoor excursion that includes my wife could come to tragedy.

But it was this aspect of her life that led her into the study of toxic reactions, and it was through the poison hotline that we met. I called because I had gotten diatomaceous earth in my eye. I don't know exactly how it happened, whether I rubbed my eye while I was working with it, or if it was carried by a gust of wind—the powder is light. What I remember most clearly is Lena's voice over the phone, concerned and serious, as if there were nothing on earth more important to her than preventing my cornea from being scratched.

If things had gone another way, if I hadn't gathered the courage to call back the next week without the excuse of a poisoning, I might have become one of her stories. Instead, I became her husband. I called and explained to her what I'd been doing with diatomaceous earth, since I thought she might wonder. The name is poetic, but in fact this substance is a lethal insecticide. I was dusting it onto the leaves of my eggplants, which had suffered an attack of flea beetles and looked like they'd been pelleted with buckshot. I'm fond of eggplants, for aesthetic reasons as much as any other. “Really,” I said to Lena, my future wife, “could anyone ask for a more beautiful fruit?” Over the phone, her laughter sounded like a warm bath.

Our courtship was very much a vegetable affair. By way of thanks I invited her to see my garden, and to my amazement she
accepted. She had never grown vegetables herself, she said, and it impressed her to see familiar foods like cabbages rooted to the earth. I showed her how brussels sprouts grow, attached along the fat main stem like so many suckling pigs. She seemed to need to take in the textures of things, brushing her hands across velvety petals, even rubbing my shirt sleeve absently between her thumb and forefinger as if to divine the essence of a botanist. I promised to cook her an eggplant rollatini by the time of the summer solstice. But before the shortest night of the year I had already lain beside Lena, trembling, and confessed I'd never held anything I so treasured.

Lena says I was the first poison victim ever to call back, except in the case of repeat offenders. And to think I nearly didn't. A person could spend most of a lifetime in retrospective terror, thinking of all the things one nearly didn't do.

Diatomaceous earth, by the way, isn't dirt. It's a remarkable substance made up of the jagged silicon skeletons of thousands of tiny sea creatures. It feels to a human hand like talc, but to insects it's like rolling on broken bottles. It lacerates their skin so the vital juices leak out. This is a fearful way to die, I'm sure, but as I sprinkled the white powder around the leaves on that spring day I wasn't thinking about the insects. I was thinking of eggplants, heavy and purple-black in the midsummer sun. I believe that try as we might to see it differently, life nearly always comes down to choices like this. There is always a price. My elderly neighbor is fond of saying, as he stands at his mailbox riffling through the bright-colored junk mail: “If there's something on this earth that's really for free, I'd pay everything I got to know what it is.”

 

Lena thought that rather than just hypothesizing it might be a good idea for us actually to try out a baby for a weekend. The
more I thought about it, the more reasonable it seemed. In fact, I thought maybe it ought to be a requirement. In any event, our friends the MacElroys were happy to oblige us with their daughter Melinda. They offered to drop her off Friday evening, and head post-haste for Chicago.

MacElroy teaches zoology and has an office next to mine. Our college is small; the biology department is comprised solely of the two of us, one ambassador each from the plant and animal kingdoms. MacElroy came here from a state university, and thinks this is extremely amusing. Sometimes in the restroom he will stand at the next urinal and say, “Shall we convene a departmental meeting?”

What is not a joke, to the MacElroys, is that at the age of twenty months Melinda still doesn't walk. At first they were evasive, saying, “She's shy about walking.” This soon eroded into outright defensiveness, and from there they went the sad route of trying everything, from specialists in pediatric orthopedics to “Ask Dr. Gott.” All the tests that money can buy have been run on Melinda. The doctors all say the same thing: that she is fine, bonewise, and that every child has her own timetable. And still the MacElroys entertain nervous visions of Melinda packing her bags someday and crawling off to college.

Early on Friday afternoon, Lena called me from her office at Poison HQ. “What have you got for the rest of the day?” she asked.

“Office hours,” I said.

“What's the chance some student will drop in?”

“There's a chance,” I said. I looked around my desk and considered the odds. I have ferns and bromeliads in my office, a quietly carnivorous
Darlingtonia
, a terrarium full of the humid breath of mosses. I spend a good deal of time alone with them. “A meteor could strike the Science Building, too,” I said.

“I've traded shifts with Ursula so we can play hooky for the
afternoon.” Lena sounded breathless. “We might as well enjoy our last hours of freedom, before we take on the awesome responsibilities of a child,” she said. Less than ten minutes after hanging up the phone, she was honking the horn outside my office. We set out for the Covered Bridge Festival.

I should explain that this is not a festival in any normal sense, but a weekend during which the residents of southern Indiana drive about celebrating the fact that there are numerous covered bridges in the vicinity. One can enjoy them in any order. My own favorite is the one at Little Patoka, on the Eel River.

“One of the pros,” Lena said as she frowned slightly over the steering wheel, “is that our schedules are so flexible. I could always arrange my shift on the poison line around your classes.”

“Assuming your staff doesn't all have a crisis at once.”

“There will always be Ursula,” she said. Ursula was a good friend of Lena's, a widow in her sixties, and the only other member of the poison hotline team who had neither procreated nor cleaved from his or her spouse in the previous year.

“Think of it,” she said. “It's perfect. On the days you have evening classes, I could work days. The other days, I could work nights.”

“And when would we talk to each other?” I asked.

“On weekends. And whenever you've taken poison.”

Little Patoka is about half a mile from the river. We parked in town, where a small fair had been drummed up along the road running out from town toward the bridge. Against the backdrop of harvested fields and roadside tangles of poison ivy and goldenrod, tables were piled high with local produce: handwoven baskets and corn-husk dolls, clear jars of clover honey, giant pyramids of pumpkins. There was an outstanding display of locally grown vegetable oddities. One was labeled “Two-Headed Yolo Wonder Bell Pepper,” and really that is very much what it looked like.

As we walked away from town the tables began to keep their distance from one another, and were laden with more unexpected items—the efforts of people who had come from out of town. One young couple, who were selling jewelry, evidently traveled in a VW van to take advantage of occasions like this. They might have been expecting more from the Covered Bridge Festival. They seemed a long way from home, both in terms of geography and era. The woman had pale hair and eyebrows and wore a long skirt and a great deal of dangly jewelry. The man seemed estranged, sitting apart on a folding chair, concentrating on repairing the small silver mechanism of a necklace.

“I'm Earth,” the young woman said. “And this is Jacob. We're from Sacramento. This is really lovely country.” She seemed hungry to talk.

“It is,” Lena agreed.

“We see a lot of country, but what you have here is something special,” she told us. “I read auras. People are at peace here.” She stopped then, apparently arrested by the sight of my wife's face, and I wondered momentarily about auras. “Your eyes are exactly the color of lapis lazuli,” she said. As proof she held up to Lena's temple a smooth, blue oval that matched like a third eye.

I took the necklace when the young woman held it out to me. The stone had a rubbed, comforting feel. I couldn't help thinking that it was shaped very much like a prosthetic eye. For a long time I thought glass eyes were complete and spherical, like real ones, but they are not. I turned it over and read the tag on the back, which was marked with the number 45. This price startled me. There is some persistent part of my soul that expects the products of nature to be free of charge.