Sweet Talk (10 page)

“Once a week he comes over here to tell me how much he misses you,” Lila says. She is talking about Harvey. I truly am not interested, so I turn and open the cabinet to look at the purses. Each purse is covered with glass beads and, I see, each bead is faceted so that it gives off many pinpoints of light. “He thinks that you’re perfect,” Lila says. “He thinks you’re a nice cross between Susu, who is crazy, and me. I’m much too independent for just about everybody.” We have already established that in Harvey’s life Lila occurred briefly between the sculptress and the fruit-and-nut woman, and that she reentered it briefly during the Susu-and-me period. I truly do not care, I told her. I now look back on those months as a phase of temporary insanity that began with an accident in a parking lot.

“You can tell Harvey that I do not wish to be attractive to someone because of my characteristics as a hybrid.”

“You’re crazy, too,” Lila says. “You’re a dreamer, you don’t have any courage.”

“I’m not unhappy,” I say. “I’m fine.” All week long I have been working on the Janet Freeman Elementary School project, which may be the last elementary school built in California for a generation, now that the taxpayers have voted once again against education. This school will slide on Teflon joints during the earthquakes and will save all the children and the teachers.
“Besides, I’ve just met this writer. He only owns seven shirts and doesn’t have any other girlfriends. He leads a simple life.” Already I can imagine the two of us moving to the country. Lila leaves the room to refill the drinks, and I turn back to the purses, where there are beads giving off light of every color, amethyst light and rose light, gold and platinum light, the silver light of oat fields in early summer, the coppery light of rivers stirring with mud after a spring thaw. Each bead twinkles like an eye, and it seems to me that if you could get close enough to one it would be like looking into a pupil to see your own reflection, and in the background there would be trees and hills and bridges, each bead different, here a mountainscape in the Himalayas, tiny goats grazing below the snow line, there a tropical shore in Rarotonga, pink orchids strewn across the sand, and always in the foreground, the oval face of Angelina.

I
grew up in the Army. About the only kind of dove I ever saw was a dead dove resting small-boned upon a dinner plate. Even though we were Protestants and Bible readers, no one regarded the dove sentimentally as a symbol of peace—the bird who had flown back to Noah carrying the olive branch, as if to say, “The land is green again, come back to the land.” When I was thirteen, my family moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, only a few weeks before the dove-hunting season opened. My father, who liked to tinker with guns on weekends, sat down at the dining-room table one Saturday and unwrapped a metal device called the Lombreglia Self-Loader. The Self-Loader was a crimping mechanism that enabled a person to assemble shotgun ammunition at home. “Save Money and Earn Pleasure,” the box label said. “For the
Self-Reliant Sportsman Who Wants to Do the Job Right!”

“If you can learn to handle this,” my father said, “you can load my shells for me when the hunting season arrives.” He was addressing my brother, MacArthur, who was ten years old. We pulled up chairs to the table, while my mother and grandmother remained near the light of the kitchen door. My father delivered a little lecture on the percussive action of the firing pin as he set out the rest of the loading equipment—empty red cartridges, cardboard wads, brass caps, a bowl of gunpowder, and several bowls of lead shot. He spoke in his officer’s briefing-room voice—a voice that seemed to say, “This will be a difficult mission, soldier, but I know you are up to the mark.” MacArthur seemed to grow taller listening to that voice, his spine perfectly erect as he helped align the equipment in the center of the table. My father finished the lecture by explaining that the smallest-size shot was best for dove or quail, the medium size was best for duck or rabbit, and the largest size was best for goose or wild turkey.

“And which size shot is best for humans?” my grandmother said. She did not disapprove of guns, but she could rarely pass up a chance to say something sharp to my father. My grandmother was a member of the WCTU, and he was conducting this lesson in between sips of a scotch-and-soda.

“It depends,” my father said. “It depends on whether you want to eat the person afterward.”

“Well, ha, ha,” my grandmother said.

“It is a lot of work trying to prize small shot out of a large body,” my father said.

“Very funny,” my grandmother said.

My father turned to MacArthur and grew serious. “Never forget that a gun is always loaded.”

MacArthur nodded.

“And what else?” my father said to MacArthur.

“Never point a gun at someone unless you mean to kill him,” MacArthur said.

“Excuse me,” my mother said, moving near the table. “Are you sure all of this is quite safe?” Her hands wavered above the bowl of gunpowder.

“That’s right,” my grandmother said. “Couldn’t something blow up here?”

My father and MacArthur seemed to have been hoping for this question. They led us outside for a demonstration, MacArthur following behind my father with the bowl of powder and a box of matches. “Gunpowder is not like gasoline in a tank,” my father said. He tipped a line of powder onto the sidewalk.

“It’s not like wheat in a silo, either,” MacArthur said, handing the matches to my father.

“Everybody stand back,” my father said as he touched a match to the powder. It flared up with a hiss and gave off a stream of pungent smoke.

We watched the white smoke curl into the branches of our pecan tree, and then my grandmother said, “Well, it surely is a pleasure to learn that the house can burn down without blowing up.”

Even my father laughed. On the way back into the house, he grew magnanimous and said to me, “You can learn to load shells, too, you know.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “My destiny is with the baton.” I was practicing to be a majorette. It was the white tasseled boots I was after, and the pink lipstick. Years later, a woman friend, seeing a snapshot of me in the white-braided costume, a sort of paramilitary outfit with ruffles, said, “What a waste of your youth, what a corruption of your womanhood.” Today, when I contemplate my wasted youth and corrupted womanhood, I recall that when I left high school I went to college. When MacArthur left high school, he went to war.

It is nine years after the gunpowder lesson, and I am a graduate student teaching a section of freshman composition at a large university. On a bright June day, at the end of the school year, one of my students, a Vietnam veteran, offers to give me a present of a human ear. We are walking under a long row of trees after the last class of the term and moving into the dark, brilliant shadows of the trees, then again into the swimming light of the afternoon. We are two weeks short of the solstice, and the sun has never seemed so bright.
The student slides his book bag from his shoulder and says, “I would like to give you a present for the end of the course.”

Ahead of us, the plane trees are so uniformly spaced, so beautifully arched that they form a green arcaded cloister along the stone walk. A soft, easing wind passes through the boughs with the sound of falling water. “Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “But I’d like to give you an ear.”

Did he know that I came from a military family? Did he know that I had a nineteen-year-old brother in Vietnam? Did he know that my sense of the war derived largely from the color snapshots MacArthur had sent of happy young men posed before the Army’s largest movable artillery weapon, their boots heavy with red dust, the jungle rising like a green temple behind them? There were two things MacArthur asked me to send him during his thirteen-month tour—marinated artichoke hearts and Rolling Stones tapes. The only artichoke hearts I could find came in glass jars and were not permitted in the Army’s mailbags. The first Stones tapes I sent were washed away in a monsoon flood. I sent more tapes. These were stolen by an old man who wanted to sell them on the black market. I sent more Stones tapes. These MacArthur gave to a wounded boy who was being airlifted to a hospital in Tokyo.

It has been said that the war in Vietnam was so fully photographed that it was the one war we learned
the truth about. Which truth did we learn, and who learned it? One of the most famous pictures to come out of the war was the videotape of the South Vietnam chief of police firing a bullet into the head of a prisoner, a man who stood before the chief in shorts and a loose plaid shirt. He looked the chief in the eye, looked with fear and no hope, and was still looking with fear and no hope in that moment when he was already dead but had not yet fallen like a rag into the Saigon street. There were other memorable pictures like that. There were also ones like the picture of the blond, blue-eyed soldier, his head wrapped becomingly in a narrow bandage (“Just a flesh wound, sir”), reaching toward the camera as if to summon help for his wounded comrade. This photograph, with its depiction of handsome, capable, white middle-class goodwill, was so popular that it appeared in every major American news source and has been republished many times since, whenever a news agency wants to do a story on the Vietnam era.

That picture always reminds me of my student, a man in his late twenties who had served three tours of duty in Vietnam and was being put through college by the Army so that he could return to active duty as an officer—the student who stood before me pulling a canvas sack from his book bag on that dazzling June day at the end of my first year as a teacher.

“Don’t get me wrong,” the student said. “But I would like to give you an ear.”

“What would you want to do that for?”

“I want to give you a present. I want to give you something for the end of the course.” He withdrew his hand from the sack and opened it, palm up.

You probably have heard about the ears they brought back with them from Vietnam. You may have heard how the ears were carried in pouches or worn like necklaces, the lobes perforated so that they could be threaded on a leather thong. You may have heard that the ears looked like dried fruit, or like seashells, or like leaves curling beneath an oak tree. The mind will often make a metaphor when it cannot make anything else.

A human ear, though, still looks like a human ear. It is only after you have stared at it for a long while, at its curving ridges and shallow basins, that you begin to see: here is the dry bed of a wide river valley, here is the tiny village, the bright paddy, the water buffalo. Here is the world so green you could taste that greenness on your tongue even from an altitude of ten thousand feet in a jet bomber.

As the student and I looked at each other in the sunlight, two young women strolling along the walk separated in order to pass us—parted like river water moving around an island. They were laughing and did not notice what the student held in his hand. “So,” said one of the women, “my mother calls me back to say they had to put the poor dog to sleep, and you know what she says?” The student and I turned
to hear what the mother had said. “She says, ‘And you know, Anita, that dog’s mind was still good. He wasn’t even senile.’ ”

When the student turned back to me, he was smiling. “What a world,” he said. He extended his hand.

“Thank you,” I said. “But I do not want that present.”

We had begun to move again. I was walking slowly, trying to show with my easy pace that I was not afraid. Perhaps he was angry with me for something I had said in class. Perhaps he was on drugs.

“It’s okay,” he said, “I have lots more.”

“Really,” I said. “No, but thank you.”

“If you don’t want this one, I can give you a better one.” He reached into the bag again.

“How can you tell which is which?” I said calmly, as if I were inquiring about fishing lures or nuts and bolts or types of flower seed.

“I can tell,” he said. “I’ve got this one memorized. This one’s a girl.” The girl, he told me, was thirteen. At first, the men in his outfit had taken pity on her and given her food and cigarettes. Then they learned that she was the one who planted mines around their encampment in the night.

It took us a long time to cross the campus and shake hands and say good-bye. Two days later, the student left a bottle of vodka on my desk while I was out. Apparently he had been sincere in wanting to give me a present. I never saw the student again. I did not
see another war souvenir of that kind until after my brother returned from Vietnam.

The autumn we lived at Fort Sill, our family ate five hundred doves. There was a fifty-day dove season, a ten-dove limit each day. Every night, my mother brought the birds to the table in a different guise. They were baked and braised and broiled. They were basted and stuffed, olive-oiled and gravied. But there were too many of them, each tiny and heart-shaped, the breastbone prominent in outline even under a sauce. Finally, a platter of doves was set before us and MacArthur said, “I am now helping myself to a tuna casserole. There is cheese in this casserole, and some cracker crumbs.” He passed the platter to me. “And what are you having, Gemma?”