This is Just Exactly Like You (16 page)

He meets Beth this way: At a party, cheap can beer on ice in a plastic tub, somebody out on the sidewalk grilling chicken legs and corn on a big red kettle grill propped up on cinder blocks. He half-knew who she was already, had seen her at TA orientations. Sharp chin, green eyes. Art History. She was one of a gang of grad students who all lived on the same street, rented from the same landlord, haphazard apartments cut three and four and five at a time into a handful of slouching Victorians. They had cookouts a few times a year for all comers. She walked up to him at the party, said, “I’m Beth. I know you from somewhere. Do you need a dog?”

“I can’t,” he told her. “I’ve already got one.” The first week he was in Chapel Hill: Registered for classes, got a dog from the pound.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Jack.”

“Right. I thought I knew you. Are you sure you don’t want another one? Another dog?” Her lip was sweating. Her hair was tied up in something. She had barbecue sauce on her shirt. He liked all of that. “Tanya’s dog had puppies.”

“Who’s Tanya?”

“She lives down the street. French Lit. Not my thing, but she’s pretty into it.”

“I can’t get another one, I don’t think. Yul Brynner would be pissed.”

“Isn’t he dead?”

“Is he? Kojak?”

“That’s Telly Savalas,” she said. “Isn’t it?” Telly Savalas. It came down on him. An historical blunder: He’d named the damn dog after the wrong bald guy. Too late now. She leaned over, did something to her sandal. “Anyway,” she said. “That’s your dog’s name? Yul Brynner?”

“He’s got a big scar on his forehead,” Jack said.

“That,” she said, “is excellent.”

Deep into the party somebody produced a wooden baseball bat, and they drew bases in the street with chalk, played baseball with the leftover ears of corn. If somebody hit it just right, the thing would disintegrate in a spray of kernels and husk. When the police drove by they’d apologize, get out of the street, wait a few minutes, start over.

He meets her again at the yearly Halloween party the art department throws. It’s famous. There’s plastic taped to the floor, wall to wall. People come dressed as historical figures, as time periods, as abstract ideas. Beth comes as someone’s inner child. Little red polka-dot dress, braids, roller skates. She skates through the door, hits a threshold between the kitchen and the living room, falls, hits her head on the floor and knocks herself out. Jack’s one of the ones who picks her up, puts her in a bedroom, unlaces her skates. He goes for ice, and by the time he gets back she’s awake, holding her head, crying a little, laughing. “Thank you,” she says.

“You’re welcome.”

“What are you dressed as?” she asks him, taking the ice.

He’s glued flags and rocks to a torn windbreaker he found at the Goodwill. He’s carrying a Molotov cocktail that he’s using as a real cocktail, is drinking out of it. “Sectarian Violence,” he says. He’s proud of it.

Easy enough after that. Dinners at her place, mostly, a green garage apartment behind one of the Victorians, a tiny, rickety deck off the back of it. And they take the dogs to the lake: Yul Brynner, who she loves immediately, and Austria, hers, an ancient German Shepherd. White around the muzzle and all the way back to her ears. Yul Brynner will run off, disappear for half an hour at a time. Aus stays glued to Beth.
You don’t worry when he’s gone like that?
she asks him. Jack says he’s gotten used to it, but he worries every time.
Why art history?
he wants to know, over glasses of wine, over chicken casserole, over coffee in the mornings.
I don’t know
, she tells him.
I just love it. I don’t think I could imagine doing anything else.
Jack’s been starting to worry that he might not feel that way about his own work: He likes history in his own way, likes the Viaduct still, but he’s half-ready to admit to himself that all that’s mainly owing to the fact that he’s good at it. That it’s maybe more like a hobby for him. He’s not sure any more that he loves it the way his classmates seem to, knows he’s probably supposed to. He can imagine doing something else. He just doesn’t have any idea what that might be.

Beth is steady, she’s funny, she’s not crazy. He’s comfortable. He’s happy. Austria dies, thirteen years old, and they bury her at the lake. Jack moves into the garage apartment. They get married in her parents’ back yard in Knoxville. Dr. Dunst gives them a first edition
Rivers, Aquifers and Watersheds of the Southern Appalachians
, leather-bound.

Beth finishes her dissertation and applies for a job at Kinnett that fall
just to see what happens
, because
it’d be perfect for a couple of years. You could still drive in to Chapel Hill. We’d have enough money to live. You’ll finish up and we’ll both apply for jobs for real.
They didn’t think she’d get it, and then she did. Burlington, North Carolina. Maybe forty-five minutes west of Chapel Hill, an old mill town, dying since the early eighties because all the socks and pillowcases get made in China now. And Kinnett’s not even in Burlington. It’s in Kinnett College, North Carolina, which sits right next to Burlington. There’s a town hall and a fire station and a little run of storefronts, all owned by the college. And there is the college itself, immaculately landscaped— botanical labels on every tree, flower gardens anywhere possible. Beth scores Jack an adjunct gig and they move, rent a plain brick box of a house on the west side of Burlington, close enough to bike to campus. A couple of miles. Beth is the second of two art historians. Rena’s the other one, and they’re joined at the hip right from the start. Rena invites them over for dinner, and soon enough it’s every couple of weeks all fall, all year, all the time. Rena and Beth and Jack and Rena’s boyfriend, Canavan. They sit up late into the night yelling at each other about Kinnett politics and general politics and eventually Canavan the tree surgeon will work himself toward some kind of proclamation about whether or not Bradford Pears are too fragile for landscaping, or about how to cure green wood. It becomes, simply enough, a life.

Jack teaches the freshman core classes. It’s easy, teaching—at least the rhythm of it is, comfortable, back to work in the fall, summer vacation right as you get too tired to do it one more day. And he likes the crazy GenHum courses, basically the history of everything. Art and culture and geopolitics. What amounts to an excuse to roll in there and go for an hour and a half about whatever’s happening in the world. Floods. Gaza. High-fructose corn syrup. He gets approval from Chapel Hill to postpone his dissertation hours. He has six years, they tell him. Finish when you want to. Dunst tells him it’s a solid first job, says it’ll be good for him.
Take it where you can get it, Lang, believe you me. Write your bridge book when they fire you.
By now he’s fully afraid he’ll never write his bridge book, that he might not have it in him. So he takes it where he can get it. He teaches.

The year Beth is pregnant with Hendrick he starts going to Rookie League Burlington Indians games with Canavan. He’s a little in love with Canavan, because they all are, and for Jack it’s because Canavan’s plenty smart enough, but has no real time for all the bullshit that comes with being smart. At least not how it goes over at The College, anyway. That’s what Canavan calls it.
The College. Now I don’t know how y’all would do it over at The College,
he says, and then he’ll go on to explain how
half of them over there wouldn’t even know how to fire up their own weedeaters without some kind of panel discussion on the ontology of the string pull.
Canavan’s probably the only person Jack knows well outside of school, outside of the academy, someone who never says
pedagogy
or
learning strategies
or
goals and objectives
. He’s someone who just wants to go to ball games with him. Rena and Beth come along once or twice, but it’s mainly Jack and Canavan, cheap beer, cheap hotdogs, bad baseball. Games end up 12–10. Errors everywhere. Most games, a woman who’s got season tickets right above the visiting dugout gets up and sings along with “Green Acres” when they play it over the loudspeakers. Top of her lungs. The visiting team looks up at her and stares. The crowd cheers while she belts it out:
Darling I love you but give me Park Avenue.
Jack and Canavan give her a standing ovation every time.

When Hendrick is born, it’s Rena and Canavan who come to the hospital in Greensboro, who are the first people who aren’t Jack’s parents or Beth’s mother to see Beth. No one sees the baby, not yet. He’s four weeks premature, is whisked off to the ICU immediately, the doctors serious and frowning but saying
Don’t worry, it’s just a precaution, we’ll bring him back, we’ll bring him right back.
It is hours before they bring him back, and when they do, he’s in a little glass case, tubes running into and out of it.
He had some trouble breathing, but he’s doing fine now, breathing on his own.
In his glass case, Hen looks like something from a museum, or something for sale—a leg of lamb, a bolt of cloth. His hands and feet are blue, and this is what Jack focuses on, keeps asking the nurses if his hands will be that way forever.
That’s perfectly normal
, they tell him. The more honest ones say
It’s really nothing to be concerned about, this sometimes happens, he should be better later tonight or tomorrow.
Rena and Canavan wait until the doctors say they can come back to see the baby, see Hendrick, named for Beth’s grandmother, her maiden name. They tell Beth he’s beautiful. Jack realizes as Rena says it that he hasn’t said it yet, apologizes again and again after they’re gone.
I just forgot. I’m sorry. In all of that, I forgot.

Rena and Canavan are also the first people who aren’t Jack’s parents or Beth’s mom to come to the house after Hendrick comes home. They arrive with groceries, cook the meal, clean up when they’re finished. Jack has not once in his life imagined that he could be this tired, that he could feel like this and still walk through his day. The four of them sit quietly in the living room, watch Hendrick sleep on a blanket on the sofa. It’s mid-August. School starts in two weeks and Beth’s off for the semester, maternity leave. Jack can’t quite conceive of going back to school, but in a way, he needs it, needs something predictable in his life. Lectures, papers, tests. A knowable pattern.

In the evenings, he’ll go in there and watch Hen sleep. He can’t wrap his head around the notion of having another person in the house. They have
made
him. Three years ago he was standing on a porch in Chapel Hill drinking beers with sixteen other grad students. Now he’s a
father
, for Christ’s sake. The two mandatory parenting classes at the hospital were nowhere near enough. Don’t shake the baby. Don’t bathe him in scalding water. OK. But then what? Does he start saving all his quarters to pay for college? Is the house big enough? Do they have enough rooms? What do babies eat once they stop nursing? He stands in the baby food aisle at the grocery and looks at all the jars lined up like paint chips. Peas and Carrots. Prunes. Pears. Right next to all that, the diapers. He puts Hendrick in the papoose carrier and leashes up Yul Brynner and walks them both around the neighborhood, explaining what he knows to Hendrick, suburban sprawl and watersheds and cul-desacs and bridges and why kitchens in postwar homes are so tiny, how we thought we’d never cook again, how everything would come frozen, how we had defeated food.

All fall, Canavan comes over with burgers to throw on the grill, and he and Jack watch the end of the baseball season, the playoffs, the World Series. Hendrick, two months old, three, generally falls asleep for good by the second inning, either in his little motorized swing or in a folding crib Jack keeps behind the sofa. Beth gets to go to bed, and Jack does the night feeding. Hen’s already, for the most part, sleeping through the night. Jack and Canavan cheer for both teams, cheer for the Series to run on longer, talk about the infield fly rule, four-seam fastballs, the Texas steal. About the women in Jack’s classes, about how Canavan drives through the college between tree jobs just to see the girls walking the sidewalks. Every other weekend or so, the four of them—the
five
of them—have dinner. Jack’s classes go fine. Hendrick slowly catches up to most of the benchmarks in the baby books. Eye contact. Smiles when talked to. Responds to his name. Jack turns in his grades and he and Beth get their spring schedules worked out to where she’ll teach mornings, he’ll teach afternoons. Someone always home with Hen. No day care. They can’t afford it, anyway. Christmas with his parents in Atlanta, New Year’s back home, eight-dollar champagne, the two of them trying to stay up long enough to watch Dick Clark make the ball drop in New York. Spring semester, summer, Hen’s first birthday: There’s a sheet cake Beth cuts into the rough shape of a dog, ices to look like Yul Brynner. Photos of Yul Brynner with his own piece, icing all over his face, photos of Yul Brynner and Hendrick looking like long-lost brothers.

When does it happen? It’s another World Series, so it’s October, just into November. On television, the pitchers blow into their cupped hands to keep them warm. Hen’s almost sixteen months old. He gets quieter, at first, seems a little withdrawn. Like he’s maybe considering something. Then he quits trying to talk. For a week he doesn’t make any noise at all, doesn’t acknowledge their presence, even, except to watch them. He stops making facial expressions. Jack and Beth take him to a restaurant, get him into a high chair. This is new, taking him out, but because he’s so damn
still
, they can. In his high chair, he doesn’t move, does not fuss or complain. He slumps down a little and ignores the beads that slide across the bar in front of him. He doesn’t chew his blanket.
Your son is so well behaved
, the waitress says.
He’s so serious
. Jack thanks her. Another half-week goes by, and then there’s one long Wednesday where he does make noise again, finally, but he makes all of it, all at once, everything he’s been saving up. He screams for hours. No tears. Just noise. They’re worried he can’t breathe, or that he won’t. His face goes red, the skin of his arms hot and dry to the touch. Now they’ve got to ask somebody. Now they’ve got to take him in. On the phone, when he calls to make the appointment, Jack describes the symptoms.
First he was quiet. Now we can’t get him to stop screaming.
They get an appointment for that day.