dropping the truck down into third and then fourth.
They passed well-maintained signage: Norway Spruce, Serbian Spruce, Concolor Fir, West Coast Noble Fir. The old man wasn’t looking at the signs that marked the rows. He scrutinized the fence line as they bumped past it. Then all three—and Squally probably, too—watched the rushing fence posts. Keeping a keen eye out for any having fallen.
The old man turned back to Marie. “What tradition?”
Marie looked to Dan for approval to tell his story. Dan nodded, paying attention to the drive, loving the speed, loving the sound of frozen grasses shattering under the chassis.
“Dan used to come here, to your farm, every year when he was little. With his dad.”
“Wasn’t my farm then. I got this place five years ago in a foreclosure settlement.”
Dan looked over. “Foreclosure? I thought you worked for the Loftons.”
“Nope. At the worst of the blight this place just about got bulldozed for a housing development. Instead the Loftons held on as long as they could. Let the developers fish someone else’s place over on 114. By the time they’d fought that fight they were so overextended that they couldn’t make the property taxes. I got the place real cheap from the bank.”
“But you always farmed around here?”
“No, ma’am. Not me. I was in real estate in Dayton for thirty-four years. I was married right after I got back from Korea. We had three kids: one smart one who can’t keep a job for all his politics; one dumb one who can’t keep her mouth shut but to say yes to any man dumber than her who comes along; and one who drives an old school bus from one art fair to another every summer and somehow manages to make a living painting hearts, flowers, and smiley faces on tiny wooden beads. Could have been a god-damned surgeon with steady hands like that—but nope, has to paint blessed beads.”
Marie looked back into the bed of the truck to check on Squally. The happy mutt gave a cinnamon wag while watching the fence posts zip by under the dark blue broken clouds.
“Don’t ask me why I did any of it.” The man in coveralls rubbed the inside of the windshield with his sleeve and turned on the defrost blowers. “After I retired I had a charter-fishing boat business in Florida.
“But even in a subdivided paradise my wife hated me and made my life a living hell for as long as she walked this earth. No American Dream for me, Marie. Not for me. Even though I edged my sidewalks clean and pretty in three damn states.”
The oak trees held onto dry brown leaves. They all stared into the darkening woods. Dan downshifted and the truck stopped at the property line.
The old man cracked the window again. “I guess I could have divorced her somewhere along the line. Or she could have divorced me. Or something. But that’s not what we did. We stuck it out. Did the best we could.”
Marie said, “Sounds like you did great.”
The old man laughed. “Some old milk slogan used to say, ‘Good as any, better than some.’ That was us. Good as any, better than some.”
Marie was worried. “So you’re all alone now? You’re way out here by yourself?”
“No, no, no, sweetie. I moved up here with my girlfriend. Buying this place was her idea.”
Dan sort of snorted. “Girlfriend?”
“Sure. In Florida, after my wife died, I’d get real bored. Go down to the marina and tinker around on that damned charter boat and end up at that little bar they had there. Me and the other geezers all afternoon. Talking about mangled manatees. What to do about oil leaking into the channel. Whether to charge fathers for little puking kids losing rods overboard—shit like that.”
Marie reminded him. “But what about this girlfriend?”
“Elaine? She never lost a rod. She wears a fishing belt. She’s no fool.”
“I mean, how’d you meet her?”
“Oh, she ran a bait shop on the landing and sold beer and candy and cigarettes, too. She ran the deliveries to the bar in a motorboat. Somehow, I got to helping her unload that motorboat on her runs.” The old man sat up straight.
The light was gone. The day was over.
After a long silence, the old man said, “Guess I didn’t know about me hating my wife and my wife hating me while she was alive. Guess I thought all that antagonism, all that animosity, all that manipulation and the rest was love. How could I have known different? All those years should’ve meant something, right?”
“You didn’t love your wife?” Marie folded her hands in her lap smoothing the finger of the glove over her wedding ring.
“Not like I love Elaine. Not like that.”
The tradition was to implement a pattern that was a kind of suffering self-loathing to which any good person gets humbly indoctrinated. The tradition was to keep doing what you had always known how to do, to give up certain hopes for the someone whose role model said to love you. So what if you’d sacrificed almost everything on a little cross around your neck pulled side to side for years on end?
Marie turned to the old man. “What would you have done different?” She wasn’t really asking to know.
“Nothing.”
Dan said, “Nothing?” Dan looked back to be sure Squally was still there and not too cold. The dog was asleep.
The old man countered, “Good as any, better than some.” He realized how late it was getting. “It’s pretty dark to be picking Christmas trees now.” But the old man wasn’t sentimental. He wasn’t a traditionalist. To him it was neither here nor there. He was a businessman. He motioned toward the darkness. “Well, you saw this place. Rows upon rows upon rows. And they’re all the same anyway. Hell, we even spend the whole spring pruning so they’re every one the damned same, exactly the same. I’ll give you one of the precut Scotch pines half-price. No needles in the carpet this year, Marie. There’s a six-foot beauty up there if Elaine hasn’t sold it. It’s plenty fresh.”
Marie nodded, holding back tears. The tradition, Dan’s tradition which kept the old man’s heat on, was to walk into the unknown if familiar rows and pick your own tree, cut it down, carry it out any way you knew how, and call it yours until it died, until it was time, until it was time to let it go.
Throughout the evening the symmetric snowdrifts against the barbed wire fence changed from white to pink to lavender to purple-shadowed hillocks to blue to black and then back to white in the headlight beams.
The truck started up and Dan finally remembered how to drive in the country. He handled the old tank with surety. Marie watched him shifting gears between her legs. Squally must have woken up as they bounced and lurched over the frozen ruts.
LIMBIC RESONANCE: RESPONSES TO A MATCH.COM QUESTIONNAIRE
I
Me? You know how some women have those really nice sitting rooms? With the Ethan Allen furniture and the Andersen windows that open in, so that theoretically you can clean them easily on a regular basis? You know how you can hear that Windex squeaking in blue alcoholic circles which dissipate, right? You know how some women vacuum their stairs? Those soft almond stairs, with stripes like lawns, right? Well, I'm not really like that. I've got a plywood sitting room, with no furniture, where long-lost friends come and do gymnastics. I’ve got mirrors which finally breathe light after years’ dark storage box. I’ve got shine and mercury filling up this column-spine.
II
Who I'd like to meet? Dear Lord, no more immovable glaciers and, please God, no more rocky white waters, jagged, choked, and swirling. Any other emotional undercurrent? I can handle it. So hit me with your best shot. Part of me wants to overcome this addicted-to-the-thrill-ride part of my intimate life. I’ve read the self-help books. I know it's pathologic and divisive. But it’s not like it’s my problem. We’re a generation of gimme sociopaths playing dress-up and get-it-on. It’s a cycle of heartbreak, a norm of constant devolution, and I understand that it breeds all sorts of instability that you can’t call home. It’s consummate evidence of an insidious disrespect for others. I have learned that nothing comes of it—that people can get hu
rt, that nothing lasting exists in constant resonance. I've learned a lot. But you know what? I'll tell you what. I love believing in the aquifer. I love rivulets trickling into silent secluded streams through limestone beds. I love quick-moving rivers plunge-dive-bombing on a sunny day. I love the immensity of oceans. I love sublimation, evaporation, condensation, and I-think-it’s-gonna-rain-soon thunderstorms. And honey—lovesick tenderized, meat cleaver runaway, undoing body surfer boy—I love those mighty waves. So, whatever I've learned, I'll see you curling bored in the pipe.
III
Do I want what? Who knows? Maybe. (Pass the gun, Mr. Walken. Let's go one more round of Russian roulette in these booby-trapped, mud-obscured Vietnamese waters. I'm up for it. Are you?) I suppose the main problem is that I don't want my children to have me for a mother. This creates a secondary problem wherein the only real logical choice is becoming someone other than myself, in order to have children, so that I can be their mother, successfully. Somehow logic gets lost. There's no way out of this bamboo trap. Not having children does not solve the syllogism. It should. But it doesn't. (Faith enters stage left dressed in some sort of transparency.) That’s the kind of logic that doesn’t last but finds a pocket in you somewhere to burrow down into, as if safe. That’s the kind of momentary panic where you find yourself breathing in and out, real slow, real even, staving off something