Homeland and Other Stories

Roberta has no interest in sports either, and never has, except for the 1972 Olympics, which the women of Elgin watched with unprecedented eagerness. That was the year Hampton Mill got the contract for the Olympic swimwear. It sent chills up their spines to think the swimsuit they were cutting or stitching would soon be on its way to Germany and could end up with Mark Spitz's privates in it. Later on, their husbands shook their heads in amazement when the women could not be pried away from TV sets whenever the Olympics came on. Roberta watched too, as he dived into the water, and she blew her nose when he stood with the ribbons and gold around his neck, dripping and smiling, in trunks made especially for him.

  Thinking of this as she scoots the heavy turkey around in the oven, it occurs to Roberta that working at Hampton's wasn't so bad, even though all anybody ever talked about was how soon they could quit. But she remembered exactly the way her arms felt, steady and knowing, on the cutting and pressing machines. She liked the women she worked with, especially Dottie Short, who was the organizer of the Textile Workers at Hampton's and worked the pressers with Roberta. Dottie claimed to know a lot about history and was fond of saying peculiar things. She once told Roberta that the vacuum cleaner was invented to get women out of the factories and back into the home after World War II. Without a lot of new kinds of machines and gadgets. Dottie said, they'd have gotten bored stiff and wanted their old jobs back.

  People often said behind Dottie's back that she was a Red, but Roberta saw what she meant about the vacuum cleaners. It was hard to imagine Rosie the Riveter in an apron and hair ribbon, sweeping with a broom, but you could just about picture her behind a big old Hoover.

  Roberta's own kitchen has technology enough: the self-cleaning oven, the refrigerator with an ice maker. No dishwasher yet. Only last year did they finally replace the gas stove Ed's mother had cooked on when he was a boy. It was an antique with little enameled feet, and in a way Roberta hated to see it go, but she needed something with even heat and better temperature controls. She has modernized gradually, simply by making it clear to Ed that these are things she needs. She wonders, though, if she is somehow replacing herself. Even a complicated thing like Thanksgiving dinner practically cooks itself. A kangaroo could do my job, Roberta thinks, amused by the picture in her mind.

  Aggie is scooping out the insides of a cooked pumpkin for pies while Roberta rolls out dough for the crust.

  "I ought to be making apple instead of pumpkin. With all those apples we got this year," Roberta says.

  "Thanksgiving with no pumpkin pie? The boys would have a conniption!"

  Aggie, who has twin sons, is fond of saying "boys" in an emphatic way that suggests male children are her own special cross to bear. She rarely recalls that Roberta lost a son. Roberta can't blame her, really. Even Ed and Roxanne seem to have forgotten. It's so long in the past, a river that has gone underground, surfacing only rarely, at times when they intend to count their blessings.

  "No," Roberta agrees. "You can't always do the practical thing. We'll leave the apples sit for today." They have a whole cellarful--mostly Red Delicious, although there are some very old trees in the orchard that bear a small, nonsalable variety Roberta calls "antique." She's heard old people call them "witch apples." For a long time she's been experimenting with new varieties, planting two new saplings each year. She orders them from a catalogue while the ground is still under snow, and they arrive so certain of spring: little switches of trees wrapped in paper, their buds aching to burst. They are Roberta's project. Ed is the type inclined to say, "Apples is apples."

  Lonnie comes into the kitchen to get a couple of Buds from the refrigerator. He complains to Roberta about their TV. "I can't even tell the players on that little thing. The white uniforms looks just like the yeller ones. You ought to tell Ed to get a new set." Lonnie manages a gas station, but he still talks like a boy who grew up on a farm.

  "Tell him yourself," Roberta says. "He won't listen to me. He says he can see the colors just fine."

  "Lonnie's just as stubborn," Aggie confides after he leaves the kitchen. "You ought to have seen how we went round and round about getting another car, even after the old one got to where it wouldn't go three blocks without stopping dead in the street."

  Lonnie and Aggie are a good deal younger than Roberta and live in town, near Lonnie's station. It sounds peculiar to Roberta to hear distance measured in blocks. She's suddenly much too hot in the kitchen, finding it hard to concentrate on either cooking or conversation. She stands up straight with a hand on her back and feels a great weight moving through her, an enormous lifelessness. She has felt it before, but can't name it. All she can think of is the way she's heard people speak of whole rivers becoming dead, of something destroying all the oxygen.

  She can see much of the family land through the kitchen window: a landscape of brown stubble fields, harvested alfalfa hay, fencerows of leafless hickories. She searches among them for some premonition of the killing frost that's predicted. If it comes, it will be the first. It has been an unusually warm fall. The tomato plants in Roberta's kitchen garden are still blooming, with a perky effort that makes her feel depressed. As if they intended to go on producing forever.

  "I expect I'd better get out there directly and cover up that azalea by the front door," she says to Aggie. "They're saying frost tonight." Roberta is trying the decision aloud, to see how it sounds, though really she's leaning the other way.

  "To everything there is a season." Aggie says this in an offhand way, the way a farm-bred person could never do.

  "I've kept that thing alive for twenty-odd years now. It'd be a shame to see it killed by frost; it's real pretty in the spring. But azalea bushes oughtn't to be growing this far north."

  "What do you mean, oughtn't to be?" Aggie, who is paring radish rosebuds now for the relish tray, seems indifferent to the azalea.

  "Most of the azaleas aren't hardy. All the nursery catalogues say that white one won't survive north of zone seven. Right around the Mason-Dixon, in other words."

  "Well, how'd it get up here, walk?" Aggie laughs.

  "Didn't I ever tell you? Ed's mother planted it when they first moved up here. She brought it with her from her people's place in Virginia. There were some other things that were here when Ed and I first got the place. Magnolias, I don't even remember what all. That azalea's the only one of them left."

  "I didn't know Lonnie and Ed's mother came from Virginia."

  "Didn't you? She was a Franklin." Roberta checks the oven again, feeling better. The hot flashes have subsided. "You remember her, don't you? She was a good woman, but Lord help me, she was ornery as a tree stump. She'd come back and haunt me if I let that azalea die."

  "I'll have to tell the boys they had a grandma from Virginia," Aggie says. Her twins, Benny and Andrew, are chasing each other around the circle of the kitchen, dining room, and what used to be called the parlor. Benny misjudges the kitchen door and bangs into the door frame, with Andy right behind.

  "Come here, Ben, let me see you. Are your teeth all right?" Aggie takes his head between her hands and examines his teeth while Benny squirms. The boys are ten years old, but only during the past year, since Aggie stopped dressing them alike, has Roberta begun to see her nephews as separate people. She was amazed when she realized this. That a mother had the power to make two people one, or vice versa.

  "Your Aunt Roberta's house is no place to be running horse races," Aggie says. "You boys go on outside."

  "We're not running races, Mom."

  "Whatever you're doing, then. Go do it outside."

  Ben pushes Andy against the refrigerator on his way out the back door.

  "It would be okay with me if they wanted to play inside," Roberta says. "It's too quiet around here now that Roxanne's grown up."

  "Count your blessings," Aggie says. "Boys are so rambunctious."

  "Whatever you say," Roberta says.

  Ed and Roberta's old farmhouse truly is too large. In winter they have to move downstairs into th
e guest bedroom, next to Roxanne's, so they can heat only a small section of the house and close off the upstairs. There was a time when this inconvenience seemed romantic to Roberta. They were like the lovers in Dr. Zhivago, with snow all around and wolves howling. But over the years it's become just one more way of marking the passing seasons.

  Aggie has made a green Jell-O-cottage-cheese mold that is shaped like a fish, and moves like one too, flopping on the plate when she turns it out.

  "That's real pretty, Aggie. Something different."

  "Mama always used to make this for Thanksgiving, but it seems like nobody around here's ever heard of it. Mama just used a plain round mold."

  Roberta turns the pumpkin pies deftly, pressing a fork around the edges to pleat the crust. She remembers once watching Roxanne out the kitchen window, when she was four or five, pressing a plastic fork around the rim of a mud pie. Just a few years ago Roxanne would have been snitching fingerfuls of whipped cream from the pies in the refrigerator, and fighting with her Daddy to watch the Macy's parade instead of football. Roberta finally settled that argument with a compromise: they would watch the parade until Roxanne got to see the Bullwinkle balloon, and then could switch over. It was a successful solution because it entertained them both. It was a gamble. Sometimes Bullwinkle's giant antlers were the first thing to come bobbing down the street between the rows of skyscrapers, while other years they saved him until nearly the end.

  This year Roxanne is having Thanksgiving dinner at Danny's house, and she and Danny will drop by later. The shape of things to come, Roberta thinks. We're all Graviers here. Roxanne will soon be a Talmadge; or if not, then something else, most likely. Ed's sister is a Richie now, and usually spends the holidays with her husband's people across the river in Kentucky. Families swallowing other families, endlessly, like the Pac Man game Millie and Darrell gave Clay last Christmas. Ed, Lonnie, Roland Talmadge, Danny, one day even Benny and Andrew: they're all like the Pac Man, running around the blocks of Elgin and the county roads, gobbling up little dots of women.

  But the women don't disappear, they only rearrange. Roberta doesn't believe she's changed much for being a Gravier. And Roxanne will still be Roxanne, even if she goes to Indianapolis. Maybe she'll go to college one day; she has always been quick to pick things up, doing passably well in school without half trying. Or possibly she'll work in a factory. Indianapolis is probably jam-packed with industry, big plants that make important things, TV sets and cars. Roberta knows for a fact, from reading the package, that Granny Brown frozen mince pies are manufactured in Indianapolis. As she polishes the Gravier china and sets the table, she imagines her pretty daughter in coveralls and a head scarf, like Rosie the Riveter, operating a big machine that turns out Granny Brown pies a hundred at a time.

  Soon after they all sit down to dinner the telephone rings. It's Roxanne, explaining that she and Danny are going to be late. "We'll be there in an hour or two," she says. She calls Roberta "Mom," instead of "Mama," which she tends to do if any of her peers are within earshot.

  "That's fine. We're just sitting down now," Roberta says. "Where are you?"

  "I'm calling from the pay phone at the Tastee-Freez."

  "Well, Lord have mercy, didn't they feed you over at Talmadge's?"

  "Oh Mom, sure they did, we're just out driving around." She hesitates. "The Tastee-Freez is closed on Thanksgiving. Didn't you know that?"

  "Sure, honey, I knew. I was teasing."

  "Oh." Roxanne's voice is up in her nose. Roberta can tell she has been crying.

  "Are you all right?" she asks.

  "Yeah." Roxanne pauses. "I guess so. We're having a fight."

  Roberta waits for her to go on.

  "I told Danny I might not go to Indianapolis right away, that I might want to stay and work at Hampton's, and he's real mad. He says he won't go without me. I feel awful. It's his one chance to play college ball."

  "Well, try not to get too worked up about it. You'll get it straightened out. You've got six months or better to decide."

  "No we don't. He's got to let them know pretty soon about the scholarship."

  "That's his decision, Roxanne. He's got his to make, and you've got yours."

  "Mom, it just isn't that simple." Roxanne is lecturing now. "Everything depends on everything else."

  "Well, if it helps any, I imagine he's just as scared as you are."

  "I know it." She hesitates again, and Roberta can tell from the change in Roxanne's voice that she's smiling. "He is, and he won't admit it."

  "Don't be too long, now," Roberta says. "And be careful. The roads might be freezing up."

  "Okay."

  Roberta waits for her daughter to hang up, listening to the quiet static that is swimming in the few miles of wire between her house and the Tastee-Freez.

  "Mama? I was thinking about what you said."

  "About what, hon?"

  "When you said you'd been in Elgin all this time chasing your tail. It isn't like you've been doing nothing. Maybe it's not like a job that, well, like the jobs people have, you know. But it's something. To me it is."

  When Roberta comes back to the table and sits down, the landscape of white linen and silver has been transformed into a war zone. The turkey looks more like a carcass than a bird, and the Jell-O fish is gutted and beheaded like a bluegill ready for the skillet. Already there is gravy on the tablecloth. She helps herself to some cornbread stuffing. The twins are trying to pull the big turkey wishbone, but it's rubbery in their greasy fingers, and won't break. It becomes a contest to see who can jerk it out of the other's hand.

  "You boys can be excused now," Aggie says.

  Roberta is always amazed that a dinner that took days to prepare can be eaten in minutes. "Come back after while for pumpkin pie," she tells them, before they vanish. "If you've still got room for it."

  "They'll have room," Lonnie says. "Them two has hollow legs." He reaches across the table to refill the glasses from the second of two bottles of wine he brought. Ed and Lonnie had a strict Methodist upbringing, but their wives have been an influence. They're more relaxed about things than their parents were. And, although none of the Graviers is accustomed to much drinking. Thanksgiving is clearly a time when excesses are forgiven.

  Roberta sips the wine happily. It's too sweet, but she likes the way it warms the inside of her chest as it goes down, and numbs her lips. Her cheeks feel flushed, like Roxanne's after she and Danny have been necking.

  Lonnie is telling a complicated story about a man with three dogs named Larry, Curly, and Moe, which he takes to the grocery store with him. Aggie corrects him on factual points several times, but Roberta is uncertain as to whether this is just a joke, or a real story about someone Lonnie and Aggie really know. In the end she decides it must have been real life, because the story just fades out without a punch line.

  "I've got one for you, Lonnie," Roberta says. She touches her tongue to her numb lips to make sure they're still in working order. "Why did the punk rocker cross the road?" Lonnie says he doesn't know.

  Roberta starts to laugh. "Because he had a chicken stapled to his ear. For an earring, see? And the chicken..." she can't stop laughing. "The hen is the only one of the two that knows where she's going."

  "I don't get it," Lonnie says, but Aggie is laughing.

  "Now I can just see that," Aggie says. "That hen flapping, and the man trying to keep up. 'Come on, boy, time to get across this road!'" She gets the giggles so badly that when she takes a drink of water it goes down the wrong way, and Lonnie has to slap her on the back.

  "That's an old one," Ed says. "I've heard that one before."

  "Oh, I expect you have," Roberta says. She smiles out over the expanse of gristle and balled-up napkins and the cage of bird bones sitting in the place of honor, a bedraggled centerpiece. It's really more meat than bone; only a few magnificent slabs have been carved from it. Roberta imagines the army of women across the country marching into their kitchens with turkeys like this, p
reparing to pick the bones clean for sandwiches and soup stocks that will nourish their families halfway to Christmas.

  A sunbeam slants through the west window looking weak, as though it has had to pass through a great ordeal to reach this dining room. It's late. Roberta catches Aggie's eye and feels a secret between them that neither could own up to if they were asked. Possibly it's just that. That no one will ask.

  "Aggie," she says, "come help me throw a quilt over that azalea bush. There's no point letting it stand out there and die."

  Islands on the Moon

  ANNEMARIE'S MOTHER, Magda, is one of a kind. She wears sandals and one-hundred-percent-cotton dresses and walks like she's crossing plowed ground. She makes necklaces from the lacquered vertebrae of non-endangered species. Her hair is wavy and long and threaded with gray. She's forty-four.

  Annemarie has always believed that if life had turned out better her mother would have been an artist. As it is, Magda just has to ooze out a little bit of art in everything she does, so that no part of her life is exactly normal. She paints landscapes on her tea kettles, for example, and dates younger men. Annemarie's theory is that everyone has some big thing, the rock in their road, that has kept them from greatness or so they would like to think. Magda had Annemarie when she was sixteen and has been standing on tiptoe ever since to see over or around her difficult daughter to whatever is on the other side. Annemarie just assumed that she was the rock in her mother's road. Until now. Now she has no idea.

  On the morning Magda's big news arrived in the mail, Annemarie handed it over to her son Leon without even reading it, thinking it was just one of her standard cards. "Another magic message from Grandma Magda," she'd said, and Leon had rolled his eyes. He's nine years old, but that's only part of it. Annemarie influences him, telling my-most-embarrassing-moment stories about growing up with a mother like Magda, and Leon buys them wholesale, right along with nine-times-nine and the capital of Wyoming.

  For example, Magda has always sent out winter solstice cards of her own design, printed on paper she makes by boiling down tree bark and weeds. The neighbors always smell it, and once, when Annemarie was a teenager, they reported Magda as a nuisance.