Homeland and Other Stories

  "That truly is the essence of Nathan," I said. "Everything has to revolve around his pursuit of the perfect petroglyph."

  "The rock that will complete his life."

  "That's it," I said. "The Rock of Ages, there, from whence they flow."

  "From whence what flows?"

  "I'm not sure. That's Robert Southey." Sometimes lines of poems I'd read long ago would flutter up from the air and perch in my brain like sparrows. "From whence poetic things flow, I guess, rocky reveries. Chiseled hopes and stone dreams."

  "Obsidian dreams," said Peter, who had a working knowledge of rocks himself. "Sedimentary obsessions, and obsidian dreams."

  Our plan was to go as far as Flagstaff the first day and camp near the Wupatki ruins. We would hike out to Wupatki in the moonlight, and in the shadow of the ancient city carved into the hillside, we would make love. The next day we would continue on to our destination.

  I had carried with me from childhood a fascination for the Petrified Forest. I can't imagine how I even knew of its existence, but in sixth grade I wrote a poem about it. It was deemed excellent, and I was required to read it to the entire class. I had in mind that the Petrified Forest was an elaborate affair, comprised of entire, towering trees; I remember a line about "the twisted igneous of their trunks, their glistening granite leaves." (My mother owned a thesaurus.) I believe I even had their firm branches offering shelter to stone deer and little stone squirrels. I'd had such splendid confusions about the geological world back then, before marrying a man who'd minored in igneous and granite.

  But Nathan, it turned out, was unconcerned about formerly living things turned to stone. The fossil fish in our living room were my idea of a representation of his interests, not his. In all our years in Arizona he'd steadfastly refused to take me to see the fossil forest. "It's not a forest at all," he explained. "The very name makes it sound like something it isn't. No person alive has ever visited the Petrified Forest and not come away disappointed."

  This sort of statement was so typical of Nathan that it didn't dissuade me. I wanted to see it. When it became clear that Peter and I were going to have a clandestine adventure, it seemed fitting that we should go to the stone forest of my dreams. Peter was only too happy to fill the various empty places Nathan left in my life.

  But Peter and I, unlike Nathan and me, were a couple without a practical half; vacations do go more smoothly when someone takes an interest in things like museum schedules and motel reservations. It turned out that Peter and I had chosen an utterly moonless night for our moonlight hike, and the drive to Wupatki was hours longer than we thought. We reached Flagstaff after dark and had trouble finding the state park. We ended up in a deserted county fairground. A sign said it was the home of the Rotary Ranglers, and served also, for a few weeks of the year, as a Boy Scout camp.

  A man at the entrance waved us in, and we were too tired and lost to resist the motion of his hand.

  "It's free, anyway," Peter said.

  "It's late," I added. It was, and I was hungry. Peter had brought some corn on the cob to roast slowly in the coals, but I had a feeling we'd be content with cold chicken and one another.

  I was right. After we'd picked the wishbone clean and found the paper towels to clean our fingers and chins, Peter pulled me along, kissing my neck, to the edge of the fairground and up through a dry stream bed. We'd climbed thousands of feet in elevation since Phoenix, and it was cold. We walked side by side, or single file where the path was narrow, touching each other's palms in the darkness and sometimes slipping our icy hands inside each other's clothes. They practically made steam against our hot bodies. I don't think we'd ever gotten over those early days in the arroyo; we were turned on by uncomfortable outdoor locales.

  The night was black. I'd forgotten that the moon sometimes failed to show up at all. From the dim lighting over the fairground we could make out silhouettes of the boulders along the creek bank, but little else, and I did consider rattlesnakes, but not very much. We rolled ourselves down onto a wide, flat boulder, which I informed him was granite. I'd learned a thing or two in sixteen years of marriage, I said.

  "Like what?" asked Peter, who was on the verge of discovering the modern engineering miracle of drive-in pants. We lay in a small clearing, with tall pines standing around the edge like dignified voyeurs.

  I unbuttoned my coat and pulled up Peter's sweater and mine so that our abdomens could commune. He was astonishingly soft to the touch, like kitten leather himself. I always forgot this, in between times, or thought I'd imagined it. He said his mother used to tell him that Gott in Himmel meant for Peter to be a girl, but at the last minute realized little Werner needed a baby brother. Little Werner got his brother all right but died young of rheumatic fever, so God's last-minute decision went to waste, except insofar as heterosexual womankind was concerned. Peter was another one turned loose too young in the candy store, I suspect.

  Peter's kisses were cold on my skin, and my fingers in his hair tingled as though they'd found a pair of fur-lined mittens. Through several layers of clothes I could feel his muscles. It never failed to arouse me, to think my contours were appreciated by one of the city's most excellent builders of cabinets.

  He sat up, stroking my hair and looking at me, forming over me a dark man-shape that blotted out the stars. He ran a finger from my jawbone to my ear and said something in German, "Geliebte Hafen." My body lay flat against the rock and was cold enough to be part of it, like a fossil fish, but at that moment I belonged to the living world nearly more than I could bear.

  Peter bent over and picked up something from the ground and polished it on his jeans, then touched it to my lips--something cold and surprisingly smooth. It was a pebble. He put it down the neck of my sweater and I shivered as it slid between my breasts and touched my belly.

  "What kind of rock is that?" I asked.

  "Melted rock," he said, warming it with his breath and drawing it in a circle around my navel. "Obsidian."

  Obsidian is rare, and fairly precious. Technically it is volcanic glass, cooled suddenly to brilliance when it is pulled from the earth and thrown across miles of sky.

  I'd worn my old camping coat, a Navy surplus pea jacket, and was glad to have it. With our passions spent and our furnaces running low on fuel, I pulled it over us like a blanket. Even through the wool the brass buttons stood out as individual points of cold. We were lying back on the boulder and on Peter's sweater, looking at the stars. It was nothing like Phoenix; the stars here were crowded. It looked like there was a shortage of space up there for all of them.

  "Last time I wore this coat I was stargazing with Julie," I said. "We went up Camelback Mountain, I think it might have been New Year's Day. I can't remember where Nathan was."

  "I wish I knew the constellations," Peter said. "Not from a need to be scientific, but for the stories. There is so much poetry up there, and history, and to me it's only stars."

  "That's almost exactly the same thing I told Julie. I said I hated not being able to teach her the constellations, that they stood for all these ancient myths. But she didn't care, she said she wanted to know about idioms."

  "Idioms?" Peter pulled the sweater down, tucking it under our backs. The granite felt cold and grainy, like frozen sand.

  "She said they show how the language changes. She wanted to know what funny expressions we used to use when I was a girl in Kentucky. She made it sound like I'd lived in a covered wagon. I told her they didn't seem that funny to us at the time, it was just the way we talked. I couldn't remember any. Just one."

  "Which one?"

  "'My stars.' My mother used to say that, 'My stars!'"

  "What did she mean?"

  "Oh, just surprise. Like, 'My goodness' or 'My word.' I have no idea where it comes from. But I liked it. I used to think Mother really did have some stars of her own tucked away. That a little section up there was fenced off like a garden, and those were my mother's stars."

  Peter's lips smiled against m
y neck.

  Eventually the cold was too much for us and we got up. Peter buried the fruits of our labors under a rock. A friend of mine, new to extramarital sex, said she loved how condoms kept everything neatly packaged up, but I didn't. I knew I would wake up in the morning missing the stickiness, proof that someone had needed me in the night.

  "Latex isn't biodegradable," I reminded my lover as we zipped and buttoned ourselves for the hike back. I slipped the pebble into my coat pocket, determined to look at this alleged obsidian someday in better light. "I'm sure there's a huge fine for littering a county fairground with prophylactics."

  "But, my love," he said, "we use sheep gut. It will have disappeared by morning."

  "But the question is, will you?"

  This, in its variations, was an old joke.

  Back in the tent I couldn't sleep. Like the pea princess I was aware of every stone underneath the air mattress and the down sleeping bag, and I felt myself growing bruised and old while Peter breathed heavily in a distant, happy land. I knew we would never really be together; we needed different things. I loved the time I spent with him, but felt in some other chamber of my heart that it was time wasted. That I ought to be doing something else while there was time.

  Sometimes I get this way, letting my mind run in frantic fast-forward like a videotape gone wild. In a year, I say to myself, I will be forty. In a decade, fifty. Peter may be the last man ever attracted to me purely on the basis of sex. I wonder what else there is to me, what will become of me, and of Julie. I can't see staying in my marriage, but neither could I ever be the one to bring it down just to please myself. Nathan would say I was selfish, and he would be right. All I can imagine for certain is Nathan's anger, the roof caving in and plate glass flying as the house implodes on itself the way a light bulb will when the vacuum inside is disrupted.

  I woke up in the heat, with morning sun on the tent and Peter tasting my ear. Peter's sexual appetite was surpassed only by his supply of condoms, which seemed to swarm around him in their bright yellow wrappers like a hive of personal bees. Sometimes they surprised me in my purse or the glove box of my car, lying dangerously close to the little folded notes in which my daughter the linguist had declared, "I ? MY MOM."

  I turned over and ran my tongue along his collarbone. He rolled me onto his chest and bingo, we were connected. Peter's body and mine were like those spacecraft that lock or dock, moving together all of their own accord. I've heard that up there in the absence of air molecules objects develop their own gravity.

  Peter turned his face into my hair and whispered, "The Boy Scouts are here."

  Mother of God, it was true. I could hear sounds of hatcheting and seventh-grade swearing and, I imagined, of two sticks being rubbed together, all in the near vicinity of our tent. They had arrived early this morning, obviously, or very late last night. The man at the front gate must have thought we were the first wave of Scouts.

  Peter began to roll under me like the ocean and I had a good deal of difficulty being quiet. We were lying right out on the same ground where boyhood industry was getting fires built and kindling split; copulating, very likely, in the middle of a merit badge. The only thing between them and our nakedness was a membrane of blue nylon, and it seemed so thin.

  Peter's hands held the small of my back like some piece of maple or walnut they understood. "Peter," I pleaded, about to laugh out loud, or cry, "have pity on the children. They're trying to remain clean in thought, word, and deed."

  "How do you know?"

  I tried to hold my breath. "I'm sure of it. It's one of their laws."

  "Girl Scout laws," he said, his fingers sending chills up my spine that threatened to disturb the peace. "I don't think the Boy Scouts have that one."

  On the way to the Petrified Forest we had a fight. Peter drove faster and faster as we argued, and my ears were roaring so ferociously that I demanded we roll up the windows and sweat until the argument was over. We were back in the low country, in the heat.

  It started when I found a condom in my purse. I wasn't really angry, but we'd talked about this. "I've asked you not to put them in there," I said.

  "You put it there. Three weeks ago. Remember, when we met at the bicycle race and walked down to the river?"

  Men will make fun of you for lugging around a purse, and then the minute you've set off for somewhere they'll ask if you could just stick in for them this little thing or that.

  "Just try to keep them out of my territory, okay?" I asked. "That's all Julie needs, to find her own mother's illicit contraceptives."

  I felt the weight of last night's depression moving back into my chest. Also I was getting a headache, an actual migraine--something I'd rarely had since Julie's birth rewrote the recipe of my body chemicals. As a teenager I'd had them like clockwork. First came the aura: an arc of blue lights strung across my field of vision. Slowly it would curve around into circles, so I'd see the world as if through two long glass tunnels in a sparkling ocean. Then the pain would clamp down.

  "It wouldn't be the end of the world if Julie found a condom," Peter said. "She would probably think they were for you and Nathan."

  "She knows about Nathan." Nathan had had a vasectomy, performed for free by a colleague in exchange for his mother's cataract operation; Nathan felt he'd gotten the short end of the bargain. "She knows way too much," I said. "Sometimes I think she reads my mind."

  "What do you mean when you say, 'That's all Julie needs'? You talk as though she's constantly about to step over a cliff."

  "I just think there's enough stress in her life right now. For example, she thinks she hates her own father."

  "Why do you deny the validity of her feelings? Maybe she really does hate him."

  "She can't really hate him. He's her father."

  "He is her biological father, which doesn't prove he is good for her. Male guppies eat their children."

  "He's cold-blooded, but he's not a guppy."

  "Children," said Peter the authority, who hadn't laid eyes on his sons in a month of Sundays, "have excellent instincts about what is good for them."

  "Children need their parents."

  "Do you think your mother was good for you? You're always saying she robbed you of self-confidence."

  "She was all I had. Daddy couldn't do a whole lot for us."

  My father was killed in a train derailment when my sister was still too young to know him from any other man without a beard. After that, Mother had a career behind the soda fountain at Woolworth's. On weekdays you could see her there drawing out sodas with no expression on her face, or standing at the juicer making orange juice, stacking up the emptied-out halves like a display of bright beanies, their cheerfulness lost on her. The franchise was owned by a Mr. Fuller, who people said was a philanderer. Mother told us this meant he gave away his savings. His wife threw herself off a bridge and lay at the bottom of the Licking River for nine days before they dragged her out, the reason being that she had tied a whole cement block around her neck with binder's twine and it took her down like an anchor. She was a small, weak woman, and people speculated about how she'd lifted the thing up in the first place. She must have made a great effort. On the day of her funeral, my mother got the job.

  She worked there still. I had the crazy idea--I knew I wouldn't do it--of sending Mother a postcard from the Petrified Forest.

  Peter was still involved in winning the argument. "But what if you had had a choice?" he insisted. "As Julie does."

  "What do you mean?"

  "What if you'd had two parents, one who was good for you, and one who was not?"

  It seemed unfair of him to egg me on like this. He certainly wouldn't be there to offer her fatherhood, if I bailed out of my marriage.

  I sighed and rolled down the window. "I don't know what people do when they have choices," I said. "I don't think I've ever had any."

  I don't suppose I had honestly expected whole trees, standing upright, but really there was so little to see. A young
Navajo woman in a Smokey Bear hat at the park entrance handed us a brochure. "There's a map of the auto route in your brochure," she said. "There are nine stops. Please stay on the trails, and have a great day." She sounded as if she would willingly surrender her job to progress, if a robot could be found.

  At each stop we parked the Volvo and hiked the hundred yards or so through the desert to the vista, hoping every time that we were about to see the real petrified forest. Peter tried to make it seem more impressive by reading passages from the brochure about the mineralization process, how actual living tissue had over the millennia turned to stone. But it wasn't trees, just trunks, scattered here and there over the desert. Not even whole trunks, really, just short lengths of log toppled over and broken into parts. "Take Nothing but Pictures, Leave Nothing but Footprints," we were instructed by signs at every turn, but if there had ever been anything to take it must have been carted off long ago. At the later stops, some people weren't even getting out of their cars. A giant mobile home hummed like a vibrator next to us in the Stop Eight parking lot, its windows rolled up to hold in the air conditioning. High up in the passenger seat, a woman in a sun visor sat petting a cocker spaniel, waiting while her husband went out for one more try.

  I hated to admit Nathan was right, but they had no business calling this a forest. It reminded me of a Biblical disaster area--a tribe of toppled-over women who'd all looked back and got turned into pillars of salt.

  Finally, on our way back, something went right: we found the Wupatki campground. Peter bustled around setting up camp, pleased with himself. He lit the lantern and built a fire and pitched the tent while I slowly wrapped each ear of corn in aluminum foil. He buried them in the coals like little mummies, making a ritual of it, saying that by the time we returned from our hike to Wupatki it would be done to perfection.