But two hours later, when she got up and went to the kitchen for her English muffin, she saw that she was still the same as she had always been—the shopping was the pleasure, not the buying. She did buy a pair of colorful sneakers from Inkkas, and she did look at Amazon’s caviar collection before ending up with white anchovies in olive oil and Australian licorice. You could take the girl out of Decorah, but you couldn’t, after all these years, take the Decorah out of the girl. Frank had been that way, too. With their looks, and his ambition, and her addiction to style, they had immigrated to New York, and been taken on, like many immigrants, by kindly natives—the Upjohns. But once the energy propelling the effort dissipated, they fell back to what they had always been, stolid Midwesterners. The phone rang. She looked at the display; it was Janet. She pressed the “talk” button. Janet said, “You didn’t think I knew it was your birthday, did you?”
Andy said, “I did not.”
Janet said, “Happy Birthday, but I told everyone else it’s tomorrow. Expect a flood of intrusive calls and e-mails.”
Andy said, “I can take it.”
Janet said, “I know you can, Mom. That’s one lesson I’ve learned.”
Andy said, “You know, sweetheart, I am so old, I really don’t want anything. I think the thing for me to do is give everyone whatever they want, the first thing they think of.”
“No!”
“Yes. What is the first thing you’ve thought of?”
“New tires.”
“They are yours. Be sure you get Michelins.”
“Fur-lined,” said Janet, “with rhinestones.”
Andy said, “Don’t tell anyone that this is my plan. Just remind them to call me. Say my computer is on the fritz.”
Janet said, “Oh, Mom.”
On the sixth, Michael sent her a potted plant.
—
FELICITY’S INSTINCT had proved correct: if you wanted a job, there was nothing like microbiology. You could investigate bacteria and viruses everywhere, including in space, if your specialty happened to be geomicrobiology. She had been much courted, particularly by firms in Des Moines and Minneapolis that wanted her to run laboratories or contemplate milk. She did not get the job in San Jose, but, after three interviews and some nail biting, she did get the job in Boston, at Tufts Medical Center. She did not have the official supervisory experience the job description called for, but her adviser had told her new boss that she had “over twenty years steady practice telling everyone what to do, and she is good at it.” The first day on the job, she had suggested a new way of recording results. Now her boss, who was married, seemed to want to date her, but she pretended not to notice. The job was everything that her adviser had said it would be—well paid, and difficult. People were smart and friendly, as if they did not feel that they had been born in a state of original sin, had never conceived of that possibility. She had a tiny apartment in Back Bay, down the street from DeLuca’s market and La Voile. She had joined a book club that met in Cambridge. She noticed that the average age in Boston seemed to be twenty-seven, and the average man was good-looking. It was not herself she was worried about.
The guy she hung out with the most was someone she had met on eHarmony, a real assistant professor in the political-science department at BU. He should have been perfect for her, since he was up-to-date about Gaza, ISIS, Ebola, earthquakes related to fracking, congressional dysfunction, and the immigration bill, all of which, Felicity knew, should concern her more than the farm. She did not have to discuss global warming with him, because he wasn’t interested in the origins of global warming—that cake was baked. He thought only about possible socioeconomicpoliticocultural responses to global warming, as dictated by historical experience, in particular the effects of climate change (he always called it “climate change”) in the seventeenth century, which did not set a good precedent, and so he had several boxes of canned goods in his basement, and, indeed, his parents had stockpiled provisions for Y2K, and they had discovered, to their dismay, that canned goods didn’t hold up quite as well as they were advertised to. Felicity suggested that he buy himself a food dryer and a vacuum sealing machine, which he did.
But Gordie was not enough to keep her mind productively occupied, nor was her job or her three nice new girlfriends (UMass, Berkeley, Wellesley); she limited her calls home to one per week, and her calls to Guthrie to one every two weeks. He talked about ISIS, but not Ferguson. Did he do it more than other people she knew? Everyone talked about ISIS and/or Ferguson. Guthrie said that she was obsessing about the farm, because she kept comparing her dad’s harvest of corn and beans with the average for the county (beans 2 percent higher, corn 3 percent lower) or checking the markets and calculating in her mind what he might have made for the year, and how that stacked up against the value of the land, which had doubled since 2009 (forty-five hundred per acre to almost nine thousand—not a good sign). And how was he going to sell his crap when it couldn’t be shipped because of the railroad cars carrying the tar sands? The harvest was estimated at fourteen and a half billion bushels of corn alone. Her dad would store it. If the moisture content was high, it could crust over. If it crusted over, he could decide to break it up. If he climbed into the bin to break it up, he could sink into it and drown. Though he never had. Felicity truly hated corn. She said nothing about this to Gordie.
Megan from Berkeley said she needed a puppy. Charlene from Wellesley said she needed a cat, and Deanne from UMass said she needed to start running—look around, everyone in Boston ran and ran. She looked around. They did. Once in a while, when she was sitting up in bed with Gordie, both of them busy on their iPhones, she wondered aloud how it could be that, right when you were peaking, you didn’t feel the way you always thought you would. Gordie’s standard answer was “You feel the way you feel. It’s impossible to change that thermostat. I mean, even quadriplegics go back to feeling fairly upbeat, if they were always fairly upbeat.” Gordie was a good example of his own observation; every time she brought it up, he mentioned quadriplegics, and so, to avoid this, she stopped talking about it. But as a revelation, the idea that her lifelong project to shape her future had resulted in worry, worry, worry was utterly depressing, and Gordie, the ideal eHarmony male and, according to the algorithm, her perfect mate, had a mole on his upper lip that she didn’t like but couldn’t help looking at, a subscription to the Financial Times (in which he showed her an article about how the sudden drop in oil prices was bad news for wind and solar), and a certain odor that only she could smell—once she had even asked Megan if she could smell Gordie, and Megan had said, “God, no. Compared with every guy I’ve ever dated, he’s a summer breeze.” Felicity didn’t want to be amazed that, after all her efforts, she was doomed to disappointment, but she was amazed.
2015
CLAIRE KEPT HER EYE on Carl’s responses to things in order to gauge whether she was being reasonable or crotchety. This was the current example, where to go after her seventy-sixth birthday. Chicago wasn’t unbearably cold, but it was, well, Chicago. There had been torrents of rain in August, then the “bomb cyclone” of cold in November, though, as Carl pointed out three times, “no billion-dollar weather disasters, according to the ‘Catastrophe Report.’ ” Carl felt that they should be pleased that November was catastrophe-less, since each of the previous thirty-three months had seen at least one. “Of course,” Carl said, “a billion dollars is only a hundred million in 1960 dollars.” 2013 had hosted forty-one billion-dollar events. Carl said “Florida”; Claire said, “Rick Scott makes my skin crawl.” Carl directed her to a Web site that rented condos by the week around Melbourne. Claire remained skeptical until the morning after their arrival, when the pleasant weather, the neat furniture, and the well-maintained landscaping won her over, at least for the time being. Her mother had died when she was seventy-four. Seventy-four was quite young these days—she had met a group of seventy-four-year-olds on a plane a few years ago who were going kayaking in Australia. But, really, you l
ived all your life in the present—memories that accumulated randomly in your mind did not convince you of the passage of time. When your son kissed you kindly on the hair, or your step-daughter spoke extra clearly, that was when you saw yourself as you had once seen your mother. It didn’t even matter that the children were hardly children anymore; her automatic response to their getting taller, filling out, sharpening their personalities was much like sitting in a movie theater and watching a film—it had nothing to do with her sense of herself.
The vacation—two weeks—was a break, especially since Claire chose not to bring her computer and they opted to not watch the news. If it wasn’t floods in Arizona, then it was drought in California, refugee crises in Italy, algae blooms in the Great Lakes, trains carrying bitumen going off the tracks and exploding in…
She tapered off after about an hour, let Carl have some peace, and then watched Yankee Doodle Dandy on TCM, casting sideways glances at Carl, enjoying his laughter and his pleasure in Cagney’s odd but exhilarating dancing style. When Carl said that if he had been short he might have been a dancer, Claire made him get up and spin her around the living room of their very modest condo, which he did, humming “Singin’ in the Rain.” She thought, but did not say, that Carl could have done anything he wanted, dancing included. She had said that often enough, and she knew the reason, an egotistical one—she wanted everyone in the world to appreciate him the way she did.
Once they were in bed, in the dark, the condo bedroom was a little disorienting, since the bed, which was against the west wall in their house, was against the east wall in the condo, and if she woke up to use the bathroom, she had to pause long enough to direct herself so as not to walk out onto the balcony and over the railing (she made herself not think this thought). The walls of the bedroom were yellow, which was pretty during the day. Her own walls Carl had repainted four times, finally settling on a restful shade called “Coastal Vista.” Nor did she especially like the sheets, which were cotton (hers were bamboo), but the coverlet was perfect—light enough to be cool without air conditioning, and heavy enough to stay put. Finicky. She was so like her mother now. The mattress was a little too firm—
Carl rolled toward her. He put one arm under her neck and laid the other one across her, and she snuggled backward toward him. They sighed simultaneously, and she felt him go to sleep. He always fell asleep before she did, which she found reassuring—it was as if he were the guide, leading her toward sleep and whatever they might find there. As with everything, he went there willingly. She could not say that Carl was never afraid, but he had always approached fear as systematically as he approached laying tile or putting together a cabinet, or, indeed, growing those vegetables in the backyard that he now adored—he would be planting the seeds in paper cups as soon as they got home.
Her own thoughts were more difficult to put to rest. Her knee itched, hair was tickling her nose, her leg jerked suddenly. Who was that who had restless-leg syndrome? Gray’s mother-in-law, it was. She took something for it.
Her bladder woke her up, as it did every night. She tried to exit the bed as quietly as she could, made herself turn left rather than right, did not look at the night-light in the bathroom or think about the paragraph in the lease that released the owners from all accidents. She thought she stepped down two steps, which startled her and woke her up—there were no steps. When she got back to bed, the sheets were cool again. Carl was sound asleep, but then he woke up, sat up, blew his nose, lay back again. He groaned softly as he settled in. She tickled the back of his head, which was the only spot within easy reach. She heard him yawn, and yawned herself. He was a little awake, because he squeezed her hand.
Claire always dreamed in the morning; when she woke up, the first thing she thought of was the conundrum in her dream, why had she not made out the bill for her party clients, such a big party, all pink, and her mother’s voice said, “Pure laziness, you ask me.” Claire stretched and stood up—she hated this part about old age, always heading for the bathroom; it made chamber pots look good. Carl was still asleep. The room was already warm. She looked at the clock. It was nine-twenty-three.
In the bathroom, she washed her hands, blew her nose, took a drink of water. She couldn’t believe they had slept so long—hadn’t they gone to bed before ten-thirty? But she yawned. She went back into the bedroom. Carl was lying on his side, facing away from her, his arm outside of the covers, his hand resting on his hip. She said, “Sweetie, it’s late. What do you want to do today?” When she sat down on her side of the bed, his arm flopped awkwardly backward. He didn’t respond. She knew what was wrong—or, at least, her body did, because she avoided touching him, only got up, went around, squatted down in front of him. His eyes were closed; his face looked the way it always did when he was sleeping, handsome, with sculpted cheekbones and a smooth forehead. She ran her fingers through his hair and said, “Sweetie?” His body shifted away from her. She touched his carotid artery, then put her ear to his chest—no movement, no sound.
Claire remained where she was for a long moment. Her immediate thought was, So it’s happened again. Of course, the death of her father was sixty-two years in the past, but if all your life was present all the time, then, yes, the two events sat beside one another, proving something. She put her hand on his forehead again, and now she felt its coolness. She kissed his lips, and felt their thickness, their lack of response; that was, indeed, the very thing that convinced her, but also, in a way, reassured her. No need to panic—Carl had gone on ahead. At that thought, the tears began.
Even so, even so, the rest of the world was the enemy now, wasn’t it? People would bustle in, push her aside, carry him off. He would then go to the funeral home, after that the crematorium (it was in his will). She continued to stroke his forehead, kissed his beautiful lips again, thought briefly of knives in the kitchen—it might be easy, she could lie down beside him and do it. Why go on, really? But she didn’t; she was a good girl. She stroked him for a while, then turned around and sat beside him, her back against the side of the bed, her head resting against his bent knee. He felt present in the room. That was all that mattered.
The coroner’s diagnosis was cerebral thrombosis, a blood clot in the brain, often no symptoms ahead of time, came on at night or early morning, when blood pressure was low. No, he would not have felt distressed, would not have awakened. The coroner said he wouldn’t mind going that way, compared with what he’d seen over the years. The director of the local funeral home was kind and sympathetic; the owner of the condo let her out of the second week of their lease; everyone was so sorry. Angie screamed and dropped her phone when Claire told her, but called back, still crying, and said she was sorry, how was Claire? When she got back to Chicago, the flowers started coming, the first bouquet from Henry, along with a note that said how much he’d always loved Carl—remember the time in his old place in Evanston when Carl came over to see why the wall in the dining room was damp all the time, and when he cut through the wall he saw that someone had used a piece of garden hose to replace a water pipe? He had to replace the hose with real pipe, the wall, and part of the flooring. Never made a mistake, listened with interest to every one of Henry’s ideas about Pope Innocent III, then remarked that he had given up on religion when he was six. Claire kissed the letter.
She let Angie make the decisions about where the service would be and what would be done with the ashes. Angie chose a nondenominational parklike place a little west of her house that had been in the cemetery business for almost a hundred years, and was well cared for; Claire wondered if she would ever visit there. The next day, Claire went into the gardening shed (formerly the garage, and so not terribly cold). Neatly stacked were the cups, the medium, the packets of seed—Red Calabash and Arkansas Traveler tomatoes, Purple Beauty sweet peppers, Dark Star zucchini, sunflowers, parsnips, morning glories. She planted the seeds as she had seen Carl do, three to a cup, made sure they were moist, and covered the cups as she had seen Carl do, with an old
blanket. It took her a couple of hours. A week since he died. Oddly, she did not feel terrible; she only felt that he was somewhere—in the back bathroom, perhaps, fixing the toilet so that it would not run, or down in the basement, straightening his tool closet. Wherever he was, he was present; she felt that, and so she wasn’t afraid.
—
AFTER THE IPCC ISSUED its report in October, Ezra taped a quote from it, written in red Magic Marker, just above the head of John Burroughs: “Warming by the end of the 21st century will lead to high to very high risk of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts globally.” When the Republicans took over the Senate, Ezra told Richie that the United States would address climate change by saying, “Fuck you.” He told Richie that the interior areas of all the Earth’s continents were going to dry up and heat up—125 degrees in Denby, Iowa, in the summer and minus fifty in the winter would become the norm. There were a few safe places to be: Oregon, Washington State, parts of California, New England, Nova Scotia, parts of D.C. (though not Richie’s neighborhood—move now, to Columbia Heights, said Ezra). Richie said, “You sound like my second cousin—well, first cousin once removed. She is a font of statistical information.” Ezra, who, when they ate lunch in restaurants, never looked at the girls go by and also never looked at the boys go by, actually made eye contact, and said, “She is?”
“Ezra,” said Richie, “she’s four inches taller than you.”
Ezra said, “She is?”
Richie saw that he was going to do some matchmaking. He said, “She’s coming in a week, for the spring flowers and to go to some conference at Georgetown.”
Ezra shrank into his seat again. Richie would have to give some advice. He was an idiot compared with Ezra, and they both knew it, but Richie had a fine record as a man-about-town—two attractive wives, both of whom remained fond of him, and some old girlfriends who e-mailed regularly (Nadie, of course, the most interesting; she and her wife had each had a child, about three months apart in age, and very compatible). In his two years working with Ezra, Ezra hadn’t mentioned a girlfriend, or even, though Richie didn’t have the best memory, a date. He stared at Ezra, who was wearing a wrinkled blue plaid shirt, jeans, and orange sneakers. He said, “Wear what you have on, but wash it between now and then.” Ezra looked down at his shirt as if seeing it for the first time.