A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [17]
We were celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, killing our birds with one stone. Howard noted matter-of-factly that the chunks of beef, water chestnuts, and pea pods tasted as if they had been marinated in bath water. The Chinese husband and wife cook and waitress team were so happy to have customers we already felt guilty for not ever coming back. Howard had combed his thick black hair for possibly the first time since our fifth anniversary. We were the only diners in the restaurant and I felt sure I could detect romance. I imagined a romance meter maid coming along in her narrow little cart, her white wand shooting out to mark our legs with yellow chalk. We were well within the bounds of adequate feeling for a married couple of six years.
Howard was leaning toward me, first describing Claire sitting in the hay chute holding two wild kittens by the neck, and then Emma hitching the dog up to the old goat cart, getting the ride of her life. He smiled as he wiped the steam from the window with his hand. I was slightly drunk on one bottle of beer. I laughed out loud, burped, and got hiccups in swift succession. Our children were marvelous and not even Howard’s beef or my lukewarm salty Chicken Almond Ding with one or two almonds in a gray-green slurry could dampen our enthusiasm.
“I wonder if a kid like Robbie MacKessy thinks that pain is the only reality,” Howard had said after I opened my fortune and read, “Happiness is illusion. Pain is reality.”
I didn’t like the idea that Happiness was nothing more than a phantom. I looked through the circle that Howard had cleared on the window, and I saw, all the way back, to the time when my father took me to Bolyston, Ohio, to see the Gem of Egypt. It was a giant earth-moving machine, an absolutely colossal machine, used for surface coal mining. It stood fifteen stories high, with pulleys the size of Ferris wheels, and rigging and scaffolding as glorious as the Golden Gate Bridge. It had a claw that could move 150 cubic yards of dirt in one bite. In one or two passes the Gem of Egypt could wipe out an entire coal town. The company my father worked for had made the pulleys and the machine was his pride and joy. When I started to run toward it, my father yanked me back by the collar and shouted, “What’s the matter with you?” When I didn’t answer, he shook me. “I said, what’s the matter with you?”
I finally managed to say, “I want to climb on it—and wave to you.”
He took me under my arms and lifted me up. I was ten years old, much too old for that sort of thing. As far as I could remember he had never held me before. I started to scream and then stuffed my hands in my mouth. It was my father’s unspoken rule that I wasn’t to cry for any reason. He lifted me up and up, so I could see the Gem. “It’s bigger than the goddamn Parthenon,” my father used to say, as if the Parthenon was a standard unit of measurement. Being three feet taller didn’t appreciably change my perspective, and I couldn’t really concentrate on it anyway, because I was on his shoulders. They were sharp and I couldn’t help noticing that he had dandruff, huge pieces in his brown hair like pussy willows growing along a stalk. Still, I knew that I would never forget that moment—it, the happiness, was stronger than almost anything I could think of, like the terrible blinding glare of sun on fresh deep snow.
“What are you thinking about?” Howard had asked that night at the restaurant.
“What?” In my experience people didn’t ask such a question unless their love was brand-new. “I was just remembering more of my cow dream,” I lied. “It was such a stressful night’s work, dreaming that dream. I was being brought in from the pasture to the milking parlor and prodded into a stanchion. My name was there on the board, everything you needed to know: GARDNER FRANCES KATHRYN GOODWIN ALICE.” I ticked them off on my fingers. “Gardner from my father, Frances from my mother, Kathryn from my aunt, who raised me, Goodwin from you, the sperm donor, Alice for myself. I was a fine milker, really. I