A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [202]
He manages the dairy animals in the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago now, what we laughingly call “the herd.” I cannot tell anyone what my husband does for a living without also wanting to tell them that it is absurd, what he does. The six cows are Holsteins, a word nothing at all like Golden Guernsey, a word you cannot say without looking as if you’re masticating. We can go out on the flat of our apartment roof near Wrigley Field and watch the Cubs play ball. Howard watches the game raptly from his lawn chair, not because he likes baseball, particularly, but because we have the best seat in the city. If I am awake in the early mornings I watch him down the hall, sitting by himself in the kitchen, running his hands over the table we brought from the farm. His hands move in swirls, as if the table is a Ouija board, about to give him an important message for his future. He has grown quieter, something I used to think impossible, like a turtle evolving into an animal that makes less noise. I don’t know if he is raging or if he is merely resigned. If there is one thing I’ve learned over the years, and learned well, it is how to be still and wait. Periodically he is so fiercely merry, determined to have a good time, that the rest of us, Emma, Claire, and I, slink away to our own corners. And yet once in a rare while Howard and I are able to reach back to the quality of the old days, to sit at our table after the girls are in bed and talk into the night. It is as if we’ve somehow been, as Theresa would say, “blessed with grace.”
On occasion I have thought that we are where we belong, city people returned to the city. We have a sunny apartment, Howard goes off to work, and I am a full-time mother. We have Dan Collins to thank for Howard’s job, for pulling strings with the director of the zoo. We have tried, halfheartedly, to incorporate a few details from Prairie Center into our urban landscape. Howard has built walnut shelves in the kitchen with wood from the farm, from trees he felled himself. Lynelle’s bookmark is on the floor by the futon, the first thing I see when I wake up. We had rolls of film from our farm life, which I recently gathered together in an album. After it was done I put the thing out of reach, out of sight. As for city dwelling, there is the homeless man on our block, the Waldorf school Emma attends with children of all races and creeds, for which Nellie pays. There is the feeling of being in the midst of noise and trash and people and life. What throws me off, every night, when Howard comes home, is the fact that he still smells like cows, like silage. He spends a fair amount of time at a desk, but he is also involved with the animals’ daily care, and therefore, of course, he smells. Even when I am prepared for his entrance I have to brace myself against the fragrance of grain and hay and manure, against all that those smells conjure, against hot summer afternoons and the marvel of the pop-up baler throwing a bale of hay onto the wagon.
We have apparently left Lizzy behind. She is, Reverend Nabor said at one point to Howard, “forever young.” I wrote Theresa on what would have been Lizzy’s third birthday, and she wrote back, a short note thanking me, telling us that she is pregnant. We are no longer friends, really, and yet I know that we are a part of each other’s lives in much the same way a dead parent, or lover, is only slightly beneath one’s consciousness by day, and always behind closed lids in sleep. I walk Claire to the park on nice days and I sit