The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [35]
I used to watch him with Eileen, instructing her. She would turn the crank on the ditto machine and he would say things like, “The important thing in a relationship is the struggle aspect,” or “When the bosses have succeeded in forcing the worker to consume his own goods, then there’s a crash, and that’s the excuse for moving the means of production elsewhere. Do you see that?” Eileen would crank and nod. We ate communally. Maury would sit down to his bowl of rice and beans and hot sauce, and admire it for a moment, then say to Eileen, “Doesn’t this make you feel connected to the whole Third World?” To me, he would say, “Can I get it all in my backpack?” and I would say, “Mark should take half and go by the PATH train.” I heard that he bargained for a reduced charge, maybe in exchange for naming me, among others, but I was gone by that time, and Maury didn’t know who I’d become or where I was. Neither did anyone else.
Last night Michael and I sat out in my garden. I think he was perplexed at how I kept questioning him about his mother. She drives a tractor, she has five daughters, she reads The New York Review of Books. He shifted around in his chair and said, “Stop looking at me like she’s some kind of phenomenon! She’s a woman who lives on a farm!” The images were wrong, which is why I kept asking for more. Nothing about her soothed me. Finally I said, “What does she cook? What’s the worst thing she cooks?”
“Jesus,” he said. Then he leaned back in his chair and looked out into space. After a few minutes, he said, in a deep, and I think unconscious, voice, “The wheeling stars.” I smiled. I was crawling around between the rows in the garden, hands and knees, and slapping the dirt, just to feel the resistant give of the soil. The solidity of the earth was something I hadn’t experienced before I came here. Now I don’t know if I would rather see it from a distance—its curve and spread—or feel it, or smell it. There are people who eat it, I’ve heard. So I crawl around the garden, then I stand up and inhale and look, then I crawl around again. “I’m sorry,” Michael said. “What are you doing?”
“Pulling weeds,” I said. That was sufficient. To a farm kid, pulling weeds is always an acceptable, and even ennobling, activity.
He didn’t leave until one. Listening to Michael talk about his mother made mine seem very present, so present that to have picked up the receiver and dialed the numbers, to have overlooked the passage of fifteen years, seemed easy. But in New York it was already after two, and I didn’t have the first notion about where she was, or where Miriam and Avram were, or even whether they were still alive. I suppose that they know that I am still alive, by the presence of my face on every post office wall in the country, but maybe they don’t. Those displays have a way of going out of currency. Or if I died, or were captured, maybe it would get on the local news in New York. Others have. But they all stuck to the east coast or the west coast, went underground, tried again. I’m the only one who just left, who got to the dead center of the continent. Here’s something: when Kansas State sent for the transcript of my first two years of college, it just came. I explained the name change by alluding to