The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [36]
Well, I didn’t call my brother, then my sister, then my mother. I think that resurrection should be prepared for rather carefully. I don’t mean mine. They can’t prepare for mine. I mean theirs. I’m not sure that I could bear it, bringing them to life again.
I do long, with a sort of physical itch, to tease my mother, to sit at the dinner table, aghast at what she has put before us, and say, “Mom! This is slop! What is this? Don’t you go into D’Agostino’s by the front door, with the customers?” My brother would be laughing. My sister would be laughing. My mother would lift her fork with dignity, and say, “It’s fine, it’s good. You children are so persnickety.”
Those dynamite operations manuals were the first manuals I ever looked into, and I loved the flatness of the prose, the elementary school drawings. And that is where my life began. The fact is that I am a happy person. Now that I know the lingo, I might call those banks and supply depots “randomly selected containment buildings” and the explosions themselves “very sudden chemical reactions.” Maybe one of my bombs did kill someone, maybe one did, though none of the newspaper accounts ever reported such a thing, and the wanted poster doesn’t mention a death. All of them went off after midnight, or in deserted military installations. But I often wonder, what if someone died? I look around my kitchen, out at the garden, down the hall at the oval glass in the front door. I feel the love that I feel every day for the simple objects of this solitude, for the spacious silence mid-continent, and I think, that’s one price to pay for this, that life for this one. In college I would have been ashamed to think such a thought, but now, every day, with every safety check, every cost-benefit analysis, every decision about what maintenance to order first, I consider the comparative value of life, money, and time. I glorify the one over the many, this one over that one. Sometimes I look at my twenty-year-old face on the post office wall and wonder about that blank expression. Maybe it was terror, the terror of only being able to imagine what I had already known. Missouri is a place I could not have imagined if I hadn’t been forced to.
• • •
After Scott died, I did not know what to do with the dogs or the cats, or the weeds in the garden, or the produce from the garden. I did not know how to cook myself dinner or check the oil in the truck we had bought together, or how to answer the door if an unexpected knock came. At the time, I thought that I was not especially sad, not sad enough, maybe. But I see now that it is the ultimate sadness for a smart person to become stupid, for a competent person to wring her hands, for a person full of thoughts to go blank. In the summer I fell into the well. When I was building bombs I was never inattentive for a moment, but I sometimes think about the well accident, wondering about how I could have gotten so careless. I was standing in front of the pump, filling a jug, and the well cover broke away beneath me. I threw out my arms and caught myself at ground level. I looked down at the surface of the water, some twelve feet below. It was July 20, my mother’s fifty-ninth birthday. That was what I thought of as I clambered out of the well. I began shivering uncontrollably in the middle of the night, and shivered for five hours, because if I hadn’t caught myself, I would have treaded water until I died of exhaustion.
Last night, Michael brought an expensive bottle of wine for dinner that he had gotten in Kansas City, and I served homemade cannelloni. The pine nuts alone cost me eight dollars a pound. We didn’t have much to say to one another. When the wine bottle was about a third full, Michael picked it up to refill our glasses, but instead of pouring anything out, he blew across the rim of the bottle. Then he poured some in his glass and blew across it again. I find this