The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [38]
But my mother would sigh and look around and say, “I just feel like I’ve lived this one out. It’s too familiar. When I look at the dado on that wall, I get depressed.”
“That’s because it’s dirty and needs painting! Let’s just paint it another color. Avie and I will do it.”
“If you spend money on a rented place, it’s just thrown away.”
“If you leave before the lease is up, it’s thrown away, too.”
“But that money’s already gone. No one’s counting on it. There are a lot of nice neighborhoods in Brooklyn that we’ve never tried.”
Then Avie would say, “You can’t live all those lives, Mom. You can only live one life.” His voice would get patient and slow. “You want to move all the time because you want to try out other lives, but you can’t.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Avram. I just don’t like the space to be the same shape all the time.”
“Why not? Why not?” He was angry.
“I don’t know, Avram. People are different. They should accept people’s differences.”
I wrote “Dear Mom,” then “Hi, Mom,” then “Dearest Mom,” then “Hey, Mom!” all in a row, on the same sheet of paper. The fact is, I have never written my mother a letter. I had never lived out of local calling distance before the bombings. I left the piece of paper next to the envelope on the kitchen table. I found a stamp and put it on the envelope, then I turned out the light and went to bed.
Once, Scott and I were having breakfast. He was looking at me, and then his eyes shifted and looked past me, out the window. All of a sudden, he jumped up and ran out the back door, grabbed the .22 on the back porch, and came around past the window. At the corner of the house, he dropped to one knee and let off a shot. Then he went out into the garden and came back with the rabbit that had been eating our lettuce plants. It was dead. He was proud of the shot, proud of its quick wit, I see now. Then, I just kept saying, “It was loaded? That gun was loaded? There was a loaded gun on our porch? I can’t believe there was a loaded gun on our back porch!” When I remember that, I remember the shrillness of my voice. Finally he shouted, “Goddammit, would you go to school?” After the accident, I found that gun. He had loaded it again. I don’t know why. He didn’t hunt, even rabbits. Mutual silence got to be a position with us, something to be defended.
I couldn’t sleep. Michael’s idea was brilliant, a concrete example of how well we work together. He isn’t very practical, and I could already see how he would get discouraged about the logistics of testing it without me. With the memory of his flesh against mine, the sense of our parallel tracks beginning to converge toward the horizon didn’t entirely displease me.
At dawn, I was wide awake and itching to work in the garden. “The back forty,” as Michael calls it, occupies the crown of a south-sloping hill, and I want to begin building terraced beds in the fall, perennial flowers and herbs, walls about four railroad ties high. If you stand far enough away, you will see a triangle of daffodils spreading down the hillside, then, later, a mass of red climbing roses growing over the terrace walls. As a rule, I live much more in the future than in the past. I crawled around the garden, clearing mulch from the paths and smelling the dewy odor of tomatoes and nasturtiums. I have only had one tomato so far this year, and no peppers. The vines are loaded, though. I crawled along next to the onions, and bent the tops down one by one. When I got up to go inside, it must have been about seven, and I was surprised to see a car pulling into the driveway. It was a late-model American sedan, dark blue. I followed my habit, which now doesn’t have much to do with fear, and hid behind the bushes of tomato vines in their cages. The driver’s door opened first, and a thick man in a sport shirt got out. He craned his neck toward the house, then wiped