The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [40]
“I wasn’t relaxed.” He waits for me to say what I was, but I can’t go on. And those are the last words we speak. He goes out to his car, gets in, and drives out of the driveway, pulling a tail of fine dust, and I go into the silent house. I sit on the couch where he was sitting.
My grandfather watched the Yankees on television every Saturday. My grandmother was under five feet, my grandfather not much over. My grandmother would be knitting an intricate and brightly colored outfit for one of those plastic dolls they had before Barbie dolls. This was for me. I hated dolls, and I would be pretending not to notice. Ringing through the apartment was the sound, not of the Yankees’ announcer, but of Rigoletto, because part of watching the Yankees was turning the sound off and listening to the Texaco opera broadcast. My grandfather called himself a “Yankee,” Yiddish pronunciation, “Yahnkih.” The afternoons were long, and I was thinking, always, about something else, half bored, looking at the dust motes in the sunbeams, running my eyes across the titles in the bookcase and making objects of the long words. An opera is actually just about as long as a baseball game. I close my eyes now, and I look at my grandfather in his chair. He has thick hair, mink-brown, and his ears jut out of it like sails. His foot is up on a cushion, because he has gout in his big toe. He glances from the game to my grandmother and smiles. She is not looking at him. A socialist, an American, a Yahnkih, a man happy in his self-contradiction. I open my eyes, and I am in Missouri, and everything is collecting in my head, light and heavy, animate and motionless, bright and dark. Of my life it could truly be said that all is lost, except these things.
I remember when I first had the idea of making bombs. That is, I don’t remember the circumstances, but I remember the feeling. I remember putting my hands out, palms curved and facing each other, about eight inches apart, as if a bomb, a hard small object, as I thought before I had seen any dynamite, could appear between them, if the force of desire alone could have that effect. Making a bomb was the most extreme thing I could think of to do, and once I had thought of it, I could not settle for anything less. All through the research, all through the dropping of hints, all through the wooing of Maury Nassiter, I was lusty and restless, the way I feel now. It is the itch to do the most unthought-of thing, the itch to destroy what is made—the firm shape of my life, whether unhappy, as it was, or happy, as it is now.
But if I turn the imagined object and look at the other side, my motives are trivial, unimportant. My grandfather would say that what is true was what compelled me to act. He used to say, “When these bosses make you go faster until you can’t keep up and they fire you to hire a younger man for less, you think this is by mistake?” He would say, “Of course they shoot me if I throw a stone through the window. You think that a pane of glass is not worth more than I am worth? Did the pane of glass cost more than the bullet? That’s what they say to themselves.” And every time he devalued himself, I got angry. It is an explosive pressure in my chest and shoulders that pulsates, I realize now, in time to my quickened breathing. It only takes a second to feel it again, to know again what my grandfather knew. I push myself out of the couch and walk to the front door. It is locked, and I open it and step out onto the porch, still panting. Since no one ever comes here, and Michael and I always park in the back, I know that this matted grass is from the morning, from the old couple. I stand looking at the tracks. Who could they be, that couple, other than the representatives of blame? I am struck, in retrospect, by their half-defeated air, the way the man stayed behind the car door, and the woman held her handbag in front of herself like a shield.