Blip. Blip. Blip.
“Now what are these. Collard greens. Can’t say I’ve ever seen those before.”
“You have plenty on your shelf.”
“And fish.” (Makes a face.) “I don’t eat fish. I catch ‘em, I clean ‘em, I cook ‘em, but I don’t eat ‘em. “
“Well, you should try collard greens sometime. Oil and salt on them, they’re great.”
“Nope. No green stuf
f for me. Just a little bit of lettuce maybe. And every once in a while green beans, but only if they’re cooked right. And I mean just right. I do eat corn. And potatoes.”Takes one last look at my food, reaching for the end of the bag of greens with only the tips of her fingers, and shudders in disgust.
Conversation #2:
“I used to give a seminar for women and their money. ‘Smart women finish rich.’ I used to have all these figures then, showed how much you’d save over time if you start putting something away a little each month.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen those charts.”
“You’re so smart to be thinking of this now, when you’re so young yet. Man. So many kids around here, they just want to make the monthly payment on their car, make rent. Nobody thinking anymore about the future.”
“And we’ve all seen where that leads, haven’t we?”
“Oh yeah, oh yeah. Take banks. It’s our fault too. We were lending people money we shouldn’t have been. So, English teacher. You know, I’ve written books. Three of ‘em actually. Novels. I’m always working on something, just scribbling away. Course the writings not real good—but that’s what editors are for, right? Clean it all up.”
“ Um, sure.”
“I got a kid, trying to get him to go to the junior college first, get some credits. But they all want to spend the big bucks to go live in the dorms, have freedom. You got your whole life to have freedom, I say. You can wait a few years and save some money first. But they don’t see it that way.”
“Uh Huh.”
“I mean, that’s why you’re so smart to be thinking about your future now. I mean, with this political situation. What we got in Washington, what mess they’re up to now.”
“Mm.hm…”
“I mean, look—I don’t try to get political with anyone. Anyone’s politics is their own business and of course I can work with anybody. But that snowstorm in DC? Now wasn’t that the Lord?”
“Mm.”
“But saving money. Yep. Now here’s how I think of it. Say you walk by a window, and you see a purty dress. I mean, a real purty dress. You want that dress! But it’s way too expensive. So you say, no , I’d just really better not. I mean, a smart girl like you, that’s what you’d say. Then, the next day you come by, and it’s 50% off! Well, now you could buy it. Now you could buy it, and look at all that money you’ve saved. That’s saving money.”
“You know…. I think I’ll just take your card here….”
Conversation #3:
“Excuse me?”
We’re in the pool, sapphire-tinged water, vaguely medical in its hue, lapping chest deep. I push my goggles up, and an older woman, one of the water walkers, is bobbing toward me, parting the surface with her fingers as she glides. “Yes?”
“Did you read that article in there, tacked up to the bulletin board in the locker room?”
“Yeah,” I say, though I didn’t really; I just saw the headline.
“Well what can we do to help? All those teachers are losing their jobs.”
“I know. Mine’s been cut too, actually.” I tell her this as some kind of fair warning. Without my contacts, I am only peering in the direction of her white shape, the sound of her voice, but I know she can't know who I am either.
“And the swimming teacher!” the woman continues. “You know, every fourth grader in the county gets their swimming lesson from her. Every one. Now what are those kids going to do?”
“I know. It’s terrible.”
“And they can’t close this pool. Where will people who need it go? You get a lesson from that swimming teacher, you get a work out, I tell you.”
After my swim, I stand in the locker room, dripping and squinting, and read the article. A few decades ago, a local fourth-grader drowned in a river. The PE teacher at the college here started a swimming lesson program, and later it expanded to include all the fourth graders in the county, so there is now a full local generation taught to swim by this one woman.
It’s like my grandmother who, in my town, taught spelling and cursive handwriting to thirty years of third-graders.
And what a power in that, I’ve often thought: a creepy, secretive power, flying under all of our radar.
Group Discussion
“Above all, it’s important to ignore rumors.”
“Oh—and they’re flying!”
“There’s the one about the pool closing…”
“I heard that one.”
“At the pharmacy the other day, there was this woman. Said she knows all about because of where her friend works. Well she went on and, and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”
“…build a new Wal-Mart.”
“Everyone in town has something to say. And I’ve been getting emails. And you can read all about it on Facebook too.”
“Oh yes. Guess-who was on there. This isn’t a rumor. It’s true and you can go look at it yourself.”
Conversation #4, in Stirrups
“Man, you just got here and now you’ll have to look for a new job! That’s the pits.”
I know.
“Still. You don’t have any family here, how’d you end up here?”
It’s a good question, and one everyone here asks—with that same awe in their voice that seems to end, so weirdly, in disapproval or suspicion. Don’t they live here? Have they no faith in the merits of their own town?
I try to explain; we’re from the Midwest. We’re from small towns. It is a good little college they have here, and I was glad for a job.
“Now, if you want to have a baby some time, I always tell people, six months it might take, after you go off pills. But, it could happen soo-oner.” He ends in a sing-song, a joke with a happy wink.
But I have not asked about having a baby. I’m here, as I’ve specifically explained, to refill a birth control prescription.
“Okay,” I say, and think wistfully of my Portland doc, and her most serious, searching question: Do you wear your bicycle helmet? Every time?
“We’ll see you again next year,” the doc says, and then stops. “Or—man, maybe we won’t huh?” He shakes his head, then shakes my hand. Good luck to me.
A Walk with T.
“Careful. Or I’ll hear about this Monday.”
But he shoves me again toward a mud puddle. I respond by launching myself from a curb into his side, a wrestler descending from the ropes. He grabs my head and scrubs my hair with the flat of his fist.
No one was coming out of any of the houses to save me. We joke about this. What will they say after we’re gone? Remember that teacher we had that one year? The one whose boyfriend beat her?
Or, they’ll remember him as my husband, since that’s what so many call him here, bank tellers, grocery store clerks, co-workers. People here even mention to me “my husband” when I am alone and when I have never met them before, causing me always to want to double-take, to turn around in a circle looking over my shoulder.
It’s like I suddenly grew old enough, crossing those 2200 miles to get here. Maybe it happened at the Continental Divide. But maybe it was halfway through Nebraska, where, for me, the bartender gallantly opened a Lite beer.
If we did stay here, they’d marry us off for sure, just through force of repetition. Even people I gently correct forget by the next time I see them, so it’s like sweeping a drift of sand.
“See? We should have brought the movies,” I say as we pass the video store: Spotlight Video, with its neon sign and new release painted windows and one strangely boarded-over window, like a car drove through it.
Once I’d walked in to return some movies, and one of my students was sitting behind the desk, working on an assignment I had given. She looked up at me in total surprise. I was an apparition.
It made me remember a math teacher, new one year to our middle school, who was not married but living with her boyfriend, to whom she referred, in a way that deeply embarrassed us all, as her partner. She also went by “Ms.,” the first woman I ever knew to do so, and as if it were related, was skinny—skeletally skinny—could be seen around town running, of all things, and gave us her home phone number so we could call if we had homework questions, even at night. We thought she was the weirdest adult we’d ever met. I don’t think anyone ever called her with a homework question. I think that because one night when I called her she seemed so surprised, and even annoyed, like she’d forgotten that she’d offered.
Any questions? I joked with my student at the video store, and was grateful when she shook her head no. I was in a nubby jacket, not in my teacher clothes.
Everything is mud. We walk along the road, where it is less muddy. Grass everywhere is browned and matted, the fur of a long-sleeping or dead animal; trees are sticks and twigs.
“Look.” T. grabs my arm. There’s a small dog inside a house, stock still and staring over the back of a couch. Framed by the front window, it’s like a painting, the dog’s little face rigid, ears perked.
“Doesn’t it look like a painting?” T. says. “I thought it was, for a moment.”
On and off, in different places, at different times of day, we talk about where we’ll move next, when, what kinds of jobs we’ll find. What can we get? But also, what do we want actually?
We don’t know, of course. But we keep talking in the same circular way that had been enough last spring to tornado us here.
I MapQuest our route again, and that purple line stretches so unbelievably long back across the country.
“Let’s go to that library.” T. teases me as we approach a dip, a ditch, and then a looming brick building, new and tucked behind winter bare trees. “I’ll vouch that you’re my friend.”
“Very funny.” There, to my mortification, I’d nearly failed to qualify for a library card, unable to provide the name and number of one other person in town, someone not living with me, who knew me.
I’d had to pull out my big guns: I’m an English teacher. At the college. The librarian—after looking over her shoulder—whispered that I could just put down my office number for my reference.
It was too bad the student of mine I’d seen outside the library, on my way in, had ridden away already. He lives about ten miles out of town, and in my class had written essays about riding his bike long, and then longer distances, starting with the first time he’d left the end of his grandparents’ long driveway. We’d chatted there in the parking lot, and he’d showed me the big four-wheeler gloves he’d outfitted to the handlebars of his bike, for the wind.
Now he’s ridden as far as the state line, and across it.
Passing the library, T. and I come upon a street decorated with basketball cut-outs. The boys’ team has won the state basketball championship. We pass a small boy on a makeshift pitcher’s mound in his side yard, a bucket of baseballs at his side, and a man squatting to receive these pitches eyes us. What do we think we’re doing—walking around?
“Pitchers and catchers,” T. says gamely. We turn on to a street named Oil.
Earlier—while I was upstairs prowling for jobs and googling cities, and T. was making a spinach soup—he reached far into our second-hand dishwasher to fiddle with a metal loop sticking up, something out of place. Extracting the thing, he found it to be a tiny, child-sized engagement ring, with five plastic diamonds in a row. He’d called me downstairs, wonder in his voice. It was like our dishwasher had proposed to him.For a minute—for one minute—it was like this town had tried to marry us.
I take the opportunity near the end of our walk, while T. leans to inspect the new buds on a tree—he knows the names for everything, he knows the genus and the species—to give him one more good, loving, relieved, terrified punch to the arm.
