A Regular Guy (53 page)

“Why didn’t you stay back East? Do you think the quality of life’s better here?”

Noah had shrugged. “Quality of sidewalk. You should go.”

Now she and Noah picked up Owens at his house and then continued on their walk.

“So what do you think?” Noah asked. “You going to run for something?”

Jane looked at her father, eager for the answer. She’d wanted to ask him that too.

“Naw. You can’t go making a fool of yourself on roller skates if you’re a senator or something. I’m sick of representing things. I want to just be a goof. I think that’ll be a lot funner. No, I’m glad history’s passed me by.”

“Look over there,” Jane said, when they finally wound back home. The neighbors in the yellow house across the street seemed to be having another party. People slowly moved over the lawn in long ballroom dresses.

“She’s a debutante, the daughter,” Jane said. “But what is that exactly?”

“Oh, it’s a horrible little club,” Noah said, “set up so the upper classes can guarantee that their children marry into the upper classes.”

“No, Jane,” Owens said. “I don’t think that’s what it’s about with our neighbors. Their daughter has some hearing problems. She’s actually pretty deaf. And they want her to have as normal a social life as possible. So I think that’s why they have all these parties. They figure if they have a lot, people will maybe invite her to theirs.”

Noah snickered. The deaf, in his experience, were often snobs.

They all came to Jane’s graduation. For that day, the old teachers turned up, carrying rich Mason jars of preserves they’d made from fruit picked at night in Alta’s parks. Old stragglers, single people from her years over the mountains, came too. Bixter handed her a puppy from her bucket, its eyes still closed. Eli had castanets on his fingers, Olivia brought a bouquet of daffodils.

For those who knew her earlier in her life, what had become of Jane was amazing though also a sorrow, not because she was lost to them forever but because she had ceased to engage their deepest interest. These were people who had been willing to fight for her survival, and now she had not only survived but was thriving. To many of them, what was rare and best in her bloomed only in shaded obscurity; her odd clarity, her frangibility, her allowance for their small comforts and predilections, had not long survived her drive over the mountains. That soft-fingered child was somewhere buried, another victim of the frontier. She had survived, in ways most of them had not, and they carried their losses everywhere behind them, jangling like a string of tin cans.

The diction of Jane’s new family was High English. They whistled Mozart, roller-skating under the full dark trees or pushing the stroller. Since the valley had become rich, most of the old houses had been refurbished and some of the bungalows had been torn down and replaced with structures built out to the lot lines. Fathers could be seen through yellow windows, sitting down to read. If you asked any one of them how his day was, his answer was apt to be “Great!”

So the old ones gave their gifts and bowed away after the ceremony,
and Jane settled the strange assortment in a bag, holding the puppy under her dress. She sighed. These were precious oddments she had no use for, typical of her mother’s friends.

“Did you see Ozzie’s father over there? He was all proud, saying, ‘Attaboy. That’s my boy.’ He gave him a thousand-dollar bill.”

“What does his father do?” Mary asked.

“Counterfeiter,” Owens said.

Owens was still famous. A woman he didn’t know walked up to him and said, “Oh, I’m so glad you shaved off your beard. It was really ugly.”

He shrugged and said, “I’m speechless.”

Another of his theories concerned summer. He decided Jane should do nothing. He wanted her to sleep late and slouch around the house. Pick roses and put them in vases if she wanted to.

Weekdays, between the hours of nine and five, Alta reverted to its long-ago memory and lived in Spanish. Gardeners tilled yards and dispensed water they would never own. Soft religious women held babies too young to talk, feeding them things their mothers disapproved of, because they knew what God wanted with children, and it was quiet and graceful repose.

Owens could be counted on to believe in love, not only his own but yours too, if you told him so. It was his supreme value in life, even when he’d worked twenty hours a day. For him, it was the slender everything.

He believed in Jane’s loves when she was too young to really have any. And he was loyal. He sang:

I’m just that man
whose sperm fertilized the egg—
half your chromosomes—
who made sure you weren’t a man
.

Or, into the telephone, calling Eliot Hanson, “We’re sitting around in the foyer, trying to call our favorite lawyer….”

This was embarrassing but also consoling. The way he was.

They ate at six o’clock and walked at seven. They fell asleep at nine-thirty or ten, and beyond the screenless windows crickets sounded their two notes under the dark stateliness of the old oaks and a tilted moon like an ironic earring.

Owens knew odd facts—for example, that Mount Whitney is the highest point in America, Death Valley the lowest, and California has both. He loved to explain things to Jane, small things that were part of the everyday world but that would neither come up in ordinary conversation nor help her get into graduate school.

He pointed at the triangular device he was pushing the baby in.

“Why does it stop so evenly, Jane?” He always quizzed her to make sure she understood.

One night, she asked him about his youth.

“I wrestled for six months over whether I was going to start Genesis. I knew I wanted to do it but just not then. I wanted to wait. I thought maybe I should go and join a monastery. But I also knew that was the time.” He looked at her as he did only with Eve and, sometimes, her. “I knew it was going to be really big.”

They walked with that for a moment, then Owens stopped at a bush of open roses. He cupped one and dunked Jane’s head down to smell. She loved thinking of her parents together, sharing a bed that had white sheets and no blanket, never made. She pictured it in an empty room, with one chair.

“You know, rock and roll started here. The Grateful Dead was here.
The Whole Earth Catalog
started here. It’s hard to explain, but it was really wonderful here then. It was—well, I want to say the sixties, but the sixties were really the seventies. You could date it with
Sergeant Pepper
. It’s like the universe cracked open for a little while and a certain number of people got out, some of the brightest people in the world. Chemists and poets and philosophers.

“I feel lucky to have been in it. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It was like, it was like this….” He swept his arm off the handle of the baby carriage, “This time of night in summer, about seven o’clock, a little balmier than right now.”

The Dance

T
o Noah’s wedding, Jane wore the first dress her father had finally bought her. He’d taken her to the fifth floor of Alta’s old department store, where she’d carried dresses to the assigned room and walked out in her rubber shoes and thick socks, the flimsy fabric tickling her knees. They’d agreed on the dress; it was black and sleeveless. And every time Jane wore it, she felt the thrilling bareness again as air tangled around her legs and scarfed inside the armholes. By now, she owned many dresses. Eve took her shopping and let her pick out what she wanted. One thing Jane liked about Eve was that even though she didn’t care much about clothes herself, she didn’t make Jane feel bad because she did. Still, once Jane could wear anything, she found she was most comfortable in the jeans and tee shirts of her childhood.

The wedding was outside, in the stunted orchards adjoining the Copper King’s mansion, and Jane had flown home for it. Home: it slipped over you like a dress when you stepped outside the airport doors into the transparent weather and saw the ridge of pines with palms. She found her father the way he’d become: outside, in his garden,
the infant girls at his feet. The oldest was standing now, wearing overalls, bending the corn.

He was a man who could have only girls. In this epoch of genetic understanding, everyone knew whose fault this was. He could have eleven more children in the next twenty years, all daughters, he said, and that would be fine. “It’s a lot more important than work,” he told Jane and winked, handing her the warm bundle.

He’d given away the cars and made a regular triangle between the college library, the farmers market and home. “I find, as I get older, what I care about most is I love watching things grow.”

Only now, living away, Jane began to understand how many kingdoms there were. His was not the first or the largest. A lot of other people, even in college, tried to be showy. And the East counted all kinds of things she’d never even heard of, or heard of only in bad ways from old-fashioned books. But in the sphere of home, very little was enough, and probably, all over the country that was once a frontier, they were all emperors to their children: a chicken in every pot and a king in every living room.

Louise, Noah’s bride, had silver-gray hair and a dress that was absolute white, dimming the fog as it sailed up the mountains, snagging on pine.

Jane remembered the first time she had come to this place. What if it had been empty, as it was now? She would’ve lived off the stunted orchards and vagrant gardens, with the hulking walk she’d had in the mountain town.

The ceremony was over; and they were beginning to serve food. It was just dusk, and people Jane didn’t know—scientists maybe—were crowding around Noah. She wandered through the whole wedding and found no boys her age.

But the Copper King’s mansion had not been empty. Her father lived in three cold rooms, and Noah found her and saved her for him. She’d always wanted to know her father, the way she knew her mother, and now she did. But with her mother it was still different. She and her mother had always had the bird time of day. About now, they stopped wherever they were, together or apart, and stood still in the
new dark, looking outside and listening to the trees. Her mother sometimes relaxed, almost alone, even with Jane. “Listen to the birds,” she’d say, without ever expecting an answer. “Smell the lavender.”

She wanted Jane to hear every sound and see every beauty she did. She didn’t expect conversation. In fact, if Jane said something, it startled her. This must have begun when Jane was newly born, long before she could talk. Her mother spoke to her when she took long walks pushing the stroller.

“Hey, I brought you some chow,” Owens said, handing her a bowl and sitting down next to her. “There wasn’t much we can eat. These carnivores.”

Jane sometimes ate a hamburger at school and regular things like cheese he didn’t believe in, but her father always assumed she was as pure as he was. Now she had acne and often felt the craving for the clean taste of his vegetables. Jane ate the bowlful of rice, picking out the broccoli with her fingers. She used a spoon, not a fork, and pushed the rice into the spoon with her other thumb. This was one of the things her mother, glancing from two tables away, knew her by. They ate in silence under a canopy of rustling, cheeping birds.

Then, on the big black-and-white floor inside the tent, people were beginning to dance. Jane bit her lip. She wanted to. A long time ago, before she came to Alta, she knew how to dance. In the mountain town, it had been all she cared about, and for years she’d watched grown-ups dancing. Having studied this evolution, she now saw each stage of her parents visible here. The tuxedo dance her father had done with Olivia on marble floors, each of them as tall as the other—Louise’s mother was waltzing that same way, with a man in a white jacket and an orthopedic shoe. And her mother and Eli swinging in a folk turn, as they had in the desert, with opposite hands meeting in the middle—a dance of people who didn’t know steps but felt love. Back East, the old bells would sometimes ring from church steeples, summoning the rare devout from their shaded streets: Olivia had that air to Jane now, slightly out of date, without the constituency and power she once had.