Broken Vessels (6 page)
Authors: Andre Dubus
Between Roseville and Sacramento the land flattens and is crowded and we have reached, or returned to, cluttered America living close enough to each other to hear and recite the neighbors' quarrels and exclamations of joy and grief, the only spaces those cleared of trees and reserved for sport: softball diamonds and golf courses. I am saddened by what we make: the buildings where they might as well hang a sign:
THIS UGLY PLACE IS WHERE YOU WORK
, the playing fields and parks, and the house to contain you. While somehow there is a trick at work and you have been removed not only from the land itself, but from its spirit; or, as Sharon says, the heart. After the open country and mountains, the earth looks punished, and it is hard to believe that its people have not been punished as well, for nothing more than the desire to love and to prove oneself worthy of that by going to work.
West of Davis there are irrigated farms and fields of yellow-brown hay with a wide black strip where they have burned it. To the south the sky is broad, nearly midwestern, but it seems lower; to the north it is hazy and broken by a mountain range. Corn is growing. Near us the low hills are grown with hay, and the trees on them are darker green against their sand dune color. Turning southwest we go through a stretch of marsh, white herons rising from it; then rows of grey ships are sitting on green and yellow grass, and we see the wide Sacramento and cross it and from the bridge we see the ships mothballed at Vallejo. We stop at Martinez and watch Casey outside with his mother and two-year-old sister, their hair moving in the breeze, Casey punching his palm with his fist.
Then we go downriver. On the opposite bank are blond hills; then men are fishing from a wharf, there is a marina with sailboats and fishing boats, and we are going south along the Bay. It is wide, muddy near the shore, then green, and across it there are blue ridges against the pale sky. Then we see the Oakland Bridge and, far off, the Golden Gate Bridge, and trees shaped by the wind leaning forever to the east, and a teenage black boy, lean and muscular in his shorts, jogging north along the tracks, his hands high, at his shoulders, punching: hooking and jabbing the sunlit air.
1981
W
HEN I WAS
a graduate student at the University of Iowa I had a wife and four children, and an income of about four thousand dollars a year, and I stood in line monthly for food handed out by the state. My juxtaposition with the others in line made me uncomfortable, for I was usually wearing a tie and jacket for my duties as a teaching assistant, I was in my twenties, and I felt that, to the others in line, I looked like a man with hope and direction; at the very least, a man who was only temporarily a part of that line and the life it helped support. I brought home cans and cartons of butter, cheese, peanut butter, flour, and chunks of strange meat reminiscent of C-rations; but with imagination, the meat could be made into a casserole that was more than merely edible. I also knew, as I stood in line with the poor, that I had chosen to leave a good salary, had chosen to go to graduate school, while for those other people the act of choosing was so limited that it was not, and would probably never be, an essential part of their lives.
But there was another way I brought home the bacon, a romantic way that could not have been romantic when it was the only way a man could feed the bodies he loved. In the fall we went hunting, my friends and I; sometimes there were so many of us that we resembled a rifle squad walking abreast through the cornfields. None of us went hunting because it was a cheap way to feed families. The money for licenses and shells would have bought more food in a supermarket. We hunted because we were friends, and because we loved to hunt: to slip between the cornstalks in autumn and, as winter started, to walk over the snow or frozen earth and the cornstalks lying now stiff as wood; to flush the rabbit and fire over his bounding tail at his head; and, best of all, the sudden rush of the pheasant, the quick shooting, and the always fair decision, in doubtful cases, about whose gun, whose finger and eye, had killed the bird. At the end of those weekend afternoons I brought home the game and placed it on the picnic table where we ate in the kitchen, and I was able to forget what it had actually cost in time and money, to see it simply as lovely meals I had brought home, a supplement to the C-ration casseroles, the spaghetti, the beans and rice. They were meals which even demanded that rarity in the house, a bottle of wine. All of this was a delusion, but it was a good one: gun in hand, looking at a cock pheasant on the table, its feathers bringing to the kitchen the aura of the field, the cold wind, the intensity of the hunt, and the thrilling release of the death shot. I felt I had done what a man should do for his family.
Romance dies hard, because its very nature is to want to live. Forty-one years old and living in 1977, I still have that need to do something pure and clean and male about bread-winning, something to replace or at least supplement the paycheck: for the paycheck seems nothing more than a piece of paper with numbers and my name on it, a paper deposited monthly in my account, its numbers having nothing to do with my work, for I love teaching and so I rarely see the classroom and the salary as having any connection. And the business of paying bills, of writing checks and subtracting numbers, is not at all satisfying, but always impersonal, and always frustrating, because always there is never enough to pay everyone everything. I long then for the pheasants and rabbits on the table, the gun to be cleaned; once or twice a summer I fulfill that need with an afternoon of mackerel fishing with my children.
I know I'm not supposed to yearn for these male pleasures, but I do anyway, and I end with uncertainty; and since these acts of breadwinning have to do with women, it is the women I'm uncertain about. I believe in most of the tenets of the female movement. There are some exceptions; I am bewildered and angered by the iron-clad liberationist whose name escapes me because I never wanted to house it anyway, who said: A man who tries to make a woman have an orgasm is a sexist pig. Which makes me ask: What, then, is a man who doesn't try to make a woman have an orgasm? I am also bothered by the occasional woman who is likely to see any simple gesture as symbolic; once I offered to light a woman's cigarette, but she said: No, I can take care of myself. I had no doubt that she could take care of herself and did not understand why lighting a cigarette had such significance. I was younger then.
Later, though, I became so sympathetic to the sounds of pain from the female soul that I went through androgynous periods when, in a moment of total capitulation, I might have called myself a sexist pig for remembering with nostalgia the dead birds on the kitchen table in Iowa. There were many reasons for this. One was the work of Anton Chekhov, who showed me that a woman's soul has a struggle all its own, neither more nor less serious than a man's, but different. So did John Cheever and Joan Didion and Edna O'Brien, and many others, but Chekhov got there first with the most. There was, though, a deeper force working on me: my own life during five years of bachelorhood, when I listened to many women, women I wasn't involved with, so that I was free to listen to them without concurrently preparing my own defense. I began to feel a special rapport with them, began to see their lives as struggles very close to those of a writer. I am speaking now of women who stay home, and whose children are old enough so that they have left breast, arms, and backpack and, like puppies, are wandering in the lawn smelling new things. Or have finally gone, with new shoes and lunchbox, to that terrible first day of school. These women, like writers, have no time clocks to punch, no waiting boss. I write in the morning before teaching, and neither these women nor I care about the morning commuter traffic. There is no place we have to be. We already are where we have to be, facing ourselves. Both of us, without the prodding of a paycheck or the loss of a job, face only time itself, and our responsibility to use it as best we can. This demands discipline, daily resilience, and a commitment to use time fully, to find or create joy in it, and we must always fear what Hemingway in
A Moveable Feast
calls “the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.”
I do not envy those men and women who have jobs instead of true work. But, for some of them, there is this: They know from one minute to the next what they must do at their place of work, they know at the day's end they will feel they have accomplished something, even if it is no more than reporting in at a given hour, staying at a given place, going through motions and speaking words they understand and can even predict, until the hands of the clock reach that algebraic symbol which tells them they can go home. They have put in a day. But the women I'm speaking of can lie on the bathroom floor, staring at the ceiling and courting despair, until the children return loud and hungry at three o'clock. I can leave my desk and stare at the ceiling, too, and no one but I will suffer for it, unless I then turn on those I love, make them pay for my failure. And if the woman rises from the floor at the sound of the children's voices, and passes out the peanut butter sandwiches, vacuums the floor, and girds herself to prepare dinner number three thousand nine hundred and forty-two, feeds the family and is cheerful at dinner, and cleans the kitchen, then she too can lead a life which only she suffers, only she knows is killing her so slowly and relentlessly that by the time it does, she will have long since stopped dreading the end. So, for me, talking to certain women is like talking to a fellow writer.
And why did it take me so long to understand this, and why do I keep losing sight of it, wanting to bring dead birds to a woman whom I want to be happy, even if she has spent the entire day talking to no one but children while mortality screams at her from the walls which are supposed to be her love nest, her home? Because I am fixed in transition, static, pulled one way by my youth, and the other way by what I have learned since then. Very early, I understood that women were required to be other than what they were. When I was thirteen, my sixteen-year-old sister quizzed me on baseball before her dates. I told her the leading teams and hitters, and after one of these catechism lessons, I asked why she had to know about Ted Williams anyway. Because you have to know these things for boys, she said. I asked her what the other girls talked about. They know these things, she said.
The rest of what I learned as a boy gave me that vision of men and women which I had to discard during the first half of this decade, when I was a defrocked husband and was, for the first time since my teenage years, a-courting again, a-hunting again. My parents taught me to open doors for women, pull out chairs for them, to walk on their street-sides so that gutter spray from passing cars would hit me instead of them, to follow them up stairs and precede them down in case they fell, and, in general, to treat them like distant cousins who were making a fragile visit from the mental institutions where they spent their lives. Then there were the household tasks; neither my sisters nor I ever questioned the girls' assignment to kitchen and housecleaning, and mine to the disposal of garbage and mowing the lawn. It was not until I came, too late, to bachelorhood and shared apartments with men that I learned that food, before it becomes a meal, does not belong strictly to the female province, and that when a meal becomes garbage, it does not belong strictly to the male province. And I further learned that dirty dishes are the responsibility of those who dirty them, as pots and pans are, and floors and rugs and sheets and clothes. My teenage sons are excellent cooks, and my nine-year-old stepson does not suck his thumb in a sudden spasm of sexual disorientation when he sees me pushing a vacuum cleaner, cooking a meal, or washing dishes.
Reading Chekhov helped me into transit; one of his combatants was a character in another book, a harmless enough book for a boy to read, or so it would seem, but it was not harmless, for in my boyhood life of the imagination I learned much from Robin Hood. Not Errol Flynn, the Robin Hood who caused too much emotional swirl, not only in the ladies on the screen but in the audience as well, to make me feel that women should be handled with a delicacy which denied their very souls. No, it was the book that moved me to the sort of angelic devotion to the female, which is finally a form of exclusion, a tyrannical boundary (albeit usually unwitting) between the real world of men and the dream world of women, a world which was of course dreamed by men, not by the women who were held in deleterious yet tender captivity there. I read
Robin Hood
often, and my sisters, both older than I, were pleased by each reading, for in that lingering days-long nimbus of the book, which ends with Robin Hood's murder by a woman, and his dying refusal of Little John's request to kill her, with gentle Robin's saying he had never in his life harmed a woman, and would not have it done in his name after he was dead, I walked about the house like a young boy who has just heard the whispers of angels, and knows that his destiny is sainthood. I brought my sisters and their girlfriends cookies and soft drinks from the kitchen. I deferred, with the humble strength of Robin Hood (no trace of uxoriousness in that bowman), to all their wishes. I remember riding a city bus with a sister and her friends; we were going to the swimming pool. When I saw that I had taken a seat too soon, that one of those eleven- or twelve-year-old girls was left standing, I quickly rose and gave her my seat and stood holding the hand bar, pretending not to hear my sister murmur to her friend: He's been reading
Robin Hood
again. On her face was a sweet smile of victory, the sort of victory women got in those days.
So I remain static, pulled backward by my early years (they probably add up to thirty or more) and by Robin Hood, the hunter whose bow provided meat, the merry drinker of ale whose adventures and games and joy were with men, and whose purity and tender strength were given to women. And I am pulled forward by what I know, and I try to learn to erase the old boundaries, to see women as they are and I suppose always were: creatures like me, who live in the same world I live in, who do not need me to keep them from being splashed by cars, from falling down stairs. But boyhood is hard to leave, and perhaps one never does, and while I try to become a man of the times, I ask you, O ladies, for neither absolution nor understanding. All I ask is a smile. That wise and affectionate smile that only a woman can give.
