Novelties & Souvenirs (31 page)

I. L
OST

T
HE LOGIC WAS PERFECT AND COMPLETE
; there was a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning was love, then came marriage, then two children even before I got out of graduate school and got a real job. There was even a baby carriage, a real one, the blue-black kind with great rubber wheels, chrome bright-work, and a brougham top with a silver scroll on the side to raise and lower it. I wonder where it is now.

The next story element, therefore, was divorce. She with the kids, I with the job (it wasn’t logical but as a story element it has verisimilitude, meaning that it was always done that way then). I taught. I taught American poetry to children, to college students, and over time began to forget why. I thought about it a lot; I did little else but reason out why I did what I did, and whether it was useless or not, why they should be interested, why I should try to capture their attention.

None of this intellection helped my chances for tenure. The word was that I wasn’t a team player; I wasn’t. I was an Atom. I
had no reason beyond physics for anything that I did.

Then she showed up again. With the kids, she and he. She had a lot of plans. She was moving, she told me, to Hawaii. She’d already shipped over her cycle, and the rest of the guys were waiting for her over there. The kids were going to love it, she said. Water and fishing and cycles.

And when would I see them?

Whenever you can come out.

Money?

Somebody had told her somebody was opening a speed shop in Maui and she might work there.

It’s odd how quickly two people who have seemed to be practically one person since before they were wholly out of childhood can diverge as soon as they part. I was awake most of that night, lying beside her (old times’ sake), and by dawn I’d made a decision. I wanted the kids. She couldn’t take them. She said she sure as hell was taking them. I said that I would take her to court and get custody before any judge: I worked, I was a college teacher, I had a suit and tie, she was a biker, or could be made to seem one. It might not have been true, that it would have been so easy; but I made her believe it. She wept; she talked it out; she hugged them a lot; she left them with me.

And when I went back to classes in September I had, instantly, a reason to teach American poetry to adolescents, and do it well, too. Love costs money; so love makes money, or is willing to try. What I could not find a reason for doing in itself became quite easy to do when I did it for them. I went and talked all day about Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman to put bowls of oatmeal before them, bicycles in the garage for them. And oddest of all (maybe not so odd, how would I know, I’ve only done all this once) I think I was a better teacher, too.

Unfortunately I had stumbled into all this—ordinary life, I guess, the thing that had kept all of my colleagues at their work and playing for the team—just that little bit too late. Despite my new need and my new willingness, I got turned down for tenure. And that in academe being equivalent to dismissal, I now looked into a kind of abyss, one I had heard about, read about, been touched by in stories, and had not thought was possible for me to encounter, though a moment’s thought would have told me that countless men and women live facing it all the time.

Did I think of shipping them to Hawaii? No, never. Some doors cannot be gone back through.

So the next scene is the dark of the woods.

I used all my contacts to get a job that almost no one, it would seem, would want to have, thereby entering into another level of this thing, where the hewer of wood, the drawer of water, grows desperate not for release but for more water to draw, wood to hew, so his kids and he won’t have to beg.

An inner-city enrichment program for no-longer-quite-youthful offenders, which had tenuous state funding and a three-story house downtown that had been seized for taxes. They were given courses in basic English and other work toward a high-school equivalency diploma, and seminars in ethics and self-expression. They got time off their probation for attending faithfully. Do you have better ideas?

The group I taught English to was about the same age as my old students, a group who had appeared ordinary enough then but now in hindsight and from here appeared as young godlings awash in ease and possibility. Days we worked on acquiring the sort of English language in which newspapers and books and government documents are written, a language different from the one most of
them spoke, though using many similar words. We diagrammed sentences, a thing I am the last teacher of English on the continent to remember how to do; they liked that. In the evenings we met again. We were going to write stories.

They have stories, certainly. They tend to spill them rather than tell them. It seemed grotesque to try to chasten them, and make them shapely, make them resemble good stories; but that’s what I was hired to do, and simply to listen is too hard. “A beginning, a middle, and an end,” I say. “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief ’ is a plot. Who, what, when, where, how.” And they listen, looking at me from out of their own stories, inside which they live, as street people live within their ragged shelters. Not one grew up with a father: not one. I know what crimes some of them committed, what they have done.

Late at night then I bus over to the adjacent neighborhood, one small step up in the social ladder, and climb the stairs to my apartment; let myself in, awake the sitter, asleep before the glowing television, and send her home.

They grow so fast. In the city even faster. Most of my salary goes to their private school, called fatuously the Little Big Schoolhouse, but really a good place; they love it, or did. They’re getting restive, weirdly angry sometimes in ways they never were before, which leaves me hurt and baffled and desperately afraid. They don’t want sitters anymore. I am going to come home and find them gone; or find one of them gone and the other silent, looking at me in reproach, can’t have her, couldn’t keep her.

“Let’s retell a story,” I told my students. “Just to get our chops. We’ll all write the same story. Not long. Three pages max. A story
you all know. All you have to do is tell it, from beginning to end, not leaving anything important out.”

But it was not a story they all knew, and so I had to tell it to them. They listened with both eyes and ears, as my children had once. My own son, at the point in the story when the two lost children understood that the new protector they had found intended them not good but mortal harm, had cried out
It’s their mother!
Which seemed to me to be an act of literary criticism of the highest order; and for the first time I noticed that indeed the mother, like the other, is dead at the story’s end.

A girl named Cyntra wanted to know: Was I going to do this, too?

I said yes I would. I would do it in three pages. I hadn’t thought of doing it but yes I would.

I know this story. I know it now, though I didn’t before. I will write mine for me, as they will write theirs for themselves; we will trade them and try to read them with eyes and ears.

Three pieces of mail in the box on this night when I got home. A postcard from Hawaii. An official letter telling me that the enrichment program is being zeroed out, and my services will not be required. An answer to my personal ad in the
Free Press,
written in a clear strong hand. A picture, too.

My children still there, asleep but not undressed, unwashed and sprawled over the couch and the floor: they would not permit a baby-sitter, said they could take care of themselves. They are at least still here.

I will write my story with a beginning, a middle, and no end. No bread crumbs, no candy, no woods, no oven, no treasure. No who, what, where, when. And it will all be there.

Where will they go, those kids?

II. A
BANDONED

P
OVERTY IS NOT A CRIME
.
Infatuation is not a crime either; and when a man who has loved his wife dearly, and had two children with her, boy and girl, children he loves deeply and in whose eyes he sees her every single day—when that man falls helplessly in love again, those children might find it in their hearts, if not then perhaps later on, after a period of transition, to forgive him. And to love this new woman, too, as he loves her, without ever forgetting—as he himself cannot—the other and earlier woman.

Children, though, spring from but one mother; and they, even if they cannot remember her, can’t forget her either. The fact that he can see in their eyes the reflection of the woman who bore them can come to seem a reproach. Perhaps it is a reproach. That’s certainly the way the woman who comes to replace her in their home might see it: a constant reproach, a claim never able to be made good and yet never withdrawn. And it’s possible that—she being as infatuated as he, filled up with that domineering love that allows no rival (no crime; it happens); might scheme somehow to remove them, shut their eyes, shut their mouths for good. Especially if there weren’t enough for all of them.

Was it a crime that he listened, that he chose between her and them? That was a crime, and he knew it when he abandoned them. Abandoned: went away from them when he thought they could not return, though at the same time he brought them back with him, of course, he would have to, have to bring them with him back home where they would trouble his sleep thereafter.

But we are always abandoned. We abandon our parents as we grow, and yet it seems to us that they abandon us; that’s the story we tell. And often—usually, not always—we discover that abandonment is flight, too: our flight away. We leave a trail to guide us back, but it can disappear behind us as we go on.

Harder than it seems, abandonment; they who are to be abandoned are often more resourceful than we who abandon expect them to be or than the act or the name of the act (abandonment) allows them to be. Often enough they will not suffer being abandoned, must be shed or forced out or tricked into remaining behind when we go. Often they must be abandoned not once but more than once, each act of abandoning hardening our hearts further, until in the end the logistics of the deed are all we can think of, the awful logic, just get it over with.

Abandonment implies redemption, the finding of the lost, not always but sometimes: safety discovered in the midst of danger, altering the new equation of loss and abandonment again, and posing a question usually, a judgment to make though we aren’t wise enough to make it; we make it anyway because we have no choice. Look how wonderful, all sweet, all good, and we so hungry and needy.

Finding out then that we have made a wrong decision, the worst possible decision, one we can’t help having made and that we know as soon as we have made it was the wrong one, and that it can’t be taken back. Finding out that this is what abandonment means: death at the hands of those we have relied on. They taught us to rely on them, on the two of
them, their love, and then abandoned us: but still we only know how to rely on others, and have done so, and we were wrong, and now we will die. We didn’t know this about life.

Only perhaps it isn’t death, perhaps there is an exit from the cage, the death; perhaps we know better than we thought. Perhaps we have ourselves got reserves of cleverness, and will, and cruelty. Yes we have. We, too, can fool. We can do as we have been done by. And it is abandonment that taught us.

So this is life not death after all. It’s even profit. We didn’t know this about life either, what can be won from it by need and the willingness to be cunning, and cruel.

It was a long time ago. You find that even if you have lost the way home there is a path that reaches out to you from there, a path that you are bound to discover like it or not: and then, when you return there with what you have won, it isn’t the place you left. You can forgive them, if they are still there to forgive: or you can refuse to. What you did and learned from abandonment—yours of them, theirs of you—has made home different. Now you can go or stay
.

E
LMERS AGAIN
.

You waited in a sort of exasperated amusement for yours, thinking that if you had been missed last time yours would likely be among the households selected this time, though how that process of selection went on no one knew, you only knew that a new capsule had been detected entering the atmosphere (caught by one of the thousand spy satellites and listening-and-peering devices that had been trained on the big Mother Ship in orbit around the moon for the past year) and though the capsule had apparently burned up in the atmosphere, that’s just what had happened the time before, and then elmers everywhere. You could hope that you’d be skipped or passed over—there were people who had been skipped last time when all around them neighbors and friends had been visited or afflicted, and who would appear now and then and be interviewed on the news, though having nothing, after all, to say, it was the rest of us who had the stories—but in any case you started looking out the windows, down the drive, listening for the doorbell to ring in the middle of the day.

Pat Poynton didn’t need to look out the window of the kid’s bedroom where she was changing the beds, the only window from which the front door could be seen, when her doorbell rang in the middle of the day. She could almost hear, subliminally, every second doorbell on Ponader Drive, every second doorbell in South Bend go off just at that moment. She thought:
Here’s mine.

They had come to be called elmers (or Elmers) all over this country at least after David Brinkley had told a story on a talk show about how when they built the World’s Fair in New York in 1939, it was thought that people out in the country, people in places like Dubuque and Rapid City and South Bend, wouldn’t think of making a trip east and paying five dollars to see all the wonders, that maybe the great show wasn’t for the likes of them; and so the fair’s promoters hired a bunch of people, ordinary-looking men with ordinary clothes wearing ordinary glasses and bow ties, to fan out to places like Vincennes and Austin and Brattleboro and just talk it up. Pretend to be ordinary folks who had been to the fair, and hadn’t been high-hatted, no sirree, had a wonderful time, the wife too, and b’gosh had Seen the Future and could tell you the sight was worth the five dollars they were asking, which wasn’t so much since it included tickets to all the shows and lunch. And all these men, whatever their real names were, were all called Elmer by the promoters who sent them out.

Pat wondered what would happen if she just didn’t open the door. Would it eventually go away? It surely wouldn’t push its way in, mild and blobby as it was (from the upstairs window she could see that it was the same as the last ones) and that made her wonder how after all they had all got inside—as far as she knew there weren’t many who had failed to get at least a hearing. Some chemical hypnotic maybe that they projected, calming fear. What Pat
felt standing at the top of the stair and listening to the doorbell pressed again (timidly, she thought, tentatively, hopefully) was amused exasperation, just like everyone else’s: a sort of oh-Christno with a burble of wonderment just below it, and even expectation: for who wouldn’t be at least intrigued by the prospect of his, or her, own lawn mower, snow shoveler, hewer of wood, and drawer of water, for as long as it lasted?

“Mow your lawn?” it said when Pat opened the door. “Take out trash? Mrs. Poynton?”

Now actually in its presence, looking at it through the screen door, Pat felt most strongly a new part of the elmer feeling: a giddy revulsion she had not expected. It was so not human. It seemed to have been constructed to resemble a human being by other sorts of beings who were not human and did not understand very well what would count as human with other humans. When it spoke its mouth moved
(mouth hole must move when speech is produced)
but the sound seemed to come from somewhere else, or from nowhere.

“Wash your dishes? Mrs. Poynton?”

“No,” she said, as citizens had been instructed to say. “Please go away. Thank you very much.”

Of course the elmer didn’t go away, only stood bobbing slightly on the doorstep like a foolish child whose White Rose salve or Girl Scout cookies haven’t been bought.

“Thank you very much,” it said, in tones like her own. “Chop wood? Draw water?”

“Well gee,” Pat said, and, helplessly, smiled.

What everyone knew, besides the right response to give to the elmer, which everyone gave and almost no one was able to stick to, was that these weren’t the creatures or beings from the Mother Ship itself up above (so big you could see it, pinhead sized, cross
ing the face of the affronted moon) but some kind of creation of theirs, sent down in advance. An artifact, the official word was; some sort of protein, it was guessed; some sort of chemical process at the heart of it or head of it, maybe a DNA-based computer or something equally outlandish, but no one knew because of the way the first wave of them, flawed maybe, fell apart so quickly, sinking and melting like the snowmen they sort of resembled after a week or two of mowing lawns and washing dishes and pestering people with their Good Will Ticket, shriveling into a sort of dry flocked matter and then into nearly nothing at all, like cotton candy in the mouth.

“Good Will Ticket?” said the elmer at Pat Poynton’s door, holding out to her a tablet of something not paper, on which was written or printed or anyway somehow indited a little message. Pat didn’t read it, didn’t need to, you had the message memorized by the time you opened your door to a second-wave elmer like Pat’s. Sometimes lying in bed in the morning in the bad hour before the kids had to be got up for school Pat would repeat like a prayer the little message that everybody in the world it seemed was going to be presented with sooner or later:

And no space for No, which meant—if it was a sort of vote (and experts and officials, though how such a thing could have been determined Pat didn’t know, were guessing that’s what it was), a vote to allow or to accept the arrival or descent of the Mother Ship
and its unimaginable occupants or passengers—that you could only refuse to take it from the elmer: shaking your head firmly and saying No clearly but politely, because even
taking
a Good Will Ticket might be the equivalent of a Yes, and though what it would be a Yes
to
exactly no one knew, there was at least a ground swell of opinion in the think tanks that it meant acceding to or at least not resisting World Domination.

You weren’t, however, supposed to shoot your elmer. In places like Idaho and Siberia that’s what they were doing, you heard, though a bullet or two didn’t seem to make any difference to them, they went on pierced with holes like characters in the Dick Tracy comics of long ago, smiling shyly in at your windows, Rake your leaves? Yard work? Pat Poynton was sure that Lloyd would not hesitate to shoot, would be pretty glad that at last something living or at least moving and a certified threat to freedom had at last got before him to be aimed at. In the hall-table drawer Pat still had Lloyd’s 9mm Glock pistol; he had let her know he wanted to come get it but he wasn’t getting back into this house, she’d use it on him herself if he got close enough.

Not really, no, she wouldn’t. And yet.

“Wash windows?” the elmer now said.

“Windows,” Pat said, feeling a little of the foolish self-consciousness people feel who are inveigled by comedians or MCs into having conversations with puppets, wary in the same way too, the joke very likely being on her. “You do windows?”

It only bobbed before her like a big water toy.

“Okay,” she said, and her heart filled. “Okay come on in.”

Amazing how graceful it really was; it seemed to navigate through the house and the furniture as though it were negatively charged to them, the way it drew close to the stove or the refrig
erator and then was repelled gently away, avoiding collision. It seemed to be able to compact or compress itself too, make itself smaller in small spaces, grow again to full size in larger spaces.

Pat sat down on the couch in the family room, and watched. It just wasn’t possible to do anything else but watch. Watch it take the handle of a bucket; watch it open the tops of bottles of cleansers, and seem to inhale their odors to identify them; take up the squeegee and cloth she found for it.
The world, the universe,
Pat thought (it was the thought almost everyone thought who was just then taking a slow seat on his or her davenport in his or her family room or in his or her vegetable garden or junkyard or wherever and watching a second-wave elmer get its bearings and get down to work):
how big the world, the universe is, how strange; how lucky I am to have learned it, to be here now seeing this.

So the world’s work, its odd jobs anyway, were getting done as the humans who usually did them sat and watched, all sharing the same feelings of gratitude and glee, and not only because of the chores being done: it was that wonder, that awe, a universal neap tide of common feeling such as had never been experienced before, not by this species, not anyway since the days on the old old veldt when every member of it could share the same joke, the same dawn, the same amazement. Pat Poynton, watching hers, didn’t hear the beebeep of the school-bus horn.

Most days she started watching the wall clock and her wristwatch alternately a good half-hour before the bus’s horn could be expected to be heard, like an anxious sleeper who continually awakes to check his alarm clock to see how close it has come to going off. Her arrangement with the driver was that he wouldn’t let her kids off before tooting. He promised. She hadn’t explained why.

But today the sounding of the horn had sunk away deeply into
her backbrain, maybe three minutes gone, when Pat at last reheard it or remembered having heard and not noticed it. She leapt to her feet, an awful certainty seizing her; she was out the door as fast as her heartbeat accelerated, and was coming down the front steps just in time to see down at the end of the block the kids disappearing into and slamming the door of Lloyd’s classic Camaro (whose macho rumble Pat now realized she had also been hearing for some minutes). The cherry-red muscle car, Lloyd’s other and more beloved wife, blew exhaust from double pipes that stirred the gutter’s leaves, and leapt forward as though kicked.

She shrieked, and spun around, seeking help; there was no one in the street. Two steps at a time, maddened and still crying out, she went up the steps and into the house, tore at the pretty little Hitchcock phone table, the phone spilling in parts, the table’s legs leaving the floor, its jaw dropping, and the Glock 9mm nearly falling out: Pat caught it and was out the door with it and down the street calling out her ex-husband’s full name, coupled with imprecations and obscenities her neighbors had never heard her utter before, but the Camaro was of course out of hearing and sight by then.

Gone. Gone gone gone. The world darkened and the sidewalk tilted up toward her as though to smack her face. She was on her knees, not knowing how she had got to them, also not knowing whether she would faint or vomit.

She did neither, and after a time got to her feet. How had this gun, heavy as a hammer, got in her hand? She went back in the house and restored it to the raped little table, and bent to put the phone, which was whimpering urgently, back together.

She couldn’t call the police; he’d said—in the low soft voice he
used when he wanted to sound implacable and dangerous and just barely controlled, eyes rifling threat at her—that if she got the police involved in his family he’d kill all of them. She didn’t entirely believe it, didn’t entirely believe anything he said, but he had said it. She didn’t believe the whole Christian survivalist thing he was supposedly into, thought he would not probably take them to a cabin in the woods to live off elk as he had threatened or promised, would probably get no farther than his mother’s house with them.

Please Lord let it be so.

The elmer hovered grinning in her peripheral vision like an accidental guest in a crisis as she banged from room to room, getting her coat on and taking it off again, sitting to sob at the kitchen table, searching yelling for the cordless phone, where the hell had it been put this time. She called her mother, and wept. Then, heart thudding hard, she called his. One thing you didn’t know, about elmers (Pat thought this while she waited for her mother-in-law’s long cheery phone-machine message to get over) was whether they were like cleaning ladies and handymen, and you were obliged not to show your feelings around them; or whether you were allowed to let go, as with a pet. Abstract question, since she had already.

The machine beeped, and began recording her silence. She punched the phone off without speaking.

Toward evening she got the car out at last and drove across town to Mishiwaka. Her mother-in-law’s house was unlit, and there was no car in the garage. She watched a long time, till it was near dark, and came back. There ought to have been elmers everywhere, mowing lawns, taptapping with hammers, pulling wagonloads of kids. She saw none.