The Solace of Leaving Early (2 page)

Steve and Lydia were typical, really, of the town and of a certain way of life. Steve was short and round, with dark hair that never seemed clean, and large, brown, watery eyes. He was jovial and appeared to have a good heart. For years, since he’d graduated from high school, Steve had sold campers and RVs at a lot a few miles outside Dayton, and he seemed to make a comfortable living. He loved Lydia, who was shorter and rounder and talked too loudly. She sold, Amos wasn’t sure what to call them, knickknacks? ornaments? things with which to decorate a home? and they were uniformly ugly and caused a bubble of despair to rise in Amos’s esophagus each time Lydia brought him a catalogue. They had two children, Brian, who was twelve, and Karen, who was sixteen. Both kids were dark like their dad, silent, and overweight. They were involved in nothing, no sports, no activities or clubs. The few times Amos tried to talk to Karen she had blushed furiously and answered him in a mortified whisper. Every week when Amos saw them he couldn’t help but wonder if there was ever a conversation about
anything
in Steve and Lydia’s household, apart from grocery lists and car maintenance. They all seemed so resigned and complacent; so blank. They were curious about nothing, they exhibited no restlessness, they seemed to want nothing more than they had. The slightest reference, on Amos’s part, to an inner life, seemed to bounce off their collective surface like a foreign language, and finally, Amos was forced to consider that perhaps there was simply no there there. They were human, yes, and they bore immortal souls. All God’s creatures. But Amos didn’t understand them any more than he understood bison or oak trees.

One Sunday, as they passed through the receiving line, Steve shook Amos’s hand and said, in a sly and conspiratorial way, “Were you at the game last night?” And for a number of empty moments Amos couldn’t imagine which game he was meant to remember. A card game? a game of chance? Rook, Scrabble? and then realized Steve was talking about the county basketball team, of which the members of his congregation seemed inordinately fond.

“Oh, no. No, I’m afraid I missed it.”

Steve leaned in even closer, so that his mouth nearly touched Amos’s collarbone. “We’re hotter than a popcorn fart, this year.” And then he backed away, pleased with his analogy and his daring, to have said such a thing in the vestibule of a church. Steve’s eyes shifted left and right to see if anyone had heard him, all the while leading Lydia out the door by the elbow and nodding his head in agreement with his own pronouncement.

The phrase rang in Amos’s head for a day—he had absolutely no idea what it meant—and considering it was a form of torture. The fact of the phrase caused the sky to bleaken and his skin to itch, and by Monday night, when he was unable to sleep, Amos despised his own sensibilities and also despised the world. He smiled in the dark and drummed his fingers against his chest. He even laughed, some, before he fell asleep, and then Tuesday morning the organist at church, May, called him much too early, earlier than he ever liked to be awakened, and told him that Steve and Lydia’s daughter Karen had died in the night of peritonitis, after her appendix burst at home. They hadn’t known she was sick, and hadn’t heard her calling weakly and in terrific pain from her bedroom, because they all slept with televisions on in their rooms. May mentioned this detail in passing, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, but Amos was struck dumb. They were all in their separate bedrooms on a Monday night, asleep with televisions on? Their daughter, a sixteen-year-old girl, was
dying
and they couldn’t hear her? This great and mysterious thing, this outrageous event, happened to those people?

“I thought you ought to know,” May said, sniffling, into the silence.

“Yes.”

“Because you’re their pastor and maybe you want to head over to the funeral home.”

“Oh God. Of course. Thank you, May,” Amos said, hanging up. He reached for his clothes and tried with all his heart to imagine what he might say to Steve and Lydia, but there was nothing. And so he tried emptying out his mind and heart and allowing the Holy Spirit to fill him, but the nothing was then full of nothing. He was out of his league, he was no match for this one, and more than anything, it had happened to
them
? What comfort could there be beyond the most wretchedly platitudinal? And if, finally, he was called upon to offer those platitudes, could he do it?

It was worse, of course, than he could have imagined: when Amos arrived in the funeral director’s office Steve was doubled over in a chair and gasping. Lydia had been tranquilized and simply sat, staring out the window. Brian had been sent to his grandparents. As Amos turned the corner into the arrangements room, the funeral director met him with such a look of gratitude that Amos was filled with foreboding, and then Steve realized Amos was standing there and rose from his chair with a force that caused it to topple over backward. Lydia never flinched.

Steve threw himself on Amos, wailing, “Oh my God oh my God oh my God,” in such a piteous way that
Amos
began to weep, all the while thinking,
This won’t do at all,
and finally it was the funeral director who calmed them all down, who spoke the phrases Amos couldn’t have allowed himself to say, and thus Steve and Lydia settled the business of burying their daughter.

At the funeral Amos delivered the kindest eulogy he could have written, about the light in Karen and how that light had rejoined the eternal light of God, which he believed. He said things he didn’t believe, about how we will all be transformed in the blink of an eye, about how we will all be reunited in heaven, where there is neither suffering nor death, anymore. The church had been filled with hysterical teenagers, more teenagers than Amos had ever seen in a single place. Even the Pit Bull children were there. Amos had no idea where they had all come from or who they were or what they wanted; certainly Mechanicsville couldn’t lay claim to this much youth. He knew from May that Karen had had few friends, and yet there they all were, wailing and comforting one another and distracting Steve and Lydia, which was maybe good in the end but seemed cruel at the time.

Amos stayed in Mechanicsville for a year after Karen died, and the church closed in around Steve and Lydia, in the way that small towns and certain denominations take care of their own. Amos, too, did what he could. He offered to counsel them, and when they failed to keep their counseling appointments, he offered them anything else they wanted: to cook their meals or keep their dog while they went camping for the weekend. He tried to cut their grass, but Steve waved him away, despondently. They continued to come to church every Sunday, wrapped in a silence and vacancy Amos doubted they would survive. They survived.

*

He would use those images in the early part of the book (if there were a book, and there never would be): the deer on the hook. The dog flying out to the end of its chain. A father knocking his chair backward.
This is evidence,
Amos would say to Mike, his fellow seminarian from long ago.

Evidence of what? Mike would ask, genuinely curious.

Amos pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and prayed for sleep, trying not to consider the events of the last week, the final chapter added to his bleak metaphysics.

I don’t know, Amos would answer. I simply don’t know.

Chapter 2

LANGSTON COMES HOME
AND SAYS NO

She had been home only a few days, hidden away almost exclusively in her attic room, when the church bells began to ring for Alice Baker-Maloney’s funeral. They would ring on the hour, every hour until noon, when the services were set to begin. Alice’s mother, Beulah Baker, was burying her in the Sycamore Grove Cemetery, just a quarter mile east of town.

It was the middle of May and already hot in Haddington. Langston lay on top of her quilt and watched a combination of dust motes and pollen swirl in the shaft of light saturating the air over her bed. An old, black, metal fan her daddy found who knows where was directed at her from atop her desk; the blades appeared to be lethally sharp, and the cloth-covered cord had been gnawed upon by generations of vermin. A hum that was also a whine, a serious and direct complaint, issued from the motor. She was nervous for a variety of reasons, and the possibility of an electrical fire was only one.

Langston had always been opposed to perspiration, for one thing, and her situation had become painfully clear to her in the past few, humid hours. She no longer lived in her beautiful old apartment off-campus in Bloomington, which had been remodeled just enough to provide its tenants with climate control. She was, in fact, in her childhood home, in her childhood room. The house was entirely free of comfort throughout the long, hot summer months. Her family baked, they mildewed, they shone, they stuck to furniture. Langston’s mother, AnnaLee, outlawed any articulation of discomfort. (The house was cold all winter, for that matter, but the cold seemed less oppressive, somehow.) Langston was embarking on a new career in perspiration, one that could potentially last for months.

In addition: she was broke, had no prospects, was unemployable, and found all forms of employment untenable, anyway. She had walked away from a Ph.D. in, not midstream, exactly, but some location more horrifying than that. She had stepped out of her program the way one might step out of an airplane
30,000
feet above a bean field in the dead of night. In truth, she walked out of her oral examination, just stood up and walked out. She collected the few things from her office she thought she might need, then went into the main English department office and resigned her fellowship, withdrew from the program, and said some things. The few things she said were like kitchen matches applied to a gasoline-soaked bridge.

Then she drove her Renault (an old car, faded burgundy, with a stick shift; so old, in fact, that there were icons on the dashboard which no longer meant anything. Cultural symbols divested of meaning, by time) to her lovely apartment building, the Greene Arms. When Langston saw the name the first time she felt she had found a way to participate in some very subtle ceremony for a dying and rising god.
I live in the Greene Arms,
she thought.
I am safe within the Greene Arms
. On her last day as a Ph.D. candidate she stayed there only long enough to load her car with a few belongings, and to collect her dog, Germane. (Named not after Germaine Greer, but as in: Germane to this conversation.) He lay on the floor with his head resting on his front paws, a look of profound worry on his face. Langston didn’t speak to him, not knowing what to say. She gathered up clothes and books and toiletries; Germane’s bed and squeaky hamburger, his food and water dishes.

After loading everything in the car, she stopped at the apartment of the landlady, an old woman named Mrs. Shekovsky. Langston had already paid May’s rent and had not yet extended her lease into the next school year, so it didn’t matter if she left early. Her father would return to collect the rest of her things, Langston told Mrs. Shekovsky, who nodded. Her rheumy gaze filled Langston with unhappiness.

“I’ll miss that dog of yours,” she said. Mrs. Shekovsky was absent a number of teeth, and in their place was a darkness to which Langston could not become reconciled.

“Yes, he’ll miss you, too.”

“I always felt safe with him around.”

“Dogs are good for that.”

They were silent a moment.

“Take care, then.”

“You, too.”

It was so easy to walk away from the life she’d spent years building that for a moment Langston thought she might levitate. Everything is so temporary, she thought, so unrooted, and any one of us can just stand up and leave. She tried to imagine the world, even just one square mile of it, from the point of view of God—the appearances and vanishings, the abandoned objects, doors left open in haste—how it must look over centuries, but she felt her breath catch in her throat.

Germane and Langston took the stairs down to the first-floor hallway, which was tiled in black and white marble diamonds. A radiator painted gold shone from the corner. The inset mailboxes were military green. She memorized it all. Then they walked out into the courtyard. The fountain in the center burbled a bit listlessly; the baby frog who spit water out of his little froglips seemed to be clogged. She ran her fingers over the black iron benches surrounding the fountain, studied for a moment the flower garden, where the spring tulips were blooming red and yellow. A small, coral-colored stone got stuck in the bottom of her shoe, and she reached down to pull it out. She thought that if evidence were ever necessary, there was, no doubt, a laboratory somewhere that could test the dirt from the bottom of her shoe and locate with utter precision the last place she had been. She could hold out this rock to anyone passing by and say, “Look here! Here’s the proof: I
did
leave home.”

*

It was hot in her childhood bedroom; she had walked away from her life and her vocation; her parents would surely try to force her to get a job, and the church bells were ringing for Alice Baker-Maloney, another unreconciled bit of Langston’s history, a girl she’d grown up with who was now undeniably dead.

They’d gone to school together, and attended the same Sunday School week after week, year in and year out, and so had cobbled together a friendship during a time when friendship was determined by proximity. For a few years Alice had been Langston’s only playmate (with the exception of Taos), but Langston couldn’t remember loving Alice or feeling jealous of her affections or desiring her company. She couldn’t remember
knowing
her. Alice had been a quiet girl with a plain, flat face and an overbite. Her hair was blond and listless. The only magic she seemed to possess were dimples; her appearance was changed entirely when she smiled.

Langston listened to the bells. There was something anachronistic in the way they rang out against the bright afternoon air. She tried to think about anachronism—what it means in literature, what it indicates about our confusion regarding the nature of space, our own persistent perishing—but found she was unable to hold on to the thought. She couldn’t think about much of anything at all. Alice had traveled only as far as an old farmhouse on the Crooked Tree Pike, two miles west of town. She’d married a man from Hopwood, converted to Catholicism, married, had two daughters. Neither Langston nor Alice had traveled far, but here they both were, home again.

*

When Langston was in college, and later, in graduate school, she often found herself staring at strangers, wondering what they knew that she didn’t. In the library once, for instance, she saw a young man whose slight build and scuttling carriage (along with his chaotic hairstyle and eyeglasses) suggested to her that he might genuinely understand the connection between the most esoteric reaches of the Eastern religions and quantum mechanics, a subject in vogue at the time. She would have loved to understand such a connection herself, but found that she was too busy to learn what she considered the crushingly tiresome foundations of physics. Alice, of all people (and Langston could suddenly recall that she had an unfortunate cowlick right at her hairline, which caused her limp hair to grow, for an inch or so, backward) now knew something Langston did not. Alice knew how it felt to have children, and how it felt to die, and she had seen, most likely, the entrance to heaven.

Langston most devoutly wished, while not daring to expect, that many things might be restored to her in heaven; some things she simply lost, and some things she never had. In heaven she would see again the wooden swing set in the backyard where her brother Taos and she used to linger as children, he so fair-haired and she so dark. She’d see his legs shooting out with enough force to propel him higher and higher, nearly out of sight, the dying summer light held captive by their simple joy. The old barn that used to sit in the north corner of the yard would be resurrected, and the terrible events Langston came to associate with it would be wiped away. She suspected there would be, in addition, a room built especially for her, a room lined with shelves like the showroom of a sacred toymaker, and on those shelves would stand all the immortalized and misplaced objects of her life—some things she would be stunned to see again and some she would barely remember having owned.

And in Langston’s heaven she would attend dinner parties with Alfred North Whitehead and his lovely wife, and she’d take as her guest John Donne. And since this was heaven and not just any heaven, but Langston’s, she’d ask Emily Dickinson to join them and Emily would say yes without hesitation and never behave strangely. They would stand at Dr. Whitehead’s picture window and watch the snow descend on heaven, which would look remarkably like Cambridge. The wine and conversation would be so sublime that their very bones, if bones they had, would shine; at the end of the night Langston would walk home alone and hear behind her on the cobblestone street the muffled sound of all the world’s good dogs running toward her, going home with her, and the silence and the snow against their fur would amount to a sort of transport.

In heaven many things would be restored to Langston, and also she would be able to begin the story of her earthly life differently; she would construct a fiction that was nonetheless legitimate—it would be the story she told and therefore true—and it would not begin with her in exile in her thirtieth year, in this attic room, at home with her parents in Haddington, Indiana. It would not be a tale in which her life grew smaller and smaller, as if she’d been moving through ever-tightening concentric circles toward a vacant and inexplicable center.

*

Langston heard the low coursing of her mama’s voice on the telephone, so she snuck down the attic stairs to the wide hallway on the second floor, and then into the bathroom, next to her parents’ bedroom. By placing her ear against the cool radiator, she could hear, just barely, what was being said. Not that she cared. Her mama was forever talking to someone, going on about something. When Langston casually mentioned, just two days ago, that she thought her mother might find less frivolous ways to spend her time, she had been met with a blood-curdling look. But today Langston thought her mother might be talking about Alice, and the puzzling circumstances of her death. Not that Langston cared.

“. . . the two children. It’s hard to even
take in
.” AnnaLee’s voice was like a river. She paused, and Langston could tell she was crying. “No, I know. Yes, she’s here. I have no idea—no one does. And who would she tell, who does she have? Let me call you back a little later.”

Langston slipped out of the bathroom while AnnaLee was blowing her nose (quite loudly, for Langston’s taste) and up the attic stairs. By the time AnnaLee knocked on the door, Langston was sitting in the window, casually watching the comings and goings (such as they were) on Chimney Street, as if she’d been sitting there for hours.

“Come on up,” Langston called. Germane’s tail began to thump on the floor, but he didn’t rise. He knew the sound of all their footsteps.

“It’s hot up here,” AnnaLee said, turning the corner of the staircase.

“And it’s only May.”

“Hmmmm.” AnnaLee sat down on the bed, pushing her hair off her forehead. She looked—as always—Langston felt, disheveled. Her hair, which had been red in her youth, was now a sort of strawberry-blond mixed with silver, and she still wore it long, even though she was over fifty. She most often gathered her hair up in some sort of bun and stuck a chopstick through it (or a twig, if a chopstick wasn’t handy), and if there was the least amount of humidity in the air, tendrils and curls sprang out from everywhere. And she insisted on wearing strangely antiquated housedresses, the sorts of dresses that had little glass buttons, or embroidery on the pocket.

“I want you to go to Alice’s funeral with me today, Langston.”

“Excuse me? No.” It was just like her mother to spring such a thing.

“I ask you for nothing, and I’m asking you to do this with me. It isn’t much. Your father is at work, I don’t want to go alone, and I think it would be a good way for you to, I don’t know, come back to town.”

“Mother. No.”

They both sat in silence a few moments. Not a single thing moved on Chimney Street. The hum of the fan rose and fell, as if it might burst into flames or shoot up like a rocket.

When she spoke again, AnnaLee’s voice was strained, but Langston was relieved to see she wasn’t crying. “Look. Let’s just say on this one day, May
14
,
1998
, just today and perhaps never again, say yes to me. Make this easy. I want you to go with me. You grew up with Alice Baker; her mother lives right across the street, for heaven’s sake, and,
and
it’s the polite thing to do.”

Langston clenched her jaws against her own conflictedness until she thought her teeth might crack. Of course some part of her wanted to say yes; of course she wanted to be easy for her mother, but there was another part, a whole other side that stayed hard and resistant. She was afraid to give in, ever, for fear that all personal standards would be abrogated at once. Each time she tried to compromise or broker some emotional bargain with her mother, she saw again in her mind a nightmare figure she’d invented for the occasion, a dark figure riding into town like one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. She called him Squander, and his sole purpose on this earth was to make Langston behave.