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  What she said was, “Those jerks.”

  “Jerks?” I said, stunned.

  “To treat you like that. No regard for you or your father and me. Jerks,” she said again. Water dripped off her hands onto the floor.

  And she made her feelings clear when Aunt Ida called that night. “I don’t appreciate what you said to my daughter. Yes, you did say. You should have given some thought to us. No Ida, I am really mad. You stay out of my business.”

  You stay out of my business. How she got the nerve to say this to a Barron I still don’t know. The claim that my mother’s business did not belong to all of them, was not open to committee argument, meant only one thing to Aunt Ida: I do not love you anymore.

  “She hung up on me,” my mother said.

  My mother, at age fifty, had taken her first step away from her family.

  She sat down next to me on the sofa. “She’s upset,” she told me. “She was cooking soup, and she said I spoiled it.”

  “A tragedy,” I said. “So she’ll throw it out.”

  “So she’ll throw it out,” said my mother. “But. On the way to the sink, she slips. She spills the soup, gets covered in it. She breaks her leg.”

  “And the ambulance comes, and they see the soup,” I said, “and they know they need to get her to the hospital, but what if the soup goes bad on the way?”

  “It might kill her,” said my mother. “They wrap her up in tin foil to keep her fresh.”

  “So they get in the ambulance, but on the way to the hospital, the drivers get distracted. Aunt Ida smells delicious.”

  “They just can’t get chicken off their mind,” my mother said. “They stop at a roadhouse. Poor Ida is still in the back, but can you blame them? She smells like their mothers’ kitchens.”

  “Nobody can blame them,” I said.

  “No,” said my mother, and then, “Ida won’t ever speak to me again, and over such a little thing.”

  I couldn’t tell whether she was still playing the game or if this were a simple fact.

  Aunt Ida and my mother had fallen down on the job. They forgot to dream of all the tragedies that now slipped, uncatalogued, into our lives.

  My mother and I sat on the sofa picturing Ida in the ambulance, her slippery fragrant fingers smoothing her tin-foil stole. There she is, peering out at the stars through the little window in the back door, thinking about going into the restaurant to say something to the drivers, just a small, diplomatic reminder.

  We loved her best then. We already missed her.

  Three months later, still not speaking to my mother, Aunt Ida died of a heart attack.

  “Broken heart,” said Aunt Sadie, who called with the news. “Esther, you plain broke her heart.”

  How could this be so? Ida’s heart had been broken so many times, she’d let it be broken. Uneaten ice cream, her daughter’s smallest bad luck, a ruined dress, any tiny transgression. Surely all that heartache was good exercise, like push-ups; surely those little scars had made her heart tougher, used to abuse, maybe hungry for it. She could take grief. Hadn’t she devoted her life to proving that?

  Nevertheless, the Aunts and Uncles called my mother up to announce this: they wouldn’t be calling anymore. They’d had enough of her. They called one at a time, each trying to make it seem as though it had been his or her own idea.

  “Foolishness,” Mom said every time she hung up the phone. “I never heard of grown-ups acting this way.”

  My mother, the Barron, did not cry, was not sorry. Not sorry for what she had done. She didn’t speak of her favorite sister’s death, not for years, as if it were a final unforgivable snub.

  My father came home, though he was never quite the same. He’d been given shock therapy at the hospital and developed an odd, intense look; he stared at people too directly. He lost his longing to invent things. His voice got soft, and people had to lean in to hear him. But he seemed to like that, a sudden tentative closeness.

  And so my mother and father settled in to live the rest of their lives. Mom took on all the little jobs that Dad had taken care of before. I knew that in spite of everything, she still waited for the whole thing to blow over, for a single phone call.

  When I was in high school, I had to write my obituary for journalism class; I remember it ended, “Miss Savitz is survived by her eight Aunts and Uncles.” I was sure that they’d each stubbornly outlast the others, thereby outlasting me. I didn’t know then that longevity was not a matter of pure will and logical argument. Ida was only first. Mose of a botched appendectomy; there goes Bram, of cancer. My mother, having cast off her Barron identity, is fine and lonely in the house with my father. She still tells stories of her childhood, full of the same nostalgia as always. When she talks about home, it’s the house in Chicago she means, not where she is now, not my childhood home.

  It’s nowadays that I wish I’d inherited my father’s longing for inventions, though I don’t want to make lives longer or easier or speedier. There are inventions enough for that, and I’m not sure I approve of any of them. This is what I want:

  There are these tourist traps—every state has one—Pilgrim Village or Wild West World or Alamo Days—where they re-create the past, and there are people in costumes and they pretend not to have ever heard of these times, our modern conveniences. I dream of doing that for Mom, of assembling Barron World, her childhood complete: look, there’s the porch, and the horse that kicked Benny; there’s the cranky piano player Sadie adored; there’s Sadie, adoring him; and Bram, bookish, and Ida just getting over some tears, and your parents and the whole Barron set, unbroken, and you can just slip in, Mother, it will be like you never left.

  The Goings-On of the World

  In 1936 my wife Rosie and I lived in a small town called Madrid, pronounced not like the town in Spain but with the accent on the first syllable, the vowel as flat and wide as the land around it—Maaaadrid. One morning in the last week of May I got up, got dressed, and killed my wife. I remember an argument the night before about oranges, and Rosie threatening to leave. I remember it was cold in that bed.

  Afterward, on the front porch, I saw some pawprints in the lard that Rosie had set out for making soap. Raccoons. I couldn’t recall which way town was. A few gray splinters dotted my hand, and my fingers didn’t quite want to let go of the wooden handle. You know the ache of your arm when you put down something heavy, the ghost of weight still there? I feel that all the time, still.

  The road I walked down, looking for somebody to catch me, smelled of chickens. I found my friend Nelson, a police officer. He took care of things. I pleaded guilty right away, and for that plea was sentenced to life instead of death, though believe me, those words aren’t all that opposite. The past is like an old suit: you either put it on or get rid of it. Just looking doesn’t tell you anything.

  Now I live at Benson House, a halfway home run by the Cottage Grove Church. This is my second time out of prison. Reverend Massey, the minister in charge of Benson House, met me at Fort Madison and invited me, said I could stay forever if I wanted. So here I am, permanently halfway. He said I could earn my keep by washing dishes or cooking—now, how would I know how to cook? He’s a nice young man with a beard, and the other men here—twelve of them—call him Dave. They call me Mr. Green, even Eddie, the cook, and we work in the kitchen together. Eddie came to Benson House four years ago as a guest, helped in the kitchen and got so good at it they offered him a permanent job. He’s a skinny colored fellow who wears his hair in a number of braids, and when he takes me to the movies or out to the mall to walk around, we get looks. I’m in good shape for seventy-six, got my own teeth and my legs work, but next to Eddie I look frail. One time a guy with tattoos on his arm sidled up to us and asked if I was okay.

  “Looks like a criminal type,” the guy said, nodding at Eddie.

  “Buddy,” said Eddie. He took off his tweed cap and regarded the guy. “If you only knew.”

  Eddie takes care of me. He says, “Mr. Green, you
need exercise,” and we go for a walk. He sees a counselor twice a week and comes home with the leftovers. “You should keep a journal,” he says. “You got a lot on your mind.”

  “Let it stay there,” I tell him.

  He shakes his head and the braids rattle. He says, “Not good.”

  The other fellows don’t mention what I did, though they all know. I was in prison for so long that I got written up in the newspaper when I was released, both times. I’m a record holder. Most continuous years in prison in the state. Around here, in 1936, a life sentence meant just that—as long as you lived, no parole. But about 1984, the governor—who was four in 1936—got to thinking about me. He decided that I’d had enough of Fort Madison, or that Fort Madison had had enough of me, and commuted my sentence to ninety-nine years, which made me eligible for parole the next spring. The math of this eludes me, and I used to teach math. The reasoning went something like this: the laws had changed since 1936, and now fellows did what I did and worse, and got released sooner. I shouldn’t, thought the governor, be a victim of my own bad timing.

  Every night at Fort Madison, I dreamed up new ways to die. I slipped off the edge of a tall building or was torn into by an angry dog, or got shot in the woods by someone looking for food who bagged only skinny Joseph Green. One night I imagined undoing my body as if it were a machine, unscrewing first my feet, then calves, opening my torso like a cabinet and clattering around in there, untightening kidneys. Then, with an arm that in my dream still worked, I packed myself in a suitcase, veins and intestines coiled so that I would fit, muscles folded like bedclothes, lungs jigsawed together, and threw myself in the river.

  My deaths took place outside the prison, every one. It was my way of keeping alive. I did not want to die there, forbade myself to even imagine it.

  Because I was an educated man, Fort Madison gave me a job. As a watchman I earned three dollars a day, and saved it carefully—I didn’t buy a TV when that was an option, read other people’s old magazines. When I got out—seven thousand dollars rich—I had an idea I wanted to be an urbanite, so I climbed on a bus to Des Moines and found a room at a boardinghouse on the east side. There were a thousand things that I had not taken into account. I’m a well-read man—that’s what the newspapers said at the time—and had kept up, I thought, with the goings-on of the world. The big things.

  It was the small things that got me—the doors at the Hy-Vee that leapt away before I had a chance to push them, the way everything was packaged in gaudy, impossible-to-open containers. Almost all of the forty-nine years I had spent away were lost, great people obscure, ordinary people disappeared. I couldn’t find shaving brushes or my favorite brands of candy; the light in stores was too bright by half; I ordered soup and a sandwich at a lunch counter and was asked to pay five dollars. The logic of things confounded me; I couldn’t understand the simplest billboard. People’s faces, close up, looked completely different, their skin a new texture, hair a new substance.

  Women, especially, seemed weird, as if they were now manufactured differently. Let’s be honest, it was a problem after those many years, all those bare legs and that long loose hair, unconcerned, looking fresh from bed. All of them out in the world: I stood on corners downtown and saw those girls flitting around, in groups together or with men. Salesgirls flirted with me, their fingers hit my palm when they handed me change. Sometimes they even winked. No one can tell me that’s right.

  I complained to my parole officer.

  “You’re like something H. G. Wells dreamed up,” he said.

  I disagreed; I didn’t feel at all fictional. Just the opposite: I felt like the only real thing on earth, as if the new world was something I myself had inadvertently imagined, a detail a day for forty-nine years.

  “People can tell about me,” I told the parole officer. “They’re frightened.”

  “You’re frightened,” he said. “Mr. Green, in this town what you did is just a drop in the bucket.” As if I were flattering myself.

  I wasn’t ready for that life, thought maybe I never would be. I am not, believe me, a violent man by nature; my temper, when it kicks up, embarrasses me. I stole a box cutter from the grocery store, went to see my parole officer, that young man who, at the time, seemed to be the root of my problems. I went for his face, so that they’d see I was serious and dangerous—but I gave him time to put up his arms, and that’s where I got him.

  I was back at Fort Madison within a week, spent two more years there.

  This time out, things are better. Plenty of good, if you know where to look—the headlights that flash into my window at night, all that perfume on people. I wake up at four-thirty, an hour before the other men, and get my own breakfast together. I’ve learned to boil eggs; yesterday, I looked down at one little egg in one little pan, the shell cracked, a bit of white in the water like the tail of a comet, and felt happy.

  Sometimes I stroll down the street, with my head back to look at the sky, at night, early morning. I love to see the sun at the end of a day, resting its chin on the horizon, red and exhausted as a housewife. Last fall, when I was first out, I spent hours watching southbound birds move across cloudy skies that were solid and gray as cement. I supposed that on those overcast days the birds have to navigate by looking down instead of up, steering by streetlights instead of stars. I could almost see them hooking a wing, craning a neck: Is that the river we passed last time, the highway, the filling station.

  And there’s Eddie, and Dave Massey, and the people at the Cottage Grove Church, good people who sometimes even seek me out for conversation. I am taken care of, don’t have to shop or go into restaurants or pay bills. I spend holidays at the church, eating meals in the function room downstairs with the other senior citizens who have nowhere else to go.

  This is not to say that my life is without worry. For instance, three months ago, I went to the movies with Eddie. A red-haired actress played the girlfriend of the hero; she wasn’t in much of the picture, but when she was, she reminded me of somebody. The recognition came in small stabs when she made one expression or another—I kept almost deciding who she was like, and finally, after an hour, I realized. It was Rosie. I had to leave the theater.

  I sat on a bench in the lobby, shaking a little, furious but not knowing at who. I felt tricked.

  Eddie came out.

  “Mr. Green, you all right?”

  The girl at the popcorn counter stared. I coughed and shook my head.

  Eddie bought a fruit punch and a box of lemon drops. He sat down next to me.

  “It’s not a very good movie,” he said. Then he took my hand and put a piece of candy in it. I ate fast, chewing down and letting the sugar get gummy in the cracks of my back teeth. Then I put out my hand for another. We sat there until the crowd came out of the theater, Eddie handing me lemon drops one at a time, me eating them as if they could dissolve the feeling of ash in my stomach. By the time we got to the car, I felt much better.

  And most days I’m fine and can ignore the facts, tell my temper, Oh no you don’t. I can take being a curiosity, like it even. Last fall, a television station decided that I was a Rip Van Winkle and sent a reporter over. She asked me slow, patient, rude questions. Did I do it? I said yes. Why? I didn’t know. Did I believe in God? Sure, why not. Finally, she asked: of all the things I had seen so far on the outside—TV, computers, sex everywhere, the bomb—what amazed me most?

  And I said: me.

  At Fort Madison, I didn’t think of my family; I didn’t think of much. I concentrated on my watchman job, and on reading magazines, and on keeping clean, and on not dying. It was like I had killed everyone I ever met, like the people I once knew had simply disappeared, and I was not allowed to hear from them, or talk of them, or grieve for them.

  Not hearing from my folks wasn’t new: they’d cut off contact with me when I married Rosie. My family lived in Indianapolis; Madrid was Rosie’s town.

  My father was fond of saying, “Don’t misunderstand me, but y
ou’re smarter than I am.” He didn’t mean it nicely. The last time he said it was at the dinner table the week I graduated from college.

  “Educated man,” he said, shaking his head.

  He ran a furniture store and wanted me to take over, and none of my refusals, my petty transgressions, could dissuade him. I had tried politeness, rudeness, threats. At twenty-one, I burst into tears at breakfast; I crashed the family car; I was purposely careless with money. Nothing would change my father’s mind.

  My sister, Evelyn, was not expected to work in the store, since according to my father men didn’t want to buy furnishings from girls. She had enrolled at Butler University the previous fall and had just started seeing the young man who would be her husband. Now she was giggly and harebrained all the time. I knew she would marry, that she would be allowed to belong to a different family, a different set of responsibilities. She sat at the dinner table and kicked the legs of my chair absentmindedly, her face already bright with that future. She would never have to work in that dusty store, full of people who wanted to quibble over prices, who searched for a scratch or a squeaky hinge, anything to pay a little less. Every thump of her foot reminded me.

  “I can’t work there,” I told my father.

  My father was examining his fork, trying to fix a bent tine. “Of course you can,” he said. He looked at me and smiled. “You don’t care about family duty? Fine. This is a business transaction. You owe me. I’m collecting my debt.”

  The next week I drove to Madrid to visit a friend. Later, I learned that he wanted me to meet his sister, Irene, but I spent my time in the kitchen with Rosie Roach the hired girl. That’s what the family called her always, the full name and the description, as if she were the heroine of a comic strip. She was Irish and freckled like the rice pudding she served, pale and cinnamoned. She got on well with my friend’s family, and every time I snuck back to talk to her, she said, “Irene’s looking for you,” or, “She’s a sweet girl, Irene,” or “For God’s sake . . .” But Irene was loud and gangly, with a nose shaped like the state of Nevada.