Megan drives back to the farm, one hand resting on the box containing the binoculars. She’s forgotten what it is to drive a truck, to be intimate with a machine, the gears that feel abnormally warm in her palm, the spectrum of metal motor sounds you must listen to. She can’t drive with the radio on, it’s too distracting. There is nothing on the radio but religious sermons and country western songs, a squalid repetition of alcohol and poorly educated people without recognizable options whining about it in strict and predictable rhyme schemes.
Megan Miller spends the afternoon on the south field where the irrigation canal is. She studies the book of birds with its intimidating glossy pictures. She can’t identify anything. They all look like big black birds or medium sized black birds. There is more to classification than she anticipated. She spots magpies and hawks. The golden and bald eagles are easy, and the oriels and robins, pelicans and seagulls. Everything else eludes her. How does it fly? It flies well, she thinks, furious with the text. It flies with authority.
Later, she hears her brother Matthew say, “She’s got binoculars.” He is talking to her father, reporting in. “Looks like one of them tourists from California. Dressed up like she’s on safari.” There is laughter.
The city where she now lives is a region of collective contempt for her family, a contagion. For a moment, Megan feels she has been ambushed when she least expected it. But that’s the point of an ambush, after all, she remembers.
Matthew is engaged in a singular process of subtraction and reduction. He is continually divesting himself of what he learned in school, even to the level of grammar. They used to read plays out loud together. She recalls a winter of Tennessee Williams in the basement. They memorized and recited their lines with conviction, acted them with cleverly assembled props. They had lighting cues. Martha designed and sewed costumes. Then it was another winter. They had aluminum paper crowns and swords. Matthew glued on a beard. Perhaps it was Chaucer. Her brother had a beautiful voice. Some actors can read the telephone book and bring tears to your eyes. Matthew could do that, naturally.
His hold on words is each season lessening. They have failed him. Or perhaps he is growing in reverse. All the attention to the ground is pulling him in. Soon he will communicate in a sequence of grunts and slaps. Then he’ll be ready to marry someone like Martha.
In the late afternoon she drives the old pick-up to town. She is going to call Karen Kaplan, her partner and best friend. Megan promised to telephone but she hasn’t. There’s no cellular service in the valley. And she cannot physically force herself to use the one telephone in the kitchen at the farm. She senses her mother in the air, in the wires, in disguise, tapping in, listening and recording, saving words for a future sabotage. Megan exists on the farm in a paralysis, as if she’s had a stroke. She must separate herself by seven miles of interstate before she remembers how to use her credit cards.
“Why do you do this?” Karen Kaplan asks. She is talking about the farm, Idaho, and her summer ritual that has nothing to do with purification. “It’s perverse. You could have had Shelly’s condo in Kauai. Dylan’s in camp. You could have gone anywhere. You do it to make yourself feel worse. Admit it.”
Megan considers the possibility that her summer returns are an obvious propitiation. It is her ritual supplication, her unique blood letting to insure her own crops. Harvests of clients with injuries. Fields of clients who are victims of fraud, irrefutable negligence, breech of contract, misconduct that has a criminal code clearly attached to it like a price tag on a suit. And the bad faith that is someone else’s fault. Megan glances at the river across the street from the phone booth, the river slow as if damaged slides through the center of town. It looks dull and beaten in early August. She is prepared to tell this to Karen, to reveal this as an absolute confession, but she doesn’t.
“I’m collecting Jewish lawyer jokes. They’re Neanderthals but they have rocks and clubs. And there are so many of them.”
“As your attorney, I advise you to stay out of the mashed potatoes and gravy,” her partner offers, voice too light. Megan detects her concern. “Limit your biscuit intake. Remember Los Angeles lent. It comes the spring of your 15th year and it lasts through your first grandchild. Keep your priorities, dear.”
A small corridor of laughter. It feels sticky and contrived. Her words and reasons are weak, exposed and inadequate. The inside of her mouth is dusty.
“I always used to know what you were thinking,” her mother says. She holds a cotton cloth for washing or dusting. It’s a prop.
Her father is watching television. Her mother looks directly at her and the words are an accusation. Her mother rinses dishes and smokes. She brushes a strand of gray hair from her eyes, barely glances out the window at the view she has memorized. At the end of the barley fields are two silos stranded above an irrigation ditch. Then the purple etch of Morris Road with the railway crossing and cemetery and the roof of the new high school. They were building it when she left for college. She remembers enormous piles of bricks.
“I used to be able to read your mind,” her mother says. There is sorrow in this, but Megan cannot determine why or for whom. “You’d be looking out at the potatoes. But I knew you were seeing bridges and cities on the other side of the ocean.”
“Yes,” Megan says. “I was.” Is this the door she must walk through? Is this the sudden portal you cross and find the other and more vivid world?
“But now…” Her mother pauses, lights another cigarette, straightens an invisible wrinkle in her apron, loses her train of thought. Her mother looks each year increasingly like Central Casting sent her for a farmwoman crowd shot. They all are. Her father and Matthew and Martha and her children named after detectives and districts.
Outside is a sunset that dust has turned into unexpected strands like lava. There are islands of purple embossed above a molten orange that might be Hawaiian. Summer opens like an oven. Megan waits for her mother to remember that she is speaking. “Now you’ve been those places,” her mother points out, turns to examine an area of linoleum near the door. She extracts an envelope from her apron pocket. It’s a stack of postcards Megan sent in what appears to be chronological order. Her mother places them on the kitchen table. They are merely another set of cards. But there are more than fifty-two. Oahu. Paris. Venice. Bali. Amalfi. Tahiti. Shanghai. Prague. Rio. Bora Bora.
“Was it worth it?” her mother asks.
That’s the question, of course, the matter of worth. You bring in your acres and what is the yield? There is the computation of planted field to pound, to ton. People are no different. Is that what her mother is attempting to measure? Did she plant at the right time? Were the seeds spoiled? Was the effort appropriate to the product? Or is there something else, more primitive than even the biblical? After all, Megan has sacrificed her blood, her kin, the village of her birth, her ancestors, the incontrovertible rituals and borders, the bones of the ancient ones. She violated them on a molecular level, brought the black haired daughter from the foreign tribe into the world. This is unforgivable.
When a witness is encouraged to engage an unnecessarily ambiguous question, particularly one with an implication of damnation, it is best to equivocate. Megan can negotiate this obvious treachery. “Worth it?” she repeats. “Well, that’s difficult to say.” In the morning, Martha screams at her. “You don’t come at Christmas when we could use some decoration.” Her sister is following her down the driveway, into the road. The three standard issue children she has spawned are in various stages of ambulation behind her. Megan walks toward the road that leads to a trail with a marsh. She has her binoculars around her neck and the book of birds under her right arm even though she rarely identifies anything with certainty and wants to abandon the entire project. Big and black, or is it perhaps merely charcoal gray? How large must it be to be considered big? What of other markings, colors around the neck, the bands on the legs and, of course, how it is flying? It’s using its wings, she wants to scream. That’s how it’s flying.