Joe looked up and said, “Why is he having a grain embargo anyway?”
“Oh, you were sick as a dog,” said Marie. “Lois told me all about it.”
“Well, I guess they invaded Afghanistan,” Russ Pinckard said, “wherever that is!”
“Kinda like us invading Mexico,” said Marsh Whitehead. “Piece I read said Carter should leave ’em alone, they’re gonna regret it soon enough without us lifting a finger.”
George, who was manning the register, looked up, and Marie looked over at him. George almost never said anything, but now he said, “You think he wants them to call him a sissy all over again? Those folks in Iran pulled his pants down; now the Russkies are doing the same thing.” Everyone shut up at the reference to the Iran hostages — it was something like two months now. The women and some minorities had been released, but there were still fifty-two men stuck there. Forgetting about them had been another privilege of his illness.
“And we got to pay,” said Russ Pinckard. No one rose to the bait; everyone knew that Carter’s response to the crisis was a ticklish issue. Russ looked at Joe. “You pay any attention to the markets lately? Surely you weren’t that sick.”
Joe shrugged. “I thought it was the middle of winter.”
“Well,” said Marsh Whitehead, “don’t have a heart attack when you do, because prices are way, way down. He suspended trading for a couple of days right after the embargo, but when they opened again, the price dropped as far as it could go, and it still hasn’t recovered. Best thing I think we can do this year is—”
“Shut the place and take off for Florida,” said Russ Pinckard.
Everyone laughed, but not cheerfully.
Ricky Carson, who had just come in and sat himself at the counter, said, “That’s where Dickie Dugan went. They got themselves a lemon grove down there by Tampa somewhere.”
At this, everyone fell silent again. Life surely was unfair if the Dugans were thriving.
A couple of weeks later, Reagan got in trouble for telling a joke that Joe thought was harmless enough—“How do you tell the Polish one at a cockfight? He’s the one with the duck. How do you tell the Italian? He’s the one who bets on the duck. How do you tell when the Mafia is there? The duck wins.” A lot of people went bananas, though no one at the Denby Café. In the New Hampshire debate, which Joe watched on television, Joe wasn’t impressed by him until he got to the grain issue — when he said that Carter’s move was “for domestic consumption and it actually hurt the American farmer more than the Soviet Union,” Joe had to agree, and then when he said that “there could be a confrontation down the road if they continue,” he had to agree with that, too. Of course, Reagan wasn’t a serious candidate, but he was pleasant — what he said about Carter came out in a genial way, as if he were chatting in your living room or something. Yes, Carter did more or less dare the Russians to cross the Afghan border, and then when they took his dare, he didn’t do a thing about it, and how could he? Maybe no one in Iowa, or in Washington, either, was quite sure where Afghanistan was. At any rate, the Russkies took Carter by surprise and everyone knew it.
Of course, this guy John Anderson stood right up to Reagan, and what he said was true — why were we afraid of the Soviets taking over Iran and Saudi Arabia? Well, if they did, where would the oil come from? But Reagan smiled — the camera caught this — as if he expected that sort of talk from a guy like Anderson. (And who had heard of Anderson? Not Joe.) But that was all they said about farming issues. Mostly it was about taxes and inflation, whether the economy needed a little shock therapy, and whether the secretary of the treasury should be investigated. Not even much about Iran. None of this helped Joe decide what to plant when he had to go to the bank a few days later and apply for his loans to buy seed. The best rate he could get was 14 percent, and if the ships full of grain were already looking for places to store the corn, beans, wheat that had been intended for the Russians, maybe shutting down the farm for a year wasn’t a bad idea. If he were rich, he would plant clover and plow it under in the fall, just stay out of the market altogether. When he said this to Minnie, she laughed as if he were joking, so he didn’t dare say it to Lois. All he said to Lois was that God would provide, and of course she nodded, and even quoted a Bible verse, “Therefore they shall come and sing in the height of Zion, and shall flow together to the goodness of the Lord, for wheat, and for wine, and for oil, and for the young of the flock and of the herd: and their soul shall be as a watered garden; and they shall not sorrow any more at all.” Although Joe didn’t often go to church with her, and didn’t quite know what he believed, he found this verse comforting, and asked her to repeat it.
—
LILLIAN WAS vacuuming. She liked vacuuming more than any other household task, and she had gone ahead and let the door-to-door salesman sell her the Kirby, not because she needed a new vacuum cleaner, but because she liked having two, one at each end of the house. Now she was pushing it under the bed. It was heavy, it was loud, it made her feel as though she were sucking every microbe out of the carpet and smashing it to atoms. When she bent down to push it farther under the bed, she realized that the phone was ringing in her ear. She turned off the vacuum cleaner, worried instantly that someone was calling about Arthur.
But the caller was Janet, long-distance, from Iowa. Lillian looked at the alarm clock. It was only eight there. She said, “Hi, honey, everything okay?”
Janet sniffled.
Lillian sat down on the bed. She said, “How’s Emily?”
“Fine.”
“How’s Jared? Are you okay?”
“I’m okay. Jared had to stay at work all night to send some file to somewhere. He’s okay.” Then she said, in a low voice, “I’ve been up all night, worrying that there is going to be a nuclear war.”
Lillian said, “You have?”
“Well, and so I’ve done this thing.”
Lillian felt a jolt of real fear. She said, “What thing?”
“Is Uncle Arthur there?”
“He went to work already.” Arthur was going to retire very, very soon, unless he could persuade them to keep him on against everyone’s better judgment.
“Does Uncle Arthur think there is going to be a nuclear war?”
“No, he hasn’t mentioned it. But what would cause it?”
“The Iranians.”
“But tell me what thing you’ve done?”
Janet started crying. In the two and a half years since Janet escaped those Temple people, Lillian had been thinking something was going to happen. She and Eloise had talked it over a dozen times. Eloise was more sanguine, especially since this young woman Marla someone had turned up not dead, but first in Paris, and now working in New York, at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Janet seemed to have moved on pretty well; Jared was a straightforward, kind person; Emily had had an amazing effect on Andy, who had then warmed up to Janet — they got along like sisters now. But Lillian trusted nothing, and believed far more than Andy and Eloise that underground poisons could surface unexpectedly. She shifted her position on the bed and adjusted her bra. Janet said, “I keep looking out the window. We have this window that faces west, and I keep looking out the window and imagining a mushroom cloud.”
“Why west?” said Lillian.
“Des Moines.”
“You are living in Solon, Iowa, and you worry there’s going to be a nuclear explosion in Des Moines?”
“The prevailing winds are westerlies.”
Lillian didn’t dare to smile, even though they were only talking on the phone. She said, “Who is going to bomb us?”