Now Rocky eyeballed it. He said, “She looks like she’s trying to unscrew her tits, but can’t figure out if they come off clockwise or counterclockwise.”
He had a point.
“And,” he added, “all the boys come here and give her a rub for luck.”
“Could be. I’ve never heard that.”
“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. Wherever there are public breasts, there are boys rubbing them for luck. See how they’re a different color than the rest of her?”
“No, actually.”
“So what did you do here as a kid? Sled? What?” It was windy and bright on the hill, and Rocky looked like a monument himself, his coat flowing behind him, the wind rattling his white shirt. Heavy men always look handsome in a breeze.
“We took our sleds here, sure.” And though I thought I’d brought him to an unsentimental place, I remembered coming here with Hattie, winters with toboggans, summers with sheets to spread out on the lawn. Our sister Ida and her family lived on Ninth Street, and in August on visits we were allowed to bundle up our bedclothes and walk here for the breeze that hit this hill and no place else, as though it was paying its respects to the politicians. Plenty of families would have had the same clever idea. The side of the hill, as we walked up hugging our pillows, looked like a ramshackle galaxy: a child beneath a bleached sheet, glowing faintly, was a distant star; a fat man in his undershirt shone as bright as Venus; look, there are the Pleiades, all seven, dozing. I can’t imagine sleeping outside these days, but we could, we did. Not all night. Hattie would wake me. She’d poke me with the toe of her shoe, but I bided my time till she had to crouch and put her hand on my back. “Mose, Mosey,” she said, quiet because of the dreamers all around us. “Ida will worry. Let’s go.”
Ah, God. Grief was a flood. I knew that from growing up in Valley Junction, where the Raccoon River jumped its banks once a decade and slunk into town like a convict come back to a favorite crime scene. The floods soaked your basement, the rains that caused the floods came through the shingles of the roof into the attic, the very places you saved things. People sandbagged and waited for the water to go down. Basements were worse. Your beloved belongings floated until they sank. The water eventually dragged down everything you owned, your books, your diaries, your most seaworthy childhood toys. When the water left and your life was back out in the air, your things would be so heavy you couldn’t lift them to throw them away, mildew blooming like black roses already. But before the water receded, everything you loved was somewhere underneath, and if you couldn’t clearly see it all, neither could you see what had been destroyed. While your belongings were submerged, you could walk among them, slowly by necessity. There was no need to clean up. There was no need to salvage some things and burn others and arrange for replacements. You stood in the water, and though once the place dried out you could get to work, you hoped it never would: look, that chair’s sound, that magazine’s legible, that face in the photo album’s only slightly blurred, ready for conversation or kisses. We’re only separated. We still can see.
Leave that shipwreck alone.
Adam and Eve Was a Marriage of Convenience
Our train left the next morning at nine. “Stay!” said Annie, and we had to explain that we actually were employed, that people waited for us in California. My father was sitting in his chair when I got ready to leave. I took his outstretched hand and he reeled me in — where had such strength come from? — and I tumbled into his lap. I’m breaking my elderly father! I thought, but I felt his arm around me, his knuckles fondly knocking my shoulder. “Come back,” he whispered. “Come to California,” I whispered back. He knocked on my shoulder twice more and let me go. My father shared my superstition — maybe he was the one who put the idea in my head — and we did not say the word good-bye. I was not so sad. I’d come to Iowa and lived, and surely that meant I could return whenever I wanted.
We took a local to Fort Madison, where we boarded the Super Chief to California, an all-Pullman train, very deluxe, very Hollywood. Ahead of us, in our car, a thin woman in a suit with a fox collar stepped out of a compartment. She turned around and looked up.
“Penny!” I said.
“Mr. Sharp!” she said back, and then in a low friendly voice, “Mr. Carter.”
He paused. “Mrs. Carter.” He muscled by me to kiss her. When they turned, Rocky held out Penny’s wrist, as though her hand were a flashlight he meant to shine at my face.
“Meet the little woman,” said Rocky, and Penny smiled dazzlingly in my general direction. Ah. There was a ring on that hand. I tried to sort this out: Penny was not in New York. Penny was on the train. Penny and Rocky appeared to be married.
How could he have kept that a secret from me?
“No kidding!” I said, and gave her a kiss. We had to bust it up to let a middle-aged couple get past us.
“You haven’t told me how I look,” said Penny.
“You’re beautiful, Pen,” I said. “You don’t look married at all.” That wasn’t true. She looked married and divorced and already facing a long future alone. “But when did this happen?”
Rocky shrugged. Penny said, “The night before you left. We figured, California! Why not go together? We’d’ve told you, but. . surprised, right?” She laughed delightedly, as though your husband wanting to keep your marriage from his best friend was good news under certain circumstances. Rocky wouldn’t look at me.
Nevertheless, the newlyweds went to their compartment and I went to mine. The bed pulled down from the wall right in front of the window: it made me feel like a failed tank act, drowned, pressed up against the glass for the audience — people at the stations we pulled into, that is — to gawk at. I couldn’t get over this sudden marriage. Probably he’d been drunk, maybe they both had. I remembered how indifferent he’d seemed to Penny when we left her the first time, waving in Penn Station at our northbound train. Maybe he’d married her out of a different brand of boredom, and was ashamed.
I was a bachelor then. Now I’m sure it wasn’t shame or restlessness. Rocky knew how to talk about anything but happiness, and Penny, for all her chatter and nightclub flash, made the guy authentically happy. He couldn’t explain it, so he wouldn’t try. In those days Rock never said anything he couldn’t bluff his way out of.
Somehow I could not imagine that we were actually moving toward California: it seemed more likely that California was being pulled toward us, on giant chains run by the train engine, and that we stayed where we were while the cars rocked from the effort. Where I had picked up such a cinematic notion, I have no idea, but that’s what eventually happened in our movies. No matter where trouble found Carter and Sharp — Mexico, Mars, Italy, New Orleans — we ourselves were always on a Californian movie lot, and the mountains, the craters, the Mardi Gras parade, were pulled in by chains and prettied up with paint.
In the morning I went to meet them in the red-and-black dining car. Penny wasn’t up yet; Rock waited by himself in one of the orange leather booths.
“She’s a great girl,” I said as I sat down. “Now, tell me the truth. Are you divorced from your last wife?”
“Yes!” he said. “Penny made me, actually, and there went my last good reason for not getting married. I only hope your father is right about this come-to-love business.”