“Why can’t you?” Gen asks.
“It’s a philosophical question,” Annie says, “we could talk about it forever.”
“We wouldn’t talk,” Gen says.
Her mother looks hurt. She pushes her hair up and off her neck, which makes her look younger and sadder.
“How is your turkey?” Gen asks Katherine. “What does he like to do?”
Katherine tells her that the turkey likes corn and egg shells and bagels and then finds herself telling a long Baba Yaga story. She tells Gen that the turkey reminds her of Baba Yaga, a Russian witch who lived in a house on chicken legs. Whenever anyone came along that Baba Yaga did not want to see, the chicken legs would move the house around so that the visitor couldn’t find the front door.
Gen had never heard of Baba Yaga.
“Do you like fairy tales?” Katherine asks her.
“I like science fiction,” Gen says and wanders from the room, smelling the way Annie would smell if she ever had the opportunity to use her own perfume.
“Have some wine,” Annie urges Katherine, “tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Actually,” Katherine says, “I was thinking about how I used to climb trees so a certain person would think I wasn’t home.”
Annie thinks Katherine is referring to her childhood. “Children are different today,” she sighs. “They’re entirely different from the way we used to be.”
A week before Katherine’s birthday, a long envelope arrives from Travis’s mother. Each year she sends a birthday card to Katherine one week ahead of time. She must have put the date down wrong on her calendar years ago and transferred it incorrectly to each succeeding year. Katherine opens the envelope and there is a birthday card and a long red and white automobile bumper sticker inside. I LOVE MY VOLVO the sticker says. Travis’s mother has a Volvo too, but an old one, a bulbous sedan painted a cheery Coca-Cola red. Katherine doesn’t put the sticker on her car. Actually, Katherine doesn’t love her Volvo. She’s surprised that Travis’s mother doesn’t realize that.
Katherine’s birthday finally arrives. She has given Gen a tape recorder. As for herself, she and Peter decide to drink champagne all day. She would like to forget this birthday in a fashionable manner. Peter borrows a friend’s sailboat and they sail around in the morning drinking champagne. In the afternoon, they return the boat, change their clothes and go to an art opening at a local gallery where there is lots of champagne being served. The artist says that his paintings, which are mathematical and precise, are based on Gestalt principles of illusion. Katherine likes the paintings which give the impression that they have solved something, that something is settled and finished. They don’t remind her of anything. The artist is a fat jolly man dressed in black. His wife is beautiful and a smoker and since smoking is not allowed in the gallery, she stands outside mostly, smoking. Peter is a smoker too and he and the artist’s wife stand outside beneath the palms and smoke and drink champagne. She smokes Gauloises and he smokes Camels. They are the last smokers left in the world. When Katherine walks outside to join them, she finds herself telling the woman how much everything has changed, how only a few years ago there were pileated woodpeckers and tarpon and sea turtles, but there aren’t any more. Peter begins fiddling with a long silk scarf the artist’s wife is wearing. He holds a tasseled end in his hand and runs it through his fingers. He rocks back and forth on his heels and tosses one end of the scarf softly around the woman’s neck. Katherine walks away, down the street to the Volvo. Just as she is putting the key in the ignition, Peter runs up. She puts the car in gear and Peter jumps into the back seat as the car moves off.
“I’m sorry,” he says, “I was being a little ebullient.”
“Ebullient?” Katherine says. “Is that how you pronounce that?”
“Yes,” Peter says. “Honk the horn on your birthday.” He kisses her and climbs into the front seat. “Just honk the horn like you normally would.”
Katherine taps the horn and there is a loud blast which makes her jump in her seat. It’s the sound of an ocean liner.
“I could have bought one that had eighty-one different sounds,” Peter says. “It was a synthesizer that mixed tone, bass, treble and frequency. You could make zoo sounds, UFO sounds, animal yelps, ambulance and police siren sounds, everything.”
“I love this,” Katherine says, and she does, but she will have to get used to hitting the horn. She never uses the horn. She is not that kind of a driver. She taps the horn again.
“Do you love me?” Peter asks.
“Yes,” Katherine says.
On New Year’s Day, Katherine goes to the house with Peter. He is going to plant four citrus trees and a Jacaranda. Katherine is going to poison the ants. She measures everything carefully and pours the poison through a funnel into the hills.
“There goes their breakfast nook!” Peter calls to her encouragingly. “There goes their fandango room!”
Katherine measures and mixes. She moves from one end of the property to the other, pouring the smoky green liquid into the mounds.
“There goes their ball game,” Peter says. He sets a lemon tree firmly in a hole, taps the earth down around it, sprays the green leaves lightly with a hose. The Jacaranda will grow high above the citrus and losing its leaves in winter, allow the sun to shine through its bare branches and ripen the fruit below. In the springtime, when the citrus is in neither fruit nor flower, the Jacaranda will be in full color. Katherine watches Peter as he works. She tries to remember the last words Travis ever said to her, the very last words. She can’t. She wraps the empty bottle of poison tightly in newspaper and stuffs it in the trash, then runs water from an outside spigot and washes her hands. She goes over to the turkey’s pen. The turkey looks at her with vacant dignity. She feeds it pieces of bread and grass through the wire.
“We’ll have a big party when this is all finished,” Peter says. “We’re going to have a wonderful time in this house.
“In the lot next door, behind a fence, someone starts a chain saw. The turkey shrieks wildly in response. The turkey loves the sound of chain saws, motorcycles and sudden laughter.
“That’s new,” Katherine says, pointing through the trees at the shine of a distant roof. “We were never able to see a house over there before.”
“They’re building too,” Peter says. “They’ve subdivided the land.”
“Everything’s changing,” Katherine says.
“We won’t notice them,” Peter says, “we’ll plant some more trees.” When Katherine doesn’t reply, Peter says, “I know things change now and I do not care. It’s all been changed for me. Let it all change. We’ll be gone before it’s changed too much. I found that if you took a drink it got very much the same as it was always.”
Katherine looks at him.
“Hemingway,” Peter says.
“Yes, let’s have a drink,” Katherine says.
Katherine sits at the kitchen table in the beach shack and writes out invitations for the party Peter’s planned. As she writes addresses on envelopes, she thinks of a T-shirt Travis wore all the time. The T-shirt said THE FAINTING EGG. It had something to do with a vegetarian restaurant where one of their friends worked as a waiter. The shirt was dark blue and had white lettering. She remembers it clearly.
On the table with the invitations is a letter from Travis’s mother, who writes that she has just won a black and white television set in a soft drink contest. “I pried this little plastic liner out of the bottle cap and there it was, a little picture of a TV! The first time in my life I have ever won anything! I am donating it to the church, however, as I already have a nice TV.”
Katherine and Travis’s mother have been keeping in touch now for seven years.