Tom said nothing. He shifted down a gear as they came up close behind the lumber truck, which was laboriously making its way up the hill on the far side of the dam. At the top of the hill, the road straightened and widened, and Tom pulled out and passed the lumber truck, giving a toot and a wave to the driver as he passed. Driving rapidly, he soon was ahead of the truck by a quarter mile or more, and two miles down the road from the dam, with rolling green fields of new corn spreading away from the road, he came to the Turnpike, and he pulled over and stopped the pickup. The lumber truck was drawing slowly up behind him.
Buddy, suddenly understanding, looked at his father with terror, then anger. “You sonofabitch.”
“You get out and stick your thumb out and that driver’ll pick you up,” Tom said in a low voice.
Buddy wrenched open the door and stepped out of the pickup and slammed the door shut behind him. Slinging his bags quickly to the ground, he waved up at the driver of the lumber truck hissing to a stop and showed him his thumb. The driver waved him up, and Buddy climbed aboard. Tom let the truck pass, then turned slowly around in the road and headed back to town.
Politics
DRIVING BACK THROUGH A COLD OCTOBER RAIN, somewhere near Rockingham Park racetrack and the New Hampshire state line, Nancy Hubner tried to decide to tell her husband Ronald that she wanted a divorce. But that’s soap opera, she told herself, because what she really wanted was a separation — phrasing it carefully in a sentence, however, as if she could be heard by Moses. Moses was her doctor, her psychiatrist. His real name was Dr. Norman Moses, but Nancy, even when talking to him face to face, enjoyed referring to him as Moses. He wore a shovel-shaped beard, salt-and-pepper, was tall and broad-faced, had blue eyes and was in excellent physical shape. She’d had no difficulty mistaking him for Charlton Heston, especially in the liquid-eyed manner he used in listening to her every Thursday afternoon, and after six months of therapy, she had developed the habit of thinking in complete sentences that she felt would make sense to Moses, the way you do when you’re first in love or when you have made a new, deep friendship with a person you admire very much.
She was not in love with Moses, of course, but she did admire him very much. Her problem, the one she had brought down to Boston with her six months ago, was that while she was in love with her husband Ronald, she did not admire him very much. As a matter of fact, she did not admire him at all. Moses apparently had no difficulty believing that part. Instead, what he seemed to question was the part about her being in love with Ronald in the first place. She had presented her problem to him, as if bearing a gift, smiling with her characteristic, slight self-effacement, and he had looked at her problem somewhat casually from several angles, and then had asked, “What makes you think you love your husband?” It was like asking the price of a gift.
Now, she said to herself, gratitude thickening the tone of her imagined voice, now, he was presenting her with a gift, for now her problem was solved. She not only did not admire her husband, she did not love him either.
She buzzed north on the Turnpike, and the rain slopped heavily down. It was dark, though still late afternoon, and traffic was thin, so she cruised at nearly eighty, driving the car without thoughts about the car or road, as if both could take care of themselves. She would like to tell Ronald tonight, just sit down at the kitchen table and tell him that she wanted a separation, and by next Thursday afternoon, when she saw Moses again, she would have told the children and her parents, would surely have told several of her friends. She may even have moved out by then. She would be the one to leave. She had been able to decide that much. It was only fair. Ronald loved the house — it was properly his. He ran his business, insurance, from the house. He had renovated and even decorated the place without much interest or special cooperation from her, converting it from a run-down, long-empty farmhouse on the edge of town into an attractive, modern dwelling fit for an attractive, modern family. It was her life that was changing, had changed, would go on changing — not his. And it was unfair of her to impose any more change on his life than was absolutely necessary for her survival. My emotional and spiritual well-being, she said to herself.
When a man and a woman have been married for two and one half decades and have raised or nearly raised three children together, they necessarily will have become different people at the end of those decades. Everyone knows that. Frequently, however, the single path they have been following together for so long, like Hansel’s and Gretel’s, does not come out at the same place for both Hansel and Gretel, and surprised, often confused, they find themselves standing in the clearing alone. Or so it seems to them. They can rejoin, but only if they go all the way back to the beginning, where they first entered the forest years ago. But that only happens in fairly tales. In real life, if you have not reached the clearing yet, you must go on. And if you have reached the clearing, you must live there.
Nancy believed that she had reached the clearing. She had become “political,” she said. She said it to everyone, to Moses, to Ronald, and to her daughter Noni, the only child still living at home, a fifteen-year-old, blond, self-absorbed child who gave the impression to strangers of being soulless. The other two children, her sons Chip and Ron, Jr., one in law school, the other working for a prestigious law firm in Washington, had such hidebound ideas of what “political” meant that Nancy did not try even to mention it to them, for they would have obliged her to explain it precisely, which she could not have done to their satisfaction, and they would have teased her about it then. To them, her “politics” would have seemed nothing more than the self-indulgent expression of middle-class taste refined by years of idleness. Naive, they would have called her. Sentimental. Woolly-headed.
But that was not true, she knew, for she had beliefs, she had principles and she had positions that she did not have when she was a younger woman and that she had acquired only after great thought and some reading and a considerable amount of conversation with people who shared those beliefs, principles and positions. She believed, for instance, that as a child of the 1940s and ’50s she and her entire generation had suffered from the sexual restrictions imposed by her parents in particular and society in general, and further, that the guilt used to enforce those restrictions complicated and extended the suffering long after one’s parents had died and society in general had changed its mind with regard to such crucial human activities as masturbation, foreplay and orgasm. On principle, then, she could say that a casual, sexual relationship between a man and a woman, so long as it was experienced without feelings of guilt, was a positive and enlarging event. And an example of a position Nancy held might be that society in general and individual citizens in particular have no right to judge in moral or legal terms the sexual activities, proclivities or technologies employed for pleasure between consenting adults.
She was, therefore, for vibrators. The sale of them, she meant. Just as she was for pornography, though she herself had never actually seen any. After all, as the middle-aged wife of a small-town insurance man, she did not find sexual paraphernalia and pornography easily available. On the other hand, as a direct result of her principles, she had enjoyed, really enjoyed, a casual sexual relationship with a man, an exceedingly attractive young man named Dino whose attentions to the details of her body had strengthened her beliefs concerning the injustices her generation had suffered at the hands of its parents. Dino was a carpenter who specialized in building houses the old way, without nails and with hand-hewn, mortised and pinioned beams. He abjured the use of power tools, and probably for that reason had taken from April to late November last year to build Nancy’s solar greenhouse. Dino lived in the woods in a cabin with his wife Bliss, who wore gingham dresses that trailed along the ground. She had a tattoo of a rose above her right breast which she revealed fetchingly by leaving the top buttons of her dress undone at all times. Nancy’s “relationship” with Dino had taken place over the summer, while Dino was building the greenhouse, and had ended in October (almost exactly a year ago today, Nancy said to herself) when she discovered that Bliss was five months pregnant. “It would only have complicated things,” she had explained to Moses. “And ours wasn’t the kind of love that could have endured complications and still provide us with pleasure.”