Universal Harvester(25)
“It’s an expense,” conceded Peter. “But it’s a temporary expense.”
“It’s a waste,” said Harold Colton. “Either you should move here, or you both should move out to Crescent.” Irene’s mother nodded without looking up from her plate.
“He’s right,” Irene said. She was of two minds about leaving home: since coming home from college, she’d felt restless, a little curious about what else there might be beyond Tama, having seen just enough at college to pique her interest. But living a whole day’s drive from her parents made her anxious, the idea of it; they weren’t old yet, but it wouldn’t be long. Her job wasn’t awful, but she didn’t care about it; starting a new life appealed to her, but she couldn’t wholly envision the particulars, and when she tried, she felt uneasy. Still, college had been fun, every year a little more so; she pictured herself out in western Iowa, going into Omaha on weekends, seeing the sights. And she wanted to be bold and decisive, to make an impression on Peter like the one she’d made when they first met.
“You have a good job,” she said; her father nodded with satisfaction. “That’s where we ought to settle down.”
But Crescent was not Ottumwa. She made a few friends and played bridge with them, braiding simple daily threads together into a new life that didn’t feel entirely unfamiliar. For a while she felt as if she were settling in; but toward the end of her pregnancy’s first trimester, in 1968, she began to feel an almost primal nervousness, a need to be near her family. She wanted her mother’s meat loaf, not some meat loaf made using her mother’s recipe but the very one stirred together by her mother in a purple glass bowl on the tiny kitchen counter and baked for an hour and fifteen minutes in the Magic Chef oven. She hadn’t acclimated to the view from the living room window in Crescent: it still felt like somebody else’s window, somebody else’s yard. She couldn’t lay claim to it in her mind. The feeling gnawed at her as her body grew bigger; she didn’t want to have her baby in a strange hospital far away. It is hard to leave home, and sometimes it takes a long time.
*
“The faucet’s broken again,” Irene said to Peter at dinner.
“Seems like there’s always something with this place,” he said. It was true; he’d secured a job at the Tama Bank & Trust before leaving Crescent, but it didn’t pay like the Union Stockyards. They’d left a lot of money behind.
“I washed the plates in the bathtub,” she said. In her high chair, Lisa Sample gave out a joyful cry and slapped the mashed peas on her tray with an open palm. She was eight months old.
“Do you want me to give Henry a call?” Henry Jordan owned the house they rented, along with two other houses in town; he kept up the maintenance on them himself. Irene tried to avoid bothering him too much. He was a nice old man and she felt like he needed his rest.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Peter put down his fork and smiled at the baby, who smiled back through a mouthful of food. “You know,” he said, eyes still on his daughter, splitting his tone between business and baby talk, “back in Crescent I hear the Ketterman house is for sale. They’ve got a sink as big as a fishing hole, yes they do.” He tickled Lisa’s chin; she cooed.
“Peter,” she said.
“I know,” he said, still playing at baby talk. “But we’re throwing money away, staying out here. Throw-throw-throwing money. Yes we are!” The appeal to thrift was fair play, and a reliable arrow in the quiver.
“But we manage,” she said.
“I know we do,” he said, turning finally. “And I don’t mind. I don’t. I know you like to be near your parents.”
Lisa cleared what remained of her peas from her tray in one sudden sweep of her short, plump arm; they sprayed across the room like heavy confetti.
Irene was reaching for a dish towel.
“Terry called from the stockyards and says the new guy already left,” he said. “He asked me to reconsider.”
“She won’t eat the carrots, either,” she said, smiling up from her position on the floor. “Carrots are easier to pick up.”
“There’d be room enough for another baby, if we wanted one,” he said.
Irene had crushed several peas under her knees cleaning up the mess; scowling, she calculated the time she’d have to waste on the carpet after putting the baby to bed.
“I feel like I’m just getting up on my feet again, Peter,” she said. She remembered Crescent as a place where everything looked familiar but never felt that way.
“Well, OK,” he said, cheerfully, like he’d only been floating a mild suggestion. But the germ was in the grain. The next day Henry Jordan forgot all about the sink; it was Wednesday before he got to it, and all the while the interior of the Ketterman house grew fine and fresh in her mind. Clean counters, shiny showerheads. It couldn’t be all that much better than this, she knew, but a little might go a long way. And so it was Irene, the following week, who next raised the question of moving house, which she did by first telling Peter how grateful she was that she’d been able to have her baby at home; but it was important, wasn’t it, to start saving up for college, because time would get away from them before they knew it and costs were going up every year, et cetera. They’d been in Tama less than a year. Away, then back, now away again. So much news. It’s important to consider your choices carefully before settling on a course of action; when you keep changing course, you forget where you are. It’s disorienting.