Universal Harvester(26)
Lisa Sample celebrated her second birthday with her family on October 9, 1970, gleefully smashing both hands facedown into a two-layer vanilla cake with pink frosting, baked by her mother, Irene, at their home, the former Ketterman place in Crescent, Iowa, population 856.
2
On the living room carpet in Crescent, Irene was trying to teach Lisa to play Parcheesi. Lisa couldn’t follow the action, but she loved the dice, the way they rattled in the little blue cup. Was three too young for board games? Her mother thought probably so, but Lisa’d arrived at every milestone early: weaned early, crawled early, and surprised everybody with her first word before she could walk (“bear!” while having The Little Engine That Could read aloud to her; the bear in question was scratching at a tree on the same hillside where the train stalled). As soon as she could say two simple sentences she began putting them together to tell stories about her dolls: “They stopped playing. They need a rest,” she explained to her mother once, sequestering a Raggedy Ann in one corner of the living room and a nameless blinking-eyed vinyl doll in the one opposite.
In town there were only a few other little girls her age. Everybody knew everybody else. The kids would play together while the mothers visited, sometimes at one house, sometimes at another; there was a single grocery store that served as a social hub most mornings. It was a good life, small and navigable.
Peter got home early; it was four. He wasn’t due home until six thirty. “Daddy!” Lisa yelled, running to hug his knees.
“I haven’t even started dinner,” Irene said apologetically, getting up, but this was strictly a formal protest: Peter’s commute, and the way it meant they only occasionally took the evening meal all together, was a hardship for her. She had grown up in a house where everyone met at the table at the end of the day.
“They let us out early to buy gas,” he said, in motion, picking up Lisa and rubbing noses with her before putting her back down. She ran back to the Parcheesi board. Irene knitted her brow.
“To buy gas?”
He took a folded copy of the Omaha World-Herald from the pocket of his fall coat. “Prices doubled overnight,” he said. “Cars lined up two blocks down the street from the station.”
Irene read the headline and skimmed the story: it had a sidebar about the best times to avoid long lines. “That’s crazy,” she said.
“It’s crazy,” he said. “People are bringing their own cans to carry away extra. The guys at the station were trying to discourage it, but people are determined.” Lisa was at the Parcheesi board throwing dice from the shaker again and again, saying the numbers out loud.
“What in the world,” said Irene.
“Politics,” he said. “All the oil used to come from Texas. I just paid twelve dollars for a tank of gas.”
“What on earth,” she said.
“Well, I know, but I can’t exactly walk to work from here,” he said: that light tone, the easy cheer. It was his strength. “Could get worse by next week. I filled it up. It’s an expense for now.”
“Nine!” said Lisa.
“An expense, sure,” said Irene, wheels turning: in two months they were supposed to drive home to Tama for Christmas.
“Just a short-term situation, most likely,” he said. “Back in July when the car was in the shop I rode in with Bill. We could try that some more.”
Irene started hurrying around the kitchen, pulling a few steaks from the freezer. “That will be nice,” she said.
“Sure,” he said. “Some company on the way in is nice.”
“Twelve!” Lisa cried in triumph.
“How many twelves is that?” her father asked.
“First one!” she said.
*
A lot of people have never really been to a small town, not even to stop for gas. They have ideas about how small towns should look: they’re supposed to have maybe only one building taller than two stories, usually the bank, standing tall in the middle of a two-block downtown. There’ll be a school and a high school and a grocery store and a library, and maybe a department store and maybe a Texaco and a Shell. More people on the sidewalks than cars on the streets. Several parks with swings and slides and baseball diamonds.
There are towns like that in Iowa, plenty of them; Nevada fits the bill. More than six thousand people live there, and the sign on the Lincoln Highway that welcomes you there declares Nevada the “26th best small town in America.” It has soil testing labs, water testing labs, a high school football team. There’s a little espresso and cappuccino place just outside of downtown. Java Time. People shoot scenes for movies on soundstages and try to make it look like Nevada, but the claustrophobia they’re trying to invoke is more native to a place like Crescent, whose length you can walk in a day.
It’s not a ghost town; there are a couple of motels, and a restaurant or two. There’s a church, and a bar. There are just fewer of these places than you usually think of when you picture a town where people go to live. If you were to visit for a weekend, you’d be able to see all of it on foot; and you might say, later, that it looked like there was hardly anything there—that you didn’t know what people did there, why they didn’t just move into Omaha. I don’t think I could live there, you might say. But it’s more likely that you won’t have occasion to say any of this, because you won’t visit Crescent at all, unless you maybe have family there, which, statistically speaking, you probably don’t.