Universal Harvester(30)
Every quiet house is different. Sometimes this one felt like it didn’t have enough air in it. She woke up a little after four, her mind wholly awake; it was Saturday. She lay in the dark for as long as she could stand it. She kept seeing the smile on the face of Lisa in the brown dress, Lisa from somewhere in Michigan now standing in front of an aging movie palace in Omaha. Irene was attempting to square that smile with the God talk and the end-times message-making—there was a through line to draw somewhere, a path, however long and wandering. But there were only the two coordinates. In the quiet of the dark, she considered these as they might appear superimposed on a map of someone else’s life: anybody’s. Peter’s, for example—the traces of fatigue at the corners of his eyes while he listened with visible pleasure to Lisa at the dinner table. The fatigue traced one arc, the pleasure another; they were impossible to hide. Place to place to place. Tama to Crescent. Where was the young woman who’d gone off to Ottumwa Heights College in 1957? Hiding around here somewhere: she has to be. People don’t just go missing. She got up, dressed quickly, and slipped out through the front door.
It was very dark; she’d turned on the porch light, but her restlessness extended as far as the steps leading down to the bricked walkway. She had her yellow cardigan on. She loved it even though it made her feel her age: she was thirty-five. Thirty-five is not old, but it can feel old.
She fumbled in her pockets, but there was nothing in them: she’d emptied them into the anything drawer when she got home. We are called as witnesses. The horizon began rippling with hints of the earliest blackish purple. There are witnesses to weddings, but also to crimes; it was a word that led to a number of places, she thought. The world apprehends it not. She wished Peter harbored a little more natural curiosity about church, just a little interest, but he mainly worried about whether there was enough money: “To keep this whole operation afloat!” he’d said once in his joking manner, never wanting to make anyone worry. But Irene, despite herself, had not been able to forestall a vision of their whole operation as a vessel losing its buoyancy, their modest ranch house sinking into the earth, rain gutters filling with dirt and then breaking away from the frame, the dirt covering all, the house and everybody who lived inside it, the noise and the squall and the panic all resolving into a patch of untilled ground that betrayed no hint of the life that had once gone on above it.
4
Peter wished some moment of clarification might present itself: it was hard, by June, to keep silent about the changes in Irene, about the strain those changes were placing on the house over which she presided. But a man like Peter, in the absence of any immediate crisis, can’t feel sure about what might occasion such a moment. His wife was a different person from the one he’d known last summer, or even in early spring: that much was plain. But who, in the privacy and safety of his home, says something like “you’ve changed” to his wife? Actors in movies talk like that, not people.
She’d begun spending more time at church; but this was not a seismic change, and besides, she took Lisa along with her for Greta Handsaker to dote on in the church nursery. Her baby had grown much too big to just be set down and left alone on a nursery floor, but there were plenty of books to read there, and sometimes other children to play with; if Lisa found herself playing with younger children, she’d try to interest them in Drop a Dragon, a game she’d invented with her mother a little over a year ago. In this game, each player draws one unbroken line—of any color, following any arc, however long and squiggly—until a picture emerges, sometimes vague and evocative, sometimes clear as day. They’d called it Drop a Dragon because the drawing produced from its halting initial playthrough had looked a little like an undulating green dragon; in those days, Lisa, still trying out new ways to speak each day, sometimes appended consonants to words that ended in vowel sounds. “What will we call this picture?” Irene had said, holding it up. “Drop a dragon!” she’d said proudly, pointing. It was a story Peter and Irene liked to recount when they could. Everyone always smiled when they got to the punch line.
But Irene brought Bible study home now. Sometimes she read by candlelight before bed. It struck Peter as an odd affectation, the candle; you keep candles around for when the power goes out. She was probably saving the house a few pennies, though, so what was the harm? She did seem to sing a lot now, more than she ever had. It was a little strange. But she wasn’t loud or bizarre, just different. And so he kept his thoughts to himself.
She never preached to the family, and she seldom said much that seemed out of character. Occasionally Peter would make romantic advances at night; she almost always rejected these now, but he attributed this to her practical nature. He was still part-time at work, and there’d been no company-wide raise last year; more children were not in their plans. Of all the small differences only one occasion really stood out, and it was a secret he couldn’t tell.
She was in the kitchen washing dishes, her back to the living room, where Peter’d dozed off on the sofa. She was singing quietly to herself. As he rose from sleep, after who knew how long, he heard her, the song drifting in as through a light fog. He’d loved her voice the very first time he’d ever heard it, all the way back at Henry’s Drive-In; now he lay listening, motionless, trying to identify the hymn. He expected to find something familiar if he listened hard enough; but the key was minor, the tempo slow; and then the melody dropped away, but the song continued at the same pace and tempo, and he realized she’d been praying—chanting—either petitioning God directly under her breath, or reciting some formulaic prayer he didn’t recognize or couldn’t make out at this distance.