Our Country Friends(29)
Nat had run out of the house and was bounding toward them. “Aunt Karen! Do you want to visit Steve the Groundhog’s winter house with me?”
“Distance,” Masha commanded. She had heard from Nat that her husband was storing things in the groundhog’s hole, which seemed beyond the pale even for him. She wondered if it was time to put on her clinical hat.
“Sure, honey,” Karen said.
The Actor turned to Senderovsky. “In my bungalow in twenty,” he commanded the landowner.
* * *
—
The tree guy silenced his saw to give Dee a full state inspection as she passed. She returned the favor. A nice face, shy smile revealing some broken teeth, perhaps a couple of roadhouse fistfights in his wilder days. But now she was applying his biography with a thick country brush, the very thing she detested in her urban readers. Maybe he had just fallen out of a series of trees and broken his teeth that way. Ed wanted to say something about the tree guy’s saw, but he was at the moment confused by the difference between a buzz saw and a circular saw, and he wanted to get the terminology right. He was still aching over the fact that he had called the road a “street.”
They passed through the driveway promenade of leafless oaks and elms and turned past the sheep farm. They walked on opposite sides of the road, maintaining distance, their voices raised over the tree frogs. Ed swept his hand across the sheep-filled hills and said to Dee, “To many people this evokes the English countryside.” He realized he sounded as affected as Senderovsky.
“Never been,” she said.
“Your book didn’t come out in the UK?”
“Yes, but I only did a reading in London.”
“Of course, of course.” She was wearing snug sweatpants and the same fleece as yesterday, her sandals were now running shoes. Ed ruminated on all this, trying to keep all of his daydreams at bay, their ridiculous journey to Chania, the silver necklace around her sunburned neck. The weather was still cold, the clock had only recently sprung forward, but the sun pressed a warm hand against his collarbone. And against hers. A line of sheep in their naturally occurring black knee-high boots were jumping over a rill, flexing their hind legs like horses as they did so. A pair of horses on the other side of the road, clad in their woolly sweaters, watched them like the members of an Olympic jury.
“This is all very beautiful,” Dee said, almost in the form of a concession.
“Was it like this where you grew up?”
“In parts,” she said. “I think we’ll get to those parts up the road.”
“English countryside gives way to Appalachia,” Ed said. He realized just how offensive that may have sounded, but Dee laughed.
“I feel like we’re on a reality show,” she said. “Like there’s a truck with a camera following behind us.”
“I’m obsessed with this Japanese one.”
“I bet Sasha’s house doesn’t even have a television.”
“You bet right.”
“So where you from?” she asked. Now it was her turn to be embarrassed. The question could connote that he wasn’t American, despite his perfect accent. This had happened to her at a reading in Minneapolis with a Laotian audience member (Laotian American, she had to remind herself, or maybe Hmong American), and she had felt shamed by her ignorance, by the way she represented herself and her kind. She had cried in her hotel room and afterward over an expense-paid meal of craft beer and chicken tenders, the guilty tears and the expense account both a first for her. But also the Laotian American woman, a student at an expensive local liberal arts college, could have been nicer to her, could have corrected instead of reprimanded. “I mean which part of the country?” Dee said.
“Now that’s a really tough question,” Ed said. “I went to college here, but truth be told I’m not a citizen.”
“Your English is way better than mine,” she said with an exaggerated drawl. They were passing by a small estate, the downward slope of its rolling aquamarine lawn fitted with a sign that read HATE HAS NO HOME HERE in many languages, including the three Ed had grown up with. “But last night you said you’re Korean, right?”
“Not formally,” Ed said. “I have Swiss, UK, and Canadian citizenship. I guess I have to nab me something in the EU after Brexit. Lots of folk becoming Maltese.” So petrol princes and sunbaked Russian orangutans were now just folk. What was wrong with him?
“But you spend time here? In the city, I mean.”
“Sure. Plenty. Home away from home.”
“And you never felt like becoming an American?” She didn’t know why she was pressing him on this one point.
“That’s for people without options,” Ed said. “Sorry, I mean…” He trailed off.
“No, I get it. Nation in free fall. Where did you go to college?”
“School of Foreign Service in DC. My mother wanted me to be a diplomat. But it just didn’t take.”
“Well, you’re not super diplomatic,” Dee said. He looked across the road at her. She was smiling. That memory again: Bologna, junior year abroad, that tall ridiculous girlfriend, being carried in her arms, La Pietà. “But I bet a lot of your friends are diplomats.”