Our Country Friends(48)
“Fuck!” he shouted, uncharacteristically.
Even as he strode toward the beamed interloper at the end of his driveway, Senderovsky took the wind personally. He had just given the tree guy eight hundred dollars in cash he did not have. And for what? Nothing changed. The dead trees kept falling. He could not win.
“Who are you?” he shouted toward the solitary figure behind the wheel of the pickup. He could not see a gloved hand tapping upon it, the call letters of a terrestrial pop music station coming in green over the dashboard. He tried a kinder tack as he approached. “Are you lost?” he shouted. And then in his best American, “Mister, are you lost?”
A crack popped past him. A gunshot? And then another crack. He covered his face with his opened gown and fell to the ground, gravel against his stomach. The cracking sound returned, but this time it wouldn’t stop; an object was groaning under the wind’s unremitting torture, its pleas ignored, until a chunk of elm, an antler of wood, began to separate from the tall bare yellow trunk right above Senderovsky.
Ny vsyo, he thought in Russian. Well, I’m done for. But as he closed his eyes, he found himself being rolled off the driveway and into the soft ditch of the lawn, the beneficiary of an unseen providence. A terrible crash curled him fetally. Moments later, when he opened his eyes, the utmost extremity of the immense sundered branch was tapping him on the forehead with an insistent finger, the way Nat sometimes did to wake him up at an early hour. The wind kept at it, but now country rain that put his wife to sleep without fail had started sluicing against the Rushmore of his forehead. The freshly sundered tree limb gave off the gamy odor of young summer skin. It was dead black now. The power had failed all across town, much as it was failing across the country. The truck down the driveway was gone.
Act Three
Out Like a Lamb
1
“There are beautiful cattails on the side of the road,” Nat informed Senderovsky over breakfast two weeks after we had last seen them. Per her therapists, her eye-contact skills were poor, but now she was looking into his eyes directly, as if trying to befriend him with her innocence. How did Karen merge with her so well? How could he not acknowledge that he was the father of a remarkable child, who noticed everything, processed it differently than those with fewer anxieties, those with quieter minds, and spoke with utmost honesty? It was still not too late to be a complete parent to her if he could find the solvent that might decalcify his love. His beloved espresso trembled in his hand and he crunched at the high-fiber cereal in his mouth. “Look at them if you go for a walk today, okay, Daddy?” Nat said.
“Okay,” Senderovsky said. But, to paraphrase a last line of a famous author, he did not move. Instead of the soft brown beams of his daughter’s eyes, he saw the truck’s lights at the end of the driveway, bathing him in their malevolent illumination.
* * *
—
People were dying in the city. Some more than others. The virus had roamed the earth but had chosen to settle down there, just as the parents of Masha, Senderovsky, Karen, and Vinod had chosen it four decades ago as a place to escape the nighttime reverberations of Stalin and Hitler, of partition and Partition, of the pain that radiated not in distant memory but cracked outright from their own fathers’ hands.
Catching a signal in the main house, the bungalow colonists learned of what was happening a hundred and twenty miles down the river, and they felt many things, but mostly they felt guilt. It was so unconscionably lovely where they were. The weather remained fickle, but even its fickleness was something to behold. A fine layer of snow after a heatstroke day. (“You’re gonna be okay, flowers,” Nat sang anxiously to the daffodils she and Karen had planted by the main house, in full view of Masha’s office.) A heatstroke day interrupted by a new sprinkling of snow, which rested like bits of wet sugar on Nat’s tongue. Even the nightly windstorms, which continued trashing Senderovsky’s lawn with comical consistency, were in their own way breathtaking, the trees—now sprouting their first leaves—swaying in long measures like midnight dancers.
Guilt. Because they were safe here in their own community, and after two weeks of Masha-imposed semi-quarantine they no longer needed to maintain distance from one another, with the exception of Senderovsky, whose cough only worsened by the day. “I don’t have it,” he would announce every night at dinner, their one communal meal, after suffering a consumptive fit, his eyes wet with tears. “Acid reflux,” he would add as the Actor made a show of moving away from him and toward Masha, whose knee now received him, warm and ready beneath the table.
Guilt because there was sumptuous food (everyone but Senderovsky put on weight, even Vinod), educated and intriguing company, and, for some, the first tendrils of love. No one was more affected by the stark difference between town and country than Vinod. There were, he realized, a series of refrigerated trucks parked behind his local hospital in Queens, collecting the forklifted bodies of the dead. He wrote, guiltily, to his fellow workers at his uncle’s restaurant. Whenever they would write back, he would be happy they responded. But upon reading their messages he would put down his phone and look out the window and watch the ricks of hay being prepared in the adjacent meadows while the mating monarchs migrated north feasting on milkweed in a sweep of black and orange. Why was he here and why were his co-workers there? Because his parents had documents? Because educated Indians were in the grand order of things prioritized over uneducated Mexicans? Even as he had objectively failed by the standards of his family, first as an adjunct in the merry field of “writing and rhetoric” and then as a common worker, he found himself here, at the estate of a fellow classmate at an elite high school, sheltering in place, sheltering in space.