Chapter Three #4
At Greensbury Middle her mother, Eleanor, was chair.
There were also a few girls Wesley’s age, but he had brought a book.
The chair’s house sat on the edge of campus and was roughly the same size as the entire apartment building that Kate and Miles had lived in back in California.
The guests had gathered on the patio in back, where a grand lawn led down to the Greensbury River.
They were introduced: Kate, Miles: Alan, Adele, Isabella, Steve, Zahra.
First names apparently were the thing at Greensbury, very egalitarian, though it meant that it took some time to match scholar to specialty: Wordsworth, the Harlem Renaissance, Woolf, the transcendentalists, contemporary Middle Eastern diasporic fiction.
The guests then broke up into smaller circles, Eleanor took Kate by the arm inside, her wife, Vy, went to meet the caterers, and Miles joined a circle of men who were talking about their lawns.
Unknown to Miles the Californian, who could hardly pass a waking hour without commenting with astonishment on the lushness of the summer, it had been a terribly hard year for lawns.
What a rainy May! Biblical! And then June: damn.
(June was also rainy.) But then: July! (Dry enough to send the county into mild drought.)
Order had only been restored the second week of August. Oh, but May, and June!
Even John, who drove a Toro Titan, had struggled through six acres of lawn that had turned into a thick wet marsh.
Sixty-inch, Zero-Turn, roll bar, 18,908 fpm—the “Lawnosaur” was apparently the object of unbridled lust for not a few of the others.
As John elaborated helpfully, 18,908 feet per minute meant 300 feet per second, Mach 0. 3.
Miles, trying to settle into the conversation, his first extended conversation with adult male country people outside the farmers’ market, then asked a question.
It was one of those questions one asks when one is just trying to say something, an unnecessary question, a time-filling question—indeed, a question that, in retrospect, he knew the answer to, but which, in an instant, obliterated his credibility faster than, well, a patch of late-fall bluegrass under the Titan’s spinning teeth.
There was a very long silence.
“No, no, the mower itself doesn’t go Mach 0.3,” said John. “It’s the blade speed.”
Miles took a sip from his beer.
The conversation began again. Once or twice, one of the men looked at Miles with an inscrutable expression, but no one asked him about where he was from or what he would be doing in Greensbury.
So Miles pretended like he had finished his beer, went and tossed it in the recycling, took another, and looked around.
Not far away, Olive and a new friend were making bubbles from a bucket of soapy water, dipping coat hangers and running barefoot across the grass.
Already, she seemed utterly at ease in her new home, laughing as she took off at speed, bubble heaving behind her, the world slipping across its waving fun-house surface.
She let it go; it rose above her, over Miles, gathering in its rainbow sheen the other children, the bright-green lawn, the guests, the belt of trees, the bluebird sky.
Transfixed, he followed its buckling flank until it narrowed, shook, and, in an instant, burst.
The girls cheered, and headed back toward the bucket, Olive briefly catching her father’s eye with a smile that fixed him foolishly to that spot.
And it occurred to him that he might stand there for the remainder of the party, the sun on his face, the sweet sting of detergent in his eyes, its taste on his lips.
But then her playmate whispered something in her ear, and in an instant the sorcerer’s wands were cast away, and Miles found himself again in the world of grown-ups, and turned, reluctantly, from the sound of laughter and the sloshing, soapy mess.
Kate was not to be seen, and the circle of the men seemed to have closed off, subtly, but at the far end of the patio he saw Miranda with a woman and a man, and made his way over.
Miranda he liked, Miranda was a font of information, Miranda had a theory for everything, and data to back it up.
Yes, how fortunate, he thought, to have Kate’s old friend, professor of sociology, author most recently of “Trends in Mini-Horses” and “Can-Throwing Behaviors of Rural American Males,” studying the very people among whom his family had settled!
Had he known, for example, that pick-your-own-apples theft had dropped nearly 60 percent at farm shares who put up posters urging children to report their parents?
Or that the secret of Vermont’s vibrant farmers’-market scene was that most of the vendors were in Witness Protection?
Oh, he’d been skeptical about this one, but it made a lot of sense when one started thinking about how a man could make a living selling dream catchers and three boxes of foraged mushrooms a week.
More recently, Miranda’s work had shifted to the sociology of urban transplants.
Earlier that week, over dinner, Miles had had a lovely time sharing a rich trove of city-country misunderstandings from folktales, and Miranda had even stopped him to take some notes.
Might the new audience be equally interested in his studies?
It occurred to him that these might be the very people to appreciate the story of the king who was tricked by a peasant into trading his daughter for a salmon, or the disasters caused by Emelya the Simpleton.
But this meant being introduced, awkwardly, as Kate’s husband, and an old-man grad student, and explaining yet again his limbo.
So he turned from Miranda and decided he had to go to the bathroom.
He didn’t know where it was, but since there was only one door from the patio, he didn’t really have a choice, unless he were to pee in the garden, something not unheard-of in drought-stricken California, but probably not necessary in Vermont, in front of his wife’s new colleagues, even if a part of him, a little part of him, recalling the mocking silence of the lawn men, allowed himself the vision of his glittering violation of the bright-green sward, their shock.
The house itself was about as different a house from that of Professor Rumphius as a house could get, with more glass than wall, a great open living room with red modernist couches, and a giant painting of green rolling hills in the shape of a sleeping woman, her arm thrown modestly across her hill-breasts, with a patch of forest marking her pubis.
This painting, which sounds terrible in description, was in fact technically skilled, whimsical, and, if one is to be frank, even a little arousing, and Miles, finding himself alone, googled the painter to acquaint himself with more of her work.
Then he was even more curious about the house, and decided that he would “get lost” looking for the bathroom.
Getting lost was something of a hobby, something he often did when he felt out of place, and in this case it did not disappoint, taking him on a pilgrimage through a kitchen hung with copper pots and bundled herbs and a long hall filled with framed music scores, and a bathroom with artsy, life-sized, raunchy photos from a Pride parade, before stumbling upon his wife and Eleanor the chair before a bookcase in the library, laughing so hard that both stopped to wipe their tears when he approached.
Kate’s hair was pulled back, summer was reflected in her skin; for a moment, Miles found himself, as he often found himself when encountering her unexpectedly, a little lovestruck, a little self-conscious of his good fortune.
His good fortune asked him if anything was wrong.
It occurred to Miles that the honest answer to this question was an emphatic “Yes!,” that with eight or nine words he had succeeded in humiliating himself in front of the first country people he had ever been introduced to by name, not even real country people, but academics or the husbands of academics.
But this wasn’t what Kate was asking. She was asking why he had wandered far from his appointed post.
He was looking for the bathroom, he said.
Eleanor laughed. “This is the one who found your route across the country? Honey, there are four of them.” And she took him by the elbow and walked him back past the closed doors of three other bathrooms he had poked his head inside, before stopping at one papered with scenes of rural life.
Eleanor paused at the door before releasing him.
She wanted to apologize that they had been unable to find a teaching position for him, but everyone appreciated his flexibility.
They were so delighted to have Kate at Greensbury.
She was a genius—Milton had never come alive until she’d read Kate’s book on Eve.
And such fun! He knew the college wished to steal her, didn’t he?
She hoped he knew what a lucky man he was.