Chapter One #2
Over the past decade, watching their course enrollments dwindle, her colleagues had been forced to pander, changing “English 7: Shakespeare” to “Sex in Shakespeare”; “English 28: Middlemarch” to “Learning Programming from Middlemarch (a Novel)”; and “Comp Lit 111: Russian Masters” to “ ‘Look What You Made Me Do’: Fyodor (Dostoyevsky) and Taylor (Swift).” But not the wife.
She was no-frills. She was hard-core. She called her classes simply: “Milton.” “Blake.” If you needed first names, perhaps you should take another class.
But few, after her first lecture, took another class. Students told her every quarter that her lectures made them cry, made them believe in humanity again.
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Since we are on the topic, the husband’s course reviews—not his own courses, mind you, but courses for which he labored as a teaching assistant at less than minimum wage—said that he was “nice,” if “sometimes hard to follow,” and that he got “caught up in arcane topics, so that a lecture on Turgenev would somehow end in Ecuador.” Once, someone wrote that he was “disheveled, not in a gross way, in a nice way”; another wrote, “My friend S—— had a crush on him, which we thought was funny,” and “Sometimes it’s a trip just to watch him go on and on, even if you lost him long ago.
” Also, he was “easily manipulated,” “gullible,” and “always granted extensions.” There was no need to make up a complex story about a sick grandparent; you just needed to ask.
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They had originally intended the journey as a vacation, and so they took a scenic route.
The route was a compromise hammered out among all interested parties.
Everyone made sacrifices. The wife was promised a visit to the National Willa Cather Center; the son secured three children’s science museums; and the daughter, who worshipped her mother, also chose the National Willa Cather Center.
Both parents, while secretly finding this charming, said the daughter could choose something of her own, something for children.
After some time on the Internet with her brother, she chose the Kids’ Room at the National Willa Cather Center.
As for the husband, he was allowed to choose the route generally, which he mapped out with precision to avoid places overrun with tourists at the peak of the American summer.
The route took in twenty-seven states, eighteen important wildlife areas, a national park no one had ever heard of, forests in states popularly conceived of as having no forests, and a rare mountaintop oasis in the middle of Nevada known only to hunters of bighorn sheep.
It was to take three weeks, but after a day beneath the dog, the husband quietly suggested that they take the interstate.
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In the end, all parties agreed that, tornadoes excepted, a highlight of the trip was a Comfort Inn just outside Huron, Ohio.
They had seen the sign from the highway.
They were exhausted, and two nights supporting local B didn’t the frontier allow pets?
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It was six hundred miles from the Fort Inn to the college.
Now the husband and the wife took turns at the wheel.
Drive-thru restaurants beckoned and received them, the sun passed overhead just west of Buffalo, and they resisted the road signs to Niagara Falls, vaguely proud that they were a family who could resist the tacky, sunburnt crowds and criminal tour-operators awaiting them.
Niagara was a bit too obvious, wasn’t it?
And hadn’t they just seen the falls in a painting at The Cleveland Museum of Art?
Instead, they stopped to rest at Akron Falls, just a few miles north of the highway, which was far less crowded.
There was a nature trail, barbecue pits, and an interpretive center (closed), while two women shouting at each other provided local color.
And the dog loved it, for he found something extraordinary in an overturned trash can, and managed to down it on the run, with all four humans in pursuit.
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Since they had decided to spend a year in the country, each member of the family had found themselves daydreaming, and, over four months, had come to imagine what life would be like.
The daughter’s fantasy drew heavily from Laura Ingalls Wilder: a homestead racked by malaria and Indian war cries; also, cute lambs, cozy fires, homemade dolls, and fresh warm cow’s milk they would serve a cat, a rescue.
It would be the daughter’s job to milk the cows, who would come to know her and love her more than her brother, as would the cat.
The son, in turn, was the most skeptical of the group, having recently entered the natural developmental stage in children characterized by distrust of everything, which in his case had been amplified by YouTube videos he’d watched during the pandemic, placing him on that fascinating threshold at which healthy skepticism tips vertiginously into paranoia.
This had been further encouraged by a series of fantasy novels called Child Rebellion, in which it was revealed that the amnesia of early life is not a biological fact but, rather, a brainwashing, carried out by a conspiracy of sterile adults who controlled a vast trade in children, and that the “de-brainwashed” could in fact remember their lives up to the opening of “the curtain” (childbirth), and so uncover their real parents among the hordes of “breeders” housed in giant feedlots across the American Midwest.
As a practical matter, the trip across the country (specifically, the Midwest) might allow him the chance to gather evidence.
He was also excited about archery and wood carving.
His father had even bought him a bow and a pocketknife, which on balance was probably evidence against the Child Rebellion hypothesis, unless his father was one of the secret allies of the Rebellion, and deliberately arming him.
The mother’s fantasies were mostly pedagogical: she imagined a true liberal-arts institution, where students came to learn and only to learn, to read Blake and Milton not because they were distributional requirements on the way to computer-engineering degrees but because they thrilled at the foreign but familiar syntax, the otherworldly theology, the imagery rivaling even the greatest Marvel enterprise.
They did not care for grades, and the thought that they would ask a humanist who lived in a tiny campus apartment for a letter of recommendation to help secure a $150,000 starting job in investment banking never would have crossed their minds.
For who, in that bucolic paradise, had heard of investment banking, of management consulting, of private equity?
She would hold classes beneath the golden trees of autumn, before log fires in the student commons in winter, and among the flowers of spring.
She wouldn’t even require the papers; students would submit them out of sheer intellectual joy.
In this way, she lived in a world more fantastical than the son.
The husband, in addition to finally finishing his dissertation, imagined himself a farmer, a gardener, a grower of apples and peaches, his practical knowledge of which involved the weekly farmers’ market in downtown Menlo Park, a tomato plant on their campus-housing balcony, and the beekeeping scenes in Anna Karenina.
As for Giuseppe, when the winds were blowing from the east, he could smell the farms and forests that awaited and so, among the family members, was the only one who truly knew the future.
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