Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

Renée had come home from Arger, Kummer & Rudman with a blinding headache, a notarized agreement running to 270 words, and her eighty hundred-dollar bills. Melanie, irrational to the end, had refused to take the bills as a security.

She answered an ad for a ’74 Mustang convertible, fire-engine red. She gave a hundred-dollar bill to a mechanic who appraised the car, and thirty-eight more to the invertebrate zoologist who was selling it.

She went to the high-impact clothing stores in the Square, places that were branches of stores on lower Broadway in Manhattan. She bought short, tight skirts and shiny shoes, tubes of lipstick, summer tops that cost ten dollars an ounce, a pair of shades. She bought a leather jacket and plastic jewelry.

The next morning she returned to the Square, had her hair clipped, and shopped some more. She was standing in front of a clothing-store mirror, seeing if she could manage a lime-green skirt with a less than straight cut, when her reflection’s eyes suddenly caught her own and she was stricken by the thought that all she was doing was trying to look like Lauren Bowles.

She decided she’d bought enough for now.

The Mustang turned heads as she drove north with the top down through Cambridge and Somerville. She took the inside lane on I-93. The only disheartening thing was that she couldn’t stand any of the music on the radio.

The air in Peabody smelled like seaweed. On Main Street, a block east of the Warren Five Cents Savings Bank, she knocked twice on the window of The Peabody Times before she saw the sign saying closed this Friday. She leaned against a fender, pressing the thin fabric of her skirt against the sun-heated metal, and chewed down three fingernails as far as seemed advisable.

On Andover Street she located the middle-aged bank building that she’d seen pictured as a newborn in the Globe from 1970. Rust now stained the panels it was faced with; the sidewalk was cracked and tanned and weedy. Across the street stood a laundromat, a video rental place, and a “spa” selling beer and groceries. The man behind the spa counter was a Portuguese who said he’d owned the business for six years. She tossed the bottle of Pepsi she’d bought into the back seat of the Mustang.

She cruised the working people’s neighborhood behind the bank building, past white bungalows nearing condemnation, through varying concentrations of acetone fumes, up and down all the streets that dead-ended against the high corporate fence with its signs saying ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING. She stopped by a house with a white-haired man on the porch. He staggered across his lawn, favoring a bad hip, and stared at her as if she were the Angel of Death who had come along in her red Mustang sooner than he’d expected. She said her name was Renée Seitchek and she was a seismologist from Harvard University and could she ask him a few questions? Then he was sure she was the Angel and he hobbled back to his porch and from this position of relative safety shouted, “Mind your own business!”

She tried other streets and accosted other old men. She wondered if there was something in the water that made them all so bizarre.

A stumpy woman turning the soil around some apparently dead roses saw her drive by for a third time and asked what she was looking for. Renée said she was looking for people who’d been in the neighborhood since at least 1970. The woman set down her hand spade. “Do I get some kind of prize if I say yes?”

Renée parked the car. “Can I ask you some questions?”

“Well, if it’s for science.”

“Do you remember sometime about twenty years ago a particularly tall. structure on the property over there, that looked like an oil well?”

“Sure,” the woman said immediately.

“Do you remember what years?”

“What’s this got to do with earthquakes?”

“Well, I think Sweeting-Aldren may be responsible for them.”

“I’ll be damned. Maybe they want to fix my kitchen ceiling.” The woman laughed. She was built like a mailbox and had a wide mouth, painted orange. “Jesus Christ, I can’t believe this.”

“My other question is whether you might have any old pictures that would show the, uh, structure.”

“Pictures? Come on inside.”

The woman’s name was Jurene Caddulo. She pointed at the gray crater in her kitchen ceiling and wouldn’t budge until Renée had found the right combination of phrases to express her sympathy and outrage. Jurene said she was a secretary at the high school and had been widowed for eight years. She had five thousand unsorted snapshots in a kitchen drawer.

“Can I offer you a cordial?”

“No thanks,” Renée said as bottles of apricot liqueur, Amaretto, and Cherry Heering were set down on the table. Jurene came back from another room with a pair of exceptionally ugly cut-glass tulips.

“If you can believe I’ve only got two of these left. I had eight until the earthquakes. You think I can sue? They’re antiques, they’re not available. You like Amaretto? Here. That’s good, isn’t it.”

Expired coupons punctuated the disordered photographic history of Caddulo family life. Jurene’s daughter in Revere and daughter in Lynn had hatched children in a variety of shapes and sizes; she puzzled over group shots, trying to get the names and ages right. Renée found herself saying, “This must be Michael Junior,” which made Jurene look again at the other pictures because she knew that this was not Michael Junior and therefore the child she had just called Michael Junior must be Petey, and then everything made sense again. Jurene’s younger son played guitar. There were dozens of prints of a picture of his band playing the heavy-metal mass that he had written at the age of seventeen and that the priest had said no to performing in the church, so it was performed right here in the basement without the sacraments. The son now had a different band and drove a customized 4x4 pickup. The older son showed up as an adult in San Francisco sporting a mustache and a leather vest, and as a distant, gowned blur in blue-toned shots of a high-school graduation on a dreary day. Jurene said he was a hair stylist. Renée nodded. Jurene said both her sons were still looking for the right girl. Renée nodded. In high school and junior high the daughters had worn their no-color hair in fantastic bouffants. Their bodies were deformed like pool toys by the affectionately squeezing tentacles of their father, now dead of cancer. All the sadness of the seventies was in Jurene’s drawer, all of the years in which Renée had not been happy and had not had what she wanted but instead had had pimples and friends who embarrassed her, years whose huge tab collars and platform soles and elephant flares and overgrown hair (Don’t the mentally ill neglect to cut their hair?) now seemed to her both the symbols and literal accoutrements of unhappiness.

Jurene still went to the same cottage she’d been renting for twenty years in Barnstable, on the Cape. She was going there Sunday. “After I’ve been at the Cape I can smell the smell here for about two days before I’m used to it again. You want to know something really peculiar, though, sometimes on the Cape I can smell it at the beach.”

“It’s like a ringing in your ear, except in your nose.”

“No, I’m talking about the smell. Here.” Jurene produced a handful of low-resolution pictures of a snowman and a snow fort and a snowball fight in the little front lawn. In the background of every one of them, well behind the houses across the street, was Sweeting-Aldren’s drilling derrick. There was nothing else it could be; no chemical process that Renée knew of required a structure like that. The date was stamped on the back: February 1970. “Can I have one of these?”