Jane Smiley - Golden Age

As she was trying to decide if she had had enough of The New York Times for one day, another e-mail appeared, this one a notification from eBay — the auction for her size 6 Dior suit from 1948, black skirt (eighteen-inch waist), white peplum jacket, belted, soft shoulder, was continuing — up to $6,750 now, depending on authenticity (and, of course, she still had the sales slip and the receipt). The high bidder was “TheCollector,” a woman who had bought other items, only French ones, and who seemed to have all the money in the world; sometimes she outbid the second-highest bidder by 20 or 30 percent. Andy had never even seen a picture of her; she lived in, or, at any rate, Andy shipped the boxes to, Dallas, Texas. So far, Andy had resisted dragging the little Google boy to the woman’s address and having a look at her house (in the new version of Maps, he swung from her cursor like a child on a jungle gym, which made her laugh). Selling off her designer clothes had kept her in food and heat for six years, and she had, she thought, the best pieces still in her closet.

Another e-mail came in—“Deposit to your account.” At first she didn’t click on it, because she was thinking about the Dior suit, and that led her to think about the last piece she had sold, a pair of Boucheron crystal earrings for seventy-five hundred dollars, not to TheCollector, but to a woman in Seattle. But that money had gone into her account a week ago. She opened the e-mail. The deposit was for $9,999, a cash deposit. Her first thought was to wonder who in the world had her account information. But of course it was Michael. Richie had told her about the found money; it wasn’t an item of scandal, but only because so many others who had stashed their money in tax havens were far more famous than Michael. The government was pursuing a rather lackluster campaign to repatriate the money and claim the taxes. As far as she knew, most of the owners of the money and the properties and the corporations whose headquarters were mailboxes in Virgin Gorda had evaded those efforts. Time, she thought, to spend some of it. A birthday present, indeed!

But two hours later, when she got up and went to the kitchen for her English muffin, she saw that she was still the same as she had always been — the shopping was the pleasure, not the buying. She did buy a pair of colorful sneakers from Inkkas, and she did look at Amazon’s caviar collection before ending up with white anchovies in olive oil and Australian licorice. You could take the girl out of Decorah, but you couldn’t, after all these years, take the Decorah out of the girl. Frank had been that way, too. With their looks, and his ambition, and her addiction to style, they had immigrated to New York, and been taken on, like many immigrants, by kindly natives — the Upjohns. But once the energy propelling the effort dissipated, they fell back to what they had always been, stolid Midwesterners. The phone rang. She looked at the display; it was Janet. She pressed the “talk” button. Janet said, “You didn’t think I knew it was your birthday, did you?”

Andy said, “I did not.”

Janet said, “Happy Birthday, but I told everyone else it’s tomorrow. Expect a flood of intrusive calls and e-mails.”

Andy said, “I can take it.”

Janet said, “I know you can, Mom. That’s one lesson I’ve learned.”

Andy said, “You know, sweetheart, I am so old, I really don’t want anything. I think the thing for me to do is give everyone whatever they want, the first thing they think of.”

“No!”

“Yes. What is the first thing you’ve thought of?”

“New tires.”

“They are yours. Be sure you get Michelins.”

“Fur-lined,” said Janet, “with rhinestones.”

Andy said, “Don’t tell anyone that this is my plan. Just remind them to call me. Say my computer is on the fritz.”

Janet said, “Oh, Mom.”

On the sixth, Michael sent her a potted plant.

—

FELICITY’S INSTINCT had proved correct: if you wanted a job, there was nothing like microbiology. You could investigate bacteria and viruses everywhere, including in space, if your specialty happened to be geomicrobiology. She had been much courted, particularly by firms in Des Moines and Minneapolis that wanted her to run laboratories or contemplate milk. She did not get the job in San Jose, but, after three interviews and some nail biting, she did get the job in Boston, at Tufts Medical Center. She did not have the official supervisory experience the job description called for, but her adviser had told her new boss that she had “over twenty years steady practice telling everyone what to do, and she is good at it.” The first day on the job, she had suggested a new way of recording results. Now her boss, who was married, seemed to want to date her, but she pretended not to notice. The job was everything that her adviser had said it would be — well paid, and difficult. People were smart and friendly, as if they did not feel that they had been born in a state of original sin, had never conceived of that possibility. She had a tiny apartment in Back Bay, down the street from DeLuca’s market and La Voile. She had joined a book club that met in Cambridge. She noticed that the average age in Boston seemed to be twenty-seven, and the average man was good-looking. It was not herself she was worried about.

The guy she hung out with the most was someone she had met on eHarmony, a real assistant professor in the political-science department at BU. He should have been perfect for her, since he was up-to-date about Gaza, ISIS, Ebola, earthquakes related to fracking, congressional dysfunction, and the immigration bill, all of which, Felicity knew, should concern her more than the farm. She did not have to discuss global warming with him, because he wasn’t interested in the origins of global warming — that cake was baked. He thought only about possible socioeconomicpoliticocultural responses to global warming, as dictated by historical experience, in particular the effects of climate change (he always called it “climate change”) in the seventeenth century, which did not set a good precedent, and so he had several boxes of canned goods in his basement, and, indeed, his parents had stockpiled provisions for Y2K, and they had discovered, to their dismay, that canned goods didn’t hold up quite as well as they were advertised to. Felicity suggested that he buy himself a food dryer and a vacuum sealing machine, which he did.

But Gordie was not enough to keep her mind productively occupied, nor was her job or her three nice new girlfriends (UMass, Berkeley, Wellesley); she limited her calls home to one per week, and her calls to Guthrie to one every two weeks. He talked about ISIS, but not Ferguson. Did he do it more than other people she knew? Everyone talked about ISIS and/or Ferguson. Guthrie said that she was obsessing about the farm, because she kept comparing her dad’s harvest of corn and beans with the average for the county (beans 2 percent higher, corn 3 percent lower) or checking the markets and calculating in her mind what he might have made for the year, and how that stacked up against the value of the land, which had doubled since 2009 (forty-five hundred per acre to almost nine thousand — not a good sign). And how was he going to sell his crap when it couldn’t be shipped because of the railroad cars carrying the tar sands? The harvest was estimated at fourteen and a half billion bushels of corn alone. Her dad would store it. If the moisture content was high, it could crust over. If it crusted over, he could decide to break it up. If he climbed into the bin to break it up, he could sink into it and drown. Though he never had. Felicity truly hated corn. She said nothing about this to Gordie.

Megan from Berkeley said she needed a puppy. Charlene from Wellesley said she needed a cat, and Deanne from UMass said she needed to start running — look around, everyone in Boston ran and ran. She looked around. They did. Once in a while, when she was sitting up in bed with Gordie, both of them busy on their iPhones, she wondered aloud how it could be that, right when you were peaking, you didn’t feel the way you always thought you would. Gordie’s standard answer was “You feel the way you feel. It’s impossible to change that thermostat. I mean, even quadriplegics go back to feeling fairly upbeat, if they were always fairly upbeat.” Gordie was a good example of his own observation; every time she brought it up, he mentioned quadriplegics, and so, to avoid this, she stopped talking about it. But as a revelation, the idea that her lifelong project to shape her future had resulted in worry, worry, worry was utterly depressing, and Gordie, the ideal eHarmony male and, according to the algorithm, her perfect mate, had a mole on his upper lip that she didn’t like but couldn’t help looking at, a subscription to the Financial Times (in which he showed her an article about how the sudden drop in oil prices was bad news for wind and solar), and a certain odor that only she could smell — once she had even asked Megan if she could smell Gordie, and Megan had said, “God, no. Compared with every guy I’ve ever dated, he’s a summer breeze.” Felicity didn’t want to be amazed that, after all her efforts, she was doomed to disappointment, but she was amazed.