Jane Smiley - Golden Age

HE FIT RIGHT IN, thought Henry, who was standing on the back stoop, letting the breeze blow the stench from the roasting hog away from him. Extrovert, for sure. Charlie didn’t just shake your hand, he patted you on the shoulder, looked you in the eye. From where he was standing on the porch, a little elevated, Henry could see the pattern — the kid would go from group to group, listen first, say something, listen again, his head bent slightly forward. When he was introduced to Henry, he’d said, “Oh, I hear you teach medieval literature! I took two semesters of that, and, you know, it wasn’t what I expected.” What had he expected? “Well, you can imagine: the first book I ever read was The Once and Future King . I thought it would be lots of sorcerers, not so many monks.” Charming, but he was not Henry’s type. Were he to show up in, say, Henry’s freshman lit class, Henry would prod him, treat him a little severely, imply all semester that Charlie Wickett wasn’t putting anything past old Professor Langdon. The boy might rise to the occasion — sometimes they did. Minnie leaned out the door and said, “Time to get organized!” Everyone began moving toward the table.

EMILY SAID that she had to go to the bathroom, but it was just so that she could wait and see where her mom was sitting, and then sit somewhere else. The downstairs bathroom door was closed, though, so she went upstairs, and instead of going to the bathroom, she went through the baby’s room and out to the back porch. From there she could see over the fields to the horizon, and she could imagine her favorite thing, which was flying. She didn’t know how this had started, but maybe from dreaming. Now the dreams and the made-up stuff were mixed up in her mind. She often thought about a myth they had read this year in her school, where a father figured out a way to fly (the book showed giant spreading wings, like eagle wings), but he put the wings together with wax, and when the son got too close to the sun, the wax melted, and the son fell into the ocean. Eli Grissom, who sat behind her in class, pointed out that the son — Icarus, his name was (Eli pronounced it “EYE-carus”) — could not have gotten ninety-three million miles in ten minutes, if at all, but in spite of Eli, Emily imagined it almost every day, the wings catching an updraft, the boy feeling himself lifted, the warmth and the brightness all around. It was too bad, Emily thought, that he didn’t remember how birds bend their necks and fold their wings and swoop downward — maybe he was so excited that, when the wax started melting and the feathers dropped away, he didn’t notice it in time. Emily rested her hands on the sill and leaned toward the window. The horizon was a beautiful thing, she thought.

“THERE SHE IS,” said Joe. He cocked his head toward the second-story windows, and Janet looked up. She said, “I thought she was going to the bathroom!” She began to push her chair back, but Joe said, “She’ll be fine.” Janet looked up again, bit her lip. She said, “Uncle Joe, I should have done what Loretta’s done. Emily could have gotten lost in the crowd. She hates being an only child.”

Joe shifted his position — his hip was bothering him a lot this year — and said, “Sweetheart, any number’s the wrong number.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I really do.”

Joe patted Janet on the knee. She gave him an uncertain look, then went back to staring at Emily. There wasn’t a time Joe could remember seeing Janet, even as a toddler, when she didn’t look like a face outside the window, exiled, staring at the warmth inside. According to Lois, this was all Andy’s fault; according to Minnie, it was all Frank’s fault. Joe hadn’t intended to say what he said — it just popped out. But it was true, and not only with regard to inheritances. He and Lois had agreed that Joe’s childhood on this farm, as Frank’s much-pummeled younger brother by two years, had been a nightmare, and so he and Lois had decided that Annie and Jesse were enough; but as a result, Annie and Jesse had never gotten a moment’s privacy. Joe’s always darling sister, Lillian, and her adored Arthur seemed to have hit on the right mix, but Debbie, their skeptical oldest, would not have agreed. Your hog had a big litter, and you were glad, but then there were always those runts consigned to the hind teats, who didn’t have much of a chance. Joe had bred his retrievers twice. Thirteen pups the first time, two pups the second time. You are never satisfied, said Lois. The corn crop was too big, the corn crop was too small. Impossible to know what to hope for.

Well, it was Jesse’s problem now. Jesse was scientifically trained, and he sank all his dreams into predictive models. When he had gone to Frank and asked for some money to use to trade commodities futures, Frank was proud of him — playing both ends, good strategy, and why not — but Joe himself had been too dumb to think of it.

Still, it made Joe uncomfortable when Jesse talked about “growth medium” and “inputs” and “upticks.” He spent his evenings on a computer, and when he walked the fields, it was with soil-moisture instruments and that sort of thing in his hand. If he wondered about the weather, he watched the news, not the western horizon, and he would never in a million years name a sheep or pat a cow. What you needed to do these days, just to survive, was to turn it into an equation. With an equation, every solution was interesting, even the one that put you out of business. Lois set Joe’s plate before him, patted him on the shoulder, then said, “Kevvie? You want a popover? I made some.”

NOW EVERYONE WAS SEATED, including Emily, who had come around the house and claimed the seat beside Andy. Andy squeezed her granddaughter’s hand and spooned some of the pork and the potato salad from her own plate onto Emily’s. Emily’s head dipped forward and her nostrils flared, suddenly reminding Andy of what had happened sometime before dawn. She and Frank had the guest room of that funny house where Joe and Lois lived, now that they’d let Jesse, Jen, and the two boys take over the big house. The room suited Frank (twin beds, a row of six double-hung windows facing east), and while they were getting ready for the night, he had gotten a little talkative about Charlie: he wasn’t entirely wrong, the kid did look like him from the back; he had recognized when he bought the boots that the kid had gotten a gene for agreeability from somewhere, but Joe was agreeable, Jesse was agreeable (he smiled automatically when he referred to Jesse, couldn’t help himself). He hadn’t thought of Tim at the time, but if he had…Andy had drifted off to the sound of his voice.

The double-hung windows looked out on the back field, and when a light along the fence line came on, she woke up. There was a fox, triangular head, dark eyes, pointed ears, gray and bushy but small, taking a drink from the dogs’ water bowl. The window was open; she could hear lapping. She stared, wide awake at once. The fox lifted its head, looked away, looked at her. She would not have said this to anyone, but she did trade a thought with it before it trotted off — not words, but perspective, the tunnel through the corn, amplified sounds of crickets, the crusty feel of the dirt beneath its paws.