Jane Smiley - Golden Age

Janet finally overcame her rage sufficiently to drive out Sand Hill Road, creeping with everyone else through the black traffic lights, and she controlled her rage long enough to groom both horses and give them a little outing, but on the way home, all she needed was a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker in order for her actually to see red (she had never seen red before; what happened was, a sort of blood cloud closed in from either side, and she began to tremble in her seat so that she had to pull over). It didn’t help that the sticker was on a ’98 white Chevy pickup that looked a lot like the one Chance drove, although she thought he was in Phoenix at a rodeo.

She looked at her watch; it was two-thirty-four. She pulled into Town and Country Village, sat quietly in the car as the rain began to drizzle down, and took 150 deep breaths, which nearly made her fall asleep, but did mean that, when she picked up Jonah half an hour later, she was fairly sane, and this lasted through dinner, through the evening, and all the way until Jared started snoring beside her in their lovely but now deeply indebted bedroom.

The next morning, she wrote a long complaining e-mail to her congressman — not Anna Eshoo, whom she had met and did like, and therefore could not badger, but her own personal congressman from Brooklyn, who always replied with a stock e-mail entitled “Congressman Langdon Responds to Your Concerns.” This time, though, the return e-mail included a note from Riley, who said, “I know exactly what you mean! It is like a coup around here, and not just because everyone knows that SCOTUS scuttled the recount on VERRYYY questionable grounds. Everyone is scared! My friend Nadie Cantwell says that her parents say it’s just like 1964 in the U.S.S.R., when Khrushchev was ousted and Brezhnev took over — the same sort of watch-your-step chill in the air.” Then, below that, “BTW, an hour later — I guess your mom got all her money back. The congressman says you can call him about it when you get the chance, but the brokerage firm managed to get it somehow, and the bonus is that she gets back what it was worth when it was stolen, not what it’s worth now, since the crash. Isn’t that funny?”

Janet wrote back, “My mom is always lucky. How is Charlie?”

Riley wrote back: “Charlie busy! Somehow, talked his way into nursing school at Georgetown! He just started, midyear. He finished his EMT course, and took two courses at another school in the summer, and then he was sharing a cab with someone, and you know Charlie, as soon as he found out that that person was in admin for the nursing school, he started asking questions and getting excited, and pretty soon, that person wanted him, even had him come over for an interview, and wrote him a recommendation! The reading isn’t easy, but it gives him more hope than his source of rage, which, now that he’s been on several hikes in the Appalachians, turns out to be hilltop removal mining! (Congratulations, me, since I have been talking about this for years, but he had to see it to believe me.) Anyway, we are hunkering down here. Not happy, but hoping for the best.”

On February 17, Bush bombed Iraq — Janet read all about it in The New York Times . This time, she wrote e-mails to Bush, Cheney, Richie, and Congressman Eshoo, as well as a letter to The New York Times , and various messages on various message boards under her alias, Sunshinelover. She spent all day doing this, and failed, it turned out, to cook supper. When Jared came in and the oven was as cold as the weather, she snapped, “Shit! I will just order a pizza, okay?” He hit the roof (finally, many of their friends might say). He set his laptop gently on the dining-room table, then dropped his briefcase, threw down his coat, and said, “I have had enough.”

“Enough of what?” But she did not phrase this as a question.

“Enough of this over-the-top reaction at whatever Bush does, whatever the Republicans do, whatever doesn’t go exactly your way in the world we live in.”

Jonah appeared in the doorway, and disappeared. Janet’s heart seemed to push toward him, but she said to Jared, “That’s right, put your head in a damned hole and wait till someone shoves his dick right up your ass. It’s the American way.”

They had not agreed on the election. Jared had wondered whether Janet wanted Gore to wreck the government over the vote count, when the outcome of that would have been iffy at best.

Now Jared said, “There is something wrong with you. I don’t know what it is.” His voice was mild, enragingly forgiving. He went on. “Your attitude toward your father is, honestly, insane, especially considering that he’s dead. And you extrapolate that attitude onto everything masculine.”

“I do not.” That was the only defense she could think of at the moment.

“I liked your dad. Frank was interesting and complex. I enjoyed talking to him and working with him. I thought he was generous in his way. He was a man . Your idea is that if a man makes any mistakes, no matter how old he is, he is never to be forgiven, his mistakes are never to be forgotten.”

“What are your mistakes, then? I suppose I need to know.” As soon as she said this, and in a frozen, spiteful voice, Janet realized that she should take it back, that she had confirmed her identity as a bitch, maybe permanently.

Jared said, “Fuck you. If I disagree with you, you argue with me until I can’t stand it anymore, and if I agree with you, I get depressed. I’m going out for dinner. And I am taking Jonah with me.”

Janet stared at her computer screen and sat still, all through the slamming of the front door, the turning on of Jared’s car, and the backing around. Jonah hadn’t made a noise or said a word, which meant, she thought, that he was either a very good child or that he was scared to death.

It was clear that she was supposed to ponder her sins while they were gone, so she did for a while, at least as long as it took her to eat the leftover tagliatelle and chicken sausage from the night before. Then she went back to the computer, did some more complaining (because she was right, after all), then felt exhaustion flood over her. She went to bed. At eight-thirty in the morning, she realized that Jared had slept in Emily’s room. The only words they exchanged when she got up to find him sitting at the breakfast table were that she asked him where they went, he said they went to see Little Nicky , she said, “Is that appropriate for a nine-year-old?” and he said, “Yes,” gritting his teeth. Then he said, “I’m going out. My sincere and honest suggestion is that you find an Al-Anon meeting somewhere.” He finished his cup of coffee, got up, left. When Jonah came into the kitchen half an hour later, it was Janet who said, “Where did your dad go?”

Jonah said, “He said he was going to go skiing up at Dodge Ridge for a couple of days, and he’d be back Wednesday.”

She should not have said, “I guess he doesn’t give a shit about his company, then.”

Jonah said, “I don’t know,” and went back to his room.

—

EMILY HELPED with the horse show — it was at Mount Holyoke — but she didn’t ride, because Pattycake had come up with an abscess in his left front hoof. No one minded an abscess — as soon as you got your horse out of his stall and panicked because he was hopping lame and then felt the hoof wall, and realized that it was burning and the horse had a bounding digital pulse, the vet came, pulled the shoe, excavated the abscess, and packed it, and a day later the horse was soundish, and the hoof wall was cool. But even though it was not serious, it was a couple of weeks off, and that wasn’t bad if spring break was coming, and your roommate and another friend were planning to drive to Florida just to escape the everlasting cold and snow. It was possible that if Emily had known what she was getting into, she might have gone to Sweet Briar for the weather, even though her mom had gone there. Mount Holyoke was more prestigious, and she liked Boston, but she was learning about trade-offs.