Jane Smiley - Golden Age

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CLAIRE HAD PUT on three parties for the Jaspers, who lived in a stony palatial house on three acres in Lake Forest, a place that would have looked and felt like a tomb if Jed and Caroline Jasper were not the ebullient, generous folks that they happened to be. There had been a fourth party, too — at New Year’s — and Caroline had invited Claire and Carl as guests rather than as employees. Claire would have minded losing the business if Caroline hadn’t set her up with three of her other friends, five parties there, the most recent a Labor Day bash that had cost the Mordecais forty thousand dollars (10 percent to Claire, a nice addition to the bank account).

As Carl drove up to the Jasper house, Claire looked around — left, right, behind. She did not quite recognize the property. But there was the number, and there was the south tower. Everything else was different; the front yard had become a farm. They pulled into the driveway, and Caroline emerged from behind a stand of sunflowers, be-gloved and be-Crocced, a basket in her hand. She ran over and opened Claire’s door, handed her a speckled green tomato. Claire took a bite and gave the rest to Carl.

Caroline said, “Can you believe this? I have almost a bushel of sweet corn, and tomatoes coming out of my ears. I had to invite everyone I knew just to distribute the harvest.”

Claire said, “I feel right at home, except that on my folks’ farm the garden was out back.”

“Not enough sun! My gardener was very adamant. Front yard or nowhere. She was so hypnotic that I just nodded and let her put in the beds.”

Carl took another tomato out of Caroline’s basket and said, “What in the world do the neighbors think?”

“They are so envious! I mean, I keep them plied with vegetables, and the two kids across the street have emerged from in front of the television to pick weeds and eat raw green beans, and almost everyone is talking about how much they hate grass now. I swear the Carnabys are going to buy goats. Or they say they are.”

Claire wondered why she hadn’t thought of this herself.

Caroline led them to the eggplants, and, really, Claire thought, they were the most beautiful and impressive, more self-contained and dignified than tomatoes, so densely purple and heavy. She squatted down and let one sink into her palm. Around her, the fragrance of the compost and the straw mulch blended with the damp scent of the plants.

Caroline was saying, “Jed saw one of those little posters — you know, with the phone numbers you tear off — and why he called them I can’t imagine. The girl must be forty, but she looks thirty. She is so bubbly, and the boy is darling. They make me feel very old and stick-in-the-muddy.” Caroline was fifty-three and looked forty. How did that make Claire feel, seventy-one now, deep into the age where everyone remarked about how well she was holding up? Caroline said, “We can die in peace. The younger generation is going to fix everything. Let’s go in. Jed is making mojitos with our very own mint, and he and Carl can discuss building a still for our reserved-label rum in that derelict backyard we’ve been maintaining all these years.”

The Jasper backyard was an acre and a half of beautiful old elms and oaks with a tennis court. Caroline said, “This is a totally locavore meal we are serving you guys, except the rum and the sugar.”

And it was delicious. All the way home, Claire and Carl disagreed, in their very agreeable way, about whether a nice raised bed or two would do well in their own backyard. Claire’s argument was that Carl needed something to build; he had redone the living-room moldings twice already and rewired the kitchen and put up enough shelves in the basement to last three lifetimes, especially since he was a vocal exponent of getting rid of everything. Once she had a crop, she would add that to her party offerings — seasonal, local, delicious menu — and raise her prices. Carl’s argument against was all about deer and squirrels and raccoons and gophers: he had spent years getting rid of the rodents who were turning their yard into a sieve, why go back now, when the deer were finally convinced that there was nothing to be had at 1201 Pine Street? Claire knew what she had to do — order the beams, have them delivered, leave them stacked beside the garage. They would find their way into Carl’s hands, and into the yard. She had gotten the name of the gardening girl. She would invite her for breakfast. Angie, too. Angie was working on the South Side, at a youth center. Claire remembered that Angie had even said that she set up some pots in the spring, of pepper plants, tomato plants, onions, garlic, herbs, but her charges, all in their teens, had shied away from touching them — they hated the feeling of dirt on their fingers. Two of the girls had washed their hands over and over after doing a little weeding.

Claire buzzed around with this plan for three days before she realized how it changed her mood, how the last time she had been this hopeful was before Michael’s crime hit the papers. When Rahm Emanuel became chief of staff, ambivalence about the Chicago election turned to real arguments — all the Emanuels had a talent for arousing controversy, and liked to do so. Claire had told Carl that she thought she had known despair before the election, but she had been wrong: Should your enemy misbehave, sadness ensued. Should your friend misbehave, desperation ensued, a deep feeling that nothing could be corrected or changed. Carl, of course, had never expected anything to change. But she saw him out the kitchen window, hands on hips, looking down at the beams in the late-fall sunshine. He leaned forward and scratched the wood with his fingernail, brought his hand to his nose, took a sniff. Cedar. Carl loved wood. Then he turned around and gazed out toward the back of the yard, where the most sunlight was, where the deer were worst, where they had let the fencing deteriorate because you couldn’t see it from the house. He began rubbing his chin with his hand, then pushed his hat back. He was thinking. Best let him think, say nothing. But she did look in the refrigerator to see how many of those Pink Lady apples she had left. Four — just enough for a galette, a two-person pie. With an oil crust. Some cranberries. She set the apples on the counter.

RICHIE HAD ALREADY READ the lead article about how the Fed and the SEC could have foreseen the financial collapse, and he had put in a comment under his pseudonym, “DCNumbskulls”—“The regulators were too busy lining their pockets and swilling booze to actually pay attention. I know. I was there.” His comment came between “I agree with #1 and #2. The real questions are: where is the money, and why can’t it be found and appropriated for redistribution?” and “Is anyone surprised? It has been evident for a long time that lack of regulation makes the rich richer. Allowing investment banks to gamble with depositors’ money was a huge mistake. It would be nice if self-regulation worked, but it doesn’t. Therefore, the government has to regulate the unchecked greed of those who are capable of causing these disasters. If the government won’t pursue criminal charges, they should at least retroactively tax these exploiters and use the money to help bring down the deficit.” He could check back later to see how he did in the comment sweepstakes — you had to get in early, though, to have a chance of being a top Readers’ Pick. The day before, he had made a comment about the Citizens United decision (now a year old), using the words “irretrievable disaster,” that had come third in the Readers’ Pick running. The first article he’d read today was about butterflies and Vladimir Nabokov, which reminded him to order a copy of a book called Pnin (he read books now, but only short ones); the second was about the food writer’s twenty-five favorite recipes (he saved this one for Jessica). After those, he read about the State of the Union address, which would be taking place that night, about how the young man Daniel Hernandez, who had saved Gabby Giffords’s life, would be sitting with Michelle Obama. He sighed as he read that. The shooting was as vivid in his mind as if he had been there, though his only interaction with Congresswoman Giffords had been a discussion of bicycle brands back in the spring of ’08.