Jane Smiley - Golden Age

The Shoebox was in good shape — the virtue of small windows. Even the tiny little sunporch was okay, since it looked away from the storm. Michael scrambled eggs, made toast and coffee, told Richie and Jessica he had worried about them, been up all night, in fact, though he didn’t mind that.

Jessica went to the bathroom to take a shower. Michael talked about the “derecho”—started as a storm cell in Iowa, grew and expanded, eighty-to-ninety-mile-per-hour winds, straight, not swirling, always blew from the northwest. Lots of storms that people thought were tornadoes were really derechos. While he was taking his own shower, Richie managed to come to, and not only from this hard night. He hadn’t meant to be so dumbstruck, he hadn’t meant to feel so old and sunk in some sort of mental goop, he hadn’t meant to be taken care of by Michael, he hadn’t meant to let almost four years elapse after his time in the Congress before he got himself together. He hadn’t meant to take Jessica for granted, to buy her only a potted hydrangea from the grocery store for their last anniversary. It was a sign of how lost he was that he did love her all the time, turned toward her like a sunflower toward the sun, and yet he let conversations die, occasions where they might do something together pass, opportunities to help her make dinner or do the dishes fall by the wayside. Did she think he was indifferent to her, when, really, he was indifferent to himself? When he got out of the shower, toweled off, and opened the bathroom door, he heard her laugh in the kitchen. She hadn’t given him one of those laughs in weeks. Michael laughed, too, exactly in sync. Richie shook his head back and forth, back and forth, loosening the dead particles of brain matter that seemed to be clogging his thoughts. They had done their best to grab his hands and drag him out of the sinkhole. Now it was time for him to exert himself.

Once they put on their clothes, Richie suggested to Jessica that they drive out to Uncle Henry’s, partly to see what they could see on the way. And also, of course, to enjoy the car’s air conditioning. What they saw was interesting. Their neighborhood was more damaged than most of the neighborhoods in the city, but the suburbs were a mess — lots of detours because of trees and power lines. When they finally got to Henry’s, Henry and Riley were out in the yard, raking up debris. Richie pulled in. Were they glad to see him? They seemed glad to see Jessica. Richie started his new life by pitching in, sweeping, raking, picking up debris, dragging the waste containers to the curb, wiping the sweat off his brow with the hem of his shirt, but not therefore tapering off. In spite of the heat, they laughed a lot. Riley kept pausing, looking at Alexis, and smiling. Richie overheard her say to Jessica, “Eight to twelve is the best age! The last time I was really, really happy was when I was in fifth grade.” And Jessica laughed and nodded. I’m happy now, thought Richie. I am happy now.

Only two interns and one consultant at ReNewVa were working on climate change, according to Riley. No funds for more. “I could help them,” said Richie at supper. “I’m not doing anything else.”

Riley said, “Talk to Ezra. He’s good.”

“He’s twenty-three,” said Richie. “He weighs six pounds.”

“More like a hundred, but he is a vegan. Nevertheless, he’s up-to-date. He graduated from Caltech. He has no interpersonal skills. He knows nothing about the Arab Spring, but he can put you to work. Just don’t take offense at his air of superiority.”

The ReNewVa offices did have power on Monday. He knocked on Ezra’s door and said, “So — Ezra! Get me up to speed about climate change.”

Ezra looked up from his Diet Coke and burped, then said, “No one ever says that to me.”

Richie said, “Good. Then I have you to myself.”

“Do you want to work on the Keystone XL pipeline or weather extremes?”

“Anything is fine,” said Richie.

Ezra’s last name was Newmark, and he was from Roxbury, New York. There was a picture of John Burroughs above his desk. Richie knew this because the words JOHN BURROUGHS were printed on a piece of paper to the left, shaped like an arrow and pointing at the bearded elderly man. Underneath the picture was another piece of paper, cut into a jagged shape, with the words “Marcellus Shale” printed on it. To the right were four pictures of flooding in Roxbury caused by Hurricane Irene, now almost a year in the past. Richie didn’t ask if the pictures were of Ezra’s parents’ house, but he looked at them thoughtfully. He remembered Irene as something of a bust, but, then, a year ago, he hadn’t been thinking of the Catskills, or much of anything else. Ezra spoke quickly but with exceptional clarity, as if he had been explaining things to people his whole life. He suggested that Richie write down what he was being told. Richie took his suggestion.

That was his life at work. At home, he avoided looking at the sofa, at the television, at his computer, all lures to sitting down and fading out, including the London Olympics — yes, you could watch javelin and discus and sprints until you fell into a coma. He suggested what might be good for supper, stopped at the market on the way home, bought things like eggplant and leeks. He moved on, in the Julia Child cookbook, from Potage Parmentier to Potage Crème de Cresson, and then he jumped ahead to Carbonnades à la Flamande. Jessica loved it. He bought another cookbook at the supermarket, called All-Time Best Recipes . A drain got clogged. He found a wire hanger and unclogged it. The summer, though hot, began to progress with verve and energy.

All the same, he did not take personally the drought in Iowa until Michael brought it up in late August. There was a graphic on the New York Times Web site about crops — corn, soybeans, wheat, sorghum. Tiny black dots like a swarm of locusts hovered over the map of Iowa (and Minnesota, and Missouri, and Nebraska), indicating crops that had been declared “poor or worse” and would be left in the ground or turned into silage. Fifty percent of corn, a sixth of the soybean crop. There was also a report that he found somewhere, about river temperatures being almost a hundred, and thousands of fish dying in the water and decaying along the banks. Somehow Michael knew some things that Ezra had mentioned, things that Richie considered rather esoteric — the flow of water down the Mississippi was so lacking that salt water from the Gulf was flowing upriver toward New Orleans; huge soybean plantations were the root cause of the destruction of the Amazonian rain forest. None of these factoids surprised Richie: Ezra had a four-by-six map of the United States with drought conditions penciled in on the wall of his office, across from John Burroughs. What surprised him was that Michael seemed interested, that he knew conditions were worse than they had been in the eighties (“Not the year we were there, but the year after that—’88 was a terrible drought year”), as bad as they had been in the fifties. He was Facebook friends with Felicity. (Did Richie remember her? What was she, early twenties — Jesse’s youngest.) She posted about crop reports, even took a picture or two of Jesse’s corn (dry, pale) and beans (spare, but not a disaster). She took pictures of the soil between the rows — dusty — and the dust on the west side of the house. Her comments were usually “Could be worse” and “At least a little rain.”

Richie said, “What do you post on your Facebook page?”

“Cartoons. Links to YouTube videos of punk bands.”

Jessica, who had a Facebook account, said that this was true. She showed Richie: Michael had 932 friends. Jessica had 267 friends. One of Michael’s friends was Loretta, but, according to Jessica, she never commented on or liked anything Michael posted.