Jane Smiley - Early Warning

Of course, this guy John Anderson stood right up to Reagan, and what he said was true — why were we afraid of the Soviets taking over Iran and Saudi Arabia? Well, if they did, where would the oil come from? But Reagan smiled — the camera caught this — as if he expected that sort of talk from a guy like Anderson. (And who had heard of Anderson? Not Joe.) But that was all they said about farming issues. Mostly it was about taxes and inflation, whether the economy needed a little shock therapy, and whether the secretary of the treasury should be investigated. Not even much about Iran. None of this helped Joe decide what to plant when he had to go to the bank a few days later and apply for his loans to buy seed. The best rate he could get was 14 percent, and if the ships full of grain were already looking for places to store the corn, beans, wheat that had been intended for the Russians, maybe shutting down the farm for a year wasn’t a bad idea. If he were rich, he would plant clover and plow it under in the fall, just stay out of the market altogether. When he said this to Minnie, she laughed as if he were joking, so he didn’t dare say it to Lois. All he said to Lois was that God would provide, and of course she nodded, and even quoted a Bible verse, “Therefore they shall come and sing in the height of Zion, and shall flow together to the goodness of the Lord, for wheat, and for wine, and for oil, and for the young of the flock and of the herd: and their soul shall be as a watered garden; and they shall not sorrow any more at all.” Although Joe didn’t often go to church with her, and didn’t quite know what he believed, he found this verse comforting, and asked her to repeat it.

—

LILLIAN WAS vacuuming. She liked vacuuming more than any other household task, and she had gone ahead and let the door-to-door salesman sell her the Kirby, not because she needed a new vacuum cleaner, but because she liked having two, one at each end of the house. Now she was pushing it under the bed. It was heavy, it was loud, it made her feel as though she were sucking every microbe out of the carpet and smashing it to atoms. When she bent down to push it farther under the bed, she realized that the phone was ringing in her ear. She turned off the vacuum cleaner, worried instantly that someone was calling about Arthur.

But the caller was Janet, long-distance, from Iowa. Lillian looked at the alarm clock. It was only eight there. She said, “Hi, honey, everything okay?”

Janet sniffled.

Lillian sat down on the bed. She said, “How’s Emily?”

“Fine.”

“How’s Jared? Are you okay?”

“I’m okay. Jared had to stay at work all night to send some file to somewhere. He’s okay.” Then she said, in a low voice, “I’ve been up all night, worrying that there is going to be a nuclear war.”

Lillian said, “You have?”

“Well, and so I’ve done this thing.”

Lillian felt a jolt of real fear. She said, “What thing?”

“Is Uncle Arthur there?”

“He went to work already.” Arthur was going to retire very, very soon, unless he could persuade them to keep him on against everyone’s better judgment.

“Does Uncle Arthur think there is going to be a nuclear war?”

“No, he hasn’t mentioned it. But what would cause it?”

“The Iranians.”

“But tell me what thing you’ve done?”

Janet started crying. In the two and a half years since Janet escaped those Temple people, Lillian had been thinking something was going to happen. She and Eloise had talked it over a dozen times. Eloise was more sanguine, especially since this young woman Marla someone had turned up not dead, but first in Paris, and now working in New York, at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Janet seemed to have moved on pretty well; Jared was a straightforward, kind person; Emily had had an amazing effect on Andy, who had then warmed up to Janet — they got along like sisters now. But Lillian trusted nothing, and believed far more than Andy and Eloise that underground poisons could surface unexpectedly. She shifted her position on the bed and adjusted her bra. Janet said, “I keep looking out the window. We have this window that faces west, and I keep looking out the window and imagining a mushroom cloud.”

“Why west?” said Lillian.

“Des Moines.”

“You are living in Solon, Iowa, and you worry there’s going to be a nuclear explosion in Des Moines?”

“The prevailing winds are westerlies.”

Lillian didn’t dare to smile, even though they were only talking on the phone. She said, “Who is going to bomb us?”

“The Iranians.”

“Oh yes, so you said…but the Iranians don’t have the Bomb.”

Silence.

Lillian said, “Did you talk to your mom about this?”

“She said she wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Lillian. “That is just like Andy.”

“She said I used to have nightmares about nuclear war.”

“I never knew that.”

“I didn’t have them at your house.”

“Oh, sweetie.”

There was a pause. Janet said, in a lighter tone, “She thought it was a sign that I was precocious.”

They both chuckled.

Lillian said, “In 1961, you were right to be worried. Not so much anymore.”

“But I can’t get it out of my mind. I look at Emily walking around, and I am just terrified something will happen.”

Lillian thought of giving her a list of terrible things that were more likely to happen, but refrained. Instead, she said, “Ask your dad about the time he went to Iran.” Lillian had gotten to the point in her life where she would talk about almost anything.

Janet said, “What?”

“Arthur sent him. There was disagreement about…” She should not have started this. “I think you were three? Anyway—”

“When I was three was when the U.S. reinstalled the Shah and overthrew the democratic election of Mossadegh.”

Of course, Lillian thought, Janet would know this. Not Debbie or Dean or Tina or 90 percent of the American population. Ninety-five, maybe. She adjusted her bra again, then said, “Mossadegh was courting the Soviets. We really couldn’t take the chance. I could see it at the time. When Frank first came home from the war, he said that the Russians defied the law of probabilities — anything was possible. Arthur seemed to…” Her words trailed off.

“What did my dad do there?”

Lillian thought, Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. “He accompanied some money, some bags of money.”

“Bribery.”

“You need to get over your idealism about how the world works.” Lillian hadn’t meant to sound so sharp.

“Okay,” said Janet. “Okay. So we get what we deserve.”

“Oh, honey,” said Lillian. Then she said, “We do, but only if we’re lucky.” She held the phone to her ear for a long time, even though neither of them said anything. Finally, Janet seemed to turn away from the receiver, because her voice got distant. She said, “There’s Emily. I have to go get her.”

Lillian said, “I love you, Janny.”

Janet didn’t reciprocate, just said, “Bye, Aunt Lillian.”

Lillian hoisted herself off the bed and went back to vacuuming, but her heart was no longer in it. After five minutes, she turned off the Kirby and rolled it down the hall to the closet where it was ensconced with all its many unused accessories. She could not get comfortable. She went back into her room and rummaged in the underwear drawer for a more forgiving bra. It was when she was putting it on that she felt the swelling, low and to the outside of her right breast, not quite painful but unmistakably present. She went into the bathroom and looked into the mirror, something she, a formerly vain young woman, now did as little as possible (and when she did, she made a practice of smiling at herself, so as not to seem judgmental). But there was no smiling now. The swelling was firm and visible, and it was evident that she was not destined to be alive one day and dead the next, Arthur’s ideal.