Jane Smiley - Early Warning

Michael said, “When Loretta was little, her room was papered in DDT-impregnated wallpaper. Just for kids. Donald Duck pictures on it.”

Loretta spun around. She said, “What was wrong with that? It was a good idea. It killed the mosquitoes that landed on the wall.”

Meanwhile, Ivy was staring.

Loretta said, “If you ban DDT, and then millions die from malaria, you haven’t done anyone any good.”

“Let the market kill them,” said Ivy.

“At least it’s their choice.”

“How about full warnings on the roll of paper, saying what is known about DDT?”

“We know it will kill mosquitoes. We don’t know it will hurt kids. Anyway, I guess the market decided about DDT-impregnated wallpaper, and that was that. I haven’t seen it lately. Or lead-based paint, or X-ray machines in shoe stores. Things come and go. If you don’t let them come and go, then you get like Russia.”

Richie thought maybe she had Ivy there.

But then Ivy said, “Russia isn’t the only alternative. Banks in the U.S. used to print all the money, and now the government prints it, because a free market in dollar bills didn’t work and was chaos. There are things that the government should do, and things that companies should do. I don’t want Russia, but I don’t want the Mafia, either.” Michael was beginning to look bored, and Richie sympathized. Michael said, “I loved The Godfather Part II. Pow-pow! Let’s have the Sambuca. You do this thing — you put a coffee bean in it and set it on fire. Burns off all the alcohol. Pow! Pow! Oh, you got me.” Michael fell to the floor.

Loretta said, “Reagan is tough. The Iranians know it, and the hostages will be released.”

Ivy said, “We’ll see.”

Richie thought, “Uncle.”

Loretta said, preening just a bit, “Yes, we’ll see.”

On the way home, Richie and Ivy agreed, no more Michael and Loretta until at least the end of January.

CHARLIE WAS READING a book. He was sitting up in his bed with his back against the headboard, knees drawn up, quilt to his waist. All he had on was a T-shirt from camp that was ripped at the collar, but even though it was zero degrees out and Mom had turned down the heat for the night, he was not cold. It was three-fifteen by the clock, and he was on page 477. There were about 150 pages left to go. Charlie had stayed up over the years to watch movies, drive around, TP Ricky Horan’s house, talk to Leslie Gage on the phone, and listen to rock and roll turned very low, but he had never stayed up to read a book. Even while he was following the story with joy and pleasure, he was also rather amazed at himself.

He had found the book lying on the street outside of Kroger’s. He took it home, hid it in his room so that Mom would not make a big deal over him finally reading a book, then opened it idly, noted the print was small. The first sentence made no sense at all, but he laughed at the second, “The governess was always getting muddled with her astrolabe, and when she got specially muddled she would take it out on the Wart by rapping his knuckles.” He half understood this when he realized that the Wart was a child, not a blemish. It took him half an hour to read the first two pages, they were so strange. But he saw that they were meant to be strange, and he felt like the author was making a puzzle for him — this many words I will give you to understand, this many words I will keep for myself, and then there are these words in the middle, which you can have if you work at it. Things popped out of the page and into his head, and he pictured them. He went on, although he had only the dimmest idea about Arthur and Gawaine from occasionally looking at Prince Valiant in the Sunday comics. When he got confused by the words, the story stayed in his head, and drew him back.

He stretched his shoulders a little and turned the page. Now the story had turned to Lancelot and Guenever (which he pronounced in his mind to rhyme with “whenever”). He liked the line “Half the knights had been killed — the best half.” He read about the ones that were left, and saw that King Arthur was thinking about how, whenever you set out to do something, you use up the good stuff first, and then you are stuck with the bad stuff, whatever it is. This was kind of like Charlie’s experience on both the swim team and the diving team — they always did their best dives first, or swam the backstroke first and the breaststroke last, just to get so far ahead of the other teams that they maybe couldn’t catch up. But that meant that you had to do your worst dives when you were more tired, so that you got even lower scores than you might have. The next part he could only sort of picture — stuff about clothes people were wearing and how stupid they looked. But he understood perfectly the part about Guenever. All the good people were gone, and those that were left were like the kids at school — they mostly wanted to see her fuck up, not because they cared, but because they didn’t have anything better to do.

Charlie could not say that this section of the book was his favorite, even though he couldn’t stop reading. What he had really liked was the part about Merlyn turning the Wart into a fish and a hawk. Even though he had never been farther from St. Louis than Chicago, in one direction, and the Ozarks, in the other, he could read that part and imagine just what England was like — all the birds and castles and hills. There was also a place where he, Charlie, had cried, something that hadn’t ever happened before, even in a movie. When the kids — Gawaine and Gareth and the rest of them — killed the unicorn for their mom and dragged it home all dirty and wrecked, and their mom didn’t even let it in the house, he thought that was the saddest thing he had ever read or seen. He did not know why. But it looked like even sadder things were to come.

At four-fifteen, the book fell onto the quilt, and his head dropped back onto the edge of the headboard. He was perfectly comfortable — one of his skills was sleeping soundly no matter what his position. When he first went to camp on the Current River, the other campers would test him: Head out of the bunk? No problem. Feet on the floor? Feet tied to the upper bunk? Spread-eagled? If he was asleep, he was asleep, that was Charlie. The other kids came to respect that after he blackened a few eyes for them. And anyway, he was big — six foot three, 165 pounds, too big to dive anymore unless he faithfully lifted weights. But he didn’t mind that. He and Coach Lutz both knew he was coming to the end of his talents. Coach Jenkins had told him about a thousand times that Mark Spitz, who was six one, with an arm span of six two, weighed 170. Somehow, Charlie, six three, with an arm span of six four, could arrive at 182 pounds and win seven Olympic gold medals, or maybe only one. “You’re the hope!” Coach Jenkins said. But Charlie needed fear to keep him going, and breaststroke was a singularly unscary activity, unless maybe you were swimming to Cuba and there were sharks. He hadn’t done that yet.

When his mom came in at ten and woke him up by picking the book off the floor, turning it over in her hands, and then setting it on the bedside table without saying anything, they had a glance — one of those mom glances that said, “Now what?” Charlie smiled. His mom smiled. She knew better than to kiss him anymore, but she ruffled his hair and said, “Oh. The Once and Future King. I always wanted to read that.”

—

CLAIRE’S TROUBLE NOW, a year and a half after she first tried to serve Paul the papers, was that no one she had talked to would take on Paul’s lawyer. Claire’s lawyer was someone she never would have dated. His father had spent the lawyer’s entire Chicago childhood at the racetrack, scaring the pants off the kid with big bets that often went wrong and angry language about crooks and gangsters. He was now a brawny, tough-talking specialist in divorce, but every time Paul’s lawyer issued some sort of ultimatum, Claire’s lawyer would shake his head in despair, and say that they had to abide by it. Claire had no idea if they really did or not. She should have gotten Paul’s lawyer, a colder, more genial type, and she would have if she’d had any advice, but she had opened the phone book, run her finger down the column, and decided probably they were all about the same. Oh no, not even in Iowa, one of the first states to grant no-fault divorce. The very words “no fault” enraged Paul.