Jane Smiley - Early Warning

“Yes, you should,” said Andy.

It was time to toss the bouquet. There wasn’t a stairway in the American Legion Hall, but there was a small stage, so the three bridesmaids and two other girls gathered just in front, where the stage bowed out, and Jenny stood above them, now dressed in a green suit with big shoulder pads and white trim. She turned her back and threw the gardenias straight into the air. All the girls in their yellow bridesmaids’ dresses threw their arms out and started shouting. It was the youngest who caught them, athletically, as if she were going for a rebound. She laughed and put her face into them, then handed them to someone who looked like her older sister. Now everyone followed Jesse and Jenny out to the car — Rosanna’s eleven-year-old Volkswagen, still running like a champ. They were driving to the airport in Des Moines, then honeymooning at a resort in Arizona.

Lillian, who was holding on to Arthur’s arm, caught sight of the Eunice woman making her way up to Frank. It was amazing — they didn’t even look like members of the same generation. The woman had blue hair and a frail demeanor. More amazing than that, she gave Frank’s arm a familiar little squeeze. Arthur said, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“I’m not sure I would,” said Lillian.

“Just for the drama aspect,” said Arthur.

Lillian shook her head.

That night, settling into the very comfortable bed Joe and Lois had vacated for them, Lillian said, “Do you think Frank has a sense of humor?”

“Frank is a terrible romantic, sweetheart. He has always worn his heart on his sleeve.”

“Frank? I never noticed that,” said Lillian.

“It’s a very small heart,” said Arthur.

—

IN THEIR ROOM at the Usherton Best Western, Andy had taken the bed by the window and Frank had taken the bed by the bathroom. It was the first time they’d shared a room in a number of years, and Frank decided his best bet was to pretend to fall right to sleep, thereby avoiding any conversation. Andy said nothing about Eunice in the car; the only thing she said at all was that Arthur acted worried and Lillian looked pale and tired. In fact, she seemed in pain. Frank had thought so, too, but what business was it of theirs? The more interesting one for him was Claire, who’d come into the church flanked by two tall young men who could not be, but were, Gray and Brad. There was plenty of good news about the boys — Gray had gotten early admission to Penn; Brad was a forward on the junior varsity basketball team, and his team was in contention for the league title. Throughout the wedding and reception, they had shadowed their mother — not as if they were shy, but as if they dared not let her out of their sight. Even when two of Jenny’s cousins had come up to flirt openly, Gray kept one eye on his mother. Thinking of Jenny made Frank think of Jesse. Jesse had been quietly attentive, had asked him if he had any advice, had seemed to want to be sure that Frank was not just satisfied with Jen, but impressed by her. He wasn’t, but she was a Guthrie — Guthries were harmless. And she had hugged him with easy good nature, as if she was expressing affection rather than obligation.

Content with this small pleasure, Frank began his customary going-to-sleep ritual, which was counting backward in fives from a thousand, but around the time he got to 435, he couldn’t help coughing, which unfortunately indicated that he was awake, and when he did, Andy said, in a perfectly clear and nonsleepy voice, “Claire has grown into her looks.”

He said, “I was thinking about Claire, too.”

“I always felt sorry for her.” Her tone was even and cool.

“You did?” said Frank. He opened his eyes. The room was hardly dark at all, with the lights from the parking lot blazing on the ceiling. Frank wished they had somehow managed to fly home after the wedding, but the weather was threatening even now. There could be another night in the Best Western.

“She only married Dr. Paul because she was still in mourning for your father. But your mother didn’t like her enough to notice.”

Frank did not feel that it was his job to defend his mother — she defended herself from the grave perfectly well. However, he didn’t disagree with Andy’s assessment. Andy said, “But now I think she’s lucky.”

“Who’s lucky?”

“Claire.” Then she rustled around in her bed and said, ruminatively, “When your parents don’t like you, then you are free.”

Frank rolled onto his side and looked at her. There was so much light reflecting off the pale walls that he could see her perfectly. He said, “Your parents liked you.”

“Didn’t they, though? My father especially. But, you see, there you are.”

And he knew right then that she meant that she had never been free. That was not what he had assumed she held against him, not at all. He said, “I am sorry if you never felt free, Andy.”

Just then, lying there, staring at her across the little space between the beds, he saw how the architecture of her face remained unchanged by forty years. Her cheekbones and her jawline and her nose were a little more finely modeled, and her blue, blue eyes were a little more deeply set. Her lips were thinner, but not too thin. He laughed at Andy these days, almost as a reflex — but he had not laughed at her at the beginning. He had, in fact, been afraid of her. That was why he had taken refuge in fucking Eunice, in obsessing about Eunice even though he’d hated her, hated her somehow for Lawrence’s sake. And now Lawrence had been dead for four decades. Andy smiled, and her smile was still wide and pleasing. She said, “You did your best, Frank.” Which wasn’t much — Frank finished the thought in his own mind. Then, just to be sure that he knew she was not being ironic, she reached across the space and squeezed his hand, a reassuring, motherly squeeze. She turned away from him. Frank started his counting ritual over but lost interest at 635. After that, he lay there, looking at the lights blaring and rippling across the ceiling. Andy went to sleep, silent and still. He was always surprised at how people thought of him, surprised that they did think of him. He thought of himself as the observer, but really, he was the observed, wasn’t he? Maybe he had spent his whole life trying to escape that very thing.

—

ELOISE WOULD HAVE LIKED to go to the wedding, but she hadn’t been able to get out — planes canceled because of the weather. She had finally given up, telling herself that maybe she would go in the late spring. She had a strange desire to see Iowa one last time — she hadn’t been there since Rosanna’s funeral. She always jokingly called everything east of the Sierras “the humid lands.” Nothing about Denby or Usherton ever tickled her imagination the way California did. But this year’s floods had killed the West Coast romance. San Mateo was a disaster area. Marin was a disaster area. Oakland, always in some sense a disaster area, was cloudy, dark, wet, and threatening, and for the first time in her life, Eloise had had the drapes closed all day — she felt the sense of something encroaching, something like a mudslide, slow and inexorable, not something like a tornado, quick and random.

Maybe her mood came from going through closets and tossing old clothes and shoes. Pink high heels! Could she have bought those? It boggled the mind. Good heavens, as Rosanna would have said, she was seventy-seven! Revolutionaries did not live to be seventy-seven. Buddhists lived to be seventy-seven, and she still knew a few of those, with whom she got along well enough. With three boxes of old clothes to take to the Goodwill, Eloise was wise enough to admit that her life had been a failure, but she didn’t exactly mind it. She liked to think of herself as a sport — a branch of a peach tree that had happened to produce nectarines. She had violated her Lysenkoist principles enough to wonder about some of the Vogels and the Augsbergers, both in Iowa and back in Germany — either there were some malcontents hiding back there, or some woman somewhere had imported another genome into the family. However, she knew by her sense of humor, so offensive to every comrade over the years, that she was indeed related to Opa.