Jane Smiley - Early Warning

When she got to Iowa (she still would not go all the way to New York), she slept one twelve-hour night, and then she was up, her hair washed and combed, her bed made, her bag unpacked, and her clothes put away. Minnie was a week away from starting school, so she sat in the kitchen while Janet fixed herself a hard-boiled egg and a piece of toast, which she ate neatly. She washed up after herself, and then sat down across the table from Minnie. She looked haggard and grief-stricken, but she said, “I should do something.”

“Why don’t you take some courses?”

“Where?”

“ISU. Iowa. Drake.”

“I never applied to graduate school.”

“You can still take some courses. Night courses, if you want. Ames and Iowa City are pretty quiet, at least compared to—”

Janet smiled. “That would be a change.”

“Do you want to talk about—”

Janet shook her head, and Minnie wondered which thing she didn’t want to talk about — what happened after she got to San Francisco, or what drove her to San Francisco in the first place. But that was neither here nor there. Janet was sitting in front of her, as ready as anyone Minnie had ever seen to take advice. Minnie said, “I always say, choose the place, not the school. Then you’ll be happier.”

“I would choose Iowa City.”

“Me, too,” said Minnie.

So they did it step by step. The girl would not take a penny from Frank, referred to his wealth as “blood money,” but she was willing to take a loan from Minnie of $250.00. This was when she admitted to Minnie that she had given all her savings to the Peoples Temple at the last minute, after everyone she knew was gone, as a kind of desperate gesture. “How much did you have?” said Minnie.

“Eleven hundred dollars. I had a good job. I was making fifty bucks a night in tips.”

Minnie asked no more questions, just helped her find a small apartment on Gilbert Street, within walking distance of downtown, and a part-time job at Things, Things, and Things, which was an expensive but cheerful shop on Clinton. She helped her buy a bed and a chest and a lamp and some bedding and a chair. She went with her to the registrar’s office, and, yes, there were quite a few courses she could take. She chose an advanced French-conversation class and a class in art history. Minnie paid the fees, which were small, since she would only be getting adult-ed credit. Then she left her there, sitting on her bed, on a very warm, humid, sunny afternoon, with a sad look on her face, and as she drove back to Denby, Minnie wondered if she had diverted Janet to a less self-destructive path, or if she had just supplied her with the setting for more of the same.

IT WAS NINE. Henry was dressed and had eaten a bowl of oatmeal. It had been snowing for fifty-three hours. Henry knew because he remembered getting up in the dark two nights ago to take a piss (from the Old French, pissier , twelfth century, origin unknown), looking out the window, thinking that it was snowing again — what was that, the tenth storm since Thanksgiving? — looking at the clock, and going back to sleep. With the howling winds and the sad attempts at plowing, some drifts mounted to second-story windows, covered cars, blocked streets. He had tenaciously kept shoveling and sweeping his little walk — if he hadn’t, he would not be able to get out the door. It was fortunate in some ways that he had sold his car and not purchased another: he would have hated to see a new car simply buried in snow for four months on end. And having no car meant that he wouldn’t set out hopefully for, say, Milwaukee, only to be stranded, trapped, and frozen to death. On the other hand, if you walked everywhere, as Henry did, being frozen to death or blown away in these winds was also a hazard.

Rosanna had sometimes talked about the storm of ’36 or some such year — Henry would have been three; he remembered nothing — when they first sent Frank to Eloise in Chicago because there was no school in Denby. Frank had supposedly gone through a tunnel of snow and nearly died, and two women saved him by buying him a berth in the sleeping car. Maybe, in those days, two women were always saving Frank. That same year, snow outside his future room, the addition where Joe was sleeping alone, had been up to the eaves. After this winter, Henry thought he could go toe to toe with Rosanna; he was in the most prepared-for-snow city in the world, and there was nowhere to put it. All they needed now, Henry thought, would be a nice ice storm to seal them in permanently.

In ordinary circumstances, no one would have said of him that he was a farm kid, not even his parents, but he had a farm kid’s plenitude of provisions — bags of flour, bags of rice, bags of dried beans, boxes of spaghetti, cans of tomatoes, a freezer full of chicken breasts and nicely trimmed steaks. He had wine, he had water, he had anchovies and several varieties of Italian cheeses; if he had to make himself pizza for a week, he could do it. He had a kerosene lamp; he had wood for the fireplace (he’d used about half of that, and he was careful to keep the flue clear — his colleague Nina had passed out several times, thinking that it was the dreary nature of her manuscript that was putting her to sleep, but it turned out to be her chimney leaking carbon monoxide into the living room).

He went into the front room and picked up The Poetry of Jean de La Ceppède: A Study in Text and Context , which had just arrived from Oxford for his review. Jean de La Ceppède was right up his alley now. In the summer, Henry had visited Aix-en-Provence and decided that medieval France was unbelievably alluring, and why had he not lifted his youthful gaze from Caedmon and Cynewulf and looked farther south, where the weather was better and the literature and history more complex?

But not only had Henry’s academic interests shifted toward France, he was also lonely, had been lonely since Philip left, now two years ago. Philip was in New York, and there was no reasonable hope of seeing him until spring break, seven weeks away. And even if he saw him, Philip had moved on. When Henry stayed with him for four days in October, they had gone out to the bathhouses every night, and while Philip ran joyously from room to room, partner to partner, disappearing and coming back, Henry sat at the bar, sipping gin and tonics, frightened, glad of his graying hair, his utterly straight outfits — khakis, sweaters, blue shirts. Though he had appreciated the wildness and color of the scene, though he had been flirted with, he would have grabbed the bar and resisted being taken away from it with all his strength. Philip, irritated and a little offended, had said, as if he meant it, that that emblematic medieval experience Henry had had as a boy, an eyeless white horse exploding in a ditch full of paleolithic refuse, was the key to his whole Weltanschauung: human nature is inherently evil and is never to be trusted. Philip was much more of a Romantic.

Once in a while, he wished he could call Rosanna and pick a fight with her, as he had done so many times in the past. “Ma,” she had hated that, but when he called her “Mom,” she said, “What are you, twelve years old?” When he called her “Mother,” she said, “I am not a nun,” and so for a few months he referred to her, only in her hearing, as “Mother Superior,” always smiling when she pursed her lips. Ma! Ma! What did you call a finicky maternal figure? She might have liked “Rosanna,” but none of them had dared. He’d wept when he saw her in the open casket, neatly dressed in her gray dress, with the pink sweater she had knitted herself and some black pumps. They had fixed her hair anyhow, not in the bun she preferred, and Lois had said, seriously, “Maybe we should fold up all the sweaters she made herself and put them in there. I hate to see them go to the Salvation Army.” But it had seemed too strange to do such a thing, and so they had gone to the Salvation Army — they were too small for anyone in the family.