Jane Smiley - Some Luck

Toward the end of the class, Eunice happened to look around, yawning, and to see him. She didn’t smile, but she did keep looking. After a moment, she lifted her fingers in a wave.

She was first to the door, but she waited for him, and he couldn’t avoid her. Without even greeting him, she murmured, “I came by your room, but you were at work.”

“Yeah,” said Frank.

“I want to give you something.”

“What?”

“Some photos Lawrence took. There are about ten of them. You and him over where your tent is. Dead animal skins in the background. He’s in four of them with you. You want them?”

“You know my address. Mail them.”

“I can bring them to class Wednesday.”

They walked down the hallway, then down the stairs and out the big front door. She turned left, and marched away without saying anything more.

It was lunchtime, so he was going to meet Hildy at the Union. She was standing beside the wall that commemorated the dead from the Great War, and as she turned toward him, he said, “Lot more names coming to this wall.”

She said, “Yeah, it’s terrible in Norway.” But she said “ja,” which struck him as funny. “The ones who can’t run away are eating their shoes.” He glanced at her. She looked pained, not joking. She pulled his arm tight around herself and leaned into him. They went up the stairs and into the dining hall.

“I saw Eunice.”

“Oh, poor Eunice.”

“I don’t think she cares.”

“Of course she cares. She’s heartbroken. They were going to get married.”

“She says.”

“Well, they hadn’t bought the ring yet.” She turned her eyes toward him and then away. Her eyes were always such a surprise. “But they’d looked at them.”

“He would have told me.”

“Maybe he thought it was private.”

“Maybe she thought she’d caught him.”

“I don’t know why you hate her. She’s nice.”

“For a buck,” said Frank.

Hildy stared at him. “I know you’re putting that on. I know you don’t mean that.”

He took her hand and squeezed it, then said, “But I do.”

“Oh, Frankie darling. You don’t mean half the things you say. You’re a softie in the middle.”

He raised an eyebrow. Just then, some of Hildy’s friends headed their way. He knew they thought he was a little scary but interesting, an A student, mysterious. Not one of them knew that his father was a farmer from Denby, forty miles away. He thought that was the funny part.

LILLIAN AND JANE HAD a fight. In eight and a half years of school, they had never had a fight, so Lillian was floored, not only at Jane for saying, “You think Phil is a goof; well, he’s not, and I’m tired of you being such a snob!” but also at herself for saying, “Open your eyes, Jane, he is a goof!” And he was, but goofy guys were everywhere, and what did Lillian care if one of them had attached himself to Jane? The top of his head came up to Jane’s nose, and he was always laughing, ha-huh-ha-huh, and if he ever had a handkerchief, Lillian would be thunderstruck. Still, he was nice enough, she didn’t dislike him, and he was in three of her classes. But Jane stood by the flagpole outside of the school when all the kids were waiting for the hack and shouted at her, “Stop being such a snob! Stop being such a snob!” And when Jane burst into tears, Lillian actually looked around to see who she was yelling at, and she saw the other kids looking at her.

The next day was the worst day of her life. It started at breakfast, when she had Claire on her lap, and Claire gagged up some sausage and it landed on her white blouse, which she had pressed the night before; then she argued with Mama about whether you could still see the spot, and flounced up to her room to change, but there was nothing that went with that skirt, so she had to put on an outfit she had already worn that week. While she was dressing, she saw the hack pass outside the window, and so she had to run to catch it, all the way past Minnie and Lois’s house, so she was out of breath and her hair was a mess by the time she was sitting in her seat. Lillian knew that she was a perfectionist, and that that was a bad thing, but sitting there, and then after she got down and went into school, she could not stop thinking about the wrong things — her outfit and her hair, and her feeling that she was already late to everything for the rest of the day. One look at Jane, in math class, sitting with Betty Halladay, told her that Jane was still furious with her; both she and Betty stared at Lillian for a long time before turning their gaze away.

It did seem as though no one at all spoke to her all morning, and then, when her geography test came back, she saw that she had missed almost every state capital — eight right and forty wrong — not merely an F. When she looked more closely, she saw that she had misread the pattern of the answers, and filled in the wrong circles — if she had been paying attention, she would have gotten three wrong and forty-five right (and who knew anything about Olympia, Salem, and Carson City, anyway?). She had even gotten the capital of Iowa wrong — she had marked it as Topeka. The paper had “See me” written along the top. For lunch, there was liver. She hated liver, and it didn’t help that everyone seemed to hate liver, and two of the boys in her class started throwing all the liver on the floor of the cafeteria, until some teachers ran over and gave everyone detention.

After lunch, she was so hungry that she fainted in English class and fell out of her desk chair, and so she ended up being walked to the nurse’s office by Mary Ann Hunsaker, who held her elbow in a tight grip “in case you fall down.” The nurse took her temperature, which was normal, and felt her head, and told her that if she felt sick again she should put her head between her knees, which Lillian could not imagine doing in front of the other kids. And still Jane did not look at her or talk to her in their last class of the day, which was Latin, irregular verbs. When she got on the hack to go home, she saw Jane and Betty across the lawn in front of the high school. They were right next to one another, their heads bowed, and they were laughing. The hack was cold, too — they drove straight into a bitter wind all the way home.

Mama was not happy when she got home. Claire had been fussy all day, and Joey, who had been moving the last of the oat hay around in the hayloft, had fallen through the trapdoor and twisted his ankle (“Or worse than that!” said Mama). He was sitting in the front room with his leg propped on a pillow, and every time Mama walked through the room, she said, “Well, we just pray to the Lord that it isn’t broken. My land! It’s always something on a farm! What in the world do city people do with their time, is what I want to know!”

It was the worst day of her life not because anything terrible happened, like Uncle Rolf hanging himself, but because her whole life seemed to be falling apart in her hands, and she didn’t know what in the world was left. She could not imagine what she could do to reconstruct all the things she enjoyed, and she could hardly remember what it was that she had enjoyed. It was only a year since she and Minnie had gotten the other children to use the end of winter to sew and read. That cozy time was turning into her favorite memory. But she could only remember that it was good, not how it felt.

ELOISE ALWAYS WONDERED if Julius and she would have been so surprised at the German invasion of Russia if they had been living somewhere east of Chicago. Sometimes, the entire atmosphere between London and Chicago occurred in her mind like a huge layer of cotton wool, muffling every single communication from the east, and sometimes it occurred like an echo chamber — whatever was being said, you did not know who was saying it or where it was coming from. At one point, Julius suggested that they keep their eye on the Canadians — whatever the Party decided to do up there, they would do that, too. After Trotsky was killed, Julius declared that that was it, he’d had enough, he would never, never raise a finger to help Stalin, the revolution had veered so far off the tracks that world communism was unsavable. For four weeks, they stayed home from meetings, had no contact with any friends. The ones in the Party were not to be trusted, and the two or three like them, who sympathized with Trotsky, were dangerous to associate with — who knew what revenge Stalin was plotting, even in Chicago? But what were you supposed to do with yourself when you saw no one? So they crept back, one friend at a time. But they never, never mentioned Stalin or Russia or the Soviet Union’s alliance with the Nazis.