Jane Smiley - Some Luck

THE RETURN ON their Rubino investment had been nineteen thousand dollars, plus the original six. In a single year, old Uncle Jens had rolled over in his grave twelve times, but that was not what Frank was thinking of when he looked at Andy and Janet and said, “Yup. So if we buy me an MG TD with a little of the payoff, what can we buy you?” Jim Upjohn had an MG TD — left-hand drive, very exotic, and not something Frank wanted — but there was nothing that he really wanted.

“Oooh.” She glanced at him, and Janet, and then surveyed their small kitchen. By rights, she should say, “A house.” But she said, “I saw a navy shantung skirt with its own petticoat that was nine yards around the hem the other day. I even sat Janny in the corner of the dressing room and tried it on with the contrasting jacket.”

“How much was it? You should—”

She glanced around again. “I don’t think it would fit inside this duplex.” She reached for her pack of Luckies that was lying on the table. “Nutria is always nice. It can be quite blond, with lovely highlights. A nutria jacket with a nipped waist?”

“Why not the skirt and the house to wear it in? Those Levittown houses are twenty-five feet by thirty-two feet now.”

“Oh, Frank!” Andy laughed. “But I’m not ready for a house yet. Just a very large skirt is fine.”

It turned out, though, that what they bought was a television, so that Andy could watch the news. Dinner would be on the table when he got home — tonight it was minute steaks and mashed potatoes, some salad, and some red cabbage, which Andy was fond of. They ate quietly, and Andy was pleased because Janet actually took a bit of the cabbage. Andy said, “It’s sweet underneath. Bitter is the first flavor you taste, but if you take your time, it’s nice. She understands that, don’t you, lille elskling ?”

“We should try her on some schnitzel.”

“We should try us on some schnitzel. I love that. I keep forgetting to find a recipe.”

They moved into the living room, Frank carrying Janet and Andy carrying the last of her lemonade and her Luckies, for her after-dinner smoke. And then the news came on. Frank settled Janny in his lap and picked up a magazine. Andy’s preferred news show was John Cameron Swayze’s Camel News Caravan . Swayze had a circus-barker delivery style that made Frank laugh, so he didn’t mind it, though he found the “news” always to be a few days behind things, if you were keeping your eyes and ears open. The news show was only fifteen minutes long. Frank was about a page into the article he was reading, and Janet was sitting quietly, when Andy started yelling at the TV.

Setting Andy off, he had once thought, was nearly impossible. Was there anyone as agreeable and accepting as Andy? They had never had an argument, and Frank liked it that way — Mama, not slow to tell Papa what to do, had given Frank a distaste for domestic noise. So maybe, startled at Andy’s tirade, he squeezed Janet a little too hard, but there she was, screaming, too.

“Hey!” barked Frank, and Andy whipped around in her chair. She said, “He was right!”

“Who was right?”

“MacArthur was right! We should have gone into China right then and done in those Chinese communists, and Truman fired him, and now we’re all going to have to pay, because Stalin is going to give them the bomb!”

Frank didn’t completely disagree with this assessment — no one did — so he only said, “But that was April or something—”

“And he got away with it! I thought they would impeach him, but they chickened out, and now …”

“Now what?”

She reached for the baby — Frank paused for a moment before he handed her over, but decided it was safer in the end to do it — and took her in her arms. Janet’s crying subsided.

Frank stroked Andy’s hair. Everything was quiet for a moment. There was a Tide commercial, and the music started for You Bet Your Life . Andy turned the TV off. Janet struggled to get down, so Andy put her on the floor, and she crawled to her toy box. Andy got up and came over, sat in Frank’s lap, put her head against his shoulder. She said, “I’m sorry. I snapped. But you know what? Every day, I sit in this duplex, and all I think about is bombs.”

“You do?”

“I do.” Andy sat up. She said, “Don’t you? Every single thing we do is on the surface. Every single thing we do is just a pretense that we all aren’t going to be blown to bits by the Russians.”

“We aren’t going to be blown to bits by the Russians, Andy.”

“Yes, we are.” She said this with icy certainty.

“They don’t have a delivery system. They have a bomb or two, but—”

She scowled and said, “We don’t know what they have, but they know what we have.”

“We know what they have.”

Janet came crawling back and reached toward him. Frank gave her his hand, and she pulled herself up.

Andy did an odd thing — she picked up her skirt and ran the edge between her thumbs and forefingers, back and forth — then said, “Why did we bomb Nagasaki?”

“I don’t know,” said Frank.

“Does Arthur know?”

“He might, but he’s never mentioned working on anything to do with the Manhattan Project.” Frank knew Andy had read the John Hersey book about Hiroshima. It was on the bookshelf across the room. He avoided looking at it so that her gaze would not follow his.

“Was it showing Stalin something he needed to know?”

“I don’t know,” said Frank.

Andy put her face on his shoulder again, and after a while said, “You’ll tell me when they can blow us up, right?”

“Right.” Then he said, “Honey, maybe this is an effect of listening to the news too often. It’s just a show, like any other show.”

Andy nodded.

After Janet went down and they were reading, though, the argument resumed. Andy looked up from her issue of Vogue and said, in a surprisingly bitter tone, “Everyone in the State Department is just busy as bees making sure the commies know all about us.”

His mistake was saying, “Us?” He had picked up the morning paper, but in fact was remembering that night in Strasbourg when they discovered that the Jerries had vanished.

“Yes, us!”

He turned and looked at her. Alight with indignation, she was beautiful. He said, “I don’t think the commies care about you and me. Arthur and Lillian, maybe, but not—”

“What about Judy?”

“Judy?” He put down the paper. But of course he knew whom she meant.

“You knew her! She knows you! You work at Grumman! Don’t you think she’s keeping track of you?”

“Well, I would be flattered, but—” That was his second mistake.

She leapt off the couch. “You would be flattered!”

“Anyway, she doesn’t know who I am. She never knew who I was. She thought I was Francis Burnett from Dayton, Ohio. Baby, I’ve covered my tracks.” After making this flat joke of the thing, he reached for her hand, tried to pull her back to the couch and kiss her.

Andy said, “Did you love her?”

“No, Andy. I did not.” She stayed over by the arm of the couch.

“Did she know that?”

“Know that I didn’t love her? Yes. I saw her once a month. It was a very cool relationship.”

“Did you tell her that you loved her?”

“No.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her the usual things — that she was nice, that she was fun, that she was special, that she looked good tonight, that I liked her outfit, had she changed her hairdo, had she lost weight, had she been to the dentist, had she, I don’t know. I never said ‘I,’ I always said ‘you.’ ”