Buckeye

by Patrick Ryan

“We’re each meant for a special thing,” the boy said, and when Cal asked what his special thing was, the boy shrugged and said the two of them would have to wait to find out.

At a town hall meeting for Homefront Safety, the head of the Chamber of Commerce had proposed a search of every home to ensure no one was harboring any persons of German or Japanese descent. That was voted down (since, one of the librarians observed, nearly half the town was of German descent), but the plan for a public smashing of all products made in Japan went forward.

But if God could zap an unusual ability into Becky Jenkins, why couldn’t He zap the life out of the war? Or keep it from starting? How many people out there were praying right now for their suffering to stop, and it wasn’t stopping? Mysterious ways—that bigger-than-life, worthless, blanket explanation people ascribed to God. The ongoing promise that all would be revealed on the other side. Forgive her (if she needed to be forgiven), but she was beginning to think a grand explanation wasn’t coming.

“You have to love him, and you have to let him love you back. But you don’t have to care about every dumb thing he says, because I can guarantee you, tomorrow he’s going to say something dumber.”

When you give Cal a hug, squeeze extra tight. That’s what I do with your father. He says I only know how to give bear hugs, and I want to say, ‘That’s because I’m trying to squeeze the stupid out of you, honey!’ ” She waved that away. “It doesn’t work, but you’ll feel better.”

Not all of her neighbors had children, but they were all ready to ask her when she was going to start having her own. Put just that way, as if she were holding in a litter as she went about her day.

Dishevelment on him was just another kind of handsome. He always seemed glad to see her, even if she was just coming back into a room she’d stepped out of minutes ago. He held her hand when they walked downtown.

There’s no future in it, he told himself each time he slept with a man. Back to the directives. Be a good person, a good worker. Be a man. He resumed dating, as he had in college. His attraction to women wasn’t what it should have been, he knew, but he still managed to go on some perfectly nice dates.

Every day was a series of tests, accompanied by a litany of directives: be a good person, a good worker, a good husband. Don’t slouch, don’t shirk, don’t stray from the intention.

She’d lost a sense of him. She’d been eighteen when they’d met, had been married for five years when he left, and had been living without him for two and a half.

All that remained, then, were the pleasantries, uttered with the shared knowledge that whatever words they came up with were intended to close and seal a vault; after that, there would be nothing more to say. But having nothing more to say didn’t change their circumstances.

Ida would make them what she called “a gourmet snack,” where she took two plates down from the cabinet and on each put one of most everything in the kitchen that could be considered snackable, such as a Hydrox cookie, a Vienna sausage, an olive, a pickle, a pineapple ring, and a saltine—that was high living to them.

The things that we love tell us what we are.

“But you’re telling me I was the thing you thought would fix you, and it didn’t work. So you just carried on, trying other things? I was step one in your experiment? This is my life, Felix. This is all I have.”

Therein, she thought, lies the unbearable solitude of a lie: you’re alone when you tell it, alone when you live it, alone when you try to dismantle it.

What was it like to visit your husband’s grave and each time see your own waiting for you, and that unfinished sentence? Would you feel like you were holding things up?

“He could be likable,” Cal said. “That should be his epitaph.”

The whole reason you build a bridge together is so the water can run under it, right? And not wash the two of you away? Sometimes one of you makes it flood, and then the water recedes.

Forgiveness wasn’t so great if you were the forgiver, Becky discovered. Forgiveness was supposed to be the high road, but it was low and bumpy—and long.

Forgiveness, the way her mother had described it, wasn’t something that shot up out of the soil; it had to creep in over time, like a vine.

“A person can get whiplash just walking through life. They love your allegro but loathe your troppo. They invite you to lunch, then shit in your soup. Know what I mean?”

Part of what had appealed to her about Columbus, when she was eighteen, was its vastness—all there was to see and do, and the chance to be a part of it. What appealed now was its vast anonymity, its ability to cloak people in its density, so that you could live your life without answering too many questions or encountering too many expectations. Right up to your last moments, if you wanted, so that the most lasting impression you left on your neighbors was that they’d known nothing about you.

“Capitalism only works if people are out there selling what they don’t own.”

If you believed in God but didn’t go to church, and only prayed on an as-needed basis, you lived with your fingers crossed that your life was stacking up to make some sort of sense, and that it was preparing you for what was to come. But that meant you were depending on a map you were drawing as you went along. When he read, heard, and watched the news, he wondered how many people were out there doing the same thing he was—scratching their heads as they tried to figure out how to prioritize their worries and confront their prejudices; drawing their own maps with their fingers crossed.

Nothing is quite as maddening as being angry at people who lovingly understand your anger.

The world will always bring you back into perspective, if you only bother to let it.

What is it about time that confounds us? We spend it. We save it. We while it away. We waste it. We kill it. We complain about not having enough of it, or about having too much of it on our hands. We regret what we’ve done with it. We give it away. We want it back. We say “time and again” when something is bothering us and “it’s time” when something is supposed to end.

The wisdom that comes with age was needling, he found, because it brought the clarity of hindsight without the means to change anything.

Wasn’t it a fair measure of a person, what they did with their mistakes? How they managed to stumble into some of the right steps, after taking all the wrong ones?

This is why old people seem distant and distracted, he thought. We aren’t living in the past; the past is living in us. And it’s talking. We get old to be able to recalibrate everything we thought was going to be important. We get old just to hear it. It says, the days, the days, the days.