There Is No Long Distance Now Read online

Would Sarah tell her dad? He said Granny wasn’t supposed to have any alcohol with her medicine, but how much fun was Granny having these days and what did it matter? If she died on a Tuesday instead of a Friday, I mean really?

  Sarah stepped back into the living room. “That sounded delightful,” she said. “What’s Uncle Randy up to?”

  “Well, you just won’t believe it,” Granny said. “He is the smartest boy. I mean, a little nutty, but so smart. When he heard about my last panic attack, he decided to start telling me the stories he remembers your grandpa and me telling him when he was little, and tonight he told about the raccoon who lives in a cavernous tree and irons for the other animals. Lovely! I know your dad thinks he’s shirked his family responsibilities by living so far north, but he’s been my hero all these years.”

  Easter Bonnet

  It was so stupid, really. And it was promoted—by history, culture, groceries, storybooks. The really important stories were buried—what happened to the Indians, for example. And the stupid stories stuck around for generations: a rabbit carrying eggs. Where did he get them, by the way? And where did he live the rest of the time? No convenient North Pole for this guy. Children searching for eggs in damp grass. Eggs packed with quarters and candy.

  Sylvia grew up mad at the Easter bunny. She never got a wicker basket piled with plastics and sugars and trans fats like everyone else did.

  She never got a pink necklace with little bunny hearts dangling down from it. The bunny shunned her. Her mother wouldn’t follow the script.

  “This has nothing to do with Jesus Christ as far as I can see. Can you picture it? Jesus Christ carrying an Easter basket?”

  Well, who cared? Theo, the boy down the street, whose parents were Southern Baptists, got an Easter basket. Jamie, the adorable redheaded kid at the corner, got an Easter basket. Margaret and her many brothers and sisters, all Catholics, got Easter baskets. Sylvia’s mother went to the Church of the Everlasting Arms on the south side of town under the freeway. Sylvia had been dragged there for years, especially since her father ran away to Mexico with the lettuce lady. The minister talked more about blood than eggs. He never talked about rabbits.

  One Easter Sunday, Sylvia took notes in church and the minister asked to see her afterward. He wanted to know what she had written on the program. She refused to show him. His sermon had been all about rising up, from the grave, from the cave, from the darkness of despair, from the ashes. Sylvia had written in the margin: Well, they didn’t burn Jesus, did they?

  The minister seemed suspicious. Sylvia said, “I like to think about things later.”

  In the car on the way home, passing the men who sold tiny palm trees out of trucks and taco cafes packed with cars for special Easter taco breakfasts, Sylvia’s mom said, “What did he want with you? Reverend Ruiz? I saw him talking to you?”

  “He liked my haircut,” Sylvia said.

  For the first time in a while, her mom brought up the lettuce lady.

  “Sometimes I think about how your father made fun of her, but it was just a cover-up.”

  The lettuce lady grew lettuce in her front yard, not her back. The whole little plot furrowed with rows; dark green, light frilly lettuce, arugula, spinach, many tones and sizes of layered leaves. Her house needed painting and her porch chairs had weathered to rust, but her lettuce, abundant. And she was always giving it to everybody. She wore a halter top featuring impressive tanned cleavage. Sylvia’s unspoken questions would remain—was her dad really that mesmerized by big boobs? And, wasn’t the lady sad about her carefully tended garden withering after she left?

  When Sylvia’s father ran away with her, in fact, the refrigerator at their own house was packed with about six bags of aging lettuce in various degrees of withering—Sylvia’s mom said too much salad gave her diarrhea so she didn’t use it all up and Sylvia was, well, a kid. The first thing she made when she got hungry wasn’t a salad. Try peanut butter and jelly. Try cheese.

  Sylvia’s mother was so disgusted with the whole scenario she threw each sack of lettuce down the toilet. Not in the trash. Bad call. Their plumbing backed up and they had to get Joey to come fix it and he charged them eighty dollars to unplug everything, so it was what Sylvia’s grand-father, who also didn’t like lettuce, called “insult upon injury.” That was another thing Sylvia wrote down.

  “Everything is a cover-up,” Sylvia said now, on Easter, once again frustrated because she would get nothing pretty, nothing shiny, nothing sweet. “Life is a cover-up.”

  Her mother looked at her. Her mother drove with both hands on the steering wheel, like an idiot.

  “Don’t you talk like that, Missy Prettycakes.”

  But Sylvia continued. She wasn’t afraid of her mother.

  “Life is a cover-up for deadness. Jesus is a cover-up for people who want to sin and get away with it by saying sorry later. Easter is a cover-up for gluttony. All holidays are cover-ups for boringness.” She could really roll.

  “I’m disappointed in you,” her mother said. “When you go away to college you’ll remember these days, how rude you were to me. I think you’ll be sorry.”

  Her mother pulled in at the John/Juan taco stand. “Let’s celebrate,” she said unexpectedly.

  “What?”

  Her mother said, “Today I am turning a corner. I am saying good riddance to your father. I am grateful to the lettuce lady.”

  “What?”

  They stepped into the café.

  A bowl of chocolate eggs wrapped in foil sat on the counter by the cash register.

  A weathered old man wearing a cowboy hat motioned to the bowl. He was the greeter. “Take, take!” he said, as they stood there for a moment. “Happy Easter!” He picked up two skinny menus and pointed to guide them to their table. Sylvia dug her hand into the bowl (no one seemed to be looking her way) and grabbed at least eight eggs. She popped them into the pocket of her jacket. If she didn’t forget about them when she got home, she could make her own little basket. She could add the perfect tiny blue egg that had fallen from a nest high in the pecan tree the other day. And the necklace of colorful beads her father had left her with his pitiful good-bye note. She refused to wear it but liked how it looked. And an old Monopoly piece someone had lost in the street—the tiny silver shoe. She could make her own basket every day of her life.

  Enough

  When you saw a headline like that, “CIVILIANS KILLED IN INTENSIVE FIGHT FOR CITY,” and did not know from those words alone how many there were, what city, what country, what they were doing at the time they were killed, how could you just wash your face and go off to school? Pretending the world was in balance? That the bell ringing in the science hallway was a real bell?

  Was it their fault those civilians lived in a place where so much fighting was going on?

  Civilians stacked chipped plates on a wooden shelf in the cupboard. They swept their front stone stoops with tattered brooms of ten thick straw hairs. They folded their dusty comforters. Coins jingled in a teapot with a hole. Civilians would have had more possessions if they could have, as anyone would—a better bucket, a donkey, a blue glass pitcher for juice, when there was juice, which was not often.

  And now they were dead.

  How could you see your friends at school and slap hands and say, “Hey man, doin’ great. . . .”

  Ali slipped gingerly into his desk in first period Government. Was studying government more important than ever or completely irrelevant?

  What could your teacher say?

  What about the window there? Shining. Why did your window deserve to shine?

  The talkative girl Susan leaned across the aisle to Ali and said, “Did you take notes on that petro-political stuff yesterday and could I possibly see them after class?” She was always asking him things. Sometimes strange things, like, Is it true you don’t date?

  He wished he had unfolded the newspaper so he had more details—where were these civilians?—but he had only brought the paper inside, placing it
tenderly on the table where his parents would find it after work.

  They went out through the garage every morning when they left, traveling almost forty-five minutes to the university where they taught, so he was the one, stepping through the front door to catch the school bus down the block thirty minutes later, who brought in the paper.

  They had their rituals. He placed his father’s soft slippers back together as a pair and left them at his father’s side of the bed. He returned his mom’s bathrobe to its hook and draped the sash over it. In the evenings when he came home from debate club or chess club or the public library, where he did most of his studying, his parents would have dinner ready, rice fresh in the pot. They ate together, usually chatting somewhat formally about their days, other times in silence. If the news had been really bad near Islamabad, if more “fighters” had died in Peshawar, they were silent.

  Ali had never been to Afghanistan or Iraq, but his father had been to both places, long ago, when he was a student, before this recent round of warfare had disrupted the region so thoroughly and sent battles spilling over into their own part of mountainous Pakistan. The place they all missed so much. Where his cousins were trying to study.

  Ali’s teacher often stared at him, as if he could tell there were thoughts swirling in turmoil inside Ali’s brain. His teacher wore a concerned expression that seemed to say, “I wish you could explain this to us.”

  But Ali could not. War was not his interest. Studying and living seemed captivating to him, but weapons and strict ideologies which led people to fight other people left him cold.

  Today their class had a substitute. Which was a good thing. Because Ali did not want to see the deep pools of his kind teacher’s eyes and fall into them. He didn’t know how to swim.

  “The worst thing,” his chemist father always said, “is infighting among citizens. They should practice local diplomacy. Get together at town meetings, work out their differences. Local pride should require presenting a better face to the world.

  “To have the United States strangely present in the region is one bad thing. To have the British Parliament speaking about us as if we are merely a land of rebels and thugs is deeply painful. But to have our own people, our brother Pakistanis, bombing hotels, killing children in schools, cannot be fathomed. It is quite obvious violence is contagious as pig flu or any kind of virus.”

  His father’s doctor had suggested an antidepressant.

  His father said there was only one reasonable next phase for the wars—Get out. Get out of there, U.S. military. Take your heartless drones and go. It was not your place to be.

  Not one of the grandmothers, uncles, teachers, bread sellers, shepherds had ever hurt you.

  These people had no such power or interest. These people, now dead, were interested in where a greener patch of grass grew, so their goats or sheep would be happy.

  Now no one was happy.

  The children of the American soldiers, missing their parents, weren’t happy.

  The children of the British soldiers, celebrating birthdays without their dads singing to them, weren’t happy.

  The Pakistani kids, now dead, weren’t a bit happy.

  The immigrant kids worldwide, like Ali, weren’t happy at all. They were confused.

  Ali sometimes wished he had no imagination. It seemed a terrible, depraved thing to wish. But how was imagination helping him? He could imagine those civilians too clearly. Their voices, the salty smells of their lean, brown bodies after days in the fields, the clip-clop of an old man’s cane against paving stones. The elegant way a checkered scarf was knotted and tied. Ali had read only yesterday that military handbooks of the United States said, “Empathy will become a weapon.”

  “Would you like some more?” his mother asked. The newspaper, today, lay unread on the far end of the table beyond the condiments.

  “Thank you,” said Ali softly. “I think I’ve had enough.”

  Weatherman

  Jacob felt excited to enter the airport, even if the drive-thru and façade were so messed up by construction it looked like a disaster zone.

  He mouthed the names of airlines—Continental, American—feeling proud, relieved. It had been a terrible summer so far. Get me out of here. He pulled his suitcase on its little black wheels.

  When his Aunt Fanny on Martha’s Vineyard had phoned his mom two weeks ago and said, “Why don’t you send Jacob up here for ten days, he can help me on my computer and clean out a few closets and we’ll have a great time”—he jumped on it. They even found a good cheap ticket on the internet.

  Even though Aunt Fanny lived quite a distance from everything except a giant meadow, some woods, and a pond, and the closest business to her house was a general store selling lollipops and taffy, it would be nice to feel cool sea air and be away from everyone who wasn’t calling him.

  Not one person had asked him to do anything all summer.

  He couldn’t mention this to his mother. She’d only say, But have you asked them? What would you like to do, Jacob?

  He didn’t know. He’d been sitting at his desk. He’d cleaned out his drawers. He’d been on Facebook. He’d sorted through his clothes and given half of them away. He should have gone to Tanzania with Matthew to build a water tank. Even studying Japanese at the junior college would have been preferable to the summer he’d had. He was sick of thinking about being a high school senior, all the work ahead of him, applying to colleges, making decisions. He should have gotten a job. Yes, he should have applied for that lovely job he saw at Target, pushing the giant snaking line of shopping carts across the 105-degree pavement. Then at least he would have had a suntan and some cash in his pocket.

  Gate 35 flashed Houston, Boston, Houston, Boston.

  He would take a bus straight from Boston’s Logan Airport to Woods Hole, then a ferry to Vineyard Haven on the island. He liked how his trip sounded more and more like the journey of a leprechaun as it went along. Maybe by Woods Hole he’d be wearing a pointed red felt cap.

  Aunt Fanny would meet him in her rattling green jeep.

  She was the eccentric of the family, the thrice-married landscape painter with Plymouth Rock chickens wandering around her back steps and her own son teaching high school in Rabat, Morocco. Maybe Jacob could visit him next.

  He’d brought along a book to read on the plane—Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun, about the Arab-American man in New Orleans who stayed behind during the hurricane to watch his properties and help people and animals, and ended up being thrown into prison.

  He sipped some Starbucks, sitting at his airplane gate, and floated on a page of text. “What are you reading?” a shockingly familiar voice spoke right into his ear. It was so familiar Jacob almost couldn’t turn his head to learn where it came from. Terrifying, actually.

  He lifted his gaze to his English teacher from last year—Mrs. Dunlap—smiling at him conspiratorially.

  “I’m glad to see you reading, at least.”

  God! She was so condescending. All year she’d acted as if his opinions were little wads of trash. No respect at all. She’d given him a C on his paper about the American transcendentalists—possibly the best paper he’d ever write in his life. It deserved A+ at least. If not ++. What was she doing here?

  She sniffed. “I’m very happy to be headed to Cambridge to visit my grandchildren for a week. We’re going to play, play, play!”

  Cambridge! That meant Boston. Horrible. He stared like a zombie at the boarding pass in her hand and saw 16A. He was 16B. You’ve got to be kidding.

  Jacob had never had an easy time with teachers who treated him poorly. He couldn’t forgive them. His mom always said he could make a stronger effort, ask for conversation after class, end up being friends. But it was hard. By the time they hit William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, whom he hated and loved, in that order, by the time she insulted his selection of William Burroughs as a parallel text for Faulkner (“You can’t just pick people who are named William and expect there to be any conne
ction”), by the time Tim O’Brien actually came to their school to talk about The Things They Carried and behaved so generously toward the students, as if they had brains and hearts, which was a major contrast to her attitude, Jacob’s mood had hardened toward Mrs. Dunlap forever.

  This seating arrangement was a slap in the face.

  “Are you off to visit the Boston-area campuses?”

  Lump in his throat. “No, I’ve taken a brief job on Martha’s Vineyard.”

  “Doing?”

  “Cleaning closets.”

  “Truly?”

  “For the arts community.”

  “Seriously, Jacob?”

  “Their closets are very dirty.”

  He wanted a seat change. But the flight agent had announced the flight was full—no cash or vouchers offered for anyone to stay behind. He would have taken twelve cents and waited all day not to have to sit next to Mrs. Dunlap for four hours.

  She sniffed again. “I think you have a lot of potential, Jacob. More than you realize.”

  Sure, sure. She could go to hell.

  They boarded the plane without speaking further. He had only one choice. When the flight took off, he’d go to sleep and sleep the whole way.

  He pressed the button for his seat to recline the first moment he could. The air felt bumpy and unsettled. He stared out the window. Froth of cumulus, swallow me. He spoke to the clouds. Layers of subtle movement. They comforted him, just being there—they were so speechless, as he often was, and especially now, trapped in a silver tube with a woman who thought she knew him.

  She unfolded her New York Times. “Jacob, do you have any thoughts about what you might do with your life?”

  His pitiful, B-, uninspired life.

  His chest felt tight.

  He had never even thought of this before, but it came out of his mouth.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m going to be a weatherman.”

  Feeding Nightmares