American Elsewhere

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX




Listen:

Down the street from Mrs. Benjamin’s house are Mr. and Mrs. Elm, who live in a very nice bungalow with an impeccably groomed garden of irises. Their grass is trim; their gutters are clean of leaves; and their drapes are of a subtle off-white that works wonderfully with the robin’s-egg blue of the window trim. But the indisputable pride and joy of the Elm household is hidden from the street, and hardly ever seen: for in their garage, almost concealed by a leaning stack of oil cans and dented old Dagmar bumpers, is a lime-green 1966 Cadillac Eldorado.

It looks exactly as it did when it was driven off the lot, and this is solely due to the tireless efforts of Mr. Elm. At this moment he lies on the garage floor under the car, drizzled in oil and grease, working away on the beast’s marvelous undercarriage. Mrs. Elm stands at the garage door, smiling and holding a pitcher of lemonade.

The lemonade is quite watered down, for the ice has all melted. This is because Mrs. Elm has been standing at the garage door, smiling as she watches her husband work, for four straight days.

“It’s a beautiful car, Harry,” she says.

Harry does not answer. He is busy. He is always busy on the car. Sometimes he is busy only for a few hours—eight or nine at most. But sometimes it gets bad, and he needs to be busy, really quite very busy, and on those occasions he works underneath the car for so long his body develops bedsores and bruises and pooling blood, and when he emerges (or attempts to emerge) his joints are so atrophied and stiff they sound like machine guns going off, and it takes him the better part of an hour just to stand up.

And she waits on him. Of course she does. She is his wife, and this is what a wife does. She waits on her husband, helps him, serves him. She knows this. She’s seen it. She knows what she must be.

Mr. Elm eats nothing during these sessions: the only thing he consumes is can after can of warm Schlitz beer, which he drinks, every time, in one long, foamy draught. He does not move to urinate: his pants and shirt and entire back become soaked with cold urine, which he lies in for so long his crotch and back turn a raw, brilliant red.

There is a mound of empty beer cans just beside the car. Mrs. Elm knows she should go to the store to get more, but this is such a busy time that she can’t get out of the house. She must be there to attend to her husband. So she stands in the doorway, smiling, proffering ignored lemonade, listening to her husband pound and twist and tinker with the guts of the Eldorado.

“It’s a beautiful car, Harry,” she says.

It is a beautiful car. It is a remarkably beautiful car. But at times Mrs. Elm feels a little troubled: she is fairly certain that sometimes—not all the time, but sometimes—they should drive it somewhere.

But they have never driven the Eldorado. It has never been out of the garage. This is because the car is undrivable.

Under the hood or in the undercarriage of the car, soldered or hammered or screwed or even taped into place, are:

A rotary phone.

Most of a ceiling fan’s motor.

Six curling irons.

Two waffle irons.

Thirteen hundred and seventy-four iron nails.

One television tube.

Nine feet of garden hose.

Two neon lights.

Two feet and seven inches of PVC pipe.

The majority of a lawn mower blade.

The door of an ancient microwave.

A combined thirty-eight feet of electrical tape.

One pint of roofing tar.

The tracks of a sliding glass door.

And, last but not least, one Scrabble piece. (An S.)

What you would not find underneath the hood of the Eldorado is anything resembling a functioning engine, transmission, radiator, alternator, air filter, or even battery. Mrs. Elm knows her husband needs to work on the car—a car like this requires maintenance, and the husband is the person who does that—but though she would never say it out loud, she secretly believes Mr. Elm does not know what he is maintaining, nor how to maintain it.

“It’s a beautiful car, Harry,” says Mrs. Elm.

And it is. She loves it. She loves the car. How could she not? It is beautiful.

But sometimes she gets tired of standing there and waiting on her husband and their car. Her kneecaps begin to itch, right around the tops where they connect to her muscles, and the itch just grows and grows until it’s an outright burn, like her patellae are floating in little pools of lava. Her bra, which is a brutal, industrial contraption, begins to eat into her skin, leaving a dense tangle of red welts over her back and shoulders. But this does not compare to her feet, which are pressed into three-inch, red patent-leather heels. Once, not that long ago, she glanced down to see that the color appeared to be leaking off the shoes, pooling on the tile floor and running down the grout lines like a curiously crimson irrigation network. It was blood, of course: she had stood there until her feet bled. The blood has hardened to become a flaky grid of brown, but she knows that since this fix-it session is so bad it’s likely she will bleed again, probably soon.

An image, always still, always melting. Oh, what a pain it is to wear these bodies.

Why is the work never done? Why must we work so hard to maintain these trappings that only harm us?

But these are bad thoughts, she knows. Because they are living a good life. They just need to work a little harder to make sure everything is all right. And they have a beautiful car.

Such a beautiful car.


Listen, there is more:

Mr. Trimley is old and alone, but he has his diversions. Specifically, his model trains, which occupy nearly every waking moment of his life and most of the eighteen hundred square feet of his adobe home. His trains are his hobby, he tells himself, just a hobby, yet sometimes he wonders if it is all right for a hobby to grow so extensive that he throws out his bed, stove, tables, chairs, all in the cause of allowing more room for his many trains.

No, he thinks. That’s silly. He is an old man, and old men are allowed their eccentricities.

One day, Mr. Trimley thinks, he might have enough trains. But he is not sure when—for there is always an anxious, gnawing hunger inside him, telling him that this is all not quite right, and he needs to adjust things just a little more…

It often takes a lot of adjustment. He has somewhere in the range of 950 model trains, all running on electrical tracks from four to four hundred feet long… and perhaps longer. Mr. Trimley knows that it is a good thing to be a man, just a simple old man living in his simple house, but he does not feel it is wrong to help things a little, all in the name of his trains, of course. After all, if he can alter things to make his trains more impressive, then he should, correct?

Yes. Of course. And Mr. Trimley can alter quite a bit.

Some of his trains, when they enter a little plastic tunnel or trundle under a miniature wooden bridge, take a very, very long time to come out on the other side. The most extreme example is the Northern Line, which comes back to his house only every three days or so, usually at around nine in the morning. And when it returns, the Northern Line is frequently bedecked with snow, and reeking of sulfur.

Mr. Trimley has laid a lot of track for his trains. It’s just that some of the tracks go places outside his home, or to places invisible to the naked eye. But that’s just a detail, really—after all, this is just his quaint hobby. Isn’t it?


Listen:

The Dawes children are merry children, playing fun games in their big sandbox in the backyard. It is just slightly unusual that they come out and play at odd hours—often well after midnight—and that, in their happier moments, they sometimes have the tendency to levitate.

But the neighbors do not mind. No, they do not mind. They are not allowed to mind.

Listen:

No one goes in or out of the Crayes house—you can only tell it is the Crayes house by the name on the mailbox out front. But during certain nights, often around nine o’clock, you can hear Big Band music blaring through the windows, and if you watch the drapes (and you would never do such a thing) you would see the form of someone very, very small dancing a curiously stiff dance…

Listen:

Mrs. Huwell tends to her garden every morning and every night. What she plants there, no one is entirely sure: no one ever sees anything grow, or ever sees a single blade or stem poke up through the soil. Yet on windy nights, if the neighbors listen closely, they can hear leaves rustling in the wind, as if on the other side of the fence is a lush, dense jungle of a garden, though there is nothing to be seen; and in spring, when it is cool and wet, sometimes a soft green glow filters through the fence boards…

Listen:

Mrs. Greer throws a garden party once a year, and she invites the same list of guests every time. This party lasts only forty minutes: the guests will walk down the sidewalk in single file, enter without saying a word at ten p.m. sharp, and walk straight to her backyard. There they will stand in rows, staring up at the night sky in silence. Mrs. Greer (who is a widow, sadly, but really no one can ever remember her having a husband) will stand on the side of the porch and tend to her grill, where she will cook upward of forty hamburgers. When they are ready (she cooks all her hamburgers to well, well done), Mrs. Greer will arrange them on paper plates, and the guests will come by and pick them up, and hold the plates in one hand throughout the night. They will not eat them: at the end of the night, they will throw them away.

At ten thirty p.m., on this specific evening, the skies will clear and all the guests will have a view of a dark corner of the night sky, and at this time the corner of the sky will be very, very clear to them.

They will stare at this corner of the sky, and will not move.

If you were to be nearby at that moment, and if you listened, you would hear a noise like hundreds of crickets cheeping softly in the same rhythm; and there would be a somewhat sad, desperate note to their cheeping, as if the crickets were mourning something, remembering something incredible they’d one possessed, but had lost. If you could name it you would say it was a sound of aching, overwhelming nostalgia, a terrible desire to return to a place you are never even sure you’ve ever visited.

Then the song will end, the sky will cloud up once more, and the guests will turn to one another, each with one hand raised with its fingers extended, and they will touch one another’s fingertips, index finger to index finger and thumb to thumb. As they touch, they will stare into one another’s eyes as if swearing to some silent oath; then they will nod, turn to the next person, raise their hands, and do it once more.

At ten forty p.m., all of Mrs. Greer’s guests will line up in single file once more, thread out the door, and return to their homes.

And as always, Mrs. Greer will sit down in front of the grill. The flames will bathe her face; her hair will grow brittle and withered in the heat; her skin, deprived of moisture, will tighten as if it is the skin on a drum.

She will stare at the fire, and she will think—This is a good life. A very good life. But what is missing? What do we lack? Why do I not feel whole?


But listen, just once more:

At this very moment, not far from the Elms, Margaret Baugh is standing in her backyard. And unlike many of her neighbors in Wink, Margaret is not from Elsewhere; she is a native, born and raised here, as human as human can be.

She stands in her backyard, and she weeps.

She is not sure why she is weeping. Tonight she will have one of the few joys she can get these days. But still, she weeps.

She supposes that part of the problem might be her dinner: that night she tried to cook something a little less conventional than normal: salmorejo, a Spanish tomato soup she found in a recipe book. But her husband Dale Baugh is frequently quite vocal about having meat with his meals: this is an American house, is it not, so should he be denied beef with his dinner? So Margaret stressed to good old Dale that he could have ham in this soup if he wished, as it was traditionally made with ham, and that was all right, wasn’t it? And so Dale went to the refrigerator, took out an entire packet of ham lunch meat, chopped it up into huge, silver dollar–sized chunks, and dumped it into his bowl. Then he took out a whole sleeve of crackers, just the whole sleeve, crumbled them up, threw them in, and mixed it up until the soup had turned into a pink-whitish paste with thick chunks of cold pork at the bottom.

And, looking her in the eye the whole time, he ate it. He choked down that thick pink slop, silently recriminating her for forcing him to eat such a thing.

For some reason that hurt Margaret more than anything else Dale has done recently. It reached into her and crushed some fragile part of her. Could she not at least end the day well? Was that so much to ask?

It probably was. Things have not been very good with Dale in a long while. Perhaps since they got married: Dale was not exactly a catch, but at the time he was kind enough, and he owned a mechanic’s shop, and Margaret, who had always been very bad at talking to men, was happy to receive the attention and the security his favor offered.

She wishes now she had thought about that more. About that choice, and about herself. She wishes she’d realized why she was so bad at talking to men, and why she preferred the company of her few close girlfriends; she wishes she’d realized that, throughout her friendships with other women, she was often trying to peripherally approach some silent, forbidden subject, hoping to tempt both herself and her friend into a revelation so illicit she could not even admit to herself she was doing so. It was not until her wedding night, with all the awkward, sweaty fumblings, some of which were pleasant but quite a few of which just hurt, that she realized what she’d done, and regretted it and hated herself for it.

In Wink, boys like girls and girls like boys, and no one ever, ever gets divorced. That was part of the rules. When They first came, all those arrangements were made: We offer you a good life, a wholesome life, and all you must do is live it. And to so many in Wink the life They offered seemed good, and wholesome, and safe, and they agreed. And perhaps some of them are happy.

But here Margaret is, weeping in the backyard. Yet unlike some in Wink, she knows exactly what is missing. She will get a little taste of it tonight, enough to keep her going for a while.

A light goes on in the top room of the house next door. Margaret stops weeping, and looks. The light goes out, then comes back on again. Then it goes out.

Her heart trembles at the signal. She sniffs and wipes her tears away. Then she stands on her tiptoes, looks around over her fence for any watchers (But would I even see them if they were there?), and walks to the fence that runs between her house and the house next door.

She stands beside the fence—exactly in front of one fence board with a large hole in it—and she waits.

She has been waiting for this moment all month.

She hears the back door of the house next door open and close. Feet crunch through the grass. The person comes to stand just on the opposite side of the fence from Margaret, and Margaret longs to look through the cracks, but she cannot bring herself to.

A woman’s finger extends through a hole. It is not an unusual finger: it is longish, with dark red nail polish, and it has a few freckles on the last knuckle. But new tears spring to Margaret’s eyes at the very sight of it, like she is a pilgrim finally reaching her shrine.

Her hands quake, but she manages to extend her own finger and curl it around the one poking through the fence. The finger curls as well, embracing Margaret’s, and the two squeeze each other tight, so tight it hurts.

She is so, so lucky that she happens to live next to Helena. And she is so lucky that she happened to look up one fall evening nearly two years ago when she was raking leaves, and see the wife of her next-door neighbor watching her with a strange, distant look in her eye: a look of longing, of quiet grief, and of awe. It took her a moment to understand this look.

Helena, her next-door neighbor of nine years, thought she was beautiful. It was likely she’d thought Margaret was beautiful for a long time.

Margaret turned away and pretended she had seen nothing. But she kept that moment close to her heart, as if that one look were a burning ember that could keep her warm no matter what happened.

They pursued their relationship without ever admitting they were doing so. They spoke in glances, in nods, in tiny, insignificant gestures invisible to the rest of the community: a certain audaciousness in Christmas decorations, a sudden predilection for listening to Bach on the radio outside at night, and, most importantly, a tendency to go to their fence one night once a month, poke a finger through the fence, and revel in one brief, glorious minute of touch, genuine touch. They do not dare more. They have not even spoken to one another, not honestly: to do so would be to risk the punishment that awaits anyone who breaks one of the rules in Wink. And everyone, especially natives like Helena and Margaret, is bound to them; and while no one knows what the punishment for breaking the rules is, everyone knows they don’t want to find out.

After their minute is done, they release one another. It is like coming down off a thundering, blinding high, like trying to regain your legs after a moment of paralyzing sexual ecstasy: they must return to this muddy world they briefly circled above, like albatrosses dancing on the breeze, and soil themselves for one more month, one more agonizing month.

They smooth down their skirts and return to their homes. Margaret sits down on the couch beside Dale, who is watching Bye Bye Birdie for the fortieth time. But as Margaret watches Dick Van Dyke dance around, begging Janet Leigh to put on a happy face, something within her starts to crumple.

She begins to weep again. She is not sure why. She got her moment, didn’t she? Shouldn’t that be enough?

Dale coughs and asks if she thought to buy bourbon this week, and did she buy that expensive stuff again, because he really can’t taste the difference between the expensive stuff and the normal stuff, so she bought the normal stuff, right? Didn’t she? Didn’t she?

Margaret says, “Yes.” And she stands and goes to the pantry to fetch it.