Authors: Jane Smiley
Golden Age (68 page)
—
THE BARGAIN THEY MADE
was that Ezra could plan the wedding, and Felicity would plan the honeymoon, and each set of plans would be secret from the other person. Felicity thought that it would be very difficult for Ezra to plan the wedding around a rally or a march, but if she gave him the honeymoon, he would have a field day, and, as usual (in her experience), she was right. He put off and put off, and then, when they went to Britt and Leo’s place for Halloween, there was the Officiant, and there were her parents, looking spent but better than they had in the summer. Britt and Mona were wearing matching outfits, Leo and Jack were in suits, and Ezra had bought her a dress—beige, not white—and it fit perfectly of course, and looked good. Ezra was nothing if not precise. Emily and Jonah were there, too. Jonah was doing graduate work at Cornell, in Chinese, and if he wasn’t going to work for the NSA, Felicity would be dumbfounded; but at the moment, he was writing his dissertation on the violent end of the Ming Dynasty. Emily had with her a present from Tina, who had become a potter “as a retirement gesture.” It was a beautiful six-quart
stoneware casserole that looked as though a peacock feather had been draped over it. Chance had been unable to come, but he had sent along his and hers cowboy shirts made of old feed sacks, which Ezra’s mom liked so much she said she would sell them in her shop. She had knitted Ezra a black vest and Felicity a white lace shawl. Felicity could tell she had been planning their marriage maybe longer than she and Ezra had, because the shawl and the vest were intricate and time-consuming. Felicity loved Ezra’s mom—in Roxbury, you did not have to hide your hippie origins or feel any embarrassment about all your friends who still lived in Woodstock. Ezra’s dad brought the Lamoreaux Landing Finger Lakes sparkling wine, a case.
She hugged her mom for about five minutes, she was so happy to see them, happy they looked okay, happy that Ezra had talked them into it, happy that her mom and Ezra kissed as if they really liked each other. But the fact was, everyone in the family liked Ezra; they thought she was lucky to get him. She did, too. Uncle Richie couldn’t come—he was in the hospital for an emergency cardiac procedure. All through the wedding, everyone tried not to be worried about him, tried to talk about Guthrie instead, what a sweet young man he had been, but at least six people, including Leo, said, “He just hasn’t been the same since Uncle Michael got killed.” When, before the ceremony, they said a prayer for Guthrie, they included Uncle Richie. As a rule, Felicity stared straight at the wall when anyone said prayers, but because it was for Guthrie, and her mom was standing next to her, holding her hand, she bowed her head this time. And so it was a big wedding, and so Ezra had pulled it off, and so the onus was now on Felicity to make something of the honeymoon.
Ezra had never been west of State College, and he had only gone there when Wolf was inaugurated as governor in ’15, to protest fracking. A honeymoon in late November was always a risk, especially since Ezra did not like sports but didn’t like any other sort of leisure, either. There had been no snow, however, so Felicity decided that a road trip, first to Chicago to visit her parents and Aunt Claire and sample the wares at the city market, and then on to…Well, that would be the surprise. Ezra might think that she was setting up an inspection of the Illinois coal mines and oil fields that he would like to blow up, or perhaps the old nuclear-waste site on the Missouri side of the river down by St. Louis, which had become such a scandal.
There was really nowhere safe to go on a honeymoon anymore—not Florida, or even the Caribbean, since the hurricane season had gotten so wild. This was, perhaps, a bad omen for a marriage. Nevertheless, Felicity hadn’t been to the farm in four years. They would drink a bottle of real champagne in their room at the Days Inn in Ames, and that would remind them of who they were.
Felicity did the driving. Eleven hours through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Ezra staring out the window and noting roses blooming here, jonquils blooming there. As they drove, Ezra checked his phone for coordinates, and kept a list of what he saw. Only two years ago, monster snowfall, and now this.
Aunt Claire’s house was an oasis of beauty and order, her dad still seemed mournfully relaxed, and her mom was beginning to resemble her old Guthrie self. She took Felicity and Ezra to the city market—tables of products from Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, even Michigan. Organic pulled-pork sandwiches, and on your ticket was the name of the hog you were eating (in Ezra’s case, “Dennis”). Tomatoes that were fresh off the vine in the last week. Baby asparagus. One of the sellers said, “Yes, the weather is crazy, but as long as we are deploring it, we have to take advantage, and produce as much as we can, for the compost, and also for the dryer. We are on our own now.” She was from Racine. Ezra took down her name. Felicity bought five skeins of lamb’s wool, undyed, cream, gray, and dark gray. That night, she was almost happy when she lay in bed, in spite of what she knew was coming.
They left at 7:00 a.m., with six of Aunt Claire’s scones in a bag and a small jar of pear jelly. They were through Cedar Rapids and on the Lincoln Highway before noon, and Ezra said, “You are taking me to the farm.”
“Just for the afternoon,” said Felicity.
The weather remained sinisterly sunny. It was strange to crack her window so late in the year because the interior of the car was so warm, strange to see…Well, she kept her eye on the road.
The farm was entirely flattened. You could loop around it, as you had always been able to do, but if you didn’t know the numbers and names of the roads, you wouldn’t know where you were. The houses were gone, the barn was gone, the butternut trees were gone, the little hill was gone, the old creek bed was gone. Some kind of machinery
had been used to plane the surface of the land so that it was as flat as a table, and slightly raised, and over it the owners had spread acres and acres of black plastic sheeting, no doubt to preserve the moisture. Between the rows of sheeting, there were long, deep ditches with slanting sides, fake creeks that stored the rainwater and, Ezra thought, let it seep, by means of some sort of capillary system, into the adjacent “soil.” On the southwest corner of the farm, where the old house had once been, there was now a double-wide trailer. After Felicity and Ezra had been standing beside their car for a few minutes, its door opened, and a man stepped out onto the tiny porch. He was holding a Bushmaster. Ezra waved, and they got back into the car and drove around to the other side, where he wouldn’t be able to see them. Felicity wasn’t exactly afraid of guns, and the man hadn’t lifted his, but she was happy to drive away. She said, “One more thing.”
Ezra said, “Measuring the depth of the soil.”
“Exactly,” said Felicity. They pulled over where maybe the hill had been, the hill her dad had never wanted to plant, just west of that, where the soil had been deepest and most fertile from years of manure. She didn’t have a tool, so she used the spoon they had used for the pear jelly. She dug. She came to subsoil.
“Two inches,” said Ezra.
“It was twelve or fourteen a hundred and fifty years ago,” said Felicity.
“And it’s very fine, like sand or dust. I guess that’s the reason they cover it with plastic.”
Felicity rubbed a bit between her fingers. It was gray, just grit.
Ezra said, “You know, it took the Mesopotamians thousands of years to destroy their soil base.”
They got back into the car and drove to Ames. That night, Felicity did not feel like drinking champagne.
—
WHEN ANDY WOKE UP
, she thought it was the new year, but the clock on her phone read “11:55.” Her eyes opened wide; she was not sleepy, and she was looking out the window of her room. Maybe the moon had awakened her, so bright that it pierced her eyelids. The surprising thing was the quiet weight in bed with her—behind her, causing the mattress to dip. She knew who it was, and so she didn’t
roll over. Out the window, the moon had moved upward; the light it cast was a shimmering film—over her golden yard and the glittering hill beyond, into the darkness of the trees, so that they looked bejeweled, across the sky, so that it was a deep cerulean. There was no wind. The fox that was crossing her yard paused, waved its tail, turned its head. They exchanged a glance, and what came into her mind was “Now. Right now.” Then it happened again—she saw her world through the eyes of the fox. It was more monochrome, but also more distinct—it was as if she could see every blade of dry grass, note the ones that were quivering with life. A squirrel on a branch, a rat under the porch, the earth undulating in every direction, the sky far above. She did remember that fox in Iowa: same fox? A different fox? And now she knew that that fox had come to get her, and that she had sent him away because she’d had more lessons to learn. This time, she would not send him away. The weight in the bed shifted. A warmth lifted off him. She closed her eyes. He took her into him, Frank.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Barbara Grossman for plenty of support and advice. I would like to thank the members of the U.S. Congress for being so easy to satirize, and I would like to thank my own personal perfectionist, Robin Desser, for her patience.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J
ANE
S
MILEY
is the author of numerous novels, including
A Thousand Acres
, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and most recently,
Some Luck
and
Early Warning
, the first volumes of The Last Hundred Years trilogy. She is also the author of five works of nonfiction and a series of books for young adults. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has also received the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. She lives in northern California.
What’s next on
your reading list?
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.