Authors: Tim O'Brien
I
magine any object, any person, any human event. Ponder the word
substance
.
As an example I might pluck some random snapshot from memory. A backyard, let us say. Midcentury Minnesota, the summer of 1952, and I am watching my father perform sleight-of-hand for Lorna Sue and Herbie and me. I see him now as he was then, athletic and graceful, utterly adult, standing near the birdbath in that silvery backyard. Sunlight surrounds him. He sparkles with the ferocity of here and now. Proud, but also a little nervous, I watch as my father shakes out a cigarette—a Lucky Strike—lights it with a match, slides it into the opening of his right ear, blinks at the pain, then smiles at me and retrieves the cigarette from his mouth.
All this is like concrete. It has a dense, solid, ongoing durability. Granted, my father died in 1957, of heart failure, yet he has substance even without substance. He lives in the chemistry of thought, an inhabitant of the mind, his flesh reconstituted into those organic compounds we so lamely call memory. I do not mean
this in a figurative sense; I mean it literally: my father has substance. Hit a switch in my head, fire up the chemistry, and there he is again, in the backyard, wincing as he inserts a Lucky Strike into his right ear. Herbie’s mouth drops open. Lorna Sue squeals with delight. And I am there too, seven years old, snagged in Lorna Sue’s brown eyes, her black hair and summer skin—I loved her even then, obsessively. It is indelible. I see the white birdbath before me, the bubbles-appearing at Herbie’s lips as he demands that my father do the trick once more. “Come on!” he screams.
He jiggles.
He grabs my father’s arm.
“Jeez, come on!” he yells. “Stick it in
my
ear!”
A painful admission, but it’s true: Back then, in 1952, I loved Herbie with the same volatile, high-octane passion that now fuels my hatred. Same for Lorna Sue.
It’s been hard since she left me. Late at night I’ll jot down things to say to her in the event she calls someday. The word
reptile
is on my list. And
lizard
. And
crocodile
.
I cannot choose from among the three.
Lizard
has the virtue of specificity,
crocodile
even more so, but in the end
reptile
probably makes the strongest claim, most inclusive, most primitive and wicked and dangerous and cold-blooded.
Substance:
the word gnaws at me.
Late at night, tormented, I find myself sliding up and down the scales of history, first here, next there, and eventually I return to a hot, windy beach outside Tampa, where not so long ago I lay feigning sleep while Lorna Sue chatted up her greasy new friend, a Tampa tycoon.
I was present. I heard it all. I smelled his Coppertone, seethed at his rancid pleasantries.
In the days afterward, almost without pause, Lorna Sue devoted our vacation to a slow, compendious recitation of the man’s virtues. (With each glowing item, by way of silent contrast, she was also devaluing and denigrating me.) The cocksucker was witty, she
claimed. Generous. Thoughtful. At peace with himself. A good listener. Self-assured. Comfortable inside his own skin. Polite. Smart. A man of substance.
At this—finally—I balked.
We were flying home, I recall, and Lorna Sue had sighed and levered back her seat. “Most people with money,” she was telling me, “they’re not really comfortable inside their own skins, they’re not at peace with themselves, but he’s … well, obviously he’s a man of substance, but he still seems—”
“Who?” I said.
Lorna Sue blinked. “Well, you know.” (She then intoned the man’s name.) “He’s got—”
“Let me guess,” I said. “I’ll bet he’s got substance dripping out his nostrils.”
It was shortly thereafter that Lorna Sue suggested I see a counselor. I was paranoid, she claimed. I was irrational.
“First Herbie,” she said, “and now you’re jealous of—” (Again, painfully, she uttered the tycoon’s patently ridiculous name.) “I’m serious, Tom, you need help. It’s like you won’t … like I can’t have anybody else in my life. No friends. Not even a
brother
.”
I shrugged and closed my eyes.
Her allegations were without substance.
Tampa: it breaks my heart.
I stare at my airline ticket stubs and feel a great chill in my chest, a frozen sensation. I cannot catch my breath. For you, perhaps, the place might be Boston, or San Francisco, or Fiji, but in any case it strikes me that words, too, have genuine substance—mass and weight and specific gravity. I carry Tampa with me all day long, and to bed each night, and I fear my spirit has been warped by the burden. I dream in turquoise.
An interesting wrinkle. One hot afternoon, while staking out Herbie’s new house in Tampa, I happened across a spicy little item
in the local newspaper. A Catholic church in the vicinity—Our Lady of Assumption—had burned to the ground three days before my arrival. No surprise: arson. The possibilities for vengeance did not escape me. Immediately, still seated in my rental car, I began composing an anonymous letter to the Tampa police force, alerting them to Herbie’s presence in their sunny city, providing key data regarding similar events in the small prairie town of Owago, Minnesota.
Can I be faulted for giggling as I posted my incriminating epistle that night?
(I cannot be.)
Even if by some curious fluke he was completely innocent—in fact, especially so—Herbie would soon be feeling precisely what I had felt on the day he invaded my marriage and my life. He would learn, as I had, the full meaning of such phrases as “circumstantial evidence” and “presumed guilt.” Late at night he would wake up screaming the word
assumption
.
A few weeks after returning from my third solo trip to Tampa, revitalized by my successes there, I had occasion to revisit the backyard of my childhood. Easter break, spectacular weather. My students had packed up their Levi’s and bad grammar, I packed my Wittgenstein and a pair of suits.
At a gas station near campus, as I took on fuel, a trio of young coeds sped by in a blood-red Camaro, giggling and honking at me, lifting their stubby middle fingers in salutation. I returned the greeting. (My students, it appears, consider me an odd duck. And why is this? Because I can spell
cat
without drooling? Because I refuse to fucking split my infinitives?)
Believe me, I am no duck. I am a man. I sail along with furled feathers, an ardent, lovable, hurting human being. A victim, in fact, of my own humanity. Remember: Herbie destroyed me. Lorna Sue sleeps with her tycoon in Tampa.
Enough—why bother?
Easter break, school dismissed, and I drove south through farm
country, past pigs and soybeans, past a huge billboard indicating my arrival in the Valley of the Jolly Green Giant. (Fee-fi, ho-hum.) Two hours later, in early afternoon, I approached the outskirts of my pitiful history, a forlorn little prairie town tucked up against the Minnesota-Iowa border. Owago: Pop. 9,977. Off to my left, as I made the final turn onto Highway 16,1 took notice of the very cornfield in which Lorna Sue and I had once bared ourselves to the elements of autumn. Such zeal, such ardor. “It hurts!” she had cried, and who could blame her? A layer of frost had accumulated that night on the hood of my father’s Pontiac.
Now she lives in Tampa. Quack-quack.
Tired and hungry, battered by the road, I found humble lodging at the Shady Lane Motel, just off Main Street. (No shade, no lane. The professor in me shivers at such vacuity of language.) Enthroned in my room, I showered, rested, corrected papers, raged, wept, plotted, napped. Near dusk I returned to my car and executed a slow reconnaissance up Main Street. Why exactly was I here? In part, no doubt, out of desperation. And because the trail of human misery inevitably leads homeward. And, it goes without saying, for revenge: I yearned to cause hurt where the hurt would hurt most—at the roots.
And so I cruised—tooled, as my freshmen say—up and down Main Street. The town had changed little since my departure thirty-odd years earlier, still bleak, still threadbare. In modern dictionaries, under the word
boring
, you will find a small pen-and-ink illustration of Owago, Minnesota. Flat, bald, windy, isolated, desolate. (How impotent the adjective.) Proudly, a bit ridiculously, the town promoted itself as the Rock Cornish Hen Capital of the World, a grip on fame at once tenuous and pathetic. Firstly, the hen business had fallen on hard times; the graph spiraled downward. Secondly, it struck me as sad that a community’s grandest annual celebration boiled down to an event called Rock Cornish Hen Day. (In September of each year a banner is hoisted to the top of the water tower; ministers prepare sermons; housewives bake pies. At midday, a few hardy farmers truck their hens into town, dump them in front of the courthouse, then herd them up Main Street in a great clucking
parade. The citizens of Owago watch from sidewalks. Then they go home.)
Odd duck?
Me
?
With these and related memories, I drove past the Rock Cornish Café, Wilson’s Standard Oil station, the courthouse, the First National Bank, the Ben Franklin store. Day had passed into dark by the time I parked in front of the tiny stucco house of my youth. There were no signs of animation from within. No lights, no sounds. The place seemed impossibly small, as if shrunken by the tumble of time, and for a moment I considered pointing the car back toward Minneapolis.
Instead, impulsively, I locked my vehicle and strode into the backyard. The birdbath was still there, and my mother’s rhododendrons, yet again I felt a curious compressive force at work. My whole life suddenly seemed puny and pitiful. My dreams had shriveled. My spirit too. (I had wanted to be a cowboy, for God’s sake, but here I was, a peddler of the English language.) I was struck, also, by the thought that Lorna Sue had represented my one true chance at happiness—my life raft, my lovely bobbing buoy—and now even that gallant vessel had gone to the bottom under the winds of marital treachery.
It made me want to cry.
And I did.
I lay beside the birdbath and made fists and blubbered at the moon.
Imagine my embarrassment, therefore, when only minutes later I was interrupted by a shrill, off-key, distinctly displeased female voice. I blinked away my grief. Above me, haloed by moonlight, loomed a tall, very shapely member of the wholly opposite sex. Stunning specimen, I thought, although at the moment she held a garden spade to my head.
“Trespasser!” she cried. “Don’t budge. Not one muscle.”
My position, of course, was awkward. (Supine. Teary face. Spade at my skull.) To my advantage, thank goodness, I was dressed in respectable garb, a blue wool suit and a silk tie, and with this modest consolation I sat up and introduced myself.
“Thomas H. Chippering,” I said merrily. “Professor of linguistics.”
My captor was not enthused. “Professor?” she muttered. “In somebody’s backyard? On private property? Bawling like a three-year-old?” She poked at me with the spade. “What
is
this anyway?”
“Apologies,” I said.
“Sick man.”
“Of spirit,” I admitted. “May I stand?”
“Not yet.”
The woman appraised me with a blend of fear and curiosity, perhaps slightly shaded toward the latter, and I therefore seized the opportunity to outline my circumstances: that the world had recently dealt me a number of knockout blows, among them faithlessness and divorce. I explained, too, that I had spent my early youth in this very backyard, a child of Owago. “Granted, it may seem peculiar,” I said, “but if we could only … Seriously, may I stand?”
She shook her head. “You could’ve knocked. Asked permission.”
“Absolutely.”
“And you were … Listen, you were
crying
.”
“Right. That too.”
The woman hesitated then withdrew her spade a fraction. “Divorce, you said?”
“Eight months ago Thursday. Crushed. Heartbroken.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “So it’s like an anniversary sort of? That’s why you’re here crying in my backyard?”
“More or less. Seeking answers.”
“Well, God. I should call the police.”
“You should not,” said I. “You should offer me a drink.”
The woman relaxed her grip on the spade. Here came the moment of decision, plainly, and as a signal of good faith I smiled and displayed my huge, pale, innocent hands. (With due modesty, yet truthfully, I must point out that I am not an unattractive man—tall and craggy in the mode of certain stage actors. Virile as Secretariat.
A war hero.) No surprise, therefore, that a surrendering twitch came to the corners of my captor’s pliant, full-lipped, well-moistened mouth.
“Water,” she grunted. “One glass. Then you’re out of here.”
Home sweet home.
Inside, escorted by this handsome female prototype (who had by now introduced herself to me as one Mrs. Robert Kooshof), I stood in the long-lost kitchen of my youth: same gas stove, same breakfast nook, same pink Formica cabinets. Briefly, I had to stave off another wave of tears, and it was fortunate that Mrs. Kooshof chose that moment to place a plastic tumbler on the kitchen table. “Water,” she said. “Drink up.”
I smiled gratefully, helped myself to a chair. I sensed a turn of mood, a new warmth. (The whole kitchen, for that matter, was positively fragrant with innuendo. Standard stimulus-response. I have grown used to it.)
“And your husband?” I inquired. “Mr. Robert Kooshof. He would be returning when?”
There was a little shift in her eyes. “Five to seven years. Tax fraud. I’ve been thinking about divorce myself.”
“I see.”
“You
don’t
see.”
“Very true, but I was only—”
“And don’t condescend,” she said. “You’re not exactly a welcome guest on the premises.”
“No,” I murmured. “Nor inexactly.”
Mrs. Kooshof shot me a look. “Right
there
. That’s condescension.”
And so once again I found myself apologizing, a form of discourse that has never fallen within the perimeter of my special genius. (Arrogant, I am falsely called. Supercilious.) Cautiously, over a second glass of tap water, I did my best to make peace with my bewitching host, outlining the sequence of events that had carried me
back to this squalid piece of the prairie. Betrayal, I said. Marital treason. Once or twice Mrs. Kooshof came close to nodding—a definite thaw in progress—and it occurred to me again that I was in the presence of a truly unique representative of the malleable gender. (Mid-thirties. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Busty as Nepal. One hundred fifty well-muscled pounds.)