Where the Kissing Never Stops (7 page)

“I took Valium once,” I said. “Right after my dad died. I couldn’t seem to get to sleep, so my mom started giving me some of hers.”

“I know; me too.” She let go of my wrist so that she could use her hands to cover her face for an instant.

“C’mon,” I said. “Let’s talk about something else.”

She nodded bravely. “Are you hungry?”

“No,” I lied.

“Me neither. Let’s sit a minute.”

“Don’t you want to buy something?”

“No.” She looked surprised. “Do you?”

“You mean you just come out here…”

She finished for me. “To be here? Sure.”

Below us was a sea of hats, bald spots, and hair. We leaned over the railing, our elbows touching.

“People don’t look kind of dead to you?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“And you don’t feel claustrophobic?”

She pointed up. “Skylights.”

“Well, it all just makes me want to get my hands dirty.”

“You know,” she said thoughtfully, “when I finally saw Disneyland a few years ago, I was really disappointed. I mean, I’ve walked up perfect streets all my life. What did Sleeping Beauty’s castle mean to me compared to Lord & Taylor?”

Right on cue a maintenance man in pressed coveralls stopped nearby to pick up a gum wrapper.

“Can you wait,” she said abruptly, “while I go to the bathroom?”

I watched her walk away, wondering, frankly, what her legs looked like under those enormous pants. It was almost summer and she was completely covered up. I had better undress her soon; once winter came it would take hours just to get all her clothes off.

A lot of kids were with their parents, and I couldn’t help but think about being here with my dad. He was shopping for the running shoes that would carry him into the path of that Pontiac. I couldn’t look at some kid with his dad’s arm around his shoulders without feeling lonely and a little weird. Not that my dad had put his arm around my shoulders that day. Or any day, actually. He wasn’t touchy-feely like my mom. But we’d walked side by side and talked about the mall and about how it’d been built on land that he had once worked on, driving a tractor for some old farmer and getting paid two dollars an hour.

Thinking about that made me so hungry I got a stomach cramp. I stood up and stretched, trying to concentrate on something else so that Rachel didn’t find me doubled up on the spotless tiles alternately weeping and calling for a double cheeseburger.

Right below me four or five employees, dressed in jeans, straw hats, and checkered shirts, were handing out free pieces of sausage. They had straw in their socks and cuffs, like scarecrows. From the store right behind them came square-dance music, but the Muzak was oozing either Mozart or Three Dog Night. I began to feel strange again.

Turning, I spotted Rachel talking to a salesgirl. They wore the exact same outfit, and in the store window stood their catatonic sister. That didn’t help my emotional state either.

“The Garden of Gardner,” Rachel said, slipping in beside me, “is going to have three thousand bathrooms if I have anything to say about it.”

“Can we go?”

“Are you okay?”

“Sure,” I said, like all real men when they’re only shot through the brain. “I just have to get the car home, and I want to get to the other side of town first, and…”

“Yeah, me too. I told my dad I’d eat with him tonight for sure.”

We drove slowly along the frontage road, trying to make sense of the map that lawyer had given my mother. Everything was rich and green, all the farmland in every direction, even the ditches and the sides of the road had things coming up with all their might.

Then we came to a big section with hardly anything growing at all. I checked the map. Sure enough.

Rachel and I climbed out and surveyed the place.

“Gee,” I said. “This looks awful.”

She eyed it shrewdly. “You’ve got access; that’s what counts.”

“Access to what?”

“Your place borders the highway. It’s like riverfront property; it’s the best, that’s all.”

“But why is it so sad-looking? If this was a person I’d just inherited, I’d buy him a new suit and a hot meal.”

Just then someone across the way wearing overalls and an honest-to-God straw hat cut the engine on his tractor, climbed down, stepped over the broken-down barbed wire that separated our two fields, and began to slowly make his way toward us.

Rachel eyed the uneven ground. “Do you think he needs help or something?”

“Probably, but I’ll bet he wouldn’t take it.”

“Name’s Kramer,” he said, taking off his hat for Rachel’s sake.

We introduced ourselves, and I explained what we were doing out there. Then I asked what had happened to my land.

“Mostly it got leased to some chuckleheaded bastards who read the stock market page once and if soybeans was up, they planted soybeans first thing in the morning. Then they planted them next time and the time after that, too. Pretty soon the ground gets tired, like if somebody came along every night for a week and took a pint or so of your blood, you’d get tired, too. Probably your daddy didn’t know what was going on, but maybe that ain’t much of an excuse, either.”

I pointed. “What are you growing over there?”

“Nothing. It’s called green manure. You just let it grow, then plow it back under. You have to put back what you took out — that’s all there is to it. It’s just good business.”

“You mean all that green stuff isn’t anything?” Rachel asked.

“No, it’s oats. I only meant it wasn’t no crop to harvest and sell.”

“So what goes in there next year that you can harvest and sell?”

“Not a blessed thing. By the time next year comes that land might be miles of asphalt and women with fat ankles and nothing to do all day but go into stores and say, ‘My, but ain’t the air-conditioning nice.’”

“So what are you going to do?” I asked.

“Sell. Probably can’t afford not to.”

“Did they offer you a lot of money for your land?”

“Not a thing yet. But they will, sooner or later. Everybody knows this is where the new mall’s going to go. Don’t you worry about the price, either. They’ve got to come to you; you’ve got access. You’re sittin’ in the catbird seat, son.”

I said that I didn’t know why, exactly, but I felt bad about my property and in a funny way I wished there was something I could do.

Kramer pounced right on me. “There is,” he said, “unless you’re just moving your lips to hear yourself talk. I’ve got more seed than I can ever use and it won’t be much use once they get serious about building out here. So I’ll give it to you.”

“What seed?” But he wasn’t about to slow down.

“You can use that little Farmall Cub of mine, too, if you’ll just pay for the gas, and that goes for just about anything else I’ve got that you might need, including an old Oliver Sixty with a seven-foot double disc if you get to feeling high and mighty.”

He was pretty fired up, and Rachel took a step closer to me.

“What would I need all that for?”

“To plant yourself some oats, that’s what. Make this place look like something.”

“Oats?” I said.

“Like Quaker oats?” asked Rachel, and I pictured the round package with the happy fat man on the front.

“The very same. It wouldn’t take long, neither.”

“Planting wouldn’t?”

“Plowing, planting, cultivating. Hell, it’s only forty acres. I used to do ten times that with two field hands and a horse-drawn plow.”

I waved my hands helplessly. “I don’t know how to drive a tractor.”

“Can you drive a car?”

I pointed to my mom’s Saturn.

“Stick shift?”

“My dad taught me on a stick shift.”

“Then you just wait right here and I’ll bring her around.”

“Listen, it’s late. Maybe we should…”

But he was already on his way.

Mr. Kramer motioned for me to climb into the Farmall’s palm-shaped seat, which seemed to hang between the two huge rear wheels. He pointed to everything, and touched what he could reach.

“Now, this here’s the clutch and the brake. Throttle’s up here and that’s the gearshift. Happy landings.”

Sitting there on the throbbing machine, I wiped both hands on my doily-colored pants and read the gear pattern on the knob. I looked at Mr. Kramer and mimed, “What now?”

His hand described a big circle and he came closer to shout, “Just get the feel of her.”

Swallowing hard, I wrestled it into first, held the throttle like I was strangling a viper, and eased the clutch out.

The tractor jumped about a foot and died.

“Well, that wasn’t so hard,” I said in the sudden silence. “Am I done plowing?”

“Crank her up and try again.”

Another foot.

“Better call your dad, Rachel. At this rate we won’t get home till Christmas.”

His thumb depressed an invisible starter, so I put mine on the real one and, lo and behold, actually got moving. Mr. Kramer bisected the circle to shout, “Little less throttle and let your clutch out all the way.”

I went all the way around a couple of times, then made a figure eight or two. It was fun. The steering wheel seemed to connect directly with the wide front end. When I turned the black plastic an inch or two, I was pointed in another direction. It made my mom’s car seem like a big, soft toy.

“It’ll feel different dragging a plow, but you’ll adjust.”

“When do we get started?”

“Why don’t you meet me at my place about five-thirty.”

“Gee, my mom’s got to have the car by five-thirty.”

“
A.M.
, son. That’s in the morning.”

“I’d give a lot to be like him,” Rachel said, waving one last time at the disappearing tractor.

“Like Mr. Kramer? Why?”

“Do you know what you want to do when you grow up?”

I shook my head. “Not really.”

“See? But every day Mr. Kramer gets up, feeds the cows, does some chores — it sounds like heaven.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to, though; maybe he has to.”

“Then how about Sully? Hasn’t he known what he’s wanted to do ever since he was a little kid?”

“More or less. His father…”

“Traveling is fun, but a person just can’t travel all her life and put down
traveler
on her income-tax form where it asks for occupation. I still change my mind every day. I want to be a psychologist sometimes — can you imagine that? And then I want to go to New York and work.”

“Doing what?”

“I don’t know; that’s the trouble. And then I start thinking about all the poor people in the world and I want to do something.”

“Like give them all checking accounts.”

She leaned toward me. “I don’t understand why I’m young and rich and they’re poor and starving. Do you ever feel apologetic? I want to apologize to people sometimes. I want to say, ‘I’m sorry I’m the way I am and you’re the way you are, but it’s not my fault. It just happened.’” She sat back dispiritedly. “I’d really like to do something, though, to help people or to make the world a better place.”

“People like the places your dad builds; does that count?”

“Oh, I guess. But it’s not like I do anything but spend about a zillion dollars a year buying clothes so I can look like everybody else.”

“Well, there’s no shops here — not yet, anyway. So let’s take a little walk before the escalators go in.”

We rocked on the uneven earth, laughing and bouncing off one another. Halfway across I stopped and murmured, “My land.”

“What?” She was breathing a little hard.

“I said, ‘My land.’” Then I made my voice as low as possible and tried it again. “My land.” I turned to Rachel. “It really is kind of a magical phrase. I say it and get goose bumps.”

She sang the first line of an old folk song: “This land is your land, this land is my land…” Her voice was sweet and airy.

“This earth is mine,” I said firmly. “You varmints get off my land.”

“Land ho,” she ventured.

“Give me land, lots of land under starry skies above.”

“The fat of the land.”

“Easy now. Don’t get personal.”

“You’re not fat. You just have big bones.”

“Big bones covered with fat.”

“I’m a little hippy,” she said softly.

“Well, then this relationship is doomed, because I’m a big Republican.”

She laughed politely and patted herself on the bottom.

“That’s why I like these new fashions. They cover me up.”

“You look fine to me.”

“How can you tell? I’m always bundled up like an only child with a cold.”

I thought it was great of her to tell me those things and not sound destructive. I was self-critical beyond belief. For example, I wanted a different nose, a thinner one, so I’d squeeze the one I had until it was sore and generally give it a hard time. But when Rachel talked, she sounded like her own best friend: realistic, maybe, but not mean. Me, I was my own worst enemy.

We sat down under an enormous oak, a few yards into Mr. Kramer’s property but facing mine. I felt like Adam looking out the front door of Eden: here it was rich and sweet and moist. There it was strictly sweat-of-thy-brow.

Rachel settled back against the trunk. “It was really nice of your father to leave you this place,” she said.

“Yeah, but stuff’s been coming up about him lately that I can’t believe.”