Excerpt from Cool Nation

This is the eleventh section from the fourth chapter of the novel.� All other excerpts are on the sidebar.

Lives Forming�

��������� On a Sunday afternoon in April Stephanie came home one from the Y, where she and some of her friends had gone to swim in the indoor pool, and flirt, and show off in their bikinis.� Stephanie was now thirteen, and was rapidly becoming aware of her power over boys, lifeguards, and even men.� But that power didn�t extend to my father, as she was about to learn.
����������� We were sitting down to Sunday dinner and waiting for her to come in when she finally did, wearing only a t-shirt over the bikini.� Dad asked her what she thought she was doing.� She sat down and picked up her fork and said, �Eating.�� He said, �Not dressed like that, you�re not.�� She said, �Why not?�� He said, �Because I said so.� Now go get properly dressed and don�t show your face in this room again until you are.�
����������� This was said half in humor, half in sternness.� Stephanie was his favorite.� He�d always felt badly about her dyslexia.� Also her hip had been broken in a playground accident when she was seven, and in her body cast he had nursed her, and cared for her, and watched over her every night in a way that even Mom thought spoiling.� Whenever she rode in competitions he attended every meet; when the year before she won a ribbon in dressage at the American Royal he nearly wept.� On Sundays they often rode together, he on Rex, she on Shasta, both of them going up into the hills to cover the country, and sometimes to race, but mainly for him to try and arrest time before she would too soon grow and leave him.
����������� She stared at him before getting up from the table, then rose and started out of the kitchen, stopping by the stove, where a half-filled pan of water was resting.� She looked at the pan, then at him.
����������� �Dad,� she said.
����������� �What?�
����������� �What would you do if I threw this water on you?�
����������� The shock at the table, the silence as we all turned, the hilarity as we realized she meant it.
����������� With granite-like calmness he laid down fork and knife, resting his hands to either side of his plate, and quietly said, �Why I�d get up and spank your little butt.�
����������� �If you could catch me.�
����������� �Oh I�d catch you.�
����������� She took the pan and said, �Jean, go hold open the front door.�
����������� All of us starting to laugh now, Dad not moving but staring right at her, waiting.� Then she swung the pan, the water sheeted out over him, his chair shot back, and she was gone, he right after her.
����������� Everybody was dying, even Mom.
����������� We knew where she was going, to Nicole Matson�s house a mile away, and we knew that he would chase her the entire distance, limping on his polio-weakened leg.
����������� Mom at first wouldn�t get the car out but we said she had to and finally she did, we catching up with them on Indian Boulevard, Stephanie running in her t-shirt, laughing across the great lawns, with their redbuds and forsythia just beginning to bloom, Dad ten steps behind her, winded and blowing but there.
����������� He caught her on the Matson�s porch as she was trying to get in the door, and turned her and raised his hand but never brought it down.� Then with his arm about her he walked with her back to the car, blowing and laughing.� Mom said, �For God�s sake, get in before you both catch cold.�� But she was smiling when she said it, and it was the way she said it, and the way she looked at him, that told you why she had married him all those years ago.
����������� We went home and finished dinner, Stephanie at the table with us, only dressed this time.

Excerpt from Cool Nation

This is the tenth section from the fourth chapter of the novel. All other excerpts are on the sidebar.

Lives Forming

Cary came home after the Holidays, to try again to make a start and find his place in the world. He took Jackie�s room in Jackie�s absence, living there with his open suitcase and Fantastic Four comics and bottles of Old Spice and Vitalis and Listerine. He arranged his things like he had arranged his room in St. Joe, the hair goop and after-shave intended to give him the appearance of a man, the comics betraying the boy that he was, and would always be.
In the evenings he would sit at the dinner table with us, big like Dad, with a face and eyes like Dad, but nothing like Dad. Quiet, shy, unsure of himself, he would sit there and try to join the conversation. But he didn�t seem to know how, and we didn�t know how to bring him in.
�Well,� Dad would say at last, �you�re looking good.�
Cary would gaze down at his plate, stir his peas around, and say, �Thanks.�
Silence.
�Have you thought about what you want to do?�
�Not really.� A kid�s smile, a kid�s laugh, then Cary looking up and saying, �I�d kind of like to draw comics. I mean, I think that�d be fun.� Cary had no artistic abilities, not that we knew of anyway, and it was apparent that he didn�t think he would need any.
Dad glanced at Mom, Mom at Dad, then Dad said, �Well, should we go down to the Art Institute and have a look around?�
Again a kid�s smile, a kid�s laugh, then, �Naw. I don�t think so. I wouldn�t fit in there.� And just as quickly as cartooning had come up, it went back down.
Then they�d struggle for something else to talk about.
For awhile Cary tried working at The Place, going out with one of the crews as an installer, working with fiberglass batts all day. But it was miserable work, and the crews were made up of tough, unsympathetic men who didn�t understand Cary�s problems, and didn�t want to. He was ridiculed as the boss�s kid, criticized for being a poor installer, and in general derided in ways that many other young men would have overcome, or seen as a challenge, but which he could not.
In the evenings he would sit with Dad in the living room and read the Star with him, but really not understand it, or the issues in it, or why he should read it instead of the comics he loved. Dad couldn�t understand why anyone who was twenty-two would want to read comics, and could barely tolerate Cary�s poor performance at work, let alone his still living at home. He was losing patience with his eldest son.
Tired of the asylum, tired of Cary going back there, tired of him failing to shoulder responsibility for himself and to simply live, Dad didn�t know what to do with him anymore. He knew Cary was ill, but there were times when he didn�t quite believe it, or didn�t want to, or didn�t want to believe that someone like Cary was actually descended of him�especially after all the things that Jackie had put him through. The whole, long-lived ordeal had begun to wear him out. He wanted Cary to grow up. Cary I�m sure just wanted to be left alone to live in the basement bedroom for the rest of his years.
After he quit The Place Dad told him he would have to move out. Mom said no, he wasn�t ready yet. Dad told her he would have to damned well get ready, because it wasn�t going to do him any good to keep staying at home, and to always have home to fall back on. It was time, he said, that Cary learned to fall back on himself.
In March Dad presented him with the ultimatum: it was time to become a man. I don�t think he put it quite that way, but that was the gist of it, Cary knew it, and I�m sure it scared him.
What, he likely wondered, was a man? A successful guy who smelled of Old Spice and belonged to the country club and had a wife and kids and a large house in the suburbs? Or was it a guy who was tough enough to install fiberglass year after year, saving what he could, not necessarily having a large house but having a house anyway and likely a wife and kids too�as well as a willingness to cold-cock anyone who gave him any shit? Was it the guys in the Marlboro ads? The Budweiser ads? The Van Heusen ads? And if it was them did they also have suicidal depressions? Did they have insects crawling on their arms that were never there? Voices too that were never there, but were? Was it an everyday struggle for them just to get out of bed and face the reject facing them in the mirror? What was a man?
I�m sure he didn�t know. But I�m also sure he thought that every man he met was one, that he would never be one of them, and that he had been excluded from the club. He had known he would be from the beginning. I know he did because when I was a boy I had a good look at that same exclusion, and it terrified me, and I knew I would do whatever it took to avoid that kind of exile. I didn�t necessarily want to belong to the club, I certainly didn�t want someone else�s definition of manhood, but I had to know that I could gain membership if ever I applied, even if I never would. Cary was never able to summon that kind of independence, and Dad, no matter how he tried, could never seem to teach him how to do it.
In March Cary called one of his old asylum friends, who had left the asylum and moved to Miami, hoping for a softer world in the sun. The friend said he could help Cary get a job driving a cab. Dad bought him a plane ticket, gave him five hundred bucks so he could land on his feet, and drove him to the airport. They drove there alone. Mom couldn�t bear watching him leave like that, knowing what he was facing. The rest of us didn�t really understand, and were too young and self-involved to care. We had our own everyday challenges to deal with. Cary, who was so much older than us, was an enigma; we assumed we would be able to take care of himself.
I knew, after he left, that I would be allowed to move into the basement bedroom if I chose to. It was a large room with a bathroom, a door that opened outside to the redbud tree, and windows that looked out across the backyard. It would be mine if I wanted it. I didn�t want it. It scared me, or something that seemed leftover there scared me, and I wanted nothing to do with it. Cary and Jackie were my brothers, and I loved them, but I wanted to be different from them. I didn�t want to go the way they had, and at age eight I already began formulating ways to ensure I never would.
I never asked to have the room, it was never offered, and, except for occasional visits from Jackie or Uncle Galen, it was never occupied again.

Excerpt from Cool Nation

This is the ninth section from the fourth chapter of the novel. All other excerpts are on the sidebar.

Lives Forming

On occasional Sundays at different times of the year we would drive to St. Joe to visit Cary. The drive through the Missouri hills and the little Missouri towns was cheerless�not because of the landscape, which was beautiful, but because of where we were going and what it meant. Mom�s characteristic quiet would deepen as we neared the asylum, Dad�s tough veneer soften, and we�the children�would fall silent. We knew that this was not a time to ask for favors, or to tell them that we were hungry, or to argue among ourselves. This was a time for silence, and silence only.
Then we�d get to the town and drive among its Depression-era buildings and bungalows, past the house where Bob Ford shot Jesse James, past the gloom and squalor of the bottoms, and finally up the hill through the gates of the asylum, its well kept grounds and Victorian buildings, where pajamaed inmates roamed the lawn with their orderlies and nurses.
In the main building we would wait in the high-ceilinged lobby, and listen to the distant grunts or shouts that emanated from far-away rooms, and watch as occasional drooling patients went stumbling past in the company of a nurse. If the patient were a man he might stop and stare at Stephanie with animal hunger, and if she was pissed she�d stare back, or perhaps just turn to me and whisper, �God let�s get out of here.�
Finally, after however long, Cary, with his flaccid body and pale flesh and dark-ringed eyes, would come down one of the corridors with an orderly and be turned over to us. Mom would kiss him and Dad would shake his hand and say, �Well, you�re looking good,� and Cary would smile his little kid smile and say he was feeling good, and then in a tense, bewildered group we would go out the door and across the grounds, maybe to go for a walk or on into town for lunch or for a drive to the river.
It�s not as though Cary was much like many of the others in the asylum. He didn�t grunt or drool and he was never, that I know of, stuffed into a straitjacket�although you could never be sure of what went on there in the maddening hours of night. He was coherent most of the time, and was always kind and never cruel and not without a form of intellect. Why then was he there? Only because he couldn�t make it out here. His black depressions, his hallucinations, his jumble of insecurities, his having been rejected at first by girls and then women and at last by society itself, all brought down on him a weight that, when combined with his schizophrenia, left him without a place where he could fit into our world. He simply couldn�t find anywhere to fit, just as in his own way Jackie couldn�t either.
But Jackie faked his role through bluster and bravado, where Cary faked nothing. He didn�t know how to play the role, any role; didn�t even have that basic talent that most of us fall back on each day in pretending whatever it is we pretend. And so time after time, after supposedly having gotten well, he would be released and take some dismal job and get an apartment downtown, and stock it with his comic books and TV dinners and Playboys, and try again to fit in, and sometimes it might even last a year. Then my parents would get a call from a landlord or a doctor or maybe even Cary himself, and if it was he would be sobbing and saying how he couldn�t do it, he couldn�t do it, and gravely Dad would nod and say he�d be right there, and go get him, and recommit him, and the whole thing would start again.
I never would have guessed then, at age eight, that fifteen years later Dad and I would go back to that same asylum, back to those same echoing halls, to accompany my brother�s body to Kansas City, and arrange the funeral, and then accompany the body to the Durrand plot in the Ozarks, where four generations of our people�Civil War veterans, tough frontier women, wealthy landowners, white-trash miners�were buried, and bury him among them, and say thanks that finally he was at peace. Of course you can�t guess those things, or alter the harshness of the day when finally they�re realized. I don�t doubt it�s better that you can�t.
But on occasional Sundays we would drive to St. Joe to visit Cary, and after an afternoon together leave him there, then drive home again, the tension in the car thick, Mom�s melancholy like a cloud above us, Dad forever wondering what he had done wrong, and no one able to do a damned thing about it. That was my oldest brother�s world. I loved him, but even as a child I was grateful that that world wasn�t mine.

Our stacks of forty-fives grew until forty-fives were no longer enough, and we graduated to albums: The Turtles, The Temptations, The Animals, The Mamas and the Papas. Our lives were dominated�you might even say controlled�by music. The record player in the girl�s room, the record player in the den, and, when were lucky, the big Hi-Fi in the living room: a massive piece of veneered furniture that we always turned up louder than we were supposed to. Then there were the radios, with the fast-talking DJs and the never-ending roll of hits and shows like Make it or Break It or the Top Ten at Nine or the Top Forty Countdown. We knew all the songs and we sang all the songs and it seemed there was rarely a moment when the music wasn�t jamming.
In the car Stephanie was faster with the buttons than anyone, Mom learning to tolerate it as she switched from station to station, skipping the ads, forever searching for just right the sound: The Byrds, The Buckinghams, The Association, The Monkees, all bands that Mom didn�t mind and some she even liked. But when The Doors or The Stones or, later Hendrix came on, Mom would tell her to change it or turn it off. Those were bands that frightened her, although she didn�t know exactly why.
Whenever Dad drove we listened to his Easy Listening music, and that was it.
One night though, not long after Help! came out, when we all were home and a fire was roaring in the fireplace and Dad was in his easy chair, reading, Stephanie talked him into letting her play the album on his stereo. He�d just taken a bath and was in his robe and his hair was still wet, and as he sat and watched us dancing across the room you could see the love in his eyes: we playing music he detested on his big Magnavox, he just sitting and watching as we danced.
Allen and I didn�t dance so much as shook. The girls though had all the moves down, with just the right motions of hip, leg and arm. They got them from watching shows like Hullabaloo and Shindig, which they studied with the intensity of worship.
While we danced and spun Stephanie whispered something to Jean, who whispered something back, they ran upstairs, ran back down, went behind Dad�s chair, and began combing his hair down until it covered his eyes, more or less in the mode of John Lennon. He sat there with the hair over his eyes and all of us shrieking and Stephanie running off to get Mom and bringing her back, and Mom sitting down and laughing at the sight of him, then Stephanie and Jean pulling Dad onto the floor and saying dance dance, and he breaking into something that was a cross between the Jerk and the Pony, and Stephanie saying no no, like this, and trying to show him, then finally he sweeping her aside and grabbing Mom and pulling her onto the floor as �Yesterday� came on, and the two of them, Mom somewhat embarrassed, dancing a ballroom step across the room while the rest of us watched.
It was a silent moment for them, and you could see it as they left us behind, going back to a place that was theirs alone, that no one else would ever touch, that maybe was gone now but still was alive back there somewhere, and in that sense still whole and warm and strong. They danced the entire song that way, looking only at each other and completely forgetting us.
Then �Dizzy Miss Lizzie� came on and it was rock and roll again, and they retreated to the sofa, holding hands as we broke up the room. The girls tried to get Dad to dance again but he wouldn�t. He just sat there holding Mom�s hand, sitting in a way that they hadn�t sat in a long time.
You�d never think music could do things like that, but it could, and did.

Excerpt from Cool Nation

This is the eighth section from the fourth chapter of the novel. All other excerpts are on the sidebar.

Lives Forming

My older brother was moved to the Wornall Home for Boys that same fall. For fighting. For emotional instability. For the decision on the part of the school counselor that he needed a more controlled environment than they could offer. My parents, at their wits� end, concurred, this having been the third school to reject him.
Jackie had broken some other kid�s nose after being called loony by a ring of tormentors. He had also broken one of his own fingers in the process. The cast he wore, when we went to visit him at the home that Sunday, held the index finger in an upraised position, and laughing he later told me he wished it had been the middle one.
He showed us around the home, the room he shared with several other boys, the mess hall, the basketball court, his counselor. The counselor was a kind man, gentle and young, and he seemed to hold great hope that Jackie was like any of the rest of us, and that he only needed warmth and understanding. This wasn�t so much spoken as implied, but even at that young age I could sense it, and sense also the way my parents took it.
That counselor didn�t know Jackie yet, but he would.
As my parents talked to the man, and as Stephanie and Jean and Allen went over to the stables to look at the horses, Jackie took me for a walk. We went down to the banks along the Blue River, and in the red October grass sat and watched the brownish water curl past. He sat with his arms enfolding his knees, staring at the water, his muscles taut and drawn beneath the t-shirt. I watched him. We sat that way a long time.
�I never wanted to be crazy,� he finally said. “Never.”
His confessions often started with me that way. I don�t know why. He had been closest to Cary because they both had it, but Cary was locked up in St. Joe now. Jackie couldn�t confess to him anymore. Maybe he confessed to me because he thought I was the next best thing to Cary. Or maybe just because he thought I had it too, or one day would. I was too young to understand any of it though, except for the simple fact that he only needed someone to listen.
�You�re not crazy,� I said.
�I am. My mind�s all fucked up and I know it. You know it. So do they.� He jerked his head back, toward the home, the city, society, and everything that had scorned him. �I�m so tired of it. I wish it would just stop.�
But it wouldn�t stop. It would only grow and intensify and finally consume him, and I think he knew even then that that was the truth, and nothing would change it.
�Maybe someday it�ll stop,� I said, since at that age I still believed that anything was possible–as in some ways I still do.
�No.� Violently he shook his head and then looked up at the sky, blinking back his tears. �No, it never will. It never fucking will.� He looked at me with those eyes that never really seemed to see, never comprehend, never love, but that always wanted to. �Come on,� he said. �We might as well go back.�
We walked back up the bank and across the field to where my parents were cautiously listening to the counselor at a picnic table under the trees.
Later we said good-bye to Jackie, each of us hugging him, my mother hugging him especially long, then we drove away in the wagon, he waving to us from the drive.
All the way home Mom and Dad held hands, Mom looking out the window, sniffling, staring at the passing houses, saying not a word.
I heard her crying in their bedroom later. Stephanie and Jean heard her with me, and we listened as Dad talked to her in soothing undertones; tones that already I knew couldn�t change the thing that had happened, or prevent the things that were to come.
As they talked, the girls and I went outside to see the horses, and without speaking we bridled them and mounted and rode out down the drive�Jean and Stephanie on Shasta, I on Nancy. We headed for Indian Valley, and the creek, then the hills. Riding there wouldn�t replace our brother, riding there wouldn�t fix anything, but somehow it always felt as though it would.

�Not on our team,� Hastings said.
�But I don�t have any other team to join.�
�I don�t care. Not on ours.�
�It�s not your call, Hastings,� Seth said. Seth and I were always on the same team, as Hastings knew.
�It is so. I�m captain.�
Seth called then to Mr. Helms. So did Hastings. Helms looked over at us. He was a beer-gutted man, balding, once a football star at some junior college, now the enlightened guide of our school�s gym class�today, flag football. �What?” he said.
�Durrand can�t join our team,� Hastings said. �We�ve already got eleven.�
�We can have one player sit out each set of downs,� Seth said.
Helms looked at us, almost spitting tobacco out of habit, then remembering he couldn�t have any during class. �Durrand,� he said, �get over there with the greens.�
Seth started to go with me.
�Stay where you are, Drummond.�
Seth stayed, I went, going to a different team that already had eleven also but that was primarily made up of klutzes like me; the group of boys who hadn�t quickly enough joined other teams, or who had tried and been rejected. The slow, the weak, the uncertain. We would be slaughtered by Hastings� team, but those boys were being groomed for the school team, and Helms was coach of that too.
On the grassy field, bordered by poplars and overlit by blue sky, we played. The score at hour�s end was what you would expect it to be, and we were laughed and jeered and herded toward the locker room in our bond of inferiority, a bond we each needed as much as we resented.
There was nothing Seth could do to break that bond. He and I knew where he was ranked, and where I was too. It was established early on, and once established you were never allowed to forget it. That was your place, and if you let them they would keep you there always. Those were still the years when I thought they would keep me there always, when I felt I would be branded Loser for life. But life is long, adolescent rank fleeting, and justice if not always swift at least exacting. I would learn this later.
Even so, even now, still there is shock when, in some far away town or perhaps a town near yours or perhaps even your own, one of the weak or rejected is found hanging from a tree, or maybe just fished from some muddy stream. Or worse, when one of the weak and unstable, after a lifetime of being bullied, snaps and takes an automatic and clears out a hallway. Each time there is shock. In a culture that glorifies bullying, slaughter and firepower there is shock.
There was never any shock in that to us. You�d feel sorry for the dead ones, you�d feel sorry for their parents, but you understood the way those kids who�d snapped must have felt. I guess I always will understand it, though you’re not supposed to admit that. Sure I could identify with them; millions of kids can. But I wasn’t one for harming others, or putting a noose around my neck. If I did I�d just have to go through this whole life, and all of its lesson, again. I knew this even then, as I also knew that years of glorious joy awaited me somewhere in the future, if I could just get to them whole, and not let people like Hastings and Helms deter my progress.
Later, in the locker room, amid the clanging of doors and the exchanging of oaths, Helms passed me as I was changing, then he doubled back. I could feel him looking down at me.
�I heard,� he said, �about your brother. I heard he went to The Home.”
The boys around me fell silent, since any mention of Jackie always brought two reactions: first quiet, then fear.
I said nothing.
�It�s too bad. I used to have him, you know. He was good at ball.� Football? Baseball? Basketball? It didn�t matter. For Helms, life always revolved around some kind of ball. To be worthy to him, you had to be good at one of these. There was nothing else. Already he was mourning my brother�s loss, and trying to comprehend the scrawny kid who had taken his place.
I looked up at his blunt, unknowing face, but still said nothing. There was nothing I would ever say to him on the subject of my brother, or to any of them. It was none of their goddamn business.
�Tell him hello for me,� he said. �Tell him he better watch his ass or they�ll have him over there, and that ain�t no game those boys are playing.�
He waddled away on down the line, with urgings of, �All right, boys, all right. Put a move on it. Put a move on it now.�
Seth and I watched him disappear, then finished dressing.

Excerpt from Cool Nation

This is the seventh section from the fourth chapter. All other excerpts are on the sidebar.

Lives Forming

When in summer the pasture grass grew thin and brown, Dad would occasionally ride one of the horses to the end of the block, to a vacant lot there that was bordered on one side by a stream. The lot was rarely mowed and the grass was lush and Dad would stake the horse, whether Nancy or Blaze or Shasta, and leave it to graze for the night.
We would sometimes follow on our bikes and watch as Dad drove the stake and tied off the horse. The horse would pull on the rope until it was taut, the rope stretching out straight in mid-air, then the horse would begin to graze. As it grazed Dad would take a five-gallon bucket down to the stream, fill it, and place it at the edge of the field, just within reach of the rope. Then we would stand back and Stephanie and Jean would go in and kiss the horse goodnight�whether Nancy or Blaze or Shasta�and we would all start back up the hill to the house.
When I was eight we took Blaze one evening and staked him in the lot. The girls kissed him, Allen and I kissed him, and we all went back up the hill toward home.
In the morning Dad, Stephanie and I went down in the station wagon to get him, but when we got to the lot he wasn�t there. Dad stopped the car and we looked out across the grass but he wasn�t there, nor in any of the other yards, nor anywhere else that we could see. Then Dad saw the rope. He saw it at the same time we did.
The rope was stretched as tight as a piano wire, going straight across the lot and over the bank of the stream. It was stretched so tight you couldn�t have picked it up. It ran right across the lot and out of sight down the bank, and it wasn�t moving.
Stephanie, already crying, opened the door but Dad grabbed her and said, �No.�
She shook loose and ran crying through the grass, following the line of the rope, where at the little bluff she stood and put her hands to her head and screamed. I watched her scream, then Dad was there, sweeping her up in his massive embrace, carrying her like nothing back to the car. I had gotten out and come up behind them, and without looking at me he said, �Go back.�
I didn�t go back. I stood at bluff�s edge and looked down to where Blaze lay, neck stretched out, blood-covered nostrils, eyes bulged open, the rope burned into his flesh. Blood had sprayed all over the ivy and grass along the steep of the bank, and his hind hooves had gouged out jagged holes in the mud where he�d tried to raise up.
�Russell Peter! Russell Peter Durrand! Now. Right now!�
I turned and went back to the car, where my sister huddled against my father as we drove up the hill to the house, where she went inside under the shelter of his arm and up to her room and back to bed, he sitting on the bed beside her.
Dad didn�t go to work that day. In all my life that is only day I ever recall that he did not go to work. Instead he stayed home with my sisters, and held them as they cried, nursing them all day through this, their first brush with death; nursing them and nursing them until, by day�s end, he knew they would endure it, even though for years he had a hard time doing the same. My mother nursed them beside him. Mom was also the one who called Doc Carter to come and dispose of the body.
Blaze had pulled the rope its full length in trying to reach the green shoots above the creek. The bank had given way, and he had fallen, dying of strangulation. No one could believe that my father, who ran one of the most successful contracting businesses in the city, who owned and flew his own plane, and who had come so far from so little, had allowed such a thing to occur. But he was human, as that day I realized for the first time. I also realized, when he told the girls over and over that it was his fault, his fault, his fault, that he was also a man, and that I would be lucky if I were ever half the man he was.

We stood at the fence beneath a blue October sky, and in silence watched him. Indifferent to us, or anyone, he stood across the pasture grazing, forelegs askance, tail swishing, he ripping the grass loose with a sideways jerk of the head. Nancy and Shasta grazed at the other end, still nervous and unsure in his presence, both having been kicked and bitten already. Nobody rode the new horse but Dad. He was half Arabian and half quarter and stood sixteen hands at the shoulder and his name was Rex.
�You couldn�t either,� Jean said.
�I could too.�
�You couldn�t. You�d better not anyway. Dad�ll kill you.�
�He�ll never know. Unless you tell.�
�But they�ll see you,� Seth said.
�No they won�t. They�re both upstairs in Mom�s room.�
Allen looked up at me. �Why do they always go up to Mom�s room on Sundays?�
Jean and I looked down at him. �Never mind.� Then I went off to the barn for some oats.
I stood on the split-rail fence and called him, the oats cupped in my hand. He looked up, his reddish hide twitching, looked at the other horses, who were looking up also, then in a slow walk came over. Other kids who had been playing on the rope swing were watching now too. They were mostly the D�Agostino�s kids, little ones all.
Rex came over, his hide rippling, and ate from my hand. I guided him parallel to the fence, and after I felt the relaxing of his guard I climbed on.
It was like sitting in a treehouse, except it moved. I took him by the mane and turned him, and as I did all those kids burst out and came screaming toward the fence, leaping up on the rail with a suddenness and a shrillness that no one foresaw and no one could stop.
The far end of the pasture came racing toward me with a neck-snapping velocity that was surreal in its violence and speed. Then I was airborne, then the split-rail fence came rushing up, and that was all.
It was after a long time, and through a strange darkness, that later I heard Mom weeping, felt the cold damp of the washcloth on my head. Through the darkness I heard Dad say, �Hush now. He�s not dying. I tell you he�s not.�
�But he is he is!�
�Hush. He isn�t either. I won�t let him.�
Slowly I came through the darkness and opened my eyes and saw half the neighborhood crammed into our den: all those kids, a scattering of adults, Seth, Jean and my parents (but not Stephanie, as she was out chasing boys). I was lying on the sofa with them gathered around in a half-circle, Dad damping my forehead, Mom beside me, her face in her hands.
�Helen,� Dad said softly. Shirtless, he was dressed only in jeans, and she had about her the appearance of someone who had thrown on her clothes in a panic.
She looked up, saw my opened eyes, and started weeping again. �You little fool you little fool!� Hugging me now. �What were you doing on that horse? Tell me. What?�
I said nothing, but only stared up at the neat bouffant of her golden hair as she held me, as I smelled her perfume, and as Mrs. D�Agostino, who had been a triage nurse in Normandy, came forward to check for broken bones.
Dad continued to damp my forehead, which before had been numb but was now starting to throb There was blood on the washcloth and on my shirt. I stared at it as though it had come from someone else. I kept wanting to get up, but a strange weight in my head held me down.
After awhile Dad carried me out to the car, and took me to the hospital.
In the end it cost me a concussion, twelve stitches and a broken collarbone�a fair enough price for glory.
The next night, as I lay on the naugahyde sofa wearing my brace and watching Gunsmoke, Seth came over with a copy of �We Can Work It Out.� We set it at the bottom of the stack of forty-fives�their other forty-fives followed. After that we played The Stones, The Dave Clark Five, and The Hollies. We listened to the whole stack, then flipped it over and listened to the other sides too. Then we flipped it over again and went back to the ones we�d listened to first.
Seth stayed with me, playing the records and fetching us bottles of Vess Soda, until his mother called for him home.

Excerpt from Cool Nation

This is the sixth section from the fourth chapter. All other excerpts are on the sidebar, lower right.

Lives Forming

My mother too had always dreamt of flying, but differently. Since childhood she had had the ability in her dreams to fly�not with a plane, but bodily, freely, without impediment or limit. She kept that ability throughout her life, except during the times of her worst depressions in Indian Heights, when weighted down by material riches and spiritual emptiness, the ability left her. In time though she got it back, and never lost it again. I inherited that same ability from her, although she�s always said it came from a previous life, and the gradual freeing up of this one.
Wherever she got it, it is that I suppose, along with so many other qualities, that led her to believe in reincarnation, karma, the power of love over hate, the limits of organized religion as opposed to the limitlessness of spirituality. All this led her on a lifelong quest, from Lutheranism to Unitarianism to Metaphysics, to finally her own set of beliefs, beliefs that remarkably paralleled those of so many of the people she met over the years. She said it was because they were drawn together. Dad said it was because they were all crackpots, and so naturally they were drawn together. Whatever the reason, she always found a common language with the people she needed in her life, and also with the people who needed her.
It was these things I suppose that gave rise to her beliefs in equality at a time when such things were rarely considered: equality of women, equality of race, equality of creed. Eventually she began to cultivate Jewish friends, although they weren�t allowed to live in Indian Heights like us. Through these friends we joined the Unitarian Church and, later, the Jewish Community Center�we, blond-haired Germans essentially. After that Mom went on to join Planned Parenthood and the NAACP, the last of which nearly proved too much for my father, who she was still trying to break the habit of referring to blacks as niggers.
Eventually Mom began attending, and giving luncheons for, the League of Women Voters. Several of the women she met from the League were Jewish. One of them, Barbara Levy, had tried to a purchase a house in Indian Heights. The Levys had recently moved to Kansas City from New Jersey, and had been renting an apartment in Brookside until they could find something to buy. No one had told them about the restrictions in Indian Heights and, being from the East Coast, they likely wouldn�t have believed it anyway.
On a Sunday excursion they�d discovered a two-story stone cottage on Indian Boulevard and decided to buy it. Since Dr. Levy was a surgeon at KU Med, and a well paid one, they anticipated no problem. They were wrong, and when they were turned down, then later learned from other Jews the reason why, Barbara Levy, after going ballistic, told my mother, who went ballistic after she.
Mom learned about it on a Wednesday, the day that Jean and I had our piano lessons with Mrs. Jones. When Mom dropped us off she had been as usual quiet and gracious, sending us inside with our sheet music and a five-dollar bill each; when she picked us up I could see she was livid. Something had transpired in the interim but I didn�t know what. I only knew that instead of taking a right on Indian Boulevard and going home, we took a left and drove to Neuman Realty.
The office was situated in a large model house that reflected Father Knows Best ideals that had never existed, and concepts of equality and justice that sounded good in the Pledge of Allegiance, which the Neumans spat out at every Boy Scout meeting they attended, but had no intention of implementing. My mother had been living with the hypocrisy of it all her life, gradually realizing as a girl the strangeness of it, comprehending as a young woman the wrongness of it, and finally as a mother exploding over the idiocy of it. This was the first in what would be a series of similar explosions, or rebellions, or outright protests. My sister and I were there, in the car, on the day that first explosion took place.
�What are we doing here?� Jean said.
Furiously Mom looked at us in the mirror, grabbed her purse, and got out. �You�re waiting. Don�t move.�
She went into the office, we shrugged, turned on the radio, and listened as WHB cranked out the hits. We were still listening when, ten minutes later, Mom came storming out, got in, and laid a little rubber backing out. We didn�t dare ask what was wrong, and wouldn�t have understood anyway, but this was one of the few times I ever heard her swear.
�Morons!� she said. �Goddamn morons. God I�m so sick of all these morons.� All this under her breath, just loud enough that you could hear it, just quiet enough that you couldn�t be sure.
I wasn�t in the office when the discussion took place, but I�ve heard enough of the story since to be able to piece it together.
My mother going into Bill Neuman�s office unannounced and laying right into him. She didn�t need to introduce herself; he knew very well who she was. He certainly knew who my father was, since they did business together. That was one of the things that threw him�that and my mother�s vehemence.
I can almost picture him trying to backpedal:
��I simply don�t understand your attitude, Mrs. Durrand. Those people don�t belong here. When you and your husband built your house I thought you realized that that was one of our policies.�
�Well we didn�t.�
�Well you should have.�
�Well whether we did or did not it�s an unenlightened policy, and I have no intention of silently endorsing it. You can either sell them the house or I�ll report you to HUD.�
�You can�t do that, Mrs. Durrand. This office is not yours to report on.�
�Well that is exactly what I will do, and you should know that several of my neighbors will do the same.�
�Who, for instance?�
There was a pause, and knowing my mother I�m sure it was a furious one. �Don�t you dare ask me who. You have no business asking me what I intend to do about your company�s transgressions. Transgressions that, unless I�m mistaken, we fought that war to end. At least I know my husband did his part in it. You did too, didn�t you, Mr. Neuman? Didn�t you? Or did you just lay up here and make money on real estate speculation?�
�We are not here, Mrs. Durrand, to discuss my war record��
�No. Only your ignorance.� She turned and started out of the office, saying: �I�ll be sending a report to HUD next week unless I hear that the Levys have acquired the house. You can have your secretary notify me either way.�
That was my mother at her best: cutting when she needed to be, direct when she had to be, and dignified always�falling back on a dignity that the Neumans couldn�t hope to touch, let alone understand. Yes she was quiet, and sometimes melancholy, and on occasion nervous or high-strung in that suburban manner of white women who have too much, know it, and despise themselves for it�but you couldn�t touch her dignity, or remove it from her, so much was she it, and it her.
Yes at our house it was our father�s presence that dominated: his size, voice, passion, drive and vigor. Mom couldn�t help being overshadowed by that. But in her own way her presence was felt also, like a constant undercurrent of warmth and compassion and a yearning to be better, to go farther�inside�than any of us initially ever thought possible. Her contributions to my life weren�t as dramatic as my father�s, or as obvious, but in their quiet way they were of a more enduring substance that, as I grew older, registered on me increasingly, and helped to keep me grounded through all the insane and difficult years that lay ahead.
I never found out what HUD did with the report, but Neuman was finally forced to sell the Levy�s a house the next year, when the Fair Housing Act was passed, and the first few Jewish families began moving into Indian Heights, then, much later, a scattering of blacks. Nothing Neuman could do would stop that, even though he tried, just like the Neumans of the world always have, just as people like my mother will always oppose them.

Excerpt from Cool Nation

This is the fifth section from the fourth chapter. All other excerpts are on the sidebar, lower right.

Lives Forming

He had always dreamt of flying, my father, since his earliest days as a miner�s son, climbing the tailing piles that sprouted like small mountains around the mine shafts of Picher. He would climb the great piles and watch as the occasional mail plane, a Curtiss, would pass by on its run from Joplin to Tulsa, unsteady and wavering in the sky. Like many people, he believed it was a better life up there. In his case he was right.
When the war came he tried to enlist in the Army Air Force but they wouldn�t take him; he�d had polio in his left leg as a child, and the muscle was deteriorated and the bone weak. So he worked in a war plant in Kansas City, building B-25s. It was on that Fairfax strip that he learned to fly.
By the time I was four he had his third plane, a Beechcraft Twin Bonanza. It seated seven and was white and red and cruised at 225 and topped out at nearly 300. When he taxied it onto the runway he would come to full stop and push the throttles forward and the engines would throb and the noise would deafen and he�d release the brakes and we�d be screaming down the runway, pressed back in our seats, then like a dream leap free of the world, over the Missouri, over the skyscrapers, and off to wherever we were going. Sometimes it was on business to St. Louis, sometimes just a cruise down to Picher, where he�d buzz the closed mines, and once a year a vacation, to Colorado or Arkansas or maybe even California.
I felt royal with him at the controls, his aviator glasses on, he forever chewing Wrigley’s, and going over maps and gauges and checking and rechecking everything that could be checked. When he flew you never doubted his competence, or his certainty.
In �66 he took us to Padre Island, or at least tried to but we got weathered in at Dallas. So we spent four days in the rain there, driving around looking at the mansions, driving past Daly Plaza to see where the bullets had struck, sampling Texas barbecue to see if it compared to ours.
Every morning Allen and I went with Dad to the airport, where he would get the weather reports and talk with the mechanics and with the men in the tower. Then he�d go into a sheet metal building where they put him in a flight simulator to take refresher courses on instrument flying. These he took to make sure he’d get us home alive, since by the fourth day of unceasing rain we knew we weren�t going to Padre.
When we took off for home that last day the overcast hadn�t changed, and with the rain hitting the windshield he powered us up through the storm and then into the blue as we rose above the clouds.
Three hours later we got to Kansas City, circling the airport not once but many times. As we circled he stayed on the radio with the tower, nodding into the headset and talking that rapid-fire jargon that only pilots use. My mother stared at him the whole time he talked, since only she could hear what was being said. I can still remember the way she looked at him, and the whiteness of her lips, and the tension on her face. Then his hand went down to the floor and grasped a small handle and began cranking it, around and around and around.
That was when Mom got out of her seat, and in her harlequin sunglasses and polka dot dress she came down the aisle, touching each of us, trying to smile, checking our seatbelts. She went back to her seat and belted herself in as if girding for some coming battle, and rigidly waited.
Finally Dad nodded one last time into the headset, banked the plane, and went sweeping down toward the runway. Like tension incarnate my mother waited for us to touch down. At last we did, and roared toward runway�s end, gingerly slowed, then Dad taxied off for the hanger. As he did I noticed Mom was shaking, her hand tight and slender in one of his, he holding it and squeezing it and whispering to her.
Not until I was a man did she tell me about the landing gear.
Somehow in flight the gear electronics had failed, the gear wouldn�t descend, and Dad had had to lower the wheels manually. But without the electronics he had no way of knowing whether the gear had locked, and whether or not they would collapse. Being children we had never noticed the fire engine standing near the end of the runway, or the second one standing to one side. My mother did though, and the sight of these, and the fear of losing us, after having already lost one child and in a sense two others, was nearly more than she could bear. It�s not that she cared a damn about dying, she just didn�t want us to die with her.
No one died though, there was no crash, the fire engines were sent away, and we pulled up before the hanger and watched as the props swung to a stop. My father, you see, was flying. He had always taken us wherever we needed to go, and always brought us back. We never doubted, as children never do, that he always would.

Excerpt from Cool Nation

This is the fourth section from the fourth chapter. All other excerpts are on the sidebar, lower right.

Lives Forming

You�d wake up early because you had to, because you couldn�t sleep, because already you could hear them going off all around the neighborhood, and you knew you had to be a part of it. So I�d wake Allen and the girls, and we�d go running downstairs and open the Times, and cut out the ads that told us which tents were having sales, since Dad wouldn�t buy anything if it wasn�t on sale.
He�d be in the kitchen sipping coffee. Mom would be baking pies, and out on the patio you could hear the ice cream maker churning. I�d go running in and say let�s go let�s go. He�d lower his cup and look at me and say aren�t you forgetting something? Then I�d remember, and he�d follow me to the hall closet, and I�d bring it out on it�s staff, tightly furled, then carry it outside, he following behind saying don�t let it touch the ground now. I�d put it in the bracket that was screwed to the side of the house, and unfurl it, and we�d all stand there looking at it: the blue, red and white. Then we�d go.
In the Pontiac he�d take us down State Line, to where the tents were lined up, and we�d walk through each of them�the smell of canvas, the trampled grass, the smell of dew and gunpowder�buying Black Cats and bottle rockets and cones and Roman candles.
By the time we got home Seth and Keith would already be down at the creek, blowing up toy battle ships and army men, and once with M-80s blowing an upended trash can twenty feet in the air. We�d blow up things with them too until Stephanie or Jean came down and said it was time to go. Then with the tub of ice cream, and the cakes and pies, we�d drive to Lake Quivira, to our cousins� house on the water there, where at water�s edge my cousin Chip would be blowing up toy battleships and army men. Allen and I would blow them up with him.
Later my uncle Ralph would say who wants to ski, and we�d go out with him in the Crisscraft, and Chip would ski expertly, and I wouldn�t. After maybe seven tries though I�d finally get up on the skis, and be scudding along behind the boat, then see Mom on the beach watching, and let go with one hand to wave, losing it and slamming down face forward and getting a mouthful of water. Uncle Ralph would bring the boat puttering back around and say, �Want to try again?�
�Sure.�
�You going to wave this time?�
�No.�
�All right.�
Later we�d sit at the picnic tables on the beach, and eat the barbecued chicken and potato salad and roasted corn, and the men would drink Falstaffs, and the women wine, and we�d show the adults when our paper plates were clean, and Mom would finally take the lid off the ice cream tub, and we�d dish it up and stuff ourselves.
Later we�d be back at it with the Black Cats, blowing them up in strings now, dusk falling, the bottle rockets going off, Roman candles, sparklers and cones. Finally by ten we�d exhaust our supply, and gather on blankets facing the clubhouse across the water, and watch as the display was set off�the huge rockets, shells and stars. I�d lie back and watch until I couldn�t watch anymore, and with my head on Mom�s lap I�d sleep, and hear it all from a distance, and the oohing and aahing, until at eleven Stephanie and Jean and Chip would wake me and say, �Wow, man, you should have seen it. When it was over they sent up a rocket that said THE END.�
�Really?�
�Yeah. In big letters about a hundred feet high.�
�No they didn�t. They can�t do that. Can they? Can they, Mom?�
Very late we�d load the car and say goodbye, and Uncle Ralph would hug me and call me tiger, and Aunt Sally would hug me too, and we�d drive along the shore and through the big gates and past the main line of the Santa Fe, then up into the hills through Shawnee and on toward home, and I wouldn�t know anything until I heard a car door open, and felt Dad sling me over his shoulder, and was carried to bed.
In the morning the neighborhood would be quiet, except for the occasional renegade outburst, but mainly quiet, with the veil of smoke and spent fireworks, and I�d go to Seth�s to swim, and we�d sit around sadly because it would be a whole year before the next one, and we didn�t believe we could wait a year. But we would.
The summers often had that magic. Mom and Dad saw to it that they did. I�ve since tried to do the same for my own children. I hope I�ve done as well.

Excerpt from Cool Nation

This is the third section from the fourth chapter. All other excerpts are on the sidebar, lower right.

Lives Forming

Midnight was a game that we only played in the summer, that we never played until after dark, and then played it only in the D’Agostino’s yard, since theirs was one of the few unfenced. A whole group of us Durrands, Schultzes, Drummonds would gather on the front drive and yell out the o’clocks from one to twelve, always shouting midnight at the end. Then in a scared pack we’d run off into the backyard, where Jamie D’Agostino lay in wait.
At sixteen Jamie was already larger than most men would ever be, and stronger than most. I often used to ride his shoulders across the deep end of the Indian Heights pool, he taking one great breath and walking the length of the swim lanes while I rode atop. He was huge and powerful and capable of great harm, if harm had been in him. It was not. Jamie was as docile as a collie pup. He was also slowly going blind. But he never complained of it, and anyway he knew his own backyard in his growing darkness better than we knew ours in light.
As we began to circle through the yard he would eventually leap out from the forsythia or spirea or from behind a walnut tree, and block our passage, then huge as Frankenstein descend on us to tag out whomever he chose, until finally, after succeeding rounds, he had tagged us all. He never tagged Keith Drummond though. Keith was a halfback on the junior high team, and would fly through the yard dodging trees and kids and Jamie until winding up safely on the front drive again.
One night though he forgot about the concrete bird bath, or maybe in the darkness didn�t see it, or maybe he was already getting high by then. Anyway he slammed into it at full run, we heard his screams, and the game stopped.
The bird bath weighed close to a hundred pounds, and he had hit it at his waist, knocking it over, the big basin falling on his legs. He lay there twisting and whimpering, and Jamie bent over him, and we watched in the darkness as he carried Keith through the backyards, across the creek, and up the hill to the Drummond house.
It was like that scene out of To Kill A Mockingbird, when Boo carried Jem all that long distance down the street to the Finch house, and safety inside. Or this at least was the scene I envisioned, having seen the movie for the first time that year, my mother proud that such a movie had finally been made, my father surprised, my brothers, sisters and I engrossed.
The day after the accident Jamie moved the birdbath up close to the house, and the next week the game resumed, but Keith wasn�t able to play for the rest of summer; it took that long for the fracture to heal.
No lawsuits were ever filed. No one was ever blamed. No lawyers were brought in to protect us from ourselves. It was life, and as long as no one was maimed or killed, we were allowed to pursue it for all we were worth.
In the game of Midnight Jamie D�Agostino was our protector, and in our own way we each needed him, we each loved him. The only thing I regret is that none of us ever told him, but of course as kids we couldn�t.

Excerpt from Cool Nation

These are the two opening sections from the fourth chapter. All other excerpts are on the sidebar, lower right.

Lives Forming

We were waiting on the lawn of the Indian Heights Country Club for Dad. We Jean, Allen, me were all in our trunks, our towels about our shoulders, our hair sun-bleached and damp. We waited and waited for him, and while we waited Matt O’Malley, an older kid who by reputation was no damned good, came along with his wetted towel. He snapped at a tree. He snapped at the grass. Then he saw Jean, his eyes brightened, and he snapped at one of her skinny thighs.
She rolled over backwards crying and I got up and tried to hit him and he laughed and threw me down, then went and sat among his worshipers, bragging.
Jean was still sniffling when Dad rolled up in the Pontiac convertible five minutes later.
What is it? he said.
She wouldn’t answer.
He touched her cheek and said, What is it, darlin? What?
She swallowed and quieted and told him, and I watched from the back seat as his face went from one shade of red to three shades darker. Then his lips tightened and so did his face.
Now you listen, he said. You stop that damned crying, and you go over there and get you a rock he pointed to where the new parking lot was being graded and you bring it back over here, and you make sure it’s a big one.
But Daddy
“Hush! Now you go do it.
She wandered off. We watched as she sorted among the rubble, and as she came struggling back with a chunk of limestone the size of a cantaloupe.
Dad jerked his head to where Matt O’Malley was sitting, his back to us. Now you go over there and you hit that sonofabitch with that rock, and let’s get on home.
She didn�t protest, she didn’t resist. In fact she laughed, then went over and threw the rock. We all watched as it thudded off his back, his chin nearly hitting the ground, he turning and looking up at her in stupefied shock: Why you little bitch.
Then he was on his feet, twisting his towel for the snap that would surely kill her, when Dad raised a mammoth arm and pointed at him. Hold it right there, boy.”
Matt O�Malley froze mid-snap.
“You done hurt her once. I’m pretty sure you don’t want to do it again. Do you?”
White-faced, frozen, shaking a little now. “No sir.”
We’ve reached an understanding then, have we?”
Yes sir.
Good. I thought we might.”
Jean got in the car, still laughing, and we drove away. At home we told Stephanie and Mom all about it. Stephanie loved it. Mom didn’t. Dad didn’t care.
We might have lived in Indian Heights, we might have had new cars and a big house and horses in the backyard, but rocks here, as in Picher, still served the purpose of meting out justice where in Dad’s view justice was due.

It was his smothering, she once told me, that she could no longer bear. The demand that she be wherever he was: outside when he was, watching television when he was, reading when he was, and most certainly in bed when he was. After sixteen years it had gotten to where she couldn’t take it anymore.
Then there was their social circle: hard-drinking contractors and their wives, people who had never heard of Ralph Waldo Emerson or William James or Mahatma Gandhi; people to whom ideas of vegetarianism and meditation were not merely alien, but inconceivable; people who if she brought up these ideas at a cocktail would respond in two ways: first with silence, then laughter.
Then there were our Indian Heights neighbors. The Hendersons, pleasant but predictable Baptists who were forever dwelling on Satan and whose children were the missionaries of the neighborhood. The D’Agostinos, Catholics who were frightfully pious on Sundays but more relaxed on other days and certainly less fear-driven than the Hendersons. The Schultzes, Lutherans who played tennis like mad and drank Scotch on their patio and whose children were beaten by their father, an ex-Marine, with German regularity (Mr. Schultz kept a Japanese rifle and sword on a peg board in his basement remnants from the price he’d paid at Iwo Jima.). There were also the Moores, retired people who had a fallout shelter beneath their patio, and who loved cats and hated children and never disguised the prejudice. Then there were a dozen or so others, but Mom had nothing in common with any of them.
Of course she socialized with our neighbors. She liked them, she had coffee with them, tolerated their various intolerances, but she couldn’t talk to them. Neither could she talk to my father, unless it was about hunting, fishing or contracting, or occasionally politics. Neither could she talk to my older brothers; one of them was already confirmed mad, and every day she feared that the other would follow suit.
With no one to talk to, surrounded only by children, she felt she was finally going mad. Then, shortly after I was born, she discovered Jack Paar.
After all of the safe, sanitized programming of the Fifties, he had shown up late one night on our screen actually discussing ideas, interviewing actors, writers, painters, many of them Brits, touching with humor on matters sexual, spiritual, aesthetic. In other words he was embracing life, and my mother in her particular suburban hell felt she had been denied this, or at least had failed in finding it.
So each night, instead of going to bed at the appointed hour, she went downstairs to the den and turned on the television, and in the semi-darkness smoked and watched. That was the only time of day that she smoked, and this was the only time in her life that she did so. Both the watching and the smoking were I suppose acts of rebellion against my father, which he did not respond to well.
I can easily see how the response would have gone:
He coming down the two flights of stairs to stand behind her, the white light of the set showing on her face, and his. Neither of them speaking.
Finally he breaking the silence: Aren’t you coming to bed?
Not yet.
Why not?
Because I want to watch this
Why?
My mother at last turning to look at him. Because it’s interesting.
And I’m not?
She shaking her head. �Oh, Floyd, of course you are. But this is a change. I just need a change.
All you need to do is come to bed. Or have you forgotten that you’re my wife?
Being your wife doesn’t make me your property.
He had no answer to that. He hadn’t been raised or trained or prepared to answer that. In the Ozarks women were the property of the men. Through no fault of his own, that’s what he had been taught. That’s what he’d expected. But he wasn’t in the Ozarks anymore.
When are you coming to bed then?
When this is over.
That’l be midnight.
That’s right.
He watched her smoke and watch, huddled in her nightgown, drawn away from him, drawing away from him. That’s when he knew I’m sure that he was losing her.
Are you going to take up smoking too? he said.
If I want to.
Why?
She exhaled, stubbed out the cigarette. I don’t know, Floyd.
He stood there, the anger finally now rising. Well I don’t know either. But I do know you’re not the same woman I married, and I’m not very happy about it.
I realize you’re not.
‘Well then I wish you’d do something about it, instead of just reading those flaky goddamn books all the time. Instead of just ignoring me. I’m trying to do something about it. She turned to him. I am.
He stared at her a little longer, then turned and started up the stairs. Not hard enough, he said. Damned well not hard enough.
The bad part, she later told me, was that many other women would have loved his smothering, his demands, all his male needs. But she wasn�t another woman. She was only herself, which was something she sometimes resented as much as he did.
When Paar went off the air in 1962 she tried to watch Carson, but it wasn’t the same. It was glib and slick and neatly packaged but, like so much television that followed, it was also desperate, mercenary, and shallow. She stopped smoking and resumed going to bed at the appointed hour, but that of course was never to be the same either.
It was the year after Paar went off that they took separate rooms, never to really, in the full sense, share the same room again, let alone the same life.