She met Uncle Moose for one or two hours on alternate weeks at his office at Winnebago College on East State Street, a ten-minute bike ride from her high school. After the crescendo with which their accord had been reached, a certain letdown was inevitable. Her uncle remained awkward, aloof, rarely meeting Charlotte’s eyes. Alone with him she felt a spooky kind of banishment, as if she might leave his office, which reeked of tomato sauce and stale Chinese takeout cartons mashed in the garbage, to find that the world as she knew it had ceased to exist. History meant little to Charlotte: facts about dead people. And Moose, deeply attuned to the apathy most people felt toward the pursuits he held most dear, achingly conscious of the erasure of history from this land without context, perceived his niece’s indifference and was bewildered; what was she doing here?
Sometimes they met at Moose and Priscilla’s apartment in a complex called Versailles, a half mile east of Winnebago College. They sat on Moose’s tiny second-floor balcony, just big enough for two chairs and a small glass-topped table. Below, a boy rode a tractor-mower over the undulating grass around Versailles, and Charlotte blamed this mower for the many occasions when she and Moose began speaking at once and then stopped—then started—then stopped. But on her next visit the lawn boy was gone and a disastrous silence remained, an enormous stretch of nothing in which she and Moose foundered gloomily, solitarily. No more, Charlotte thought, mounting her bicycle with relief at finding herself back among the wind and cars and trees turning gold. I’m not going back, it’s too strange.
At home, she felt the push of her mother’s curiosity. Ellen had never been inside Moose and Priscilla’s apartment. Were there many pictures on the walls? Did the phone ring often? Was the refrigerator full? Her mother’s hunger for news of her brother exposed itself helplessly to Charlotte, and she felt her privilege at being allowed inside her uncle’s life. Blue round soaps in the bathroom. Towels smelling faintly of flowers. Once, Aunt Priscilla left a banana bread in the kitchen, and her uncle, barefoot, had cut himself and Charlotte each a slice. She told her mother almost nothing.
In an album by her mother’s desk, a younger version of Moose stared mockingly at Charlotte from old photographs. One in particular: her uncle standing in water to his thighs wearing neon-green swim trunks, torso broadening toward the shoulders like the flare of a cobra’s head. The picture fascinated her. She’d pried it from the album and brought it to her room, where she kept it hidden between the layers of her blotter.
Late in September, she began writing short conversational essays on the reading Moose had assigned her, and these helped to alleviate their mutual shyness. Her uncle spoke to the essays and scrawled corrections upon them, waved them in the air and once was robbed of a page by a gust of wind. Moose leapt from his chair and sprinted from the apartment, and Charlotte seized upon his absence to push open the door to the bedroom, which she’d never seen. A bed with a green silken spread, a pair of giant fur-lined slippers poised beside it. A forest of prescription bottles on one bedside table. She peeked in Moose’s closet: five worn tweed jackets, three pairs of black shoes. Soft plaid work shirts.
By October, they were able to engage in normal conversation.
“How’s the family?” Moose asked with an ironic lilt, as if both asking the question and posing as someone asking the question. And Charlotte told him how the tension in their house rose each month before Ricky’s tests, which were later that week. “Your folks must be scared,” Moose said.
“It’s all they think about.”
“And you?”
“It’s weird,” she said. “I know he’ll be okay.”
Moose cleared his throat. “I meant: How are you?” he asked, rather stiffly.
Charlotte glanced at him, but her uncle was looking over the balcony, where the lawn boy had raked piles of leaves into orange plastic bags that looked like jack-o’-lanterns. It was the first time Moose had asked a question about herself, personally. Charlotte waited, wanting to take full advantage of this pulse of interest, to answer him with absolute precision.
“I’m waiting for something to happen,” she said.
Two Men Take a Gamble
In the 1830s, when this part of the world was still untouched, the first speculator came to Rockford: Germanicus Kent. In 1834 he and his partner founded a town on the west side of the Rock River next to Kent Creek, where our downtown is now. They built a sawmill, which was one of the three things you needed for a town (the others were: a saloon and a blacksmith shop). Meanwhile, another speculator, Daniel Haight, settled on the east side of the river that very same year.
So Rockford started out as Kentville and Haightville, two almost invisible towns glaring at each other across the river and getting competitive before they practically existed.…
Pedaling home from Versailles, Charlotte wove among the Cadillacs on State Street, cruising the slight downhills standing up, the fall wind boxing her body, stinging her ears. She imagined herself at the opening of a tunnel, tipped forward on its downward slope. Something moved in her: a slow, sweet unraveling of anticipation.
After they combined their towns into Rockford, Germanicus Kent and Daniel Haight were like actors in a play with twenty-five different parts: Haight was the first sheriff, first postmaster, first commissioner to decide where the State Road (which is State Street today) should go. Kent was the first election judge, first representative in the Illinois General Assembly, and first ferrymaster across the river.…
On the day of Ricky’s tests, Charlotte met a strange woman in her mother’s dressing room. She’d been listening to Alanis on her Walkman and reading about Rockford’s first bridge, a graduate student’s paper so old it had been typed on a typewriter. Headphones still on, she wandered into her mother’s bathroom to look for the lotion she’d brought back from Florida last spring. White, pearlized lotion that smelled of the beach, of coconuts. And there Charlotte found the woman: a stranger in scarf and sunglasses. “I’m an old friend of your mother’s,” she said.
Looking back, Charlotte was mortified by the many suspicious details of this “old friend” she had somehow failed to notice: the woman knew nothing of Ricky’s illness; hadn’t called before arriving or rung the bell; had walked around the house alone; then rushed away (limping!) without leaving any message for Charlotte’s mother, whose “old friend” she supposedly was. A thief—what else could she be? And Charlotte had stood there, making conversation. Had shown the thief her fish!
She’d been absorbed by the question of what was wrong with her. The woman wasn’t old. She was very tall, but seemed narrow inside her heavy coat. Her voice was raw. A car accident, she finally said. Last August. Then she took off her glasses, baring to Charlotte her broken, vermilion eyes.
Later, as Ellen was getting dressed for a wedding reception at the country club (an ordeal she dreaded), Charlotte moseyed into her dressing room and loitered there. This was unusual, but Ellen paved over her surprise. Displays of eagerness tended to drive Charlotte away.
“Your jewelry is in this room, right?” Charlotte asked.
“In that drawer,” Ellen said, pointing. “Would you like to borrow something?”
“Is it valuable?”
Ellen turned to her, trying to read her shuttered, tricky face. “The really valuable things are at the bank,” she said. “Why?”
Without answering, Charlotte went in the bathroom and stood by her mother’s sink, scanning the miniature skyline of bottles and lotions and creams and sprays and different kinds of makeup. In their midst she spied the pearlized lotion from Florida. Charlotte opened the bottle, poured some into her palm and rubbed it on her arm. She closed her eyes and lifted the smell to her face.
“Why don’t you keep that, honey? I almost never use it.”
Charlotte cracked her eyes, glimpsed her mother beside her in the mirror and moved quickly away. The image of herself and her mother together—in a mirror, a window, a photograph—flattened her with a blunt hopelessness, a sense that
she might as well be dead. Her mother was beautiful and Charlotte was not; she knew this always, of course, and yet a defiant optimism hummed within her, a faith that she had forfeited beauty for some extraordinary compensation. Seeing her mother beside her annihilated that hope, leaving Charlotte to wonder whether someone so unbeautiful as herself would be allowed to go on, to have anything. Wouldn’t someone more beautiful get it, whatever it was?
Stung, Ellen ran a brush through her hair. She was used to Charlotte’s rebuffs, but now, after a whole afternoon at the hospital with Ricky, her eyes filled with tears.
“You don’t worry about someone stealing the jewelry that’s in here?”
Christ, why was she harping on the jewelry? Ellen looped her hair around and pinned it onto her head, waiting for her eyes to clear before she answered. “Not really. I mean, we’ve got the burglar alarm.”
Still, after finishing her hair, she slid open the jewelry drawer and looked at the tray of velvet cups, Charlotte lurking nearby while she checked her favorites: the Elsa Peretti bracelet, the jade lozenge Harris had brought from Singapore, the tiny yellow diamond cuffs. The amethyst pin, a gift from Moose years ago. She wore it for luck when Ricky was tested each month. “The important stuff is all there,” she said. “Why?”
Charlotte gave a disinterested shrug and left the room, as if Ellen were the one dwelling on the topic.
Harris stood at his dresser, assembling the oblong gold studs and cufflinks engraved with his initials that he wore to dressy events. Charlotte watched his meticulous toilette from her parents’ bed, thrilling at each gust of irritation her father provoked in her. His shirt was flawlessly pressed, sections of fine, translucent netting in the arms. Had he ever worn a soft flannel shirt, even once? Did he even eat banana bread?
“No plans!” Harris exclaimed, as if this were out of the ordinary. “No friends coming over, nothing?”
“I have plans with Ricky. When he’s done skateboarding.”
Her father looked disappointed, as if this were a feeble excuse for nothing.
“Plus I’ve got tons of reading for Uncle Moose,” Charlotte threw in, purely to annoy him.
Her father frowned, and installed his cufflinks in silence.
Driving to the club through the azure dusk, Harris thought of his daughter alone before the TV set and felt a twist of anxiety. “She doesn’t seem to be making many friends at East,” he said.
“No,” Ellen said. “She doesn’t.”
“I worry she’s gotten lost in the shuffle,” he said, turning to his wife. “This whole Ricky saga.”
Ellen sighed. “I can only worry about one kid at a time.”
“How was today?”
“Fine,” she said. “Afterwards he ran out the door with that skateboard.”
Harris whistled. “Busy life.”
Since the beginning of school, Ricky had assumed a new identity as a skateboarder, an identity whose component parts were baggy pants worn so low that Harris expected to see his son’s bare ass any minute, and a partially shaved head, a thin sheet of hair dangling over baldness. “Kid’s hair finally grows back,” he said, “and he shaves it.”
Ellen shook her head. She hated the hospital; even now the smell of illness, of hospital food, made her almost gag. From the moment she and Ricky walked through those glass doors, her brain objected to every sight they passed: The veal-complexioned people in their paper outfits—no. People crumpled in wheelchairs or walking feebly, dragging IVs alongside them on wheels. No! No! They stared at Ricky ravenously, these failing creatures, as if he were a gatekeeper jingling the keys to their release. Ellen’s son had never looked more beautiful than shuffling beside her over the hospital linoleum; she imagined these sad, broken figures grasping for his narrow eyes and lingering summer tan—
“Let go, Mom!” Ricky barked, shaking free of her grasp and pounding ahead down the hall in his oversized skateboarding shoes. Ellen understood, from her sessions with Dr. Alwyn, that her feelings about the hospital were freighted with memories of her mother, who had taken to bed for whole years, swaddled in her mysterious illness, ringing a little bell—deceptively tiny, for it had made a sound like breaking glass that filled the house—asking for cranberry juice. And Ellen would bring it, climbing the stairs with the small silver tray to her mother’s room, which was always dark. No matter how bright or pretty a day might be—soccer games, damp summer grass, diving lessons at the country club—Ellen always felt inside her the weight of that dark room; only Moose had the power to dispel it. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to sell the house! Now, with Dr. Alwyn’s help, she had come to see that her reluctance was not so very strange—that the urge to return to the scene of unhappiness with the hope of undoing it was natural, if not necessarily good. “Bigger windows!” she’d exhorted the architect. But your furniture will fade. Screw the furniture, Ellen had parried, taking a certain delight in shocking the man. She wanted light, light. Fresh air to wash away the smell of her mother’s illness—her mother, now hale and robust at seventy-two, living in Palm Beach with a Cuban immigration lawyer. Who took lessons in the tango, the mambo, the hustle, and had wallpapered a bathroom by herself. Who, it now appeared, had never really been ill in the first place.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Harris said. He’d been hoping she would ask about his golf—he’d played under par and won a client, Matthew Krane, a consultant to the Radisson Hotel chain. But nowadays she rarely asked.
“I hope Ricky comes home on time,” Ellen said. “So Charlotte doesn’t worry.”
“Charlotte never worries,” Harris said.
Grass
Okay, the land. Well, it was totally different from now. (First of all, where IS the land now?) It was mostly prairie, and prairie in those days did not mean dried-out grass up to your knees with some flowers mixed in. Prairie meant a mixture of many grasses—Indian Grass, bluestem, side oats grama—that were extremely tall, taller than a person’s head! With long tangled roots that reached way down deep into the earth. Prairie soil was incredibly rich and good for planting, but all the grass and roots were very hard to break through and turn over, which you had to do before you could plant anything. It could take a whole year to make prairie ready for farming. “Breaking the prairie” was the name for that process, and there were professional Prairie Breakers who were experts at it. But eventually the whole prairie got broken up and planted into crops, and the real original prairie hasn’t been around for many, many generations. What we call “prairie” now is just grass.
Eight o’clock, no Ricky. Charlotte went to the window and looked at the sky, but it offered her nothing tonight: a starless darkness. In the kitchen, she slipped a mini pizza into the microwave. She went online to see if any of her three best friends were logged on, but they weren’t—out somewhere, probably together, these girls she had known since third grade, sharing sprees of candlemaking, ant farms, weaving, papier-mâché; Halloween costumes in which each was a different colored M&M. The summer after freshman year, the other three had gotten boyfriends, and a gap had fallen open between them and Charlotte. Even as her friends schemed on her behalf, begging to know which boys she desired and promising, through espionage and subterfuge, through brainwashing, hypnosis and possibly witchcraft, to make at least one reciprocate; even as they urged makeup upon her, a padded bra with the future option of implants, colored contact lenses (violet being their top choice), an alternative haircut and some more intriguing mode of dress—The thing is, Chari, you aren’t really making an effort—even as a machine of rehabilitation churned around Charlotte, she’d been seized by a deep new resistance in herself, an aloofness from her friends’ earnest confabs on her behalf. It was true, she wasn’t making an effort. It seemed phony—dangerous, too, as if she might lose something in the process. A last hope.
She sent an e-mail to all three: “What’s up? Hey, I miss u guys :-)”
At eight-forty-five she started watching Murder on the Nile—part of an ongoing project she and
Ricky had undertaken to watch every Agatha Christie movie ever made. It was half over by the time she heard her brother downstairs and paused the tape. He gasped when she walked in the kitchen. “You’re stoned,” she said, looking at his boggled eyes.
He didn’t answer. He was prying open a box of Pop-Tarts.
“It’s nine-forty,” she said.
“Ding ding ding.”
“Where were you?”
“Skating. I nailed a dire trick.” He dropped a Pop-Tart into the toaster. “A Switchdance one-eighty.”
Charlotte had no idea what this meant. “Who with?”
“Seniors.” He could not suppress a grin.
“You’re kidding. From Baxter?”
“No. From Saturn.”
The Pop-Tart jumped, and Ricky caught it between two fingers, blew on it a while and took a bite. The flavor shot through his head, a crazy infusion of berries. Charlotte just stood there. At the Pit, where he’d been skating, he’d heard someone say his sister’s name but thought at first he’d imagined it; he was stoned, which made everything loop around and curlicue until he was skating through time—kings, knights on horseback waving lances, then ollying back around to the steps, where he heard it again—“Charlotte Hauser”—and was so startled he lost his balance and the board blurted away. He listened. Two seniors. It seemed to Ricky they were using Charlotte’s name as kind of a threat, like, If you fuck with me—Charlotte Hauser. Hearing his sister spoken of in this way so appalled him that he forgot it instantly, let it drop into the night and disappear. Paul Lofgren, a senior, had decided this year that he and Ricky were bros, a mysterious grace that had befallen him for reasons Ricky didn’t analyze. And so he hung with these older kids now, Smashing Pumpkins on the boom box, the very air sweet and rare. Charlotte was folded into the night. When he nailed the Switchdance 180, everyone clapped.
“Who’s the kid?” Someone to Paul Lofgren. And Paul, laughing: “Girl bait,” which occasioned a bigger laugh (everyone laughed when Paul laughed), and although Ricky wasn’t clear on how he could be girl bait when he hardly knew any girls, he liked it immeasurably better than being the kid who was sick.