should call Agriculture. Demand a tour yourself. They think they can buy you with a pretty girl?”
But Lila was no longer listening to Kennedy. The father had thrust the boy into a chair and returned to the counter; behind Lila the boy was whimpering, snuffling squeaks that reminded Lila of a pet rat she’d had as a child. “I can’t stand it,” Lila said.
Kennedy shrugged. “We’re not parents.”
“He’s tired. Can’t his father hear he’s tired?”
“We’re all tired, Lila.” Kennedy reached for her handbag.
The man came back to the table with a drink and some bread. The boy quieted as he sat down. “Pood?” he asked hopefully.
“Daddy doesn’t buy pood for whiners.” The “p” of “pood” exploded on his lips.
“You go ahead,” Lila said to Kennedy. “I’ll stay and finish my coffee.” When Kennedy was gone, Lila went to the counter and ordered bread and apple juice, and as she left she placed these on the table in front of the boy. “If you eat, he eats,” she said to the father.
The little boy looked terrified. “Daddy, can I eat it?” The father’s eyes went shifty; Lila waited a moment to watch the boy pick up the bread and hunch away from his father. “He gets every bite, okay?” She hissed, pleased when the father cowered.
I still have it, Lila thought as she walked out the door, not sure why she hadn’t wanted Kennedy to witness what she’d done.
LILA COULDN’T SLEEP. The oldest trick in the book. A younger person, a sexually attractive person, and they walk in and drape you with flattery and when you’re practically licking their fingers they ask you for something. Was Lila supposed to fall for that? Was she that transparently weak? Did the Agros (or someone beyond the Agros, someone in the Defense Department or Environment or God knows where) really think she’d jump for their bait like some widemouthed fish? Had they pegged her as that desperate, that lonely?
She was desperate, she was lonely. She’d wasted her life. In interviews, in discussions, what did people say made their lives worth living? The small things: family, friends. For years, Lila had thought the small things didn’t matter. Her successful gestures were all public. Her father had left the family, dying years later in a residential hotel. Her mother had passed away in a nursing home four months after Lila last saw her. Her siblings were like strangers. And then there were all those lovers, come and gone.
Lila got up, flicked on the bathroom light, and inspected herself in the mirror. Salt-and-pepper hair in a pageboy, bangs chopped across her forehead, a sagging chin, gray teeth, breasts lying almost flat against her chest. The mole beneath her left eye, once a beauty mark, now drooped on its stalk like a wilted flower. An uto, just like Kennedy. Ugly, tired, old. It wasn’t the ugly that offended her; it was the tired. Years ago she’d loved being alive. She wanted love, she wanted fame, she wanted a child. What had happened to all that energy? Was there anything she yearned for now? Even something simple like eating ice cream or feeling a breeze? Sitting on the edge of the bathroom cabinet, surprised and almost grateful for such emotion, Lila started to cry. The youngie, the youngie had woken her up.
what sharis knew
SHE MAY NOT have gone to college, but Sharis knew things. Here was knowledge she kept to herself: deprivation and the threat of danger made her feel alive. Weeding, stirring, chopping, always planning. Every day was not the same. Basic things mattered.
Food mattered. Food mattered tremendously, and Sharis’s parents each summer, as part of their survivalist ethos, had planted an enormous garden. Sharis knew how to start lettuces, the best way to post tomatoes, the mixture of soap and water to spray on Swiss chard. All her married life (which was all her adult life) she had not planted anything, but this spring, with Cleveland being taken over and the whole world, it seemed, turned against America, she’d said to Chad, her husband, Sweetness, we should plant things this year. Chad had tilled a large rectangle in the sunniest and flattest portion of their yard. This happened to be in their front yard, which a year ago would not have been acceptable, but neighborhood standards had changed.
Now, by mid-July, they had … Well, anyone could guess what they had, because Sharis was an industrious woman and the weather was good and even the Grid, which critics said raped the soil, exhausted resources, used too many chemicals, etc, was projected to have a record year.
Chad and Sharis lived south of Dayton in the suburbs, on a private lane off Far Hills, the main road from downtown. Chad and Sharis’s street wound down a hill through trees, and then curled up a hill to a sunnier area. Chad’s drawing of their street would make it a snake. Its tail would touch the main road, the cul-de-sac where Chad’s and Sharis’s house sat would show up as the snake’s open mouth.
Chad and Sharis lived in a nineties home built with a two-story great room. Like most of those homes, theirs had been modified during the Short Times with new, lowered ceilings. Sharis liked the puddles of light that formed below the ceiling cans. She liked the overstuffed chair in the corner, the beautifully grained wooden bowl, the hanging clock decorated with hand-painted flowers. Sharis had grown up in a dark house; for her father, closed curtains were a moral imperative. In contrast, now Sharis had drapes only in the bedrooms. Sometimes, lying on the couch in the great room, looking out the wide front window, Sharis imagined the empty space above the ceiling as a hidden room: if the troops swept down from Cleveland, she and Chad and the boys would have a place to hide. What an adventure that would be, something for the boys to remember forever—the aim of an adventure, always, being the exhilaration of survival.
There was one cabbage in her garden that Sharis had watched for a month, getting bigger and bigger and not precisely rounder but vaster. When the cabbage was as big as it reasonably could get, Sharis cut it and carried it into the house. She and Chad made a sort of party of it.
“Ten pounds,” Sharis guessed. She set the cabbage on the bathroom floor and peered at her weight on the scale. “Hand it to me, honey.” If she was editing their family, this was a moment she’d leave in. Of course, she took on only respectable clients, not people with cameras in their bathrooms or even bedrooms. Chad picked up the cabbage, its dark outer leaves studded with slugs and wormholes, and handed it to his wife. “Eleven,” Sharis said firmly. Her voice rose in its girlish way: “Char, as Howard would say.”
“What’s char?” Howard asked breathlessly, arriving at the top of the stairs. Even a trip up the stairs made him pant.
“The average war lasts seven months,” Derk said from the blue table in the kitchen. Derk had been a history minor and, after Dayton: The Roots of Midwestern, one of Chad’s most enthusiastic students. He worked at American Motors running a paint machine for tanks. Derk lived with his parents. He’d tried to enlist in the military, but a childhood infection had left him with a bad heart. “Your husband taught me that,” Derk added.
“I did?” Chad said.
Derk’s shirt was off because of the heat, and the thumping of his defective heart twitched the few hairs on his chest. Chad hoped that Sharis didn’t notice this; it was the sort of thing she might comment on.
It was fun then, it really was. Sharis was slicing her huge cabbage in the kitchen: a quarter for cabbage rolls, a quarter for coleslaw, and a half for sweet-and-sour soup. Her massive knife flashed and gleamed. She thought of a cabbage seed, sun, water, something-from-nothing. How could anyone doubt the existence of God in a world with eleven-pound cabbages? She wasn’t a religious
