His wife didn’t realize, Chad thought, that she intimidated people. She was small—“petite,” people said, “like a little ballet dancer.” When she turned, her dark brown hair spread out shining over her shoulders, and when she was busy or impatient, she would grab the whole great hank of it, twist it around her hand and drop it to the left of her neck. Her lips were full and pink; her brown eyes heavily lashed and often narrowed.
Derk’s mouth jerked, and Chad, thinking of his friend’s wispy father, his impossible mother, gave Derk a smile and a roll of his eyes. Chad was six foot four and two hundred eighty pounds, but he scared no one. “Make yourself small,” Chad’s mother used to say, marshalling her sons through the crowded aisles of the grocery.
“I’m fine. I’m on the lowest dose,” Derk said, his eyes fixed on the blue table.
“They passed it out up north the day they did the Gridding,” Chad said in a companionable way. “Didn’t give people a choice. Just woke people up, lined them up in the streets, and squirted it in their mouths.” He glanced at Sharis as he spoke, invoking her complicity. She had watched this from a stand of trees twenty feet from her parents’ house, a fact known only to herself and Chad.
“What was wrong with those people?” Derk said. “Why’d they stand there like sheep and take it?”
“Maybe they were stunned, Derk,” Sharis said, her voice rising. “Maybe it was like a dream for them.” Chad shifted in his seat, wondering how much she was going to give away. “Plus, if you wouldn’t open your mouth for the Calmadol, they gave you a shot. Those shots knocked people out.”
“Gridding was the stupidest thing the government ever did,” Derk said. “They wouldn’t be dropping bombs on Shaker Heights if the government hadn’t done that.”
“No one’s dropping bombs on Shaker Heights,” Chad soothed, relieved Derk hadn’t noticed the immediacy of Sharis’s words. “From what I’ve heard, the Cleveland takeover’s been remarkably peaceable. I think the Alliance will be sorry they did it.”
“You may think the Grid’s stupid, but we’re eating,” Sharis said. “For thirteen years we’ve been eating. We’re still eating.” She was parroting Chad’s words, and Chad felt suddenly—uncomfortably—as if she were his child, spouting his ideas in a speech contest.
“Those Africans and the Suds, they don’t eat hardly anything,” Derk said, his animation returning. “That’s how they can run such a big military. I mean, they practically feed all their troops off what they draw from Canada.”
“Canada has a rich agricultural heritage,” Chad agreed. “No one’s going to starve when they’ve got Canada.”
“I hate Canada,” Sharis burst out. “Don’t talk to me about Canada.”
Chad smiled apologetically at Derk. Whenever he and Sharis had visitors, Chad found himself missing his mother. His mother who kept a pot of soup on the stovetop, who believed, forty-plus years too late, in counterculture, who forbade video games and even resisted a computer in the house until Chad reached middle school and the gifted program made it a requirement. Chad’s brother had it easier, being younger: he even got a cell phone.
It wasn’t until college that Chad had recognized how sparely his family lived. At his parents’ house the plates didn’t match the bowls, guests drank from decorated plastic cups passed out at ballgames, and the bathroom off their kitchen was a tiled cube with no fan and a door that incompletely closed. Any of these things could have been changed—money was not, was never, the issue—and it struck Chad as he reached adulthood that his mother was indeed a resister. The unmatched dishes were a choice. And Chad’s clothes from Meijer’s and Walmart: a choice again.
Chad’s mother was a tall blonde with watery eyes. In contrast to Chad’s father, who called himself a “nothing,” she called herself a tikkun olam—a heal-the-world—Jew, and drove Chad and his brother to Hebrew school twice a week and made sure they got through their Bar Mitzvahs. Unlike all the other women in their synagogue, even the fat ones, she had very protuberant teeth. “Didn’t they have braces when you were young?” Chad’s little brother had asked.
“My teeth work fine,” Chad’s mother said, baring them and chomping. “Like a horse’s.”
No other Jewish mother Chad knew would compare her own teeth to a horse’s; no other Jewish mother would call the Torah “just a bunch of stories about rescues”; no other mother of any stripe wore shoes patched together with duct tape. His own mother, Chad supposed, had prepared him for the oddness that was Sharis.
“Zucchini brownie?” Chad said, holding out a plate to Derk. His mother’s recipe, Sharis’s garden.
HERE WERE SOME Ohio casualties of the Grid:
Wapakoneta, birthplace of the first man on the moon, where General Theodore Marshall, on the day of the flattening, was observed outside the former Neil Armstrong Heritage Museum lifting his sleeve repeatedly to his eyes.
West Liberty, with its downtown restaurant famous for pies and potato salad, although the family-owned cave outside town with the white (calcite) formations, Ohio Caverns, was left unbombed and was outfitted, according to rumor, as a shelter for the Gridians in case of armed invasion.
St. Henry’s, once noted for turkeys shipped as far away as Tel Aviv, Saint Petersburg, and Damascus, was replaced by soybean fields that would be rotated (as were the majority of the Grid fields) with wheat and corn. No one knew what had happened to the turkeys. There were stories of a lavish dinner held in the army tents, the scent of roasting meat overpowering the odor of bombs and burning, although everyone in the battalion denied it.
Tipp City was leveled, as was Lima (pronounced like the bean, despite the town being named for the city in Peru), Versailles (rhymed with fur tails), and Milan (long i, accent on the first syllable).
Three people had shot themselves during the reclamation of Utica, leading to a brief (it lasted minutes) armed rebellion and the composition of a song:
The ghosts of Utica Just wanted to be free To live their simple lives The way it used to be.
The towns of northern Indiana and Illinois and southern Michigan all had similar stories; the big cities—Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Fort Wayne, and Chicago—were spared.
The Ohio Historical Society had a goal of interviewing every person from Ohio who’d been Gridded. They were making a database. They were proving someone cared.
IF YOU TOOK a five-pointed star and tilted it slightly to the right, as if it were racing, and centered it over the shield shape of Ohio, the star’s center would be the city of Columbus, the state capital, and Cleveland would sit at the star’s uppermost tip. Dayton would be in the star’s bottom left arm. Dayton’s origin was similarly modest: it had been founded as an investment. At the University of Dayton, where Chad as a tenured history professor taught every third year a two-semester course on Dayton history, the investment angle was always the first thing that he mentioned.
It was true that in 1749 the French declared, by means of mounted plaques, possession of the Ohio River and “all streams that fall into it.” The land that later become Dayton was on one of those contributing streams, so technically one could say that the French first claimed the land that would be Dayton. But the French were hunters and fur trappers, not settlers. No one threatened the natives or the wilderness until transplants from Pennsylvania, baby citizens
