snow underfoot made a sound like chalk on a blackboard. It had iced over during the day, but that morning it had still been fresh and soft. When Ocean woke, she was enchanted. She ran to the window and announced her immediate intention to go outside and play, but I caught her at the door. She was a tropical child, with no understanding of the bitterness of cold. I took her to the mudroom and stuffed her into an old pink snowsuit I’d found, and she stood there, straining like small sausage. She was whimpering by the time I shoved a knit cap onto her head, pulling it down low to cover her ears. I zipped her up, catching her throat skin in the metal teeth and drawing a speck of blood, which I wiped off with spit on my thumb. I wrapped her neck in a scarf and knotted it, then clipped mittens onto her cuffs. I made her put Baggies on her double-socked feet and step into felt-lined galoshes. I sat back on my heels and looked at her with grim satisfaction. It’s amazing, the routines you remember.
“There. Go on outside.”
Ocean’s face, what I could see of it, twisted in despair. “But I can’t moooooooooove,” she wailed.
Go. Play, girl, play. I shoved her, sniffling, out onto the porch, and she descended the steps like an ancient woman, feeble and tentative. When she reached the ground, her rubberized feet flew out from under her and she fell down hard on her well-padded bottom. She lay there pinkly in the snow, face up, immobile. I watched her from inside the door. Phoenix joined me.
“Yummy, she’s not moving.”
“Mmm.”
“Aren’t you going to help her?”
“She’s all right. She’s dressed for the weather.”
He sighed and then pushed past me. He was wearing his surfing jams. It was zero degrees out. He ran down the steps, hauled his plug-shaped sister to her feet, and brushed her off. “Come on, Puddle,” he said. “Stand up.” He was wearing flip-flops and a T-shirt with a skateboard logo.
Now I lit the soggy cigarette in the dark and shivered. When you’re seven years old, you think know everything. When you’re fourteen, you’re certain you do. When you’re pushing forty, if you’re honest with yourself, you realize that your omniscience is wearing thin. If I’d had any foreknowledge at all, I would never have come back here. Now that I was back, I was feeling as restless as if I’d never left in the first place.
Fourteen. It seemed impossible that I had ever been so young, or so in love. So sure of everything. I exhaled and the acrid smoke mixed with the frozen air. I’d forgotten about Idaho winters, how long and punishing they could be.
elliot
It was not just bad luck that led to Elliot’s transfer to potatoes. Rather it was an ironic twist of fate, and one he found very unpleasant when his boss pointed it out. The conversation took place in Duncan’s office, on the northeast corner of the twenty-third floor of the D&W building. Twenty-three was an auspicious number. The northeast corner balanced Dragon energy with the Tortoise, auguring material wealth.
“Of course we had the offices feng shui–ed,” Duncan explained. “Powerful stuff. Do you know there’s a feng shui index in the Hong Kong stock market?”
Elliot shook his head. Clear water trickled down a craggy rock face located against the far wall of the room, gurgling as it spilled into a limpid pond. The sound was playful yet serene. A small Japanese lantern sat on the edge of the pond, and fish flickered below the water’s surface. A residue of incense hung in the air.
Elliot sat before the black marble expanse of Duncan’s desk, watching his boss finger a floret carved from a Japanese radish. Behind him in the distance, through the polarized glass, Elliot could see the ghostly architecture of the nation’s capital glimmering in the twilight.
“Sorry to keep you so late,” Duncan said, nudging a plate of seaweed across the sleek desk with the lacquered tip of his chopsticks. “You sure you won’t join me?”
“No thanks, Duncan.” Elliot eyed the mound of dark, twiglike shapes, glistening in a muddy dressing and dotted with seeds. “I’m going out for dinner.”
“Gotta watch it in restaurants, Elliot. Never eat in them myself. Not unless I know the owners.”
“That’s very . . . careful of you.”
“Can’t be too careful these days. Never know where your food is coming from.” He lifted a ruffled leaf of lettuce to his lips. “Food is sacred, Elliot. Food is life.”
“Yes, I can see that.” Elliot watched his boss chew the leaf for what seemed like a very long time. Duncan was the junior partner in the firm. Wiley, the senior partner, was an old-school PR man. Duncan was the young eccentric, the wild card, the one Wiley counted on to think out of the box.
“Just got back from a raw retreat in Maui,” Duncan said when he finally swallowed. “Fantastic. All the food was exquisitely uncooked, but the power locked in those legumes! The purity! The unadulterated energy! It was life altering.” He bowed over a slice of avocado, then speared it with his chopsticks. “You really should go. I’ll have Sedona send you the contacts.”
“That would be just great.”
“It clears the head,” Duncan added. “Balances the yang. Equilibrium is the key, Elliot. It enables one to accept what the Universe offers.”
Elliot was trying to look open and enthusiastic. He didn’t quite know how to interpret the general direction the conversation was taking, never mind predict when Duncan would get to the point. The man had two methods, one a smooth shift into a higher gear, the other a sudden, clutchless grind into reverse.
“I’ve got some rather fortuitous news, Elliot.”
Elliot braced while Duncan took a sip of frothy green tea from a ceramic bowl. He watched his employer’s tongue flick quickly against the rough-glazed edge. Duncan had a large collection of historically important raku tea bowls, about which Elliot had learned much during his five-year tenure at Duncan & Wiley. Duncan liked to recount the provenance of each bowl, just before dropping a bomb. The most recent had been the merger of D&W with a prominent Japanese public relations firm, but this news Elliot had greeted with genuine enthusiasm. He’d always had a thing for Asia. He started dreaming of a transfer to Tokyo, maybe a meditation pond of his own.
“. . . a divisional reorganization,” Duncan was saying. “We’re beefing up our Cynaco task force in response to all the recent protests. What we had in mind was developing a proactive management strategy geared toward their NuLife Potato line.”
Elliot watched as Duncan rotated the tea bowl slowly in his hands, studying its pocks and careful imperfections. He tried to focus on his equilibrium, to quell the panic that was rising in his gut. He had a bad feeling.
“And this is where it gets uncanny, Elliot. We were casting about for the right talent for the job, when someone from Human Resources remembered that you had taught school in Idaho once upon a time. So we had her pull your file, and there it was. Liberty Falls. As I said to the guys from Cynaco, who would have thought that we’d have right here, on staff in D.C., someone who actually hailed from the Idaho heartland! Who’d actually lived among the People of the Potatoes. Who’d taught their children.”
“Duncan,”
