Читать книгу Neon Green - Margaret Wappler - Страница 13
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“Honey, I’m sorry, but I only have a few minutes.”
“I want to run an idea by you.”
Cynthia worked in an unglamorous office at a desk that was always buried in sedimentary paperwork. At thirty-nine, she was one of the few lawyers in a small Chicago law firm that specialized in environmental law and civic government cases. She had the phone crunched on her shoulder while her hands dug through an especially unruly file, spilling over with affidavits and reports.
“At last night’s meeting, we realized that we’re short on budget. Even with what town hall’s giving us, we’re not going to make our goals. We don’t want to pull back on the plans but we’ve got to raise money in other ways. Creative, homespun ways that aren’t going to rely on corporate sponsorship.”
“What’s wrong with corporate sponsorship?”
“We don’t need yet another partner telling us what to do and how to do it. We need money with no strings attached, given from the goodness of one’s heart.”
“Oh, I see where this is going.”
“Do you?”
“You’re talking about torturing our children.”
“Torture! I’m talking about building character.”
“Everyone knows that ‘building character’ means doing something you don’t want to do.”
“I want them to go down to the mall and collect money from the small business owners.”
“Babe, really? How much money will they get from that? A few hundred bucks, tops?”
“We’re always emphasizing to them the importance of working for their values. And who wouldn’t want to give them money? It’s sweet, these two kids collecting donations for an Earth Day celebration.”
“I love them, Ernest, but I don’t know if they can play the cute card anymore.”
“Sure they can.”
“How did this come about?”
Ernest recounted that after the budget had been revealed, he quickly volunteered to raise money. Or more specifically, his children. After all, they were old hands at fund-raising. One year, they’d raised a whopping $168 for a beach cleanup—spent on trash bags, recycling bins, and a humble lunch for all the volunteers. They were little kids then—Gabe, barely ten years old, dressed in a suit, and Alison, eight, wiggling a loose eyetooth and smearing the extra blood on her peach dress. Ernest parked them in front of the local bank, where they kicked their legs out underneath a folding card table. From across the street, he kept an eye on them; he knew they’d get more without him there fouling the scene. “Look for people with nice things,” he said. “Leather coats and jackets, big jewelry. Call to them, ‘Would you like to save the environment?’”
His strategy was all about leading by example. He thought if he volunteered his kids, as the director of the Earth Day committee, then all the other members would follow suit. But his prime targets—Jean, Ross and Marcy, all of whom had children around Gabe and Alison’s age—didn’t seem to bite. Jean said something about Leigh having too many commitments this year already—debate team, gymnastics. Ernest pushed the issue but was politely stonewalled.
Cynthia said, “Why don’t I ask Stephen if he’ll contribute?”
“Oh, Stephen. I don’t know.”
Stephen was the head of Cynthia’s law film, a strapping environmentalist whom Ernest always imagined riding a chestnut horse to work instead of a low-emissions car.
“You’ll get a sizable sum at once instead of nickels and dimes from people at the mall.”
“But he’s going to want the firm’s name on something.”
“Of course he will, but what’s wrong with that? Just list the name with Demeter and all the other sponsors.”
“The kids are grassroots,” Ernest said. “That’s what I want.”
Cynthia recognized the ragged maw of an argument opening in front of her. She could point out that it wasn’t particularly rootsy to use their children as pawns, regardless of the cause, but she had too much to do and it was already a well-worn argument. Cynthia knew Ernest’s gripes about corporate sponsorship; he’d fired himself up last night talking about Demeter’s involvement. All the same, she made a request:
“Things are so tense in the house right now. Promise me this: keep the peace with Gabe. I don’t need a repeat of last night.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll keep things easy. You have my word.”
Last night, things had gotten so annoying that Alison and Cynthia fled the house. But first, in the kitchen, Ernest shook the notebook at Gabe: “The log. Where’s the log? No entries?”
“You haven’t been entering either,” Gabe said.
They’d been loading the dishwasher together; the door hung open, slopped with a few bits of food.
“I’m an adult with things to do. I put you in charge, remember?”
“OK, well, I’m a teenager with equally important things to do.”
“No, Gabe, the point is that I asked you, the last few days when I saw the ship dumping and vibrating and otherwise being a pain in the ass, to record it diligently in the notebook. And do you know what you said to that, Gabe?”
Gabe’s shoulders slumped and he didn’t meet his father’s eyes.
“You said, ‘I’ll do it, Dad,’ and then I check on it and the thing’s blank besides my first entry. How do you explain that?”
As if the dishwasher contained all the answers, Gabe stuck his head down and fiddled with the arrangement of the cups.
“Gabe?”
“I don’t know, Dad. I didn’t want to record it, OK? Not if it’s going to feed your paranoia.”
“I’m not paranoid; I just want to document this like a scientist. I just want an orderly, fact-driven document that captures the experience of having a trespassing alien disk pooping on my lawn.”
“Oh my god, I get it, OK? Hand me the notebook.”
Ernest passed over the notebook.
“First of all, it looks like, well, not a scientific document at all. This notebook is ugly.”
“Oh, please. Fine, let Alison draw a spaceship on the cover. Something like she drew for her shoes.”
“It needs a title. It’s totally random otherwise.”
“How about . . .” Ernest found a Sharpie and started to write in bold letters on the cover: THE ACTIVITIES OF THE UNWELCOME VISITORS FROM JUPITER: AN ALLEN FAMILY LOG.
“Speak for yourself! They’re not unwelcome by me or anyone with an open mind.”
Their voices continued to batter, and Cynthia felt a headache coming on. She gave up on trying to get work done in the den and jogged upstairs to knock on Alison’s door.
“Do you hear the beasts feasting on all that testosterone?”
Legs crossed on the bed, Alison looked up from her notebook. “Trying not to but—”
“Do you want to take a walk with me?”
“It’s OK, they’ll stop soon enough.”
“Even if I let you get a soft drink in a color insulting to nature?”
Alison’s eyes brightened. “Ooh, like what?”
“A Slurpee or a Pizzee or whatever. Let’s walk to 7-Eleven.”
“Really? A Slurpee isn’t technically a soft drink, but OK!”
“Whatever it is, it’s definitely not good for you.”
Once inside the convenience store a few blocks away, Cynthia stood mystified in front of the mixing vats, all three churning a different hue of sweet slush. She gripped one of the black levers and started to twist.
“Oh my god, Mom. You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?”
“No, I don’t.” Cynthia quickly retracted her hand. “I’ve never seen this before. Every time you kids came in with a Slurpee, I never thought about the machine that makes it.”
“Watch and learn.” Alison grabbed the biggest cup available.
“No, no, no. Smaller size than that. That one.” Cynthia pointed to the adult small.
“Is this for me or for you?”
“It’s for you. This is a good size.”
Alison sighed but accepted her mother’s decree. She pulled down on the black knob and looked pointedly at her mother. “See?”
A shoot of cola fuzz rocketed to the bottom of the cup, and then the machine whined and ceased to drip out anything else.
Cynthia jumped back a little bit. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s like you’ve never seen a machine before. Hold on,” Alison said. She pushed the lever back. “It just needs a minute.”
“How do you know this?”
“Because I live in the twentieth century in suburban America.”
They giggled loudly, enough so that the sour-faced man at the register craned his neck to look at them. He’d had a lot of candy bars walk out the door lately, and he wasn’t taking any chances.
Alison pulled on the lever again and a smooth snake of Slurpee emerged. She expertly twisted the cup with her other hand so that it lay in spirals. Close to the rim, she cut it off with a practiced hand.
“Wow,” Cynthia said. “A Slurpee pro.”
“You want one?”
“Just that baby cup. The red flavor. Cherry, right?”
“No, steak.”
They giggled again. “Just fill it up. I’m going to find some Advil.”
On the walk home, they sucked in silence on the straws with the little spoons on the bottom end.
“How’s everything going with Rebecca?” Alison’s best friend from junior high, ever since they’d started high school, had been palling around with an aggressive jock crowd. For friendship-preserving reasons, Alison was forced to pretend that watching them all play grab-ass and call each other fags while drinking Natty Light was an engaging activity.
“It’s fine when it’s just the two of us.”
“But not when other people are around?” Cynthia enjoyed testing her daughter’s openness. It shifted for reasons she could only guess at.
“It’s just this certain crowd she’s into now. This other girl Claire is pretty much her idol because she has a car and knows about all the senior parties.”
“Do you like Claire?”
Long pause. “I don’t think she really likes me. The minute Rebecca isn’t around we kind of just stare at each other, and then she asks me questions about the spaceship, which is, like, the only thing she knows about me. Well, OK, she does like my drawings. She wants me to draw a logo for her scrunchie business.”
“Scrunchies?”
“Yeah, she sews buttons on them, dips them in sparkles. They’re really puffy.”
“Do you like them?”
Alison paused again. “They’re kind of cool. She might start making velvet chokers too.”
“Does she have a name for her business?”
“Tiny Vampire.”
“Well, there’s your illustration right there. A cute little vampire wearing a big puffy scrunchie.” Cynthia laughed at the vision of it.
“Yeah, whatever. She said she’d give me twenty dollars to draw something, so that’s pretty good.”
“You should sell more drawings. Look at your shoes. You could sell hand-drawn sneakers for a lot of money.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Alison tried the idea on. Her stomach panicked a little at the thought of selling something she’d made herself.
“You could do themes, whatever they request.”
Alison had already been approached by a few kids to do a copy of the scenario she had drawn on her own white Converse—a crowded sunshine-lit utopia of spaceships flying through the air toward a wild landscape. Lots of yellow and green. But she’d told the other kids that it was one of a kind. Why hadn’t she thought to offer them something else? She wrestled with wanting and shunning attention. On one hand, she longed to be the center, to have her talents praised and used as currency, but on the other, she got squeamish and shy talking about it.
As usual, her mother intuited her thoughts, saying, “You shouldn’t be so shy about your skills. You should be proud that you can draw like that. I don’t know where you got it from.”
Alison didn’t say anything, but she basked in the odd sensation that she was a rare creature. That for every moment her parents were clueless, they could stare right into her like this with ease and see something that she’d grasped only the corner of herself. She kept drinking the Slurpee, the icy cola numbing her throat.
A couple of blocks from the store, Cynthia pitched her drink into a trash can. “Ugh, I’ve got a headache and I think that’s making it worse.” Cynthia wrenched open the Advil bottle, shook out a tablet, and gulped it down.
“No water? Can I have one?”
“You have a headache too?”
“No, I just like the taste.”
Her mother frowned. “What do you mean?”
“The coating. I love the taste.”
Cynthia stopped walking. “Wait. Do you just pop Advil for the flavor?”
Alison took another long draw from her drink, wondering what answer could still be relatively honest but not get her in too much trouble. “I guess so. Sometimes I swallow them, sometimes I spit them out.”
“How often?”
“I don’t know. Once a week?”
“Alison, you can’t do that. You can’t just eat Advil because it tastes good.”
“Most of the time I just suck on it and spit it out.”
“Jesus, no wonder we’re always out of Advil.”
Her mom was surprisingly pissed. “What is the big deal? It’s not like it gets you high.”
“No, but it’s not candy. It’s medicine. Promise me you’ll never do that again.”
“OK, I won’t. I didn’t know it would be such a thing.”
“God, why would you do that?”
“It’s sweet; it tastes good. There’s never any sugar or candy in the house.”
Cynthia nodded. “Maybe we’ve been too strict about that.”
“Well, you don’t have to jump down my throat about it.”
“I just want my girl to be safe.” Her mother squeezed her hand.
Coming down the sidewalk was a tall elderly woman with striking orange-and-red pants, the colors in swirls. She held her beehived head down until the last moment before they crossed paths.
“Hello,” she greeted Cynthia.
“Hello,” Cynthia said. “You’re out late tonight.”
“It’s nice weather for a walk. Is this your daughter?”
“Sure is.”
“Love those sneakers. My gosh are those great! Enjoy your evening, ladies.”
Cynthia swatted Alison on the arm. “See?”
After the woman walked a distance away, Alison said, “That woman has great style. I could totally draw her some psychedelic sneakers—peace signs, paisleys, oh my god. Whatever she wanted.”
“She walks more than anyone I’ve ever seen. I see her in the mornings usually. She’s in amazing shape for her age, or any age. I wouldn’t mind being like her.”
“Mom, I don’t think you’ll ever be able to top that lady’s look. I mean, no offense or anything.”
Cynthia laughed. “None taken, but I’m not totally hopeless, you know.”
“Really? What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever worn?”
“When I was in college,” Cynthia said, “I mostly sat around in bikini tops—trippy psychedelic ones with tiny strings—and jean shorts. Either my shoulders were bare or my feet were bare—or both.”
“Are you telling me to wear as little clothing as possible when I go to college?”
Cynthia smiled. “Only if the climate’s right.”
When Cynthia first met Ernest in college in California, they were both enterprising, politically active firebrands who argued that environmentalism touched every facet of life, no matter your race, class, or gender. In a discussion about water pollution, she watched Ernest, handsome and volatile, stand in his ragged T-shirt and rattle off several statistics about water. When a classmate offered the idea that water problems in Latin America might be exaggerated, Ernest drew him into a debate, expertly shooting him down with a steely command of the facts. He knew how to channel his rage and passion and, somehow, still maintain a sense of absurdist humor, a rare commodity among activist types. Soon enough, they were cooking dinners together in her tiny apartment shared with three other girls, throwing slices of squash into a sizzling pan from her parents’ farm, his arm wrapped around her back as she was cooking, pulling her in as the vegetable caramelized, his breath tracing her ear as he lowered down to kiss her neck.
Later, on the rumpled sheets of her bed, they’d get lost in each other for hours, until they were tired of the taste of their own bodies, but then the pull would be just as intoxicating the next night, and for a long, long time it sustained them that way.
Though they were in agreement politically, their beliefs manifested in different ways: Cynthia wanted something tangible, so she pursued a law degree once the kids were in school, working herself hard late at night over the minutiae of environmental law, as it was the early 1980s, with still-fresh laws passed by Nixon, back when Republicans saw the good of protecting the land, air, and water as much as anyone else (or at least did a decent job of parroting the rhetoric).
Truth be told, Cynthia never quite understood how a man with Ernest’s talents couldn’t find the right fit. He was so committed to his ideals, quoting Roderick Nash, Denis Hayes, and Rachel Carson. He recalled the Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969 and how it had compelled him to change his life. He alluded to the conditions in Chicago’s industrial South Side, where he’d grown up, with bitter intensity. Yet he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biology and promptly stalled out, getting education jobs that let him work outdoors but little else. “Why not law?” she’d asked him. And he’d hemmed and hawed, sometimes agreeing that one could do good that way, other times ripping apart the system as effecting no real change other than holding up a small hand against the tidal wave of destructive corporations.
He settled instead into a pattern of consulting jobs, most of them low paying, to Cynthia’s disappointment. These short-term gigs never provided the right situation to contain or sustain his specific brand of environmental fervor. Before directing Earth Day, he had worked as an environmental impact consultant for the state government. Basically, his job entailed following all the condo development projects in the area and making sure none of them infringed upon protected lands or the survival of natural habitats. In one way, the job appealed to Ernest’s watchdog nature, but he complained about how little he could do. Sure, he could get a project to move by a few hundred feet sometimes, but it was only a stopgap measure. There was always a sense from him that nothing was good enough or pure enough. This absolutism prompted both affection and exasperation from everyone who knew him. His friends talked about the certain facial expression he had to go along with his speeches: the transfixed look of a righteous monk.
Cynthia, for all her frustrations with Ernest’s career path, appreciated his passion and authenticity. And his lack of traditional ambition allowed her more freedom to pursue her career while he took on cooking for the family and other time-consuming household duties. That flexibility in a man of their generation was hard to find.
And somewhere in all his idealism, he did possess a realist’s eye. Cynthia filled with relief whenever he acknowledged practicalities, limits, and contradictions, the daily bread of her practice. When she couldn’t manage to block the building of a mall on some prairie grasses, Ernest nodded in understanding at the other lawyer’s argument that the financial benefits for the depressed town would outweigh the natural harm. “See,” Cynthia had pointed out to him, “you would’ve made a strong lawyer. It’s all about seeing the other side so you can plan the appropriate counterarguments, and an appropriate counterargument can lead to finding a working compromise.” That was the backbone of her work: negotiation. But then he said that he was just pretending; in actuality, he couldn’t see the other side. He could understand it but he could never empathize. And somehow, in all of his contradictions and obvious posturing, she loved him anyway. For all his complaining, Ernest was in touch with the essential playfulness of life. She still brightened every time he burst into a room with some little fact or wry observation that he just had to share with her.
Ernest’s car was a disheveled old beast that hadn’t been serviced in years, a maroon Volkswagen Jetta with scrapes of rust rimming the wheel wells. Cynthia teased him sometimes to trade it in, but secretly, she felt a swell of affection for it whenever she heard its motor rasp to a stop in the driveway. In the backseat, torn upholstery and files from his work. Between the front seats, a few banged-up cassette tapes stored in a heavy pottery dish Gabe had made in grade school, along with change and keys to a long-abandoned locker at the YMCA. The tape player wasn’t there anymore, just the wiry guts of a deck long ago ripped out by a thief unconcerned with the fastidiousness of his crime.
For months Ernest had driven around in silence, but Gabe had deemed this too depressing, so he outfitted his father’s car with his old boom box; it sat on the passenger seat, some kind of stereophonic pet living off D batteries. When the power ran out, Gabe replaced the batteries for him, fetching the frozen alkaline tubes out of the garage refrigerator that Ernest stocked with frozen marinades, soups, Popsicles for the summer, rolls of film, exotic spicy mustards and hot sauces. Some of the foods were stored with a recipe attached or just the aura of a plan. His children thought it was strange that he had plans so far ahead for something as ordinary as dinner, but to him the days clicked by that way, filled with reassuring little details.
He puttered home from work, spent but still nervous from an exhausting afternoon. In what was supposed to be a quickie freelance gig for the state government—he’d taken it on in addition to his Earth Day duties for the extra cash—he met with developers who had condo plans for a prairie area some sixty miles south of the city. His job was to inform them that their project wouldn’t work because some bird nests would be in jeopardy. The CEO of the company asked Ernest a series of questions that grew more hostile as they went along.
Ernest didn’t mind educating the developer on the new measure; it had been passed only for a year. The brawny businessman was spoiled by a culture where he could build anything, anywhere, and not worry about the problems. Toxic runoffs into water, fine dust from construction materials covering the ground for miles around, destruction of tree groves and bird nests, buying people’s land with eminent domain, changing pathways of roads to go around his projects—he never had to be concerned about any of it until recently, so, at first, Ernest was patient with the man’s confusion. But then it became clear that the developer wasn’t seeking clarification on the measure; he simply opposed its very existence.
Once Ernest recognized the true mission of the developer’s questions, his mood shifted. “There aren’t any ways around this measure,” Ernest repeated. “And it isn’t in effect to make your life difficult.”
“How about I make your life difficult?” the developer said with a sleazy smile.
Ernest could sense the developer sizing up his shaggy hair and his unassuming sneakers, and he silently returned the same scorn for the developer’s ostentatious pinkie ring and starched shirt.
“No one’s life has to be difficult,” Ernest said. “Birds included.”
After the meeting was over, as Ernest drifted home, he reflected more on his self-presentation. Cynthia would’ve recommended playing a different part, rather than the granola-chomping nature advocate. “It only muddles the true issues,” she would have said, “because then they fixate on you and how you must feel superior to them. Or, worse, how you are an incompetent pot-smoking hippie who can’t be taken seriously.” That’s why, for all professional interactions, Cynthia dressed in simple, moderately priced skirts and blouses. She preferred neutrality, but Ernest couldn’t situate himself outside his identity, no matter how much he conceded that it might help him.
Through the windshield he spotted a set of white lines on the sky, a little wavy like they were drawn in shaving cream: contrails. He pulled over at Aurora Park and got out of his car to take in the sight of this man-made intrusion on the natural world, somewhat repulsive, somewhat fascinating. He was also in no hurry to go home.
Twilight pink was settling on the fall day, the kind of breezy beauty that the Midwest delivered around this time of year as an early apology for the next five months of meteorological brutality. On the park’s corner near the basketball court, a woman stood alone, staring into the sky. Ernest stood at a polite distance from her, watching one of the cottony lines shred till it vanished. The other lines remained.
He released a long sigh. She turned her chin over one shoulder to look at him.
“Did you know that Chinese astronomers in the fourth century thought that the blue of the sky was an illusion?”
“Is that so?” she said.
“They thought it was an optical illusion to cover up the infinite, empty space.”
“I guess we know it a little differently now,” she said. Then pointing at the contrails: “See those marks in the sky? They come from all the chemicals we’re using.”
He knew the contrails theory only a little bit. The sharp lines that jets and planes drew in the sky were really remnants of their pollutants, leaked out of their tails as they soared to oases unknown.
“I’ve been researching it,” she said, still not turning around fully, but he caught enough of her face to recognize her.
“Marilyn Fournier,” he said. “You write for the city paper. I remember your piece a few years ago on the city’s Earth Day debacle. That was a great story.”
She turned around to thank him, but he was already continuing.
“I’m always reading environment stories for my work. You know,” he said, taking a step forward as the opportunity dawned on him, “I’m organizing Earth Day’s twenty-fifth anniversary next year. It’ll be held right here in this park. It’s going to be quite the blowout.” As he spoke about the town politics of getting the event off the ground, and how he had convinced Prairie Park to increase the budget, he thought he noticed Marilyn checking him out. He had ventured out on an arduous hike yesterday; maybe the healthy afterglow hadn’t yet faded.
“And you also consult?” she asked. She listened to his explanation about monitoring certain construction projects with a slight smile. “So you’re an enviro-cop.”
“To serve and protect.”
“I bet people don’t like when a stranger drops in and enforces the rules.”
“Well, I get a little thrill out of it.”
He asked her for a card, so that he could alert her now and again on potential stories. He casually slipped in that he wrote the occasional editorial for the Tuesday Courier. The last one he wrote a few months ago was on the importance of green space in the town mall, currently shut off to car traffic. Prairie Park’s officials wanted to run a street through it to spur business. Ernest thought it was a terrible idea. His editorial had garnered several responses: some from local businesses who said a street would save the flagging mall, some who agreed with him, and one from a seventeen-year-old Marxist who advocated for the entire mall to be destroyed.
Marilyn dug a card out of her purse, an unfashionable but highly functional canvas shoulder bag that gave Ernest a sense of kinship.
“What are you working on now?”
“All sorts of stories,” she said in a way that suggested she wouldn’t talk any more about them. She had a serious, secretive air about her, even when she was smiling. “Let me ask you something: Do you spend a lot of time in this park?”
“All the time. I live only a block away.”
“I see,” she said with a bobbing nod.
“In fact, you can see a bit of my house right there.” Ernest pointed down the block. They were close enough to see some neon-green light from the spaceship spilling onto the driveway.
“There?” She squinted. “With that green light? What is that?”
“Well,” he said with an exhalation, “that’s a spaceship from Jupiter.”
Her body froze and then a giddy smile spread on her face. “You’re kidding me.”
“Lucky winner, right here.”
“Right, oh right! Someone at the office was telling me that a saucer had landed in this neighborhood—”
“Do you want to come see it?”
She checked her watch. “Sure, I’ll take a quick peek.”
Marilyn Fournier walked around the ship, rubbing her hand on a leg, then knocking on it. She pressed her hand to her sternum and murmured, “Amazing.” Then she folded over with a few vigorous sneezes. She laughed. “Is it made out of ragweed?”
“No, but you’re not the only one allergic to it.” Ernest pointed to two squirrels who’d been on their way into the yard via the driveway but promptly turned around. “All small critters run in the face of the spaceship, including our cat.”
“Not surprising.”
“You’ve never heard of these being toxic, have you?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing of the sort.”
“You should come back in a week,” Ernest blurted out. “We’re having a party. It’s calm right now, but if you’re here for a while, it’ll make a racket. You’ve got to see it.”
Before she left, they both checked in on the sky. One of the contrails looked like it had been drawn with chalk. That mark would stay the longest, but by nighttime, it blended in with the rest of the clouds, its edges gilded with moonlight.
