Ordinary Love and Good Will

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, as well as four works of nonfiction. She is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, and in 2001 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature in 2006. Jane Smiley lives in northern California.

ORDINARY LOVE

I don’t want Joe to find me on my knees, buffing the kitchen floor with an old cotton turtleneck, but he does, and says, “Mom! What are you doing? Relax!”

I sit back on my heels and say, “It’s only six-thirty. What’s with you?”

But I know. We both know. He crosses the kitchen and pours himself his first cup of coffee. He drinks them three at a time, I’ve noticed this summer, hot and with lots of milk and sugar. Now he turns away from the coffeemaker, and the cup is half empty before he sits at the table. He is grinning. Michael will be here today. Michael, Joe’s identical twin, has been teaching mathematics in a secondary school in Benares, India for two years. That is why I am buffing the floor, why neither of us can relax.

The floor is pegged maple, about seventy-five years old. The boards vary in width from two inches to five, and are laid diagonally. In the last fifteen minutes, I have worked my way from the pantry to the back door, into a long bronze leaf of sunlight that colors my forearms and turns my hands muscular with shadows. I like this floor, troublesome as it is: caring for it, I remind myself of my mother, and this city, in spite of all its trees, seems rather like Nebraska,
where I grew up. The long, rhythmic motions with the rag are soothing and productive at the same time.

Joe says, “I think I’ll leave for the airport about nine.” He is bouncing in his chair. I smile and say, “Why don’t you leave now?”

“I’m relaxed, Mom. What makes you think I’m not relaxed?” His expression is almost maniacal. They are twenty-five, and they have not seen each other in two years. “You, woman, get up and have a cup of tea or something.” And so I do, simply for the pleasure of sitting at the kitchen table with my son. I let him make me toast and peel me an orange, and pour milk on my Rice Krispies. We talk about the geraniums in the window box and the broken lawnmower and the courses Joe is going to take when school starts again in two weeks. We don’t talk about Michael. It is a family ritual, not to allude to the returning traveler while he or she is in transit. Usually we just don’t speak the name, but this time Joe hasn’t even said “he” or “my brother.”

Joe has been with me all summer, the longest time we’ve spent together in six years, and I’ve gotten used to him. Joe was nervous about living with his mother all summer, but it has been one of the great summers of my life, the brush and thump and rattle of a congenial presence in the house every day. I’ll be sorry when he goes back to school, and he knows it. He gets up from the table and goes into the dining room. He puts on some record, though only after carefully cleaning it off, and here comes Hank Williams, a compromise. I get back to the floor. He brought home his record collection and all summer his gift to me has been surprise music, but he can be pretty demanding—he’s made me listen to Elvis Costello, The Talking Heads, The Flamin’ Groovies, Dire Straits. I pretend I can hear the melodies. He says, only half joking, “This is pretty central to your mom-project, I would say, if you want to do it right.” Doing it right involves learning to tolerate weirder harmonies
than I was accustomed to before, but as a part of his “son-project” he plays the opera and the folk music I like.

He was living in Chicago, but his girlfriend broke up with him in June. After he got here, she wrote him four letters in two days, then that was it. Louise, her name is. She’d visited here four or five times, and I’d liked her, found her a pleasant, straightforward young woman. At lunch after he had been here a few days, he pushed one of the letters across the table for me to read. The important thing, she wrote, was that she didn’t have the power to make him happy. Joe got up then and went to pull weeds in the flower beds. I remembered that feeling, life with a moody man, the ceiling lifting and lowering hour by hour, some days minute by minute. I thought she was wise to recognize her capacities before marriage, before children, but when Joe passed the kitchen window, I saw from the angle of his shoulders that he was devastated, and tears came into my eyes for him. Since then he hasn’t dated.

His whole social life here revolves around Barbara and Kevin, friends from high school who got married at the end of college. When they come over, she always wants to sit me in the kitchen and talk about furniture and he always wants to take me outside (No eavesdroppers? I wonder) and probe my knowledge of state government. I am fifty-two years old, which turns out to be the age when your children and their friends are suddenly eager to plunder the knowledge and experience they once wouldn’t admit you had for nuggets they now find useful. I am an accountant for the state, in the DOT, which must explain Kevin’s interest.

I’ve been married once, almost married a second time. I have five children, four grandchildren, which must explain Barbara’s interest, even though furniture is the closest she can get to the real topic of children and family life. My younger daughter, Annie, who had a baby in May, calls
about everything now, though for years I hardly heard from her. My elder daughter, Ellen, lives a mile from here. She has two daughters of her own, and she talks to me or stops by every day. Daniel, a year younger than Ellen, lives in New York. He has one son, and calls every weekend. Once I was the font of wisdom about babies that they think I am now. My hip was made for carrying an infant; I could thread my way among toys and toddlers without stumbling, hardly looking down, except to admire a scribbled drawing. I thought four high chairs at the kitchen table and two big Labrador retrievers milling around them hoovering up the jetsam was unremarkable.

After buffing the floor, I go into the bathroom and scour the tub and the sink. I love this house. I used to drive past it every day on my way to work, and then it came up for sale, and I bought it. It is a four-bedroom Colonial Revival, on a huge corner lot, with a wraparound porch downstairs and a second-story walk-out balcony, too much for a single woman, but just enough, in a way, for me. I think of it as my acreage. Here alone, the way I usually am, I appreciate the largeness of its peace—no grandeur, but plenty of roomy quiet. There are three chestnut trees in the yard that must be indestructible, since there aren’t three chestnuts so close together anywhere else in the state. By the time I have done the bathroom and straightened the living room, it is nearly nine. Joe is whistling through the house, making himself, I know, wait until the exact minute before letting himself depart. I stand in the shadow of the living room doorway, and soon enough he comes downstairs, putting his things into his pockets, jaunty with anticipation. I admire him. He is tall and square-shouldered. He stands up straight. He is slender, with large hands and feet, and though he doesn’t have the air of physical know-how that, say, Daniel has, he has repaired a lot of things around the house this summer, and cut a lot of wood with the chain saw he bought when
he got here. The man he is going to the airport to get now is his exact copy, top to toe, hair, fingers, feet. I haven’t seen them together in years. He shouts, “I’m going now, okay?” I say, softly, “Okay,” and he turns. He exclaims, “No big deal, Mom!”

“Oh, yeah. Right. I remember. Who cares?”

Just after he leaves, the phone rings, and it is Ellen. She says, “What time did you say he’s getting here?”