The Vast Fields of Ordinary
My father, Ned, ran Cedarville's only luxury car dealership, and my mother, Peggy, was an art teacher at St. Jude's, the smaller of the two Catholic schools in town. When I was thirteen we moved from the country to Cedarview Estates, a new housing development in the eastern part of Cedarville. The houses were all painted safe colors. Taupe, beige, and dusty blue. At night their windows glowed with a soft golden light. My mother hated it there.
"It's like a village of futuristic lighting fixtures," she said. She was out on the front porch smoking a rare Marlboro Light. "Sometimes I feel like if I stare at them for long enough I'll start to see them moving real slow. Like glaciers."
My parents had initially moved out of Cedarville and into the country when they found out they were having me. My mother wanted to raise her kid in a farmhouse. She wanted an unnamed cat and a few chickens that she didn't know what to do with. She wanted the space and the sunsets, the weird bugs in the yard. I spent my days wandering off the porch into the cornfields that ran behind the house. I would stand in the middle of the field, close my eyes, and spin myself around to try to make myself as lost as possible. One evening at dinner my father told us that he'd heard good things about the new Cedarview Estates being built in town and that maybe we should think about moving.
"It'll be great to move back into town," he said. "We'll be closer to everything. Plus, a guy from work knows a couple of the guys behind the development. He said it's going to be gorgeous. Real state-of-the-art living style."
"I don't see anything gorgeous about cracker-box houses," my mother said.
"Well, we're not twenty-five anymore, Peggy," he said.
She slammed her silverware onto her plate and asked what that had to do with anything, and I took my food up to my room so they could fight in peace.
The house in Cedarview Estates was too big for us. We had three extra bedrooms and a huge basement that my mother had taken over with art projects. Headless mannequins painted blue. Black stick figures acting out Biblical scenes on shattered mirrors. There was a fireplace we used one Christmas Eve and a stainless steel refrigerator with built-in flat-screen television. We had a pool out back and a man who came to clean it once a week. There were stereo speakers installed in the walls, and sometimes the house would sing.
I didn't mind the house and our new neighborhood. It took some getting used to, but before long I saw it as I saw the cornfields that ran behind our old place in the country. It was a space to be explored and to disappear in. My parents, on the other hand, fought about the house all the time, about what it meant and what kinds of people it made them. My father thought it represented a new level of adulthood and affluence, like it was a giant arrow indicating that they were moving in the right direction. But my mother saw it as a surrender to normalcy, a rejection of the fantasy where she created sculptures in the barn and heard the voice of nature in the black silence of the rural Midwest evening.
One night my father and I were reading the paper in the living room when my mother's voice came through the intercom on the wall.
"I just want you to know that I'm in the master bathroom using the bidet. I can't believe this. Dade, if you can hear me, never, ever let yourself become this."
My father looked up from the sports page and gave a dismissive shake of his head before going back to reading.
My mother's fellow teachers referred to her as The Hippie. She had long sandy blond hair and always wore flowing peasant skirts and gauzy tops that revealed the teenage girl slimness in her arms and shoulders. Her eyes lit up when someone told a clever joke or when she noticed that one of the flowers she planted in the backyard was beginning to bloom. But there were many days when the light behind her eyes went out and it seemed like the world she saw left her hopeless and disappointed. We'd been in the house for a year when she made an announcement at the dinner table.
I stood up and led her into the house, my hand on her arm.
"Friends over?" she asked. "So we're friends, right?"
"Sure. We're friends."
"I help you, you help me." I was pulling her through the kitchen. "We help each other out."
"Yeah," I said, not really getting what she was saying. "For sure."
"I mean, maybe someday we could sorta be more than friends, right? That's possible."
I stopped. "Fessica, come on. You can't be serious."
They were playing some home video of Jenny Moore on the refrigerator television. I went over and punched the mute button.
"Jeez," she said. "What was that about?"
"Fessica, I'm gay. We both know this."
Her eyes grew wide. It occurred to me that I'd never actually told her I was gay. In fact, Lucy was the only actual person I'd told. Her eagerness quickly gave way to a look of concern.
"But what about what happened in my bedroom?" she asked. "Did that mean nothing?"
"You attacked me," I said, gesturing at the ceiling like my dad when he was pissed. "You tried to stick your hand down my pants and I ran out of your house like I was on fire. What about that sounds like a romantic moment to you?"
She opened her mouth to let out a sound. But nothing came out. Her eyes got wet.
"Oh shit," I said. "Don't cry. Don't do that."
But it was too late. She let out a broken little cry. She limply held her arms out, ready to receive anything the world would offer her. I felt horrible and before I knew it, I was hugging her. My chin was on her shoulder, and I was staring at the television in the refrigerator, at a muted commercial for laundry detergent, and I prayed she wasn't getting the wrong idea. She started sobbing uncontrollably.
"Don't cry," I said. "Jesus, dude. Don't cry. I'm sorry. This isn't your fault."
"But I don't have anybody," she said between sobs. "I don't have anybody, Dade, and it makes me wish that I was dead. I wake up every day and I wish that I was dead. The only reason I don't kill myself is because the idea of it is so terrifying, and I'm scared I'll be so scared that then I'll screw it up and then people will have something else to make fun of me for."
"Jesus," I said. I pulled back and looked her in the eye. "Don't say that. That's horrible. You don't really think that, do you?"
"I do!" she screamed.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," I said.
She pulled away. She wasn't crying anymore. She looked angry now.
"Maybe I'll do it now," she said. "Maybe I'll just go home and get it over with. No one will miss me. My parents won't. They have Jessica. What do they need me for?"
"Um, you're way cooler than your sister. Trust me on that."
She stared at my knees, her face locked into a hard grimace. I was hoping to maybe get a laugh out of her with that last line. No such luck. My annoyance with her gave way to a very real sympathy. My earlier thought of drowning myself in the pool was just a catnap away, and it was impossible to admit that it wasn't.
"You want to come upstairs?" I asked. "Hang out? It'll be fine. My parents won't care." She looked up at me and nodded solemnly, the faintest trace of a smile on her mouth. I grabbed two Cokes from the refrigerator and led her up to my bedroom. She followed behind, sniffling. She sat on my bed and sipped at her Coke while I went around picking up random articles of clothing off the floor and tossing them into my closet.
"What's this?" she asked.
I looked over and saw she was holding a soda can that Lucy had turned into a pipe a few nights beforehand.
"Gimme that," I said, going over and grabbing it from her.
"Sorry. It was just sitting there on your nightstand. What is it?"
"It's a pipe," I said.
"A pipe?" There was still the residue of sadness in her voice. Her throat sounded wet and clogged like a neglected storm drain.
"Yeah," I said. "You smoke pot out of it."
Three weeks after I started school my mother called me to tell me that her and my father were getting a divorce. It was one of the most anticlimactic conversations I've ever had. If I felt anything, it was only a sense of relief that it was all over. I was vaguely worried about how they would cope with wandering the desert of adulthood without the other's hand to hold, but then I remembered that they never appeared to give each other that much comfort in the first place, or at least if they had, those days were buried so far in the past that it was hard to consider them a meaningful part of their life.
My mom stayed in the house in Cedarview Estates. Sometimes its largeness made her lonely, but I think she stayed there with the secret hope that someday she would use every inch of it again, that maybe she would have another husband, maybe even another kid or two, and the house would have a life again. There would be splashes in the pool, bikes lying on their sides in the yard, and rubber balls rolling down the gentle slope of the driveway. Every few months she sent me checks with subtle commands written in the memo line. For Healthy Snacks they sometimes read or New Winter Coat Money. Once it even said To Take a Nice Boy Out to Dinner. I called her after that one to tell her that I loved her.
My dad became the merry bachelor. He started dating, which filled me with sympathy for the single ladies of Cedarville. He bought a condo in a new development across town and furnished it with nothing but a treadmill, a king-size bed, and a giant flat-screen television. Sometimes I pictured him walking on the treadmill and talking on his headset to some legal secretary across town while he watched a basketball game on mute.
Every now and then he'd drive up to Fairmont for football games. We'd drink hot chocolate in the stands and I'd stand up and cheer whenever he did. One night after a game we got drunk at a pub on campus and afterward when we were walking through the snow he stopped and held me and told me he was sorry. I told him that it was okay, that I knew he always did the best that he could, and then we trudged on back toward his hotel with icy tears sticking to our cheeks.
Lucy came to visit in the spring. I showed her the buildings where I had classes and the little nooks around campus where I would sit and write. I told her I was working on a book called The Vast Fields of Ordinary. She begged me to let her read the first chapter, but I told her it was better to wait until it was finished, until all the little pieces fit together to make a whole picture.
I took her to the Laguna Lounge on a Wednesday, which was Lesbian Night. We sat at the bar with fruity cocktails and talked about the previous summer while the DJ played a string of ridiculous Fleetwood Mac remixes that reminded me of my mother. We talked about Alex and what would happen to him.