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Authors: Jane Hamilton
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maybe it was those dogs of hers. They were all going crazy behind her fence.” She chewed on her lip and Walter noticed that she had fine lines—wrinkles—on her brow. “Anyway, now you’re leaving your old life and moving back here. I hope your students can read other things besides the gearshift panel of their John Deere tractors.” She stroked her forehead as if she knew he had seen the creases, as if she was trying to smooth them away. “I’m a lot dumber than I ever thought I’d be. I planned to be a famous ballerina, an artist, and deep down I’m just a suburban mom with a paneled station wagon, domestic problems, two bratty kids who sleep on cotton sheets patterned with trucks. But you, you are going to teach your swine to walk and talk!” She reached both hands out of the window, pulled Walter’s head in, and solemnly kissed him on the mouth.
“Ask your mother if she made the pictures smash and why,” she called as she started down the drive. “I’ll bet you a million dollars she didn’t.”
“She’ll never tell,” Walter shouted after her. “That’s what I bet. She will never tell.”
Before school began in Otten, Walter drove to Schaumburg, Illinois, to visit his baby sister, Lucy. She had been born in 1974, when a goodportion of the family’s life, in Walter’s view, was over. She had missed growing up with his brotherly instruction and he couldn’t keep himself from thinking that such an absence might explain why she was living in a place like Schaumburg. He was arrogant, he knew, but he couldn’t help it, couldn’t help wanting to improve her, to make her see what was hollow about her choices. He was, after all, thirty-eight years old, and she only twenty-one.
There was nothing good about Schaumburg, in his opinion, not the mall around which the town had recently been built, not the corporate headquarters, not the concrete sprawl of it, not even the sweet backward intentions of the planners who wanted to build a Main Street with a mock downtown. He did not like the wide new streets in Lucy’s subdivision, with culs-de-sac that were supposed to prevent undesirable people from speeding and pillaging. All of the homes in the neighborhood—a term he used loosely for Lucy’s environs—had two-story foyer windows and skylights in the master bedrooms, but they were alike in a way the Oak Ridge houses had never been. Maplewood Avenue, he knew, had once been a tract and many of the Queen Anne-style houses had identical floor plans, but all the same those structures had grace and beauty, and also character. In fact, there were certain houses that seemed to attract handicapped or troubled people and others that assured a type of normalcy. It was as if the buildings themselves determined the owners. In Schaumburg there was probably an ordinance that broadly defined and prohibited weirdos. Nothing, Walter believed, neither a range of owners nor the ravages of time, would add texture or variety or interest to the houses. And where was the alley? In Oak Ridge, Mr. and Mrs. Kloper and the ten girls had lived to the south of the McClouds, and their cousins, the other Klopers, were in the yellow house straight across the alley, all twelve of them, all boys. For years there had been jokes about the water, the air, the soil on one side of the alley versus the other, and the effects those elements had on determining gender. The alley itself was the great divide, the place where the children spent the daylight hours, but after, in the dusk of summer, they split away, each to his own turf, and went to war.
Walter couldn’t imagine that there was one personality in Schaumburg as peculiar as Mrs. Gamble, not one woman who wouldstorm out of her house with a bullwhip when the little children begged from the milkman. He was stubborn and not altogether reasonable about his dislike of his sister’s town. It was middle-aged of him, he realized, to feel irritated by a place, to be bothered by the fact that
“Ask your mother if she made the pictures smash and why,” she called as she started down the drive. “I’ll bet you a million dollars she didn’t.”
“She’ll never tell,” Walter shouted after her. “That’s what I bet. She will never tell.”
Before school began in Otten, Walter drove to Schaumburg, Illinois, to visit his baby sister, Lucy. She had been born in 1974, when a goodportion of the family’s life, in Walter’s view, was over. She had missed growing up with his brotherly instruction and he couldn’t keep himself from thinking that such an absence might explain why she was living in a place like Schaumburg. He was arrogant, he knew, but he couldn’t help it, couldn’t help wanting to improve her, to make her see what was hollow about her choices. He was, after all, thirty-eight years old, and she only twenty-one.
There was nothing good about Schaumburg, in his opinion, not the mall around which the town had recently been built, not the corporate headquarters, not the concrete sprawl of it, not even the sweet backward intentions of the planners who wanted to build a Main Street with a mock downtown. He did not like the wide new streets in Lucy’s subdivision, with culs-de-sac that were supposed to prevent undesirable people from speeding and pillaging. All of the homes in the neighborhood—a term he used loosely for Lucy’s environs—had two-story foyer windows and skylights in the master bedrooms, but they were alike in a way the Oak Ridge houses had never been. Maplewood Avenue, he knew, had once been a tract and many of the Queen Anne-style houses had identical floor plans, but all the same those structures had grace and beauty, and also character. In fact, there were certain houses that seemed to attract handicapped or troubled people and others that assured a type of normalcy. It was as if the buildings themselves determined the owners. In Schaumburg there was probably an ordinance that broadly defined and prohibited weirdos. Nothing, Walter believed, neither a range of owners nor the ravages of time, would add texture or variety or interest to the houses. And where was the alley? In Oak Ridge, Mr. and Mrs. Kloper and the ten girls had lived to the south of the McClouds, and their cousins, the other Klopers, were in the yellow house straight across the alley, all twelve of them, all boys. For years there had been jokes about the water, the air, the soil on one side of the alley versus the other, and the effects those elements had on determining gender. The alley itself was the great divide, the place where the children spent the daylight hours, but after, in the dusk of summer, they split away, each to his own turf, and went to war.
Walter couldn’t imagine that there was one personality in Schaumburg as peculiar as Mrs. Gamble, not one woman who wouldstorm out of her house with a bullwhip when the little children begged from the milkman. He was stubborn and not altogether reasonable about his dislike of his sister’s town. It was middle-aged of him, he realized, to feel irritated by a place, to be bothered by the fact that
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