The Enthusiast (16 page)

P
atti and I walked out of the Kansas City airport into hot soaking air, rented a Spectra, and drove to Barney and Deirdre's yellow house and vegetable garden on a half acre at the edge of Lawrence. Beside their front door was a long row of hiking shoes, gum boots, galoshes, cross-trainers, clogs, and sandals. I remembered this folkway from the other college towns I'd been in: the number of shoes outside the door, and the activities they were muddy from, signaled the family's wealth in the next world. When we added Patti's clean lime Hindenburgs and my black Rockports to the lineup, they looked like the mean developer at the town meeting in a movie with sass and heart.

Barney answered the door in a brown flannel shirt, oatmeal jersey, gray cords, and brown socks, a dirt rainbow. Deirdre
came up behind him in a gray sweatshirt and one of her mossy long skirts. Barney looked like he hadn't been sleeping, and an activist's despairing smile had settled on Deirdre's face.

In the hugs Patti got elbow clutch and brief cheek contact from Barney, I got a three-count nose-to-ear off Deirdre, Patti and Deirdre gave each other full waist-up, and Barney and I shook hands. Over his shoulder I saw the living room: futons, paper-lantern lights, and a few hundred books on each of whose twenty-sixth pages I would have bogged down for good.

The kids ran in, yelling, “Hello!” and wearing most of the color in the house. Michael was eight, Pearl ten. After their hugs they grinned curiously at us, wondering what treats we might have brought from California: grosser candy, thunkier music, or rubbery black-and-yellow clothes like Aunt Patti was wearing. They were right: our duffel bags were too big for overnight. We put our stuff in the guest room upstairs, and when we came down everyone was in the pale yellow kitchen making dinner.

We offered to help, but Barney, oiling a wok, said, “No, the kids like to do it. Michael, please get me twelve grams of dried mushrooms. Pearl, let me have half a liter of quinoa, please.” The kitchen counters were lined with jars of dry foods, their names in calligraphy on old, red-bordered filing labels
—MILLET, BUCKWHEAT, ADZUKI BEANS—
with a lab scale beside them. Deirdre chopped vegetables that Barney stir-fried in sesame oil. She weighed the portions before putting them on plates.

When we sat down Michael said, “Aunt Patti, do you have guys that skateboard where you work?”

“Guys and gals,” Patti said. “Yes. They're going to the X Games in a few weeks.”

Pearl said, “What are the X Games?”

Deirdre, looking pleased, said, “You could be speaking Mandarin to these two.”

“It's a big contest for skateboarding and BMX bikes and stuff,” Patti said.

“Because we saw some guys that skateboard,” Michael said.

“They went up on the curved thing and then they went off it? We thought they were going to crash.”

“Sometimes people crash, but they usually don't,” Patti said.

“It's centrifugal force.”

“I know what centrifugal force is,” Pearl said.

“It's not centrifugal force,” Barney said.

“Oh,” Patti said. “I thought it was.”

“What magazine are you working at now?” Deirdre said.

“I work on a few different ones,” I said. “One of them's about boogie boarding.”

“Damien does that when they go to Florida. You go in the water and hold on to it,” Pearl said, giving Deirdre an I-know-Mandarin look.

After dinner we had a free hour before Deirdre was to take Patti and me to a madrigal concert at the university. We went up to our room to wrap the presents we'd brought the kids, big-wheeled mountain boards and Hindenburg clothes. The door opened a crack when we were almost finished. Michael peeked in and then ran down the hall yelling, “Pearl!”

A minute later both kids came in, with Deirdre behind them. “Hi,” she said. “Could I see what we're doing here, please?”

Patti pulled the paper aside, exposing a mountain board. The kids lunged for it, but Deirdre said, “Leave that there, please. Michael? Leave that there.” She turned to us. “This is nice of you, but I wish you'd asked us first.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “We—”

“We don't want them having skateboards.”

“They're not skateboards,” Patti said. “They're mountain boards.”

“What's a mountain board?” Deirdre said. “I'm sorry, I don't know what a mountain board is.”

“It's for grass and dirt,” Patti said. “They could use it in the yard. It's—”

“No,” Deirdre said. She looked at the clothes. “None of this. I'm sorry—”

Barney came in and said, “What's going on?”

I said, “We brought some presents.”

“Why not?” Michael said.

“Could you take Pearl and Michael downstairs, please?” Deirdre said to Barney. He was looking at the clothes. There was a black-and-yellow tank top for Pearl, a red hoodie for Michael, and T-shirts with a burning skull eating the Hindenburg logo. “How come the skulls are on fire?” Barney said. “Is that about the Hindenburg disaster?”

Deirdre said, “Could you…?”

“I heard you,” Barney said. “I'm asking a question.”

“It's more of a joke,” Patti said. “It's like—”

“I'm sorry,” Deirdre said. “I know this is your work, but we don't want this for them. It's not just the safety. Every time they go out the door they get assaulted by this culture.” She held up the tank top. “All this fake sex and—”

“No, it's so you can move around,” Patti said. “When you see the women who do sports in—”

“I have seen them, with the things that say ‘Nike,' with sweatshops, all over their—”

“All our sewing is—”

“Why
not
?” Michael yelled.

Deirdre's look at Barney said, “See?”

“Let's go downstairs,” Barney said, in Dad's old voice of seething calm. The kids followed him away.

“You know, we're living through an emergency these days,” Deirdre said. I nodded, although I hadn't been following the news closely and wasn't sure which emergency she meant.

“They have backpacks. Anywhere they go, they've got flashlights, drinking water, first aid kits and emergency meals. We have them too. I need them to be focused.”

“Because of…?”

“Because of how the world is now.”

That emergency. “I'm sorry,” I said.

“It's okay,” Deirdre said. “We should get going.”

She went downstairs. Patti said, “
Fuck
her.”

While Patti got dressed I went out to Deirdre's Volvo, which had lifesaving hammers bracketed to the doors and a library of scolding bumper stickers on the back. Barney was in the driver's seat. I got in next to him and said, “I'm sorry about the presents.”

“That's okay,” he said. “It's just that now they want them and they don't understand why they can't have them.”

“I don't understand, either,” I said.

“I kind of understand,” he said, almost telling me something, a lifelong habit.

He blew the car horn. “I have to get to work,” he said. “We're trying to get money renewed and we're not getting a lot of results right now.” I nodded sympathetically, making an effort, although I was wondering why you couldn't just be related to people without making an effort. Barney hit the horn again, harder. A minute later the others came out.

The plan was for Barney and the kids to get off at his lab, where he'd work and they'd do homework, while the rest of us went to the concert. Deirdre was cheerful on the drive, chatting about the excellence of the Lawrence Madrigal Singers
as if the mountain board argument had been her after-work martini. Barney drove silently, Patti looked stony, and the kids seemed to tune out.

We pulled up in front of Barney's lab, a three-story concrete building. In a second, seven people came out of the dusk and surrounded the car, too fast for Barney to drive away. They joined hands, forming a circle around us.

“Goddamn it,” Deirdre said.

“I didn't see the van,” Barney said. It was across the way, an Econoline with blown-up sonogram pictures taped to its panels.

The people in the circle stared at us through the windows. Pearl put a hand on Michael's shoulder as Barney and I got out of the car.

“Dr. Bay, we're here to ask you and your colleagues to stop doing this Frankenstein science,” a fortyish lady in a windbreaker said. “The embryos can't talk, so we're here to talk for them.”

“Yeah, I remember all this,” Barney said.

“You remember it but you're still doing it,” a guy in a
FUNDAMENT HOUSE
T-shirt said. “That's why we're here again.”

“We don't have time for this today,” Barney said.

I looked around the circle. There were some college-age kids, but most of the people were older. With their sloganed clothes and ad hoc friendships they could have been any of the enthusiast clumps I'd covered, rock hounds or Yahtzee fiends.

A guy in a T-shirt that read
THERE'S NO FIRST AMENDMENT TO THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
broke out of the circle and lay down on the hood of the car. Three women lifted their paired hands and started singing that they weren't afraid. A few students slowed down to watch, but most of them seemed to have seen it before.

Barney speed-dialed his cell phone. “This is Dr. Bay,” he said. “I've got someone on my car in front of Crofter. We're in kind of a hurry. Thank you.” He hung up and talked to the guy on the car. “He's going to be here in a minute. Do you think you could leave now?”

“This isn't for your convenience, Dr. Bay,” the guy on the car said.

“No kidding,” Barney said. “How come you get to be on the car today? Where's Derek?”

“Derek's on retreat.”

The circle had closed in, the faces close to ours now. One of the young singing women decided I could be swayed, or even saved. She leaned close to me, coffee and doughnuts from the van ride on her breath, her gaze marching into mine in a blitz of sanctioned intimacy. All the love on earth was mine for the asking. Quit it, I thought.

A tall, edgy-looking guy with bushy hair and a beard said, “I'd like to talk to the children.” He bent close to Pearl's window. “Pearl? Michael?”

Deirdre threw her door open, got out, and faced him across the car roof. “Get away from the car,” she said. “Right now.”

The guy ignored her and talked to the kids through the window. “Can I just talk to you guys for a minute? Is that okay?”

“Leave them alone,” Barney said. His anger made his face geological, with ledges over his eyes and ridges beside them.

“What are you afraid of?” the guy asked Barney.

Barney turned to the windbreaker lady. “Make him move,” he said.

“What are you afraid of?” the guy said again.

The lady hesitated, then put a hand on the guy's arm and said, “Martin—”

Patti was out of the car now, moving in quickly on the guy. “She told you to get away from the car,” she said.

“It's okay,” the windbreaker lady told Patti, and tugged on the tall guy's shoulder. “Martin, let's go over here for a minute,” she said. The guy stood up from the window but didn't move away.

A campus cop, young and mustached, rolled up on a mountain bike. “I need you folks to get away from the car,” he said. “And I will have to cite you.”

The guy at Pearl's window backed away. “I'm sorry about the thing with the kids,” the guy on the hood said softly to Barney as he stood up. “Martin's new.” The women kept singing as they moved toward their van.

Deirdre asked the kids if they were okay. Pearl nodded, then Michael. “You notice he knew their names,” Deirdre said. “They love that kind of thing.”

“You should get to your concert,” Barney said. “Let's go,” he told the kids. “Straight ahead.” They got out of the car and walked with him to the lab.

When they were inside, Deirdre started the car and we drove in silence to the concert. By the time we got there I was sick of everyone, and I wasn't clear on what madrigals were but I didn't expect to like them.

Six women in white blouses and long velvet skirts sang to a half-full lecture hall. The songs turned out to be mostly religious, and after what we'd just come from I considered walking right out. In honor of her childhood, Mom called religion “Halloween on speed,” and Dad liked to say we were “decent, church-fearing Americans.” I'd thought of them fondly on the drive over. But there was a look people got on their faces when they listened to that kind of music, head tilted and a fifth of a smile, hearing the promise of home. Somewhere in the first
few songs I caught that look on Deirdre, and a trace of it on Patti, and then I felt it on myself.

 

I
n the morning Barney and Deirdre weighed out six portions of trail mix and put them in their emergency backpacks, and we all went for a walk on a muddy road around a lake. Barney had us tuck our pants into our socks in case of ticks, while Deirdre passed out sunblock and bug spray.

As we started walking she asked what everyone thought we should do with the Hindenburg gifts. When there were no suggestions she said, “Do you know any kids in California whose parents would think those things were appropriate?”

“Lots,” Patti said.

“I think that might be nice,” Deirdre said, “because then they could be a gift to those kids from Michael and Pearl. What do you guys think?”

“Okay,” Pearl said.

“Michael?” Deirdre said.

“Yeah.”

“First deer,” Pearl said, as a whitetail froze beside the path and then ran into the woods.

“Okay,” Deirdre said. “Why don't we get out the crafts stuff when we get back, and maybe Henry and Patti would help you guys make gift cards for those kids, and that would be Henry and Patti's present to you. What do you think about that?”