The Portable Veblen (22 page)

He ran zigzag from the system and saw wages as hour counting.

You see, the work of maintaining your life with your own skills was never counted in hours. The days were long and arduous, but there was no wishing them to go by.

The very word “weekend” was a monstrous little propaganda of modernity. Of gladness that time had passed, your very life!

From the attic he laid his plans:

To infuriate corporate schemers!

To annoy government wasters!

To drive developers completely insane.

To teach gluttonous consumers lessons they wouldn’t soon forget!

To create havoc for the rude and the nasty, to waylay specious marriages, partnerships, and other misconceived unions!

To madden captains of industry!

To screw academic toadies!

To make “pest” his middle name!

•   •   •

P
AUL ARRIVED
with his family at dusk. They had spent the afternoon cruising open houses. They called out, “Invasion of the Vreelands!” as they came in with damp bags jiggling with wine and beer bottles and Hansen’s pomegranate sodas, a bouquet of yellow jonquil, and a loaf of Francese bread sprinkling flour in a white paper sleeve.

He kissed her in the kitchen. “Dad and I had a talk this afternoon,” he muttered. “It’s the first time he’s ever said he might be part of the problem. Ever!”

Veblen, who believed in slow, incremental changes, glowed with satisfaction. “See? You’re using the stoic glacier method.”

“Remind me, what is the stoic glacier method?”

“It’s the slow process of shaping someone’s behavior by force of one’s own personal stoicism.” (“If you wish to be loved, love,” said Seneca, a Stoic of note.)

“Wow. Maybe so.”

To have family and friends to make dinner for! (Though she wondered what Paul would find fault with after they left.) Cocktails (vodka and lemonade), little appetizers (mushroom turnovers), the voices, the combustion. Justin was going around examining everything in her house, even in her bedroom.

“Justy, come on, give Veblen her privacy,” Bill called.

She glanced in and saw Justin leaning over and touching her pillow. Some drool spilled from his lips.

“Open houses sure have changed,” remarked Marion. “They stage the place with all that furniture and fake artwork. It used to be you just went inside and saw how somebody lived, and you bought a house.”

“They put in a lot of fancy bells and whistles and jack the price through the roof,” Bill proclaimed. “You know what they wanted for the last one? Two point three! For fifteen hundred square feet! That’s bullcrap!”

“Dad, admit it, living in Garberville you’re not in the mainstream.”

“It’s not his values,” said Marion.

“A beautiful, clean house with all the things you need aren’t your values, Dad?”

“All bells and whistles.”

“Your father made you a very fine life,” Marion ventured. “Someday I believe you’ll see that.”

“It could’ve been better,” said Bill. “I’m not saying it was the best.”

“Dad, it was okay. But things are expensive here.”

In her small kitchen, with its old green tiles and Wedgewood stove, Veblen made a special drink for Justin, with fresh lemons, sugar, mint, and ice. Then she blended the rest with vodka and poured it into her best glasses.

Paul checked the squirrel trap in the attic, still empty. He’d replaced the sauerkraut and mace with a slice of cheese a while back, and now Veblen heard him gasp.

“Very funny,” he said, bringing down the plate. “Fess up.”

Veblen said, “It’s a Rorschach of your projections, Paul. An id intrusion. Your repressed desire to believe!” And she took a
picture of the mysterious cheese before Paul heaved it into the trash.

THE CHEESE.

“Hmmm,” Paul said, eyeing her.

“Mr. Science Man can’t explain everything,” Bill said.

“Dad, we had squirrels in the house, remember? How did you deal with them?”

“We lived peaceably with the wildlife.”

“No, Dad, you got rid of them. We had a blackout once. We had solar anyway, but they chewed the wires.”

“They
dislodged
the wires.”

“Did you use steel wool?”

“I plugged a few holes. They went away.”

Justin asked her, “Do you love Paul?”

“I do,” she said, still thinking about the cheese.

“I do too.”

Paul smirked over the edge of his cocktail. “I’m so lovable.”

“Do you love me?” asked Justin.

“Of course,” said Veblen, giving him a hug, wondering if he really hated Paul and wanted to ruin the wedding. He moved his body as if to press himself against her breasts. She gently backed away.

With some urgency, Justin ran to the bathroom.

“If I were you, I’d stay here,” Bill said. “This is a sweet place.”

“Thank you,” Veblen said, grateful that Bill saw the charm in
her simple cottage, with its limited market orientation and many outdated fixtures. But then it seemed something was wrong, Paul was pacing by the bathroom door, Marion was murmuring to him. Paul was angry. Marion was angry at Paul for being angry. Veblen retreated to the kitchen.

She heard Marion at the bathroom door, knocking gently. “Justy? Come on now.”

“Don’t just stand there, do something!” Paul yelled.

Veblen chewed fiercely on her inner cheeks, wishing she were outside with a cool breeze on her skin. What kind of crisis was it, that Justin was in the bathroom? Couldn’t Paul surmount his regressive tendencies? Through the window of the place next door she saw her neighbor Donald Chester remove a flat of macaroni and cheese from his microwave, with no one to eat or regress with at all.

She sliced lemons and chopped parsley, heard the unfastening of the lock.

Then Paul’s voice:
“You little shit.”

And Justin calling out: “Don’t bother me, Paul!”

Veblen came out and saw Paul clamp his arms around Justin’s neck, bringing his own head down where he could lean over Justin’s and put his face close. “I’ll bother you, you fucking asshole!”

Bill was there, pulling on Paul. Paul wedged a leg around Justin’s legs. Justin butted Paul with his head and Paul screamed and Bill yelled, “Let go,” and pulled Paul’s legs out from under him. The cottage shook like it had been hit by a falling tree. Acid burned in Veblen’s throat.

Marion took Justin to the couch. “You didn’t understand,” she was whispering. “You didn’t, did you?” Her cheeks were reddened
by a pattern of broken vessels Veblen had never noticed. “You’re a good boy. A very, very, very good boy.”

Bill said, “I’m sorry, Veblen. Everything is fine and now we’ll move on and forget about this.”

She doubted everything was fine with Paul.

“What just happened?” she whispered to him, in the kitchen.

“Later,” he said apologetically, and shortly, as with plucky volunteers at a hospital, it became the job of the Vreeland family to levitate the mood above the threshold of the damned. When Veblen served dinner, Paul and Marion were overly impressed with the pork tenders, and Justin shoveled them in, and Bill made no cutting remarks about pharmaceutical companies. All joviality; no brutality. A conspiracy of sorts.

After dinner, as Paul, Bill, and Justin caught the last quarter of a college basketball game on Veblen’s little TV, Marion settled on the couch and opened up a box she’d brought full of Paul’s baby pictures. “Here he is at about six months,” she said, offering Veblen a snapshot of a doughy slab on a blanket. “And this is his first birthday.”

“Come on, man
, play ball
!” yelled Bill. He stomped his feet. The cottage rattled.

Veblen, to her dismay, was laboring to perceive the baby form of Paul as cute. She found him blockish and sour in appearance, and a jolt of alarm coursed through her while she went through the photos with Marion. Things improved when Paul reached twelve—now she could see the man in him, the shoulders filled out, the glint of humor in his eyes. But then—what was this? This Paul-boy had a pot belly and wore bizarre striped velvet pants—

“He went through a phase,” remarked Marion. “We used to call him Mr. Fancy Pants.”

Wasn’t it vital to think your betrothed had been an adorable child? What if they had a baby like him, sour and grim? When she couldn’t stand one more image of the little blob, she jumped up and offered to make tea, then grabbed the barely full garbage bag and went out with it, what Linus always did when he needed a break.

In the cool air of evening by the bins, she drew some deep breaths and watched a lappet moth bat against the window, and saw Marion, Bill, Justin, and Paul congregating in her small house. Through the glass she saw gestures of familiarity as they huddled over the pictures. Marion placed a hand on Paul’s shoulder. Justin leaned on Bill. Bill talked to his boys, and for that moment, listening to their father, they sat as brothers absorbed in the family lore. What did she know about families, and how they ran? About siblings, and how they pounded each other, but loved? The normal give-and-take of family life hadn’t been hers to witness. Next to the organ pipe cactus near the window, she could faintly hear the sound of the beetle burrowing into the cactus flesh, while a shower of dried needles and leaves came down from the rain gutter. Over her head stood the outlandishly upright squirrel, three young ones abreast. Their heads seemed to glow in the darkness.

“Oh my gosh,” she whispered. “Are those your children?”

The squirrel quipped and chattered, and if you didn’t know better you might think you were in range of a Perfect Squirrel Call, registered trademark no. 348205, a black tubular device of about four inches in length, which Veblen had been sent as a girl
by her pilot grandfather, Woodrow, nothing to do with hunting, but for the magic of summoning squirrels. (Of course, she’d wondered why it was called “perfect” and what it was actually saying in the language of squirrels, and looked up the patent once to find out who thought they knew all this.) But she’d cherished it along with a few other odd gadgets he’d handed down to her, such as his old pilot’s plotter and his flight calculator. “That’s been high-grade, classic humor, bothering Paul the way you have,” she said to the squirrel. “Chaplinesque. But really, enough is enough.”

The sky was deeply black that night, scratched with silver. An attack of happiness came over her, that she’d assembled this crew, however imperfect, in her domain. Ragged scraps had always proved under her auspices to sprout new things fresh and worthy. She saw Paul look expectantly at the screen door, depending on her return.

“This is your last chance. Stop making so much noise if you want Paul to stay.”

She returned inside, heart bucking. She was superstitious about making ultimatums. If he made noise again, she’d have to take it as a sign.

She served the Vreelands strawberry shortcake, with tender buttery biscuits, tart berries, and hand-whipped cream. Plates were scraped and licked. And then good-byes and good-nights
were set in motion, with every permutation of hug and talk of plans bandied about before the car rolled away and vanished from sight.

Paul turned and kissed her. “I owe you,” he muttered. “My neck is so tight I think I’m going to puke.”

“I don’t understand, what happened?”

Paul swallowed. “Don’t you know?”

“What?”

He groaned softly. “I thought you knew.”

She shook her head.

She followed him back to her bedroom, a paper bag in the corner, with a pink pair of panties wadded up inside.

“That’s my underwear.”

Paul looked sick. “I know it! This is what he does. At people’s houses. Didn’t you understand?”