We were living in Oklahoma ironically. Obviously it is not possible to live in a place ironically, but we were twenty-four and freshly married, so it was not obvious to us. It would not become obvious to me for a very long time; by then, by now, this clarity would be pointless, the thinly exhilarating aha! of a riddle solved at a cocktail party.
Three months before we relocated to the Sooner State, Steven had come home from work with the news that he’d been offered a promotion and a significant raise for a position in his company’s Oklahoma City office. He shared this information tentatively. He was always tentative with me, always eager for my approval and watchful for the barbs of my scorn, and this was another thing that should have been obvious to me but wasn’t. The company had 130 active oil wells in the state pumping out 120,000 barrels a day. Steven was a chemical engineer; he would monitor and, if necessary, modify the desalting process in the crude oil distillation unit at a refinery on the I-240 corridor. I don’t mean to suggest that I understood any of this. I didn’t, nor did I try to. I delighted in letting the particulars of Steven’s work—all that science, all those numbers—sail over my head. I suppose I thought my mind too pure to be sullied by such things.
This would be Steven’s first post away from corporate headquarters. We were living on First Avenue at the time, in a studio apartment the most notable features of which were its odor of mice decaying in the walls and its location across from the UN. The odor inculcated in us a sense of the small realities of our life, while the UN, with its sweep of flags snapping in the wind, its kaftaned and suited and dashikied diplomats eating hot dogs and shawarma on the plaza before the glittering glass and marble of Niemeyer’s Secretariat building, reminded us of its spacious potentials.
In New York we were broke, but this was OK, even fun, because we assumed that someday soon we would be comfortable, and would look back on these days with a tender longing that was not the same as actually wishing to relive something. Our faith in this narrative made it possible to enjoy things that were not, in themselves, enjoyable. I made a pot of chili con carne and fed us for a week on six dollars. Steven discovered a bookstore near the World Trade Center devoted exclusively to ornithology, where for five dollars apiece the owner would let you sit all day in the air-conditioning. Perhaps our faith in this narrative is what allowed us to delight even in our frequent arguments, and to misapprehend them as markers of our marriage’s durability rather than its fragility.
It was the notion of spacious potentials that Steven’s job offer awakened in me. I remember the moment clearly. It was July of 1990, one of those callously hot New York nights when the urban winds seem lifted from the surface of Venus. In the face of this, our stalwart air conditioner may as well have been made of putty. I was in the lightest thing I owned, a slip I’d bought to wear beneath an unfortunate bridesmaid dress. Steven had just arrived home from work, and was dressed uncomplainingly in a suit. We were sitting on the corduroy couch in our tiny living area. (“You could sit on the couch and touch the stove with your toes,” I had told our future children a hundred times in my head.) The origin of the corduroy couch was a story we liked to tell. We had salvaged it from the sidewalk on a drizzly summer day, and it took weeks for it to dry out in our apartment. I can still smell it, like some colossal, sodden basset hound returned from a hunt. The couch, the mice, bodies underground on the 6, wine souring in an open bottle on the coffee table . . . We lived a life of manageably unpleasant odors. In my fantasies, our future was scentless as water.
As soon as Steven told me about the job offer, I saw us on a blanket in the prairie beneath a sky as solid and ardent as a conversion. I saw an old Indian in a headdress of magnificent tail feathers, his face canyoned with wrinkles, his eyes black and sad and weary. (Years later I would visit a museum exhibit of the Indian portrait photography of Edward S. Curtis and realize that this mental image was not even mine; it was Chief Three Horses, Dakota Territory, 1905. But at the time, I confess, the image in my head seemed to me a thing I had conjured from some deep well of empathy within myself.) I saw a faceless woman in red cowboy boots and knew that she was me. The woman glanced at me through time and space with immense knowingness. Yes, I thought. We would go. Oklahoma would become part of the story of my life. As I sat beside Steven on the couch in the heat, with the pink night peering in at us through the window, I was also sitting on the edge of a small white bed, tucking in my children with a story about Mommy and Daddy’s time in Oklahoma.
You see, I lived then guided by the unconscious notion that the story of my life as I was meant to live it was already written in a secret, locked-away text. At the end, I would finally be able to open it and read the story that had been written there all along—its arc, its twists and turns, its motifs and themes, its most evocative lines. For a moment before death, I would know what the world had intended for me and whether I had gotten it right or gone terribly astray.
In September, we loaded our first car with our scant possessions and said goodbye to the mice and the diplomats.
In Oklahoma, we moved into a house in a suburban development off I-40 called Amber Ridge. The neighboring development was Willow Canyon. There was neither a ridge nor a canyon as far as the eye could see, and we got a real kick out of this. We got a kick out of the house, too. It was brand-new, crisp as a toy yanked from the packaging, with an unseemly number of gables cramming the roofline and a potpourri of arched, circular, and Georgian windows on the facade—a jangling, architecturally screwy pastiche. The house was five times the size of the apartment we had left behind. It was a silly amount of space, more than two people could possibly fill. We had arrived in a place where space was completely unprecious, and this notion was as astonishing to me as if the same thing were to be true of time.
On our first night in the house, after Steven fell asleep, I wandered from room to room. Night in New York had trembled with residual light; here it was pure black, so that I could not even make out the walls, the edges of what was ours.
The next morning, one of Steven’s new colleagues pulled up in a Ram pickup to give us “the grand tour.” His name was Ward and he wore a bolo tie with a turquoise pendant. I stored this detail away. In the days and months that followed I collected many more like it: a church billboard that read, IF YOU THINK OKLAHOMA IS HOT . . . !; an octogenarian with a handlebar mustache and a bald eagle tattoo on his withered bicep; a gaggle of drunk, big-haired women stumbling out of a honkytonk. I tended my little collection with the vigor of an avid hobbyist, savoring the delicious irony of a place that conformed exactly to my hackneyed expectations. Another misapprehension: I believed that I could nail this place by triangulating among its details, that these typifying images converged upon a deeper truth.
As we sped west on 41, away from the suburban sprawl and out into the prairie, Ward told us that the region had no native trees. “Any tree you see was brought in one time or other,” he said, waving generally at the landscape. To this day, I’m not sure if what he said is true, but the idea stuck with me. For the entirety of our brief time in the state, what few trees there were seemed to me to have a wavering, shimmering quality, as if they were projections you could slide your hand through. In lofty moments I think I saw my own presence there the same way. I loved Oklahoma because it had nothing to do with me. Ward, I learned later, was from Annapolis.
I said our house was cluttered with gables and Georgian windows, but when we moved in I didn’t know what a gable or a Georgian window was. These were terms I learned through the part-time job I found six months after our move, working as a copywriter for a realtor named Bethany Parkhurst. Whether it took me so long to find work because I was depressed, or whether I was depressed because it took me so long to find work, I am no longer sure. I do know that in our first months in Oklahoma, despite my outward pleasure in our circumstances, I was depressed for the first time in my life, and maybe that is part of what I mean when I say that it is not possible to live in a place ironically. I was lonely in Oklahoma, the particular loneliness of an unemployed wife who knows no one but her husband for a thousand miles. Often I stayed in bed until noon. I ran errands in a sweatshirt with no bra underneath because why not? One afternoon I went to the supermarket planning on lamb chops for dinner, but they were out, and this seemed absolutely personal; I abandoned my cart, already loaded with cereal and juice and the cocktail nuts Steven liked, and rushed out of the store.
The next morning, I woke to find that I could not move my right index finger. I stared at it, willing it, but I could not bring myself to lift it. Then the phone rang and I got up to answer it and that was that. This kind of thing began happening regularly. I would be standing beside the car at the gas pump and suddenly I could not raise my left foot. At dinner with Steven’s boss and his wife, it was my neck that separated from my control. These incidents ended only with some external interruption: a car honking for its turn at the pump; Steven’s boss punching me playfully but hard on the shoulder and saying, “Right? Right?”
I spent a lot of time during this period driving through the prairie. I’d tell myself I needed to get out, that it would do me good to see some nature. The truth is that on these drives I stoked my growing terror of this place, of the on and on and on of it. Sometimes as I drove, the clouds above me would seem to coalesce around a brown center and then, suddenly, drop. Sometimes the thing I was driving past—a mailbox, a swimming pool—would suddenly be coated in black, glossy oil. I had developed a twinned obsession with tornadoes, on the one hand, and oil, on the other. They seemed to me to be part of a unified system, connected by some mystical-sinister energy. The tornadoes funneled destructive force down from the sky, the oil wells pulled it up from the ground, and I was living where these forces met, on the perilous surface of the earth.
In March, my best friend Kristin and her husband Rich, who were moving from New York to Los Angeles (where it was assumed Rich’s screenwriting career would take off), stopped to visit on their journey across the country. I’d been counting down the days to their arrival, and when Kristin stepped out of the car I hugged her so tightly I frightened myself a little. We took them line dancing, and I watched with local smugness as they costumed themselves for this activity in western shirts and boots and jubilantly chucked the g’s from the ends of their gerunds. “Steven’s company has wells all over the area. Ponca City, Enid, Waynoka, Fort Supply,” I told them breathlessly, willing my utterance of these strange names to sound authoritative.
“Do you have a tornado shelter?” Kristin asked. We took them out back to see it. The house was so new the yard was still grassless, all loose yellow dirt.
“I see you’re workin’ on Dust Bowl: The Sequel,” said Rich.
“You know us Okies,” said Steven.
He pointed out the shelter, a reinforced steel door in the dirt.
“This would be just perfect for an abduction,” said Kristin.
“Don’t tell anyone, but we’ve got a little Polish babushka down there right now,” I said.
“We take her out when we’ve got a yen for pierogi,” said Steven.
It had been months since we’d had anyone for whom we could show off our verbal acuity. The next morning as I watched them drive away, next stop Santa Fe, I could hardly breathe.
That very day I picked up the local jobs newsletter at the grocery store and found the advertisement for a copywriter.
WRITER NEEDED TO BRING RESIDENTIAL PROPERTIES TO LIFE.
WORK FOR TOP-10 OKC REALTOR. PART-TIME, PAY NEGOTIABLE.
Within the hour I had mailed off a cover letter and résumé. Two days later I received a phone call from Bethany Parkhurst, the Top-10 OKC realtor who had posted the ad.
“The job is this,” she said. “Every listing needs a description for the brochure. I hate writing and I’m not good at it. I’ve always done it myself but I want to stop. That’s where you come in—I hope.”
She asked about my experience and availability. I told her about my job in New York and tried to convey that I was very available without sounding too desperate; Bethany’s voice was crisp and polished, and suddenly I wanted this job more than I had ever wanted anything in my life.
“Are you a good writer?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said steadily. It was a relief to be asked a question about myself and to be so certain of the answer. I could dash things off quickly and I could make just about anything sound good. In college I got As on papers about books I’d barely skimmed. It was not that I was so smart; it was just that I was exactly what Bethany had asked for—a good writer. I could give the impression of meaning and insight, of grand convergence, and if you weren’t paying careful attention you might not notice that beneath the rhythms of thought the argument was facile, even specious.
“I have a listing in Willow Canyon. Can you meet me there tomorrow at eleven?”
I told her I could. She proposed an hourly rate which I agreed to. It wasn’t until that evening, when I told Steven about the job and he asked how it paid, that I realized I hadn’t even listened to the number.
Bethany Parkhurst was one of the most appealing people I have ever known. I suspected this would be the case when I spoke to her over the phone, and when I met her the next day in front of a beige ranch in Willow Canyon, I knew immediately that it was true. I couldn’t stop staring at her. She was not beautiful, nor was there anything unique or interesting about her appearance. Her features exhibited a kind of generic perfection—hers was the face an adolescent wishes for while examining the acne on her too-wide forehead.
“You’re on time,” she said when I got out of my car. I would later learn that she had been born and raised in Oklahoma City. But she did not have the open drawl of most locals. She kept herself a little apart without seeming to keep herself apart. This was one of her many talents.
“This house isn’t much. The owners haven’t put any money into it at all. It really needs your special touch,” she said as we walked up the short driveway.
Warmth spread through me. My special touch. Bethany had asked if I was a good writer, I had said yes, and that was that. The next day I would send her the copy and ask if the style, length, and structure were what she’d had in mind, and she would call and tell me that it was perfect, and after that she would never mention anything about the quality of the work I sent her ever again.
The owners weren’t home. Bethany had a key and let us in.
“Oh no you don’t,” she said when we stepped inside. I looked up, startled. Bethany was staring at a large painting on the living room wall. It was one of those kitschy landscapes—a stone cottage next to a babbling brook, a little wooden footbridge. “I told them to take this down. It’s part of my job to monitor taste. People have to trust me.”
Bethany walked me through the house, pointing out those features I should highlight (chair-rail molding in the dining room, a vaulted ceiling in the master bedroom) and those I should refrain from mentioning (linoleum flooring, a cracked concrete patio out back).
“What I’ve always done is, after I’ve seen everything I come back to the living room and just—” She breathed deeply in, out. “Reflect. Until I’ve sensed the house’s essence.”
She looked at me a bit sheepishly, and I was touched by this betrayal of earnestness. I imagined Bethany Parkhurst hunched over a desk late at night, typing and deleting—striving, as she had said in her ad, “to bring residential properties to life.”
Together, we stood in the living room beneath the painting of the stone cottage. (Was this the home the owners of this shabby ranch wished for? Suddenly the trite painting seemed as personal as a wound.)
After a short while, Bethany turned to me. “OK,” she said, and waved me to the door, as if the metaphysical process of sensing a house’s essence always took precisely one and a half minutes.
I assumed that Bethany had spoken so bluntly about the painting because it was just the two of us, but I would come to learn that she had a single self, which did not adjust. Later that week, at a house in Colony Corners, I would hear her say the same thing she’d said to me—“It’s part of my job to monitor taste. You have to trust me”—directly to the owner’s face, this time about a homemade quilt, a retro item in shades of avocado and mustard draped over the back of a sofa. The woman bit her lip and silently moved the quilt to the closet. But before we left, she thanked Bethany. “I do trust you,” she said, like a penitent seeking forgiveness from a priest; then she hugged Bethany.
“It’s their home and people can be sensitive,” Bethany said to me once we were outside. She said this in a voice absolutely empty of judgment. She’d spoken about monitoring taste in this same rinsed tone. There was nothing moral about taste to Bethany, no pride in having it nor shame in lacking it. It was simply necessary in the selling of residential property.
Soon I was visiting five or six properties a week. After the first few houses, Bethany did not accompany me. Sometimes, as at that first house, the owners were not at home, and I would be given instructions for getting in. The key was under the mat, or in the planter, or taped to the mallard whirligig. I would wander through the house taking notes: walk-in closet, en suite master bath. Exploring the houses alone felt wonderfully subversive. I especially loved to investigate the pantries. If I found items that suggested a sophisticated home cook—curry paste, anchovies, cornhusks—I would put in some extra effort with my writing. Often I found mountains of junk—jumbo tubs of cheese puffs, three different marshmallow cereals, a discovery that was like pressing my tongue to a battery, a sour thrill of pleasure at the poor choices of other people.
Frequently there were pets—terriers yapping from the garage, a marmalade cat slinking across the back of a sofa, gerbils spinning in the dark. Once, I stepped into a house where I’d been told no one would be home and a loud, clear voice said, “Go away, please!” I blurted an apology and was hurrying out the door when the voice said the same thing again with exactly the same intonation. “Go away, please!” It was a parrot, a splendid lime-green bird that lived in the kitchen in one of those old-fashioned domed cages. I recounted the story to Steven that night, and again to his coworkers and their wives at a dinner party that weekend. (It was all coworkers and wives; the extraction of resources, apparently, was the province of men.) I had become a person whose job came with that most valuable perk: good anecdotes.
Usually, though, someone was at home, and except for a single instance, that someone was a woman, which meant, almost automatically, a wife and mother. One house, I told Kristin on the phone, had so many shrieking, stampeding towheads that I found it impossible to ascertain how many children there actually were. In another, I entered the living room and a child of about four in spaceship pajamas looked up from his cartoons and said, very matter-of-factly, “We’re moving to Texas because of Trashley.”
Often the women were about my age, with a baby on a hip, a toddler hanging from a leg. “Can you imagine having two kids?” I would say to Steven at night, as if the idea were as lunatic as keeping wildebeests for pets. We would laugh together, delighting in our sense of ourselves as too urbane, too bright and scattered, to manage the exigencies of family life—exigencies about which we were intentionally very vague—at such a young age. (Though looking back, I wonder if Steven actually felt this way at all, or if he simply went along. I believed then that I understood him completely, but perhaps I had simply assumed he saw everything the same way I did.) The competence of these women, the hardened shapeliness of their lives, terrified me. Though none was quite as appealing as Bethany, many shared a certain ineffable quality with her—a diamond selfhood, hard and translucent. It turned out many of her clients attended the same church as she did, Radiant Assembly, an evangelical congregation that one of Steven’s colleagues, a fellow transplant from the Northeast, referred to as “Rabid Insanity.” I used to wonder whether it was the church’s power shining through these women. Sometimes when I was touring a house and the woman was out of view, I would pretend that her house was my house and her children were my children. I had been born here and was among Radiant Assembly’s faithful. I was friends with Bethany and fistfuls of women like her, like us. If I could get deep enough into that imagining, my self would sweep cleanly away and a feeling would fill me that was like being dipped in cool, sweet water.
My drives out to the prairie stopped. My work kept me busy in the suburban enclaves close to downtown, and I no longer felt the need to cultivate my own fear by traveling beyond these places. At unexpected moments, though, I would be overcome by an acute physical awareness of everything that was still out there. Once I was standing in an ersatz Arts and Crafts bungalow in Rivendell Corners, when suddenly I felt the vastness of the prairie and the sky tingling against my skin; I felt the oil beneath my feet, like swimming far out in the ocean and sensing all that black depth below you. Then I heard Bethany’s voice in my mind—You have to trust me—and at once, I felt better.
Some of the things I saw resisted the transformation into anecdotes. Once, I found myself in the home of an elderly widow. I sensed the house had once been well kept, but it was badly neglected now, and the woman’s daughter, who was also her live-in caregiver, apologized over and over for what she euphemistically called “the mess.” The house needed everything—a new roof, new floors. The kitchen appliances were ancient. Mold speckled the wallpaper and the husks of flies collected on every windowsill. From a reclining chair in front of the television, the old woman muttered, “Tell her to write about the garden.”
“She knows to write about the garden, Mom,” the daughter said. She looked at me with an embarrassed smile that perplexed me until I went out into the yard and saw that there was no garden, just a mud patch where a garden must have been once.
“There’s bluebells, foxglove, snapdragons,” the old woman said when I came back inside, counting the flowers off on her fingers.
“She knows, Mom,” the daughter said impatiently.
“Be sure to mention the hollyhocks. People like those. And the daylilies. Stargazers—”
The daughter closed her eyes.
I did not tell anyone this story or any of the others like it. They weren’t meant for me. I witnessed them only as an accident of circumstance. This is life. This is what it means to be human, I would think to myself vaguely as I breathed in the humid air of other people’s dramas. And I would feel pretty good about myself, both for bearing witness and for keeping their secrets.
The writing was a breeze. I developed an efficient process: I would draw up a list of evocative words and phrases that were more or less germane to the house at hand. Say: curb appeal, mint condition, stately, pristine. Or: stunning, sought-after, the very best in country living, charmer. Then I would string these words together with the pertinent information. This pristine three-bedroom ranch oozes curb appeal, from its stately front lawn to its mint-condition brick facade. Or, For homebuyers looking for the very best in country living, this stunning charmer in sought-after Castlegate is a must-see. The copy was like candy floss—voluminous clouds that dissolved to sweetness, to the idea of substance.
Months passed. At some point I realized that it had been a long time since a part of my body separated itself from my control.
One day Bethany called me about a house that was not located, as most of her properties were, in one of the developments that encircled Oklahoma City like a frill. This house was thirty miles away, out in the country. “Really annoying location,” she said. She had a knack for stating opinion as fact.
I drove out to see the house the following afternoon. It was a cloudy, humid day, the air fuzzed with an electric tingling. I drove for miles down a two-lane highway that radiated northwest from the city. A few months earlier this drive would have terrified me, and I felt relieved, not because I could now speed past fields of switchgrass unafraid, but because it seemed to me that my resilience had been affirmed; I remember thinking that I was very good at handling a mental rough patch, and this pleased me the same way being good at anything pleased me.
I still remember the name of the street, Redtail Road. It was a narrow country road, straight as an arrow and shot dead into the abyss. The houses were spaced far apart. You could look down the whole length of the road and see them all at once, like dice cast on an enormous table. My destination turned out to be the last house. Just past the driveway the asphalt formed a tidy edge against an infinity of prairie.
For a minute before I got out of the car, I just sat and stared. This house was like none other I had visited for Bethany. It was architecture, a word whose variants I had deployed emptily countless times in my copy: This three-bedroom home exhibits colonial architecture at its very finest. Gorgeous architectural touches abound in the formal dining room. Architecturally innovative yet effortlessly livable, this home embodies the elegance for which The Meadow Estates are prized. The exterior was cedar and glass. The angles of the roofline fit together with the mysterious rightness of a poem. The roof was copper and, touched by the diffuse light of the overcast sky, it seemed to glow. Beside the house, a tall tree grew; it looked older than any other tree I had seen in the state, with a broad, generous crown of leaves. I blinked, half-expecting that when I opened my eyes the improbable house and tree would be gone.
I had just the last name of the seller—Follett. I rang the bell and a few seconds later the door opened. I blinked again. I was standing face-to-face with the most conventionally handsome man I had ever seen. I told you that except for a single instance, the people in the houses were women. This story, the one I’ve been getting to all along, is the story of that single instance.
“Mac,” he said, holding out his hand. He was tall and leanly muscular and looked entirely sun made—skin darkened by it to the shade of a toasted cashew, hair lightened by it to gold filaments.
“Jen,” I said, and shook his hand.
An image blazed into my head of him on a chestnut horse with a Marlboro between his lips. For a horrifying moment I was certain he had somehow seen it, too. In my head I was already on the phone with Kristin: “When I say handsome I mean beyond anything you could be imagining right now.”
“I’ll leave you to it,” he said. “Let me know if you need anything.” He walked down the hall and disappeared.
I stood in the foyer, flummoxed. Typically the owners wanted to show me around, at least a little. They wanted to be sure I noted the recessed lighting in the living room or that I knew the kitchen cabinets were solid maple. “The open floor plan is a fantastic kid-friendly feature,” a woman once said to me. They had an idea of how they wanted their home portrayed and they wanted to be sure I got it right. I attributed Mac Follett’s behavior to a certain male cluelessness—he didn’t have the instinct to monitor and steer things the way a woman did, I thought.
I began to make my way through the house with my notebook. It was as beautiful inside as out: soaring post-and-beam ceilings, a fireplace with a stone hearth, tongue-and-groove pine floors. Outside it had begun to pour, and through a leaded glass window I watched the rain strafe the terrace.
I had noticed that Mac didn’t wear a ring, and there was no evidence of a woman’s presence in the house, at least not the kind I was used to seeing—no fashion magazines in the basket next to the couch, no lipsticks or lotions in the bathrooms.
“What do you think he’s doing out there all alone?” Kristin would ask, and we would toss around theories.
“He used to live in the Rockies until he developed a debilitating fear of elevation.”
“He was married, but his wife left him for a dirt farmer.”
“It’s a real sod story.”
When I reached the master bedroom, he was sitting on the neatly made bed watching television. Golfers strolled across a velveteen green. I tried my best to do everything as usual. I jotted: double exposure, built-ins.
“So you go around looking in people’s houses?” he asked, his eyes still on the golfers.
“Pretty much.”
“Sounds interesting.”
“Not all of the places are like this. Your house is amazing.”
He smiled crookedly. I blushed. Amazing—another fatuous word I used all the time in my copy. He must be used to women liquefying in his presence, I thought.
“It is, isn’t it?” he said after a moment. The tone in which he said this was not at all boastful, but almost apologetic. I supposed that he was one of those rich people whose good fortune embarrassed him, the type who would refer to a family compound in Jackson Hole as “the cabin.” Typically I found this sort of thing irritating, but in Mac Follett it struck me as oddly touching—such discomfort and unease in a man who surely received affirmation at every turn.
Lightning flashed, turning the sky briefly green. A sharp crack of thunder followed almost immediately. I flinched, and he smiled at this.
“Big one,” he said. I wanted to say something witty, but I was all ooze. “You’re not from here.”
“How can you tell?”
Again lightning flashed and again I flinched.
“You’ll get used to it,” he said. The thunder came, this time a sound like a spray of gunfire. He cleared his throat. “Don’t let me keep you.” He returned his gaze to the golfers. I turned and left the room quickly, unsure if he was trying not to impose on my time or if he’d grown bored with me.
I surveyed the rest of the house. There were three other bedrooms, each sparsely furnished, the closets bare. A beautiful library with walls of knotty pine held only a few paperbacks. The pantry was stocked with things you might take on a camping trip: peanut butter, oats, jerky. I saw in these details an appealing asceticism, a minimalist self with no need for ornamentation. When I was finished, I stopped back at his bedroom. The rain had tapered. In the humid aftermath of the storm, the land that stretched beyond the windows appeared like soft fur.
“All set,” I said, waving my notebook imbecilically.
“You saw the observatory?”
I looked at him quizzically.
“It’s kind of hidden. Come. I’ll show you.”
He clicked the remote and the TV sucked in the golfers. I followed him down the hall. He stopped at a door I had assumed to be a closet and opened it to reveal a narrow spiral staircase.
“It’s all one tree trunk,” he said, sliding his hand along the banister. The wood was exquisite—intricately grained and polished to a whispery smoothness. I had the sense, then, that I was about to ascend into the house’s “essence,” that thing Bethany had spoken of with such unexpected earnestness.
He began to climb, and I followed after him. I could feel his movement drawing me upward, and I could hear Kristin: “He took you to his observatory?”
When I reached the top of the staircase he held out his hand for me. I took it, and he pulled me up into the gray light of the small room.
“It’s something, isn’t it?” he said, hands stuffed in his pockets.
I could only nod. There were no walls, only windows, and through them the prairie stretched in every direction. It would not be correct to say that it stretched to the horizon because I could not see any horizon line. At the edge of itself the prairie seemed simply to fade, land turning to dust turning to air.
“It’s like floating,” I said.
He smiled that crooked smile again.
“You can make out Norman if you squint,” he said. “Over here.”
Together we looked east, straining to make out the blurred gray rising. And because we were looking in the same direction when it happened, we both saw it: The clouds coalescing around a brown center. The center dropping from the sky to the ground.
In the years since that day I have lived many places: Florida with its hurricanes, California with its earthquakes, and, for the past decade, Maine with its blizzards that bury cars and houses in stunning, sinister white. If you stop to think about it, the idiosyncrasy of these forces is astonishing. A vortex of clouds kissing the earth. The solid ground splitting and rippling. You could never imagine such things, if you didn’t already know they were possible. I have come to believe that life is different in each place, and I do not simply mean that in Florida you sandbag while in Maine you salt. What I mean is that a place and its disasters—its fathomless, inscrutable unknowns—are not separable. Oklahoma is its tornadoes, just as Maine, even on the mildest of spring days, is its snows, is a caved roof and a woman asleep in her bed, and then gone. The disaster is always there, because it takes up residence inside of you.
Mac Follett didn’t hesitate. He grabbed my arm and led me back down the staircase. Before the living room window I froze, transfixed. The funnel cloud was soft and brown. Against the plains it seemed to stay perfectly still, and I understood that this must mean it was moving toward us in a straight line.
“Come on,” he said, tugging at my arm. “There’s a shelter.”
We hurried through the pelting rain, past the tree and across the terrace and the lawn, the tall grass whipping around my ankles. When we reached the shelter, he pulled open the heavy brown door and we climbed down into the earth. He closed the door behind us and I was plunged into darkness more total than any I have experienced before or since. I waved my hand in front of my face but saw nothing. For a moment the coherence of things seemed to break apart. I felt as if I were neither upside down nor right side up but tumbling through the darkness. Then suddenly it was light, and I was standing perfectly still with my feet on the packed earth floor. Mac had turned on a lantern that hung from a nail on the wall. I took in our surroundings: a few coolers stacked by the stairs, some cluttered shelves beyond the light of the lantern, two metal folding chairs in the center. The ordinariness of these things seemed wildly discordant with our situation, though I no longer remember if I found this comforting or unnerving. Honestly I think I was probably too panicked to feel much of anything. I sat. I hugged my knees to my chest and tried uselessly to slow my breathing.
Mac paced slowly back and forth, hands plunged in his pockets. He did not look at me. For a minute or two he seemed to go completely inside of himself, as if he had forgotten my presence altogether, and I thought that we must be in even graver danger than I’d realized. I was drenched, and though the rain had been warm—unsettlingly so, like bathwater—I shivered, and this movement seemed finally to pull him out of something.
He stopped pacing and looked at me. He unstuffed his hands from his pockets and squatted so that his eyes were level with mine.
“You’re safe,” he shouted over the noise of the storm. “I promise.”
In that moment, in a storm shelter in Oklahoma, with my hair hanging around my face in wet strings and Mac Follett, round-shouldered in the lamplight, promising that I was safe, I had the exhilarating sense that for the first time I was living a page from the secret text of my life. It was obvious, suddenly, that the storm raging on the other side of the shelter door was here for me, to catalyze my life with its force. I was supposed to be here, and here I was, and the purpose behind my being here was effortlessly legible. I could see what would happen in this moment and the next and the next just as I had seen all of the houses along the length of Redtail Road at once. I would be unfaithful to Steven. Mac Follett would tuck a strand of wet hair behind my ear, testing my resistance, and I would offer none. When the storm passed I would emerge into the watery light of its aftermath with him, the cured scent of his body and the chlorine of semen on my skin. “Stay,” he would say, and I would. For a day, then two. I would call Steven, and though there would be nothing I could say to explain, I would stay on the phone for hours, just talk, words strung together to create the impression of a gentle goodbye. Mac would not sell the house. We would remain there together, until my body was made of grass and dust.
I sat on the folding chair, waiting for him to tuck my hair behind my ear and set the story in motion. And as I waited, two things happened. First, the storm subsided, the roar giving way to soft, defeated wailings. Second, my eyes adjusted to the dim light, and things that had at first been hidden became visible. I could see, on one shelf, a jumble of fishing gear—rods and waders, a khaki vest pinned with lures. On another, a dusty golf bag stuffed with clubs and a tin bucket of white and yellow balls. And, on a shelf in the corner, still half-concealed in shadow, a big camouflage rucksack and a blue cap with a gold medallion.
“You were in the army?”
He looked away from me.
“My brother. In the Gulf.”
“Oh,” I said. I tried to convey with my expression an all-purpose weightiness. I knew nothing about the Gulf. I knew no one who had gone, no one whose life had brushed even lightly against this war or any other.
“This was his house. He built it himself. I’m just selling it. He died four months ago.”
“I’m sorry,” I said reflexively.
He winced.
I understood then that I had misapprehended everything that had happened since I arrived at the house, which wasn’t his at all: the way he’d disappeared after letting me in; his unease when I told him how beautiful it was. And suddenly I felt very foolish, or maybe ashamed.
He walked over to the shelf and picked up the cap, passed it back and forth from hand to hand, then set it back down.
“I moved his things down here because I couldn’t keep seeing them,” he said.
I wanted to tell him he didn’t need to explain, least of all to me, but I saw now that he did need to. The need glinted plainly in his eyes. It had been there all along, but I had missed it.
“It’s OK,” I said, though what was OK, or for whom, I couldn’t tell you.
We stayed down there a few minutes more in silence. When the sound of the storm had faded away, he pushed open the brown door and we climbed out. The light was the watery way I had imagined. The house was untouched—whatever path the tornado had taken, I could see no trace of it.
Mac walked me to my car. “Thank you,” he said. For days afterward, I would hear his voice thanking me, and I would feel sick with everything I was beginning to know about myself. I got in the car quickly, backed down the long driveway, and went straight home. Two days later, I sent the copy to Bethany Parkhurst. On the market for the very first time, this exquisite post-and-beam home has been custom designed to take full advantage of its spectacular surroundings.
In December, Steven’s company transferred him again, and we left Oklahoma for Nevada. Two years after that, when they summoned him back to corporate headquarters, he went to New York alone. I continued west to California.
But first. Before we left the Sooner State, some months after that storm, I found myself in the dusty archives at City Hall. I couldn’t help myself—I needed to know, though I was suspicious of this need, as I was by then suspicious of nearly all of my wishes and desires. It took me only an hour or so to find what I was looking for.
Terence Follett, 29, of Eakly, died January 16 from injuries sustained in a two-vehicle collision in Omega. An avid outdoorsman with a lifelong passion for astronomy, he enlisted in the army after graduating from West Central High. He was stationed in Landstuhl, Okinawa, and at Fort Irwin in California’s Mojave Desert. He then returned to Eakly, where he bought twenty acres. Selling the mineral rights made it possible for Terry to build his dream house. During Desert Storm he reenlisted and was deployed to Kuwait, where he assessed infrastructure damage in Al Wafrah. He had returned home in July. He is survived by his mother, Joanne Beams; his father and stepmother, Walter and Connie Follett; a brother, Maclean; and numerous aunts and uncles.
That’s a good story, isn’t it? Rich and diverse in its settings, with a real sense of arc and one hell of a plot twist—to return home from a war in a faraway land only to die in Omega, Oklahoma. Even that name, Omega, sounds like something from a story, almost too evocative, too on-the-nose, to be real.
I read an interesting article online last night. It said that earthquakes have come to Oklahoma. Scientists predict that this year seismic activity in the state will be six hundred times the historical average. Fracking is to blame. Wastewater injected into wells deep in the earth. After reading this I closed my computer, made myself a cup of coffee, and went out onto the heated porch to drink it. It’s winter here. I stayed up much of the night, watching the snow fall onto the fields beyond my house, and wondering what it must be like to feel the earth tremble in a place meant for other disasters.
Maybe you think all of this is easy to interpret. A girl left the city and learned a thing or two. A silly young woman hoped to be ravished by a man who was not her husband. A marriage fell apart, and afterward a wife was wiser, though in some ways no better, than she had been before. Maybe it is only my personal stake in the matter that makes me want to believe it was not that simple. All I can say is that when I pulled up to the house on Redtail Road I thought life was one thing, and when I drove away I knew it was another. I knew, quite simply, that a life is not a story at all. It is the disasters we carry within us. It is amazing, it is exquisite, it is a stunning charmer, and it is noted in water and jotted in dust and the wind lifts it away.