SASKATCHEWAN. ALBERTA. NOVA SCOTIA. The names jumped at them from the map. Howard’s finger traced the shape of Canada.
“Saskatchewan,” Elizabeth said.
From their apartment, they heard trucks pull in and out of the warehouse below them. The workmen shouted to each other. In the distance, a siren sounded.
“Ottawa,” Elizabeth said.
She bounced Rebekah on her knee. The baby’s mouth was always turned down, as if she were constantly on the verge of tears.
“I never thought we’d get such a cranky baby,” Elizabeth said as Rebekah squirmed.
“Maybe we got the wrong one,” Howard smiled.
Elizabeth thought she could live in that smile, crawl into it and shape herself against it. And his eyes. Howard’s eyes were so blue that strangers sometimes stopped him and told him he had the most beautiful eyes they’d ever seen.
Rebekah twisted her body uncomfortably. She disliked being held, but when they put her down she screamed until she was picked up again. At night she sometimes whimpered even as she slept, her hands clenched into tiny fists. Elizabeth had been sure they would have a boy, a gentle baby with Howard’s smile. This baby had been born scowling. She had lots of thick black hair that stood around her head like a permanent that went wrong. Already there were creases between her eyes from frowning.
“Do you want to take her back? Exchange her for a different model?” Howard said.
“No,” Elizabeth said, “let’s keep her. I understand I wasn’t such a lovable baby either. Colicky.”
Howard took the baby in his arms.
“Hello, Rebekah,” he said. “What’s the matter there, kiddo?”
Rebekah’s face relaxed a little. All of her smiles were saved for her father.
Elizabeth picked up the map and looked at Howard.
“You think it’s running away, don’t you?” he said.
Rebekah pulled at his chin.
“Don’t you?” Elizabeth asked.
“I’m not married to Joan Baez,” he said. “No one will take notice if I go to prison.”
“I’ll notice. And someday this cantankerous kid of ours will grow up and she’ll notice. She’ll know we didn’t run away.”
Rebekah wrapped her fingers in Howard’s hair. Sometimes Elizabeth would find them asleep like that, the baby’s fingers clutching her father’s hair.
“There is, of course—” he began.
“Another option.”
“Going.”
“A C.O.”
“That is what I am,” he said. “A conscientious objector.”
“You could go and shuffle papers somewhere.”
“That’s why I left graduate school. I didn’t want to shuffle any more papers.”
“How about mopping floors in a hospital?” Elizabeth looked at the map. Bay of Fundy.
“I talked to Bob. From the deli. You know who I mean?”
Elizabeth nodded, pictured the man who filled hero sandwiches with tuna salad or corned beef, his long hair held back by a powder blue hairnet.
“They put him in Special Services. He speaks Thai. His mother’s from Thailand and he lived there for a while. They sent him to learn Vietnamese and he went over as an interpreter. He never had to fight.”
They looked at each other. Rebekah whimpered as she fell asleep, tightened her grip on Howard’s hair.
“He told me that he feels he helped get peace in a peaceful way.”
“You speak Japanese,” Elizabeth said.
Howard smiled.
Oh, please, Elizabeth thought, let me climb into that smile and stay there forever.
“Do you remember,” Howard said, knowing that of course she remembered, “what I told you on our very first date?”
Beer and pizza at the local college hangout. I’ve never seen such gorgeous eyes, she had said. Pizza with olives and mushrooms, the same combination they got now at Arturo’s on Houston Street.
“I spent six months in Japan,” Howard had said that night, “learning the language and the philosophy. I was in a motorcycle accident when I got back and on the admittance form I listed my religion as Buddhist. They thought I was being sassy.” He had laughed then. “I’m probably the only guy who took his language requirement for grad school in Japanese.”
“You told me to eat quickly because you wanted to take me home and kiss every inch of my body,” Elizabeth said.
“I believe I was true to my word.”
“If you go as a C.O. and they put you in Special Services like they did with Bob from the deli—”
“He said he felt like he helped achieve peace in a peaceful way. And through the system.”
“Will you come back in one piece?”
“How could I not come back?” Howard said softly.
He disentangled Rebekah’s fingers from his hair. As soon as her fingers were free, she grabbed Howard’s forefinger and held on tight. Elizabeth wanted to grab his hand, too, and hold it so tightly he wouldn’t be able to leave unless he took her with him.
“Some grip,” Howard said.
Don’t let go, Elizabeth thought.
Howard wiggled his finger free from his daughter’s grip, and gently laid her in her crib.
LIFE WITHOUT HOWARD WAS the hardest thing Elizabeth had known. Rebekah cried through the night. New York City never had a hotter summer. During the day, an old pea green fan spit choppy hot air at Elizabeth as she painted. She was having her second show in the fall and, as she planned for it, memories of her first show that spring flooded her. Sometimes she had to put down her brushes until the images passed.
She had tie-dyed Rebekah’s outfit for the opening that spring, purple and pink broken circles intersecting, bleeding into each other. Howard had stood beside her, so proud that his eyes shone stronger and bluer than ever before. Later, Howard had told her that she had upstaged her own paintings, that was how beautiful she looked. They laughed at the man who showed up in a paisley print Nehru jacket with a fat white rabbit on a leash. When it was all over, they took champagne to the roof and drank to her success. And to their love. The city blinked at them.
Since he’d been gone, he wrote to her every day. She read the letters over and over, silently to herself and then out loud to Rebekah as she wailed into the sticky night.
At six o’clock every night, Elizabeth sat in front of the TV, an old Zenith that elongated all the images on the screen. Helicopters whirred, their rotors distorted so they looked like lava lamps, dripping into the jungle behind them. She scanned the pictures for a glimpse of Howard, even though she knew he was somewhere beyond all that, in a hot hut, where the war played in the background like a distant transistor radio. At eleven o’clock she looked again.
Elizabeth wrote to Claudia. “We want Rebekah to grow up free.”
“We’re looking for a farm,” Claudia wrote back. “Maybe we can all live there together. You can teach the boys about the constellations. All I can tell them is they’re both Libras.”
IT WAS WINTER WHEN he came back. The very end of winter. March. A day so cold that even in the apartment puffs of air came out of her mouth when Elizabeth spoke. She dressed Rebekah in layers of clothing, Elizabeth’s own knee socks over the child’s legs, the bright zigzags of yellow, pink, red, and purple climbing toward her hips.
Elizabeth decided to make vegetable chili. She sat Rebekah on the countertop as she chopped eggplants, tomatoes, and squash. The chopping helped to keep her hands warm. Every now and then the radiator hissed. Elizabeth had placed a bowl of orange peels and cinnamon sticks on top of it and the steamy air smelled vaguely spicy.
Rebekah pointed to the bowls of vegetables. “Yuck,” she said.
“Not yuck, Rebekah. Yum.”
“Yuck.”
The elevator door slammed downstairs. The gates pulled shut.
“Sounds like we have company. Maybe Mrs. Santini has brought us some more soup.”
Since Howard had left, Elizabeth and Rebekah had often eaten dinner with different families in the neighborhood. They were proud that Howard had gone off to war even though Elizabeth made a point of telling them that he was a conscientious objector. “He doesn’t fight,” she told them. “He translates messages.” Still, grandfathers showed her their World War I uniforms and their wives brought out sepia-toned photographs of proud sons in World War II.
“Soup,” Rebekah said. “Yuck.”
“No, kiddo. That’s another yum.”
Often, Mrs. Santini brought them thick escarole soup, full of chopped eggs and celery and carrots. “Usually,” she had told Elizabeth, “I put in little tiny meatballs, as little as this. But for you, I leave them out. Even though babies need meat to grow.”
“Can you say escarole?”
“No,” Rebekah said.
The elevator grunted and groaned toward them.
“Can you try?” “No.”
“Try, Rebekah. Come on. Es—ca—role.”
“No!” she wailed. Her face crumpled, turned red.
Elizabeth heard the elevator gates slide heavily open.
“Come on. Don’t cry now. Mrs. Santini’s here. Don’t cry.”
Rebekah cried louder.
Elizabeth scooped her up and carried her to the door. A knock.
“Mrs. Santini,” Elizabeth said as she opened it.
Rebekah pounded on her mother’s shoulders.
“It’s good to know,” Howard said, “that nothing has changed.”
He had lost weight. His hair had thinned. He had a thick short beard crowded with gray hairs. Howard drew them into his arms and underneath the smell of days of travel, Elizabeth smelled him. She buried her face in his chest and breathed him in. Already Rebekah had found his beard and clutched it as her cries faded.
“YOU CAN’T JUST QUIT the army,” Elizabeth said.
“I did.”
“How? Did you write a formal letter of resignation? Fight with the boss?”
They were in bed, under three quilts in the darkness. Elizabeth had lit fat candles, white ones, that sent round chubby shadows onto the ceiling. Rebekah snored loudly in her crib. They drank hastily chilled champagne, left over from her fall show.
She felt giddy. From the champagne and from Howard.
“I just quit. Stopped working.”
“What did you do all day?”
“Walked around mostly. Meditated.”
Elizabeth remembered them driving to Boston back in college to listen to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He lectured about transcendental meditation. TM, everyone called it. Howard hadn’t liked the little man in white with the flowing beard. She had. There was a simplicity about him, a kind of peace. “Oh, no,” Howard had groaned, “you’ll go off to India with the Beatles. Learn sitar music. Marry Donovan.” She had tried it for a while, repeating her mantra over and over each morning.
“Did you dredge up your old mantra?” Elizabeth said, clutching Howard’s hand under the quilts.
Howard laughed. “Funny you should ask. I ran into Paul McCartney in the jungle. He sends his love.”
Howard had found his peace. That was apparent to Elizabeth. She had found hers when she met Howard. And that balanced with the joy she felt each time she picked up a paintbrush. Life, they both thought, was all about balance, a perfect circle with all the parts equal and full.
“It was all wrong to be there,” Howard said softly. “Bob from the deli may have felt he was doing something peaceful, but I didn’t. It was all war. That’s it.”
In their months apart, life had become clearer to them. They both knew that living a pure life and not supporting the war in any way was the only answer for them.
Howard had decided to apply to a program in Japan to learn to be a potter. Elizabeth could paint the patterns for him. It was the perfect way to combine philosophy and art and lifestyle. It was a way to keep their circle balanced. And that night, sipping champagne together in the dark, part of the answer was in Claudia’s letter. “I found it,” she wrote, “a big old farm that, with a lot of work, can support us all. At least come and see it. There’s a barn and grass and a pond in the back—perfect for the kids. Perfect for us all.”
“We should go to see it,” Elizabeth said.
“A farm,” Howard said.
“Maybe the country life will make Rebekah smile.”
“Don’t expect miracles,” Howard laughed.
“Why not? You’re back, aren’t you?” “Small miracle.”
Elizabeth put her hand on Howard’s chest. If the room weren’t so dark, she would have seen gray hairs there.
“By the way,” Howard whispered later, “this dishonorable discharge means I can never work for IBM.”
“That’s okay,” Elizabeth whispered back, “I won’t tell Suzanne.”
THEY DROVE TO THE farm on the first Saturday in April. As soon as they saw it, they both knew it was right. A crooked crab apple tree was in bloom, its tiny flowers so delicate that Elizabeth could never quite capture them on canvas, though she tried for years later. Already, Claudia’s sons had filled the yard with children’s things. Scooters and trucks and blocks.
Howard picked up a spongy yellow ball.
“A Nerf ball,” Claudia told him. “For Nerf baseball.”
“Maybe I should stick to Frisbee.”
“Come on,” Claudia laughed, her red hair shining like a polished penny in the sunlight, “you’ve got to keep up with the times.”
All around them there was the quiet noise of the country—birds and crickets, someone sawing in the distance.
Simon came over the hill from the pond, wet and tanned, wearing only a pair of faded cut-off jeans with long strings dangling from the bottom. “Here,” he said, and handed Rebekah a small bouquet of wild daisies. “These are for you.”
She looked up at him and broke into a wide smile.
“That’s it,” Elizabeth said. “If he can charm Rebekah, he can charm anyone.”
“He charms me every day,” Claudia said.
“Maybe we’ll be in-laws someday,” Howard laughed.
“Let’s move in first,” Elizabeth said, “and then wait twenty or thirty years.”
They all watched as Rebekah let Simon take her hand and lead her up the hill.