PROPOGATION, PT. 1
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| Norman Rockwell. Freedom From Want. |
Even though most of them are unemployed—Charlie having been fired only three weeks ago and his parents having retired just last Spring—they are all talking about work.
It is Thanksgiving Day and dinner is almost ready. Charlie has just arrived, jarred by the quick train ride from his own city sprawl to the slow and spacious rural Midwest. Beatrice, his younger sister, has been home the entire week. With her generous art school holiday, she has been spending long days with their oldest sibling, Samantha—today’s host—so that when Charlie had arrived, Beatrice had met him at the door with an ominous, “Charlie, I am this close. This fucking close,” holding her index finger and thumb a sliver apart.
Now they are all seated for an early meal, Charlie and Beatrice, their mother and father, and Greg, Samantha’s neighborly husband. Samantha is a frenzy, darting around the house which is utterly new: the furniture in the living room still plastic-wrapped, most of the dinnerware in boxes all marked “FRAGILE!” in her bold red print. Although only minutes away from their childhood home, a home now under renovation, Samantha’s new neighborhood is, to Charlie, another world: a foreign subdivision-state that, according to the homey wooden sign at its landscaped gate, is called Shady Lakes.
“So where is the shade?” Charlie had asked Beatrice moments ago, standing at a bay window that opened to a treeless belt of homes. “And where are the lakes?”
“Sam says the lake hasn’t been filled yet,” Beatrice said, shaking her head slowly, her mouth hung open.
In the kitchen, a baking dish clangs onto the stove top. Samantha is talking to herself, loudly, but the family pretends not to notice. They have each given up offering help, and are instead sitting patiently, picking lazily at an olive tray, and talking about work.
“What I mean is,” their father says, “thirty years ago, it was just a different culture. There was a real mission statement. It was a mission statement culture!” He runs his hand through his coarsely graying hair. “And the mission statement was subversive. Now it’s a branding tool.” He throws up his hands. “I mean you could talk about prestige. And rigor. And working really, really hard. We were known for low retention rates. Imagine that! Being proud of that.” He takes off his glasses, placing them next to his plate to better massage his right temple. Their mother takes them and cleans them on the wide sleeve of her shirt, an old habit. “And then, it all became so unfashionable. Suddenly we’re working for a damn summer camp. Suddenly it’s so very important that everyone is having fun and getting prizes.”
Before retirement, their father was Chair of the History Department at the town’s small college. To some, he was considered a foremost scholar in America’s many small, undeclared military conflicts. “America’s technically been at war more often than not,” he was fond of saying. That and, “nobody knows shit about history anymore.” He had a way of speaking so that one felt like he was yelling even when he wasn’t.
The previous spring, he had briefly been a local controversy after he wrote a damning article about the invasion of Iraq last Spring. Charlie had heard about the fallout from Beatrice—how the college supported his politics but hoped he could work to support, as they said it, “inquiry in the classroom over didacticism in the town square.” Charlie’s father had announced his retirement shortly after.
At the dinner table, he absently pokes the tines of his fork, looking blankly at the robin’s egg blue of the dining room wall. “Whenever you start talking about students like they're consumers...” He trails off, takes a large gulp from his water glass, swallowing hard, as if it were gin. “Well, then…” he searches the air for the right idea. “Well then I don’t know,” he looks to his wife for support.
“I got an online review,” their mother says, then to her children, “do you know they rate professors on the Internet now, like we’re restaurants?” Charlie and Beatrice shrug a reluctant nod. “Well I got a terrible online review last year. This young lady was convinced that I hated women. She called me a misogynist!” She whispers the word like it’s obscene. “It’s such a shame.” She takes a deep breath, then shrugs, grinning slowly. “They brought in this executive-something, like he was from PepsiCo or something dreadful,” she says, handing his glasses back to her husband. “A consultant. Oh god, Charlie, he was probably your age. His name was Cody, or...Kyle.”
“Oh, yeah Kyle,” Charlie snaps his fingers. "Good old Kyle.”
“You have a whole generation around you,” their father says, “of men with the names of boys.”
“Poor guys,” their mother says.
Charlie’s mother was a professor too, although adjunct and of journalism, but her real job was as the Production Manager of a local newspaper, The Advocate, and in that she was something of a local celebrity; her casual elegance and dry humor, her premature silver hair and sweetly sad smile, all of it a symbol of community, of civic pride, yet also of something metropolitan, vaguely East Coast, and certainly bygone. Yet after twenty years the paper had long ago reached its pinnacle and now it was dying in earnest, each year consumed more and more by shouting advertisements. It was now an advocate in name only. It would be sold before next summer. And so, Charlie’s mother had, like her husband, retired early, almost apologetically, like the last woman taking the last seat in the last lifeboat, leaving the men to drown.
“Poor, poor Kyle,” Charlie’s mother says again, at the dinner table, looking off.
“Yeah. Poor Kyle,” he father sneers to no one.
Charlie nods, waits for more, but his father has made his point, whatever it is. He sits back in his chair and smiles widely at his sleepy wife. “But that’s all over,” he says. “It’s not our problem anymore. Right?” he asks her.
“Right,” she says, a practiced agreement. They have had this conversation before, together and alone. They have talked each other down from their dangerous precipices, consoled each other about their dying worlds of work. They clink the lips of their water glasses and drink.
“To quitting,” Charlie raises his glass to his family.
His father gives him a down-turned look but his mother joins him. “Hear hear,” she says. “To quitting.”
Charlie had been shown one picture of his parents at their retirement party. They were sitting at a booth in their town’s one fine-dining restaurant, friends and colleagues leaning on the low booth’s back, all smiling perfectly at the camera. But his mother was looking down at her plate, smiling to herself, as if by an old joke she had just remembered. His father was looking down and away, at some empty corner of the room, startled, as if by a rat.
Now at the table their father shakes his head, amused, angry, at the thought of his old job. Then suddenly, he looks up to his family, brightly, a little flushed, realizing his own digression. “But I guess it’s not just me, or us. Greg can probably talk all about institutional blues. Right, Greg?”
Greg looks up from his hands, startled at the mention of his name. Greg is the City Clerk of this small college town, his big balding head full of municipal code, council board meeting agendas, tedious strings of regulation.
“Oh, sure,” Greg says, “to a degree.”
In truth Greg fills out massive amounts of paperwork, his duties amiable and routine. Some days, Samantha once told Charlie, he’ll sit in his office and copy township maps onto graph paper.
“Why does he do that?” Charlie had asked.
To which Samantha had shrugged, “he really likes maps.”
Now Greg is fingering his napkin, not wanting to have missed his cue. ”Well” he says, “from the sound of University life, I think city politics is a lot less political.”
“You’re telling me!” their father booms and the table smiles into their water glasses.
Charlie smiles too, although he only wants to hear more from Greg. Two summers ago, while staying with his sister, he had caught Greg staring hard at a pot of water on the stove, arms crossed, waiting for it to boil. He had since grown fascinated with Greg: his effortless smile, his undemanding talk, his apparent love for his wife. “He is very romantic,” Samantha had once said of him, quite defensively. But to Charlie, he seems a sketch of a person, the unassuming cover that con men or secret agents assume. Charlie is certain there is more to him, is a hidden component, something restless and lurking.
“Greg, I was meaning to ask you,” Charlie says. “What are the zoning laws for urban gardens? Is it a big process?”
“Well,” Greg squints to the ceiling. “We don’t really deal with that here.” He thinks, his brow deeply furrowed.
“Are you starting a garden?” his mother asks.
“Thinking about it,” Charlie says. “I’ve been looking into a lot of things. But I’m keeping it open.” He takes a long sip of water and waves the topic away. He does not like to lie to his parents.
He looks to Beatrice, who is circling her finger around the lip of her glass, head tilted, as if listening for a pitch. “I’d be more concerned about our Art History major,” he says. “Is there, like, a career day? Is it mostly kindergarten teacher or, like, barista training?”
Even though Beatrice is in her first semester, this is already a tired joke. Still, Beatrice joins in with her playful deadpan. “No, they set up a temp agency next to the graduation stage,” she says. “And you can sell your plasma while you’re waiting.”
“You guys,” their mother scolds, laughing. Then to her husband: “we're making them cynical. Are we making you cynical?”
Beatrice brushes her razor-cut bangs off her forehead. “No mom. It’s Charlie’s fault. He’s the cynical one.” She gives her brother a small sneer of a smile that she immediately realizes and stifles. But both their parents smile brightly at the table, at each other.
If one must be grateful on this day, Charlie thinks, then he will be grateful for this—for stupid jokes and small talk, for the easy distraction of his baby sister, the rosy promise of the youngest, the still most pure. He thinks to thank her for that later when they are alone.
Rockwell, Norman. Freedom from Want. Between 1941 and 1945, oil on canvas, 116.2 × 90 cm. National Archives at College Park, Still Picture Records Section, Special Media Archives Services Division, Accession no. NRACT.1973.022.