The Gods of Midwest Nice
In their hall of The Great Reward, the Gods have laid their nightly feast for the Blessed and Chosen Dead. As always, the tables are groaning heavy, overflowed with offerings from every corner of the heartland. Here is the last pancake from the Duluth Airport Holiday Inn breakfast bar, which not one of the hundred and sixty-five guests could be compelled to take for fear of depriving the others. Here is the last half-pint of Edy’s Caramel Delight Slow Churned Ice Cream, which has remained in the Monroe family freezer in Poplar Bluff, Missouri for nearly two months following James Monroe’s ninth birthday pool party, deemed too indulgent for daily consumption but too expensive to throw away. Here is a slice of cheesecake that has been cut into ever smaller portions at The Rapid City Senior Center’s annual Mother’s Day brunch, halved and halved again, infinitely approaching, but never reaching, its point of disappearance.
A fraction of this cheesecake is now hovering on the fork of one of the Blessed, a Mrs. Eleanor Grim, 88, formerly of Chicago. The Duluth pancake is being shared among the extended Jensen clan, of whom there seem to be more every day, and who are now nearly as numerous among the Chosen as they are among the citizenry of Tower City, North Dakota. Dorothy Tate, who has a tattoo of the Cleveland Indians logo that she has shown to only two people in life or death, is now taking very small sips from the last lemon-drop margarita served at the August wedding of Katie Anne and Jacob Reed. The bartender had announced, “That’s the end of them,” as he poured the yellow slush into a oversized glass, and so the margarita sat sweating beside the bar through all the toasts and through all the dancing. Sophia Tracey, 24, a member of the event staff at the Shawano County Country Club, had considered drinking the now-melted margarita as she was packing away the bar, but upon nearly touching the long, shapely stem of the glass, had felt a convulsion of shame pass through her, and she threw the drink away. For this action and others like it, which she will repeat habitually and unalterably throughout her life, she will, someday, be guaranteed a seat at this grand table.
But tonight there is a stirring among the luminaries, a ripple of excitement among these best and nicest—someone new has appeared. Arrivals always merit a little fuss: a round of introductions, an icebreaker question or two, maybe an extra bite of chili mac casserole pushed the newcomer’s way. The Chosen consider it a part of their mission to welcome recruits to their ranks, to invite brethren into what has always, truly, been their flock. But already they can tell that something is a little different about this one, maybe even—though they don’t say it aloud—a little off. He’s young, first off, which isn’t a problem in itself, but does make him stick out a bit. The Blessed are old, mostly because they are dead, but also, they have all decided, because the young people now tend to be a little wild. Certainly this one looks a touch devil-may-care, with his hair all messy and his fingernails blackened half-moons of dirt. But no one had looked their best when they arrived, and they’d forgive that if he was acting right, but he isn’t. Usually newcomers are abashed, grateful, nearly (but not quite) weepy with joy. Always they dive right into the conversation, making several remarks along the lines of “You shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble,” “You’ve done enough, let me,” or “My, isn’t this just so, so nice?” No such sentiments are forthcoming from this boy; not only is he not joining in, he is hanging back, leaning his long and jumbled boy-body against the walls and the furniture, skulking. Sometimes they see him, sometimes they don’t, but always they feel that sourpuss face watching them.
He is spotted jumping line at the dessert table ahead of Colin Schultz, who went four mostly unrecalled seasons for the Red Wings before succumbing to a heart attack brought on by shoveling both his own and his neighbors’ long driveways. The Blessed catch sight of the boy’s scraggly orange head bending to talk out of turn to Ronald Anderson, who worked in the steel until they shut it down, and after that sold timeshares in Florida condos he did not, himself, visit, and who kept up a lifelong, rousing tête-à-tête with the checkout girls at the Save-A-Lot. Soon the young man is seen approaching the very seat of honor—and in nothing but his high school track outfit and filthy white trainers—to speak to the most revered of all the Chosen: Leona Mills. Leona Mills, who suspected that there were peanuts in the small, pink cupcakes served after her granddaughter’s violin recital, but who said nothing because everyone else was ohhing and ahhing over the cream cheese frosting. Leona Mills, who said nothing when her throat began to tickle, who did not even excuse herself to get a glass of water, because Mrs. Worth from the music school was telling a long—and yes, actually a very funny—story about her vacation in London. Leona Mills, who did not carry an EpiPen because, well, what a fuss. What a fuss about a tiny peanut. Leona Mills, who made it outside, around the back of the theater where a tiny creek ran, and where the air, the bit of it she managed, was cool and sweet and scented with spring.
The boy, of course, the newcomer, is Ian Hollis Sinclair, Bill Sinclair’s boy, beloved first grandchild of Martin and Leslie Sinclair, starting pitcher for Bloomington High and not a bad runner either, fully expected to be scouted by Urbana-Champaign, and after that, who knew what. Class Secretary and Social Committee Director. Youth group assistant leader for the past four years at Calvary Baptist, and bible camp counselor for three. Summer job at the Circle K. Service trips to Guatemala, Thailand, Detroit. Debate team and model UN in alternating years. Twin little brothers he kept an eye on when they started high school and got a little lost in the Big Pond, and a grandmother who lives with them—he shows her card tricks at night and makes her laugh. And don’t get it confused, he was not driving drunk that prom night—had, in fact, dropped his date off at her door on the very stroke of midnight, chaste church girl in a pink princess dress with a thin, pink shawl over her shoulders, chaste cheek kiss on the front steps. He had driven home and changed out of his tuxedo, but still felt buoyed up by the music and the coca-cola he’d drunk, and so had changed into his trainers and his sweats with the reflective stripes down the arms and had gone for a jog. The spring had been hot; the heat came up early in the morning, but he liked running in the dark better anyway, slipping through the streets before dawn or in the starless middle of the quiet night.
But, of course, someone had been drinking that prom night, or so he assumed from the way the car had come so quick and loud, pop music blaring from open windows—he recognized the song but never remembered the name of it. He felt the headlights rising up his back, and turned a little to look, stepped a little sideways to get his feet onto the gravel beside the road. It would have been alright if they hadn’t hit the brakes, but they must have startled when they saw him there—an unexpected bright flash beside the road—and the car fishtailed, once across the center line, then back, choosing between the river on one side and him on the other—lanky and unkissed and seventeen, a mile from home, a good kid.
They didn’t choose the river, and this is what he got, then, for all his years of doing as he was told, a flash of bone-broken suffering and then a room full of old women nibbling on leftovers. Well, he’d given it a fair shake, he thinks to himself, watching from the corner as a pair of gray-haired ladies compare dish-washing routines. He’d been as good as good can be, had been nicer than a May wedding, and here is eternity spread out before him like a string of Lion’s Club dinners. And now, he thinks, now it is time to give something else a shot. Now is the time to let his hair down. Here, at long last, is his chance to bust some shit up.
Though she is giving every appearance of being engrossed in her meal and in a neighborly conversation about the encroachment of non-native grasses, Dorothy Tate is watching. She watches as the young man grabs an entire porterhouse steak from in front of Leona Mills with his bare hands and walks off, taking big, disorderly bites that show his canines. The steak went unordered at an Outback in Muncie when Jill McKibbons realized her uncle was going to insist on paying and opted for something smaller; it was twenty-two ounces, medium-well, and came with fries. It would have fed Leona Mills for a year. Dorothy is watching, too, as the boy, after only a few bites, tosses the steak far underneath the radiator, where someone will have to get down on hands and knees to remove it before it starts to smell. And Dorothy is watching, finding it increasingly difficult to focus on the continuing discussion of box myrtle, as the boy pulls down the front of his sweats and begins to piss only mostly into a potted fern. At this, Dorothy sets down her margarita hard enough to slosh the neon liquid onto the white table cloth and feels, for the first time since her death, a true and energizing indignation.
“Some people,” she says, turning to Eleanor Grim, who has taken up another cheesecake crumb and has it balanced delicately on one tine of her fork, “simply have no manners.”
Eleanor smiles in a way that is blank and quick, and Dorothy knows she has said the wrong thing. She scolds herself in the silent, bitter way she has done frequently since girlhood. Dorothy can admit, in private moments, that she doesn’t know why she is here. Me? she sometimes thinks. Dorothy? Dorothy, who has burned more casseroles than she has ever consumed? Dorothy, who never finished writing thank-you cards for her wedding gifts though her marriage lasted thirty years? Dorothy, who for three years in her mid-twenties lived in California? So it had been a shock, waking from a dementia haze, to find herself here, among the Chosen. The others assured her they’d been shocked as well—that the shock was part of it—but she didn’t precisely believe them. She’d always felt a little different, not quite worthy of a fancy place like this.
But now, watching the young man prop his muddy shoes up on the white settee and gobble a mound of hot dish so fast it looks like he’ll choke, Dorothy begins to feel a little more deserving than she ever has before, begins to resent Eleanor’s little jabs, the way all the Blessed call her “modern” and “independent” when they think she doesn’t hear. She’d never think to behave like this boy, this young bull, this brat. And hadn’t she always done her best? Hadn’t she been unfailingly polite to all waitresses, leaving the same tip regardless of service (ten percent at first, then twenty, after reading an article suggesting this was expected nowadays). And yes, hadn’t she served on the PTA, and even run the bake sales for years after her own children and grandchildren had graduated? And most important of all, hadn’t she borne her own weight, always? She had never been a burden. The ladies here all spoke that word to one another, when talking of their lives and the ends of them. “I didn’t want to be a burden,” they all would say. “I couldn’t bear to be a burden.” So yes, she’d done well enough; she’d worked and made a little money, kept up with the house and the children’s needs, cared for Harold herself until he passed, and had enough in savings to pay for her nursing home—made sure to die before the money ran out. The kids sold the house after, and it wasn’t very much, but everyone got enough to pay down their credit cards.
She’d done all that was asked of her and much that wasn’t, and though she’d not been the best, she’d always given her best. That’s how she put it to herself now, and it must have been good enough, for here she was in The Great Reward. But what, then, of this boy? This awful, loping, puffed-up boy, putting the lie to everything she’s earned. She glances out of the corner of her eye at Ronald Anderson, digging into a leftover zucchini casserole that the Smithwick family of Oklahoma City eat every Wednesday because they all claim to love it, though none of them do. Mere days ago, Brett iced her out of an entire dinner conversation because, she can only imagine, she’d let slip with a political opinion (she’d thought it would be all right to mention Mondale, so many years on. A foolish mistake). Celeste Mckee—a preacher’s eldest daughter who never bobbed to the surface during a church-sponsored swim-trip game of Marco Polo—has hardly spoken a word to Dorothy in months, not since a comment about how a particular Sonic Burger had been cut into so many pieces it had “begun to resemble the loaves and fishes.” Even Leona Mills, the sweetest of them all, had put a bit of backbone into her voice when she refused to let Dorothy help her with a heavy pot of funeral potatoes that had been put into a freezer in Ottumwa, Iowa, deemed not quite good enough for the actual funeral. All of these little mistakes, these small slips made in innocence and good heart—these they punish. But the boy? Slovenly and inconsiderate, arrogant and loud, the boy will feel no reproach? It isn’t right, Dorothy decides, taking one big gulp of margarita: something must be done.
From there it happens very quickly. Dorothy is on her feet, striding across the room, everyone looking, the words resounding in her mind. “Young man,” she will say, “young man, do you have any idea where you are? Do you have any respect, young man? Young man, what kind of woman raised you to think you can act this way?” And Ian too is on his feet. Ian has his bare hands in the mashed potatoes. Ian has removed his shoes and left them in the middle of the floor. Ian is drinking a beer he is not old enough to have, a beer that he himself had opened and only pretended to drink at a party the week before, dumping half in the bushes and leaving half on the patio railing. Ian’s mouth is open and he is about to yell “food fight!” or he is about to yell “titties!” or he is about to yell “hail Satan!”And Dorothy is almost upon him now, every thought in her mind painted on her face for anyone to see.
And they do. They do see. Eleanor and Colin see her, and Ronald and Celeste and Leona see her, and all the assembled host of the Blessed and the Chosen see with the greatest interest as she storms towards the horrible boy. And even the Gods themselves see as they hover, nearly visible, nearly solid amongst them. And with all those eyes upon her, she knows she isn’t right to make this scene, knows she does not deserve her place here, and she is ashamed but cannot stop. And then her hand is on his arm, and from her open mouth comes, “Young man,” and from his open mouth comes a voice that shakes and stammers and says, “I’m just so sorry, ma’am. I didn’t mean it. I didn't know what to do.”
And for a moment there is no air, no space between them, no difference between her and this dead boy who will never see his mother again. Their eyes meet and they do not look away, do not turn even as the tears well up against the lashes, and they see and they see, and everything else seems to dim and shimmer and drift, the tables and the chairs and the feast and the faces of the Blessed fading away as the woman and the boy stare into one another’s eyes. The awful unfairness of it all, the secret pain they have borne until it nearly crushed them—did crush them, bore down on them until they shattered, and then the way they continued on afterwards, their jagged edges all cutting and catching the light. And one of them is going to yell, “I love you,” and one of them is going to yell, “I hated every moment of my life,” and one of them is going to yell, “I have looked into the heart of everything and been blinded and saw nothing.” Something is rippling out from them like a wave moving across still water, an energy that lifts the tables and sends the dishes crashing to the floor, that turns each face upwards, to the impossible brightness above, which they have never seen before, which they can neither understand nor describe—beautiful and sad and as painful as death had been. Is it the sky? And it seems for a moment that they all will rend the clothes from their bodies, as if they will leap, naked and yowling through the hall, weeping and screaming every word they had pushed down until the words were drowned in the depths of them, worse than forgotten. It seems as if they will crack the very substance of the doors and stream out into whatever it is that lies beyond the Beyond, all of them together like a single great bird pecking through its shell, soaked in the wild, bloody yolk of birth.
But they do not. For in that moment, the Gods—the silent progenitors of this afterlife, the builders of this hall, the eternal custodians of all the sweetness and the gentleness, of all the care—deem it necessary, for the first time, to intervene. And into each and every mind, the Gods begin to speak, to remind and to guide, to rebuke, maybe, but without any cruelty, only, perhaps, with disappointment. For, truly, this is the home of the blessed, and yes, truly, this is where they do belong, even if they cannot see it, and indeed and always, their Gods shall never abandon them, no matter what they do. And so every tear is dried before the first one falls, and the world is brought back order. And so say the Gods:
MY, DOROTHY, THAT’S A NICE DRESS. IS IT NEW? I NEED SOME NEW THINGS FOR SUMMER, BUT IT IS SUCH A LONG DRIVE TO THE MALL IN FAIRFIELD, AND THE PARKING IS JUST AWFUL. BUT I HEAR THIS SUMMER IS GOING TO BE A HOT ONE, SO I’D BETTER SHAKE A LEG. OH AND IAN, HOW ARE YOU LIKING MR. RAGEL’S SPANISH CLASS? HE TAUGHT MY BOYS, IF YOU CAN BELIEVE IT, AGES AGO. THEY WERE JUST LIKE YOU, DIDN’T CARE ABOUT ANYTHING BUT BASEBALL. DO TELL YOUR MOTHER I SAID HELLO. I HAVEN’T SEEN HER SINCE THE BAKE SALE IN THE SPRING. WASN’T THAT NICE? I THOUGHT THAT WAS SO NICE. ISN’T THIS JUST SO, SO NICE?