Marsha and Scott drive to the mountains to wait
for whatever will happen when the clock strikes
midnight on December 20, 2012. She asks if
they should take extra food and water “just
in case” but he only shrugsand says, “Why?”
They are not there because they think the world is coming to an end. If that’s what they thought they would have told the kids to join them but they are educated, level-headed, middle-aged folks who think about the end of the world in a rather abstract way, as most people do; and yet the news, scientific forecasts and the most recent economic slowdown has left them vulnerable to mild bouts of depression and irritability amidst what feels like a nation-wide background of low-level but constant anxiety. After all, who’s to say the world won’t come to an end? With all the nuclear weapons, global warming, meteors in space and volcanic eruptions of cataclysmic proportions just waiting to happen, who’s to say? Maybe, in some mysterious way modern science has yet to discover, the great calendar making Mayans were on to something.
A friend of hers, Helen Townsend, just came back from China. “You should see all the new buildings they’re putting up there,” she said two days after she returned. “They work like beavers and they’re so cheerful. My God, what a race! And they eat everything, I mean anything that flies or walks on four or eight legs.”
Marsha thinks about this on the drive up the mountains, the drive that, years ago, used to make her car-sick. What has made us so gloomy, she wonders. Is it that we are just coming to the end of what my parents called the American Century? Maybe we’ve just run out of gas, literally as well as figuratively. All great powers come to an end. Maybe things have just run their course. Having pride in being able to do something useful seemed to be a thing of the past, for instance. Did anyone care anymore about their work? She had to call the cable company three times before she could finally talk to someone about their remotes. And then it was to a man who talked with such a heavy accent that what he said hardly sounded as if it were in English. Parents of her students used sub-standard English, vulgar words and expressions in front of their own children when they came to see her. After twenty-five years of teaching she was still astonished that children in her classroom said things she hadn’t permitted herself to say until after growing up and living on her own.
They climbed out of their gas efficient Honda Hybrid and began lugging paper bags and a big blue suitcase into the cabin. Inside the air, as it always did, smelled of cedar wood, lemon-scented wax, moth balls, old lavender soap and ashes left in the fireplace. Scott turned the electricity on by snapping switches in the fuse box while Marsha opened windows and loaded the little refrigerator with plastic containers of frozen blue ice. With light and fresh air, the cabin seemed to expand, glow and come to life.
It was hard to believe that they had been away for nine months. She sometimes wondered if the cabin missed them when they weren’t around. Good memories and not so good memories had seeped into the floors, cabinets, lamps and cases filled with worn paper-back books over the years. In their third year of marriage they had come to the cabin after Scott had been diagnosed with cancer. He wanted to talk calmly about plans they had to make but she only became increasingly hysterical. The cancer did not spread. In one operation it was removed. Their lives went on. And yet, years later, there were times when the thought of losing him so soon into their marriage brought back the old stress and she could feel her lips and the tips of her fingers turn cold and numb with terror and despair.
She looked out the window at the cabin next door and thought about the couple who used the hot tub naked every night. Then came the skinny, long-haired people-four, five or six of them-who smoked weed and played loud rock music till four in the morning. It became a bed and breakfast place after that for a while. Now it was empty and looked relaxed, like a dog that has nothing to do but slumber in the sun all day long.
After they unpacked they took a walk to the stream, walked as far as they could along its banks of mud, rocks and boulders, then turned in the other direction and walked into town. People in short sleeve shirts ate ice cream, sauntered into galleries filled with glass and wood sculpture, bought over-priced clothing and bags of home-made candies. The kite shop was new. So was the shop that sold Hummel ceramics.
Marsha and Scott waited for a table at the Mountain Dove, drank domestic beer and ate hamburgers made with freshly ground beef, chopped onions and cheddar cheese. The French fries were thick and still hot from the fryer. This was the restaurant they always ate at first.
“I can’t believe how warm it is,” Marsha said. “Like summer.”
“It’s supposed to cool down,” Scott said, looking to his right at the people on the wooden sidewalk. “It’ll be cold tonight.”
“We’ll have to have a fire,” she said.
“Sure.”
She looked at the people, too, and couldn’t detect worry on a single face. So far there hadn’t been reports of hysteria or mass suicide. Several groups awaited the end in various places but so far none of them were on the news as dangerous or out of control. A few two thousand and twelve movies had been made but because they were horror films no one took them too seriously. There were, however, a lot of doomsday books on the market and the internet was filled with dire warnings about the twenty-first of December.
Suddenly the people on the sidewalk stopped and looked up. A few screamed. The sun was turning red. The wind knocked their table over. Windows exploded, cars careened out of control…
Oh knock it off, she told herself. She had the same apocalyptic imagination as her mother, who read the Bible every morning before breakfast and often talked about the end of days, usually during the evening news.
Marsha went to church every Sunday until she was 22 but she had lost most of her convictions by the time she was 17. After that the sermons were embarrassing and to be endured for the sake of her family. She knew that if she had told her mother that she no longer took the idea of a personal deity seriously her mother would have fallen down dead of a stroke. But there had been a time when the ideas of damnation and salvation were not ideas but palpable realities, burdens as real as the whole world crashing and rushing into consciousness. She had prayed, then, with an intensity that had left her weak and light-headed. Whenever she thought about it now she could only shake her head and wonder what it was that had so gripped her imagination.
They walked hand-in-hand through the town, toward their cabin, stopping only once to pick up a few supplies and a few more groceries at Smarty’s Liquor Mart. The beer and hamburgers left them feeling pleasantly full and sleepy. In the cabin she made up their bed and he stacked wood on top of balled up newspaper in the fireplace.
She took off her shoes, put on soft slippers and padded into the living room. Scott sat on the sofa, reading the financial section of the Los Angeles Times. She thought that one day his whole brain would turn into a black and white column of numbers. Finance was his work but lately it seemed to have become his entire life as well. Three computer monitors in the office at home ran 24 hours a day, displaying information about markets in such places as New York, Tokyo and London. It was not unusual for him to spend 3 or 4 hours a day on his cell phone talking to nervous investors. They were making money but not as much as they used to. No one was.
“You want me to make some coffee?” she said as she sat down on the thickly padded orange chair in front of him.
“That,” he said, softly rustling the Times. She looked at an advertisement, displayed on the back of the paper, for a new luxury condominium complex in Orange County with units starting at a half-million. Good God! She thought. Who has that kind of money these days?
“Would be nice.”
He had agreed not to bring the laptop but here he was reading the damn newspaper. Would it be too much to expect, she thought as she gazed at pictures of two-story homes, swimming pools and a golf course, to get away from work for just one day!
She wondered what would happen if she just sat there and did nothing. Would he notice? Would he eventually float down to earth and ask about the coffee?
He kept on reading, oblivious to her. During the week, after she had finished correcting papers, he stalked into the office, rarely taking time out of his busy schedule to watch television with her. When he finally came into the bedroom it was to sleep. She had never thought of herself as a woman with a strong sexual nature; but after their third date she was, to her own dismay, almost panting with desire. Contrary to what she had been told to expect, on their first night together she had reached an orgasm so intense it had nearly caused her to black out. Now, when they were both awake in bed, their intimacy took the form of a kiss and a chat about what was on their list of things to get done. She didn’t miss the sex. Giving birth to two kids and then raising them had taken the energy out of that; but she did worry that maybe he missed it. There were two young blondes in his office that, when she was a girl, were called bombshells. He never stayed late but who was to say what when on during lunch hour? The fear came to her most acutely when she caught sight of herself in the mirror, at her flabby cheeks, crow’s feet and mop of shaggy gray hair. Just yesterday she had graduated from high school. Now she asked the reflection staring back at her, “who is that old woman?’
She heaved herself to her feet, intending to pad into the kitchen and pour water into Mister Coffee but something stopped her. Maybe it was the sound of the paper gently rustling or the advertisement of half million condos but whatever it was, it brought her blood to a simmer. They had been on the road for an hour and 15 minutes and he was going to sit there and bury himself in the Times.
“Well,” she heard herself say. “I guess I’ll go and set my hair on fire.”
“Um,” came the distant reply.
She intended to pad into the kitchen but suddenly felt herself lunging for the paper instead. To her astonishment the paper flew across the room. She saw his exposed eyes bug out and his face turn pink.
Even as she yelled at him she couldn’t believe that she was yelling at him.
“Do we have to come all the way here so that you can stick your nose in that fucking paper!”
As was his custom when angry, he didn’t say anything at first. He looked down, smoothed the wrinkles on his slacks and then said, rather mildly, “Well, there’s no need for bad language.”
She looked down at him with her mouth hanging open. She flapped her arms against her sides. She sputtered. She walked to the sliding glass door, opened it, stepped outside, closed it, took a deep breath, felt alone.
In all their years together she had never once raised her voice to him. Just because, she thought, he was reading a paper? My goodness, what a baby! And yet she couldn’t help the feelings of sorrow, bitterness and anger that swept through her. Tears trickled down her face. It was cold. She wanted to be cold. In a few days winter break would be over and she would be back in the classroom. She felt as if she had been teaching for a thousand years and the thought of going back to it all added a fresh layer of misery to her grief. She wanted him to come out. She wanted him to stay in. The world is about to come to an end, she thought, and here I am wailing about a newspaper. But she was tired, in a panic about her age, and the thought of love turning to ashes just like everything else was unbearable.
It was dark when she went back in. She found Scott in the kitchen making coffee, looking sheepish and clumsy. She padded to the refrigerator, opened it, took out a pint of half and half. Her ears felt full of wax and she realized that she had been shivering.
“You look cold,” he said.
“I’m okay.”
“I’m going to start the fire,” he said.
“Okay.”
He laid blankets in front of the fire place once the logs started burning, took off his shoes and then lay down. She lay down next to him.
“I’m still full from lunch,” he said, putting an arm under his head. “Maybe later on we can just heat up some chicken soup.”
“That sounds good,” she said.
She turned on her side, put her head on his chest, stroked his arm. The heat from the fire felt good.
“I’m sorry I threw the paper,” she said softly.
“You should have beaten me over the head with it,” he said.
“In a few hours it will be the twenty-first of December,” she said.
“No kidding.”
“I know it’s mostly crap,” she said. “But, Christ, the world is a mess.”
“When hasn’t it been?”
“Not like it is now,” she said. “Everywhere people are starving. Companies are closing down, there’s no work, houses are in foreclosure, the dollar isn’t worth anything, we’re all in debt up to our ears, the government keeps rattling its saber, getting ready for the next war and the war after that. I look at my students and wonder what kind of a world they’re getting into. Where’s it all going to end?”
“I know what you mean,” Scott said, breathing heavily. “The market is unpredictable, you might as well flip a coin. Problem is, we’re not manufacturing anymore, that whole sector has gone south. We can’t compete with the Chinese, we don’t even want to be able to compete with the Chinese. Wages are down, the cost of everything keeps going up, it seems like everyone’s just trying to keep their head above water so consumer confidence isn’t good to say the least. I don’t know where it’s going to end. I suppose it’ll get worse before it gets better, if it ever gets better.”
She saw ruined Mayan temples in her head, saw empty, decaying skyscrapers and the broken windows of abandoned homes.
“You know you’re under stress when you go on vacation to get away from work and take work with you anyway,” she murmured.
“I always hoped that life would get simpler the older I got,” Scott said. “For a long time the business seemed to run by itself, like we were all on automatic and didn’t have to think too much about what we were doing. Now I’m not certain about anything. Maybe that’s how it should be. Maybe we had all grown too complacent.”
“I never used to worry about getting older,” Marsha said, tugging at one of her ears. “Now I get up in the middle of the night, think about death and it terrifies me.”
He turned to look at her. After a minute of silence he spoke slowly with his eyes closed.
“I never thought of death either until I got cancer. Then it weighed on my mind constantly. I worried about what would happen to you and what it would do to the kids. It left me feeling horribly empty inside. I never felt that way before and it scared me. I kept telling myself that I’d be okay but there was a part of me that wasn’t so sure. One day, it was weird, I’d been at the hospital that day, I was driving back home and I looked at the road and the other cars and just kind of fell into a kind of trance, it was very peaceful. The strangest thought came to me. I’m pretty sure it came from a documentary I had watched a few days before on the History channel about the plague. Whatever it was, I began to think about death in a very concrete way, you know, like people who have died and I thought about all the people, all the thousands and millions of people who have died and I thought, ‘but here I am.’ I don’t know how to explain it but the feeling came over me that we die but in some way no one can put in words we’re still here, we’ll always be here.”
“I didn’t know you had become so philosophical,” she said.
“Me either,” he laughed.
They stayed up until the fire was almost out. When it was midnight they crawled into bed. She dreamt about her children when they were small and awoke refreshed, with only a mild ache in her lower back, to the sound of birds outside and Scott shaving in the bathroom.
On Christmas Eve morning they packed up the car and drove home. It was another unseasonably bright and warm day. Scott drove while she made a list of what they had to do at the last minute to get ready for tomorrow, Tuesday, Christmas Day. One child would come and, as usual, one child would not. Two gifts hidden in the garage had to be wrapped. Phone calls to Mom and to a favorite uncle had to be made. A bird in the freezer, a box of stuffing, wild rice, yams and fresh asparagus patiently waited for her to return and attend to them.
She looked out the window, at the ground that seemed to spin away from them. Her outburst had left her shaken. Something of how she felt or could feel had been revealed too openly and she was afraid of what she might have set in motion. The thought of teaching for another ten or twenty years, of standing in front of bored faces full of vacant eyes, made her feel as if her life had come to a complete stop. A couple of months ago she watched a smiling woman on CNN who had just been named Teacher of the Year and all she could think about was how much she wanted to see her drop from a ten story building with her clothes on fire. She would stay married to Scott. The crisis had passed. Their lives would go on. Sometimes, on a weekend at the cabin or on a visit to her sister in Oklahoma, they would be happy. Maybe, she thought, the most you can hope for is that life won’t be too terrible and that you can go on without having to think about what might have been. Maybe we only think we’re afraid of the end of the world.
Three days before her marriage her mother had actually said something profound to her, something weirdly out of character. Marsha had long ago thought of her mother as sweet and practical but essentially simple-minded-a bible thumper who waited for Jesus the way other people wait for a package in the mail. But one afternoon, after hours of trudging through stores, bridal shops and the bakery, her mother sat at the kitchen table filling little baskets with Jordan almonds and talked about her own marriage. She said the usual things-how nervous she had been on her wedding day, how they couldn’t afford a honey moon and how fine her father looked that day in his suit with his head so full of black, wavy hair. And then she stopped, looked up and said, “Marriage makes a union, Marsha. It brings two people closer together than they can ever be. It also makes people lonely. I don’t know why but it does that, too.”
That stayed with her for years; but it wasn’t till now that she finally understood what she had really been saving in the back of her mind. Nothing can exist without its opposite. Light makes dark, noise makes silence, war makes peace, being together makes for being alone. Civilizations with all their order create the chaos that will consume them. And so the world will end and be reborn, for death has its opposite, too.
Scott put his hand on her leg. She picked it up, put it to her lips and held it there.
