3. Omens
Looking back, there were omens. They didn’t believe in omens, of course, but that summer every time they went out they saw tarantulas. They saw rattlesnakes; sometimes two or three. They opened the door one morning to find a red-shouldered hawk dead on the grass, a dead sparrow gripped in its talons.
Two people don’t deserve to be this happy. The phrase came to her lips again and again. She found herself saying it out loud, first when alone and then eventually when others were present. It was startling, the way the words emerged unbidden.
And they were very happy, in most ways. Anita loved the feeling of being pregnant. She loved the tautness of her skin, the swelling of her breasts, the flickering of movement inside, like tadpoles or minnows. She loved the feeling of being stretched into something new, of something strange and alive growing inside her.
They had moved to the mountain two years before; they were married there, on their deck overhanging the precipice. The year before that Anita had come west to do a PhD in literature, and met David through a mutual friend in the geology department. They got along instantly. She liked his quiet, comical demeanor, his interest in what came before, what lay beneath.
David was working with a team of geologists and paleoseismologists mapping prehistoric earthquakes in the Santa Monica mountains, so he knew every winding trail and fire road through the hills. Together they went on long rambles, David collecting rock samples, Anita learning the names of plants and birds. They were both restless in the city, and anyway LA was too expensive, so one day after a long hike they drove up a tiny canyon road and just kept driving. They figured the road would eventually dead end or turn down again, but instead shadowy ravines dark with native oaks suddenly gave way to floods of sunshine and a view of the Pacific that extended from Palos Verdes to the Channel Islands. They followed the serpentine road along the ridgeline, twenty-five hundred feet above the sea, and there was their house.
In those days almost nobody lived up there; a few misfits, the ones who didn’t belong, who didn’t want to be bothered. There were a few handmade-looking houses; a trailer with a rain cistern and a pen for chickens, wire-roofed to keep coyotes out; an earthship with a wall made of used tires. Prices were cheap because of the hair-raising drive; the nearest real grocery store was half an hour away. They saw a small side road, turned in, and discovered a small cluster of houses, one a slight wood-framed structure with a rickety deck and a "For Rent" sign out front.
Nearby a bulldozer was grading a new building pad, metal teeth cutting the face of the mountain. That was another omen, she realized later.
The beauty took your breath away. After working at the university on a cloudy day, they would drive up the tortuous canyon road, come around a hairpin turn, and plunge through the cloud layer into light. By the time they got home it was like the view from an airplane, mist turning tangerine and pale aqua in the falling sun, mountains emerging from the clouds like islands in the sky. The air smelled of coyote brush and sage; hawks hovered and soared below them in the purple canyons. At dusk a warm breeze would blow over from the valley and the sky would darken to blue-black, the Milky Way plunging toward the dark heart of the ocean.
In the morning part of a fawn’s leg appeared on the driveway, small hoof still attached.
As a PhD student Anita taught freshman composition and read Dickinson and Thoreau. In her imagination she had seen herself as an English professor, reading poetry, teaching students, occasionally publishing an attentive and heartfelt exegesis of a beloved work of literature. But she had been naive. Nobody explains these things to the students who don’t know, or don’t know to ask. It began to dawn on her that to make your mark you needed to draw attention to yourself, you needed connections and you needed a marketable thesis, a saleable commodity in the planned obsolescence of ideas. But it all kept slipping through her fingers.
In any case literature was not really the thing any more; in those days literary theory had all the heat. She took the obligatory theory course with the new department star, a wild-eyed boy-man fresh out of Yale who looked unnervingly like a young Charlie Manson. He assigned Paul de Man’s essay Semiology and Rhetoric, and by the time Anita arrived at the rhetorical grammatization of semiology, just as in the grammatical rhetorization of illocutionary phrases she understood that there was no way de Man was not aware that he was completely full of shit. He was pulling everybody’s leg, making fools of them all, and making himself into a hot commodity by doing so. It was peak capitalism of the intellect. She was not surprised when a few years later it came out that de Man was an actual sociopath, a bigamist and a pathological liar who had fled Belgium to avoid charges of financial fraud and Nazi collaboration.
At that point she almost quit. In this hierarchy of stars she would remain below the horizon. But her advisor, a kind, thoughtful woman, a Dickinson scholar, low-status in the department but endlessly thrilled by Dickinson’s halting, skewed speech, persuaded her to stay.
Further in Summer than the Birds, this professor had enthused one day in seminar; she had always thought this was one of Dickinson’s most enigmatic lines of poetry. What could it possibly mean? She slowed it down for emphasis:
Further in Summer than the Birds
Pathetic from the Grass
A minor Nation celebrates
Its unobtrusive Mass.
Anita looked around the room at her professor, the other students. It… means that in late summer the birds stop singing, she finally said.
Her professor looked at her with wide eyes.
Like, further on in the summer. The birds stop singing and the insects start singing, she said. From the grass, she added.
Her professor thought this was pure genius.
How could people not know this, Anita thought.
But her professor was kind, and it seemed to be the path of least resistance, so in the end she wrote her dissertation on something blah blah nature eco-blah in 19th century American poetry. Pathetic from the Grass. It wouldn’t make a splash. It would probably get her a community college job at best. But she decided that was fine; she would read poetry, and teach the kids who couldn’t afford to be elite, and occasionally write an attentive and heartfelt exegesis of a beloved work of literature that would be published in an obscure low-status journal somewhere. She put a wooden table and a lamp out on the back deck and wrote an attentive and heartfelt dissertation. She wrote it with care and love, as her belly swelled, as her baby rolled and turned, and she was happy. Shooting stars streaked the sky as she wrote. Owls streaked the walk with droppings like white paint and coughed up pellets of fur and tiny bones. Coyotes posted their scat, reddish and crumbling with seeds and berries, on the driveway.
Ours, they said.
Not yours, they said.
Ours, they said.
As her belly swelled Anita dreamed of tidal waves that reached to the top of the mountain, the last delicate lip of foam lapping gently around the flowers that edged their back steps. Two people don’t deserve to be this happy, she murmured to no one in particular.
In the morning she stepped out of bed to find a scorpion on the floor beside her.
That summer she got her dissertation approved and officially got her PhD. She hadn’t finished in time for the formal hooding ceremony, but David had insisted on organizing a celebration with friends and even surprised her with an official PhD gown and hood. She had a job lined up as an adjunct instructor of English at a community college in the Valley, she had daycare lined up for the baby who was due to be born any minute. She was uneasy about going back to work so soon after the baby was born, but the semester started when it started and it couldn’t be helped, so she tried to trust that it would all be fine. She stood in the hot sun getting pictures taken, sweat stinging her eyes, dark robes billowing around her moonlike body, trying to remember when she had last felt the baby move.
Something dark and gray slid down her throat.
She called the doctor, who repeated (with that special condescension doctors use when repeating information that you already know) what she already knew from the pregnancy book, that babies often move less in the last days of pregnancy. In his indulgent doctor-voice he chortled at her anxiety and told her not to worry.
Looking back, she thought of something her brother John once said to her when they were teenagers: You’re the kind of person who will always get caught. Of course, at the time, he was talking about getting caught at teenage things, smoking weed and hitchhiking to keg parties. But it wasn’t just that.
Two people don’t deserve to be this happy.
She didn’t believe in omens, not literally, of course. The talkative part of the brain declares that no such thing is possible; it is superstition, metaphor, a projection of human subjectivity on an indifferent material universe. Or conversely the chatterbox brain tries to decode the world literally, every star or spider a token to be traded for explicit meanings; an owl means this, a snake that. The deconstructed brain says yackety-yak to that; there is no meaning, in anything, anywhere; all is slippage.
The silent part of the brain sees it differently.
That night at dinner her friends all toasted to her achievement. She chatted, and laughed, and tried to celebrate in a way, but she couldn’t hold her mind on it.
You’re the kind of person who will always get caught.
Two people don’t deserve to be this happy.
The moon slipped behind a cloud as they went to bed. Outside, a pack of coyotes began yipping, high-pitched voices overlapping in a wild crescendo that echoed off the canyon walls.