American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,169

single file, enter without saying a word at ten p.m. sharp, and walk straight to her backyard. There they will stand in rows, staring up at the night sky in silence. Mrs. Greer (who is a widow, sadly, but really no one can ever remember her having a husband) will stand on the side of the porch and tend to her grill, where she will cook upward of forty hamburgers. When they are ready (she cooks all her hamburgers to well, well done), Mrs. Greer will arrange them on paper plates, and the guests will come by and pick them up, and hold the plates in one hand throughout the night. They will not eat them: at the end of the night, they will throw them away.

At ten thirty p.m., on this specific evening, the skies will clear and all the guests will have a view of a dark corner of the night sky, and at this time the corner of the sky will be very, very clear to them.

They will stare at this corner of the sky, and will not move.

If you were to be nearby at that moment, and if you listened, you would hear a noise like hundreds of crickets cheeping softly in the same rhythm; and there would be a somewhat sad, desperate note to their cheeping, as if the crickets were mourning something, remembering something incredible they’d one possessed, but had lost. If you could name it you would say it was a sound of aching, overwhelming nostalgia, a terrible desire to return to a place you are never even sure you’ve ever visited.

Then the song will end, the sky will cloud up once more, and the guests will turn to one another, each with one hand raised with its fingers extended, and they will touch one another’s fingertips, index finger to index finger and thumb to thumb. As they touch, they will stare into one another’s eyes as if swearing to some silent oath; then they will nod, turn to the next person, raise their hands, and do it once more.

At ten forty p.m., all of Mrs. Greer’s guests will line up in single file once more, thread out the door, and return to their homes.

And as always, Mrs. Greer will sit down in front of the grill. The flames will bathe her face; her hair will grow brittle and withered in the heat; her skin, deprived of moisture, will tighten as if it is the skin on a drum.

She will stare at the fire, and she will think—This is a good life. A very good life. But what is missing? What do we lack? Why do I not feel whole?

But listen, just once more:

At this very moment, not far from the Elms, Margaret Baugh is standing in her backyard. And unlike many of her neighbors in Wink, Margaret is not from Elsewhere; she is a native, born and raised here, as human as human can be.

She stands in her backyard, and she weeps.

She is not sure why she is weeping. Tonight she will have one of the few joys she can get these days. But still, she weeps.

She supposes that part of the problem might be her dinner: that night she tried to cook something a little less conventional than normal: salmorejo, a Spanish tomato soup she found in a recipe book. But her husband Dale Baugh is frequently quite vocal about having meat with his meals: this is an American house, is it not, so should he be denied beef with his dinner? So Margaret stressed to good old Dale that he could have ham in this soup if he wished, as it was traditionally made with ham, and that was all right, wasn’t it? And so Dale went to the refrigerator, took out an entire packet of ham lunch meat, chopped it up into huge, silver dollar–sized chunks, and dumped it into his bowl. Then he took out a whole sleeve of crackers, just the whole sleeve, crumbled them up, threw them in, and mixed it up until the soup had turned into a pink-whitish paste with thick chunks of cold pork at the bottom.

And, looking her in the eye the whole time, he ate it. He choked down that thick pink slop, silently recriminating her for forcing him to eat such a thing.

For some reason that hurt Margaret more than anything else Dale has done recently. It reached into her and crushed some fragile part of her. Could she not