Jane Smiley - Ordinary Love and Good Will  

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, as well as four works of nonfiction. She is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, and in 2001 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature in 2006. Jane Smiley lives in northern California.

ALSO BY JANE SMILEY

NONFICTION
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel
A Year at the Races
Charles Dickens
Catskill Crafts

FICTION
Ten Days in the Hills
Good Faith
Horse Heaven
The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton
Moo
A Thousand Acres
The Greenlanders
The Age of Grief
Duplicate Keys
At Paradise Gate
Barn Blind

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION , OCTOBER 2007

Copyright 1989 by Jane Smiley

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1989.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Ordinary Love was originally published in somewhat different form in Fiction Network. Good Will was originally published in somewhat different form in Wigwag.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Smiley, Jane.
Ordinary love; & good will : two novellas / by Jane Smiley.1st ed.
p. cm
I. Parents and childFiction. Domestic fiction, American.
I. Title.
PS3569.M39O7 1989
813.54dc20
89-45284

eISBN: 978-0-307-78748-4

www.anchorbooks.com

v3.1

It seems appropriate to dedicate this book to
Delores Wardenburg, of Iowa City,
Carol Mullally, of West Branch,
Nancy Lewis, of Ames,
the Iowa State students who baby-sat, and to
the teachers at the Ames Community Preschool Center
whose kindness, care, and hard work made
this and all of my other books possible.
Thank you.

ORDINARY LOVE

I dont want Joe to find me on my knees, buffing the kitchen floor with an old cotton turtleneck, but he does, and says, Mom! What are you doing? Relax!

I sit back on my heels and say, Its only six-thirty. Whats with you?

But I know. We both know. He crosses the kitchen and pours himself his first cup of coffee. He drinks them three at a time, Ive noticed this summer, hot and with lots of milk and sugar. Now he turns away from the coffeemaker, and the cup is half empty before he sits at the table. He is grinning. Michael will be here today. Michael, Joes identical twin, has been teaching mathematics in a secondary school in Benares, India for two years. That is why I am buffing the floor, why neither of us can relax.

The floor is pegged maple, about seventy-five years old. The boards vary in width from two inches to five, and are laid diagonally. In the last fifteen minutes, I have worked my way from the pantry to the back door, into a long bronze leaf of sunlight that colors my forearms and turns my hands muscular with shadows. I like this floor, troublesome as it is: caring for it, I remind myself of my mother, and this city, in spite of all its trees, seems rather like Nebraska, where I grew up. The long, rhythmic motions with the rag are soothing and productive at the same time.

Joe says, I think Ill leave for the airport about nine. He is bouncing in his chair. I smile and say, Why dont you leave now?

Im relaxed, Mom. What makes you think Im not relaxed? His expression is almost maniacal. They are twenty-five, and they have not seen each other in two years. You, woman, get up and have a cup of tea or something. And so I do, simply for the pleasure of sitting at the kitchen table with my son. I let him make me toast and peel me an orange, and pour milk on my Rice Krispies. We talk about the geraniums in the window box and the broken lawnmower and the courses Joe is going to take when school starts again in two weeks. We dont talk about Michael. It is a family ritual, not to allude to the returning traveler while he or she is in transit. Usually we just dont speak the name, but this time Joe hasnt even said he or my brother.

Joe has been with me all summer, the longest time weve spent together in six years, and Ive gotten used to him. Joe was nervous about living with his mother all summer, but it has been one of the great summers of my life, the brush and thump and rattle of a congenial presence in the house every day. Ill be sorry when he goes back to school, and he knows it. He gets up from the table and goes into the dining room. He puts on some record, though only after carefully cleaning it off, and here comes Hank Williams, a compromise. I get back to the floor. He brought home his record collection and all summer his gift to me has been surprise music, but he can be pretty demandinghes made me listen to Elvis Costello, The Talking Heads, The Flamin Groovies, Dire Straits. I pretend I can hear the melodies. He says, only half joking, This is pretty central to your mom-project, I would say, if you want to do it right. Doing it right involves learning to tolerate weirder harmonies than I was accustomed to before, but as a part of his son-project he plays the opera and the folk music I like.

He was living in Chicago, but his girlfriend broke up with him in June. After he got here, she wrote him four letters in two days, then that was it. Louise, her name is. Shed visited here four or five times, and Id liked her, found her a pleasant, straightforward young woman. At lunch after he had been here a few days, he pushed one of the letters across the table for me to read. The important thing, she wrote, was that she didnt have the power to make him happy. Joe got up then and went to pull weeds in the flower beds. I remembered that feeling, life with a moody man, the ceiling lifting and lowering hour by hour, some days minute by minute. I thought she was wise to recognize her capacities before marriage, before children, but when Joe passed the kitchen window, I saw from the angle of his shoulders that he was devastated, and tears came into my eyes for him. Since then he hasnt dated.

His whole social life here revolves around Barbara and Kevin, friends from high school who got married at the end of college. When they come over, she always wants to sit me in the kitchen and talk about furniture and he always wants to take me outside (No eavesdroppers? I wonder) and probe my knowledge of state government. I am fifty-two years old, which turns out to be the age when your children and their friends are suddenly eager to plunder the knowledge and experience they once wouldnt admit you had for nuggets they now find useful. I am an accountant for the state, in the DOT, which must explain Kevins interest.

Ive been married once, almost married a second time. I have five children, four grandchildren, which must explain Barbaras interest, even though furniture is the closest she can get to the real topic of children and family life. My younger daughter, Annie, who had a baby in May, calls about everything now, though for years I hardly heard from her. My elder daughter, Ellen, lives a mile from here. She has two daughters of her own, and she talks to me or stops by every day. Daniel, a year younger than Ellen, lives in New York. He has one son, and calls every weekend. Once I was the font of wisdom about babies that they think I am now. My hip was made for carrying an infant; I could thread my way among toys and toddlers without stumbling, hardly looking down, except to admire a scribbled drawing. I thought four high chairs at the kitchen table and two big Labrador retrievers milling around them hoovering up the jetsam was unremarkable.