The Portable Veblen

6 ART IS DESPAIR WITH DIGNITY

After Paul left for work on Monday, Veblen rolled her bike from the garage and heard the rubbery leaves of the magnolia shiver. Leaping from bough to bough went the squirrel, as if it could fly. Curious how the squirrel stuck around, even with a mean-looking trap in the attic.

Curkcuuuuurikieeeeecururururucuriii! The squirrel flew from the branches onto the garage roof, every spiky guard hair on its tail gathering sunlight.

“Hey, what’s up?”

Seeforyourselfforyourselfforself, it seemed to chatter.

“Up in Cobb, was that you?”

His reply formed a rhyme in her head:

Whiskery day, whiskery do

No one knows me and no one knows you!

“Did you stow away in the car? Did you flatten yourself like a pancake?” she asked him. He must have laughed merrily at the pinch he’d been in, as it kept a fellow from going soft, to find himself in a pinch now and then.

The squirrel twitched and ran.

“See you later!”

Spring had come. Bright-headed daffodils elbowed through the soil, yellow acacia fanned the rooftops, humming with trains of bees. Tender young buds could be chewed on everywhere, as could those easily damaged new leaves that had the feel of baby skin. Out on the bike path, snaking around the bends in the creek, the breeze tousled her hair, morning cool and redolent of the bark of tall trees. At the railroad tracks she detoured south to University, under the sandstone archway, to enjoy the passage down stately Palm Drive, lined with parallel columns of the majestic Canary Island species. From eucalyptus to redwood to oak, sparrows, towhees, juncos, thrashers, and jays all whistled and dipped. Ground squirrels raced back and forth over the path, barely escaping her wheels. She avoided the basking earthworms on the shores of rain puddles. Her tires crunched the russet husks that had fallen from the palms in the rain. Nature was irrepressible, and should be. If a squirrel took note of her, as if to say she was a human worth knowing, as if to say (and you couldn’t help but take it this way when singled out by an animal) that she was a human worth marrying and loving, then let him have his say!

• • •

HER MOTHER CALLED, during her morning round of transcription; Veblen called back when her break came, under an oak in the sun.

“Hi, Mom,” said Veblen, swatting at a mosquito near her face.

“Veblen, did you take the typewriter from your room?”

“Yes,” Veblen said.

“What made you think you could do that? Why didn’t you ask me?”

“It was just sitting there. You don’t need it, do you?”

“You know that typewriter is special to me! You know that!”

Veblen took a deep breath. “Okay, so I took it. Now what? Do you want me to ship it back?”

She could hear her mother swallowing some kind of liquid.

“No, Veblen. Keep the damned thing. I wonder why you did it, that’s all. It seems as if you did it to hurt me.”

“Hardly. Why are you so touchy about the typewriter?” Veblen wanted to know.

Her mother spoke in a near whisper. “Because it was given to me by a brilliant man who saw my potential. That was a special time for me. You know that.”

“What was so special about it?”

Her mother’s voice shrank further. “I don’t need to justify my attachment to that machine. I’m merely asking that you’re careful with it.”

“What am I going to do, throw it off a building?” Veblen looked up at the roof of the hospital.

“I suppose not.”

“Watch out, maybe I will,” Veblen said, with actual malice.

“All right. Tease me all you wish. It’s your typewriter now.”

“I know it’s mine. I used to take it all over.”

“But you never took it away before,” said Melanie.

“I took it away now.”

“Yes, you did.” Her mother sniffed, and adjusted her tone to sound upbeat and agreeable. “Anyway. Linus and I were talking about your desire to further your Norwegian, and we wondered what you’d say if we offered to help you take that time in Norway you’ve always wanted.”

Veblen was a fool sometimes, but she was no fool the rest of the time, and she crushed an old acorn beneath her shoe.

“Why are you saying that?”

“What, dear?”

“Why are you saying that right when I’m about to get married?”

“Oh! Don’t you remember, you said it yourself — right here in the bedroom next to me — that you wished you’d had the chance to spend time in Norway.” Melanie was a bad actress.

“So what you’re really trying to say is that you don’t want me to marry Paul!” Veblen cried.

“No, I’m not,” said Melanie.

“I wanted to go on that study abroad program ten years ago! You said you needed me at home. And then I managed to raise the money later, and you went into the hospital a week before I was supposed to leave so I didn’t go.”

“Oh, I’m sorry I inconvenienced you!” her mother jeered, and Veblen scanned the skies.

By now she recognized the patterns in her mother’s behavior that were triggered by any forward progress in her life. When Veblen finally made her move to Palo Alto, her mother fell into a horrible snit as Veblen finished packing that last day, throwing something at her while she zipped up one of her bags.

It was a patchwork cover for her computer, perfectly fitted, finely finished, made of scraps of Veblen’s childhood dresses, just like the one her mother made for her typewriter once upon a time, an otherwise loving gesture except that her mother pitched it at her head and ran from the room in tears.

“Mom?” she called.

“What?” yelled her mother.

“I love it!” Veblen said.

Melanie screeched, “Go on, get out of here! Go, go, go, go, go!”

“Why is she yelling at me?” she asked Linus.

“Because she loves you so much. She’s going to miss you.”

Veblen began to cry too. “I wish she could just give me a hug.”

“Give her a call as soon as you get there, okay?” Linus said, patting her on the back. “That’ll make her feel much better. Good luck, babe.”

This was her send-off, and as she drove away, eyes still red, she vowed that the only way to break free from the grief her mother caused her was to make something out of it — but what?

Art is despair with dignity, she thought, and scribbled it on a scrap of paper in her car. If only she were an artist!

Now Melanie said, “Why not do your thing in Norway before you get married. There’s no hurry, is there? Paul can keep on with his work, then you can come back and get married anytime you want. You’ll never get a chance to do this again, believe me.”

Everything had gone so well. Paul had brought up the roof of the chicken house and almost got scratched to death. Her mother had seemed so happy.

What went wrong?

What always went wrong?

She was supposed to thank her mother for the offer, play along without subtext. “Did I tell you what a great time Paul had?” she tried instead. “He loved you and Linus. He loved our house.”

“Is that so? We’ll see how long that lasts.”

“Yeah, especially if I tell him you want me to go to Norway right now.”

“I don’t know if I’d mention that, unless you decide to go.”

“I’m not going to go,” Veblen said.

• • •

THERE WERE FAR more important things to do than get married, of course there were. There were exploration, discovery, all kinds of challenges to be had.

Girls who dreamed only of marriage were doomed, mentioned her mother at regular intervals throughout Veblen’s life.

• • •

BETWEEN UPDATING Dr. Chaudhry’s calendar and making some copies, she fell into a reverie about married life involving her cottage on Tasso, but the daydream rejected her attempt to have it because Paul had his eye on bigger, “better” houses, so she switched channels to an old daydream in which she had a job as a foreign correspondent in Jakarta, based on seeing The Year of Living Dangerously at an impressionable age.

There she was in sweaty khakis, there was her Linda Hunt — like friend taking her into the seamy underground, where they supported a sickly child with bags of stolen rice. There they were, ranging through the smoke of riots, bold and unstoppable, sending back reports on the hour. She used to imagine meeting a male reporter, maybe an Australian, with manly arms who grew up on a sheep station, who’d take her home to meet his family, a short hop across the Torres Strait, where she’d jump in with the chores, unafraid of the work, and they’d soon see she was no stuck-up American. They’d marry and take over the sheep station and her sweet old in-laws would live out their days on the veranda, watching them canter up in the evening after a long day mending fences, the shepherd dogs right behind, waiting to be fed.

Wait a second, that wasn’t going to happen — she’d chosen Paul, a doctor who experimented on brains at a veterans’ hospital in California, who probably didn’t like sheep, and definitely would never have his parents living with them.

Probably not a good idea to fantasize about that anymore.

• • •

IT WAS REFRESHING to continue on with Paul as if she existed independently of her parents, but wasn’t she misleading him?

He had no idea.

After she’d completed some filing and mailing, made a trip to the drinking fountain, and performed a stretching session behind her desk, she received a call from Bebe Kaufman, the head nurse at her father’s mental health facility in Paso Robles.

“Veblen, your dad needs some new pants and all the rest of his usual supplies. When can you make it down?”

“How’s he doing?”

“No change. No problems. That’s the kind of news you want, right?”

“Thanks for everything you do for him,” Veblen said. “I’ll come soon, I promise.”

“Good girl,” said Bebe Kaufman.

• • •

VEBLEN HAD RISEN UP the ranks of the temp agency, and nowadays made eighteen dollars an hour, just enough for rent and food and a few small items of need. Keeping a low overhead was part of her mind-set. It made for an existence that was lean and challenging, like life on the frontier. She believed it was important to be fairly compensated for your time and work, but that it was also important not to earn a bunch of money just to play a predetermined role in the marketplace. When unforeseen expenses came up, such as when her 1982 Volvo 244 blew its head gasket, she discovered how vulnerable she was — and had to take a second job for a while, packing candles into boxes in a factory in Milpitas on the night shift. But for the most part, her life worked. She was getting better at Norwegian, and her translations came more easily. She’d accomplished things, hadn’t she? All kinds of things you couldn’t put on a résumé, such as deciphering the cryptic actions of family members, and taking care of them until the day they died.

• • •

COMING HOME TO the old typewriter these days was inspiring. She’d go to it to record new ideas and make lists and take in that ancient smell.

The smell was the London of Dickens, the catacombs on the Appia Antica, the Gobi Desert in winter, a dark monastery in Tibet. It was Nevada City in the gold rush. It was a telegraph office near the Mexican border. It was a captain’s trunk coming around the Horn. It was a dressing room on the Great White Way in New York. Sometimes, it was a breezy little tree house in Wobb.

I love Thorstein Veblen because even after an exhaustive survey of his life, he has never let me down; because he bucked the establishment not only when he was youthful and idealistic, but all his life; because he was so free, he lost jobs that others would have made every compromise to keep; because he was a thorn in the side of the powers that be; because he posted office hours on his door, 12:30–12:35; because although he was defeated in academia, he never stopped contributing to the intellectual life of the nation; because he lived true to his beliefs, and committed not a hypocritical act in his life; because he cobbled together his clothes and furniture with dignity; because he had to brew his own coffee the exact same way every morning and would not let anyone else do it for him; because he had a horse named Beauty and allowed animals to wander around his yard free, even skunks; because he was proud of his Norwegian heritage but deeply curious about the lives of everyone else; because he never kissed an ass except those of the women he loved; because he built Viking ships for his stepdaughters out of logs and taught them the names of the constellations and every flower and tree and mushroom in the forest; because he traveled all over the continent and knew and feared its natural resources would soon be commodified and pillaged; because he coined wonderful phrases to describe the follies of the postindustrial world, including conspicuous consumption, pecuniary canons of taste, and decadent aestheticism; because he had his stepdaughters dress like boys so they could run free in summer and so that their talents and habits would not be formed by convention; because he spoke at least fourteen languages and astonished haughty intellectuals without even trying; because even now his reputation is skewed by misinformation he did not bother to correct; because in photos he appears foreboding but in a hundred recorded instances he was gentle and kind to those he loved. Thorstein Veblen was a large gangly man with a soft voice who mumbled, and he didn’t have to prove anything to anybody, and he doesn’t still.