Early Warning

ELOISE WOULD HAVE LIKED to go to the wedding, but she hadn’t been able to get out — planes canceled because of the weather. She had finally given up, telling herself that maybe she would go in the late spring. She had a strange desire to see Iowa one last time — she hadn’t been there since Rosanna’s funeral. She always jokingly called everything east of the Sierras “the humid lands.” Nothing about Denby or Usherton ever tickled her imagination the way California did. But this year’s floods had killed the West Coast romance. San Mateo was a disaster area. Marin was a disaster area. Oakland, always in some sense a disaster area, was cloudy, dark, wet, and threatening, and for the first time in her life, Eloise had had the drapes closed all day — she felt the sense of something encroaching, something like a mudslide, slow and inexorable, not something like a tornado, quick and random.

Maybe her mood came from going through closets and tossing old clothes and shoes. Pink high heels! Could she have bought those? It boggled the mind. Good heavens, as Rosanna would have said, she was seventy-seven! Revolutionaries did not live to be seventy-seven. Buddhists lived to be seventy-seven, and she still knew a few of those, with whom she got along well enough. With three boxes of old clothes to take to the Goodwill, Eloise was wise enough to admit that her life had been a failure, but she didn’t exactly mind it. She liked to think of herself as a sport — a branch of a peach tree that had happened to produce nectarines. She had violated her Lysenkoist principles enough to wonder about some of the Vogels and the Augsbergers, both in Iowa and back in Germany — either there were some malcontents hiding back there, or some woman somewhere had imported another genome into the family. However, she knew by her sense of humor, so offensive to every comrade over the years, that she was indeed related to Opa.

Her first mistake today had been to look at the paper even though she hated Reagan. She had been suspicious of Reagan from the beginning. In California, he had extended the right of public workers to strike, but he had fired the air-traffic controllers when they struck, showing his true colors — born-again union buster. But more than Reagan, she hated his advisers: James Watt, made secretary of the interior specifically to destroy that very interior. She hated Anne Gorsuch, and she hated Rita Lavelle (now, thank goodness, fired). In her opinion, Rita Lavelle was not the bad apple, she was the open sore that indicates the underlying infection, and the underlying infection, in the Reagan administration, was the drive to suck as much out of the ground as possible and make a few people as rich as they could be. She’d heard that Watt said something about Jesus returning soon, so what did the earth matter — it was there to be put to the use of man, anyway. This was a sentiment people from places like Wyoming often expressed. It was a sentiment the Perronis adhered to, and it was a sentiment profoundly allied to another sentiment — that no one was going to tell a Perroni what to do. If someone tried, that person might get shot. It was not an Iowa sentiment; people in Oakland and Berkeley, who worked, like Eloise did, in co-ops and on local weeklies, laughed at this sentiment, but Eloise did not, having talked to Mrs. Perroni, who was if anything harder around the eyes and more uncompromising than Mr. Perroni. A hundred thousand acres! The hundred thousand acres owed them something, and Mrs. Perroni was going to make it pay. After Eloise looked at the paper, these feelings had rolled around in her head all day, and because the weather was so bad, she couldn’t get out and take a walk away from them.

She had sold her car. Even Rosa didn’t know she had sold the car. But what happened was, she had fallen into the habit of not turning around to back up — her neck and her shoulders hurt too much when she turned around. She had carefully looked in all three mirrors, left, right, center, and she had done so three times each. She knew that there was nothing behind her. Except that there was something. She hit it, felt it drag, heard the sound of it scraping the pavement. In her panic, she touched the accelerator rather than the brake, and bumped out into the street. Only then had she stopped, turned off the car, leapt out, and rushed around to see one of those plastic tricycles toddlers rode these days — a Big Wheel or something, red and yellow, and fortunately without its toddler. Maybe it had rolled down the street from a neighbor’s house, since the toddler was nowhere. But Eloise had been so upset that she’d gone back in the house and lain on the couch for an hour, then called the Ford dealer to find out what she could get for her car, only four years old and with thirty-four thousand miles on it. She would not drive it again; the representative from the dealership came and got it the next day, and she was relieved to see it go.