An Ocean in Iowa Read online

  An Ocean in Iowa

  Peter Hedges

  An Ocean in Iowa

  Copyright © 1998, 2014 by Peter Hedges

  Cover art, special contents, and electronic edition © 2014 by RosettaBooks LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Cover design by Brehanna Ramirez

  ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795343186

  Special Thanks

  The Millay Colony for the Arts, Austerlitz, NY

  The Manhattan Class Company

  Dr. Phyllis Staplin and the students and teachers at Fairmeadows Elementary School in West Des Moines, Iowa

  And the many friends who kindly read the early drafts of this book, with an especially big heap of thanks to Raymond Shelton.

  For Marc H. Glick

  CONTENTS

  What Scotty Said

  Almost Heaven

  Look at Scotty Grow

  A Good Boy

  Christmas

  Other Mothers

  The Wrong Crowd

  What Was Learned

  WHAT SCOTTY SAID

  When he was four or thereabouts, Scotty Ocean liked to stand on the piano bench while his mother, a painter of abstracts, played the only song she knew.

  She practiced it daily, her eyes closed, a Salem cigarette burning in the nearby ashtray.

  For Scotty there was no place better to be than at her side, where he might tug at her blouse or whisper in her ear or pound the black keys with his fists. But it hardly mattered what he did because when Joan Ocean played her song, everything—even Scotty—disappeared.

  One day he said something that brought her to a stop.

  She made him say it again. This time she watched closely as his pink lips shaped the sounds. She would never forget it. Later it would haunt her: his eyes, his voice, and the words, spoken simply…

  “Seven is going to be my year.”

  ALMOST HEAVEN

  (1)

  In the summer of 1969, if you had asked the then six-year-old Scotty Ocean what a judge actually did, he couldn’t have told you—and why his parents never hugged or kissed, he would have been at a loss—and why his sisters kept whispering, giggling about girl matters, he would’ve had no idea. Scotty Ocean was not in possession of all the facts.

  But he knew some things. He knew where he came from. He knew his mother had made him. In her art studio. The same way she made paintings and sculptures.

  “You made me, right?”

  Joan always nodded a gentle yes.

  “But just you.”

  Joan would try to include the Judge but Scotty would cover his ears and scrunch his face, insisting—“Only you made me.”

  Soon Joan stopped trying to tell him otherwise.

  For Scotty, the particulars always changed. When his mother experimented with sculpting marble, he was convinced that he, too, had been chiseled, and the unused parts of him had fallen to the floor like the slivers and chunks in the corner of Joan’s studio. When she worked at her pottery wheel, he watched the way she would wet her fingers and stick a thumb in the spinning lump of clay—suddenly a shape. He would shout over the blaring radio, “This is how you made me.”

  Joan didn’t bother to correct him. Scotty’s beliefs were creative and she was the featured player in his wanderings—this charmed her, and why, she thought, why, as she popped open the next can of beer, why tell him the facts. He had his whole life to live with the facts.

  (2)

  The Judge had been standing at the top of the stairs, calling down to his wife for some time. “Joan,” he said. “Come here.”

  Joan pretended she hadn’t heard him.

  “Honey,” the Judge pleaded.

  Joan called back, “We’re in the middle of dishes.”

  Claire, their older daughter, helped clear the table while Maggie played on the kitchen floor.

  “Honey, come here,” the Judge begged. “It’ll only take a minute.”

  Joan looked at her daughters both occupied and the dishes half washed. Then she turned and headed out of the kitchen. She went because in West Glen, Iowa, in 1961, when called, wives went.

  “What is it?” Joan asked, climbing the stairs.

  Judge Ocean did not answer.

  “What do you want?” She looked for him in the bathroom. She walked into their bedroom. “Walter?” He was nowhere to be found. “This is no time for games.” She sensed something behind her moving, so she turned in time to see the linen closet door swing open, only to find her husband standing in front of her, naked and erect.

  She removed her apron and bent over their bed. While he moved above her, she thought about the flowers she would plant the coming spring.

  When he finished, the Judge, gasping for breath, leaned over and stuck his tongue in her ear. “Don’t,” she said, and pulled up her underwear.

  That night Joan sat on the living room sofa. In the kitchen, the Judge made popcorn using a pressure cooker. The sound of kernels popping had the girls jumping up and down. “Mommy,” they shrieked. “What are we!”

  Joan drew in on her cigarette and said nothing.

  “We’re popcorn!”

  The girls slowed their dancing, then stopped. They studied their mother, who stared blankly at the turned-off TV, cigarette smoke leaking out her mouth.

  Claire asked, “Mommy, what is it?”

  “Nothing, honey.”

  But it was hardly nothing. She knew it; she felt it deep inside.

  She had conceived.

  When the Judge rounded the corner with his nightly bowl full, his girls leapt toward him, their little hands reaching up for the corn. With a girl on either side, he settled into the sofa. He lifted up the saltshaker. “Let me,” the girls squealed. As each daughter took their turn, Joan Ocean started to cry.

  ***

  Her first pregnancies had been remarkable experiences. In 1957, after reading the book Childbirth Without Fear, Joan informed her obstetrician, Dr. Charles Vernon, exactly how she intended her baby to be born. Dr. Vernon argued with her. He believed Joan was making a mistake. But in thirty years of delivering babies, he’d rarely met a woman so determined.

  When it came time, Joan requested three pillows and refused to lie down and submit to the common medical practices of the day. With proper breathing and an unshakable belief that childbirth couldn’t hurt too much, that for millions of years women had been giving birth, and that she was just another, a link in a long line, she gave birth to Claire the “natural” way in an eleven-hour period. Nurses who had been skeptical looked at her with a much deserved respect.

  “Your wife is unusual,” Dr. Vernon later told the Judge.

  Maggie’s birth proved even easier, done in eight and a half hours, and it confirmed Joan’s thought that there was nothing nicer than giving birth.

  But Scotty’s labor would be different.

  Joan, all sweaty and exhausted, shouted and moaned—endless contractions—she was to endure hours of pain.

  “The little brat doesn’t want to come out.”

  Dr. Vernon said, “You know, Joan, this doesn’t have to hurt so much.”

  She shook her head, determined, her hands clenching the steel sides of her hospital bed.

  “You know we can kill the pain….”

  “No!”

  Joan held out. She had gone into labor on July 10, 1962, and Scotty was delivered just after midnight on the twelfth. Twenty-nine hours—it was as if Scotty didn’t want to be born.

  Perhaps he knew he wasn’t welcome, Joan told herse
lf. Between contractions she vowed to work extra hard to like her child. Fortunately her guilt for wanting a miscarriage, her self-hate for wishing this baby had never existed, evaporated the first moment Scotty was set on her chest and went for her breast and missed.

  “He’ll learn,” she told the Judge, who wiped her sweaty face with his handkerchief.

  “Of course,” he replied.

  On the drive home from the hospital, the Judge remarked, “The doctor said you have an unbelievably high tolerance for pain.”

  The Judge turned onto their street.

  “I thought you should know that’s what he said. Very few people could take what you withstood. He was impressed.”

  Joan forced a smile for her husband. She knew he was proud of how she delivered.

  The girls stood with Joan’s parents on the porch. A sign hung on the garage door, painted in bright red and blue: WE’VE GOT A BROTHER. WELCOME HOME, SCOTT.

  Later that afternoon, the Judge painted on a Y, explaining to the girls who watched, “Your grandfather, my father, was also named Scott. So we’ll call your brother Scotty. Scotteee.” Then the Judge went back inside, and the girls practiced saying their little brother’s name.

  Joan received visitors for most of that afternoon. Neighbors and friends stopped over. The Judge’s secretary came with balloons. All guests were served pink lemonade and cookies compliments of Joan’s parents.

  While the Judge told the entire birth experience from his perspective (which consisted of his pacing the halls and napping in the waiting room), Joan sat at the kitchen table. The noise of children playing and the Judge talking in the living room blurred for her, and she looked down at her boy asleep in her arms, his crooked face, tiny eyes, his lips and nose so little.

  In the living room, the consensus among the guests was that Scotty’s looks favored his father, but the Judge was quick to disagree: “He doesn’t look a thing like me. He looks like an hors d’oeuvre.”

  Hearing this, Joan thought the following, and pledged it to herself, as both prayer and promise: You will be loved, Scotty Ocean.

  And while the guests laughed at the Judge’s remark, Joan leaned over and softly whispered to her newborn son, “You will be loved.”

  (3)

  On his last day as six, Scotty tagged along with his mother as she ran an afternoon of errands.

  At Kmart, he stuck his hand in the back pocket of her blue jeans and gripped tight. They came to a stop at the party supply section and picked out paper plates, party hats, and noisemakers.

  At the cash register, while his mom paid with a personal check, Scotty wandered off, and Joan was forced to look for him, checking Toys, Pets, and Sporting Goods. When she finally found him in Appliances, he was standing, mouth open in awe, staring at images of astronauts practicing weightlessness at their training facility. Sixteen television screens, different sizes with various hues and tints, but the same image—these were the astronauts of Apollo 11.

  “Scotty?”

  Scotty didn’t answer. He imagined he was bouncing around in the aisles of Kmart, floating like the astronauts in their simulation tank.

  “Scotty?”

  He turned to his mother and waved in slow motion.

  “Let’s go,” Joan said.

  ***

  At Kenny Rayburn’s, where Scotty got his hair cut monthly, Joan sat outside in front of the twirling candy stripe that spun forever upward. Inside, Kenny Rayburn used an electric razor to shave the back of Scotty’s head. Using scissors he trimmed Scotty’s bangs.

  ***

  In the parking lot of Safeway, Scotty finished off a bottle of 7-UP and then asked for a sip of his mother’s beer. They talked about Buzz Aldrin.

  At Magill’s Bakery, Scotty begged his mother to put the top down on her yellow convertible, and Joan couldn’t deny him. She unlatched the car top. She nodded to Scotty, who pushed the button that started it all moving. The black top rose up, folded back into itself, and Scotty could see the sky, which was gray, bruised with rain clouds.

  She told him to wait right there. He stood up inside the car. She watched as he flailed his arms and shook his head.

  “You know what I’m doing?”

  “No, I don’t.” A palsy, Joan wanted to say. Something spastic.

  It was the beginnings of a dance.

  “Seven,” he said. “I’m seven.”

  “You’re still six,” Joan reminded him. Then she walked quickly to the store. The sound of thunder came from above. It would rain in minutes. Before going into the bakery, she turned to check on him. Scotty had continued his dance alone.

  ***

  Joan gasped. Any guilt for not baking her own cake disappeared the minute she saw the detailed frosting design. She turned to the baker Jerry Magill and exclaimed, “It’s wonderful!”

  Using gray dye in the frosting, Jerry had created the surface of the moon. Frosting craters; a miniature lunar module built out of toothpicks; an astronaut figurine and seven candles with small American flags taped to the sides.

  “It’s a work of art,” she said.

  Jerry smiled. He’d been so pleased with the cake that earlier he’d photographed it for his scrapbook.

  “It’s a crime to eat it,” Joan said. “This cake could be framed.”

  “That’s quite a compliment coming from you.”

  Joan Ocean began painting the year Scotty was born, working in a rented studio behind a toy store and an Italian restaurant in Windsor Heights, an adjoining suburb. Her work had a small following, and Jerry Magill and his wife were two of her most loyal supporters.

  “I want it to be a surprise,” Joan said.

  So Jerry Magill carefully set the moon cake in a box, taped it shut, then wrapped it in a white sack.

  On the drive home, the cake box sat in Scotty’s lap. He wanted to open it but he knew better than to ask. He had to wait.

  Scotty put his hand on the stick shift so that when Joan needed to change gears, her hand would wrap around his and they would shift together.

  In the distance, east of town, lightning flashed.

  “Let’s go down Buffalo Road!” Scotty shouted.

  Buffalo Road was an unpaved back road that had as its highlight a bump. Whenever Joan sped over the bump at full speed, Scotty would lift off his seat several inches.

  “Go fast, Mom.”

  “Not today.”

  “Pretty please,” Scotty begged. He knew she was the only mother who would speed over the bump on Buffalo Road.

  “Honey,” Joan said, “I have to take it slow.”

  “No!” he demanded. “Take it fast!”

  Joan simply pointed to the cake box resting on Scotty’s lap, the cake box that covered up two thirds of her boy.

  Lightning flashed closer and a rumble of thunder followed.

  Scotty looked down. “Let’s go slow,” he said.

  As Joan Ocean drove slowly, winding and curving as the road dictated, Scotty studied the cake box. He wanted to open it, to prove what he suspected to be true. But he needed no proof, for he knew from his mother’s expression when she came outside, he knew from the triumphant manner in which she lit her cigarette, he knew that in his lap was the cake of his dreams.

  (4)

  “I don’t remember,” Maggie Ocean said, after biting into a corn muffin. “Uhm. Much about. Seven was the year I got to…”

  “Maggie, chew before speaking,” the Judge said.

  “Okay, uhm…”

  “Swallow.”

  They waited for Maggie.

  At ten, her blond hair was shoulder length; her bangs were cut like Scotty’s, a wedge across the forehead. She had a few large freckles. Tall for her age, skinny, narrow shoulders, she was all bone and eyes.

  Finished swallowing, Maggie said, “Okay! Seven was good, I think? I think it was good?”

  “Is it a question, Maggie?”

  “No, Daddy, it was good.”

  The Judge turned to Claire, who wiped her mouth with
a napkin before speaking. “Seven was a year of tremendous change. The Vietnam War accelerated, Martin Luther King gave the ‘I have a dream’ speech—”

  Joan interrupted, “Honey, that was 1966.”

  “Yes, but Maggie was seven for much of 1966. I was speaking for Maggie.”

  “That’s correct,” the Judge said.

  “I thought you meant you were seven…”

  Claire smiled at her mother. “No, it would have been 1963 for me. Two weeks after Kennedy’s assassination. How could I forget that?”

  “I stand corrected,” Joan said. “But let Maggie speak for Maggie, and you speak for yourself.”

  Without missing a beat, Claire said, “Seven was a great year for me. Boys weren’t an issue, they were still smaller than the girls, and it was the year I began to read real books. So I remember liking seven.”

  Scotty stared at Claire, who at twelve looked like her mother. She wore her hair in the same style, straight, bangs behind the ears, and her mouth had the same thick lips.

  “Uhm, you know what I think?” Maggie said. “I think…” She paused as she struggled for the right words.

  Tired of waiting for Maggie to finish her thought, Scotty clinked his glass with his salad fork. His family turned to him as he shouted, “Me. Me, me, me!”

  And it was then that the Scotty stories began.

  The Judge told about a much younger Scotty trying to revive the dead rabbit. Claire remembered when on his fourth birthday Scotty tried to direct the traffic on Ashworth Road using a plastic police whistle. Joan recounted the time Scotty came home from kindergarten, packed a suitcase, and ran away. Later, when he was returned home, Joan opened the suitcase to find one side filled with his favorite toys. On the other side—and this was the detail that got them all to laughing—he’d packed only one thing: a large photograph of himself.

  (5)

  Their favorite Scotty story had taken place the previous February, when Scotty, a first grader, stepped outside during a sleet storm. His two sisters watched from the living room picture window. Bundled up in his winter jacket, a tasseled stocking cap, and his wool mittens, Scotty leaned over and licked the mailbox. His wet tongue fused with the cold metal. He could not move.