I was a pale girl and still haven’t lost it. No amount of UV—no matter how graduated—can change that, with all the Irish and English I have in my genes. I’ve got big bones, too—big country-girl hands, pronounced veins and tendons, and hipbones that bruise loves. “Daughter of a meatless tribe,” as my father used to put it.
I wonder how I first looked to Jory.
He was the darkest man I’d ever met, as dark as an “olive” complexion can get—the curse (as he put it later) of some rather thoughtless BlackAm, Amerind, and Hmong-refugee ancestors.
His face, when he turned it to profile, was a hatchet from an ancient dream, and he frightened me at first.
I was raised on one of the last megafarms of the American Midwest. No, that’s wrong. I was raised as the daughter of the senior administrator of one of the last megafarms of the American Midwest. There
Jory, though, was a son of the Detroit Glory Ghettos—those Recessional projects begun by a cornered liberal administration two decades before his birth. Every minute of his life had been subsidized by citizens who, at their noblest, were full of self-congratulating “concern”; at their worst, rationalized bigotry; and for 1,439 minutes of every day, apathy and indifference. He knew this. He’d grown up knowing it—1,440 minutes of every day.
For years I dreamed of a career somehow related to the magical sciences of megafarming. What I really wanted, of course, was a way never to leave home—a career to protect my narrow affections, first loves, prized childhood memories of a mother and father who worked happily for The Farm. My father, the loud, proud administrator; my mother, the taciturn gene-splicer whose love of her work showed clearly in her quiet eyes.
The last time I saw The Farm was the eve of Jory’s departure. I was twenty-eight years old. The machines were still incredible—the immense nuclear combines, the computerized “octopus pickers” and “dancing diggers.” The land was just as awesome—the dark pH-perfect soil stretching from horizon to horizon. But it was boring now. How could this be the world I’d romanticized for so long?
The career I finally chose to pursue—at the clear-thinking age of fourteen—was veterinary medicine. Not the anthropomorphic-pet kind (which I knew was glutted with practitioners), but the animal-husbandry kind (about which I knew absolutely nothing).
I made it as far as my fourth year of undergraduate studies, and then the world changed. I discovered people, and the dream of veterinary medicine began to fade.
One day I discovered a young man named Jory Coryiner and never dreamed the dream again.
I met him at one of the dinners my parents gave for the Huddleston Industries trainees. There were twelve this time—the usual fifty-fifty split of women and men—and Jory was impossible to miss: dark, cocky, intimidating, haloed with heroic rumors—in all, the most magnetically masculine thing I’d ever encountered in my cloistered Iowan life.
He disliked me intensely at first, I know that now. And with good reason. He knew who I was, and dreaded the inevitable patronizing. I persisted. Here was a young man all were talking about, a young man who’d won a fertboss traineeship not through federally imposed quota-tokenism but through his own impressive record, and for some reason I felt chosen, destined to understand him—his obvious need for a wall, tough carapace, calciferous shell, to hide behind.
How it happened, I can’t say. After an hour’s efforts, he softened. By the end of that hour, I felt I had glimpsed what few others had—the real reason for his chitinous ways: he was the son of a “welfare gloryhole” and he believed he wore that stigma for all to see in the melanin of his skin.
He was wrong, of course. To most men and women, his complexion was charismatic, magical, superior to their own. My own parents certainly never thought twice about my seeing him. But he never understood this. He still doesn’t, and now, it is too late.
I should have seen it. I should have realized that the son of two mothers and two fathers—a boy shuttled back and forth from “step’nt” to “step’nt” throughout childhood—might perceive families in a different way. That a man from a Glory Ghetto who had struggled to escape the dark badge of its dependency might never stop struggling. That the moat might never dry up, the walls never crumble, the carapace never see a shedding no matter how much love fell upon it.
Were there alternative worlds in your eyes even then, Jory—places where Hiroshima never rose toward heaven, where the Jurassic Sea never dried, where the Visigoths held Italy for over five centuries?
I do not know. I lied to myself then, too.
