Berwin Pies is on the other side of town and we drive there past more boxy warehouses, Altavista on a grander scale, but with more check-cashing and more big parking lots. We drive past the beautiful lake we missed on our entrance to the town and Alice keeps her own counsel while I attempt to parallel park and then give up and pull into one of the big empty lots kitty-corner from the pizza joint. It is what you might expect, neon sign pleather booths the light a little too bright, just needs a bulb three notches warmer and it would be homey instead of bald and flea-bitten but I see they have several beers on tap and I smell pizza and we find a booth and a friendly rotund lumberjack type brings us a high chair for Honey. Alice who has been mostly silent the whole drive looks at him almost flirtatiously and says “We want beer and lots of it” and he laughs and says “Well I think we can take care of that for you” and asks what kind of beer we want and Alice says “Whatever you got” and I intervene and ask for some Oregon thing and we order a large supreme pizza and sit back and wait for all this bounty to flow in.
I expect a town of this size to feel less depopulated than Altavista but there are only three sat tables in the restaurant. I reflect that almost everyone I’ve seen since we came north besides Kimmy has been a teen or the aged or aging.
The beer comes and I cheers Alice and she says cheers but then sits there silently and I am not sure whether or how to make a conversation go. Honey is shredding napkins and banging her spoon gently and she is occupied and before I know it the pizza arrives and I serve all of us and cut up Honey’s piece.
Alice tries to pick up her piece and then sets it down again.
She drinks some of her beer. I’ve almost finished mine and realize I need to pace myself if I’m going to drive us home.
“I wanted to be a playwright, you know,” she says out of nowhere. I don’t really know what to say so I say “I thought you were a teacher” and she says “Yes but in my spare time I wrote plays.” She goes again. “Do you want to be a teacher?” She looks at me. “Since you work at the University?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t know what I want to be exactly. I was going to get a Ph.D. but I never really had a plan for after. I just like to know things and feel useful.”
“You should be sure you have a way to support yourself,” she says.
“My mom always said the same thing,” I say. “When my father died it was like we lost the thing about our family that said what our family was and then she had to make herself over.”
“When I had all those babies they kind of railroaded the rest of my life.” She takes another long sip of her beer. “This just tastes so good,” she says, as though she had not just issued an utterly devastating statement in Berwin Pies. Honey is playing and spilling milk and I try to shovel some more pieces of pizza into her.
“Why are you AWOL from your job now,” she asks.
“One of our work-study students and her classmate got a grant from my Institute to go interview refugees in Turkey, and I helped them plan their trip and when they were there they got into a car accident and one of them was killed.” The mustard gas doesn’t accumulate behind my eyes like it normally does. She doesn’t say anything. “I don’t love the way my institution does things normally but, like, this girl
“You’re never safe from bad things happening,” she says. This thought is so profoundly depressing I hope the earth opens and gently swallows everyone on it, right now.
She seems to feel how despondent that makes me and she looks at me with some fond light in her eyes and she says “I want to apologize if I’ve been bad company for you,” and I say “Alice no, no” and she cuts me off and says “I don’t make friends easily. I say the wrong thing” and I say “Alice I don’t know what we would have done if we hadn’t met you” which is true because at the very least she got us out of the damn house.
“I told you about our farm,” she says and I nod and she says “It was going to be a place for the girls to run around and catch fireflies” and I can just picture it something verdant and humid and the lightning bugs flashing. “There was a long time after they died where I was so angry I didn’t try to make the house nice, when I didn’t always behave nicely with people. I was in the… abode of pain.” I don’t exactly see what this has to do with being good company to us but I just say “I find you delightful to be with,” which is basically true.
“Ever since I got in the car to come west I feel some of it falling away,” she says and I just say “I’m glad.”
