American Rust

bread she’d bought at the Keystone Bakery in Monessen. She rarely got time to cook at home, as Simon preferred to eat out. Which was fine. Another reason to enjoy coming back. Afterward they sat at the dining- room table quietly drinking coffee, Henry reading his paper while she sat there, chin in hand, staring out over the long sloping lawn, the low brick walls around the property. The walls were ornamental, an unbelievable indulgence now, enough brick to build another large house. Like everything else, they were crumbling.

Her father was making his way through the Post- Gazette, the sun was coming strongly into the window, she let her mind wander, decided to cancel the interviews with the nurses that afternoon. She wondered if maybe Poe had made everything up, the reasons being obvious. That would be the easy thing to believe. But she was sure that Poe was telling the truth. She wasn’t sure how, but she knew.

Poe’s picture had been on the front page of the Valley Independent, under the headline FOOTBALL STAR CHARGED IN KILLING. She’d hidden the paper before her father had a chance to see it. It hadn’t mattered. Last night, the chief of police had come around looking for Isaac. A thin, balding, pleasant- looking man, obviously thoughtful. She had liked him right away and wanted to hear what he thought but he only wanted to speak to her father. She realized it was out of respect, but still. She was able to get the gist of it—Poe was being charged with the killing of the man in the factory Isaac was most likely a witness but, at this point, not a suspect.

This morning, her father had looked haggard. He was sliding. In fact he’d gotten worse since she’d gotten here. How long? She counted: Saturday through today, Thursday. Six days. It felt much longer than that. Her father hadn’t shaved in two days now and his white hair was tangled and flat on his scalp, his shoulders dusted with dandruff. The look of a heavy drinker—cheeks and nose mottled with burst capillaries—though he barely touched the stuff. Watery eyes. His clock running down.

They ate in the dining room, the old walnut furniture, an antique china cabinet and credenza, the waterstained wallpaper around the windows. A large room with a tall ceiling and a glass chandelier. It occurred to her that maybe her father had bought this house because of her mother, because he’d wanted to impress her. It was difficult to know.

They still hadn’t talked about the visit from the police officer. There was something extraordinary about their desire to avoid conflict. But it would have to be discussed. She got up and decided to do the dishes.

“You finished?” she said to him.

“I got a couple years yet.”

She smiled but couldn’t bring herself to laugh. She took his plate to the kitchen and ran the water until it was steaming hot, found the rubber gloves and began to scrub the dishes. When she was done she wiped down the stove and countertop, though they weren’t dirty; she’d cleaned them that morning as well. At the apartment in New Haven of course they had a dishwasher, they also had a maid service once a week, she’d protested against that at first but Simon had looked at her like she was crazy. Normal people had maid service.

A feeling of loneliness came over her, this place wasn’t home and neither was the other, she stood with the hot water running over her hands and then she thought: you don’t deserve to feel sorry for yourself. You have to go in and talk to him.

Instead she looked for something else to clean. She would sweep the back porch. It was one in the afternoon and the deer had come out to graze in the yard among the old apple trees. The porch was filthy and she saw the stain on the couch where she’d slept with Poe. She swept. It was pleasant, sunny and green with the deer and the trees and distant hills but that was all there was, all this place had to offer. She didn’t understand why her mother had come here. She didn’t understand why her mother had married Henry English.

Of course she herself was making compromises but it wasn’t the same as her mother. Married rich and early. When she thought of it that way it was like being punched in the stomach. She didn’t want to go to law school, either, she was probably more the art school type, more the comp lit type, but she’d never let herself run with those crowds, it was out of the question given the family situation. It would have been equally nice to join the Peace Corps and just see where she landed, let the wind take her instead of having such a trajectory. Like Siddhartha— the stone falling through water. In a few years she’d have a law degree, an insurance policy—even if things went bad with Simon, her father and Isaac would be taken care of. She had a good plan and a good backup. Nothing was perfect but she went to bed happy.

Given that, how she’d arranged her life, it was baffling what had happened to her mother. Somehow she’d decided that Henry English was her best option. You are a bitch for thinking that, she decided, you are a terrible person. But the fact remained. It had been much harder for her, Lee thought. Thirty- one, unmarried, no family in the country. Henry English sits down next to her in a dive bar, a stable, predictable, honest man. A man who is proud of her, who would never leave her, who knows she’s more than he deserves. Then everything in the Valley falls apart and he loses his job and there goes the stability and on top of it there are two kids. He’s out of work for two years and then lives in Indiana for three years, sending money back until his accident.

Then you get into college and things begin to change. Her moods get deeper—higher highs and lower lows. Sunday after graduation, everyone goes to church and that afternoon she disappears. Two months later you leave for New Haven.

Before her father, she knew, her mother had been engaged to another man, a student in the music department at CMU, but he’d broken off the engagement at the last minute. Long before that, her mother had split from her family in Mexico, she’d come from money but been too proud to return to it, and by the time she died she hadn’t spoken to them in twenty- five years. Lee wondered about this side of her family occasionally, but her interest was only theoretical. Meeting them would not unlock any secrets that she needed unlocked. She suspected it would only depress her.

In the end it was impossible to know. Her mother must have felt some sense of desperation, or loneliness, or time creeping in on her, if she had married Henry English. A beautiful woman with a master’s degree in music composition. But she was also thirty- one, living in a country that was not her own, no family to speak of, little support structure, and here was a man who would never leave her, a man with a good job, a man who wanted to take care of her. Knowing how her position might be worse if she married a wealthy man. Or maybe Mary English, nee Maria Salinas, had the same notions as Lee’s Marxist friends at Yale— solidarity, noble workers, an impending revolution. She had wanted to marry a worker, a final rejection of her family. There were certainly people like that in the Valley, Mr. Painter, the history teacher at Buell High who’d written Lee’s letter of recommendation, he told Lee he’d moved to the Valley to bring socialism to the mills, he’d been a steelworker for ten years, lost his job and become a teacher. Graduated from Cornell and became a steelworker. There were lots of us, he’d told her. Reds working right alongside the good old boys. But there had never been any revolution, not anything close, a hundred and fifty thousand people lost their jobs but they had all gone quietly. It was obvious there were people responsible, there were living breathing men who’d made those decisions to put the entire Valley out of work, they had vacation homes in Aspen, they sent their kids to Yale, their portfolios went up when the mills shut down. But, aside from a few ministers who’d famously snuck into a white- glove church and thrown skunk oil on the wealthy pastor, no one lifted a hand in protest. There was something particularly American about it—blaming yourself for bad luck—that resistance to seeing your life as affected by social forces, a tendency to attribute larger problems to individual behavior. The ugly reverse of the American Dream. In France, she thought, they would have shut down the country. They would have stopped the mills from closing. But of course you couldn’t say that in public, especially not to her father.

The porch was swept. There was no point in putting it off further. Lee went back into the house, through the kitchen, and into the dining room, where her father was still sitting.

“Dad?” she said.

“That’s me.” He looked up reluctantly. He knew what was coming.

“What did the police chief talk to you about?”

“Isaac’s friend Billy,” he said. “They locked him up for killing someone.”

He went back to his paper and she could tell he was uncomfortable. She wondered how much he knew. It seemed much warmer in the room all of a sudden.

“I don’t think he did it.”

“I guess that’s possible, but it’s not worth speculating over. They’ll get it figured out in court.”

“Maybe what I’m getting at is I’m pretty sure he didn’t do it.”

“Maybe your view of him is skewed.”

It was quiet for a few seconds; she felt her face get hot. Her father wanted to drop the conversation and she