Country People: A GMA Book Club Pick

One

The wife had been offered a one-­year visiting professorship at a college in Vermont, and the husband was married to the wife.

They had two children, a son and a daughter. The plan was for the husband to finish the first draft of his dissertation, which he had been working on for fourteen years, twelve years longer than intended. But a week before they departed, they read an article describing the “child-­care deserts” of rural America, so he knew deep down in his heart that he would be watching their kids.

The truth was that he already knew this, because this is what had happened at their home in the city, which was not a child-­care desert. But the college was prestigious, an exciting opportunity for the family, an adventure.

And he loved deserts! As a boy, he had been to the Grand Canyon, and kept a “Creatures of the Southwest” poster on his wall.

They had driven there from California, because of the dog, whom they couldn’t bear to put in cargo.

In the beginning, the dog sat in the back, between the two children. They had cleared a spot. By Sacramento, the spot was needed for a box of Goldfish crackers the size of the daughter, and the dog had hopped over the divide and settled in the husband’s lap, where it remained. It was assertive and warm, with warm, cadaveric breath, and each time the husband tried to move it, it adopted a posture of such defiant deadweight that he felt as if he were lifting a dog-shaped bag of water. At night, in the motel showers, he could still see the imprint of its talons on his legs.

The wife reminded him that the correct word was “paw,” not a difficult word to remember.

The dog was a breed called a Lagotto Romagnolo, from Italy, which the husband was always embarrassed to share, because it sounded like a luxury sports car, while the truth was the dog had cost the same as every other dog during the pandemic, but it was the first hypoallergenic dog to come off waiting lists in California, Oregon, Arizona, Nevada, and Idaho. Every other dog was taken.

The family had written pleading letters, sat for interviews, submitted videos of their home, videos of their children, and each time they had been rejected by the cabal of profiteering breeders who saw that time of suffering as a moment to assert their superiority over desperate, allergic professionals homebound with their kids.

They had named the dog Giuseppe, after Arcimboldo, after Garibaldi, after Verdi, to honor his Italian roots.

Their son had discovered the breed on the Internet during Zoom school. In addition to not shedding, it had the virtue of being bred for truffle hunting, which meant that at least one member of the family would have a useful skill when society broke down. In online forums, the dog was praised for its gentleness and soft fur and interesting coloration, which changed as it got older, though some people cautioned that unless you ­ really intended it to hunt truffles, what you were buying was an animal genetically selected to go crazy over secret, pungent morsels of which humans were blissfully unaware.

•

When the wife had received the offer to teach, she was also offered housing in the Visiting Faculty Residence, which on the website of the college appeared to be a light-­filled modern structure, with basketball and tennis courts, and a playground, just on the edge of campus. It seemed, in fact, almost identical to their California faculty apartment, though when the husband studied the photo on the webpage more closely, he noticed that all the cars were twenty years old. This was the first warning sign. The second warning sign was an actual warning, from the grad-­school friend who had helped arrange the invitation: under no terms should they ever stay in the Visiting Faculty Residence, which had been built by an avant-­garde Colombian architect, very famous, revolutionary. As in the tropical country Colombia, she added. As in the one without a winter. The year before, a Finnish scholar had suffered frostbite in her bedroom. As in the Arctic country Finland, she said.

This struck the wife and husband as hyperbolic. Every university had its history of architectural tragedy. How bad could it ­ really get? And the wife, whose California office had beautiful floor- to-­ceiling windows that had been blocked, in the seventies, by a four-­ foot-high “brise-­soleil” of concrete, thought for a bit, as did the husband, who had to ascend three floors from his basement office to reach a bathroom with urinals arranged in a rosette to foster creativity and communication. But what were they to do?

Their friend set out to find who might be on sabbatical, and after some inquiries, they received an email from a professor of economics. What fortune! He was looking for a house sitter. And he wouldn’t charge them anything; he needed someone to look after the place, to watch for leaks, to keep the animals away.

Such generosity, not to mention the casual animal reference, should have been a warning, but for simple city people, it was not.

•

And so they set out. The wife drove, and the husband, who already had a few moving violations, sat under the dog. In the back were the boy, the girl, the Goldfish crackers, and a pair of potholder looms, gifts from the wife’s mother.

For the husband, the appeal of a potholder loom had remained one of the durable mysteries of parenthood; part of him was proud that, in an age of all-­consuming electronic media and dwindling attention spans, his very bright nine-­ year-­ old child could be occupied for hours making potholders, though he was less certain about his twelve-­year-old. But the loom kept the children occupied until Nebraska, when the seven bags of vibrant multicolored loops ran out.

“Look at the view,” said the wife, when the kids began to complain, though there was no view—it wasn’t that it was monotonous or featureless, or whatever the unimaginative coastal elite might say about the landscape of the extraordinary American heartland, just that the highway had been embedded in said heartland in such a way that they could see nothing but ten feet of grassy verge, for hundreds of miles. They could not agree on a podcast, the books were in the trunk, and although the husband could have climbed back over the seats under normal circumstances, now there was the dog. So the husband told them a story.

•

The story was one of many stories the husband had encountered in graduate school, where over the past fourteen years his dissertation topic had drifted—­geographically, chronologically, thematically. He’d begun with an obscure troubadour, taken three years to learn that he was obscure for a reason, switched to Rabelais without telling his adviser, then the body in Rabelais, then monsters in Rabelais, then monsters in French folktales, each great fun, but none of
which led anywhere concrete. It might have been pathetic had he not loved the books, the stories, the paths they took him down, the laughter, outsized and impossible. But time was ticking. By then his first adviser had died; his second seemed to have forgotten he existed. Well, perhaps Western Europe was the problem! And, following a year brushing up on college Russian, and another spent falling in love with Chekhov’s early humor, he was ready to begin again, when his son, age three, discovered Thomas the Tank Engine.

All of a sudden, trains were everywhere. How had he never noticed? Could trains in Chekhov be his topic? It was a rich one, and it would give him and the boy a new shared interest. But Tolstoy’s use of trains was even richer—­lethally so—­and trains led to train stations, and train stations led to rural train stations, led to rural life, and nothing was as magnificent as Tolstoy’s depictions of haying, mushrooming, and beekeeping, and by then his son was on to Legos.

But bees! And hay! Reading Tolstoy, he could almost smell it. So, again, he changed his dissertation, to the world of Tolstoy’s peasants, where he had remained for a full two years, reading Russian folktales as background, before deciding that Russian folktale peasants might be an easier topic, compared with such a famous author who had written such long books.

That was how he got to where he was. Once upon a time. Or, as they said in Russian folktales: In a certain kingdom, in a certain land.