The Portable Veblen: Shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016

“Yeah. Squirrels are actually one of the oldest mammals on earth!” she told him, with curious pride. “They’ve been in North America at least fifty million years. That’s a long time, don’t you think? I mean, people brag about their relatives coming over on the Mayflower in 1620, so I think squirrels deserve a little respect, don’t you?”

She could see him scanning the corners of the attic for entry holes, and he didn’t reply.

“Anyway, settlers and townspeople across North America wrote in their diaries about oceans of squirrels that would flood through the fields and over the mountains, as far as their eyes could see! Can you imagine it? It was like an infinite gray blanket. At times, whole tides of them were seen swimming across rivers, like the Hudson, and the Missouri, and the Ohio. Even Lewis and Clark witnessed a migration! In 1803. In southern Illinois in the 1880s, it was reported that four hundred fifty million squirrels ran through this one area, almost half a billion!”

“This is true?”

“Yes! It’s very well documented.”

“Sounds like a Hitchcock movie.”

For the record, she wished he’d said “Wow!” or “Amazing!” or something flavored with a little more curiosity and awe, because those mass migrations had always represented something phenomenal to her.

“The solidarity is what I love about it, all of them deciding it was time to go and then setting out together,” she tried, for she loved Richard Rorty’s writings on solidarity and had no trouble applying it to squirrels.

“Probably in a blind panic, burning with mange.”

“Paul!”

“I don’t have the same feeling about squirrels, Veb.”

This was upsetting for some reason. Although Paul wasn’t the only person who thought squirrels were nasty, furry bastards with talons like birds and the cold hearts of reptiles.

Even Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, a classic of children’s literature, by an introverted woman who generally adored small animals, offered up a pesky idiot-squirrel who riddles a landed authority figure into a fury. But was Nutkin as frivolous as he was made out to be? She had a few theories about that.

“Thorstein Veblen would say people hate squirrels,” she called up to him, “because that’s the only way to motivate expenditures on them—such as buying traps or guns. It’s the same with stirring up patriotic emotionalism, because it justifies expenditures for defense.”

“Uh, what?” He took the sleek apparatus in his grasping hands, then was back on the chair stuffing it somewhere in the dark near the hatch. He said, “I’ll check it every day, you won’t have to think about it. I’ll take it up in the hills where it will live happily ever after. Okay?”

“Whatever, just do it!” she said, biting into her arm.

In addition to biting herself, another way Veblen dealt with emotional distress was to fixate on ideological concerns.

Unhappy that Paul was stuffing a trap into her attic, registering a loss of control that would come with a growing relationship and further compromise, she began to think bitterly about how phenomena in the natural world no longer inspired reverence and reflection, but translated instead into excuses for shopping sprees. Squirrels = trap. Winter’s ragged hand = Outdoor World. Summer’s dog days reigned = Target. Same with traditions—marriage was preceded by the longest shopping list of all, second only to the one after the birth of offspring.

“Paul, take this trap. You impute it with awesomeness because you acquired it and you now believe it’s the crystallization of your desires.”

“Can you bring me a piece of cheese or something?”

She trudged into the kitchen, to look for a snack a squirrel might not enjoy. She had an idea.

“Veblen?” he called.

“Coming.”

“A piece of bread is fine.”

“Okay, just a minute.”

Shortly, she carried in a plate with her offering.

“What’s that?” asked Paul, peering down.

“Sauerkraut sprinkled with mace.”

“Why?”

“I hear they love it,” said Veblen.

She heard him set the plate into the trap with a clap.

THEY SPENT the afternoon walking and talking about all they were about to face. It would come back to her later that Paul barely mentioned his family that day. Instead he talked a lot about his vision of their material future—the signing bonus for the trial and stock from Hutmacher Pharmaceuticals would allow them to buy a house. “You don’t want to stay in mine?” she asked, surprised. She loved her house.

HER OWN VISION of the future was of happiness in the air. Something was baking. Children were playing games. There were flowers and substantial trees, and birds were singing in their nests. She was living with someone who was laughing.

Paul gave a sample of laughter.

“That works,” she said.

SHE WAS STILL very pleased with her little house, and how she’d found it.

Nearly five years ago, having finally escaped from home, she’d been sleeping in her old Volvo by the San Francisquito creek and checking out listings by the dozens for days. She’d seen rooms in dingy, greasy-smelling houses in Mountain View, tiny, dark rooms in houses full of guffawing male engineering students, and a room in the house of a high school science teacher filled with exercise machines.

It was a warm night in September, that night. She had a soulful bottle of beer and a slice of pizza on University Avenue, then walked the neighborhood in the glow of dusk, down streets named for famous poets: Lowell and Byron and Homer and Kipling and the tormented, half-mad Italian poet Torquato Tasso. She crunched the sycamore and magnolia and locust leaves on the sidewalk. Just before she reached the end where the street met the arroyo, she passed a small house so overgrown with vines that the windows were no longer visible. The yard was neck-high with weeds and ivy and morning glory, and in the gentle air of evening she heard the flap of a tarp on the roof, laid over the old shingles to protect them from rain. The chimney was missing a few bricks. Swatches of animal hair were mixed in the litter of leaves up the walkway, as if various creatures regularly rolled on their backs there and stretched out in the sun. The site of the abandoned house, or possibly the dwelling of an old eccentric, filled her with warmth and hope, and perhaps because she lingered there thinking how this might be a positive instance of absentee ownership, she fated her meeting with the person who came down the narrow driveway between the two bungalows, from a yard choked with the summer’s industry of honeysuckle and jasmine.

This was Donald Chester, wearing his grubby Stanford sweatshirt stained with motor oil and paint. He was a retired engineer who’d grown up only a few blocks away in the 1930s, and attended the university as a day student before, during, and after World War II. Palo Alto wasn’t always so swank, he told her. Back then, a settlement of hoboes camped around the giant sequoia by the train station, rough wooden shacks on Lytton Avenue housed kids who went without shoes, and rabbits were raised in hutches in the grassy fields behind them for supper. Before the university came in 1896, sheep, goats, horses, and mules grazed on ranch land. And before that, when the Spanish began to deed land grants, tule-gathering tribes swept through the tidal flats in bunched canoes, fleeing missionaries. If his parents, who’d struggled through the Depression eating rabbits and mending their socks until there was no more sock to mend, only the mending, could have seen what happened to dreamy old Palo Alto, they’d get a real kick out of it.

Yes, Donald Chester knew the owner of the wreckage next door. She was an elderly woman who lived in New York with her daughter, who would neither let go of the house she’d lived in as a young bride nor maintain it, and Veblen said that was good. To her it looked enchanted. To which he said, Let’s see what you think after you look inside, and brought out some flashlights. It was one of those magical strokes of luck that a person enjoys once or twice in a lifetime, and marvels at ever after.

She followed him behind the place, where there was a modest garage built for a Model T, with the original wooden door with a sash, hollowed by termites, like cactus wood.

The back door hung loose off its hinges, and a musty odor surrounded them in the kitchen. Old cracked linoleum squeaked underfoot. A bank of dirt had formed on the windowsill, growing grass. But the huge old porcelain sink was intact. And the old tiles, under layers of silt, were beautiful. Donald Chester laughed and said she must have a great deal of imagination. In the living room, water stains covered the ceiling like the patterns in a mosque. She told him about the house in Cobb and the fixing she and her mother did to get it in shape, all by themselves. (She’d been only six when she and her mother moved in, but they’d worked side by side for weeks.) She knew how to transform a place, wait and see. Donald Chester took down her number and said he doubted anything would come of it, but he’d give her a call. And the very next day he did. The widow took a fancy to the idea of a single woman fixing it up. She priced the place nostalgically, a rent about the same as single rooms. Veblen sobbed with disbelief. She’d saved up enough money over the past few years to get the whole thing off the ground.

She loved the tiger lilies, which were out. She kissed them on their crepey cheeks, got pollen on her chin. For the next week, she started on the place at dawn, ripping vines off the windows, digging dirt from the grout, hosing the walls. One day Albertine came down to help. They pried open the windows to let in fresh air and barreled through the place with a Shop-Vac. Another day Veblen climbed onto the roof and tore off the tarp and discovered the leaks, and patched them. It wasn’t rocket science. She cleaned the surface of every wall with TSP and every tile with bleach, and painted every room. Then she rented a sanding machine and took a thin layer from the oak floors, finishing them with linseed oil and turpentine. She kept a fan blowing to dry the paint and the floors all day long.

Donald Chester pitched in. He lent her tools and brought her tall tumblers of iced tea with wedges of lemon from his tree.

“You like to work hard,” he remarked, when Veblen came out of the house one day covered in white dust.

In the kitchen, the old refrigerator needed a thorough scrubbing, but the motor worked, and the old Wedgewood stove better than worked. The claw-foot tub in the bathroom had rust stains, but they didn’t bother her very much. The toilet needed a new float and chain, no big deal. She had the utilities changed to her name. She played her radio day and night, and by the fifth night, give or take a few creaking floorboards and windows with stubborn sashes, the house welcomed her. The transformation absorbed her for months to come, as if she’d written a symphony or a wonderful book or painted a small masterpiece. And she’d stayed on these last five years despite the hell-bent growth all around, conveniently located halfway between each parent in her outpost on one of the last untouched corners of old Palo Alto. One day the widow or her daughter would get an offer they couldn’t refuse. But for now, it was hers.

The two buildings had never been remodeled or added on to, and provided the same standard of shelter as they had when built in 1920, which was plenty good. Now a week did not go by when real estate agents didn’t cram business cards into the mail slots, hoping to capture the deeds and promptly have the little houses bulldozed. She and Donald liked to feel they were taking a stand.

For her first meal on Tasso Street, she boiled a large tough artichoke from Castroville and ate it with a scoop of Best Foods mayonnaise. She took the thistles out of the heart and filled it like a little cup. She listened to an opera on the radio, live from San Francisco, La Bohème. Surrounded by the smell of fresh paint and linseed oil, the smooth floors, the clean glass, the perception of space to grow into, she was too excited to sleep.

As she often was at night now, with Paul beside her. Sharing simple meals and discussing the day’s events, waking up together with plans for the future—these things felt practically bacchanalian when you were used to being on your own.

AND SO WHAT about a wedding? Where, how soon? There was a huge catalog of decisions to make all of a sudden. If you were normal, Veblen couldn’t help thinking. Part of her wanted to do all the normal bridely things and the other part wanted to embrace her disdain for everything of the sort.