Independence Day by Richard Ford Page A

dilemma of many Americans. Sometime in the indistinct Sixties, each with a then-spouse, they departed unpromising flatlander lives (Joe was a trig teacher in Aliquippa, Phyllis a plump, copper-haired, slightly bulgy-eyed housewife from the D.C. area) and trailered up to Vermont in search of a sunnier, less predictable Weltansicht . Time and fate soon took their unsurprising courses: spouses wandered off with other people’s spouses; their kids got busily into drugs, got pregnant, got married, then disappeared to California or Canada or Tibet or Wiesbaden, West Germany. Joe and Phyllis each floated around uneasily for two or three years in intersecting circles of neighborhood friends and off-again, on-again Weltansichts , taking classes, starting new degrees, trying new mates and eventually giving in to what had been available and obvious all along: true and eyes-open love for each other. Almost immediately, Joe Markham—who’s a stout, aggressive little bullet-eyed, short-armed, hairy-backed Bob Hoskins type of about my age, who played nose guard for the Aliquippa Fighting Quips and who’s not obviously “creative”—started having good luck with the pots and sand-cast sculptures in abstract forms he’d been making, projects he’d only fiddled around with before and that his first wife, Melody, had made vicious fan of before moving back to Beaver Falls, leaving him alone with his regular job for the Department of Social Services. Phyllis meanwhile began realizing she, in fact, had an untapped genius for designing slick, lush-looking pamphlets on fancy paper she could actually make herself (she designed Joe’s first big mailing). And before they knew it they were shipping Joe’s art and Phyllis’s sumptuous descriptive booklets all over hell. Joe’s pots began showing up in big department stores in Colorado and California and as expensive specialty items in ritzy mail order catalogues, and to both their amazement were winning prizes at prestigious crafts fairs the two of them didn’t even have time to attend, they were so busy.
    Pretty soon they’d built themselves a big new house with cantilevered cathedral ceilings and a hand-laid hearth and chimney, using stones off the place, the whole thing hidden at the end of a private wooded road behind an old apple orchard. They started teaching free studio classes to small groups of motivated students at Lyndon State as a way of giving something back to the community that had nurtured them through assorted rough periods, and eventually they had another child, Sonja, named for one of Joe’s Croatian relatives.
    Both of them, of course, realized they’d been lucky as snake charmers, given the mistakes they’d made and all that had gone kaflooey in their lives. Though neither did they view “the Vermont life” as necessarily the ultimate destination. Each of them had pretty harsh opinions about professional dropouts and trust-fund hippies who were nothing more than nonproducers in a society in need of new ideas. “I didn’t want to wake up one morning,” Joe said to me the first day they came in the office, looking like bedraggled, wide-eyed missionaries, “and be a fifty-five-year-old asshole with a bandanna and a goddamn earring and nothing to talk about but how Vermont’s all fucked up since a lot of people just like me showed up to ruin it.”
    Sonja needed to go to a better school, they decided, so she could eventually get into an even better school. Their previous batch of kids had all trooped off in serapes and Sorels and down jackets to the local schools, and that hadn’t worked out very well. Joe’s oldest boy, Seamus, had already done time for armed robbery, toured three detoxes and was learning-disabled; a girl, Dot, got married to a Hell’s Commando at sixteen and hadn’t been heard from in a long time. Another boy, Federico, Phyllis’s son, was making the Army a career. And so, based on these sobering but instructive experiences, they