The Past Tense of the Census
In the census year, with three small children, my wife sought part-time work, self-designed hours convincing her to canvas our county of farms and quiet, well-zoned streets. There were heads to count, assessment questions, and not every house, she soon learned, was welcoming. House trailers were rare and always alone, set so often on barely landscaped lots that she was surprised, this late afternoon, by one site’s borders of high wooden fence, a lawn weed-infested, yet closely mown by somebody, she thought, who was taking whatever care he could, not a man who opened his door and stood naked to show whatever news he might possess could wait.
Once exposed, a man might be capable of anything, logic that hurried her to our car where she turned, keys posed to thrust, and saw the trailer door closed, driving home touched only by a familiar story during the year Jimmy Carter looked sad, as if he understood another sort of census would defeat him — hostages held in Iran, inflation, scarcity of oil — though we spoke nothing of that while our children scattered around our fenced-in back yard, twilight settling, our neighbor’s Black Lab barking longingly at the gate as my wife began, hushed and intimate, to speak while we stood beside the deck rail so our children could see we were watching.
What did he say? I asked. He was soundless. What did he do? He picked his teeth and spit. How close was he? Arms’ length. Able to reach. I’m never counting him — is that a crime? And right there her story ended as if she was willing to tear only one page from her notebook of murmured memory.
Carter is smiling now, benign with age. Though he must have more than such small horrors to tell, the country exposed and ugly, taken hostage and held for limitless ransom. That man, years ago, was surely naked as he watched my wife, a stranger, cross his cropped-weed yard. And surely, he had his chance to choose shorts and shirtless or call out “Just a moment” before fully clothed, choosing, instead, full-frontal exposure.
That evening, all we could see of our three children was movement. They appeared to be vanishing, about to no longer live in our house, my wife using the past tense of the census to say, “He was, he was” in a sentence stuttering, then gone dark.