Sharp and Dangerous Virtues: A Novel

What Sharis Knew

38 what sharis knew She may not have gone to college, but Sharis knew things. Here was knowledge she kept to herself: deprivation and the threat of danger made her feel alive. Weeding, stirring, chopping , always planning. Every day was not the same. Basic things mattered. Food mattered. Food mattered tremendously, and Sharis ’s parents each summer, as part of their survivalist ethos, had planted an enormous garden. Sharis knew how to start lettuces, the best way to post tomatoes, the mixture of soap and water to spray on Swiss chard. All her married life (which was all her adult life) she had not planted anything, but this spring, with Cleveland being taken over and the whole world, it seemed, turned against America, she’d said to Chad, her husband, Sweetness, we should plant things this year. Chad had tilled a large rectangle in the sunniest and flattest portion of their yard. This happened to be in their front yard, which a year ago would not have been acceptable , but neighborhood standards had changed. Now, by mid-July, they had . . . Well, anyone could guess what they had, because Sharis was an industrious woman and the weather was good and even the Grid, which critics said raped the soil, exhausted resources, used too many chemicals, etc, was projected to have a record year. 39 what sharis knew Chad and Sharis lived south of Dayton in the suburbs, on a private lane off Far Hills, the main road from downtown. Chad and Sharis’s street wound down a hill through trees, and then curled up a hill to a sunnier area. Chad’s drawing of their street would make it a snake. Its tail would touch the main road, the cul-de-sac where Chad’s and Sharis’s house sat would show up as the snake’s open mouth. Chad and Sharis lived in a nineties home built with a twostory great room. Like most of those homes, theirs had been modified during the Short Times with new, lowered ceilings. Sharis liked the puddles of light that formed below the ceiling cans. She liked the overstuffed chair in the corner, the beautifully grained wooden bowl, the hanging clock decorated with handpainted flowers. Sharis had grown up in a dark house; for her father, closed curtains were a moral imperative. In contrast, now Sharis had drapes only in the bedrooms. Sometimes, lying on the couch in the great room, looking out the wide front window, Sharis imagined the empty space above the ceiling as a hidden room: if the troops swept down from Cleveland, she and Chad and the boys would have a place to hide. What an adventure that would be, something for the boys to remember forever—the aim of an adventure, always, being the exhilaration of survival. There was one cabbage in her garden that Sharis had watched for a month, getting bigger and bigger and not precisely rounder but vaster. When the cabbage was as big as it reasonably could get, Sharis cut it and carried it into the house. She and Chad made a sort of party of it. “Ten pounds,” Sharis guessed. She set the cabbage on the bathroom floor and peered at her weight on the scale. “Hand it to me, honey.” If she was editing their family, this was a moment she’d leave in. Of course, she took on only respectable clients, not people with cameras in their bathrooms or even bedrooms. Chad picked up the cabbage, its dark outer leaves studded with slugs and wormholes, and handed it to his wife. “Eleven,” Sharis said firmly. Her voice rose in its girlish way: “Char, as Howard would say.” 40 s ha r p a n d d a n g e r ou s v i r t u e s “What’s char?” Howard asked breathlessly, arriving at the top of the stairs. Even a trip up the stairs made him pant. “The average war lasts seven months,” Derk said from the blue table in the kitchen. Derk had been a history minor and, after Dayton: The Roots of Midwestern, one of Chad’s most enthusiastic students. He worked at American Motors running a paint machine for tanks. Derk lived with his parents. He’d tried to enlist in the military, but a childhood infection had left him with a bad heart. “Your husband taught me that,” Derk added. “I...