The Roberts

An Essay.

We are in the middle of one of the biggest droughts this area has ever known. You have to go back to 1843 to find a summer when the skies were less forthcoming in upstate New York. Naturally we are lucky here, on the shores of one of the biggest sources of fresh water on the planet, Lake Ontario. But that does not for various reasons inspire confidence during this epic drought. A friend at Dunkin Donuts tells me that he knows for a fact the water table where he lives is at least nine feet below the bottom of his well. He’s been getting water delivered by the truckload, but the trouble is, the thirsty earth guzzles it up before the well can fill. One pitiful aspect of this, he says, is that he now eyes his neighbor over the town line, who has city water, with envy and secret vexation. “What can you do?” he keeps asking, “What can you do?” Gloomy, he holds his coffee cup with both hands, as though hoarding the liquid in it.

When something commonplace disappears, there’s a terrible foreboding that it will never come back again. Early on in this drought season my girlfriend moved out after a lackluster couple of years and, to be blunt, I haven’t had sex in a record long time. I find myself surveying the social horizon with all of the fervent hope of a rainmaker—every promising cloud turns out to be a kite or a plane or a flying saucer. For a certainty my rainmaking skills are dubious, but I have always been hopeful.

One pitiful aspect of being newly single is that you begin to watch with keen interest to see if others are having sex. Here on rural Ridge Road, in spite of the drought, there’s been a lot of funny business going on this summer: the flocks of wild turkeys have crossed and re-crossed the road with their communal broods of eight or ten chicks; the snapping turtles have long since gone down to Rice Creek to lay their eggs; the birds seem to be in a second mating season, sometimes flinging themselves against the glass windows of my house, as if to immolate themselves in their own arms; my baby snake, which moved into the house in March, is now months old and no doubt laying eggs behind the drywall; and I’ve noticed that my next door neighbors have taken to holding hands after almost thirty years of marriage. Everybody is having sex. It’s been difficult not to feel a little glum in the midst of all this provocative activity.

For example, mourning doves are capable of producing up to six broods a year, making them the U.S. native birds with the most prolific sex lives. My spring began with two or three mourning doves whose cooing informed a daily sunrise stroll around the yard with my second cup of coffee. By June there were almost a dozen very young mourning doves jockeying for position along my fence railings. Sometimes on a stroll, with their twenty-four eyes upon me, I felt much as I did back in high school, walking the gauntlet of highly sexed popular girls who lounged around the hallways, eyes sated and judgmental. It is uncomfortable being single in front of these chicks. When the mourning doves fly off, their wings produce a whinnying sound, not unlike derisive laughter.

One very hot day I noticed a lone wild turkey walking forlornly up Ridge Road. There have been lone turkeys on my road for as long as I’ve lived here, always males. These lone turkeys are a common sight each summer, a little bedraggled, feathers ruffled or missing, a look of hopelessness in the winking eyes, tittering in soft lunatic tones, sometimes pulling up the rear of a group that ignores them completely, other times affecting a limp for the sake of attention that is never given. I have always called these turkeys Robert. This summer it struck me with foreboding that I may have been completely off base about these cross-generational Roberts, that I’ve gotten the Roberts all wrong. There may just be one turkey, one Robert, not many. It’s possible that this true solitary has spent the last twenty years, even the last century, brooding in a desultory way around the outskirts of the wildly rich turkey sex life on Ridge Road. This version of Robert, this forever unaccompanied turkey, has in my imagination now become some kind of ageless, gabbling symbol of alienation. Certainly he has never, ever had sex.

I have resolved not to be that turkey. I have an out-of-town friend I’ve known for quite a while, and whom I have found to be attractive. For a while now I’ve been toying with the possibility of calling her. Someone has warned me that this is a “temporary solution”—as though what I really need is a better set of problem-solving skills. Someone else pointed out that this would lead to fraught “rebound” sex—although surely desire isn’t dependent upon the last shot one took in a completely different emotional basketball game. The subtext is always that it’s too soon after the break-up, too soon to venture back into the world. “Too soon, too soon,” coo the surfeited mourning doves, full of good advice they need not take themselves.

If the world must impose droughts, it must also allow for the end of them—or else there’s no need to name them. I have the sneaking suspicion that “too soon” is what the Roberts are always telling themselves. I understand exactly why my friend at Dunkin Donuts held onto his coffee with two hands during a drought. Because it connected him to something he had learned, perhaps too late, that he valued. Because what can you do, having valued, but try to hold onto some version of that valuable thing? Because in the end the connection matters, desire itself matters, hope matters.

And so, of course, I make the call.