Something New Under the Sun

by Alexandra Kleeman

  But sometimes it feels less like she’s homesick for the past and more like she’s living the past over again, waiting for a bus with New Order blasting tinnily in her ears, just like she did as a teenager in a flat, unremarkable suburb of Denver. As though leaving her house and all the possessions inside it had flung her back to her adolescence, shy and overly aware of how she sticks out. As she boards the bus and takes an empty seat, she imagines herself explaining to a friend, it doesn’t matter which one, that it’s as if she died in that year of weeping, fasting, and compulsive consumption of news, the year she spent grieving something that everybody around her insisted hadn’t died at all. And now, like a video-game character returning to its last save-point, she’s been reborn as her daughter’s older sister in a never-ending summer camp. Her former life already has a hazy, fictional quality to it, though it feels more real to her with the lights off at night, when she is lying in the bunkhouse and listening to the noisy breathing of eleven other sets of lungs. That life reasserts itself when she checks the credit-card statement, going line by line through the intimate, inscrutable tabulation of Patrick’s Los Angeles purchases: $42.07 at Juicy Ladies Cafe, $29.83 at Exxon La Brea, $176.68 at the WAT-R SuperCenter on Sunset Boulevard. In moments like these, she feels that odd feeling from the first year they were married, the invisible threads linking her to every minor thing that he did, the strangeness of this person whose familiarity was so intense and new to her that she couldn’t help but point it out to herself many times a day. She wishes he wouldn’t keep bringing up the lawn incident, which always makes her feel anxious, guilty, and angry—angry at herself, she assumes, though she’s not completely sure.

  Outside the window, woods give way to sparse housing, fast food, and short strips of retail, and then the friendly-looking Oswego Main Street with its brick buildings and renovated historical banks. Alison gets off after the bridge and walks three long blocks to the public library, which resembles a castle in white, crenellated and adorned with an American flag flapping proudly at the top. Inside, it’s like the library back home in New Jersey: warm yellow wood and mottled carpeting, retirees and the probable homeless. Everywhere, the smell of aging paper. She waves to the woman behind the front desk and sits down at an unused computer. The browser window opens in a slow, fitful sequence. First, the outer box pops up on the screen after a period of whirring; then, slowly, the window begins filling in the starting address in the location bar, then some pieces of text, then a few small icons, and a large, colorful image of the library she is sitting in, which appears one inch at a time in the center of the page. She enters the travel site into the field at the top of the browser and begins searching.

  Patrick had said he wanted to leave today, but there are only a few flights left for this afternoon out of LAX and Ontario, and none of them will get him to Syracuse or Rochester. She finds a last-minute red-eye from Orange County to Buffalo that she thinks they could afford and texts him the details. He replies, Thzzzr35#yxtpxffsehTW$#YHjbq, and then, a minute later, another message comes through. This one reads: Thank you. It looks good. She writes back: You won’t have trouble making this flight, will you? It’s a red-eye, but it’s on the earlier side. She waits, but there’s no response. As she’s leaving, the confirmation email pops up on her battered old cellphone: …GET PACKED…YOU’RE GOING ON AN ADVENTURE!

  The return trip is on the same exact bus, and she takes the same exact seat. She leans her head against the window, but it’s not restful. The sense of relief she had experienced immediately after purchasing the plane ticket has been replaced by a deep malaise: she keeps turning over Patrick’s words from this morning, trying to arrange them so they’ll resemble a window into his mind, explaining why he’s so desperate to come back east today, after months of delay and defensive rationalization. She doesn’t understand why the job is over, why the troubled starlet Cassidy Carter is driving him around in a van, why he can’t seem to string three sentences together in coherent order. In the weeks since she arrived at Earthbridge, she’s become used to knowing less and less about his life, and the feeling is a little like coming off a drug: a halo of nervousness hovering around every small thing, and a deep current of relief as she begins to sense a subterranean normalcy. She tells the other Bridgers, when they ask, that he’s in California caring for a sick relative. She doesn’t want to invite a lecture on the unsustainability of the film industry, the relationship between celluloid and peak oil, the role that Hollywood plays in celebrating the human at the expense of all else that lives and suffers. She’s begun to understand what it might feel like to live a life without her husband.

  It’s not ethical to lie to them, but the truth would make no sense in this place. To tell them she has concerns about Patrick’s sacrificing so much to work a basic grunt job, to tell them how strange she finds his commitment to the project or his defensiveness over simple questions like “You’re a writer, why are they making you haul water around town?,” would only invite them to question whether being attached to a man like this, a fool still begging to buy capitalism’s plummeting stock, was really compatible with an Earthbridge lifestyle. How could they understand her feelings when she doesn’t understand them herself? Nora fit in instantly, integrating herself seamlessly into the rotation of youth workshops and work assignments. She plays tambourine in the evening jamborees and serves as a Junior Deputy Mourner during the Mourning Reports, calming fidgety younger kids. On the volunteer wheel for Bridgers aged nine to fourteen, Nora’s name appears three times, maximizing her chances of getting picked for a task. Alison, on the other hand, still feels as though she’s performing a pantomime of what she sees everyone else doing, her imitation lost among the community’s earnest iterations. When the entire auditorium recites the Mourning Prayer in unison, she closes her eyes and finds herself worrying about small, petty things: her rosebushes back home going rotten in the harsh summer sun, their leaves eaten down to lace by iridescent beetles from Japan.

  Even in this place, a place chosen explicitly to heal the deepest sorrows she has, she shields a part of herself from view. Peeling and chopping vegetables with five other Bridgers, she answers the questions about what brought her here, whom she left behind, what piece of news or dire prediction was her “burning bridge,” the sign that told her there was no going back to life as she knew it. She asks small, polite questions in turn: how long are they staying, what’s their favorite task in the rotation, is this carrot too old and ugly for the stew? But when the ends and trimmings are sorted, she’s out the door, walking alone back to the bunkhouse to change clothes, while the others are still chatting with one another a few dozen paces behind her. She can hear their laughter, but she stares out at the forest, like one lost in thought. The behavior is reflexive; she barely realizes she’s doing it before it’s done. It reminds her of being in high school again, leaving the house as soon as dinner was over to walk around with headphones on, in the world but separated from it by a scrim of pop-punk anthems, ending eventually at a narrow canal carrying rainwater runoff out to the treatment plant. She would smoke a cigarette in the tall grass, watching a heron on the other bank stalking prey with vast patience, slowly lifting a long-clawed foot and holding it there aloft for minutes to prove its own stillness. The important part wasn’t the cigarette; it was the fact that her parents thought she was out with other kids—friends that they worried about, drinkers and smokers, sex-havers—when she was actually here, doing nothing at all. Keeping something, however small, away from everyone she knew made her feel safe, protected by a secret power.

  Sometimes it seemed to Alison that choosing Patrick was a continuation of this pattern. Yes, she loved him and his troves of errata, and the band tees he used to wear when they were going out were cool, but it was also convenient for her to be married to someone whose inner struggle filled much of his field of vision. When he was at work in his office, she could do what she wanted and feel no guilt for not thinking abou
t him at all. He noticed when she was happy, but rarely noticed when she was unhappy unless she told him explicitly, which she explained to herself was better than being held accountable for passing disappointments, fleeting depressions, or feelings of doom. With him, she could hide in plain sight—purchasing a new sectional from IKEA, switching to a cheaper internet-service provider, going to birthday parties for Nora’s friends, and telling the other parents about their plan to put in a swimming pool when no such plan existed. She could dream out loud with him about buying a cottage on the Cape when he sold his next book, knowing that it would probably never happen and he would soon move along to some other fantasy. Patrick’s belief in the reality of their shared life made it real enough for her to go along with for a decade and a half, and made her doubt nearly impossible for him to perceive.

  But all of that was wrecked by the lawn incident. Alison lay in the bath for five long hours as the hot water went cold, feeling the adrenaline travel up and down her body in swells of anger and nausea. Sometimes it felt as though her skull were burning, sometimes it felt as though all the life had drained from her limbs. When she moved them, they shook. She stood up and looked her reflection in the eye. She had never truly gotten used to her face, a face that had been called ugly when she was in middle school and then pretty when she entered high school. Now she tried to focus on the new traces, the lines and spots that marked her age and belonged to her existence as Nora’s mother. A patch of shadowy, sun-damaged skin above her jaw on the side where the bright morning light pressed during her commute, a mouth sharper and thinner with a carved-out shape. The person indicated by these signs of maturity could walk out of this room and into the rest of her house without shame. She could explain to her husband and daughter why she had done what she had done and how that behavior was continuous with the rest of her, not a break but an unusual intensification. She knocked on the bathroom door until Patrick came to remove the barricade and let her out. As the door swung open, she saw his face muddled with a mixture of anger and fear, and she began immediately to weep.

  That night, the three of them ate microwaved macaroni from thin black plastic containers in silence, as she felt the discomfort of the full, undiluted weight of her partner’s scrutiny falling on her over and over. Of course, she saw Patrick looking at her, noting whether she was eating and how much, noting that she wiped away stray tears from time to time. She wasn’t trying to cry; it was just physiological now, when and how they seeped out, at all times the tears were softly present within her face, like an ache in the muscle. But even when he wasn’t looking, she felt the force of his attention, his thinking about her, the questions he posed to himself about how she was doing and whether another eruption was imminent. Now when she returned home from a long shift at the clinic, having stitched up the lacerated paws of German shepherds and excised benign growths from the armpits of elderly cats, he asked about her day in extensive, progressive detail. Each piece of her response was turned over and scrutinized like a clue, as though she were a crime that hadn’t yet been committed. It wasn’t that she didn’t want him to care, or to worry. Worry was the bridge toll for love—you had to pay for your passage as others paid for theirs. But she didn’t want to be examined all the time, searched by his gaze and still not seen.

  But there was one night when the scent of damp loam woke her from a deep dream with no images, no sounds. In the dark room, tinged blue by the cold light of Patrick’s bedside clock radio, she sensed soil and chlorophyll, the smell of green structures tearing. The thunk of the crowbar digging deep into the Kentucky bluegrass, dredging the rich earth as Patrick slept next to her like one knocked unconscious. She inhaled the scent that was not there and felt inexplicably happy, her heart full. The physicality of that memory—stripped of the presence of sadness, of desperation, of Patrick running up behind her emitting sounds of panic—was beautiful to her now. It was freeing, to recognize something new: that she felt alive in that moment, plunged into the world. There were other planes of reality that could be accessed, other ways of putting the world in order, which were no less true or concrete. She had accepted that her behavior on the lawn was a sort of stupid self-immolation, but maybe she had unearthed something in herself. Shame made it harder to slip back into her old routines, to behave exceptionally normal as a means of repentance. Under Patrick’s surveillance, it was harder to get comfortable, to settle in alongside him and get back to work on feeling happy. In her discomfort, the home turned unhomely, and there was room to imagine a life away from this one, a different logic, a different family.

  She fell asleep dreaming of the sea, dreaming in a body different from her own, one lower to the ground and buzzing with totalizing sensation. In her dream, she crawled across the sandy beach and toward the saline bound. Froth moistened her face as she slipped into the saltwater, heaving. It lifted her up toward the surface, buoyed her as she watched the wave in the distance coming closer, growing taller and sharper. When it hit, driving her body deep below the surface, she opened her mouth to scream and realized with shock that she was able to breathe there. Even there, in the dense, chill surf, she could breathe.

  * * *

  —

  When she sees the small, nondescript sign along the side of the road, Alison pushes the button to request a stop and climbs down from the bus to solid ground. She walks back toward the Earthbridge gate, checking for a cellphone signal, though she knows she won’t find one. Back at the main meadow, she heads to the pay phone and slips two quarters into the slot. She dials Patrick’s cellphone and listens as it rings and rings and rings. She hangs up and tries again, and again. On the fifth call, someone picks up. It’s a young female voice, sleek and glossy and sounding a bit worn out.

  “Hello?” it asks.

  “Hi, sorry,” Alison starts. “Is this Cassidy? It’s Alison, Patrick’s wife. I’m just calling to make sure the info for the plane ticket came through. I still have to figure out how he’s going to get here from Buffalo, but the plane is the first step. Without the plane, there’s no getting home.”

  “I got it,” Cassidy says. “I got the ticket. I’m driving there now.” There’s a pause. “Patrick is, I dunno, sleeping. Or something.”

  “Is he okay?” says Alison. “Did something happen to him?”

  “I guess you could say he has food poisoning.” She pauses. “That’s probably the quickest way to explain it.”

  Alison can hear the sound of the honking in the background, and a siren faintly blaring. “Well,” she says, “I’m really grateful to you for taking him to the airport. I don’t know how you got into this situation, but it’s really a nice thing for you to do. I’m sure celebrities don’t do airport runs very often.”

  Cassidy laughs a tight, bitter laugh. “It is pretty nice of me, isn’t it? I should put out a press release to let everyone know I’m not such a bitch after all.”

  Putting the phone back on the hook, Alison looks out at the campus, at the happy Earthbridgers living seamlessly as one. There’s a gnarl in her heart that she can’t seem to undo, and thinking about it only pulls it tighter. She walks over to the main garden, where she sees Phoebe and Naomi, two of the women who share her bunkhouse, down on their knees in the rich, warm soil. She asks if they could use any help, and they move down the row to give her some workspace. With her hands on the ground and her back warmed by the sun, she breathes in the mineral scent of earth, like her own sweat after a run along the Charles back in college, the gulls curving in the sky far above. Right at the surface, the dirt is warm and crumbly, but an inch or two down, it’s cold, like the chill night air.

  Alison grabs the dandelions beneath their tough, tooth-edged leaves, close to the start of the fleshy white root, and pulls up, at the same time taking a trowel in her other hand and digging out the long, stubborn tail. She does dandelion after dandelion, until her eyes and knees and wrists hurt. But the delicate clovers need only a gentle upward
tug to hoist them from the ground, stringy little roots dangling with clumps of dirt still attached. She likes weeding the clovers, takes pleasure in how fragile they are and how numerous. As she pulls them up, she sets them in a pile to carry out to the field later on, where she’ll leave them out for the rabbits to find.

  * * *

  —

  In the dining hall, dinner is served at six. Pots of simmered beans and carrots, lentil stew, gluten-free pasta with marinara sauce, and fresh-baked bread next to a bowl of butter, everything hot and filling but with too little salt. Alison and Nora slide down the line, scooping portions onto their plates with the shallow wooden spoons. Nora seems quiet to her lately, and when Alison asks she tells her that she’s talking to herself inside her head, she forgets she needs to say parts out loud sometimes to let her mother in on the conversation. They sit down across from each other on the long cafeteria benches, and Alison decides to tell her the good news: her father is coming back tonight, leaving on an overnight flight into Buffalo. They’ll have to figure out his pickup in the morning—either he can take a bus to Rochester or she’ll go and pick him up that afternoon, after her shift in the laundry building. Nora regards her mother with suspicion.