And then, as we kneel to pull three matching pairs of overalls in our grandfather’s size from the back of the bottom drawer of our grandparents’ dresser, we find a shoebox rattling with trinkets. We recognize instantly a tinted lip balm given to us by a friend in fourth grade. The sparkle and flavor had been intoxicating. It made us feel beautiful, real, important, and for this it was confiscated. A school photo of ourself at twelve years old, two horns painted around our head in white-out. The suggestion of Satan so transgressive, the self-destruction so powerful a feeling. It had been found under our pillow and went where all the things we loved went—to this box in their bureau. The skeleton keychain with jeweled eyes, a picture of a gun torn from a magazine, a stolen blood-red nail polish, a chain with the gold partly rubbed off, a crucified Jesus hanging grotesquely by a jump ring in the chain. A graven image. We touched them all with the reverence of religious relics, evidence of our former selfhood, and all of these things mixed with other artifacts we didn’t remember: a bottle of perfume the size of our thumb, a beaded bracelet with half a heart with the letters BF burned into the wooden charm, a deck of cards—an invitation to gamble—a palm-sized spiral notebook with the word Private written on the front in childish scrawl, on the inside the name Ruth.
We can’t help but confuse these objects with the physical person of our mother. The perfume smells like alcohol and rotten cherries, and we breathe it so deeply we feel faint and then nauseous and crawl to a waste can by the door to retch. We sit with our back against the doorframe, catching our breath, the phantom smell of the perfume still lingering in our nostrils with the very real smell of our vomit. We hold our breath to replace the cap of the perfume and slide the too-tight bracelet over our hand, letting the beads pinch the skin of our wrists. As we sit on the bed, a fine mist of dust scatters. We flip through the pages of our mother’s private notebook, both desperate for a secret message and embarrassed for invading her childhood privacy.
On the second page, each line is filled with the same message in careful but unbeautiful script:
I love Bobby.
We look through every drawer and recess and box with renewed vigor, but the only objects that remain of our mother, or the person she was, are those few mementos of her as a failure in the eyes of the grandparents. Perhaps, we think, there are no better artifacts. No better secret code than our shared space in their gallery of sin. We’d never felt so close to her, or to ourself.
We stop removing everything when there is nothing left to remind us of anything; the voices are for the moment at a loss for words, everything is choked, and in the house’s new barrenness we stand above the replica of the house, feeling its haunting presence below us, its gold-flecked floors made of the house’s gold-flecked floors, flesh of my flesh, we move through the rooms and die in each one. We stuff the small spaces with ancient newspaper and mousetraps. We destroy the world the grandparents made like an angry god, and in the end we rest with an exhaustion that suffices for satisfaction, still smelling the oppressively sweet scent of spoiled cherries.
We sit on the couch at the far end of the house and look down its empty expanse. We don’t understand who we are becoming or if it will be better than who we were before, but we know that we are angry, and that the anger is our own.
We wonder about Bobby. Was it Bobby who drove her to a life of sin? Her first inkling of something different, something tantalizing because it was forbidden. For this we love Bobby, too. And we whisper it aloud into the emptiness.
I love Bobby.
I love Bobby.
I love Bobby.
The house is skeletal around us, foreign and vacant. In the strange space, we are unsure who we are—did we ever know? The mother, grandmother, did they know? Does anyone know how to live?
We are full with grief and grasping and want to empty ourself/life/the house. To remove the trash left by the years, to be gutted, to be made clean.
The alignment of heavenly bodies paints a rainbow across the chipping walls and over a portrait of the desert, and as in our youth we feel a magnetic pull. God sent a rainbow, says the grandmother, as a sign of His eternal love.
We know that the colors are the result of the mechanics of light and a tchotchke purchased in a gift shop and hung in a window, forgotten by our frantic dismantling, and that it has only just now caught the distant sun in its glass. But we know that that is no small feat, either.
We hold out our hand so the rainbow is cupped in our palm and the magic of the light travels across our skin. We are surprised by its concentrated heat, and the warmth of desire flickers, and we remember an early longing, older than David or God. A whisper of a memory from a life before the grandparents and a more distant house activated by the projection of light, a memory so detached from space that it is all impression: the feeling of wonder.
We dream the house in lightning, an X-ray: still-life black and white of the electric snap casts the shadow of everything now hidden back into the dark, dustless holes they used to fill. And in the dream nothing is not absence, but all of the somethings between the things we pick up, move, remove, and like this we move through David’s nothing, the thick air of him left between all the things taken away.
In the morning we snap the too-tight elastic of our mother’s beaded bracelet against our wrist. We sit at the edge of the bed, meditating on the sting. We think of her, forty years before. How miserable she must have been.
The days without David pass in cruel slowness. We are led through space by a leash of heartache. A week feels like a month of the screen door swinging Come, Go, but no body comes/goes. Our selfishness is the shapeless hallway of the yellow house where we mop the dry cracks in the floor with our tears and shine the wooden back of chairs with the running we wipe from our nose. We pray our silent love to Bobby. We try to become the woman who got away, whatever the price.
But who are we in any other context? The fear that David is a counterfeit—that he is empty, that he is less real than we’d hoped, that he is some human machine—pales in comparison to the fear that we are the fraud. That we lack adequate kindness or intelligence to be a sufficient person, that our lack of physical struggles have made us lazy, that crying over our own relative ease is just another ploy to make us feel better about it and to spare us the effort of thinking of others.
It has nothing to do with wanting to die and everything to do with our inadequacy at living.
As we cry into our bathwater, we become sensitive to a different sort of suffering: every moment is ripe with opportunity for transcendent pain. Alone in the tub with electric appliances tantalizingly close, we are struck by a dread much bigger than our own—that it is not just the man who dies at the end of the book, but everyone. People are vanishing, forgotten and alone in bathtubs all over the world. Who will find them? Who will hold them as they cross over? We press on our sternum to keep our heart from leaking out of our chest. We are crushed by cosmic grief caused by our inadequacy to traverse the gaping maw of human indifference. Everything is lost. The trees that sway in the backyard. The families in the park. Our parents. The abandoned sweater. There is nothing we can do, but the Sisyphean impulse is there to push against it senselessly.
This new ambivalence toward death has a parasite of sickening hopefulness.
The smell of a neighbor’s dinner wafts through an open window. Broccoli, maybe. There are people just next door making their way through over-cooked vegetables. Everyone, we believe now, is suffering. We are all so sad, and who will know? Who will come be lonely with us?
We try to multiply the number of days we might have left on earth to see if we could spend a day with each person with whom we share this spinning rock, just to keep them company—us company—if only for a moment. We will be the ambassador of suffering to the whole world.
We will do nothing, we know, because loneliness is a disease that other people can’t cure. Even so, there has grown inside of us the need to watch the end as it approaches of its own accord. To suffe
r more fully. To meet death as we once met David: offering ourself so there is nothing it can/t take.
We know the reward for this courage will not be ease, but the promise of some new plight.
We wake with the confusion of waking in a foreign place, but it is only the absence of everything we’ve ever known that causes this sensation. In that brief moment, as we try to remember who and where we are, we forget David and our sadness.
When the memory returns, we look at it like a rude guest. An uninvited visitor of whom we have grown tired.
Our hand is taut and red and stiff without circulation from the tight bracelet. We take it off and tuck it under the pillow. For a moment we worry for its safety there, but remember the grandparents won’t find it.
On the ninth day, David stands on the front step and says Regret and Stronger Will and Fidelity. We imagine these words rubbed into his chest like an old jar of vapors by Lara’s fingers because she knows: All they needed, really needed, was to talk. We stand in our new body seeing with new eyes but also with David’s eyes with the unforgiving eyes of another life easier, better, without us. We see with Lara’s eyes and those of our grandmother and great-grandmother before so that nothing becomes the place—not where David has stood—but where he stands on the peeling step and he doesn’t say Goodbye or I’ll miss you or any words that would mean he’d ever been here at all. His presence is the only admission of guilt. Already gone in this way, he says all the words that mean Lara, or mean that we have always been alone, we would be unreasonable to ask for more, we must have known this would happen, and he knows, Lara says in his mouth Commitment and New Start, and maybe in our silence there appears a moment for admission but instead comes out: I’m sorry if you—
He will never say: Sorry I.Just: You/What did you do to make me sorry? He says between the other words that can never be discerned from the piles of trash that make us up.
We dress our mind in our old body so we can remember it is easy not to cry, not to want the man; we squint instead into the sun as it lowers behind David earlier than ever before, before anything we can remember. We whisper in our mind I love Bobby over and over so as not to hear what David is saying. Everything is all blue sky shooting out from him, the white trail of a plane leading to nothing—but then we imagine the head at our breast, we shade our eyes with our hand, the hand we use to wipe crying snot from our face. We say, Oh.
The cold filling our throat, the smile is poison on our mouth. It is easy enough to say: I understand. And we watch ourself act out ourself, and we need only to say so little before we can collapse back into the still, hot house.
I’m happy things are working out for you, we say.
He is Relieved and Surprised, but there is the unspoken: Hurt. Wanting only to have meant more to us than we to him. We close the distance between us. Resting fingertips on his arm, we kiss his cheek he neither offers nor refuses. We step back into the dark hallway and, as if caught by a shadow or the right reflection of light off some dull, white surface, we are lit up. David, maybe for the first time, recognizes that there is a change and terrified asks with sudden, honest concern: Are you okay?
We smile with warmth manufactured: I’m fine.
He is not assuaged and asks to come in and, though we hate it/long for it/hate that we long for it, we open the door, a sickness coating our lungs as he passes. In the kitchen we see through his eyes the missing everything. The empty walls and counters and tables. What happened? he asks, and maybe he does not remember why he is here now, to leave us and this place where we fuck where he has come to say: not fuck—but now, maybe a new place and us: maybe new, and he: the same, more the same than before as he struggles to match himself to some man he was or was supposed to be.
Cleaning, we offer lightly.
But your family’s stuff——As if crushed by the weight of absence, the absence we’ve felt since he stood, as he stands now, carefully balancing at the edge of the counter. The same sadness he feels for the man who will die. And he cannot believe that what happens to the man in the story is happening to him. That life could move on without him.
Everything must go, we say dully, and we are still pretending like children to be man and woman, and we pretend to be Fine, a good woman, Fine. David says, in the endless blue of the lake,You are fine, and we are his to do with whatever, to throw away or hide in cupboards and to be Fine. And it is clear in this house, that we are living and burrowed into ourself, and that David is the sand the oyster rejects and even inside us, the house our body makes, rejects him.
Are you leaving? he asks, and maybe the Resolve in front of the house becomes more complicated when it is no longer his, no longer Lara’s, but ours, ours to take from him, our fantasy the man who comes and stays the night and in the morning kisses the cunt and then the forehead and then to work, and it is ours to take. Ours to ask for nothing, and to give nothing, to accept no generosity, to be nothing. We see him not as the cause of our sadness but a vessel for it, an explanation, and his departure marks only an inconvenient shifting to a new problem: ourself.
Maybe, we say, knowing immediately that it is true, never having considered it until this moment. And David feels the trap of his life he will return to and leave and be forced again to return to: he knows himself now and that while we die from him, leave for a faraway emptiness of our own making, he has no new self to inhabit. He sees as we see the house, barren except for the stain he’s left, and sad/empty/gone from everything, he says again:
Are you okay?
I’m fine period Our smile becomes heavy and he wraps us in arms and kisses our forehead and says only, at least, I’m sorry.
Easy, now: I’m sorry. When there is nothing he can do and he knows we are not his to do for, and more importantly that we will not ask. We know the weight of nothing that will follow as he tries to make up for himself. Now. Now, now.
Our hands move familiar over the clean, bright body, and his fingers find our hair and the easy remembered pull and our head back he kisses our mouth we rest tender breasts against him, his thumb slides over nipple and near pain we press against him and he walks us backward to the sink, presses, lifts our grandmother’s thin dress up to our waist. A finger sliding in as if searching for what he has left and our breath in his ear and he pulls away to turn us around, to push us over the sink before he can think his way out of it, the sunlight on the faucet distant through the milkglass of our watery vision, and we will the tears not to fall down our face, the dress pushed up and the man sliding cock against wet and then the first slap, and the second, and we falter, grab for the edge of the sink, particles of food dried to the pale peach basin, the faucet’s decade of slow drips make a thin green-brown mineral trail to the drain. The sink’s lip pressing into our ribs, the flesh below our breasts, and we think Tits and pretend that this is all that has happened, sex. It was nothing, we say to ourself as we hear the next crack of a slap before we feel it. The faucet glimmers a dead bird and the come lands across our back like a flock.
His cock presses against the flesh of our ass as he rubs the come in, puts his hand to our face to taste, to eat his body, to make his body our body again. He rests his head on our shoulder, bites gently, holds us before moving away to pull together his pants. We stay, staring into the sink, dripping wet onto the floor.
We’d seen him as the answer to the infinite list of our problems. To the problem of being. But he has become a new problem without a solution. Or with an obvious solution, yielding only new problems.
David sits, rolling on a wheeled chair through his own empty space. We wipe our face with our hands before stepping out of the sticky underclothes and crossing the narrow room to lean against the counter beside him. We consider the lack of emotion we feel at his turned head. He wheels nearer to us with awkward minced steps. It’s incongruous with the seriousness of the moment and we want to laugh. He wraps his arms around our thighs and rests his forehead against the small bulge of our stomach, just below our navel. He is silent
and maybe now there is also Resentment, for taking first his good intentions and then his fantasy away, for reminding him of it and denying him. We are at fault that he must return to the good woman, good wife who loves him.
We stay like this until the bitterness and sadness and loneliness and many adjectives of our affair settle into the boredom of waiting for it to pass and for David to leave—his body growing smaller the farther it is from us, haloed in the glint of the horizon beyond him, the allure of places just past what we can see—and for the next thing to arrive.
TATIANA RYCKMAN is the author of the novel The Ancestry of Objects (Deep Vellum Publishing), and the novella I Don’t Think of You (Until I Do) (Future Tense), as well as three chapbooks of prose. She is the editor of Awst Press and has been an artist in residence at Yaddo, Arthub, and 100W Corsicana. Her work has appeared in Tin House, Lithub, Paper Darts, Barrelhouse, and other publications. Tatiana can be found on airplanes or at tatianaryckman.com.
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