The Art of Feeling

by Laura Tims

  Tito jumps into my lap, and I wrap my arms around my stupid dog and drown his patchy fur in tears.

  Chapter Eight

  AT SCHOOL, THE BATTLE OF ANTHONY VERSUS Eliot is a one-sided massacre, an army marching against a rebel coalition that can’t be bothered to pick up a gun. Eliot’s disinterest pisses them off even more. Someone pours cafeteria milk through the slots in his locker, warping the covers of his books. Anthony’s friends hiss insults at him in the hallway. There are ominous references to a Facebook group.

  As for Anthony himself, he pretends Eliot doesn’t exist. Like a true mafia boss, he’s delegating, setting up claims of innocence in case Eliot ever reports it to Principal Chase.

  “Just tell her.” I’m near tears when we head to the parking lot after school to discover that his tires have been slashed. “Someone will get suspended, and everyone else will back off.”

  “You want me to narc, to cure my reputation as a narc.”

  “You don’t care about your reputation.”

  “I don’t care about any of this. Why report it when I don’t care about it?”

  “I care about it,” I bark.

  “Have you considered not doing that?”

  I storm off, and then storm back because I’m afraid of what will happen if I leave him on his own. It’s been a while since I’ve been this stressed about something other than my leg. Going to school has never been great, and SMD it’s just been a place to exist during the long hours of blankness; but now it makes me tense and hypervigilant, like there are enemies on all sides.

  And the harassment isn’t even directed at me. Yet somehow Eliot’s not afraid. I don’t know how he survived this, at school and after school. Maybe physical pain isn’t the only kind he can’t feel.

  Eliot calls AAA, but I need a ride home, and unfortunately Lena is the only one who answers her phone.

  “So do you think you’re making progress in therapy?” she asks in a horrifyingly chipper voice on the drive, which is supposed to be ten minutes, but she manages to extend it to a trillion years by slowing to a crawl behind a bicyclist instead of passing him.

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “Now that I’m here, you and I have got to team up. We’re the girls in the family.” She glances painfully at my oversize jeans, my short haircut, and makeupless face. “Maybe we can do a shopping day!”

  I stretch my lips horizontally in a rough approximation of a smile.

  Mom never complained about the way I dressed. It’s not that I hate girly clothes—they look nice on other people, but they’d look stupid on me.

  “Are the people at your internship really okay with you working remotely?” I ask. “It’s not bad for, like, networking?” Hint.

  “Obviously I’d form stronger connections if I was there every day, but my place is here with all of you. I was thinking about Rex’s outburst at our session before last, and I figured out it’s his way of telling me how much I’m needed here!” She hums with cheerful determination. Rex calls her delusional, but I’m jealous of her ability to interpret everything in whatever way makes her feel the best.

  “And since Dad is obviously depressed, I should step in as the head of the household,” she adds.

  “Dad’s depressed?” The gummy dinosaurs and the forgetfulness definitely aren’t normal, but my depression was a black, black hole, and Dad just wanders around looking confused.

  “Of course he’s depressed. He has no idea what to do with you two. He’s stuck. We—you’re all stuck. That’s why it’s time for a change.”

  My stomach fills with doom as the bicyclist’s butt waves in front of us. “Hey, why didn’t Dad answer his phone? He doesn’t have work today.”

  “Dad,” she says proudly, “is at an estate sale. When an elderly person is transitioning to assisted living, or when they’ve passed away and some of their belongings need to be sold, it’s called an estate sale. I gave him a newspaper clipping.”

  “I know what an estate sale is. It’s a depressing yard sale.”

  “Estate sale,” she corrects.

  Drinking game: take a shot every time Lena says estate sale. Alcoholism would be a fair coping mechanism at this point. “It’s a step up from craigslist, but not that many steps.”

  She wrinkles her nose just like Mom would whenever Rex left a mess on the couch. She probably practiced in the mirror. “It’s all in Dr. Brown’s book—domestic entombment can cause emotional stagnation. Excuse me!” she shrieks out the window at the bicyclist as she inches around him into our driveway. “So I took the initiative and cleared out some of Mom’s old things while you were at school.”

  The doom worsens. “What things?”

  “Oh, some of that awful stuff Mom found on craigslist. Like that smelly couch . . .”

  She keeps talking, but I’m already wrenching the car door open, swinging out before it’s fully stopped.

  “Samantha, wait, let me help you!”

  She couldn’t have unglued Rex from the couch long enough to chuck it. And if she tries, we’ll set up a barricade and take turns marinating on the polyester, bringing each other rations of gummy dinosaurs. But I can’t rush to the living room, due to the fact that half our furniture has been relocated outside.

  All the weird junk Mom had accumulated over the years, things so ugly only she could love them—the coffee table that some kid painted to look like a globe, the egg-shaped clock that runs seventeen minutes fast and is the only reason I’m good at math—are discarded on the grass.

  “You’re probably wondering how I got it all out myself. One word: Pilates.” Lena stands triumphantly beside me, surveying her destruction.

  “Are you having a yard sale? I’ll give you ten bucks for that coffee table!” our neighbor screams over her fence like she’s miles away instead of several feet.

  “We’re not selling it!” I scream back.

  “Hang on, Samantha,” Lena says, then howls at the neighbor: “How about twenty?”

  “Lena!”

  “Oh, come on, it’ll save us having to drag one more thing to the dump.”

  “The WHAT?”

  “Dr. Brown’s book said that you may be reluctant to let go of old possessions.” She gives me a look of bottomless pity.

  My world is disintegrating, and pieces of it are on the grass. “Why don’t we just burn the house down, since phoenixes rise from the ashes or whatever?”

  “What a beautiful metaphor, Samantha! I’m glad you understand where I’m coming from.”

  I fly past the boxes blocking the steps and go inside. The best thing about crutches is that nobody expects me to hold the door open for them anymore, and the worst thing is that nobody takes offense when I let the door slam in their face.

  In the living room, the couch is gone.

  It’s GONE.

  A horrible empty coffin-shaped rectangle is in the carpet, studded with candy wrappers and pennies and pairs of lost earbuds because nobody ever moved that couch. There’s a soda stain on the wall that Rex probably didn’t bother to clean up because nobody in a million years would ever move that couch.

  Lena follows me. “I’ll have this cleaned up in no time; you know how tidy I am—”

  “Where is it?” I whisper, ready to wrap my hands around her stupid pencil neck. She abandoned us when Mom died, and now she thinks she can show up and start replacing everything Mom loved?

  “You hated that couch. Be reasonable.” She steps away from Tito, who’s hopping around her feet, and actually snaps at him. “Bad dog. Down.”

  I scoop him up and tell him he’s not, in fact, a bad dog before whirling on her. “Where is it?”

  “I . . . paid the kid down the street to take it to the dump,” she says, wide-eyed. “I figured nobody would buy it, so there was no point leaving it on the lawn. . . .”

  “Where’s Rex?”

  “Upstairs. Don’t bother him. He’s—”

  I climb the stairs faster than I thought I still could and murder Rex’s d
oor with my crutches. Mom used to joke that she was lucky she had me to stick between Rex and Lena in the backseat when we were little. I’m supposed to be the buffer, the neutral party. But right now Rex and I have a common enemy, and I’ve never been happier to have a grumpy bulldog of a brother.

  The door cracks open. Rex’s headphones are falling off his neck, still blasting the music that must have drowned out the sound of Lena disemboweling the living room.

  “I don’t care, she can do what she wants, I don’t care,” he says miserably, and slams the door again.

  Apparently the battle was fought and lost while I was at school.

  Lena lurks uncertainly at the foot of the stairs. “Samantha, please tell Reginald that I’m sorry if I was a little harsh earlier.”

  The only other time I’ve ever heard her apologize to Rex was when she shut the window on his fingers when he was six. She must have really laid it on.

  I keep bashing the door with my crutches. It’s therapeutic. Eventually it opens again, and Tito nips between Rex’s legs into the room.

  “What can I do?” He’s wild-eyed and wobbling. “She’s a nightmare.”

  “Reginald, I can hear you.”

  He leans in close. “I’m too high for this, Sam.”

  Why is it that the only time I want to cry is when I’m faced with my mess of a brother? He’s not just too high for this, he’s too high for work applications, college applications—too high for everything, every day, and it’s my fault because I give him the pills.

  “We have to get everything back to normal before Dad comes home,” I croak.

  “Normal?” He begins to laugh, doubling over, and he’s right to, because normal died with Mom.

  I have to stand up to Lena. I have to fight, too, not just break fights up. This is my life, not a TV show.

  I inhale as if I can swallow Mom’s ability to handle Lena, like some part of her still hangs in the air that she used to breathe. But she hasn’t breathed this air in a long time. How long does it take for all the oxygen in a house to be replaced?

  “You’re not really mad, are you?” asks Lena in a small voice at the bottom of the stairs, tapping her foot on the steps, tapping her finger on her elbow, all nervous energy.

  Eliot would be able to say it. Of course I fucking am. But she’s shrinking back, like she genuinely didn’t realize how I’d react.

  It’s always been a fair fight between Rex and Lena, one versus one, and I’m scared of what will happen to the losing party if I finally decide to tip the scales.

  “I . . . I have to go out.”

  I speed-hobble downstairs, past the scalped section of carpet, and go outside, where I shoo away the neighbor vulturing over our yard. My stomach burns. I close my eyes and try to calm down by envisioning myself sitting next to Eliot in his car, his arm draped out the window.

  But I can just have the real thing, and so I text him.

  When he arrives, he’s in an unfamiliar green car, his arm out the window exactly as I pictured it. “Rental while my tires are replaced,” he explains as I careen into the passenger seat. “Are you having a yard sale? How much for the hideous coffee table? I’ll put it in Gabriel’s room.”

  “Can you drive me to the dump?” I manage.

  His eyebrow lifts, but for once, he doesn’t ask. He ditches his cigarette in my driveway and peels off, nowhere near as carefully as he did the first time he gave me a ride. He’s not actually a cautious driver, I realize—he was being considerate because of the accident.

  “Are we going Dumpster diving?” he inquires.

  I slump against the window and breathe out my nose. “No. Couch rescue operation.”

  “Sounds dangerous. I’m in.”

  Fifteen minutes later:

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S NOT HERE?” I politely ask the dump owner, an old man with a beard the length of my arm.

  “Big striped couch, ugly as sin? Some fellow in a Ravens shirt picked it up half an hour ago. Dunno what in hell he wanted it for; looked like one of them with a rat nest in it.”

  My leg gives an enormous throb. I limp to a discarded tire and beat it to death with my crutches.

  “Anger issues,” I hear the dump owner say in an aside to Eliot. “You want to watch that.”

  The couch is gone. Like Mom, like lacrosse, like my old friends and my old life, and I have to accept it because I don’t get another option. I’m tired of things I love being gone forever. I didn’t think there was room in me for any more holes, but that’s all I am now, a collection of empty spaces where things were ripped away.

  Eliot stands beside me, smoking a cigarette. Then he smokes another. I can practically feel all the things he’s struggling not to say.

  Finally he breaks. “ISFJs often project their emotions onto representational objects. It makes sense that you’d hit the tire, since a tire is a component of a car—”

  “Not now,” I pant.

  A pause. “If you need a couch, you can have my white one. Gabriel spent lots of money on it, so I was planning on putting it in the driveway before the next big rainstorm anyway.”

  “I don’t want that couch. I want my couch.”

  “By virtue of grammar, once I give it to you it will become your couch—”

  “It was my mom’s, okay?” I fight back tears. “She found it on craigslist, and we’ve had it forever, and my sister just threw it out.”

  “I see. So it’s the couch you have an emotional connection to, not the tire.”

  I didn’t expect Eliot to have flawless comforting skills, but this is ridiculous.

  “The couch represents your mother—” he starts.

  “Are you seriously psychoanalyzing me right now?”

  “Which is nonsense,” he finishes loudly. “Your mother wasn’t a piece of furniture. The presence or absence of furniture has no effect on your love for her.”

  I gulp a protesting breath, but he’s right. I can’t compare losing a couch to losing Mom or my ability to walk unassisted.

  And maybe redecorating really will help Dad and Rex. If I can’t help them by remembering the driver, I should at least let Lena try.

  “Fine, Eliot. But I have to warn you that I’m going to cry in about thirty seconds.”

  He practically catapults away from me, holding up his hands like I’m about to open fire on him. “If you agree with me that this couch thing is stupid, why do you insist on crying?”

  “I’m not insisting on it; that’s just how emotions work. And it’s not stupid.” I haven’t cried since the funeral, but now I’m too revved up not to. It’s actually a relief to feel the tears coming, like I’ve been dying of thirst and I’ve just taken my first step toward a desert oasis.

  “Oh, no—wait, Sam, this is really not my area.”

  This is the first time I’ve seen him show weakness, and it’s kind of adorable. I have to force myself to ignore it so I don’t lose the need to cry now that I’ve built it up.

  “Ten seconds,” I sniffle threateningly. “Five . . . four . . . three . . .”

  “Should I get you a tissue? I don’t have any tissues. Maybe the old man has tissues?” His tortured expression is so cute that all I manage to squeeze out is a single tear. I point at it wickedly as it wiggles down my nose.

  “Look! I’m crying.”

  “Please don’t— Ahhh, shit,” he yelps. A few feet away, the old man is snickering.

  I’m fully cracking up now, my eyes still wet. I might be losing my mind. Dr. Brown will be excited.

  Eliot flings out his arms belligerently like he’s presenting me to an audience. “And now she’s laughing! Laughing isn’t supposed to come after crying! The specimen is clearly deranged.”

  For once, he’s lost and I’m the one who understands: when it comes to people, Eliot’s confused and mistrustful, like a little kid who’s been hurt. He has no experience with relationships, and books and wikiHow can’t prepare a logical person for the silly moments and nonsense that are part of human cl
oseness.

  It makes me want to treat him gently.

  “That’s because you only see stuff like this if you’re friends with somebody,” I gasp, breathless.

  “You’re saying there’s a lexicon of behavior I haven’t observed because you only find out about it by being in relationships?”

  “Yes,” I choke out. “Duh.”

  He looks devastated.

  Once he takes me home and drops me off, still sulking, I wander up to Lena’s room. It seems like there should be an apology, though I don’t know which of us it’s supposed to come from. But her purse is gone. She must have fled, too.

  When she moved out, we didn’t touch her room, just like we didn’t move Mom’s stuff from all over the house. But with Lena, there was nothing left to touch. She took her clothes, desk, file organizer, and makeup, and threw away almost everything else: old toys, old photos, anything that could be construed as sentimental. Even now that she’s back and her empty suitcase sits on the floor, it could still be a guest room.

  Dr. Brown’s book is on her bedside table, heavily bookmarked. I’m tempted to hurl it out the window, but I pick it up instead. Dr. Brown’s author photo is on the inside cover. She’s younger, with the face of someone who thinks she’s smart and wants you to think so, too.

  I page through it, stopping when one passage catches my eye.

  Part 3: The Relationship between Pain and Empathy

  Originally, pain evolved as a way to alert us to danger and injury. Pain is humanity’s common denominator: we all know what it means when someone says “Ouch,” and we instinctively reach out to help. Our shared experience of pain connects people with nothing else in common—different ages, languages, religions. In this way, pain is the root of human empathy.

  This drive to assist our community in times of need likely ensured the survival of many tribes and, by extension, our collective survival as a species. Is it hard to imagine that even in the modern day, pain remains key to our ability to understand each other, to forge meaningful relationships, to view others as kin rather than as predators or prey?