by Brock Clarke
And what did his story mean to Mrs. Murray? It was difficult to say, for whenever he took the lead in telling it, his wife eventually left the table during its telling. Mr. Murray noticed this. There were plenty of things he was supposed to notice but didn’t—he was completely blind to nature, for instance, and paid no attention to the pink flaring sunset, had no ear for the different sounds different birds make, and could never tell what makes poison oak not poison ivy—but Mr. Murray did notice that his wife was never in the dining room when he told his version of the story and shouted his motto, and that she reappeared only when the story was through, after Dud had smacked Win on the back of the head and Win had smacked back and Penelope had ultimately brokered a truce. Only then did Mrs. Murray emerge from the kitchen, blinking, as if coming out of a cave and into the light. “It’s getting late,” she would say. She had turned into the kind of woman who always reminded one of the lateness of the hour; Mr. Murray had noticed that, too, and he also noticed that she was much concerned with the cleanliness of public bathrooms (whenever they would go out—to dinner, the theater, a baseball game—Mrs. Murray would return from the bathroom and announce to her husband, “The ladies’ room is quite clean”). The only time Mrs. Murray wasn’t this kind of woman was when a Murray other than Mr. Murray was telling the famous story. Only then was Mrs. Murray the woman he wanted to remember—beautiful, happy, content. Mr. Murray loved telling the story—it was true; but he loved his wife even more than telling the story, and so he would give it up for her. I will do that for you, he almost told her, right there at the table, but she looked him straight in the eye and repeated, “It’s getting late,” and so he didn’t.
WHEN PENELOPE GRADUATED from high school, as she’d promised herself, she read no more and went, instead, to dental hygienist school. The school was in Provo, Utah. Why she should go to Utah instead of staying in Ohio to learn to be a dental hygienist bothered her parents, for reasons that remained mysterious to them. It wasn’t that they were against their children traveling, or that they were against their only daughter going so far away to school; perhaps it was that they were against Utah. But in any case, Penelope pointed out that it was no more expensive to go to dental hygienist school in Utah than it was in Ohio, and besides, she’d never been to Utah before, and wasn’t this a good, practical excuse to go to somewhere you’d never been before? Mr. and Mrs. Murray had no adequate response to this, and so they let her go. And when, over her first Thanksgiving in Utah, Penelope said she wasn’t coming home because she wanted to go skiing, they had no adequate response to that, either, except to say “We’ll miss you,” which she knew, and “You could always go skiing after Thanksgiving,” which she also knew. But she went skiing over Thanksgiving anyway.
Unlike his twin sister, Dudley had enrolled at Ohio State, and unlike her, he did come home for Thanksgiving. He’d been at college for only three months, but already higher education had helped him aggressively develop his worst qualities. For instance, he had always had the thickest neck in his family, but he’d taken up weight lifting at the university and his neck had grown exponentially. It didn’t help that he wore nothing but turtlenecks, turtlenecks with no sweater or shirt on top, and each turtleneck was so tight over his new muscles that he resembled a superhero out of the pages of L.L.Bean.
And then there was his new approach to the famous Thanksgiving story. Dudley had always felt the story deeply and couldn’t understand why Winslow didn’t seem to feel the same way. He often slapped his younger brother when he fell asleep at the table; that much has been told. But to be true, Dudley had always wanted to do something much more severe and permanent than slapping, something more along the lines of bone marrow surgery, in which Winslow would be opened up and forcibly given something he needed to have, whether he wanted it or not.
Thanksgiving dinner that year was quiet, tense, as though the Murrays were all waiting for some person or thing to take the place of Penelope. No one paid much attention to the food itself except to say that it was very good and that it made them very full. Mrs. Murray cleared the table by herself, and when she returned to the table from her dishwashing, Dudley immediately, without preamble, launched into the famous story. Except it wasn’t the story, wasn’t a version or an aspect of the story, but was instead an explication of the lessons to be learned from the story. Dudley had joined a fraternity at OSU, and he had also become a history and political science double major, and so he was much concerned with brotherhood and legacy and blood and the History of Man. “I’ve been thinking about it,” he told them, and this was what he had been thinking: If you were a Murray man, he told them, then you could not give your wife the divorce she wanted, no matter how badly she wanted one. This was what the Murray men should take pride in, the yardstick by which they should measure themselves as Murrays. The Rockefeller men could all make money and find just the right charitable trust to hide it in; the Medicis could be counted on to rule benevolently and patronize the arts; the Kennedys had their full heads of hair and their overlarge teeth and libidos, and their in-the-prime-of-their-life assassinations and tragic airplane, automobile, and playing-football-while-downhill-skiing crashes. “And a Murray man,” Dudley said, raising his voice just like his theatrical father, “will not give his wife the divorce she wants, no matter what.”
They sat there in stunned, queasy silence. Dudley realized immediately that he had ruined both Thanksgiving and the story, which was the exact opposite of what he wanted to do. He loved Thanksgiving and the story very, very much, and now he had ruined them, these things that he loved, and how could one do that? He felt like crying or apologizing, except he had never done either of those things and had no confidence that he could do so now even if he wanted to, and instead he reached over and ruffled Winslow’s hair. But even that gesture—which he’d meant to be fond and instead was violent—he misjudged, wrenching Winslow’s neck in the bargain. He tried one last time to regroup and said, his voice full of mock threat, to Winslow, “When you get married, buddy, you can’t give her a divorce, no matter what. Understand?”
“Whatever,” Winslow said miserably, still rubbing his neck. He was eleven, after all, and as far away from marriage as Cincinnati was from Provo.
“What do you mean, ‘Whatever’?” Dudley said, the anger pouring into his voice as the contrition poured out.
“Who wants some tea?” Mrs. Murray said, and then got up to go to the kitchen before anyone said that they did, or didn’t.
The table was quiet for a minute. Finally, Mr. Murray began asking Dudley questions about the university (he had gone there as well and was much concerned about whether they still taught freshmen the fight song), and after enduring a few minutes of this, Winslow followed his mother into the kitchen. He found her standing at the butcher’s block, her back to him. She was chopping at something with a knife (he couldn’t see the knife, but there is no sound like a sharp, well-balanced knife on a butcher’s block), slowly and deliberately chopping, and each time she did so Winslow could hear his mother suck in a painful, sharp breath, and because of that and because Winslow couldn’t see the hand that wasn’t doing the chopping, either, he had the distinct impression that his mother was chopping off her own fingers, one by one.
Of course, Mrs. Murray was probably just chopping lemon for the tea and in any case, still has all her digits. But the point is, Winslow knew something was wrong, and despite his vow years earlier to detach himself from his family and their story on this night, he was nonetheless having thoughts about his family and maybe the world of families being full of barbaric rituals and traditions designed to leave our humanity behind, rather than enlarge it. Winslow could have asked questions, about the whys of his mother’s crying and maybe even about the hows of preventing his own future wife having at her digits with her own knife. He could have at least gone over and comforted his mother, or tried to. But he didn’t. He didn’t. You couldn’t comfort your mother and pretend that she wasn’t your mother at the same time
. Instead, Winslow quietly backed out of the kitchen and into the dining room, with the rest of the Murray men, where, apparently, he belonged.
PENELOPE DIDN’T COME home next Thanksgiving, either, but there was another woman there for dinner. Her name was Susan; she was Dudley’s new girlfriend. Like Dudley, everything about Susan was big: her head of hair was big and piled high, her laugh was big and throaty, and she was nearly six feet tall and walked with a slight limp from a high school volleyball injury. Susan was more than a match for Dudley: she seemed to be able to deflate him without humiliating him, and the Murrays were all grateful for this. In truth, Dudley seemed grateful for it as well: perhaps he feared what would happen to him, or to someone else, if he weren’t deflated.
The only other thing notable about Susan was that she was from Fort Wayne, Indiana, and spoke about Fort Wayne as if it were some faraway exotic land with its own customs and rituals. “In Fort Wayne,” she told Mrs. Murray, “we make the stuffing inside the turkey.” “In Fort Wayne,” she said, “it doesn’t usually snow on Thanksgiving, but when it does, it’s very pretty.” And so on.
The first year Susan was with them, Mrs. Murray—as though in Susan’s honor—told the most outlandish of the stories in their repertoire. This was after both the books and the ties, about a month before the famous Thanksgiving dinner, and once again Mr. Murray refused to give Mrs. Murray the divorce she wanted, and this of course infuriated Mrs. Murray, and so she began doing things designed to embarrass her husband in front of their neighbors. She did tai chi on the lawn, in her pajamas, every morning at dawn; during full moons or waxing moons or gibbous moons or pretty much any sort of moon, she dressed in dark robes decorated with symbols of the occult, the way a Wiccan might, and howled at the moon, howled and howled, until the neighborhood dogs all joined her in chorus; months in advance of Christmas, she bought or built elaborate, oversized illuminated snowmen, reindeer, Santas, cherubim, baby Jesuses, adult Jesuses, black African Jesuses, Marys, Josephs, mangers, and wise men, and put them on the front lawn, the roof of their house and garage, and dangling from the flagpole—all in violation of strict neighborhood association codes. But Mr. Murray endured it, endured his neighbors’ withering looks, endured the warnings and second warnings of the neighborhood association’s executive board, endured this all quietly, so quietly, until finally she’d exhausted this particular grab bag of eccentricities.
“You didn’t really howl,” Winslow said, as he always did, because he had no memory of the howling, aside from the story itself; it was the only time he ever spoke up, ever participated in the Thanksgiving storytelling. He hated himself for it; each time, he would steel himself to not say “You didn’t really howl.” And each time, it came out of his mouth anyway. It was inexplicable.
“I did,” his mother said, and then, to prove it, began to howl right there at the dinner table. In the past, whenever she howled, Dudley was sure to join in. But Dudley didn’t join in. Mrs. Murray stopped howling and turned to Dudley, who was staring straight ahead, as though there were a particularly infuriating and terrifying stain on the wallpaper. His family knew why: Susan. How had they not realized how odd this story might seem to her? What would she think? Would it drive her away from them, and from Dudley? And if so, would they be stuck with an even more militant version of Dudley? They all leaned toward Susan in anticipation, as if waiting for the jury to render its verdict, for the judge to hand down his sentence.
“Your neighbors must have thought you were a bunch of kooks,” Susan said. “Now, in Fort Wayne . . .”
MR. MURRAY DIDN’T care whether his neighbors thought they were a bunch of kooks or not, and he certainly hadn’t cared back when his wife was lobbying for divorce and he was denying her. Because back then, the Murrays’ neighborhood had become an absolute incubator for divorce; there was no better advertisement for the moving industry than their block, and the block next to theirs, and the block next to that one. Every day there were new refugees out on the sidewalk, surrounded by their belongings, waiting for the moving van to take them and theirs away to their place of exile. One day there was Dr. Whitney and his medical books and his framed degrees and his leather chair and his full-sized skeleton that his children had given him as a joke birthday present; the next day there was Mrs. Huggins and her two moon-faced girls in their identical corduroy jumpers, surrounded by their unbunked bunk beds and serving buffets and antique dressers and boxes and boxes of their suddenly outdated framed family pictures and photo albums.
And there was Mr. Murray, on his front steps, the day after Mrs. Murray had ceased her howling. He could hear his children out in the backyard, playing a complicated game involving an old tennis ball, the side of their garage, and Winslow’s dress shoes as rackets. Mrs. Murray was upstairs in their bedroom crying. She was crying, but at least she was not howling, and at least he hadn’t given her the divorce, and at least their house was still their house, their clan still a clan. You couldn’t say the same of Dr. Whitney, out there on the sidewalk with his few belongings, the totems of his new bachelorhood; you couldn’t say the same of the fractured Huggins family and their sorry furniture. Mrs. Murray was upstairs crying—you could hear the arrhythmic sobs coming from the open window—but Mr. Murray was able to tune out the sobbing and the reasons for the sobbing. Because there were his sorry divorced neighbors on display, and Mr. Murray could point to them and say, That is not me. That is not us. That is not me.
PENELOPE SPENT THE next Thanksgiving in Provo, but finally, on her fourth year away, she came home for the holiday. She was snow-bunny tan and tooth white and generically beautiful in the way Mrs. Murray was in her husband’s stories of when they’d first met. The Murrays had all assumed Utah would have effected some large change on her—deleterious, more likely than not—but that wasn’t the case. No, the only change was that Penelope was constantly bringing her dental training into conversational play. She chided her mother for drinking too much coffee, because of the way it would certainly and permanently stain her teeth; she asked Winslow, who was a pen chewer, if he knew what that would do to a person’s enamel. And speaking of enamel, Penelope was much taken with its hardness. “Do you know how hard enamel is?” she asked after Thanksgiving dinner. No one did. “It’s harder than Daddy’s hard head,” and then she went over and knocked on it, which led to a retelling of the time Mrs. Murray had thrown books at her husband.
Susan was there at this Thanksgiving as well, and had come prepared with tales of her own family’s eccentricity. Once the book-throwing story had run its course, she told the Murrays about the Desmonds (that was her last name) of Fort Wayne. There was her uncle’s family who threw Christmas parties during which, at some prearranged moment, each family member (there were six) would form a line, pluck the stem off a cherry, place the stems in their mouths, and somehow tie the stems into knots, which they would then hold out in front of them—ta-da!—until the guests gave them and their nimble tongues due applause. Her other uncle’s family would every Sunday make a midafternoon meal consisting of French toast and bacon, which they called, for obscure reasons, Monkey Night. And her own family would, at weddings or funerals or family reunions, fire off cannons, miniature cannons with miniature cannonballs, which tore through neighboring clothesline sheets and porch flags and, on occasion, bay windows.
“I don’t believe it,” Penelope said. She had the normal sisterly resistance to her brother’s girlfriend, and she also had some resentment over the story itself, which seemed to Penelope not at all in the spirit of their normal story, which was not at all about eccentricity. What it was about, Penelope couldn’t exactly say, but it certainly wasn’t a story about a cannon, a tiny cannon with its tiny cannonballs; and this certainly wasn’t the time to tell such a story; and Fort Wayne Susan certainly wasn’t the person to tell it the way she was telling it, either, telling like a member of the family, like a substitute member of the family who had taken the place of a genuine member of the family in (it was now obvious) he
r too-long absence. “I don’t believe it,” Penelope said again.
“You don’t believe what?” Susan asked.
“That you fire cannons,” Penelope said. “In your neighborhood. Through your neighbors’ windows.”
“Not on purpose we don’t,” Susan said.
“I don’t believe you even did it accidentally,” Penelope said. “You’d get sued.”
“Not in Fort Wayne you wouldn’t.” It wasn’t Susan who said this, but Dudley. Penelope looked at her twin brother, dumbfounded, for a good thirty seconds. In truth, she had never particularly cared for him one way or the other, except as a twin brother for whom she was required to care. But now that it was clear that he was more Susan’s than his sister’s, Penelope loved Dudley beyond requirement, loved him the way their shared gestation suggested she should have always loved him. “I’m sorry,” Penelope said, to no one in particular, then excused herself.
Susan began to get up to follow her, but then didn’t. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands, clasping them above the table as if in prayer, then fiddling with a napkin, and finally dropping them into her lap. Susan stared at her hands sadly, as if they had just disappointed her.
