I didn’t want to say anything because I liked how, until now, we never spoke in the morning.
You aren’t doing anything in particular here, are you?
What do you mean?
You don’t appear to have any plans.
I don’t want to have plans, I said.
Werner’s mouth turned slowly to a frown.
But where will you go next?
He took a large bite of toast and stared in a way that made me severely uncomfortable and I tried to hide my severe discomfort and I wanted to tell him that this was my plan, to come here and stay here, because life was simple and I could be useful for a place to stay and not be near my husband and not be near my past and not think about time or plans or deadlines or that rust spot in my old shower that bothered me so much or that wild animal with all the teeth charging toward me called the future, and in the months I’d been here my wildebeest had shut up and I did not want to provoke the wildebeest because it had been so long that it had been silent, but I knew I couldn’t explain that to him, explain to him that a large and useless and angry animal was in me—
I haven’t thought about what’s next … It’s just being here, alone.
But you’re not alone here, Elyria. I was alone before you got here but not now—and really, you’re one of those people who needs people. You’re not meant to be alone.
I wanted to throw a plate at his face, but I did not throw a plate or a whole stack of plates at his face. I said, Oh, I don’t know about that, and I looked at my feet and I poured half a cup of hot tea down my throat.
No, you are not a happy person alone, I can tell. You come to a country where you could be alone in four thousand ways, yet you choose to have company, to go to the one place you know a person will be.
I need to finish something in the garden, I said, and I left and I went down to the garden and I walked in circles and realized I had nothing to do there so I hiked up to the highway and went to town and sat on a bench reading the Katherine Mansfield stories that I’d borrowed from Werner (who couldn’t make me leave, couldn’t make me) and I read until it was dark because I didn’t want to talk about plans with Werner and I didn’t want to think about plans by myself because I didn’t have any and wouldn’t make any because there weren’t any to be made—I was here. I was staying here. I wasn’t leaving. There was no reason to leave. So I put my brain elsewhere and when it got dark I realized that all the bars and cafés were full of people who had been becoming more and more exuberant and loud and drunk, and I looked through a window into one and there were people dancing against each other and smiling and drinking and they were all wearing Santa hats: women wearing Santa hats, old men in Santa hats, flimsy-legged boys with thick dreadlocks wearing Santa hats, and why did they want to impersonate someone who only gives and disappears? What did they have to give each other?
On the porch of one of the quiet cafés there was a woman with a long grey braid at a table by herself. Seeing her alone made me wonder if Jaye was alone with her family, if she had one of those families that being with is worse than being alone and maybe that was why she had invited me to her home for Christmas, to have an ally in that fight. I felt a slice of guilt, ate and digested it, then forgot about Jaye. I went up and ordered a beer from the window and I sat at a table near the woman with the grey braid and she looked over at me and smiled and said, It’s Christmas again, my dear. Where does the time go? And she looked up at the tree branches but the tree branches did not answer her, but if they had they would have said that time goes to sleep, it goes insane, it goes on vacation, it goes to Milwaukee, it goes and goes and goes and keeps going, going, gone. Or maybe time is more like a person walking down a street carrying two grocery bags and a grate gives way and that person and their groceries fall to the bottom of the sewer, suddenly elsewhere, suddenly a bloody mess with eggs cracked and splattered and milk spilled because everyone walks around thinking nothing is going to happen right up to the moment when something does happen, just like time, how it’s here one minute and we don’t notice it till it’s gone—no, it’s not like that, I would tell the tree branches if I was the type of person who talked to tree branches or imagined a monologue for a tree’s branches—no, time is a thing that is always almost a thing that is never here and never gone and never yours and never anyone’s and we’re all trying to get a hand clutched tight around time and no one ever will, so can’t we call a truce, now, Time? I am not asking, I am just saying—I’m calling a truce with time. Truce.
* * *
When I got back to Werner’s, so late it was early, all the lights were out and I knew Werner probably didn’t know if I was home or not and probably didn’t care and so I said, See? I’m fine here. It’s like I’m not even here— And I was talking to Werner but he didn’t hear because he wasn’t there, wasn’t listening, but I was actually talking to myself, or to my whole life but my whole life wasn’t listening to me either and my whole life, at that moment, was a garden with no wildebeest tracks in it, not yet, but there was a wildebeest in the forest nearby, I knew, and if I left this calm place I wouldn’t be safe and I just needed to figure out a way to explain this to Werner without really explaining it to Werner, because I’d be fine if I could keep staying here, still and goal-less and husbandless and pastless and peopleless, because when I was here I was both here and not here—I was a person made of things that were fine, no wildebeests, just tomato plants and pumpkin vines and mulch made of seaweed and dirt, a pure piece of earth.
The next morning I didn’t mean to say what I said to Werner at breakfast, and I don’t even know why I was talking, but now I believe that everyone actually does say what they want to say, even when they say, That’s not what I meant, that’s not what I meant to say. A person can only say things that are already in there, waiting for a way out, animals grown sick of fences, and I later wondered if my wildebeest had grown sick of its fence and was ready to migrate even though I wasn’t, but my wildebeest didn’t listen to me, didn’t care what I wanted or what I thought I wanted because the wildebeest was above want, is still above want, is the heaviest thing in me, the thing that still makes all too many choices— That morning I said a phrase I didn’t think I could say anymore:
My husband—
And I paused, inhaled deep, realized I hadn’t spoken those words in a month or more, and recognized a certain look on Werner’s face, a look I had seen on the faces of certain other men when I first mentioned my husband—
… told me that you sleep more just before and just after making important progress in your work, creatively, I mean, your creative work.
We didn’t say anything for a few seconds.
He’s a mathematician, I said.
You said you didn’t have a husband.
I only said I didn’t have a family.
Werner nodded as if I had just told him the punch line to a riddle. We were holding mugs of tea too hot to drink. I held mine close so the steam put sweat on my face.
What does your husband think about you staying in the center of no place at all with an old man you’ve only met once?
He was smiling as if this was another part of the riddle, but I knew the answer to this wasn’t going to make me look like a particularly nice person. Possibly it was too late for niceness. I started to say something but wasn’t sure what to say, so I shut my lips again and I nodded and tried to smile a little. A husband—ha.
He actually doesn’t know exactly where I am.
Where does this husband believe his wife has gone?
It isn’t exactly clear, I said.
And how long will this wife let this husband be uncertain of her whereabouts?
I’ve been trying to understand a way to understand that.
Werner tilted his head to the side like there was some nice music playing.
Oh, Miss Elyria. Whatever has gotten into a person like you? Whatever is it that makes a person do a thing like this?
There was no way to answer that quest
ion and I’m not the kind of person who tries to explain a thing that has no explanation so I went to the garden and I pulled things out of it, until I could feel the sun putting color on my scalp, until the muscles in my back were twitching in little fits, until the weeds were all wilted in a heap, and all I could think was how there would be more weeds tomorrow and wouldn’t it be easier for the world if everything just stayed still, just stopped growing altogether? Maybe it would, but we won’t do that, we won’t stop, plants don’t, people don’t, we keep showing up and living and trying to do something and dying and what was it that all these vines and leaves were struggling toward year after century after eternity? Because, really, they would be strangled dead by another weed or else scorched to death or frozen to death or eaten by possums or bugs or people. And I also wondered what it was that had gotten into me, or a person like me, and I wondered what it was that made me do these things, leave my life so abruptly, and I didn’t know then what it was because I couldn’t know then what I was and I barely know now what it was or still is that made me leave. I think brains might be machines that turn information into feelings and feelings back into decisions and I’ve discovered that my machine has been put together in a strange way and it translates life in a strange way but I have no way to fix this—I’m not a brain-machine fixer, I’m just a haver of a brain, like anyone, and none of us know how to fix ourselves, at least not entirely, not well enough.
Now I know how to sit still, how to accomplish my job, how to walk home, how to order a sandwich at the diner, how to pay a bill, how to sleep in a cold bed, but I still don’t know how to fix my brain, make it turn life information into calm feelings, responsible actions. I know, now, how to ignore everything, how to not talk to strangers, how to not get on one-way planes to countries where I don’t belong and that’s all I can expect of myself these days, but back then that was all beyond me, that was life at a level that I wasn’t able to reach.
* * *
I managed to stay completely out of Werner’s way for a few days—waking early to work, staying in town all day and sneaking in late, but on that last morning he came down to the garden while I was working and it was clear I had lost my use to him.
You are a sad person, he said, and I’m not a person who can tolerate other people’s sadness.
I’m not sad.
It’s very clear that you are.
Maybe you’re projecting. I’m a happy person. I am fine.
I’m not a projector. I am twice your age. I know sadness. Yours is inextricable. It is terminal. I know these things.
I didn’t say anything.
It’s okay, he finally said. I get it. You’re trying to find yourself.
I don’t want to find myself, I said, but I don’t think he heard me.
Who understands what has gotten into women these days—trying to find themselves somewhere, like they’ve split in two and they’re chasing the other part. You’re one of those women who thinks nothing is good enough for you, the entire human experience is not good enough for you and you want something impossible.
I didn’t say anything but my face must have.
I’m sorry, he said in a tone that said he wasn’t actually sorry. It’s really time you left.
22
Werner—
I am asking you to remove yourself from my automobile.
I was still. I stayed in my seat.
Werner, this is ridiculous, you know I don’t have anywhere else to go.
Werner took the keys out of the ignition, got out of the car, opened the trunk, and put my backpack on the sidewalk, gently, as if it was living, then he got back into the car.
Remove yourself from my automobile.
It was hard not to take it personally, how fast he drove away.
A man sitting on the library steps waved as if he’d been expecting me to show up. I looked at him and half-waved back, but then he realized that we didn’t know each other so he shrugged and turned back to talk to the man sitting beside him.
Light left the sky quickly when a fat cloud came. A yellow phone booth across the road was so bright, I wondered if it had just been painted.
It was possible, I thought, that my husband had simply replaced me after I left him, that he had simply gone out and found another woman, a simple fix for his wifeless life. Someone to understand his situation, to understand his needs as a human man in this world. I thought of my husband sitting on a bench looking at the river down the way. I thought of him running in the snow. I thought of him eating an apple and how his jaw could stretch out almost like a snake’s, fitting a whole half of it in his mouth, then he’d chew for a full five minutes as he clacked at his blackboard. Across, across, across, and pause, then across some more, next line, more acrossing. I could see him exactly as he had been on that night months before (a Tuesday, I think) when I had gone to bed early but I woke up in the middle of the night, got out of bed for a glass of water, and stopped at the doorway of his office to look at him writing on his blackboard, clacking away at it like he was some kind of machine, and as I watched him doing his calculations it occurred to me that I did love him and that despite loving him I was still leaving and isn’t that what people always roll their eyes at, say, That doesn’t make sense, say, It’s misguided, selfish, stupid, whatever. The little lamp in the corner of my husband’s office made his fair skin seem golden and he smiled at me and I thought this was how I would always remember him. This is the little piece of my husband that I will store permanently in myself.
Did it wake you? Am I working too loudly?
No, I like it. It’s a good noise.
I thought you hated the chalkboard.
I do, but the sound of you putting things on it makes it okay.
I know that when other memories of my husband have gone threadbare and splintered, this will be the one that lives. When I am eighty and explaining my life to someone much younger I will pause when I mention my first marriage and this will be the version of my husband that I remember. Smiling his tiny smile, his I-am-in-the-middle-of-something-but-I-love-you smile.
Remembering this, I put myself inside that phone booth and didn’t expect him to answer, or if he did I was expecting not to recognize his voice, like he might be using a new one by now. But that didn’t happen. He answered. He said hello like there had been no change in his life, like his life had gone on completely and normally without me being around, like he could just keep waking up and having coffee and clacking at the blackboard and jogging in the park and saying the same words in the same way and sleeping on the same side of the bed and making the same steaks in his skillet and turning on the lights in the same bedroom when the sun went down and reading a book in his same reading chair and all the while his voice wouldn’t get up and leave his throat and his body wouldn’t take itself apart and fall into a little heap on the floor and his brain wouldn’t turn to mud and pour out of his ears. He could do all the things that he did when I was there, even when he was doing those things without me being there.
Hello, he said.
Hello? he said.
I said his name.
I said, It’s Elyria.
He said, Ha.
Then we were quiet for I don’t know how long. A big truck drove by. The man who was driving was hooting at the radio, the sound of a crowd cheering.
I went to New Zealand.
I know.
And I should have told you.
My husband inhaled fast, tried to make a word and didn’t.
Well? he asked.
Well, what?
Do you have something to say?
I don’t know.
You don’t know.
I’m not sure.
He did the inhale thing again. Well, if it’s all the same to you I’m going to get back to work now. The next time you call you might want to have something to say.
And the line went dead and a machine woman started speaking, asking for more money, saying, Please, saying, Have a nice day.
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I slung my backpack on, walked down an alley, put my backpack down, and crouched over it to have an almost-human moment. I felt like I got close to being a rational person right then, phlegm dripping in my throat, face turning red. In this situation, any rational person would be hurt, would feel lost, and being hurt and feeling lost would cause her to do a real thing, to really cry. A rational person would feel upset instead of just knowing she was upset. Her feelings would show up in her body as if she had no choice in the matter and this would cause her to realize she needed to find a way back to her home, to her real life that was somehow going on without her. She would immediately go to an airport and buy a plane ticket. She would start practicing her apologies on the flight and when she got back home she would start seeing a therapist to prove to herself and everyone else how sorry she was, how wrong she was, how much she needed help. And if she was lucky, her husband would work hard to forgive her—he would work at forgiveness every day like it was an extremely difficult equation. And slowly, eventually, they would go back to being okay, to being a two-piece team moving through life. And when this rational person was in therapy she would talk about things like her dead sister and her monster mother—and where the hell was her father, anyway?—and through all this she would make progress in her therapy and when someone asked how she was she would say, I am okay; I’m in therapy; we’re sorting things out; we’re making progress. But first this rational person would need to get to an airport and buy a plane ticket straight back home and before she could do that she would need to have the courage to do that and before she could have the courage she would need to want to have the courage, to need to want to try to have the courage to say, I give up, I was wrong, take me home.
In my almost-human moment, I felt the tears building up behind my eyes, bubbling there, humming like a teakettle before it boils, but I didn’t cry. Blood rushed around in my body like it was being chased, but then it stopped—maybe it realized there is nowhere for blood to go but around and around and as I thought this I knew I wasn’t always a rational person, or even a nice one. I stood up straight, put myself back in order, and tried to figure out where to go next.
Nobody Is Ever Missing Page 9
