Stranger, Father, Beloved

by Taylor Larsen

  She opened her eyes and looked up at Dari, who was staring down at her, clear-eyed and smiling. Ryan snapped her eyes back shut.

  “Try to relax your head. Here, I’ll cradle your head in my hands. Try to soften your neck.” With surprising skill, the tiny hands scooped under her neck and held it. Ryan’s head began to spin, and her legs went numb. She wanted to slip into sleep but firmly jerked herself back from the edge each time she began to drift off. Dari released one hand, and she heard a gently spraying sound above her head as she released aromatherapy into the air. An earthy smell tinged with sweetness wafted down. Quickly, both hands were moving under her neck, rubbing, pulling, and she felt suddenly delirious. Exploding images accelerated through her mind, and she tingled all over. Then her head was placed back down with tenderness, and Dari had gone on to someone else.

  * * *

  After the class, Ryan did feel energized, but she did not admit it to Jill. Instead she shrugged her shoulders and gave a little yawn; she couldn’t bring herself to tell Jill she had actually liked the class. She didn’t feel like returning home, so she suggested to Jill that they surprise Carol by attending one of her games. While they were cruising the streets in Jill’s beat-up Toyota, Ryan felt the sudden urge to stop by, pick up Max, and bring him out into the sunshine. When they pulled up to Ryan’s house and went inside, Max was playing on the living room rug with his giant plastic insect toys—a bee, an ant, a caterpillar, and a fly. The toys could be disassembled and reassembled to make stranger and stranger insect hybrids. Max ran to her carrying a giant ant with glittery wings and threw his arms around her waist.

  Her mom came into the living room from the kitchen after hearing them come in. Ryan had noticed that Jill always nodded excessively whenever she was around Ryan’s parents. She looked around a lot and nodded her head as if approving of all she saw.

  Max stayed close to Ryan’s side, watching her every move. Boredom hung thickly in the air, and it was clear he was relieved to be getting out of there. He had on one of Ryan’s favorite outfits of his, green corduroys and a red-and-black-striped shirt, with tiny brown shoes that complemented the pants nicely. He seemed hungry for her attention. In the car, whenever she looked into the backseat, he was staring at her. Only when she would beam at him would he mimic the full, unbridled expression he saw on her lips and grin in response. Often, even as a toddler, he had looked to her, watched her to see how to act, what to do. He would follow her around and see where she decided to sit and how she held her body. Then he would tentatively come around to where she was and sit in the same position next to her.

  At the game he sat on the bleachers and seemed stunned. It was a sunny day, with a brisk wind, and the sun reflected harshly off the silver bleachers. Carol didn’t yet know they were there to see her. She charged forward and blasted toward her destination goal, time after time. When the crowd roared for the team, Max looked up at Ryan quizzically and then, after a delay, would raise his two fists and twist up his face and say “Ahhh . . . rrrr.”

  Sitting there, Ryan felt that they were a family, had always been one. Carol was also a member of the family, for there is always a downer member of a group, a reminder of how not to be, and Carol was it for them. For better or for worse, they were linked. Ryan scooped Max up onto her lap, and he lay back. She had the distinct impression that he was trying to melt into her, merge with her, and, out in the sunshine, this didn’t bother her.

  When the three of them approached Carol after the game, she seemed pleased, especially since Max was there. Carol had seen him grow up, had even been there the day he had been brought back from the hospital—that was how inseparable the girls used to be. The four of them headed for the parking lot and decided to stop by the ice-cream stand on their way back to Jill’s. Carol, in her gray station wagon, followed Jill’s car, and they returned to the house with cones.

  They all sat in the living room and played Parcheesi. The presence of Max united them all. Max was more animated than usual, and Ryan felt confirmed that it was good to get him out of the dreary energy of their house and into the normality of Jill’s. Jill fried up some burgers, and they ate an early supper. As dusk was approaching, they put in one of Carol’s old movies, about a pack of wolves that raise a little boy, and they all settled comfortably around the TV. Carol lay on the rug with some pillows, while Ryan and Max lay on the couch. Jill sat in an armchair beside them. Midway through the movie, as both Carol and Max were dozing, the phone rang. Ryan sauntered over and picked up the receiver.

  “Ryan, why didn’t you call? I was getting worried.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom, I totally forgot. Max is asleep. Can I bring him back in the morning? He seems happier than he’s been in months.”

  “We shouldn’t put such a burden on Jill. You’re over there so much anyway. Why don’t you two come home?”

  “It’s no big deal. Jill doesn’t care. She likes having us here.”

  “Okay, fine. Come back in the morning. But Ryan, we are having a talk tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Nancy felt a tremor of anger when it occurred to her that neither Jill nor her daughter had thought to invite her along to the game that day. The thought had never entered their minds because she never entered their minds, except as a means to an end. A small pebble of sadness plunked down into her belly. Every time she was not included, welcomed in, every time other people’s eyes passed over her in search of someone else, someone better, it registered in her, a little check mark next to some truth.

  She thought back to earlier in the day, when Ryan and Jill had come by for Max. They had seemed like a guilty pair, guilty of something. Nancy had tried to make conversation with Jill, as she always did.

  “Great to see you, Jill. It’s been a while—almost a year,” Nancy had said, trying to make eye contact with her.

  “Yep, it has,” Jill had said and nodded as she scanned the living room and then rested her eyes on Max.

  “Mom, can we take Max to see Carol’s lacrosse game? I’ll take his inhalers and everything. He never gets out much. Let me take him.”

  “Mom, I want to go!” He had looked into his mother’s eyes, pleadingly. It always bothered Nancy that Max expected her to say no to things, or to be unreasonable, when she never was. As if she would withhold the thing that he wanted. She always let him do whatever he wanted. And he always expected her to punish him when he made a mistake, and she never did. Where had this come from? To flinch when there was no danger present—none of it made any sense.

  “Sure, you can take him.” She had packed a small backpack for Max, some juice, a snack, and a coloring book and markers in case he needed a way to occupy himself. Jill stood by the couch in her baggy linen pants and tank top, and Nancy noticed the sweat-stained circles under her armpits. She never would have noticed these kinds of things in the past, but being married to Michael had trained her to look for imperfections. Over the years, his gaze had landed heavily upon her, day after day, and the comments on her choice of clothes or choice of decorations in the house had trained her to look for what was right and best and to abhor things that fell short. She began to wear more expensive sweaters and decorated their home based on ideas from the magazines they received in the mail in the hope that that heavy gaze would look elsewhere or soften into appreciation. Now she realized she had caught the bug herself, pitying those in her view who were less than perfect.

  “Would you like to sit down, Jill, and have some lemonade or water?”

  “Oh, no, but thanks all the same.” Jill had never accepted her offers of beverages on the rare occasions she had been to the house. It was rude to say no every time something was offered. It showed bad character, Nancy thought. Jill looked like an oversized teenager, big boned and clueless about fashion. Nancy didn’t know what her daughter saw in this woman—why she was more preferable company than herself.

  * * *

  Nancy had had the en
tire day free after Max left. Book club was that afternoon, but thinking about it gave her no pleasure and she decided to skip it. That month’s book was Miranda’s pick, and hers were always painfully weird and experimental, almost incomprehensible. Nancy always dreaded the month when Miranda selected the book and led the discussion. She felt Miranda was showing off her graduate degree by choosing books that no one but she understood or enjoyed. The other three women in the group were appeasing, tried hard to show that the themes were things they could grapple with, but they never convinced Nancy. She had joined the group three years ago because Michael’s friends’ wives were in book clubs, and Nancy, after all, had always enjoyed a good story.

  That week they were reading something called Fall the Tower by a Chinese author, and Nancy was agitated by each and every word of it. The main character, a man named Scrub, was obsessed with a tower he had once seen on a trip with his parents when he was six. There were twenty-nine pages where he discussed this tower in bed with a woman named Gigi after they finished having sex. She kept asking him questions about it, entranced by his reveries and excited by his tales of the secret rooms in the tower, tales he had concocted entirely in his own mind. They took breaks from the discussion to resume fornication, both incredibly aroused by the tower. It was absolute nonsense.

  Nancy knew that Miranda would say something like “The tower is the symbolic thrust of this intellectual exploration.” Her statements were growing more and more tiresome. It was just a chance for the “ladies” to show off their “college” talk. Nancy was embarrassed by never having attended college, but with each passing book session, she detested more and more the high opinions of the educated. She wanted a good old-fashioned story, clearly laid out, with a hero and a heroine, a villain, and a clear plot. Why did modern plots seem to stray so far from that time-tested formula?

  She had loved reading fairy tales to Ryan and Max every night. Michael had hated reading simplistic children’s stories—it was as if he couldn’t wait until the kids were older and he could begin his tutorial on literature. It was a tough year when Ryan had stopped wanting Nancy to read to her at night, when she was around seven years old. She could remember clearly a series of yawns, and even some mean-spirited giggling, as Ryan had grown bored with her story.

  Ryan had gotten up from the bed and said, “I’m going to go downstairs to get some milk.”

  After fifteen minutes, she hadn’t come back, and when Nancy went downstairs, the kitchen was empty. Michael’s study door was closed, but she could hear through it the murmuring of voices. When she’d opened the door, Ryan was on Michael’s lap and he was reading to her from Treasure Island. She had her eyes closed, imagining each scene. They both had looked up at her, and she could sense the guilty pleasure they took in each other’s company. Nancy had pretended to blow the whole thing off—who was she to care who her child picked to read to her? But really she was crushed. That evening, in her mind, had been the beginning of a separation, a gap between herself and her husband, as well as one between herself and her daughter, one that had never been repaired.

  Even though Ryan and Michael were no longer close to each other, she felt she had permanently lost her connection to each of them. It was subtle, but the roots of disconnection grew deeper and deeper. Who would have thought that something so innocent as books and education could cause her to feel isolated from her own family?

  Maybe when Max reached high school, he would turn on her also. Once he began to intellectualize, he would see her differently. The objective facts of her status and background would dwarf her motherly charms. Max would become more and more of a bookworm. If he had problems, he would go to Michael for help, Michael who had been so cold to him all these years. The coldness would be forgotten as the first six years of his life became submerged in the realm of the unconscious.

  She picked up Fall the Tower and wondered whether she could bring herself to go to the meeting. The book had had to be specially ordered and picked up at a tiny local bookstore, because an independent press had published it. Nancy felt suspicious when she went to buy it, as people are when they purchase something that isn’t of their own taste.

  She hadn’t finished it and couldn’t bear the thought of the two-hour discussion with Miranda. She wouldn’t go; she resigned herself to it. The day would be empty otherwise, but she would fill it somehow.

  She finished washing the dishes in the sink and then went up to her bedroom and put two of Michael’s shirts in the laundry. She thought about her parents and what they’d used to do on Saturdays when she was younger. Saturday had been treated in a similar manner to the other days of the week. The children’s chores were expected to be completed before lunch. Nancy had had to share a bedroom with two of her sisters, both older, so she had never had any privacy. The house had one bathroom, its lock eternally broken. Sitting on the toilet was an anxiety-ridden experience, both eyes on the knob so that in case it turned, she could jump and slam it shut before anyone walked in. There were usually voices in the hallways of their small house, and one of her brothers and sisters was always caught up in some drama, which would be announced to whoever would listen in the kitchen.

  She had looked up to her brother Dale, with his glittering blue eyes, who was the most charming and handsome one in their family. Dale was softer and kinder than the rest of them, and when he had moved to Richmond upon turning eighteen, she had thrown a fit. It had taken her years to get over his leaving, as she had taken it as a personal slight. The house seemed smaller without him there, and her family members irritated her more than ever. Suddenly all their loud voices and rude manners seemed horrific, and she became withdrawn and moody until high school, when she was finally allowed to stay out later.

  Now she had space and silence, endless amounts inside and outside. The house had a voluminous sequence of rooms, many of which were uncomfortable and stiff, and the temperature was forever a degree or two too cold. The woods beyond the yard had a haunted quality, an unidentifiable angst or shiftiness. One tree sat in the far-right section of the yard, and its isolated position made it seem like a statue of sorts, watching over the solemnity, a guardian of absence.

  There were days when she wanted to weep with gratitude for her good fortune and days when she missed the busy atmosphere of her childhood home. She would have given anything to have the vacuum filled with messy and straightforward people who came and went with ease. Their current house was decorated like a museum, cold and unsettling, and she longed for one room that was completely hers that she could break in to her liking, one that would be soft and comfortable, with bright, cheery colors.

  Michael’s upbringing had been quite different from her own, so he was used to all the empty rooms and cool beauty. Brought up in a large home in Connecticut where his mother still lived, it had been just Michael and his sister, each with his and her own areas of the house, and a maid who came in and put all in order twice a week.

  Nancy’s guilty pleasure had been reading V. C. Andrews books. With all their grandeur, they told tales of huge lonely mansions and high-society, pampered individuals, each with a crippling private loneliness no one but the reader could understand. When she had first met Michael, he had reminded her of some of the characters from the books. She liked to place him in the settings of the novels she had read. When she had finally seen his parents’ home, she had to admit that some part of her was disappointed. Yes, it was grand and beautifully furnished and quite large, but their home was no mansion and was diminished in her mind by the gothic halls of V. C. Andrews.

  Michael had used to tease her about those kinds of books when they were first married. She had read a passage aloud to him in bed one night, and they had both had a good laugh. But secretly, as she read it, the words had seemed powerful to her and commanded her attention. She vaguely remembered the passage—it involved one of her favorite characters, Anne, a stepchild of the family, who was praised for her beauty. She was desc
ending the staircase into one of the long halls at night and looked through the huge windowpane at the moonlight. She was alone and in the process of contemplating the events of the last night. Her virginity had been coaxed from her, and she began to know that the man who had taken it would no longer want her. She remembered a specific line that Michael had repeated and laughed over: “She was no longer the keeper of the treasure in the eyes of men.” It had struck her as sad, and as overly sentimental as it was, she had loved it.

  How different her life would have been if she had married her former boyfriend, Tim. She would still be living in West Virginia and would be around many of her high school friends and their husbands. She would know the business of everyone in town and would have a smaller house and a mortgage to pay off and would be working, most likely as a teacher for the elementary school or in a day-care center. Tim would have made a good husband, although she would have become bored with him. She would have been queen bee, the beloved rather than the lover. But she would have always wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t left and gone to live near the university. She had gone looking for something better. If she had stayed with Tim, she would have always wondered if she could have done better.