by Ben Marcus
Her voice was husky and coarse; it reeked of knowledge and confidence. Her T-shirt said “Chicks with Balls.” She was twenty-two years old.
She stayed for a week, discharging her strange jangling beauty into the house and changing the molecules of its air. She talked about the girls she shared an apartment with, her job at a coffee shop, how Californians were different from Michiganders. She talked about her friends: Lorraine, who was so pretty men fell off their bicycles as they twisted their bodies for a better look at her; Judy, a martial-arts expert; and Meredith, who was raising a child with her husband, Angela. She talked of poetry readings, ceramics classes, workshops on piercing.
He realized, as he watched her, that she was now doing things that were as bad as or worse than the things that had made him angry at her five years before, yet they didn’t quarrel. It seemed that a large white space existed between him and her, and that it was impossible to enter this space or to argue across it. Besides, she might never come back if he yelled at her.
Instead, he watched her, puzzling at the metamorphosis she had undergone. First she had been a beautiful, happy child turned homely, snotty, miserable adolescent. From there she had become a martinet girl with the eyes of a stifled pervert. Now she was a vibrant imp, living, it seemed, in a world constructed of topsy-turvy junk pasted with rhinestones. Where had these three different people come from? Not even Marsha, who had spent so much time with her as a child, could trace the genesis of the new Kitty from the old one. Sometimes he bitterly reflected that he and Marsha weren’t even real parents anymore but bereft old people rattling around in a house, connected not to a real child who was going to college, or who at least had some kind of understandable life, but to a changeling who was the product of only their most obscure quirks, a being who came from recesses that neither of them suspected they’d had.
* * *
There were only a few cars in the parking lot. He wheeled through it with pointless deliberation before parking near the drugstore. He spent irritating seconds searching for Self, until he realized that its airbrushed cover girl was grinning right at him. He stormed the table of contents, then headed for the back of the magazine. “Speak Easy” was written sideways across the top of the page in round turquoise letters. At the bottom was his daughter’s name in a little box. “Kitty Thorne is a ceramic artist living in South Carolina.” His hands were trembling.
It was hard for him to rationally ingest the beginning paragraphs, which seemed, incredibly, to be about a phone conversation they’d had some time ago about the emptiness and selfishness of people who have sex but don’t get married and have children. A few phrases stood out clearly: “… my father may love me but he doesn’t love the way I live.” “… even more complicated because I’m gay.” “… because it still hurts me.”
For reasons he didn’t understand, he felt a nervous smile tremble under his skin. He suppressed it.
“This hurt has its roots deep in our relationship, starting, I think, when I was a teenager.”
He was horribly aware of being in public, so he paid for the thing and took it out to the car. He drove slowly to another spot in the lot, as far away from the drugstore as possible, picked up the magazine, and began again. She described the “terrible difficulties” between him and her. She recounted, briefly and with hieroglyphic politeness, the fighting, the running away, the return, the tacit reconciliation.
“There is an emotional distance that we have both accepted and chosen to work around, hoping the occasional contact—love, anger, something—will get through.”
He put the magazine down and looked out the window. It was near dusk; most of the stores in the little mall were closed. There were only two other cars in the parking lot, and a big, slow, frowning woman with two grocery bags was getting ready to drive one away. He was parked before a weedy piece of land at the edge of the lot. In it were rough, picky weeds spread out like big green tarantulas, young yellow dandelions, frail old dandelions, and bunches of tough blue chickweed. Even in his distress he vaguely appreciated the beauty of the blue weeds against the cool white-and-gray sky. For a moment the sound of insects comforted him. Images of Kitty passed through his memory with terrible speed: her nine-year-old forehead bent over her dish of ice cream, her tiny nightgowned form ran up the stairs, her ringed hand brushed her face, the keys on her belt jiggled as she walked her slow blue-jeaned walk away from the house. Gone, all gone.
The article went on to describe how Kitty hung up the phone feeling frustrated and then listed all the things she could’ve said to him to let him know how hurt she was, paving the way for “real communication”; it was all in ghastly talk-show language. He was unable to put these words together with the Kitty he had last seen lounging around the house. She was twenty-eight now, and she no longer dyed her hair or wore jewels in her nose. Her demeanor was serious, bookish, almost old-maidish. Once, he’d overheard her saying to Marsha, “So then this Italian girl gives me the once-over and says to Joanne, ‘You ’ang around with too many Wasp.’ And I said, ‘I’m not a Wasp, I’m white trash.’ ”
“Speak for yourself,” he’d said.
“If the worst occurred and my father was unable to respond to me in kind, I still would have done a good thing. I would have acknowledged my own needs and created the possibility to connect with what therapists call ‘the good parent’ in myself.”
Well, if that was the kind of thing she was going to say to him, he was relieved she hadn’t said it. But if she hadn’t said it to him, why was she saying it to the rest of the country?
He turned on the radio. It sang: “Try to remember, and if you remember, then follow, follow.” He turned it off. The interrupted dream echoed faintly. He closed his eyes. When he was nine or ten, an uncle of his had told him, “Everybody makes his own world. You see what you want to see and hear what you want to hear. You can do it right now. If you blink ten times and then close your eyes real tight, you can see anything you want to see in front of you.” He’d tried it, rather halfheartedly, and hadn’t seen anything but the vague suggestion of a yellowish-white ball moving creepily through the dark. At the time, he’d thought it was perhaps because he hadn’t tried hard enough.
He had told Kitty to do the same thing, or something like it, when she was eight or nine. They were sitting on the back porch in striped lawn chairs, holding hands and watching the fireflies turn on and off.
She closed her eyes for a long time. Then very seriously, she said, “I see big balls of color, like shaggy flowers. They’re pink and red and turquoise. I see an island with palm trees and pink rocks. There’s dolphins and mermaids swimming in the water around it.” He’d been almost awed by her belief in this impossible vision. Then he was sad, because she would never see what she wanted to see. Then he thought she was sort of stupid, even for a kid.
His memory flashed back to his boyhood. He was walking down the middle of the street at dusk, sweating lightly after a basketball game. There were crickets and the muted barks of dogs and the low, affirming mumble of people on their front porches. Securely held by the warm night and its sounds, he felt an exquisite blend of happiness and sorrow that life could contain this perfect moment, and a sadness that he would soon arrive home, walk into bright light, and be on his way into the next day, with its loud noise and alarming possibility. He resolved to hold this evening walk in his mind forever, to imprint in a permanent place all the sensations that occurred to him as he walked by the Oatlanders’ house, so that he could always take them out and look at them. He dimly recalled feeling that if he could successfully do that, he could stop time and hold it.
* * *
He knew he had to go home soon. He didn’t want to talk about the article with Marsha, but the idea of sitting in the house with her and not talking about it was hard to bear. He imagined the conversation grinding into being, a future conversation with Kitty gestating within it. The conversation was a vast, complex machine like those that occasionally appeared in his drea
ms; if he could only pull the switch, everything would be all right, but he felt too stupefied by the weight and complexity of the thing to do so. Besides, in this case, everything might not be all right. He put the magazine under his seat and started the car.
Marsha was in her armchair, reading. She looked up, and the expression on her face seemed like the result of internal conflict as complicated and strong as his own, but cross-pulled in different directions, uncomprehending of him and what he knew. In his mind, he withdrew from her so quickly that for a moment the familiar room was fraught with the inexplicable horror of a banal nightmare. Then the ordinariness of the scene threw the extraordinary event of the day into relief, and he felt so angry and bewildered he could’ve howled.
“Everything all right, Stew?” asked Marsha.
“No, nothing is all right. I’m a tired old man in a shitty world I don’t want to be in. I go out there, it’s like walking on knives. Everything is an attack—the ugliness, the cheapness, the rudeness, everything.” He sensed her withdrawing from him into her own world of disgruntlement, her lips drawn together in that look of exasperated perseverance she’d gotten from her mother. Like Kitty, like everyone else, she was leaving him. “I don’t have a real daughter, and I don’t have a real wife who’s here with me, because she’s too busy running around on some—”
“We’ve been through this before. We agreed I could—”
“That was different! That was when we had two cars!” His voice tore through his throat in a jagged whiplash and came out a cracked half scream. “I don’t have a car, remember? That means I’m stranded, all alone for hours, and Norm Pisarro can call me up and casually tell me that my lesbian daughter has just betrayed me in a national magazine and what do I think about that?” He wanted to punch the wall until his hand was bloody. He wanted Kitty to see the blood. Marsha’s expression broke into soft, openmouthed consternation. The helplessness of it made his anger seem huge and terrible, then impotent and helpless itself. He sat down on the couch and, instead of anger, felt pain.
“What did Kitty do? What happened? What does Norm have—”
“She wrote an article in Self magazine about being a lesbian and her problems and something to do with me. I don’t know; I could barely read the crap.”
Marsha looked down at her nails.
He looked at her and saw the aged beauty of her ivory skin, sagging under the weight of her years and her cockeyed bifocals, the emotional receptivity of her face, the dark down on her upper lip, the childish pearl buttons of her sweater, only the top button done.
“I’m surprised at Norm, that he would call you like that.”
“Oh, who the hell knows what he thought.” His heart was soothed and slowed by her words, even if they didn’t address its real unhappiness.
“Here,” she said. “Let me rub your shoulders.”
He allowed her to approach him, and they sat sideways on the couch, his weight balanced on the edge by his awkwardly planted legs, she sitting primly on one hip with her legs tightly crossed. The discomfort of the position negated the practical value of the massage, but he welcomed her touch. Marsha had strong, intelligent hands that spoke to his muscles of deep safety and love and the delight of physical life. In her effort, she leaned close, and her sweatered breast touched him, releasing his tension almost against his will. Through half-closed eyes he observed her sneakers on the floor—he could not quite get over this phenomenon of adult women wearing what had been boys’ shoes—in the dim light, one toe atop the other as though cuddling, their laces in pretty disorganization.
Poor Kitty. It hadn’t really been so bad that she hadn’t set the table on time. He couldn’t remember why he and Marsha had been so angry over the table. Unless it was Kitty’s coldness, her always turning away, her sarcastic voice. But she was a teenager, and that’s what teenagers did. Well, it was too bad, but it couldn’t be helped now.
He thought of his father. That was too bad too, and nobody was writing articles about that. There had been a distance between them, so great and so absolute that the word “distance” seemed inadequate to describe it. But that was probably because he had known his father only when he was a very young child; if his father had lived longer, perhaps they would’ve become closer. He could recall his father’s face clearly only at the breakfast table, where it appeared silent and still except for lip and jaw motions, comforting in its constancy. His father ate his oatmeal with one hand working the spoon, one elbow on the table, eyes down, sometimes his other hand holding a cold rag to his head, which always hurt with what seemed to be a noble pain, willingly taken on with his duties as a husband and father. He had loved to stare at the big face with its deep lines and long earlobes, its thin lips and loose, loopily chewing jaws. Its almost godlike stillness and expressionlessness filled him with admiration and reassurance, until one day his father slowly looked up from his cereal, met his eyes, and said, “Stop staring at me, you little shit.”
In the other memories, his father was a large, heavy body with a vague oblong face. He saw him sleeping in the armchair in the living room, his large, hairy-knuckled hands grazing the floor. He saw him walking up the front walk with the quick, clipped steps that he always used coming home from work, the straight-backed choppy gait that gave the big body an awesome mechanicalness. His shirt was wet under the arms, his head was down, the eyes were abstracted but alert, as though keeping careful watch on the outside world in case something nasty came at him while he attended to the more important business inside.
“The good parent in yourself.”
What did the well-meaning idiots who thought of these phrases mean by them? When a father dies, he is gone; there is no tiny, smiling daddy who appears, waving happily, in a secret pocket in your chest. Some kinds of loss are absolute. And no amount of self-realization or self-expression will change that.
As if she had heard him, Marsha urgently pressed her weight into her hands and applied all her strength to relaxing his muscles. Her sweat and scented deodorant filtered through her sweater, which added its muted wooliness to her smell. “All righty!” She rubbed his shoulders and briskly patted him. He reached back and touched her hand in thanks.
Across from where they sat had once been a red chair, and in it had once sat Kitty, looking away from him, her fist hiding her face.
“You’re a lesbian? Fine,” he said. “You mean nothing to me. You walk out that door, it doesn’t matter. And if you come back in, I’m going to spit in your face. I don’t care if I’m on my deathbed, I’ll still have the energy to spit in your face.”
She did not move when he said that. Tears ran over her fist and down her arm, but she didn’t look at him.
Marsha’s hands lingered on him for a moment. Then she moved and sat away from him on the couch.
SOMEONE TO TALK TO
DEBORAH EISENBERG
“Are you going to be all right, Aaron?” Caroline said.
Shapiro saw himself, as if in a dream, standing on a dark shore. “Yes,” he heard himself say.
“Are you sure?” Caroline said.
Lady Chatterley leaned herself thuggishly against Shapiro’s shin and began to purr. “Hello, there,” he said. He reached down and patted her gingerly.
Caroline hesitated at the door, then took a few steps back toward Shapiro, and her delicious, clean fragrance spilled over him. “Your big concert’s in less than a month now …” She tilted her head and managed a little smile.
Was she going to touch him? Shapiro went rigid with alarm, but she just looked vaguely around the room. “You know, it’s supposed to be a beautiful country …” She scooped up Lady Chatterley and nuzzled the orange fur. “Chat. Dear little Chat. Are you going to take care of Aaron?” She took a paw in her hand. “Are you?”
Lady Chatterley wrenched herself free and bounded back to the floor. Caroline’s eyes—like Lady Chatterley’s—were large and light and spoked with black. Her small face was pale, always, as though with shock.
&nbs
p; “Shall I help you with your things?” Shapiro said.
There was really only one suitcase, a good one—leather, old, genteel—which had probably accompanied Caroline to college; the rest had gone on before. “No need,” she said. Tears wavered momentarily in her eyes. “Jim’s picking me up.”
The suitcase appeared to be heavy. Shapiro watched Caroline’s thin legs as she struggled slightly with it. At the door she turned back. “Aaron?” she said.
He waited to hear himself answer, but this time no words came.
“Aaron, I know this is probably not what you want to hear right now, but I think it’s important for me to say it—I’ll always care about you, you know. I hope you know that.”
Shapiro awoke suddenly and unpleasantly, as though a crateful of fruits had been emptied out on him. There was an unfamiliar wall next to him, and the window was all wrong. He heard footsteps, a snicker. A hotel room wobbled into place around him—yes, Richard Penwad would be coming to pick him up, and Caroline wasn’t even in this country.
The night had been crowded with Caroline and endless versions of her departure—dreamed, reversed in dreams, modified, amended, transfigured, made tender and transcendently beautiful as though it had been an act of sacral purification. For a week or so he had been free of her, or at least anesthetized. But this morning he was battered by her absence; in this distant place his body and mind didn’t know how to protect themselves.
As soon as she’d left that day, he’d closed his eyes. An afterimage of the door glowed. When he’d opened his eyes again, the room seemed strange in an undetectable way, as though he were seeing it after a hiatus of years. Hesitantly, he brushed cat fur from the armchair and sat down.
Six years. Six years of life that belonged to them both, out the door in the form of Caroline’s fragile person. If only there’d been less … tension about money. Caroline, from many generations of a background she referred to as “comfortable,” was deeply sympathetic with, and at the same time deeply insensitive to, the distress of others. “Why not, Aaron?” she would say. “Why don’t I just take care of the rent from now on?” Or, when she felt like going to some morbidly expensive restaurant, “I could treat. Wouldn’t it be fun, for a change? Of course”—she would gaze at him with concern—“if you’re not going to enjoy it …” Sometimes, when she noticed him grimly going through the mail or eyeing the telephone, she would say gently, “Something will turn up.”
