This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories

by Johanna Skibsrud

  But men, Fay thought, were very often oblivious to these, and other, things.

  Almost overnight, however, after the illness, Eva grew up. Not entirely (there were strangenesses, things that worried Fay still), but, for the most part, Eva became, in teenagehood, a teenager. No one could have been happier than Fay when Eva stormed through the house in a violent temper, or suddenly began talking on the phone at all hours to God-knows-who. This, Fay told herself, was normal. This was the manageable stuff. The old irregularities lingered, of course—but they manifested themselves in small ways, now. She had a terrific fear of insects, for example. She wouldn’t scream or run, like Fay would sometimes, but would instead grow very pale and still until someone noticed and steered her from the room. Then there were the “fad” fears, which were as irritating as they were troubling. One week, for example, Eva would be so afraid of dying in a road accident that she would refuse to ride in the car—but then the next week, and with no seeming transition, the car would be forgotten, and it was elevators that she steered away from. Then it would be the curb of the road, and several months would go by in which she left a wide berth between herself and the street, making crossing at intersections difficult. Still, though, as time passed and teenagehood more and more took its hold, these things diminished as well, until it seemed that Eva was an ordinary person with only very abstract fears of things.

  She remained, of course, an intelligent child, with what her parents continued to refer to as an “overactive mind,” and so she was never unaware of the eccentricity of her behaviour. Sometimes Fay would wonder what she was paying the therapists for, when it was Eva who seemed to be able to articulate everything—the trajectory of her fears, their probable root causes, and incongruencies—so much better than any adult with whom these issues had so far been discussed. The insects, for example. Eva would puzzle over it out loud sometimes, like it was a riddle—or somebody else’s problem. She calculated, for example, the likelihood of dying from an insect bite in North America, and it was something so ridiculously small that she admitted without qualm that the possibility was more or less absurd. “We must just fool ourselves into thinking we’re rational,” she said once, after a similar exercise, “as a mechanism for survival. I mean,” she explained to Fay, “if we think we’re rational, but clearly are not, we can justify anything.”

  Fay and Carey had somewhat relaxed once Eva was safely in college. She seemed to adjust well and, to Fay’s surprise, even joined one of the sororities and involved herself in their affairs. Fay had always been against that sort of thing, and she was (she even admitted this to Carey) somewhat disappointed that her daughter would need to resort to such “institutional forms of acceptance.” Carey replied that—probably—institutional forms of acceptance were “just exactly what she did need,” and Fay tried to content herself with that.

  FAY FEARED THAT her departure—certainly a large-scale disruption from the regular order of things, which she had always attempted to maintain—might upset what she had always assumed to be, for Eva, a fragile balance, but, to the contrary, the departure seemed hardly to register at all. It was difficult to tell, though, because Eva refused to discuss the situation. On Fay’s less optimistic days, of which there were many, she surmised that this refusal on Eva’s part indicated that the damage was, indeed, running deep. This did not stop her from remarking, however (harshly, in a moment of frustration, which she later regretted), “Well, isn’t irrationality a convenient mechanism for survival,” which was something that had stuck with her, like many things that Eva said over the years. Eva—immovable—had only calmly told her mother that, according to her theory (which Fay, she said, had abused), it was Fay herself who was acting irrationally, and Fay who needed, desperately now, to “justify” things. “You know,” Fay said, as calmly as she could, “you don’t know as much as you think.” She hadn’t the least clue if this was true, but she had to say something.

  It was frustrating, though—to have finally taken such an enormous step and have it go more or less unnoticed. All through that first fall Eva would continue to speak to her mother as though she had called up from the Redwood Plaza on the corner, instead of all the way from Paris, France. As though she had only stepped out for some “therapeutic overspending,” as she often had before, and that she would undoubtedly return, just as from those earlier excursions (the possibility that she would not being so disproportionately small …), milder, a little abashed, and with an apparent sense of fresh commitment toward their—touchingly—ordinary lives.

  Even Carey, after the initial shock, and those first few weeks, within which the messages piled, pretty well stopped calling. He was waiting for her, he said, to “come to her senses.” This was just about what Fay had predicted. Carey, she’d told Martha after her first week in Paris, was, as the “ultimate human being”—a term she applied disparagingly—capable of adapting himself to anything, given enough time.

  On the contrary, it took Fay three months to leave Carey after she had decided to do so, and then another three months to discover why she had. It wasn’t, that is, until Eva was visiting over her Thanksgiving break in November that Fay at last connected the panic she had felt rising steadily within her, as she had stood in her garden cleats, stuck out in the yard, to the one other, half-remembered occasion in which she had felt that way before.

  As always, it was just some silly thing—something that Eva had said, a particular note in her voice as she said it—that served to remind Fay of that original occasion. But when she did recall it, she recalled it in such perfect and immediate detail that it seemed to be no more distant a recollection, suddenly, than the memory of only six months prior.

  Fay and Martha had still been in high school at the time—though just barely. They would graduate in June, and it was already spring. It was a Saturday, and as usual, the five of them—Martha, Fay, Laurel, Marilyn, and—oh, but that was right. Linda had not been with them that time. It had happened on the weekend that Linda was away—visiting Mount Holyoke and William and Mary. A boyfriend of Marilyn’s (whose name and identity escaped everyone’s notice even then) had taken Linda’s usual place in Bobby Zerembeh’s car. So, of course—there was Bobby Zerembeh himself. The wonderful Bobby Zerembeh, who married Laurel within a year and a half, but was Martha’s—as everything seemed to have been Martha’s—then.

  Axel’s was the only place they knew of that would let them drink without any trouble. It was in the next town over, and they could only get there on Saturdays when Bobby borrowed his father’s old beat-up Rambler. When he did, they would all pile in—the five girls and Bobby—and drive the twenty minutes out on the back roads, because they preferred to take their time. It was, after all, those moments in the car before they arrived—when everything was about to, but nothing had happened yet, and the whole night spread ahead of them as if it belonged to someone else—that were the most precious. Once they arrived, and tumbled out, everything seemed to happen at once. They would be drunk almost right away just at the sight of the place—and then all over again on a pitcher of beer apiece, each for two dollars.

  You could see New Jersey from Axel’s, because of the way that the place was set out right there at the edge of nowhere. From that point—just outside of Axel’s swinging door—there stretched only a large expanse of marshland. Then, on the other side of it, there were lights, and that was New Jersey.

  Never once did they see another woman at Axel’s, but the men didn’t seem to mind it when the girls came. They were courteous and even gentlemanly—most of the time. The girls practised flirting, and bummed cigarettes. The men all slapped their thighs ironically by way of invitation, but they didn’t kid themselves. Sometimes one of the girls, for a bit of a laugh, would sit down for just a fraction of a second on a proffered knee before she got up again, shrieking, to her feet—as though surprised to have encountered anything alive. The rest of them would be nearly doubled over in a corner, from laughing so hard. Bobby would be there too, of
course, but with his eyes averted.

  To Martha, and so to Fay, and to the rest, the men at Axel’s were an experience—and experience they knew (of whatever kind) would stand them in good stead when someday confronted with the real thing. In return, the girls were gracious as could be; they didn’t judge the men, or let them be judged, and even condescended sometimes to love them in an awful, sad sort of way. Even, or particularly, if there was something vaguely appalling about them. If they had no teeth, say, or gave one of the girls’ bums a pinch as they were dancing. “Isn’t it just—just so—awful and sad?” they would say to one another as Bobby drove them the long way home.

  They were (even in those years, which later they thought of as their cruel years) capable of being tremendously touched by things. That was what Axel’s was like. Like being touched to the quick by something outrageous, and bracing, and strange. When they felt that way, the whole place—that little rundown bar, right out at the edge of everything, from where you could see New Jersey—would suddenly feel warm and bright, and Fay would feel so full to the brim with something that she thought she might burst.

  What it was she was filled with she didn’t know then, and never would. She was only afterward able to recall the feeling through things that seemed to have so little to do with her, or with anything, that she wondered if she had really ever felt that way at all. It would come back, for instance, sometimes—just a hint of it—in the occasional black and white images she saw (not a scene so much as a flicker—as though between images) on a blanched TV screen. Or else it would be the clattering sound of silverware—the sound of other people’s meals being eaten, with great pleasure, from a distance. Why either of these things would bring anything to mind for Fay at all—let alone the full-to-bursting feeling that she had got sometimes on the Saturday evenings of her youth—was a great mystery. Especially the silverware. No one ever ate anything but peanuts at Axel’s place.

  About halfway through the night, though, the feeling would change again. She wouldn’t feel light anymore, like in the movies (the blanched light, the weightless clattering of silverware), but heavy and dull, instead—as though she’d absorbed a blunt object exactly the same size as herself. For whatever reason, Fay always appeared to the others in these moments almost too self-assured, and the girls avoided her—though not with contempt. Left alone, she would idle by the bar for a while looking unapproachable—until, without hardly knowing why, she would get up and run outside, swinging the door back and forth on its hinges behind her as she went.

  She would run only a little ways, though, before she stopped, and though no doubt—at least in part—it was fear that stopped her, she never would have admitted to it. In her mind, Fay would have run all the way to New Jersey, if she’d wanted to. It was something else that stopped her. She didn’t want, suddenly, to just run away. Just—anywhere. For two or three minutes, then, she would stand outside not wanting to run away, but not wanting to go back either. In those moments, it seemed impossible that anyone else was awake or alive in the world. Even the sounds from the bar seemed distant—as though they already had more to do with a memory of something. She tried to feel something. Some particular way. About the stretch of grass, for example. Or about herself. About the way she was then, or the way she was going to be. But she always got cold very quickly standing out there like that, and then, almost imperceptibly, bored, and she would start to wish that Martha—or better yet, Bobby—would come running out after her, and be concerned, and yell her name so that she would have no choice but to forget it all, and go back, and not have to feel any particular way about anything. When neither Martha nor Bobby did come, as they often did not, she’d wonder why, and feel hurt—and then jealous of Martha, who had everything—though everything, in those days, really meant only one thing: Bobby. It would never have occurred to either of them to be jealous of any of the other girls—and least of all, Laurel.

  If no one came—as, again, they often did not—Fay would have to make a scene, like in the movies: she’d have to stumble in, knock into a chair, crash to the ground if she was able. In order that Bobby would have to get up from wherever he was and come over to her and ask if she was all right. Other times, she poked her head inside the door instead, and yelled, “Come on! Let’s run across to New Jersey,” and make as if she was really going to do it this time. Maybe she even believed that she really would do it, too, if no one came along to stop her.

  But they always did, and that night it was no different. Then they piled into the car—all of them except for Linda—and began the long drive on the back roads home.

  Perhaps it was just that: Linda being gone. But somehow that drive home was not like any of the other drives home. Something had shifted, and it even occurred to Fay that the great change, which they had all been anticipating with such eagerness but could never envision, or even properly believe in, had actually begun. Perhaps it was just that. The idea of Linda, back at school the next day, all aglow, talking about Mount Holyoke and William and Mary—choices that Fay and Martha scoffed at, preferring the state schools, where the men, at least, would be interesting, and you could actually learn something. Whatever it was, Fay found herself unhappily staring off down the long distance of the road, as if it were the distance to New Jersey. Wanting to be there. For real this time. Or in the empty field that stretched in between—which was neither here nor there, but instead nowhere in particular. To really know that field. To think it and think it, and never get cold, and never get bored. In short: she wanted to be anywhere but in that car, on that interminable road. Squished in the back with Marilyn, and that boyfriend of hers, whoever he was—irrelevant even then.

  Up front was Martha, of course. She was sitting in the middle—between Bobby, who drove, and Laurel. Laurel, saying something in a sad, faraway voice, like in the movies, about Linda. Missing Linda. Saying: This is how it happens. How it begins. How everything changes … Fay, irritable in the back seat, saying: “Linda wouldn’t have fit.” Even though it struck her as interesting and a little disappointing that Laurel had been thinking the same thing that she had just a moment before. Interesting that Laurel had been thinking at all … But then what she said—about Linda not fitting—had made Laurel start to cry, and she sounded awful when she cried. The effect was not at all touching, like in the movies. When people cried in the movies it always seemed to do with everything all at once, and not just the thing that they were crying about. Martha would have been able to make it like that if she was the one crying. Fay, even, would have had a better shot at it. But Laurel was so plain, and so depressing when she cried, that it was as if the sad thing that she was crying about really was just that sad thing.

  At first, Fay wished only that Laurel would shut up and not cry, but then she forgot about Laurel. She felt a growing pressure behind the ears. Then—a field rose before her. Stretched like a canvas. So that for the first time, she saw it. Truly. In panoramic vision—from all sides. There was no end to it this time—no New Jersey in the distance. It was just, for the first time, an uninterrupted vision of that which stretched, toward nowhere in particular, in between everything. But then, suddenly, it was not a vision at all. It was the field. Beamed into existence by the headlights of Bobby Zerembeh’s car as he swung it from the road. And then it was Laurel. Scrambling like an animal at the door. And the scream. She felt it rather than heard it at first, but then she heard it, too. An inhuman sound. Then Bobby, who had turned around in his seat. Slapping her—quite hard—across the face, with the back of his hand. Finally, the scream stopped, and she realized it had been her own.

  It had only been a small accident, and in under half an hour, the two boys—with the help of Fay herself, who had become remarkably calm by then, in that way that made the other girls leave her alone—had the car back on the road. With the exception of Martha, who had received a few bruises and scratches from Laurel as she had attempted to escape, no one had been hurt.

  IT WAS MARTHA, and not Fay, who later
spoke of the event if it was spoken of at all. Fay herself did not think of it; in fact, she did not even properly recall it, and over the years, because of this, she had come to think of the experience, to a certain extent, as Martha’s own. Perhaps this was why it had taken six whole months to remember that it was that particular moment—the long extended moment leading up to the scream in which the scream had occurred—that she’d recalled and in some way experienced again, all those years later, when she wore the cleats that Carey had given her for her fifty-second birthday, and got stuck in her yard.

  Like all of Martha’s stories, this one had been told variously over the years. Sometimes, she spoke of it as a “falling-through time,” a “flash,” a “primal scream.” When Eva visited, and the story of the scream again resurfaced, Martha said: “For your mother, it was like a sudden glimpse of—” and closed her eyes. How could she put it? What word fit now? At this juncture, after so much had changed? “Like a sudden glimpse …” Martha said again, finally, her hands floating in the air—not quite descending—“of the … the old-fashioned horror of things.”

  Eva raised her eyebrows and looked hard at Fay, then Martha. “The—what?” she said. She was sitting opposite Fay, on Martha’s couch, her feet tucked up under her. There was something surprising about the way that she sat. A certain—composure about her that Fay could not have anticipated. It made her want to cry, suddenly. It made her feel terribly—alone. But glad, too, in a way. Glad to be alone, if that was what it took. For her daughter to be sitting there, as she was just then—opposite her in Martha’s living room—looking, for all the world, as if she had grown up by herself, without context.