Fight No More

by Lydia Millet

  “I think you’re beautiful,” said Lynn, and turned and held her face and kissed her.

  Then he let her go.

  “Now for that second glass,” he said. “Lush.”

  On the way home she sat on the passenger side feeling so happy it was hard to speak normally, casually. She was tempted to put her arm around the back of the driver’s seat, but then—there was a tinge of presumption to that gesture. She never knew what to do in a passenger seat. In her job she was always the one driving. Often the clients sat in the back, so that she felt like a chauffeur. She was a chauffeur. She fiddled with the straps on her bag.

  “Can I see you again?” asked Lynn, in front of her duplex. He’d walked her to the door holding her hand.

  “Yes, please,” she said.

  “Soon?”

  “As soon as you like.”

  “I like tomorrow.”

  “I like it too.”

  Inside, she felt herself spilling out. Or over. She didn’t have the right words. Were there good words for it? There was only time, speeding up. Time spiraling. Or no, that couldn’t be—that was a wrong idea.

  Maybe it was just that she felt herself moving through time, for once. You went along at the same pace for so long that it felt like you were standing still; then something shifted and suddenly life was rushing past. Not in the sense of disappearing, but in the sense of happening. She was in her house, and others were in theirs, and now she knew she was one of all of them. She was one bee in one cubby in a honeycomb. Or one star in a constellation. A thousand points of light, someone had said. But there were far more than that.

  Was it just that when you felt like this, you felt the world wanted you, for once? Was that why everyone was obsessed with it?

  One person was the world.

  She wanted to run. Should she run into her house?

  She bounded into the living room, where the overhead light was blazing. She spun around, arms flung out. Not as good as dancing. Just as she was slowing down the doorbell rang.

  Oh no. Was it him? Had he seen her?

  Maybe she shouldn’t answer it. But then, if it was him . . . whoever it was had to have seen her run and spin. How would she explain it?

  If it was him, maybe she wouldn’t need to.

  She went to the door, a knot in her stomach. It was dark. It was late.

  “Who’s there?” she called.

  No answer. Then again, the door was thick. She wished it had a peephole, but the landlord was too cheap.

  But what if it was him?

  She clicked on the porch light. That way any potential assailant might have a witness: the next-door neighbor who smoked on his stoop at night.

  She opened it.

  The chain-smoker’s wife. Phew. She held a pile of mail.

  “Delivered to our box again,” she said. “It looks like mostly junk, but still.”

  “It’s always mostly junk,” said Nina, and took it.

  She had a home health business, this woman. If you had allergies and were a New Age type, you went to her and she pressed glass vials of foods against your skin. Right through the glass, supposedly your body reacted to them, telling you to avoid soy or gluten. Surprisingly, she had numerous customers.

  It was the smoking husband who had explained it to Nina. He wasn’t a New Ager; he worked in construction. He said the allergy testing was bullshit. “Snake oil. Pure quackery. But it keeps me in these,” he joked, raising his crumpled pack of Marlboros.

  “But she believes it, right?” Nina had asked. “She’s not ripping them off on purpose, is she?”

  “One hundred percent,” nodded the husband.

  She hadn’t been sure what that meant.

  But now she wanted to know. Did the wife believe in what she did?

  “Can I ask you a question?” she said.

  “Sure,” said the woman. Surprised, maybe. Still friendly though.

  “Your practice,” said Nina. “The allergy testing. Does it depend on science? Or, like, belief?”

  “Oh, science,” said the woman, and smiled. “One hundred percent.”

  Nina thanked her and closed the door.

  She stood without moving then: what if she did what Marnie wanted, went to the self-help group? It was all Marnie wanted. It was the only thing she’d asked of her. If she went—Marnie had told her they held “seminars” in every major city—maybe she’d have a sister again. Was it so hard? She should have done it sooner. She’d been afraid it was cultish, but it wasn’t like you lived in a guarded compound. You didn’t have to sleep with the leader or be a sister wife. You paid money and went to meetings, that was all, at some big hotel or conference center, and wore a nametag, and after the meetings were over you went home. Even if she couldn’t stand it, if it was like a hair shirt she had to wear, it would be worth it. Worth every penny.

  Because Marnie would have to talk to her again, if she went. She wouldn’t have any excuses left.

  She’d look online for it. Right now. She’d sign up. Whatever it took. Just give in.

  Joy made you look foolish, if you showed it. Always she thought of what her mother said—pain brimmed in everything that lived. Hands on her shoulders, fingers pinching hard but not cruelly. She’d understood it back then, even, in her kid’s way that didn’t put words to the feeling: the pinch was not cruel, just desperate. Her mother wanted her to see. Pain was electric, flowing from one to many or many to one, a current that moved among them.

  But so was joy.

  Can you feel the pain that resides in all beings?

  What would she say to her mother now?

  No, Mama. And neither could you. The pain you felt was all your own.

  Joy was ambient, a charge in the atmosphere. What you could do was partake. Some people didn’t have a choice, she knew that too well. Some got mostly pain instead.

  Pretend her mother hadn’t taken the pills. Pretend they hadn’t both failed Marnie, pretend that Marnie cherished her still, looked up to her with the old childlike devotion. Pretend her mother and little sister had stayed at home, taken care of each other while she’d gone off to school. Gotten the education she wanted. Seen the wide world. Pretend all that: who might she be? How different?

  Who knew?

  One thing was sure: still electric. Still a pulse in a deep field of stars.

  THE FALL OF BERLIN

  She loved her home so much, had loved it so deeply for so many years, that when she thought of her death it was the house she felt sorry for.

  No one would ever hold this place as dear as she did. The house wasn’t grand—from the outside it was frankly plain. But she’d furnished it so deliberately, so delicately over time that every shade of color or light, every nook and corner was cared for, warm and welcoming. Curated, they said now, about everything. Her home was curated.

  The furnishings were only her belongings and not permanent by nature, though she wished them to be. On the news recently a venerable archaeologist in Syria had been murdered by militants. He’d been defending a cache of ancient artifacts from Palmyra, refusing to tell the radicals where they were. They cut his head off. When she heard it on the news she cried.

  Courage, she thought. That was courage.

  But this was only a home, only her house, and even before she died the whole place would be taken apart methodically, no sentiment wasted. Her chairs, rugs, lamps would be separated from each other with violent haste, never again to be a part of this perfect harmony. If she was lucky they would be sold to people who valued them. That was the best case, and even the best case was unbearable.

  She gazed out the window from her favorite armchair—a graceful prospect. In the breeze her front-yard trees dipped and swayed. The greatest of them was a Norfolk Island pine, its rounded needles like velvet. Beyond the moving bough she could see a haze of blue lupines among the river rocks, and then the neighbors’ hedge. Beyond the hedge was only sky, where, on this sunlit late afternoon, a bank of cumulus had gathered. Billowi
ng flowers of atmosphere.

  Now was the time to give up what she loved. She knew that. But it was so hard. She should have specialized in Buddhists instead of fascists, then maybe she’d be ready for the world to fall away. Ready to rise, her arms outstretched, with nothing to the left of her and nothing to the right. Enter the air.

  There was his car, its top a hard shine of silver, pulling up to the curb. It wouldn’t be assisted living, at least—for this she was gladder than she could ever say. Her son’s guesthouse was butter-colored stucco and surrounded by a lush garden. He paid a gardener to do the heavy lifting, but she would putter around, prune and put in some plantings here and there. She would dwell in the backyard quiet and humble, the troll lady in the hut, the gnome in the hollyhocks. The grandmother in the calla lilies. Twice over, for her new daughter-in-law, the twenty-four-year-old he’d left his first wife and his son for, was expecting.

  There were three boxes, all marked Study. Before her hip went bad she would have had the boxes neatly stacked in the front hall, waiting, but now it was virtually impossible for her to carry them. They sat through the open door to the study, in her line of sight: Study. Study. Study. Betrayed by joints! In the end, it came down to parts. This load was a small one, only art. The earliest moment of moving, the nonessentials—nothing she needed to sit or sleep or eat on. But things that mattered, all the same.

  “Mom?”

  She’d never liked that word. Preferred Mama, Mother, even Mommy. When he was little he’d called her those, but it changed to Mom over time—greater neutrality. More masculine.

  His head came around the doorjamb.

  “Where’s the stuff?”

  She inclined her head toward the study door.

  “These three? That’s it?”

  “For now. I’m just going to look at the wall space today, see where the pieces should go.”

  He lifted the first box, walked out the door.

  “Thank you,” she called after. She wished she could do it herself. Wishes had to be surrendered. Surrender, she thought, give up, these were verbs of defeat.

  But at the end of things, surrender was the only victory.

  Maudlin. She wasn’t dying yet, for Chrissake, just moving out, which people did every day. Commonplace. No hospital smells in store for her, no cafeteria smells, no humiliation in the loss of privacy. She’d visited her cousin at an old folks’ home. Upscale, they claimed, but the smells had been so disgusting. Also the tube lights overhead, that sick fluorescence that bleached out the world.

  He was helping her out of the armchair next, and she was performing her invalid’s walk toward the front door. Once she was up or down it was fine—the pain was in the transitions. Sometimes she was able to convince herself that in the act of slow, deliberate walking she was maintaining her dignity; other times she felt like a wreck. A stately wreck, she insisted to herself hopefully, like a ghost ship moving across the wide ocean: its sails were tattered, but proudly it faced the wind.

  Or she might look like a trash barge. Hard to know.

  It was just fifteen minutes’ drive and on the way he talked on his cell phone. She got to hear both sides of the conversation—sports-team opinions she didn’t care to follow—since he was driving and had it hooked up to the audio. Why he needed such a large SUV was a mystery to her. She’d always assumed these hulking cars were mostly for obese people.

  “Lora will help you, OK?” he asked as he parked, finally done reeling off his commentary on sports scores. “I have to go pick up Jeremy after I drop your boxes in back. He’s actually coming over tonight. His first time since, you know.”

  Poor kid. And yet: one day the acne would be gone.

  He disappeared around the side of the house carrying the first box and she made her labored way to the front door, which was unlocked. Then she was moving—trundling, as she thought of it—into the main house, expecting an interception but also indifferent to it. The place’s benign and subtly sculpted appointments looked like a page from a West Elm catalog. Too much off-white, the default palette of many a modern homeowner . . . an error of domestic engineering. There was no surer way to make a house feel cold and generic than by painting its insides white.

  She always puzzled over the place’s décor elements, probably bought from the selfsame West Elm or another such bourgeois home-furnishings vendor, possibly meant to conjure a faint idea of art. For instance, here in the large foyer—more like a luxury hotel lobby—there were life-size, stylized brown branches along one wall, made not of wood but of plastic. Or metal. Or plastic painted to look like metal. On another wall there were large autumn leaves in shadow boxes. But neither her son nor her daughter-in-law had an interest in trees or leaves. Paul had told her more than once that a garden, to him, was nothing but added property value.

  Farther along she passed a floating shelf made out of cut-up books. The books had been disassembled and covered in shellac or something, maybe epoxy, all glued together with their spines pointing outward. Scouting for Boys. Birds and Beasts of Africa. Pig-Sticking or Hog-Hunting. Sport in War. Paddle Your Own Canoe. Baden-Powell, if she wasn’t mistaken. The famed Boy Scout founder. Also, fascist.

  On the shelf sat glass globes with ferns sticking out of them.

  At times she thought she should have been an interior decorator instead of a scholar. She would have failed, needless to say: too many harsh judgments. She would have tried to rule her clients instead of satisfy them, ride roughshod over their taste. Correct, uplift and educate. She would have been as popular as head lice.

  No wonder she’d thrown in her lot, instead, with the Nazis.

  On the cream-colored sectional sat Lora, reading a pregnancy book that had the heft of an annotated King James. They put them through their paces these days, the wealthy mothers. You had to read a Bible-sized parenting manual—and make no mistake, its commandments were stern. Thou shalt not eat unpasteurized cheese. Lora looked up, smiled sweetly—a good-natured girl, despite being a trophy—and stood, offering a wide array of beverages, up to and including a fine Hendrick’s G&T.

  But she couldn’t stop walking now on her way to the guesthouse. No. Her progress would not be impeded.

  “You know what it’s like,” she told Lora, who had stood up and padded nervously beside her, belly leading. One hand hovered midair, as though to prop her up in the event of a sudden timber. “Once I go down, I can’t get up again. I’ve fallen and I can’t get up. Remember that? The famous commercial?”

  The girl shook her head, confused. Of course. That commercial was before her time. Born in 1991. Literally half the age of the man she was married to. Paul was already forty-eight, but still didn’t believe in old age. As far as he was concerned, decrepitude was something that happened to others. His mother, for instance.

  It would come as quite a shock when it happened to him. At that point he’d have to marry a twelve-year-old to feel young.

  “Let me get it,” said Lora, and opened the door for her. She stepped onto the deck, slowly down the redwood stairs, slowly onto the flagstone path. The garden was beautiful, though it lacked her Norfolk Island pine. It lacked her lupines and swells of California poppies . . . but those could easily be ushered in. Her pine, though—she’d never see its like again. Once she moved here, after her own dear house was sold away, no tree she planted would grow tall before she disappeared.

  She’d take that G&T, she told Lora as soon as she was situated in the guesthouse on a chair—thank you. Lora kept up a stream of quiet talk as they made their way down the path to the cottage, whose door stood open now; Paul had deposited her boxes square in the middle of the doorway, she could see, so that she’d have to steer around them. Lora said something about a stroller, then a swing, then a vibrating chair.

  Containers. Babies were mostly about buying polymers now. Feminism had taken the form of plastic. Arms are the best place for babies, she wanted to say, you don’t need all that crap.

  In the small house it was cool an
d a fan turned slowly on the ceiling. Lora was surprisingly patient about holding up the pieces of framed art against the walls. She marked the walls carefully with a pencil once she was told where a piece should go.

  “What’s this one of?” she asked. Remarkable image, shades of red, a golden amber, steel-gray in the background. “Oh wow. Is that black thing a . . . ?”

  “Swastika, yes,” she said. “This is an original poster for the most famous of all the Nazi propaganda films. By Leni Riefenstahl. You’ve heard of it, I’m sure. Triumph of the Will?”

  “You’re not afraid the swastika will, like, offend someone?”

  “Offend,” she murmured. The girl made her shake her head inwardly, but she couldn’t help liking her. “Well, it’s what I studied. Study. Still working on a paper or two. It’s not an endorsement, dear. I had these pieces in my office, you see. They’re part of my work—the art and the propaganda of fascism. The aesthetics.”

  Maybe Paul had omitted to tell Lora that detail, how most of their relatives had perished in the Gulag.

  She wouldn’t put it past him. He was a guy with little time for history, even his own family’s.

  Offend. She’d have her desk here—she’d re-create her study in miniature. She couldn’t walk well, but she could still write.

  “That soldier looks like he’s holding the flag so awkwardly,” said Lora. “It’s weird how high his elbow is.”

  The elbow was notably high.

  “Well, bearing the standard of the thousand-year Reich wasn’t a task for pansies,” she told Lora. Though technically, of course, it often had been.

  “I like this one a lot,” said the girl, taking the next framed poster from the box. “He’s handsome. And the baby’s so cute!”

  Indeed: a distinguished gray-mustached gentleman was holding up a baby against a blue sky.

  “That’s Joseph Stalin,” she said.

  She said it kindly, she thought. Not condescending, she hoped. Just letting her know.

  But the name didn’t ring a bell. Lora smiled and nodded, as though a distant but welcome relation had been introduced. “I adore how they dressed old-fashioned babies in these lacy outfits, don’t you? I saw one picture from like eighteen-something where even though it was a boy, it wore a long white dress.” She held up Stalin near the door to the kitchenette. “You could put it right here! The baby’s flowers and that little flag go with the colors of the backsplash tiles, don’t they?”