I’d spent the holiday clapping for every song my nieces performed, filling myself with apple desserts, and rehashing the plot points of past Thanksgivings with my sisters and parents.
I held my head in my hands and wondered if a hundred years in this filthy closet could be enough to undo the past few days. My inner eye zeroed in on an escape, but there were rides to be given to the airport in the morning, babies to be cuddled, dishes to be washed. The polite thing to do was stay.
I remembered that final holiday before anyone went away to college, or moved out of state, or spent Thanksgiving with a boyfriend’s family. A distinguished year if only for the fact of our obliviousness of how easy everything would never be again. We dedicated the abundance of food and quarrels to the notion of family, and we did it with gusto. We daughters clinked our etched wineglasses filled with sparkling grape juice and made sure we looked everyone in the eye with our mischievous smirks. This was the last holiday I could remember without the nausea. After that, I started to feel ill from the pressure. From the feeling that everyone was supposed to live more on holidays, pack a year’s worth of a relationship into several days, feel all that love and hate in such quick succession. It was all I could do to find the darkest spot in the house, the room where one of my sisters had grown penicillin on oranges back in junior high and where Halloween masks too scary for little girls were hidden out of sight, where I could sit and let my mind loosen.
I had tried to turn the weekend into a science, to make it into a game I could learn the rules for, to escape the cliché of it being difficult to be home for the holidays. If you asked me who I loved most in the world, the people I would list were under that roof, but spending four days with their adult selves, with the spouses they’d chosen and the children they’d wrought and the opinions they’d formed where curiosity had once lived, was more than I could manage.
Alone in the furnace room, I thought of a person trying to remember a phone number while someone else shouted random numbers in their ear. I thought of trying to sync three clocks perfectly with only two hands. I thought of impossible pulses.
There are times when I know I’m a part of something, even when I’m not actively adding to that thing. Like the dim spot on a fluorescent sign, I can feel the other sections buzzing around me, and I know people can make sense of the words, because the light of the working parts is enough. They can fill in that dark gap because they know what should be there. And sometimes the hardest thing is to be recognized as a part of something that I know I had nothing to do with, no matter how much I wish I did.
Women in Wells
The certainty clings to his smile from the minute she opens the door. They stare at each other recognizing bits that have faded and others that have taken shape over the years. She makes some indecipherable gesture with her eyes, breaking the connection, and laughs. “You’re too good to be true. They’ll be home soon, I think. I’ll wait with you.”
He comes in, thankfully unable to think up an excuse not to. She puts on a record and asks if he wants something to drink. He nods, and when she leaves the room he sits. Everything around him is older now and the same. He remembers playing here as a child, with these brothers who are due back any minute. These brothers and this sister of theirs haven’t changed the house at all since their grandparents died. He breathes in the smell of mothballs. The scent comes from all sides.
When she returns, the glass looks dusty, and he sets it on a coaster. The soul music on the turntable hustles a circus into her muscles and he sits watching her dance, watching the glimmer of her watch face can-can around the room.
It’s taken him a moment to figure it out, but this girl reminds him of someone. She reminds him of that woman in the well when he was a child, just up the road. That woman he told no one about, who’d spoken to him calmly, who’d seemed not happy but certain of her place all the way down there; that woman who’d just stopped speaking to him one day. No flashlight could shine far enough to see if she had gotten free or if she was just being quiet, and he couldn’t tell anyone she’d stopped talking to him because they’d wonder why he never tried to help her out. This girl who answered the door? Who said just a few words as she let him in? This girl who he’s known forever, but not for a while? The voice this girl grew into is the voice of that woman in the well.
All the while she dances, trying not to color so exactly between the lines, slapping the walls. She wonders, beneath the beat, if this man won’t get up and join her; what could he possibly be thinking about her while she willows and swipes around the room?
The music slows and she calms herself and sits in the rocking chair. This man, here. Her brothers, nowhere. This girl can’t be still and because she can’t be still? She begins to whip her tongue around her mouth, counting her teeth: twenty-eight. Wasn’t she supposed to have thirty-two? The number thirty-two sticks out in her mind.
He watches her, the lump moving under her jaw skin, and thinks about how he still sees her as a girl. But she’s beyond that. Surely puberty has wrenched its way through her system and, by now, established well-worn patterns. She is still lithe, pale-looking. Girl-like. They both have evidence in their minds of the other being younger.
He wants to hear that voice again. For years his pride has named itself plainly around pretty girls, but with this one, each thing he thinks to say seems a high-handed sermon delivered from beneath a cartoon mask. He distracts himself with the newspaper from last Sunday lying on the coffee table. He leafs through to the crossword and fills in a few squares. He looks up at her and finds her eyes. He never saw the woman in the well, but he knows this is how she looked up at the silhouette of him against the daylight. Disconcerted, he reads her the next crossword clue: “River in which the heroine of The Scamps of London drowns?” This girl? She hums her elegiac response, lowly, “The Thames.”
He escapes behind the crossword again, eager to hide his excitement at hearing her voice. Yes, that was it. He is sure now. It is full and vacant in the same ways as the voice of the woman in the well. How funnily life was able to fold on itself.
She tucks her feet up into the chair, happy to have company but wasting the opportunity to make legendary decisions. She peels her nails and thinks of where her brothers might be. Until this guest had arrived, she’d repeated a mantra from nowhere, again and again, out loud at first, until it wouldn’t stop itself even in the silence: “To become abandoned, you’ve only to extinct the others.” These aphorisms had been showing up for months now. She watches the window, sure her brothers will pucker into focus at any moment.
The man will shift on the couch, squeaking against the plastic cover, and pretend to look at the newspaper while he threads her voice through his head. The girl will rip off the tips of her nails one by one and the same sentence will travel quietly into and out of her mouth. She will salivate and swallow it whole.
These two will be in this room together for hours, and what originally felt like a solitary stubbornness, slowly, will show itself to be spineless. The brothers will arrive back, with apologies. The girl will retreat, and the visitor will never admit what he’s heard.
Marbles Loosed
The question I asked myself was simple: How is it that someone can be lost in a system that exists for keeping track?