“If he said it, it was only because he believed it,” Stewart says.
“That doesn’t mean she didn’t cry about it later,” Christopher says.
“Okay, so one time he said something that hurt her feelings,” Stewart says.
“You also told her not to get her hair cut any shorter than last time because if it was any shorter she’d look like a boy,” Christopher says to me, then says to Stewart, “and you ate the chocolate she bought with her own money, and also you told her that if she was an animal she’d be a mole.”
“She laughed when I said that,” Stewart says.
“She wasn’t laughing about it later in her room,” Christopher says.
* * *
Our weakness is the same it has always been—the books we read as children, the books we read still. We study “Nate” too long: see him following his tian around the yard, imitating his tian’s lumbering stride; see him ducking the balled-up homework flung at him from buses; see him mocking a younger boy holding a grown-up’s hand downtown; see him shoved against his garage by his tian after having punched his friend in the face, struggling as his tian growls at his friend to hit the boy back, shouting as his tian gestures at his friend that the boy will not be released until his friend has struck him in the face in retribution; see him peeing against the trash bin behind the bookstore after the owners of the bookstore and the antique shop and the gas station and the arcade have all refused to let him use the bathrooms inside; see him sitting alone on the rocks along the pier on days his friend doesn’t come, hood up, shoulders hunched, feeding the gulls from his hand. Stewart and I suffer othery for this “Nate,” still hate him, and try not to love him, but love him anyway, unable to kill our aptitude for othery, the skill we learned as children—a skill our tian never learned, nor our sister, nor even this “Nate” himself.
Stewart pretends nothing is wrong, insisting that when the opportunity arises he will fight him, with or without me. I say we should forget the boy, should devote our afternoons to other pursuits, but Stewart says our afternoons are for Emma, shaming me into coming.
Stewart pretends nothing is wrong, I pretend nothing is wrong, and Christopher is utterly unaware that we have been changed—unaware until the afternoon that “Nate” bothers to look at the pickup and wonder who’s inside.
* * *
The pickup is parked across from the boy’s cottage, windows tinted with frost. Stewart is napping under a blanket; I’m sipping tea from a mug; Christopher sits between us, rubbing his mittens together to warm his hands, talking about what he plans on doing to this “Nate” once we finally have him cornered.
I feel the bed of the pickup bob.
Christopher spins, I spin, and together we peer through the cracks in the frost and see the boy creeping along the bed toward the rear window of the cab, breathing mouthfuls of fog.
“Stewart,” I whisper, nudging him, “start the truck!”
“Let’s get him, let’s get him!” Christopher says, diving for the handle of the door.
I hit the lock and shove him back. “Sit still,” I hiss at Christopher, then shake Stewart, whispering, “Stewart!”
The boy squats at the rear window, wiping at the frost with his hands until his palms have melted patches back to glass. Stewart blinks awake just as the boy peeks into the cab.
“You faggots?” the boy shouts, squinting at us.
Christopher scrambles for the other door, shouting, “Let me out!” I snatch him by the ankles and yank him back again as “Nate” climbs onto the cab—we hear him fumbling around above us—and then leaps back down onto the bed, slamming down hard with his boots, making the pickup shudder. The boy hops around, shouting something too muffled for us to make out.
“How’d he find us?” Stewart shouts.
“What do you mean, how’d he find us?” Christopher shouts, kicking at me, lunging for the door again. “We’re parked outside of his house! Let me out of here already!”
Stewart glances at Christopher, then looks at me, and can’t pretend anymore. He grabs Christopher by the collar, so roughly that it chokes him, and shoves him back between us. Christopher hunches in the seat, holding his throat, coughing, as Stewart fumbles in his pockets for his keys.
The boy appears at the window next to me wielding a branch the size of a bat. He cocks back and takes a swing at the door, and the branch hits the door with a jarring thud. “Fuck all of you!” the boy shouts, spittle flecking his parka. “You dogfucking faggots! Fuck you and fucking Emma and everyone in your fucking family! I’ll kill all of you fuckers!” The branch splinters against the door and the boy stoops at the fender, digging around in the snow for another. Stewart starts the pickup.
“Run him over!” Christopher shouts.
But “Nate” is back, swinging at the window. “Get the fuck away from my house!” he shouts as the branch cracks against the glass. “Gutterfucks! Pixielovers! Buttsnobs!”
The door to his cottage slams open and his tian stomps out into the snow in gym shorts and shoeless just as Stewart shifts the pickup and floors the gas. The tires spin in the snow, the window shatters, the pickup lurches into the road. Christopher and I turn, watching through the rear window as the boy’s tian jerks the branch away from him, the boy shouting words at us we’re too far away to hear, words we wouldn’t understand even if we weren’t. The boy has a private language of his own; he has the words he needs to hate us. His tian quiets him with the branch, and then the pickup dips with the road into a thicket of trees and Christopher and I can’t see anything anymore and turn back around.
“Take me back,” Christopher says. Stewart says we won’t. Christopher calls us cowards. He doesn’t speak another word to us until we’re home.
A fox with snowy fur scampers away from the garage as we pull into the driveway. Stewart tosses his jacket onto the stool by the door, I hang my jacket from the knobs on the wall, but Christopher keeps his coat zipped, with clumps of snow melting on his shoulders.
“Even if you were afraid to get out of the car, you could have at least let me out,” Christopher says, crying now, voice cracking. “I quit band for the chance to get back at him. I quit band, I lie to Emma about why I’m not on the bus anymore, we sit in your stupid truck every stupid day waiting for the perfect stupid opportunity, and then when it finally comes you let him say whatever he wants and then just drive away after he’s finished.”
“Shouldn’t you be happy, you idiot?” Stewart says. “We didn’t fight him, we aren’t going to fight him, and now she won’t have to hate us like you said she would.”
“Just because she wouldn’t have understood what it meant doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have meant it,” Christopher says.
Christopher slips out the door, shuffling off into the snow. We watch him hike into the woods. It is irrelevant what this “Nate” has done, irrelevant what more this “Nate” might do. We cannot think of him as a foe, a kimlee, anymore, can think of him only as somebody with his own hurdens. Not merely a “Nate,” but an actual boy who would actually feel whatever we did to him. We are men who in the eighteenth century would have been called incapable, pitiful, spineless, men who in the twenty-first century are called those things still. We could not defend our niece from the evils of the world. We could not defend even those evils from other evils.
Stewart won’t talk to me, instead carries a flattened box from the garage to the driveway, tapes the cardboard over the broken window, then brushes the snow from the cab. I stand at the kitchen window, waiting for the extracurricular bus to bring Emma home from the latest performance of her play. While I wait, I take an empty vase from the cabinet and pour in some water. Every night somebody has been going to watch her; every night some boy has been bringing her flowers.
Rites
Months before the rites, they began arguing about who would bring great-uncle, cousin-in-law, brother Orson.
They argued on the blanketed bleachers of football stadiums, on sunbleached driftwood
along the lakeshore, over rusted grills of smoking meat. While they argued, they fiddled with nearby objects. Shifting umbrellas, swiping at handfuls of sand, nudging the lids of ketchup bottles. Moving things from here to there. The impulse of the animate to manipulate the inanimate. To reposition, to rearrange.
They were a big family.
Among them there were those who affected the rigid silence of their Polish ancestors, those who affected the wine-drunk gestures of their Sicilian ancestors, those who affected the dour sneer of their French ancestors, those who affected the wind-beaten posture of their Manx. They bore Belgian lips under Irish noses, beneath Scandinavian foreheads. They wrinkled like Luxembourgers. They wrinkled like Turks. They were the product of thirteen generations of immigrants intermarrying. They were everything, which felt very much like being nothing.
They lived in Minnesota.
Some dwelled in gated manors, on leafy estates. Some dwelled in cluttered bungalows, among suburban sidewalks. Some dwelled in apartments above restaurants in the city. Pearl lived in a farmhouse, on untilled farmland, in the countryside, which was where the rites were to be held.
The argument was resolved in the back of a taxi, where Pearl’s sons were crammed, wiping rainwater from their eyes. Everybody except Zack agreed it should be Zack.
“He won’t come,” Zack argued.
“You’ll have to make him,” said bearded Morgan.
“Tell him lies, if that’s what it takes,” said bearded Lauren.
“Remember, he took you fishing once when we were younger,” said mustached Alexander. “He never took any of us fishing.”
Everybody agreed it should be Zack, because once Orson had taken Zack fishing.
Next they argued about who would pay for the gasoline.
* * *
The internet said the weather would be foggy on the morning of the rites.
On the morning of the rites the weather was foggy.
Zack drove to Uncle Orson’s apartment. Zack’s wife was layering a mask of cosmetics over her face. Zack’s daughters were bobbing their heads and singing along with an advertisement.
Zack parked the car at the curb.
Zack’s wife uncapped some lipstick, said, “Hurry.”
Zack’s daughters sang, “Drinking—it’s—my—life!”
Zack buzzed Uncle Orson’s apartment.
* * *
Uncle Orson was wearing a pale violet bathrobe and a discolored pair of boxers. His fingers were wrapped with a bandage. His nostrils and ears and nipples were sprouting whitish hair.
“I don’t like rites,” Uncle Orson said.
“It’s going to be more than pills and champagne,” Zack said.
“I don’t care what it’s going to be,” Uncle Orson said.
Uncle Orson’s apartment reeked of leeks and cabbage. Piles of unwashed dishes stood tilting against piles of faded magazines. An envelope with a gold seal and stamped postage (the invitation to the rites, signed by Zack’s mother, Orson’s sister, Pearl) lay crumpled on the sofa, stained with a smear of snot or mustard.
“It’s an honor for the family,” Zack said.
“It’d be better if I didn’t come,” Uncle Orson said.
“She’s only sixty-seven,” Zack said.
“The age is irrelevant,” Uncle Orson said.
“Don’t you love her?” Zack said.
“That’s what I’m saying,” Uncle Orson said.
* * *
Orson sat between Zack’s daughters.
Zack’s daughters weren’t singing anymore.
It wasn’t Orson’s apartment that reeked of leeks and cabbage.
It was Orson.
* * *
They drove through the city. They drove through buildings tattooed with graffiti and through buildings capped with billboards and past plastic bags hurrying together onto a bridge. They drove under stoplights lurching in the wind and past flags with gold stars hanging jerking from balconies. They drove past blinking signage. They drove past gutters weeping steam. They drove from the city into the woody countryside roads, drove through the fog to the barren unplowed fields where Pearl lived in the farmhouse with its painted shutters. And the other cars were there already, and Zack’s daughters ran into the house and through the unlit rooms of empty cupboards and boxed belongings and latched windows and shrouded mirrors and out of the house again, the screen door slamming shut as Zack’s daughters galloped from the deck into the trees, stumbling panting to a stop along the shore of the marsh, where everybody was standing with the dew blackening their shoes. And mustached Alexander was lugging a can of gasoline onto the dock. And bearded Lauren and bearded Morgan were talking to their mother’s roommates from university, the roommates who hadn’t had their own rites yet, a pair of women with gray bouffants and suits wrinkled from the train, and Lauren and Morgan were nodding and smiling. And their mother in her blue dress and gold pearls was laughing with the children—the neighbors’ children, and Lauren’s children, and Morgan’s children, and the daughters of a man with a port-wine birthmark who had worked with their mother at the theater, and some cousins’ children, and now Zack’s daughters—and a few of the children were weeping, but Zack’s daughters scolded them. And Alexander’s husband was doing a dance for the cousins. And Zack was pouring himself, and then their mother’s wrinkled childhood sweetheart, a glass of champagne at the rickety tables propped along the birch trees. And the tablecloths fluttered with the wind. And golden balloons bobbed on strings. And loafers squelched through mud. And the rowboat creaked in the marsh. And the fog drifted through reeds. And Orson stood against the rough bark of a maple tree, and the tree had a scar in its limb from the clothesline it had worn there for years and years and years, but now the clothesline had been unknotted, and wound, and boxed. And now everybody had a glass of champagne except for Orson.
Zack made a speech about their mother’s moods.
Alexander made a speech about their mother’s quirks: about what Pearl had liked watching (horror films, usually bloody, often with zombies, which had given Alexander nightmares), about how Pearl had dressed the brothers (matching shirts, as children, always), about where Pearl had kept spare sheets (inexplicably, Zack’s closet).
Lauren and Morgan made a speech about different memories: a memory of her taking them to a parade; a memory of her taking them to a waterfall; a memory of her giving a speech at her own mother’s rites; a memory of her chasing Alexander through the house with a ladle after Alexander had sworn at her; a memory of her nursing Zack during a fever and Zack’s hallucinations during that fever and the braces on Zack’s teeth in those days; memories of things she had worn that were now unfashionable.
And again their mother was laughing.
And others made speeches. And when their mother saw Orson, she clapped her hands together, and said his name, and hugged him. And wrinkles made maps in the skin of her face. And she thanked him for coming. And he whispered something to her. And Zack’s daughters were teaching the other children the words to an advertisement. And the children were singing advertisements. And their mother offered a toast, and the champagne glasses clinked, tipped, emptied. And when their mother was ready, bearded Lauren and bearded Morgan shook gasoline into the rowboat, and shook gasoline onto their mother, and their mother stepped dripping from the dock into the boat. And the boat pitched from side to side. And their mother’s bouffant had wilted from the gasoline. And their mother’s dress had been blackened by gasoline. And Zack untied the boat, and their mother clutched the oars, and their mother rowed into the marsh. And the boat slid through the reeds into darker waters. And their mother stood, then, in a swaying rowboat, in a foggy marsh, facing the family. And lit the match. And dropped it. And the rowboat became a fire the shape of a rowboat. And their mother became a fire the shape of a mother.
The fire was waving.
Everybody clapped.
Alexander cheered.
The wives of Lauren and Morgan shouted their goodb
yes.
But Orson wept, as if Orson were one of the children.
* * *
The paperwork was submitted. Pearl’s belongings were variously inherited, or donated, or sent to the landfill. The farm, its vast acreage, had been sold months before.
Afterward they gossiped, the family, about how Orson had cried.
“A disgrace.”
“Almost ruined the celebration.”
“I said from the start, he’s unsociable, he’s antisocial, just don’t invite him.”
“Why was he crying? Does he think her life was a failure, unfulfilled, unhappy somehow? Doesn’t he understand that she was quite successful, actually?”
“She certainly chose painful rites.”
“No worse than a twelve-hour wedding day in heels.”
“And she looked so lovely.”
“You don’t think she saw him, do you? From the boat? Her triumphant moment, spoiled by her own sibling?”
Even with Orson’s tears, everybody agreed that Pearl’s rites had outdone any rites to date—even the rites of William, Orson and Pearl’s grandfather, who had imported a crate of fungus from Japan, bright scarlet toadstools the shapes of coral, and at dawn had eaten the toadstools, seated atop a throne of piled rocks, and then throughout the day had chatted with the family, until by dusk the toxins had killed him.
William’s had been clever, but something about Pearl’s—about seeing grandmother, great-aunt, cousin Pearl transform into a creature of fire, in the same rowboat in which her dead husband once had proposed their marriage, above the marsh at which she had stared so many mornings over mugs of tea—had captivated the family. To the last, they preferred sentiment to cleverness.
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