Certain American States_Stories

by Catherine Lacey

  On the sidewalk with a dozen others I was embarrassed about how much I was carrying: my backpack and purse and this quite large print and a bag of squirming, hissing cat. A few people looked at me and I’m sure silently judged how I was being so materialistic at such a dire moment, and Echo began squirming with increased vigor, so much so that I nearly lost my grip on the print as she leapt from the bag and I was too concerned with safely holding my lithograph to stop Echo from sprinting down the street. I just stood in a dumb shock, and I knew that what I needed to do was leave everything on the sidewalk and go running after Echo, but I was worried about leaving my laptop unattended and I thought the framed print might get scratched or damaged and though I did make a small attempt to run after Echo, I couldn’t exactly see where she had gone. Had I been thinking more clearly or being a better person, I would have realized my entire promise to Nathan was that I would keep Echo alive and in my possession, but then I saw the fire trucks coming and I imagined the soon-to-be spectacle of seeing Nathan’s apartment building go up in flames, and that was more interesting to me than searching for Echo, which seemed hopeless and inconvenient. I thought she might not travel too far, come back when she was hungry, but then the fire trucks actually passed the building and kept going down the street. The alarm in the building stopped and a man with a ring of keys on his hip and a patch on his chest that said CLYDE came out, waving his hands like we had it all wrong.

  False alarm, people. Y’all can go back in.

  It was only then that I realized that I’d forgotten the keys. I asked Clyde if he could let me back in to 4B but he looked at me sideways.

  That’s Mr. Nathan in 4B and I know his girl and she ain’t you.

  Actually, they broke up. I’m just cat-sitting. Except I lost the cat.

  How’m I s’posed to know they split up, huh? I’m nobody’s mama. I gotta do my job, lady. He didn’t tell me to look out for no cat lady.

  I’m not a cat lady—it’s his cat.

  But Clyde was walking away and for some reason I held up the print as if he were still looking.

  See? I made this for him. We’re old friends.

  It was then I either lost or found something, lost the part of me that was keeping it together, or found the clone that belonged to whatever Nathan had caused, and either way I knew I had not done the right thing—if there was a right thing—by choosing to protect my things instead of Echo. I looked at the print and became aware of its deep and undeniable hideousness, a still life with the bust of a woman pushed over, a pile of grapes beside her. How had this ever been important to anyone?

  I don’t care what you made, Clyde said. I’m not letting you in nobody’s apartment, lady.

  It was probably for the best.

  Echo? I called a few times, but nothing came back, no cat, no assurance. I had a strong desire to be in Nathan’s apartment again, to celibately drape myself across his bed, to hear him talking through that breakup, to be the shoulder he was crying on without actually crying. But I also wondered if I just wanted all this—to take care of his cat, to water his ferns, to pretend to be at home in his home—as a way to retroactively salve a hurt, a dislocation, a thing I could never get right, never figure out how to do. I’d always thought our history was just a history, but looking at that awful lithograph and not knowing where Echo was or how to get back inside, I understood that’s the damn thing about the past. The things you do to people are always the things you did to people. My phone pinged but it was just junk mail, but then it lit up.

  Nathan—

  Can I tell you something?

  Family Physics

  You’ve been going through a lot, Sarah said on the phone.

  Everyone kept saying this to me, that I had been going through a lot. I did not agree, yet I knew the “lot” to which she was making an inaccurate reference was how, in the last three months, I’d gotten married, filed for divorce, moved several times, quit my job, and driven to Montana, where I began working in a grocery store, stocking beans. Karen had called it The Blitz, though it’s not like anyone died. But Karen is, by most accounts, my mother, so she has a certain perverted perspective on what I do, this thing that was once in her body, now walking around the world, messing things up.

  How are you doing? Sarah asked. Are you feeling all right?

  I feel all right.

  Do you?

  Sure.

  Okay … But do you really?

  Tell me about you. How’s law school?

  It’s med school and I’m fine. I’m just concerned about you. Dad said I should call.

  Ethan had called me daily for the past week, and before him it had been Linda, and before her, Karen, as if they’d organized shifts. It was hard not to feel as if I were a maybe-expired food that they were each smelling. I had always been the fermented vegetable of the family, but now it seemed to them (or it seemed to me that it seemed to them) that this rot had gotten the best of me. This time Sarah was calling to say she was going to come check in on me, for real, physically, despite my telling her I was fine, there was no need for a visit. She arrived the next day.

  It’s just a lot, she said on the drive from the airport. It’s a lot to go through.

  You all keep saying that, I said, missing a stoplight, horns blaring and tires squealing around us, but what do you even mean?

  Holy fucking fuck, Sarah shouted, even though we’d made it through just fine. No one got hurt. She’s always been nervous in cars.

  We’re fine. Then, after a long silence I suppose she meant as punishment I said, again, Everyone’s fine.

  I’d always tried to keep my distance from my parents and sisters, but they outnumbered me, were always closing in, always calling, always telling me that family is important, always talking among one another about what to do about me, and though I thought of cutting them out entirely, I had already learned the hard way, years ago, that such an extreme approach was more trouble than it was worth, like shaving your head—like any short haircut—some kinds of obliteration required constant upkeep—so I let my relationship with them get overgrown and ragged.

  Mom’s so worried she can’t even sleep. Sarah stared into my peripheral as I drove.

  When are you going to get a place of your own?

  She kept staring. I moved out seven years ago.

  Seven?

  Um, yeah.

  How old are you again?

  Guess. She thumbed her phone as she waited.

  This wasn’t going to go well. I’d never been good at remembering things that meant little to nothing to me, especially years, periods of time, exact dates. I was older—I could remember that much—but I wasn’t sure how much older and at the moment even my own age—thirtysomething … three or eight or six—wasn’t entirely clear. Was Sarah old enough to have a habitual, though pointless, relationship with the newspaper’s real estate section? How old is a person when they finish college? Had she skipped a year?

  She interrupted my calculating with an eruption—I’m twenty-fucking-five! You’re thirty-five, Bridget, and I’m twenty-five. Ten years between us, and guess what? It’s always been that way! I don’t understand why you never can remember.

  She had wanted to insult me too, to call me a freak or a cold bitch or something, but I could hear her rein it back in. There was no reason for her to be angry, but I didn’t say so. That’s never what angry people want to hear.

  But how do you know Karen can’t sleep if you don’t live with her?

  Because she’s our mother so I actually talk to her like a normal person.

  It’s true my family does many things known as normal. The density and hue of their front lawn can give one the feeling that imperialism really hasn’t been so bad. My getting married had given them all the sense that I too might one day maintain such a lawn. It was all a huge misunderstanding, my being in this family.

  She calls me when she can’t sleep, Sarah said, sounding proud and put-upon, a vindictive maturity. She’s just worried
about you. It’s a lot for a person to go through.

  I could have told her there’s no logical way to quantify experience, or I could have said there was no point in saying that what one person does or endures in any given week or month is, in any way, more than what another person does or endures, or I could have said that even if there was a way to quantify one’s life, to assign weights and masses to the mess that fills a year or lifetime, who is to say that some larger quantity of mess was demonstrably worse or more difficult than some lesser quantity? Couldn’t a life of too many small, pointless things, a life like a dripping faucet, be, in many ways, so much more terrible? But I kept quiet. There was just no point.

  Well, what about you? I asked. Aren’t you going through a lot as well? With law school and—

  Seriously? I’m in medical school—I just told you that.

  Ah, sure. To be a psychiatrist, a podiatrist?

  Pediatric oncology.

  Anyway, doesn’t Karen—

  You mean our mother, Sarah corrected.

  Call her whatever you want—doesn’t she have enough to worry about on her own not to lose sleep over whatever I may or may not be doing? Isn’t just being alive, just having to wake up every day, isn’t that a lot to go through?

  It probably was my fault that I wasn’t paying enough attention to the road to notice that older lady making her way with a cane along the crosswalk, but again, no one was hurt, and the lady may not have even noticed my bumper coming nearly within bumping range of her, though Sarah wouldn’t stop going on, for the remainder of the drive, about how the woman had jolted, that we nearly scared her to death. I am not going to disagree with Sarah, on this point at least, that fear certainly does have the power to kill or nearly kill a person.

  * * *

  Some years ago, both wanting and not wanting to die, I made a series of decisions I now realize were not my finest decisions. It started when Karen and Ethan received a large envelope from my university—I had, they were all too delighted to learn, earned the school’s annual Physics Award.

  You’ve never won anything before! Karen said on the phone. If I had known it was going to be her, I would have never picked up. This is marvelous. Just marvelous!

  I hadn’t even realized there was such a thing as a Physics Award, nor that I was in danger of receiving it—though it was the only class in which I was doing well. Dr. Dabrowski wrote the words very nice several times in the margins of my tests and essays, and I had often looked up during class to find him staring at my legs, his eyes tracing them, unashamed.

  And there’s going to be a ceremony in just a few weeks! It’s all just so exciting. Why don’t we all drive up to D.C. and have a little celebration dinner for you, how’s that? Pick somewhere nice for us, won’t you?

  There’s really no reason to do that. I’m not going to the ceremony.

  Can’t you just be happy for yourself, Bridget, just this once?

  I explained, yet again, that even enrolling in college had been a huge moral compromise I’d made for the sake of my parents—one last thing—but participating in this horrendous university’s pageantry of meaningless citations and accolades was completely out of the question.

  This place does nothing but print propaganda about their alleged social-justice mission while they silence all the truly progressive initiatives on campus. Why would I want an award from them?

  But Karen didn’t answer me, instead asked the familiar questions—Why does everything have to be political with you? And Why won’t you just accept that something good has happened? And Why can’t you just do this one thing, just this one thing, for your family, for me and your father?

  (It has always been just this one thing, then another one thing. Like the annual Little Miss Portsmouth Pageant that all three of us were entered into at age six. For the talent segment, Sarah tap-danced and Linda sang, but I chose to recite a section of The Lorax, though when I actually took the stage I forgot (whether intentionally or not, I can’t remember) to read the book aloud, so I just sat there, book in lap, face caked in pink blush and blue eye shadow, reading to myself. The audience nervously laughed, went quiet, laughed again, went quiet again. Sarah won it her year; Linda was a runner-up; I was nothing. Some years later at Cotillion—a series of weekend classes teaching fourteen-year-olds how to heterosexually waltz—I was sent home the first day for insisting that I learn the boys’ part (not because I liked girls (I didn’t like anybody) but because I didn’t want anyone touching my waist and pulling me around). Cotillion was just training for future debutante balls (some colonial-flavored patriarchy dressed up as mere tradition) but by the time I got my invitation to be a Year 2000 City of Portsmouth debutante I was old enough to flatly refuse, though when Ethan and Karen found the ripped Debutante Society stationery in the kitchen trash, they spent a whole evening trying to convince me to accept it—It’s quite an honor, Ethan said, not every girl in town is chosen, you know—to which I said I was well aware not every girl was chosen, since of course poor girls weren’t chosen and neither were black girls or brown girls, and no one had asked Missy Elliott to be a fucking debutante and she was the only person worth a shit to ever come out of Portsmouth, to which Ethan said, That big black lady with all the choice language? to which I threw a half-finished Coke bottle at the wall. I just cleaned in here, Karen said to the sparkling brown liquid and glass shards. I went to my room and stayed there as much as possible for those last few months before college, wearing out my Missy Elliott discography, nearly blowing out my speakers. Karen would sometimes linger by my door saying, I don’t like this language, while I mouthed the words to “She’s a Bitch,” on its fifth repeat. I loved that song.)

  I remember this phone call with Karen about the Physics Award going on for hours, perhaps the longest we had ever spoken, during which she occasionally cried as I stifled my tears, clenched my jaw, and clawed my way through the somewhat nonviolent communication I’d learned to use in a workshop earlier that semester.

  Family is important, she said, and it’s important that we stick together and support each other. That’s what family is for.

  But to value one person over another just because they’re genetically related to you is really just an insidious form of racial and social oppression. I don’t want someone to do things for me just because I’m related to them. That’s not a legitimate reason to—

  Listen, we just want to have a nice dinner for you. Not everything has to be so complicated. Should I put your father on the phone?

  She knew very well that Ethan and I hadn’t spoken since Bush had been inaugurated, and I laid into her about hiding her own beliefs behind the beliefs of her husband, and if she really had, like she’d once told me, burned her bra in the seventies then why didn’t she stick up for me last spring for refusing to be shown off like a prize pig at the fucking Debutante Ball? She nearly hung up then, but somehow we recovered and by the time the conversation ended we both thought we’d reached an understanding.

  Weeks later, the day of the ceremony, I was still in bed when Karen barged into my dorm room.

  Today’s your day! My little physician, it’s your day!

  I was hungover both from a beer-pong tournament benefiting the Womyn’s Resource Center, and a late-night screaming match I’d gotten into with one of my suitemates, Laurie, because she’d actually voted for that moron on the rationale that she was Catholic and he was cute. (She even had a W-of-the-month calendar, a dozen horrifying images, tacked up in her room.) Laurie shared a last name with a building on campus and happily called herself a legacy. She was everything that was wrong with everything.

  Are you ready for the ceremony? Karen asked. I pulled the quilt over my head. Your dad and sisters are waiting downstairs. I brought you a couple dresses to try.

  I haven’t worn a dress since Cotillion, I said under the covers.

  But I think you’ll like these—they’re very plain, and they’re school colors.

  I kept the quilt over my head
, unable to shake this dream I’d had of W wandering the White House, looking for the bowling alley, eating a tuna melt off historic china, remotely blowing people up with the click of a button, and it was in this weakened state that I conceded to attend the ceremony, but I wasn’t wearing a dress, and could she please get out of my room because I slept naked.

  Karen left the dresses behind—just in case you change your mind, she said—but I just showered away the beer sweat and put on the same black Levi’s I’d been wearing all year. First she didn’t say anything about my clothes but at dinner she brought up how nice my suitemate Laurie had looked in her red shift dress. (All the honors students had gotten awards for being honors students, and it had taken nearly a half hour for all of their names to be read, for them to cross the stage one by one, surrounded by applause, and accept their little medals.)

  Laurie’s a fucking maniac, I told Karen, pouring myself another glass of wine.

  She seemed like a very nice girl this morning.

  She’s got Ann Coulter on speed dial, I said, but this seemed to signal nothing to Karen, which frightened me too much to push.

  A toast, Ethan said, to my beautiful daughters!

  May we all experience the right to make choices about our own bodies, I said, clinking my glass to his.

  Yes, my mother said, there sure is a lot to celebrate, isn’t there? Linda’s getting married and Bridget turning out to be such a physician.

  And Sarah just told me she’s going to be the cheer captain next year, Linda said as she twisted her engagement ring around, looking at it like it was the happy little end of her.

  How old are you? I asked Sarah.

  I’m going to be ten in six and a half months.