Clarity

by Myanne Shelley

Chapter 9

  It was Sunday afternoon, before I had the chance to talk to Doug. Really talk, beyond the half-hearted and quickly forgotten how-was-your-day and regular back and forth about groceries to pick up or minor social obligations. Not that this was much of a topic anymore either. Times had changed since the old days of his frequent must attend cocktail parties and client dinners, though he still had some commitments. Both of us did, although it amused me, when I noticed, how rare it was for any of these to keep us out past 8 o’clock.

  Without conscious discussion or planning, it seemed, our friends as well as our workplaces had toned it back. And we almost automatically said no to any but the most pressing events, if they were scheduled late or farther than an easy drive. What this meant was over the past few years we’d been to a couple 50th birthdays, a silver wedding anniversary, and a pair of weddings for children of friends. Doug had shown up when he needed to at his office functions, and I’d dutifully come to the annual holiday parties. He worked out regularly at his downtown gym and sometimes went to their seasonal gatherings; I’d had a couple girls nights with Joan and other friends.

  This should have left endless time for the two of us as a couple. But it hadn’t, had it, I asked myself, evenings when I watched him for a moment or two before deciding the time wasn’t right. Since her stroke, I’d spent extra time with Mags. Or earlier, with Sam, who had needed a surprising degree of handholding in applying and then getting ready for college. And Doug, more than ever, seemed swallowed up by his work. Focussed on it to the point of tuning out everything else, or exhausted from it, and slumped in his chair, bleary eyed.

  Sunday, though, we had enjoyed a late breakfast and fresh made pastries I’d gotten at the local market. The day was cool but not overly foggy, comfortable for indoor or outdoor activities. I’d spent the morning cleaning and making sure Sam’s space was ready for him, and our kitchen was appropriately stocked. The Giants played a morning game away, so Doug had little interest in the afternoon game.

  I sat down on what I still thought of as Sam’s chair, the squishy one he had favored when obliged to join us in the living room back in adolescence. Small, silly, I would readily acknowledge, but in different little ways I was trying to bust out of our routines.

  Doug glanced over for a moment. Then his eyes grazed over “my” chair, and I saw him briefly register that something was different before dropping it as not worth contemplating further. He was wishing for a better game, and suspected he was about to be asked to join in afternoon chores. His eyes darted for a moment: no, logging onto the computer and doing his paid work would be worse.

  And I sat back, smiling at him in a neutral way. Then looked around the room, observing it both as a whole and a sum of its parts. Comfort came first, followed by a confident middle to upper middle class aura. Nothing was ostentatious or brightly colored, but the sensible furniture and little accents came together in a pleasant way. They spoke of an accepted level of affluence that didn’t need to call attention to itself. We didn’t need new things because we took care of what we had, and what we had was solid, old school quality.

  At least that was what I took in, and I assumed a perceptive stranger might get a similar impression. And what of the silent couple, husband gazing at the TV, wife pointedly looking away from it? Would someone else who was so-called sensitive be able to look at me and feel any of the churning beneath? But surely that was true of anyone, nearly any time.

  And yet not Doug. I truly did not get a sense of him struggling with anything internal, despite (or because of?) how he struggled with his working life. A tiny inner voice quickly queried: Clarissa, really, what kind of match is this for you?

  I didn’t tune this out. I’d had those inklings long before anything was outwardly wrong with me and Keith. And I had shunted them aside, buried them away until they had bitterly burst out after he confessed his affair. I should have paid more attention, that was so obvious now.

  But Keith and I – I turned back to Doug, now, watching him surf the channels – it had been different. Much more prickly and hostile. Keith was a guy who had learned how to tell a joke but really didn’t have much of a sense of humor. I had somehow been blind to that for quite a long time, too. It had taken Sam’s early years, his goofy boy humor and quick witted comments to wake it back up in me. Where Keith was more likely to roll his eyes at the pair of us.

  Doug could be sharp, intelligent, funny. He just needed to be free of distraction. “Can we turn that off?” I asked him. “I mean…” I nodded at the extraordinarily insipid beer commercial assaulting us at double volume.

  He clicked the remote and the big screen blinked dark. His eyes lingered there for a moment anyway, like he was imagining something better. “Need help with the furniture?” he asked, masking his wariness with a friendly veneer.

  “No, it’s fine. Sam can shove stuff around if it’s in his way. But I wanted to talk to you,” I continued. “About some other stuff. The, um, physiological things I’ve been trying to work out.”

  I watched him try to keep his face utterly still. And fail, as a twinge of an expression of distaste surfaced and was quickly repressed.

  “Okay,” he said. “You’re kind of giving me a funny look, by the way.”

  That made me laugh, for some reason. Yay, Doug, coming right back at me. I gave a tiny nod of acknowledgment and turned away. “Sorry. I can tell you don’t like hearing about it. But I – I guess I need you to hear me out anyway. I know you want it to, but it’s not going away.”

  “It?”

  “This, this ability of mine. This awareness. I’m sorry, I know you don’t like it when I try to predict what you’re thinking—“

  “You’re not always right, you know,” he put in. “Just for the record.”

  It barely even crossed my mind to challenge him. A, because that wasn’t the point and B, I was pretty darn sure that there were times when I was right and he just hadn’t owned up to his own inner feelings yet. “And it’s not appropriate of me in any case,” I answered calmly. “This isn’t really about you and me and our communications. I mean that’s a part of it, but small.”

  “Okay.” A hint of a frown crossed over him, again, hastily masked.

  “I’ve been tuning out a whole lot of what’s around me,” I told him, trying to summarize the whirling thoughts that had threatened to overwhelm me recently. “It’s become second nature. And that’s going to change. I’m not going to make a big deal out of it – nor get in the habit of making news out of it – but I’m not going to ignore these things anymore. I’ve picked up on information in weird ways. Scary, strange sounding. I’ve had physical sensations that came from other people, which seems bizarre. But it’s real, Doug. You know me, you know I wouldn’t make this stuff up.” I turned away from him, wishing to listen to his verbal response rather than be struck with the one on his face.

  Doug said nothing. I glanced over, and he arched his eyebrows. Almost exaggerated, like he wanted me to read him. “Well, what stuff,” he finally said.

  “The things I already told you. When my grandmother died, and just a couple months ago, when Yvette died. That nightmare about Chernobyl. And since I’ve been, you know, investigating it, I’ve remembered more. Quite a lot more.”

  Doug’s posture finally relaxed there on the couch. I watched a warm sort of openness radiate down, and it made me think of early times we spent together. The way we would talk, how interested he was in new ideas. It seemed like he was channeling some of that old spirit. And I was too, I felt the shivery excitement of being smart and clever, with something good to share.

  So trying to keep my thoughts somewhat organized, I spilled out a series of memories. First, my mother’s miscarriage. Along with my literal gut feeling of it, recalled from childhood. And moving forward, other times, other knowledge, other sensations that had come from outside myself.

  To
his credit, Doug listened carefully, and withheld judgement, or at least withheld speaking it. It was disappointing, but perhaps not that surprising, that he had forgotten I’d told him about my own miscarriage. So he was sweet and sympathetic, but his reactions were more oh-you-poor-thing, than any sort of wonder that I already knew the sensations from my visceral childhood memories.

  After awhile, I was the one running out of conversational steam. It felt invigorating, at first, to share these things with Doug. Hadn’t we stood up before everyone we knew and sworn our faith to each other, for better or worse? I felt like I was sharing whole seasons worth of interesting items with him, things I had previously withheld.

  But taken all together, it was exhausting. Just laid out like that, it seemed like all I’d been doing was swallowing up, and being swallowed by, other people’s emotions and physical woes. Not to mention learning depressing things in my dreams. I braced myself, clutching the soft arms of Sam’s chair, arching my back away from its soft embrace and stretching side to side. I needed firmer support, I thought, in chairs and in life.

  I took a closer look at Doug, who remained relaxed back on the couch, arms and legs extended. “Do you have any questions?” I asked. He had listened in an impressively non judgmental way, but also impassively.

  Doug shook his head, sitting forward and patting my leg. “Not really. I mean, you seem to have covered everything.”

  So you don’t wonder how any of this feels, inside, I thought but did not say, remembering Daniel’s insistent questions. Instead, I teased him, “You’re not going to go look this all up online and dispute it, right?”

  “Proof never hurts,” he answered. “But no.”

  That might be it in a nutshell, I thought. Maybe it was asking a lot, but his skepticism still bothered me. It’s not that I wanted him, or anyone, just to accept every crazy thing that came along as fact. But this wasn’t UFOs at Roswell or seeing ghosts. These were my experiences, and I hated feeling I had to justify and prove my own very real perceptions before Doug would accept them.

  “It would be nice if you could just take my word for it. I mean, at least acknowledge I’m not totally nuts, you know?”

  “Okay. You’re not nuts.” Spoken with an utter lack of conviction that anyone could have picked up on.

  “Some people actually find this interesting,” I said.

  He sighed. “I suppose your new friends are more attentive. Say the right things. But do they ever talk about anything else?”

  “Well I’m pretty sure they have interesting, full lives. They seem to get out more than we do, along with express things other than disdain for new ideas.” I thought about Daniel, the animation that often played on his face.

  Doug remained impassive, expressionless. Not insulted, just weary of the whole thing. He stood up. “I think I’ll go pick some stuff up,” he said. Doug, like a thousand men before him, hated to shop as in select nice gifts for relatives – but he would use the excuse of a trip the hardware store to get out of the house.

  Well, we’d opened the door anyway, I told myself after he left. If he hadn’t been a hundred percent supportive, neither had he blown me off, as he had earlier. Maybe I had focussed too much on the bodily stuff – things I knew made him a bit uncomfortable even in conventional circumstances. We would revisit the topic again, no doubt. Beyond the psychic/psycho stuff, I could better convey this growing need to get back out there in the world, to really pay attention and listen. To be a bigger part of my own life.

  I left Sam’s chair and eased into my own. Relieved, now, that Doug and I had shared at least the beginnings of this ongoing conversation. And knowing that if he had felt the need to get away for a bit, that he also would be back soon, even keeled and perhaps now less annoyed by my stories and needs.

  Imagining us in our seats here for the afternoon – me catching up on the dull sections of the paper, him watching a game he had little interest in – bestirred me back up and out to do some gardening. That image, the two of us, dully going about our routines, stuck with me for a moment. Like train tracks receding in the distance, our parallel lives could run forward in a straight line, never veering and never converging. We would become cranky, increasingly pudgy losers on the other side of the middle age hill, staring at our screens, pale and achy, living for our one-upmanship of complaints.

  That was the alternate future, I told myself, the one where I didn’t get out there and learn from all that had recently happened. Anything else would surely be an improvement.

  Outside, I paused before I started, just looking over the small yard. Tall trees from the street behind, some natives, some fragrant but ever shedding Eucalyptus, shaded much of it. We had claimed the far section most protected from the wind and exposed to sunlight for our herbs and vegetables. Try as we might, these always seemed to come up in miniature. Still, the very air was refreshing here.

  I knelt, feeling the give of the loose dirt below, and plucked up some weeds, gripping carefully to pull the roots. Doug had bought fresh soil as well as some nutrient rich concoction to lay over it back in early spring. We mulched everything else, but the hardier weeds still found their way amongst our carefully tended sprouts.

  Weeding and watering, I thought of my mother’s flat, dried out bed back in Pleasanton. It seemed like something she just did now and then for show, not from any connection to the earth or desire for its bounty. Now that everyone cared so much about growing and eating local, we had researched what grew best, and in what conditions.

  I thought about this fertile soil blend, and how you need the good stuff, loose, tilled, and nutrient rich in order for the plants to grow. And it seemed to me almost an analogy for both my parent’s lives. I mean, they had been raised in a time and place so poor. Despite that, they had at least tried to provide better for me. And I had reached beyond for myself, and then for Sam. And going forward, I would need to really make the effort to nurture all of us, all our hopes for future.

  I glanced at the clock as I took off my garden gloves and went inside for some water. It was plenty late, Sam surely was up and about by now. I clicked open my phone to call him, energized again, just to work out details of when he’d be arriving, which weekends we could count on seeing him. I wouldn’t freak him out or dump all this at once – but he’d be home soon. We, too, would find time to really talk. I would listen, I promised myself, to whatever he had to say. And Sam, I could count on him listening too.