by Lynn Coady
“I understand you’re very busy,” apologizes Jane.
Dave squints, frowning the same puckered, stagey frown with which his daughter favoured her moments ago. “My dear,” says Dave. “I’m busy going broke.”
Dave has several photographs for sale. Shots of the tower, the batteries that dot the hill — guns toward the water — the icebergs, reprints of the old Marconi photos. Quality reproductions in deliberately rough, wooden frames. Overpriced. Jane pretends to study them, giving the hangover-mind time to catch up. What Ned told her versus what he told them. And why. And why? Eventually buying two of the things by way of apology, once the gears have clicked more firmly into place. To make up for cancellation of the boat ride, but also the fact that she — just remembered! — can’t make dinner this evening after all. She’s got a flight to catch. Also she must make up for the fact that she was, apparently, staying directly across the street from Dave and family the whole time she was here. Dave with the long “a” sound in his name, across the street from her hotel.
Because, no. No indeedy, Ned. I will not do this thing with you.
Yet kept insisting, apparently, she’d have no time for a visit. No time for anyone but Ned. Then all of a sudden demanding a ride in the boat! This, she’s gathered from Dave’s gruffness, is not how things are done. She selects a third print to take home, apologizing numbly all the while. It’s cutting little salt with Dave. He’ll be on the phone the moment she jangles her way out the door. Alerting local media. West Coasters Big for Britches, As Suspected All Along.
The prints of Marconi are the same images she saw at the tower for the most part. Different vantages of the same scenario; the photographer must have circled him, hoisting his heavy tripod around, ducking his head beneath a black shroud. The serene fanatic seated in his desolate, wind-blasted room at the top of the hill, wire-mess of his obsession on the table in front of him. A scribble of potential — connection unconnected. Oh, this? This is nothing.
HELLGOING
Once she got back Theresa told her friends about how her father said she was overweight not even an hour into the visit. Just — boom, you’re fat, he lays this on her. “Not, you know,” said Theresa, “you look well, or you look healthy or, you know, maybe: however you might look, it’s good to see you.” Her friends held their faces and smiled in pain, the same way her brother had when he was sitting across the kitchen table from her with their father hunched and slurping tea between them.
Her brother had been her enemy once. Even though it was just the two of them, and only a year’s difference in their age, they had never been the kind of siblings who were each other’s greatest ally and defender. They weren’t really each other’s greatest enemy either — just petty rivals, but the rivalry was immediate and ongoing. The longer Theresa had been away as an adult, however, the nicer and better-adjusted Ricky seemed to get.
She had expected the worst when he decided to move in with their father after their mother’s death and Ricky’s divorce. She had expected the two men, who were so alike already, to simply merge into one horrific masculine amalgam. And end up one of those bachelor pairs of fathers and sons that she knew so well from back home, finishing each other’s sentences, eating the same thing every day — cereal, cheddar, toast, bologna with ketchup — pissing in the kitchen sink because the bathroom was too far away, wiping their hands on the arms of their chairs after finishing up a meal of cereal and cheese. Served on a TV tray. A TV tray never folded and put away, never scrubbed free of solidified ketchup puddles, never not stationed in front of the chair.
But Ricky got better instead of worse — he’d refused to merge into the two-headed, tea-slurping father-thing that haunted Theresa. Maybe it had haunted Ricky too, that bogeyman — perhaps he’d steeled himself against it. He had taken to wearing ironed, button-front shirts, for example, clean ones, even around the house, instead of T-shirts and sweats. He didn’t wear a ball cap anymore, which was astounding because Theresa had never seen him out of one since seventh grade — he’d spent adolescent eternities in front of the hallway mirror attempting to get the curve of the brim just right.
Theresa arrived in their childhood home to find things neat, dust-free and zero TV trays in sight. Their father was expected to come to the table when his tea was ready — he didn’t get it brought to him, like their mother would have done. “I’m not here to wait on ya, buddy,” Ricky would call into the living room. “Get your arse to the table.” He somehow had made it a new ritual from what it was when their mother was alive — something tougher, less domestic. Just a couple of dudes drinking tea. As if coming to the table was now a minor challenge thrown down from son to father, like their dad would be sort of a pussy if he didn’t rise to the occasion. She wanted to applaud at that first sight of the old man heaving himself to his feet without so much as an irritated grunt. She wanted to take her brother aside and congratulate him on it.
She told a potted version of all this to her girlfriends as they sat around drinking vodka gimlets — they were on a gimlet kick — in Dana’s living room. To set them up for the climax of the story, the big outrage: Put on a few pounds, didn’t ya? She used the pissing in the sink line to make them smile, but also to ensure they had a solid sense of where Theresa and her father stood. Ruth’s father, by way of contrast, was a provincial supreme court justice, long divorced, and he and Ruth went on cruises together to a different part of the world every year, where they had pictures taken of themselves holding hands.
Theresa had packed off her girls to their dad’s house and flown home for the Thanksgiving long weekend. It was a long way to come for three days, but Ricky called her and asked her.
“Jeez, Ricky,” she’d said on the phone, “I’d love to, but we’re into midterms now. I’d planned on spending the whole time marking.”
“With Mom gone,” Ricky interrupted — it didn’t feel like an interruption so much as an ambush, a bludgeoning. He silenced her by breaking the rules of their brother–sister interactions as she’d understood them up to this point. Theresa had been busy making her breezy, half-assed excuse and out of nowhere Ricky hits her with the grotesque reality of with Mom gone.
“With Mom gone,” said Ricky, “I feel like we all have to make an extra effort here.”
For years, she and Ricky were not in touch. They weren’t estranged, it just never occurred to them to call each other. They sent Christmas cards, some Christmases. It took Ricky forever to get the hang of email, but once he was on email, they emailed. Ricky “wasn’t much for typing,” though. So they didn’t email very often. Point being, Theresa knew what Ricky was saying in evoking their lack of mother — he was acknowledging that they had for years depended on their mother to give a shit on everybody else’s behalf. Their mother giving a shit was the only thing that kept the family together. It was their mother who, at Christmas, made sure everyone had a present for everyone else. It was their mother who always passed the phone to Ricky when Theresa called on Christmas Eve. Their mother gave Theresa Ricky’s news throughout the year (the divorce, the knee operation) and gave Ricky Theresa’s (the divorce, tenure).
“The women of our mothers’ generation,” Theresa said to her friends. “That’s what they do, right? That’s their job — to give a shit so the rest of us don’t have to bother —”
Jenn was sprawled on the loveseat shaking her head tightly as she spat an olive pit into her palm. “I get so mad, I get so mad,” she interrupted. “My mom hauling out the address book every year and writing Christmas cards to everyone she’s ever met in her life. I mean it takes her days. Then she carries them all over to Dad’s chair for him to sign. It just — it infuriates me! Like he’s had to put any effort into it whatsoever. Gavin — he doesn’t get why it pisses me off so much when I’m sending a present to his mom or someone. He always goes, Hey, can we go in on that together? And I’m like, No, we fucking can’t! I went shopping for your mother. I put actual thought into it. It took me an afternoon of my own free
time! And I bought her a card and I wrapped the present and I’m going to drop it off at the post office. Do you know why you didn’t do any of that? Because it’s a pain in the ass! It’s effort! But now you wanna get in on it? No! Go and get your mother a present yourself if you want to send her a present.”
Everybody laughed. Jenn was playing up her anger for effect, because who among them hadn’t tried to get in on someone else’s present, piggybacking on another, better person’s kindness? Her friends were being angry in solidarity with Theresa, dredging up their own slights and outrages and laying them neatly down like place settings — napkins, knives and forks.
“So what happens when women stop giving a shit?” asked Ruth then, trying to turn things into a seminar all of a sudden. You could always hear the ‘y’ when Ruth said “women” — womyn. Just like she wrote it. They all loved Ruth, but she never “punched the clock,” as Dana liked to say. Her students all adored her, because she was like them — what her friends referred to, in private, as a “true believer.”
Theresa spoke next in order to shut Ruth down — to avoid the classroom discussion her question was meant to provoke and get back to her story. “The real question is,” she said, “what happens when they all die off, our mothers?”
It was not the nicest way to get things back on track. Everyone else’s mother but Theresa’s was still alive, so every brow but her own was pinched in existential dread. But at least the attention was back on Theresa. This was her particular gift, she knew, after years of running seminars and sitting on panels. She knew how to manipulate the attention of others — to get it where she needed it to be. She knew how to be ruthless when she had to and she knew this was a trait she had inherited.
“What happens, I guess,” said Theresa, “sometimes at least, is that people, sons, step up, the way Ricky has.”
Ricky saw what a motherless future might hold and, by God, he took the helm. Yes, he moved in with a parent, but at least he didn’t wear a ball cap anymore. (He must have looked in the mirror one day and thought: This is ridiculous. The hair is gone and everyone knows it.) And he hired a housekeeper to come in once a week — a masterstroke. And the housekeeper, she laundered the flowered armchair covers Theresa’s mother had sewn years ago precisely in response to her husband’s habit of wiping his food-smeared hands on the arms of the chair. It all meant that clean, orderly adulthood continued apace on Ricky’s watch, with or without a mother on hand. Theresa had been fully braced for everything in her childhood home, including the dregs of her family (because what was her mother if not the best of their family, the cream, and what were Ricky, her father and Theresa herself if not the grounds at the bottom of the cup), to have gone completely to hell. But things had not gone to hell.
“Ahem,” said Ricky, as they walked together down the dirt road to check the mailbox. “You don’t have to sound, you know, quite so astounded.”
She didn’t tell this part to her friends — what she did to Ricky after what her father did to her. They walked down the road together, Theresa still vibrating. She’d been mugged, once, in Miami while taking a smoke break outside the hotel where her conference was being held, and she’d vibrated like this, exactly like this, after having her bag wrenched out of her hands by a scabbed meth-head who’d called her cunt box. “Cunt box?” Theresa had repeated in disbelief, trying to catch the meth-head’s eye as they struggled — and that’s when she lost her bag, because she’d been more focused on trying to prompt the scabbed man to elaborate than on maintaining her grip.
She was forty-four. I am forty-four! she’d sputtered at her father. She had had babies. I have had babies! Put on some pounds? I’ve put on some pounds?
Theresa had jumped out of her chair so fast it fell over. Goosed by insult — the shock of the insult, the unexpectedness of the attack. Her father sat there looking affrontedly at the overturned chair as Ricky ran a hand over his bristled head, maybe wishing for his ball cap, wishing for a brim with which to fiddle. The truth is, Theresa wanted to run across the yard into the wall of pines at the edge of her father’s property, there to hide and cry.
She was the Assistant Chair of her department. She had a paper coming out in Hypatia. She was flying to Innsbruck, Austria, in the spring to deliver that very paper. There would be another conference in Santa Cruz a few months later where she was the keynote motherfucking speaker. She was being flown down there. I am being flown down, she’d hacked, asphyxiating on the rest of the sentence.
“However,” Theresa narrated to her friends, “who gives a shit about any of that, right? The important thing I need to know is I’m a fat piece of crap.”
“Don’t say that,” pleaded Ruth. “Don’t say ‘I’m fat,’ because then it’s like you’re agreeing with him, you’re affirming it on some level.”
Dana leaned forward. “Did you have an eating disorder when you were a kid?”
“Of course I had an eating disorder,” yelled Theresa. “Who didn’t have an eating disorder?”
“They push our buttons,” said Jenn. “The buttons are installed at puberty and they can push them whenever they want.”
“I didn’t think I had the buttons anymore,” said Theresa.
“We always have the buttons,” said Dana.
“They fuck you up, your mom and dad,” quoted Jenn.
It was an obvious quote, there was no other quote in the world more appropriate to quote at that moment, but Ruth jerked around, frowning. Disappointed at Jenn, because feminists weren’t supposed to quote the likes of Philip Larkin. Theresa and Dana fired a secret true-believer grin at each other. Theresa was finally feeling like herself again.
She didn’t tell her friends about anything else — the climax of the story had been told: Put on a few pounds, didn’t ya? Ba dum bump. Punchline! She didn’t tell them how she tried to offload her feelings onto Ricky as they walked the dirt road. He was only trying to make her feel better with the walk. But she kept jawing on about how great the house looked, how well their father seemed (“Same old Dad!”), how monumental it was that Ricky made him get up from in front of the TV and come to the table. And hiring a housekeeper — how had he known where to look? Then it just seemed natural that she move on to Ricky himself — he was looking great! He’d stopped smoking, she noticed. He seemed so fit, so together. She was getting personal now. Was he running? Going to the gym? He was dressing better, wasn’t he — had that been, like, a conscious decision at some point? When had he ditched the ball cap — she had to be honest, that was a good call. Just shave the head, rock the bald-guy thing. Everyone was doing it these days. He was looking, she told him — forty-four-year-old divorcee sister to forty-three-year-old divorcee brother — very grown up.
Which was when he told her she did not have to sound quite so astounded by it all.
She used to do this to her mother, she remembered abruptly. Because she didn’t have the nerve to retaliate against her father, she would torment her mother instead. Ricky had never done that, she was sure. He protected their mother. He absorbed things like a sponge, whereas Theresa had always needed someone to pay.
“Sorry,” said Theresa.
“I was married for many years,” said Ricky.
“Sure, I know,” said Theresa.
“So I know how to run a home, is what I’m saying.”
She realized she knew nothing about her brother’s married life. The woman’s name was June, they had eloped to Vegas (according to Theresa’s mother, who’d told her over the phone) and so there wasn’t even a wedding to attend, no in-laws to meet. June was a cashier at Ricky’s pharmacy. Theresa had to admit she hadn’t taken a huge interest in June. The last she heard about their activities as a couple, just before she heard about the divorce, was that they’d bought a speedboat.
“June,” said Ricky, “struggled with depression.”
He said it like an ad, a PSA. Like he had read many pamphlets, posters on a doctor’s wall.
“Oh,” said Theresa.
/> “Sometimes she would go to bed for weeks.”
“Whoa,” said Theresa. “Jeez.”
“So that was shitty,” he sighed.
And now you live with Dad? Theresa wanted to say. Now you reward yourself by moving in with Dad?
“It just made me see how easy it is for people to give up,” said Ricky. “You have to be vigilant.”
“Yeah,” said Theresa. “Well —” She had nothing insightful to say to her brother. She’d spent her life being vigilant about other things. You can only be vigilant, she thought, about a few things at a time. Otherwise it’s not vigilance anymore. It starts to be more like panic.
“Well, I just think it’s great, Ricky. I mean — good for you. Really.”
Ricky sighed again. They had arrived at the mailbox. As they were approaching it, Theresa could see the flag wasn’t up. But they walked the rest of the distance anyway and Ricky rested his hand on the box like it was the head of a faithful dog.
“You wanna check?” he said.
This was sudden childhood. The walk to the mailbox. The peek inside for mail-treasure. Because sometimes, Theresa remembered, the postman just forgot to put the flag up. Or it fell down on its own, but the mail remained within. That was the earliest lesson, when it came to vigilance, the giddiest lesson. You flew to the end of the road no matter what the flag was doing, you didn’t hesitate, you stood up on your toes and had a look either way. You could never trust the flag.
DOGS IN CLOTHES
You’ll be glad to get out of here, they all told Marco moments after shaking his hand, inviting him to sit down at the microphone. How long are you in town for? And Marco would tell the host, or producer, or whoever it happened to be, the same thing he’d been saying all morning: in and out, quick trip, reception last night, lecture tonight, flight to London first thing tomorrow.