by Lydia Netzer
I’m fighting off images and skips in what I see: I see my life before the fire.
I see warm-weather picnics, and cold-weather mittens in a blue basket, and I see my rocking horse standing in a different room, a room with trees outside. It is the room in George’s cottage, where I have slept with George. I see two high chairs together, and I know I usually sit in one of those chairs. I see pancakes on a platter, and two mothers cooking in the kitchen. I think very hard, and I see George, and I see George’s mother, and she’s smiling at me so kindly, so encouragingly, and I want her to love me. I do not want to disappoint her. But I know that I have.
“When I put you in her, I didn’t know she was a drunk!” she is saying. “I didn’t know she was a liar! I thought it would be different. But I’m sorry, but you can’t have him now. I cannot let that happen.”
“It’s all fake?” I say. “Our love? It was all a trick? All a scheme?”
She is nodding her head. She is shrugging. “If you want to call it that. I tried to get her to stop, but she kept going. I tried to pull the plug, but she wouldn’t leave us alone. All those years, she kept at it. She wouldn’t stop spying on him, trying to get you two aligned. Everything we did, she did with you. It was so annoying! As if she didn’t realize, wouldn’t realize—I’m not like her!”
“We’re not in love?”
“It was only science,” she says. “It was a good plan. But she wasn’t worth it, and now here we are.”
She fades in and out as I stop looking directly at her. I hold my hands out in front of me, and I look at them. They look like monster hands. I know that if I saw a dream mirror, I would see a monster face looking back. Everything I have ever worried about myself, coming out the mouth of this put-together woman and her big bossy mouth. I am worthless. I am the most insignificant blob of cells, of all the cell blobs there are walking around. I am unwanted. I am a creature formed for a purpose and I am failed in my purpose and there is no purpose left for me. I feel the most terrible despair.
I get off the stalled moped and I begin to walk, and I walk past her where she is still standing there, so tall and still. She keeps making words come out of her mouth that I cannot hear. She is shrieking. She is calling to me. She is saying STOP STOP or she is saying YOU ARE FILTH ANYWAY SO JUST GO AND BE SAD or she is saying YOUR MOTHER IS YOU or whatever she is saying. She can’t grab me or touch me at all. When I am past her I can’t tell anymore what she’s saying, and it doesn’t matter, because I’m going where I have always belonged, and to the place that I see I have created for myself long ago, to use when I most need it, which is now. I walk to the edge of the hole in the middle of Dark House, and without waiting or thinking, I lean forward, and I fall in. And I am gone. It doesn’t even feel terrible.
*
The first thing I remember, falling into the hole in Dark House, is my mother standing in the basement next to the ironing board, throwing clothes into a bag. I am ten. I am crying, saying, “Please, don’t go.” But my mother fiercely, angrily stows things in this black garbage bag, storming around the basement like she is cutting her life apart with an ax. “I would kill myself,” says my mother in this memory. “I would kill, kill, kill, kill myself if I wasn’t afraid to go to hell. After all this time, I think I’m actually afraid to go there!” And then my mother laughs a dry, humorless laugh and marches up the basement stairs. I remember reaching out to grab her by the elbow, begging her to stay, and now she swings around and snaps. “Don’t you touch me! Don’t touch me!”
The second thing I see is a moment when I was older, maybe twelve. I had been prescribed a dental retainer to wear during the day and at night. But it got left on my lunch tray at school, and I threw it out with the garbage. Twice. I see myself walking upstairs to find my mother lying in bed with her arm over her face. I remember standing inside the door, telling her about the thrown-away retainer really fast, and then slipping out into the hallway. In seconds, my mother is on me, her teeth bared. “You ungrateful, arrogant arrogant arrog.” My mother’s breath, her body, her hair, even her skin smell of gin. “This is the limit, the limit,” she says to me. “I will take your model rockets, and I will melt them down. It will be plastic for plastic on the kitchen stove: you throw away your plastic, I throw away your plastic, plastic for plastic, for plastic, for plastic.” I can feel her hand grinding into the meat above my elbow. Her feet, bloated and mottled, sticking out from below her flannel nightgown.
The third thing I remember is new: from before the fire. A fog has been lifted between me and my own mind, and I can see this for the first time:
I am standing on the road outside George’s country house. I am young, almost three, and my mother and I are taking a walk. The fire hasn’t happened yet. I am falling forward, rushing down through the hole in Dark House, terrifically afraid, but I can’t stop myself from remembering it. I am afraid to think, afraid for what horror might be waiting for me, what painful memory from the time that I forgot. What have I been hiding from my own brain for all these years behind the wall of the fire? But I cannot pull away. Because I am holding my mother’s hand.
“Look, mother,” I say. “It’s the naked hairy ape!”
“Irene,” says my mother. “Shhh. Let’s go into the house.”
In front of us, on the other side of the street, there is a neighbor clipping his long rows of hedges without his shirt on. Clipping and clipping hedges, with all his gray hair curling up from under his arms, out from his chest, up his back and into the back of his head. I remember this man. He lived next door.
Back in the house, my mother is, laughing, talking to someone.
“I’ve called him that a thousand times just talking to you!” My mother laughs. I am looking at the back of her head and I cannot see the other person, but I hear laughter. “Of course I didn’t realize she was picking up on it! She just called him that to his face!” The two people convulse with laughter. They cannot stop.
I remember violets. Violets in my hand, picked from the cracks of the patio bricks. A wave of violets. I remember these violets were before the fire. Before the fire, I remember a boy in the other high chair. It’s George. He is looking right at me.
And then I understand that the reason I could not remember the things that happened before the fire was not because these memories were so sad, but because they were so happy. I was so, so happy back then.
23
“I am going to San Francisco, George,” said Irene. “To that conference where Lebernov invited me to sit on a panel. Then I’m moving to Bowling Green. I already found a place, on Clough. Some poor idiot already dropped out of school. Parents desperate to sublet.”
He sat at his desk. She stood in the doorway to his lab. They hadn’t spoken in days. There was, ridiculously, a disco ball hanging from the ceiling. In the floor, scratch marks and shavings outlined the holes that had been freshly drilled. Poles of varying heights stuck into the holes, and on the poles were mounted galaxies, nebulas, the major landmarks of the near universe as George knew it, set up in a 3-D model.
“I don’t understand,” said George. “I thought you weren’t going to that thing. I thought you wouldn’t fly.”
“They’re trying to apply my substrate to radiation detectors in nuclear power plants. I just got off the phone with Lebernov, and again he strongly encouraged me to go.”
“So go,” he said grimly. “But moving to Bowling Green is a little extreme.”
“Ask your mother about it,” said Irene.
“I did ask her,” said George. “You were there. She said a bunch of crap that doesn’t matter.”
“Don’t you get it?” Irene said. “They were friends. They planned the whole thing, George. Your mother and mine. All those little things you thought were fate? No. Plants. They plotted and organized it. All those things my mother said to you, you thought she was reading from the stars? No. She knew you when you were a baby. Probably if she hadn’t been so wasted by alcohol and you hadn’t been so tipsy
and heartbroken, you would have remembered her, too. But whatever. You’re right; it actually doesn’t matter. We’ve been played.”
“I don’t care,” said George. “It’s not important. It doesn’t change anything.”
Irene let out a dry laugh. “It changes everything. Whatever we thought was happening wasn’t happening. The Yeats poem? They decided when we’d both memorize it. You went to Thailand on vacation—my grandmother lived in Thailand for years. Kismet? No. Thoughtful planning. Joke’s on us. You’re right—it never mattered.”
“Stop saying that. You’re being wrongheaded,” said George.
“You’re wrongheaded!” she yelled. “I’m the one that got made for you, like some custom pair of pants or a sauce recipe. I’m the one that got born for you. You can’t possibly understand what that feels like.”
“I’m sorry!” said George. “But it doesn’t matter.”
“You can say that because it’s not the same for you. I didn’t get to choose what I wanted to do. I always had to do what would make me better for you, because my mother was so committed to this—these lies—she wouldn’t stop. I never got to choose! Anything!”
He sat there behind a pile of student papers. He was wearing his reading glasses and looked utterly adorable. But for all Irene knew, she had had the idea planted in her head when she was a toddler that tall guys with brown hair and pink cheeks and reading glasses were proper mating potential. She had it planted in her head, and then she had her head discarded by the people that planted it, before they even harvested the idea. Here it was, come to fruition, and she had nothing to do with it. She only wanted to retreat. Retreat, retreat, retreat, before there was more embarrassment and more grief.
That morning she’d hired a real estate agent to list her mother’s house, and she’d hired a Dumpster company to come and park a big one in the driveway. She would empty out the house. Maybe Kate and Belion would help her. Then she would move to Bowling Green and commute. She would see George at work sometimes, maybe, but the Toledo Institute of Astronomy was a big place. She wouldn’t run into him that often, and when she did she would be professional. She would see him married to someone else, someone he could pick in the usual way, where you look around and notice someone you like, and you don’t get all hectic, throwing the word “love” around right away like a crazy person. She would work tirelessly at the Euphrates Project. She would finish setting up the experiment. If once in a while on her way home over the Anthony Wayne Bridge she stopped her car and got out, wavered a little on the edge of the river, no one would blame her for touching the railing. And when the project was up and running and the beams were firing, the detectors detecting, she would let herself fall forward, smack into the water, crush into a broken thing. Maybe they would name a particle after her. The George’s Constructed Wife particle. How glorious.
What she knew, what she knew with utter clarity, was that if she could not have George, she could not continue. She could not go through life whizzing through a pipe unhindered, endlessly whizzing and whizzing, a proton in a circuit, a hamster in a wheel, with no one to intersect, nothing to stop her. She would stop, meeting water, meeting concrete, meeting whatever would break her apart into whatever particles were no longer recognizable as her.
“You won’t do this,” said George. “You won’t leave me. You think you will, but you won’t.”
Irene bridled at this. She almost told him to go to hell. But then she felt sorry for George, too. It wasn’t just her who’d been duped. Poor man, he’d bought the long, sick story even before she had.
“You don’t know me, George. You think you do, but you don’t.”
“I do know you,” he said. “I recognize every part of you. I knew you when I first saw you, before we figured out about all these stupid intersections they planned. I knew you when I first saw you in the banquet hall. Just because our mothers did some stupid crap back in the eighties. Come on. Two people meet and fall in love. Then they’re happy forever. That’s the story. That’s the whole story.”
“That story is not real!” she screamed at him.
“What in the time we’ve known each other has not been real? What about me is not real? What about you?
“Forget all the schemes and the intersections, all these little coincidences they planned. They also made us, on some deep and basic place, to work together. You’re the lover, I’m the fighter, you’re the believer, I’m the pragmatist, you’re the heart, I’m the head. They built that. We can’t ignore it—it’s who we are.
“Then let’s not ignore it. Maybe that is love.”
“Of course you still believe that stupid crap! It’s you that believed it this whole time! You’re the believer, George, right? And I’m the scientist. We fit together like a puzzle! Except now, surprise! The thing you believe in so much means that our big fancy ‘true love’ romance story is bullshit, just a bunch of planted ideas, manipulation, hypnosis, whatever!”
“Irene, what if it’s even lower than that, even deeper, beneath all that stuff? We’re not the believer and the scientist. We’re not the folk music and the travel and the birthday. We’re two people who are loyal, and ambitious, and honest, and we both are scientists—hello? We both are believers—don’t deny it. The girl who believed she could create a black hole in a lab? The guy who documents the location of distant stars—with actual math, thank you very much. We aren’t puzzle pieces. We are actually the same.”
She listened to him, her breath coming hard. He must feel such a fool, having sat with her mother, her drunk and devious mother, listening to a ridiculous prophecy of a girl with brown hair, astronomer, dreams, and nonsense, who was really hardly worth the use of a pregnancy test. How long had the mothers’ plot survived, even six years? And then it fizzled. They were too crazy. They were too drunk. Or somebody changed her mind, and somebody else was too drunk to argue.
“Why are you trying to ruin everything? Why can’t you just be happy?” He sounded so sad. She felt so sorry. She wanted to fix it. But how could she?
“I don’t even know what happiness is,” said Irene.
“I do,” said George.
She should have let her mother burn their house down with both of them in it. She should have taken a deep, cleansing breath of the smoke and rolled over in her bed to pass out and expire right there. Then George would be with Kate Oakenshield right now. Or George would be with Sam Beth. And Sam Beth would take care of him properly. She, Daughter of Babylon, would know what to do with George. She was an astronomer, a brunette, and a dreamer in the most literal sense of the word.
“You don’t belong with me,” said Irene.
“You’re not in your right mind,” said George. He carefully made a mark on one of the papers in front of him and set it off to the left.
“Maybe you belong with Sam Beth,” said Irene.
“Who?” said George. “Patrice?”
Irene began to move distractedly between the pieces of his universe model. She touched a galaxy with her left hand, a galaxy with her right hand. She stepped carefully around a single star, though she had no idea what it was doing out all on its own. She had seen George’s calculations, his attempts at solving for a plane of symmetry in the universe, his attempts to fold it back on itself across a single plane and find that each half had a match on the other side. She felt the magnetism in his body, felt it pulling on her, making her try to find his words sensible, convincing. She felt she could almost let go, just nod, smile. She had to fight.
“Now you’re being crazy,” said George.
“No, you’re being blind. Maybe Patrice really loves you,” said Irene. “Just by chance. Real love. Not by design.”
“You love me,” said George.
“No, I don’t.” Irene corrected him sharply. “George. It’s not how we thought. I am conditioned to feel something for you, but it’s not love. It’s training. Maybe Sam Beth loves you for real. Reach out to her. Why not? She’s smart, and she believes in you.”
“So do you,” said George.
“I believe in nothing. No, correction,” she added. “You’re right. I believe in my experiment. Which is the only thing that’s ever been what it’s supposed to be. That’s what I believe in. Observe. Collect data. Record that data. Make conclusions dependent on the data and nothing else. Absolutely nothing else.”
George shook his head. “I’m not going to fall in love with Sam Beth just because you tell me to,” he said. He smiled and she felt her heart lurch. She could just say OK. She could just laugh and forget the rest. But then, but then, there was still the fact of who her father was, who her mother was, who she was. She couldn’t just laugh and forget that.
“At least give her a try. You’d be stupid not to.”
“Not stupid, just happy,” said George.
“Don’t embarrass yourself,” Irene admonished him. “You embarrass yourself and you embarrass me. Don’t you understand that we’re fools? We’re tricked. We’re misled. You’re gold and I’m dross. You’re teak and I’m fire. The fact that you don’t know that is an embarrassment to both of us. It was a trick, George. It is. A trick.”
“It doesn’t matter what it was or what it is. It only matters what it does.”
“This is what it does,” said Irene. “This is how it ends.”
“No, it’s not!” He slammed his hand down on the desk and glared at her, eyes full of fire. “You think you know yourself, but you don’t. I know you. I see you.”
“No, you don’t!” she screamed back at him, suddenly ferocious. “You see nothing. I am just the ruins of their plan. I am the hopeless residue of everything that they did wrong, George. I’m not worthy to be yours, and if you weren’t brainwashed by them to want me, you would see it. I can’t drink, because I’m too scared of falling down drunk. I can’t have sex—I am too scared of falling in love. I stand on bridges, stand there and stand there, scared to death of falling. I can’t even fall asleep without controlling my dreams. Dreamer? Oh, yes I am. I’m falling, falling, falling all the time. I’m half an inch from suicide, whichever way I turn.”