The Ancestry of Objects

by Tatiana Ryckman

  Each day after David is marked by the number of days since he stood in the kitchen, claiming only one tile of ancient floor. We have taken out the trash and watched it carried away in the back of a truck that shakes the panes in the windows as it drives on. The thin sandwiches we make while standing in front of the open refrigerator fall apart in our hand, and we stare vacantly at the space across from us that feels new. David’s absence is a new space. The air becomes a thing to touch and move through. We catch the lip of the counter with our fingernail absently. Over and over until the nail breaks close to its bed and becomes sensitive and pink. It flushes with the faintest crescent of blood. We sit in the bathroom, cutting our nails short like a man’s, until they are tender—until it hurts.

  We feel the weight of his lips on our forehead. We believe that if we turn around, if we scan the street through the lace curtain, we will see his silver sedan parked in front of the empty lot across the street, we will see his body waiting for our body in his nervous steps across the asphalt or quiet standing at the door.

  To lose ourself is a new way to die, and when we wake at two and three a.m. with a sheet wrapped around our waist, we think he’s found a way in and as a sleepwalker we let him. In this way, he takes more and more of the moments that used to be our own. The moments of hand-me-down reprimands, every We don’t do that, and the tireless failures of youth. The arbitrary tests of self-discipline. How long can we hold our breath? How many years can we pass through quiet disapproval, how many years can we be haunted, how many years until the only voice that echoes in the house is the voice of the woman, the doctor, and her persistent death every day. It won’t matter, we’ve decided, if the years won’t come.

  In the bath with just the light leaking in from the next room, we watch our hand in silhouette against the tile. The way the fingers move darkly through space. We think of the hands of a childhood friend. We once watched her clasp a ball before throwing it with all her might at a boy with a bat. We were stunned by the dark tan of her short fingers, the strength of them. She laughed easily with anyone, and we understood even then that it was incorrect to call her our friend because what we loved most about her was that she could not be contained or owned. But we were hers absolutely, because we required ownership to exist.

  We loved and hated her for those strong, dark fingers.

  David appears in the afternoon, Just for a moment, he says. He has soup and sandwiches in a paper bag from a deli downtown. We pull bowls and plates from the cupboards. We don’t remember when we last used dishes. We set them out on a low wooden table in the kitchen, and we sit in brown faux leather chairs that roll along the uneven floor at any provocation.

  Have you tried this place? David asks.

  No, we say, still confused by his appearance, by his existence, by the necessity of a spoon. Everything is overwhelming, and for a moment, overwhelmingly beautiful.

  We wonder about the stuff of him. The untouched tennis rackets and forgotten boxes under the bed with receipts and a college yearbook. In the same moment, we want him out of our mind. Want our own stuff out of our mind. Want the grandparents and preachers out of our mind. But the many things we have spent our life trying to escape are gone, and perhaps the world is so very overwhelming because it is entirely our own.

  •

  I wanted to clear the air, he says eventually, when the waxy paper flecked with turkey is folded and tucked under his plate. Things have been stressful lately and I got carried away. I worried when I didn’t hear from you that you thought I’d been … unseemly. I’d still like to be friends.

  We nod and smile and say reassuring things: Of course. Naturally. I understand.

  But what does a friendship with this man entail? Will we be invited to Thanksgiving dinner? Bowling or backyard cookouts? Will his wife suggest we paint our nails together as she kindly tries to fix us? Or will it be a proliferation of stolen moments accented by forced chastity? We are bored with the limitations of the man. Of humanity. Of ourself. Of things, being what they are. Of spoons at lunchtime. Now. Now, now.

  David stands. He has to get back to work. Was just stopping in. Call any time. His embrace at the door is perfunctory and embarrassed. He is proud of himself. He is ashamed of us.

  When he leaves, we know that we will not, cannot, call him, and we lie on the floor to count the friends we’ve had. The last new friend we made was eleven years old. We were ten, and now she lives three states away and we haven’t spoken in two years and even that, we suppose, is amazingly recent.

  Three months before the end of the job, a woman confided that she planned to quit. We resisted the temptation to look around the room to see who she may have intended the secret for. We wondered if this was how friendships were formed in the workplace. Or perhaps if mutual malcontent was what brought people together. All of us are doomed, she added, filing her nails on a purple board. All those girls who work from home, she said, that was just to make it easier for them to let us go.

  We look at the blinking cursor on our screen, then back to the nail file. Are you sure? We ask because we are supposed to ask, but we know that her certainty is why she is telling us. Because our presence signals a sort of death. Because talking to us is like talking to something already ended. Safe.

  The plot of our days takes on a beige vacancy. The house is a hair shirt, and we have grown accustomed to being unable to scratch the itch. A lifetime of summers spent punishing ourself between bedroom and kitchen and living room floor has prepared us for the special ennui, though this time we have no one to blame but ourself.

  While contemplating the crooked hang of a cabinet door, a feverish dissatisfaction compels us to leave the house. We will go for a walk. There is a hilarious practicality to it. To move one’s legs. To be out of doors. To pass the time. The word advisable comes to mind, and when a sound comes from our throat, it takes full, long seconds before we identify it as a laugh.

  You can’t go alone, the grandmother says.

  We pull on our shoes.

  You can’t leave the house like that. What will people think. They’ll find your body in the lake. You need a man to take you/show you/protect you/tell you how to be.

  We rest our head against the front door, waiting for it to let us leave. And this is how we know. It is us—our fear and our shame and our pride—and no one else that paralyzes us.

  We circumvent the cemetery on our way. Though we have been here before, on school field trips and walks after church and once on what might have been a date or might have been mutual existence in a specified place for a few hours after our class at the community college, the place feels new. The trees, though older than us, feel new. The painterly shades of green made by their overlapping leaves and the sound of families picnicking all seem incredibly new.

  We round a bend and see a pulse of red. Someone emerging from the bushes? Climbing over a low stone wall? As we near, we see it is just a sweater. Forgotten or discarded. We realize we are holding our breath, have tightened the muscles in our neck, that we are clenching our jaw. We coach ourself that we are safe. That we will be fine. That it is daylight in a public park. That there will be sweaters. That there will be other people, and they will not hurt us. This involuntary reaction catches us off guard and makes us wonder if, despite how we feel on our back in the house with endless light, maybe we don’t want to die. Or if biology will always betray us.

  At home, by the window with an apple leaking unappetizingly over our fingers, mealy and inedible, we think David is out to lunch and imagine the fork he is lifting to his mouth, the careful way his teeth hold the pierced pink flesh. We create for him a gush of salty juice, we make his tongue control the meat as he teases it from the utensil. The muscles at his jaw work, food mixes with saliva, and he swallows. The body he eats moves through his own body and becomes him. The X-ray of his stomach in our mind shows the mass breaking apart like decaying, slowly, until it ceases to be a fish or a cow. It is only David’s body.

  In the
evening, we imagine he is moving lovelessly through his wife. We remember her name and forget it. She is abstract. We think Simple. We think she is just lying there, and we think he is thinking of us, and when we answer the door, he is holding a bottle of wine like an excuse to be anywhere at all, and the sky is changing color and we step to the side as he enters.

  I don’t have to stay, he says quickly, as he follows us to the kitchen. I just thought I’d stop by. The silence that follows while we pick through a tangle of metal kitchen accoutrements floats between us like the long seconds of holding breath underwater and he fills the air like lungs: I hadn’t heard from you and thought maybe you’d lost my number. He stops to watch as we slowly turn the key into the cork. And I didn’t get yours.

  He is already leaning against the counter in the same place, and we aren’t compelled to invite him to sit, to stay. To do anything. We look over our shoulder while muscling the cork from the bottle, pleased that he is real, as if all this time he’d been an apparition. He looks confused or embarrassed. The cork is stained the deep red of death and skewered by the key. He is offering an excuse, an exit.

  He waits, and when we do not ask him to leave, he asks how long we’ve lived here, where are we from?

  We are (are we?) exactly where we’ve come from. But the man can’t tell the difference. Even seeing us in the only context we can imagine, he would readily believe we were anyone, and while a lie is appealing for the possibility it presents to be new, to be other, to be not ourself for the brief duration of the lie, we are honest. This is the only place we’ve known.

  He moved here from Florida. He says it with three syllables, Flor-i-da, and we wonder at the many shores it takes to make (someone) an island.

  We press a glass into his hand and fill it to the top. We are relieved by his physical presence, that it silences his imaginary one.

  He asks questions we don’t know how to answer: How have you been?

  We are unsure how we’ve been but remember that he stood in the same spot a week ago, and that we have looked at the David-shaped corpse of air as though it were a stain and worried that there is nothing we can do to remove the outside he has brought in, and the emptiness in us finally has a name. We remember running our fingers over cloth and opening doors and watching the white foam of toothpaste roll sadly down the drain. We remember the empty lot across the street coming into focus and turning to blurred background through the thick white rose-shapes of lace, we remember circling our own wet with a finger under the kitchen table, we remember drawing in the chalky dry windowsill dust: a series of stripes the width of a flattened pointer finger. We remember to say, Fine. And you?

  Good, he says twice. Everything is good. Work is boring, but it’s good. He seems like a person uncomfortable with uncertainty, eager to get past the obstacle of being learned.

  In this flurry of common satisfaction, we fear that he is a counterfeit. That the David we have let grope at the stale parts of our imagination is really ourself in this man’s face and dress shirt. That this man is only an imitation of the one we’ve created. We look around the room for an excuse to change the topic or make him change into the person he acted out the first time he stood in our house. Someone who, if he cannot see us, can at least be seen.

  Artificial gold flecks every surface and we have nothing to say, but ask, What part of town do you live in? as we try to color him into a backdrop, like a doll in her house.

  A wisp of cool air moves through the open kitchen window. The end-of-day light takes on an unnatural dark, tinted with pink. Mayfield, he says, and he becomes a man with matching luggage whose refrigerator holds only the sad glass jars of open condiments. Until we remember the wife, and her name, Lara, and the shelves fill with premade diet meals and flats of uneaten yogurt. We swirl the wine in our glass and smell it as if it will mean anything to us.

  Do you like it? he asks with eyebrows raised for approval. I didn’t know if you preferred red or white. I have a friend in California with a vineyard—David does not seem to know how to finish his own sentence—He sends me a few bottles every year. Maybe you don’t even like wine?

  It’s nice, we say, swallowing most of the contents of the glass. Our tongue dries against the roof of our mouth. We take another mouthful and lean against the counter. In the first lull of alcohol spilling into our blood, everything becomes a waterfall: the sink behind us and the mess of David in our lives before us; moisture pools between our legs, the bottle in our hand again fills the glass, and immediately everything feels like drowning.

  The light from the living room shines down the long open house; the color of everything is muted without warning until a snap of lightning illuminates our faces in ghostly white. We become aware of the angry rustle of leaves outside, and the smell of earth permeates the house.

  We turn to look out the window: the neon of late summer days is sooty and gray with pregnant clouds.

  David describes the optimal weather conditions and soil pH for grapes, and he does not see that the world outside lifts like a wave. He does not hear the house groaning to hold us. It is the dry tomb that protects us from the slop of every path that starts at the door. He tries to keep the conversation afloat and reaches for our attention, anything to anchor the moment: What do you do?

  Yeah, we say, distracted for the old wood of the window sills and floor concealed under tile and the years of filth that have baked carefully into the curtains and carpets, perfectly preserved. We should close the windows, we say as rain begins to pour off the roof in thick sheets.

  It’ll be fine. David places a hand on our arm to stop us from moving away. The breeze feels nice, he says. In another flash, David’s face is overexposed, sharp contrast where bones make tents of his skin and compose the graves of his eyes. What sort of friend, we wonder again, will this man be?

  The electricity flickers and the house goes foggy. In the thick light we can’t make out the purple stain of his lips, just the shadow of features against a pale backdrop. We look from the shadow of his brow to the dark curve of his mouth. Our lips and thumb tingle numbly. The small circle of his palm moving to our waist is fire where the cool air blowing through the house turns us into the flesh of something plucked or skinned. Raw. We lean forward, and in the next stroke of lightning his eyes are pools. We imagine our face as the endless black of silhouette against the window, a shadow puppet, and the desert of our tongue finds the cool wet of his mouth.

  Our hand sliding across the counter knocks our glass, purchased at a yard sale, ancient even then, to the floor. Despite the press of David’s mouth we see for a moment behind our closed eyes our grandmother, the image bright with the artificial glow of something remembered, like the saturated color of old film. We see her hesitant collapse into the rolling chair, her resigned free fall rehearsed for decades, the glass placed delicately on the counter. The milky memory even of neighbors, innumerable neighbors ago, trapped, then shattered in the thin edges of glass.

  David pulls away to apologize for what we’ve done, to say Let me clean that up—grasping at the opportunity to take it back, to leave innocent, to run to Lara. Glass and a blood-red spray glint off the tile. The wine sits on the plastic floor in beads, pooling together and running over the uneven surface.

  We toss a kitchen towel printed with geese wearing bonnets over the mess and rest against the lip of the counter. It will be fine, we say, leaning toward him.

  The house whines as its joints swell. David’s body is heavy with reservation and guilt, but he takes fistfuls of our flesh as if he can carry it away with him. His short hair pulls between our fingers. The great suck of our lives opens in the pit of our stomach and we know that we do not know why the man is here but that we want him to stay not forever but for this moment, and to carry this moment around for whatever forever looks like. You should be ashamed, our grandparents say, and we are. It feels like being alive.

  We lick the soft shell of his ear and he presses his hips into us. He pins us to the counter. F
or a moment the danger is not doing something wrong, to Lara—we picture her turning the pages of a magazine in soft lamplight—to the voices that still scold from every rocking chair, but to ourself. We will not be distracted by the long, straight slope of her nose or the labial pink of her lips. Her existence is the distraction, her absence the thing we grope between us.

  Lara must be privileged and boring because we are too lazy to give her humanity. If she were an interesting person, a good person, even an undeniably real person, we would have no one to hate but ourself, and that would feel like starting all over again.

  He becomes gentle, thumbing our nipples absent-mindedly. He is already pulling into his long driveway, the simple elegance of his life falling into place. He says something we cannot hear until, confusingly, the skirt of our grandmother’s dress bunches at our waist as his hands search for our body in the fabric.