Familiar

by J. Robert Lennon

  At some point the arguments with Naomi left the hallway and moved to the bedroom, where, in predawn light, Elisa could make out the ivy pajamas discarded on the floor, and in the bed, her roommate’s thick stubbled ankles crossed over a man’s tight and clenching ass: Derek, her husband, fucking the horsey Naomi!

  The women shoved and shouted while Derek cowered, half-covered by the bedclothes. Elisa could feel the rough synthetic carpet underneath her feet, she could smell deodorant and sweaty bras and the funk of sex. You don’t go to bed without washing your fucking dinner dishes! And your fucking hair in the shower drain! And that’s my husband, get your hands off my husband! Before dismissing Naomi, poor shy unhappy Naomi, from her thoughts, Elisa got her libido back, made Derek screw her, told him to give up the woman from work, You’re mine, she told him, you’re mine.

  In the days that followed, in her head, she found herself in a pseudointellectual standoff with an old philosophy professor; embroiled in a religious debate with an Orthodox rabbi, the father of an old friend; in the checkout aisle of the supermarket, demanding to see the manager.

  And then Silas, the nonexistent adult Silas, in the hospital waiting area, the two of them separated by twenty feet of linoleum, shouting at one another, their fingers gripping the soft and soiled arms of their chairs. She could smell the stale coffee in the little café beyond the reception desk; she could see nurses hurrying by, white moths at the edges of her vision. This was the hospital where they were told to go after the accident; this is where the doctor told them he was dead. Indeed, in this fantasy, the doctor was waiting just offstage, invisible but present; Elisa warded him off with an outstretched hand.

  Here, Silas was tall—he was still growing when he died—and stooped, around twenty-five, though he seemed to have aged further. Sullen, as in life, but sadder now. Angry, but a new kind of anger. Calculated, precise. She was afraid of him, not afraid of what he might do, but that whatever he said, it might be right.

  You always thought you were so smart! You thought you were smarter than everyone else! But look at you now!

  He raised his face to reply, and his mouth moved and sounds came out of it. They frightened her, though they had not yet coalesced into sense. Any second now, they might.

  What are you doing here? she shouted, Why did you make us come here? (Though Derek wasn’t there in this fantasy, only Elisa; she needed Silas to think his father was present to back her up, though it wasn’t clear why this was important.)

  He was pointing at her now, as he spoke, pointing first at Elisa and then down the hall, where his own dead body lay, and his eyes were blazing and his lips were white with spit. He stood up, accusing her of something, she didn’t know what. The twenty feet between them seemed to collapse into ten, then five.

  There is nothing else I could have done, she was saying, I would have had to become someone else.

  And now he was right there, she could feel the heat from his enraged face and she understood him now, That’s what I wanted! he shouted, That’s what I wanted!

  (And all the while she poked and pulled at the embroidery hoop, a toad seated on a mushroom, blades of grass springing up on either side, I HEAR IT’S SPRING! was the caption, and her lips moved, muttered sounds came out, and later Sam would say he paused outside the open door calling Mom, Mom! and she didn’t answer.)

  She stops for gas and food at the first place she sees when she can no longer stand not eating. It’s a sprawling rest stop, with separate parking lots for cars and big rigs, and multiple pavilions under which gas can be pumped. She chooses one, fills her tank with the wind blowing her hair into her face, then goes inside and eats something so bland and generic she isn’t even aware of what it is while she’s eating it. She is reminded of every other highway journey she has undertaken, every other undistinguished meal. She thinks they stopped here when they moved from Wisconsin—here or someplace exactly like it. They sat in a silent cluster, chewing their food and staring into space.

  They never did find a rhythm, the three of them. A way for them to fit together without Silas. They would get along, life would be peaceful in their new home, but they had no sense of purpose. The house in Reevesport was quiet; it had more rooms, for fewer people. One of them was a studio for Elisa in which, presumably, she would find something to do. She loaded all her embroidery into it, sat there for a few days, then threw it all away.

  A few weeks later, Sam said to her, “That stuff was fucking you up. You should paint.” This was a habit that Sam had begun, gradually and then with increasing confidence, to indulge: treating his mother like a casual acquaintance, another teenager. He swore. He let her see his cigarettes, spilling out of the military-surplus canvas satchel on which he had Sharpied an anarchy symbol. This is something his brother might once have mocked. Sam was seventeen then, but at times seemed much younger.

  Elisa said, “I don’t paint.”

  “So?” he said. He himself was into drawing. He was trying to start a band. “It doesn’t matter,” he said to her. “Just paint.”

  She did what he said. A few months later, it was almost all she did. For a long time she tried to paint particular subjects—she bought some watercolors and an easel and went out in nature and made terrible pictures of things. But she preferred to be in the studio. So she switched to still lifes. Then she took up acrylics because the watercolors were so thin as to seem to consist of nothing at all. She liked the acrylics so much, the rich pastes in their metal tubes, that she stopped caring about what she was painting and just put the paint onto the canvas right out of the tube. Then she gave up on canvas and just slathered the paint around using a palette knife on squares of plywood she cut to size in the shed. When she broke the palette knife trying to open a frozen door lock, she switched to a heavy-duty paint scraper from the hardware store.

  She did not talk to herself or to anyone else, real or imaginary, while she was painting. At first it was an effort not to. This was a thing her mind craved. But she silenced the voices and tried to appreciate the integrity of the materials before her, and as the voices went away so did her subject matter, until she was left with pure form. She tried to make her mind mirror the paintings, to render the slurry of memory and impulse as colored fields, complementary blanknesses connected by line and hue. This became the new project, doomed to failure. Which is part of why she liked it.

  All of this took a year. She was working again, at the new lab. She worked, and made these paint-covered squares, in perfect contentment. The paintings weren’t art. They weren’t for other people. They were just a thing she was doing.

  But Derek told her she should go out and find a gallery to hang them in. She believed that he was growing weary of her cadaverous presence in the house, her sexual appetite (which had not been quelled by its regular satisfaction), her newly rediscovered intensity and sobriety that appeared, once and for all, to have nothing of substance behind it. So she took a couple of the most obscure-looking paintings out to get framed, and the man at the frame shop looked at them and said, “They don’t need much. They don’t really need frames at all, do they?” A few weeks after that, she went to bed with him.

  She gets back on the road, and again she is driving, and the windows are down and the air is rushing in. This stretch of highway is both different and exactly the same. They made it to be consistent. So that wherever you go it looks like the American highway. And the highways of Ohio, she has often thought, are the precise average of all the other highways in America. When people say “the open highway” they are thinking of Wyoming, Colorado, northern California, but if you are driving a car in America, chances are you’re someplace that looks a lot like this. Elisa is surprised that more people don’t fall asleep and crash.

  Two cars and a pickup are approaching from the east. They are still a great distance away. Behind her, equally distant, is something that looks like a minivan. Far out in front of her is a white sports car that entered the highway ten minutes ago and accelerated quickly
away. She expected it would continue to outrace her, to disappear, but it slowed down and is still visible.

  The guardrail beyond the white line is gently bowed, as though a giant paused there for a rest. Underneath it grows an unfamiliar weed, some kind of fern, and beside the fern lies a perfect undented aluminum can.

  5.

  The crack in the windshield disappears. She tries to blink it back into place because at first she thinks that her vision has blurred, but blinking doesn’t bring it back, and now she is noticing other things. The sound inside the car has changed. It’s quiet. The window is closed. The window’s closed and the air-conditioning is on, the dashboard isn’t dusty anymore, and the taste of mint gum is in her mouth. In fact the gum is there, she has gum in her mouth right now. She pushes it out with her tongue and it falls into her lap.

  The gum lands not on her cutoff jeans, but on a gray cotton skirt draped over a pair of stockings. These aren’t her clothes—she doesn’t have clothes like these. She’s wearing an ivory silk blouse and there’s a sticker on the blouse that reads HELLO! MY NAME IS, then in her own block printing, ELISA MACALASTER BROWN.

  She notices that the spring in the seat is no longer bothering her, and that she is wearing an uncomfortable bra.

  Elisa looks up at the road. Only a second, less than a second, has passed, and the road has grown. It’s wider, the sky is taller. And it’s cloudy now, partly cloudy, many small clouds, as though the single cloud has spawned. No—it isn’t the road that’s wider, it’s the windshield, the windshield is larger.

  She glances around her, at the interior of the car, and it isn’t her car.

  She signals and pulls over. The shoulder here is wide, and she comes to a stop as close to the guardrail as she dares. Another car passes her from behind, startling her, because it wasn’t there before. She shifts into park and leaves it running: there are her hands on the wheel, her familiar hands. One of them reaches into her lap and picks up the gum; the other reaches for the window crank. But this car has power windows. Okay. The switch, then. The window rolls down and out goes the gum.

  After a moment, she opens the door and gets out herself. When she tries to stand up she nearly falls over. It’s her shoes. She’s wearing pumps with low heels. Not sneakers. Right. She slips off the shoes and stands on the hot pavement in her stockings. Stockings! In the summer! But of course the car is air-conditioned, why not?

  She turns and gets a good look at this car. It’s American. A Dodge Intrepid, sort of copper-colored.

  An eighteen-wheeler passes, roiling the air, and she squints. Maybe I should find a doctor, she thinks.

  Instead she gets back into the idling car, closes the window, and sits very still for a few minutes. She peels the name tag off her blouse and folds it over, onto itself, and sets it in the drink holder. (Drink holder!) Beside her, on the passenger seat, is a thick plastic three-ring binder. There’s a label stuck to it, bearing her name—laser-printed, this time—under the title 6TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF ACADEMIC ADMINISTRATORS. She opens it. A schedule, presentation agendas, handouts. New networked software applications offer statistics-driven space management models for research and pedagogical purposes. Has she attended this? It doesn’t seem possible. She thumbs through the pages until she arrives at the plastic pocket in the back of the binder. There are several printed-out e-mails, hotel reservations, maps. An envelope marked RECEIPTS in her own handwriting. She chooses an e-mail at random. It consists of an exchange between, apparently, herself and a conference organizer. Supported by a small forest of carets is a boilerplate sig line: Elisa Macalaster Brown, Graduate Studies Coordinator, Levinson Biotech Center, SUNY Reevesport. And a phone number.

  This is not her job.

  There’s a handbag on the passenger side floor, and she reaches over and picks it up. The movement is familiar to her, she performed it just the other day, picking up that change. But it feels more effortful now, for reasons that are not yet clear. The bag is familiar too—it’s her bag. Inside it is a cell phone, not one she recognizes, but no matter—the bag interior looks right, it contains the same mass of scribbled notes and receipts and ticket stubs and dead ballpoint pens she is accustomed to. Okay then. She turns on the phone and there’s a photo of Derek on the screen. It looks recent—he is groomed and relaxed, smiling in the shade of a tree.

  She hesitates for a moment, and in that moment feels the world trembling, as though it might implode. An involuntary gasp. Have to do something. She casts her gaze around the interior of the car, settles on the printed e-mail, picks it up. She opens the phone and calls the number in her own sig line.

  She expects voicemail. But: “Levinson Center.”

  “Ah… hello?”

  There’s a pause. Then, “Lisa?”

  She laughs. She’s got to admit, it’s funny! She laughs and the voice on the other end laughs and says “Are you at the conference?” and Elisa says “Yes, no, I mean I’m on the road, sorry, I meant to call Derek” and the voice laughs again, says “See you tomorrow.”

  Elisa ends the call.

  If there’s a time to panic, this is it, while she’s alone. She takes several deep breaths and rests her head on the wheel. All right, she thinks, this is very unusual, this is frightening. Or it should be frightening. But she isn’t afraid, not really. Instead, she is intensely aware.

  She is reminded of times in her life when everything felt different, all the time. When the small changes in her social circles, her patterns of thought, the texture of her emotions, would register as tectonic shifts, altering utterly the landscape of her life. College, grad school. The early days with Derek. Often she would stop what she was doing, close her eyes, take stock, and it would feel as though her life of just a week before, even of the previous day, was thoroughly, inalienably over, and that everything was starting again, beginning with now. And there were times when she would apprehend the impending extinction of the present moment. Out walking around the lake, or in bio lab, the sweat beading on her forehead and trickling down into her safety glasses. She would think, this moment was just born, and soon it will be gone. She would meet it, fall in love with it, mourn it, all at once. She cried more in those days. Almost daily, and often in public: silently, unobtrusively. The brutal immediacy of thoughts and emotions. This is what she has forgotten. It is here now. Her throat is tight and her jaw trembles.

  Something must be wrong with her. Yet she doesn’t feel dizzy or light-headed. She only feels different. Her body is different. Jesus, this bra.

  She lets out breath. Leans back in the seat and unbuttons her blouse. Quickly strips it off, unclasps the bra and removes that too. She tosses the bra onto the open binder and puts the blouse back on. Then, after a moment’s thought, she lifts the blouse and looks at her stomach. It is definitely different. Fatter. She’s what, ten pounds heavier? Fifteen? Suddenly she can feel her thighs chafing.

  But I’m thin, she thinks. I walk to work.

  To her lab, that is. Maybe she doesn’t walk to the Levinson Biotech Center at SUNY Reevesport. Maybe she drives this car, not her Honda. Maybe she picks up a box of doughnuts on the way.

  This is fucked up.

  From inside her bag comes the sound of electronically rendered mariachi music.

  She reaches in and takes out the phone. There’s the picture of Derek again, and the screen tells her it’s him who’s calling. She isn’t sure if she wants to hear his voice right now. But perhaps something is wrong. Maybe it’s Sam, something’s wrong with Sam. Why would he call her when he knew she was driving? He doesn’t ever call her. If he needs her, he just waits for her to appear.

  The music is awful. She answers.

  “Hi, it’s me! You got on the road okay?”

  She doesn’t speak.

  “Lisa?”

  “I’m here. Yes, I’m fine, I’m on the road.”

  “How far are you?”

  “I don’t know. I’m in Ohio.”

  After a silence, he says, “Are you all r
ight?”

  “Sure.” He sounds different. So must she.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’ll be home soon.”

  “Should I have dinner ready?”

  Dinner. This isn’t something he does.

  “Yes, okay.”

  “Will do,” he says.

  “Okay.”

  “Love you.”

  “Okay,” she says. She draws another breath, then hangs up. She sits and stares at nothing for a moment then figures out how to turn the phone off entirely. Hands trembling, she drops it back into the bag.

  Now she is frightened. That voice that both is and is not Derek’s. The presence of love where there is supposed to be none, or at least a different kind: habitual, practical, inert. A bulwark. Whereas the voice—even in the early days, when he whispered to her in the narrow apartment bed, when their love was a force field around them, buzzing like a short circuit in the energy of the world, it was not like that. Derek was never sweet. This wasn’t a thing she thought she ever wanted. Her father was sweet. No, Elisa wanted a serious man.

  The Derek who just called her was not anyone she recognized. He didn’t sound like her husband impersonating somebody else. He sounded like somebody else.

  There is something reassuring, isn’t there, about the absence of love. This is what she has often told herself. The only real marriage is the marriage of the body and the mind. Until death do us part: a romantic lie. People can indeed be parted. Love can end, and the body and mind soldier on. To pick up the phone and find that love is gone, that’s something a person can understand. That’s a thing that happens. To pick up the phone and find that love is here, where it doesn’t belong: well.