Prodigals

by Greg Jackson

  Was it possible Lyric was pouting? Hara wouldn’t have believed it, but she had never seen this reticence in the girl, her lower lip thrust ostentatiously forward. It was hard to remember sometimes that the girl was just that, a child, subject to emotions all her own and yet emotions she could not have lived with long enough to understand in all their unoriginality and predictable rhythm, their mendacity, their worthless force.

  “What about Robert?” Hara said, hating herself a little as she said it.

  “Robert and I are friends,” Lyric said. “I’ve told you that.”

  “Okay, God. Did you ever hear about the lady who protested too much? But let’s go to the party if it’s going to be like this.”

  “Don’t you think it’s strange,” Lyric said, “you’ve had the house, what, six years and you don’t know anyone who lives here?”

  “I know Gerry. Now I know Robert,” Hara said. “I know people who come here in the summer.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “I’m not an adorable sprite like you. I don’t like people nearly so much. What do you want from me?”

  “A minute ago you didn’t want to go to the party because you said someone named Dwayne was going to sneeze type-two herpes in your cornea.”

  “I don’t think I said that, and anyway,” said Hara, “I can’t be held responsible for every dreadful remark that escapes my mouth.” She affixed a puzzle piece and sensed a bit of humor stealing back into the girl. “Look, I’ll take the risk.”

  “It’s late,” Lyric said.

  “Oh, it’s barely ten. I’ll bet we’re just in time for some chip detritus or whatever they eat.”

  “They?”

  “I’m joking. The Morlocks.”

  Perhaps Hara had misunderstood. Perhaps Lyric merely wanted to bring her two worlds together. Perhaps she wanted to help Hara make friends. She seemed to have enough of them, Lyric did. And the girl was right, the party was outside, although why Hara had disbelieved her she couldn’t quite say. It was next to the site of a new house going up. There was a fire at least, a faint hint of rippling heat coming from the crowd dancing at the foot of a platform on which a few underdressed young men were trying to damage some instruments. Hara shivered and pulled her jacket around her.

  “I told you,” Lyric said.

  “All right, you don’t have to gloat.” Hara took a shot of bourbon, then filled her plastic cup. “What? Oh Lord.” She drifted away from Lyric, toward the fire, catching in its sweet odor a second scent, bodily and intimate. A man pressed a small pipe to his lips.

  “Excuse me,” Hara said with her most obliging look. “Hi, would it be a terrible bother…”

  “Be my guest,” the man said through a held breath.

  He was a few years older than her, she guessed, his face leathered and ruddy. She took the pipe from him and sucked the flame over the embers while he gazed off at the stage.

  “Shit that passes for music these days,” he said.

  “They said the same thing about Schoenberg, though, didn’t they?” said Hara.

  What on earth was she talking about? How old did this man think she was? She was, come to think of it, exactly the age Zeke had been when they married. She tried to hold the thought still, to explore it for the deeper meaning it seemed to promise, but her attention was turning molten. The lights around her, blazing at points along their catenaries, edged into a sharper dazzle.

  “Don’t believe I know you,” the man said.

  “No, it’s unlikely,” Hara agreed. His hand in her smaller, softer hand felt like clay, the hand of a golem. “Where, um— Do we pee in the bushes then?”

  He laughed. “Probably your best bet. There’s a porta-potty down the road. Plumbing won’t go in for another month or two.”

  “Oh, is it your house?” Of course it wasn’t.

  “No, no. House like this? Summer folk, you know. All the new construction, really.”

  It was Hara’s turn to laugh. “An invasion then! How terrible! No doubt you just want to be left in peace to pursue your venerable folkways.”

  He looked at her, his mouth seeming to flicker between uncertainty and something else, but he left whatever it was unsaid.

  Of course. She was hated. They all were, seasonal invaders, self-important snobs from their effete enclaves, bringing the entire economy with them but full of prissy needs and ideas, their impossible diets, their fussy attachments to foreign wine and East Asian calisthenics. So peculiar and helpless, weren’t they, babes in the woods when it came to anything practical, but not above affecting a chummy tone and shedding grammar to mingle with the brutes who cleared their lawns and fixed their toilets. Well, Hara would love to see them try the contract law on a corporate merger. Ha! Or— She tripped on a root and righted herself, just.

  “Easy,” Lyric said. “You okay?”

  “I am, thank you,” said Hara. “And I don’t need to be babysat.”

  The girl was silent.

  And how Hara loathed her just then, loathed all of it—her simplicity and openness, the opacity of her openness, the light, flitting quality of her affection, her quiet restraint.

  “You think it’s so easy,” she said, “traipsing about without a plan or care in the world, with no job or money. But not to worry! Just throw yourself on the mercy of fate! How magical life is—fa la la!”

  Lyric toed a twig. “I never said it was easy.”

  “No. But you don’t buy the groceries, do you? Or the gas for the car that takes you to and from what’s-his-name’s house? Or the heat that keeps us from freezing? Or the electricity, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “So?” Lyric said. She said it as an actual question and so simply that Hara lost her point. What was her point? Something stupid, clearly.

  “Right. So. So what? So what? Let’s just wear flannel and mosh to Nirvana and say ‘So what?’ when life gets, like, totally annoying.”

  Lyric laughed. “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know,” Hara said. “I don’t know, and now I have to pee. So excuse me.”

  She pushed past Lyric down a path in the woods. When she had finished, she followed the path the rest of the way to the water, to the shoreline strip of dark rocks where a downed tree shone a ghostly color in the moonlight. She sat and lit a cigarette.

  “You missed us play.”

  Hara started but didn’t turn.

  “Alas, alas,” she said. The feel of his presence behind her set a tingle at the base of her neck. When he didn’t respond she said, “I heard a different band play. If you sounded anything like them, never might be too soon.”

  He snorted. She looked up to see him shaking his head, lighting his own cigarette, face yellowed in the flame.

  “Strange thing, you and Lyric,” he said.

  “Yes. Well. My husband’s a twat.” She could just make out the islands in the distance. She should have built the house there, hidden in the woods, with embrasures to fire arrows through. “It worked out well enough though.”

  He nodded in a ruminative way. “Maybe, maybe.”

  “Or, strange that I let her stay, do you mean? Strange that we got on so well?”

  His laugh rang false in Hara’s ear. “Do you know anything about her?”

  She stood and stretched. She hugged herself. “Oh, enlighten me, Robert. What is it you’re just dying to tell me.”

  “Jesus,” he said. It thrilled Hara to hear even the faint note of exasperation in his voice. “The way you treat people—”

  “People, Robert, let themselves be treated this way or that. Or did they not teach you that in clam school?” A warmth was passing through her, a taste as charged as blood. He looked her in the eye and she wanted to laugh. “Are we fighting, Robert? Over Lyric or what exactly?” Her expression was all concerned incomprehension and nothing else.

  He dragged on his cigarette until he had the tempo back. “Her parents didn’t win any charity auction, you know.”

  Her lip tw
itched. “Well, somebody did.”

  “Yeah, I guess she overheard—”

  “Are you her savior, I don’t understand? Do you imagine you’re protecting her from me, her knight in armor, that little trip?”

  They were standing rather close.

  “You never owe anyone anything, huh?”

  “Owe? I think you have economics there backwards, Robert.”

  “People like you…” He flicked his cigarette away.

  “Yes, people like me. Go on.”

  “You—” Oh, he did seem childish, didn’t he, struggling to find his words? “People aren’t there for your amusement.”

  Hara laughed and clapped her hands. “Oh, very good, Robert. Thank you. Thanks for letting me know. Is it quite disorienting to get a woman of my age and not a mother’s selfless charity in the bargain? Not that you’ll ever know, but that is what the world seems to expect.” She had closed the remaining ground between them, a glorious ringing pressure in her head. “But, ah, is it that you feel you’re owed something? For your honesty, perhaps? Your masculinity? Your stern good looks? Does the world owe you something because you’re awfully handsome?” She felt the destructive element swim into the night, as beautiful and wild as the surf below. “Or for the clams, how could I forget? And clearing the yard, and stacking fruit in the market, there’s that…” She thought he was looking at her like a windup toy whose program had simply to be endured. She forced her voice to a hush and straightened a lock of hair on his forehead. “Does it take an awful lot of restraint? And now you have to listen to some spoiled bitch. Because that’s what I am, isn’t it? Some spoiled bitch tossing about handfuls of glitter, expecting everyone to be grateful. But you have to clean it up, don’t you? That’s your job. Sweeping up all the glitter spoiled bitches leave around.” She looked at him with sympathy. She felt herself partway enwrapped in her own words, the tightening ligature of silk, but she was tempted to laugh at herself in the same instant, her ridiculousness, the ongoing and self-regarding performance of her desperation. It was his look that stopped her. Her hand had found its way to his cheek. And now she saw uncertainty there on his face, the utter absence of the irony that opened channels in one’s own seriousness, and this absence seemed to her, in précis, the very gross vulnerability of youth. Children, always thrilling to an adult business with no ability to follow through. Flinching at the moment of consequence because they had gotten only as far as its pantomime. It was uncertainty, hesitance, that was ugly. And youth thought beauty was a matter of looks! She shivered and turned in to him against the cold. “Oh, Robert,” she said consolingly, and it might have been no more than instinct that made him hold her, instinct, habit, or the confusion of seeing tenderness offer to replace contempt, attention lavished in hatred suddenly as a permutation of ardor. “Brr,” she murmured, no longer cold but simply intent on the tide of uncertainty in him, on not letting it settle, the warring impulses that cleft men, so eager to possess, to protect, and to get away. Her cheek brushed his. When she turned her eyes to him, open wide and faintly imploring, she might have set a clock, she thought, by how long it took their lips to touch.

  In the fantasy she would play out for herself Lyric found them like this. Or better still, found Robert fucking her with her dress hiked up on the log. And Lyric watched, dismayed, entranced, relieved in some way perhaps, or just submissive to the actuality before her, the new order spread as creaselessly as linens on the sovereign bed. She would go down on Robert, yes, with Zeke watching—that was good—and her father, their precious flower, defiling herself and for nothing, for no more than the monstrousness of their own vanity, the wild-burning ego that had to vindicate itself in the ashes of all it laid to waste. She, the daughter of a goddamn Indian ambassador, wed so regally and for all to see, front and center in the Times notices, like a fucking princess! Look, Daddy! Look, Zeke! Look … But even as she entertained the wish, she felt the gap between the fantasy and reality like a plummet in the mist, a fall awaiting her, a dizziness, a despair. She would come back to herself, she and the dream would fall apart. And there she would simply be, bereft of even shame and anger, bereft with only her life before her, all the things that made it up, her job and few friends, the rental, the cottage, the knowledge that it would all be there waiting for her tomorrow and the next day, and through all the days ahead. Days demanding to be filled, because even if you got rid of the stuff there would still be days. Time had to be filled, one way or another. And what an obligation it was! There had once been places for people like her, hadn’t there been, walled off in the countryside or mountains, where you were spoken to in a soft voice and spent your days beneath arbors, wandering garden paths, stilled in the lovely sedation of pills from tiny plastic cups? Yes, that sounded right. And Daeva would come visit once a year, citing concern but really there to gloat, to delight in her sister’s ruination. “If only you’d been less sure you were special,” she would say. “Less certain that the world cared. But you were always very self-involved, weren’t you?” And Hara would smile and nod agreeably, lost to the wondrous indifference—that’s how it would feel—the delicious peace of no longer having a life to fight for, an identity to pretend was hers.

  * * *

  Hara did not remember getting home. She remembered very little, in fact, when she heard Lyric speak and felt the project of locating herself in space and time crash in on her with such violence it seemed she might never pull clear.

  “Hey, are you all right?”

  She was in the living room, her own living room, that seemed true. Yes, on the sofa; she could feel it now as more than a cloud holding her aloft. Was it daytime? It was. Lyric sat facing her, a magazine open on her thigh.

  “I think … I’m alive,” Hara said. “You look like a friend of mine, but of course the devil takes many forms.” She tried to catch Lyric’s eye. “Joking.”

  “I’m leaving soon.”

  “To town, or…” Lyric was silent. In the stillness Hara saw something flash at the periphery of her consciousness, something awful. She squinted. She couldn’t quite make it out, darting and flitting among the trees. Another flash. It nearly gave itself up, dodged away, dashed this way and that, almost at hand.

  Then she saw it.

  “Ah,” she said. She hoisted herself up—it took some effort—and went to the kitchen to make coffee.

  “Where will you go?” she said. “Do you know?”

  The girl shrugged.

  Hara shook her head. “Just friends,” she said under her breath, too softly, she thought, for Lyric to hear.

  But the girl said yes and laughed once. “Just.”

  It was Robert’s car Lyric piled her stuff into. Well, that figured. Hara couldn’t see into the driver’s seat and she didn’t go out. She stood in the doorway with her coffee and watched Lyric carry out her bags.

  “Well,” Lyric said when she was done. “Bye.”

  “Bye,” Hara said, feeling that crippling dignity hold her in the doorframe and seal her lips.

  But the things she could have done, the things she could have said!

  She watched the car drive away and listened until the sound of the tires faded on the drive. Then she took her coffee to an armchair. She didn’t move until the sun began to dip in the sky.

  By evening she felt better. She got up and wandered around the house. How big it was! How quiet. Had it always been so big or was it bigger in the silence? The lights were off and shadows lengthened across the room. The early evening had turned a golden color outside; the light seemed to burn as it fell, catching on the lawn, scattering on the ocean. There was the puzzle. Her hand had fallen on it without her realizing. God, she had been truly crazy to think Lyric wouldn’t leave until it was done. She touched it tenderly for a moment, the stiff-edged cardboard, the soft joints where the pieces met. Then on an impulse she swept it to the floor. The sun pulsed. Good riddance, she thought. The sun pushed into the clouds, good riddance, pushed through the clouds, and she saw them,
the wolves. Out in the meadow the pack was running. The sun caught their backs as they tore across the grass. They reminded her just then of the golden jackals she had heard calling from the grassland in her youth. On the darkening porch she heard the jackals calling and her mother calling—“Haaaaaaara”—summoning her to another of their prim, stately dinners. She strained for a moment to hear the jackals. She wanted to join them, as if such a thing were possible! They were deniable, she supposed, the wolves. But then who was to say? Who was there to contradict her now? The trees around the yard were so much fiber and pith. Milkweed and primrose flowered here in spring. The moon was rock, Hara thought. The ocean so many particles of water. And people—what did they say?—minerals and proteins, was it? Minerals and proteins who ate to persist. Who slept to persist. Who fucked to persist. At some point the stories had to stop. At some point the wolves died, the people died. The alarm clock went off. The particles did what they did and at times, out of chaos, suggested order. And at times, out of chaos, dashed order. And at times, who knew? The facts were stubborn. They were also stories. Quite a lot, in other words, was left to interpretation. But moments continued to come, this one on the last one’s heels. And a new one. And a new one. And a new one.

  Dynamics in the Storm

  The storm was coming. The storm was coming. For days that’s all we heard. How big it would be. How the colliding systems might encounter each other. How long power could be out. Towers would come down and houses too. Lives would be lost (about that we heard less). About how to protect ourselves we heard a lot. Residents stockpiled candles, batteries, and canned food, cleaning out stores. Critical patients were flown to hospitals inland. Those who could, left. Most stayed. They had nowhere to go. And could they leave every time, could they make it a habit? Train and bus stations were mob scenes. Flights were canceled en masse. Grounded fliers camped out in airports, amateur survivalists. We saw them on TV. Going nowhere in an airport was now news. I was still brash and foolish enough to wait for the day of the storm to drive south. I had a car, the storm wasn’t due until evening, and I had no interest in cutting my visit short. It wasn’t often I saw my old friend Mark and his wife, who had once almost been my wife long ago.