by Sue Halpern
“Is that your daughter?” some guy with a foreign accent shouted, and this time Kit was forced to respond.
“No,” she said. “A friend.”
So I was a friend. Good. I was happy to hear it. And then, before she raised the newspaper in front of her face like a shield, she turned to me and said, “To remind me that Wallace Stevens was right.”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
I was exasperated. And she was exasperated right back. She let the newspaper drop to her lap.
“Wallace Stevens, Sunny,” she said, as if repeating his name a second time would jog my memory, though you can’t shake loose a memory you don’t have.
“‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’?” she said.
“I like ice cream,” I said eagerly.
“Wallace Stevens was a poet.” Kit sounded like Willow sounds when she asks me to recall something I am supposed to know and she has to tell me the answer. “One of his most famous poems is called ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream.’”
I’m not sure how or why I was supposed to know that, but from her tone (irritated), it sounded like she thought I was.
“Okay,” I said, “but what was he right about?”
Kit closed her eyes and slowly pumped her foot a few times so her chair began to rock back and forth again. “‘The wind shifts like this: / Like a human without illusions, / Who still feels irrational things within her,’” she said softly. She opened her eyes. “That’s from a poem of his,” she added, as if I was such a dunce, I couldn’t even figure that out. “You should memorize some poems, Sunny. You never know when they’ll come in handy.”
* * *
Let the lamp affix its beam.
—Wallace Stevens
The afternoon unspooled slowly. Sunny lay on the porch swing, her head leaning uncomfortably against one arm, her knees bent, and her feet poking over the edge. It was a less than ideal vantage point from which to observe Kit, since Kit was mostly obscured by the Boston Globe, but it wasn’t bad, either. Kit knew she was hiding, but what was she supposed to do with a teenager all day? What did parents do? she wondered. Probably nothing, she decided. The last thing teenagers wanted to do was hang out with their parents. The neighbor, Jorge, who asked if Sunny was her daughter would have known that. He was probably just being nosy, she guessed. She had never thought about it before, but a woman living alone in an old house like this with only workmen for visitors must be a curiosity. “Without meaning to, I’ve become the neighborhood weirdo,” she thought, which struck her to be so absurd that she laughed out loud.
“What?” Sunny asked.
“Nothing,” Kit said. “Just something I read.”
“Are you going to write it down?” Sunny asked.
“Maybe I will,” Kit said, but made no move to pick up her pen.
Sunny’s parents showed up a few minutes past five, when Kit was already wondering if she was going to have the girl there for dinner again. Willow and Steve came walking slowly up the sidewalk, heads close together, talking so intently they went past 1635. Kit was surprised at how normal they looked, Willow in a sundress, Steve in jeans and a T-shirt, his long braid coiled under a trucker’s cap, the two of them indistinguishable from any other couple on the street.
“Hey,” Sunny called out. She had been watching them, expecting that they would look up and see her when they approached the house, and when they didn’t stop, called out, “Hey, guys!” to reel them back.
“What were you guys talking about?” she said when they got closer, and saw Willow gently nudge Steve, who said, “The car. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Sunny, but we spend an awful amount of time talking about the car.”
Sunny knew he was lying. She wondered if Kit, who was reading an old issue of The New Yorker—another gift from the recycling bin—did, too.
“Where were you?” Sunny asked.
“With Beth and Sam,” Willow and Steve said at the same time, as if they’d practiced.
“I said ‘where,’ not ‘who with,’” Sunny said. She was being ornery, she knew, but she was tired of the way adults shut her out. It was like there was a whole world out there, a parallel universe, where real things were happening, that was unavailable to her, and it was pissing her off. First Kit and her notebooks, now this.
“We were celebrating Independence Day,” Steve said, and he and Willow smiled at each other coyly, and Willow told Sunny to get her things, and Sunny held up her knapsack, which was under the swing, and said she was ready to go. There were a lot of thank-yous to Kit, who said it was no problem having Sunny around and seemed most animated, Sunny noticed, when she was expecting them all to leave.
And then, finally, they departed, and the house was returned to its steady state. Kit took deep breaths and listened to herself breathe, but the quiet that descended did not bring the relief she expected. Or maybe, she thought, mindlessly turning on the TV, it wasn’t the quiet that wasn’t soothing, it was that she was aware of being by herself, aware of the starkness of it. This was a surprise. She had lived alone for so long now. That was the way she liked it.
“I’m a misanthrope,” she told Dr. Bondi. “Being alone suits me.”
He was skeptical. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe now, but I don’t think it’s your nature.”
Kit laughed. “If it’s nature versus nurture, in this case nurture wins.”
“Like I said, I don’t think it’s a permanent feature.”
But it was. That’s what it had become. And Kit had come to think of herself as a loner, at home in her solitude, like one of those self-reliant spinster women from literature. By the end of the workday she craved nothing more than to hear the creak of the floorboards underfoot and the hum of the refrigerator that suffused her house. By the end of the week she was content to putter, to speak only the occasional greeting to passersby if she happened to be on the porch, to ask little of others and be asked little in return. Did it make her happy? “Happiness is overrated,” she complained to Dr. Bondi whenever he asked her this, but years afterward, years in which she’d gone to bed alone, risen alone, sat in her single kitchen chair sipping coffee brewed exactly as she liked it, eaten on no fixed schedule, and been accountable to no one but her boss at work and once a year to the Internal Revenue Service, she could say yes, being alone made her happy. Or, at least, it was what she liked. And now this: a sense of unease in her own house. And that displeased her.
Kit went into the kitchen, put a tofu dog in the microwave, and, as the timer counted down, listened to the TV news floating in from the other room. The usual stuff: people who had blown off limbs setting off fireworks, tall ships in Boston Harbor, a break-in at a pharmaceutical company where some research animals were released from their cages, which made her think of Cal’s rat guillotine, which made her think of Cal, and when the microwave dinged she didn’t hear it because she had walked away and turned off the TV, which didn’t hush the voices in her head and the random cascade of images crowding out the present with words and thoughts and scenes from the past.
“Trauma is not just one thing,” Dr. Bondi had to remind her. The news was full of stories about soldiers returning from the Middle East with post-traumatic stress disorder. They’d be driving to some mall in suburban Phoenix and a stray piece of trash, blowing across the road, could make them feel an overpowering need to jump out of the car. They were hypervigilant. What seemed like the most innocuous thing could bring them right back into battle, to the smell of burning hair and flesh. A washing machine on its spin cycle could reduce a grown man to a scared, inconsolable, and furious little boy.
“You’ve got it, too, Kit,” he said. “That’s what trauma does. It lodges in our reptilian brain. It’s insidious that way.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Sarcasm helps, believe it or not,” he said.
“Well, at least I’ve got that going for me,” Kit said.
“You’ve got a lot going for you, Kit. You’re stronger and more resi
lient than you know. What the literature shows, by the way, is that the most effective way to neutralize trauma is to relive the event until it loses its power.”
“That makes no sense,” she said. “And what if there is more than one event? What if the event is your whole life—or, at least, a lot of it?”
“It’s harder, obviously. But the treatment is the same.”
“Well, if that’s the treatment, I’m in luck,” she said, “since reliving the trauma is basically what I do, over and over.”
“Time will help,” he said. “Give it time.”
Did time help? She supposed so. The demands of the present had a way of crowding out memories of the past. But then something would happen—a word would be spoken, or a story would come on the radio, or someone would ask for a particular book, or she’d hear a song, or bite into a sandwich, or note the time of day, or hear the siren of an ambulance, or think she heard the siren of an ambulance—anything, everything, nothing—and she’d be right back there, in the thick of it, or in a slice of it, stray bits of conversation coalescing into a string of words that she had heard before but understood differently, because history is always rewriting itself.
“The mind is pliable,” Dr. Bondi said. “But it can bend in many directions, not all of them healthy. One thing I can suggest is that when you start to go to a dark place, for you to consciously redirect your thoughts. Mind over mind. Make yourself think of something completely different. An image of something joyful or silly, and focus on that. Go watch some cat videos on the Internet.”
“So your prescription for dealing with trauma is to watch cat videos?”
“It can’t hurt,” he said.
“Unless you were traumatized by a cat.”
“In which case I’d recommend bunnies. Or puppies,” he said. “Just give it a try.”
Kit did. She felt ridiculous, but he was right—the videos gave her something else to think about when she started to get into what Dr. Bondi called a “ruminative loop.” It was as if her mind were a theater where bad actors could be run off the stage by a pack of adorable, yelping dogs. All she had to do was remember to let the dogs out of their pen. It didn’t work every time, but it worked enough of the time that Kit lost a certain amount of respect for the mind—hers and everyone else’s. It could be so submissive.
But it could also be willful and unrelenting, pushing memories to the forefront of her brain, like rude people cutting in line. And not just rude, but people who were noisy and smelly and daring you to challenge them.
Kit walked back into the kitchen, took the tofu pup out of the machine, took a bite, spit it out in the sink, and tossed the rest in the trash.
“I don’t see how anyone can eat this,” she said out loud, to no one, though she could imagine Sunny’s objection.
“I guess it’s what you know,” she said, carrying on the conversation, and remembered Cal’s face the first time he ate sushi. She had tricked him, didn’t tell him it was raw mackerel until he had chewed and swallowed it, and he was angry and she was laughing, so there was that.
Kit poured herself a glass of wine and climbed up the stairs to the roof. A nearly imperceptible breath of wind carried the aroma of meat grilling in the park behind her house and the sound of children pushed to the top of the swing set, first the grind of metal, then the squeals of delight. She wondered about Sunny: what she was doing right then, what Sunny would say about her, if it would be awkward between them at work, and if—and this surprised her, too—Sunny liked her.
Part II
The Marriage Story
We didn’t get married right away. We were both still in college, and the best rationale for tying the knot was to get better housing in the dorm lottery, but I was living off-campus anyway, and when my roommate graduated, Cal moved in and we stopped talking about getting married, though Cal would always introduce me as “my fiancée.” I hated it. It wasn’t that I felt uneasy about being married. At that point marriage seemed as far away as Pluto, which had just been demoted from our solar system, a controversy that obsessed Cal for a while. And it wasn’t that I was uncomfortable with the word “fiancée.” It was the word “my.” The possessive. Like he was claiming me, the way houses under contract have a sold sign on their front lawn before anyone has moved in. And it made me think sometimes that I hadn’t been wrong, that he had asked me to marry him because he wanted to get that part of his future lined up and settled and out of the way. Marriage, check.
Our life was uncomplicated. We’d go to class, we’d come home, we’d study, write papers, cook pasta or omelets or have breakfast for dinner, watch a little TV, go to bed together. Not “go to bed” as in sex. That happened some of the time, but more often it was “go to bed” as in lie next to each other with our feet entwined under the covers. We were companionable. We fit together. It was easy, pleasant.
And my mother liked him. This was a surprise. I had known my mother only as a woman who felt misled by marriage. The vows said “in sickness and in health”—they didn’t say anything about “in death in an undeclared and unpopular war, leaving you a widow at twenty-six with an infant, a mortgage you couldn’t possibly afford on your elementary school teacher’s salary, car payments, and credit card debt.” After my father was killed, she and I moved back to her childhood home and lived with her bridge-playing, gin-sipping, perpetually upbeat mother, three generations of Oliver women under one roof. It took me years before I could see how hard this was for my mother, who, from what I could tell from the photos, seemed to have grown old and puffy overnight. When my grandmother urged her to find another man, she’d say she didn’t have time or didn’t have any interest, but I think that as lonely as she probably was—and she never said she was—the real reason was that she was scared to cast her lot in with someone else again. It was safer to be alone, even if being alone meant living with her mother as a single mother to a girl who would grow up without a steady masculine presence in her life. Someone my mother had known in high school came around for a while, and I remember her going to the movies with him, but after he stopped calling I heard my grandmother scolding her for sending him away.
Then there was Greg. Greg was the music teacher at the school where my mother worked. I don’t know when he started to be a feature in our lives, but my mother had known him for years before he materialized in our house, sitting between my mom and her mom, passing the popcorn bowl back and forth while they watched The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Cheers and any musical that had made it to film, and helping my grandmother roll out pie dough—she was getting arthritic; he was big—and calling my mother “girlfriend,” not in a possessive way, but in a friendly, intimate way. “Hey, girlfriend, let’s do the dirty,” he’d say, which I learned only later was a joke, since in their case it meant “let’s do the dishes.” My grandmother thought he was wonderful: kind, attentive, funny, and, in a pinch, willing to sit in on a hand of bridge. She was certain he was the solution to my mother’s problem. My mother said she didn’t have a problem, or that her only problem was that my grandmother thought she had a problem. I could hear them talking; their voices carried through the heating vents.
One night, after years of this, my mother explained that Greg was gay, a homosexual, that he didn’t like women. My grandmother said this was hogwash, the proof was in the pudding (she actually said these things), and the pudding was that he spent so much time in our house, where there were only women. “You want proof, you want proof?” my mother said, and ran up to her room, pulled open a few drawers, went downstairs and showed her a photo of Greg on a trip to Chicago wearing leather chaps, a sleeveless leather shirt, and a spiked dog collar and with his arm around another man, dressed similarly, standing in front of a bar called Boize Town. (I had seen this picture myself, rifling through my mother’s bureau, which I did every once in a while, looking for I don’t know what, maybe the secret of life, and knew immediately what it meant. I was probably twelve.) My grandmother pushed it away and said it didn’t
matter what he was, that Greg was a good man and obviously loved my mother and me, and that was all that counted. A few days later, Greg came over when my mother was out, and he and my grandmother holed themselves up in the kitchen not eating the éclairs he’d brought, and I don’t know what they said to each other, but after he left I could tell she’d been crying, and it wasn’t long after that that we started hearing more about the gay cancer. He lived longer than she did, but not by much.
So my mother, I’d say, had been unlucky in love, though I suppose you could also say she was lucky in love—two men had loved her dearly—but either way, I didn’t expect her to approve of my engagement to Cal, whom she’d never met before I unveiled our plans. Cal was there when I told her, standing next to me in the kitchen of the house where she and I had both grown up and where, for all I knew, she had told her parents she was going to marry my dad. Cal’s arm was around my shoulders; my arm was around his waist. I was nervous. He wasn’t. The three of us chatted aimlessly about the weather, about Cal’s work in the lab, about our four-hour drive and the red-tailed hawk we seemed to be following for part of it. Mother mentioned that the basement sump pump had stopped working again, and Cal offered to take a look. He was solicitous and polite. I suppose that after Kyle and Kylie-Kyle and crazy John, he seemed blessedly less “interesting”—the good provider type—which is why I assumed that as soon as I told her we were engaged she’d demur, take me aside, warn me off of this marriage ship on which Cal and I were embarking. She had not raised me to be someone’s wife; it certainly wasn’t the example she’d set all her life. So my knees were bent, my stance defensive, waiting for the inevitable pushback.