The Local News

by Miriam Gershow

  But this was how I’d always been, whether with Martin, the willowy philosophy major who I’d dated most of my junior year at Brown, or Stan, the architect and casual pot dealer who made my toes curl just from touching my wrist during my first six months in D.C.—finite in my capacity for tolerating simple day-to-day contact. I could handle it just fine, all the way up to the point that I couldn’t anymore, as if I existed on a tether, and not a particularly long one, finding myself able to wander only so far into the territory of another human being before snapping back into myself.

  Gene overheard several of the calls with Lola, at least my end of cagey evasions, and was perplexed as to why I wouldn’t want to go home, why I wouldn’t want to take him home. This, to him, was how things worked. You fell in love, you met each other’s families, you moved in together, you …

  We’d already weekended with his parents a handful of times, in a beach house in Virginia, in New York City, where we visited MoMA and the Trade Center site and Chelsea galleries. All of it was fine and exhausting and hard the way other people’s families always were, especially in their small, easy intimacies: Gene holding his mom by the elbow, steering her along the crowded Fifth Avenue sidewalks; his dad patting Gene’s belly, making a quick joke of You working on a paunch there, son?

  Gene knew about my family, about Danny, but only in the most general and newspaper-headline of ways. I had a brother who’d been killed, just like our friend Lisbeth had a father who was gay, just like our other friend Jonathan had survived a teenage bout of leukemia. Gene had learned early on not to probe, the same way I learned that wine made him snore and the soles of his feet were painfully ticklish.

  But the topic of the reunion drizzled into our conversations regularly enough that I knew it had come to matter to him, to mean something. “I bet you’re the only one in your class who can say she saw the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee at happy hour,” he said over Cheerios, his hair still tousled from bed. He sent e-mails about it in the middle of work with links to the African American History Museum in Detroit, writing simply, “This looks interesting.” I recognized here the need for concession. I was the limiting factor of the relationship. I was the no. And I was not an idiot. Even the most patient and imperturbable of people, which Gene could easily lay claim to being, had only so much capacity for evasion and sulk. He was a good man, and Fairfield, in that it was time-limited and at the very least a known entity, was the easiest—the only—yes of which I was capable.

  My mother was still in the old house. Over the years it’d taken on a greenhouse scent of dirt and incubation from her constant presence. She gave a “tour” when we arrived. “Here’s the living room,” she told Gene facilely, cracking her gum as we walked. She always chewed gum at the start of visits, a show of trying to quit smoking, though the years of smoke still perfumed the air, especially when a curtain was riffled or a door swung quickly open. I could see that she had just cleaned; vacuum trails divided the carpet into fresh rows. She was dressed in a skirt and blouse, and her hair was parted neatly and combed flatly across her head. But there was a cabbagey wrinkle to her shirt collar, and her outsized dress loafers slid easily off her heels like flip-flops.

  Gene’s mother wore pressed pants and cropped silk jackets; at the beach, a sarong in complementary color to her swimsuit. If Gene now noticed my mother’s unshaved legs or the dry-skin flakes in her laugh lines, he gave no indication. He smiled his usual affable smile, even though I knew he was feeling peaked from the flight. He’d been excited about the trip, and in a rare unguarded moment ate a few stray pretzels from the airline’s snack mix. Even though he’d stopped almost immediately, sheepishly handing me the small foil bag, I could see it now in his pale face and the tiny beads of sweat over his top lip.

  I fished out the pewter paperweight from my bag, a replica of the Washington Monument, purchased last-minute at the airport gift shop along with my bottled water and the New York Times.

  “Ooh,” my mother said, weighing it in one hand, almost doing a series of mini-curls.

  “It’s a paperweight,” I said dumbly, embarrassed by it now.

  “I’m surprised they let you on the plane with this,” she said, holding it like a spear, lurching playfully toward Gene as if she were going to stab him. He acted fearful in return, arms up. She went on about how much she loved the paperweight, and her effusiveness only increased my embarrassment. She went on too about how she’d always loved Smithsonian magazine as a child. It was the first place, she told Gene, she’d seen photographs of a woman’s breasts. She laughed at her own confession, a strange, birdlike noise. Gene laughed too, correcting her gently: he worked at the museum, not the magazine.

  “Oh, oh,” she said, bringing her hand to her chest and giggling. She was nervous, I could tell. I’d never brought a man home before. I hadn’t seen her in close to three years. Her face was rounder now, with traces of an emerging double chin. Weight gain was a side effect of all her meds, the cocktail of sedatives and antidepressants and antianxieties she’d been on for years.

  “And how’s your job?” she asked me, shepherding us into the kitchen. Condensation dotted the stove and countertop from a recent wipe-down. The air smelled of the bracing remnants of cleanser.

  “Good,” I said. “It’s going really well.” I loved my job. I loved being a research analyst. I loved puzzling through data and looking for patterns. I loved making sense of what appeared to be a mess of random numbers. I loved it that I had known absolutely nothing about sediment distribution or erosion and accretion or hydro -dynamic models when I’d begun at my environmental consulting firm, but I’d soldiered through to figure out what the heck was going on and was able to talk shop now with colleagues who’d been in the field for years. It was hard to explain any of it to laypeople, though, especially to my mother. She had a particular way of twiddling her fingers and nodding before I even spoke, smiling at Gene and playing with the rattan on the back of the kitchen chair, that suggested the combination of eagerness and absence of which she seemed uniquely capable. It made the tips of my ears burn.

  “I’m still on mud,” I said. This my standard line about sediment transport models.

  “Mud is good,” she said. My mother and I smiled at each other.

  Moments unfolded, followed by more unfolding moments. Gene put a hand on the small of my back. Eventually she announced, “Let’s eat.” She’d carefully cubed pineapples and watermelon and bananas, having called three times in the previous week trying to figure out what Gene could eat.

  At the table she talked about her most recent volunteer work, the girl who’d gone missing from Western Michigan University while walking home from the library. My mother was helping the family set up a listserv to coordinate search efforts and helping with a Web site, findjacqueline.com. I scanned the fruit plate for dog hair. Oliver and Poppy were both dead. Only an arthritic Olivia was left, following us stiffly through the house. Gene kept leaning from the table to scratch her beneath the collar.

  My mother said that Jacqueline’s boyfriend had received a nonsensical text message from an unknown number at 4 a.m., eight hours after she was last seen. Cryptologists had been analyzing it for any sort of code.

  “You mean cryptographers,” I said, and she smiled uncompre-hendingly. I knew she thought we’d said the same word. I had a particular dislike for these conversations, not just because they were ghoulish and rubbernecky—I understood the appeal of ghoulish and rubbernecky, was still drawn to coverage of school shootings or tsunamis or terrorist attacks—but rather because she didn’t know to be embarrassed by her excitement.

  Gene asked about search-and-rescue operations and her HTML background. They could’ve been talking about migratory patterns of midwestern birds or the benefits of regular lubrication for car engines, from the mild set to his face. Same when she dragged out the dreaded scrapbooks, all the clippings and letters and police reports, the file cabinet distilled into book form. When I tried to object, both
shushed me, Gene while smiling. He was always smiling at me.

  My mother narrated as she turned the pages. “This is the first local story after he went missing.” “This is the article from Newsweek. Newsweek! Can you imagine?”

  “I can’t,” Gene said simply. I found myself watching his expression, waiting for something more. I had worried in the days leading up to the trip about his reaction to this place: shock? repulsion? Now, though, there was only his normal placidity. How thrilled I usually was about this very quality—his incapacity for needless drama. It seemed so clear-eyed and revelatory, even. But as he sat beside my mother, nodding and nodding, I had the urge to kick him in the calf, to leave a welting charley horse.

  “This is about the arraignment.” My mother soldiered on, pointing to articles. “This is the groundbreaking for the memorial.” When she finally finished, he placed a hand on the back of hers. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Pasternak.” She told him to call her Bernice. I had the urge to give her a charley horse too.

  After a few minutes, Gene asked if there was someplace he could lie down and my mother sputtered quickly about being sorry for upsetting him and he reassured her, no, no, it wasn’t that, and explained about the pretzels and she patted him on the arm and said good, good, and that I’d show him upstairs.

  • • •

  My old room had a skeletal feel to it, with the bare bookshelves and desktop, the nearly blank walls. All of my old furniture was still here, but any mementos, any indication that someone had inhabited this place for eighteen years, were gone. There was something comforting in the austerity. Aside from my framed diploma hanging in one corner, we could have been anywhere.

  Quickly Gene was down to his boxers and under the comforter. He looked huge in my bed, his feet trailing off the end. “Do you want to lie down with me?” he said, but we both knew the answer. I hadn’t had insomnia in years, but I still treated bedrooms with a ritualistic reverence, replete with eye pillows, blackout shades, and white noise machines. I’d never turned into the kind of person who could laze around casually in a bed, willfully awake.

  “That is tremendously sad about your brother,” he said. I nodded and kissed his eyelids. He liked to be kissed on his eyelids. “You okay?” he said. I nodded again, though I wasn’t sure if he meant in this moment or in life. It was clear from his expression that he expected something more, a conversation, and suddenly he looked so sad, his whole face drawn. Here was the opening I had moments be-fore hoped for—Yeah, it is sad, isn’t it?—though now I found myself empty in the face of it, with nothing to say. I was terrible at this topic.

  I asked about his stomach, and he studied me below a knit brow that gave way to a half-smile, his familiar expression of being confounded but deciding not to push it. He said it was okay. I told him he still looked pale. We talked for a bit about little nothings, if he’d left enough food for his cat, what time we needed to leave for the re-union. I studied his face, his slightly stubbled chin, the tiny scar that bisected his left eyebrow. He looked funny here, out of context, bordering suddenly on stranger. Gene, Gene, Gene, I told myself, touching the tip of his nose. I kissed him, the familiar taste of his waxy lip balm, his breath slightly sour from a morning of travel and a stomachache. But he didn’t taste bad, really, just like a person, another person. When I pulled away, he smiled, his eyes already closed.

  I found my mother in Danny’s room, at the computer—such a familiar pose, though the computer was new, with a large, flat monitor. Danny’s room had become a strange amalgamation of preservation and reinvention, my mother having entirely taken over the desk area. Next to the new computer sat a wiry, stacking file organizer with a cascading column of manila folders: Maynard; Smith, T.; D’Agostino. Already the Washington Monument sat atop a pile of yearbook stills and newspaper articles. The old file cabinet had been moved from the kitchen, joined by a pair of newer ones. A giant bulletin board hung overhead, crowded with photos of her small army of missing kids. Some had Post-it notes attached, indicating Found, others with dates: 12/30/87–3/9/01.

  But all of Danny’s old things were still here too: the bed, the dresser, the wall-spanning single bookshelf lined with trophies and old, yellowing comic books. A lone, improbable beer poster still hung above his bed, the corners curled from age, a rip snaking through the scantily clad, big-haired woman. Inside his closet, I suspected, his clothes still hung.

  The room unsettled me, making it seem like my mother spent her days in a tomb. Though, admittedly, it wasn’t all that much worse than my father’s bright, antiseptic house, with its matching leather furniture and Berber rugs that pulled easily and often, leaving Dolly on her hands and knees with cuticle scissors, clipping the errant threads. There you’d find well-placed photos of me and Danny on a back table in the den or on one end of a mantel filled mostly with more recent shots of Dolly, Dad, and their towheaded girls. There was something creepy about the pictures of me and Danny, something eerily undifferentiated. It didn’t matter that one of us was dead and the other alive; we were both just the kids he used to have.

  My mother clacked away at the keyboard.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She spun in her chair. “Oh,” she said, a hand to her chest. “You startled me.” A cigarette smoldered in the ashtray next to the keyboard.

  “Still smoking,” I said. It came out sharply.

  She looked at me and then into her lap. She shrugged. Gone, all the girlish excitement she’d had around Gene. I tried to think of something nicer. “Working?” I said.

  She told me yes, her hand moving automatically toward her cigarette, then stopping.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I don’t care.” I’d meant that, at least, to sound nicer. “You’re working on the Western Michigan girl stuff?”

  “Oh, no, no,” she said. “I have about four other kids right now. I’m e-mailing a father in Wisconsin. His ex-wife, looks like, ran off with their son during a custody weekend.” She paged through the folders in the wire rack. “Here,” she said, pulling out a picture from one of the files. The boy was little, six or seven, with wheaty hair, his lips a shiny, shiny red.

  “Evan,” she said, with feeling. “His name is Evan.” She was insatiable when it came to this stuff.

  “Evan,” I repeated, trying to affect a little bit of the airy countenance Gene seemed to come by so naturally.

  She smoked. I picked at my torn cuticles. Eventually she said, “I like Gene.”

  “I like Gene too.” If you listened carefully, you could hear the low, slurring noise of his breathing from the next room. He would sleep for hours. He could nap like an infant, Gene.

  My mother stared at me, as if waiting for my next thought. I didn’t have a next thought, except maybe that the new roundness of her face made her look soft, almost babyish, which made eye contact difficult, and I found myself glancing instead at her shoulder or the bright tip of her cigarette. Or that the bulletin board was even worse than the daguerreotypes.

  “Don’t let me stop you from what you’re doing,” I said. She looked at me strangely. I tried to smile. If I were of sound mind, I would have simply gone downstairs and sat by myself on the couch and patted Olivia in relative peace. But something rooted me in the doorway, the same occasional impulse that guided me through record stores, looking for the old serpent-tongue-and-red-rose-dotted Chili Peppers album that had been Danny’s favorite, or sent me on an Internet search of Elvin Tate (pages and pages of results, unsettlingly), the impulse toward prurient surrender, the want to look. Leaning against the doorjamb and peering at the geometric sheets of his childhood bed, the figurines on the trophies, worn now of their gold paint, revealing a pale plastic beneath, the framed photo—that once ubiquitous yearbook shot of the blue background and the cowlick—I felt an unmistakable if infinitesimal slackening, something approximating an exhalation. This, perhaps, was the singular distinction between home and everyplace else. The reason I stayed away. The reason I came back. Here I could do this, look and look.


  My mother asked if I wanted to help. She had some pamphlets that needed to be prepped for mailing. I said no. She said something else about Gene and nice. I didn’t have a response. I just wanted to stand there, left alone if possible.

  When it became clear I was neither coming nor going, she said an uncertain “Okay” and went back to what she was doing, finishing her e-mail and printing something out, stuffing, stamping, and sealing an envelope. Occasionally she turned to look at me, and I continued to try smiling. “Honey—” she said once, but did not finish.

  Her phone rang a couple times. The first call was from a man named Douglas. She asked him if he’d gotten in touch with the Du-luth police yet. She read aloud through a list of drop-in centers and homeless shelters she’d found in northeast Minnesota, all with a note of calm efficiency I wasn’t used to. Our own calls were more of a collective stammer.

  The second call was from a woman, Franny. Even from where I stood, I could hear the sobbing, a sound that never failed to make me want to rip my ears from my head. My mother appeared unfazed. She slowly repeated Franny’s name, then said, “Listen to me. We are going to get through this. I am here.” And then for a very long time she simply sat and listened to the woman’s howls, nodding slowly as if Franny could see her. As the crying faded, my mother began with low questions: “What’s happened today? Any new news?” She took notes as Franny talked. Six mo anniv, she wrote. Frank @ hotel. I found myself wondering who Frank was and why he was at a hotel.

  “This,” my mother told her, “would be a good time for more media. When was the last time you were on the news?” Again with the same low tone of authority, shades of, amazingly, Denis Jimenez. It had never occurred to me that she might have grown good at this by now. I shifted my weight against the doorframe, suddenly feeling like a voyeur, telling myself to stop lurking, to go read the data from work I’d brought with me, to go curl up next to Gene.