The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  There were no deaths of children in the movie, only drama that involved love and marriage and infidelity and sex, always sex, which interested everyone on every continent. Then the movie was over and he was back to himself, lodged unhappily in the narrow space between his seatmates. One of them—he wasn’t sure which—smelled of spice and yeast and something a little disturbing and unnamable. But he had been crying so hard and had been releasing such toxic, alarming chemicals that for all he knew, it came from him.

  * * *

  • • •

  Greer was already waiting in Macopee by the time he arrived. He had flown to LA and then on to New York, and then took a bus up to Springfield, and a taxi to town, which was snowy and cold, reminding him that he had no coat with him. Cory hadn’t brushed his teeth or gotten washed in a full day; he was a stinking, soaking being with a furred face and mouth. He’d cried intermittently on the flight, feeling ill and suspecting that this kind of illness would always be with him, either an acute or a chronic expression, depending on the day. The idea of never seeing Alby again, the two of them never having one of those conversations that flew in different directions like an unstable firework, wasn’t something he could exactly believe.

  The taxi pulled up in front of the Pinto house. Various cars were parked out front, blocking the driveway; he recognized Aunt Maria and Uncle Joe’s green Pontiac. Cory entered the house through the unlocked door and his relatives descended upon him, some of them crying, and then they parted, revealing Greer standing there alone. She’d braved the Pinto family scene even without him; she hadn’t just been hiding out in her own parents’ house until he arrived. His relatives left the two of them in the living room.

  “Oh, Cory,” she said, which were the right words. “Oh, Cory, come here. I love you. Oh, honey, I love you.”

  She had rarely called him honey, and he thought: This is weird. Honey was for a moment of extremeness. She had reached out from their usual vocabulary and into that of some other generation; the words that they usually used wouldn’t do. Honey was weird, but it was a bridge across the terrifying open space between where they had been and where they now were. A honeyed bridge that would take them forward as best it could. They sat together, him smelling so disgusting, even to himself, and Greer so sweet and scared, her eyes a startling red.

  He was a young teenager when his brother was born, and what an indignity that had been: a baby in the house, going wah wah wah when you were trying to sleep, or do your homework, or think about sex. For a long time Cory had ignored the boring, explosively gassy baby, but then finally the baby began to crawl, and that was interesting, and then he began to talk, and that was super-interesting. The things he said! The things he asked! At age two, to Duarte: “Tell me about fertilizer.” And at age four, to Benedita, regarding one of the macaroni spirals on his plate: “Do you think it feels tense? It’s all wound up. That’s what Cory says when he feels tense. ‘I’m all wound up.’”

  “I can’t believe this,” Cory said to Greer now, his head in his hands. “What can I do?” he asked, looking up at her.

  “What do you mean?”

  “To make it not be true.”

  “I see.” She nodded seriously. “I’ll help you.”

  “How will you do that?”

  Greer paused, thinking it through. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I will.”

  Together they sat on the couch with its slippery plastic, and then Cory lay with his head in Greer’s lap, both of them wordless and crying for so long that after a while they heard the click-click of a gas burner being turned on. Apparently someone had the idea that eating dinner would be appropriate.

  “You got off work to come here?” he thought to ask.

  “Oh, it wasn’t a big deal. Forget about it.”

  “But wait,” he said. He tried to focus, a tremendous task, and then he remembered something. “Wasn’t your thing now? Your Loci thing? With all those people speaking at a conference center? Do I have the dates wrong?”

  Greer shrugged, which gave the truth away. The first summit—“Women and Power,” she’d once explained, slightly embarrassed and excited by the sound of it—which she had been working toward since starting at Loci, would start tomorrow morning, and she was needed there. Except she wasn’t there; she would miss it.

  “You’re sure it’s okay that you’re not there?” he persisted.

  “Of course it is.” She paused. “When are you going to go upstairs and see your mother?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Cory, you have to. I’m going to go see her too at some point, if you think she’d want that. But you definitely have to go to her now.”

  Somehow he found the ability to go up there. His father was out at a bar with one of the uncles, and had been out for most of the day. His parents’ bedroom was dark, the shades pulled, and he walked right in without knocking and just stood there at the bedside, his hands behind his back like a sentry. His mother lay on her side under the chenille bedspread that Cory and Alby used to sit on and pick at, all the little nubs and knobs offering interest and engagement to their always-moving hands.

  She was a mess, of course, able to lift her head only a little. “Why couldn’t you see that he was in the driveway?” he finally burst out cruelly.

  She craned her head up at him. “Cory, you’re here.”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “He wasn’t in rearview mirror,” she said.

  “Were you actually looking?”

  “Yes, I swear! I don’t know what happened,” she said, and she turned away again.

  He felt ashamed at the ease of his own cruelty, and said, more calmly, “Well, okay. Okay. Anyway, I’m here.” Then he left the room quickly.

  Cory’s father didn’t return all day, and the aunts took care of Benedita, so Cory went to stay with Greer across the street at the Kadetsky house. Both of Greer’s parents hugged him and spoke kindly to him, and then left them alone. He showered for a long time in the upstairs bathroom, and then he and Greer lay in her bed and had effortful but strong sex. It had been months since he’d touched her, and he was as responsive as ever, almost as if, through sex, he could work out the insurmountable problem of death. He bumped up against her with his hipbones in a familiar way, though he noticed that her body seemed sleeker now. This was the New York City version of Greer. The version that lived and breathed a life that wasn’t his.

  You would’ve really liked sex, bro, he thought as Greer touched his penis. You would’ve loved it. A girl actually touching you down there, and you touching her! Doing it openly, mutually. On purpose, bro. Alby had been interested in everything; he’d liked to explore. He would have been all over some girl someday, a brilliant girl who would have been his equal.

  There was a wake with an open casket—it was just unspeakable to spend the day in the presence of his brother’s small body—and then a funeral mass at the Catholic church. His mother fainted at the grave and his father helped her up, though grudgingly. They were barely speaking, so maybe it wasn’t surprising when, two days after the funeral, Cory’s father appeared on the doorstep of the Kadetsky house, politely asked to see his son, who had set up camp there, and then, alone with him in the kitchen, told Cory that he was going back to Lisbon for a while.

  “Now?”

  “Yes. I need to get away a little.”

  So he left, and there was no word from him for a few days, which was surprising to Cory, who just assumed he would be in touch every day. His mother, in all her distress, now had an additional refrain. “Where is Duarte?” she asked from her bed.

  “He went for a short visit to Lisbon,” the aunts and uncles and Cory told her several times.

  But there was no word on when he would be back, so using the phone card in the kitchen drawer, Cory called his father to confront him. “What’s the deal?” he said.

  “I w
ill stay here for a while longer.”

  “What’s ‘a while’?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Okay, be straight with me. You’re not coming back, are you?” Cory said, and there was some deflection, and then a sigh, and then the admission that no, he was staying there for the foreseeable future.

  “But Mom can’t manage,” Cory said. “She just lies in bed.”

  “She has her sisters. And I’ll give her money. Plus, I will leave her the car. Now she can go around killing anyone she wants.”

  “But this is a crisis.”

  “I’ll miss you, but I can’t live with her anymore. My cousin offered me a job here. You are a great son,” Duarte added, breaking down.

  When Cory told Greer, she said, “How can he just do that?”

  “You’ll have to ask him yourself, if you happen to see him again.”

  “You can stay here with me as long as you want, you know,” she said. “My parents barely notice that you’re in the house. Or that I am.”

  “Don’t you have to go back down to New York soon? Your job?” he asked her.

  “It’ll keep.”

  “Greer, you blew off your summit. I can’t believe that you did that. That I made you do that.”

  “You didn’t make me. I wanted to.”

  “But they needed you there, right?” She didn’t say anything. “Did they say it went okay?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It went great.”

  “Was Faith Frank angry with you?” he persisted.

  “Cory,” said Greer, “I’m here of my own free will, okay? Don’t worry.”

  Over the next day and a half, back at his own house, he watched YouTube clips of the panels and speeches at the summit, and tracked down various Loci hashtags and mentions, some of which were nasty, accusing the foundation of taking “blood money” from ShraderCapital, but most of which were enthusiastic. “What great energy at the Centauri Center,” someone wrote. “Amazing event,” someone else wrote, and there were more details about how dynamic the speakers were and how responsive the audience was.

  He watched the video of Faith Frank’s keynote. She was unequivocally sexy at sixty-eight. He liked her boots; they had a hint of kink about them. Her speech was intense and serious and witty and rapturously received, and he understood why Greer would be so into her. Women sometimes liked to be dazzled by other women; he thought that if he were a woman, he would be into Faith Frank too.

  Then he watched the others, all female: the astronaut, the naval commander, the hip-hop artist, the poet whose collection about poverty in America had just won an important prize. Some of the speakers were earnest and well-meaning; others, like the poet, were thrilling. Plus, there was an impressive multimedia aspect: enormous wraparound screens showing the speakers out and about in their real lives, and excellent acoustics when a girls’ choir from the South Side of Chicago sang. Emmett Shrader had spent a lot of money on this, and Greer had missed it all. He felt terrible about it, despite her reassurances.

  One morning his mother rose up from her bed and came into the kitchen, where Greer and Cory sat with his aunt Maria. “What’s going on, Mom?” he asked warily. “What do you need?”

  “I feel the spirit of Alby,” she announced. “Gênio Dois. He is here. He wants me to shed my skin.” She held out her arms and showed them the marks where she had been pulling and scratching at her skin. Later, online, Cory would read about psychotic breaks in the context of mourning. Now he just stared at his mother and couldn’t think of anything to say to her.

  She needed supervision; that was what the aunts and uncles decided. They did what they could, calling her employers and telling them she couldn’t make it to work. But they had their own lives and families, and none of them could stay on in Macopee much longer. Even Greer felt she finally had to get back to work, and Cory said of course she had to go.

  “What about you?” she asked him the next time they were alone.

  “I think I’m going to stick around.”

  “Really? Can you do that?”

  “What do you mean? It’s what I have to do.”

  “Okay,” she said unsurely.

  “What?” he finally said. “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s just that I’m concerned about you, Cory. It shouldn’t all fall on you like this.”

  “But it does, Greer.”

  “I think you’re an amazing son,” she said, but this didn’t seem at all like a compliment to him.

  “Right, I’m amazing,” he said tightly. “I’m incredibly amazing. And now I have to stay.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Alby’s room called to Cory with the strange ferocity of sound waves coming from deep inside a cave. He had ignored the room until now, but then once the relatives were gone and he had officially moved back into the house and called to quit his job at Armitage & Rist, shocking his employers (his immediate supervisor had said, “You’re really giving all of this up? No one does that”), he was pulled toward the room his brother had inhabited.

  And then, once he went inside, he couldn’t stay away. Cory sat for a long time on the blue rug, with his old bobblehead basketball player figurines above him on the shelf, nodding vigorously at the slightest footfall, and with Alby’s action figures scattered all around. One had an arm raised; one was kicking nothing; one had its torso twisted all the way around into an impossible stance; all of them were frozen into their last, permanent positions.

  Cory had also taken out Alby’s school papers and drawings and notebooks, and was obsessively reading everything, as if there might be clues to be found there and decoded, which would prove, somehow, that his little brother was actually still alive in some until-now-undisclosed location elsewhere in the world. This was the fantasy Cory had constructed; it relieved him to linger in it.

  Alby’s handwriting was large and erratic, and his teacher had constantly circled words in red pen, admonishing him, “Try to be neater, Alberte.” But the content of Alby’s work was sophisticated, occasionally even long-winded. In his class essays he expounded on dinosaurs and Incans and the Big Bang, using statistics to back up his work, but still he digressed. “Try to stay on topic, Alberte,” wrote that same teacher, and Cory wanted to punch her in the nose.

  Then there were the notebooks. At first he didn’t understand what they were, or what purpose they served. There were three of them in a pile, with that familiar black-and-white egg-drop pattern common to school notebooks everywhere. When Cory opened the first one it appeared to be a kind of homemade spreadsheet. In his brother’s enormous and childlike but highly controlled handwriting were cryptic stats and notes:

  AUG. 6

  10 AM

  TEMPERATURE: 76 DEGREES

  15 MINS OBSERVATION

  MOTION: SOME

  DISTANCE: 4 CENTIMITERS

  VELOSITY: (4 CM DIVIDED BY 15 = .27)

  AUG. 7

  RAIN!! NO OBSERVATION

  STAYED INSIDE WITH PLAYSTATION INSTED

  AUG. 8

  10 AM

  TEMPERATURE: 82 DEGREES

  15 MINS OBSERVATION

  MOTION: NONE

  DISTANCE: NONE

  VELOSITY: NONE

  NOTES: DOES TEMPERATURE AFFECT DISTANCE AND VELOCITY? CHANNEL 22 NEWS SAYS THERES A HEAT WAVE COMING THIS WEEKEND, SUPPOSABLY! THEY ARE OFTEN 100% WRONG. WE WILL SEE WHAT HAPPENS.

  And then, on the weekend, there were further statistics, with the notation, “WAVED FRONT LEFT ARM. DISTRESS? CANT BE SURE.”

  Front left arm. Cory didn’t know what he had meant.

  And then he did. He was seized by comprehension and immediately horrified, like someone who has driven hours from his home and then suddenly remembers he’s left a pot on the stove. Cory shot up into a standing position. Frantic, he looked around the roo
m. No one had been in here since Alby died except for one of the aunts, who had straightened up a little. In the corner on the floor by the window was a box. He crouched down and opened it; inside was a little empty bowl and a few pieces of old, dried-out meat. This was Alby’s pet turtle Slowy’s home—Slowy, who had been entirely forgotten, and was now missing.

  Now Cory knew what Alby had been doing in the driveway that morning, why he was so low to the ground and why his mother hadn’t seen him. “Oh my God,” he said, and he dropped the notebook and ran downstairs, pushing through the front door without a coat on, peering hard at the ground all along the strip of brown lawn to the side of the driveway.

  The turtle was there in the grass, easily camouflaged. It had been there this whole time, but no one had thought to look. No one had remembered it even existed except for Cory, who picked it up now and cradled it against his cheek, saying, “Slowy. Slowy.”

  The shell felt dry and cold; the turtle was dead, he thought, and that was fitting, that was appropriate. Slowy and Alby were like Romeo and Juliet, and should have been buried in the same casket. A boy and his turtle, packed together for all eternity.

  As Cory stood with the flat bottom of the turtle pressed to his face, he felt a rumble from inside the shell that was like the vibration underfoot when a subway train approaches. The turtle was waking up from its hibernation, or perhaps its deep grief. It reached out a pale, mosaic-textured arm and lightly raked Cory’s cheek, as if waking him from his own long and fitful sleep.

  The next day he contacted his father in Lisbon at the relatives’ carpet store, telling him in a loud and bursting voice that Alby’s death hadn’t been Benedita’s fault after all. “See, he was lying on the ground studying Slowy,” Cory said, and though he was sure his father would say, “I am so glad to hear this. I’ll be on the next plane home,” Duarte simply said that he needed to stay in Portugal for now, and that he would be in touch when he could.