My mother walked to the counter and made herself a fourth gin and tonic. I watched her drink it. Our talk became small. Before I left, I washed my own glass out, filled another with water, put it on the table like a suggestion.
San Joaquin Valley, 2017
I left my mother’s house and I drove home. The town in which I live is far from the coast, the water, salt spray, beauty. What it is close to: the 5, a cattle ranch, a state prison, a mental hospital. The law firm where I am a legal secretary is in downtown Fresno and on weekdays I commute, an hour in every morning, an hour back every night. Often I am asked why I have chosen to live so far from my place of employment. Usually I plead poverty and when I do I am believed, though Fresno is by no means a desirable place in which to live and there are affordable neighborhoods much closer to its center. Still, it’s hard to argue with a single mother, what with the cost of childcare, the cost of kids. Sometimes I say nothing. Silence: the great conversation killer. In truth I moved to this town because in the months immediately before I stopped drinking I was drinking a great deal and sleeping very little. My son, by this time a toddler, was plagued by nightmares, woke crying almost every night, so that my own sleep was only ever partial, alert as I felt I had to be to my son’s bleats of distress. I became eventually so attuned to the sound of his breath growing faster and more shallow, to the quickening rustle of his bedsheets, to the soft mewling that presaged a full-throated shout, that I often arrived at his bedside a moment before he opened his mouth to scream. And because I was not always as quiet as I intended to be, moving from my room to his, it was sometimes the case that when I arrived at his bedside I found him sitting up, eyes open, asking me if he had had another nightmare, which he pronounced no-more, which, at least partially intoxicated as I always was, I found heartbreaking in its just so–ness. And because, though I had not heard his screams, I felt certain that, had he not heard my feet against the wood of the hallway that connected my room to his, he would nevertheless have woken himself up with his cries, I always said yes; with tears in my eyes at how small he was, at how dear he was, at how vulnerable, I said yes and, saying yes, would take him in my arms and bring him to my bed, where he would drift off, his head on my lap, me sitting up, my back against the wall, my hand lifting a low glass ever emptier of bourbon from my bedside table to my mouth until my alarm went off and it was time to get up.
It was during these hours, between midnight and morning, in the space between waking and sleeping, between sober and drunk, that I remembered a short story I’d once read. The author was male. Male and from California and a playwright as well as a writer of short stories, and sometimes also a painter, also an actor, also a singer of country-and-western songs. Exemplary jeans-wearer. All these facts of the essence. My son and I were, at this point, living in an apartment in the city in which I worked. Before that we’d lived in Los Angeles, on the first floor of a two-story several blocks from my parents’ house, the two-story owned by friends of my parents, my parents also paying the majority of the greatly reduced rent. But then I got the job in Fresno, two hundred or so miles north of Los Angeles, and I moved, this move financed by my parents, the rent of the apartment, too spacious, to which my son and I moved, subsidized, as the rent in Los Angeles had been, by my parents. They worried about me, hadn’t wanted me to move away, agreed only, in the end, if I let them pay most of the rent so I’d have plenty of money left over for the gas that would be required for frequent trips down south, to visit them, in the used car they had also paid for. In part I drank to forget the fact of their charity. Charity that they could ill afford. On the night I remembered the jeans-wearer’s short story, my divorce, dragged out far longer than necessary by John’s groundless hope that we might reconcile, had recently been finalized. Or else was about to be. And in any case I’d heard from my lawyer, whom my parents had hired and whom they were of course also paying, that because California was a community-property state, I could theoretically be entitled not only to alimony but also to half of John’s assets. I waived alimony, waived any claims to his income, his savings, his 401(k), but John, newly flush—he’d just received a modest inheritance from a generous aunt who had died before we’d divorced but whose will had only recently been probated—insisted I take a lump sum in cash. For the baby, he said. He was, as I’ve said—he is—a very kind man. The dollar amount was hardly extravagant, four figures after taxes, but it would, I suspected, be enough for a down payment on a house in the town mentioned in the short story I’d read.
There was a town in the short story. I should have mentioned that earlier. There was a town in the short story. Or there were towns, many of them. In the story, a man leaves his wife. He drives down the Maine coast. He reaches a town. He calls another woman from a pay phone. He tells her that he’s left his wife to be with her. She tells him she won’t leave her husband. He hangs up. He gets back in his car. Not his car. His truck. He keeps driving. There is a second town. The pattern repeats itself. In each town, there is a different woman. Each woman, despite the promises it is implied she has made, refuses to leave her husband. He drives down the Eastern Seaboard. He drives across the South. He drives up through the Plains states and west through the Rockies. In each town he is rejected. He does not stop to sleep or to eat or to take a shit, or if he does, the jeans-wearing author will not speak of it. At last he lands in a town in California. The town whose name I now, drinking, dozing, remembered. He makes a call, finds that the number has been disconnected. The story ends there, but I always imagined him staying. How can he leave? He has run out of road.
The reader senses that the man’s promiscuity, his faithlessness, is to blame for his being repeatedly rejected. But this sense is overridden, and deliberately, by the anger the reader also feels toward the women he has called. He has driven so far. He’s been driving for days. Can one of these women not offer him a meal, a bed, the comforts of her flesh, if only for one night? I read once that violence onscreen, even if it is designed to appall, argues, inevitably, for itself. That the viewer is always inherently intrigued and therefore aroused by it. That the visual fact of violence is titillating, even if the intent is to disgust. And so one feels not disgust but pity for the lone driver. The writer who depicts an abhorrent male character still demands that the reader pay the abhorrent man his attention.
Did I imagine myself as the lone driver, making a life for myself in a town full of strangers? Yes I did. Pay attention to enough men and you will begin to think of yourself as one. You will think of this as an improvement over fantasizing about being mistreated by one and you will, probably, be right. I mean, also the bourbon helped. So I put a down payment on a house and my son and I moved out of the apartment in Fresno and into the house I had bought and then, sometime after, I quit drinking, a process that involved dropping my son off at my parents’ house and checking myself into a rehab facility my parents had paid for and my parents also, for a time, paying the mortgage on the house I had bought, so that when I left rehab, though I refused to attend meetings of any kind, found the idea of sharing, of a higher power, of making amends, repulsive, I nevertheless remained sober because I had discovered it was the only way I could prevent my parents from helping me financially in any way. By prevent I mean avoid the necessity of. Pride kept me sober. Also anger, also stubbornness. Worth mentioning, too, that getting sober also helped me realize the mistake I had made, looking at a dusty, deserted, racially segregated, economically deprived town and seeing quaint, and here, too, it was pride and anger and stubbornness that kept me from admitting I’d been very drunk and very wrong, pride and anger and stubbornness that kept me from selling the house. Also, realistically, no one would have bought it. With the minuscule down payment that I had scraped together, no surprise that the place was a dump.
When I reached the home I am still now, without my parents’ help, paying off, only one light was on. I had made improvements to the house since purchasing it, since sobering up, but this is not the kind of narrativ
e in which I now detail those improvements and extol the redemptive power of physical labor, though I do in fact believe in said redemptive power, as I believe in the redemptive power of almost anything that is unpleasant and/or difficult. Anyway. Just, the house was nicer. That’s the important part.
It was nine o’clock and my son had been, if the sitter had followed my instructions, which she always does, asleep for an hour. The sitter is my age, a fact about which I feel some guilt. Or, she is the age I still usually imagine myself to be. In fact she is roughly a decade younger. She dropped out of college to care for her parents, who contracted, within the span of several months, two different but equally rare cancers. When chemo and radiation failed, when it became clear that surgery would do more harm than good, she came home and set them up in twin hospital beds in the living room of her childhood home and cared for them. Sometimes she tells me stories about the last few months of their lives, stories I enjoy not because they are affecting but because they are gruesome. Not affecting, well, not affecting for me.
When I entered my house, the sitter was on the couch, looking at her phone.
“Hey,” I said.
“Oh.” She turned. “Hey, you’re back. How’s your mom?”
“Fine. How were things here?”
She shrugged. “Fine. Had a little trouble getting him to bed. He wanted a second story, and then a third.” She rolled her eyes, smiled. “Nothing unusual.”
“Well,” I said. “Thank you.” I paused. “I know he really likes you,” I said. Though she had been my sitter at this point already for many months, and though she had told me about rubbing lotion into the cracked skin of her father’s feet, cutting his hard and yellowed toenails, holding her mother over the toilet and wiping her ass, running a sponge under her arms and between her legs, I still felt, still feel, in her presence, a profound awkwardness. As if she might at any moment decide—not to quit but to humiliate me. I don’t keep a journal but I sometimes felt, sometimes feel, in her presence, as if I do, and have forgotten, and that she’s read it, and is about to post its contents on her blog. This is my standard reaction to the fact of a slowly growing—as opposed to an immediate and overwhelming—intimacy. My therapist—I don’t work the steps, but I lost the argument with myself on therapy—says understanding the problem is the first step to fixing it and I agree, only I’m not sure whether I care to take any further action. And yes I know no one keeps blogs anymore.
The babysitter and I talked for a while, first about my mother and then about hers, about her mother’s depression, untreated, and it occurred to me, and not for the first time, that in addition to the anxiety I experience when threatened with intimacy per se, in the babysitter’s case the fear that her past seemed likely to be my future—my parents are aging; I am an only child; there is no money for nursing homes—might also be a contributing factor. My therapist would have wanted me to share this fear, would have urged me to in this way make myself vulnerable, might even have suggested that I ask the babysitter about the fears she herself had experienced when she’d learned of her parents’ diagnoses, when she’d understood that the next months, the next years of her life would have to be devoted to caring for them. But I was not then, am not now, so evolved. I asked my babysitter how much I owed her and I wrote her a check and I said, as she shouldered her backpack and moved toward the door, “See you Monday.”
After she left I looked at my phone for a while. By looked I mean stared, stared specifically at the phone number I wasn’t entirely sure was still Laura’s. Two visits ago my mother had mentioned that Laura had stopped by, that she was pregnant, that her third husband seemed like a keeper, a little younger than her, devoted, doted on her, which sounded nice enough for Laura, not everyone is as immediately repulsed by tenderness as I am. It was the fact that she was pregnant, it created what a more optimistic woman might have called possibility. All my friends—all the people I knew by name and saw on purpose more than twice a month—were moms. Laura was going to be a mom. Perhaps she could, by the transitive property of moms really having very few options when it came to socializing, again be my friend. My own mother had offered to give me Laura’s number, and I had said, No, thanks, I already have it, and since then I had been staring at the number, on and off, and wondering whether in fact I did and, if I did, whether I should do something about it.
Maybe five minutes of staring, of turning the phone’s screen on and off, of not calling, and then I checked on my son. Sober I walk more softly and he was asleep when I opened the door and still asleep as I approached his bed and leaned over his supine body and kissed him on the forehead. In the living room I turned on the TV. I checked my phone. When I worry about my son of course I worry about him dying, but when I have convinced myself that he is still breathing, that his pupils do not look jaundiced, that the lump that forms on his forehead when he bumps his head cannot also be concealing a tumor, what I worry about is how he’ll end up. I mean the possibility that he’ll end up like me. Not that I’m so horrible, just that I know I can do a great, an excellent, a perfect—I mean, my parents were fine. They weren’t amazing but certainly they did not encourage me to hate myself. They did not tell me to seek out men who were controlling and cruel, they did not suggest this is what I deserved. And if there was, during my formative years, a certain cultural consensus about what women wanted and how men should go about giving it to them, well, many others of my generation were smart enough to be skeptical of it. What I’m saying is that my life, like the lives of most people, lacks an origin story. I mean one with any explanatory power. Which means that my son could turn out any way and for any reason or for no reason at all. I’m not sure if it’s irony but here it is, at last I’ve found the thing I do want to control, and of course I can’t.
When I bought the house I did so in part because I had a romantic notion about the turn my life might take in such a town, so small and dead-ended. I imagined myself working at a diner, a diner frequented by truckers. I imagined one of them, kindhearted, modifying his routes so he could see me more often. Never staying longer than the time it took to drink two cups of coffee and eat a grilled cheese, but nevertheless, an understanding growing between us. I imagined myself in a long dress, in a backyard, hanging my sheets out to dry on a clothesline. Shielding my eyes from the sun. Instead I pay a woman to care for my son while I work as a legal secretary. All my skirts hit just below the knee. To clean these clothes, I use a washing machine and a dryer, both located in the basement. In the short story I read, the protagonist has a son, a son whom he leaves, with his wife, on the Eastern Seaboard. The author, the jeans-wearer, had a number of children. They are scattered about the country with the women who bore them. And though yes, it is true that the author never got sober, perhaps all this time I have been wrong about the story’s protagonist, the man who runs out of road. Because he hasn’t, not really. I mean, he can drive into the ocean. He can always decide to turn around.
WORKS (NOT) CITED
This manuscript emerged in part from an engagement with and in some cases refers elliptically to the following texts, television shows, films, web series, works of art, songs, e-mail newsletters, and podcasts: Speedboat and Pitch Dark, Renata Adler; Phantom Thread, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson; Hotel Chevalier, directed by Wes Anderson; Unmastered, Katherine Angel; Frasier, Seasons 1–11, created by David Angell, Peter Casey, and David Lee; Fish Tank, directed by Andrea Arnold; Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper, directed by Olivier Assayas; All Grown Up, Jami Attenberg; Rocky, directed by John G. Avildsen; John, Annie Baker; Cassandra at the Wedding, Dorothy Baker; Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin; The Big Blue, directed by Luc Besson; Out of This World, created by John Boni and Bob Booker; Horace and Pete, written and directed by Louis C.K., especially Episode 3, starring Laurie Metcalf; The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro; “The Glass Essay,” Anne Carson; “Fresno’s Ugly Divide,” a multi-part series published by The Atlantic and written by Rachel Cassandra, Misyrlena
Egkolfopoulou, Briana Flin, Alexandria Fuller, Margaret Katcher, Mary Newman, and Reis Thebault, graduate students at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism; Husbands and Minnie and Moskowitz, written and directed by John Cassavetes; The Handmaiden, directed by Park Chan-wook; Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell; “Reading the Tarot,” an e-mail newsletter written by Jessa Crispin; In the Last Analysis, Amanda Cross; Outline and Transit, Rachel Cusk; the e-mail newsletter associated with “The Small Bow,” a website created by A. J. Daulerio and illustrated by Edith Zimmerman; “Shitty Media Men,” a crowdsourced Google spreadsheet created by Moira Donegan; The Possession, Annie Ernaux (trans. Anna Moschovakis); reporting in The New Yorker on Harvey Weinstein by Ronan Farrow; Veronica, Mary Gaitskill; The Babysitter at Rest, Jen George; The End of the Novel of Love, Vivian Gornick; Call Me by Your Name, directed by Luca Guadagnino; I Love Dick, created by Sarah Gubbins and Jill Soloway, especially Episode 5, “A Short History of Weird Girls,” written by Annie Baker, Chris Kraus, and Heidi Schreck; The Piano Teacher, directed by Michael Haneke; L.A. Confidential, directed by Curtis Hanson; Writing a Woman’s Life, Carolyn G. Heilbrun; “Invictus,” William Ernest Henley; How Should a Person Be?, Sheila Heti; “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” bell hooks; Three Times, directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien; In a Lonely Place, Dorothy B. Hughes; Negro-land, Margo Jefferson; Moonstruck, directed by Norman Jewison; The Folded Clock, Heidi Julavits; The First Bad Man, Miranda July; reporting in The New York Times about workplace sexual harassment led by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey; Big Little Lies, created by David E. Kelley; I Love Dick, Chris Kraus; The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950–1962, edited by Karen V. Kukil; Suite for Barbara Loden, Nathalie Léger; August: Osage County, Tracy Letts; The Widening Spell of the Leaves, Larry Levis; Margaret, directed by Kenneth Lonergan; Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado; Shame, directed by Steve McQueen; The Collected Stories, Leonard Michaels; The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm; The English Patient, directed by Anthony Minghella; “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey; Blank Check with Griffin and David, hosted by Griffin Newman and David Sims, especially the December 23, 2018, episode on Aquaman, directed by James Wan; And Now We Have Everything, Meaghan O’Connell; The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje; New Collected Poems, George Oppen; Meaning a Life, Mary Oppen; Where Should We Begin?, Season 1, hosted by Esther Perel; Parallel Lives, Phyllis Rose; Mating, Norman Rush; “Reading Women’s Lives,” compiled by Professor Georganne Schriner, Arizona State University; Goodfellas and Casino, directed by Martin Scorsese; The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald; “Push,” written by Matt Serletic and Rob Thomas, performed by Matchbox Twenty; Secretary, directed by Steven Shainberg; The West Wing, Seasons 1–3, created by Aaron Sorkin; “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” Amia Srinivasan, London Review of Books, Vol 40, No. 6, March 22, 2018; Want and When the Saints, Lynn Steger Strong; Antígona González, Sara Uribe (trans. John Pluecker); Jane the Virgin, created by Jennie Snyder Urman; “On Pandering,” an essay by Claire Vaye Watkins given as a lecture during the 2015 Tin House Summer Workshop and reprinted in the 2015 Winter Issue of Tin House magazine; Basic Instinct, directed by Paul Verhoeven; Fleabag, created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge; “Ventimiglia,” Joanna Walsh; Mad Men, Seasons 6–7, created by Matthew Weiner, especially Season 6, Episode 7, “Man with a Plan,” starring Linda Cardellini; Drive, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn; “Burn This,” Lanford Wilson; Heroines, Kate Zambreno; Sour Heart, Jenny Zhang.
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