by Amity Gaige
The old man raised his glass to the sky.
“To you, my darling,” he said. “To you.”
GRIEF
Grief is long, flat roads and low skies. Grief is ashes. Distant carnival music. Roadside cats weak with hunger. True grief, he sees, is shocking.
But maybe, he thinks, After…
He drives the long, flat road under the low sky that is like a shelf of ash. Along the roadside trots a gaunt yellow cat. As he drives, he begins to cry. The carwheels thumping in their wells go Remember? Remember? Remember? His remembering gathers like a storm in his mind. The sky darkens. The clouds gather. Yes, Florida—of course it was not a vacation. Gray beaches and gray music, and games that were not games. He sees now how easily he has believed in the happiness of tiny windows, tiny distractions, chinks of blue sky. Worse, he sees that resistance to grief is grief twice. He will have to weep twice. Once for now, and once for Florida. He will have to drive the long flat road twice.
Pulling into the Drive-Thru, he leans out the window toward the speaker.
“I’ll take a coffee,” he says, wiping his nose with his sleeve.
That it? responds the adolescent voice.
“Yes,” Clark says. “Black.”
That’ll be ninety cents. Pull up to the second window, please.
As he pulls forward, he sees, just off to the side, a public telephone. He swerves toward it, gets out, slips his quarters into the slot. As the phone begins to ring, he pulls his collar up against the coming rain.
Back at home, she stirs. Her sleep is very thick and glutinous. It is not sleep. She totters on the edge of sleep and something very, very different. Beside her, the bottle of pills lies upended. How many were there? Five? Twenty? Her vision pulses. The house slips out from under her. She looks down at its roofless shell and sees the staircase and the bed, white as a marble bier. It is as if she has jumped very high and been caught in the air. It is silent where she is. And cold. She looks around—space. Sheer space, inflationary space. She cries out, but her voice is feeble. All around her the stars prick at her. How she misses the ground! That unassuming yellow house where she keeps herself! To be alive and to walk on dirt. To receive the gifts of pennies and bread and stamps and oranges and kisses. She does not want it to be over. She wants to be alive, a woman who can run and argue and prick herself on things. A woman who can be left even. For wasn’t it worth it? Wasn’t it something? Hovering in space, she thinks of this, smiling a little.
Suddenly, in the darkness below, the sound of a telephone.
Wait! she cries. Hold on! I’m coming back!
She kicks and kicks but doesn’t propel herself any closer to the house. The phone continues to ring but she cannot reach it. It is amazing to her, how far away it sounds, in this death-drugged stupor. Then, suddenly, some force begins to close the blinds to her view, closing the lid or curtain that obscures the entrance.
A mistake! she cries. I want to come back!
The house swings in the dark. The phone stops ringing. Exhausted, she stops kicking and gazes down at the silence, floating backward, her arms outstretched.
He hangs up, gets back into the car, and drives up to the second window. It’s a gusty, gray day, not yet raining but spitting, and colorless leaves sticking to the windshield wipers as they move back and forth, thwop thwip thwop.
The teenage kid at the window winces when he sees Clark.
“Ninety cents,” the kid says, touching his visor.
The teenager accepts the money, then hesitates.
He says, “You all right, sir? You need help or something? You look sort of bad.”
“Yep,” says Clark, taking his coffee. Tears cling to his cheeks and his cuffs are full of snot. “It’s pretty bad, all right.” But with this admission, Clark laughs. “But I gotta go. I gotta do something.”
“Well,” says the kid, smiling. “Good luck. Merry Christmas.”
He pulls out of the Drive-Thru and turns back onto the long flat road and keeps driving. The hum of the wheels on the road is mesmerizing. The road is so flat and straight it appears to have been crushed by the fact of the sky.
The kid leans out of the window, looking after him.
RAIN
Trees stirred. Birds fell silent. A wasp fretted in a corner. In the sky, thin clouds furled opened like young girls’ hands. In the distance, a wind was blowing. The branches clattered, and all at once the wind came up over the hill and washed across the maples in the front yard, and the chimney pot atop the yellow house on Quail Hollow Road started slapping.
She heard the trees. She heard the chimney pot. The house creaked in the wind. In this way she knew she had survived. Because what god would be clever enough to bury her along with the sounds of her life?
Cautiously, Charlotte opened one eye. It parted at the crusted seam, and there was a slight tugging pain. Overhead, the ceiling was blank. The crack did not move, and the room itself did not move or shudder. She caught her breath and closed her eyes, stroking the exquisite flatness of the sheets. There was never an object as beautiful as a bed. A strange cry escaped her mouth. She felt her tongue with her fingers. Her tongue slapped numbly in her mouth, which tasted of chemicals. She could not feel her tongue. She poked it. Her tongue was not working but her fingers were, and her heart was beating and she was alive. And now she smelled, as if in a dream, the smell of toast. Weakly, she pulled the blanket aside and sat up.
“Hi,” Clark said.
Charlotte screamed and covered herself with the sheet.
For there he was—born of thin air, sitting tall in the dim gray sunlight, his olive skin damp and hair mussed with wind and travel. His shirt was rumpled and stained, and she could see his neck and his breastbone moving with his breath. On his lap, he held a plate of jelly toast. She reached out to him, then withdrew her hand. Fingers to her lips, she stared.
“I was just sitting here,” Clark said, “watching you sleep. And for some reason I remembered this joke. I thought it would make you laugh. Can I tell it to you?”
Charlotte looked down. She looked up, eyes wide. Imperceptibly, she nodded.
He sighed and pressed his lips together, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.
“Okay,” he said. “There are these two guys stranded on a deserted island. They’ve been stuck there for years, you know, eating barnacles and coconuts and hoping to be rescued. But no one ever comes. One day, they find a genie in a bottle. The genie says I will grant you both one wish. He says to the first guy, What do you wish?”
He smiled a little, looking off toward the doorway. “Christ, cries the guy. I wish to be rescued, of course. And as soon as he says it—poof, the guy disappears. The genie says to the second guy, I will grant you one wish. What do you wish? The second guy looks around. He looks around at the island, the coconut trees. It’s terrible to be on the island all alone. He misses his friend. Gosh, the guy says to the genie, I sure wish my friend were here.”
He looked at Charlotte and laughed shyly. Then he continued, more softly. “I always really liked watching you sleep. Do you know you kind of purse your lips? I think it’s going to rain. I just beat it here, I think.” He gazed over his shoulder out the window, scratching his neck, suddenly awkward.
Charlotte blinked back at him. After a moment, she moved over on the mattress. She pat the space beside her.
“Oh yeah?” Clark said.
Charlotte nodded. The bed creaked as he sat. He passed her the plate of jelly toast and smiled.
“Hungry?” he said. “Well, eat up. Merry Christmas, Charlie.”
She tried to take the plate, but her hands trembled so wildly that she couldn’t hold on to it. Clark caught the plate in the air and looked at her.
“Are you all right?” He touched her forehead. Then he drew his hand away in alarm. “Jesus, you’re soaked. Jesus, Charlotte. Jesus! Are you sick? Let me open a window.”
He lumbered to the window and opened it. The air rushed in.
“I missed y
ou,” she said suddenly from the bed. “I missed you so much.”
“What?” Clark said. “I can’t understand you.”
“I missed you. I love you. I’ve loved you since I was a child. I dreamed of you when I was a child,” she laughed, wiping the corner of her eye with her wrist. “I missed you, Clark. You and all of it. Toast. Oranges.”
“What?” Clark leaned forward on the bed, slapping one hand to his head. “Your words are all slurry, Charlotte. I can’t understand a thing you’re saying.” His mouth was trembling. “What happened to you?”
She shook her head no.
“I love you,” she said, laughing clumsily. “That’s what happened.”
“You what?” he said. “Lorloo?”
“I love you!” She was laughing.
He gripped her hand. “Hey, tell me later, all right? Rest for now.”
Clark stood up and rubbed his hands together, his brow in a knot. He drew the sheets up to Charlotte’s chin. Then he drew them down. He looked desperately around the room as if expecting someone else to spring helpfully out of the wall. He stumbled into the bathroom and clawed through the medicine cabinet. He came out into the room empty handed, breathing hard.
“A sweater,” he said, pulling one down from her closet. “You should have some clothes on so you don’t catch a chill.”
She raised her arms up and he pulled the sweater over her head. Her face popped through the other side, looking up at him, eyes soft and watchful and urgent about something. He pulled her hair out and smoothed it against her back. With the cuff of her sweater, she touched the rawness on his lip.
“Oh that,” he said, looking down. “You should see the other guy.”
He sat next to her on the bed, their arms touching.
The wind fell still. The chimes hushed. Everything was listening.
Clark cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Charlotte swung her head in his direction, mouth opened. Then she played with the cuff of her sweater.
“It’s good you can’t talk,” he said.
She laughed.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, Charlotte. For everything. I’m sorry that I went away. And I’m sorry for everybody, for the things that happen. All the… blows. And we hardly even know.… We don’t even feel them when they…” He paused, one hand in the air, and gasped. Suddenly, leaning forward, a great pressure broke in his gut. A breaking rolling opening. He pressed Charlotte’s hand to his eyes and sat hunched over that way for a moment, breathing into the palm of her hand.
The word itself, he saw then, was like a password. With it, he entered innumerable rooms. He said it again. He wanted to.
“Oh, Charlie,” he said, weeping now. “I’m so sorry.”
She pulled him into her arms. There they sat, rocking each other.
Finally, it began to rain. It began as a tapping on the window-panes of the neighborhood. Then, all at once, the sky broke, rushing down in great warm spouts, pouring from the gutters, jumping up and down on the drowning streets. Leaves and coupons and newspapers in their plastic sleeves swam in swollen puddles, and Christmas lights blinked dimly through the sheets of rain.
And outside, in the yard, in the downpour, were Clark and Charlotte Adair. They were shrieking. They were soaked. Clark slammed the car trunk shut and stepped toward his wife, who looked back up at him with licks of hair pasted to her cheeks. She was laughing. She was spinning around and around in the yard, in her nightgown and loose, oversized sweater. Rain flew from the ends of her yellow hair.
Clark clapped, looking on.
She was spinning. She looked like a girl on the first day of spring. The rain, warm and constant, felt like some first rain. She spun closer to him until she fell against him, wet and laughing and dizzy. They staggered now to the car, and Clark helped Charlotte inside. He tossed a duffel bag in the backseat, where Tecumseh was awaiting them quietly, sniffing the air through the gap in the window, showing a respectful yet dispassionate interest in it all—laughter, life and death, the scent of moss.
Clark stood and squinted back at the house. The house looked on with a dark, misty expression. Rain ran into his eyes, and at first he was not sure of it. Charlotte was mopping her face with a napkin from the glove compartment.
“Look,” he whispered.
And there they were—it was them all right—in the upper windows, the one chasing the other. The pale hair fluttered past like ribbons. The second figure pursued, draped in a blanket, arms outstretched like a monster—a benevolent monster at large, lumbering after all the delicious human embraces.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AMITY GAIGE is the author of the novels O My Darling and The Folded World. Her essays, articles, and stories have appeared in various publications, including The Yale Review, The Literary Review, and the Los Angeles Times. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, residencies at the MacDowell and Yaddo Colonies, a Baltic Writing Residency Fellowship, and in 2006, she was recognized by the National Book Foundation as one of five outstanding emerging writers under thirty-five. She is currently the Visiting Writer at Amherst College.
Also by Amity Gaige
The Folded World
Schroder
Acclaim for Amity Gaige’s Novels
Acclaim for
O MY DARLING
“Crystalline insights into the nature of love and flashes of narrative brilliance… sparkles and delights.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A life-enhancing novel and a stunning debut… Gaige’s style sings and twists. Each moment or shift in perspective conjures up a strange image, a quirky insight, a sumptuous simile… haunting, riveting, wonderful.”
—Providence Journal
“Love, marriage, the whole damn thing—all spanned in a witty, tender first novel… The impression overall is of a limpid style and the peeling away of the comedy of intimacy to expose isolated souls.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Given its level of sophistication and off-center wit, it’s a bit startling to realize that O MY DARLING is Amity Gaige’s first novel. The characters, beautifully drawn, are as unsentimental toward one another as their author is toward them and yet, wonderfully, this novel with its many ambushes of lyrical moments, is deeply felt.”
—Stuart Dybek, author of I Sailed with Magellan and The Coast of Chicago
“An introspective, sometimes humorous look at how aspects from one’s past can suddenly reemerge and pilot one’s life in totally unexpected directions.”
—Booklist
“Generous, wry, and bristling with humor, O MY DARLING is a gift to the reader. There are so many pleasures to be found here: indelible images, crystalline prose, and two characters that are rendered with such entertaining insight and tenderness, they will continue to haunt us long after we have, with great reluctance, left them.”
—Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, finalist for the
National Book Award for Madeleine Is Sleeping
“This fine, intelligent novel should be required reading for anyone who is (a) in love, (b) engaged, (c) wed, or (d) planning on buying real estate, especially as a concrete expression of (a), (b), or (c). With one scalpel-sharp sentence after another, Amity Gaige has cut a beautifully sad pattern into the skin of that rootless, troubled creature—the modern, secular marriage.”
—Adam Haslett, New York Times bestselling author of
You Are Not a Stranger Here and Union Atlantic
“Amity Gaige seems to know everything there is to know about us. [The novel’s] details are so sharp and unique, every sentence carries the burden (and sometimes the joy also) of truth.”
—Peter Orner, author of Love and Shame and Love
Acclaim for Amity Gaige’s
SCHRODER
“Enthralling… with its psychological acuity, emotional complexity, and topical subject matter, it deserves all the success it can find.”
—Washington P
ost
“Brilliantly eliciting sympathy where, theoretically, none is deserved, this is a tense, ambitious, bravura exploration of the physical and psychological limits of identity, how we are seen by others, and what we make of ourselves.”
—Sunday Times
“Agile… transporting… a book that works as both character study and morality play, filled with questions that have no easy answers.”
—Janet Maslin, New York Times
“4 stars! Like Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Schroder is charming and deceptive, likable and flawed, a conman who has a clever way with words. Schroder’s tale is deeply engaging, and Gaige’s writing is surprising and original, but the real pull of this magnetic novel is the moral ambiguity the reader feels.”
—People
“Gaige writes beautifully… The novel’s climactic chapter is also its best conceived: the item that brings about Schroder’s downfall is perfect, both dramatic and mundane. The reader will realize that he or she has been given every detail necessary to see what was coming, yet didn’t, which is plot-making of the highest order.”
—New York Times Book Review
“With Schroder, Gaige has achieved a remarkable feat. How impressive to have created a protagonist who’s brilliant, narcissistic, creepy and unhinged, yet somehow sympathetic… Gaige is such a masterful writer that she makes Schroder seem more pitiful than hateful… As unlikely as it sounds, you’ll be half-rooting for this lost soul to prevail.”
—USA Today
“Impossible to put down.”
—Chicago Tribune (Editor’s Choice)
“A brilliant exploration of identity and belonging, and Gaige’s writing is beautiful.”
—The Times