Hold Still

by Lynn Steger Strong

  HOLD STILL

  Lynn Steger Strong

  LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

  a division of W. W. Norton & Company

  INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS SINCE 1923

  NEW YORK / LONDON

  For Peter, Isabel, and Luisa

  HOLD STILL

  Prologue

  Maya wants to go in with her. They’ve been out all day, their last in Florida. Ellie’s eight and wants to swim just one more time before they go. The sun has fallen past the dunes, and the sky is pink and blue and purple. Maya’s daughter stands, smiling, sunny, salty, sandy, and promises that she’ll be fine, that Maya doesn’t have to go in too. Maya’s already pulled on her pants and sweater. She’s almost always cold, even here, where, even in winter, it’s warm right up to hot. She stands up to where the waves come in thin films of foam over her ankles, her sweater held tight around her, her toes curled into the sand and bits of broken shells, and Ellie bounds away in front of her, past the point where the sand drops off, her tiny body quickly swallowed up. Maya watches Ellie let herself fall forward, arms reaching up and shoulders rolling: she dives down beneath the waves and comes up twice, and, all at once, Maya wants her daughter next to her: warm and wrapped up tight. But Ellie’s vertical again and treading water. Her head is small and dark and her curly hair is matted tight around her skull. The water dips as the pressure builds beneath her, and Ellie’s shoulders pop up and out, light brown now, with a smattering of freckles. Her bathing suit is yellow with tiny purple dots. Maya calls, “Come in, El,” but Ellie doesn’t hear her. The water settles. Another wave forms a hundred feet away. The curve of it grows, and Ellie’s still and small and getting smaller. Maya’s chest and neck get hard. “El!” she calls, as if she’ll hear her. As if somehow her screaming will keep the wave from crashing down. Ellie’s head is there and then it isn’t. And Maya breathes in once, then out. And then she’s running, diving, swimming. She kicks, and gulps of water fall into her throat. She has to keep her eyes open so she can see where Ellie is and they sting sharp, her vision blurring; she grabs hold of her close to the bottom, and the round hollow of her chest and the slick softness of her bathing suit are held tight in Maya’s arms; she’s still wearing her sweater, which is heavy now with the weight of water, salt, and sand. “El,” she says and thinks she sees her daughter smile. Maya holds tight to Ellie and drags her up to shore. Maya pants and Ellie’s breath is even. “Ma, I’m fine,” she says. Maya will not let go of Ellie for the next hundred years.

  Winter 2013

  (Afterward)

  “Maya, where the hell are you?” Boots on stairs, and she can hear the cadence of his breathing. She drops her pen and reads the letter one more time before she slips it in the book she’s brought with her to bed:

  Sometimes I say it out loud to myself or type it, the thing you did. I write it down and stare at it, try to figure out how to fit it, what it looks like in my brain. I try to imagine a world in which I hate you. I try to see if I’m capable of letting you go. This is not a thing that people are supposed to think about their children, but all that stuff about how and why and when to love is all wrong anyway. It doesn’t take into account the specific impulses and capabilities of all the thousand million different people who love and are loved. What makes me angrier than what you did is the impossibility of the idea of not loving you because of it. I’m irrevocably attached to whatever it is you’ve done or do or are, because loving you makes me a person who could rationalize anything that you’ve done, as long as I can know for sure that you’ll survive.

  M

  She curves her neck, chest to chin, as she listens for the last stair to creak beneath her husband’s steps. She sets down the book, the cover’s edges furred and softened, the back cover ripped. She sits up, her back straight against the headboard, and grabs hold of one of Ellie’s tank tops. It’s one of the few her daughter didn’t take with her to Florida when she left.

  When she left because Maya made her go.

  Maya fingers the book’s spine one final time as Stephen shoulders into their daughter’s bedroom. She’s stayed herself for his arrival. Still, she starts when she sees him; she slips the book, the letter safe inside, beneath Ellie’s duvet and looks up at him.

  He wears glasses, thick-rimmed, rounded. He wears his coat still, wool black pants. He’s thin, with a face that’s pale with creases at the mouth and eyes, gray hairs peppered through what was once the color of wrought iron. He’s still handsome, distinguished: a professor of philosophy, widely published, head of the department. He is, even now, the most capable man she’s ever known.

  Ben comes through the door three steps behind his father. His dark hair is shorn close to his head. She is always conscious of the breadth of him. He’s five inches taller than his father, all strength and sinew. She unfurls slightly and turns toward him. He is, perhaps, her favorite thing on earth.

  “Ma,” Ben says. He looks as if he’s told on her.

  This is the first that he’s been with them in over a year. She wants to beg him not to leave, to stay close and with her; she wants to ask him quietly to stay far enough away from her in order that he not be ruined too.

  “How long have you been up here?” asks her husband.

  Hours? Maya thinks. Years?

  She sleeps in here most nights. She starts in bed with Stephen; then wakes up here—often on top of the covers, often with the large wool blanket Stephen gave her years ago—not always knowing when and how she’s moved.

  Her son won’t look at her.

  “We’re going out, Maya,” says Stephen. “You’re eating actual food.”

  Maya wraps the thin shoulder strap of her daughter’s shirt tight around her index finger, till the tip of it is white.

  “Get your coat,” says Stephen, speaking to Ben. Their son looks back and forth between the two of them. His eyes are his father’s, his nose and mouth some combination of the two. The sleeve of his sweatshirt is pulled down over his thumb and the bottoms of his fingers; Maya keeps her eyes fixed on the edges of his sleeves as he walks out of the room.

  “Maya,” Stephen says again once Ben has left them. Her husband can say her name to make it mean a million different things. This one, the tone low and firm, his eyes big and accusing, means she’s acting in a way that makes him want to scream. But he will not scream because he has control. He will cut much more deeply and precisely by staying reasonable and firm.

  “You have to stop this, Maya.”

  “Stop what?” She knows what, but she wants to hear his version of it.

  He looks at her in the way he’s always looked when he thinks she’s asking needless questions.

  “This, Maya.” He spreads his arms. “Staying up here all the time. You’re scaring Ben.”

  She wishes she were the type of person to stand up on this bed and yell at him. She wonders how often anger manifests itself as sadness, how it’s so firmly taught to a certain kind of woman that it is better, more productive, to cry instead of scream.

  “I’m doing what I can,” she says.

  Her voice is firm now. She hopes he’s quick enough to catch the anger underneath.

  “Just stop doing it to Ben,” he says.

  She looks down at her bare feet and folds the tank top. She places it on the bed, and stands; she pulls back the duvet, the book a bump beneath it still; she leaves it there. She walks past her husband into the room they’re still meant to share and puts on jeans and socks—there’s a pile of folded laundry sitting in front of her closet. She can’t imagine who has thought to wash and fold her clothes—a long-sleeved shirt and an oversized cashmere turtleneck. Everything she owns, all small to begin with, looks oversized these days. She has long dark hair that she unknots now, only to pul
l it up and tighter, higher on her head.

  She walks down the stairs where Stephen waits while checking email on his phone, and Ben stares at her, his coat on but unbuttoned, his sweatshirt still covering his hands.

  “Shoes, Maya,” says Stephen. She wants to place her hand, palm spread, thumb and forefinger firmly on his collarbone, and put her face up close to his and tell him not to treat her like a child.

  She pulls on boots.

  Summer 2011

  (Before)

  Ellie hasn’t seen him coming, though the coffee shop—where she works, where she doles out coffee and pastries every morning while every other kid she knows is enrolled in some college she has somehow failed to get into—has a large window looking out onto the street. It’s almost ten and the early morning rush has emptied. She’s had no warning, no time to prepare; she stands stock-still, a black apron tight around her waist, short shorts, two coffee stains on the hip and shoulder strap of her white shirt. She’s half listening to a girl from down the street who talks in front of her, something about new neighbors, a book she’s read.

  Ellie smiles at whatever the girl’s saying, but her eyes stay fixed on him. He’s taller than he was when they first met, broader, the sleeves of his shirt newly taut across his arms.

  The girl, round-faced, soft-spoken, hands Ellie the money for her order, takes her coffee. Ellie doesn’t turn to him until she’s gone.

  Dylan’s hair has always been long, but it’s short now, clipped down to a nub around his head. The whole time she’s known him it’s flopped down heavy in his face; he would toy with it incessantly, one large hand palming up over his head. Now, the sharp lines of his face and the largeness of his features shock her; he has big dark eyes, a long straight nose, thin lips. She can’t imagine what he does now with his hands.

  He wears a gray T-shirt, jeans, and what her brother would describe as “douchebag loafers.” As he stands there, hairless, so much bigger, she has an image of him, fifteen, in Prospect Park: both of them stoned, no clothes and cold, his arms planted straight, chest hovering, thin but broad and firm, angling himself slowly, till his length had swallowed hers. He’d cupped his hand over her mouth and she’d bit the base of his thumb hard until he winced, still silent; he’d let her go. Ellie’d laughed out loud then, Dylan still on top of her, and she’d thought, Finally, I’m just like all the other girls.

  He takes a piece of the free sample brownie. He swallows without chewing and takes another piece.

  She can taste his breath: cigarettes, Mexican Coke, and ginger chews. She can feel the brush of her tongue along the crooked jumble of his bottom teeth.

  He still calls her sometimes. Mostly she’s able to ignore it: his name flashing over and over on her cell phone as she sits curled under her duvet not able to sleep. But sometimes she answers; sometimes she slides open the phone and lets him talk: she needs too much sometimes to be reminded that he’s out there, that there’s still someone in the world who’s wanting her.

  She tries to look at him sternly. “What do you want?” she says.

  “Nothing,” Dylan says.

  She feels Joseph—short and sweet, her coworker and only friend here, her only friend at all right now—he’s right behind her and Ellie wishes Dylan would just leave them. Instead, he leans in close to her: the smell is brownie and the hand-rolled cigarettes he smokes only when there are people around to watch him roll them. The rest of the time he smokes his mother’s Parliaments. “You,” he says. “Always, always. Pretty, pretty Ellie.”

  She feels her body leaning toward him. She holds tight to the countertop with both her hands.

  Winter 2013

  “Where will we go?” Maya says.

  “Indian?” says Ben.

  “Sure,” says Stephen. “The closer one.”

  There’s a better place in Crown Heights, but Stephen hates driving the car.

  “How was campus?” asks Maya, because Ben’s next to her and the silence gapes. They walk down Garfield to Fifth.

  “Fine,” says Stephen. “Usual early semester jostling.”

  “Things in order?” she says. “What are you teaching again?”

  He pulls at a thread on one of his coat’s buttons and pretends not to hear her. He’s been teaching the same classes every semester for the past ten years.

  “What about you, Benny?” she says, turning to him as they keep walking. She loops her arm through his elbow and thinks she feels him wince. Across the street on the next block is the coffee shop Ellie worked the few months before she left. All three of them are silent for a block; Ben and Stephen look back toward Sixth Avenue; Maya looks up at the brown awning with the too-bright white scrawl: GINNY’S, it says.

  “Calc 2,” Ben says. His voice is flat, disinterested. “Western Political Thought,” he says. This is Stephen’s domain and his back straightens.

  Stephen starts to speak, but their son stops him.

  “It’s a requirement,” Ben says.

  “Of course,” says Stephen. “Speaks highly of the school, then.”

  Ben’s in school in Ohio, bucolic, foreign, a soccer scholarship. Maya was jarred, baffled by the choice when it came.

  Ben nods, and Maya leans in closer. “What else?”

  “Spanish,” he says. It’s January and frigid and she wants to tell him to put his hands inside his pockets. She wants to bend down and button up his coat.

  “I might have to retake English,” he says, turning to look at her.

  Stephen stops and faces them. He takes his hands out of his pockets and folds his arms across his chest. “Retake?” he says, lingering on the first syllable in a tone that Maya knows too well.

  Ben turns toward Maya. He curls his hand into a fist.

  “It’s not a big deal,” he says. “The class was really early in the morning. I just sort of stopped showing up.”

  This is her son whom teachers have been calling “gifted” since preschool. Her son for whom there has never been space enough to be a problem too.

  “Sort of stopped showing up,” says Stephen. Like he’s trying out the feel of this idea. “Does your coach know?”

  “It’s fine, Dad. I’m covering it.”

  “Covering it.” Stephen has been reduced to only able to repeat.

  “Fuck off, Dad,” her son says.

  “Excuse me?” says Stephen, keeping his voice steady, though he looks like he’s been hit.

  “I’m starved,” says Ben. “And cold. Can we keep walking?”

  Stephen turns and walks ahead of them. Maya holds tight to her son.

  They get samosas, tandooris, rogan josh, and spoon rice and creamy sauces on their plates. No one’s speaking and Maya’s grateful each time the waiter comes to cut into the quiet.

  “All right?” he asks. He’s older, with a thick, clipped accent. Maya nods, smiling at him, trying to think of what she might say to keep him there. A Bollywood musical plays on low behind them on a large flat-screen TV. Blues and oranges and purples all mixed up with lithe brown limbs. The waiter walks away.

  “I heard Kenny Lambert made the Olympic Development Team,” says Stephen.

  Maya drops her fork and glares at him. They’ve agreed not to talk about the soccer. The coach called weeks before to express concern about Ben’s “lackluster” involvement at practice in the fall.

  A girl on the TV behind Stephen does a back bend, revealing a slick, perfectly flat midriff. Stephen never played or even cared about sports until their son suddenly proved himself a prodigy. By the time Ben was in high school, he was being recruited by a handful of colleges and Stephen knew the stats and names of every high school student in the state.

  “Jesus, Maya, what? He’s a friend of his.”

  “How do you even know this?” Maya asks him. She’s caught him a few times, trolling the Internet for scores and statistics, obsessive for the sake of it. Ben’s quiet. He lines his water glass with the index finger of his free hand.

  The waiter comes and clears
Stephen and Ben’s empty plates and they stay silent. It’s almost closing time and he’s removed his apron. Stephen sips his beer. “I’m interested in what our son is interested in.”

  “Kenny’s not my friend, Dad,” Ben says. “He’s kind of a douche.”

  Maya’s lips purse toward Ben and he smiles at her. She passes her plate to him and he consumes quickly all she’s not been able to.

  At three a.m. Maya sits in the nook in the kitchen, her arms wrapped around her shins, in running tights, a sports bra, and a jacket, waiting for morning to get close enough that she can leave. If she can wait till five she’ll look less crazy. She’s decided it’s sufficient to hold out till four. She’s dressed quietly in clothes she keeps in Ellie’s room. She’s always kept socks and shoes close to the door.

  Pans hang over the island on which there are six stovetops and lines of spices. Instead of cabinets, they have large oak shelves along the walls, the dishes, pans, and cookware on display. They’re embarrassingly wealthy—Stephen’s parents. He’s the only child and they’ve inherited everything. They have the brownstone in Park Slope, a block from the park, on Garfield, instead of Manhattan because it was what Maya wanted. Because there was a time in their lives when he made gestures as grand as moving to a side of the East River on which he had never previously set foot because Maya liked the trees.

  She pulls on socks and shoes and ties them slowly, bends her left knee, and pulls her shin up against her face, then switches to the right. She laces her fingers and stretches her arms, one and then the other, pulling on her forearms. The lock clicks and the door creaks as she leaves.

  Their block is shady, two-and three-family brownstones. They were some of the first gentrifiers, when Ellie was a toddler, Maya full-bellied with Ben. They’d felt a little pioneering, with the squatters and the lesbians still peopling Fourth Avenue, the less-than-stellar public schools they let their children attend the first few years. Maya brought up Sophie and Otto Bentwood at least once a week. (She’d even wanted to take in a stray cat that had loitered in their garden a few winter months the year they moved in. But Stephen was allergic; she’d had to bring her to the shelter instead, knowing full well what would probably happen. She was most shocked by how quickly she’d forgotten about it.)