by Dave Eggers
"You remind me of her sometimes," he said without looking up.
That night, for a few hours, my father appeared genuinely haunted, and I was heartened. He sat in his study looking out the window for a while, and then he took out some files from the cabinets in there. He was flipping through my mother's notes and preliminary pages for her book on Paul and Jane Bowles.
For all my father's achievements, my mother was always a step or two ahead of him. She was the one who'd finish the Sunday crossword puzzle, who knew word derivations, who could speak three languages, who had more persuasive things to say about the films and plays we went to. She feared alternately that I would pursue success single-mindedly like my father or that I'd inherit her impractical intelligence, the kind that ensured the vibrancy of their social life but that only recently had earned her—in the form of the Bowles advance—even a modest income. On her deathbed, I was still deciding who to be like, and who to rebel against, though I still had time to fail them both.
I watched him from the doorway. I felt a bit guilty for forcing him into my mood, but it was a mission I'd undertaken.
"Someone should follow up on this," he said. "All this good work shouldn't just go to waste."
"Maybe I will," I said.
His eyes lit up. "Oh, I'd love that. I really would."
Then he gathered up the pages, put them away, and got dressed to go out.
The radio station was on the fifth floor of an old warehouse building on the Lower West Side. I had to call from a pay phone to get someone to open the padlocks on the back door and bring me up a rusted elevator. I assistant-produced for a phone-in issues show (the insurgency in Iraq, corruption in the Justice Department), screening callers for whoever was hosting and gauging people's on-air skills. Their politics didn't matter to me, so long as they had something to say. The most intense conversation I had was with a man whose wife had Alzheimer's who'd called to talk about stem cell research. After forty-five years of marriage his wife barely recognized him, and once, after a meal, she tried to tip him.
I listened to his stories, and then I told him about my mother. Nothing planned.
He spoke and then I did, back and forth, a game of catch. I told him about lying to everyone, making excuses for her thinness. That was her rule. She thought her publisher would cancel her contract if it got out that she was sick. I told him about Thanksgiving, how I kept pushing her to eat. She said politely she didn't want any more, but I insisted. She couldn't hold it down.
She covered her face and ran to the kitchen, my father and me hovering as she leaned over the sink. My God, I can't do this, I just can't do anything. She was so terribly sorry, she said, that she'd ruined our Thanksgiving. "It was the last time we ate a meal together, and I screwed it up," I said.
"You're lucky." The caller had an even baritone and a slight Brooklyn accent.
"You're more than lucky she's dead and buried. Dead and alive is what's killing me. It's breaking my heart."
Jonas met me at the Dublin House on Seventy-ninth and Broadway later that night. It was packed, and everyone was drinking as though the end of the world were coming; at least it felt that way to me. We settled down at a dark wood table in the back and made our way through two sizable pitchers. I described how my father appeared to have a steady girlfriend now, a school administrator named Linda.
"Women do great on their own," he said. "But the men from our fathers' generation are kind of clueless. For all their yelling at each other, my dad couldn't go three days without my mother. Remember when my Aunt Beth died? My Uncle Ned remarried within five months."
The buzzing in my head started in again, and then the music got incredibly loud.
Jonas was saying something about the way we're wired, which I couldn't really hear. Then it felt like someone had shoved cotton in my ears.
"I've gone deaf," I said.
He helped me to my feet and pushed me through a maze of beery faces out the door. In the freezing air, my hearing returned.
"Is it possible you're working backward through the healing process," he said.
"Fuck off."
"I'm not knocking it. I think it's admirable."
I threw up on his shoes and felt somewhat better.
Over that weekend Jonas brought me to a Rites of Spring party on Spring Street, endearingly enough. We rode the subway down, then walked there through a late March blizzard. The cars moved soundlessly down the street. From somewhere in the heavens a snowball scraped the top of Jonas's head.
"Took you fucking long enough," a woman's voice yelled. She was leaning out the window of a fourth-floor apartment.
"Took us forever to shovel out the driveway," Jonas yelled back.
The party was packed with downtown hipsters, most about five years older than us, with something already to show for their lives. In what passed as a dining room the snowball hurler, Sylvie, was arranging the hors d'oeuvre platters and mixing margaritas.
"You're Andrew," she said, when I walked by the food table.
The crier, I thought.
She handed me a margarita, then tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She was nearly my height, pale and possibly sleep deprived, with an oval face, soft features, and dark brown librarian glasses. When we shook hands hers was damp from the snow, or from squeezing limes.
After a minute or two of introductory conversation, she said, "I'm really sorry about your mother."
"Thanks," I said.
Someone called her name, and she excused herself and went to hug a woman in a short skirt and knee-high boots, who introduced her to a white guy with thick dreadlocks.
When she returned she said, "I don't know if Jonas told you, but I went through something similar when I was in high school."
I was starting to understand that having someone close to you die meant hearing everyone else's saddest story.
"You lost your mother?" I said.
"Father. Listen, you probably don't want to talk about this at a party."
"Maybe not," I said, and so we talked about where she went to school and my job at the radio station. She was studying art history at Columbia. She told me all about her roommate, Dana, whom Jonas slept with once ("zero chemistry"), and then she asked me how my father was coping.
Sort of as an experiment, or because I had a buzz on, I decided to tell her the abridged saga of my winter, about the perfumed notes and late-night calls, how I felt sometimes like a dormitory R.A., how I'd bump into T-shirted women in the kitchen half asleep, how one of them made elaborate snacks in the middle of the night, and how another, the boutique owner, accidentally walked naked into my room, thinking it was my father's.
"Oh, please. You think she went in there by accident?" Sylvie said.
"I guess I did."
"Sweetheart. When my father died my mother kept me away from the men she was dating." We were side by side and our arms brushed. My body tensed. "I was sixteen, and I think she thought I'd try to seduce them. And I probably would have in my own insecure way. Not literally, but enough to ruin things for her. In any event she stayed over at their apartments. At first it was only on the weekends, but then it was like four nights a week. She'd phone to tell me to order a pizza for me and my brother, or Chinese food, whatever we wanted and to charge it to her American Express card."
She poured me another margarita, then poured herself one. "I could have stayed out in clubs all night, or had huge-ass parties, and she would have never known. I tried it once, throwing a party, but I ended up getting too nervous about all the people there getting drunk and throwing up, so I kicked them all out."
"Did she remarry?"
"Yes, to my stepfather."
"Do you like him?"
"Better than her."
"Seriously?"
"Let's just say he's a lot less complicated."
"I find everything about my father's dating depressing."
"Depressing is when he dates a twenty-year-old."
"He hasn't done that."
"Then count your blessings."
I watched her after that. She was unabashed in a way that usually put me off, but in her there was something heartfelt that I latched onto. She disappeared for a half hour or so and then reappeared at my side.
"Feel like getting out of here?" she said.
"You mean the two of us?"
"You think you could do better?" she said.
I tilted my head in mock judgment. She was kind of gawky, I thought, with narrow hips and long skinny arms and an illegible word written on the back of her wrist. Her hair held the shape of a wool cap she must have worn to the party, but she didn't seem to care.
"All right. Lefs go," I said.
It was Sylvie's idea to stop by our house. She wanted to meet my father "in the flesh" and see if he was as dashing as she imagined. When we reached home, Linda was camped in the kitchen, making a pot of coffee.
"Your dad went down to tell the doorman to turn up the heat," she said. She wore a cashmere V-neck sweater of my father's over a white camisole and looked like a late-career Jane Fonda. "It's freezing in here, don't you think?"
"I'm Sylvie," Sylvie said. She took off her ski cap and shook out her hair, sprinkling melting snow into the room and onto her glasses, which she removed and placed in her coat pocket.
"And I'm Linda, Andrew's dad's girlfriend," Linda said. She pulled out three mugs, one that I hadn't seen before, with the Statue of Liberty drinking coffee. She poured us cups and told us about her evening, coaching a room of Bensonhurst kids about writing résumés.
My father buzzed the intercom from downstairs and said he'd be up in ten minutes.
"When he wants things done, he goes out and gets them done," Linda said, smiling. I could have told her that was inaccurate, that when my father wanted things done he convinced others to do them for him, but I figured she'd learn that soon enough.
"It's supposed to get down to single digits by the morning," Linda said. "Are you two in for the night?"
I pretended not to grasp what she was suggesting, but Sylvie said, "No. We just came by to warm up."
When my father came in and saw that I was with a young woman he grinned widely. "Welcome to spring," he said. He asked Sylvie a series of questions about herself, listened with interest to her answers, and then showed her the view. There was something both wistful and very tender in the way he treated us.
***
We walked uptown along the park. I didn't know where we were headed, only that Sylvie appeared to have a plan.
We sat on a bench on the path at Eighty-first Street and sipped from a pint bottle of Knob Creek we bought at the corner liquor store, assessing the few passersby who braved the weather. A young guy, two or three years older than me, hobbled across on crutches.
"He's faking," Sylvie said. "Grab one of his crutches."
"What would I do with just one?"
"You could sell it back to him," she said. "Or you could beat him with it."
We traveled then to the benches near the band shell, where Sylvie said she used to roller-skate. I used to ride my skateboard over to watch people like her, I said.
"I was the one in the hot pants."
"Really. I think I kissed you once."
We were at the center of Central Park in the middle of the night. I thought: this is what unbalanced people do. Snow dropped down on us. My feet felt cold and wet, and I took another slug of whiskey. I was getting drunk. She rested her legs over mine, and I warmed them with my hands. It all felt forced, and then it didn't.
As though she'd been working up to the question, she asked me, "what's the weirdest thing you can do with your body?"
"I don't understand."
"I mean, can you do this?"
She touched her elbows together behind her head. "Or this?" She bent her hand back so that her fingertips touched the back of her forearm.
"No," I said. "Nor would I want to."
She looked so distraught that I went ahead and wiggled my left ear, something I hadn't done since grade school.
"I knew there was greatness in you," she said.
At some point, because it was on my mind, I told her about walking in the park with my mother, a week after we found out she was sick. I'd been away for the summer and I'd flown back to the city the day before. My mother was critiquing my wardrobe, the holes in my t-shirts and jeans.
"I'm buying you some pants," she said. "Don't be embarrassed."
"I won't," I said.
We went to some stores on Columbus Avenue, and I felt like I was eleven.
She bought me four pairs of pants, two pairs of dress socks, three shirts, and a navy peacoat. It was as though she were outfitting me for a trip. It was the first time I understood there was a finite number of afternoons we'd have together. A hundred. Ninety-nine. The next day it would be ninety-eight.
We never talked about the fact that she was dying, or what she was heading into. I think we both believed there'd be time. But it all went so quickly. The night I came to her with all the questions and thoughts I'd been saving up, her painkillers had made her so dopey she thought I was taking her to the opera. I actually played Carmen for her, and she said, head pressed into her pillow, that it was unbearably beautiful. She knew that she was sick, and in bed, but she thought she was young and in bed with the flu. And she asked me on one of her last days if I could make sure her tennis racket was strung, because she'd broken a string the summer before. I took it into a shop, and when they'd finished I brought it back to show her.
When I reached her the nurse had upped her morphine, and from then on she was gone.
When my story ended, Sylvie closed her eyes. "You know, I said everything I wanted to say to my father, and he made his peace with me. But I never played opera for him while he was in bed," she said. "That is such a fucking cool thing to do."
Outside her building Sylvie declared, "It's been a while since I slept with anyone."
I just smiled stupidly.
"You're quite adorable," she said.
Her roommate was away for the weekend. It was a pretty standard grad school apartment, two tiny bedrooms, a kitchenette, a narrow hallway, and a sunken living room decorated with a nice plush armchair and couch that must have come from someone's family. We passed out in our clothes for an hour or two. Then we slept together with them off. Undressed she was far sexier than her boyish clothes and awkward eagerness had forecast, and when she pulled me inside her I felt irrationally as though I might have fallen in love. At around 4:00 A.M. I woke up sweating and startled from a nightmare. My mother wasn't in this one. My father had died and I was sorting through his papers and clothes, and I was showing our apartment to a series of realtors. I asked them each, Have you seen the view over Central Park? It took some effort to determine that my father was snoring in his bed a dozen blocks away, and my relief at this understanding was so overwhelming I wept uncontrollably. In the morning I was curious to find myself in a strange apartment and not in my childhood room. I heard car horns and voices outside, a doorman's whistle. I felt tired still, but in a different way, as though I'd been drugged.
I noticed then what wasn't there. The buzzing. I stumbled over to the clock on her desk. 9:34.
"You can go if you want," she said from the bed.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, I sort of trapped you here last night."
There was something fragile in her eyes I hadn't yet seen.
"I'd much rather stay," I said.
She smiled and curled into her pillow. Her feet dangled from beneath the covers.
I slipped back into bed and drew her to me so that her warm back rested against my chest. I closed my eyes, and in seconds I was out. I slept as I hadn't in years, through that whole snowy day, and when I awoke again it was night. I threw on my pants and padded down the hallway, where I came across her reading a book on the living room sofa, legs curled beneath her. She glanced up at me. "It stopped snowing," she said. "Shall we go get a bite?"
&n
bsp; "Yes," I said.
I grabbed the rest of my clothes from the bedroom. We bundled up and headed into the freezing night. On Broadway I felt the wind rip through my pea coat, all the way to my skin, and I was aware then that I had left the first stage of my life and was out in the world in a way I was never before.
We Show What We Have Learned
Clare Beams
FROM Hayden's Ferry Review
BEFORE HER DISINTEGRATION, we had long held an absolute and unwavering contempt for Ms. Swenson. She had won that with her uncertainty, which we had sensed in the very first moments of the very first day of fifth grade, the way dogs can smell fear. Waves of it rolled off her, along with the odor of cats and Kleenex and chalk that hung in her sad, pilly sweaters. Ms. Swenson was pitiful, but this did not mean we pitied her. We felt nothing for the faded blue of her eyes, which were like a soft sea creature's underbelly, or for the way she kept them open so wide and blinked so rapidly that she seemed to be seeing us through a mist. Her movements, too, were misty, whereas we were sharp and quick and feral. We did not wonder much about her life. She seemed ageless to us in the way that most adults seemed ageless—we could not have said whether she was twenty-five or forty—but we did know that she was younger than most of the other teachers. This was less because her face was unlined than because she seemed so much more unfinished. Everything Ms. Swenson ever said to us had a question in it, even when she explained to us long division or poetry, things it was clear she understood, and even when she told Mark Peters to stop it when he pulled down Sally Winters's pants and underpants to show us the hair-flecked space between her legs. The question in her voice then was simply more panicked than usual.
The day the disintegration began, we were learning about Indian civilization. We were always learning about Indian civilization—we began each year with it, and then we might, as on that day (when we were supposed to be talking about the southern agricultural system), make several unexpected detours back to revel in the quietude of that life so close to nature. The teachers all loved these lost things, and Ms. Swenson loved them even more than most. We watched while she drew wigwams on the board. Ms. Swenson was very bad at drawing, worse even than the worst of us, because she was crippled by second guessing. She darted in to draw a line, darted back to look at it, darted back in to erase it and start over. "Is that straight?" she asked us, but wasn't it supposed to be rounded, wasn't that the whole point? Finally she sighed in a way that meant she was giving up and settling for the misshapen thing she had produced. "You see, children, the hole was put there," she said, pointing, "so that the cooking smells could escape. It's ingenious." Her hands began to wave like vestigial gills that she was trying and failing to breathe with. There was something beautiful about her excitement in these moments, irresistible target though it was. "The early colonists were never so ingenious. In many ways, the civilization they would brutally overpower was vastly superior to their own."