The Running War

by E. L. Carter

  “She never came to me,” I counter.

  I remember the woman at the edge of the lawn, far away with her little hands hidden in her pockets. I turned away because I didn’t know her. How many times had I seen her without seeing? Mrs. Bird is right. I never asked questions.

  I say, “Why didn’t she come closer?”

  “I think she had made up her mind that she could save you by staying away. Protect you from her fate.”

  “She thought because she had lost everything—”

  Mrs. Bird nods. “That she had some kind of—I don’t know. A curse.”

  I grit my teeth. “Maybe she should have asked us how we felt about that.”

  “Well.” Mrs. Bird looks away. “Well, there’s more. You see—she would have been acting against orders. Against an agreement that had been set.”

  I had never asked a thing. I believed their story. I say, “My parents knew where she was the whole time.”

  “Yes.”

  “And now she’s dead.”

  “Yes.”

  The room is completely silent. I can hear myself breathing. I can almost hear the flowers growing in the garden.

  “It’s been treated like a dirty secret,” she says. “As though to stoop to acknowledge suffering was a dirty secret.”

  “And now the story is over.”

  Mrs. Bird looks at me with such ferocity I wince. “It’s never over. You either help or you hurt.”

  “How on earth would I help?”

  “By listening to the truth. By telling a different story.”

  I want to hold my ears and start singing. I glare at Mrs. Bird instead.

  “You want her to be your enemy, don’t you?”

  I hesitate. “Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t want to turn my family upside down.”

  “What would you really lose by the truth?”

  “I don’t know.” I put my face in my hands. “That’s the problem. I don’t even know.”

  “Well, think about it,” she says. “I’ve been quiet long enough.”

  TO LOSE an enemy is to disorder the cosmos.

  I need my enemies; they map out the terrain of my life, delineate political boundaries, impassable topography, even form the color of the map. Here’s the bold truth: it’s comfortable to have someone to hate.

  I’ve spent my whole life hating Grandma. And now Mrs. Bird, like Copernicus, asks me to turn my mind around, to see as if from upside down or sideways. Do I want to hear her story? Chaos might be a price I’m willing to pay for truth. But it’s not as easy as it sounds.

  Still, Grandma followed me to dinner tonight. Curious how Mom has aged, what they’ve done with the house, the faces I would make when I sensed her across the table. I brought a salad. When I arrived in the doorway I held out the bowl, a sixties vintage Rubbermaid that a previous tenant hopefully didn’t pay any money for. Mom looked behind me, over my right shoulder, out into the dim porch-lit hollow and then the dark. She didn’t welcome Grandma. She thanked me for the delicious-looking salad and took it in her hands.

  Now we’re washing dishes. I’m the rinser. Dad sits at the table, his right leg resting perpendicular across his left knee, like the Hanged Man. Grandma hasn’t eaten. She doesn’t complain, though, happy to sit in the extra wooden chair and listen.

  Dad upends his wine flute into his mouth. The glass clinks as it touches the table again. He asks, “Can you get me another?”

  The extra chair squeaks. I look at Mom. She dries her hands on the towel, briskly, as if she’s disciplining it, and then she walks to the closet and gets a bottle of wine.

  I say nothing. When she returns to the sink she hands me a soapy pot and then a lid. She says, “Maddy, I feel disappointed every time I look at you.”

  I place the lid back into the sink and then rest my hands on the metal edge.

  “I mean, waitressing at the Riverstone? Your harp is sitting in the closet. All you need to do is sit down and play it. I just can’t understand why you would waste your time here, fiddling around with the past, when you have such a bright future.”

  My throat is going to explode. Am I having an allergic reaction to dinner? I try to clear it, but all that comes out is a gurgling sound. Mom looks at me sharply.

  She won’t stop, even though she’s strangling me. “I’m not trying to pressure you. It’s just that you have a gift.”

  I turn around and rest against the counter. The cold wetness pushes against the back of my shirt. I can’t see Grandma.

  I’ll have so many good comebacks later. I always do, and I’ll replay them over and over in my mind as if enough repetitions will change history, will keep my mind from blanking out right in the moment I most want to speak. When I was little, we used to swim in an opaque lake that smelled like mud and frog poop. I don’t know who thought it was refreshing. Once Mom swam underwater and pulled me down by my legs, and held me there until I needed air so badly I stopped kicking. Of course, she left my hands alone. Eventually, out of the blankness, I hear myself ask, “Do you know where Grandma went?”

  Mom laughs, the kind of laugh that isn’t really a laugh. “Why on earth would we want to know that? She left us, Maddy. You know the story. She left us completely.”

  “Red herring,” Dad interjects. “You’re trying to upset your mother.”

  “No.” I hear the flat tone I use to defy him. “No, I was just wondering.”

  I focus my gaze on the extra chair. They’re right. Grandma’s gone. But I will ask Mrs. Bird for the truth anyway.

  THERE’S AN enemy in the house, and Mom can’t tell where it is. Some nights she looks under her bed before she climbs in, but the wooden floor always looks the same behind the skirting. The closet, behind the door, inside the hope chest: none of the obvious places are inhabited.

  Something is missing. Did the enemy steal it?

  Grand-mère pats her on the head and tells her to be a good girl. Nanny tucks her in all the way up to her chin under smooth white sheets and reads a bedtime story about a naughty squirrel. Papa sometimes tickles her. She has a little black horse with fur like velvet that she holds all night long.

  Something is missing.

  As if anger might return the mysterious thing, Mom lashes out, often against her own judgment, rages, kicks her legs in the air like an overturned beetle, bites and hits and screams. Then one day, after she hits her nanny—when Grand-mère is whipping the switch against her bare bottom, once, twice, three times, rhythmical and solid, chanting, You need to make more of yourself, child, over and over, she feels the fight slipping away, she gives in to the pain, lets it talk to her, and she understands now that the enemy is in fact herself.

  The realization calms her. Order has been restored, the question resolved, case closed. She ceases to lash out against the people around her and instead makes a pact to hold the enemy in handcuffs.

  She gets older. She learns that other girls her age have a mother and a father, not a Grand-mère and a father. An unnamed absence begins to fill the same spaces again. Eventually Grand-mère gives the absence a name, her face contorted as she says it, as if she is trying to will it out of existence at the same time as she invokes it: Your Mother. Papa invokes the absence with something more like longing, but when he tells Mom the story, it is the story of an enemy.

  The absence develops a face, a history, hands and feet, dark brown eyes like the ones in the mirror—all places, like raw land, to build the hatred Mom feels. She will always see herself to blame for the whole thing. But because she needs to make more of herself, she will cease to recognize her own motivation, will build a story, a war story that holds all the key elements: love, betrayal, pain, revenge. She tells herself the story relentlessly, repeatedly, it absorbs every offense she encounters, justifies anything from a C in history to spilled tea. It protects her from herself.

  Mom grows up some more. The human instinct to actualize fuels a Great Teenage Rebellion. In her case, math is the trigger. Intellectually challenging, emotionally
neutral. And she is really, really good at it. So good that not doing it is like preventing a bird from building a nest. At least that’s how her teachers see it. Her father sees it differently. Apparently it is unfeminine to crunch numbers. How can doing what comes naturally be beneath you? But reasoning aside, it’s an important family value. Not doing equations when serving hors d’oeuvres better befits your station.

  Mom disagrees. Fine, Papa says, good luck paying for college. Fine, Mom says, and gets a scholarship to a Seven Sisters school.

  I wish the rebellion had lasted. Sometimes I want to believe that my destiny would have been different if she had seen it through. But fighting an enemy weakens you. On the surface, here you are at college, going to class, returning to your dormitory, eating food, staring out the window—but all the time the life force that could be building a beautiful nest is pecking, pecking at you. So what a relief to meet a boy instead, a fair-skinned, rebellious boy.

  I don’t blame her. It’s much easier to rebel by marrying a rebel than to organize your own coup. So she married, and her family, a proud military family, was proud that she’d married a soldier. She hadn’t seen it: his rebellion was all show. He was just fighting too, fighting and losing.

  Like a caged bird who has no mud and straw, she makes nests however she can. She lives everyone else’s lives to perfection. She keeps Dad perfectly drunk and tries to save him at the same time. It’s better than e=mc2. She solves the problem of how to keep two children and a no-good husband looking exactly like nothing is wrong. Like we have roast fillet every night, a vineyard in France, and a group hug whenever one of us feels lonely. She pits her brilliant mind each month against the difference between what’s in the bank and what’s in the bill pile. She designs the perfect kitchen, and when she gets her inheritance, she has it built. She keeps her kids in order, neat as an algorithm.

  But then we grew up. It was her chance to grasp the uncertainty principle. When I was nineteen Mom’s childhood pain embedded itself in the lining of my womb. No amount of thinking could straighten things out. But she forgot about wave mechanics. She just kept fighting. “Give it away,” she said. “You need to make more of yourself than this.”

  I tried to disobey. I tried to be on point to my own destiny. But she won.

  I did as she said.

  I gave it away, and then I ran. I would never do as she says again.

  No matter how many thousands of miles away I am, I can feel Mom’s mind press against mine; she has to solve me, her life depends on it. She wills me to add up to what she wants me to.

  The war goes on.

  THE TREES won’t relent in their tranquility. The streets shush me. The hum of a sports car comes at me like a gunman. At the restaurant I’m a prisoner. I don’t want to look into the bored, placid face of another customer and force a smile. I need room to move on, get it over with, before my nerves run out, before this lull of money and sleek houses starts to convince me of the illusion it’s trying to create. It’s a war around here. Can’t they see it? Everyone lives in chains. Even the flowers. Have we all forgotten that a full belly doesn’t make you free?

  Just yesterday, when Mom was at a church committee meeting and Dad said he had to do some shopping (code language for a liquor run), I snuck inside their screen door. I tiptoed down the hall, and across the living room. Really, all I wanted to do was look.

  I opened the painted wooden door. Mom and Dad’s winter gear faced me. Musty down and mothballs. The rustle of nylon, tickle of fur. I traveled through it, farther, farther, until I could hardly breathe. Then the solid knock of the harp under its cover. I fumbled for the forepillar and shimmied it toward the light. Coats came off their hangers around us and crumpled to the floor like victims of a shootout.

  I pulled off the cover. It came to me, wood and varnish. The harmonic curve. The comb, carved to look like leaves from a bird of paradise. A big belly, the pregnant woman beneath her crown of leaves. They had kept it dusted and the closet provided a stable temperature, so the wood and strings had stayed straight. Should I call this little quiet gift love, or something else?

  I reached out and touched a string. It squawked out something like a D and then jumped away from my finger in two directions: broken. I fumbled with the pegs and tried to line up the notes along the diatonic scale. Each twisted into its perfect place—a small grace—and then stiffened out of tune as soon as I passed to the next string. I returned again and again to the keys along the right-hand side, twisting them into the wooden knob, stretching the string back out. I lost seven to old age. The rest eventually succumbed to their proper pitch. By the time I was done I couldn’t remember why I had even kept at it.

  But it was like standing in front of a lover you didn’t know you still wanted—out of the back door of the heart, the musty closet, there comes the desire, fresh and muscular like you’ve never strayed. Find the stool in the closet. Shove it toward the soundboard. I sat down, tilted it toward me, and let my right shoulder fall against the bend in the wood. Find the pedals: seven slippers for my feet. My arms created a smooth line from shoulder through straight wrists to hands. I held out my fingers, the familiar U shape of thumb and index finger. A string vibrated like a live wire. I stopped. Retuned. Played a scale. Perfect this time.

  I stretched my right hand to the bottom C and started a song, an old one I’d made up. The melody came clearly to my inner ear and through to my right hand. The left hand followed, stumbled, stopped, and restarted. If I had stopped to wonder what note was where, I would have been lost. But my fingers remembered; the song poured into the room and hung there like smoke.

  Now I want Avi to be pompous, sitting there in his chair with his food all eaten up. To strut and crow when I ask him. But he says, “Yes, I play the piano.” And looks down at his plate as if unsure what more to say.

  I look at the plate too, taupe-edged on the white tablecloth with the white napkin next to it, all scraped clean. “What kind of music?” I ask.

  “Classical.”

  I was hoping for baroque or modern, Bach or Elliott Carter. I say, “Oh.”

  “Do you like classical music?”

  “Some I like, some I don’t like.” I see his eyes glaze over a little, the way they do when someone realizes the conversation offers so little interest it is about to falter. I continue. “Are you a composer?”

  “I wish.” He stops then, and looks at me. “You know, you look a little like a student of mine. A high schooler in the summer program. It always cracks me up to watch amazing talent well up through a badly made-up, passionately shallow fourteen-year-old.”

  This man has an amazing talent for saying the wrong thing. What can I say? Your girl is a could-be, and I’m a could-have-been.

  It happened yesterday at the end of one note and before the next, when the room just thrummed. My mind was completely centered on the vibration. Then my middle finger followed to the F string and the fingernail buzzed against the still-quivering E. Out of the same thoughtless place as the song came the familiar rush of adrenaline; my heart suddenly thumped, waiting for the shrill voice of the teacher to come over my shoulder.

  Who owned that moment anyway? Was it my harp teacher? Was it Mom, her shadow cast across the room and the strings and my mind? I broke the song apart with a glissando across the strings, not like a swan on a lake but like a paver ripping up a road.

  Now I hold Avi’s eyes with mine. “I’m nothing like that girl,” I say. “My talent is serving other people good food.”

  He keeps looking at me. “Come on,” he insists. “You must be really good at something.”

  Yes. Running. “I’m not bad at basketball.”

  Avi smiles now, and his fingers start up a little drumbeat on the edge of the table. Only a good pianist would do it in an odd meter. “Maybe we can have a shoot-out behind the elementary school one of these days.”

  Is this a date? Do I get to play hoops with the pianist? How can I be mad at him when I don’t give him the inform
ation he needs to stop insulting me? “Maybe.” I flip open my order book, pull out my pen, and a delicious idea comes to mind.

  Christmas 2003

  Scheherazade sang.

  I don’t like what she said.

  I don’t know. I’m too confused to tell the story. Playing over and over in my head like some crappy B movie. I can’t leave the theater. I can’t deconstruct the script. My hands are shaking. Sleep. Please. But that’s worse: in my dream there’s no one to remind me it’s over.

  I did the wrong thing.

  I can’t make it better.

  I held the person I shot. No good sleep for days. Up for raids, then too wired to rest. My body doesn’t know if it’s morning or dinnertime anymore. Patrolling the neighborhood. Trying not to fall asleep on my gun. A private got shot. He told the guy to drop his gun and got shot through the head. And then in my dreamscape—what time was it?—this man runs toward me. A suicide bomber slammed into the front of the convoy and everyone’s freaking out, there’s smoke and burning flesh and civilians with blood on their faces, and then a sniper shoots at me and I raise my gun, I see a man running and I shoot and he falls, and then I see the woman and the little girl propped in the dust where he was headed.

  When Connor debriefed me, he kept saying, “You did the right thing, man. You did the best you could.” Sitting there behind his fucking desk with his fucking pencil. Did he break it after I went out? His eyes were hooded, two executioners. He knows I remember his nightmare.

  I held the man. I have the man in my arms, I’m trying to put compression on his chest. A child was crying. The woman screamed at me but I didn’t let him go. She beat at me with her hands and yelled, and beat her chest, and pulled her hair. The man’s eyes are moist and direct and I can see into him so far it’s like I’ve never known a human being before. And then the next minute, as the blood that has been seeping through the back of his shirt begins to pool around him, to pour past my hands and spread across the pebbles like a blooming begonia, his eyes still looking right at me become distant, as if he is no longer a foot away from me, as if he has gotten up and walked 100 yards away, and he is watching me from afar, almost indifferent, like I am a vaguely interesting shrub. And then he breathes out, and he does not breathe in again. Whoever said death looks like sleep? It looks like—a thing, a contorted thing with glassy eyes and pale skin, where once there was a person. Where did that person go?