This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories

by Johanna Skibsrud

  But there I was, just sitting there, holding Benny, who was still sobbing away, when Steven came down, and no breakfast was made.

  “Can’t you do something?” Steven asked. “Can’t you get him to simmer down or something?”

  “Are you going down to MacLeod’s?” I said, overtop of Benny’s noise.

  “Got to sometime,” Stephen said. “Be nice to eat something first.” He wasn’t like that usually. He wasn’t snappy like that, or mean, if I just hadn’t got around to something.

  And I don’t think that he meant to be, even then, because after he said what he said he started fumbling around with the pots and pans, and moving things in the fridge, as if all he’d meant by the remark was that he meant to rustle something up for himself before he went.

  I hadn’t offered to nurse Benny all that time because I’d hoped he would forget. I’d hoped I would forget, too, because I felt guilty about drinking so much the night before. But finally I gave in and Benny took to me greedily and stopped crying.

  “There we go,” Steven said, when things got quiet. “That’s a good boy,” he said. I tried not to wonder how quickly whiskey could go into the milk, or how much, and what sort of long- or short-term effects it could have on the bones or the teeth.

  Then Matthews was at the door, stomping the hard clumps of dirt off his boots, outside.

  “Come on in,” Steven yelled, and Matthews did. He had a funny expression on his face I’d never seen before, like maybe he was going to burst into tears or else laugh out loud and couldn’t decide which one was which.

  “Angus won’t be needing his bull anymore,” he said when he came in. He just stood there in the doorway and said what he said and then kept on standing there, with that funny expression on his face.

  “What?” said Steven.

  “Angus won’t be needing his bull,” Matthews said again. “He’s dead.”

  “What?” Steven said. He looked annoyed. “Who’s dead?” he said.

  “Angus,” Mathews said.

  “Angus?” said Steven. And then I said it too, and Matthews repeated the name again, sounding sure, and then we all just stood around for a while looking at one another. Matthews’s mouth was twitching at the corners. Twitching all over the place. Like he was going to laugh, but didn’t know why.

  “He had a heart attack last night,” he said finally, to make his mouth stop twitching. “My mother told me. She saw the ambulance go by.”

  “What time?” said Steven. He had his hand up at his throat, as though he were thinking about choking.

  “Around supper,” Matthews said.

  “Yes,” Steven said. Then he repeated what Matthews had just said. He said it very slowly. Almost like a question. Or like he only understood the words one by one. That he couldn’t piece them together, and so didn’t understand yet what Matthews had told him.

  But then I saw that just the opposite was true. That he understood too well, and was starting to see connections to things where there weren’t, or shouldn’t have been, any. “Oh,” I said. “Don’t—” and I put my hand out as if to stop him. But of course I couldn’t do anything by then, so I just stood there, with my arm out, and watched his face, and saw for the first time how much he looked like Benny.

  Or maybe it was just at that moment—the way he looked to me then. With his eyes wide open, and dark like that, like they were seeing things, or trying to see things, from all sides at once, and six times over.

  Matthews was still standing in the door. He shrugged a little. “Guess he won’t need his bull,” he said again.

  Steven nodded, and let his breath out in a rush. “Well,” he said, “doesn’t that beat all.” It was not his own expression, but an old one of his father’s—which, until that moment, he had used only as a sort of a joke. “Doesn’t that beat all,” Steven said again, in seriousness, and took one step forward. He moved deliberately. As if that were the way that a person moved and could be expected to move through life. As if he knew in what direction, precisely, he was headed, and what he’d do when he got that small bit farther forward, in the direction of the door.

  FAT MAN AND LITTLE BOY

  SUSAN AND GINNY WERE friends from the old days. They’d worked together in the translation department of a large ball-bearing company in what used to be outside the city. Then Susan had moved to Japan and thirty years had gone by. It’s funny that way. Time—without anything against which to measure itself—tends, essentially, just to disappear. A lot of things are like that; you hardly notice them, and usually for two reasons. They’re either too familiar or too strange. In Japan, for example, no one ever noticed Susan’s thick Maine accent in the same way—but for precisely the opposite reasons—they never noticed it in Maine. By the time Ginny finally visited, after promising to do so for so many years, Susan had taught a generation and a half of Japanese businessmen to say “watah” and “ovah theyah.”

  Ginny had remained in Paris all that time—far longer, now, than she had ever lived anywhere. Paris wasn’t even Paris anymore, she had stayed that long; it was just a place that she lived. The city, and her life along with it, had become exactly what she had once dreaded most: ordinary. And even that (having nothing against which to compare itself) had lost all shape and particularity; it had crept in everywhere. That, it turned out, was what “ordinary” was. Looking back, it was easy to see that it had, in fact, happened a long time ago. Long before Susan had gone away, even. Before anything had yet come together for either of them—or subsequently fallen apart. They had both still been young—veritable artistes. So sure of everything.

  But if it had happened in Paris, it had certainly happened everywhere—or at least it was some comfort to assume that it had, and Ginny did. Still more comfort was to find out that this was actually the case: “You should have come ten, fifteen years ago,” Susan had said when she’d greeted her in the gleaming lobby of the Osaka airport. “Things wouldn’t be so—packaged up. You know. So—American.”

  It was a relief for Ginny to discover that the last thirty years had not had—for Susan in Japan, any more than for herself in Paris—a more noticeable, or enduring effect.

  GINNY WAS, LIKE SUSAN, an American herself—from Sacramento, California. She could have joined the Daughters of Columbus if she’d wanted to. Her father had a tree at the end of the drive, the trunk of which he’d painted to look like an American flag, and even though he was now well past eighty he still touched up the paint every Fourth of July. Ginny’s grandfather had almost been a real cowboy; he’d owned a ranch—only recently sold—thirty-five miles south of the city, and even with how Ginny herself had never done, as she sometimes put it, what amounted to an honest day’s work all her life, this was something of which she was proud. When she visited her father, she still drove out past the Sacramento city limit to where the property—now divided into sub-plots and developments—stretched on either side of the highway. There was something that still felt vast to Ginny about that landscape. She was never sure if it was only her imagination.

  By contrast, what Ginny admired in Japan was the way that everything was small. In a postcard back to Paris, she wrote that it was as if everything fit “neatly inside of everything else.” Even the houses in the tidy suburbs on the outskirts of the cities, which they flew past on the bullet trains. Nothing went rambling off, unknown and extraordinary. Even the branches of the juniper trees, for instance, which when Ginny had first arrived had struck her—in contrast to the carefully tended streets—as surprisingly unkempt and wild, were, it turned out, carefully cultivated that way. Toward their own very specific, requisite immoderation. Ginny liked to see the strings still attached sometimes—evidence of their design.

  Were there or were there not, she wondered, strings, that pulled and pushed a person in particular directions? It was her habit to feel that there were not. She was an American, after all, and did not believe in God. The great puzzle seemed, instead, to be only the manner in which, if there was no larger—o
utside—governing force, anything was propelled by anything at all. The future, no matter how intimately she imagined it, never seemed actually to arrive. It was always disappearing, instead—just out of reach. Dissolving from what had at one time seemed (in advance of itself and independent of its approach) a completeness, into a procession of associative, indeterminate moments. These she was then compelled to enter into consecutively—therefore never wholly, or completely, in the way that she had once imagined.

  THEY VISITED THE TEMPLES. Taking the train into Kyoto; snapping endless photographs of themselves in front of the pagodas. The evenings were spent over hot sake or wine; they had thirty years to catch up on. Through letters and emails, and the occasional telephone call, they had managed, of course, to communicate the more monumental events, which—having once occurred—or failed to occur—now constituted their lives, but now they were intent on “filling in the details.” Sometimes it felt that it would take another thirty years. In that respect, not much had changed. They got on exceptionally well—just as they always had. Once, when Ginny had exclaimed at this fact in delight, Susan had coquettishly suggested she stay. As if it was true—just as it seemed. That thirty years had not actually passed, and they were both still able and willing to make complete and sudden changes like that in their lives.

  On one of the final days of the visit, they took the train to Hiroshima to visit the museum there. It had been Ginny’s idea. The one thing, she said, that she “simply had to do.” She didn’t say why. There was something pleasurable in not mentioning it. Not saying anything about Uncle Pauly, or Aunt Marianne—or the diagrams that Pauly had drawn into the column of the sports insert one morning when Ginny had asked him what it was he did all day while she and Marianne were out shopping, or at the cinema, or painting each other’s fingernails out on the lawn. Or for that matter the particular size and shape of the cancer that was slowly killing Pauly now, while Marianne cared for him with characteristic—pretended—unconcern.

  Perhaps, Ginny thought to herself—as she drifted in silence past the display cases with Susan, refraining to mention all of these things—she had expected to enter the museum as she had sometimes expected to enter the future. As usual, though, there was nothing actual or whole to enter into in the museum. It felt wrong—that there was so little to actually do in there, or even properly to feel. That they should emerge from it—still unspeaking for the most part, to collect their jackets at the coat check and make their way outside—so similarly to the way they’d arrived. That there was nothing to say afterward but the usual things; that Ginny herself should have gained from the experience only a sudden, nearly unbearable, fatigue.

  AUNT MARIANNE WAS NOT, in fact, a blood relation, and had married Uncle Pauly when Ginny was old enough to remember. Pauly was her mother’s brother, a chemist. He’d worked at the Texaco plant in Sacramento before Ginny was born, but then had moved to New Mexico, and that was where he’d got tangled up with Marianne. “Got tangled up with” is how Ginny’s mother always put it.

  Still, there was nothing else to do, when Ginny’s mother got sick in the summer Ginny was almost twelve, but send her down to stay with Marianne.

  It was “appendicitis,” they said, but Ginny knew the real reason.

  Marianne drove up all the way to Sacramento to get her, and then all the way back. Ginny had never been in a car that could put its roof down. Sometimes the gas attendants or the waiters at the restaurants that they stopped at would say, “You going to try to tell me you two ain’t sisters?” and Ginny would turn pink with pride.

  It was a great shame—and perhaps a mistake—that the two of them were not actually blood relations. Marianne was Ginny’s first truly kindred spirit, and the whole ride they hardly said a word. They would yell out together when the good songs came on the radio, and make faces at one another when they were bad. They always agreed as to which ones were which.

  When they got near Los Alamos, Marianne pointed in the distance to the watchtower, which she had told Ginny about some hours before. For many years, Marianne had explained, the city had been kept under careful supervision. “It has to do with the important work that your uncle Pauly does,” she’d told her. “You should be very proud.” Ginny was. From a distance, the tower looked formidable, and grand. But when they approached, she saw that it was in fact now unguarded, and smaller than it had first appeared. The gates were pulled back, and the road was clear. Ahead of them, the landscape stretched—on the Los Alamos side, as on the other—repetitive and dry. There were, Ginny noted, the same moderate hills. The same distance, extending in worn-out colours: in patches of tired greens, and golds, and washed-up browns, between herself and the sky.

  THE FACT WAS THAT Ginny knew all about the baby, but not about the baby dying. Her mother didn’t think she knew about either. She didn’t think Ginny knew about anything: that she was too young and couldn’t guess, or hadn’t figured anything out about life yet if her parents hadn’t told her. She’d brought it up with Marianne on the first day, during the drive, even though she had wanted to pretend that it was only her and Marianne all alone in the world. She also wanted to let Marianne know that she was not exactly a child, as her mother had supposed. That she couldn’t be fooled. “I know about the baby,” Ginny had said, and she gave Marianne a sideways look, her hair falling over her eye. “Oh,” Marianne had said, biting her lip. “Oh sweetheart, I’m sorry.” And she stretched her hand out to cover Ginny’s knee, her long fingernails flashing.

  At first, Ginny did not understand the apology, and remained frozen, unsure, Marianne’s hand on her knee. But then Marianne continued, saying: “There was nothing that anyone could do,” and, “Sometimes these things happen”—and then she knew everything.

  GINNY WONDERED SOMETIMES if things might have happened somewhat differently if the events of that summer had been left, instead, to Ginny’s mother to explain. If it had been her mother who told her—that the baby had not been a baby at all, but only a collection of mismatched cells in the womb, which (Marianne said) could “trick you.” It might have seemed, coming from her mother, different—reasonable, even. Her mother would have made it that way. She would have mentioned God, and then it could have been He that filled up the holes if there were any, and pretty soon Ginny would have again been able to enter into a—how would you say it? An understanding with the world.

  There was no understanding to enter into in Marianne’s car. With the top down and the baby dead, or, what was worse, never having been, it was clear that she could never return, now, to that other sense of things. To the faith that, up until that point, had been maintained in her by an hour and a half of church every Sunday, and a nightly emptying out of her head, which was her attempt at prayer. Instead, ever after, she would have only that sense: a long-nailed finger on her knee, and a matter-of-fact voice in her head saying that that there was “nothing to be done,” that “these things happened”—and always after that, too, a firm resolve that she would never, unlike her mother, be “tricked” by anything.

  GINNY HAD NEVER been back to Los Alamos, but she and Marianne had managed to remain close, especially after Ginny’s mother died. It was Ginny whom Marianne called, even years later, when there was anything important to say. When Pauly got sick, for example, Ginny was the first to know. One year, a forest fire had burned within five hundred yards of a nuclear storage site outside the city, and Ginny was the first person whom Marianne—a week late—told about that, too. “We drove past that spot a thousand times when you were out here,” she said. “I could point it out now and you’d remember. Just out of town, right at the foot, on the Los Alamos side of the hills. You know the sad thing?” She paused and Ginny didn’t say anything. “They didn’t know it was going to go out,” she said. “Honest to goodness, they thought it was going to burn right down the hill, right to the foundation of that building … No one knew what was going to happen then,” she said, pausing again, and speaking hesitatingly slow, as if afraid that Ginny m
ight not catch her meaning. “And still,” she said. “No one. Said. A. Word.”

  Though Ginny was hazy on the details of the event and somewhat skeptical about those that she knew, she could not get rid of the image of her aunt at the other end of the line—as she had drummed out the final syllables of her story, as though they were her own long-nailed fingers drummed on her knee: “Lucky thing was,” Marianne had said, “it just—happened to rain.” Worse, still—the image of Marianne as she had apparently sat only a week before, waiting patiently in her Los Alamos living room: for the lightning flash. For the sun at once to touch the earth; for the last, dark cloud to billow up, finally, from behind the Los Alamos hills …

  What, Ginny later demanded to know—still unable to rid herself of the image, and hoping to coax from Marianne some logical explanation, which she felt to be conspicuously missing from the account—of the unpardonable silence of the chemists and technicians? Of the government? Or even of Aunt Marianne herself? None of whom had had the clarity of purpose, or mind, to alert anyone—even poor Pauly, who was dying in the next room—that the last hour had come?

  Marianne did not have any particularly satisfactory answers to offer—but nor did she defend herself, or deflect the blame. “What exactly,” she had asked Ginny instead, “would you have had me say?” Then, after a long silence, amplified by the low hum of the telephone, she said: “You know, I’d rather die by flood. What about you? Or by natural fire. People shouldn’t be afraid of real things anymore.” Once more her voice was light, and untroubled—trilling slightly on her final note.

  THE WAY THAT GINNY imagined it, nothing had changed in Marianne’s house since the summer she was almost twelve. The photos still hung darkly. Everyone leaning a little forward in their frames. Ranchers. Ranchers’ wives. Ranchers’ daughters. (All Pauly’s family, and therefore Ginny’s own. Marianne didn’t have any family—at least not to speak of.) Generations of almost-cowboys, who, with a staunchness of character and a firmness of mind—which had become, it seemed, in ensuing generations, increasingly difficult to pass on—had crossed continents, built homesteads now long demolished, raised children now only dimly recalled … The land they’d cleared was still cleared land now, no doubt—a parking lot, or a shopping mall—but everything else had long since grown over or faded away. Still, though—they were men of whom a person, descended from that line, could be frankly proud; men on whom reality, as Marianne would have put it, fire and flood, for example, had had an effect. It seemed sad to Ginny, because of this, that on the nearly fateful afternoon her aunt had described, the one-dimensioned characters of that house had continued to regard it all—Marianne, ankles crossed, her feet touching at exactly one central point on the carpeted floor—from the ludicrousness of their over-large frames.