by Robin Black
The fence goes up on a day when we’re out.
And you have no idea where we’ve been.
If I loved you, I would invite you in, sit you down in our kitchen, and I would say to you: You just never know. You, the yeti. You don’t know why this matters so much to us, why we care. You don’t know what secret pains we have that we haven’t shared with you. You don’t know us.
But then I would have to admit that I don’t know everything either, wouldn’t I? Like I don’t know why it matters so much to you to build that fence exactly there.
What happened in your life that makes a property line mean so much?
Why do you think you should get what is your right?
You’re so uncaring, so unreasonable. It must be a defense mechanism of some kind. I’m sure that it is.
But Sam says that’s ridiculous of me. Even to think about you that way.
It’s late at night and neither one of us can sleep. I say to him, I’m sure that the yeti must have been hurt. Very badly. At some point in his life he must have been very badly hurt. Or he’d understand our side. No one can care so little about other people unless they’ve been very badly hurt.
Not necessarily, Sam tells me. Maybe the problem is he’s never been hurt. He can’t imagine real pain because he’s never experienced it.
I can feel his hand reach across the bed for my arm.
Or maybe some folks are just bad.
He wraps his fingers around my wrist.
Maybe some folks are just bad.
My poor sleepless husband.
He says that to me twice.
II.
On the day of the mammogram I was more worried about the technician seeing all the bruises on my arms than about the results. You’ll be lucky, I told Sam, if they don’t come and arrest you for wife abuse.
I hate to see you look like that.
I was standing in just a bra and panties. The bruises were all different colors, the newest ones purple, the oldest turning yellow. It’s not so bad, I said. He doesn’t mean it. He doesn’t know he’s hurting me.
I know he doesn’t mean it. I’m not angry at him—you know that. I just hate to see you this way.
It’s nothing big, I said. He gets upset. He can’t talk to us, so he lashes out.
But I understood that the words were pointless, just filling the air between us with sound. There was nothing I knew that Sam didn’t know. There was only this ritual of repeating back and forth what we both already knew.
We kissed in the door and I watched him pull out his car—just behind mine in the driveway. He didn’t wish me luck and it never occurred to me that he should.
So, first there was the mammogram, at which I stood with my breasts and my mottled arms exposed. As the technician squeezed my flesh into position I mumbled something about having fallen off my bike. I bruise very easily, I said. Not: My son had a stroke while in utero and is severely brain-damaged. He isn’t a bad boy at all, but he has these moments of violence and these are the results.
Not that.
Then came the letter ordering me back for more tests, an ultrasound, the biopsy, the meeting in my doctor’s office—this time Sam right there by my side. And through all of this, about three weeks, right up until the surgery, all I could think about was Todd. Not even what would happen to him if I died—I couldn’t die, that was out of the question, not on the table for discussion—but little things like who would watch him while I went in for the biopsy, and could I possibly take him to the doctor’s office with me and have him there in the room.
It used to seem so simple: you’re young, you go through school, you fall in love, you marry, you get pregnant. And then the road takes a certain kind of curve. Your sense of self can disappear.
Todd: cannot speak, cannot walk, barely hears, is blind in one eye. Cannot control his bladder or his bowels. Does he know us? It’s never been clear. Until now, I’d always hoped that he did. I’d always hoped that it gave him some kind of comfort to have me and have Sam there with him. But now I’m not so sure that I want that anymore. Now I find myself hoping sometimes he never really knew who I was.
Now, my yeti, I find myself hoping he may be like you. And so won’t ever miss me when I’m gone.
There was spread into the lymph nodes. One doctor spoke about saving the breasts and I said, Just do whatever will make this stop. I don’t give a shit about my breasts.
New questions arise:
Just how many fifths of scotch were the two of us going through every week?
We tried not to count them in the recycling bin. And eventually we began to throw a couple of bottles into the garbage cans instead, split them up. Maybe Sam would take a bottle or two in the car and dump them somewhere else. It’s almost funny.
We were drunk the night we realized Todd would have to be moved. In vino veritas. In whiskey are decisions born.
Is this the brave thing to do or the coward’s way out?
Sam said, I don’t know, honey. I just know it’s what has to happen to now. And so do you.
Lawrence House. It’s a low-lying building filled with heartbreaks, amongst whom my son looks like part of a crowd. And people like me and like Sam pass one another with guilty looks on our faces. The first year, I went to see him just when I was well enough. The second year, there was no sign of spread. I was off chemo and I went almost every day.
Maybe we could bring him home, I said to Sam. We managed before and I’m feeling fine now. He could come back.
Sam’s voice was quiet. He said, I don’t know if that’s something we should do. Remember how the two of you used to struggle? You were covered with bruises, Ruth. You couldn’t handle him at all.
Well, let’s think about it anyway. Let’s just not say that we won’t.
Okay. If you want. We won’t say that we won’t.
Sam deals the cards, counting quietly to himself. We’ve kept the same deck beside Todd’s bed for all these years.
Fives? I ask.
Go fish.
So I draw from the pile.
No, I say. Not a five. It’s your turn.
I look over at our boy. He is staring somewhere else.
My son is eighteen years old. His head is covered with thick black curls like my own used to be and his eyes are the same bright blue as Sam’s. He would have been a very handsome man. He would have been something wonderful, I’m convinced. But for the travels of a blood clot to his brain, while he burrowed small and silenced in my womb.
III.
It’s been two months now since your six-foot fence went up. Two months, more or less. From my bed, I can hear your children playing on the other side. Sometimes I turn the television up louder just to drown them out. It’s a terrible thing to feel yourself hate a child.
Sam didn’t want to go to work today but I argued him out through the door.
Nothing will be improved by you losing your job, I said.
He drives my car these days. It was always the more dependable one. It’s parked down the drive, near the street, of course—thanks to you. His is stowed in our garage. He argued when I first told him he should take my keys. We went through the game of my telling him not to be silly; it would just be until I felt stronger. It wasn’t a big decision at all. Stop being ridiculous, I said. You look like you’re murdering me. It’s just the better car. You should use it while I can’t. I’ll be taking it back soon enough.
And so he gave in.
I know that you go to work a little after he leaves—I hear your car door, the ignition. I know the hours you keep, can predict when you’ll come home. And I know you have a wife. A friend who visits me, brings us food, brings me gossip, has told me that your wife is very pretty, slender and naturally blond, in her thirties. She stands on the corner in the mornings and puts your daughter on the bus. Then an older woman comes in and watches your little boy, while your wife keeps herself busy, though no one in the neighborhood knows exactly what she does.
There are s
peculations about you. The new family on the block. There are rumors that you’re putting in a pool. But winter is coming now, I know, and it isn’t the right time. Maybe in April, when the world has thawed again so the ground will be soft enough to dig.
Sam drives out alone to Lawrence House now, every two or three days.
My last trip was two weeks ago. I said my goodbyes in silence, the language of my motherhood. There were other periods when I wasn’t there. There’s no way to explain to my child that this is different. And probably no reason that we should, though I still carry this awful fear that he’ll think, in whatever way he thinks, that I have given up on him.
I held his heavy head one last time, pulled it gently to my chest, no longer soft.
That day, in the car driving home, Sam was unusually talkative, telling me stories about a new coworker, and then about an old friend. Both of them had done hilarious things—as though everyone Sam knew had taken on an antic side, every situation holding a fistful of punch lines.
And it was funny, genuinely funny. I laughed out loud as he drove us both home.
I don’t drink anymore. I lost the craving. But Sam brings the bottle upstairs now and he sits by the bed. Sometimes we watch television. Sometimes we just talk. He pours freely for himself on the understanding that I’m not keeping track. I pick through our lives, recounting good moments, like looking for treasures at the flea market. He listens, sometimes even smiles.
I know you must have heard by now that I’m sick. It’s that kind of town, that kind of neighborhood. Our story: the boy who was born so damaged, the mother who won’t make it to the spring, it’s all well known. We’re the kind of family people talk about.
Sam phones me from the office to let me know he’ll be late because he’s visiting the boy. I tell him that’s just as well. I’m feeling tired. But by the time he gets home, I say, I’ll be awake.
I say it, but who really knows?
The clock has lost its meaning. My relationship with time is more personal now.
Just take care of yourself, he says. I hate to have you there, alone.
I’ll just take a nap.
Just don’t go on the stairs.
I won’t go on the stairs. I won’t even go to the bathroom. I won’t get up. I’ll just rest.
Just take care.
Just.
It’s a word we use a lot now—though in only one way that we might. As though we have lost our knowledge of the other meaning.
Just be careful. I’ll just do this tiny thing. Just move my pillows a little higher up. Just don’t worry. Just be good to yourself. Just take care.
If you’d just moved the damned fence just a foot…
It was the little note of grace that we both needed then.
I sometimes think that when I’m gone Sam will drive his car right into your well-constructed fence. I can picture it so easily: Sam behind the wheel pulling up into the drive, gunning it; and veering left. If the tables were turned, there’s no doubt it’s what I’d do.
Because who is there left to be angry at? Except you? We used up all the other obvious candidates long ago.
When he gets home, Sam climbs heavily to our room, the whiskey bottle and a glass in his hand. I have been dozing, but am now awake.
I hope he feels bad about what he did, he says.
If he were the type to feel bad, I say, speaking slowly, he wouldn’t have done it in the first place. If he cared a tiny bit about us and our lives he wouldn’t have acted as he did. He’s indifferent to us. It had all been decided before we met. There was never any hope.
I don’t tell him about these now-fading fantasies of mine. The ones that started early on. About trying to reason with you. Trying to make you believe in my life. The simple fact of my existence. I don’t tell him that.
I am so close now to being entirely erased. I see things that were invisible to me before.
Sam sits there, and he drinks, a flush beginning to spread through his cheeks.
He’s indifferent? he asks. Is that really what it is?
There is a universe of sorrow, wide and dark, in my husband’s staring eyes. An eternity built there, constructed over time, forged gradually of the realization that this is in fact our lives. This is what we have been dealt.
It’s possible, I say to him, that you were right. What you said about some folks just being bad.
But as I speak, I realize how little I want to say what I have learned. How reluctant I am to admit to Sam what indifference truly means, and has long meant to us both. I do not want to play a role in confirming that cruel universe that dwells inside my husband’s eyes. But I do love him. I do. I love him very much. And so to him—if not to you—I speak the truth.
Immortalizing
John Parker
IT ISN’T A NEW SENSATION. For the past many weeks, Clara Feinberg has found it harder and harder to paint human faces, her bread-and-butter task. Increasingly, she is struggling with what feels to her like a repugnance to the act. Though it’s all very sophomoric. Her own thoughts on the subject sound to her like the voices of pretentious but earnest youngsters debating the meaning of life.
It’s morning—again—and Clara is perched on the side of her bed, as though undecided about whether to stand or lie back down. Her hands grip the edge of the mattress, maybe to push her up and maybe to hold her there. She can see herself in the dresser mirror—if she lets her eyes drift that way. It’s not her favorite sight, not normally of particular interest to her. As drawn as she is to study others’ faces, she would be perfectly happy to go through life without ever seeing her own. Not because of anything amiss about her appearance. For a seventy-year-old woman, she looks better than well, straight and a bit stern and more handsome than ever. Age suits her. But she knows too well what a face can reveal.
As a child, if she caught a glimpse of herself when alone, she would stick out her tongue; and to her own surprise, she does it now. It’s an odd sight. An old woman making the face of a spiteful little girl. An oddly upsetting sight. She closes her lips and looks away, looks down to her feet, hanging bare and gnarled just above the floor. She still can’t quite force herself to stand. Not yet. Can’t quite force herself to dress, to leave the apartment, to walk among the living. Go to work, step into her studio. Smell the paint, the turpentine. Populate the blank canvases waiting there with her people, her creations.
The prospect pins her where she is.
It isn’t that she has tired of studying faces. Not at all. How could she have? She still thinks daily about how it felt thirty years ago, how like learning a precious secret it had been when she first discovered her longing to sit for hours and ponder another person’s features, to study their very particular texture. It was as though she had found a hidden primal drive in herself, something to align itself with hunger, thirst, sexual desire, the instinct to stay alive. And this drive has never flagged.
But the paintings themselves upset her now. The act of painting them upsets her now.
She forces her eyes to her own image again, holds her face steady, drains it of what expression she can. It’s this same eerie stillness she detects in her portraits now. A kind of death. Death, which used to seem so remote, now feels to Clara as though it is everywhere, like the universally disliked relative who arrives early to every gathering and shows no discernible sign of ever going home. She can sense it turning her against her own work, lurking in the notion of permanence surrounding portraiture, skulking around the very idea of catching a person at one moment and documenting them, just then. This is what death does, she thinks, stony-faced, staring right into her own eyes. Catches us all. Stops time.
“Pull yourself together,” she says out loud. “You still have a living to make.”
And finally, that gets Clara to her feet. She is paid preposterously well for those paintings of hers; and so this recent repugnance must be overcome; and the day, the new clients, must be faced.
As if revealing a precious secret, Kathe
rine Parker states that she and her husband—John—have been married for fifty-one years. Not that Clara has asked. She’s asked them very little since they entered the small sitting room adjacent to her studio. And when told how long they’ve been married, she doesn’t offer up much of a reaction. Divorced herself for nearly three decades, she can think of too many reasons, good, bad, and indifferent, why people might stay married half a century to assume that she knows the appropriate response.
“We didn’t make very much of our fiftieth. But then when this one came around, I realized I would like to have a portrait of John. That’s the gift I want. John, immortalized.”
Katherine Parker is a small woman, with suprisingly short hair, entirely white. The wrinkles that web her pouching cheeks run without a break or variation across her pale lips, as though a veil of lace has been etched into her face. When she speaks, her eyes blink rapidly, seeming to seek refocus every time. And the truth is, Clara realizes, she would rather paint her than him. It might be interesting to try to capture this topography of time and the sense of urgency that seems integral to her.
“Not of you both?” she asks.
“Oh, no. I had mine done years ago. I’d much rather be remembered that way. Young, and elegant. Not like this.”
Clara nods, skipping over her own arguments with this view. The point, it turns out, isn’t youth or beauty. The point is happiness. And to the extent that happiness ever came to her, it came to her late.
She looks over at John Parker on the sofa beside his wife. He hasn’t spoken at all. Not a single word. Nor is his face particularly expressive. His skin has an odd smoothness to it, a yellow tinge; his eyes are round, brown, and moist.
He’s dull, she thinks, that word stepping out of line, as if louder, bolder than the others in her thoughts. Sitting there, Clara recognizes this as something with which she’ll now have to contend. Often, with her subjects, there’s a first impression that dominates her ability to see clearly. And here is one, again. This quality of dullness she perceives will have to be continually questioned and examined. In the end she may conclude that it does define him in some way that deserves expression in the work. Or she may not. But for as long as she is painting him, she knows, she will be in a continual dialogue with this word. Dull.