Tell Me How This Ends Well

by David Samuel Levinson

  Switching on the radio, Edith flipped through the stations and tried to locate KJEW, for she’d just remembered the satellite office they kept at Pomona, which was going to do an interview with her and eventually air it, and her talk, in tandem. She couldn’t find KJEW, but she did end up pausing on NPR to listen to the last few minutes of Fresh Air with Terry Gross, who was still going strong as ever. As if it were just yesterday, she recalled when Sheik had been a guest on the show and how surprised she’d been to hear him all the way in Atlanta.

  She and Elias had been driving to meet some friends for dinner and there he was, discussing his novel, which had just won some huge international literary prize, Edith going still with discomfort, the sound of him filling her with agony. She did not dare move or change the channel, for Elias loved Fresh Air and would not have taken her interrupting it lightly. When he’d brought up her acquaintanceship with Sheik—that’s how she’d taken to thinking of him, merely as an acquaintance she’d briefly known in a past life—she’d wanted to ask him how he knew about it but didn’t. But then it didn’t seem to matter, for he’d mentioned Sheik just that one time, during the construction on the house in North Druid Hills, and hadn’t ever broached the subject of him again. It was Edith’s hope that that night Elias had forgotten all about him, that they’d listen to the interview without consequence and then she’d reach out and casually change the channel. Sitting beside Elias without moving or breathing, she’d listened to Sheik go on and on about how startled he’d been to learn he’d won the prize, that he had no idea it came with such a sizable cash award—two hundred thousand dollars to do with as he pleased. It was then that she’d let out her breath and scoffed, whispering without meaning to, “Like he even needs the money,” then had fallen silent again, praying that Elias, who had been concentrating on the road, hadn’t heard her, or that if he had, wouldn’t question her about it.

  And he hadn’t, not then anyway. It would take another few months of talking around things, of fighting, of trying again, of giving up, of trying once more, before he finally asked her point-blank about the comment she’d made in the car. “Sheik Cohen,” he said one night from the doorway of the addition, his playpen, as she’d come to refer to it, first merely to herself, then to her friends, then to him as well. “I finally finished that book of his. The one that won that big literary award.” He was crying, at least that’s what it looked like to Edith, who remained just outside the room, her back and hands pressed against the wall, her spine as rigid and straight as it had ever been, every muscle tensed, and her breath quick and shallow, as if she were about to pounce, to rip out his tongue before he said another word. “Now I understand why you were so coy when I brought him up and never wanted to talk about him. You were…involved with him, or whatever you want to call it, and then I came along? Is that it, Edith? I was the schmucky booby prize? Am I getting the timing of that right?” he faltered, accusing, wiping his eyes. “You’re the dog walker from the book, aren’t you? Is any of it true? Any of those things he wrote? Poisoning the dogs and writing his wife all those sick, threatening emails and notes? Did you stalk their child? Were you obsessed with him?”

  She pressed herself harder against the wall, until she imagined she could feel the pulse of the house itself, a slow, dying pulse to match the slow, dying pulse of her marriage.

  “It’s fiction, Elias. A novel. He embellished. It’s what he does,” she said. “I couldn’t stop him from writing what he wrote. He never liked me. It was his revenge.”

  “For what, though? What did you do to him?” he asked.

  Edith pulled up to Mo’s house still in a state of remembering, all of the good times, all of the bad, and all of the forgotten moments in between. There had been so much good and it had gone on for years, until that moment in Atlanta when she heard Sheik’s voice on the radio, broadcasting his story for anyone to hear and discover, then it all fell to pieces. She never saw Sheik again, but hearing his voice, well, that had been enough. She couldn’t stop herself from loving whom she loved any more than Elias could stop himself from falling out of love with her. Which is what happened, a glacially slow progression of withdrawals on his end that resulted in a bankruptcy on hers.

  She parked the van in the curve of the cul-de-sac, understanding that once she stepped through that salsa-red front door and took her place among her family, she would have to keep a careful watch over what she said and how she said it. She would have to arm herself with smiles, her best and only defense against a Jacobson onslaught. And as she climbed out of the van, she had to remind herself again why she was there in L.A.—to give her talk, to check on her mom and dad, and to knock some sense into her brothers, whom she loved but who she was certain had lost their minds. They were not murderers, and she was not about to let them turn her into one, either. She was Dr. Edith Jacobson Plunkett, a professor of ethics, with a CV as long as Ephraim’s dick, and if nothing else, they had to respect her position in the world, how hard she’d fought to get where she was—and how hard she was fighting to keep her life from unraveling any further.

  Von Trapp Lane was still and silent, everyone off at work, Edith imagined, making her way up the walk and taking in the state of the lawn, which looked as if someone had started to cut it, then pooped out and gave up. Having lived in real cities like Boston and D.C. before moving south to Atlanta, which was not a real city at all, in her estimation, just a concatenation of villages and good old-fashioned sprawl, she had cared little about lawns or their magical, rigorous upkeep—until they’d moved into the house with its sumptuous, flowering backyard. Truth be told, Edith despised anyone with a lawn who farmed out the maintenance of it to others, namely to migrant workers in big pickup trucks. This practice was rampant in Atlanta, where, on any given spring, summer, or fall morning, the air was choked with the obnoxious, whiny cry of one or more leaf blowers, the bêtes noires of her existence, which inevitably woke her up and cast a pall over the rest of her day. She hated the damn contraptions, which accounted for far more noise pollution than any amount of Boston or D.C. traffic ever could and released the same harmful emissions into the air. When had the rake become a relic and her fellow citizens so lazy?

  Though everyone, including the pundits and talking heads she admired, seemed to believe that an explosion in population was the leading factor in western civilization’s decline, Edith herself opined that the advent of the leaf blower had heralded its downfall. The leaf blower, and the field of nanotechnology, which had made great strides in being able to cure a whole host of cancers as well as the virus that caused AIDS. People were simply living longer, into their hundreds, thanks in large part to continued governmental investiture in the multitrillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry—the same industry that still had not been able to find a cause or a cure for her mom’s illness.

  Edith also took note of the house, which she did every time she visited, because it was lavish and beautiful and put her own little carriage house to shame. Though she made a decent salary at Emory and could have afforded a grander place, she did not get the kind of monetary assistance from her parents that Mo did. Sure, her dad had helped her out from time to time when she was in a bind, but it was nothing compared to Mo’s supposed need—seven mouths to feed, a mortgage, private-school tuitions. Still, it hurt her to know that her dad, who controlled the purse strings, viewed her life as less valuable than Mo’s simply because she was unmarried and childless. Granted, it was Jacob who really got shafted, for she knew her dad barely even registered him as a living, sentient being, preferring to keep him at arm’s length, seeing his homosexuality as a kind of affliction rather than a way of life. Jacob had told her he had neither asked for nor received a dime from her parents in years. Which was probably for the best, because it meant that he was not beholden to them at all.

  She pushed on the door and it gave way, then she was in the vestibule, marveling again at the modern decor, the tasteful elegance of what her mom and dad had helped Mo and Pandora aff
ord. A new, giant flat-screen TV graced the far wall, its shiny black surface reflecting her movements through the large, spacious room. She waited with both excitement and dread to be set upon by her family, who didn’t appear, even after she called out again, louder this time.

  “Where the hell is everyone?” she asked the indifferent air.

  Perplexed, she’d gotten out her phone to text Mo when she heard a squeak behind her and turned to see her mom wheeling herself out of the guest room. The sight of her in the chair, the green tank of oxygen resting in her lap, nearly brought Edith to her knees. She hadn’t seen her in over a year and in that time her mom had grown frailer and more faded, as if she were becoming a ghost right before Edith’s eyes.

  “My little girl.” Her mom smiled, throwing her hands out in front of her, upsetting the tank, which slipped out of her lap. It landed with a crash on the hardwood floor, then rolled away and yanked the tubes out of her nose, pitching her forward out of the chair. Edith was at her side in a shot, lifting her back into the chair, then grabbing the heavy tank and settling it in her arms, like a newborn infant. “Pandora’s at boot camp, Mo’s at an audition, and Jacob and his German friend went to Fleischmann’s Market just up the road. They should all be home soon,” her mom said after she was breathing more normally again.

  “And Daddy?” she asked, alarmed at how they’d all gone off and left her alone.

  “He’s been fiddling around with the lawn mower all morning,” her mom said. “You know your father. Can’t sit still for a second.”

  “How are you feeling, Ma?” Edith asked, still somewhat in shock at seeing her in the wheelchair.

  “Don’t worry, dear,” she soothed. “I can still walk. It just takes so much out of me.”

  “So the meds aren’t working?” Edith asked.

  “Roz, you know what that idiot did? He didn’t leave the gas can, which means I have to run up to Exxon myself.” This was her dad, who suddenly appeared, oblivious to Edith’s presence.

  “Honey, Edith’s here,” her mom said, and that’s when her dad finally registered her.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she exclaimed, going up to him and giving him a long hug.

  “That your van I saw drive up, Eddie?” he asked as she let him go and stepped away. “I thought it might belong to the city of Calabasas.”

  “Why the city of Calabasas?” she asked.

  “Because of that dimwit brother of yours,” he snorted.

  “Jacob ran over an ostrich,” her mom explained, “and your father called the city this morning to have them come out and take it away.”

  “Not an ostrich, Roz. A peacock,” her dad corrected her gently, without any hint of his usual aggression and self-righteousness, which alarmed Edith for reasons altogether different from her previous reasons for alarm.

  “Even when I was a girl, I always got them confused.” Her mom laughed.

  “How did Jacob kill a peacock?” she asked.

  “You’ll have to ask the genius when he gets back with Marlene Dietrich.”

  “Honey, you’re terrible,” her mom said. “Don’t you dare say that in front of Jacob.”

  “Why? You think it’ll offend the German? I think not, my lovely Roz,” he said sweetly, making her mom giggle like the fresh-faced Catholic schoolgirl she had been in a different life.

  What the hell is going on around here? Edith wondered, feeling dizzy with relief and warm with suspicion, for even at his best, she had never seen him act this nice to his wife. She thought for a moment that she’d come to the wrong house, that body snatchers had stolen him away in the night and replaced her usually cantankerous, ill-tempered daddy with this replica, who looked and sounded like him but wasn’t. An adult changeling. Had she stepped into Jacob’s last play, in which this very thing had happened? For her mom’s sake, she didn’t want it to be an act, yet she knew her dad, perhaps better than any of them, and now she understood that on top of keeping a careful watch on herself, she would also have to keep a careful watch on him, realizing that if any of them were going to make it out of this weekend alive, it was going to be up to her.

  Edith left her parents kibitzing and went out to the van to grab her suitcase. While she was wrestling it to the ground, her phone gonged again—another nudge from TBS1946. My, but you are impatient, she thought, leaning into the dark, empty cargo hold to shade her phone’s screen from the sun so that she could get a look at the word he’d played, only to realize that the hold was not as empty as it appeared, for lying in one of the wheel wells was what looked like a used syringe. The sight of it made her skin crawl and raised goose bumps all over her arms. She straightened up and quickly slid the door shut, hurrying with the suitcase through the grass and into the house, trying to knock the image of the syringe out of her mind by picturing Ephraim, naked and asleep, in her bed. The ploy worked and soon enough Edith was able to concentrate her attention on her tiles, laying down the eight-letter word COLOSSAL, using the O in ABOUT and all of her letters, to make a bingo. Her phone went wild, lighting up with all kinds of digital pyrotechnics and emitting all kinds of delightful sounds.

  She spotted her parents in the backyard, her dad pushing her mom in the chair. It looked to her as if he were angry, his face distorted under the morning sun, this face she had come to loathe and love—sometimes more the former than the latter, she had to admit. She approached the wall of glass and sure enough she could hear him blustering, pointing at the barbecue for some reason, screaming about Mo. The angrier he got, the faster he pushed the chair, until he was directly at the lip of the pool, her mom’s feet dangling off the side. Edith stepped so close to the glass that her breath fogged it up. As her dad tilted the chair back and spun it around, she let out a gasp, for she’d caught the look on her mom’s face, a look she wouldn’t be able to soon forget—the sudden terror in her mom’s eyes that gave way to a peaceful, resigned calm, as if she understood that it could not, would not, happen any other way than this.

  It was over in a matter of seconds, then her dad was pushing her along the smooth flagstone path that ran through the backyard, his own face drawn, full of its own terror and resigned calm. She watched them for another few moments before abandoning the wall of glass and struggling to get her suitcase upstairs and into the guest room, which seemed to be already occupied. Fuck me and the duck I rode in on, she thought.

  After slumping down on the bed, Edith got out her phone and tapped out a message to Ephraim, whom she’d promised herself she wasn’t going to contact.

  I arrived in L.A. safely, got called a kike bitch on the way to pick up my rental car, but the reservation had been made for yesterday (on purpose) and so I have to drive around in a cargo van, the last renter of which I’m sure was a murdering drug addict, who left a syringe behind. My dad’s acting strangely and my poor mom looks haggard and has been confined to a wheelchair, though I don’t know if she’s in it against her will or not. The room I normally stay in when I visit has been given away to my gay younger brother and his German lover, who I’m sure after four days of being around us will leave an anti-Semite (if he isn’t one already), thanks in large part to my older brother and dad, who hate Germany and all things German with a blinding passion. How’s your day going? Do you miss me yet? EJPxo

  Edith thought long and hard about sending this text to her neighbor, with whom she’d been sleeping for only three months. Thought long and hard about what she’d witnessed between her parents just moments ago in the backyard. What was she to believe she actually saw? Certainly not the incomprehensible horror that she was imagining at the moment, nothing like that from the man who’d given her life, whom she’d called her daddy for forty years. And yet there were her eyes, which had not betrayed her, and her intuition, which she usually trusted. But how was she to trust in this when it was simply too big and too gruesome?

  Erasing everything except the last two lines of the message, she sent it to Ephraim, who responded a few seconds later with a smiley face in black sunglasses.
She supposed he was trying to be cute, that the smiley, sunglasses-wearing emoji represented her, and though she appreciated the gesture, it still flabbergasted and disappointed her, then began to gnaw at her when she realized that this was going to be the extent of his reply. Seriously, he couldn’t do better than that?

  She got up and went to the window, looking out at the other houses on Von Trapp Lane, noting with dread the sudden arrival of a big pickup truck pulling a flatbed trailer, which was full of all kinds of power tools and landscaping apparatuses—two lawn mowers, an industrial-strength power saw, giant pruning shears, and a couple of leaf blowers. The scourge of the modern world, she thought, her heart sinking when three men jumped out of the truck and unloaded the trailer, first the mowers, then the saw, then the pièce de résistance, the infernal leaf blowers, which two of the cigarette-smoking men started up immediately, even before a single blade of grass had been cut.

  Turning away from the window before she did something impulsive, like open it, lean out, and scream a nasty string of expletives at them, Edith’s eyes fell on the nightstand and the pair of neon-orange earplugs perched atop it. They looked remarkably like candy corn and had the effect of whisking her back to a long-ago Halloween night, circa 1988, when she was just six years old and didn’t want to put on the costume her mom had chosen for her—a witch’s outfit replete with a warty nose and all, which Edith was convinced her mom had picked out only to spite her, because she was sure her mom thought it reflected her true nature. Reluctantly, Edith slipped the costume on, to her mother’s great delight, which only made Edith cringe and withdraw, eventually locking herself in the bathroom and weeping hysterically until her dad intervened. He knocked on the door, and when Edith finally allowed him to enter, she told him that she hated the costume and didn’t want to be seen in it and could she please stay home with him, please?