The Punch

by Noah Hawley

  Time again rears its ugly head. For without time there would be no history, no need to forge stories from the past, to see faces in clouds, patterns. We wouldn’t spend half our lives looking for meaning. We live and die on this Earth and it has to mean something. The universe is a story, isn’t it? A novel? A movie? No. It’s simply the unconnected mess of what happens. Unacceptable. We are literally incapable of letting things go. Our minds are designed to retain information that fits into a compressed narrative. In social science circles this distorted view of the world is called the hindsight bias.

  If you can predict it, it will not occur.

  This is the level of paradox we’re dealing with here. We live in a universe that is becoming less ordered as it ages. Time, they tell us, is actually moving backward, and yet all we can see is what just happened.

  What do you believe is true even though you can’t prove it?

  When Doris tells Florence and Alice she is their sister, when she pushes past their initial resistance (You’re kidding, right? Isn’t she a scream?), when it finally dawns on them that they have lived their whole lives in darkness, the world will turn upside down for these women. They will rack their brains, going back. Could we have known? Were there signs? They will retrace their histories, look for clues, revisit every gathering, all the Passover Seders of their youth. That mousy girl in the ugly dress, she was our sister. When the unimaginable happens we look for answers. We turn to science. We turn to God. We hunt for understanding. When a tidal wave swallows a country, when two gunmen walk into a high school and start shooting, we look for meaning. We want to understand how it happened so we can stop it from happening again, but the whole point of these events is that they’re unimaginable. We literally have to see them to believe them.

  Lunch arrives. Scott has a hamburger. Florence and Alice eat salads. Doris has the cassoulet and eats a sum total of none of it. A strong wind and she would fly away like a piece of trash. When the waiter puts a plate of mussels in front of David, he says thank you, then bows his head slightly, closes his eyes.

  “What are you doing?” says Scott, leaning over.

  David opens his eyes, unclasps his hands.

  “Nothing.”

  Scott stares at him for a minute, then turns back to Doris.

  “Daniel is at the club,” Florence is saying. “He’s always at the club. I’m a golf widow.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Scott sees David resume his pose, head slightly bowed. He whips around, catches David mouthing something.

  “Are you praying?” he asks.

  David shakes his head. The brothers exchange a look that contains the following exchange:

  David: Don’t do this right now. Just eat your lunch.

  Scott: No way. Don’t you flip out on me. You’re acting crazy, and I’m not doing this by myself.

  David: Calm down. Everything’s going to be okay. I can see that now. You’re not doing anything by yourself. None of us are. As the Bible says, all is full of love.

  Scott: That’s a Bjork song.

  David: The point is, stop fighting. Let the world embrace you. You’ll feel better.

  Scott: Don’t give me that Buddhist crap. You can’t hide behind some smug Zen nonsense. We’re in the shit and in the shit we’ll stay. Why should you have peace?

  David smiles, turns back to his lunch. It worries Scott that he is being so calm. It makes Scott feel left out. Christians believe in the Rapture, in a day when God will call all the true believers up to heaven, leaving everyone else behind. This is how Scott feels. He has been abandoned to live out the end times with all the other hopeless cynics. As they eat, Florence fills them in on how the other relatives are doing. There’s Rachel in Florida whose son married a crystal meth addict. There’s Erica in Poughkeepsie who has the cancer. Uterine. Some of these people Scott knows. Some he doesn’t. He listens to her monologue without absorbing the words.

  He spent most of the night in the back of a dark club hatching a scheme. It was crowded and humid and he felt better just being there, just sitting at a table in the corner nursing a drink, surrounded. He drew diagrams on cocktail napkins. He wrote down details he remembered—where the tree stood in the yard, how many paces from the back door. The music was like a motor revving in his chest. He must have entered some hypnotic state. That’s the only way to explain why it was eighty-thirty in the morning when he got back to the hotel, why he fell asleep in the elevator and woke up in the lobby with a bellman nudging him gently with the toe of his shoe.

  “Everyone on our side is coming in for the memorial,” says Alice. “Is Joe’s family?”

  Doris pushes food around on her plate. She is on her second glass of wine.

  “Fuck them,” she says. “Bunch of rat bastards.”

  There is a moment of awkward silence.

  “Well,” says Florence. “I’m sure they’re not that bad.”

  Doris gives her that secret smile. It says, Just wait. You’ll see.

  “And then you’re going to Maine?” asks Alice.

  “We used to go there every summer,” says David. “To the island. We thought it would be a good place for the ashes.”

  Alice nods, her face assuming that sympathetic frown. She lives alone in a condominium two towns over from her sister. She was a schoolteacher for twenty years. Now she knits and volunteers at the synagogue.

  “It was so cold last night,” says Florence.

  “It was,” says David. “I went for a walk, almost froze my ears off.”

  “I slept through it,” says Doris. “The flight must have wiped me out.”

  Scott watches them, dumbstruck. Are they really talking about the weather?

  “Maine will probably be freezing,” says Florence.

  “Don’t remind me,” says Doris.

  “Last week,” says Scott, “there was a woman on hold and she couldn’t stop crying. She’d called the Hostess hotline. Maybe she wanted to report a faulty Ding Dong. All the operators were busy. She must have waited for twenty, thirty minutes, just sobbing. And I have no way to break in, no way to ask her what’s wrong, so I just had to sit there and listen.”

  “That’s awful,” says Florence, making a face.

  David gives Scott a look that says, What are you doing? Why do you always have to be so dark? Scott looks back. Why don’t you pray on it, God-boy? See what Jesus says. He has this feeling in his bones that goes, If you’re not with me you’re against me. That’s the point. They’re supposed to do this together. You get one end and I’ll get the other. That way the weight isn’t too much. That way the burden is easy to carry. They used to hold each other in their sleep. When David was four and Scott was two, David would climb into his brother’s bed and hold him. My baby, he told people on the street, picking him up. Scott would follow his big brother around the house laughing. Anything David did was magic. Now they hunch their shoulders and eat in silence. Now they circle their wagons and eye each other warily from the high towers of their castles.

  Alice checks her watch. She has no idea what’s coming. In twenty-four hours she will have to reassess her entire life, but right now she picks a piece of lettuce from her teeth, innocent, unsuspecting. If there was no such thing as time, there would be no surprise. Imagine it. No unexpected tragedies, no unforeseen disasters. There are statisticians in insurance company basements across the globe working tirelessly to devise formulas that will allow them to predict the unpredictable. They draw equations on blackboards. They compile data and crunch the numbers. If it were up to them, no one would ever be blindsided by life. There would be no acts of God, no random violence. Life would be 100 percent predictable.

  “Do you like Portland?” Florence asks Doris.

  “It’s nowhere.”

  “The people are nice, I hear.”

  “The people are fine. They’re soft. They believe in saving the trees. A bunch of bicycling fascists, if you ask me.”

  “Does that mean you’re coming back to New York?”
asks Alice. Scott can’t tell if she welcomes this idea or is terrified by it.

  Doris looks to her sons.

  “If they don’t want me.”

  Scott rubs his eyes. At this moment, family feels like weight and pressure. It is the sensation of sinking to the bottom of the ocean, the way the water squeezes you like a fist.

  “I was happy in high school,” he says.

  “What?” says Florence.

  “Who wants to see pictures of the kids?” says David, pulling out his wallet. He passes them around. The cousins ooh and ah.

  “That’s Christopher,” he says. “He’s ten. He plays shortstop for his Little League team. That’s Chloe. She’s eight. We’re thinking of having her skip third grade.”

  “She’s got tits,” says Doris, signaling the waiter for another glass of wine. Florence makes a face but says nothing.

  “And who’s this?” says Alice. “Florence, look at those eyes. Isn’t he just adorable?”

  “That’s Sam,” says David. “He’s seven months old. A real pistol.”

  “Sam,” says Florence. “I like that name.”

  “All the old-man names are coming back,” says Scott. “Ezekial, Methusala…”

  David gives him a look. You’re not helping. He glances at Doris. She’s chuckling quietly to herself. Scott can see it on his brother’s face—how he feels like he’s going to have to carry the lot of them on his back. How he is their dad now, all of them. The waiter brings Doris another glass of Chardonnay. Thank God she’s got a wheelchair, thinks Scott. He remembers the supermarket. It feels like a dream now, the bright white interior, like heaven with bulk candy. And there was that woman, Joy, that sweet-faced angel and her baby. What he wouldn’t give to be back there now. They could barricade the doors and live for years feasting on box cereals and drinking Fanta. The baby would grow to be tall and strong and learn how to mop linoleum. At night they could quiz each other on the price of popular grocery store items. They’d make a game out of it. He would teach the child to read using the directions label on packages of soap, would teach him to add and subtract using a price gun.

  “It’s funny,” he says. “I met another baby named Sam last night.”

  David looks at him.

  “Where? At the hotel?”

  “No. In the West Village. I went back to the old house, you know? And when I went into the D’Agostino’s to get warm, there was this woman and her baby.”

  David blinks several times in rapid succession.

  “It’s a pretty common name,” he says.

  Scott shrugs. He is picturing his supermarket family. Outside the world would disappear under nuclear winter, but there they’d be, happy and secure, sleeping on beds of toilet paper and packing straw. He would build a nursery in the produce section and their babies (five, six, ten?) would lie on mats of green Astroturf. Overhead sprinklers would shower them lightly with mist every twenty minutes to help them grow. When they were old enough, they would play lime hockey in aisle 6 using brooms from aisle 9 for sticks. They would bowl cantaloupes into empty two-liter soda bottles in aisle 3. Every year Scott would surprise Joy on her birthday by making some tiny, precious jewel out of knickknacks from the kitchen-supply section in aisle 7 or the school-supply section in aisle 8. He would build dollhouse furniture for his daughters using toothpicks (aisle 2) and color them with shoe polish (aisle 13). He would make shoes from oven mitts (aisle 5) and hold dance parties by the pharmacy, blasting ABBA songs off K-Tel compilation CDs (taken from the magazine rack near the checkout counter) over the PA.

  “Is this dance taken?” he would ask his daughters and they would giggle. He would pull them up onto the toes of his oven-mitt shoes and whisk them around in circles on lemon-fresh floors.

  “Wake up,” says David. “We’re going.”

  Scott opens his eyes. Somehow the lunch has ended. He must have fallen asleep. He gets to his feet. The hostess fetches the wheelchair. When Florence and Alice see it they exchange a look. Concern returns to their faces.

  “Oh, you poor dear,” says Florence. She looks at Scott. Her expression says, we had no idea it was this bad. He stares back at her, stone faced, feeling oddly protective of his mother in this moment. We may be freaks, he thinks, but at least we’re freaks together. We don’t need your sympathy, your condescension. Don’t come in here with your last-minute apologies and dramatic gestures of solidarity and expect me to give a flying fuck. Where have you been the last seven years? A card at Christmas? Go fuck yourself.

  “It’s just to be safe,” says David about the wheelchair. “She gets short of breath sometimes.”

  Florence nods. She reaches out and squeezes Doris’s arm.

  “So good to see you,” she says. “We’ll see you tomorrow at the memorial.”

  Doris nods. She bares her teeth in what some might call a smile but what looks to Scott like an act of aggression.

  “I’ve got a surprise for you,” she tells them.

  “A surprise,” says Florence, bending down the way you would to talk to a child.

  “For you, too,” Doris tells Alice.

  “What is it?”

  Doris smiles her secret smile.

  “Just wait,” she says. “You’ll see.”

  She lifts her feet onto the wheelchair rests.

  “I will say this,” she says. “Wear sensible shoes.”

  “Shoes?” says Alice.

  “Flats. I wouldn’t want you to fall.”

  The sisters exchange a look.

  “Okay.”

  “And if you have heart medicine,” says Doris, “I’d take it. They say a real shock to the system can do you in.”

  The sisters exchange another look. Scott sighs. He thinks his mother is drunk. Like Florence and Alice, he has no idea what’s coming.

  None of us do. That’s the point.

  Doris Henry wakes at dawn on the big day. She sits on the edge of her bed and watches it snow. In the last three hours it’s dumped eight inches on New York, and on the street below, for the first time she can remember, there is no traffic. Not a car. Not a pedestrian. The white streets glow orange in the light of the rising sun. On Park Avenue not a soul is moving. The cars sleep under blankets of snow. Doormen huddle inside warm lobbies, waiting for the plows to arrive. Soon the storm will pass and the salt trucks will emerge, and by noon the city will be back to normal—you won’t even be able to tell the snow is fresh—but for now the city is hushed and still, like a woman holding her breath. It is a beautiful sight, even to someone as cynical as Doris, though the beauty only makes life seem that much crueler. But then this is how she is—a woman who can find the cloud in every silver lining. Outside the snow falls in a quiet hush. If Doris were to open her window and lean out onto the cold, wet ledge, she would hear only the breathy hiss of winter, the gentle creak of flakes settling. For some reason the words born again return to her mind. The Chinese wear white when someone dies. She doesn’t know why she thinks of this, but she does. She always pictured blindness this way, not dark, but light, like staring into the sun.

  She pours herself a glass of wine. Last night was bad. She hardly slept at all, even with half an Ambien in her. How do you say good-bye to the love of your life? If it was a funeral she could throw herself onto the coffin. She has always liked this idea, the passionate Mediterranean widow hurling herself into the hole after her husband, sobbing and tearing at her clothes. But as with most things, Doris likes the idea more in concept than in practice. She is not emotional that way, not demonstrative. She has to settle for subtler expressions of anger and grief, passive aggressions, a more Machiavellian approach. Besides, the whole issue is moot, anyway. How do you throw yourself onto a bag of ashes without looking ridiculous? No. She will show her loss, but in her own way. To cheer herself up, she pictures the look on Florence’s face when she learns the truth. What a delicious thing a secret can be, a secret nurtured and polished for years. Some truths become more powerful with time. The tragedy of them inc
reases. A bullet becomes a bomb becomes a mushroom cloud. If she had told Florence and Alice the truth when she was younger, say sixteen, they could have forged a bond. They could have become sisters. It would have been tough, but they could have overcome. There was still time to right the wrong, to fix what was broken. But now, fifty years later, it really is too late, and the thought of it is both wonderful and horrible. Horrible because for all those years she could have used a sister, could have used the love and support, but she was always too hurt and afraid to ask. She feared rejection more than anything. She had been rejected by her mother after all, and that is the most elemental form of denial on Earth. That level of unwantedness had fused with her bones, become part of her soul. Whenever she imagined telling the girls, she always pictured them laughing at her, cracking up over her longing, her need. You want what? A sister? You? That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard. This is what it’s like to be an outsider. You learn to make do outdoors.

  And yet now the thought of telling them is wonderful, because, here in her dying days, it is a sublime act of revenge. Now there is no time for reconciliation or apology. Not really. Now there is only enough time for the true magnitude of their mother’s deception to sink in. Think of all the realizations it will trigger, the dethroning of that woman from her pious tower. Finally, Florence and Alice will know her as Doris knew her, as a liar. A selfish woman who would abandon her own daughter for the love of a portly man. A woman who would lie to her own children for decades, would deprive them of the comfort and strength of an older sister. This is Doris’s true revenge, not against her sisters—because what have they ever been really except aloof and dismissive—but against her mother. Now, for the first time in her life, Doris will truly be seen. The thought of it kept her up all night, because to be seen is to worry about what you look like. Who you are. The thought of it makes her short of breath and jittery. Her husband is dead. Her children pretend to care for her, and today she will unmask them all and show the world the truth. For the first time in her life she will have the last laugh.