Though she’d never blame him outright, her husband’s underactive sense of agency might have borne some genetic responsibility for their son’s full-blown inertia. For privately she regarded Court as a specimen: the type who just out of college takes an acceptable job with acceptable pay, because it’s there, because it will do, and because it seems a respectable placeholder for surveying an array of beckoning better options. As time lolls infinitely up ahead, promotion ensues. The pay improves. Until suddenly our hero is old enough to have looked up his pending Social Security payments online, and he’s still managing the bookstore in Ansley Mall. Lo, though he has a degree in journalism from Georgia State, apparently he “decided” to be a bookstore manager when he grew up. This process of expedience sliding to what, for mortals, passes for permanence recalled that weary aphorism about life and other plans, and the pattern was far more standard than fixing on a goal and getting there. Court was cheerfully resigned, though his work put only a thin intellectual gloss on removing cuboids from boxes. The Local Bookie was now sponsoring events to counter online sales, and congenial jawing with visiting writers helped compensate for the fact that only five people showed up. Independent bookstores had achieved the same edgy, right-on quality of Eileen’s peace rallies, which made running in the red feel a cut above ordinary bankruptcy.
Court was a boyish, toss-a-baseball-in-the-street type of guy, sexy in his day, still sexy in his way. Maybe it was the cowlick, or an innocuous touch of the prankster that one associates with about age ten, but others always mistook him for younger. Of the two, he was the laissez-faire parent, and while she was reluctant to label him passive, he was too amenable. Were it up to her husband, Court would have granted their son the rather exalted-sounding status that her expatriated college roommate had finally won in Britain: indefinite leave to remain.
But turning fifty-nine in March had hit Harriet with an unexpected starkness. She’d always been a rounder-up in relation to birthdays, and no sooner turned one age than readied herself for the next. Effectively, she was as good as sixty. Much media verbiage serviced the notion that sixty was the new middle age, but Harriet rejected this view on arithmetic grounds; she wouldn’t live to 120.
She accepted that her job had its funky side, but of all the work in the world she wouldn’t have dreamed as a girl of casting about Peachtree Center for a black silk robe for a prima donna hip-hop star’s dressing room. She didn’t mind having ended up in Atlanta, a vigorous, mixed city with terrible traffic that sometimes didn’t even seem part of the South—but she wasn’t confident that she had chosen it rather than come by it, as Court had come by Ansley Mall. Much like her husband’s, the course of her own life exhibited a deficit of intention, and she was running out of time to intend. Granted, in physics “what happens when a stoppable force meets an immovable object?” didn’t pose much of a paradox. She still refused to simply submit to the fact that Liam would be lumped downstairs till the day she died.
Before making a frontal assault, Harriet slipped behind enemy lines to lure a defector.
A force of nature in her latter twenties, buxom and bright in every sense, for going on two years Jocanda had made free with the house on Wildwood Place, to Harriet’s delight. She had a swooshing physical presence and a booming, anarchic laugh. The girl gleaned the funniest cat videos from YouTube and the wisest home remedies from her mother, whose advice to treat discolorations on beech wood with lemon juice had recently rescued Harriet’s blotched butcher-block kitchen island. As for her being African American, Harriet was very proud of her son’s racial open-mindedness, but had never figured out a way of telling him so, since to commend his choice of girlfriend on this basis sounded closed-minded.
Yet the young woman’s CV was disconcerting. She had qualified as a veterinary technician—something short of the full medical whack, the very sort of achievable, solid second-best career choice that Harriet could only applaud. Jocanda was a sophisticate in so many respects. She wore flowing, monochromatic garb made of draping, upscale synthetics, in that orchard of subtle colors in-between the primaries, like tangerine and plum. She preferred Django Unchained to Twelve Years a Slave, and could elucidate with great eloquence why the swashbuckling revenge fantasy was actually more empowering to her community than another sobering epic of abuse. Enthusiasm for Obama didn’t blind her to the dubiety of his extrajudicial drone killings in Pakistan. Still, this intelligent woman conceded cheerfully that she’d never researched the availability of employment in the veterinary field before applying to Gwinnett Tech. Jocanda was part-timing at Staples.
Yet Liam’s girlfriend did have mighty powers. Although she was forever snitching incremental wedges of Harriet’s freshly baked rhubarb cream pie until she consumed two or three slices in the guise of a taste, ferrying away Harriet’s dinner leftovers and never returning the snap-lock containers, and availing herself of Harriet’s washing machine, often running a whole load to launder one wraparound and a pair of leggings, Harriet lived in terror of escaping the girl’s good graces, and fell all over herself to be ingratiating. Still officially living with her divorced mother in South DeKalb, Jocanda stayed over only about four nights a week; on the nights she was gone, the feeling upstairs went dumpy and stale, and Harriet would old-lady the evening away mending, watching improving documentaries, and filing clipped recipes. Atmospherically, that girl pumped up the Friel-Garsons’ home to a near-bursting beach ball, and sucked the air out with her when she left.
Alas, the who-curried-whose-favor dynamic put Harriet at a manipulative disadvantage. One evening when earphones safely tethered Liam to his computer in the den, she dangled a timorous question to Jocanda in the living room: “Don’t you and Liam ever wish it was just you two, you know, in your own place?”
“Not really,” Jocanda said, stretching her shapely bare feet onto the coffee table. The single cornrow spiraling from around her crown to below her ears was mesmerizing, and reminded Harriet of The Twilight Zone. “Raised with three brothers, you get used to bumping into folks in the hall. And you and Court make me feel real welcome, don’t you worry about that.”
“But you must sometimes want to be able to have a screaming match, and not worry about being overheard?”
Jocanda tilted her head. “Liam and me don’t have screaming matches. You and Court at odds over something? Sounds like projection to me!” Languidly, Jocanda scratched the family tabby, Fluffernutter, who acted every bit as smitten with Liam’s girlfriend as Harriet was. “As for whatever else you might overhear from upstairs,” she said, eyes aglitter. “It’s kind of a turn-on, if you want to know the truth.”
Having long before owned sex with the same possessive sense of discovery that every generation did, Harriet refused to be embarrassed. “I realize there are only so many openings at veterinary practices, and you have to be patient. But Liam—I mean, he has so many gifts—it does seem as if maybe it’s about time that he, well, did something with his life. And I was thinking—he’s not going to listen to his mother—but I’m sure he’d listen to you.”
Dismissing the cat in a gesture of getting down to serious human business, Jocanda reared back, while eyeing her hostess through the roseate glow of her Negroni—a cocktail whose name made Harriet anxious. “This whole idea of ‘doing something’ with your life, it’s wrongheaded. Ask Liam—you maybe don’t realize, but your son, he’s into some profound shit. You are your life. It’s not outside you. You can’t ‘do something with it’ like a toaster on a table. Liam already is, know what I’m saying? He don’t need to become nothing. This whole goal thing, keeping your head in the future, it’s where most folks get all, like, subdivided. Like, some big part of them’s off in a time and place that don’t even exist and may never exist, ’stead of right here and right now.” Harriet was reluctant to call the downtown touches in Jocanda’s speech an affectation. Still, the girl had been raised in an affluent suburban black neighborhood in Sandy Springs that Harriet and Court could never afford.
&
nbsp; “Ah, don’t you think, maybe Liam could still be present in the way that I think you mean and still get a job?”
But Jocanda was on a roll. “Whole country always waiting, and planning, and striving, and educating, trying to ‘get somewhere’ or ‘get ahead’ so they don’t notice where they already at. That’s what don’t wash about the ‘American dream’—that it’s a dream. Like all them wiggly screens in old movies. Liam and me, we awake. Liam and me, we happy as clambakes, right here and right now. We’re not itching to head or get or become, and that’s the whole secret, the whole ball of wax, know what I’m saying?”
“Well, I’m awfully glad to hear you’re so contented with each other!” Harriet declared.
“Contented? Honey, we blast-into-the-stratosphere, off our butts with bliss!” She rattled her ice. “Now, what say we go for a refill? Double up that bliss.” Jocanda’s teeth shone, while Harriet grinned with her mouth closed, self-conscious about how yellowed her smile had grown, here on the threshold of sixty.
If the mountain’s girlfriend wouldn’t come to Mohammed, then Mohammed would go to the mountain—although any proverb with Mohammed in it made Harriet anxious, too.
Hands flat on the kitchen table later the same week, she announced, “We really think it’s time for you to find a job and move out.”
Liam’s head bobbed. “I can see how you might think so. But I’m not trying to hear that.”
“What’s ‘I’m not trying to hear that’ supposed to mean?” Jocanda had a late shift at Staples, and Harriet was feeling forceful.
“Hon, don’t ride him too hard,” Court said. “We’re just exploring possibilities.”
“In allowing you to stay here for the foreseeable future, we’re being lousy parents. It’s child abuse.”
“That’s nice of you to worry,” Liam said politely. “But I’ll be all right. Kids sticking around—it’s a thing.”
“He’s right about that,” Court contributed unhelpfully. “It is a thing.”
“Well, I’m hugely sympathetic with the likes of the Sawyers,” Harriet allowed. “You know their daughter Julia—she got a master’s from Duke, and now she’s back home trying to pay off a quarter of a million bucks in student loan debt. Lucy says they’re having to get her treated for depression. But your loans are a fraction of that, and we’ve almost paid them off.” Harriet was privately convinced that Liam’s brief infatuation with a degree in court reporting hailed directly from his watching too much Law & Order.
“I do wish you’d let that go,” Liam said pleasantly. “It was the stenography. They decided I must be dyslexic.”
“Voice recognition software will eliminate those positions anyway,” Court said. “Liam dodged a bullet, in my view.”
“But don’t you want to have a career, raise a family? Make the world a better place?”
“That whole, you know—it’s not my bag.” Liam continued to sound affable. From childhood, he’d lacked the shame gene. If a parent went nuclear with, “I’m so disappointed in you” regarding his substandard grades—and by the time Liam was in school, to get anything less than a B you really had to go out of your way—he took in the assertion congenially as a point of information. Corporal punishment was out; using food as reward or chastisement was said to foster eating disorders; “grounding” was meaningless when there was nowhere their son especially wanted to go. So Liam’s immunity to their displeasure had reduced disciplinary options to zero.
“Well, what is your bag?” Harriet charged.
“Manhole covers,” Liam said promptly.
Not that this was news. Liam spent hours per day on ManHole.com—an address that initially moved his mother to assure him that they’d have no problem with his being gay. But no, it was a website for enthusiasts of manhole covers. They traded photographs of different designs, scans of pencil rubbings, anecdotes about sewer-gas explosions, and stories of car-axle breakages when metal thieves stealing the big iron discs left the cavity agape. Obsessed with a cramped urban version of Journey to the Center of the Earth, hole spotters with more catholic interests explored a sideline in municipal drains, debating parallel versus perpendicular gutter grates, while one pull-down menu listed big digs, roadworks, and water pipe replacements. The very arbitrariness of the absorption was clearly its attraction: more filling a cup with pebbles and dumping them out again. Harriet would have liked to infer from her son’s fascination with substructure a metaphorical determination to eschew surface for deeper substance, to get to the bottom of things, to master underlying patterns and derive the gist, but she couldn’t help but associate holes in the ground with pet burials and sandboxes.
“I’m not sure we’re going to be able to exploit that. But what if we told you,” Harriet veered, “that we’re thinking of offering your room to a Central American refugee?”
Court looked alarmed. They hadn’t discussed this.
“Why take in one refugee,” Liam said smoothly, “only to create another?”
“You’d hardly be on a par with someone fleeing violence and hardship. You’ve had all the advantages. A nice home, clothes, plenty to eat—”
“So as punishment for these advantages,” Liam said, “I have to give them up. Though I’d at least be fleeing persecution, if this discussion is anything to go by.”
“Buddy boy,” Court said, “we sure don’t mean to twist any screws—”
Liam stood up; they were dismissed. “It seems crazy to pay for a whole other pad when there’s a bedroom downstairs. You always go on about carbon footprints. Well, I use fewer resources this way, too. Unless you don’t like having me here?”
“Of course we do!” Court said. “We love having you here! Don’t we, pumpkin?”
So much for the talking to.
Applying the new political fashion for the “nudge,” phase two involved an unnerving outlay of cash. But Harriet argued that presenting Liam with a fait accompli would introduce him to the thrills of autonomy—to which he would become sufficiently accustomed that the prospect of living with parents in one’s thirties might reachieve the stigma it had apparently lost. So the couple sought out a one-bedroom apartment that listed for $1,250/month in the rapidly revitalizing Intown neighborhood of Old Fourth Ward. They put down the deposit and prepaid two months’ rent.
They presented the plan to Liam with a giddy gaiety that may have bordered on hysteria: The two months’ free ride should give Liam time to find work, so that by the third he could pay the rent himself. They promised him a stipend for the transitional period, and help in locating job openings. MARTA having crabbed in all directions from the center of town, lack of a driver’s license shouldn’t pose a problem, so long as he avoided delivery work. They would admire his determination, Harriet emphasized, even if he started at a rudimentary job like minding a cash register—although historically Liam had proven as indifferent to parental approval as he had to their disappointment. Throughout this presentation, he continued to forge his way through a carton of fudge nut ripple, pausing only to dig out and lick clean the almonds, which he preferred to eat plain.
“It’s a cute place!” Harriet enthused. “With a balcony. You’re not far from the Carter Library, and the trail through Freedom Park. O4W is becoming really hip, you know, and super integrated.”
“You mean I’d be displacing an African American,” Liam said, scraping the last of the ice cream.
Harriet blushed. There was truth to the charge. “Blacks and whites living side by side immeasurably improves the social health of this city.”
That smile again, the one that could get him decked someday, and pretty soon Harriet could be volunteering to do the honors herself. “You should consider becoming a flack for one of those big developers. You’ve got the knack.”
His parents spent the following weekend scouring thrift shops and yard sales for secondhand furniture. Liam went amicably along for the ride, but claimed to have hurt his back doing a manhole cover rubbing on North Rock Springs Road, and let
them load the serviceable single bed frame, fold-up table, and upright caned chairs into their VW wagon with the same vicarious engagement with which Norwegian television viewers were said to have watched the stoking of a woodstove on camera for hours on end. The apartment was a one-floor walk-up, and as his aging progenitors struggled to lift a sofa over the banister, Liam provided helpful pointers from below.
Harriet set up the new router that came with the Comcast one-year contract—though the password she picked, Liberty4ME!, did raise the question of liberty for whom exactly—folded clean clothes into his dresser, and packed the refrigerator with a generous Kroger shop that included more fudge nut ripple. She made up the bed with worn sheets from home, though the pillows were new, while Court registered for a free two-week trial subscription to Netflix on Liam’s laptop. She unpackaged a new toothbrush, popping it in one of the Family Guy glasses from the yard sale on Windemere Drive, and stacked the cabinets with the set of floral stoneware—on the ugly side, but with one plate chipped and a dessert plate missing, the as-is dinnerware had been a steal for six bucks.
Struggling to equalize the bedroom blind, Harriet remembered kitting out her own first digs. When you got older and more financially capable of devising domestic space in keeping with your tastes, your very agency gave rise to dissatisfaction—leading couples their age to continually make over kitchens, build new extensions, and tear down walls. Because the real inadequacy was one of imagination, the wealthier you became, the more utterly you erected a monument to your own limitations.
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