by Ali Benjamin
Things didn’t work out as he’d planned; that night, Zo stayed up late working on the newsletter for All Them Witches, and the day after that, she worked until almost dawn, sorting game clips for the Trilling documentary. The day after that came another school shooting, this one at a Florida high school, which left both of them numb for weeks.
And on it went. Even on the rare occasions when the conditions were right—when they happened to get into bed at the same time, Alex quiet, the news not quite as horrific as it had been the day before, or would be again the next day—Zo didn’t respond to his advances. By now, his beard falls nearly to his clavicle, representing—what—seven months of unintended celibacy?
He’s like the loneliest damn lumberjack on the planet.
* * *
—
Ethan sighs now, heads to the bathroom. Pees one last time. When he’s done, he picks up one of the crumpled papers in the trash.
It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with basketball.
* * *
—
The ones who whooped at you from construction sites. The ones who yelled from car windows, even though you were still a kid, and walking alone. The ones who made slurpy kissing noises as you passed, which you understood reflected something about you even though you couldn’t say what, or why. The ones who sat next to you in public, and made perfectly ordinary, friendly conversation, until the conversation shifted, became something else entirely.
The ones who left you wondering what you should have done differently.
The ones who told you to smile, put on some lipstick, show a little leg, why don’t you. The ones who said don’t worry, it’s better to have an interesting face than a beautiful one. The ones who said they liked you because they were tired of pretty girls, pretty girls are more trouble than they’re worth. The ones who said flaws are what make a girl truly beautiful.
The ones who made lists: best body, best ass, best rack, most likely to squeal. The ones who made rape lists. The ones who passed the lists around, and the ones who laughed. The ones who taught you that laughter can be dangerous, something to be avoided, a lesson you will never, in your life on this Earth, unlearn.
The ones who offered to drive you home from a party, then pulled the car over to the side of the road. The ones who listened when you said this wasn’t what you wanted. The ones who didn’t. The ones who pretended not to hear.
The ones you hated.
The ones you still fucking hate.
Early morning. Dim and formless. Ethan drifts through a strange, in-between place—between night and dawn, sleep and wakefulness, swirling dreams and rational thought. Indistinct fragments appear and disappear in his consciousness, like waves lapping on a shore. They’re detached from context, no sense or structure.
the comedian in handcuffs (Suspenders. He was wearing suspenders)
America’s dad, hawker of pudding, on a hard prison bed, right now, surreal
lipstick marks on white paper, smoke rising to yellow streetlight
need to steel yourself?
just like, whatever
that motherfucker
The clock radio kicks on, NPR. This is the same way Ethan’s woken for decades; he and Zo had this very clock radio in their Brooklyn days. It, too, is an in-between thing: digital numbers keep the time, while an analog radio dial never quite finds a static-free station. Through the fuzz comes the president’s voice, something about North Korea. If Zo were here, she’d groan, yell at Ethan to shut it off, I abhor that man’s voice, can’t stand it even for a second.
Not that he wants to hear the man either.
He should roll over, hit Snooze. But that would require action, change, an object at rest becoming an object in motion. Not possible, not yet.
Besides, Zo is already gone, off to the gym. Not to her usual one, either. For a decade, Zo went to the fitness center on Corbury Road—the one that’s small and clean with the treadmills and ellipticals. A few months ago, though, she switched to a different gym altogether, one that’s halfway to Bettsbridge. At this new gym, his wife wears boxing gloves. She punches things: a bag, mostly, but sometimes she gets into a ring and spars with actual human beings. Unnerving, really.
The president’s voice gives way to newscasters. The reports are dire: warming oceans, rising interest rates, bump stocks, crippling smog, the whole world splintering, descending into some kind of sinister entropy.
You do, or we all die, Randy’s text had said. Ethan lets that wave, too, roll up onto the shore of his mind, then watches it ease back into the deep. Now there’s the president’s voice again. He’s talking about the Supreme Court situation, some of the accusations against the new nominee: “…she said she was totally inebriated,…she was all messed up. And she doesn’t know—”
Cripes, who can bear this guy? Ethan rolls over, slams the clock radio with his palm. He picks up his phone, sees a notification that Randy has texted him twenty-seven times. He sets the phone back again, facedown. He places his feet on the floor, runs his fingers through his hair.
A new day begins.
* * *
—
The smell of butter in a cast-iron pan. The clank of the radiator, the first groaning efforts of the season. Ethan cracks an egg, measures out a scoop of dog food. Outside, an old Pontiac in need of a muffler slows, tosses a newspaper in a blue plastic bag, motors on. The refrigerator kicks on, hums, then stops.
Each day the same as the one before.
Ethan eats his egg alone, in silence. In fifteen minutes he’s going to wake Alex, start the infernal, exhausting process of getting his child ready for another day of sixth grade. Alex will fight him, as she always does, and he will plead, as he always does, saying that if she can just get started—if she can just begin, get out of bed and start the morning routine without a fight, move through her tasks one at a time—then maybe just this once they won’t have to rush, he won’t yell, the whole thing can be just a tiny bit easier. If only Alex could just try. And all the while he’s pleading and cajoling, Zo, theoretically his partner on this parenting journey, probably won’t even show up.
These days, his wife rarely returns until after Alex is already at school.
Ethan checks the clock: he’s still got a few minutes before any of that has to happen. He grabs his keys and a travel mug, then steps outside into the crisp late-September morning.
* * *
—
Ethan drives the half mile down Schoolhouse Hill, hits the Ledge cautiously, then continues down to the heart of Starkfield, such as it is.
It’s a hollowed-out sort of town, this place where he and Zo have landed. No matter where a person goes in Starkfield—the one-block business district that circles the village green, or either of the two-lane highways that take a person out of here, one sees ghosts of hopes come and gone. The Kmart gone. The tack shop gone. The single-screen movie theater gone. The hospital gone. The first attempt at an urgent-care clinic gone. The second attempt at an urgent-care clinic gone. The Grand Union, the Price Chopper, the Kwik-Stop convenience store: gone, gone, gone.
Three hours south of Starkfield, a city—once his—rises toward the sky. Ethan imagines those New York sidewalks now: crowds already flooding into the streets from the subway depths, jackhammers, honking taxis, drivers flipping one another off through car windows, food vendors in silver carts handing over foil-wrapped egg sandwiches and coffee cups emblazoned with Greek columns. He pictures men in dark suits barking into phones, women tucking loose strands of hair behind their ears, adjusting their handbags, then striding forward, chins high. All those people, old and young, rich and poor, from every corner of the globe, every language on Earth streaming from their collective tongues: they’re all weaving around one another, a river of energy, movement, urgency. The click of heels, the slap of wingtips, the whooshes and whoas and watch-its
of bike messengers dodging traffic, everything thrumming, humming, alive, even at this hour. They’re hustling, those people, ready to conquer the street, the day, the world.
When Ethan steps out of his car, the sole movement on Main Street is his own.
He throws open the door to the Coffee Depot, feels instant relief as sound washes away silence: the swirl of frothing milk, the murmur of voices, a single clap of laughter, the ting of a metal spoon against ceramic. Above the din, Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” pipes through overhead speakers. No, this isn’t New York, not by a long shot, but it’s some sort of life, and he welcomes it all, welcomes the noise, and the mustard walls filled with amateur landscape paintings, and the handful of others, familiar, every one of them, who have risen early to be here, together.
He knows without having to look who is in this café, and where they’re seated. He knows the trivia crew will be nosed up against the window in the near corner, the New York Times Arts section open to the Jeopardy! Clue of the Day. He knows, too, that the ancient plumber in coveralls will be watching the news on his phone without headphones—the sound annoying everyone, but not enough for anyone to confront him. Ethan knows that the craggy poet who teaches at the community college three towns away will be in the back corner scribbling on her yellow pad, that the maternity nurse, the one who delivered Alex more than a decade ago, will be studying Spanish at the center table.
Behind the counter, a server (Nancy: retired third-grade teacher, two grandchildren, had hip surgery last spring) sets a cup on the counter, shouts, “Jane!” And from her usual table in the far back corner, Jane (former New York City punk rocker, partied with Warhol and Basquiat back in the day, moved to Starkfield after 9/11 just like Ethan and Zo did) stands to retrieve her latte. Ethan listens to the two of them make small talk about the weather (spectacular), Nancy’s grandson (a handful, but getting bigger every day), Jane’s back pain (better, thanks, the cortisone shot really helped).
It could be yesterday, this whole scene. It could be the day before that. It could be fifteen years ago.
A voice from the corner: “Yo, Encyclopedia Brown!” It’s one of the trivia crew: a retired logger in a VFW cap, looks like Willie Nelson with a bit more meat on his bones. Other members of the trivia crew include a wispy, thirtysomething yoga instructor, and a practical social worker in horn-rims, whom Ethan would place around sixty: three individuals who seem to have little in common beyond the fact that they happen to show up here, every morning, to debate the Clue of the Day.
“Get over here, Encyclopedia Brown,” Willie Nelson calls. “We need you!”
“What’s the question?” Ethan asks. He doesn’t really care, but isn’t this what you do in a small town? You go through the motions, give everyone the gift of small talk, of sameness, of predictability—a courtesy that they, in turn, extend to you.
“The category is Authors,” says the social worker.
Ethan reads: After this woman’s death, her daughter wrote, “As far as we in the family are concerned, the alphabet now ends at Y.” Ethan turns the question over in his mind. “The alphabet ends at Y. Huh.”
“First or last name has to be Y, am I right?” asks Willie Nelson.
“Yumi,” suggests the social worker. “Yvonne.”
“Yasmeen,” says Yoga. “Yoshiro. Yakira.” Apparently the strategy here is to grab names at random and hope one of them happens to be right.
The answer hits Ethan at once. “Sue Grafton!” The mystery writer, woman protagonist, every book begins with a different letter of the alphabet. A is for Alibi, C is for Corpse, M is for Murder. Zo read a few of them back in New York. Grafton must not have made it all the way to Z before her death.
“That’s it!” Yoga’s delighted.
“Who the hell is Sue Grafton?” asks Willie Nelson, which prompts a debate—this, too, is part of the routine—about whether there’s actually a mystery writer named Sue Grafton, and if so, why Willie, who has read every John Grisham and Lee Child novel ever written, has never heard of her.
Ethan feels himself falling backward into all of this, lulled by the sleepy sameness of it all. Sure, he gets pissed off at Starkfield sometimes, as if the town should somehow fight harder against its own inertia, should rage, rage, against the dying of its light. But there’s something so easy about this predictability, so comforting and soft. Sure the world out there might be cracking to pieces, but here, at least, is something a person can count on.
* * *
—
It was good until it wasn’t. All of it: The town. His marriage. Their finances. The world.
Ethan can draw a line through his life: the break between before and after, then and now. It would look, he supposes, like the thick brown band embedded in the fossil record, the one that demarcates the age of dinosaurs from all that followed. The K-T boundary of his own life was Election Night 2016, nearly two years ago. A party, held at the home of some parents from the Rainbow Seed School. It was to be a huge celebration. The mothers showed up in pantsuits, the dads got slapped with I’m with her stickers. Kids ran through the finished basement like a pack of puppies, emerging only to ask for more Pirate’s Booty or Newman-O’s. Television reporters filled the airwaves by showing Susan B. Anthony’s grave covered with i voted stickers. Nearby, bottles of Veuve Clicquot chilled on ice.
It was to be an early night, that’s what everyone said. A historic night. There was a rumor even Georgia might go blue.
Then stunned faces, serious voices. Projected winner checkmarks, and the godawful New York Times forecast needle moving steadily, bewilderingly left—deeper and deeper into the red. The party got quiet, then quieter still. Just as it started to look bad, impossibly bad, Zo had stood. She smoothed her pants, adjusted her blazer, and walked to the kitchen, chin high. Ethan watched as his wife bent at the waist, tucked her head beneath the faucet, and vomited right into the couple’s hand-hammered copper sink.
Ethan did his best to comfort Zo—that night, and through the days that followed. He was upset, too, of course he was. But it would be okay, he was certain. This was America! There were checks and balances. Regulatory limitations. So much bureaucratic red tape! He reminded Zo that the founding fathers—they were geniuses, those guys!—had crafted the Constitution so that sudden changes, about-faces, were nearly impossible. Why, in the last decade alone, federal agencies had created something like 85,000 government rules! You can’t just undo all that!
But Zo stubbornly refused to be comforted—seemed, in fact, to barely hear him. About a week after the election, as Ethan yet again tried to reassure her, Zo had leveled her eyes at him. “What I want to know, Ethan” (and this was the beginning, he realizes now: this was the start of the rift between them), “is why you would assume that I need you to tell me whether and how much I should worry.” Ethan had been stunned by the hardness of her voice, by the fact that his wife would direct her fury at him.
Him, of all people! And he was only trying to help!
Now Ethan sits in the familiar coffee shop, listening to the trivia crowd argue good-naturedly about whether the fact that Willie Nelson has never heard of Sue Grafton says more about the author or about him. When a delivery truck attempts to back into a narrow alley on the far side of the green, the three of them pause from their debate to rate the truck driver’s skills (B minus, says Willie, A minus, says Yoga, that’s harder than it looks), then they squabble about which grade is the correct one.
Ethan imagines that Zo is by his side, that he can hold up the scene like an exhibit in a court case. See? he says to Imaginary Zo, the Zo who isn’t here, the version of Zo who isn’t at this very second wearing a mouth guard, a face mask, and boxing gloves, punching something, or someone, again and again. Things go on, he tells her. Look: there is Nancy pouring the same variety of beans into the same coffee grinder. There is the framed art on the walls, the peaceful Starkfie
ld green on the other side of the glass.
Yes, the world out there is a mess. Yes, we have to stay vigilant, vote, do what we can. And we will. Of course we will. But look around at how easy things can still be if we let them. If we trust in time, in the world, in each other, in the arc of history bending toward justice and all of that, everything will be okay.
You were right, he insists, but I was too.
That’s the thing he longs to say above all: I was right. Because here we are. See all the normal that still exists? See the way other people are able to go on with their lives? The world is, at its heart, still ordinary.
What is there to fear in such an ordinary world?
* * *
—
Which version of Alex will Ethan find this morning? It’s a daily question, the answer never sure. It could be Foggy Alex: disorganized and dreamy, poky about getting ready but generally pleasant. It could be Big Energy Alex, the child who bounces all over the house like an overcaffeinated Tigger. Or, in a worst-case scenario, it could be Angry Alex: the kid who loses her temper, slams doors, refuses to put on her shoes.
He’s surprised to find Alex already at the table shaking out a box of Cap’n Crunch—healthy breakfasts have become another post-election casualty. “Maddy woke me up,” Alex announces brightly. She pours a carton of oat milk on top of the cereal, from a height that guarantees a mess. “She said I was going to be late for school.”
So perhaps this is the rarest version of all: Easy Alex, the pleasant, right-side-of-the-bed variety. Ethan kisses Alex on the head, notes that her hair smells vaguely ripe—the kid’s old enough to have BO, but not yet old enough to care.