The photo was part of a multi-artist retrospective, curated less to discuss a school or approach than to cater to nostalgia for a certain era in New York. Shows like these are a dime a dozen here, and they are not of the sort I seek out, having lost most interest I might have had in the type of lives and rooms they always feature. Bare mattresses on the floor, curtains that are not curtains, enormous telephones off the hook, the bodies always thin but never healthy. Eyes shadowed in lilac, men in nylon nighties pour liquor from brown paper bags into their mouths. A woman with a black eye laughs, her splayed thigh printed with menstrual blood. These photographs are in color, the light strictly natural. There is always some museumgoer finding her imprimatur there, looking affirmed and clarified about the ragged way she’d arrived feeling.
That day I had come to the museum for a show of paintings, landscapes of Maine refashioned with a particular pink glow the painter must have felt when he saw what inspired them. I was wearing a shirt that buttoned high on my neck, and my rose-gold watch, vintage, which I had just repaired. The wedding ring remained. It wasn’t that I had any hopes for reconciliation, but its persistence on my finger was a way of matching inside to out. I needed to be reminded, when I caught myself deep in a years-old argument with my husband, alone and furious on the mostly empty midday subway, that he had been real—that my unhappiness was not only some chemical dysfunction of mine.
I decided to take the stairs, and then to pass through the exhibit in question: I had an hour to spare, and I thought it might be an interesting metric. How little I related could be the proof of a transformation I had undergone, a maturation evident in how I saw and felt. When my husband met me, twenty-two to his forty, he saw a girl with a rough kind of potential, and he tended to me as one might a garden, offering certain benefits and taking others away. He did not wish me to grow in just any direction. That I allowed him this speaks just as poorly of me. I was once a girl with an exquisite collection of impractical dresses—ruched chiffon, Mondrian prints—and a social smoking habit, a violent way with doors and windows. I left him in taupes, my arches well supported, my thinking framed in apology. It is true there were parts of me that must have been difficult to live with, namely an obsessive thought pattern concerning various ways I might bring about my own death, but also clear that I rose to the occasion of this malady with rosy dedication, running miles every day and recording the impact of this on my mind, conceiving of elaborate meals, the hedonistic pleasures of which I believed spoke to my commitment to life. Could a person who roasted three different kinds of apples for an autumn soup really be capable of suicide? I asked him this question laughing, wooden spoon aloft, during an argument about a drug I did not want to take. Doesn’t the one cancel out the other, leaving you with a basically normal wife? They could delight me, my obsidian jokes, but he saw them hanging from me like statement jewelry, heavy, aggressive, things that could not be forgotten even as I spoke, quietly and practically, about the empirical world. He began not to trust me on issues I saw as unrelated: what a neighbor had said about a vine that grew up our shared fence, a letter from the electric company that I claimed to have left on his desk.
I passed through the contiguous rooms, high-ceilinged and white, as briskly as could be called civilized. Whatever my feelings about the work, I never want to be one of those people rushing through a museum, intent on immunity—I was here, their bodies say, and that was it. It is true I sometimes court discomfort, that I will deny my headache an antidote, and that I don’t expect to feel the same way from one hour to the next. This was a quality my husband feared, then hated. That’s the usual trajectory, it might be said. If we don’t talk to the thing we are afraid of, it becomes the thing we hope to kill.
All the people in the room were young women, and I felt tenderly toward them, their damaged wool and winged eyeliner and overstuffed shoulder bags. They interested me more than the photos. What could I tell them, from just the other side of thirty, except that things did not seem to exist on the continuum we needed them to—so little of life was a rejoinder to something said or done earlier, the opportunity to, as school had often demanded, show what you had learned. Your real self was mostly revealed in negotiation with the unforeseen element. How did you behave when the emergency room bill arrived, triple the estimate? When someone you loved was suffering, how long did it take for you to wonder about a life that didn’t include her? I had saddled up to one of them, the girls, whose face intrigued me particularly, a saturation of peachy freckles she had made no attempt to cover up. Hanging there, the object over which she was pouring her young mind, was my mother.
As far as I knew, my mother had lived in New York City for only six unfortunate months. The image I associate with them is not a photo of her looking bewildered by the Rockefeller tree or exposed on the steps of the Met—they don’t exist—but rather a gesture she would make, at her suburban dining table, if ever asked to describe her time there: a low hook of the hand, swiped an inch or two to the left. Total dismissal. Sometimes, on the rare occasions she’d had more than her characteristic half-a-glass with dinner, a blush and a remark. I had no idea what I was doing there, she would say, and pat the hand of my father, the ostensible representative of a life she found a year later and understood quite a bit better.
About the photo in the museum, I will tell you this: my mother looks like someone who knows exactly what she is doing.
Seeing her like that, I started to cough and I could not stop. There is very little ambiguity about what has gone on in the pictured bedroom that contains her, shot from just outside it so that the leftmost third is a slice of peeling door, paint riddled with thumbtacks. There is the characteristic mattress, right on the floor, the open window and fire escape. There is some rubber tubing, knotted in places, elevated above the usual detritus on a milk crate. The inner sleeves of records, the cellophane casings of cigarette packs, a battered silk tie one must assume, from its crippled shape, has been used otherwise. That time passed for me, there in front of the photo, was a separate cruelty, for it came with no palliative or normalizing effect, and so the third minute I took it in elided with the ninth and the twelfth. A German tourist, the kind of spokesperson for a concerned and patient group of them, touched a finger to the back of my elbow. It was clear, from the damp focus of their faces on mine, that it was not the first time he had spoken the word in my direction. “Please,” he said. “Please,” I replied, stepping back so that they could see her.
Though all identifiable marks were in place, the mole I had liked to press at the base of her jaw, the gap in her eyebrow from a childhood accident with the Girl Scouts, there was nothing about my mother’s facial expression I recognized. It had not come up in her rare flirtations with anger, episodes about which she felt embarrassment for days. A faulty appliance without a warranty, a time I had, at fifteen, responded rudely to an elderly neighbor’s offer of homemade rice pudding—Ev, whose teeth looked to me like towns devastated by hurricanes. Young lady, my mother had said, that the cruelest thing she could think to call me, your days aren’t any bigger than hers. Even before she was ill my mother was a diminishing creature, eliminating distinctive or inconvenient parts of herself by the year. At fifty she stopped wearing the perfume she had for decades, her one luxury, thinking an insistence on a certain scent was an affectation of the young. What do people need to smell me for, she said, with a horsey puff of air out the side of her mouth. Once, from the passenger seat during a trip home, I watched her wait patiently while the man driving the car in front of us, by all observations asleep at the otherwise empty intersection, leaned farther across the wheel. Honk, I said, but my mother would not honk. Honey, have you considered he might need the sleep? Choose a radio station, for God’s sake. There are some good ones around here, you know.
The Germans had formed a barrier around my mother, talking and gesturing, so I exited the museum, taking the stairs as my husband had always insisted. A little bit of exercise was a phrase he kept spring-load
ed. The gap in our ages was hardly noticeable to others, and I had often imagined the point when the stunning preservation of his youth would overtake the rapid deterioration of mine. Growing up his beliefs as their rigidity dictated, I was something like an espalier, the distance between the vine and the thing that trained it almost imperceptible. I wanted to call him, to wash his reasonable pragmatism all over the issue of the illicit photo, but our terms would not allow it. I can’t deal with another crisis, my husband would say, the last year we were together, in response to vexes I saw as relatively small, a mix-up at the pharmacy over the drug I agreed to take, some passive-aggressive email from a student I read out loud in the kitchen, hoping to parse. I can tell you’re in a state, he would say, hands raised like an outdated television preacher. Rather than responding to my speaking, he took to waving at it, scenery to be considered later with the right amount of rest and reflection.
I can’t imagine the man, he said more than once, who would have an easy time living with you. This hurt particularly, for he had a fabulous imagination—a jaunty talent with a colored pencil, a habit of coming up with a song on the spot, a fond feeling for the absurdity of animals. I began keeping a tally of my behavior, days I had been so anxious at the incursion of these thoughts that I wept or went sleepless, others when my charm had been big and flexible. On a New Year’s we hosted, I built fantastical hats of construction paper and balloons, things that looked like cities of the future. On his forty-fifth birthday, in the park near our house, I hid his ten favorite people behind his ten favorite trees, and guided him on the snowy walk to discover them. I always scanned his face, on occasions like these, for a look of recognition, one that would say, Here, here you are.
Contact between us now consisted mainly of three words, even the contraction never parted into its constituents. Hope you’re well, he wrote. Hope you’re well, I wrote. Hope you’re well! Hope you’re well! The statement never altered into a question, and with time it began to read to me as a kind of threat, beveled, ingenious. To his last hope you’re well, six weeks before, I had not replied, and I believed that was the end he had in mind. Pills in a blender with strawberry ice cream, I thought. An email scheduled a day ahead of time with very clear instructions. We had been separated a year.
On the outdoor patio of the museum the tourists were unhappy, scratching their fat ankles, saying how far is it, how far, how much. It was midsummer, a time in New York I have always loved and dreaded for how it keeps no secrets, all smells and feelings arriving fully formed, unavoidable. I called my father. Since the separation from my husband he has been unsure of how to relate to me, in part because the small knots and amusements of domestic partnership were the only aspect of my life that mirrored any part of his. He had sometimes liked hearing what I was cooking, and always about the expensive and malfunctioning alarm system my husband had purchased. What, did it go off in the middle of the night again? my father asked once, excited enough that he was a little short of breath.
“Hey, it’s me,” I said.
“It’s you.”
“Do you know about this photo of Mom?” I referred to this without any introduction, I suppose because I felt I had been deprived of one and so wouldn’t be offering such consideration to him.
“What’s that?”
“There’s this photo of Mom in a museum here.”
I had to repeat myself several times, and when the point had been made and I had told him I was sure, he paused, the way he always did to gesture that my mother pick up the other phone in the hall. He could not kill the habit. I had seen this a million times, his left hand scooping the air up, the other pointer raised. She would stop whatever she was doing, leave the sentence unread, the sandwich half-assembled, so that they could hear together what it was the mechanic had to say, the second cousin with the coupon obsession. Visiting meant listening to the conversation of theirs that never ended, mundane talk that went on until they’d shut off their bedside lamps and sometimes after. Passing their room in the middle of the night once, I heard my father say, it must have been in his sleep, It’s the damn compressor, and my mother reply, without missing a beat, You bet your ass it is.
“She was a looker, wasn’t she? What is it, some kind of—do they call it street photography?”
“No,” I said. I described in euphemism what was occurring in the photo.
“There’s been some mistake,” my father answered, finally, resolutely. “That’s your eyes playing tricks on you.”
It was one of a thousand precooked phrases he had on hand: canary in a coal mine, teach a man to fish, taste of your own medicine. Language to him was the same set of formations and markers, certain maxims always leading the way to others. After you pulled up your bootstraps, you reaped what you sowed. It was something he had adopted in recovery, I thought, the beginnings of which took place a decade before I was born. For my whole life, he had referred to himself that way: in recovery. It seemed cruel to me one had to adopt that title for the duration of living, but for my father it became a helpful boundary, a gate he could close on any conversation he wanted. As a child I had found the overheard expression comforting, repeated it to myself on anxious walks home from school. Thinking of a game whose rules I had failed to understand, the nubbly red Spalding that had flown past me, I would say, with mimicked weariness, You know, I’m in recovery.
He started to talk about television, a corner to which he often retreated when uncomfortable. It was a reliable tactic for how it bored and frustrated me, and ensured I’d be off the phone sooner than otherwise. “Well, there’s a show you wouldn’t believe,” he said. “It’s called Naked and Afraid. Well, they drop these people off on an island somewhere, and they don’t give them any clothes.” He always used that interjection, well, when describing something he was happy to have no part in. Shortly thereafter I said goodbye.
By the next morning I had decided to email the photographer, but thought first I needed to return to the museum and take a photo of the photo. In the afternoon I taught, a creative writing workshop for people of nineteen and twenty, a task I could keep myself alive to only by pacing the rectangular formation of tables—as if by directing my voice from different corners of the room I had better chance at some diplomatic pluralism in my thinking. We were talking about figurative language, and I wondered aloud how close a simile should get to the character’s actual life and circumstances: in comparing her inner sadness to the color of her dress, weren’t we depriving the reader of some useful speculative distance?
“No,” said an opera singer with four names who despised me. “I literally love that.”
There was always one student who hated me. This was a problem I could solve more easily with young men, pretending to lessen my authority while I sharpened my argument. But with girls it was never clear, for their hatred was much more original, multifaceted, and they clung to it even while enjoying whichever dialectic I’d introduced to distract them. They could entertain my line of reasoning while deriding the person beneath it. The opera singer had a habit, raising her hand against my litany of leading questions, of pointing out some aspect of my appearance. There’s a hair on your jacket, your top button undone, that lace about to untie, a little something on your face. She made me wish I was only a voice, piped into the room and delivered by speakers placed along its windows.
On my way off campus, feeling comforted by the architecture and landscape, the Doric columns and rectilinear hedges, I called my father again, prepared to meet somewhere closer in feeling to him, accept his denial and negotiate with it. No one answered the home number he’d kept, and when he picked up his cell phone he did so with an exaggerated element of surprise. It was clear just from the way he said hello that he was not going to acknowledge the conversation we’d had, that he’d hoped to forgive me it as he might anyone’s spike in emotion, something attributable to hunger or fatigue.
“Honey, you ever wake up and want a hamburger so bad you believe you could will it into being? I fi
nally gave up. I’m at the grocery store now, my poor soul.”
“I want to apologize for yesterday,” I said. “I hope I didn’t upset you.”
“Ants at a picnic,” he replied. “You went with your gut.” There was a slight delay to his speech, like he was trying to describe something moving to someone who couldn’t see it, hoping to determine a pattern before he put it into words. When I began to continue he cut me off, telling me it was time for him to get in line.
In the last hour the museum was open, the exhibition was even more crowded, and I waited politely while a young couple holding hands observed the warped circle of my mother’s mouth. The thoughts had not totally ceased since leaving my husband, but because there was no one else to assign them any importance, they were less of a source of alarm. I have a friend who lives in an apartment where the door can be opened only with a wrench, but it doesn’t keep her from leaving. Anything can be lived around, so long as it’s only you who has to do it. The betrayal of my mind, when we were together, had seemed to my husband like a betrayal of him, of the life that looked like a happy one. A hotel suite uptown, I thought, a maid you’d somehow apologize to beforehand.
My husband had met my mother just once before she was ill, a lunch where he had paid and she had been impressed, and then he knew her for the five weeks she was vanishing. Despite her embarrassment at having to die, she was generous about allowing him into it, often saying how nice it was to be spending so much time with him, and he was saintly with her, crushing her pills into water when he saw swallowing was an issue, making sure she heard her name spoken lightly. These were the sorts of problems he took to with alacrity, ailments and logistics, a crooked angle or a smudged glass. To this day I cannot look at a man who is looking at a map, for it recalls him so totally, how happily he believed in things reduced to their signifiers. At first he delighted in my missing sense of direction, asking me with wide eyes where I thought I might be going, but in the end it infuriated him, the time I might take for just any left. That’s not teaching you anything, he would say, when I raised the map on my phone to pull up a list of directions. Did he believe a certain native impracticality of mine was part of the same looseness in the world that made me want to leave it? During trips he’d spread a brittle map on the trunk of the rental car and say, Just take a minute alone with this. Tell me what you think the best way is. Perhaps he thought the problem was margins, that if I could better plan A to B in the physical world, avoiding tolls and traffic, then in my mind, too, I could ignore the periphery. A downtown six you might leap toward like a deer, I thought, pliant, ready for what it would do to you.
The Best American Short Stories 2019 Page 5