Drastic

by Maud Casey

  Lizzie rises from her slump next to George, eager to earn Kevin’s forgiveness for the other night. “Why do you assume it’s a man?” She looks to Kevin, but he is focused intensely on his banana bread.

  George goes red and takes his plate into the kitchen, which has become the designated safe zone. He runs water, pretends to wash dishes.

  “No cornfed strappers—man, woman, or beast,” I say.

  Lanie comes to my rescue. She takes my hand, pulling me up from my seat as if she were asking me to dance. “Enough of this silliness,” she announces. “These sisters are going upstairs.”

  Restraint of Speech

  There are times when silence is better, even, than good words. Saint Benedict discovered this when he renounced his world in the sixth century—the Roman empire disintegrating all around him, emperors being deposed in the midst of constant war. He went to live in a cave thirty miles east of Rome, in search of structure, security, and stability.

  “Silence works to counteract our culture of anxiety,” Elliot told me. The snow that first winter in Illinois seemed to fall constantly, rendering the world, our world inside his office, doubly silent.

  It happened the first time as if by accident, but looking back I see there was nothing accidental about it, that in fact it grew organically out of studying people whose lives were efforts at controlled meditation. Halfway into it, I took a step in his direction, on the brink, moving toward him not because I wanted to but because I thought that was the right thing to do; the instinct to share that blast of pleasure seemed appropriate after the slow, teasing seduction of watching each other remove our own clothes, watching each other’s hands as they moved down to begin their steady, rhythmic work.

  But Elliot stopped me. “Stay there,” he said softly from where he stood on the other side of his desk, naked, his hand moving in swift measured strokes.

  Soon the routine became clear—when I arrived, the day would be circled on the hanging calendar made by the Benedictine brotherhood of Saint John’s, each month a spare pencil drawing depicting scenes with titles like The Good Zeal of Monks, Brothers on a Short Journey, or The Times for the Brothers’ Meals. The day circled was never fixed, but once a week, there it would be. The first day, the scene depicted was The Sleeping Arrangements of the Monks. I’ve learned to look without looking as if I’m looking—a quick, imperceptible turn of my head as I walk through Elliot’s office door. Will we retreat to the cave today? Yes, I take my place, my body already a dull purr, readying itself for the steady hum. No, we hit the books, turning away from our desires, plunging instead into the comprehension of these strange men who sometimes sleep in their clothes so they can be ready to serve God immediately upon rising.

  Most people assume monks are celibate, that they’ve rung out the last vestiges of sexual want drop by drop. But it is possible for monks to integrate a new, refigured sexuality into a constant dialogue with common love and monastic celibacy. There is instead an intensification, a heightening, a focus. One learns to draw the lines, to avoid foolish chatter lest one slip and slide in a flood of words.

  We do not touch. We do not speak. We never speak. We make no noise, no sounds, no moans or squeals. We do not say each other’s names. In this way I’ve convinced myself that there is room for something else, some altered consciousness between us standing as we do, leaning against opposite walls for support. There are moments when I feel an invisible presence in the room with us, a wind in the sealed office blowing through me, the moment rising up out of our combined efforts, to skim my soul. We limit our movements. We move our hands just enough. We wait for each other, slowing down to let the other catch up, always monitoring the pace, and when the time comes, we turn away. Though we have never articulated any of the terms of our arrangement, there is an unspoken agreement that we will not look, that the final moment is each of ours to have privately.

  Just once, I caught Elliot looking at me as he came into the trashcan lined with a plastic bag. “I am truly a worm, not a man,” he said when he saw that I’d seen him looking. And for days afterward, I turned his words over in my mind—did he mean to begin a conversation? was it a conversation I wanted to be a part of? hadn’t I achieved a celibacy of my own? would I sacrifice that? I spent long nights, tiny in my bed, staring out my window at the vast sky wondering what Elliot might offer me in the way of comfort, allowing myself to imagine the unwashed, sleepy skin-smell of it, the sound of my name in his mouth surrounded by tenderness, the salty ocean taste of him. The words began to seem, after twisting and turning them, strangely familiar. A week later, I came across the line—I am truly a worm, not a man—in The Rule of Saint Benedict, a recommendation, a mantra for life.

  Obedience

  Downstairs, I hear my father’s voice straining to be heard—“Americans have faith in faith”—as, midsentence, my mother begins to slide the vacuum cleaner around the room, sucking up the crumbs under the legs of the breakfast table.

  “For Christ’s sake,” my father shouts over the sound.

  “Here we go again with Christ. Poor guy,” Bernadette says, as my mother turns off the vacuum.

  “I didn’t realize we were having a serious conversation anymore,” my mother says.

  “Sit down next to me,” George says. My mother is his favorite aunt. “Sit here, and talk to me.”

  In Lanie’s old room, dusty sunlight comes through the windows in patterns that slice Lanie into various rectangular sections where she lounges on the bed. I sit on a coffee table that used to be downstairs in the living room, now relegated to Lanie’s room because of concentric circular wood scars made by glasses left too long without coasters.

  “How are you?” I ask Lanie.

  “You know, I’m fine,” she says, looking out the window, over the lawn statues and the yard next door with the cherub fountain spitting that sounds like rain. “Really fine.” She looks out past the yards, beyond our lives, to the horizon.

  “Have you heard from Jack?”

  She falls back on the bed and walks her socked feet up the wall. “Let’s not talk about that. Tell me something about you.”

  “Well,” I say. “I’m not sure what to tell you. I seem to be in a holding pattern. I’m waiting for something to slice the blurry edges off my life, to reveal itself, but I’m not sure what that something is.”

  “That’s it,” she says, sitting up attentively as the conversation turns away from her. “That’s exactly it, Harriet. You postpone pleasure. Look at us here right now. I’m as comfortable as I can possibly be. I’m lying on the bed, and you’re sitting on the edge of a stained, cast-off table. What are you holding out for? You wait, and I luxuriate. You’ve got to work with what you’ve got.”

  “But you’re waiting for Jack.” I throw it back at her. She knows nothing about the facts of my life, but she’s intuited something at its core and it makes me want to humiliate her.

  “Yes, but he’s something,” she says. “You don’t even know what you’re waiting for.”

  “I wish my life were that easily defined,” I snap.

  “I’m sorry,” Lanie says, her voice, that sacred instrument, full of regret. “Yesterday, Jack said he’d call this morning and he hasn’t. This woman, his ex-girlfriend, is almost dead. He’s sitting there in the room with her all day. She can barely whisper, she’s hallucinating. He’s hired a live-in nurse, but he’s staying to keep her company so that she doesn’t have to die with a stranger. I don’t want her to die alone. I don’t want that, but I’m jealous of her with him there, watching over her. I hate him. I hate myself. I want him to call me and tell me she’s dead, that she’s vanished from the earth forever and ever. But when she dies, it’ll be worse. He never got over her, and when she dies he never will. There’s always that one person who fucks you up for life, and he’s going to be mine.” She flips over and squirms across the bed toward me, holds out her hand. “I’m sorry. I’m awful when I’m not married.” I take her hand in both of mine.

  “
I want to show you something I found.”

  I rummage through my bag to retrieve the photograph I stole back from Elliot’s office. It’s worn and faded as if rubbed by fingers longing to go back to that time. Black-robed figures mill around snowy stone buildings in a cold, long-ago place. I first found the picture stuck between the pages of a library book. I held it by one edge as I drove as fast as the stoplights would allow, from my apartment to Elliot at the state university, one of the old Normal schools for teachers where people specialize in facts tiny and hard as ring-size gems. I drove the picture carefully past the false fronts on the brick buildings of Main Street, the few high-rise student dorms stabbing their way into the sky, the rumpled, tree-filled blocks of relaxed midwestern prosperity, heading for Elliot’s office dedicated to the celebration of small things. He couldn’t speak when I gave it to him. He just stood there, his academic awards hanging behind him with his name spelled out in solid strokes of calligraphy suggesting an indelible community. “For that long,” he said, his whisper rustling through his beard, “they’ve been asking each other: How many of us are in vows out of fear rather than love?”

  “They date back to fifth-century Rome,” I tell Lanie.

  “When was this picture taken?”

  “I’m not sure,” I say. “Elliot thinks it was taken around the turn of the century.”

  “Is Elliot the history professor you work for?” Work is a foreign language that Lanie doesn’t speak. When her first husband died he left her money enough to pursue her curiosities with casual abandon, curiosities that have ranged from performance art to day trading.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you love him?” She looks up from the picture. If I did, we would have that in common, loving someone who doesn’t love us back.

  “No,” I say, fairly certain that it’s not him that I love, that what I love is that invisible presence that lies between us. “No, I don’t love him.”

  Lanie and I look back at the monks overcoming the worldly concerns of a life that seems too small, walking the fields searching for a god or anyone to receive the ceremony of their beliefs.

  As Lanie rubs her eye with the back of her hand like a little sister and not a wife for the fourth time, I wonder what all this tying and untying the knot means to her. I wonder what the knot is exactly. I want to know whether marriage for Lanie means safety like a crash helmet or whether it is some sweeter form of security, but I can’t ask these questions because Lanie and I don’t talk this way about her life. I want to tell her that I’m not so much yearning for men as I am yearning for something like what Lanie sees in men, a confirmation of life, a sign that all is well.

  Voices from downstairs erupt through the silence between us.

  “He’s not coming back,” Carl says. “I always told her he was a selfish asshole.”

  “Quiet,” George says.

  “Stay,” my mother says. “All of you. Stay here, just a little longer.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Bernadette exclaims. “Christ on the cross. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

  “Stop it,” Lizzie says. “It’s not funny anymore.”

  “She’s right,” Lanie says. “It’s really not funny.”

  We spend the day in our pajamas. We finish off the mimosas. Tipsy, we wander the house as if its carpeted rooms were all there was to the world. We escape into books, music, the newspaper, draping ourselves across couches, hugging pillows, while Bernadette chain-smokes her cigarillos. At one point Lanie grabs a pillow, inhaling deeply from our childhood, and does a little dance with it. Even my father laughs. When the mimosas begin to wear off, everyone naps. Lanie and I lie down at the foot of George and Lizzie’s pull-out sofa bed to sleep. Lanie’s stomach is my pillow, the soft carpet our bed. I wake up first and peer through a window at my father standing in the driveway as he pulls the cuff of a pant leg up to scratch at his ankle with garden shears. Our mother sits on the edge of the boxed hedges with her head in her hands, talking but not for anyone else to hear.

  Humility

  Lanie jerks in her sleep and says words that punch the night. I stroke her hair until she stops moving. When I was a I child, I thought I would be a different person when I grew up. My hair would not be so stringy, it would be thick and lush and long, and I’d pile it on top of my head in elaborate knots stuck through with pencils and paintbrushes. My skin would go from sunburn pale to a dusky olive hue with mysterious, serious shadows. I would be thin-boned and tall and think thoughts that had never occurred to me before. I’d wake up one day, having memorized passages from important books, with fully formulated, important opinions that stopped people in their tracks. I would always, always finish my sentences. Transformed through a mysterious ritual, my life would be utterly different. There would be something now to show me that I was more than just bigger. But here, in the middle of the night, with Lanie talking in her sleep—Stop going so fast. You’re going too fast—life is endless unmarked territory.

  The door to my parents’ room is the tiniest bit ajar, and through the crack I glimpse my mother pressed against my father’s back, as if she were resting against a wall. In my old room, the door swung wide open, Aunt Bernadette sprawls on her back wheezing her cigarillo breath. I lean against the guest room door to listen to Carl and Kevin’s hushed tones rise and fall in the secret language of couples. Downstairs, Lizzie and George are tangled in each other’s arms, achieving a depth of comfort that eludes them in waking life. I am suddenly and terribly alone. Death is boring. Death is boring. Death is boring.

  Out on the back patio, I wait for my eyes to adjust. Death is boring. Death is boring. In the eerie blue of night, the yards seem full of hidden treasure sunk to the bottom of an ocean. The whole neighborhood is submerged in the watery glow of the moon, like Lanie’s dream the first night we were here—my family swimming through our house filled with water, everyone breathing effortlessly, and finally no talking. A dog barks anonymously from the dark corner of a house but stops once I find the shadows again. I watch for sprinklers lurking in the grass, picking my way through yards as if across minefields.

  The Barbie tribe has been pillaged—Barbies everywhere, knocked over and legs splayed. Some of them have choppy, dull-knife haircuts and lipstick smears on their tiny faces. Death is boring. Death is boring.

  The spitting cherub fountain says I’m almost home. I step over the knee-high stone wall—an unusual variation on the typical faux-wood fence—that separates the house two doors down from the Wallenborns, the family next door who took my father in during my parents’ separation. Death is boring. Death is boring. The lights in their house are out and the house itself seems to be sleeping. The moon reflects off the shallow fountain pool underneath the cherub spitting. I put my face into the cold water so inviting, a relief from the hot summer. I listen to the blood rush through my head. The second time I do it, I’m looking for a different kind of relief. Death is boring. Death is boring. Evolution, natural selection, transcendence, whatever has led me to this moment, I let my head fall like a stone, dipped in the silent splendor of the cold, cold water, not breathing effortlessly, not breathing at all, wanting to feel what it’s like just for a moment to not breathe, to not think, to be that quiet.

  I get a noseful of water and come up sputtering and choking. The yard is flooded with sudden light. The Wallenborns’ house has woken up all at once, each window awash in fluorescent yellow.

  “There, over there,” Mr. Wallenborn screams.

  I spew water.

  “Don’t move. Put your hands up. Get down on the ground.”

  “Honey,” Mrs. Wallenborn says, squeezing her husband’s shoulder, “it’s Harriet.”

  Mr. Wallenborn shines his flashlight onto my dripping face. I hiccup and water dribbles out the side of my mouth. Mr. and Mrs. Wallenborn’s faces are frozen in shock to learn that something so familiar could disturb their night.

  “Aren’t you in Illinois, Harriet?” Mrs. Wallenborn asks.

  My mother, my fathe
r, Aunt Bernadette, Carl, Kevin, George, and Lizzie are standing on the front steps of my parents’ house as Mr. Wallenborn escorts me, his hand on my elbow as if he were escorting me down the aisle. Huge moths click their wings against the front porch light as my mother pulls her sweater closed over her nightgown, though there is no chill in the air.

  “She must have been sleepwalking,” Mr. Wallenborn says.

  “Did she sleepwalk into a pool?” Kevin asks. “Go get a blanket or something,” he says to Carl.

  “Why don’t you get a blanket if you know so much?” Carl says affectionately.

  “I’ll get one,” Lizzie says. She turns to George. “Where do I get a blanket?”

  “I’ll come with you,” George says. He is only half awake, and the spell of their sleeping clinch lingers.

  “Next time, you might find yourself wandering down the middle of a busy street.” Mr. Wallenborn looks at my parents knowingly.

  “Come inside,” my mother says, when she finds her voice. “Let’s go inside. I’ll make some coffee.”

  “In the middle of the night?” Bernadette asks.

  “Decaf,” my mother says, so confused she doesn’t notice that Bernadette is mocking her.

  “Thank you, Joe.” My father shakes Mr. Wallenborn’s hand solemnly—for bringing his daughter safely home, for the time he spent sleeping on his couch, for living day after day in the house next door.

  We gather around the dining room table in our pajamas, including Mr. Wallenborn, who, after politely standing for several minutes to take a few requisite sips of coffee, excuses himself.

  “I don’t want Jean to worry,” he says.

  “Of course not,” my mother says, guiding him to the door with a grateful hand on his shoulder. “Thank you,” she says solemnly, as if he had saved my life.

  “You might want to strap her in tonight.” He nods toward me and then winks at my mother.