by Nell Zink
She told Daniel. He said she should acquiesce, because they had nothing to lose.
They spent more time shopping for stage gear than practicing. Pam bought a seventies maxi dress made of polyester double knit with a green-and-orange flower print. Daniel bought a paisley shirt and bell-bottoms. They told Eloise that their sound was pastoral industrial. Their band name was Marmalade Skye, with an e.
Their set was nothing if not harmless. But after years of wrestling with unforgiving mainframes and diffuse guilt, Pam felt like a rebellious self-emancipator for doing something as silly as singing in public. Music wasn’t her art project anymore. It was a skittish but real and ancient phenomenon that manifested unpredictably, like wild birds or butterflies. She looked up to it.
It was the influence of Flora’s violin playing. The child had been raised on two-minute songs performed solo a cappella, so she played phrases with climaxes and denouements. Pam in her youth had argued that any given random noise was more musical than all classical music combined, the performance of which was unbecoming submission to the hegemonic dead. After Flora started with Bach and Mozart, forced originality in culture began to remind her of fads in clothing. Art: ways of reinventing the wheel as all different polygons.
The mellifluous, monotonous Marmalade Skye songs rolled along like perfect circles, unoriginal music of the simplest stripe. She’d been playing rudimentary guitar for so long, she could do it in her sleep. Daniel was a competent sample looper. She didn’t feel she’d shifted from punk to folk. Punk was all folk to her now—bleating, repetitive, self-satisfied—compared to the loving exploration of inner space she heard when Flora played.
Onstage she felt a little ashamed of herself for not playing music, but she enjoyed getting away with it. As an emotion, it was nothing new.
After the gig, she said as much to Eloise. “Sorry I can’t sing worth a shit,” she said. “I sound like Jane Birkin, or that chick from My Bloody Valentine. Halfway through the first song, I’m already too hoarse to do anything but whisper.”
“That is such fiction. I can’t wait to book you again.”
“I still wish I could sing.”
“You should get vocal training. This opera expert I interviewed last month told me it’s not like playing the piano, where you have to start when you’re little to be any good. The fine-motor stuff for singing is all the same as talking. They have opera stars who started when they were thirty-five!”
“That’s an interesting idea.”
“What’s interesting?” Daniel said, handing them each a shot of Ramazzotti.
“Voice lessons.”
“I’m in favor,” he said. “Learn to sing. We’ll scale up to pastoral-industrial gothic.”
“Why were you interviewing an opera expert?” Pam asked Eloise.
“It was for Talk of the Town, in The New Yorker.”
“Was his name Simon?” Daniel asked, addressing his wife’s key unspoken concern.
“No,” Eloise said. “Andrea. In Italy it’s a boy’s name. He gives people singing lessons all the time. I could give him your number!”
“My bad,” Daniel said, patting Pam’s arm. “The world of opera is bigger than I thought.”
“This town’s big enough for two opera experts,” she said. “Now you know why I stay here.”
XIV.
Flora’s career in secondary education roughly coincided with the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), formally launched in 2005. “Sustainable” development was meant to supplant a purely exploitative relationship between creditor and debtor nations with something better suited to the ideals of globalization. “Globalization” was defined as lifting barriers to investment in former colonies. Under globalization, ruined landscapes, stripped of all but the skeletal remains of their former cultural autonomy and techniques of economic subsistence, would develop export industries rich in competitive wage labor.
Flora’s earth science class did a unit on the Sahel zone, south of the Sahara. Life there was becoming unsustainable. The rains were staying away, and there was a population explosion. Everywhere, there was poverty—no help for the sick. Of course the Sahel had enough water. It just wasn’t being used sustainably. Flora’s working group was supposed to come up with a better plan. They couldn’t tell standing oats from barley, but they made amaranth bread in a solar cooker and wrote a presentation on how it could alleviate overgrazing.
When she told her father she had baked bread for a school project on the sustainable use of tributaries of Lake Chad, he said, “What is this? Home economics on steroids?”
DANIEL BELIEVED IN SUSTAINABILITY TOO, BUT HIS VERSION CAME STRAIGHT FROM Kierkegaard, the prelude to whose tractate Either/Or suggests a life modeled on crop rotation. To counter the monotony, change it up.
He was rehearsing every Wednesday in Chelsea with a funk band called the Steve Bartman Incident. Pam called it Band of Dentists. The singer, drummer, alto sax, and drummer’s wife, on trumpet, were all dentists. Daniel had met three of them at a reggae concert he went to by himself. They were midwestern and lived in Jersey and thought he was a very cool guy. They had a cult following for a monthly gig at a roller rink in South Amboy. His job was to blast out two-chord riffs on a Hammond organ. They didn’t mind that he was a beginner. They preferred a keyboard player who didn’t want to solo.
The Steve Bartman Incident turned a profit. Daniel had never made money from music before. He found it very pleasant.
The band’s devotees were creaky best agers. They struggled to put their skates on, groaned as they stood up, and soared away like birds. They danced holding each other tight, the women skating backward, the men deftly steering, swooping across the floor from one barrier wall to the other at alarming speed. At first they scared Daniel—he thought they were all going to die in crashes—but soon he compared them to seals: ungainly and awkward on land, graceful and powerful in their native element.
FLORA WAS OLD ENOUGH TO COME UP TO NEW YORK ON THE TRAIN. IN THE UNMIXED opinion of her parents, she was a pleasure to be around. She never complained of boredom or loneliness. Her friends were always with her, in her smartphone. It reduced a clique of shrieking teenagers to silent speech bubbles in a chat program. For the adults, it was a godsend.
She showed them sides of New York they’d never seen. They finally saw the Morgan Library from the inside. They ate at Tavern on the Green, which they knew only from movies. They toured the Cloisters and the Frick Collection and watched her light a candle for peace at Trinity Church. They attended classical concerts at Lincoln Center and saw a City Opera production of The Magic Flute. Whatever they did, they were home by one A.M., because Daniel still didn’t have a key to the two-pound tubular lock on the shop’s security gate.
Secretly, alerting no one, Flora bought a canister of acidic cleaning powder and dumped it in the Chrystie Street toilet, rendering its interior shiny white. From her own money, she replaced the shower curtain. Her changes failed to be noticed or remarked upon. Finally she washed the windows. That conspicuous and dangerous activity got Pam’s attention. She asked Flora what on earth she was doing. She said that now that they were hippies instead of punks, they must want to let the sunshine in.
“Hippies live like dogs in their own filth,” Pam replied. “The elegant solution would be to cover the windows in layers of clear plastic and pull them off one at a time. I should patent that.”
“That would be an ecological disaster, when they come clean with vinegar and old newspapers.” Flora stepped back to reveal newly visible soot-blackened brick walls and a dying pagoda tree.
“What are you now, our tidy little hausfrau?”
At her next opportunity, two hours later, Flora begged Daniel to please tell her mother that despite attending a girls’ school, she was not a housewife in training. “She needs to stop labeling me,” she said. “I’m not ‘feminine’ just because I like stuff clean!”
He didn’t like the misogynistic way she hissed the wor
d “feminine,” but he said, “You can say that again.”
“Her gender is cockroach. She eats croissants in bed!”
“Your mother’s gender journey is ongoing. She just bought her first ponytail holder.”
“What’s feminine about ponytails?”
“You’ll have to forgive us,” he said. “We grew up in a dialectical world. Everything was binary. Race, gender, the global order, class warfare, the whole nine yards. Computers are still binary, so there’s never going to be any hope for your mom.”
She picked up her phone, and he flattered himself that his quip would be going straight to Facebook.
He saw her post late that night. She had garnered dozens of likes for a claim that everything’s binary when you’re on the spectrum.
He had often remarked that she was an art project, his accidental magnum opus. Only then did he realize what kind: an oracle. By growing up in the present, she acquired the ability to transmit coded hints about the future. Apparently something about the present was warning the inheritors of the future not to take sides.
ETHICS INSTRUCTION AT CATHEDRAL DIDN’T EMPHASIZE RELIGION OR COMMANDMENTS. The imperative to love one’s neighbor as oneself is wasted on teenage girls, and explicit prohibitions just give them ideas. Instead it focused on harm reduction. All self-destructive behaviors were to be reported to the authorities immediately.
In tenth grade, Flora saw that a friend of hers was living unsustainably. Shanaya was a year behind her in school and a competent pianist. They played chamber music together recreationally, mostly Brahms and Schumann. In her off-hours, Shanaya took pills she couldn’t identify and hung out with older boys. Flora’s dilemma was that there was nothing she could do to slow her down except turn her in by confiding in an adult. The penalty for drug abuse by Cathedral students was immediate expulsion.
In cases of ethical conflict, she regularly turned to the church. Not to its doctrines or its personnel, but its architecture. The cathedral was a quiet place of enforced introspection, a retreat where she could reflect safe from interruption. In the gap between fifth period and an orchestra rehearsal, she knelt on a cushion dedicated to Harriet Tubman, folded her hands as though in prayer, and asked herself, What would Flora do? The saints looked on expressionless, almost rolling their eyes, it was such a no-brainer. Flora was about forbearance and tolerance, not about being a snitch and getting people shitcanned from high school.
Several weeks later, Shanaya passed out in the loft space over a pharmacy on Connecticut Avenue and was summarily raped (it didn’t take long) by the pharmacist’s son, a senior at Episcopal. She shared the news with Flora the next morning at six thirty, by text message, before appearing at first period no more bedraggled than usual. Flora was distraught. She realized too late that absolution should be reserved to higher powers. She confronted Shanaya outdoors before lunch, saying she was in denial about her trauma and had to be helped. Also, the boy shouldn’t get away with it. She needed to go to the emergency room. Surely she was not his first victim, nor his last.
“You’re a prude,” Shanaya replied. “I don’t care whether I’m a so-called virgin. I didn’t ‘have sex.’ I was unconscious! Let him brag if he wants. We were alone. Nobody posted pictures.”
“But he raped you, right?”
“Listen, if I turn him in, the only thing that happens is I go to some rehab clinic full of addicts. Honestly, I’d rather be raped under anesthesia than get locked up in a mental hospital. Now I’m sorry I told you. I was surprised. I didn’t think he was that big of a tool.”
“I should not have let it happen,” Flora replied firmly.
“It was experiential education,” Shanaya said, not understanding the reference to Flora’s idea of drawing official attention to her habits. “I’m fine.”
She was not entirely fine. The pharmacist’s son had given her genital warts. But soon afterward, he also gave her the medication needed to treat them, so no harm done. Her wellness remained unshaken, and no one was the wiser but Flora, who felt from thenceforth that other people’s lives might not be the best place to apply her ethics training. From that day forward she hung back from gossip, contributing only the knowing asides that even the nerdiest Cathedral maidens knew secondhand from movies and TV. Shanaya had unwittingly steered her toward a lasting preoccupation with regulatory frameworks.
PAM AND GINGER GOSSIPED ABOUT THE CHILD FREQUENTLY, COMING TO NO DEFINITE conclusion. Pam had demanded her freedom early in life, and Ginger had achieved hers late. Flora didn’t seem to feel confined. She and her friends led the lives of younger children. They didn’t shave their legs or tweeze their eyebrows. They collected graphic novels and kept scrapbooks. They demanded music lessons and gathered around the TV to sing show tunes. At age sixteen, Flora had been to Ghana and Costa Rica on school exchange programs, and she could ramble on and on about Lake Chad, but she had never been on a date and showed no intention of trying. When Ginger asked whether there was a special boy in her life, her response was always the same special grimace.
Pam opined that Flora had the submissive personality of a traditional girl, and that was why she dressed like a pixie from an age before sex. When she wasn’t in her school uniform, she wore leggings under long tops. In cooler weather she enveloped herself in hooded sweatshirts large enough to serve as overcoats. “Or maybe she’s just uncorrupted, for all I know,” she said to Ginger on the phone. “It’s not like becoming a sexually active drug user was my idea. Maybe the kid is what happens when girls make it to sixteen without being abused.”
“You were sexually abused?”
“I don’t mean abused-abused! But when I think back, I have trouble coming up with even one kiss that was a good time. I knew such horrible boys. You know how they force their tongue on you, and you’re like ‘bleah,’ but you let them do it anyway, because you think you’re supposed to be into it?” (The word “kiss” was a metonymic stand-in.)
“I don’t think she would put up with a bad kisser for even a second.”
“She’s so spoiled. Like a princess—but I don’t mean it that way. I don’t hate and envy my own daughter. Jesus.”
“I know you’re not saying these things to hurt anyone. You have a right to be honest.”
“What I mean is I feel like she has it so easy, and I don’t even know why or how. Because if you look at her, you feel like obviously the world has gotten better for girls. But it hasn’t, has it? Guys are such openly sexist assholes now.”
“Not the boys her age. They’re living dolls.”
“All of them?”
“Well, the ones she knows.”
“She knows boys?”
“When the girls are watching musicals, sometimes they have boys over to help with the singing.”
“Those boys are gay.”
“Not in the least! They’re physically demonstrative but very sweet. That’s what nice boys are like now. There are still plenty of awful boys. She calls them ‘bras,’ the way you always talked about ‘jocks.’”
Pam thought it over briefly and said, “The elegant solution is that men have become such complete monsters that they’re all delaying puberty. Or men are such monsters that girls are delaying social puberty? I ‘became a woman’ the day I got my period. Probably now it starts when you go on the Pill. I mean, if I called a thirteen-year-old a ‘woman’ now, they’d register me as a sex offender.”
“It certainly simplifies growing up,” Ginger said. “Did I ever tell you how one of the reasons I didn’t want you going to private school was that I thought the uniforms were too sexy? They were the most popular fetish among the men I knew. The Lolita look!”
“I don’t believe you. The International School doesn’t have a uniform. I could have worn jeans and still gone to private school.”
“But you always wanted to wear those little hockey skirts, no matter what. I couldn’t stop you. Everybody was in jeans, but you insisted. It had to be a plaid miniskirt.”
Momentarily,
Pam pondered the notion that her punk rock look might inadvertently have conformed to a school uniform fetish. There could be something to it. After all, punk was a fashion originated by middle-aged entrepreneurs in London. There was something potentially skin-crawlingly humiliating about it. Her rebellion against the power and competence that proper clothing conveyed had taken the form of looking like a child, in an era when a child was someone to abuse with impunity. She said, “I was punk rock. I didn’t have a choice.”
“The only pants you ever asked for,” Ginger reminisced, “were those shiny black ones with little zippers everywhere. I thought they were much too sexy for a fifteen-year-old.”
“Any fifteen-year-old who thinks she needs bondage pants to be sexy should be seeing a shrink!”
“You were never sexy,” her mother corrected her. “You know men have a preference for clear skin and long hair. Your father always said you looked like a greasy white rat.”
“I know,” she said. “I remember.”
XV.
The Great Recession hit Victor and Margie hard. They had invested in tract homes upstate. The houses were deep underwater, with unsustainable mortgage balances that dwarfed their value. They couldn’t unload them. Instead of making money, they were losing more every day. They resolved to sell the property on Chrystie Street to pay their debts so they could retire in peace to their niece’s place in Boston.
When they told Daniel they were evicting him, he said, “I get it. Buy high, sell low. Works for me!” To their plans for the upstate houses, he said, “Let the capitalist running dogs foreclose. Serves them right!” Possibly it was imprudent on his part to resort to sarcasm and sound financial principles rather than a warm appeal to their long friendship. They raised his monthly rent to $900. But they didn’t turn him out.
In the downturn he was fairly idle, but he couldn’t claim to mind, having just finished a two-year administrative assignment at Consolidated Edison. He’d been tangentially involved with some interesting close calls—the company maintained a gallery of survivors’ melted helmets and scorched gloves and coveralls—but still, two years is a long time.