Certain American States Read online

  But perhaps it had all been much simpler. Her hysteria hadn’t been, generally, about Paris—it had been about this Jean Marcel character, specifically. His wife was still in love with or had been, then, still in love with someone he had never even heard of, and it was only after finding out there was a possibility that her long-lost darling Jean Marcel had been gunned down that evening in Paris that she experienced, viscerally, how large her feelings were for him.

  He picked up his phone and called her and immediately asked, So that’s why you were so upset about Paris? This guy? And she said, So you read it? And he said, Well, yeah—do you mean the story? And she said, What else would I be talking about?

  Well, actually I’m still reading it, but—

  Still reading?

  I was just reading it, but I wanted to ask you—

  I’m not talking to you about it until you’ve read the whole thing, she said, and hung up.

  He flipped through the remaining pages of the story, taking note of the sentences that spanned a whole column, hulking blocks of grammatically suspect text so rarely relieved by proper punctuation. Well, he wasn’t going to read the whole thing, on command, just because she said so. He didn’t have to do that anymore. He closed the magazine, looked at the cover image and headlines, picked up his phone to look up their circulation numbers, estimated what an advertisement would cost, wondered what she had been paid, and tried to find some information on what a person might be paid for such a story, but while he was scrolling through a three-year-old thread on a messaging board in which several avatars made speculations about what they estimated to be this magazine’s going rate for short fiction and whether it would change based on the relative fame or obscurity of the author, his phone rang and his ex-wife’s name appeared on the screen, as if she could still tell—no matter how far away she was—that he was dicking around instead of reading.

  I’m not done yet, he said to her.

  But I just wanted to say something first. The man in the story, the writer, he’s not supposed to be you or me. He’s no one. He’s an idea. And the same for the woman. She’s a bunch of words. She’s not a person. Okay?

  Fine.

  So whatever you want to ask me about after you’re done with it, it has nothing to do with you and me. Do you understand?

  He threw the phone to the other side of the couch and kept reading about this couple who live in a college town in Kansas (a state he was sure she’d never even visited) and the guy is a novelist and professor (typical) and the woman runs a dog kennel (random) and the woman only seems capable of reacting emotionally to things that happen to the dogs in her kennel or people she’s never met, and the farther away a tragedy occurred from her the more upset she could become, a condition that prevents her, after she learns of a terrorist attack in a nightclub in Paris, from even being able to get out of bed, so the novelist has to use one of his few days off from teaching to care for all the dogs in the kennel in their backyard, while his soon-to-be ex-wife weeps in bed all day, and in between taking care of the dogs the man is dashing back to his office to try to write this story about a young Frenchman who is attacked one night on a narrow street somewhere in Belgium and as he begins to fight off his attacker he is filled with adrenaline and rage he’s unable to rein in and he stomps his attacker’s head in with such force that the attacker either passes out or dies—and the writer in the story relished the seeming inaccuracy and ambiguity of the Frenchman’s memory—and the Frenchman flees the scene, splattered in his own and someone else’s blood, and he tells no one until he tells his American girlfriend some weeks later and the young woman is so horrified that she immediately packs her bags and goes to the airport and as she boards the plane she is overcome with doubt over whether she has done the right thing in leaving him. And when the novelist is finished writing this story within a story he goes to his bedroom to see that his wife has finally gotten up and is getting dressed.

  So your hysteria has passed, I see.

  Hysteria? she asked. How could you possibly use such a word?

  Okay, your … sadness, your very profound and debilitating sadness.

  But you said … hysteria.

  Well, you were in hysterics, he said.

  I was being hysterical?

  He paused. Well. Yes. In fact, you were being hysterical.

  She knew there was something she should say, something about the patriarchal origins of the word hysteria and all of its iterations, something about Freud, something about the very obvious disregard he had for women and her suspicion that deep down—and not even that deeply, it sometimes seemed—he believed that men were humanity’s default and women were a sort of unpalatable deviation.

  But she said, Forget it, and they did.

  But after that scene the story took some weird stylistic turns and suddenly the woman is confessing to her husband that not only does she allow any dog in the kennel to lick her in the mouth, but she also had a special connection to one of the dogs that stayed with them somewhat regularly—Ross, the dog’s name was Ross—and once she had let Ross hump her for long enough that she found she was getting some sort of pleasure from it as well, and after she told her husband this he broke out in laughter, sure that she was kidding and what a raunchy sense of humor she had. In fact, the wife continued, she was not kidding and in fact it had been happening with some regularity for the past few months and she had no desire to stop this behavior, she just thought that he, as her husband, should know.

  And this begins a strange fight between the couple that ultimately dissolves their marriage and at some point in the scene the gate in the backyard comes unlatched and all the kept dogs start running wildly around the neighborhood and from there the narration moves more associatively and nonlinearly through the wife/ex-wife’s mind, and it turns out that she’d actually been lying to her husband/ex-husband about her special connection to Ross, but the husband, in tears, ends up confessing to having had an actual affair with one of his graduate students the previous year, an affair he had ended, something he wasn’t proud of, but she, still unable to feel upset by her husband’s actually betraying her, tells him it doesn’t matter and she was going to give him three days to get out of the house. The story ended—

  She went outside, whistled once, and all the dogs returned.

  He picked up the phone to call her, even though he was pretty deeply confused by the ending since the story began seeming like it was about a woman who had been left by her husband, but it ended up being about a woman who lied to her husband about dry humping a dog, and what could that even mean anyway, and as the phone rang he realized he really did not want to talk to his ex-wife about any of this, and when his call went to voice mail—I can’t answer the phone right now, so please leave a message—that meek little greeting he remembered overhearing her record several years ago, and as he tried to recall that bleached-out memory, all the details gone, he realized the tone had already toned and whether he said anything or not, he was already leaving a message.

  ur heck box

  It had become such a horrible, lonely place, she said. And the wind! She swore the wind was worse than she’d ever remembered and the light just wasn’t as yellow as it used to be and it seemed that even the people had turned rude and gas prices kept rising. Anyway, she was tired of driving and she wasn’t partial to the new preacher at church, so there wasn’t much keeping my mother in Texas.

  Maybe, she said in a way that meant certainly, it’s time for me to move to New York.

  It was nearly midnight when she’d called. It had only been six months since everything. I put on my glasses and sat up in bed as if that would help me see the situation more clearly.

  What about Maude and Jackie?

  You know, I don’t think Maude ever cared for me too much. She never lets me take care of Jackie, not even now, when you’d think she’d at least have some sympathy—but she still always takes them to Lisa and Bill, all the time with Lisa and Bill. You know, I think she resen
ts me for being single by choice. And that’s really another thing, you know. You can’t do anything in this damn town without someone looking down on it. Not a thing. You know what? I actually hate it here. I never thought I’d say that, but I do. I hate it. They’re all conservative, self-righteous—and she stammered here as if looking for the right mix of obscenity and politeness—well, blowhards, that’s what.

  I didn’t know how to react to her plain-laid feelings. Prior to this call she usually managed to avoid or dull any colorful emotions, her mood always placid, beige.

  (The only exception to this beige-ness was The Christmas Fight (as I referred to it privately (it wasn’t even really a fight)), which happened two years earlier when I used the word home in reference to my apartment in Brooklyn instead of the house in White Deer where she’d raised us. So that’s it? Mom asked, trying hard to sound pleasant. One year away and you don’t even call this your home anymore? She was aggressively frosting the annual spread of inedible gingerbread men (They’re decorative, she always explained) and though I’d actually been living in New York almost three years, not just one, I didn’t correct her, just shrugged, to which she began shouting—You were born and baptized here, lived twenty-six years here, have a brother and baby niece and sister-in-law and mother here, but now you think your home is some place you hardly even know—well, if that isn’t the biggest insult you could ever say to your own flesh and blood—and in a way, I could see her point. A few years, my name on an electric bill—it didn’t really mean anything. (Then again, I’d never belonged in Texas either—I’d lacked the accent and felt uneasy about how far away the horizon was. Maybe it was the belief that I could be anything in New York, even my boring self, that made me feel so at home there. (But even that was just a theory. (I don’t know why I feel so welcome in such an unwelcoming place.))) Raeford was watching a game on TV, one arm around Maude and the other resting a beer on baby Jackie while she slept in his lap. He glanced at the kitchen, but ultimately gave us the privacy of his ambivalence. Everyone you know is here, Mom yelled. Anything you could do is here! If only you would have seen that and settled down with Daniel—and though I never drank beer I got one, hinged off the cap, and had it rolling down my throat before the refrigerator could shut. I hadn’t been raised for confrontation. She hadn’t taught me how to do this. I took a long slug of beer and hoped she’d just go back to being herself, a former Miss Neshoba County who never let anyone forget she was voted Most Amenable for both junior and senior year of her high school superlatives (though I thought she must have meant Most Amiable (but it was probably true either way (and I wasn’t going to be the one to correct her after all these years))). But you just had to run off to New York to do God knows what, and really, any woman would be lucky to settle down with Daniel—(and if she’d been braver or meaner or just more honest she could have said, especially you) but it was then she seemed to realize how unlike herself she was being (how unamiable, unamenable) so she stopped yelling and nobody said a word until the dinner blessing. (Amen.) She never brought up Daniel again, but it didn’t really matter. I’d already made it a habit to consider the way my life could have been if I’d said yes when Daniel had asked the question I knew he didn’t even think was a question, just a rite of passage we had to go through. (You could see a marriage approach some couples in Texas the same way you could watch a summer storm churning on the plains, miles before it hit.) It was possible my life wouldn’t have been any more or less enjoyable had I turned from person to wife, wife to parent, had I stayed in White Deer and parceled my hours out to a family, turned my mother grand. (A life might comfortably disappear into a well-worn groove between house, school, and grocery store. (All lives disappear one way or another. (All hours get spent.))) But as pleasant as it might have been, that kind of life also seemed—somehow—elsewhere, like a dream I could only watch instead of do. We were all surprised Raeford was the first to end up with the spouse, baby, mortgage—Man alive, I would’ve sworn I’d be the one to get out, he said during his only stay with me in the city. And don’t you fuckin’ tell Maude or Ma I was dipping, he said, with a lisp from the chew, you hear? But of course I couldn’t have ruined their image of Raeford even if I’d wanted to. For so long he’d been something of a fuckup and now that he’d become (or seemed to have become) a Good Man, no one could bear to think he’d regress. When Maude told him she was just a little pregnant, some kind of man sprang up in him, dismissing the ex-quarterback who had been coasting on charm and Coors Light through community college. Ma stopped complaining about his longish hair, older-than-God Carhartts, or infrequent church attendance. Instead she cooed about her soon-to-be grandbaby and sent me meaningful glances. It was then, at the dinner table after Maude and Rae told us about their shotgun marriage, that I decided and announced I was moving to New York. (I guess I’d been guided by our unspoken sibling law of equal-but-opposite reactions: When I made mud pies in the yard, he played Nintendo. I went to church and he drank by the river. He grew a family; I fled.) Wooo doggy, Rae said in that elevated monotone he used to express both enthusiasm and disdain, city slicker. Big-city gal. Mom teared up, excused herself to fix us some dessert, then let the TV drown out conversation for the rest of the night. It’s just … so much, she said as she shut her bedroom door, and she didn’t say another word about my leaving for years. The next week we went to the courthouse with Maude and Rae like we were paying off a parking ticket. Maude’s parents brought their own copy of the Bible and Mom threw birdseed at the newlyweds as they walked to his Chevy. Rae slapped Maude’s ass and said, Wooo doggy, got myself a wifey, in his usual way, but Rae doesn’t say anything like that anymore and he doesn’t slap anyone’s ass anymore because he doesn’t say anything or slap anything because he doesn’t exist and this, I knew, was the real reason Mom now hated everything in Texas.)

  It was June 26. Six months to the day.

  You can’t move here, I told her. Everyone you know is in Texas.

  Well, look who’s talking.

  * * *

  Mother’s move to New York was just the latest of several problems I had that summer. By then there were Rebecca’s parrots, the Appropriate Behavior Rubrics at work, the increasing hostility of my downstairs neighbor, and the small, strange problem of Maurice.

  Maurice’s problem had something to do with integrity or honesty or setting something right, but I never understood how any of it had anything to do with me to begin with. Actually, I don’t know what Maurice’s problem was, but now that I think of it, his problems were probably bigger than all that. His deafness, for one, seemed problematic, as did his reading and writing skills. Let’s just say, for simplicity, that Maurice’s problem was me.

  Rebecca told me it was best to keep busy in times of grief and that’s what I was doing when I met Maurice. There had been a late-January warm snap and the whole neighborhood had flocked into the park—coatless, delirious on their picnics, pale limbs exposed, hyper children sprinting over yellowed hills. I had several hours of science podcasts to keep me company on a walk, so I played them one after the other, filling up my head, making no room for awful thoughts. I was walking through a wooded path when Maurice ran up beside me. He wore a backward cap and an oversized jersey and motioned for me to take out my earphones. (There was a direness to his face, I thought, or maybe it was just that jagged scar that formed a C from forehead to chin. The knee-jerk fear that he might try to rape, kidnap, rob, or torture me arose as a reminder that I was still an anxious white woman from Texas, full of inherited racial and social prejudice and the defeated expectation that most men are packed to their necks with violence. (A more evolved part of myself dismissed that thought (or maybe I just rationalized my fears away when I noticed this man’s unintimidating build and remembered the statistical unlikelihood of a violent crime taking place in a crowded daytime park (or maybe it was just the heedlessness I’d felt since Rae died, that impulse I had to move toward chaos before it could surprise me))).)

  I too
k my earphones out but he said nothing so I said, What do you want? Whatever he had to say or do—I could take it.

  He pointed down the trail behind us, then at me, then at my shorts’ pocket, back down the trail, then back at my shorts. His desperate eyes locked on mine.

  I don’t know what you want, I said. He made some indecipherable sounds, all vowel and v, then more vague hand gestures. It seemed he was deaf or pretending to be deaf or at least unable to speak, enduring some kind of handicap. I shrugged and started to put my earphones back in but he shook his head, pointed down the trail. I wondered if several able-bodied men could be waiting for this harmless-seeming bait to lure me in. I started to walk away, but he got out a flip phone, typed something, and showed it to me.

  it feel, the screen said.

  It feel? I asked.

  He squinted at me, then at the words, hesitantly correcting them:

  it fell

  Immediately, I knew there had been an accident. (In the last few months I’d been avalanched by them: A woman had fallen down the stairs in my building, snapped her neck, and died by the recycling bins. A neighborhood boy had been smashed under a truck delivering apples. A distant cousin, Mom said, had stepped on an unseen crack in a frozen lake, then Rae, then a neighbor left a sticky note on my door asking if I could water her plants while she sat shivah for her mother. it fell fit into this world—everything was falling.) Maybe an old lady had broken her hip, maybe his mother or grandmother, and he needed me to call for help.

  Someone’s hurt?

  He nodded and typed something else on the screen.

  ur heck box

  I went at the words like a riddle: My heck box? You are heck box? Heck box. What did it sound like—hegbogs? Hecho? Maybe the h was silent? Eck? Egg? Egg box. Egg carton?

  I gave up and followed him down the trail. A white guy jogged past, his gait wobbling as he took in our unlikely pair. I felt embarrassed to see him noticing us and even more embarrassed that I tried to signal, in a look, that everything was fine. Still—I was following a stranger for an unknown reason. I couldn’t decide if I was being gullible, dumb, or something else entirely.