Certain American States Read online

  After several yards Maurice jerked still and looked at the ground, peered into a bush, and looked both ways down the trail. Another white jogger went by, gave us a look. Maurice exhaled hard and met my eyes. I wondered if I could go now with a clear conscience that there was no one to save, that nothing had fallen. He grunted and pointed at me, then mimed putting headphones in while walking in place, gazing up at the trees with an expression of despondent terror. (I believed this was an imitation of me.) He pointed to his hip pocket, then the ground, then looked at me, like, See?

  But I didn’t see. Maybe all the white ladies in the park looked the same and he had mixed me up with someone else. (A woman walked by us in clothes nearly identical to mine as if to confirm this notion (yellow-y white sneakers, jean shorts, and time-paled shirt (one meant to look borrowed from a man (but had, like mine, been bought))).) Maurice kept looking hard at me, then took out his flip phone and began frantically typing. There was something plasticky about his face, something unbelievable about it. Wide forehead, bushy eyebrows, an oddly small mouth.

  He showed me his screen: mayby the man had it.

  So there was no scam, it seemed, no accident, no crime. There was just something incommunicable between strangers.

  I left him by backing away, then walking fast with the strange feeling that I had escaped some kind of harm. He looked dizzy with failure.

  * * *

  The summer I first started wearing a bra, Rae taught me how to fight. He was still a half-inch shorter than me but he weighed plenty more in muscle. Coach Stern saw him play a JV game and asked him to start practicing with the varsity boys, which gave him at least as much swagger as my figure had given me. Our bodies were announcing us as adults, ready for beauty and brutality—uniformed maneuvers and dresses that fit just so. During practice Rae heard some locker-room talk about girls from school and though he never told me who said what, he didn’t like it one bit. He wanted me to be able to defend myself. In the backyard he waged slow-motion attacks, playing the part of a bad man in the darkness.

  Now if some jerk comes at you like this—what do you do?

  Scream?

  Naw, you gotta do more than that. Get him in the nuts. Get that motherfucker in the nuts, you hear?

  He taught me about pressure points that he’d learned from a karate movie, a certain way I could chop someone’s neck that would make him pass out. But nobody ever attacked me. I’m not even sure a single boy on the football team knew my name. I had to wonder if Rae had made it all up, if he’d wanted to be a protective older brother even though he was ten months younger and I wasn’t that much to protect. The closest I ever came to defending myself was when I went on a field trip to Houston and my mom gave me a little pink can of Mace.

  It’s awfully diverse down there, she said. You just never know.

  But nothing happened in Houston. I came back to White Deer just fine and put the Mace in a dust-gathering dollhouse, tucking it into a tiny bed under a tiny blanket.

  Rae still asked me to practice self-defense moves with him every weekend, and I failed to get any better at them until I realized they were more for him than me. After that my reflexes seemed to quicken. I memorized all the pressure points, could throw a decent hook. It seemed I could successfully protect myself if I knew I was doing it for his benefit, a kind of sibling symbiosis.

  * * *

  The months after Rae died I had the repeated impulse to do something inappropriate, something dangerous, but the only thing I could think to do was not get off the subway when my stop came. I imagined seeing the doors open on Thirty-Fourth Street and shut on Thirty-Fourth Street, then on to Forty-Second, midtown, and so on, and all the while I’d just watch the stops go, watch the people go and come and go again, watch the tunnels blur outside my window, and at the end of the line I’d exit the train as if it were nothing and I’d leave the station and follow the sidewalks until there were no more sidewalks and I’d keep walking until I found myself in a far part of the city and I’d stay there.

  I thought about the appointments I’d miss, the people missed, the days missed, my apartment growing dusty, job unworked, e-mails piling up. I imagined my boss squinting at my disarrayed desk, wondering if my absence was (perhaps) the quiet evidence of my brutal murder, that maybe I was dead in my apartment, lying in my bathtub, disrobed and violated, my blood clotting in a thick black pool. Or maybe it was just the flu. Or an uncurbed addiction, a bender, a secret problem.

  If I missed work for enough days and didn’t answer my phone they’d probably call my emergency contact, but the one I’d given was a former roommate I hadn’t spoken to since I moved to my studio. Since I’d not yet had an emergency, my emergency contact had never been contacted, but I guess that’s the thing about emergency contacts (that you never know if they’re any good until it’s time or it’s too late (until the emergency has already emerged, and a contact is uncontactable)).

  But I never did skip my stop. I always got out and went to work and no one ever had to call my emergency contact. The longer I fantasized about skipping my stop, the more I realized that it wasn’t the kind of inappropriateness I was really after, so I began to imagine open-mouth kissing a stranger in the street, or doing an improvised soft-shoe routine down the center of a subway platform, or wearing a floor-length sequined dress to the grocery store. But I never did any of those things either.

  I stayed the same.

  Raeford was dead and I went about my business as if nothing had changed.

  I did not become a new person. I did nothing notable. I was still just me.

  The only thing I did after Rae died that I hadn’t done before Rae died was tell people that Rae died.

  Hey, how’s it going? the barista at my coffee shop asked on my first morning in the city after the holidays and the funeral and the extra weeks I took off. It was the bitter peak of a pitch-black January.

  Fine, I reflexed, then corrected myself. No, not fine. I’m terrible. My brother is dead.

  Oh. Oh my God. I’m so sorry.

  It was hard to talk about coffee after that.

  It’s okay, I reflexed again. Well, no, it’s not okay. He’s dead. He’s going to be dead forever.

  Then it was even harder to talk about coffee. We were still for a beat until a Sheryl Crow song started blasting above us and he rushed to the back office to adjust the volume. Usually just the thought of Rae would lead swiftly to sobbing, but when I spoke about him in public it was a novelty to feel almost nothing, not even that little tremble under the face.

  While the barista was gone, I thought of my brother’s ashes blowing around the Texas plains, swirled by turbines, gathering on truck windshields. (At the funeral Raeford’s high school girlfriend, Mindy Plunkett, had shown up late and wedged herself into the family row. She had a big pink flower in her hair and she nodded at me like we were having the exact same thought. (But we couldn’t have been having the same thought because I was wishing time could run backward, make Mindy Plunkett reverse back up the church aisle and never let her reach the goddamn family row and maybe time could keep going backward, make Mindy Plunkett have never put that awful flower in her terrible hair and then the days could keep reversing and I could have gone with Rae to that barn party the day after Christmas, or I could have at least driven him there or picked him up in Mom’s Honda, if I hadn’t been as tired as I was, if only I hadn’t eaten that piece of yellow cake that was dry on one side from being cut on Christmas Eve, if only that piece of yellow cake hadn’t lulled me into a sugar-induced stupor and if I could have gone with him to the party and driven him home, or maybe he could have driven us both, sleeping, into that pine tree, and if the awful smash of metal and speed and sleep could have crushed us both out of this world, then I wouldn’t have to be here with Mindy Plunkett in the family row with that fake flower in her terrible, gigantic hair.) When she asked in a whisper where the body was I pointed to the urn and Mindy Plunkett flinched as if she’d just realized that’s what dead m
eans.)

  Maybe I didn’t need any coffee, I thought, but then the barista was back, trying to mute his compassion, trying to just do his job, to nonchalantly make coffee. Sheryl was telling us that if it makes you happy it can’t be that bad, and I gave up trying to find a natural segue between death and coffee, just said, A Red Eye, please, but when he refused my three dollars, even as a tip, I felt ridiculous again. I moped in the corner with my free coffee and guilt, listened to a podcast about how geese use magnetic fields to migrate south for the winter.

  * * *

  Rebecca took me ice-skating in Bryant Park that afternoon, insisting it would be good for me to get out of my head, but midtown looked exactly the way my head felt: bleak and crowded, a few freezing vagrants shouting obscenities at no one in particular. It was an ugly Saturday and only a few holiday-bloated people were going around the rink, their waddling movements suggesting hangovers. I couldn’t think of a worse thing to do while hungover. People made less sense all the time.

  Rebecca was the brightest spot on the rink by far, her electric-blue scarf and yellow peacoat making her look like a bird that forgot to migrate. Her pale skin seemed even paler than normal, but in a way that was more fecund than pneumonic—and how did she do that, that healthy-pale thing? I never understood it. When she hugged me I saw a man in a respectable-looking herringbone coat throwing up at the edge of the rink. This was just the world: ice and vomit and rare flashes of brilliant colors. Some people drive their trucks head-on into pine trees and snap their necks. Some people wear pink flowers to funerals. I can’t see how anything is organized.

  We skated arm in arm because Rebecca has the easy demeanor of someone who grew up in a nudist colony. At her apartment there is a buck-naked family portrait, all of them so pale and so seemingly happy.

  Rebecca didn’t need to ask me how I was doing. She snaked one arm around mine then folded the other across her body to grip just above my elbow, knowing I needed to be held in place.

  The thing is … your brother died, she said, breaking our long skating silence. Raeford died. Not you. You have to keep living.

  Her voice was strangely ebullient, as if she said this sort of thing every day, as if it were her own chipper mantra—Raeford died. Raeford died. My ankles were bowing in, a sore throb in the stretched meat under my arches. I wasn’t built for that kind of thing.

  You’re still alive, so you have to keep living, she repeated. That’s all you can do.

  I was too saturated with consolation from the funeral and wake to absorb what she was saying, but later I grew to resent this moment. You’re still alive was almost as bad as Let me know if I can do anything and the empty glare that came after. I wondered how she would feel if she were the one dead and someone were telling her loved ones, Rebecca died, not you! You get to go on living! But I guess she’d just feel dead if she were dead and eventually I lost track of how I felt about her telling me I was still alive, still a life. While we skated silently, I thought about the formation of ice crystals, tried and failed to remember facts from that podcast about them. What was the point of listening to all these things I so quickly forgot? Once I learned a thing about this thing, I was often thinking. Once I knew something about something.

  A child skated up to us, a red-faced little thing made genderless under considerable overbundling.

  Are you a princess? it asked Rebecca. Are you Snow White?

  Children like this always flocked to Rebecca as if helpless, a creepy inverse pedophilia. They gave her compliments and knock-knock jokes, presented their random shit as gifts—baggies of Cheerios, long-loved stuffed animals. She had a special way with them, but over the years I had stopped paying attention, stopped finding it cute. They never spoke to me, those kids, as if I were the unknown cocktail waitress clinging to the elbow of a celebrity.

  Rebecca unlinked from me, and with nowhere to put my free arm, I thrust it into my tote bag, groping the apple I’d just bought out of guilt at a sad two-table attempt at a farmers’ market. All they had were bruised, worm-dimpled McIntoshes, but after a sample-woman intercepted me with a chunk on a toothpick, I felt obligated even though it was mealy and acrid.

  Is she a witch? I heard the kid ask Rebecca. Both of them turned to look at me. My bulky black overcoat, thick glasses, and charmless hair were not doing me any favors. Rebecca smiled, then turned back to the kid, trying to laugh it off. What an imagination you have, she said, but the little fucker kept a bitter eye flashing in my direction as it told Rebecca some dumb story about a snowball, but I wasn’t distracted from the kid’s knee-jerk contempt. I’m not blind. What a little piece of shit.

  I wordlessly flashed the apple, made a witch face, and relished that kid’s perfect terror.

  * * *

  Too embarrassed to face the barista again, I learned to love the watery sweetness of bodega coffee, the way it left me half-tired and inattentive. (I was less effective at work for a while, but it seemed like everyone was feeling especially February that February (even when a late spring came, no one could forgive the long betrayal of winter).) On the weekends I’d drink my bodega coffee on the little wooden bench outside, unless the hunchbacked man with the cigar was there, not just because the cheap smoke bothered me, but because he always tried to give me advice about how to meet a nice man.

  Everybody needs somebody. Aren’t you afraid of being alone? he asked.

  Right now I’m just afraid of death.

  Aha! The ultimate alone.

  Do you know how to get over that?

  I was serious but he just shrugged. Maybe die?

  I’ll wait, I said.

  I’d heard a podcast about a tribe somewhere whose spiritual practices had involved, through intense meditation, briefly dying and coming back to life. Practitioners would slow their breathing until it was imperceptible. Their hearts would stop and they would just lie there for a while, dead, until they eventually woke back up and went about the rest of their day. I can’t remember the exact details of how this worked and I can’t remember the cigar man’s name anymore, just his plaid pants and the polite nods we exchanged after the ultimate alone conversation, because, really, what else was there to say?

  Then it was June and I started to feel like a new woman—not in a new-lease-on-life kind of way, more like a refinanced mortgage. I wasn’t in a better place, exactly, but I could make my payments on time—feed myself, dress myself, be at home without crying. I had quit listening to podcasts. I felt I should try to get away with knowing less. But in the same way warm molecules move toward cool ones, everyone’s problems started coming on, making storms.

  Some alleged harassment at the office meant we all had to go to Appropriate Behavior Workshops and for some reason I was asked to be in charge of getting my coworkers to turn in the Appropriate Behavior Rubric Worksheets, which were held in great contempt. They all began avoiding me, took the long way from their cubicles to the office kitchen. I stopped getting invites to happy hour (or maybe that was because I never said yes). Rebecca asked me to take care of her parrots for a few months while she did some volunteer work in Nicaragua and their squawking woke me up at odd hours. My downstairs neighbor told me they woke her up, too, and she swore she could even smell them. An increasingly hostile trail of sticky notes ensued.

  Then I was buying my coffee at the bodega on a Sunday morning, counting out my dollar in change, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. It had been so long I didn’t even recognize him until he showed me his flip-phone screen.

  i fawn wat fel, it said.

  I was sick of complication and just wanted one day of peace and silence, so I smiled and nodded as if I were refusing, for the hundredth time, to sign up for Amnesty International. But he followed me out and showed me his screen again.

  i fawn ur heck box i am go get it

  I don’t know what you want from me, I said, and it came out a little too loud and mean. He seemed to almost tear up at this (or maybe that’s just how his eyes were), then ran down the sidewalk
.

  Hey, the cigar man shouted, I didn’t know you knew Maurice.

  I don’t. He’s just confused.

  Well, what’d he want from you?

  Nothing.

  Be nice to Maurice, all right? He’s had it hard. He’s had it rough. It’s the least you could do, he said.

  Fine, I said, maybe too quietly, maybe so quietly I didn’t say it at all.

  I wasn’t in the mood to be a person.

  I’d thought my refinanced-mortgage attitude had been a signal I was getting better, but here I was again, just as terrible as I’d ever been.

  I got in bed at eight that night and couldn’t sleep. Maybe I could meditate myself to death and back, but I wasn’t meditating. I was seething. (Was anger one of the approved steps to appropriate grieving or was that something from the behavior rubrics?) I seethed for a while, then I might have slept or died and was reborn when Ma called around midnight.

  Is anger one of the steps of grieving? I asked after she told me she wanted to move to New York.

  If you need it to be, honey.

  I hoped that gentle tone meant she’d gone back to being who she used to be, that beige woman, the former Miss Neshoba County who had bootstrapped herself up when Dad left her in Amarillo, a woman who didn’t complain about the wind or light in Texas, a mother who had only once raised her voice at me, a Texan who would remain a Texan, someone who could and would keep everything the same. I wanted her to tell me she was kidding about New York, that she wasn’t going to change anything at all—but a few nights later she arrived, refusing my offer of the bed, saying she wouldn’t be able to sleep if I was on the couch. I’m pretty sure neither of us slept because of the birds’ intermittent squawks of Becca! Becca! and my neighbor’s broom beating the ceiling under my floor.