Certain American States Page 9

  It’s just that … It’s just that she taught me so much, she said, her tone a little more angry than sad.

  It occurred to me that I didn’t know what was (medically) wrong with her mother. I had been given no assurance that her mother’s life was even legitimately endangered. It would have surprised no one if this woman had gone to the ER for something benign, then told everyone she was dying. She was the resident terrorist of the family, constantly sabotaging her own children and siblings and in-laws, setting off emotional suicide bombs at every chance. For years we’d been trying to get her to start drinking again because at least then she’d eventually fall asleep. She told us drinking was bad for her skin, bad for her waistline, bad for the glint in her eye, and she told me once that if she ever found an easy, secure way to have someone killed there would be a lot of funerals to attend all of a sudden, but perhaps, she said, putting her face a little closer to mine and lowering her voice to a whisper, you wouldn’t be around to attend them—then she laughed but I couldn’t tell what kind of laugh it was. When I told Ellen she laughed too, and we laughed together. (What kind of laugh, I still did not know.)

  She is a goddamn maniac, Ellen said, but she was family and this meant something, to Ellen, that family, no matter how hostile, no matter how jokingly homicidal, was inextricable and owed something. It had always been a wonder that Ellen had survived a whole childhood under this woman’s scorn. She had once saved three weeks’ allowance for Mother’s Day flowers but when the delivery came her mother took them to the garbage disposal and forced them down by the bunch. They were ugly, her mother said, hideous.

  The smell of pollen now makes Ellen livid. Springtime is brutal.

  It may be impossible to unknow some things.

  At times I’d wondered what, exactly, Ellen could have inherited from her mother. The only thing I was sure she’d gotten was a utilitarian bitterness that had always charmed me. She’d say things like Mother’s Day is just another way for a person to marvel at their own existence or The Freudian view of psychological development means parenting is a sort of fascism. It was clear how she’d come to such conclusions and she believed them so fervently that I began to believe them too. When you spend enough time with someone, there’s always this sort of balancing and rebalancing, like walking a slackline, a continuous correction. For instance, in the days after the incident at the hospital, we became even more absentminded at home, a laziness that culminated when one of us (we each believed it was our own fault) left a teakettle whistling in our empty kitchen, all afternoon. All the water steamed out and the metal burned and warped. The fumes seemed to be noxious, or so our neighbors said—they left voice mails that were at first polite, then increasingly incoherent. They became forgetful, drowsy, and after this, they were never quite the same.

  Touching People

  She took them to see her husband’s grave, why not, the newlywed couple, still sort of on their honeymoon, part of it, anyway. Honeymoons used to be drastic—plane tickets, passports, hotels—but now it seemed a road trip would do. It was all so casual. And maybe it should be, maybe everyone in the world could stand to be a little more casual about all these drastic things. Or maybe the newlyweds had it all wrong. Time would tell, or it wouldn’t. Either way—she was taking them to see her husband’s grave.

  She had known the groom since he was a child, so she’d asked the groom’s mother to ask the groom if he wouldn’t mind stopping to see her on this road trip for a visit, so the mother had asked her son, who asked his new wife, who knew she wasn’t really being asked.

  Okay, so it was actually her ex-husband’s grave. They had divorced several years before he caught and had quickly been ended by pancreatic cancer, but they had remained close despite the separation—that’s how much they loved each other, that they could be divorced and still, you know, care.

  Anyway the graveyard was a beautiful place, worth visiting even if you didn’t know anyone in the dirt. You could see the whole town from there. And a mountain. Never figured out what mountain that is, but there, you can see it for yourself. It is certainly a mountain. Or maybe just a big hill.

  Her ex-husband’s gravestone had a trumpet and musical notes etched into it. They had always loved jazz, the two of them; it was one of their things, and she still loved it, but he wasn’t anything about anything anymore.

  I can’t believe how long he’s been gone, she said. He was a good man. He was a very good man. She thought his goodness made his goneness more tragic.

  The newlywed couple stood near and the wife squeezed silent messages into her husband’s hand, though he could not understand what she was trying to say, just wondered if perhaps she could please stop with the hand squeezing. She was trying to tell him that this was a waste of their life, that the hours this woman had taken from them were below the par of a walk through a forest or a drive along a mountain road or a ghost town or a nap. This couldn’t be life. It couldn’t be here.

  The new husband gave the wife one of his Looks—his Please Stop Look. Basically they had gotten married because they could communicate, however unsuccessfully, in these Looks. She had a Let’s Please Get Out of Here Look and he had a Just Please Be Patient Look and she had a Please Please Please Look and he had a Patience, Dear, Just a Little Patience Look. Anyway they had created a sloppy language of Looks and that seemed reason enough to get ceremonial about themselves.

  The new wife felt the long afternoon they’d spent with this not-widow was not a reasonable reaction to the finitude of existence, or perhaps it wasn’t that bad and she was just being tired and childish, a regression that slowed her sense of time. It seemed the not-widow might actually begin to cry, or perhaps she had even been trying to cry, but couldn’t. But it was a beautiful day, the not-widow told herself, and she was here with these charmingly casual newlyweds. There were enough reasons to live. She felt a surge of optimism, that all the family-court paperwork she’d filled out over the years had been worth it and she had turned out to be a decent person and had even become, it seemed, a little wise. Yes, she felt a little wise.

  You know, the not-widow said, still looking at the grave, I always thought of you as my son.

  The young wife wondered if the not-widow was talking to her dead ex-husband, or the spirit of him, or the idea of him, or whatever it is people talk to when they talk to gravestones. Had her husband felt all along like her son? The new wife looked up at her new husband and felt oddly maternal about him, though perhaps it was just the suggestion. But the not-widow wasn’t talking to the gravestone.

  You really are a son to me.

  The not-widow rubbed the new husband’s shoulder. The new wife watched. The new husband didn’t know what to do with his hands. He smiled. She’d been telling him this since he was a child, to which his actual mother made her objection—Every woman in town wishes she were your mother, but only one of them is—but since the not-widow had a son of her own, same age as the groom, who had died, had drowned, at five, the actual mother thought it was charitable of her to let this old friend have certain privileges, an inflated sense of significance. And yet, the not-widow also made the actual mother uncomfortable, as she made many other townswomen uncomfortable, because the not-widow had always been hazardously beautiful and had remained so into her sixties—she hadn’t had any work done, you could tell she hadn’t. It was unreal. It was depressing.

  The women who were unnerved by the not-widow also reminded each other that the not-widow never could keep a husband, never seemed satisfied with being a wife. Some thought losing a child must have bent her up in some permanent way, but others thought at a certain point (though all were uncertain about when and where this point might be) one had to buck up and decide to move on, not to dwell, to be mature, to blunt that old sadness, to leave it in the past. Oh well.

  Another thing about the not-widow that made the townswomen nervous was how affectionate she was, how she lingered in hugs (especially, some said, with younger men) and always found reasons
to touch people. What did she really mean by touching all these people? Why couldn’t she just leave them be, leave them in their skin, leave them? Just that afternoon the not-widow had been picking bits of lint from the new husband’s shirt, side-hugging him, fixing his hair, briefly holding his hand, and in the graveyard’s parking lot when it seemed like their afternoon together was reaching a close (a “coffee date” that became “lunch” that became “a walk” that became “a drive” that became “a visit to a graveyard”), the not-widow put a hand to the face of the new husband and invited them to sit in her car “for a minute” so she could show them something. The new wife felt or hoped she was included in this invitation though the not-widow had only been speaking to the new husband.

  The not-widow fed a CD into the stereo and some jazz began, then a woman’s voice singing. The three of them listened for a while, the not-widow tapping on the steering wheel and mouthing along to the words. The song went on and ended. Another began. The not-widow offered no explanation but eventually she looked over at the new husband in the passenger seat, put a hand on his knee—It’s me, she said. I had been talking about it for years, you know. I finally made a record.

  The new wife, sitting in the backseat, looked at the not-widow’s hand play an invisible piano on the new husband’s knee. The not-widow sang along with herself, swayed with her eyes closed. Her not-son nodded his head, half-committed.

  If someone, perhaps the graveyard’s groundskeeper or a person in mourning, had joined these three in the car and asked them if they believed they had any choice in being whom they had all become, perhaps none of them would have said a word. There were just too many answers to this question. There were just too many ways of looking at it. Far away from the car several men were preparing to blow off the top of that hill or mountain, or whatever it was, and create a cavity in it for toxic waste. And farther away, deep in some woods where no one was talking or singing, there were creeks and caves that only the bears knew.

  Anyone can visit a graveyard, no matter what they think, and every graveyard has been seen so many times there is nothing left in them for anyone to see and that is why we all must go and look, to see again what’s been seen again, and that was why the not-widow took them there. She knew much more than they did. She knew much more and much less than she knew that she knew.

  The not-widow delighted in listening to herself sing, in singing along with herself. It was a good recording, wasn’t exactly great, though on certain listens it did sound great, but at least it always sounded good.

  You see, she said, everything can turn out beautifully. It really can.

  The Four Immeasurables and Twenty New Immeasurables

  ONE

  Last month I took an internet quiz about discerning emotion in human eyes—fifty sets of pupils, multiple choice. Now I can’t look at anyone without a list queuing up—A. Trusting, B. Hesitant, C. Happy, or D. Confused—and even though E. All of the Above was never an option I’m still not convinced anyone could ever be that simple. One feeling at a time.

  TWO

  The truth is I failed it; I failed that internet quiz.

  THREE

  Another truth is, I know a monk who is trying to make the Middle Way go viral. He thinks Four Truths So Noble You Won’t Believe Your Eyes could get some decent traffic, but he’s not sure where to go from there. His other idea is something about the Eightfold Path or the Four Immeasurables but I’d stopped paying attention by then, distracted by his stoic, angular face in the late-autumn light and how his eyes never stopped darting. The wind tossed his hair like airborne snakes, those pale brown ones, harmless, found in gardens.

  Buddhism basically invented the modern concept of the list, he said, and I will admit that lines like that—audacious and overstated—have too great an effect on me, so unfortunately I might also be in love with him, in love with this monk.

  FOUR

  The first thing men want to know if I mention being in love with a monk was whether he was bald, but the first thing Amelia asked about was his possible celibacy. When I told her he wasn’t, she looked at me the same way those men did—disappointed, maybe, or hesitant or disbelieving or something. I couldn’t tell, exactly, what was going on in all those heads behind all those eyes, but at least I could tell it was something.

  FIVE

  I’m the only woman I know who swings hetero anymore. Most are either done with or never intended to deal with men, and I can certainly see their logic, but I keep getting these men in my life or they keep getting in there or I keep putting them there.

  It feels unevolved. I feel like I’ve lost.

  But what is it the Germans say? You can’t jump over your own shadow?

  SIX

  Or maybe just one German said this. One German. One time.

  Or maybe all Germans say this, all the time. Maybe the entire German language is a slow discussion of shadows and the impossibility of jumping them. I couldn’t say, wouldn’t dare.

  What I will say is that the way the monk gets worked up about consciousness and socio-spiritual evolution reminds me so much of the early days of the German, her theories about shadow selves, dark matter. Now I call the German by her name, Amelia, but when we met during her exchange year everyone called her the German. The German was known for her taut calves, hard opinions, and curls so tight they sprang if you pulled them. I am unable to resist this sort of firmness. These firm people. They are the shadow I can’t jump. I find them or else they find me, mushy me, because if you’re not making grand statements there’s so much time left to listen.

  SEVEN

  A decade ago I was an intern at a media conglomerate, and the German was an intern at a different media conglomerate, and we spent most of our internships also interning for each other, auditioning for a possibility in ourselves. Winter was early and spring was late; we spent the long months between becoming the dust in my underheated apartment—greasing the linens, then cleaning them.

  We were terribly young and naïve on top of that and sensitive to make it worse, but even so, it’s embarrassing to remember how ordinary and lethal a heartbreak can be. (Feelings fall out of sync. Ideas stay ideas. That pebbly silence moves in.) The German was nearly arrested for jumping on a Chihuahua on Seventh Avenue, breaking its back, taking its life. An accident, she said, but it was just as hard for me to believe her as it was hard for me to believe how hard it was for me to believe her.

  Are you a vegan or what? I asked one night and that’s when we started breaking each other’s things, a figurine, first, then the decent wineglasses, a banjo, an IKEA chair, a laptop dropped in a tub.

  Who have you become? our friends asked us. I couldn’t say, so I left town for as long as it took to turn into another person. It took a year and five months. My hair fell longer than a mop handle; Amelia’s face grew thick and strange. Time dissolved us, those girls we’d been.

  EIGHT

  A. Wistful

  B. Exuberant

  C. Devious

  D. Generally troubled about existence, human consciousness, the pervasiveness of suffering, and the fallacy of temporal reality

  NINE

  When I told the monk about the internet quiz he actually laughed a little and that laughter lingered into a smile, and I was so relieved to see and hear him do something so simple that I’ll sometimes spend an entire day trying to come up with ways to hear him laugh again.

  TEN

  On a rooftop bar I watched a woman peering over the ledge, examining the distance between herself and nonexistence. I couldn’t help but wonder if she might, through accident or intention, turn this place into a group trauma—if she might just go. Amelia came back, took a seat too close to me. She’d brought me a beer missing a sip so I filled my mouth and held it there till it went warm with me. What could be in a person?—whatever could be in a person?—I try not to ask myself this too much, but on rooftops I cannot help it.

  ELEVEN

  History sits too close to us. You could
explain the whole world that way.

  TWELVE

  The woman moved away from the roof ledge. Her wide skirt swung and her face blushed bright. Here she was, still here. Amelia crooked an elbow around my neck.

  The monk went silent, I said. He took a vow.

  That’s your type, isn’t it—moody and bald?

  He’s not bald. I told you that months ago.

  Celibate?

  I shook my head, though I knew she already knew, and she shook her head in a way that wasn’t discernibly approving or disapproving. This led to a debate about whether the desire for a man to ejaculate onto the body could be a form of population control built into one’s proclivities.

  Why not take sperm out of it entirely?

  I thought she was suggesting we should—biologically, as a planet—remove sperm from ejaculate, like maybe that would solve everything. Maybe it would.

  THIRTEEN

  The first time the monk put a warm puddle on me, he said something dumb I can’t forget.

  Your breasts, he said, staring at them without attachment, propping me up in bed and resting back on his elbows so he could get a better look, are my favorite kind of breast.

  There was something wrong about this. I couldn’t decide exactly what.

  B cups floated immaterially around my head—skin sacs of fat and nipple detached from their bodies—a type of breast, a kind of breast, breasts that fell ever so gently into their category of breast.

  But categories implied quantities. Quantity implied supply. Supply implied rotation—first in, first out—how much of me did he even need stocked in his life? How dwindled was my supply? Did he get me wholesale? What was my retail value? It was a capitalist’s fear.

  If only I had a photograph of my eyes at this moment, maybe I could figure out what I felt about it.