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CHAPTER 1
PART ONE
1.
She's driving. A Monday morning in July, hot outside, the windows of her Honda are down and the highway air is rushing in. It's the sixth hour of a daylong trip from the town where her dead son is buried to the town where she lives now with her husband and living son.
Her name is Elisa Macalaster Brown. She makes this trip once a year: drives to Wisconsin, stays in a motel, drinks coffee and reads magazines in the places she used to go, when both boys were alive and they all lived there together. She visits the grave, never for long. She watches television in her room. She remembers people from when she lived there, and if she sees them she says hello, but she never seeks them out. They know why she's there and they don't want to talk about it. When she's finished she gets back into her car and goes home, and that's what she's doing now.
Interstate 90 is a dull gray strap laid over brown land. There's a drought here and everything is dead. Somewhere in Ohio. Other cars can be seen far ahead and far behind, but nobody passes anybody else. Soon she'll have to stop for lunch, but for now she is content being hungry.
She likes to drive this car — she's had it for a dozen years. Silas and Sam used to ride in back, on the way to soccer practice or music lessons, in the days when they could be persuaded to care about such things. There was a dog for a while, Derek's dog from before they married, but it died. The car still smells a little like dog, but all traces of Silas are gone. Sam borrows the car sometimes, filling the ashtray with his cigarette butts and leaving them there for Elisa to clean up. No, that's not fair — it has nothing to do with her. He just forgets. He's twenty-five, a year older than his brother would be.
But for now Elisa is alone. Solitude is something she learned how to love, and now she loves it better than almost anything. She loves it at home, in her filthy little studio at the back of the house, with her radio and paints, where she goes on her day off when Derek is at work. But she is most alone in a car, on a trip, this trip, with the windows down and the wind and highway in her ears. Or in a storm, windows shut, defogger roaring, the rain thudding against the metal and glass. She doesn't listen to the radio. It's too easy to get invested in something, only to hear it fade away. Not that there's much on the radio to capture her interest. She doesn't like the news. Politics are meaningless to her. She didn't care who won the 2008 election — this disgusted people she knew. But they forgave her because her son was dead and they figured that had something to do with it.
She believes that Silas's death makes people feel superior to her. They decided at some point that it was probably her fault. In any event, her days of worrying about other people's opinions of her are long over.
Everything's going to change in a couple of minutes.
2.
The Honda has a crack in the windshield that runs from the lower left-hand corner to a spot at eye level on the passenger side. She is looking at the crack, or rather through the crack, to the white line on the roadside that it parallels. This is a habit of hers that she is now indulging, keeping the crack aligned with the line.
When she was a teenager and her father took her out to the suburbs to teach her to drive, he recommended that, in order to stay on the road, she should keep the hood ornament aligned in her vision with the white line. It was one of four stations, as he put it, for the eye to visit: side mirror, rearview mirror, speedometer, hood ornament. Even the shortest journey should consist of a constant cycling among the four. He was methodical that way. When her mother drank or grew depressed, and Elisa ended up in tears in her bedroom with the radio turned up, her father's knock was never far behind; he would sit at the foot of her bed, ostentatiously not touching her, and offer tried and tested methods for "dealing with" her mother: never look directly into her eyes when she is in "a state"; never tell her that she reminds you of her mother; always offer audible feedback to indicate you're listening; frequently use the phrase "of course you're right." As though the woman were a problem to be solved.
Which in some ways she was. Which in some ways Elisa is, as she is painfully aware. Derek, to his credit, doesn't try. He lets her wend her unthinking way through her life, making only the subtlest suggestions, usually coiled up inside the phrase "You're a scientist, you figure it out." A reminder of what she gave up. An unasked question of why.
The problem, of course, with her father's driving method is that it leaves out actually looking where you're going. In truth it is not necessary to align anything with anything, in order to drive. You just focus on a point in the distance and move toward it. Here on the highway, Elisa feels proud to have overcome this limitation in her technique; gazing through the crack is just a tic. But outside the car, in her life, this has long been, and remains, a problem. There is only what lies directly in front of her, and she is afraid to look away from it. She is resourceful; tough, she hopes; able to cope with whatever she finds immediately before her. But she doesn't want to look up and see the future.
A shrink told her that once, about herself. Facile nonsense, she told Derek. Derek nodded in the way he nodded when he thought she was wrong.
She is feeling the feeling of being hungry and thinking about what food she will settle for, when she finally decides it's time to eat. A spring inside the driver's seat is worrying at her back. One cloud is in the sky, its bottom edge just visible in the tinted area running along the top of the windshield. Sunlight has slashed the dashboard in two and she can see her fingerprints in the dust, from where she braced herself several days ago, at a rest stop on the outbound leg of the trip, while she was picking some money up off the passenger-side floor.
Everything is so clear and vivid, she is almost moved.
3.
She married at twenty-one. Derek was in law school — he was twenty-five, wore a tie; he took her out and drank one bottle of beer and they had sex in his room. He was consistent in everything, the things he said, the ways he touched her: it flattered her, that he should care enough to do the things he knew would please her. She took him home to Chicago, and her parents embarrassed her, with their sagging bookcases and thick eyeglasses and Oriental rugs worn through to the boards. Growing up, she had been smuggled into jazz clubs, she read fantasy novels in the back row of Marxist lectures, inhaled pot smoke on her way to bed. Blacks and gays came to the house and she sat on their knees. Cops broke up her parents' parties. Karl Popper once took her to a Cubs game.
But Derek managed to impress them, laughing at their jokes, pretending to sympathize with their politics. When they told him he was welcome to sleep with Elisa in her room he said no thanks, the couch was fine. During the night she went to him.
"Sorry," she whispered.
"They're all right."
"They're not."
"They love you."
"They love themselves."
Derek gazed at her levelly. "We aren't any different," he said, and she said, "Fuck you, Derek!" just loud enough to be sure her parents would hear.
This was a part of him she professed to dislike — the thing they would fight about, when they fought. The way he would challenge her, reflexively, as though, because she was younger, because she was a woman, because she was less advanced in her studies, because her parents were bohemians, she lacked rigor, lacked the ability to see herself clearly. She fought against his patronizing tone, shouted at him, cursed, pushed him hard in the chest with both hands. His amusement at her rage enraged her further still.
But of course this was what attracted them, too. She liked his immovability, his physical solidity and unswerving beliefs, the way she could fling herself against him until she was exhausted. He liked her volatility, her war against the genetic and cultural heritage she ultimately had no hope of overcoming (and perhaps, at least at times, secretly loved).
And so why, when they got married and she got pregnant, did she give in? She'd been working on a master's in plant biology at UW, in Madison. Derek told her she didn't have to quit, she shouldn't, but she surprised herself by wanting to. And as soon as she did, she felt a profound relief. She drank coffee (until her growing body developed an aversion) and read, and decided that she was going to love motherhood. She made a careful study of parenting books and tallied up their shortcomings in her head even before she'd reached her third trimester; they seemed to her like bad science. When both births went smoothly, when she appeared happy, Derek professed to be pleased. If he missed her old intensity, he didn't say so. In any event, the only advice her parents could give her now was parenting advice, and they wouldn't dare. They were proud of their inexpertise. "The shittiest parents in Chicago," Elisa's mother used to boast to her friends. Her parents approved wholeheartedly of her early marriage, her abandonment of her studies, seeming to delight in having raised someone so different from themselves, someone who turned out to be conventional after all. Or perhaps Elisa was happy, and they saw this, and it pleased them? Surely it couldn't be that simple?
No, of course not. But by now it was time to stop caring about what they thought or why they thought it. She had her own life to live. Her own children to confuse.
She raised the boys, talked on the phone with friends, listened to the morning therapist on the radio and laughed at people's problems. Derek always worked late but it was all right. He didn't have anybody on the side. He was just busy. He specialized in maritime law as it applied to the Great Lakes. When she began to feel that perhaps she had thrown her youth away, she got a part-time job as a technician at the lab where she had once interned, before she met Derek. It was all right. She kept doing it. They spent most of a decade like this, turning into Wisconsinites. She was happy enough with Derek, with her lab. This is what she told herself.
Years later, when Derek accepted the job at SUNY Reevesport, Elisa considered not going with him. Keeping Sam and staying in Madison. Or even giving up Sam for a little while, staying there alone. Derek didn't understand. He had actually been offered the job the previous year — it was what they wanted then, a change, maybe a way to break the pattern of Silas's bad behavior. But then Silas died, and he had to turn it down. Now the college had called and offered it to him again — the other guy hadn't worked out. He hounded Elisa until she told him — this came to her without forethought — that it was Silas's grave, she didn't want to leave Silas's grave.
"That's it?" he said.
It wasn't, but she said, "Yes."
"But that's ridiculous."
"Leaving our son behind?"
"But you're willing to leave our living son behind."
She said nothing.
"A grave can be moved," he said.
He was right — it embarrassed her not to have thought of that.
"That's not what I want," she said.
"Then what do you want?"
This was the question Derek could always use to end an argument, because it was the question she could never seem to answer. Even when she did know what she wanted, she often found it difficult to articulate. Where to go, what to do. Should we spend this money on the house, or on a vacation? Do you want to go back to school? Do you want to go out to eat? Should Silas's friends, the ones who led him wrong, be invited to the funeral, or barred from it? Does Sam need counseling, do we all need counseling? What do you want to do for the rest of your life? What have you ever wanted to do?
The only thing she always knew she wanted was love, was Derek, was her boys, but then even that went wrong, and she didn't want anything at all. And so she began to feel as though there was no want, there was no you.
What do you want?
They moved to Reevesport together, and the grave stayed behind, an unresolved conflict between them. An artifact. It is still there, and that's why she's on the road today, five years later, July 23, 2012. That's why she has her job waiting for her in Reevesport, in another lab, managing it this time. That's why she has her art studio and her love of solitude, and an affair she's been having with a man in the town, the man who runs the frame shop. That's why she's where she is now, poised to apprehend the inexplicable thing that's about to happen.
4.
Her initial method of coping was to ignore everything. To obliterate her usual mode of attention. She didn't let her eyes or mind rest. She kept moving, doing things of little or no importance. This was in Madison. She didn't answer the phone or return messages. She threw most mail away. Derek paid the bills, talked to Elisa's mother on the phone, took Sam to the shrink. She got thinner and no longer drank for pleasure, or for any reason at all. She stopped having sex, while Derek carried on, semi-openly and without evident pleasure, with a colleague. She rarely spoke and didn't look people in the eye when she did. She did not feel alive.
Then, about a year in, she made a discovery. If she managed to focus on something very small, she could enter into a state of deep concentration that her body registered as satisfaction. Embroidery. She had a kit: a long- forgotten gift from Derek's mother that she had almost thrown out. Now she spent three months doing almost nothing else. Her eyes were red and tired from incessant close focus. Her fingertips were callused from pricking. She would finish a project — flowers, ducks, it didn't matter — set it aside, pick up another. This is what she did while they prepared for the move, while Derek packed boxes, marked boxes, hauled boxes.
As she worked she would talk. In her head, she thought. The first time was with the memory of a college roommate, a sullen, lachrymose girl named Naomi with flat damp eyes and a long chin, who had stayed in Elisa's dorm for only a semester before transferring. She had worn flannel pajamas printed with a pattern of ivy not unlike the one Elisa was embroidering now. The two of them were not friends. They argued over petty things — water in the soap dish, moldy food. These were the kinds of fights they had now, in Elisa's head, but with a wild and violent intensity: the two of them facing off in the narrow vestibule of their dorm room, shoving each other against the walls, screaming and spitting in each other's faces. There was something deeply satisfying and fascinating about these fantasies; daily, Elisa took up her needlework with excitement and dread, like a junkie.
At some point the arguments with Naomi left the hallway and moved to the bedroom, where, in predawn light, Elisa could make out the ivy pajamas discarded on the floor, and in the bed, her roommate's thick stubbled ankles crossed over a man's tight and clenching ass: Derek, her husband, fucking the horsey Naomi!
The women shoved and shouted while Derek cowered, half-covered by the bedclothes. Elisa could feel the rough synthetic carpet underneath her feet, she could smell deodorant and sweaty bras and the funk of sex. You don't go to bed without washing your fucking dinner dishes! And your fucking hair in the shower drain! And that's my husband, get your hands off my husband! Before dismissing Naomi, poor shy unhappy Naomi, from her thoughts, Elisa got her libido back, made Derek screw her, told him to give up the woman from work, You're mine, she told him, you're mine.
In the days that followed, in her head, she found herself in a pseudointellectual standoff with an old philosophy professor; embroiled in a religious debate with an Orthodox rabbi, the father of an old friend; in the checkout aisle of the supermarket, demanding to see the manager.
And then Silas, the nonexistent adult Silas, in the hospital waiting area, the two of them separated by twenty feet of linoleum, shouting at one another, their fingers gripping the soft and soiled arms of their chairs. She could smell the stale coffee in the little café beyond the reception desk; she could see nurses hurrying by, white moths at the edges of her vision. This was the hospital where they were told to go after the accident; this is where the doctor told them he was dead. Indeed, in this fantasy, the doctor was waiting just offstage, invisible but present; Elisa warded him off with an outstretched hand.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Familiar"
by .
Copyright © 2012 J. Robert Lennon.
Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press.
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