Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion

“You’ve got some problem,” Peter observed.

“Wear coats!”

“Louis?” Eileen called from the kitchen. “Are you being strange to Peter?”

Louis thumped Peter’s knee and went around behind the sofa. On the floor, on a folded-out newspaper, was a cage in which a gerbil was availing itself of an exercise wheel. The gerbil ran haltingly, pausing to stumble with its microscopic toenails on a crossbar, then galloping onward with its head high and its neck turned to one side. It didn’t seem to be enjoying itself.

“You silly bird.” Eileen had returned from the kitchen with a faceted beer mug full of breadsticks. She handed them to Peter. “I keep telling Peter our whole family’s wacko. I’ve been warning him since the day we met not to take it personally.” With breathtaking suddenness and fluidity she dropped to her knees and, unlatching the door of the cage, extracted the gerbil by its tail. She raised it above her head and peered up at its twitching nose. Its front paws clawed the air ineffectually. “Isn’t that right, Milton Friedman?” She opened her mouth like a wolf, as if to bite its head off. Then she lowered it onto her upturned palm and it ran up the sleeve of her sweater to her shoulder, where she recaptured it and boxed it in her hands so that only its whiskered, pointed face stuck out. “Say hi to my brother Louis?” She thrust the gerbil’s face up close to Louis’s. It looked like a furry penis with eyes.

“Hello, rodent,” he said.

“What’s that?” She brought the gerbil to her ear and listened closely. “He says hello, person. Hello to Uncle Louis.” She popped the animal back in the cage and latched the door. Still anthropomorphized but free now, it seemed imbecilic or rude as it ran to the tube of its water bottle and nibbled on a droplet. For a moment longer Eileen remained kneeling, hands pressing on her knees, head tilted to one side as if she had water in her ear. Then with the fluid quickness at which Louis was visibly marveling she went and rejoined Peter on the sofa with a bounce. “Peter and Milton Friedman,” she said. “Are not on the best of terms right now. Milton Friedman did number one on some poplin trousers that Peter was very attached to.”

“How funny,” Louis said. “How terribly, terribly funny.”

“I think I’m going to take off,” Peter said.

“Oh come on, be patient,” Eileen said. “Louis is just protective. You’re my boyfriend but he’s my brother. You guys will just have to get along. Have to put-choo in the same cage together. You can have the wheel to walk on, Louis, and I’ll put some Chivas in the bottle for my little sozzlebird. Ha ha ha!” Eileen laughed. “We’ll get Milton Friedman some poplin trousers!”

Peter drained his glass and rose. “I’m going to get going.”

“OK, I’m being a little hard to take,” Eileen said in a completely different voice. “I’ll stop. Let’s loosen up. Let’s be adults.”

“You be adults,” Peter said. “I’ve got work to do.”

Without looking back, he left the room and the apartment.

“Oh great,” Eileen said. “Thanks.” She dropped her head back over the top of the sofa and looked at Louis with upside-down eyes. Her narrow eyebrows were like unbreathing lips, and without brows above them the eyes had an expression foreign to the human vocabulary, an oracular strangeness. “What’d you say to him?”

“I told him he should wear coats.”

“Real cute, Louis.” She stood up and put some boots on. “What’e wrong with you?” She ran down the hall and out the door.

Louis observed her departure with little interest. He wiped a porthole in the condensation on the window and looked down at the taillight-pinkened sleet that was falling on Mass Ave. The telephone rang.

He went to the communications equipment, which sat on its own little table, and ran his eyes over it as if it were a buffet where nothing appealed to him. Finally, after the fifth ring, the machine not coming on, he picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Peter?” The speaker was an old woman with a tremor in her voice. “Peter, I’ve been trying and trying—”

“This isn’t Peter.”

There was an uneasy rustle. Muttering an apology, the woman asked for Eileen. Louis offered to take a message.

“Who’s this?” the woman asked.

“This is Eileen’s brother. Louis.”

“Louis? Well, for goodness’ sake. This is Grandmother.”

He stared at the window for a long time. “Who?” he said.

“Rita Kernaghan. Grandmother.”

“Oh. Hey. Grandmother. Hey.”

“I don’t believe we’ve met but once.”

Belatedly Louis recalled an image, the image of a potbellied woman with a painted kitty-cat face who was already seated at a table at the Berghoff, in Chicago on a snowy evening, when he and his parents and Eileen trooped in. This was some seven years ago—about a year after his mother had flown to Boston for her father’s funeral. Of the Berghoff dinner he remembered nothing but a plate of braised rabbit with potato pancakes. And Rita Kernaghan touching Eileen’s hair and calling her a doll? Or was this some other dinner, some other old woman, or maybe a dream?

Not grandmother: step-grandmother.

“Yes,” he said. “I remember. You live around here.”

“Just outside Ipswich, yes. You’re visiting your sister?”

“No, I work here. I work for a radio station.”

This information seemed to interest Rita Kernaghan. She pressed Louis for details. Was he an announcer? Did he know the programming director? She proposed they have a drink together. “You can get to know me a little. Shall we say after work on Friday? I’ll be in the city in the evening.”

“All right.” Louis said.

No sooner had they set a time and place than Rita Kernaghan murmured goodbye and the line went dead. Moments later Eileen returned to the apartment, wet and angry, and disappeared into the kitchen. “No dinner till you apologize to me!” she said.

Louis frowned thoughtfully, consuming breadsticks.

“You were very childish and very bullyish,” Eileen said. “I want you to apologize to me.”

“I will not. He wouldn’t even shake hands with me.”

“He was cold!”

Louis rolled his eyes at his sister’s sincerity. “All right,” he said. “I’m sorry I messed up your dinner.”

“Well, don’t do it again. I happen to be very fond of Peter.”

“Do you love him?”

The question brought Eileen out of the kitchen with a confounded look on her face. Louis had never asked her anything even remotely so personal. She sat down by him on the sofa and reached for her toes, in a leg-shaving posture, the tip of her nose resting lightly on one knee. “Sometimes I think I do,” she said. “I’m not the real romantic type, though. Milton Friedman’s more my speed. I mean, it’s funny you should ask.”

“Isn’t it the obvious question?”

Still bent over, she closed one eye and studied him. “You seem different,” she said.

“Different from what?”

She shook her head, unwilling to admit it had never occurred to her that her little brother might, at the age of twenty-three, be acquainted with the concept of love. She gave careful attention to her ankles, fingering the round protruding bones, pinching the tendons in back and rocking a little. Her face was already losing prettiness. Time and sun and business school had made her color more shallow, a conceivable middle-aged Eileen suddenly beginning to show through like old wallpaper beneath a coat of new paint. She looked up at Louis shyly. “It’s nice we’re in the same city again.”

“Yeah.”

She became even more tentative. “You like your job?”

“Too early to say.”