Wally Lamb - We Are Water

“New Rochelle?” I said. “You drove all the way into New York?”

Thank God she had, she said, because she’d struck pay dirt at that Dollar Days. Her purchases included two large bags of deeply discounted miscellany, including a twenty-four-piece box of plastic British Royal Family figurines.

I began complaining about my day with the twins—how Andrew had kept making spit bubbles with his amoxicillin instead of just swallowing it. How Ariane had toddled over to the dirty diaper pail, climbed on, and tipped it over while I was at the door with a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses—and how mopping up the mess, wet-vacing and disinfecting their bedroom carpet, had taken me the better part of an hour. From now on, we were buying Pampers, I told her. I didn’t care how much they cost. I was hoping to generate a little … what? Sympathy? Remorse, maybe? But Annie just sat there, sifting through her stuff, barely listening. And when I stopped talking, she went into the twins’ room, kissed their foreheads, and then, grabbing her new “treasures,” raced down to the studio I’d fixed up for her in the space between the washer and dryer and the furnace. She was down there for the rest of that night.

What had come over her? Was it OCD—some kind of hoarding disorder, maybe? Some sort of anxiety related to motherhood? If so, she could be treated. We could get her an antidepressant or a tranquilizer to take the edge off a little. But Annie wasn’t accumulating stuff solely for the sake of accumulating it. She was making art out of it, so maybe I should back off. Give her the benefit of the doubt … But could you even call it art? Like I said, it wasn’t like she’d had any formal training. To the best of my knowledge, she’d never even taken an art course in high school. Had never even finished high school. Maybe it was some sort of delayed reaction to the tough childhood she’d had. Annie’s childhood: that’s always been another “no trespassing” zone. I know the basics. She lost her mother when she was five years old. Her father had gone off the rails as a result and she’d bounced around in foster care. But Annie’s always skirted the details of her early life. Waiting here in stalled traffic, I can’t help but wonder: has she been more forthcoming with Viveca about her childhood? What does Viveca know?

A cruiser passes me on the shoulder, its lights flashing, its siren not wailing but making loud little belches. There must be an accident up ahead, which would explain why we’ve now almost come to a complete stop. Oh man, I haven’t even gotten as far as Sandwich yet. I’ll be lucky if I get to that rental place before they close for the day—or maybe even for the weekend. And what do I do if I can’t pick up the key to Viveca’s cottage? Break into the place? Start looking for motel “vacancy” signs? And now, adding insult to injury, this little jerk in the Ford Focus has his blinker on and he’s trying to squeeze in between me and the Subaru. Smart move, buddy. Nothing like lane-changing when both lanes are crawling along at about half a mile an hour. Atta boy. Nose right in. Be my guest, you little shit. When did you get your driver’s license? Yesterday? He’s talking a blue streak to his girlfriend, oblivious that his directional signal’s still blinking. To my right is one of those big-ass campers that must get about five or six miles to the gallon. A warning sprawls across the RV’s left side: MAKE WAY FOR MEAN DARLENE! A plump white-haired couple sits up front, eating a snack out of a paper bag. Microwave popcorn, maybe? Their jaws are moving in synch. When I was stuck behind them a quarter of a mile ago, I read their back bumper stickers: LET FREEDOM RING! and DON’T BLAME ME! I VOTED FOR THE HERO AND THE HOTTIE.

I honk at the kid in the Ford, and when he looks in his rearview mirror, I point down at his blinker. I can tell he doesn’t get it. Now the girlfriend turns around and looks at me, too. They both shake their heads as if I’ve offended them. On, off, on, off … Should I? Hey, why not? We’ve come to a stop. We’re all just sitting here. I put my Prius in park and get out, go up to his window and tap on it with my wedding ring. I hear the soft clunk of his car door locks. Jesus, what does he think I am? The traffic jam ax murderer?

“Yeah?”

“Your blinker’s on.”

“Is it?” He gives me this look like it’s his inalienable right to drive me crazy. But hey, I’m not about to get into a dustup about it with Junior here. I turn and head back to my car.

He’s a ballbuster, this kid. Lets about a minute go by before he finally turns it off. And when he does, it’s like the relief you feel when one of those ice cream headaches finally begins to subside. The radio’s playing that ominous music from Jaws . “Okay, but let’s separate fact from Hollywood fiction,” the shark lady’s saying. “These animals are carnivores, yes. But they’re not evil manhunters. They hunt and eat to survive, not to kill gratuitously. That better describes our species than theirs.”

“ Natural Born Killers ,” the Mad Hatter says. “Now there’s a great movie! Woody Harrelson and … Who was the girl? Natalie Portman, right?”

It was Juliette Lewis. One of the students I was seeing at the time—when had that movie come out? 1994? 95?—she kept mentioning how Juliette Lewis and she were half-sisters, and how they looked so much alike, and if I didn’t believe her, I should go see her sister’s new movie, Natural Born Killers . She’d seen it several times herself, she said—had been invited to attend the premiere but couldn’t afford the trip to California. Petra, her name was. She was a nice enough kid, high-strung but high functioning. In the honors program, if I remember correctly. But she was a sad kid who, I began to realize, had no friends. And when I did make a point of going to see the movie, I didn’t observe the slightest resemblance between the two. I eventually diagnosed her with Delusional Disorder, Mixed Type …

“No, seriously, Tracy. You should Netflix it this weekend,” the Mad Hatter advises. Not likely, Tracy says. Tomorrow, she’ll be part of an expedition that’s hoping to locate and tag one or more of the great whites for the purpose of tracking their migratory patterns …

Whatever it was that was compelling Annie to turn her landfill and secondhand shop finds into art, over the next years she created a series of assemblages she called Buckingham Palace Confidential . In Elizabeth Burns the Rice-A-Roni! Prince Philip and the rest of the royal family sit stiffly at a doll house dinette set while, standing at a toy stove on which sits a blackened toy frying pan, the Queen, wearing a coronet and a polka dot apron, throws up her jointed arms in domestic defeat. In Lady Di Reconsiders , the Princess of Wales, in her famously familiar wedding gown, marries Magic Johnson instead of Charles. Johnson’s in his uniform, as are his ushers, the other members of the 1992 Olympic “dream team.” Diana’s attendants are female superheroes: Wonder Woman, Supergirl. The royal family is in attendance, too, but they’ve turned their backs to the ceremony. So it was art that was driving her, I decided—comic art at that, laced with a little feminist protest. But not dysfunction … And yet, those weird scavenger hunts she was doing on the Saturdays when I was home with the kids? Whenever she came back with a good haul, she’d be wide-eyed, jazzed up, talking a blue streak and fast . What was that? Creative passion? Some kind of mania? I remember worrying that she might be starting to manifest bipolar disorder. But whatever Annie’s behavior did or didn’t indicate, I tried hard to play by her rules, encouraging her without engaging her as to why she was hunting down all this stuff, or what these 3-D collages she was making meant. But not engaging her didn’t mean I wasn’t watching her—trying to understand what was going on with her. Look, she was right: she was my wife, not my patient. I tried not to analyze her, but hey. Bottom line: I was worried about her. I’m a psychologist. I observe, make hypotheses. It’s what we do.