Rebecca Makkai - The Hundred-Year House

“I think part of my skepticism,” Miriam said, “a small part, is Gracie’s sense of entitlement. Some of the things she says ! Remember what she said about my teeth?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes the people who think they deserve stuff are the ones who started life deprived. And then when they’re lucky they feel they earned it.”

“And all the things she’d have to have gotten away with! I just can’t wrap my mind around someone having that much good luck.”

“But can you imagine the same amount of bad luck?”

It was a mistake. He shouldn’t have said it.

“Yes,” she said.

“You look like a caterpillar in there.”

“Good night, caterpillar.”

“Good night, caterpillar.”

Zee was a fraction of herself, a vertical fraction, and another sliver of her was still back in New York at the interviews, and another was in the mirror that spat her decaying face back at her, and another had curled up and died.

There was no one home in the coach house, and she left the door open to the wind. The bed, yes, she checked twice, was still short-sheeted. The jackass hadn’t even made an effort to rumple the covers. Two wine bottles in the recycling.

All she’d needed, in the end, was physical proof. There had always been the possibility, however remote, that those words on Miriam’s work had been about some other man with scarred knees. That they’d been wishful thinking. That nothing had happened yet, as thick as the air was with inevitability.

In the last weeks, their private jokes had grown more flagrant. “This is the greatest soup of the millennium!” Miriam had said, and Zee could only assume it had to do with the night they stayed back at the house, the night of the heart attack, when Doug would have stooped to kiss her at midnight, and Miriam would have tucked her head under his arm and said, “That was the greatest kiss of the millennium.”

She threw things into two suitcases. Clothes and jewelry and shoes, medicine and family photos. Sofia could pack the books up later, could send them to New York.

She’d felt clearheaded in New York, but back here she was underwater again. She had to leave. Obviously, she had to leave. The only question had been whether to take Doug with her. They could have waited till summer. If she’d come home and found no evidence, that’s what she’d have done. Broken the news slowly, convinced him he wanted to live in New York, and they’d be away from her mother and Miriam and Laurelfield, horrible Laurelfield, by July. But here was the evidence, and there was a spare room waiting for her in New York, and Doug was a stranger.

Or maybe it was as simple as this: She’d never been a hard-boiled egg but a raw one — and Doug, Doug’s solid devotion, had been the shell keeping her in. When that shell cracked, what else could a raw egg do but run?

Down on Miriam’s sunporch, she found red acrylic paint and a firm, narrow brush. She took them back through the TV room — there were mountains of file folders there, probably something to do with Miriam’s next ridiculous series — and up to the bedroom, and covered the wall with words.

Doug, you idiot.

You left a trail.

But I already knew, and I took a job in NY.

I never saw how ugly I was till you reflected it back at me.

If Case comes home, tell him I’m sorry.

Tell him to run far away.

Tell Miriam that thing in the kitchen is the only pretty thing she ever made.

She stood in the woods behind the big house, and she looked at it, at all the windows. She closed her eyes, but when she opened them the house was still there.

—

She stuck a brief resignation in Golda’s box, ignoring Chantal. She might have said in the letter that the porn was her fault, but Cole wouldn’t even have wanted that. He’d adopted this battle wholeheartedly.

—

She’d brought with her the photo of herself reading Green Eggs and Ham , the one where she looked so much like her listening father. She had another copy in her album, and she wanted to leave this part of herself, this sharp and innocent part of herself, here. But more importantly, she didn’t want to keep the frame that Doug had fixed so long ago. She leaned it against Cole’s closed office door, with a note. Dear old bastard , it said. For you to remember me. Portrait of the Communist Heretic Zilla Devohr Grant, circa 1970. You’re laughing at “Devohr,” aren’t you? That’s my real gift to you. Back in her office, she filled boxes with books and syllabi and handouts. Her diplomas, journals with her articles. She saved everything from the computer to disk. She wouldn’t teach many of the same courses in New York — the school was so nontraditional that the intros and surveys didn’t even exist — but she wanted all her files nonetheless. Gretchen, her roommate for one year of college, was hard-skulled and ironic, as perfect a department head as Zee could imagine, and her phone call had been a sudden shaft of light. Yes, Zee had said, she was very much interested in a job like that. Zee had told both Gretchen and the hiring dean the story of Cole (the official one, minus her interferences) over dinner, and — she knew it would be all right after the dean told about hanging Robert Bork in effigy on the Oberlin quad — she also told them what she was planning to do. It wouldn’t affect her new contract, they assured her.

She’d been thinking a lot lately about the myths her father used to read her at night: Daphne, Philomela, Actaeon. She realized years later they were all stories of metamorphosis, and she wondered how much he needed these myths to affirm his own reinvention from alcoholic slouch to responsible father and art critic. She’d tried so hard to transform herself — Zee the earnest academic was not the same person as Zilla the privileged child — but she’d slipped. She’d ended up living at home, and sure enough her entire adult life had crumbled away.

She would do it properly this time, in a town where she knew exactly one person. As her father had done, leaving Toronto with his new wife, remaking himself in the grandest American fashion. Some things she could not escape: that gene for mental illness. The sharp and unattractive edges of her own personality. But in New York she’d be away from Doug, and from the self who’d been played for a fool. She’d be away from that house.

She marveled at the lucidity of her thoughts, then realized this was not a good sign. When did people do that, except when they were drunk? And she wasn’t, she was fairly sure.

She took the boxes to her car, and she bought, for the last time, a grilled cheese sandwich from the co-op. It was the only thing they did well, and they did it exquisitely. It was half butter, and the toasted bread broke in your mouth and then melted like the thinnest sheet of ice. In an hour she’d be free. She needed to finish just this one thing first — to undo her damage, outscandal the scandal.

—

At two fifteen, as a class period ended, she stood in the middle of her office and took off her clothes, all of them, and folded them into her purse. Her flesh was pale from the winter, her arms and legs unrecognizably thin. She stuck another muscle relaxer on her tongue. She walked, with just her purse, into the hallway and down the stairs, past students she knew and ones she didn’t, past Chad Crosley, past Fran Leffler. If sound came from their open mouths, she couldn’t hear. She walked past Jerry Keaton, who tried to grab her arm and then thought better of it. She heard Chantal calling out: “Zee! Dr. Grant! Can you — Oh, someone get her a — Zee, come in here!” Out onto the lawn, the icy lawn, her feet in the slush. She didn’t care if she fell, but she didn’t fall. Past the administrative building, through parting clusters of students in parkas. She heard one say, “Where’s my camera?” And another, “Oh, dude, it’s about Cole! I get it, it’s about Cole.” And another, “Hey it’s that math prof! Shane, wasn’t that your math prof?”