Robert Lennon - Familiar

Derek says, “You were the only woman I’d ever known who actually listened to what I was saying. The way you concentrated. Even if you didn’t know what the hell I was talking about — you figured it out. You asked questions. I liked answering your questions.”

He pauses, and his face flushes. Maybe because he has realized that’s what he’s doing now: answering her question. Or maybe because he is contemplating what he says next:

“You fucked me. Not like other girls. You wanted it and you came and got it. You didn’t give a shit how that might look to me.”

“It looked good to you,” she says.

“It looked good to me.”

Maybe too good, she thinks. He drew out the narcissist in her. The self she saw reflected in him, she came to mistake for her real self. She forgot how to desire things that weren’t him. She would blame him for this, later. Unfairly. Now, recalling that state, listening to his voice, feeling bad that she ever found fault with anything, she takes his hand in both of hers. He lets her do this. He tells her about his proposal (“You will marry me, won’t you?”), their wedding (family only, no church, which ought to have pleased everyone but pleased only the two of them), their first rental house, a crumbling bungalow two blocks from the Willy Street Co-op, with crooked floors, squirrels living under the roof, and mushrooms sprouting in between the bathtub and wall. Eventually that house was condemned, then collapsed on itself, folding spontaneously into the ground, a briefly famous neighborhood event.

The time his older brother Nate, drunk, groped her. She did not take it personally — it was something between Derek and him, a rivalry with deep and mysterious roots. Maybe it was about Lorraine, or about their dead father. At any rate Derek simply grabbed his brother by the back of the shirt, dragged him to the door, pushed him outside, and locked it behind him. He left Elisa to drop Nate’s duffel bag and car keys out a second-story window. She had known of many such rivalries in her life — there was a time, in college, when she thrived on other people’s stories of familial disharmony — but she had never heard of one that ended so suddenly or endured so completely. She has never seen Nate again, rarely even heard his name uttered — even now, retelling the story, Derek refers only to “my brother.” You’re dead to me. Derek would never say anything so dramatic, but he could mean it, live by it. He is a man of regulations, absolutes.

He is telling her, now, about the time he broke up a fight on the street and ended up in the hospital. (She remembers she was angry at him, and proud; frustrated that he should insert himself into someone else’s life in this typically masculine fashion. But why is he reminiscing about this, of all things? Why is it important to him, to their life story?) And now he begins to tell her about the boys. (His gaze leaves her face and body and drifts to the window; his voice quiets. He does not want to discuss this. But he will do as she has asked, what he has agreed to. ) Sam: the pregnancy test in the convenience store bathroom. Her craving for peanut butter cups. Lorraine’s absurd objection to certain baby names: “If you call it that, I will never speak to you again.” Elisa waking in the night, eight months pregnant, telling him the baby didn’t feel right. The drive to the hospital, the midwife’s vexation; Sam had shifted; he wasn’t where he belonged. The doctor’s efforts to shove him into place, the sudden gush of fluid onto the table, the emergency cesarean. And Silas, eleven months and three weeks later: unexpected, uncanny. Her obstetrician had retired in the interim and the new one, a young, nervous man, advised against a natural birth. She insisted. She knew it would be easy. It was easy, waking to labor, arriving at the hospital just after eight, birth by noon.

It is all the same so far, the story is as she remembers. But his voice is growing increasingly strained, as if he has been forced into a lie. Then he stops, and says, as if exasperated, “Does this have something to do with them? With the boys?”

She doesn’t respond.

“Is something going on that you haven’t told me?”

“No, no. They’re — when was the last time you talked to them? The last time we talked to them. Remind me.”

His eyes widen, then narrow into a scowl.

“I don’t remember,” he says. “Why are you asking me this?”

She doesn’t know what to say. She folds her legs up under her nightshirt.

“Is it Sam?” he asks. “Have you heard something from Sam?” As if this is a plausible circumstance, as if he’s been waiting for it to happen.

“No. I don’t know. I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking.”

He stares at her a long time. She says, “Please, just go on with the story.”

He closes his eyes, slowly, draws breath. There is a very fine sheen on his forehead. He tells her about their place on Gorham, Elisa’s abandonment of her studies. He says this carefully, as though it might hurt her to hear it. The boys’ early childhood. The Montessori preschool where they ate brown rice and seaweed for snack and made toys out of sticks and leaves and feathers. Or was it Waldorf? And shouldn’t she have cared enough to remember? She hated the place at first, until she met the aide, a kindly old German woman who told the children violent folktales in a barely penetrable accent while waving her fat arms over her head. Sam’s fall from his high chair, his stitches, the scar he still has (why does so much of this narrative consist of injuries, accidents, fights?). The time Silas went missing: they spent an hour and a half stalking through the neighborhood, calling his name, searching the park, knocking on doors. Panic, terror.

She remembers a thought that came to her then that she has repeated to herself many times over the years and that she still doesn’t fully understand: I have finally gotten what I deserve. (In the end Silas had crawled under their bed and fallen asleep.)

And now the stories focus on Silas. He begins to change. His unwillingness to take naps. His boredom. At four, he is no longer content to hear a story or to play with the toys he has. He doesn’t listen to what they tell him, or rather he seems not to hear. He is impassive in the face of punishment: where his brother wails with frustration and regret, Silas tends to endure, quietly, with evident puzzlement. If Sam is absorbed in something, Silas will disrupt it. It isn’t the behavior that disturbs them, but the evident lack of malice. He isn’t being mean. It’s as if he is conducting a social experiment. He will tear a magazine out of Elisa’s hands and throw it across the room. Or he will spill his dinner on the floor, then quickly turn to Derek to see his reaction.

They learn not to react emotionally. Or to react at all. They leave the spilled dinners where they lie. They finish their own meals deliberately, silently, while Silas pounds the table in a monotonous rhythm and Sam cries and cries.

Derek hesitates now, in the telling. He says, “And of course the time…” He pauses, his expression sour, and glares at her.

“Derek, don’t, you don’t have to,” she says, because she knows where this has been going. It all leads to this, for him. She feels, suddenly, as though she has made a major tactical error — that this, on the heels of the fake stroke, the hospital visit, has led her into a cul-de-sac she can’t get out of. Surely she seems completely insane to him.

“There’s the time I hit him,” Derek says.

“Derek, stop, it’s okay, I didn’t mean—”

She squeezes his hand but he pulls it away. He says, “That night at dinner. He threw the sippy cups on the floor. And then while we were trying to clean them up he grabbed your glass and then mine—”