Robert Lennon - Familiar

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.

Here, Silas was tall — he was still growing when he died — and stooped, around twenty-five, though he seemed to have aged further. Sullen, as in life, but sadder now. Angry, but a new kind of anger. Calculated, precise. She was afraid of him, not afraid of what he might do, but that whatever he said, it might be right.

You always thought you were so smart! You thought you were smarter than everyone else! But look at you now!

He raised his face to reply, and his mouth moved and sounds came out of it. They frightened her, though they had not yet coalesced into sense. Any second now, they might.

What are you doing here? she shouted, Why did you make us come here? (Though Derek wasn’t there in this fantasy, only Elisa; she needed Silas to think his father was present to back her up, though it wasn’t clear why this was important.)

He was pointing at her now, as he spoke, pointing first at Elisa and then down the hall, where his own dead body lay, and his eyes were blazing and his lips were white with spit. He stood up, accusing her of something, she didn’t know what. The twenty feet between them seemed to collapse into ten, then five.

There is nothing else I could have done, she was saying, I would have had to become someone else.

And now he was right there, she could feel the heat from his enraged face and she understood him now, That’s what I wanted! he shouted, That’s what I wanted!

(And all the while she poked and pulled at the embroidery hoop, a toad seated on a mushroom, blades of grass springing up on either side, I HEAR IT’S SPRING! was the caption, and her lips moved, muttered sounds came out, and later Sam would say he paused outside the open door calling Mom, Mom! and she didn’t answer.)

She stops for gas and food at the first place she sees when she can no longer stand not eating. It’s a sprawling rest stop, with separate parking lots for cars and big rigs, and multiple pavilions under which gas can be pumped. She chooses one, fills her tank with the wind blowing her hair into her face, then goes inside and eats something so bland and generic she isn’t even aware of what it is while she’s eating it. She is reminded of every other highway journey she has undertaken, every other undistinguished meal. She thinks they stopped here when they moved from Wisconsin — here or someplace exactly like it. They sat in a silent cluster, chewing their food and staring into space.

They never did find a rhythm, the three of them. A way for them to fit together without Silas. They would get along, life would be peaceful in their new home, but they had no sense of purpose. The house in Reevesport was quiet; it had more rooms, for fewer people. One of them was a studio for Elisa in which, presumably, she would find something to do. She loaded all her embroidery into it, sat there for a few days, then threw it all away.

A few weeks later, Sam said to her, “That stuff was fucking you up. You should paint.” This was a habit that Sam had begun, gradually and then with increasing confidence, to indulge: treating his mother like a casual acquaintance, another teenager. He swore. He let her see his cigarettes, spilling out of the military-surplus canvas satchel on which he had Sharpied an anarchy symbol. This is something his brother might once have mocked. Sam was seventeen then, but at times seemed much younger.

Elisa said, “I don’t paint.”

“So?” he said. He himself was into drawing. He was trying to start a band. “It doesn’t matter,” he said to her. “Just paint.”

She did what he said. A few months later, it was almost all she did. For a long time she tried to paint particular subjects — she bought some watercolors and an easel and went out in nature and made terrible pictures of things. But she preferred to be in the studio. So she switched to still lifes. Then she took up acrylics because the watercolors were so thin as to seem to consist of nothing at all. She liked the acrylics so much, the rich pastes in their metal tubes, that she stopped caring about what she was painting and just put the paint onto the canvas right out of the tube. Then she gave up on canvas and just slathered the paint around using a palette knife on squares of plywood she cut to size in the shed. When she broke the palette knife trying to open a frozen door lock, she switched to a heavy-duty paint scraper from the hardware store.

She did not talk to herself or to anyone else, real or imaginary, while she was painting. At first it was an effort not to. This was a thing her mind craved. But she silenced the voices and tried to appreciate the integrity of the materials before her, and as the voices went away so did her subject matter, until she was left with pure form. She tried to make her mind mirror the paintings, to render the slurry of memory and impulse as colored fields, complementary blanknesses connected by line and hue. This became the new project, doomed to failure. Which is part of why she liked it.

All of this took a year. She was working again, at the new lab. She worked, and made these paint-covered squares, in perfect contentment. The paintings weren’t art. They weren’t for other people. They were just a thing she was doing.

But Derek told her she should go out and find a gallery to hang them in. She believed that he was growing weary of her cadaverous presence in the house, her sexual appetite (which had not been quelled by its regular satisfaction), her newly rediscovered intensity and sobriety that appeared, once and for all, to have nothing of substance behind it. So she took a couple of the most obscure-looking paintings out to get framed, and the man at the frame shop looked at them and said, “They don’t need much. They don’t really need frames at all, do they?” A few weeks after that, she went to bed with him.

She gets back on the road, and again she is driving, and the windows are down and the air is rushing in. This stretch of highway is both different and exactly the same. They made it to be consistent. So that wherever you go it looks like the American highway. And the highways of Ohio, she has often thought, are the precise average of all the other highways in America. When people say “the open highway” they are thinking of Wyoming, Colorado, northern California, but if you are driving a car in America, chances are you’re someplace that looks a lot like this. Elisa is surprised that more people don’t fall asleep and crash.