Robert Lennon - Familiar

Instead of going home she drives up the lake to the state park. There is almost nobody there, because of the impending rain. A pickup truck is parked in the lot and a man is asleep on the rocky beach. A fat woman is listlessly fishing off the end of the jetty.

Elisa stands on the shore beside the stone benches and gazes at the power plant on the other side of the water. This is where the photo would have been taken. She tries to imagine what circumstances would have brought them here together — her and Derek and both boys. In her memory, it was hard getting the boys to do anything, let alone with the two of them together, by the time they were thirteen and fourteen.

Until now, Elisa used to think of those years, when she thought of them at all, as a time when Silas had to be endured. And indeed, he was unpleasant to be around — imperious, disdainful, he rarely opened his mouth except to mock or criticize.

But his mind was elsewhere — he was thinking about his life outside the house. By this time he had friends, sycophants, female followers; he had come into his bad-boy good looks, the James Dean cheekbones Lorraine was pleased to note had come from her; the thick black hair the wind always seemed to blow into an arrangement of perfect, studied nonchalance. He used the phone a lot, went out on his bike without asking, following just enough of the house rules to avoid open conflict. He showed every sign of not caring what they thought.

But Sam simply grew sullen, wouldn’t come out of his room. Moved slowly. The collars of his shirts were always frayed and wet from nervous chewing. He licked his lips incessantly, leaving the skin around his mouth livid and peeling. There were bags under his eyes. The older of the boys, he nevertheless seemed like the baby of the family, fleshy and uncertain. Silas, of course, was uncommunicative: he was rarely there, or distant if he was; he answered their questions with the bare minimum of effort before ducking away, back into his private world. But Sam’s unresponsiveness was more vexing. He didn’t try to escape. He just sat there in the kitchen, or lay on the bed, eyes open and blinking, thin hair stuck to his moist forehead.

“Are you all right?”

“I guess.”

“It’s late, you should go to sleep.”

A shrug.

“Do you want to talk?”

“No.”

“Did you get enough to eat tonight?”

Another shrug.

The shrug had become a signature gesture. The shrug, the slump. Sometimes a limp. “Are you hurt?” “No.” Elisa began to get the idea that Sam was feigning injury, not for their sake but for his own, for the small pleasure of privately comforting himself. She shared this theory with Derek. He seemed faintly repulsed by the idea.

Lorraine said, “It’s genes. Nothing to be done. Luckily,” she added, patting Derek’s hand, “our family has never been moody.”

Moody. Elisa’s father used to call it “blue.” “Your mother’s a bit blue today.” “Poor Lisa,” he said during meals, when Elisa let her teenage hair fall into her face, and ground her teeth, and gripped the seat of her chair with both hands as though, if she concentrated hard enough, she might be able to fly away on it. “Poor Lisa is feeling blue.”

Sam was not blue. He wasn’t moody. He was depressed.

Elisa is exhausted from her weekend of gaming and the session with Amos. She finds a picnic table and sits down at it. It’s astonishing that it hasn’t rained yet; the clouds are heavy and black and the lake surface is lashed by the wind. She will sit here until the first drops fall. She imagines herself making a run for it, hands over her head. It seems important not to take cover now — she wants to be pushed to shelter.

Poor Lisa is feeling blue. Though when she reflects upon the way she actually feels today, it comes to her as no visible color, nothing as natural as sky. She feels like something blinding and artificial and impossible to look at directly. Ultrasomething. Infrasomething. She closes her eyes hard and hears the muscles tightening in her head. Betsy the physicist seems less real to her today, the possibility of madness more palpable.

When she thinks about that last year, before the accident, what she remembers is the desperate, guilty feeling of her love for Sam beginning to fray around the edges. The component of her love that was pity, curdling and turning into a kind of disdain. Resentment at his weakness. At the ways he was like her — or, rather, the ways he was like the parts of herself she disliked. His willingness to give himself over to other people’s ideas of him, his willingness to give up.

She stayed up late with him while he lay sweating, and smelling of despair — she sat hunched over with her elbows on her knees, trying to find the right combination of words that would make him talk to her. What is it? Did Silas say something to you? Sam would talk — he wanted to talk — but he wouldn’t talk about his brother. Instead he spoke in abstractions, in philosophical conundrums. And not very interesting ones. Why, he wanted to know, should he get up in the morning and go to school when nobody cared whether he showed up or not? (But your father and I care, Lisa told him, over and over. As if that would matter.) What was the point of it all? (She could not pretend to have an answer. The only one she knew was: the pursuit and expression of love. And she couldn’t say this to her son, who loved no one and, to hear him tell it, was loved by no one but her and Derek.) Why did people like Silas when Silas was a dick who mocked and belittled them? Why did those same people turn around and mock and belittle him, Sam? And why didn’t Silas tell them to stop?

She doesn’t remember what she said. But the answer, of course, was that power attracted and weakness repelled. At times, that power could manifest itself as charm, as intelligence: as the positive attributes that people pretended to seek in one another. But it wasn’t the manifestations that mattered, it was the power.

(Elisa remembers better what she wanted to say than what she actually did say: Goddammit, Sam, you’re older and bigger than he is. Don’t be a fucking pussy. )

Silas was powerful. And Elisa respected him for it. His evident indifference to, even disgust for, his own mother: she respected it. She respected it because she felt it herself, about her own mother, who liked to preempt criticism of her weakness by calling attention to it, with feigned pride. “Lisa’s toes have been poking out of her shoes for three months and I didn’t even notice!” “I forgot, completely forgot, to make Lisa lunch!” “I was so thoroughly drunk that night I had to send Lisa to the corner for cigarettes, if you can believe that.”

It was true that at the time Elisa liked it. She liked the squirrelly little threesome she made with her parents — the shield of nondescript scruffiness and cultural superiority they suspended between themselves and the world. She felt proud to be her parents’ daughter: she thought there was something real, some empirically verifiable quality, that justified their stance of amused condescension against other people. Now she knows it was fear.

It wasn’t until she was in college, when she began to meet confident people, powerful people, that she understood. It was Derek’s confidence, his ability to approach others to ask for what he wanted, to put the past behind him with finality, that crystallized her desire: he was the antithesis of her parents.

Of course Sam was not Elisa’s mother. Elisa herself wasn’t even like her, not really, and there was as much Derek in Sam as there was Elisa. But it was impossible not to see him as a manifestation of Gemma Macalaster, casually exerting her influence from afar. Or, rather: exuding, seeping. She was like a fog, like the mildly acrid cloud of cigarette smoke that had always surrounded her, that followed you out of the apartment in your clothes and hair and was with you wherever you went. She could still smell it sometimes, or believed she could, when she was drifting, finally, off to sleep: she could smell her mother’s cigarettes in the pillowcase, in her nightgown, as if the old woman had visited just long enough to lie here and imprint her particular brand of passivity on the bedclothes.