Robert Lennon: Familiar

This is fucked up.

From inside her bag comes the sound of electronically rendered mariachi music.

She reaches in and takes out the phone. There’s the picture of Derek again, and the screen tells her it’s him who’s calling. She isn’t sure if she wants to hear his voice right now. But perhaps something is wrong. Maybe it’s Sam, something’s wrong with Sam. Why would he call her when he knew she was driving? He doesn’t ever call her. If he needs her, he just waits for her to appear.

The music is awful. She answers.

“Hi, it’s me! You got on the road okay?”

She doesn’t speak.

“Lisa?”

“I’m here. Yes, I’m fine, I’m on the road.”

“How far are you?”

“I don’t know. I’m in Ohio.”

After a silence, he says, “Are you all right?”

“Sure.” He sounds different. So must she.

“You’re sure?”

“I’ll be home soon.”

“Should I have dinner ready?”

Dinner. This isn’t something he does.

“Yes, okay.”

“Will do,” he says.

“Okay.”

“Love you.”

“Okay,” she says. She draws another breath, then hangs up. She sits and stares at nothing for a moment then figures out how to turn the phone off entirely. Hands trembling, she drops it back into the bag.

Now she is frightened. That voice that both is and is not Derek’s. The presence of love where there is supposed to be none, or at least a different kind: habitual, practical, inert. A bulwark. Whereas the voice — even in the early days, when he whispered to her in the narrow apartment bed, when their love was a force field around them, buzzing like a short circuit in the energy of the world, it was not like that. Derek was never sweet. This wasn’t a thing she thought she ever wanted. Her father was sweet. No, Elisa wanted a serious man.

The Derek who just called her was not anyone she recognized. He didn’t sound like her husband impersonating somebody else. He sounded like somebody else.

There is something reassuring, isn’t there, about the absence of love. This is what she has often told herself. The only real marriage is the marriage of the body and the mind. Until death do us part: a romantic lie. People can indeed be parted. Love can end, and the body and mind soldier on. To pick up the phone and find that love is gone, that’s something a person can understand. That’s a thing that happens. To pick up the phone and find that love is here, where it doesn’t belong: well.

She has felt this before. The imminence of something enormous and terrible, bearing down. Not knowing. The last time, she was not ready. She should have been, of course; all the signs were there, she should have seen it coming. She might have turned and faced it, stood in its path and stared it down. Instead she let it crush her.

Another big rig roars past. The car shakes. She grips the wheel with both hands and lowers her head to it. All the air seems to be leaving the car. She thinks of the last thing she saw before everything changed, the soda can at the side of the road, and she sees it imploding, some invisible force crumpling it, it folds and twists in on itself, a death rattle escapes it. The steering wheel presses its fake leather texture into her forehead and blood rushes to the spot, and it is the heat from the blood and from the friction of her skin against the plastic that keeps her steady as the moment passes, the car inhales, the air around her cools.

Elisa sits very still, opening and closing her fingers on the wheel, breathing deeply. She feels a cloud pass over the sun, then disappear; her vision behind her closed eyes goes black and then red. After an interval she sits up.

She could look through her bag right now. It would tell her things, no doubt. Maybe it would prepare her better for her arrival at home. She considers, then decides to check one thing only. She feels around in the bag for her wallet, which is as she remembers, and takes a look at her driver’s license. It isn’t the same: her photo is unfamiliar. But the address is the same. She closes the wallet, shoves it into the bag, and pushes the bag onto the floor.

A minute later she’s back on the highway, again heading home. At least she knows where it is.

There was a time, back in Madison, after the accident, when she thought she was going to get a job, and she decided that she ought to get a picture of the boys to hang in her office.

This wasn’t like her. She wasn’t sentimental. But now she needed to be reminded of what she had lost and how she had failed. And the people she worked with, at this imaginary job, they would pity and coddle her, and she wanted to show them that she didn’t need their pity, that she could take it, having this reminder there in the office with her.

As it happened, she couldn’t take it after all. And she wouldn’t work again until Reevesport. But she didn’t know that yet.

Derek’s mother was staying with them — she had come out from North Carolina for the funeral and lingered to help out around the house. As though Elisa, incapacitated by grief, would no longer be able to clean up after herself. This, anyway, was how Elisa chose to see it, Lorraine as an interloper, in collusion with Derek against her. Even from the depths of her misery, she understood that this wasn’t the case, that Silas’s death had changed her, that order had collapsed in their small house on Gorham Street and Derek feared for their marriage and for their life together: but still, he shouldn’t have invited Lorraine to stay. They had lodged her in Derek’s study, and she emerged mornings and walked slowly from room to room, coffee mug in hand, alert for signs of disorderliness. She often sat on the sofa with her arm around Sam’s shoulders, as though protecting him. At times she gazed into Elisa’s eyes and shook her head sadly, demonstrating her sympathy.

Elisa disliked Lorraine. She had always considered this dislike to be a reasonable response to Lorraine’s dislike of her, but Derek had long maintained that Lorraine liked her just fine, or as much as it was possible for her to like any lover of Derek’s. Derek’s father had died young, Lorraine never remarried, and their attachment seemed unhealthy to Elisa. Crypto-sexual. For Derek’s part, he shrugged and smiled when Elisa criticized his mother, as though the very thought of the woman charmed him. Of course this was exasperating, but on the other hand, what mother wouldn’t welcome this kind of devotion?

Well: Elisa, for one. She had not been a cold mother, or an unaffectionate mother, but she had taken pains to keep a distance, a slight detachment. She had not allowed the boys to climb on her, to sit on her lap, to lie with her when she lounged reading on the sofa or on her bed. She stopped breastfeeding each after one year (Sam, of course, lost out to his brother, who had arrived so soon, so unexpectedly; she might have nursed them both, but somehow this had seemed a kind of taboo, or perhaps a visceral reaction to Silas’s fussiness at the breast). What she feared, she would one day realize, was the overwhelming power of love: that if she ever loved her boys with the same level of intensity, the same flavor of intensity, that had once defined her devotion to Derek, she might never again take pleasure in solitude, in the fact of herself, in her self-containment, the intricacies of her mind. She feared she might give herself over to them, to the boys and men, and exist for them alone.

Lorraine blamed Elisa for Silas’s troubles. She was the type of person for whom someone always had to be to blame: there were no innocent mistakes, no accidents. And if Silas was troubled, and Derek infallible, then who else’s fault could it possibly be? To her credit, Lorraine never spoke her mind, not to Elisa anyway. But in her posture, her demeanor, the pitying way she looked at the boys, at her own boy: it was clear how she felt. And now that Silas was dead, now that the worst that could happen had happened, Elisa had begun to agree with her. It was her fault. It was. Cutting off the nursing. Pushing him away when she was trying to read. Failing to give the second helping of dessert. Letting him cry it out in the crib. Since the funeral Elisa had become obsessed with the past, with all the wrong turns their lives together had taken. If only she hadn’t shouted. If only she hadn’t smacked. Wandering through the house, in those days of Lorraine’s tenancy, she would slow, then stop, mouth hanging open, staring at a patch of wall, thinking. Seeing herself doing this, understanding how it must look to Lorraine. And Lorraine was pleased to have been right about Elisa; her every gesture seemed to communicate triumph.