Robert Lennon: Familiar

But she knows that isn’t true. Or rather, if it is, she has no intention of accepting it, so it might as well not be true.

In spite of the air-conditioning, she’s hot, and feels fat. She wants her old body back, the one she woke up in this morning. It’s her father’s body, lean, stringy, a little stooped. It embarrassed her in high school and college, but even then it felt good to live in, like the sparse apartments she favored, the casual relationships with boys she preferred, until Derek. She was surprised and grateful that this body came back after her boys quit nursing — she looked just like them.

Now she feels like her mother, with boobs and a gut. Small boobs, small gut, but still. She’s reached some critical mass — hot enough on the inside to sweat, and the cold air chilling her. Fuck it! She turns off the AC and lowers the driver’s side window. The pressure inside the car changes and her ears pop. She has to open the passenger window too, to even it out. The car isn’t built to be driven with the windows open. It’s supposed to seal its driver off from the world.

She doesn’t want to be sealed off. She would never buy a car like this, not in a million years.

In the rearview mirror her eyes are different, softer somehow, the cheeks puffier, but the face tired. Has this body been up late, worrying? Drinking? Working? Having sex? Or did it lie in bed and watch TV, just like she remembers her real body doing?

Driving, she is surprised at how calm she feels. Her hands on the wheel are still and her right foot maintains a constant speed. A moment of unease when a police siren sounds and flashing lights appear, but the cruiser is moving fast and passes before she even has a chance to react. Still, for the next ten minutes her neck and shoulders are tight and she keeps glancing in the rearview, alert for another. A part of her, ridiculously, always believes that she’s the one the cops are after; she is forever in a state of readiness for them to arrive on the scene, point, seize and detain her.

Eight years ago, when the police phoned to give her the news, she could feel some primitive device taking control, creaking and groaning in her mind. There was no breakdown, no fit of grief. She just bore the extra weight. She thought she was doing this for Sam and Derek, but Derek spent all of his time smoking in the kitchen or finding reasons to go to campus, and Sam stayed in his room, and Elisa didn’t care to see either one of them. Probably they didn’t want to see her, either, or each other. Along with everything else they were feeling, they also felt relief, guilt. Guilt at the relief.

They worried about Sam, especially when he retreated to his room or disappeared for hours on long walks by himself. A therapist prescribed drugs he declined to take. Only after weeks had passed did Elisa realize that he had what he wanted now, he had privacy, solitude. He could live for hours, days, without anyone judging him. His life was simpler and quieter without Silas in it. He put on muscle weight and his skin took on a healthier color. He spoke less, and rarely in complaint. He wasn’t depressed — he was learning how to be Sam. And Derek changed as well. He became more serious, more dedicated to his habits, if that is even possible. The world returned to him.

But Elisa wasn’t sure, still isn’t sure, if she ever got the world back. There have been times, over the past ten years, when she has wondered whether some essential part of herself was missing. She seemed to have lost her capacity for delight — what happened to that version of her that was moved by everything? Whose emotions were so overwhelming, debilitating?

There was a morning not so long ago when she woke up in the middle of the night, sat up in bed, and with absolute certainty knew that she was dead. She actually laughed at the force of this epiphany: it was summertime, the window was open, the sounds of insects and traffic carried through the room on the wind, and she understood that she could rise up out of the bed and fly out that window and disappear into the clouds. And then what? Dissolve into nothing: first her physical form, and then her mind, and then her… soul? This isn’t a thing she believes in, the soul, but she believed in it that night. Oblivion! It was hers if she wanted it; there was no need to haunt this house, this marriage. She tried to remember how she died; all she knew was that she fell from a great height and never hit the ground. She was still falling.

Derek shifted, groaned, pulled his arms out from under his pillow. “You’re dreaming, go back to sleep.” His voice had the strange quality it had when he talked in his sleep: the crisp consonants, the slurred vowels. “Oh sure,” she said, and she lay down and closed her eyes. Two adults, half-married, half-awake, talking to one another from their respective dreams.

Indeed, that’s what it feels like to her most of the time. Their marriage is like sleepwalking: each afraid to rouse the other, for fear of what they’ll see when they come to. Elisa does know some things about herself, though. She has hardened, sharpened, intensified. But also calmed. She gained a new steadiness, she likes to think, a new strength. She is proud of what she has become.

But now she seems to have become something else.

As she exits the highway onto county route 31, she begins to think that perhaps all is, that all will be, well. That an explanation for what has happened is just ahead. Everything looks the same as when she left. The same dilapidated barns and rusted road signs and the abandoned farm fields overtaken by woody shrubs and goldenrod. Reevesport is a large town on the southern tip of Kineota Lake, home to the college and a hospital and a factory that makes chains. It’s unassuming, and it assumes nothing now, as Elisa crosses over the Reeve Avenue bridge and into the city limits.

Here is the farm supply store, the burger joint, the Asian food market that is still open in spite of the always-empty parking lot and a nearly Asian-free local population. Here is the Walmart, the Hiway Motel, the Italian place the senator ate at once during the campaign. They live in a neighborhood overlooking the lake, but from a long way away; if you go out on the roof through the bedroom window and climb up to the top you can see it, hazy in the distance, green and rippling. She signals, turns, climbs the hill that leads her past the college, past the supermarket and horse pasture and onto their winding suburban street. It is all the same. She actually takes a quick look around the car, to make sure that it’s all really there, the binder, the blouse, the power windows, to make sure she wasn’t deceiving herself, back on the interstate.

The mailbox is the same and the driveway she pulls into is the same. But the house is not.

It is white, for one thing. It’s supposed to be a pale yellow-gray. It had been white when they bought it, but they changed it. The rhododendrons are gone, replaced by a row of sculpted yews. Or rather the yews they tore out a few years ago are still there. The grass, to which she had always been indifferent, is healthy and trim, and the pink dogwood, the one that had seemed certain to die but then rallied and came back to life, that dogwood is gone and in its place stands a Japanese maple.

The house could be described as landscaped, well cared for. It is not an aesthetic that she particularly appreciates or feels capable of achieving through her own actions.

Only when she begins to sweat again does she realize she has been sitting in the car, with the engine turned off, for several minutes. It would seem that she has entered into a minor state of shock. It is one thing to be driving an unfamiliar car, but her house? A motion catches her eye — it’s Derek, waving from the front window. She raises her hand to him. A moment later the front door opens and he stands in the frame, smiling at her, at the car.