Nell Zink: Mislaid

“You did say you’d have me committed,” Meg said, straightening up in her seat. “And you’re still an asshole.”

“She killed my car,” Lee explained to his children.

“I remember,” Byrdie said. “She drove it right into the lake. And then she stole her own car, and we got to borrow Grandma’s Lincoln.”

“But why on earth are you still in Virginia?” Lee asked. “You could have gone to the Frankfurt School of dramatic arts, like you were always saying.”

“The swamp fox,” Meg sniffled. “There’s no better place to go to ground than in a swamp. It was a foxhunting thing, in your honor.”

“It’s a Revolutionary War thing.”

“In New York I couldn’t have thrown a rock without hitting some friend of yours. You would have found me in three days.” Meg hung her head, thinking it might have been proper to commit her after all. What had been crazier — marrying Lee, or leaving him? “I don’t remember why I did any of it,” she added. “But I must have been very unhappy.”

“Well, you did marry a founding member of NAMBLA,” Byrdie said.

“I beg to differ!” Lee said.

“Who seduces baby dykes for kicks,” Meg added.

Lee’s protests were drowned out by Karen’s sudden squealing. “Get out of here! You’re gay?” She threw herself on her mother and hugged her with vehemence. “Poor Mom! That explains so much! It explains everything!”

“Don’t feel sorry for me.” Meg laughed, sitting up straight and patting Karen’s hair. “It’s not a sickness.”

“Nor does it explain a goddamn thing,” Lee remarked.

Meg glared at him. “So I’ve wasted half my life,” she told her daughter. “So what? I still have you, and my son back. I even have a way hap girlfriend. Before, I went around feeling angry, like I was the victim. Now I feel ecstatic, but so guilty I could kill myself.” She wiped her eyes and grinned, and Byrdie shook his head.

“Girlfriend? Where’d you meet her?” Karen asked eagerly.

“At the bait shop. I’ll introduce you. She’s spending next semester in Hampton on sabbatical, and then I’ll probably move with her to New York.”

“Dykes, always with the moving van,” Lee remarked.

“Dad, you are such a fucking bitch,” Byrdie said.

“Are you really a pederast?” Karen asked.

“I don’t go out loaded for bear. Your mother is a case in point. I’d say there’s a difference between her and pederasty.”

“Well, that’s something,” Karen said.

Meg tried her champagne and said, “Aw, shit. I forgot about this stuff.”

To everyone’s surprise, Karen stood up at her place at the table. “So I’m just wondering,” she said. “Is anybody here truly unhappy?”

“What are you doing?” Lee said.

“I mean, this isn’t easy, but none of us is sad to be here. Right?”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but me,” Byrdie said, raising his hand. “I think I have whiplash of the brain. I want to spend the next month in Florida playing golf with Grandpa and pretend I never saw you. But first I want to talk to you and Mom for a week without Dad around.”

“There’s no rush,” Meg said to Lee. “We can hang out with Byrdie first, and then you can get to know Karen.”

Karen said, “See, Mr. Fleming and Mom? Everything’s going to be fine.”

“Why are you trying to be cool with them?” Byrdie asked Karen. “They’re both insane.”

“It’s because I raised my insight to a higher power.”

Lee said to Meg in a low voice, “Where’d she get that? You want to come out as an alcoholic while you’re at it?”

Meg turned to Karen and said, “Higher power does sound awful twelve-step.”

“I mean the Sheltering Sky. It’s something Temple told me about. He’s my boyfriend.”

“It’s a novel by Paul Bowles,” Lee said.

“Really? He told me it’s that when life gets too hard, you can go up to the next level.”

“Like Pac-Man,” Byrdie said.

“No, Pac-Man is the exact opposite. In Pac-Man the higher levels are harder, so it’s like the Peter Principle in college, where if you pass a course they make you take a harder course until you flunk out. In the Sheltering Sky you go up to where things are easier. Temple says”—her voice, now grave but filled with faith and conviction, rang clearly through the room in a way that betrayed her exposure to dissenting rural churches—“that in the ancient world they believed the earth is a turtle resting on an elephant on another elephant, and then it’s elephants all the way down. So if you don’t understand things, it means you didn’t dig deep enough. That’s how science works. But society is a legal system. It goes in the other direction. If you don’t like what you’re getting, you appeal to a higher power. And the higher you go, the better off you are, like Thurgood Marshall. So that’s why I believe in my heart that it’s right that we’re back together, even if on the level of grunginess it’s a tale of sound and fury told by an idiot. When Mom said she was gay, and Dad said he married her because he got her mixed up with boys, and everybody’s white, that was way too complex. And there it is! You take it to the next phase.”

There was an awkward silence during which everyone drank, as though Karen had proposed a toast. “Your Temple is clearly an autodidact, but he’s not stupid,” Lee said at last.

“He’s a genius,” Meg said. “Within five minutes of finding out she’s your daughter, he asked me for her hand in marriage.”

At this announcement, Karen turned to Meg, squirming in such an ultra-excited and happy way that even Byrdie began to laugh. “Don’t laugh at me!” she cried.

“I have to admit, you know each other pretty well,” Meg said. “But you’re way too young, Karen. Did you know you’re sixteen? Your birth certificate is a fake.”

“I’m sixteen and I’m at UVA? I am so cool !”

“The age of consent is seventeen,” Lee said. “Temple could go to jail.”

“On paper I’m eighteen, and you won’t rat me out.”

“Far be it from me. Pederasts in glass houses. But I will prevent you from marrying Temple until he’s had at least four years of school. That theory of his sounds to me like Kafka in a blender with Hegel and Manichaeism.” A waiter entered the room as Byrdie began to giggle. “Appetizers, thank God.” Lee sighed. “You all are really going to like this quail.”

Later, when Karen went to the bathroom, Byrdie remarked, “You’re scoping out Temple already, you sick fuck.”

Lee replied blandly, “Mireille thinks she’s fated to marry Temple, because otherwise she’s going to have a hard time explaining to herself the advantages of growing up in a housing project.”

“I know exactly what you mean,” Meg said to Lee. “Going up a level resolves the cognitive dissonance. But if you say it to her, I literally will kill you.”

“And I’ll hold him down while you do it,” Byrdie said. “Temple is the one constant in her life.” His parents gazed at him in surprise as he pressed on. “Letting her think she has no father! Not knowing when she was born, or where she’s from, or even her name, thinking history starts and ends with Temple! Look at how you dress her! What is that thing, a nun’s habit from the dump? She calls herself his shadow!”

“That was something his mother said,” Meg said. “We thought it was funny because he’s, you know, dark.”

“You’re her mom and you make racist jokes about her?”

“I said it was his own mother! She’s black!”

“How does that make it not racist?”

Meg gulped and looked around for help.

Lee came to her aid by saying gallantly, “You just reminded me of a terrific racist joke. So Jean-Paul Sartre decides to tour the back roads of the South, and he runs out of gas at the bottom of a long hill. He takes the gas can out of the trunk and starts walking up the hill. He can see there’s a black guy at the pumps, so he yells, ‘Y’all got any gas?’ and the black guy yells, ‘Yeah!’ So Sartre keeps walking and he gets up to the top and he says, ‘I’ll take three gallons, please.’ And the black guy says, ‘Sorry, man, can’t sell you no gas today. Huis clos .’”