Maud Casey - Drastic - Stories

Obedience

Downstairs, I hear my father’s voice straining to be heard—“Americans have faith in faith”—as, midsentence, my mother begins to slide the vacuum cleaner around the room, sucking up the crumbs under the legs of the breakfast table.

“For Christ’s sake,” my father shouts over the sound.

“Here we go again with Christ. Poor guy,” Bernadette says, as my mother turns off the vacuum.

“I didn’t realize we were having a serious conversation anymore,” my mother says.

“Sit down next to me,” George says. My mother is his favorite aunt. “Sit here, and talk to me.”

In Lanie’s old room, dusty sunlight comes through the windows in patterns that slice Lanie into various rectangular sections where she lounges on the bed. I sit on a coffee table that used to be downstairs in the living room, now relegated to Lanie’s room because of concentric circular wood scars made by glasses left too long without coasters.

“How are you?” I ask Lanie.

“You know, I’m fine,” she says, looking out the window, over the lawn statues and the yard next door with the cherub fountain spitting that sounds like rain. “Really fine.” She looks out past the yards, beyond our lives, to the horizon.

“Have you heard from Jack?”

She falls back on the bed and walks her socked feet up the wall. “Let’s not talk about that. Tell me something about you.”

“Well,” I say. “I’m not sure what to tell you. I seem to be in a holding pattern. I’m waiting for something to slice the blurry edges off my life, to reveal itself, but I’m not sure what that something is.”

“That’s it,” she says, sitting up attentively as the conversation turns away from her. “That’s exactly it, Harriet. You postpone pleasure. Look at us here right now. I’m as comfortable as I can possibly be. I’m lying on the bed, and you’re sitting on the edge of a stained, cast-off table. What are you holding out for? You wait, and I luxuriate. You’ve got to work with what you’ve got.”

“But you’re waiting for Jack.” I throw it back at her. She knows nothing about the facts of my life, but she’s intuited something at its core and it makes me want to humiliate her.

“Yes, but he’s something, ” she says. “You don’t even know what you’re waiting for.”

“I wish my life were that easily defined,” I snap.

“I’m sorry,” Lanie says, her voice, that sacred instrument, full of regret. “Yesterday, Jack said he’d call this morning and he hasn’t. This woman, his ex-girlfriend, is almost dead. He’s sitting there in the room with her all day. She can barely whisper, she’s hallucinating. He’s hired a live-in nurse, but he’s staying to keep her company so that she doesn’t have to die with a stranger. I don’t want her to die alone. I don’t want that, but I’m jealous of her with him there, watching over her. I hate him. I hate myself. I want him to call me and tell me she’s dead, that she’s vanished from the earth forever and ever. But when she dies, it’ll be worse. He never got over her, and when she dies he never will. There’s always that one person who fucks you up for life, and he’s going to be mine.” She flips over and squirms across the bed toward me, holds out her hand. “I’m sorry. I’m awful when I’m not married.” I take her hand in both of mine.

“I want to show you something I found.”

I rummage through my bag to retrieve the photograph I stole back from Elliot’s office. It’s worn and faded as if rubbed by fingers longing to go back to that time. Black-robed figures mill around snowy stone buildings in a cold, long-ago place. I first found the picture stuck between the pages of a library book. I held it by one edge as I drove as fast as the stoplights would allow, from my apartment to Elliot at the state university, one of the old Normal schools for teachers where people specialize in facts tiny and hard as ring-size gems. I drove the picture carefully past the false fronts on the brick buildings of Main Street, the few high-rise student dorms stabbing their way into the sky, the rumpled, tree-filled blocks of relaxed midwestern prosperity, heading for Elliot’s office dedicated to the celebration of small things. He couldn’t speak when I gave it to him. He just stood there, his academic awards hanging behind him with his name spelled out in solid strokes of calligraphy suggesting an indelible community. “For that long,” he said, his whisper rustling through his beard, “they’ve been asking each other: How many of us are in vows out of fear rather than love?”

“They date back to fifth-century Rome,” I tell Lanie.

“When was this picture taken?”

“I’m not sure,” I say. “Elliot thinks it was taken around the turn of the century.”

“Is Elliot the history professor you work for?” Work is a foreign language that Lanie doesn’t speak. When her first husband died he left her money enough to pursue her curiosities with casual abandon, curiosities that have ranged from performance art to day trading.

“Yes.”

“Do you love him?” She looks up from the picture. If I did, we would have that in common, loving someone who doesn’t love us back.

“No,” I say, fairly certain that it’s not him that I love, that what I love is that invisible presence that lies between us. “No, I don’t love him.”

Lanie and I look back at the monks overcoming the worldly concerns of a life that seems too small, walking the fields searching for a god or anyone to receive the ceremony of their beliefs.

As Lanie rubs her eye with the back of her hand like a little sister and not a wife for the fourth time, I wonder what all this tying and untying the knot means to her. I wonder what the knot is exactly. I want to know whether marriage for Lanie means safety like a crash helmet or whether it is some sweeter form of security, but I can’t ask these questions because Lanie and I don’t talk this way about her life. I want to tell her that I’m not so much yearning for men as I am yearning for something like what Lanie sees in men, a confirmation of life, a sign that all is well.

Voices from downstairs erupt through the silence between us.

“He’s not coming back,” Carl says. “I always told her he was a selfish asshole.”

“Quiet,” George says.

“Stay,” my mother says. “All of you. Stay here, just a little longer.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Bernadette exclaims. “Christ on the cross. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”

“Stop it,” Lizzie says. “It’s not funny anymore.”

“She’s right,” Lanie says. “It’s really not funny.”

We spend the day in our pajamas. We finish off the mimosas. Tipsy, we wander the house as if its carpeted rooms were all there was to the world. We escape into books, music, the newspaper, draping ourselves across couches, hugging pillows, while Bernadette chain-smokes her cigarillos. At one point Lanie grabs a pillow, inhaling deeply from our childhood, and does a little dance with it. Even my father laughs. When the mimosas begin to wear off, everyone naps. Lanie and I lie down at the foot of George and Lizzie’s pull-out sofa bed to sleep. Lanie’s stomach is my pillow, the soft carpet our bed. I wake up first and peer through a window at my father standing in the driveway as he pulls the cuff of a pant leg up to scratch at his ankle with garden shears. Our mother sits on the edge of the boxed hedges with her head in her hands, talking but not for anyone else to hear.

Humility

Lanie jerks in her sleep and says words that punch the night. I stroke her hair until she stops moving. When I was a I child, I thought I would be a different person when I grew up. My hair would not be so stringy, it would be thick and lush and long, and I’d pile it on top of my head in elaborate knots stuck through with pencils and paintbrushes. My skin would go from sunburn pale to a dusky olive hue with mysterious, serious shadows. I would be thin-boned and tall and think thoughts that had never occurred to me before. I’d wake up one day, having memorized passages from important books, with fully formulated, important opinions that stopped people in their tracks. I would always, always finish my sentences. Transformed through a mysterious ritual, my life would be utterly different. There would be something now to show me that I was more than just bigger. But here, in the middle of the night, with Lanie talking in her sleep— Stop going so fast. You’re going too fast —life is endless unmarked territory.