Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

From the hallway Howard gave the room a courteous onceover, leaning in as if there were a velvet rope in the doorway. His neck was covered with shaving cuts and areas of abrasion whose cumulative redness gave him a guilty, crabby, immature expression. Before leaving San Diego he’d scraped himself mercilessly, Seitchek’s cordial invitation having led him to expect an introduction to her family and perhaps a sit-down lunch. When he arrived, though, the house was empty, and she did not even offer him a glass of water. She went back up the staircase which from outside the door he’d heard her descending, and let him follow. She appeared not to really recognize any of the things her eyes fell on, including Howard. She was hollow-cheeked and waif-like, as pale as a person with the flu.

“You feeling OK?” he said.

She didn’t answer. On a desk by the window stood a bottle of Nexxus shampoo and a dozen or so Hummel figurines. She pushed on the figurines until they were flush with the wall.

“I was amazed when you called,” she said suddenly, her back to him. “I was amazed because I’d been lying on the floor here,” she nodded at a space between a twin bed and a wall, “for about five hours, and I was wondering what could possibly ever make me stand up again ever in my life, and obviously the answer was, my mother knocking on the door and saying there was somebody on the phone for me. I was amazed when she told me who it was.”

She pushed on the figurines again, making sure they could not be straightened more. She turned to Howard and spoke dully. “Did you get to Scripps? Did you see Alan Grubb?”

“Yeah, no. He wasn’t there. You got a bathroom?”

“A bathroom? Do we have one?” She waited for him to leave.

At the bathroom mirror he tugged on his shirt, trying to get it to hang right, and scraped some of the dried blood off his neck. He looked out the window at the swimming pool. When he returned to the bedroom, Seitchek was kneeling near the closet, tossing paperbacks from a full carton into a less full carton. A bit of gum that had once been bright green was lodged in the tread of her left sneaker. Between the waist of her jeans and the white skin of her lower back was a space wide enough to stick an arm down. “Is it OK I parked my car in your driveway?” Howard asked.

“Sure.” She looked up from her books very briefly. “You can poke your cow anywhere you feel like.”

Poke his cow? Poke his cow? She’d said it so casually, and yet. He sat down on a twin bed and pounded on the mattress until the pounding became stylized and irrelevant. “You want to go out? Get something to eat?”

“No,” she said. “Do you?”

“Maybe. Maybe get some fish and chips. Saw a fish and chips place. You wanna go there?”

Ignoring him, she flipped books into the carton, A Separate Peace, Franny and Zooey, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Women’s Room, The Glass Bead Game, The Sot-Weed Factor , a stack of Vonnegut, some Frank Herbert and Robert Heinlein, Watership Down, Fear of Flying, The Sunlight Dialogues , a boxed set of Tolkien, more Salinger, some P. D. James, The Bell Jar, 1984 . She straightened her back and reported:

“My mother went out specially to buy cold cuts and hard rolls and Heineken Dark before she went golfing. I told her you were coming by.”

Bending over the boxes again, she riffled the pages of The Bell Jar and then put it back in with the discards. D. T. Suzuki, The World According to Garp and Ragtime followed. She turned to Howard. “You want some books?” With a tremendous shove she slid the box across the carpeting.

He selected two Heinleins. “These OK?”

“Anything you want. Really. It’s all going out. How about some shoes? Do you have any little sisters?” She held up a pair of sandals with four-inch cork platforms, a pair of Earth Shoes, a pair of clogs with daisies tooled on the brown leather, a child-sized pair of white plastic go-go boots. She unfolded a pair of polyester bell-bottoms with giant green-and-white checks. “I’m supposed to go through life feeling good about myself, knowing there was a time I was seen in public in these?” She rooted further in a box. “My Nehru jacket. Any interest in Nehru jackets in Taiwan these days?” She stuffed the jacket into a garbage bag.

“Cold cuts,” Howard hinted.

“Yeah, pork, beef. My favorite foods.”

He made an encouraging noise, but it was clear that she’d only been toying with this lunch idea. She pushed her bangs out of her eyes and opened a new carton. “See my first-grade class?” She handed him a sheet of photos. “Here, you want these? You want about five hundred pictures of me?” She slid the whole box over to him. While he peered into it, lifting the corners of a few photographs, she unearthed further treasures — a felt Peanuts banner stating that happiness is a warm puppy; Walter Carlos albums, Three Dog Night albums, Cat Stevens albums, Janis Ian albums, Moody Blues albums, Paul Simon albums; posters by Peter Max; the Game of Life; collections of Doonesbury strips; a throw pillow upholstered with artificial zebra fur; a lamp made out of a 7UP can. She unrolled a full-length poster of Mark Spitz. “I won this,” she said. “I won this at dancing school. The thing is I actually put it up. I put it on my closet door and he looked at me for an entire year, with his seven gold medals. His eyes would follow me.”

Howard was trying to show an interest in the poster when she let it roll back up and pushed it deep into a trash bag. She released a breath and slumped, generally, staring at the floor. “I had nothing to do with any of these things coming out here. The last time I was here I spent about two days looking at all the pictures and going through my old papers and notebooks. Every single band concert program that had my name in it. All my blue ribbons and acceptance letters and every quiz I ever took and every little paper I ever wrote. Even if I throw it away, it’s like this tremendous weight of implication, which how can I ever, ever, ever escape?”

Her eyes alighted on a pale blue college exam book lying near her on the floor. She stuffed it in the trash bag. “My parents moved out here the year I went to college. They got this nice four-bedroom house, one bedroom for each of us kids and a big one for themselves. Mine’s also the guest room, isn’t it great? The decor? It’s really me. That’s the thing: it really is me. This is what I try to forget.”

Howard looked at the poster of Magic Johnson and the Hummel figurines. He bounced a little on the bed. “What you come here for if you don’t like it?”

“To throw things away.”

An insight made his eyes glitter evilly. “Thought you came to see your nieces.”

“Oh, my nieces, yes.” She aimed a sneer through the open door. “You know I’d never seen them before? Not any of them?”

“Sure.”

“Although the last time I was here I did have the pleasure of seeing a sister-in-law pregnant. You can see we’re not living in poverty. We could have afforded to bring me home. Obviously I chose not to come.”

“I don’t go home,” Howard said.

This interested her. “What, to Taiwan?”

“Can’t go. Don’t wanna go.”

She shook her head, forgetting him again. “I start thinking there’s something here for me. That I can come home, I can drink, I can eat, I can sleep, I can come here and be rich like they are, drive the BMW, see the babies, and just be it , you know, for a week. I actually start looking forward to it. I kill myself trying to finish the thesis and get on the plane, and it’s just so dumb of me to set myself up like that. My whole family’s in the living room when I get here, both my little brothers, both my little sisters-in-law, all my little nieces. I’ve finally come to view the babies. I’m very late. But not too late. The suspense must be unbearable for me. Unthinkable that I could be anything but dying to have my nieces crawling on me. And the simple fact that it’s unthinkable is enough to kill my interest on the spot.”