Кейт Браверман - A Good Day for Seppuku

Megan Miller returns home like a journalist sent to cover a catastrophe. It’s an assignment. She’s collecting evidence, prepared for body counts, mass graves and vistas of burned acres. What she finds instead is Joe Carlson’s Fountain, Drug and Prescription. A woman could drink a milkshake at the counter while filling her pain killer supply, in one swoop like a hawk. Mrs. Carlson is seventy-nine. She can barely count. Megan can pass fraudulent scripts, give Mrs. Carlson telephone numbers of non-existent doctors in Los Angeles or New York, and confuse her with area codes and unusual spellings. Then Megan remembers she has already done this many times.

Outside is thunder like a plane straining at a blue edge too fragile to be a real border. It’s a juncture created by intention and rumor, composed of insects and feathers clinging to the underside of yellow air. It has nothing to do with her. Neither do the desolate stranded silos, derelict barns and brittle roots of Cottonwoods along irrigation canals that seem trapped and trying to claw up from the dirt.

It’s raining when she walks into the house. Her mother sits at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and playing solitaire. No lights are turned on. Rooms are cool hollows, suggesting bones and forests, images from a children’s book. A yellow dishrag lies on the table beside seven piles of cards. But her mother isn’t drying or dusting anything.

Megan realizes her mother engages in domestic chores only when her father is home. When her mother hears the pick-up truck in the long driveway, she empties the dishwasher, sponges surfaces, piles plates, moving her fingers and objects through space. When her father is home, her mother washes clothes, puts them in the drier, and busies herself with fabrics and how they are folded, stacked, ironed, stitched and carried. She wonders when her mother began preferring cotton, china and silverware to her husband. She suspects her mother is living secretly. Her father doesn’t know his wife possesses a deck of cards. She keeps cards in a box in her apron pocket. Her mother is surreptitious, layered, and indecipherable She has her own climate now, her own seasons and storms, and rivers that relentlessly change and bend.

Perhaps this is what naturally accrues to rural women. They learn camouflage, notice subtleties, the way a trail winds, how a bent branch might contain information that will save your life. One becomes adept at finding niches you don’t tell your children or neighbors about. What appears to be a lethargic primitive state is actually an evolutionary adaptation.

“I always used to know what you were thinking.” Her mother stares at the nine of diamonds. Fields of barely and potatoes and willows slung along irrigation canals tremble between thunder. Lightning now, hot neon pink streaking directly at the ground. Her mother is not looking out the window. “I used to know,” she says.

It’s not a question or accusation. It’s so neutral, without emotional direction, that the statement is less than a gesture with incidental sound. It’s like placing plates in a cupboard. Her mother is leaning over the table, studying a black king. Lightning is lavender and forked.

“What was I thinking?” Megan asks.

“That last year. You’d walk across the yard, pressing hard, leaving your boot prints in the snow. See these tracks, you’d say. Remember them good. They’re the last marks of me you’ll ever see.”

“That was cruel,” Megan realizes. “I’m sorry.”

“No need.” Her mother places a red seven below a black eight. “It was your way. You were heading out and telling us. Fair warning, fair enough. We didn’t think you’d get that scholarship. Whole year early for college. Never had your senior prom. No graduation pictures. No corsage. But you were right. Those tracks faded and they never came back.”

“I always come back.” Megan is defensive. “I come home every year.”

“Some girls have a phase.” Her mother slides a red seven below a black eight. “You were different. No phase. You left and you were gone.”

“Are you saying you missed me?” Megan senses she’s being baited, but takes it anyway.

“I don’t even remember you,” her mother says. “What’s there to miss?”

Megan walks into the bedroom she is sharing with her sister. The room her father built into the earth, paneled with pine, constructing one wall out of gray stone he carried in his truck from the quarry. He mortared all August, working in silence in the long late afternoons of sunlight, hammering and painting the extra room he didn’t believe they needed. He hauled and nailed and knelt with his back turned away, his face and hands to the wall. Rage entangled in the ridges of his muscles like vines on certain trees, tendrils growing into and over the branches, strangling them.

Her younger sister, Martha, sits on the bed smoking. “You don’t come back to see us. You come back for us to see you.” Martha doesn’t shift position. Her words are small rocks.

Martha has been discarded by a man a sane woman wouldn’t have given her telephone number to, let alone married. Martha has been abandoned by this man and left with three children under the age of seven. Two boys and a girl, blond and bland like everyone else in the region. Their names are inspired by television programs, so contrived Megan cannot remember them, like the horses, Paint Spot or Brownie. These children wear the syllables of characters from ports and capitals where they will never go. Paris, Brittany, Austin, Kingston and Wellington, Chelsea. Three children with features Megan cannot remember. They are generic, sturdy, already solid and fleshy, a good harvest. She couldn’t pick them out of a line-up.

Martha chain smokes, follows her around the downstairs bedroom where she now lives with her three uniform children, her plain wrap kids. Martha is tracking her, resting a hand on her rolling acre of cotton flowered print skirt hip, and says, “We’re some sick ritual for you. Something you do before the verdict comes in instead of a prayer. You think we don’t know?”

What does Megan actually know of the intelligence of these people, their ability to synthesize? Martha is convinced all attorneys are dirty, greedy and corrupt. She has a T-shirt with a rendering of a white shark. Beneath the caricature, block letters spell out LAWYER . Martha wore this shirt at the airport.

There is a further level of disdain she recognizes in her sister. Martha considers it absurd that a woman should work, or rather and more precisely, that a woman would deliberately choose this. Women only work from necessity, from external and unavoidable harsh circumstances, like death or abandonment. A good woman would be taken care of. Everyone knows that.

“You come by once a year, flaunting yourself. Get yourself a new name. Megan. Mildred wasn’t good enough, right? You’re a brunette. You’re a redhead. You’re getting an abortion. Then you’re divorced. You’re smoking pot. Then wed up a Jew boy. Now it’s lifting weights. Yoga and sailing. You know what?” Martha stares directly at her face. “You use us. We’re your private clinic. We’re your private mirror. Don’t you think we know?”

Outside is lightning pink and lavender like neon party streamers. Outside is rain on fields and horses, everything a sodden dark green. Outside is a driveway leading to an interstate, more fields, and a tributary winding to the Snake River. When she looks up, Martha and her children are gone.

Obviously, what she needs to see isn’t in the house at all, but rather in the distance. In the morning, Megan drives into town and buys a pair of l0w power binoculars and a book titled Birds of the Western States . What she is searching for is beyond the frame. It requires the aid of a technological device. It must be behind the silos or on the edges of irrigation canals, past the barns and gully of cloud, a slice just beneath the horizon.