Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

“My mother wasn’t so liberal. Spending all that money to look at pictures, for a girl, no less—what a waste, hey? So I came home—three years, no degree.” She drew slowly on her cigarette. Her thoughts seemed to wander.

Though the shades were half pulled, the air in the front room was stifling. Frank could feel the back of his shirt dampening against the leather of the chair.

“I’m just wondering if maybe you could tell me a little about your symptoms.”

“My symptoms?” she said, leaning forward. “Yes, I can tell you about my symptoms. Some mornings I wake up shaking, and I’m afraid to get out of my bed. If I take some of the pills I can manage to get up and make my children breakfast. Some mornings the fear’s bad and I have to grit my teeth to get through it.”

She rubbed her half-smoked cigarette out into the tarnished silver ashtray on the coffee table.

“And I’m afraid of my son.”

“Why is that?”

Her already rigid body tightened a notch further. “Like I said, if I take the pills, it’s fine.”

Noticing her strained expression, Frank decided to back off.

“You were saying you’d been to college. That’s unusual for most of the women I see.”

Mrs. Buckholdt leaned back in the couch and gave a small frown of acknowledgment, as if to say, yes, it was a pity more couldn’t go. As she relaxed, a remnant of what must have once been coquettishness surfaced in her face, and Frank glimpsed how she must have looked to the other high school kids, the ones who’d never dreamt of leaving.

“My parents were good Lutherans. We’d always gone to this big, very plain barn of a church over in Long Pine, whitewash walls, a simple cross. My mother—when she came to visit me at college—those Gothic stone halls we lived in, she didn’t like them, found them suspicious. There was something Catholic about gargoyles on the head of a drain; she didn’t like the smell of it. She’d been happy with my father out here, couldn’t imagine why a person would want to leave.”

She gazed past Frank, through the window that looked out over the side yard.

“I’d always pictured heaven as a rather ordinary place, where you met the dead and people were more or less comfortable. I think I imagined the whole world that way, as an ordinary place. But those paintings… they were so beautiful. I’d never seen anything so perfect in my life. Do you know Gericault? Do you know his pictures of Arcadia, those huge, lush landscapes of his?”

Frank shook his head.

“You should see them someday. They’re beautiful things to see.” She spoke in a slow, reflective manner.

“You came home, then,” he asked, “when you left college?”

“Yes, to my parents’ house.” She smiled. “Jack was just starting as an officer down at the bank. He’d spent a year at the state university, read a good deal. He didn’t want to stay here forever. Kept telling me that, because he knew it had been hard for me—coming back. He’d drive me out to the lake in his convertible. And he’d talk about a house in a town out in California. Always California. An orange tree in the backyard, how you could drive with the roof down all year round, a porch with a view of the ocean. I kept thinking of being close to a museum. I could enroll in classes again; it wouldn’t have taken many to finish. And near a city, I might do research. Jack—he’d nod at that. I was a college girl, you see, a catch.” She chuckled. “Twenty-five years ago, that ghost you saw out there—he was a handsome boy.” Her eyes came to rest on the floor by her feet. “Are you married, Dr. Briggs?”

There was a familiarity, almost a caring, to the way she asked the question, as though she were inquiring not for her own information but to give him the chance to tell her.

“No,” he said. “I’m not.”

“Is it something you hope to do?”

He imagined his professors judging him unprofessional for answering these questions. “Yes,” he said, “I’d like to.”

She nodded but made no reply.

“You married soon after you returned?” he asked.

“That’s right. Jason, my first son, he came early on. Of course, it made sense to save money for a while. Get a house here, just for a year or two, before the big move. I imagine you went to a Montessori, didn’t you? Or a country day school—maps on the walls.” She smiled at Frank, a wan, generous smile. “He was so bright, Doctor, from the very beginning. I wanted him to have all that. I really did.

“I’d kept my books from college, and there were the ones Jack had, and some I bought. So while the school taught him George Washington every year, I read to him. I wasn’t a fanatic, I didn’t throw the television out, we didn’t ground him.

I read him books after supper and when he got older he read them himself. And I showed him things. I played him records, drove him to Chicago once, took him to the museum. He liked the paintings all right, but you should have seen the look on his face when he saw the height of those buildings and all the people in the streets—delighted, that’s what he was, delighted. I couldn’t stand the idea of him hanging around here, waiting for some dead-end job. Of course that made me a snob, wanting more for him. Those teachers down at the high school, they didn’t like me. Too much trouble.

“Round about when he was fourteen, this place, it started doing its work on him somehow. I could see it happening. The little tough guy stance, afraid of anything that wouldn’t make him popular. His father had started drinking by then. Everything was going to hell around here, prices dropping through the floor, all these farms that couldn’t make a dime. Jack spent his days taking people’s homes and property their families had owned for decades. So it didn’t worry me at first, I figured the man deserved a drink or two when he came home. That was before the bank went under. And as for symptoms, yes, to tell you the truth, I was depressed. I was. Things hadn’t gone like we’d planned. I kept thinking about the girls I’d roomed with, visiting Europe, standing in front of those pictures. I shouldn’t have done that—let myself look back that way. It’s the sort of thing kids notice, the way you’re not really there in the room with them.”

She paused. It appeared to Frank as though she were deciding whether or not to go on. Their eyes met briefly, but he said nothing.

“There was a kid,” she said, eventually. “Jimmy Green. His parents had lost their house; the family was living with relatives out on Valentine. He and Jason started spending their time together. He rode an old motorcycle and they’d be out in that barn with it for hours, doing I don’t know what, fixing it, I guess. Since he was eight, I’d driven Jason over to Tilden for violin lessons. He’d gotten some grief for it at school, kids calling him names. He’d cried about it some when he was younger, but he loved that music. Used to sit in that wicker chair right over there by the door, his little legs bouncing, twenty minutes before we even got in the car, his eyes begging me to hurry. You know he stood in this room one evening after practice and played five minutes of Mozart for his younger brother and sister? Mozart. Can you believe that? In this living room.” She shook her head, amazed.

“About a year after he started hanging around the Green boy, I was sitting in the drive waiting for him to come out—he’d spent all day in that barn, we were late. Before he left the porch, he took his instrument out of the case.”

Her jaw tightened, her lips barely moving.

“We’d bought the violin together. Years ago, on a trip to Saint Louis. His father had given him the money and he’d stood on his toes to hand it to the salesman. That day I was waiting in the car to take him to his lesson, he walked up and smashed his violin on the hood. Said he was tired, didn’t feel like going that afternoon. That’s what he said: tired. Just like that. Walked back into the barn.”