Greg Jackson - Prodigals - Stories

I don’t know what I saw then. What I see now is the twilit lake, soot clouds in the distance, sky that faint humid orange blur it could be some summer nights, a burning calico, heat rising from the water like the ghost life within it. I see Amy staring out into the dim luster at the edges of enveloping shadow, like out there somewhere are the small girls we once were, without a hard decision to our name, tottering happily after a mindless joy, and I think, Those poor, unready girls!

Are we ever prepared for the things we find ourselves incapable of agreeing to or helpless to pursue? Our twelfth-grade English teacher, Mr. Gerard, liked to say that you hate what reveals the part of you you hope to hide and love what reveals the heroic part of you looking for its cause. And who would say that, say a thing like that to teenagers, already riven with the bladelike purity of our desires? But we loved him for it, for telling us what we already believed.

Hey, guess what? I say. I stopped spelling my name with the i . You stopped … Amy looks at me, perplexed, her confusion melting slowly into a concerned and even delicate understanding. And as I watch it settle over her, I am brought back to the last Y.G. trip we took as seniors, when hiking in the Ozarks that hot, bright day, in the sunshine and scented air, I sensed my feelings for Amy slip into a higher register, on the order of righteousness or selfless virtue, when even the need of them, crippling and illicit — illicit in God’s eyes — seemed to me as natural as the day itself, the trees and scattered light, the birds in the wind-shaken trees, when high in the mountains where the breeze swept the humidity from the air I confessed myself to Amy.

I love you too, Jessie, she said — that same look.

But no, no, you have come too far to be misunderstood. No, Amy, you say, and you explain.

And she listens, with patience and sympathy, so much it makes you sick . Because even then you know where these things stand next to lust.

(II)

A few years later I am moving to Baltimore—

No. Let’s try something different. Step back, get outside my head. If Amy’s reinventions make a mess of the perspective, shivering it glasslike in a cheap cubism, can we say that my constancy deserves no less? Can we grant that if there is no clean angle in on my friend, there isn’t one in on me either? Yes? From the top then.

A few years later Jesse is moving to Baltimore.

How’s that?

A short young woman stands in a hallway. She has just arrived. She wears her hair shorn close, a faint rip-curl at the front, a black tank top, shorts. Dirtied brass numbers call out the apartments, the corridor steeped in a residuum of cigarettes and takeout. It is summer, hot. She shrugs under the weight of her bags. Sweat blossoms on her body in the stillness. The woman who finally opens the door is Dot, she explains, Amy’s roommate and a fellow student in the literature program. Amy will be back in a little bit. Jesse sets her stuff down, the duffel bag, the painting she made Amy as a gift. It is of a naked woman in the woods, wearing the bloodied head of a slaughtered stag. This is Jesse’s idea of a joke.

Or no. She may not intend it as a joke. She may intend it as a provocation. She may intend it as a Serious Work of Art. We just can’t say. These are the things the facts omit, the things you can’t know from the outside.

Jesse and Amy last saw each other when Amy came home for Easter. That’s a certifiable fact. They met for coffee and strolled through Retford until the rain came up and forced them under the gazebo on the green. It was very pretty there, the leaves of cloud admitting a flush of light into the rain.

Are you sure you want to be here? Amy said. Retford, I mean.

No, Jesse said. She told people she was there for her mother now that her father had left, but all she said to Amy was, No, I’m sure I don’t.

I don’t miss it, Amy said. I keep thinking I should, but I don’t feel like myself here anymore. She watched Jesse light a cigarette. You’re going to leave then?

The rain tapered, the sound of it hitting a bulkhead coming slower, heavier. A breeze picked up. Drops trembled everywhere in the wind. Jesse tapped the ash on the railing and shrugged. How’s grad school?

Amazing, Amy said. No, really. It’s like whole worlds have opened up.

You like it in Baltimore?

I do. Amy seemed to place the words at careful intervals on the air. She smiled. I like never having to explain myself.

It was after Amy left the church that Jesse returned to college and began tearing the last remnants of pretense from her life. At times she felt she had seen the tape of her childhood run backwards, until there the two of them were, frozen where they had begun. And if you ran the tape now would things unfold as they had before? You could lose a lot of time wondering. Better to leave it alone. Did people really change or were parts of them suppressed while other parts were allowed to grow? Jesse decided she didn’t care — couldn’t care. Fuck identity, fuck self-expression. Live, look, listen, be. Don’t apologize. That most of all. This is what she tells Dot and Amy that first night in the Hampden dive.

It reminds me of this D. Z. Phillips thing, Dot says. How we need to move from a hermeneutics of suspicion to a hermeneutics of contemplation.

Uh-huh. And what on earth does that mean? says Jesse.

Dot blinks at her. He’s talking about what it means to understand something, Amy says. Different modes of inquiry.

Modes of inquiry, Jesse says.

Yes, Amy says. How do we understand something? By picking it apart or considering it altogether? For example.

I don’t understand anything, Jesse says. Starting with this conversation.

Yes, you do, says Amy.

Jesse smiles. No, I don’t. It’s nice of you to say, but I don’t. Because where do you begin and end, right? There’s that rubber spider above the bar. Okay. What’s it doing there? You could say a lot of things. You could say they put it up for Halloween and kept it. You could say a child glued it together in Malaysia or wherever and it was shipped here to be sold in drugstores. You could say we find spiders creepy because they bite us, or look weird, I don’t know, or that we think it’s hip to put things where they don’t belong for whatever reason. Or— You get the point.

But there you go, says Dot.

Where? says Jesse. I don’t want to go anywhere. I’m tired.

Dot smiles. She’d do well in grad school.

No, sorry, Jesse says. No. I could never spend all that time worrying about what mode of inquiry I was using.

Don’t you though already? says Amy. She stares into the Christmas lights that hang from the wall. I mean, I think about why I’m in grad school. I think, Here we are brought up being told all truth and meaning can be found in one book. What if I’ve just added lots of other books?

That’s a bit glib, though, isn’t it? says Dot.

Is it? I didn’t mean it be.

Dot turns to Jesse. You were brought up religious too then?

Jesse finishes her beer. I think of it as a very narrow literary education, she says.

And they laugh — they laugh! — and Jesse would cast the world in bronze right then to keep it still.

Smoking outside she makes eyes with a tall woman. The woman has dark hair and broad pale cheeks. She holds Jesse’s look a beat past comfort, turns, spits.

You don’t do that so good, Jesse says, hacking up phlegm and spitting herself. The woman looks on behind impassive eyes. Boredom hungering after unlikely surprise. This is what Jesse sees dancing in the dark light of her pupil.

But I can spit farther, the woman says.

I’d like to see that.

They take turns spitting and spit until their mouths are dry. Tell me your name and I’ll buy you a drink, Jesse says.