Lynn Strong - Hold Still

There’s something sad about the way her mother says this.

“I’m sorry, Mommy,” Ellie says. Mommy , like if she’s nice enough, acts young enough, the past five years might disappear and they’ll all be better again soon. They stare at one another. Her mom’s exactly the same height as Ellie, but Ellie looks down at her, since she’s seated one step farther up. She wraps her hands around her ankles, still stuffed inside her boots, and sidles herself closer to her mom.

“Were you with him?”

She has an image first of Joseph, his thin, almost hairless body, pale and careful, apologetically descending upon her.

Dylan , she thinks right after that.

Ellie shakes her head.

“All right,” her mom says. They’ve told her they won’t question what she tells them. It’s something she’s pretty sure her mom read in a book. They’ll assume she’s telling the truth and will act accordingly, but if she’s caught in a lie, that’s yet another rule they’ve said will result in her having to go.

“El, I don’t think you can stay here anymore.”

Ellie has shoved almost all of both her arms into her boots. She looks across the street, away from her mother. She’s not sure she’ll survive if they really make her go.

“I called Annie.” This is her mom’s student, from years ago, when her mom taught high school. She lives in Florida, where her mom grew up. “She says you can come down there awhile.” Her mom looks like she might cry. If her mom cries, Ellie can convince her that she has to stay.

“I think we have to do it,” her mom says. “She has a son. .” She doesn’t want to warn Ellie to be careful with him. They are not supposed to Overparent the twenty-year-old fuckup Ellie is.

“They need help with him. You’ll be near the water.” She isn’t crying. Her mom’s hand comes toward her wrist, but stops before grabbing hold of her.

“El, why don’t you come with me?”

Ellie looks up from her sketchpad. She’s been trying to draw the water stain from Dylan’s basement in pencil and charcoal; she used to lie on the floor and stare at it for hours, all blacks and browns and purples, thinking it beautiful, thinking it the most perfect thing on earth. She drew a lot when she was little and still does now sometimes in private, still thinks sometimes in terms of what something would look like if she could hold it still.

“Where?” She’s been up in her room since she got home hours earlier. She has three missed calls from Joseph and two from Dylan. She’s shoved her phone into a drawer inside a drawer in her dresser so she’s not tempted to call either of them back. She’s heard her mom leave for her run.

“We need milk and I need a walk,” her father says.

She has no excuse to offer. She slips on sandals, places a pair of sunglasses on top of her head. They leave the apartment and walk up toward the park. Her dad flips his keys around his finger. Ellie situates the glasses on her nose.

“So,” her dad says dragging out the o , and she watches his keys almost slide from his finger. They clank quietly as they roll back into his palm.

“So,” she says.

“How’s life?” He slips the keys into his pocket and they enter the park.

“Fine,” she says. “Same.” The world is muted behind her glasses, her dad’s face farther away.

They walk through the farmers’ market. Her dad eyes the flowers, then the muffins, cakes, and cookies. “Wanna split one?” Ellie asks.

Her mom seldom allows sugar in the house.

“Sure,” he says.

This used to happen often on weekend mornings — especially when her mom escaped into her office for hours at a time, or when she went for runs that seemed to go on for half the day — Ellie and her dad would walk up the street to the farmers’ market, get something sweet, juice or coffee, flowers for his garden that they would plant together. He would plant, and Ellie would sit cross-legged in the dirt.

They buy milk and a chocolate chip muffin and walk over to a bench facing Long Meadow.

“Listen,” says her dad. He breaks off a piece of muffin. “I know you’re still figuring things out.”

When she didn’t go to college, he reacted more aggressively than he had in years. He’d assumed somehow, amid everything, that she’d be together enough by then to get a sweatshirt from some place in New England or the Midwest that they could ship her off to in September. They’d assumed maybe that their own success would somehow finally seep through to her. He’d yelled, over a period of a month. Ellie had sat or stood and let him, staying still and quiet. She’d gotten stoned alone up in her room and didn’t mind much when they said she couldn’t leave the house until she figured out a Plan For Her Life. Most of her friends had gone to college. She seldom had anywhere to go. She refused to attend her high school graduation and only her mother took much issue with this. She could tell, by that point, her dad would rather not have to answer questions about his daughter’s plans for the next year. They’d briefly pushed the idea of her moving out, making her way of things, but her mother couldn’t stomach it, wanted her to steady herself first. And her dad, as much as he presented himself as the stronger parent, was nothing in the face of her mom when she was sure.

He sits with enough space between them to fit the muffin and the half gallon of milk. “I know you’ve experimented,” he says. A girl is being dragged, both hands clutching the leash, by a small, panting pit bull mix in front of them. The dog is yellow with a white stripe down his back and his legs clench as he tries hard to go after a squirrel ten feet ahead. Ellie holds the muffin and picks off two small pieces. The chocolate melts a little in her hands.

She thinks of telling him that once she was so high that Dylan had to carry her up the steps of the subway, that she took her shirt off in a cab so she could look at the contours of her shoulders in the rearview mirror while they drove, that Dylan liked it when she was high enough to want to sleep with him, but not so high that she couldn’t be on top. She wants to tell him yesterday she let Joseph fuck her, because it’s the only thing she still knows how to do that is allowed. That Recovery, or whatever it is they’ve decided to call what they’re forcing on her, is bullshit if you don’t feel like you’re getting any better, if you’re not totally sure about what you’re meant to recover from, that she’s scared and now she can’t even convince her mom to be with her any longer, that putting her in charge of someone else’s kid is almost definitely a terrible idea.

Ellie’s dad pulls his ankle onto his knee, sits back farther on the bench, and stretches his arm out along the backrest, careful not to graze Ellie as he does.

“There’s this part,” he says. “In Beyond Good and Evil .” Her dad traveled a lot — to conferences, guest lectures — when she and Ben were little. They helped him in the garden. He helped with homework and cooked most of the meals. But it has always been their mom who Parented . Her mom Parented so much sometimes that Ellie couldn’t breathe.

“Seriously, Dad?” She picks herself another piece and watches as the girl with the pit bull pulls a handful of dog treats from her bag and is able, only briefly, to distract the dog from the squirrel.

“Just bear with me, okay?”

She folds her legs up on the bench.

“There’s this part where Nietzsche talks about being young and saying yes to everything.” He looks over at her. She licks a piece of chocolate off her lip. “I spent a lot of time in that phase, I think, the yes phase. You know. I was an only child. I wanted to do well, to prove I was worthy of. .” He stops. He breaks himself another piece of muffin. “Anyway, then Friedrich says that there’s another phase.” Her dad has always spoken of philosophers by their first names; Ellie’s always liked this, as if he knows them, as if all of them are friends. “A phase in which he said no to everything. Exhausted maybe by all that yes. Maybe exhausted by what it has or hasn’t brought. A lot of people do, they reach a certain age and they get angry; they start rejecting everything that came before them, as a way of asserting themselves more certainly on the world. I think about that now, when I watch you. I’m not sure I ever hit that stage, not like you.” He stops a minute and she feels his eyes on her. She picks at a small splinter of wood on the corner of the bench. “I respect it, you know,” he says. “I respect your saying no. I think it takes courage to be willing to make people mad or not do what they ask of you.” She watches him try to get it just right. He doesn’t want to make her angry. He wants her to listen. He wants to give her something that might make her better than she is. “I never had courage like that,” her dad says. “But it’s too destructive, I think, the way you’re doing it.” Ellie’s lost sight of the pit bull. She watches a very pregnant woman walk slowly past. “So then,” her dad says, “he says eventually he realized the saying no to everything was just as much youth as the yes, because neither of these things were thoughtful. Neither of them was actually choosing what to be.”