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THE SOUND OF EVERYTHING:
REPRESENTING JUSTICE IN THE FAMILY NOVEL
____________________________________
A Thesis
Presented to
The Honors Tutorial College
Ohio University
_______________________________________
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for Graduation
from the Honors Tutorial College
with the degree of
Bachelor of Arts in English
______________________________________
by
Daniel J. Kington
April 2018
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Representing Justice in the Family Novel…………………………………. 3
The Sound of Everything…………………………………………………………………38
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Representing Justice in the Family Novel
Introduction
When Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906, exposing the dark side of the
American meatpacking industry, the novel provoked immense public outrage and horror.
The Jungle sold thousands of copies upon its release and was translated into 17 languages
within a matter of months (Younge). The public reaction to Sinclair’s subject matter
forced President Theodore Roosevelt to create a commission to investigate the abuses
Sinclair documented, resulting in the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure
Food and Drug Act, which, in turn, led to the creation of the Food and Drug
Administration (Younge). Novelist and Trotskyist activist James T. Farrell later argued
that The Jungle made “a lasting contribution to the struggle of the American worker for
social justice and emancipation from wage slavery” and that “it introduced the ideas and
aspirations of socialism into the main body of American literature.” Indeed, it is difficult
to imagine a novel that has had such a dramatic impact on American popular
consciousness and politics as The Jungle. Sinclair gained such influence that President
Roosevelt reportedly advised The Jungle’s publisher to “Tell Mr Sinclair to go home and
let me run the country for a while” (Younge).
The impact of Sinclair’s novel politically was entirely independent of its merits
artistically, however. As Farrell notes, the novel’s protagonist, Jurgis, “serves as a major
illustration of the case which Sinclair builds against the System,” but that case “is more
interesting than [Sinclair’s] characters.” For example, when Jurgis is released from the
jail in which he has long been cooped up, he is initially thrilled: “he could hardly believe
that it was true,—that the sky was above him again and the open street before him; that
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he was a free man” (Sinclair 52). However, upon his release, he must walk twenty miles
through the sleet and rain because he has no money to pay for transportation, and, when
he finally arrives home, he discovers that his family has been forced to move, as they
were unable to pay rent. When he at last locates his family, his wife is in premature labor
with no doctor present, as she cannot afford one. This situation leads Jurgis to proclaim,
in the midst of an extended, polemical monologue, that “the law was against them, the
whole machinery of society was at their oppressors' command! If Jurgis so much as
raised a hand against them, back he would go into that wild-beast pen from which he had
just escaped!” (54). Jurgis’s tirade against the economic and political system stands in
obvious juxtaposition with his earlier joy at being released from jail. The society he lives
in, the text rather overtly suggests, is itself, for the workers, no better than a jail.
Jurgis is not a complete automaton; he has real human emotion, and is a genuinely
sympathetic character. For instance, he clearly cares for his family in a tender and
intimate way, as illustrated by his sincere panic when he discovers they have been forced
to move (Sinclair 54). However, Sinclair’s “characters possess few distinctive traits” and
the novel’s only real drama is explicitly social and political (Farrell). Characters “are only
occasionally found in relationship with one another in scenes in which there is any
personal tension, and only then, when such scenes will further build up Sinclair’s thesis
in a literal manner” (Farrell). It is therefore no surprise that the novel concludes with
Jurgis’s conversion to a socialist ideology.
Although he is critical of the novel’s art, Farrell defends the The Jungle’s explicit
politics. He argues that because “The novel is a most flexible literary form,” it may
“either be propagandistic or non-propagandistic,” and that because of The Jungle’s
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political merits, it “has already justified itself.” However, the argument that the novel is
“a most flexible literary form” is a bit of a straw man, in that Farrell does not engage in a
serious defense of the text as a novel. He would likely be hard-pressed to do so since,
“Thanks to its polemical style, formulaic narrative and, at times, propagandistic language,
[The Jungle] has more currency as a work of literary journalism than of great fiction”
(Younge). The political success of Sinclair’s novel, then, reveals more about the
transformative possibilities of journalism than those of literary fiction. Further, while
Farrell judges The Jungle primarily according to its political merits, literary fiction, as the
Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky argued, “should, in the first place, be judged by its
own law, that is, by the law of art” (150). For the fiction writer who wants to engage with
the sociopolitical, this raises a number of questions, from what the ‘law of art’ even
means to whether political fiction can be, in any instance, a viable project.
It is these questions with which the remainder of this essay engages. To begin, I
review existent scholarship on the theory of the political novel, focusing on the way in
which the contradictions between ideological abstraction and the rootedness of fiction in
personal experience, taken together, serve as the driving engine of the political novel. I
then analyze various traditions of the political novel, including socialist realism,
dystopian political fiction, and post-New Left, U.S. political fiction. This comparative
analysis reveals the common obstacles that the political novel encounters, the most
prominent of which are didacticism and the failure to join social critique with a vision for
a political alternative. This analysis also identifies the ways in which the traditions
examined overcome, or fail to overcome, those obstacles. I then contrast these traditions
with the approach taken by Arundhati Roy in her realist, political novel, The God of
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Small Things, which, largely through the personal and political tensions it creates by
casting a family as its protagonist, successfully avoids didacticism while also joining
critique with vision. To conclude, I draw upon the novels and theories thus far examined
in a discussion of my own novel, The Sound of Everything, as both a literary and political
project.
Theories of the political novel: when the political becomes personal
If literature should indeed be judged by ‘its own law,’ as Trotsky argues, then the politics
of the novel must not infringe upon its art. Otherwise, the political novel is at risk of
becoming a caricature of itself, something of a genre novel. And, just as genre novels
“depend upon the management of mannequin characterization and reassuringly
recognizable type from whom the complexity of humanity and all questions related to the
soul have conveniently leaked out,” the novel that is primarily concerned with the
promotion of a given political message, and only secondarily concerned with its own art,
“is almost on the point of becoming useless,” since “In ideology nothing changes;
everything is ineffably tangent” (Baxter 18, Morel 177-178). Indeed, “when the armored
columns of ideology troop in en masse, they do imperil a novel’s life and liveliness”
(Howe 20). The rigidity of ideology is, in fact, in fundamental conflict with the genre of
the novel itself, since “the novel tries to confront experience in its immediacy and
closeness, while ideology is by its nature general and inclusive” (Howe 20). This poses
an obvious problem for the political novel. However, the contributions of Irving Howe
and Anna Kornbluh on the theory of the political novel, particularly when synthesized
with contemporary literary theory and critique, help not to resolve the contradiction
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between ideology and the novel form but to demonstrate how this contradiction can be
usefully employed.
The novel is in constant motion and contradiction. For Charles Baxter, the novel
traces the arc(s) of “mobilized fear or desire,” and for John Gardner the novel is a
product of “Certain forces, within and outside the character” that “press him toward a
certain course of action, while other forces, both within and outside, must exert strong
pressure against that course of action” (Baxter 61, Gardner 187). Rather than standing in
any sort of fundamental contradiction with the novel as social critique, the novel’s
“dynamic plurivocity of aesthetic thought in motion” that Baxter and Gardner describe
makes possible the novel as critique, which, in the Marxist view, should itself be
constituted through the study of motion and contradiction (Kornbluh 401). As it arises in
the novel, social critique, constantly contesting what is for what could be, must mirror the
novel’s own dynamism and constant motion. After all, literature, as opposed to polemic,
is not an “object-of-knowledge” but a “mode of knowing” (Kornbluh 399). To the extent
that literature is political, then, it must be political not as an object but as a mode.
Therefore the political ideas represented in the novel form must themselves be in
motion, which requires the moving force of contradiction. This means that the writer
must allow “opposition… in his book against his own predispositions and yearnings and
fantasies,” which represents a constant danger, as it requires that the writer “allow for
those rocks against which [the writer’s] intentions may smash” (Howe 23). Jean-Pierre
Morel, writing in a different decade, country, and context, came to a similar conclusion,
using a different analogy: the writer “must cut up his own ideology, show the gaps in it,
make the cracks in the throne and altar apparent” (176). It may seem absurd, and in many
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ways it is absurd, to suggest that for the political novel to be successful it must, in some
way, undermine itself. However, creating space for internal, ideological oppositions and
contradictions is only to “echo those [oppositions and contradictions] of reality” (Morel
177). It is only through opposition and conflict that political fiction can be successful,
because it is only through their opposition and conflict with the world and with
themselves that ideas shape reality.
In many ways the dilemma of treating ideas completely opposed to the author’s
own with complexity and seriousness is not actually unique to the political novel. Indeed,
ideas in general “are indispensable to the serious novel” for “ideas raise enormous
charges of emotion, they involve us in our most feverish commitments and lead us to our
most fearful betrayals” (Howe 20). However, the political novel employs ideas on an
altogether different level than do other forms of the novel. The ideas that the political
novel “appropriates are melted into its movement and fused with the emotions of its
characters” such that they begin to “have a kind of independent motion, so that they
themselves—those abstract weights of idea or ideology—seem to become active
characters in the political novel” (Howe 21). It is that independent motion of ideas that
helps to distinguish the political novel from the novel’s other forms, as it is through this
independent motion that the existing society is not only examined but questioned.
The political novel further separates itself from traditional literary fiction by its
view and portrayal of society. Howe illustrates this by contrasting the political novel with
what he terms the ‘social novel,’ exemplified by the work of Jane Austen. The social
novel is “committed to the idea of life within society” (Howe 18, emphasis in original). In
other words, the social novel takes society for granted, focusing primarily on the
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interaction of people within widely recognized codes of social conduct. The political
novel, on the other hand, calls into question the very “idea of the society, as distinct from
the mere unquestioned workings of society” (Howe 19, emphasis in original). Kornbluh
echoes this understanding of the political novel when she argues, “The dialectical conceit
of the novel as critique encompasses both that the novel makes thinkable the conditions
of social relations and that a utopian element is consequent upon this thinking” (401,
emphasis in original). The political novel accomplishes this ‘dialectical conceit’ by
employing ideas within the realm of concrete, human experience.
The portrayal of this ‘dialectical conceit’ within concrete experience is not a
problem for which art is unprepared. As Trotsky argues, “If nature, love, or friendship
had no connection with the social spirit of an epoch, lyric poetry would long ago have
ceased to exist” (31). Likewise, Howe says that “To be a novel at all, it must contain the
usual representation of human behavior and feeling; yet it must also absorb into its stream
of movement the hard and perhaps insoluble pellets of modern ideology” (20). While any
novel must be built around private human emotion closely examined and consequently
absorb elements of ideology, in the political novel, “the direction in which the emotion
moves, the weight it exerts, the object to which it attaches itself, are all conditioned, if not
indeed controlled, by the pressures of abstract thought” (Howe 21). If, as Baxter argues,
“Plot springs directly from our characters’ desire or their fears and what they are willing
to do to fulfill those desires or to avoid the objects of their fears,” creating “a linkage of
cause and effect,” then in the political novel, those fears and desires are the products of
abstraction (35). Howe argues that these abstractions can be dramatized in the following
four ways: one, “diseased and intimate emotion twisting ideology into obsessional
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chimeras;” two, “ideology fortifying emotion for an heroic martyrdom;” three, “ideology
pure and possessed strangling emotion pure and disinterested;” and four, “emotion fatally
sapping the powers of ideological commitment” (22). The breadth of these possible
dramatizations leaves open near-infinite possibilities for the political novel.
However, this understanding of the political novel also excludes numerous
possibilities. Because the portrayal of ideas in the novel is necessarily fluid, “when
novels think they do not iterate evaluative judgments (child labor is bad, patriarchy
sucks) but mobilize ideas in sensuous, plastic synthesis (the problem of child labor is
inseparable from first-person narration and bildungsroman plotting)” (Kornbluh 401).
Like any other theme, then, the political “is not imposed on the story but evoked from
within it” (Gardner 177). Therefore, the task of the political novel “is always to show the
relation between theory and experience, between the ideology that has been preconceived
and the tangle of feelings and relationships [the novelist] is trying to present” (Howe 22).
This creates yet further dangers for the political novel, as “Abstraction… is confronted
with the flux of experience, the monolith of program with the richness and diversity of
motive, the purity of ideal with the contaminations of action” (Howe 23). These
contaminations cannot be neatly resolved by the political novel’s ending either; as Baxter
argues, successful stories must recognize “the condition of self-contradiction as common
to humanity,” such that “no one ever quite wins” (61). In the political novel, that the
personal is political is less problematic than that the political is personal: concrete,
political abstractions are exposed to the vacillations and erratic movements of private
emotion.
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If it is not already clear from the theories of the political novel summarized above,
the political novel is dangerous. As Howe argues, because the political novel “exposes
the impersonal claims of ideology to the pressures of private emotion, the political novel
must always be in a state of internal warfare, always on the verge of becoming something
other than itself” (22). And yet, the novels capacity for analyzing social problems
emerges from this dynamism, without which the novel could never be considered a
‘mode of knowing.’
While the contributions of Kornbluh and Howe, particularly when synthesized
with the ideas of the other scholars cited in this section, provide a rich understanding of
what the political novel is and how it functions, their theories leave something to be
desired in terms of what the political novel can actually accomplish. Howe suggests that
the “political novel can enrich our sense of human experience” and “complicate and
humanize our commitments,” but that “it is only very rarely that it will alter those
commitments themselves” (22). What precisely this means, how accurate it is, and what
implications it has for the production of fiction as a political project, however, can only
be discerned from a closer analysis of various forms of political fiction.
Traditions of the political novel
The theoretical synthesis sketched above in broad strokes provides a means by which
different forms of political fiction may be analyzed. A comparative analysis of distinct
and competing visions of the political novel will, in turn, concretize and add nuance to
that theoretical synthesis.
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I begin this comparative analysis, briefly, with an examination of the former Soviet
tradition of socialist realism, surely the sub-genre of the political novel most consciously
aware of itself as a type. I will then turn to the tradition of the dystopian political novel
before examining the tradition that emerged and became dominant in U.S. political
fiction after the New Left of the 1960s. In my analysis of the former, I will examine
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake as a characteristic example, and in my analysis of
the latter, I will examine Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. This investigation will help
answer the question central to this essay: whether and in what ways the production of
literary fiction is viable as a political project.
i. Socialist realism
The theory of socialist realism, developed during the 1930s under Stalin’s regime in the
Soviet Union, “proposes to define and to direct in a rational manner the entire
revolutionary, Marxist-oriented literary output” by representing “a reality already
elaborated according to models furnished by dialectical materialism” in order “to educate
and transform” (Morel 160-162). How this functions in practice may be illustrated by the
example of Mikhail Sholokhov’s Cleared Land, offered by Jean-Pierre Morel in his
analysis of the tradition.
Cleared Land illustrates life on Russian collective farms. The novel’s drama
arises from the oppositions naturally arising with the imposition of this new mode of rural
organization, including “conflicts among individuals, family rivalries, peasants against
former workers, rural people against townsfolk, routine against progress” (Morel 174). It
is these oppositions that allow Morel to argue that although Sholokhov’s ideology
determines his presentation of reality, “while placing it in [his] work, [he] oppose[s] it” in
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a manner consistent with the contradictions of the real world (176-177). Thus far,
Cleared Land seems to function according to the theories of the political novel
synthesized above, in which opposition to the writer’s own ideology within the novel
creates a dynamism that allows the novel to function politically without verging into
mere polemic.
However, the fact of opposition within Cleared Land does not in itself mark the
book’s success; it is also important to consider the form that this opposition takes. Morel
admits, for instance, that the book reduces the middle- to upper-middle class landowners,
or kulaks, to mere “illustrations of the party’s analyses, presenting them as avid,
grasping, brutal” (174). Furthermore, the novel erases the “spontaneous opposition of the
peasants, even the average or poor ones, against collectivization” (175). It is clear from
the portrayal of these simplistic class antagonisms that simply allowing oppositional
elements to enter the space of the novel does not do the real work of confronting
abstraction with “the flux of experience, the monolith of program with the richness and
diversity of motive, the purity of ideal with the contaminations of action” (Howe 23).
Morel defends the novel’s ideologically motivated obfuscation of reality by arguing that
“All representation of reality passes through a certain area of refraction” and that, within
any novel, “Ideology is necessary” (175-176). While this is certainly true, Morel’s
examples of antagonisms within Cleared Land fail to demonstrate a serious commitment
on Sholokhov’s part to give credence to oppositional belief-systems and many real
contradictions within reality.
Certainly, a closer examination of Cleared Land itself would be required to make
any broad claims about the full successes or shortcomings of that individual text as a
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political novel. However, Morel’s discussion of the novel is sufficient to demonstrate that
Cleared Land, whatever else may be said about it, functions propagandistically. Trotsky
argued that this propagandistic function was central to the entire tradition of socialist
realism, decrying that the tradition’s “‘socialist’ aspect is visibly expressed, in that events
which never took place are reproduced with the help of touched-up photographs” (qtd. in
Morel 160).
However, even if we momentarily ignore the tradition’s propagandistic element,
the representation of “science in the novel,” for which socialist realism purportedly
strives, still does not successful fiction make (Morel 162). As Kornbluh argues, when
writers cede their “knowledge paradigms almost entirely to science” they “fail to
champion literature as more than evidence, more than information, more than data”
(400). In other words, the novel that establishes itself as primarily scientific also
establishes itself as an ‘object-of-knowledge’ rather than the fluid ‘mode of knowing’ that
Kornbluh suggests marks successful fiction. Therefore, insofar as a given work of
socialist realism succeeds in meeting the expectations of its tradition, it will fail as
literature.
Before simply dismissing the entire tradition of socialist realism on these grounds,
however, it is first important to consider that the practice of socialist realism did not
always perfectly reflect the theory. In Morel’s defense of the tradition, he argues that
socialist realism met with “embarrassment in establishing the links between science and
literature” and therefore had to “seek precarious equilibrium” between the writer’s
autonomous production of art and “the scientific methods [socialist realism] claims to
use,” which “would annihilate the work in favor of information” (168). Therefore, “in
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practice the good socialist-realist novels,” of which Morel offers numerous example, “are
always different from the good intentions of their programs” (178). While this speaks to
the resilience of artistry in the face of censorship, it does not, as Morel argues, speak in
any capacity to the possible vibrancy of the socialist realist tradition. This is because, in
order to succeed as political fiction, the novels Morel cites stray from the actual standards
of their tradition. Therefore, we can argue that although socialist realism is the most
rigidly defined and clearest tradition of political fiction, it is perhaps because of the
tradition’s rigidity that it is ultimately unsuccessful.
ii. Dystopian political fiction
Quite unlike socialist realism, the project of dystopian political fiction does not rely upon
“renaming ideology and calling it reality” (Morel 177). Rather, the tradition dismantles
reality by projecting it into the future on an ideological basis. As Howe argues in his
discussion of George Orwell’s 1984, successful dystopian political fiction “does not take
us away from, or beyond, our obsession with immediate social reality” because “it
derives from a perception of how our time may end” and therefore “trembles with an
eschatological fury” (236). The successful dystopian novel must therefore, through “its
desolate descriptions,” present a world that the audience recognizes as “quite possible, if
not inevitable, given existing trends” (Siply 3). To accomplish this, the tradition must
simply “allow certain tendencies in modern society to spin forward without the brake of
sentiment or humaneness” which thus makes clear “the relationship between [the
dystopia] and the societies we know in our experience” (Howe 242). The political bent of
the tradition is not complete, however, unless the text successfully makes the suggestion
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“that a large-scale structural shift must be made in order to prevent” the presented
dystopia “from materializing” (Siply 3).
Writing in 1957, Howe argues that Orwell’s 1984 “appeals to us because its
terror, far from being inherent in the ‘human condition,’ is particular to our century”
(236). Over 60 years later, the work of Margaret Atwood now performs a similar function
within the cannon of U.S. fiction. While much of her work merits serious attention in any
discussion of dystopian political fiction, here we will take up just one of her novels, Oryx
and Crake, as an illustrative example of both the political potentialities and limitations of
the dystopian tradition. Of course, published in 2003, the concerns of Oryx and Crake are
vastly different from those of 1984. Rather than the menace of authoritarianism, Atwood
takes up the degradation of the Earth’s natural environment, which is for her intimately
bound up with the profit system. To do so, Atwood projects forward current trends of
“internet pornography, gated communities,” and “genetic modification,” while
specifically “imagining the havoc that might be wreaked on the gene pool if scientists
were constrained by nothing except the profit motive” (Sipley 1, Walter).
That Atwood’s political message “can easily be summed up” naturally points
toward the specter of the labels ‘propaganda’ and ‘polemic,’ which have already, once
applied, resigned both The Jungle and the tradition of socialist realism to failure against
the standards sketched above in the synthesized theory of the political novel. Indeed,
ecosocialist and scholar Tristan Sipley concludes his review of Atwood’s novel by
proclaiming Oryx and Crake “a fascinating polemic” (3). However, Sipley also implies
the novel’s success as fiction when, in the same sentence that he labels it polemic, he also
calls it “an entertaining romp” (3). Likewise, in her review of the novel, non-fiction
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writer, novelist, and activist, Natasha Walter, writes, on the one hand, that Atwood
“wants to get ideas across to you, not to spend her energy polishing the sentences,” and,
on the other, that the novel is such “A cracking read” that, frequently, “you feel almost
breathless.” That both reviewers compliment the novel’s fiction while simultaneously
describing its politics as sharp and unapologetic seems to complicate the previously
established binary between polemic and successful literature. This warrants more
investigation.
Atwood’s concern for her art in addition to her politics can be demonstrated by
her portrayal of character. While The Jungle’s protagonist is a sympathetic but rather flat
character whose complexity is entirely subordinated to the novel’s political project, Oryx
and Crake’s protagonist, Snowman (formerly known as Jimmy), “comes rather
poignantly alive” (Walter). The opening of the novel finds Snowman tromping around
the woods to urinate, proclaiming that “It is the strict adherence to daily routine that tends
towards the maintenance of good morale and the preservation of sanity” (4). He thinks
that the comment, made to an audience of only himself, sounds practically as if “he’s
quoting from a book,” and anxiety overcomes him as he wonders whether the comment
actually is from a book that, along with much of his past, he has simply forgotten (4-5). It
is Snowman’s bizarre yet somewhat tortured demeanor that quickly endears him and
makes him sympathetic, even though he is also presented as generally unlikable when,
for instance, he thinks that although “He hasn’t been known to harm a child… There’s no
telling what he might do” (9). Whereas “things [The Jungle’s Jurgis] does and the
thoughts and feelings he has are intimately bound up with the great variety of facts
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Sinclair wished to state,” Oryx and Crake’s Snowman is not over-determined for political
ends (Younge).
And yet, the novel’s politics are still “fused with the emotions of its characters”
(Howe 21). For instance, when Snowman objectifies his late love interest, bemoaning her
loss not as a human but as a sex object, the novel necessarily invokes the moment
Snowman first encountered Oryx, as a child porn actress caught up in sex trafficking
(Atwood 109-110). The novel therefore demonstrates “the way capital colonizes not only
the total environment of the globe, but also the microscopic internal spaces of body and
mind” (Sipley 3). Consequently, the novel’s politics become personal and yet, because
Snowman is portrayed with dynamism and complexity, the imposition of the political
realm upon the personal does not become propagandistic.
The primary reason Atwood’s novel can get away with such an unambiguous
portrayal of the world without falling into the literary trap of unambiguous polemic,
however, has less to do with character than with the strength of the dystopian tradition
itself. When, in flashback, Snowman’s mom accuses his father of exploitative business
practices, “ripping off a bunch of desperate people,” and the father responds by
insinuating that there is no “honest” way to get rich within the economic system in which
the characters live, they are not discussing the world in which the novel’s readers live
(Atwood 56-57). The same can be said of the novel’s overt portrayal of “intensely class-
based spacial stratification… the scientific manipulation of nature,” and the “explicit…
connection between the commodification of scientific knowledge and the destruction of
the natural and human environment” (Sipley 2).
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And yet, the strength of Oryx and Crake politically, as Howe says of 1984, is that
Atwood “only took one step” to get to the world of the novel, and “because [she] knew
how long and terrible a step it was, [she] had no need to take another” (Howe 242). While
successful political dystopia “must first be approached through politics,” it should not be
approached simply as “political study or treatise. It is something else, at once a model
and a vision” (238). By critiquing the world that her novel’s characters live in and
simultaneously encouraging her readers to see in their world the germs of her novel’s
world, Atwood opens up her novel as a ‘mode of knowing’ rather than an ‘object-of-
knowledge’ and “mobilize[s] ideas in sensuous, plastic synthesis” (Kornbluh 401).
That Oryx and Crake is best described as a ‘mode of knowing’ can be further
demonstrated by the fact that the novel fails to identify a simple means of preventing the
world from becoming as it is in Atwood’s novel. For example, when “Anti-Happicuppa
groups stage protests and blockade compounds while farmers riot and burn crops” to
oppose mechanization and the use of genetically modified coffee crops, Atwood points to
the economic power of workers in the system of commodity production and seems to
intentionally invoke “recent anti-globalization protests and indigenous environmental
justice movements” (Sipley 2). However, these protests, as represented by Atwood, seem
largely a mark of the chaos of the time she describes and are written off by the book’s
characters: Snowman says that the peasants would behave just the same as the
corporations “if they had half the chance,” and his Uncle Pete says that “Everyone wants
a cheaper cup of coffee – you can’t fight that” (Atwood 180). Protest, then, especially
because society ultimately collapses, is not presented as even viable due to human nature
itself.
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This view of human nature is confronted, however, toward the end of the text,
“As the strange humanoid creatures that Crake has put on earth begin to show something
approaching human individualism,” which the scientific mastermind, Crake, had intended
to eradicate from their genome (Walter). Although Snowman worries that these signs of
humanity would lead to the invention of “kings, and then slavery and war,” the novel
itself provides the tools to contradict that assumption by demonstrating the communalism
and collective spirit of the creatures through their creations of music and something
resembling human religion (Atwood 360-361). When Snowman, a few pages later,
discovers that he is not in fact the only human remaining on the planet, the varying
potentialities of these humanoid creatures are projected back onto humanity itself, as
Snowman wonders whether the other humans would “Attack” or “Open their arms to him
with joy and brotherly love” (Atwood 373). The possibility of such communalism,
challenging Snowman’s earlier assumptions about human nature, can be read back onto
the novel’s earlier portrayal of protest. However, such a reading is not inevitable; in fact,
it seems unlikely that most readers will draw such a connection. And yet, it is to Oryx
and Crake’s credit, as a mode of knowing rather than an object of knowledge, that such a
reading is even possible.
Because the novel’s political success is so heavily tied to its position within the
dystopian tradition, this analysis raises the question of whether such success can be
replicated in a realist work. After all, even if it is not the case that in Atwood’s novel
“Everything has hardened into politics,” as Howe argues of 1984, a great deal certainly
has (238). While the dystopian tradition might be able to manage such an approach while
preserving its art, it is difficult to imagine a realist work in which such an approach
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would be tenable, as indicated by the above analyses of socialist realism and The Jungle.
The tradition of U.S. political fiction that emerged out of the New Left demonstrates,
however, that realist novels can take up the political without everything hardening into
politics.
iii. Post-New Left political fiction
The New Left, while not the only oppositional political current active in the United States
throughout the late-1960s era of radicalism, had a lasting effect upon intellectual and
artistic cultural production. This is because of the New Left’s merger with the decade’s
counterculture in 1967, after which New Left political protests became “redolently
‘symbolic,’” rejecting science and rationality (McCann and Szalay 438). This increasing
focus on the symbolic had profound implications, as “Any plan of action seemed in this
context an overly rationalizing, managerial endeavor” and thus “thinking through change
came to seem unavoidably compromised” (McCann and Szalay 444, 438). The
movement adopted an attitude that “dreams change the world” and that, therefore,
political and cultural radicals should work toward the ‘decolonization of the mind,’ more
vulgarly described as “a therapeutic acceptance of reality itself” (McCann and Szalay
445). These ideas had a disastrous impact on the left-wing, producing a politics of
individualism that was ripe for co-optation and capitulation to neoliberalism (McCann
and Szalay 441). Likewise, in their article on the impact of the New Left on literary
thinking, Sean McCann and Michael Szalay argue that literature influenced by the New
Left is necessarily limited in its political potentialities by that literature’s suggestion that
the “most appropriate attitude toward mundane political conflict or social tension is the
effort to transcend it” (McCann and Szalay 447). McCann and Szalay cite Toni Morrison
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as a writer whose work is emblematic of their complaint, which we can therefore evaluate
through an examination of Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
As Morrison makes explicit in her foreword to the novel, The Bluest Eye focuses
“on how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take root
inside the most delicate member of society: a child; the most vulnerable member: a
female” (xi). That female child is Pecola, and the project of the novel is certainly
achieved, as Morrison demonstrates the way in which Pecola’s sense of self-worth is
continually degraded. To take just one example among many, a group of Black boys at
one point surrounds Pecola, chanting “Black e mo. Black e mo. Yaddsleepsnekked” (65).
That Pecola internalizes her own inferiority is demonstrated only a few pages later, when
Pecola’s conversation with Maureen, a lighter-skinned, female classmate, naturally leads
Maureen to ask, “Did you ever see a naked man?” and Pecola assumes that Maureen’s
intention is to invoke the boys’ earlier chant (71). It is only at this point that Maureen,
perhaps because she is offended, echoes the words of Pecola’s bullies, “Black e mos”
(73). Accepting an inferior subject position is therefore presented as extremely
detrimental, bringing additional and unnecessary harm to Pecola. This dynamic reaches
its apex when Pecola eventually seeks to replace her brown eyes with blue ones.
The Bluest Eye does not suggest a way for Black girls to materially combat the
reality of oppression. However, Morrison’s novel does suggest that Black girls can resist
internalizing the ideologies of misogyny and white supremacy. For instance, after
Maureen degrades Pecola, the novel’s other main characters, Claudia and Frieda, chant
“Six-finger-dog-tooth-meringue-pie!” at Maureen, mocking her appearance (73). In so
doing, Claudia and Frieda reject the racialized, feminine beauty standards the world has
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offered them, thereby avoiding the severe feelings of abjection Pecola experiences. The
novel therefore suggests that Black women can and should work to lessen the burden of
the world by practicing a radical self-love, ultimately tied up with a radical hatred of their
oppressors (represented here, in a highly contradictory way, by Maureen). In other words,
Black women should do as the political tradition of the New Left suggested and “commit
to existence itself” (McCann and Szalay 446).
It is self-evident from the above discussion that Morrison successfully writes a
realist, political novel without everything hardening into politics. However, it is also clear
that McCann and Szalay are justified in arguing that “American writers in the decades
following the sixties—especially those who cast themselves as pursuing broadly political
ends—have… pursued an ostensibly higher politics, one that, in eschewing the
established institutions of government and organized forms of dispute and negotiation,
often ends up withdrawing not only from traditional politics, but also from the very
possibility of orchestrated change” (447). Post-New Left political fiction in the U.S.
therefore lacks “The dialectical conceit of the novel as critique,” which “encompasses
both that the novel makes thinkable the conditions of social relations and that a utopian
element is consequent upon this thinking” (Kornbluh 401, emphasis in original). Or, to
the extent that the tradition accomplishes such a dialectical conceit, the ‘utopian element’
is based purely upon individual transcendence rather than the transformation of social
relations.
In this way, the literary tradition that emerged out of the New Left actually
represents a simple amplification of trends already existent in American political fiction
prior to the 1960s. Writing prior to the emergence of the New Left, Howe argues that
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“The image raised by” American political fiction “is one of isolation, an isolation that a
wounded intelligence is trying desperately to transform into the composure of solitude”
(200). Howe makes clear both the strengths and weaknesses of a literary political
tradition rooted in individualism, arguing that by “Personalizing everything” American
writers “could not quite do justice to the life of politics in its own right”—however, “they
could brilliantly observe how social and individual experience melt into one another so
that the deformations of the one soon become the deformations of the other” (163). As a
necessary consequence, such novels, of which The Bluest Eye is one, fail to provide a
political alternative that takes a form outside of the individual.
Howe raises the question of whether the realist, American political novel can
avoid such a pitfall when he ties the individualist nature of American political fiction to
the fact that, whereas radical political “appetites and impulses in Europe would be
manifested through coherent theories and massive parties, in America they have generally
remained diffuse, eccentric and fluid” (Howe 161). Indeed, within the canon of realist,
American political fiction, it remains the case that no tradition jumps out which both
avoids polemicizing and portrays a politics that reaches beyond the individual.
The realist alternative: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things
While written in a vastly different cultural and political context than the American, and
not part of any clearly demarcated tradition of political fiction, Arundhati Roy’s first
novel, The God of Small Things, points toward a method by which the realist, American
political novel might escape the trap of The Jungle on the one hand and that of The Bluest
Eye on the other, all while suggesting methods by which society might be transformed in
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a given direction and succeeding as literature. The God of Small Things is an
“antiauthoritarian, antipatriarchal novel” that constructs “a narrative of subaltern struggle
and survival in postcolonial India” (Jani 48). Although the novel is presented from the
perspective of an elite family, it is “Centered around the tragedy of Velutha, a Dalit
carpenter/engineer and card-carrying communist” whose “tale of oppression underpins all
of the other major narrative streams” (Jani 51). Already, it is obvious that the novel is
written in a highly specific cultural and political context. However, the means by which
the text succeeds (and fails) in its political project are universal enough to project into the
contemporary, American context.
Like all of the political fiction thus far examined, The God of Small Things
attempts to infuse its political ideas into its characters, establishing a relationship between
‘big’ social and political structures and the ‘small,’ individual mind. At the heart of the
novel’s big/small paradigm is Velutha’s murder, which “is repeatedly represented as the
result of the collusion between history, the state, tradition, and ruling elites of all sorts” –
all the forces of the ‘big’ (Jani 52). ‘Big’ ideas are further presented as unable to offer
any sort of productive alternative for Velutha; upon his murder, the novel’s third-person
narration describes him as “abandoned by God and History, by Marx, by Man, by
Woman and (in the hours to come) by Children” (294). Pranav Jani, in his article
defending the progressive politics of The God of Small Things, is critical of this means of
approaching the world, arguing that the novel fails to offer a “theory of revolution,”
because it is locked “into a model that sees all big institutions as being so powerful” that
“the collective overcoming and transcendence of capitalism cannot be imagined” (56-57).
From this description, it would seem that, like The Bluest Eye, Roy’s novel fails to truly
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blend her critique of social structures with that ‘utopian element’ which allows the novel
to envision social transformation.
However, in addition to portraying the impact of the ‘big’ upon the ‘small,’ The
God of Small Things is unique among the novels thus far examined in the degree to which
“the novel approaches the world from a perspective that illuminates the role that ordinary
people and ‘small’ lives play in history and society” (Jani 48). For instance, when the
Naxalites (a militant communist faction) are described as having “struck terror in every
bourgeois heart” it is a ‘big’ historical phenomenon that is the subject of discussion; and
yet, the novel’s characters contribute to the development of this phenomenon and the
impact of the phenomenon is simultaneously reflected in the ‘small’ workings of the
characters’ inner lives (Roy 66). Baby Kochumma, the wealthy great-aunt of the novel’s
child protagonists, is terrified “of being dispossessed” and focuses “all her fury at her
public humiliation of Velutha,” who for her represents Naxalite radicalism due to his
participation in the movement (Roy 67, 78). In this way, Velutha and Baby Kochumma
both contribute, in their ‘small’ ways, to the making of the ‘big.’
Likewise, although Roy’s novel is immensely critical of official Indian
communist organizations and bureaucracies, which themselves contribute to Velutha’s
murder, in it’s portrayal of a communist-led march, the novel conveys the immense
power of collective action. The family on whom the novel focuses are stopped in traffic
as “the road was swamped by thousands of marching people” chanting “Workers of the
World Unite!” (Roy 63). Very quickly, the ‘small’ is subsumed by the historical force of
the masses – “Automobile islands in a river of people” (Roy 63). Jani argues that the
novel’s depiction of the march “bears a real sympathy for the communist-affiliated
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marchers’ plight” and represents it “in glowing terms as a site for utopian solidarity and
change” (Jani 63). Therefore, even if the novel’s rejection of ‘big’ ideas is counter, as
Jani argues, to a Marxist paradigm, it is disingenuous to describe The God of Small
Things as lacking a ‘theory of revolution’ (Jani 56). The novel’s theory, by which ‘small’
individuals joined together in righteous anger can thereby shrug off the ‘big’ weights of
ideology and organization in order to alter the course of history is simply not one with
which Jani agrees.
The novel’s political critique of society and its paradigm of change thus
established, how the novel avoids propagandizing remains to be seen. For one, as has
already been suggested, the novel represents the communist movement with immense
complexity, thereby allowing “for those rocks against which [the writer’s] intentions may
smash” (Howe 22). As Jani argues, “On the one hand, the march” described above “is run
by… the rulers of the state and the representatives of the big,” since the communist
movement then occupied state-power, “and the text does not hesitate to suggest,
ironically, that the entire event is orchestrated”—but, “On the other hand, the narrator…
employs the march and the marchers themselves as tools to disrupt… ancient class
hatreds” (64). The limitations of the official communist movement are most damningly
suggested by the sell-out of Velutha, by which the local communist leader, Comrade
Pillai, becomes “a functionary of the big” (Jani 60). Despite the many rocks for which
Roy allows, her political project is able to survive the beating. Against the forces of
opportunism, the march stands out as a visceral example of the force of solidarity.
In spite of these ‘rocks,’ it remains easy to imagine The God of Small Things
taking an utterly didactic turn wherein, when Velutha is sold out by opportunism, his
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militant politics of struggle and his lack of adherence to official organization are
explicitly presented as the politics which the novel’s audience should adopt. Indeed, the
novel does verge into didactisim occasionally, its third-person narrator polemicizing
against opportunism as when it critiques Marxists for working “from within the
communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to” and therefore “never
overtly question[ing] the traditional values of a cast-ridden, extremely traditional
community” (Roy 64). However, while such polemic does put the novel “on the verge of
becoming something other than itself,” the novel keeps its polemical tendencies in check
by observing Velutha only from a distance (Howe 22). Consequently, the novel need not
end like The Jungle, with Velutha, like Jurgis, adapting the novelist’s own ideology and
spitting it back at the readers.
Rather than Velutha, The God of Small Things casts, as its protagonists, an elite
family with divergent political ideas. Baby Kochumma, for instance, is devotedly anti-
communist, whereas Ammu, the matriarch of the novel’s immediate family, is
sympathetic to communist ideas, and Chacko, Ammu’s brother, is a self-proclaimed
Marxist despite his bourgeois social position. This political and social divergence is
common to the family novel, because the “strength of the family bond negates political
differences” such that, while “family members may twist and turn politically… they are
still, in the end, family” (Bridgwood 187). By drawing out the political tensions within
the family, The God of Small Things creates space for dynamic, political oppositions
expressed within personal experience. This is best expressed when the child Rahel sees
Velutha in the communist march and becomes excited, after which Ammu, Velutha’s
lover, attempts to cover up Velutha’s presence so that Baby Kochumma, Velutha’s boss,
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does not take revenge (Roy 68-78). Rather than didacticism, this scene (like much of the
novel) is filled with immense, personal tension rooted in the family that happens to have
substantial political ramifications. For this reason, The God of Small Things is best
described, in Kornbluh’s terms, as a mode of knowing, rather than an object of
knowledge. The novel therefore maintains its “uneasy compact” between the writer and
those readers who do not share Roy’s political perspective (Howe 24).
For those readers who do share Roy’s general critique of society, however, Roy
points, if in vague terms, toward the methods by which society may be fundamentally
transformed. Consequently, even if the novel lacks a clearly explicated program for
revolution, The God of Small Things, as a mode of knowing, provides the tools with
which those who share Roy’s general critique of social relations might productively
reevaluate their vision of how to concretely approach a better world. In this way, Roy’s
novel might “complicate and humanize” the commitments of those who share her
political paradigm in a manner that represents an effective political intervention (Howe
22). This suggests possibilities for political fiction in the realm of political tactics and
strategy that have thus far been only faintly implied by the above examination of
Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. There is no reason the general methods that The God of Small
Things uses to balance literary and political success cannot be carried into a realist,
American novel, even if the political and social experience of America is vastly different
than that of India.
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Crafting The Sound of Everything
While it would be impossible to create a simple formula for crafting a successful political
novel, the preceding discussion has revealed both broad, theoretical principles for such a
project, pitfalls which the political novel frequently encounters, and the particular means
by which writers such as Atwood and Roy have avoided those pitfalls to achieve artistic
and political success. These theoretical principles and practical lessons have informed
and inspired my own experiment in the political novel.
My novel, The Sound of Everything, is a family novel, a genre broadly defined,
according to Kerstin Dell, in that “The protagonist… is the family as a whole” (210). The
Sound of Everything has been heavily influenced by other entries into the genre—some
more political than others—including Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth, William
Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Eugene Ruge’s In Times of Fading Light, and, of course,
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. While I decided to write a family novel
primarily because of these literary influences and my own experiences, the family novel,
as indicated in the above discussion of The God of Small Things, is particularly well
suited to political critique. This is because “family discourses are always also political
discourses,” and, consequently, “the personal is political in the family novel” (Dell 10).
The reason for this inevitable politicization is that, as Friedrich Engels argues, the family
“is the cellular form of civilized society, in which the nature of the oppositions and
contradictions fully active in that society can already be studied” (qtd. in Dell 11). In this
sense, the family acts “as bridge between the individual and society, the private and the
public” and can therefore “be treated as an encyclopedia that allows us to look into the
people, the life, and the atmosphere of one particular nation” (Bridgwood 172, Ru 37-38).
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Although some scholars argue that the family novel is inherently conservative, for
instance because the genre’s rhyming action creates a “discourse of fate and cyclical
repetition” which undercuts “any idea of social change,” Dell convincingly dismisses
such claims as “rather arbitrary and not very substantial at all” (Bridgwood 176, Dell 17).
While this discussion merits more attention, suffice it to say for now that the examples of
The God of Small Things, and, I hope, my own novel, prove in practice that the family
novel need not bend toward conservatism.
Although The Sound of Everything is deeply and fundamentally concerned with
politics, I was never interested in writing a novel modeled after socialist realism or The
Jungle. For me, both reading and writing literature is most transformative when that
literature constructs a window into other people’s internal lives, thereby helping its writer
and audience to better and more empathetically understand humanity in its current social
forms. Of course, such an approach to literature is necessarily ideological, whether
through the social novel’s acceptance and of humanity’s current social forms or the
political novel’s questioning of those forms. All this in mind, rather than subsuming
character and plot to politics, the politics my novel “appropriates are melted into its
movement and fused with the emotions of its characters,” allowing the book to be driven,
fundamentally, by character, as the siblings of my novel’s protagonist family seek to
constitute themselves independently of their shared upbringing (Howe 21).
Like The God of Small Things, my novel uses the family itself as a vehicle for the
representation and intimate study of oppositional political ideas. The novel’s matriarch,
Joan, adheres to a socially conservative value system rooted in Christianity, and the
novel’s patriarch, Victor, is a middle-of-the-road businessman whose development
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company drives gentrification in the city of Columbus, Ohio. One of their daughters,
Madeleine, adopts anarchist politics and shuns her elite and heteronormative family while
their other daughter, Jessica, becomes involved with a socialist-leaning activist group,
which seeks to prevent Jessica’s university from partnering with Victor’s company. One
of Joan and Victor’s sons, Stephen, generally adopts Victor’s political program, whereas
the other, Collin, adheres to a vague, left politics and seeks to politically engage through
his art. A funeral brings the entire family together, which creates a space for the tensions
between these different political ideas and ideologies to gain concrete expression within
the personal realm.
As might already be obvious from even that brief description, the novel takes up
the question of how to respond to social and class privilege within the context of a world
one recognizes to be unjust. I myself am an upper-middle class white man from the
suburbs of Columbus. The question of privilege is therefore one with which I have
repeatedly had to grapple in the creation of my art and in the context of my own political
activism. Consequently, this is an area in which I feel qualified to make a political
contribution within the realm of art. Beyond the fact of my own personal experience, the
question of how to respond to privilege is also politically relevant to the radical left at this
moment. This is primarily because, due to the diffuse and variant forms that oppression
takes, the vast majority of readers will approach the novel with some amount of privilege,
and the study of how to respond to privilege will therefore be broadly relevant. As Sharon
Smith argues, the dominant mode of responding to privilege on the left is currently based
in a politics of ‘privilege checking,’ which, while productive, “is mostly limited to anger
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at class and social inequality—without an obvious connection to a working-class strategy
to transform society.” My novel attempts to intervene against that limited political vision.
The Sound of Everything makes such an intervention within the space of the
campus left, where politics around privilege are particularly relevant. Colleges and
universities, which remain key sites of left-wing organizing and resistance – whether or
not everyone on the left would like this to be the case – continue to disproportionately
recruit students of higher socio-economic backgrounds, even as students-bodies become
more thoroughly proletarianized due to the impact of neoliberalism on public education
(see Meghan Brophy on the proletarianization of student populations, Freddie Deboer’s
article critiquing the left’s focus on student activism, and David Leonhardt’s column
analyzing the socioeconomics of college campuses). Although the socioeconomics of
student populations vary widely from university to university, as Leonhardt shows, the
more general socio-economic reality of organizing on college campuses necessarily
means that left-wing campus activists will at least frequently come up against the
influence of petty bourgeois to bourgeois ideologies, including within social justice-
oriented circles. Therefore, taking up the question of how justice-oriented individuals
should respond to their own social and economic privilege is particularly vital for the
campus left, and, as I believe this question lacks a simple or straightforward answer,
appears well-situated for political intervention within the realm of art.
This question is also intimately bound up with the broader question of strategies
for emancipation, as exemplified by the fact that Jess’s movement-oriented socialism,
Madeleine’s anarchism, Collin’s broad-left artistic ambitions, and Stephen’s embrace of
his own privilege, all represent divergent responses to privilege, themselves stemming
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from divergent political ideologies. While Stephen and Collin’s politics are not treated
too seriously within the novel, the novel does not unambiguously present one of its
characters’ ideologies or responses to privilege as clearly superior, in this way seeking to
avoid didacticism. When Jess throws herself into political organizing alongside and in the
interests of those who do not share her racial and economic privileges, this predictably
creates awkward tensions and resistance from the very people Jess wants to fight for.
Madeleine, meanwhile, although the character in the novel who best ‘practices what she
preaches,’ lives as she does mainly because her politics, influenced by post-New Left
political and cultural traditions, are based primarily in seeking liberation through personal
fulfillment and transcendence, the practical efficacy of which is called into question
within the novel.
In this way, The Sound of Everything represents a fluid and dynamic mode of
knowing rather than a static and propagandistic object-of-knowledge. The novel should
therefore at least be amicable to a-political readers, even if it might not interest hardened
conservatives. Furthermore, even if the novel emerges from my own, specific, political
ideology, for those readers who do approach the text politically, the novel should provide
new ways of thinking and seeing rather than a straightforward political program.
Obviously, as a political project, the novel therefore has certain limits. It will not inspire
the masses to revolt, for instance.
It is for this reason that political activism, in addition to artistic production,
remains important to me. Inspired by Arundhati Roy’s work as a non-fiction writer and
an activist, in addition to her work as a novelist, I hope to mirror the rejection of “a
hands-off approach in which one preaches about how to change things without actually
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engaging in making that change” in order to involve myself, as Roy has, in collective
struggle (Jani 57). As Karl Marx argued, “The philosophers have only interpreted the
world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” This said, interpretation and struggle
are not diametrically opposed but are instead dialectically intertwined. At least in the
Marxist view, the world cannot be changed without its constant study and interpretation. I
hope that my own novel, as a mode of knowing combining critique with vision, will play
some small role in helping others, as it has helped me, to both better interpret the world
and better seek to change it.
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Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. Anchor Books, 2004.
Baxter, Charles. The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. Graywolf Press, 2007.
Bridgwood, Christine. “Family Romances: The Contemporary Popular Family
Saga.” Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction, edited by Jean Radford,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986, pp. 167-193. History Workshop Series.
Brophy, Meghan. “Undergraduates Are Workers, Too.” Jacobin, 2 Aug. 2017,
jacobinmag.com/2017/08/unions-campus-higher-education-organizing-college-
students.
Deboer, Freddie. “Student Activism Isn't Enough.” Jacobin, 10 June 2017,
jacobinmag.com/2017/06/higher-education-organizing-workers-students.
Dell, Kerstin. “The Family Novel in North America from Post-War to Post-Millennium:
A Study in Genre.” Katalog Der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek, Universität Trier,
Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Mar. 2005, d-nb.info/976174383/34.
Farrell, James T. “Return to the Jungle.” Review of The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair. The
New Republic, 3 Nov. 1946, newrepublic.com/article/97045/return-the-jungle.
Gardner, John. “Plotting.” The Art of Fiction. New York: Vintage Books, 1991, pp. 165–
194.
Howe, Irving. Politics and the Novel. Columbia University Press, 1992.
Jani, Pranav. “Beyond 'Anticommunism': The Progressive Politics of The God of Small
Things.” Globalizing Dissent, edited by Ranjan Ghosh and Antonia Navarro-Tejero,
Routledge, 2009, pp. 47–70. Studies in Social and Political Thought: 59.
Kornbluh, A. "We Have Never Been Critical: Toward the Novel as Critique." Novel: A
Forum on Fiction, vol. 50, no. 3, 01 Nov. 2017, p. 397-408. EBSCOhost,
doi:10.1215/00295132-4195016.
Leonhardt, David. “America’s Great Working-Class Colleges.” The New York Times, The
New York Times Company, 18 Jan. 2017,
www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/opinion/sunday/americas-great-working-class-
colleges.html.
Marx, Karl, and W. Lough. “Theses On Feuerbach.” Marx/Engels Selected Works, vol. 1,
Progress Publishers, 1969, pp. 13–15,
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm.
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McCann, Sean and Michael Szalay. "Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking After
the New Left." The Yale Journal of Criticism, no. 2, 2005, p. 435-468. EBSCOhost,
doi:10.1353/yale.2006.0010.
Morel, Jean Pierre. “A Revolutionary ‘Poetics’?” Yale French Studies, no. 39, 1967, pp.
160–179. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2929490.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Vintage International, 2007.
Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. Harper Perennial, 1997.
Ru, Yi-ling. The Family Novel: Toward a Generic Definition. Peter Lang, 1992.
American University Studies: Series XIX General Literature vol. 28.
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017.
Sipley, Tristan. “Capitalism and the ‘Environmental Dystopia.’” Review of Oryx and
Crake, by Margaret Atwood. Capitalism Nature Socialism Web,
www.cnsjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Sipley.17.3.Sep_.06.pdf.
Smith, Sharon. “The Politics of Privilege-Checking.” Socialist Worker, International
Socialist Organization, 18 Nov. 2014, socialistworker.org/2014/11/18/the-politics-of-
privilege-checking.
Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. Edited by William Keach. Translated by Rose
Strunsky, Haymarket Books, 2005.
Walter, Natasha. “Pigoons Might Fly.” Review of Oryx and Crake, by Margaret
Atwood. The Guardian,
www.theguardian.com/books/2003/may/10/bookerprize2003.bookerprize.
Younge, Gary. “Blood, Sweat and Fears.” Review of The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair. The
Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 4 Aug. 2006,
www.theguardian.com/books/2006/aug/05/featuresreviews.guardianreview24.
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The Sound of
Everything
A Novel
By Daniel Kington
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Part One
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Chapter One
Jess’s mom holds up two button-down shirts: one is off-white with a faded floral pattern,
and the second is a deep-purple velvet.
“I don’t know, Mom,” Jess says.
“She wore this one so often, you know,” her mom says, lifting the floral shirt.
“But she kept this one for occasions.” She lifts the other.
“Well, this is an occasion,” Jess says.
“Jessica—”
“What? It is.”
Her mom lays the shirts on the bed. Jess touches her hand to the floral one. The
fabric is well worn, and she imagines what it would feel like against her own stomach,
her shoulders, her chest. “She’ll look far more natural in this one,” Jess says.
Her mother mutters, “Are you kidding?” and Jess is about to say ‘no,’ but then her
mom clarifies: “Huge stain there on the bottom. This won’t do.”
“I just remember her wearing it is all,” Jess says, but her mom’s already carrying
the shirts back to the closet.
One fourth of July, it was so windy that when she and her siblings sat on the stoop
spitting watermelon seeds as usual, the seeds curved quickly in the wind like bats flying
purposefully through the night. Mammy watched on and practically cackled every time a
seed landed somewhere unexpected, like when one of Maddie’s wound up in Jess’s hair.
Of course, maybe when it really happened, Mammy might have been wearing a different
shirt, but right now, Jess sees her so clearly in that floral one.
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“Help me out here, Jessica,” her mom says, and Jess directs her attention to the
closet. Jess knows her task is to evaluate each shirt, but things carry on in silence.
Her grandmother would’ve worn one of those shirts making waffles for the girls
on Saturday, another to go to the grocery on a lazy afternoon, another to tend to her
flowerbed. Jess walks to the window to see that flowerbed, which rests beneath the
sycamore tree at the end of the driveway. Mammy stopped tending to the flowers herself
a few years back, and she started paying Jess’s brother to do it. Collin was never the best
landscaper though; the flowerbed hasn’t glowed with its neat, ordered rows of tulips,
marigolds, and peonies for some time. Now, it’s covered in a dust of snow, not unlike the
dust of dead skin, dirt, pollen, and small hairs gathered on the neglected furniture in
Mammy’s home.
“Do you think Madeleine’s going to show up?” her mom says. She stops
searching through the shirts, and Jess realizes how loud the scraping and scratching of
coat hangers had really been.
“It’s hard to know with Madeleine,” Jess says. “But she and Mammy were always
so close.”
“I never understood that,” says Jess’s mom. “Maddie always thought I was so
oppressive, but Mammy holds all the same values that I do… ‘Held,’ I mean. Mammy
held…”
“It was easier for them to sweep their differences under the rug,” Jess says.
“Mammy shied away from controversy, but you had to raise Maddie…”
That scraping sound begins again.
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“If she does come, I doubt she even hugs me hello,” her mom says. “She thinks I
don’t understand her – hasn’t even given me the time of day in years. She doesn’t have a
phone, and can’t ever be bothered to write, let alone provide a steady mailing address.
I’m probably sending Collin on a mad goose chase after her.”
Her mom could be right about that, so rather than respond, Jess checks her phone.
The activist group she’s involved with, the students’ union, has their big end-of-the-
semester rally coming up on Wednesday, and there’s still a lot that needs doing; Jess has
a long, frantic stream of messages from the group’s Facebook chat. They’re setting up
flyering and chalking shifts, scheduling a time to phone bank, and more. Jess can’t help
with any of that of course, so she mutes the conversation. She’ll get caught up to speed at
their meeting this afternoon.
“None of these will do,” her mom says. “How is it that she doesn’t have a single
suitable top?”
“Just take the floral shirt, Mom,” Jess says. “The stain is hardly noticeable.”
“Alright,” her mom says, and she grabs Mammy’s jewelry box from the dresser.
“We can pick out her jewelry later.”
“Really?” Jess says.
“What do you mean ‘really?’ I just can’t take this anymore.”
Jess stands and follows her mother as she carries the floral shirt toward the door.
Just before turning off the light, Jess pauses, and she breathes. She’s not sure what that
smell is, but she’s only ever smelled in it this house. Perhaps it’s a combination of her
grandmother’s perfume and the antique wood furniture. It feels warm, if a smell can be
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warm. It reminds her somehow of helping Mammy roll pasta noodles on the kitchen table
for her chicken noodle soup, flour everywhere…
“Come on, Jessica,” her mom calls from down the hall.
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Chapter Two
“Well do you know anybody by that name?” Collin says. “She should live nearby.”
“Sorry,” the woman replies.
“Thanks,” Collin tells the stranger, and the door closes in his face. Collin shakes
his hands in an attempt to encourage the blood to flow back to his fingers. He wishes he’d
brought gloves.
Evidently, Maddie’s house is not right by the chicken place. He considers going
back to Maddie’s old roommates and demanding that they take him directly to his sister.
But he’s already been driving around Athens for over an hour; he doesn’t feel quite ready
to surrender and make the trek back to the other side of town. He decides to try the house
across the street.
As he walks up the porch, he can see a dog’s tail wagging on the other side of the
window, almost like it’s disconnected from the body of the animal. Beyond the dog,
there’s a nice, clean rug and a small bookshelf, with a lamp and a small clock on top.
Although there aren’t too many details to go on, it doesn’t look like someplace Madeleine
would live. Still, Collin knocks on the door.
The dog starts barking, and it continues to bark until the door opens. A stocky,
well put-together young man holds the dog back as it continues yapping. Collin and the
man look at each other for a moment, each waiting for the other to speak first. “Hi,”
Collin says. “Is Madeleine here?”
“Sure, just a second.”
Before Collin can respond, the man closes the door.
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Collin steps backward. Despite all his time spent wandering across town, he
hasn’t thought at all about what he’ll actually say to his sister – how he’ll tell her that
their grandmother passed away. He tries to piece together a few words, but then that
voicemail takes over his mind once again: Hi, Collin. I just haven’t heard from you in a
while and… well, just call me back sometime. I’m sure you’re busy… Okay. I love you,
honey. He should have called her back. There was plenty of time to do it – a whole week.
He reminds himself that, of course, his calling wouldn’t have changed anything. Her
arthritis made it so she couldn’t even play the piano, and she lived all alone. She’d lost
the will to live; that’s what his mom said. But, still, who knows…
The door opens, and, Collin snaps his attention onto the stranger in front of him,
who says, “Can I help you with something?” while the stocky man from before lingers a
few feet behind, holding the dog.
“Yeah,” Collin says. “Is Madeleine here?”
“I am she,” the woman says, and Collin pauses. It should have been obvious, of
course, with the clean carpet, and the neat bookshelf… But then, Maddie’s how old by
now? 26, or 27? Maybe she’s just as tidy as this Maddie by now.
“Oh,” Collin says. “Alright. Well, thanks.”
“Can I help you?”
“No, no. Wrong house.”
Collin turns around and walks back onto the sidewalk. The dog’s incessant
barking fades away behind him.
—!
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Madeleine opens her eyes to the mid-morning light, which streams in through the dusty
blinds, most jarringly from those places where the blinds are twisted or broken. Her
shoulder aches slightly, having pressed all night against the hardwood floor. She rubs the
joint without much relief, and she tries to unzip her sleeping bag quietly, so as not to
disturb the others. But Pat stirs in the sleeping bag nearest hers, and he soon removes his
eye mask.
“Is Aaron cooking breakfast?” he says.
“Yeah,” Maddie says.
“Never mind then. I was going to have you tell ‘em not to worry about a vegan
option, but Aaron always forgets anyway.”
Maddie laughs and says, “What’re you doing for breakfast?”
“I have a job interview at the diner is all, and I won’t have time to eat.”
Mikey lurches upright on the other side of the room and chucks his pillow straight
at Pat. Pat jumps, and Mikey says, “Shut up. You know I can’t sleep with y’all talking.”
Sylvia sits then too, and rubs her eyes. A grin comes to Maddie’s face as she
looks at all of them in their bags. Caterpillar Club, she likes to call them, but that one
never caught on with anybody except Sylvia, who probably only says it to pity her.
When Madeleine and her former partners split up in February, Aaron, Mikey, and
James, the original occupants of this house, took her in – only until she could get back on
her feet. But the boys kind of liked having an extra person around, with the rent being
cheaper and all, so, one night, sitting around the living room table smoking pot, they
hatched a plan to invite all their closest friends to move into the house. The group had a
vision of making the place into a sort of collective. They cleared the furniture out of all
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the bedrooms to make space, and they put four people in each room, in sleeping bags on
the floor.
The vision of fully functioning communal living is still in progress, and there are
plenty of frustrations with the current set-up. Mikey, for instance, still misses the freedom
to masturbate whenever he wants, and sometimes Maddie can hear him getting off on the
toilet as she waits to shower. But certain aspects of the collective, like communal
breakfasts, have been largely working out.
Maddie grabs a pair of pink pajama pants from the small pile of clothes that sits
next to her sleeping bag and, after giving them a quick sniff (they don’t smell too sweaty,
but they are a bit matted in some places) she pulls them on. Maybe she’ll throw them in
the wash tomorrow.
“Can I have my pillow back?” Mikey says.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have thrown it at me,” Pat mumbles; he’s re-donned his
eye mask and rests now on both pillows. Mikey stares at him.
“Don’t forget about your interview, Pat,” Madeleine says.
“Five more minutes,” Pat mutters.
Madeleine laughs and leaves the room. As she proceeds down the hall, however,
she hears Mikey stomp across the room, and soon Pat shouts, “Hey!” She considers
marching back in there and demanding that they put their testosterone to rest for once, but
then Sylvia appears in the doorframe of the next bedroom over. She pauses when she sees
Madeleine.
“Hey,” she says.
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“Good morning,” Maddie says, and Sylvia doesn’t respond right away. She
remains frozen instead. “What’s up?” Maddie says.
“Have you told Aaron yet?”
“Christ, Sylvie, I’ll tell him when I tell him – if I tell him,” Maddie says, and she
makes her way down the staircase. The first step creaks as usual on her way down, and
Sylvia, following closely behind her, carefully skips it. Maddie is vaguely annoyed; with
Aaron blasting noise music in the kitchen, a creaking step will hardly make a difference
to anyone.
As Maddie reaches the landing, Sylvia grabs her shoulder.
“What is it, Sylvie?” Maddie says.
“It’s just that – I worry Marsha might’ve mentioned it already.”
“Marsha might’ve mentioned it? To Aaron? How’d Marsha hear anything about
it?”
“I’m sorry, but you haven’t taken any steps, so I talked to Marsha, and she says
you could borrow her car if you did decide to go to that clinic in Columbus.”
“I’ve decided to go to the clinic in Columbus, Sylvie, that was never in doubt. I
have an appointment scheduled for tomorrow.”
“Well, now you have a car to use. Marsha doesn’t need it for anything until
Friday.”
Maddie stares her friend straight in the eye, too many possible responses at the tip
of her tongue to choose just one. Their silence is only broken when Aaron, from
downstairs, calls over his music: “Maddie, is that you? I need you down here ASAP! It’s
an emergency.”
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“Fuck Aaron,” Sylvia says.
Madeleine takes a breath before responding. “You are way out of line on this,”
she says. “It’s my body, so don’t go telling all the Marsha’s of the world, alright? They
can’t keep secrets from the Aaron’s of the world. I wasn’t ready to talk to him about
this.”
Part of her wants to run back upstairs and curl up with the Caterpillar Club, but
then Aaron calls, “Emergency, Maddie, emergency!” and she continues down to the
kitchen, where she’s greeted by the smell of bacon frying. The grease in the pan pops, but
Aaron stands, elbows on the counter, and stares at the newspaper.
“Morning,” Aaron says, without looking up – he’s sort of hard to hear over the
noise from the stereo, so Maddie flips the music off. Aaron hardly seems to notice.
“What’s the emergency, Aaron?” Maddie says.
“Do you know which drummer played with McCartney and Harrison? Five letter
word, and all I can think of is Ringo, but that doesn’t fit with 2-down, which has to be
tarot. I mean, ‘15th century playing cards used for divination’ – what else could it be?
Tarot.”
“Ringo has a last name, Aaron,” Madeleine says. “Was this your emergency?
“It can’t be ‘Star,’” Aaron says. “There are five blanks, aren’t you listening? And
yes, of course this is the emergency, I’m only on 1-across and I’m already stumped.”
“Starr has two R’s,” Maddie says.
“See, I knew I just needed you down here,” says Aaron, and he turns to the stove,
where he lifts the pan and shuffles the bacon around in the sizzling grease. “Did you
know this girl got a 30 on her ACTs in high school?”
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“I did,” Sylvia says.
“That was like eight years ago, Aaron,” Maddie says. “Stop telling everybody
that.”
She looks to the crossword, finds Aaron’s place, and adds a second set of
handwriting to the page. S-T-A-R-R.
“Got into OU on a full ride, too,” Aaron says.
“And then promptly dropped out,” Madeleine says.
“Well, all I’m saying is, you are one smart cookie.”
Madeleine feels Sylvia staring at her, but she continues work on the crossword.
Seven letter word for sneaky and suspicious; third letter is ‘R’ thanks to tarot. Madeleine
pencils in ‘furtive.’
“Woah, woah, woah,” Aaron says. “You gotta let a person finish what they start.”
“Of course,” Maddie says; she rolls her eyes and sets the pen down.
Soon after Aaron returns to his bacon, Maddie feels Sylvia’s breath against her
ear. She jumps, but then Sylvie whispers, “Fuck Aaron,” and Maddie can’t help but
laugh.
“What’s that?” Aaron asks, glancing over at them.
“Nothing,” Madeleine says. She puts a hand in front of her lips and mouths “Fuck
Aaron,” back to Sylvia. They crack up, and Aaron looks vaguely annoyed. He grabs a
pair of tongs to pull the first round of bacon onto a paper towel.
Maddie’s grateful for Sylvia’s presence; at least she won’t have to talk with
Aaron one-on-one before she’s had her coffee.
—
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Light snow falls from the bright grey sky as Collin walks up the uneven steps to the
porch, which is littered with beer cans, cigarette butts, abandoned items of clothing, and a
few empty snack bags. But, the porch is spacious, and there’s a great view. A bright,
multi-colored blanket covers the outside futon, and multiple wind chimes, as well as a
string of lit rainbow Christmas lights, hang from the ceiling.
Although Maddie’s old roommates refused to come to the house with him, they
made a few calls and figured out the address after he practically threatened to stage a sit-
in. As it turns out right by the chicken place had, indeed, been quite the stretch. Still,
Collin’s surprised he didn’t pick this house out; maybe it’s just because he already knows
it’s her place but it certainly seems more Maddie’s style than that place with the dog.
Collin pauses when he reaches the door. Madeleine hasn’t had any contact with
the family for years, and he hasn’t seen her since he was in eighth grade. He’s a bit
nervous, showing up unannounced. But, after staring at the door for a minute or so, he
raises his hand and knocks.
—
“Either of y’all expecting somebody?” Aaron says.
“Oh come on,” Sylvia says. “Who of our friends do you expect to knock? Lucy
says she’s already seen solicitors going door to door for the midterms, so I’ll bet you
anything it’s those folks.”
Madeleine leans passively to the side as Aaron extends his body over the
countertop, spatula in hand, and yells toward the door, “Nobody votes here, we’re a
bunch of anarchists!”
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“I vote,” Sylvia says, as Aaron sets the spatula down and grabs a pair of oven
mitts.
“Well sounds like you’ve drawn the short straw this time, Sylvia,” Aaron says. “If
you’re going to participate in the system, you have to participate in the whole process,
solicitors and all.”
Aaron opens the oven and sighs as a wave of heat pours outward. He pulls the egg
bake from the wrack, and there’s another, sharper knock on the door.
“I don’t know if that’s how it works,” Sylvia grumbles. Still, she stands and
passes into the foyer.
Maddie stares at the counter, hoping to avoid any contact with Aaron until her
friend returns, but the cold that rushes in from outside digs into her exposed ankles and
inspires her to get herself a taste of the egg bake while it’s hot.
As she removes a plate from the cupboard, she glances out the window, through
the gaps in Sylvia’s sprawling arrowhead plants, and sees a family of deer grazing in the
yard. She admires them for a moment, as she waits for Aaron to create space for her to
grab some of the egg bake. Instead, however, Aaron begins cutting the egg bake up with
his spatula, and she’s stuck there, waiting on him.
“I’ve been thinking,” Aaron says.
“Why?” Madeleine says, cutting him off. “It doesn’t suit you.”
“I’ve just been thinking that – well, things are going pretty well here at the house,
and, you know, with how much we all talk about the nuclear family, community child-
rearing and all that… you know?”
“No, Aaron, I don’t,” Madeleine says.
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“I know you’re pregnant,” Aaron says.
“So what?” Maddie says.
“Well, I just thought – maybe we could all raise the kid. Together.”
“Excuse me? You mean you, me, and all our friends oughtta raise my kid
together?”
“Well, as the collective,” Aaron says. He’s finished cutting the egg-bake now, but
he’s still stupidly holding the spatula in his right hand. Madeleine grabs it from him and
serves herself.
A bit of liquid spills through the slots in the spatula; she cleans it off the counter
with her hand, and wipes her hand on her pajamas.
—
The door cracks open, revealing a slightly overweight woman in sweatpants. The warmth
of the house wafts outside, carrying with it the smell of bacon and eggs.
“Hi there, I’m voting for the Green Party and the rest of these folks are
boycotting, so you shouldn’t waste your time. I do appreciate your civic involvement,
sir.”
The door closes. Collin stands there for a second, half-wondering whether
someone’s playing a joke on him. He knocks again, and the door swings open
immediately; the woman stares at Collin, eyebrows raised. She keeps her hand on the
door, and seems poised to shut it again.
“Hey, look, I’m not campaigning or anything like that,” Collin says.
“That’s what they all say.”
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Collin can’t decide if she’s kidding or not, but, regardless, he successfully
suppresses the urge to follow this stranger down the rabbit hole and begin arguing about
the transparency of the average solicitor.
“I’m Madeleine’s brother,” he says. “Is she around?”
Almost instantly the woman’s posture relaxes, and her hand drops from the
doorframe. “Oh,” she says. “Well, I’m Sylvia. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Collin nods, and after they stand there for a moment in silence, Sylvia suddenly
and somewhat frantically gestures for him to enter. He does so, and as he passes into the
foyer the first thing he sees is a banner, hanging boldly above the staircase and
proclaiming that “A Woman’s Place is in the Violent Insurrection of the State.”
“Maddie!” Sylvia calls.
—
She hears Sylvia call her name, but Aaron simultaneously says, “It doesn’t even deserve a
second thought, huh?” and Maddie can’t help but answer him.
“You realize this would be, like, a human person, right?” Maddie says. “A
legitimate human child?”
“Of course I do,” he says, “and that’s exactly the point! It’s atrocious that
capitalism puts the burden of raising a child on just one or two people—and not one
person is up to that task, everyone fucks it up. People get busy, they—”
“Look,” Maddie says, as Sylvia calls her name again, “you and I, we’re gonna
talk about this later, but suffice it to say that this is not a decision for me.”
He shrugs, and grabs a plate. Madeleine walks into the foyer. She stops mid-step
when she sees him. It’s been so long, and he’s grown so much…
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Collin grins and says, “Hey, Maddie.”
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Chapter Three
Jess stands motionless just outside the meeting. She’d struggled to find parking and had
to resort to a garage a few blocks down High Street, so she rushed here. Now, she’s
sweating, her heart is pounding, her mind is foggy, and she’s 15 minutes late – yet she
doesn’t want to interrupt the current speaker, whose muffled voice she hears through the
door. But the speaker goes on for well beyond the three minutes ordinarily allotted, and
Jess wants to escape the harsh fluorescent lighting in the hallway, which reminds her of
the hospital. She had her hand on Mammy’s leg, over the bed sheet, and it was warm…
She opens the door. Nobody really looks at her as she makes her way to the seat
that Sierra saved for her.
“But you know, the worst part about all this for me is that this same thing
happened to me when I was growing up…”
Jess scans the circle of desks and is surprised to see that the current speaker is an
older Black woman who she doesn’t recognize. “My family and I lived on the Lower East
Side in Manhattan, and I remember, when I was maybe thirteen, all these white folks
started moving in right down the road. We call them hipsters now, but back in 1983 or
1984, my friends and my family and I, we used to call them assholes.” There are some
chuckles around the room. “Well, they started setting up their boutiques and whatnot.
Seemed fairly innocuous at first. Annoying, since those shops and boutiques, they
weren’t for us – but innocuous all the same. Then, before any of us knew it, there were
police officers on almost every corner just waiting for any and every excuse to lock us
up… Operation Pressure Point they called it.”
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She trails off, and Jess tries to catch Sierra’s eyes, hoping to get a hint about who
this woman is, but Sierra’s gaze is firmly locked on the speaker.
“My family had this newspaper clipping,” the woman goes on, “from the Times…
We hung it up on our fridge the week after my brother went to jail, and it said something
like: ‘the police arrested over 2,000 people in January, and now residents are finally
starting to feel comfortable.’” She laughs, but this time nobody laughs along. “Well we
were residents then too, but we weren’t comfortable. We weren’t safer. It was a much
more dangerous neighborhood for us, as a matter of fact. And a little while later, sure
enough, the shop where my dad worked shut down, and we were priced out not long after
that. Now, my kids, my two youngest… they’re around the age I was when we had to
move, and it just feels so… I don’t even know how to say it. Franklinville is their home.
It’s my home.”
She tries again to meet Sierra’s eyes, but her friend is tearing up and doesn’t
notice.
“That’s why, right when I found out about this development deal with your
university, I knew that I had to do something. So, I started a petition, and I’ve been going
door to door, doing what I can… When I saw your group’s editorial in the Dispatch, I
had this wave of relief to know that there’s people out there, right in the belly of the
beast, so to speak, who are my allies – people who actually seem to believe that the
livelihoods of people like myself are more important than luxury student housing for
spoiled white kids. So, yeah, just – thank you all for having me at your meeting, and I
hope we do find ways that we can work together to stop this thing.”
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The woman nods and, after a moment, Sierra begins to clap. Almost immediately,
the rest of the room joins in, and Jess realizes that of course they should clap, so she starts
clapping too.
“Thanks so much, Jaylin,” the meeting chair says. “I think I can speak for
everyone in saying how grateful we are that you’ve taken the time to join us today and
share your experiences. Stories like yours are at the heart of why we’ve taken up the
campaign to stop this development deal. We’ve got a jam-packed agenda, but I’m
sure…”
Sierra turns her head to Jess and whispers, “I believe…”
Jess is confused for a moment, but then she realizes exactly what Sierra’s doing.
“I believe that…” Jess whispers in return.
Sierra smiles, and as her friend’s gaze momentarily lingers upon her, the rest of
the protest chant echoes in Jess’s mind: I believe that we will win! I believe that we will
win!
The chair passes onto the next agenda item, a report from the research committee.
“Well, the records request we filed a couple weeks back didn’t turn up too much,”
says the committee head, “although we now know for sure what many of us suspected all
along. The company running the project is Ballard Development Group…”
Every muscle in Jess’s body freezes. Slowly, she turns her head to Sierra, who
returns the gesture, an eyebrow cocked. Their eyes are locked on one another for just a
fraction of a second, but it’s long enough that Jess knows her friend is expecting an
explanation.
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Even though every instinct in her body tells her not to, Jess whispers, “Just a
coincidence.”
“Well, duh,” Sierra whispers back. “I was just thinking, maybe you can infiltrate
somehow. Walk in the office all like ‘I’m Mrs. Ballard,’ and then shred all their
paperwork or something.”
Jess forces a smile and searches for words. The meeting chair says, “Sorry, I
know we’ve all got a lot of thoughts and feelings, but if you want to share them, all you
have to do is raise your hand.”
“Didn’t realize we were still in elementary school,” Sierra mutters, and the chair
sends a glare their way before directing the room’s attention back to the head of the
research committee.
Jess tries to pay attention, although she can’t stop thinking that she should have
known. Her father’s company has its tentacles all across the city, and he’s done work in
Franklinville before.
She’s not sure she’ll be able to sit through dinner with him on Thursday. In
addition to all this, she’s supposed to meet his new girlfriend, Michelle. It’s only been six
months since he broke things off with the last one, who made the classic mistake of aging
past 45.
Her dad told her Liz had moved out at his house, over wine. A few moments
passed and, after polishing off his glass, he reached for the Cabernet. As red liquid
glugged out the mouth of the bottle, he said, “I was inattentive to her. I know that.”
When her father set the bottle back on the counter, Jess said, “Was there –
somebody else?”
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Her dad spun the wine in his glass, before taking a sip.
“It was already over,” he said. “But – without her here, the house just feels so
empty.”
Jess wasn’t sure how to respond – she wanted to comfort him, yet she didn’t want
to excuse him either. She suggested her dad go to therapy.
“Maybe I should,” he replied. “You’ve found it helps?”
He rarely directs more than surface level questions to her, and, caught off guard,
Jess just said, “Yeah.” He nodded, though Jess doubts he’ll actually pursue it. She could
have said more to encourage him.
The group spends the rest of the meeting working out the kinks for the rally.
Jaylin volunteers to speak at the event, which so many subsequent speakers make a point
of verbally appreciating that Jaylin begins to appear physically uncomfortable.
Ordinarily, Jess might try to jump in and redirect the discussion, but now she simply
watches on. Besides, the conversation redirects itself soon anyway, devolving into a
circular argument about how much effort they have or have not yet made to include other
campus groups in the action. After at least fifteen minutes of that back and forth, the chair
cuts the discussion off.
While the chair wraps things up, Jess pulls her coat on and stuffs her notebook
into her backpack. The moment the chair finishes speaking, Jess slings the pack onto her
shoulder and stands.
“Hey, Jess, wait a second,” Sierra says. “We should go introduce ourselves to
Jaylin.”
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“I have to get home,” Jess says. “Mom needs help getting ready for the funeral.”
“Well you’ve already been here over an hour, what’s an extra minute going to
do?”
Jess takes a breath. “Alright,” she says. “We’ll introduce ourselves.”
She follows her friend across the room; Jaylin remains seated in her desk as
another comrade speaks with her.
“—I wonder whether we could find a way to share your petition signatures with
the university during the rally somehow,” the comrade says. “Like if we sent someone
into the meeting.”
“That would be great,” Jaylin replies. “Just let me know if you need anything
from me. You have my number?”
“Yeah,” the comrade says, and it looks like he’s about to ask another question.
Jess looks to the door.
“Hi Jaylin,” Sierra says, before their comrade can get another word in. “I’m
Sierra, and this is Jess. We just wanted to introduce ourselves.”
“Well hi, it’s great to meet you all,” Jaylin says. She looks from Sierra to Jess,
and Jess nods at her in acknowledgement.
“I just wanted to say how much your story resonated with me,” Sierra says. “In
the past, the students’ union has mostly organized around tuition hikes, but I really
pushed us to get involved with this—”
“It wasn’t just you who pushed for it,” their other comrade says.
“No, it wasn’t,” Sierra says. “But the reason it felt so particularly important to me
is because I had a similar experience to yours, growing up. And it’s so empowering to see
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someone like you who, after so many years, still has the will to fight… Sometimes I feel
like I’m going to lose it.”
Jaylin laughs. “Well, I haven’t always had the will to fight,” she says. “I’ve had
plenty of ups and downs.”
Sierra nods.
“What about you?” Jaylin says, looking straight into Jess’s eyes. “What got you
involved in all this? I’ve done my share of anti-racist organizing, and it’s very rare that I
see so many white folks show up, particularly for the long haul.”
“Uh…” Jess says.
“She got involved back when we were doing the campaign against tuition,” Sierra
says.
“Okay, that makes sense,” Jaylin says. “Well thanks for sticking around. We need
all the allies we can get.”
A beat passes. “Well,” Jess says, “I started making connections. During the… the
tuition campaign. You know, everything’s connected, so… My family’s well off. And I
have plenty of privilege but… everything’s connected. And, as a woman… Well, you
know.”
“That’s right,” Jaylin says. “Everything’s connected.”
Sierra’s eyes remain fixed on Jess. She should tell Sierra that it’s her dad’s
company before they part ways. She had a gut reaction, and that’s okay. There’s time to
correct it.
“We should get going,” Sierra says.
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After Jaylin and Sierra exchange a few parting words, Jess follows Sierra out of
the room, allowing their other comrade to resume his conversation. The fluorescent lights
in the hallway bring Jess, again, back to the hospital, but they soon pass into the main hall
of the building, which is brightly lit thanks to the skylights and the sheer grey of the
December sky. For a moment, the student center feels almost cozy.
“Are you alright?” Sierra says, as they make their way to the escalator.
“Yeah,” Jess says.
“Well, I know you said you have to get back to your mom’s place, but if you want
to come home for a little bit, I’ll be around. We could have some coffee and talk, or
whatever.”
“I need to get back to my mom,” Jess says. “My siblings are about to start
arriving, which… You know.”
“I understand if you want to get back,” Sierra says. “But you left all your stuff at
home anyway. So you have an excuse, if you want to be around friends.”
“I have everything I need,” Jess says, but it’s not true. She forgot her only pair of
un-ripped, black leggings at the house.
“Okay,” Sierra says.
They make their way out into the crisp winter air. As the cold leaks into Jess’s
body, she can feel the opportunities dwindling to tell Sierra the truth.
“I’d never made the connection, but it is a weird coincidence, don’t you think?”
Sierra says. “Ballard Development Group.”
“Yeah,” Jess says.
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“Knowing they’re who we’re up against makes it kind of intimidating, since
they’re such a major player in the city,” Sierra says. “But, in a way, it makes it easier,
too. Back when the local Black Lives Matter chapter was still active they made it their
mission to wreck Ballard’s reputation, so I feel like we can expect public opinion to be a
little more sympathetic to our side.”
“Maybe,” Jess says.
Sierra nods, and pulls her hood up over her dreads.
“Well,” Sierra says, “let me know if you need anything over the next couple of
days.”
“Alright,” Jess says. “Thanks.”
“See ya,” Sierra says, and she turns away.
As Jess makes her way to the parking garage, it starts to snow. It’s been off and
on all day. She looks up at the falling flakes, and her mind returns to her siblings. She
wonders what it will be like to see her sister after all this time.
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Chapter Four
Maddie wraps her arms around him, and Collin feels the warmth of her body against the
cold of his own.
“What the hell happened?” Maddie says, and Collin isn’t sure how to respond. It
feels like this has to be the wrong moment to tell her about Mammy – her friend is
standing right there, and they’re still locked in an embrace, not having seen each other in
years. But then again, Maddie obviously knows something’s going on, and she asked…
“I mean,” she says excitedly, “you’re like a real person now!”
“Oh,” Collin says, as they pull apart. “Yeah. I lost the baby face, I guess.”
“What’re you doing here?” Maddie says. “How’d you even find the place?”
But before Collin can worry about answering either question, a man calls, “Who’s
there?” from the next room.
Maddie sighs and appears unsure of how to respond.
“We’re just getting friendly with the solicitor,” Sylvia calls back after a moment.
“What?” the man calls.
After a moment of apparent hesitation, Maddie shouts, “It’s my brother.”
“Stephen?”
“Collin!”
“Oh, Collin!” the man shouts, and he rounds the corner shortly thereafter. “Hi,”
he says. He shuffles a spatula from his right hand to his left and extends his arm. “I’m
Maddie’s friend, Aaron. It’s great to meet you.”
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Collin shakes Aaron’s greasy hand. His mom gave him this new pair of jeans
when he was home over Thanksgiving, since all his other pants had developed holes, so,
to avoid staining them, he cleans his hand on the inside of his pocket.
“What brought you to town, Collin?” Aaron says. “Surely you didn’t come all this
way to see your sister.”
“Oh, uh – I was just passing through on my way back home from school,” Collin
says.
“School?” Maddie says. “Like, college school? That’s crazy.”
“Yeah,” Collin says. “I’m going for literature and creative writing. It’s okay,
but—”
“Literature,” Aaron says. “That’s awesome. Have you—”
“Aaron,” Maddie says. “Bring it down a couple of notches alright?”
“What do you mean?” Aaron says.
“You just don’t need to go asking him whether he’s read The Great Gatsby, or
whatever.”
“It’s a good book,” Aaron says.
“Sure, but read another one.”
Collin looks between them.
“Let’s go to the kitchen,” Sylvia says. “There’s nowhere to sit in here, and the
smell of that bacon is tempting me.”
“Nowhere to sit?” Collin says with a laugh, and he gestures at the green chair, in
the corner by the staircase – except you almost can’t tell that it’s green, because it’s piled
high in coats and sweaters, and at least one pair of boots.
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He smiles at Madeleine, but she averts her eyes and leads the group into the next
room. Collin glances quickly to Sylvia and Aaron to try and parse out whether they also
seem offended by his joke. Sylvia catches his gaze. “Every house needs a coat chair,” she
says, shrugging.
“Are you hungry, Collin?” Maddie says as they head into the kitchen. “I know it’s
a little late for breakfast but we’ve got this egg dish, and – I don’t know if you eat meat,
but – there’s bacon.”
“That all sounds good to me,” Collin says.
“Alright,” Maddie says, and she walks around to the other side of the granite
countertop. Collin seats himself and eyes the plate of food on the counter beside him.
“Oh,” Maddie says. “Why don’t you just eat that – I haven’t touched it yet.”
“I’m not in any big rush,” Collin says, and Maddie replies, “Okay. Yeah.”
“I’ll take it,” Aaron says. He sits down beside Collin, picks up Maddie’s fork, and
digs into the meal.
“You’re not a guest, Aaron,” Maddie says. “I don’t have to serve you.”
“Oh, sorry,” Aaron says. “I just thought—sorry.”
Collin glances down at the countertop. A sort of slat on the counter’s side is loose,
and it appears that the ‘granite’ is paper, glued to a thin sheet of wood, itself stuck to the
wooden counter beneath. Collin grabs the slat between his fingers and pulls on it gently;
it tugs against those places where the slat remains attached. Collin didn’t know faux
granite worked this way – he’d always assumed it was just a lower-grade kind of stone.
“But anyway,” Aaron says, his mouth full. “At the risk of returning to a
forbidden subject – are you liking school?”
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“Oh, come on, Aaron, I never said it was forbidden,” Maddie says.
“You might as well have,” Aaron says.
Maddie returns to the counter and sets a plate in front of Collin. The egg dish
looks watery, but it smells just like the frittatas his dad used to make every once in a
while on Sundays, and his mouth begins to water.
“Well?” Sylvia says.
It takes Collin a moment to realize that Sylvia’s question was directed at him, and
by the time he does, his first bite of frittata is already halfway to his mouth. He nearly
sets his fork back down on his plate, but it doesn’t seem like his table manners are really
under scrutiny.
Once he’s chewed up enough of his food, he replies, “School’s alright. I’ve
mostly been taking Gen Ed’s. I had two classes for my major – one on the romantic
period, which was pretty painful, and one creative writing workshop. The workshop was
sort of fun – although… I don’t know.”
The egg bake isn’t as good as his dad’s frittatas, but it’s way better than dining
hall food.
“People are just trying to get their degrees,” Aaron says. “That’s all college is
good for anyway.”
“Aaron, seriously?” Maddie says at the same time that Sylvia says, “Oh, Aaron, I
just remembered!”
“Huh?” Aaron says, looking up at Sylvia.
“That guy from the party last night is going to swing by to pick up a dime bag
really soon,” Sylvia says. “Do you have it all weighed out?”
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“The dude who thinks he’s domesticated that terrified squirrel?” Aaron says. “He
said he’s off the market.”
“No, that sort of annoying guy who wants to open the coffee shop,” Sylvia says.
“Brian?” Aaron says. “I like Brian. But besides, he doesn’t smoke.”
“I guess he does now,” Sylvia says. “We better go weigh it out.”
“Brian smoking…” Aaron says, and he takes another bite of the egg bake. With
his mouth full he adds, “Alright then,” and stands.
Sylvia backs up, allowing Aaron to take the lead. Before she follows him out of
the kitchen, Sylvia mouths a couple words at Madeleine – Collin can’t figure out what
she’s saying, but then Maddie returns the phrase as a half-whisper: “Fuck Aaron.”
The two of them laugh.
Once her friends are gone, his sister looks at him, perhaps expectantly. She must
know, of course, that Collin’s here for a reason.
She and Mammy were always so close, growing up. Mammy always called
Maddie her ‘golden girl,’ and Maddie would reply by calling Mammy her ‘grey goose,’ a
bit that must have originated before Collin’s time.
“Well, what are you up to lately?” Collin says.
“You’re pretty much looking at it,” Maddie says from the other side of the
counter. “The goal is to make this place into a collective – like a commune, but we still
have to pay rent. It’s a work in progress, as you can probably tell.”
“That’s really cool,” Collin says. “And your roommates seem like good people to
do it with.”
“Sylvia and I are really close,” Maddie says.
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“That’s great,” Collin says. “What about Aaron? Is he your boyfriend?” Maddie
raises her eyebrows at him, so he adds, “You just bicker.”
“Well, it’s as simple as that,” Maddie says. “We just bicker. But anyway, it’s cool
that you’re still following your dream – being a writer and all that. Not many people hold
onto things like that into adulthood.”
“Another way of saying that it’s completely naïve,” Collin says.
“No, it’s another way of saying most people are idiots.”
She smiles at him and comes around the counter to sit. She picks up on her
breakfast right where Aaron left off.
After they eat in silence for a few minutes, Collin says, “I’d like to be able to do
with my writing something like what you all are doing here. I mean, I’d like to be able to
take my skillset and make a contribution to – uh… justice. And all that. But school… it’s
like Aaron said.”
Maddie looks like she’s about to respond but just then, there’s a bang from
upstairs followed by the sound of someone rushing down the staircase in the other room.
“Maddie, what the fuck?” someone calls, and the voice very soon takes on a body
when a gangly blonde man hurries into the kitchen. “You were supposed to wake me up!
It’s been way more than five minutes!”
He grabs a comb on the small cupboard at the other end of the room and starts
running it blindly through his hair.
“Oh shoot, Pat, calm down, it’s only been like six minutes, and besides, I was
under no obligation to wake you.”
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“I told you five minutes!” the man says, and he smashes the comb back on top of
the cupboard with just as much emphasis, even though, as far as Collin can tell, his hair
still sticks up in all the same places. “If I don’t get this job, it’s totally your fault!”
With that, he rushes out of the kitchen, and the front door soon slams behind him.
“Well, that’s Pat,” Madeleine says, shaking her head, and Collin begins to laugh.
“What?” she says.
“This house just seems like a constant party,” Collin says.
“It pretty much is,” Maddie says.
“That’s awesome.”
Maddie laughs then too. “I’ve missed you Collin,” she says, and she looks up to
meet his eyes.
“Maddie,” Collin says. “I have to tell you something and it’s… well… there’s no
easy way…”
“What is it?”
“Mammy died.”
“Oh,” Madeleine says, looking down at the table. After a pause, she adds, “I guess
I should’ve figured something bad had happened.”
“She had a heart attack yesterday.”
“A heart attack? That doesn’t make sense, she always had low blood pressure.”
Maddie stands and pushes her stool back. “Mom was always trying to get her to eat more
salt,” she says. “Does that have to do with blood pressure?”
“I don’t know,” Collin says.
“Thanks for bothering to tell me,” Madeleine says.
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“What?”
“Look, I get it, Collin. I don’t have a phone or a Facebook, and so they sent a
delegate, because that’s – well, thanks for being the delegate, Collin. That was so very
nice of you.”
Madeleine carries her plate to the sink and looks out the window, her back to
Collin.
“I don’t have any malicious intent or anything,” Collin says slowly.
“I didn’t say it was malicious,” Maddie says, but her voice is sharp.
“And I’m not a delegate,” Collin says. “We just wanted to—”
“If you’re acting on behalf of ‘we’ then you are a delegate, Collin. And that’s
fine, but your job is done, so could you get out of here?”
“We wanted to invite, or – ask you to the funeral.”
Maddie laughs.
“What’s funny?” Collin says, and Maddie quickly turns around to face him.
“So I’m just supposed to be part of the family again, because it would suddenly be
improper for the eldest daughter not to be at the funeral?”
“That’s not how it is. You were always the closest to Mammy, of all us kids.”
“What does it matter? Funerals are about the living, Collin.”
Collin quiets down then. He pokes at the egg bake with his fork, but Madeleine
pulls the plate away from him and sets it loudly beside the sink. She begins scrubbing the
dishes.
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He considers writing that phrase in his little pocket notebook – ‘Funerals are
about the living’ – but it’s the kind of thing he feels like he’s heard a hundred times, and
it’s sort of obvious anyway.
“You’re living,” Collin says. “So it can be about you, the funeral.”
Maddie looks over her shoulder and says, “Did you tell Dad?”
Collin pauses. “I think Mom sent him an email,” he says.
“So is he going to be at the funeral?”
“I don’t know. Doubt it.”
Maddie doesn’t reply. She looks back to the sink, and she turns the faucet on high.
The drying wrack soon fills well beyond its capacity – plates, bowls, glasses, a
spatula, a cookie sheet, and a mixing bowl all precariously stacked in a game of Jenga.
Collin wonders how it all could have possibly fit in the sink. And Maddie’s still going,
too.
He pulls out his phone. He has one text, from his mom: “Any update?”
Collin opens up the message thread, types, “Not yet,” but he doesn’t send it, and
he puts his phone away.
“Do you remember the last thing she said to you?” Madeleine asks. “I can’t
remember the last thing she said to me.”
It takes him a moment to realize what she’s talking about, but when he does he
quickly answers, “Me neither,” although of course he does remember: I just haven’t
heard from you in a while…
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Maddie turns off the faucet, which Collin finds a bit relieving – even a single fork
added to the drying wrack could off-set the balance of the whole thing, sending glasses,
ceramic bowls and the like careening onto the floor.
When Maddie next turns around, her eyes are red and watery.
“I guess I’ll get my stuff together,” Madeleine says. She averts her eyes after that
and walks out of the kitchen.
She doesn’t look back as Collin follows, trailing a few paces behind, but he
wishes she would.
When they reach the upstairs and pass into Madeleine’s room, Collin wonders
momentarily about the piles of clothes and the sleeping bags rolled up in the corners.
He’s quickly overwhelmed by the smell, however. Aaron and Sylvia are sprawled out in
the middle of the floor, measuring out little baggies of weed from a huge Tupperware
container, and it’s almost like Collin’s wandered into a field of the stuff.
“Do you have to do that in here?” Madeleine asks.
“It’s the only room where nobody’s sleeping,” Aaron says. “Well, Pat was
sleeping, but… it’s the only room where nobody’s sleeping anymore.” He laughs.
“Are you okay, Maddie?” Sylvia asks.
“Fine,” Madeleine says. Sylvia looks to Collin for confirmation, but he pretends
not to notice.
Madeleine begins sorting through the top shelf of her closet, a hat, a sweater and a
single glove all tumbling to the ground. After a minute, Maddie pulls out an overnight
bag, walks back toward Collin, and begins shoving one of the room’s many clothes-piles
inside the duffel.
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“Going somewhere?” Aaron asks, looking up from his scale.
“My grandma’s funeral,” Madeleine says. “In Columbus.”
“Oh no,” Sylvia says. She pulls her legs up and places her hands on the ground as
if she’s about to stand. “I’m so sorry, Maddie.”
“You’re going home?” Aaron asks. “To that heteronormative hell hole? Are you
crazy?”
Collin jerks his head in Aaron’s direction and says, “Hey,” although he quickly
realizes that he doesn’t have a plan for what to say next. “You could at least begin with,
like, ‘sorry to hear that.’ And, besides, whether or not it’s a heteronormative hell hole, it’s
where we grew up and it’s… it’s Maddie’s decision.”
“Alright, kid,” Aaron says, still kneeling beside his scale. “Of course I’m sorry to
hear that, and of course it’s Maddie’s decision. But what do you really want to do,
Maddie? You want to go be with your Christian mom and your asshole older brother and
all the rest? Or do you want to stay here, like a sane person, and work through all the shit
you’ve got going on?”
Collin stares at Aaron, and Sylvia places her hand gently on Aaron’s arm, her
eyebrows raised.
“What?” Aaron says to Sylvia. “She’s pregnant, and she can’t just keep on
ignoring it.”
Collin stares at him, and Aaron soon meets his eyes. At the same time, Maddie
drops her bag.
“You know, I can’t stand you sometimes,” Madeleine says.
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“Okay, I shouldn’t have said that,” Aaron says. “But, my point is, you don’t have
to torture yourself. The death of your grandmother alone has got to be hard enough as it
is, so… there’s no use reopening all those old wounds. What good will it do?”
Madeleine looks back toward her pile of clothes, and she then looks to Collin. He
can see in her eyes what she’s going to say.
“Maybe you should just leave,” she says. “Be with Mom and Jess, and Stephen.
That place, it’s not… it’s not my place. It’s not home. This is home.”
Collin glances across the room. “There’s no furniture,” he says, and Maddie
hesitates.
Sylvia shoves all the plastic baggies on top of the weed remaining in the
Tupperware, before closing the container and moving it to the closet.
“Just get out of here, Collin,” Madeleine says. “Alright?”
She looks at him with the same sort of intensity that he saw in her eyes just before
he told her about Mammy.
“Alright,” he says, and he turns to leave the room.
“But, Collin?” Maddie says. “Can you please just not say anything about – well,
you know. I mean, I probably don’t even need to say this – I trust you, but… what I mean
is that, it’s my business.”
“Sure,” Collin says, and his sister nods. After another moment, she suddenly
walks past him and leaves the room.
Collin stands there for a moment, watching Sylvia collapse the scale and return it
to its box. He hears Madeleine bang on a door down the hall and say, “Mikey, I know
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what you’re up to in there, and can it please wait until later? I really have to use the
bathroom.”
“I didn’t mean to step on any toes, kid,” Aaron tells Collin.
“Oh, shut up, Aaron,” Sylvia says.
Collin leaves the room and treks down the hall. He passes a man – apparently
Mikey – whose hands are stuffed into the pockets of his sweatpants; he walks somewhat
awkwardly, as if he has a twisted ankle. Mikey nods hesitantly at Collin as they pass each
other, after which Collin heads down the stairs to the foyer, past the hand-painted banner
proclaiming revolution.
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Chapter Five
Stephen parks his car in the apartment complex’s small lot and stares into the third
window from the right on the second floor. The heat in the car is oppressive, but he waits,
watching for some sign of motion. The glare from the bright sun makes this nearly
impossible, however. He tries simply to shake away his worry. His wife, Angela, is
spending the weekend with her friends in Key West and isn’t supposed to get home until
late this evening. Still, his phone has been dead for a long time, which makes him
nervous.
He’s never stayed with Lisa so late in the day before. But this morning, the light
poured in Lisa’s sheer white curtains and woke them gently around 10 a.m. Lisa rolled
over in bed, her bare leg grazing against his. She rested her head just above his shoulder
and he felt her breath against his neck; neither of them spoke for a half an hour. Finally, it
was Lisa who groaned, “Good morning,” into Stephen’s shoulder.
“Morning,” Stephen said.
“You’re still here.”
“Yeah.”
Lisa rolled away. “Well I’d better get cleaned up and ready for the day,” she said.
“Okay,” Stephen said.
She got out of bed and opened the door to the hallway, not bothering to put on any
clothes first, or to close the door behind her. Stephen heard her open the bathroom door,
but didn’t hear it close. He sat up in bed, careful to keep the blanket over his crotch in
case any of Lisa’s roommates walked by. The shower started.
“Are you coming?” Lisa called from the bathroom.
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Later, she convinced him to join her on a hike. A graduate student studying forest
ecology, she took him to a nature preserve closed to the public, adjacent to Everglades
National Park. She showed him the various fungi, plants, and slime molds, and, over the
course of their hike, Lisa collected probably thirty pounds of mushrooms. At first
Stephen assumed this was for her research project (that he should really know more
about), but when he said something to that effect, she corrected him: “Dinner.”
Eventually, the trail led them to a creek. The water was shallow, clear, and
flowing quickly over smooth, round stones. Lisa stopped in her tracks.
“What’s up?” Stephen said.
“Well, we’d better cool off, don’t you think?” Lisa said, and she untied her shoes
and kicked them off; her socks soon followed.
Stephen laughed, and followed suit. After rolling up his jeans, he waded into the
water behind her.
“Doesn’t it feel so good? Flowing between your toes like that? It’s like the whole
world drifts away, and it’s just you and the water.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“You’re not a man of many words, Stephen, but I know you get it.”
“Get what?”
“I just know you see the world like I do. You appreciate things, when you let
yourself.”
Lisa stepped toward him, nearly slipping on the rocks, and she wrapped her arms
around his waist. As the water splashed around their ankles, she kissed him. Her lips felt
soft, and the sun shining on them through the trees was warm. Stephen isn’t sure how
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long they spent there – it could have been three minutes or thirty; either way, Lisa was
right about the water.
Stephen wipes the sweat from his brow and looks back toward the window one
more time before exiting the car. He pulls his phone out of his pocket to check it as he
walks through the gate into the courtyard, but it hasn’t magically revived itself.
He walks up the metal staircase and stands in front of the door for a moment,
fiddling with his keys before entering. He opens the door slowly, and peers inside. He
jumps when he sees his wife sitting on the couch, on her laptop.
“What?” Angela says.
“I just didn’t expect you to be home,” Stephen says.
A television show is playing on her screen; Stephen recognizes it as Doctor Who
from the music, even though he’s never watched the show himself.
“And whose fault is that?” Angela says. When he doesn’t respond, she continues:
“I tried to call you all night, and I called every last one of your friends, but nobody had
any idea where the hell you might be. Jamie said he’d been with you at the bars, but lost
you halfway up Town Street.”
“Exterminate! Exterminate!” cries a robot on the screen.
Laser beams fire and ricochet, and Stephen says, “Will you pause that thing?”
“No, it’s in the middle of a really intense scene.”
Stephen walks further into the house and passes into the kitchen. He pours himself
some of the coffee left on the burner. This is what he likes about Lisa; when they have a
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conversation, that’s it – they have a conversation. She’s never caught up on her laptop or
her phone.
“Pat’s little brother was visiting,” Stephen says. “I don’t know him very well, but
I got caught up showing him around and we stayed out a little late. I wound up sleeping
on his buddy’s couch.”
Angela doesn’t say anything. The triumphant orchestral music on her show gets
louder, and all the robots start screaming.
“What’s going on in there?” Stephen says.
“The Doctor sent the Daleks hurtling into the sun,” Angela says.
“Nice.”
Angela closes her laptop and the music stops abruptly. She joins Stephen in the
kitchen.
“Look,” she says, “I appreciate that you waited until I was out of town to do a
bunch of stupid shit, but you have to at least keep your phone on you, alright?”
“I’m sorry,” Stephen says. He attempts to pause long enough such that the words
really sink in before he continues. “My phone just ran out of batteries is all,” he says.
“But you’re my partner, Stephen. What happens when there’s an emergency and I
need to get a hold of you?”
“Was there an emergency?”
Angela averts her eyes. “Your grandma died last night,” she says. “Your mom
called me around midnight to let me know that it was probably going to happen. I came
straight home… I just wanted to be with you when you found out.”
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Stephen sets his mug on the counter and looks at his wife. He pauses for a
moment, groping toward the right response. Eventually, he just says, “Oh. That’s
horrible. What happened?”
“Heart attack.”
“Really? I could’ve sworn she always had low blood pressure.”
Angela shrugs. “The funeral’s on Tuesday.”
Tuesday– he’s supposed to get a drink with Lisa after work that day. She’ll
understand, of course, but he hates to let her down…
“Your mom wanted to bury her quickly,” Angela continues, and a wave of guilt
rushes over Stephen. His first thought should not have been about Lisa. “She didn’t like
the idea of her body… You know. Anyway, I booked you a flight home for this evening,
and I called John to let him know you won’t be into work this week.”
“Was John okay with that?” Stephen says. “We have to fill out a bunch of
paperwork before litigation begins next week.”
“He has to be okay with it,” Angela says. She fixes her gaze on him. “How are
you?” she says. “Tell me what’s going on in your head.”
“Well, I’m not great,” Stephen says. “I mean, Mammy and I weren’t really that
close. We never kept in touch after I left Ohio.”
Angela rubs Stephen’s arm and hugs him after a minute.
“Doubt my mom’s doing well,” Stephen says, as they pull away from one another.
“I’ve been on the phone with her intermittently,” Angela says, “I think she’s
hanging in there.”
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Stephen takes a sip of coffee. It’s a little watery – “like tea,” as his dad would say.
He should call his dad once he gets to the airport and make sure he knows he’s invited to
the funeral. He wonders whether anybody even told him Mammy passed away…
“Wait, you bought me a flight home?” Stephen asks his wife.
“Well, I expect you to pay me back. But yes.”
“And it’s tonight you said? What time?”
“It leaves at 6:15.”
“That’s in two hours!”
“Well, I didn’t expect you to be out all day, did I? How could I have known that
Pat’s brother’s friends were going to be so hospitable as to entertain you all morning and
afternoon?”
Stephen sets his mug back on the counter and walks through the apartment to his
bedroom. “I had some errands to run,” Stephen says.
“Where are your grocery bags?” she says. “Did you leave them in the car again?”
“I didn’t say what errands, I just said errands.”
Stephen pulls a suitcase out from under the bed, and walks to the dresser. He
opens up his underwear drawer, grabs a couple pairs and then pauses. “When do I come
home?”
“Well that’s fairly unpredictable, I’d say.”
“My return flight, Angie. When’s my return flight?”
“Early morning on Wednesday,” Angela says. “When I heard Maddie was going
to be there, I figured you’d want to get back quickly.”
“Maddie’s going to be there?” Stephen says.
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“That’s the plan anyway,” Angela says. “Your mom said she was sending Collin
after her.”
“Interesting,” Stephen says.
“You’re not excited to see your sister?” Angela says, her tone mocking.
“We don’t exactly see eye-to-eye,” Stephen says.
“You think she’s still dating those two women?”
“Well that was years ago, so probably not. Maddie isn’t known for her
consistency.”
He packs a few pairs of shorts, but then remembers it’s December. He puts them
back and digs up a couple pairs of jeans. Once his bag is all packed, he says, “Am I
forgetting anything?”
“A suit,” Angela says.
Stephen nods, and walks to the closet. He’s going to grandmother’s funeral, he
reminds himself.
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Chapter Six
Jess looks at the time on her phone and realizes she’s been doing this – lying in bed,
scrolling through Facebook – for over a half an hour. She’s left her mom alone for too
long, and besides, Collin and Madeleine should arrive any minute… Her finger continues
dragging the screen.
She gets a notification, then, from Sierra, whose tagged her in a photo. She clicks
on the image and it takes her to a picture of that day’s meeting, in the student center. The
post reads: “Today, we learned that the notorious Ballard Development Group, one of the
major players fueling gentrification in our city, is the university’s partner in a proposed
development deal that would create luxury student apartment towers at the edge of a
working class, Black neighborhood. By partnering with BDG on this project, the
university is proving in practice that this development deal is not about meeting the needs
of students, as administrators often claim. It’s instead about serving the interests of the
wealthy and shifting the university’s demographics toward the upper and whiter end of
the socioeconomic spectrum in order to respond to continued austerity from the state.
However, as students, we are the cogs in the machine that make the university run. We
have the power to stop it in its tracks. Every last one of the people in this room inspires
me, proving in practice that we are unstoppable, and that another world is possible.”
In the time it takes Jess to read the post, it’s amassed three likes and one ‘love.’
Jess likes it too, then unlikes it, and then likes it again, worried that Sierra will get the
notification that she liked it and then see that she unliked it. Eventually, she untags
herself from the photo all together.
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She returns to her home page and begins scrolling again, but she’s increasingly
frustrated with herself. She shuts the device off, stands, and shoves her phone into the
pocket of her cargo pants.
Jess walks toward the door, and her eye catches on the contents of her faded
yellow bookshelf: Stuart Little, Tuck Everlasting, the first Harry Potter… When her
mom moved into this house a few years ago, no longer able to afford their home in the
suburbs, Jess was preparing to go off to college. The room she thinks of as hers is really
just the guestroom, but she personalized it a bit during that summer, moving much of her
old furniture in here – the bookshelf and its contents included.
She thumbs through Poppy for a minute. She doesn’t remember much about it,
except that it features a mouse as its heroine, but she used to love it when she was a kid.
After skimming the first page, her mind wanders back to her father.
Over the summer, her dad brought her to his beach house in South Carolina.
They’d had an argument about capitalism, in which her father relied on the same material
as always, citing trickle down economics and the obtuse ‘logic of the market.’ Jess
eventually drew the argument to a close, saying, “I don’t want to talk about this
anymore.”
Her dad pursed his lips but nodded, and Jess checked her watch, wondering
whether it was yet a reasonable time for bed. The song changed to Bob Dylan’s “Don’t
Think Twice, It’s Alright.”
“Well,” her dad said, “I think we oughtta set our differences aside, smoke some
dope, and walk down to the water.” He pulled a vape out of his coat pocket, and Jess
couldn’t help but laugh.
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“You brought that on the plane?” Jess said. “Are you crazy?”
“It would just be a slap on the wrist,” he said with a shrug. Jess nodded.
Her dad bobbed his head to the music and took a hit as Dylan sang, “When your
rooster crows at the break a dawn, look out your window…”
After exhaling, he passed Jess the vape.
She pressed the little blue button down, but it didn’t feel like she was getting any
smoke, so she kept breathing in and breathing in.
“Your father’s daughter, I guess,” her dad said. Jess raised her eyebrows and
moved the device from her mouth. As the giant cloud of smoke which had been hiding in
her lungs escaped, she began to cough, and she couldn’t stop until tears were streaming
down her face.
“You make it look so easy,” Jess wheezed.
Once Jess finally suppressed her cough, her dad said, “Want another hit?”
Jess shook her head, her lips pursed and throat clenched tight. Her dad starting
cracking up then, so loud that Jess sat up in her seat. His laugh shifted to a higher and
higher pitch as he struggled for air, and eventually Jess had to join him, but after only a
chuckle or two she began to cough again.
The song faded.
“I’m proud of you, you know,” her dad said. “You stick to your convictions, and
you’re trying your best to make the world a better place.”
The garage door opens. Jess closes Poppy, then sets it on top of the bookshelf, not
bothering to return it to its proper place. She walks to the door and, after a brief
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hesitation, pulls it open. She makes her way down the hall to the kitchen, where her
mother sits at the counter.
Her mom has a newspaper and a cup of tea in front of her, but it doesn’t look like
she’s paying attention to either. The room’s grown dim as the sun’s approached the
horizon, and her mom hasn’t yet reacted to the change; the lights are all still off.
“Hey,” Jess says. Her mom doesn’t react.
The front door swings open, and Collin walks into the kitchen with a backpack
and a large sack of laundry.
“Hey, Collin,” Jess says.
“What’s up, Jess?” Collin says.
He sets his bag down and closes the door behind him. Out of the corner of her
eye, Jess sees her mother give a slight nod.
“Where’s Madeleine?” Jess says. “She still in the car?”
“Of course not,” her mom says. She stands, and walks moves toward the sink.
“Poor, poor Madeleine is so misunderstood.”
“Mom,” Jess says.
“What?”
Jess doesn’t clarify her discontent. Her mother opens the cabinet and removes a
glass. She’s already brought out the old Christmas set. Each glass is decorated to
represent a different one of the 12 days – her mom’s selected the fifth.
“I just…” Collin says. “I couldn’t find her. I’m sorry, but I think she’s moved.”
Jess eyes her brother. He’s a horrible liar – he always has been. When he was a
toddler he ripped up his jungle themed wallpaper, and when their mom confronted him
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about it, he said, “The monkey came back for his friends.” At least he didn’t stutter so
much then.
“She’s moved away from Athens?” Jess’s mom says.
“That’s—” Collin says. “Yes. She – her old roommates said so.”
“Really?”
“Really. She’s not – she doesn’t live there, anymore.”
Jess glares at her brother, who averts his eyes and unzips his coat, dropping it on
the floor of the coat closet by the door.
“Will you hang that up, Collin?” says Jess’s mom. “And, while you’re at it, please
stop trying to spare my feelings.”
Collin hangs up the coat and stares at her.
“She just—” Collin says.
“Do not defend to her to me,” their mom says, her voice level. As long as Jess can
remember, exempting the immediate aftermath of their mother’s divorce, she’s never
really screamed much – but her not-screaming is far more intimidating.
“I’m not defending—”
“Collin,” Jess says, gesturing for him to stop talking.
Their mom turns, sets her glass on the counter, and walks out the back door, not
even bothering to bring a jacket. Collin looks to Jess.
“What?” he says, exasperated.
“Nice,” Jess says.
After taking a couple of coats from the closet, she follows her mom onto the
porch.
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“How are you doing, Mom?” Jess says.
“Fine,” her mom says.
“It’s cold out here,” Jess says. “At least put on a jacket.”
Her mom takes one from Jess’s arms and shrugs her way into it. Jess dons the
other.
Most of the time, the back yard is sort of pitiful. The wooden fence, running down
the hill, fails to conceal the fast food parking lots on the other side and the highway
beyond. Jess’s mom tried to spruce the yard up a bit a few years back – she installed a
small brick patio, with a fire pit, although nobody’s ever really used it. But, situated
toward the top of the flood plain, they can see the sun set over the river in the distance,
and Jess has always liked that about this place. The first rays of the sunset are poking out
of the clouds now. Her mom seems to be eyeing the sunset too.
“Mammy would’ve wanted her golden girl to be here,” her mom says after a
moment. “Actually, scratch that, I’m sure she does want Madeleine here. And she’s
probably very disappointed right now, up in heaven.”
“You could be right,” Jess says. “But, I bet it would matter – or, I bet it matters
far more to Mammy that she had a happy relationship with Madeleine once, in life.”
Her mom looks back in the direction of the sunset and pauses. “You know,” she
says, “Maddie’s the one who fell out of touch with me, not the other way around.”
“I know,” Jess replies.
“She dropped out of school, she stopped going to church, and she started – I don’t
know… having orgies with those two women every weekend. But I still tried my hardest
to keep our relationship together.”
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Jess wants to agree with her, but she remembers all their arguments – the time
Maddie kept telling her, “It’s just who I am. It’s just who I am,” and the time their mom
said, “Well, it’s not who you have to be.” That visit was the last time they saw her – Jess
is pretty sure.
“Of course, maybe I wasn’t always so ‘chill,’” her mom goes on. “Maybe I voiced
my disagreements with Maddie’s… lifestyle, fom time to time. But I called her every
Sunday after she stopped calling me, and I kept calling every week for months after she
stopped answering.”
“I know,” Jess says.
“I kept calling for so long that it was embarrassing. For so long that I felt small
and pathetic. But I’m her mother… I shouldn’t…”
“You shouldn’t have to feel that way,” Jess says, when her mother’s words fail
her.
“Right. But I still feel that way. I feel that way today more than ever.”
Jess wraps an arm around her mother’s shoulder. It feels strange, holding her like
that.
Two or three minutes pass. The wind whips at their hair.
“You should go inside,” her mom says.
“I can stay here with you,” Jess says.
“No, that’s alright. I just need a minute to get my thoughts together.”
“Okay.”
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With that, Jess rejoins her brother in the kitchen. He stands at the counter. One of
his knees juts out, that leg’s ankle wrapped around the other’s. Meeting Jess’s eyes, he
shifts his weight onto the other leg.
“Why did you lie to Mom?” Jess says.
“I was only trying to protect her,” Collin says, his voice steady.
“Protect her? Don’t you think that’s a bit patronizing?”
“I mean, I just didn’t know how to explain…”
“Explain what?” Jess says. “That Maddie didn’t want to come?”
“Well, that’s not exactly true. She’s just – she has a lot on her mind.”
Apparently Collin notes the shift in Jess’s expression. “She does,” he snaps.
“Maybe that’s what she told you, Collin, but you can’t really still think so highly
of her, right? You have to know she just couldn’t be bothered.”
“I know it sounds that way, which is why I didn’t want to tell Mom—”
“It sounds that way, because it is that way.”
“Hey, this is serious, alright? She was really upset about Mammy, and I’m sure
she would’ve wanted to come, but…”
“But she couldn’t be bothered,” Jess says, drawing out the words.
“Jess, she’s pregnant,” Collin says.
Jess laughs.
“What?” Collin says.
“Best of luck to her,” Jess says.
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Chapter Seven
Aaron, sitting beside Madeleine, laughs and says something in reply to Mikey, talking
over the others. Meanwhile, he taps the top of his beer can three times before pushing
back the tab slightly, allowing some of the carbonation to fizz out before opening the can
fully. The motion seemed so natural, Maddie thinks; he didn’t even look down.
Madeleine’s out here wrapped in a blanket. Mikey, Marsha, Sylvia, Aaron, and a
few of their other friends have been smoking and drinking on the porch for nearly a half
an hour, and nobody’s once said anything about the cold.
“Damn, how crazy would that be?” Mikey says, taking a drag on his cigarette. “If
you just woke up, and all this had been some crazy DMT trip.”
Silence lingers for a moment as the crowd ponders this. Maddie rolls her eyes.
“Or,” Mikey says, pausing until all the attention’s on him. “What if the whole
universe is just some alien computer program, and they’re doing experiments on us?”
“You know, there’s actually a few physicists who think that,” Aaron says. “Not
exactly that we’re in a computer program, but that we’re in a sort of simulation.”
“They some sort of religious freaks?” Marsha says. “Scientologists?”
“No, they’re just regular scientists,” Aaron says, drawing a couple of laughs.
“Smart ones though. And they have good, like, mathematical reasons to believe this
stuff.”
“But how would we ever know?” Marsha asks.
“Yeah,” Mikey says. “Because simulations are supposed to model reality, so we
could never be sure if our experience was simulation or reality. There’s no difference.”
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Maddie wonders whether Mikey honestly thinks this is as profound as his tone
would suggest he believes it to be. She figures he probably does.
“I can’t explain it exactly,” Aaron says, “because there’s not really language to
understand it. You’d have to look at the math. But these are leading physicists, they
aren’t just a bunch of quacks.”
Sylvia taps Madeleine’s arm.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“Yeah,” Maddie replies, struggling to turn her attention away from Mikey, who’s
proposing that if our mathematical laws were simply products of a simulation, and not
actually real, we couldn’t use those laws to understand anything outside the simulation.
“You look a little out of it,” Sylvia says.
“Just tired.”
“Well, if you ever decide you want to, we can go inside and talk.”
Aaron glances over, concern in his eyes, and puts an arm around Madeleine. He
quickly turns back to Mikey, however. Aaron counters that if we could understand the
interface of the simulation, we would eventually be able to understand how the program
was created, and make general assumptions as to why. Interestingly, Aaron’s arguments
have stopped relying on his vast knowledge of leading scientific theories.
“I’m really okay,” Maddie tells Sylvia. “But thanks, I appreciate that.”
“Hey, are you sure you don’t want a beer, Maddie?” Mikey asks, and the
conversation suddenly quiets down.
“Shut up, Mikey,” Aaron says. “She’s got a lot to process. Her grandma just
died.”
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“Don’t speak for me,” Maddie says. She uses her shoulders to push Aaron’s arm
away, and she sits up in her seat.
“Sorry,” he says.
“It’s whatever, just don’t act like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re my boyfriend, or like your trying to shield me from the cold, cold
world or something.”
“Called out!” Mikey says with a laugh. He removes a beer from the 30-pack and
extends his arm toward Madeleine, his eyebrows raised.
“Sure,” Maddie says, pulling her arms out of her blanket. Mikey tosses her the
beer.
“Are you sure you should be doing that?” Aaron whispers, not so quietly.
“Why shouldn’t she?” Mikey says.
“Yeah, Aaron,” Maddie says. “Why shouldn’t I?”
“You just... Earlier you said you wanted to process, you know?”
Maddie makes a show of repeating Aaron’s method – tapping the top of the can
three time, pushing back the tab slightly, then opening it. She takes a sip.
Eventually, the conversation shifts gears; exempting Aaron, who seems to be
preoccupied, most everyone gets wrapped up in a debate about which house show to go
tonight.
“I think we should go see the Moonlight Bandits,” Maddie says after a few
minutes. “They’ve got a new bassist, and we oughtta see how it shakes out.”
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The groups considers this. However, as soon as they’ve come around to Maddie’s
perspective, Marsha realizes that she’d gotten the dates mixed up – the shows she
mentioned are actually not until next weekend.
“I told you so,” Mikey says. “Nobody ever has shows on Sundays,” to which
Marsha replies, “Well then someone oughtta start.”
After the pros and cons of Sunday shows are thoroughly debated, other plans are
proposed: they could sneak onto the roof of the middle school – but Sylvia points out that
it’s been snowing, and it’ll probably be too slick to make it up there safely; they could go
sledding – but it hasn’t really snowed all that much (so why can’t they go onto the roof of
the middle school, again? Mikey asks). Nobody ever suggests that they do the same thing
as usual – party at home – but then, nobody ever really does.
After most of the 12 roommates are back, some having dragged along a few
friends, the living fills to maximum capacity, and soon enough the floor is shaking from
the crowd’s jumping up and down as “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” blares from Aaron’s
giant speakers – a gift from his mom, who’s a corporate lawyer.
Maddie’s four beers in by this point, and a girl she’s been flirting with lately,
Sam, is grinding up against her as they sing, or rather scream, along: “When the working
day is done, oh, girls!”
Sam turns Maddie’s face, and kisses her for a few seconds, before they return to
the music.
“That’s all they really wa-a-a-a-ant,” they scream. “Some fu-u-u-u-u-un.”
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Once the song dies down, it becomes clear that the playlist has finished.
Confusion reigns as the most proactive amongst the crowd begin searching for the
computer that’s wirelessly connected to the speakers.
Sam offers to grab Maddie another beer, and Maddie agrees.
Some in the crowd begin conversing in twos or threes, and many are silent.
Everyone is sweaty and close together. But soon, someone starts chanting: “No Trump!
No KKK! No Fascist USA!” and soon the whole group is involved, Madeleine included.
They start jumping again, continuing to chant, and Maddie smiles to herself.
As energy begins to dissipate, someone starts another: “Black! Latino! Arab,
Asian, and white! Unite! Unite! Unite to fight the right!” Then: “1, 2, 3! Fuck the
bourgeoisie! 4, 5, 6! Fuck the bourgeoisie!” – but that one only gets a couple pitiful
shouts.
Just as another one starts – “Put the cops in jail and burn the jails down!” (which
Maddie screams at the top of lungs) – Aaron grabs Maddie’s shoulder.
“Hey,” Maddie says, over the chanting.
“I want to talk to you,” Aaron says.
Sam returns, two beers in hand, and puts her arm around Maddie’s waist. “What’s
going on here?” she says, “Someone trying to steal my girl away from me?”
“Yeah, Aaron, you jealous?” Maddie says.
“Yeah, you some sort of monogamist or something?” Sam says. “I can take this
guy, Maddie, if you want.”
“Don’t be so goddamn self-absorbed, both of you. I just want a word with
Maddie.”
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Maddie sighs, and she’s about to accept this, but then Sam says, “Here’s one,”
and she flips him off. Maddie laughs. The music starts back up then – “Addiction” by
Kanye West. Maddie spins Sam around and kisses her, more sloppily this time.
When they pull away from one another, after a couple of minutes, Aaron’s still
standing there.
“Oh, what the hell is this?” Maddie asks, screaming over the music.
“Will you just come talk to me?” Aaron says.
Maddie knows, for her own sake, that she shouldn’t talk about this here, but she
really doesn’t want to leave the party right now.
“Is it about the beer?” she says.
“The beer?” Sam says. “This guy trying to control what you put into your body
now?”
“He thinks it’ll make me bloated,” Maddie says.
“Excuse me?” Sam says to Aaron.
“That’s not – Maddie, just a word?” Aaron says.
“I made an appointment, Aaron. To deal with the bloating. And they’re gonna see
me tomorrow, believe it or not.”
“Okay, but have you thought it through, Maddie?” Aaron says. “I mean are you
sure?”
“If I say I’m sure, then I’m sure,” Maddie says.
“But how are you going to get to the clinic, and how are you going to afford it?”
Maddie looks to Sam, but her head is turned toward the other side of the room. “You said
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yourself, Maddie,” Aaron continues, “you’ve only got, like, twelve bucks in your bank
account.”
“I figure you’ve got a hell of a lot more in yours. And Marsha said I could borrow
her car.”
“I don’t start my new job until tomorrow,” Aaron says. “I’m dirt-fucking-poor
right now. If it wasn’t for the collective, I’d probably just be couch-surfing, or homeless.”
Maddie laughs.
“What?” Aaron says.
“Oh, it’s just funny hearing you talk about financial troubles, as if you have any
idea what it’s like to be poor.”
“Like you do?” Aaron says.
“I Wanna Dance with Somebody” comes on, and Sam says, “Oh, thank God
we’re back to the 80s! This is my jam! Can we get back to dancing, Maddie?”
“Just a second,” Maddie says. She looks Aaron in the eye and says, “You’ve got
the money, or at least your parents do. I don’t have any money, and earlier today you said
I shouldn’t see my parents, even for my grandma’s funeral. So this is on you.”
“I never said you shouldn’t see your parents,” Aaron says. “That was your
choice.”
Maddie shrugs, and Aaron walks off, all pissed. Maddie feels a bit guilty for
being so harsh, but then Sam grabs her hand and pulls her further toward the center of the
room.
“I wanna feel the heat with somebody!” Sam sings, and Maddie joins in for the
next lines. She’s grateful that Sam is so many drinks in that she didn’t follow the
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preceding conversation; it’s all Maddie wants right now, to dance with somebody who
has no clue.
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Chapter Eight
From his place at the dining room table, Collin has a direct line of sight to the pizza on
the kitchen counter; he finds himself staring at it now and then.
Whenever Stephen comes home, he and their mom order a Donato’s pizza, no
matter how late it is. Tonight, Stephen was supposed to be home around 9:30, but his
flight was delayed. Around 10:30, Collin convinced their mom just to order the pizza;
that way it would be here by the time Stephen arrived. However, over an hour after the
delivery, they still haven’t heard anything from Stephen, and Collin’s mom hasn’t let
them eat even a slice.
“What if we just had a piece or two?” Collin has asked almost every time their
mother’s finished another beer. No luck yet.
He hasn’t seen his mom drink more than a small glass of wine for as long as he
can remember. She finds inebriation ‘morally repugnant.’ When Collin was in high
school, his mother would often sniff him when he returned from a friend’s house,
searching for the scent of alcohol, weed, or even Febreze. Although Collin didn’t party
almost at all until college, he never really gained his mother’s trust.
His mom takes a swig from her beer.
“I took care of that woman for years, like it was a full time job,” she says. “But
nobody paid me for of it, of course. And I just find that a tad ironic, because if I’d had
any spare cash lying around, I could have hired people, or afforded one of those nice
elder-care places – but I didn’t have any money, because I couldn’t get a job, because I
was stuck taking care of my mother.”
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“It’s reproductive labor,” Jess says. “Elder care and child care are largely pushed
onto women. That sort of labor is vital to keep the system running, but they get away
without paying us by subordinating us to men.”
“Maybe if your father had given me a sliver beyond what he was legally obligated
to, I could’ve found a way out. God knows it wouldn’t have made much difference to
him.”
Jess nods. “How did it happen that Dad made off with so much in the divorce
proceedings, anyway?”
“Well, before we split up, we were comfortable, but Vic certainly wasn’t rich yet
– in fact, his company was floundering. Even at the time, I should’ve gotten far more
than I really did though. Vic was probably friends with the judge or something.”
“It’s just the way the justice system is set up, too,” Jess says. “The richer you are,
the better lawyer you can afford. The whiter you are, the more of a man’s man you are,
the less bias the judge will have against you.”
“I got primary custody of the kids, and I got to keep the house, and the dog. I told
myself at the time that that’s what really mattered to me. ‘Course the dog died, the
mortgage on the house was nowhere near paid, and you kids up and left for college – and
now Maddie won’t even talk to me.”
Collin wonders what Maddie’s doing right now. He really shouldn’t have told
Jess – but it won’t make any difference. It’ll be who knows how long before any of them
see Maddie again.
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“Sometimes I wish I’d fled to southern California, or maybe Mexico,” his mom
says. “I have a friend from grad school who moved out there, to Bucerias. Maybe we
could’ve been roommates.”
His grandmother died, his sister’s knocked up, his mom’s about to jump off the
rails, and all he wants is a slice of pizza. There’s something so essentially human about
that – and yet his mom is denying him, all because of some silly family ritual. Maybe he
could write a short story or poem about this later. He should at least make a note about it
in his pocket-journal.
His mom finishes off her drink, sets the glass on the table, and announces, “Well,
I guess I’ll have another. Either of you kids want one?”
“I do,” Collin says immediately, fearing that he’ll lose the chance if he doesn’t act
fast. Not yet 21, alcohol is still forbidden to him in his mother’s home.
His mom looks at him skeptically for a moment before shrugging her shoulders.
“What the heck,” she says.
“Don’t you think you oughtta slow down, Mom?” Jess says.
“Why?” their mom says, but she doesn’t really give Jess a chance to reply. She
turns her back and hums “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” as she heads toward the
cellar.
Mammy always loved Christmas – it was her favorite time of year.
“She didn’t even drink during the divorce,” Jess whispers.
Collin looks to his sister and says, “But, you know – there’s always beer and
liquor downstairs.”
“It’s for guests.”
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“That’s what she always says, but she hardly ever has guests.”
Jess shrugs.
“Oh, Collin,” she says. “Remember the campaign I was telling you about over
Thanksgiving?”
“Around gentrification?” Collin says. They got into a bit of a tiff about this the
last time they discussed it – Collin asked if working-class Black communities should just
remain impoverished and run-down, and Jess shot back with some comment about rent-
control that seemed only peripherally related. He closed the conversation by agreeing
with her, but he still has some lingering doubts.
“Yeah,” Jess says. “You’ll never believe this, but the company that’s partnering
with the school is Ballard Development Group.”
She looks at him almost excitedly. He hesitates but, after a moment, he asks, “Are
you quitting?”
“What?” Jess says. “Why would I do that? The fact that it’s Dad’s company
doesn’t change how awful it is – everything that they’re doing. I’m a little unsure about
how openly I should share the fact that I’m Dad’s daughter though, and that’s kind of
why I brought it up…”
“Maybe you could talk to him,” Collin says.
“Talk to Dad?” Jess says. “No, he’s not – I mean… The capitalist doesn’t control
capitalism, capital controls capitalism.”
Collin’s not even sure what ‘capital’ is, but he still thinks it would be a good idea
for Jess to talk to their father.
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“I guess this is why I stick to writing,” Collin says. “Seems like it’s easier to
change things that way.”
“It’s easier to change things, or it’s easier for you?” Jess says.
Their mom emerges from the cellar with three beers.
“Maybe we should get some more snacks,” Jess says.
Collin nods, but the moment he starts thinking about snacks he feels the emptiness
of his stomach and realizes that snacks simply won’t cut it.
“Screw that,” he says.
He stands and walks into the kitchen. His mom glances at him but then looks back
down at the drinks; she’s opening the third bottle. Collin grabs the pizza from the little
table by the entryway and carries it down the hall, across the living room, and through the
dining room’s other entrance. He sets the box on the table, opens it, and grabs a slice –
just as his mom appears in the doorway to the kitchen, slowly managing the three beers.
“Collin,” she scolds, stopping in her tracks. The slice is only four or five inches
away from Collin’s mouth.
“What?” he says, his hand frozen.
“I told you to wait for your brother.”
Collin inches the slice of pizza slowly toward his mouth, as his mom glares at
him. He takes a bite. It’s cold, but the cheese is still soft.
His mom walks forward and sets the three bottles firmly on the table, beer
sloshing onto the tablecloth. She rips the pizza out of Collin’s hand and throws it back in
the box.
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“Don’t I deserve at least a shred of respect? What am I to you, some sort of
punching bag?”
“I’m sorry,” Collin says, dumbfounded. He stares at his mother, as she takes one
of the beers from the table and returns it to the kitchen.
“This is one thing I still share with your brother,” she says, “One thing. He and
your dad go to the bars together, they play pool, and they do God knows what else. But
this is something we have.” Collin can hear his beer splashing down the drain. “If you’re
hungry, make yourself some macaroni, or have some more chips and salsa, I don’t care.
But I’m going to wait until Stephen gets home, and I’m going to eat this pizza with him.”
Collin feels Jess’s eyes on him, and his cheeks grow warm. “Don’t be so high and
mighty,” he whispers.
“Excuse me?” Jess says.
“You act like you always know what’s best. But you’ve been over there trying to
channel all of Mom’s anger into communism or something. It’s okay just to listen
sometimes.”
“We were talking,” Jess says. “Meanwhile you were just staring out into the
distance like usual. You should go apologize.”
Collin glances into the kitchen. He doesn’t hear any activity, and he wonders if
his mom’s gone back outside or something. But then there’s a knock on the front door,
and his mom walks quickly back into view as she heads to the entryway.
After the door opens, Collin hears his mom say, “Hi, honey.”
“Hey Mom,” Stephen replies. “How are you doing?”
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“Well, about as you can imagine. But, gosh, you have no idea how nice it is to see
you…”
Her voice cracks at the end of the sentence, and a moment passes in silence after
that. Collin can feel Jess searching for his eyes, but he fixes his gaze firmly on the table.
“Sorry… I’m sorry. It’s just been a hard time,” their mom says.
“Don’t apologize,” Stephen says, as they make their way to the kitchen. “I’m
sorry that I’m a little later than expected.”
“That’s fine. Your flight was delayed again, I guess?”
“The Columbus airport was backed up… You got pizza!”
Mom laughs. “Of course. Unfortunately it’s a bit cold, but it’s here.”
“I wish I hadn’t eaten on the plane,” Stephen says. “I just assumed this would be a
different sort of visit.”
Collin looks up at his sister then, and sticks out his tongue. Jess rolls her eyes.
“Oh,” their mom says. “Well, that’s okay. Maybe we can have it for lunch
tomorrow.”
Collin feels his chest tighten; he’s prepared to order another pizza, just for
himself, but Stephen says, “No, it’s just that normally I’d be able to wolf down three
quarters of this thing. I might only get half in me tonight though.”
“Oh good,” their mom says. “Well the little coyotes in other room will be happy
to hear that anyway.”
“Why are you lumping me in with Collin?” Jess calls.
“Oh,” Stephen says, poking his head around the corner. “Hey, guys.”
Jess stands to hug their brother and Collin follows suit, next in line.
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“Sup,” Stephen says, shaking Collin’s hand and pulling him in for a slap on the
back.
“Not much,” Collin says, and he slides back across the room to his seat.
“Well, I’ll get some plates,” their mom says.
“Have you guys been drinking?” Stephen asks, eyeing the beers on the table.
“Not me,” Collin says.
“Mostly Mom’s been drinking,” Jess says.
Stephen raises his eyebrows, and takes his usual seat at the head of the table.
Their mom returns, plates stacked on top of the pizza box. She distributes them
and opens the box. Collin quickly grabs his piece and takes a small bite, before Stephen
has the chance to see that he’s already been working on it.
“Bon appétit,” their mom says.
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Part Two
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Chapter Nine
Stephen and Madeleine watch as Jess covers Collin’s body in sand.
Their parents sit about a hundred feet away, under a beach umbrella; their mom
reads a magazine, and their dad reads some big huge book called 1491, which he got for
his birthday last week.
Stephen finished his summer reading yesterday, and has just been waiting to get
home ever since. He just got the thousand-year door opened in Paper Mario the day
before they left for vacation. It was like some cruel twist of fate, his parents pulling him
to Florida right then. Plus, this is the longest he’s gone without talking to Stacy since they
got together at the beginning of the summer.
He’ll kiss her so hard the next time he sees her. He won’t even say hello, he’ll just
knock on her door and, the second she opens it, he’ll pull her in and kiss her – before she
can even get a word in. He won’t even care if her mom’s around, he’ll just do it.
He tries to suppress his hard-on, but the more he thinks about it the harder it gets,
pressing against his bathing suit. He looks nervously at his little sister, but she’s
distracted, building a haphazard sand castle.
Stephen thinks about returning to the condo. He could say he’s going to make
himself lunch, but he’s knows it would be weird – they just got to the beach 30 minutes
ago. So instead, he pictures his grandma on the toilet, a tried and true method of resolving
his situation.
“Do you think Mom and Dad are going to get divorced?” Madeleine asks.
Stephen shushes her and looks to Jess and Collin, and then to his parents,
checking that nobody’s heard.
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“Why would you say that?” he asks.
“Don’t bullshit me, Stephen,” Maddie says. Stephen raises his eyebrows; it’s rare
that Maddie curses in front of him, though he hears her do it plenty when she has friends
over.
“Why do you think I’m bullshitting you?”
“You know exactly why I would say that. Dad doesn’t just fall asleep on the
couch by accident. We’re both way too old for that crap. It’s condescending.”
Stephen nods.
“And now we’re on this stupid trip,” Maddie continues, “They’re trying to
pretend that everything’s normal, like we’re just one big happy family. But we never go
on vacation. The whole thing’s a ruse.”
“You think this vacation is a ruse? That seems unlikely.”
“It’s dad’s fault, you know,” Maddie says. “He had sex with someone else. At
least once, but maybe more than that.”
“How would you know that?” Stephen says.
“I hear them talking,” Maddie says.
“You spy on them or something?”
“They wake me up arguing. Sometimes I sit on the top of the stairs, and listen as
they talk. Mom wants him to stop drinking.”
Stephen laughs.
“What?”
“That’ll never happen.”
Maddie shrugs.
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“Besides, you shouldn’t spy on people. Their business is their business.”
“It’s my business too,” Maddie says. “I don’t want to spend half my time in some
other neighborhood, where I don’t know anybody, just because Dad’s too drunk and
horny.”
“Do you even know half the words you’re saying, Maddie?”
“Boys have been trying to get in my pants since sixth grade, Stephen, I’m not an
idiot.”
Stephen flinches. If his boner hadn’t long dissipated, surely it would now. He’s
surprised to hear a 13-year-old talking like this, but, then again, Maddie’s always been a
little bit ahead of the curve developmentally. Probably part of where she gets her whole
holier-than-thou shtick.
“Who’s trying to do that?” Stephen says, stumbling over his words.
Madeleine laughs. “What’re you gonna do, go beat them up?”
“Why not?”
“You’ve never even gotten a single detention.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? That I can’t defend my sister?”
“Just means you play by the rules. You don’t cause trouble.”
“Whatever.”
Maddie knocks over her sandcastle and uses both of her hands to push together
the foundation for a new tower.
Collin starts giggling down the shore. Besides his head, he looks practically like a
mummy, his body just an outline under the sand. As he laughs, cracks emerge on the
coating over his stomach and, soon enough, his skin is visible.
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“Collin!” Jess shouts. “You’re messing it up!”
But Collin laughs harder, and soon he rolls over onto his side, pushing through his
sand enclosure.
As he continues on, apparently uncontrollably, Jess storms toward Maddie and
Stephen.
“Can it be someone else’s turn with him? I’ve had it up to here.”
“You guys were getting on fine just a few minutes ago,” Stephen says.
“He’s so annoying. I’m just asking to take a break!”
Collin waddles over behind her.
“We can try again,” he says.
“I’m not trying again,” Jess says. “You’re being a brat.”
“Woah,” Stephen says. “Don’t call your brother a brat.”
“It just started to tickle,” Collin says. “It’s not my fault.”
Stephen glances over to see their dad looking on.
“I’m just saying, I’ve served my time,” Jess says. “It’s your guys’ turn.”
Collin looks at each of them individually, and then plops down onto the sand.
“You take turns?” he says, and the tears aren’t far behind.
Maddie hurriedly walks to Collin and places a hand gingerly on his shoulder.
“She didn’t mean it,” Maddie says.
“Oh come on, Maddie, it’s just an act,” Jess says, but Stephen’s not so sure.
“Jessica, maybe you should go hang out with mom and dad,” he says.
“What’s going on, here?” their dad asks, somehow having snuck up on all of
them.
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“They take turns,” Collin whimpers between gasps and blubbers.
“We don’t take turns,” Maddie says, rubbing Collin’s shoulders. “Jess was just
being a jerk.”
They do take turns, of course. But Jess and Maddie really spend the most time
with Collin. Stephen’s turn generally just entails letting Collin watch him play video
games, which Stephen actually kind of enjoys.
“What do you mean, take turns?” their dad says.
“Looking after Collin,” Stephen explains to his father from the ground.
Their dad glares at Jess. “Don’t talk about your brother that way,” he says. “The
kind of house Maddie and Stephen grew up in was one that was filled with love. Don’t
you want your brother to grow up in the same kind of household?”
“Yes,” Jess mutters, still looking at her toes.
“Good luck with that,” Maddie tells her father.
Stephen stares straight at his sister; she either doesn’t notice or doesn’t
acknowledge him.
“Excuse me?” their father says.
It looks like Maddie’s about to respond, so Stephen stands and says, “Maddie stop
it.”
“Collin’s gonna grow up like crap,” Maddie says, gesturing to their little brother,
who continues to cry on the sand beneath the rest of them. “And all because you can’t
just keep it in your pants.”
“Excuse me?” their dad repeats.
“I know you and mom are gonna split up.”
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Stephen sighs and kneels down to tend to his brother. The situation is too far
along now to do anything about it.
“You and mom are splitting up?” Jess says.
“No,” their dad says. “Nobody is splitting up. Maddie, maybe you and I should
talk privately.”
“No,” Maddie says. “I don’t talk to liars.”
“You okay, buddy?” Stephen says to Collin, but Collin doesn’t acknowledge him.
“I’m not lying to you, Madeleine,” their father says.
Maddie sticks her fingers in her ears – a bit more like the 13-year-old Stephen
expects.
Their dad appears unsure of how to respond to this development, so Stephen
explains: “She’s just being a dramatic teenage girl. Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m not being dramatic,” Maddie snaps back, ears still plugged. “I’ve heard you
talking at night, Dad! I know you’re a liar, and you’re gonna ruin our family.”
Stephen looks over his shoulder at his mother, who watches attentively but
remains frozen in her seat.
Maddie’s fingers fall from her ears, and she turns to Jess. “He tells you to worry
about the kind of house Collin is gonna grow up in,” she says, “but he doesn’t give a crap
himself. He’s selfish.”
Stephen considers another intervention but, before he knows it, his sister’s
tantrum wanes. She stares up at their father, unspeaking. Following Maddie’s gaze,
Stephen sees their father’s jaw clenched and his eyes watering. He takes a deep,
staggered breath in, and then turns and walks away.
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Stephen, Jess, and Madeleine stand there for a moment, as Collin cries quietly on
the ground below them.
Stephen breaks the silence: “You see what you did, Maddie?” He shakes his head
and rushes off to catch up with his father, who walks along the water.
“Not now, Stephen,” his dad says, continuing forward.
“I just wanted to make sure you’re okay,” Stephen says. “Maddie didn’t mean
anything by it. She was just being a teenage girl, that’s all.”
“Stephen,” his dad says, stopping and turning around to face him. His eyes are
still red, and his cheeks still moist. “She’s right when she says it’s over, okay? Your mom
and I, we’ve tried to work it out, and we thought this trip might help, but… it’s just not
happening.”
Stephen stares at him. “You’re getting divorced?” he says.
“I wish we weren’t, Stephen. Believe me.” He starts choking up again. “You and I
can talk more about this later, okay? Man to man.”
“Alright,” Stephen says, and his dad continues walking down the shore while
Stephen remains rooted in place. The waves crash against the shore and recede, over and
over again.
Stephen looks back at his siblings, and their mother beyond them. She still just
sits there, in that beach chair, holding her stupid magazine, though she’s not even reading
it – instead, she stares at Stephen’s father, the fat on her arms dangling limply off the
bone.
Stephen glares at her, willing her to notice.
–
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Collin sits on his sand pile, the talking going on and on all around him. He hits 22 before
he loses track, distracted by his swim trunks. They fit okay, he figures, but they mostly
don’t. They’re tight, and he knows there’ll be red marks later. Maybe he’s finally
growing, he thinks, maybe he’ll break four feet this year. He runs his hand between his
hipbone and his trunks, because the skin stings a little bit.
He has to remember to tell his mom, because she always gets the new things.
She’s too far now, though, to tell her.
He starts his counting over. But this time he only gets to seven grains of sand
before Maddie interrupts him. “Collin, how about you and I go look for seashells?” she
says.
Collin glances up at her. He doesn’t know how it happened, but she’s the only one
there now.
“Is it your turn?” he says.
“No, Collin,” Maddie says. “We don’t take turns. I just want to hang out with
you.”
Collin looks back down at the sand, and starts counting again – he gets to three.
But then he remembers that Maddie’s waiting on him.
“Okay,” he says, and he pushes himself onto his feet. He spreads out his toes and
then pulls them back together. There must be twenty grains between each pair of toes, he
thinks. He looks down across the beach, first one way, then the other. It would probably
take him all day to count the sand.
“Come on,” Maddie says, and he follows – but he remembers he has a question.
“What’s wrong with Dad?”
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“He’s being a man,” Maddie says. “That’s just how men are. So I put him in time
out, and he wasn’t happy about it.”
“You put Dad in time out?”
“Yeah,” Maddie says. Collin looks over to the beach umbrella, where his mom
sits and his dad stands, the two of them talking.
“Will you promise me that you won’t grow up into a man, Collin?” Maddie says.
Collin stares at her. “I don’t know,” he says.
“Well, do you want to grow up and become a man?” Maddie says.
“Don’t I have to?”
“No, Collin,” Maddie says. “Now let’s look for some shells.”
They get to the waves and Collin begins scouring the shore. They get a real haul
pretty quick: pink shells, and blue shells, and white shells, and even a green shell, which
Collin is excited about but which Maddie finds gross.
“Look at this one, Collin!” Maddie calls, a few yards away.
Collin jerks his head toward Madeleine as a wave splashes against his legs and the
bottoms of his butt cheeks, which are just a couple inches off the ground, because Collin
had perched to study a sand dollar. The water is cold and it threatens to sweep his sand
dollar away forever, so he screams while hastily grabbing for his treasure and running to
dry land.
With the sand dollar safe, he’s free to wonder, again, why they’re called that –
sand dollars. When he asked earlier, his dad said the Indians used them as money, but
Maddie told him later that they were Native Americans, not Indians, and that their dad
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was promoting an object view of a whole people. Collin doesn’t know what that meant,
but he thinks it’s funny.
Maddie catches Collin’s gaze and holds up a big, perfect conch shell. Her hair
shines gold in the midday sun.
Collin knows his sister wants him to go see the shell up close, but the dry-hot-
sand feels good between his wet-cold-toes, so he’s taking a break.
“Come here!” Madeleine calls.
Ready now, Collin runs as close to her as he can, but he can’t go all the way,
because she’s standing where the waves come.
What’s that place called, he wonders, where the waves aren’t but where they will
be? Not land exactly, but not water either. Somewhere in between.
That’s where Madeleine is. One minute: dry – fine – good. The next: wet – cold –
bad. Sploosh, her legs are wet, woosh, her legs are dry.
“Aren’t you cold?” Collin wants to say, but once he gets it on his tongue his sister
says, “You have to come all the way, Collin.”
“Why?” Collin asks.
“Because you have to hold the conch up to your ear and listen.”
“Why?” Collin asks.
“When you hold it up to your ear, you can hear the sound of the ocean!”
Collin knows that’s not true, because he can see the whole ocean, and none of it is
in the conch shell. But Madeleine has never lied to him before, so he’s confused.
“Really?” Collin asks.
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She holds it up to her ear, and her eyes get wide. And then she says, “Really!” like
it’s a secret, and then, “Come listen.”
Collin meanders into the middle area, where the waves come. They’re cold, but
really not so bad since they don’t get to his butt cheeks this time.
Collin puts his sand dollar in their bucket, first thing, but Madeleine takes it out
and drops it in a wooshing wave. “We already have one of those, Collin,” she says, and
the water carries his treasure away. He watches it tumble and disappear, his eyes
lingering on the water, waiting to see whether it will return when the next wave
splooshes.
“Now listen,” Madeleine says, and Collin jerks his eyes back onto his sister.
She holds the conch shell up to his ear, and Collin realizes she’s right. He hears
the waves, splooshing and wooshing all at once, and he hears the wind, howling and
wowling, and he knows that the whole ocean really is in the conch shell. Maybe the
whole world! Everything. He hears the sound of everything.
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Chapter Ten
The car stops in the driveway, but Stephen lets it idle in the dark. Maddie stares out the
passenger window toward the neighbor’s too-neat hedges. They probably pay someone to
come out and trim them once a month or something. Maddie can’t imagine paying for
something like that. The hedges are just ugly green blobs regardless.
“Are we going in?” Jess says.
“Yes,” Stephen says. “But first you all need to promise not to ruffle any feathers.
What’s done is done.”
Maddie continues staring out her window. Collin, face illuminated, continues
playing on his purple Gameboy. They made him shut the sound off earlier, but at some
point during the car ride to their dad’s house, he turned it back on; the Mario theme song
plays quietly beneath the rumbling of the engine.
“Okay,” Jess says.
“Thank you, Jessica,” Stephen says.
He turns off the engine and opens his door. Jess follows suit, while Collin sighs,
and snaps his Gameboy shut. Maddie stays put.
“Come on, Maddie,” Stephen says.
“Can’t I just wait in the car until she’s gone?” Maddie says.
“You’ll suffocate,” Jess says, matter of fact.
“I don’t want to meet this bitch, or have anything to do with her. She’s just dad’s
little toy.”
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“I doubt she thinks of herself that way,” Stephen says. “Besides, this is Dad’s
weekend. Legally, he’s your guardian right now, and you’re expected to stay at his
house.”
“Screw that,” Maddie says.
“Yeah,” Jess says. “Screw that.”
“See the kind of influence you’re having on your sister?” Stephen says to Maddie.
“You shouldn’t say things like that, Jessica.”
“At least she’s saying how she really feels.”
The Mario theme song begins playing again from the back seat, slightly louder
than before.
“How do you feel, Jessica?” Stephen says.
“We don’t do anything here except watch TV,” Jess says. “That gets boring after
a while. And I don’t like it in that house either. It’s stuffy.”
Maddie feels vindicated, but after looking at Stephen it’s clear he feels the same.
“The reason all she does is watch TV is because Dad doesn’t spend any time with
us, and when he does, it’s always on his terms,” Maddie explains. “Going to a tailgate
party or some crap.”
“Don’t be petty,” Stephen says.
“I’m not being petty!”
“Yes you are,” Stephen says. “Because without him, you wouldn’t have a roof
over your head.”
“I’d have Mom’s roof over my head.”
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“Dad’s alimony pays for Mom’s roof,” Stephen says. “It pays for all the food you
eat. You don’t see it, but that’s the way it is. Mom can’t even get a full-time job. She just
works at the mall 10 hours a week saying ‘hello, how are you, enjoy your visit.’”
“You’re such a dick, Stephen,” Maddie says.
The music cuts out on Collin’s game, and Mario calls, “Mama mia!” Maddie
glances to the backseat. Collin’s mouth is open and he stares straight ahead at her; it
doesn’t even seem like he’s even noticed he got a game-over.
“Whatever,” Stephen says. He steps out of the car and slams the door behind him.
The younger three stay put.
“Did you just call Stephen a dick?” Jess says.
“He was being a dick,” Maddie says. “Besides, the only reason Mom can’t get a
job is because she was out of the workforce for so long, raising us, while Dad was out
partying and crap. His life is easy.”
They sit there for another thirty seconds, until Collin says, “Should we go
inside?”
“Yeah,” Jess says. “Dad’s gonna wonder about us.”
Maddie wishes Jess were just a year older. The difference between 11 and 12
might be enough to teach her something more about life. She’d stop being so passive and
wishy-washy, might actually stick up for herself. The two of them together would be able
to get Collin in line pretty easily, and nobody would care about Stephen’s opinion after
that.
But that’s not how it is. Maddie sighs, unbuckles her seatbelt, and opens her door.
Her siblings follow her out the car and up the neatly swept walkway.
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She pauses before opening her father’s front door.
“Do we knock?” Jess says.
Maddie looks at her and shakes her head. “What would make you think that?
We’ve never knocked before.”
“I don’t know,” Jess says.
Maddie opens the door and walks inside.
“There they are!” her dad calls from the kitchen. Maddie recognizes the smell
immediately: it’s steak. He usually only cooks it for the younger kids on birthdays or
holidays, but it’s Maddie’s favorite – or, it used to be.
She and her siblings pass through the foyer to see their dad standing at the grill
while Stephen sits at the granite island counter-top with their dad’s girlfriend – a
toothpick thin, blonde lady who looks only 15 years older than Stephen himself. Maddie
imagines this woman when she was Maddie’s age, meeting their father, with his newborn
baby…
The lady spins her chair around and says, “Let me guess. Madeleine, Jess, and
Collin.” She points to each of them individually.
“Bingo,” their dad says from the stove.
The lady smiles to herself. “It’s so nice to finally meet you all. I’ve heard so much
about you.”
She stands to shake their hands, and as Jess and Collin step forward to greet her,
Maddie sinks to the back of the group.
“I’m Annie,” the girlfriend says – but of course they all know that already.
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Maybe she notices Madeleine’s posture, or maybe shaking Maddie’s hand simply
seems logistically difficult, since she’s behind her siblings. Either way, Annie doesn’t
even endeavor to do so. Maddie’s sort of bummed; she wanted to look this woman
straight in her eyes and refuse her.
“Are you guys excited for Halloween?”
“Yes,” Jess says, and Collin nods.
“How are you liking your sophomore year by now, Madeleine?”
Madeleine says nothing.
“She asked you a question, Maddie,” Stephen says, and their father chuckles –
chuckles! – as if Maddie’s just being shy and cute.
“It’s fine,” Maddie says. She blows past Annie and her siblings and takes a seat at
the counter, beside Stephen.
“Are you gonna act like this all night?” Stephen whispers.
“Like what?”
“Like a child.”
“Are you gonna act like that the whole rest of your life?” Maddie asks.
“What?” Stephen says, confused.
“Like you know everything there is to know in the whole wide world,” Maddie
says.
“You kids hungry?” their dad says.
“Yeah,” Collin says. The swivel seats at the counter are a bit too high for him, but
he clambers onto one anyway. “I’m starved.”
“Your dad’s making up quite the feast,” Annie says.
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“Is there anything vegetarian?” Maddie says.
“Who’s a vegetarian?” her dad says.
“I am,” Maddie says.
“Since when?” Stephen barks.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” Maddie says. “We watched this
documentary in my environmental science–”
“Then be a vegetarian tomorrow,” Stephen says. “Dad made steaks for everyone
tonight.”
“Calm down, calm down,” their dad says. “We’re having baked potatoes on the
side. We can top yours up with extra cheese, and I can heat up a can of baked beans real
quick, too. Would that be alright?”
“That’s hardly a meal,” Maddie says.
“That’s what they eat across the pond,” her dad says. “And if it’s good enough for
those stuck up English folks—” He pushes his nose up with his finger. “—then it oughtta
be good enough for a Ballard.” Dropping his hand from his face, he adds, “We’re a
simple bunch, Maddie.”
All she wants is twenty bucks. That would be her ticket out of here. She could
walk to the Arby’s down the road, and then go knock on Shelby’s door.
Shelby’s dating a 16-year old who has his license and smokes pot. He’s a bit
protective, which Maddie finds obnoxious – they’re only a year younger than him, after
all – but the last time they all hung out, Shelby finally broke him down and got him to say
he’d let the girls try it next time they all got together… But her dad’s already opening the
can of baked beans.
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Before long, the six of them are seated around the kitchen table – Stephen, their
dad and Annie each with a glass of red wine, and everyone but Maddie with a steak.
Annie’s usurped Stephen’s spot at the head of the table, but, to Maddie’s dismay, Stephen
doesn’t seem to mind.
“Am I supposed to eat these beans on the potato or on the side?” Maddie says.
“The Brits eat it right on the potato,” her dad says.
Maddie scoops some onto the potato and takes a bite. The beans are only
lukewarm really, and the sauce they’re in seems too sweet to go with the savory potato
and cheese.
“Tell us about your boyfriend, Jess,” Stephen says.
“You’ve got a boyfriend?” Annie says.
Jess blushes. “Yeah,” she says.
“Oh, what’s his name?” Annie says, at the same time that Stephen, a little bit
louder, asks, “Has he kissed you yet?”
“No,” Jess says, crinkling her eyebrows. “We’re only eleven.”
“There’s nothing wrong with kissing him first,” their dad says. “Haven’t I taught
you to be bold, Jess?”
“Victor,” Annie says, glaring at him across the table.
“What?” their dad says. “I’m imparting a valuable life lesson onto my daughter.”
“Doubt you’ve ever given any of your girlfriends the chance to kiss you first,”
Maddie says. “Eager as you are…”
Her siblings stare at her, but dad laughs, and Annie jumps in immediately to say,
“I kissed your father first, as a matter of fact.”
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Dad’s snickering gets louder, and Maddie tries to picture it – this tiny little lady
making the first move on her father, pushing him against a wall or something.
“Gross,” Collin says.
“Yeah,” Maddie says. “That it is.”
Madeleine crushes a bean with her fork.
“So what do you think, Jess?” their dad says. “You ready to make the big move?”
“Vic, just drop it, will you? She’s eleven,” Annie says.
“Well, what do you think, Jess? Are you old enough?”
“I don’t know,” Jess says. “I guess so.”
Their dad nods, and Annie glares at him across the table before sighing and
turning to Madeleine. “How’s the potato treating you, Maddie?” she says.
“Fine,” Maddie says.
“Sure you don’t want some steak?” her dad says.
Maddie looks at the platter sitting at the center of the table, where the steak
allotted for her sits – the third biggest behind her dad’s and Stephen’s.
“Okay,” Madeleine says.
“Let’s you and I split that one,” her dad says.
He stands, reaches across the table, and saws it up. He stabs Maddie’s half with a
fork and hastily transports it to her plate, leaving a trail of blood on the tablecloth.
Lying in her sleeping bag, Maddie can’t stop thinking about that piece of meat, over ten
year ago: medium-rare and bloody… She feels a flash of anger at her father for cutting it
in half.
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“Maddie, you ready?” Aaron calls from downstairs.
“What?” Maddie shouts.
She hears Aaron walking up the stairs, so she rolls over and stares at the wall. It’s
extremely dusty. She didn’t think walls could get dusty.
The door creaks open. “I asked whether you’re ready?”
“I thought you were supposed to start your new job today,” Maddie says.
“I called off.”
Maddie sits up in her sleeping bag but doesn’t unzip it. Even though they set the
thermostat to 80 degrees, it never gets above 55 and their gas bills are through the roof.
“Why would you call off on your first day?” Maddie says.
“To go with you to Columbus.”
“You’re an idiot, Aaron. You’re gonna get fired.”
“I figured you could use some company. I’m sure this is going to be hard for
you.”
“I said I needed money, not company,” Madeleine says.
“Well I’ve got both,” Aaron says.
Maddie slumps back onto the ground and stares at the ceiling. “We need to dust
the walls,” she says.
“Dust the walls?” Aaron asks.
“Yes, we need to dust the walls. They’re dusty.”
“That’s weird. I didn’t know walls got dusty.”
“Well then maybe you should stay here and dust the walls, while I drive up to
Columbus.”
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“You don’t want me to come?”
Maddie bites the bullet and unzips her sleeping bag. She stands up, walks over to
the wall, and rubs her finger downward; it comes away with a thin but definitive coat of
grey. When she passes into the hallway, she rubs it on Aaron’s shirt.
“See?” she says.
Aaron trails behind her, following her into the bathroom.
“It’s just a consultation today anyway,” she says. “I’ll probably just go in there,
answer a few questions, and walk out. It’s really no big deal. The actual procedure won’t
be until at least tomorrow.”
She grabs her toothbrush. It’s the most worn of any in the jar, which has some sort
of sticky film at the bottom. Aaron always tells her she brushes her teeth wrong – ‘Hold it
like it’s a pencil,’ he says. But this time he doesn’t say anything.
“Look, are you pissed at me or something?” Aaron says.
“Why would you think that, Aaron?” Maddie says, her voice sugary. She returns
her toothbrush to the jar.
“You’ve been completely icing me out,” Aaron says.
“I haven’t been icing you out,” Maddie says. “You just don’t have a monopoly on
my attention.”
“Come on,” Aaron says, “You know you’ve been weird.”
Madeleine pulls down her pink pajama pants – which she really needs to
remember to wash – and sits on the toilet.
“I have to poop,” she tells Aaron.
“Do you really?” Aaron says.
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“Jesus Christ, Aaron,” she says, but Aaron stares at her, eyebrows raised. Once it
becomes clear that Maddie wasn’t bluffing, he blushes and hurries out of the bathroom,
shutting the door behind him.
“I’ll just get my stuff together,” Aaron calls.
Maddie doesn’t respond, but instead finishes, stands, and washes her hands. She
thinks through her options for breakfast. They’ve got those oatmeal packets, and there
might still be another piece of Aaron’s egg bake.
When she gets downstairs, however, she realizes that Aaron is still packing, and
she decides to make a get-away, simply shoving a granola bar in her jacket pocket. She
hurries to the door, but Marsha’s key isn’t on the hook, where she’d promised to leave it.
Maddie starts rooting around. She searches the pockets of a couple coats on the coat
chair, but that only turns up some spare change. She gladly transfers the coins into the
pockets of her pajama pants, although her original dilemma remains.
She hears Aaron making his way downstairs, and her search gets a bit more
frantic.
“Don’t you want to change your pants?” Aaron says. Maddie jumps and turns
around; she hadn’t realized he’d made it to the bottom of the steps.
“No,” she says. “I just can’t find the keys.”
“I have them,” Aaron says.
Maddie glares at him and he gives her a confused look in return, holding her gaze.
She averts her eyes and turns to leaf absentmindedly through the pile of papers on the
dresser. Buried underneath coupons and old bills is an unopened envelope addressed to
her in familiar, sprawling cursive. She pauses.
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“Did you get breakfast?” Aaron asks. When she doesn’t respond, he adds,
“Maddie?”
“I have a granola bar,” Maddie says, and she transfers the letter into her pocket.
“Okay,” Aaron says. “Well in that case, let’s get going. Maybe you can tell me on
the drive, about whatever it is that’s bothering you.”
She briefly resents him for having taken the keys and denying her an easy out, but
as she follows him outside, she realizes she needed the money from him anyway; even if
she’d found the keys it wouldn’t have mattered.
Once they’re situated in the car, the heat on full blast, Maddie takes the granola
bar from her pocket. Somehow, in the three or four minutes since she removed it from the
box, it’s managed to get all smushed. It’s dry, and dense – a poor substitute for the egg-
bake… and an even poorer substitute for that steak. Her mouth begins to water.
Their plates are clean, with the exception of Maddie’s. The steak was delicious,
but she hasn’t bothered finishing her beans and potato, instead mushing them into a
starchy slush.
She keeps thinking the jabbering is winding down, but Annie always seems to
pull another conversation starter out of her ass (‘How’s the college search coming,
Stephen?’ or ‘Your dad tells me you want to be a video game designer, Collin?’).
After dinner, Stephen’s going to go get laid at his girlfriend’s house, Jess is going
to sit in the computer room IM-ing her friends, and Collin is almost certainly going to
watch old SpongeBob reruns. Meanwhile, Maddie is itching to head over to Shelby’s
house. In other words, they’ll all be having a much better time once they leave this table.
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But nobody does. Instead, everyone is engrossed in Collin’s meandering story about how
the school accidentally gave him the wrong results after his color-blindness screening and
he thought, for a full five minutes, that he couldn’t see colors – it’s all somehow part of
his response to Annie’s question about the videogames.
“Collin,” their dad says, pointing to the tiles on the table. “What color is this?”
Collin pauses, not bothered by the interruption, and he hesitantly says, “White.”
Their dad’s face falls, and he shakes his head. “I’m sorry, son. But this table is
blue.”
Collin stares at the table, his jaw dropping.
Annie rolls her eyes.
“The table’s white, Collin,” Maddie says, letting a scoop of potato-bean-mush
splatter from her fork to her plate.
Jess looks between their father and Collin, laughing, and Stephen hides his phone
under the table, texting. Their dad finally caved and bought him one for his 17th birthday.
He doesn’t seem to know that other people can see his phone screen, and he’s always
sending dirty messages on there.
Collin still stares at the table.
“It’s white,” Jess says, nudging him with her elbow.
“I don’t know,” Collin says. He looks around the room. “How would I know?”
Stephen’s flip phone snaps shut. “Collin,” he says, “Look at this.” He points at the
red wine remaining in his second glass. “What color is this?”
Collin stares at the liquid for a moment.
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“It’s–” Jess starts to say, but Annie cuts her off. “Let him answer,” she says.
Madeleine glares at Annie, and Stephen kicks Maddie under the table.
“Red?” Collin says.
“Exactly!” Annie says. “I think that merits some dessert, don’t you?”
“Yeah!” Collin says.
“Great,” Annie says. “I’m just going to use the restroom and I’ll be back with the
ice-cream in just a minute.”
“Not so fast,” their dad says, putting his hand on Annie’s arm as she starts to
stand. She sinks back into her seat. “Madeleine hasn’t finished her potato yet.”
Maddie looks down at her plate and considers whether to wolf the rest down or
throw it straight into her dad’s face, when he starts cracking up.
“You notice how nobody else finds your shit funny?” Maddie says, but he doesn’t
stop laughing. She pushes her plate to the center of the table.
As her dad quiets down, she peers down at Stephen’s phone – “What are you
gonna do to me when you come over?” is the most recent message. Stephen’s fingers
hover over the keypad. He must be thinking on it.
When Annie’s safely out of earshot, Jess breaks the family’s silence by
announcing, “I like her.”
Their dad nods and polishes off his wine. “I’m happy to hear that, Jess. You’ll be
seeing much more of her soon.”
“Is she moving in or something?” Maddie says.
“Would you like that, Jessica?” their dad says.
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Jess raises her eyebrows and looks from Madeleine to their father. “I guess so,”
she says.
“Well then, I suppose Annie and I will have to discuss it.”
He winks at Madeleine. She looks down at her lap and wishes she was old enough
to have a cell phone like Stephen or young enough to have a Gameboy like Collin – some
sort of distraction.
When Annie returns, carrying a serving tray with a bowl of ice cream for each of
them, Maddie decides she can’t take it anymore.
“May I be excused?” she says.
“Don’t you want any ice cream?” Annie says, setting the tray at the center of the
table. Maddie looks in her eyes, prepared to snap ‘no,’ but there’s just the slightest
crinkle in Annie’s eyebrows, the slightest concern at the corner of her mouth, that makes
Madeleine hesitate.
“I’m good,” she finally says.
“You don’t want any ice cream?” Collin says, baffled.
“No, I’m good,” Maddie says.
“Oh come on, it’s strawberry!” Collin says, although Jess nudges Collin midway
through his last word, and he tapers off pathetically.
“Let her go,” Stephen says. “She doesn’t belong here, anyway.”
“Excuse me?” Maddie says.
“Now, Stephen…” their father says.
“Well she doesn’t,” Stephen says. He shrugs and takes another sip of his wine.
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Their dad pauses and then says, “You’re old enough to know that’s not
acceptable, Stephen. Apologize.”
“Deny it, Dad,” Maddie says.
“Excuse me?” her father says.
“You said it was unacceptable, but you didn’t say he was wrong.”
Her father hesitates.
“That’s what I thought,” Madeleine says.
“Of course you belong,” her dad says.
“Even though I’m not even worth a full steak?”
“You had your beans.”
“They weren’t even warm, Dad,” Maddie says, standing up. Her dad starts to say
something, but she interrupts him: “I don’t need to ask your permission to be excused –
we’re not dogs you can train.” Jess’s eyes are fixated on her, and Maddie meets her
sister’s gaze briefly before looking back to her father. “I want to leave, and I’m leaving.”
“Don’t talk back to me that way,” her father says, but Maddie’s already on her
way out of the house.
“I’m going to Shelby’s,” she calls, as the door slams behind her.
“Was it the money thing?” Aaron says, as they pull onto the Lancaster bypass.
“Because we got that all sorted out.”
Maddie hates this stretch of the drive. The hills recede almost immediately, and
the exurban sprawl from the city begins. They’ve entered the Land of Commuters.
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“Didn’t you say you wanted to come to Columbus to support me?” Maddie says.
“Cuz you’re doing a piss-poor job of that.”
Aaron shuts up for a second. Then: “Or are you mad that I let it slip to your
brother, about the pregnancy?”
She shakes her head, surveying the hills. They look like mounds of dirt, stuck
with thousands of little toothpicks. Maddie can’t wait until spring.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Aaron says. “You’re mad because I let it slip to Collin.”
“That’s not it, Aaron,” Maddie says. “There is no it, exactly. But of course I’m
mad about that.”
“It’s just that – in our house… everyone’s at such close quarters, and we all care
so much about each other, that it’s hard to keep secrets. I mean, openness is sort of a
virtue.”
“A virtue?” Maddie says. “First Sylvia, maybe the only person I really trust, goes
and tells Marsha, and then Marsha tells you, and then you tell my brother. I don’t think
Collin is going to tell anyone, but who knows anymore?”
“You don’t trust me?” Aaron says.
“This is not about you. This is exactly why there’s no it, no one thing that I’m
mad about, because it is everything. You make everything about you.”
Aaron pauses for ten, maybe twenty seconds. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I should have
been more considerate in this instance.”
“But also in general,” Maddie says.
“That feels – can you give me another example?”
“You need another example?”
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“I just – I get that I messed up, telling Collin about… but as a general pattern—”
“Well, just one more example among many – you declared that I couldn’t go to
my Mammy’s funeral.”
“I didn’t declare, I just voiced an opinion—”
“But do you always have to? Can’t you ever just stop and see what I want to do?”
“You were stressed, you weren’t thinking clearly! I’ve heard you talk about your
family, Maddie, and I know you. I know you don’t belong there.”
Maddie nods. She turns on the radio – Marsha’s car is set to a local country
station, but Maddie doesn’t even have the time to laugh about that before Aaron turns the
volume down.
“Oh, come on, Maddie, don’t act all pissed, you’ve said yourself that you don’t
belong,” Aaron says.
Maddie sighs and turns to look at him.
“Sure,” she says. “But it’s for me to say – that’s why I’ve said it.”
Silence settles over the pair.
“Sorry,” Aaron says after a minute. “I’ll try to do better.”
“Thanks,” Maddie says.
Another half a minute passes without words, and Maddie strains her ears to listen
to the staticy radio station. Country road, take me hooome, to the plaaace, I belooong…
Won’t this song ever run its course?
“Maddie, I think I love you,” Aaron says.
“That’s nice,” Maddie says.
She reaches back to the radio, and turns the volume up.
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She considers opening the letter; Aaron probably wouldn’t even ask about it. She
even unzips her jacket pocket, and places her right hand on the envelope. But then Aaron
exclaims, “Oh, now we’re talking! We’ve got them big miles now, girl. Vroom, vroom.”
He puts his hand on her leg as he zooms past the sign announcing the new speed
limit of 70 miles per hour. She swats him away, although she can’t help but look over and
smiles at him. “Vroom, vroom,” she echoes.
Shelby’s boyfriend David drives his grandpa’s old red Buick, the center console pushed
up to allow all three of them to sit up front, Shelby squeezed in the middle.
“I really hope he got in trouble,” Shelby says. “He’d be so emasculated by it.”
“I know,” Maddie says. “The way he idolizes my dad, he totally would be. But
he’s not going to get in trouble – if anything, my dad’ll just pull him aside and tell him to
be a little less honest.”
David pulls into the elementary school parking lot. Maddie tries to remember
getting out of the car here and walking inside, way back when, but she has trouble
visualizing the hallways, the classrooms, the desks.
“We’re so old,” she says.
“Yeah,” Shelby says. “We’re the big kids now.”
“Not even the big kids,” Maddie says. “When I went to school here, the big kids
were the eighth graders. We’re full-fledged adults.”
David pulls his bag from the back seat, ruffles through it for a moment, and takes
out a pre-packed bowl.
“Yeah, I’ve got facial hair now,” he says, passing the weed and lighter to Shelby.
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“Barely,” Maddie says.
“Yeah, you just grow a little peach fuzz,” Shelby says, “You don’t even really
have to shave it.”
Shelby flicks on the lighter and tries to get the bowl going from her lap. After
holding the flame to the weed for a second, she lifts the bowl to her mouth – but that
doesn’t seem to work.
“At least I know how to smoke,” David says, and Shelby glares at him. Maddie
wishes she could blame her friend for keeping this guy around, but he’s got weed and a
car.
“Bring it to your mouth and inhale as you light it,” David says, “but make sure to
keep your finger over the carb until you’re about finished – that’s this little hole.” He
demonstrates, and exhales a large puff of smoke. “You’ll get the hang of it.”
He passes the bowl and lighter back to Shelby. Maddie watches attentively, glad
she didn’t have to go first.
“I don’t want to burn my finger,” Shelby says.
David laughs and takes the lighter back. “Put it to your lips, and I’ll light it,” he
says, and she does so. Right as David flicks on the lighter there’s a knock at the window.
Maddie’s eyes dart up to see a shadowy figure standing outside.
“Christ, we hardly even parked,” David says, frantically snatching the bowl from
Shelby’s hand and stuffing it back in his bag.
The figure outside raps on the window again. “Open up,” he calls.
“Maybe they patrol this parking lot or something,” Shelby says.
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David throws his bag into the back seat and rolls down his window. “Is there a
problem, officer?” he says.
The officer sniffs the inside of the car and says, “What’re you kids doing here?”
The three of them are silent. Maddie’s determined not to be the one to speak, but
Shelby elbows her, hard.
“Just wanted to check out the old stomping grounds,” she says.
“That it?” the cop says.
“Yes, officer,” Maddie says.
The cop sniffs again, dramatically. Maddie feels Shelby tense up against her;
David looks straight down.
“Huh,” the officer says. “Guess the smell must just be my overactive imagination.
You see, we catch a lot of kids out here smoking marijuana. Have to take them down to
the juvenile detention center.”
“Oh, we had no idea,” Maddie says. “We’d better get running home before we run
into any troublemakers. Thanks for the warning.”
“Sure thing,” the cop says, nodding slowly. He pauses. “You kids have a good
night.”
David looks at the cop, and quickly looks down again. He rolls up the window.
Just before it closes, Maddie mutters, “Oink, oink.”
Shelby slaps Maddie’s arm, and the cop wordlessly gestures for David to roll the
window back down.
“Just drive away,” Maddie says.
“You’re crazy,” David says, the window still cracked.
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“He said we could go, dumbass!”
Before Maddie knows it, she’s standing outside in the cold with Shelby and
David, the officer checking IDs while his partner waits in the idling police car.
“Look,” the officer says at last, “we’ve got a busy night tonight. It’s Halloween
weekend and the guys busted up a big party tonight, so I don’t have the time to take you
down to the juvenile detention facility. Instead, I’m going to take you home to your
parents. That sound alright?”
The three kids nod, but nobody says a word.
“Get in the back of the car,” the officer says.
He opens the back door to his vehicle and gestures for the three to enter. He slams
the door shut after them and hops into the front seat, sitting shotgun.
“Where to?” says his partner.
“One of the girls lives right off Kenny. We’ll drop her off first.”
“I’m actually staying with my dad this weekend,” Maddie says. “He lives on the
other side of town, over by Shelby.”
The officer peers through the glass panels which separate them. “What’s it say on
your ID?”
“What?” Maddie says.
“What’s it say on your ID – the address?”
Maddie meets the officer’s eyes.
“My parents are divorced,” she says, “and I’m at my dad’s this weekend. He lives
on Findley Avenue. 2592 Findley Avenue, in Upper Kensington.”
“What do you think, Andrews?” the cop says.
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“Whether or not she’s lying to us or not, I think there’s some reason this little lady
doesn’t want to go home to her mama.”
“So what’s the move?”
“Well, there’s only one address we know for certain, and it’s the one on the little
plastic rectangle,” Andrews says.
“Then let’s take her home.”
Andrews puts the car in drive and pulls out of the parking lot, leaving behind the
elementary school and David’s car both.
When Maddie tries to open the passenger side door, it’s locked.
Aaron walks up behind her. “Maddie…”
“Unlock the car, Aaron.”
“Maddie—”
“Just unlock the car!”
“I didn’t think we were going to need the money at the prescreening,” he says.
“I told you—”
“You told me it would be around 550 bucks, but you didn’t say I would need it
today.”
“Well, you didn’t need it all today—”
“200 though,” Aaron says. “Before they even examined you. I mean, what’s that
about?”
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Maddie tries to open the door again, yanking on the handle a few times. The metal
of the car is cold, and when the door doesn’t budge, she bunches her hands into the
sleeves of her jacket.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I guess it covers the ultrasound but—”
“It’s so fucked up that they make you do an ultrasound. I mean, if you decide to
go through with it, it’ll just be a medicinal abortion anyway. I can’t imagine that the
ultrasound serves any other function besides making the patients uncomfortable and
costing them more money.”
“You don’t have to tell me how fucked up it is, Aaron.”
“I know, but I’m just saying—”
“Would you just unlock the car?”
“I’m trying to sort this out,” Aaron says.
“Look, today, tomorrow, what’s the difference?” Maddie says. “You said you had
the money, and you didn’t.”
“I was going to call my parents—”
“Oh, sure, you were going to call.”
“I was going to call, but I figured they’d want to know I was serious, that I wasn’t
just lying to them. So I thought if we had the paperwork from the screening, and an
appointment scheduled…”
“You couldn’t have asked me?” Maddie says. “You couldn’t have said, ‘Hey,
Maddie, do you think it would be okay if—’”
“Jesus,” Aaron says. “Okay. I should’ve asked you. Just lay off, okay?”
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“Just lay off?” Maddie says. “All you had to do was call home. They shower with
money. For Christ’s sake, Aaron, everything you need, they give it to you.”
“It’s not quite that easy,” Aaron says.
“Sure it is,” Maddie says. “But you glamorize poverty and exploitation, pretend
you have all these obstacles in your way, even though your mom is a god damn one-
percenter.”
“Look who’s talking,” Aaron says.
“I haven’t talked to my parents in years,” Maddie says. “I can’t exactly just call
them up and demand money.”
“What, because it’d be a slightly awkward conversation?”
She takes a deep breath in, feeling the cold air fill her lungs.
“Can you just unlock the car?” she says.
She hears the locks click open. Maddie removes her hand from her jacket, opens
the door, and sits on the cold fabric of the seat. As Aaron walks around to the other side,
she pulls her door shut, and cherishes the brief silence.
Aaron clambers into the car and puts the key in the ignition.
“Where am I going?” he says. “Back to Athens?”
“I don’t know,” Maddie says.
He takes his hand off the key and removes his phone from his pocket – to call his
parents, Maddie assumes. After the call goes to voicemail, Aaron hangs up and sets his
phone in the cup holder.
“We could get a late lunch somewhere and hope they call back,” Aaron says.
“Do you know anywhere that serves steak?” Maddie asks.
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“What?” Aaron says. “You’re a vegetarian.”
“Look, do you know where we can get some steak or not?”
“You’re the one who grew up here,” Aaron says.
Maddie sinks back into her seat and unzips her jacket pocket.
She rips the envelope open unevenly and gradually shuffles out a piece of wide-
lined notebook paper.
“What’s that?” Aaron says.
“A letter,” Maddie says.
“Well yeah, but from who?”
“None of your business,” Maddie says, and she reads the letter silently to herself.
It’s dated a little over three months prior, toward the end of August.
Dear Madeleine,
It was great to hear from you. I finished reading your letter on the porch, right
after the mailman handed it to me. He’s the second one this week, believe it or not.
They’ve been dropping like flies lately. I’ve heard the salary cuts have changed the
nature of the position. It used to be a career, and now it’s simply a job, I think – but I’m
not certain. Since George retired, none of them have kept me well informed. I do miss
that man. You remember him, I’m sure. We used to sit together and chat over a popsicle.
There’s not much to report here. My arthritis has made it difficult to play the
piano, and I’m essentially blind in my left eye now. One way or another, the right one is
doing fine. They have me put drops in three times a day. Sometimes I feel like I don’t do
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much else. Writing to you is a nice distraction, but again, the arthritis makes it difficult. I
apologize if I don’t make it much farther.
Your mother’s coming to make dinner tonight. We’ll be having pasta with tomato
sauce – vegetarian! Joan still can’t enjoy meat properly, after eating it so rarely during
your last years at home. You trained her well.
Anyway, I’m glad to hear you’re doing okay. I hope to hear from you soon.
Love,
Mammy
“Mammy?” Aaron says.
“Yeah,” Maddie says. “It’s a letter from August. I never saw it, in all the clutter.
Dust on the walls, a months’ long pile of mail…”
“Did you write to her often?”
“Stop trying to get to know me.”
“I know you, Maddie.”
Madeleine folds the letter and returns it to her pocket
“I know a place we can eat,” she says.
“Okay,” Aaron says, and he puts the car in reverse. “Steaks?”
“No,” Maddie says. “I’ll give you directions – it’ll be a surprise.”
Maddie’s mom stands in the hall, staring at her as their big black lab, Shadow,
rubs his nose against her.
“Does your father know where you are?” she says after a minute.
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“I told him I was going to Shelby’s,” Madeleine says.
“I suppose I should call him.”
They stand there a second longer, before Maddie’s mom turns and walks down
the hall to the kitchen. Madeleine and Shadow trail behind, and Maddie eventually sits at
the kitchen table.
“Your dad shouldn’t have let you out in the first place tonight,” her mom says, as
she fumbles with the landline on the other side of the room. “It’s the Friday before
Halloween.”
Maddie doesn’t say anything, and her dad doesn’t answer the phone. Her mom
sets it back into the receiver.
“And that David, I’ve never liked that boy,” her mother says. “He’s too in his
head, always plotting – you can’t trust boys like that, Madeleine—”
“Mom,” Maddie says.
“—They say one thing, but they mean another, and god knows what they’re
thinking—”
“Mom!” Maddie says, and her mom stops in her tracks, midway across the room.
“It’s my fault, alright? I willingly got in David’s car, and I was excited to smoke pot. I
didn’t smoke, but I wanted to, and that was my choice. Don’t blame Dad, and certainly
don’t blame David or Shelby. This was me, Mom.”
Maddie can’t read the expression on her mom’s face, but eventually her mom
turns and leaves the room, walking down the hall and plodding upstairs.
Maddie remains seated, unsure of what to do with herself. She scratches her dog’s
ears but he soon lies down, so she busies herself staring at the tiles on the kitchen table,
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wondering about that sticky grey material that binds them together. What’s it made of,
where does it come from? The minutes pass.
Eventually Maddie decides to take some initiative and demand that her mother
reveal Madeleine’s punishment. The anticipation is ruthless and unnecessary.
She treads lightly on her way upstairs. The door to her mother’s room is open and
when Madeleine gets close enough, she sees her mother sitting, and crying on the bed.
The last time Maddie saw her mother cry was shortly after the divorce, but she’s
hardened since then.
Madeleine almost turns to go back to her own room, but her mom looks up and
meets her eyes. They stare at each other through the doorway, Maddie in the dark
hallway and her mother on the mattress. Maddie realizes the bed is far too big for one.
She steps tentatively through the doorway and, although she intends to say
something completely different, she asks, “Do I belong in this family, Mom?”
“What?” her mother says. “Oh, sweetie, yes, of course you do.” She stands, and
walks across the room toward Madeleine, tears continuing to fall down her cheeks. She
hugs Madeleine close, and Maddie can feel her mom’s choppy breathing. “Of course you
do,” her mother says again, her tears wetting Maddie’s hair.
“Left here,” Maddie says.
“Really?”
Madeleine looks at Aaron, indignant. He slows and taps on the turning signal.
“It’s just that we’re in the heart of suburbia,” he says. “I don’t see any
restaurants.”
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“Just turn left,” Madeleine says.
After a car passes, driving well under the 25 mile per hour speed limit, he does so.
Maddie struggles with how to frame her next instruction, but Aaron’s phone illuminates
in the cup holder and begins to buzz.
“Shit, it’s my mom,” Aaron says, pulling over – just two houses away. He
answers the call and says, “Hey.”
Madeleine unlocks her door; she feels Aaron looking at her, but she doesn’t turn
back as she exits the vehicle.
She cuts across the neighbors’ yard, staring at the two-story home which looms
ahead of her. She thinks of the five bedrooms, which once hosted seven people. Aside
from this week, and the holidays, it’s just her mom here now.
It looks so different. She can’t put her finger on exactly what it is at first, but then
she realizes her mom had the wood painted. It’s blue now. Maddie struggles to remember
exactly what color it was before – off-white she eventually decides.
The furniture on the porch is different, too. But then she’s not entirely sure – the
chairs could have been there when she moved out. The swing’s new though – definitely.
She stares at the front door for a moment, wondering what her mother and her
siblings are doing on the other side. She pictures them at the kitchen table, working on a
crossword, Stephen making bacon and eggs. The funeral’s tomorrow, of course, so
whatever they’re doing, it’s sure to be a somber affair.
Maddie rings the doorbell and hears it chime throughout the house – it’s such a
distinct sound that it’s embedded itself in her subconscious: ding-dong-ding-dong… ding-
dong-ding-dong.
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On the other side of the door, a dog barks. At first she conjures up an image of
Shadow, but he died when Maddie was a senior in high school, and besides, this bark is
too high-pitched.
A woman, probably six or seven years older than Madeleine herself, opens the
door. A little Yorkshire Terrier hops at her feet.
“Can I help you?” the woman says.
Maddie, suddenly conscious of her matted pink pajama pants, looks past the
woman into the kitchen. A child, maybe a third grader, sits at the kitchen table, a
backpack on the ground beside her and a tattered copy of the first Harry Potter lying
open on the table. The girl looks up from her book and meets Maddie’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Maddie says. “I think I got the wrong house.”
“Oh,” the woman says. “Well, if you’re looking for anyone in this neighborhood,
I’m sure I’ll know them.”
“No,” Maddie says. “That’s fine. I’ll find it.”
“Well, okay,” the woman says, and the two women turn away from one another,
the door between them closing, then clicking shut.
Maddie plows straight across the lawn. Aaron stands beside the car, staring at her.
“What happened?” he calls.
Maddie doesn’t respond.
“Are you okay?” Aaron says.
She feels the first tears roll down her cheeks, streaks of warmth against the cold
air. Aaron walks around the car, and steps directly in front of her, his hands grabbing her
upper arms.
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“What is it?” he says, as she presses her face into his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s not the house,” Maddie mutters between staggered breaths. “It’s not the
house.”
“It’s not the house?” Aaron says. “What?”
“She moved,” Maddie says. “My mom moved, but it’s not the house, it’s not…”
“Your mom moved?” Aaron says. “Are we at your mother’s house?”
“Yeah, but it’s not… It’s not the house.”
Aaron pauses for a moment and then says, “Come on. That lady’s looking at us
through the blinds. I think she’s probably about to call the cops or something.”
He puts his right arm over Maddie’s shoulders and opens the car door, helping her
into her seat.
Maddie stops him before he closes the door behind her.
“I don’t care if it’s a hetero-normative hell hole,” she says. “I’m going to go to my
Mammy’s funeral.”
Aaron nods. “Okay,” he says.
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Chapter Eleven
At her house on campus, Jess hesitates before opening the door to her bedroom. It’s
going to be exactly like she left it: books sprawled out to study for her geography final,
clothes piled up in the closet. She almost wants to leave the room preserved like that, at
least for now – frozen in time at the moment she received her mother’s phone call. But
she needs her black leggings.
Her desk lamp is on, and her blinds are drawn tightly shut, light peeking through
at the edges. She crosses the room to open them, but then stops. She turns and sits at the
desk. Her book on Appalachian women and environmental justice lies open, and, in the
yellowy lamplight, she reads the first few lines on the page, trying to focus on the words
– but she can’t comprehend their meaning. So she closes her eyes. She breathes. And then
she hears the door open downstairs, followed by the muffled voices of her housemates.
“Yeah, she said she was going to stick around her mom’s until after the funeral
tomorrow,” Sierra says.
Morgan’s voice is softer and she can’t quite make out her exact words.
“I don’t know, they probably let her reschedule them,” Sierra says, and Jess
figures Morgan must have asked about Jess’s finals.
Jess still can’t hear everything Morgan says, but she catches the phrase ‘spoiled
little white girl,’ and it’s enough. She pictures herself standing with Sierra outside the
student center yesterday. ‘Weird coincidence,’ Sierra said, and Jess just nodded along.
“Hey, come on,” Sierra tells Morgan downstairs, and Morgan interrupts her, more
loudly this time.
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“You’re seriously going to tell me you aren’t pissed off?” Morgan says, her
volume tapering off toward the end of the sentence.
“No, of course I’m pissed,” Sierra says. “She had ample opportunity to tell me the
truth, and besides, she had to know everyone would find out. I’ve met the guy before, but
even if I hadn’t, she and her siblings are in his profile picture on Facebook.”
Jess forgot her dad had a Facebook; he hardly ever uses it.
She only hears some of what Morgan says next: “So why are you…”
“I’m not defending her,” Sierra says. “Although, I do just keep thinking that
maybe under different circumstances – but then I really don’t know!” She practically
shouts this phrase, and Jess jumps a bit in her seat. “I wouldn’t have thought she’d hide
something like that under any circumstances,” Sierra adds.
“You just can’t trust… Like a rule they…”
“Maybe you’re right,” Sierra says. “But she’s the only white person I’ve ever
really trusted. And I don’t know, she can’t control the fact that he’s her dad.”
“But the problem isn’t really the fact that he’s her dad,” Morgan says.
“That’s the truth,” Sierra says. “Cuz what she can control is how she reacts.”
Both of her roommates are silent then – or at least Jess can’t hear what they’re
saying. So she walks to the closet to search for her leggings.
As she roots through her dirty clothes, Jess thinks back to Saturday night. After
her mother called, she walked downstairs to find Sierra and Morgan and maybe five of
their friends sitting around drinking from Solo cups and listening to music.
“I called it, didn’t I?” Morgan said. “Jess is joining the party!”
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A few folks started to cheer and clap, but Sierra looked straight into Jess’s eyes
and said, “What’s up?” Their other friends quieted down almost immediately.
“I need a ride to the emergency room,” Jess said, her voice quiet. “I think my
grandma’s dying.”
Everyone stared at her for maybe a quarter of a second before Sierra stood, and
gestured for Jess to follow her out of the house.
When the stairs creak, Jess freezes in place and listens as the sound of footsteps
draws nearer.
“Sierra?” Morgan’s voice calls, her figure blocked from view by Jess’s open door.
“Yeah?” Sierra calls from downstairs.
“Were you rooting around in Jess’s room at all?”
“No – why?” Sierra says.
“The door’s open,” Morgan says.
“What?” Sierra calls.
“Forget about it,” Morgan calls, and she shuts Jess’s door. A few seconds later,
the fan turns on in the adjacent bathroom.
Jess exhales, and she notices that the whole time she’s been digging through her
clothes pile, her leggings have been exposed on the floor toward the other end of the
closet.
She grabs them just as Morgan flushes the toilet in the bathroom. Jess walks as
quickly and quietly as she can to her door, before making her way back down the stairs.
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She pauses on the landing. Something’s cooking – maybe Sierra’s preoccupied
and won’t notice her. Jess rounds the corner, and she can’t see Sierra through the open
doorframe that connects the living room to the kitchen, so she hurries quietly toward the
foyer.
The front door’s cracked open, letting the cold stream in, and Jess wonders briefly
whether she should close it to keep the heating bill down or leave it open so nobody will
know she was home. But it doesn’t matter; she pulls open the door and steps outside,
where she nearly runs straight into Sierra, who carries a stack of mail in her arms.
“Jess,” Sierra says. “What’re you doing here?”
Jess hesitates, and then says, “I was napping.”
“You came here to nap?”
“I… Not just to nap, no. I had to get these leggings. And then – yeah. I napped.
I’ve been asleep. Things with my family are… crazy.”
“Oh,” Sierra says. “You needed some refuge, then?”
“Yeah.”
Sierra nods, and she looks like she’s about to say something else, but Jess
interrupts her: “Well, you shouldn’t be out here in just your socks, and I should really get
home, so… I’ll see ya.”
“Okay,” Sierra says, but she doesn’t move. Jess shuffles past her and descends the
porch steps, walking onto the street.
“Jess,” Sierra calls, and Jess turns around, wordlessly. A moment passes in
silence, and then Sierra says, “You got a letter from the internet company. It’s probably
spam…”
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“I’m sure it is,” Jess says. “I have auto-pay set up.”
“Okay,” Sierra says. “I’ll just recycle it then.”
Although Jess nods, Sierra keeps looking at her. But Jess turns away, and walks to
her mom’s minivan. It’s only after she’s turned on the ignition that Sierra walks back
inside.
Due to the weather, it takes Jess twenty minutes to get home, as opposed to the
usual fifteen, and she spends just about every minute of it replaying that interaction with
Sierra, willing it to have gone differently. All she had to say was “I’m sorry” or “I heard
you two talking” – anything, just to initiate a conversation.
When she turns onto her street, she sees a car idling in front of her family’s
single-story house. She wonders vaguely who it could be – the car is a filthy and dented
old Ford Taurus.
Jess really hadn’t wanted to talk to anybody else this afternoon, but, whoever this
is, they’re almost certainly bearing casserole, and Jess knows that the thing to do would
be to save them the trip from their car.
She pulls up beside the old Ford. When she lowers her window, she sees
Madeleine, through the Ford’s fogged glass, sitting in the passenger seat.
Before Jess has a chance to react, the guy in the driver’s seat rolls down his
window, and Madeleine says, “I guess this is really the right house, then?”
“The right house?” Jess says.
“We got the address from the Millers, down the road from the old place, but it just
doesn’t look right.”
“It doesn’t look right?” Jess says.
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“I don’t know,” Madeleine says.
Jess shakes her head and squints at her sister. “Are you here for the funeral?” she
says.
“Why else would I be here?” Madeleine says.
Jess almost offers money as a possible alternative explanation, but when a car
honks behind her, she’s grateful she didn’t get the words out. She gestures for Maddie
and her friend to hold on, rolls up her window, and pulls up in front of their Ford.
She parks and steps outside, holding her leggings in her left hand and clenching
her right into a fist inside her jacket pocket.
After Maddie and that guy get out of their car, Jess stares at her sister, unsure
whether to hug her. Instead, she just says, “Nice pants.” They’re pink and fuzzy, but
matted in places with what looks like dried syrup.
Maddie looks down, as if she’s surprised that she’s wearing them. “I’ve been
meaning to wash them,” she says.
“Are those your only pair of pants or something?” Jess says, and Maddie just rolls
her eyes. “Well,” Jess adds, “You can borrow some of mine later if you need to.”
“Thanks,” Maddie mutters.
“You’re Maddie’s boyfriend?” Jess asks the man beside her sister. He has shaggy
brown hair and gauged ears. One corner of his flannel shirt is tucked into the front of his
ripped up jeans, and Jess wonders whether he’s just had his hand down his pants, maybe
to itch at his crotch.
“Why would you think he’s my boyfriend?” Maddie says, before the man has a
chance to answer the question for himself.
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“I’m Aaron,” the guy says, but Jess speaks over him: “Well, you’re brining him to
the funeral.”
“He’s not staying,” Maddie replies.
“I’m not?” Aaron says.
“Of course not,” Maddie says, turning away from Jess and looking Aaron in the
eyes. “You seriously thought you were?”
“I don’t know.”
Jess looks between the two of them and then walks toward the house.
Maddie and Aaron follow, and Maddie says, “Hey, good to see you too.”
Jess doesn’t reply. Maddie soon closes in on her and throws an arm over her
shoulders.
“Are you mad at me or something?” Maddie says.
“A little bit, yes,” Jess says.
“Well I’m mad at you too. You never respond to my phone calls!”
“You’ve tried to call me?”
“No, never,” Maddie says. “I was just trying to break the ice. Why’re you mad?”
Jess shrugs out of her sister’s embrace and says, “I’m sorry, I’m just in a mood.
Forget about it.”
“Will not,” Maddie says.
“It’s just… it was bad enough for you not to come, but this is the worst way you
could possibly have gone about things.”
“That’s what you’re mad about?” Maddie says.
“First of all, I’m not the one who used the word ‘mad,’” Jess says. “I just—”
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“Because I’m sure I could think of at least five or six worse ways to go about
things. You underestimate me, little sister.”
Jess unlocks the front door.
“So,” Jess says. “This boy who isn’t your boyfriend – he’s coming inside?”
“I promised him lunch,” Madeleine says. “Do we have steaks by any chance?”
“Steaks?” Jess says, pausing to look at her sister. “You drop the whole veggie
thing, Maddie?”
“No,” Maddie says. “I’ve just been having a craving all day.”
“Well, I guess the rumors are true,” Jess says.
Maddie’s face drops, and Jess can feel her sister staring at her as she opens the
door. She really shouldn’t have said that.
“Sorry, I don’t even know what I meant by that,” Jess says, as she enters the
house. “I’m just tired.”
“Oh,” Maddie says. “What’re the sleeping arrangements like, anyway?”
“You’ll have to sleep on the couch,” Jess says.
“But you get a bed?” Maddie says.
“First come first serve,” Jess says.
“Who’s there?” their mom calls from the kitchen.
“Just another casserole,” Jess says. She turns to Maddie and whispers, “One last
chance to back out.”
“I expect you to be nicer to me after lunch,” Maddie says, patting Jess on the
shoulder.
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Maddie walks ahead of her then and passes into the kitchen, with Aaron trailing
behind her.
“Madeleine…” their mom says.
“Hi, Mom,” Maddie says, as Jess walks down the hall to her room. She doesn’t
want to witness her mother’s reaction to Maddie’s boyfriend – or her pants.
She shuts her bedroom door behind her, grabs Poppy from the bookshelf, and
collapses in bed. She reads a few pages but can’t concentrate, so she covers her eyes with
the book, thinking that perhaps a nap doesn’t sound like such a bad idea after all. She
can’t even do that though, because her mom’s asking Maddie question after question in
the kitchen, and Maddie’s near-robotic one-word answers are too excruciating to turn
away from. One day, maybe Jess will live someplace with thicker walls.
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Chapter Twelve
Collin glances at the photograph: he, Jess, and Madeline are with Mammy in her
backyard, sitting at the picnic table. Collin’s young – maybe six. He doesn’t remember
that day, and he wonders vaguely whether either of his sisters would, if they were here.
He sighs and places the picture facedown on the scanner. His mom asked him to
make a poster board, filled with pictures of Mammy, since they’d only allow ‘a measly
twenty’ in the slideshow. Collin was relieved when Stephen volunteered to help, but so
far that’s only translated into Stephen accompanying Collin to CVS and standing behind
him, texting.
“It stresses me out, having to finish this project tonight,” Collin says. “I’m really
not that good at Photoshop.”
“You’re an artist,” Stephen says, after he closes his phone. “Isn’t that what you’re
going to school for?”
“I’m a writer,” Collin says. “And to be honest – well, did you ever have any
doubts that you were on the right track? With law?”
Stephen looks at Collin, the faintest hint of concern in his expression, but then his
phone buzzes. He looks down at the screen and smiles.
Collin lifts the scanner and removes the picture of their picnic. He avoids looking
at the next one as he places it on the glass.
“Who are you texting, anyway?” Collin says. “Angela?”
Stephen laughs.
“What?” Collin says.
“We’ve been married three years. We don’t really text much anymore.”
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“Then who’re you texting?”
“A friend,” Stephen says. “How many more of these do we have to go through?”
“We’re about halfway there,” Collin says. “Are you in a hurry or something?”
“Just curious,” Stephen says.
In the next picture, Stephen is a newborn, and Mammy holds him in her arms,
peering into his eyes and smiling. In the bottom right hand corner, bright red lettering
reads, “02/15/89” – the day Stephen was born. Mammy looks about the same as she did
the last time Collin saw her, but somehow she looks so much more vivacious, radiating
life. Collin can’t remember her ever looking that way.
“Are you ever gonna have kids?” Collin says.
“What?”
“You’re nearly thirty, it’s a fair question.”
“I’m 28,” Stephen says.
“29 in February,” Collin says. “All I’m saying is, you’re almost as old as Mom
and Dad were when they had you, and our parents started late, at least for their
generation.”
He shows Stephen the photograph, but Stephen’s phone buzzes, and he quickly
looks down.
“I don’t think I’ll be having kids anytime soon,” Stephen says.
Collin nods. “I think I want to have kids early, assuming I can get a job and
everything.” He sets the picture of Stephen and Mammy on the glass.
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Stephen slides his phone into his pocket, despite another vibration, and nudges
Collin’s shoulder. “Don’t go throwing your life away, just because it’s what’s expected
of you,” he says.
Collin looks at him and raises his eyebrows. “You’re one to talk.”
“If you say so,” Stephen says. He gets his phone back out and responds to the next
message.
“You got married when you were 25,” Collin says. “You’re a business lawyer.
Just because I want kids doesn’t mean I’m a sell out or something.”
“Don’t get defensive,” Stephen says, continuing to type. “And don’t forget to scan
the pictures.”
Collin glances at the machine; a pop-up window announces the completion of the
scan. Collin hurriedly replaces the photo, but he accidentally hits ‘delete scan’ rather than
‘scan another.’ He curses under his breath and switches the pictures back.
He looks up at Stephen, but he hasn’t noticed, or, if he has, he’s unphased.
“Who’s your friend, anyway?” Collin asks.
“Her name’s Lisa,” Stephen says. Then, after a beat: “I’m not sure Angela and I
will be together much longer.”
Collin looks up at his brother. “Because of Lisa?” he says, and Stephen laughs.
“What?” Collin says.
“You just look like you’ve heard horrible news or something.”
“Well?”
“It’s not that big of a deal.”
“You’re married.”
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“So are plenty of people. We were young.”
Stephen points at the scanner, and Collin spins around.
“You regret it? Getting married?” Collin says.
“There’s just more experiences to be had in the world,” Stephen says.
“Sex, you mean?” Collin says quietly.
Stephen laughs again.
“What?” Collin says, annoyed.
“I can have all the sex I want,” Stephen says, and Collin’s eyes dart across the
store, fixating just over Stephen’s shoulder. A middle-aged woman, next in line for the
scanner, glares at them. “I just don’t want to be tied down,” Stephen explains.
“What do you hope to gain by telling me all this?” Collin asks.
“I’m just talking,” Stephen says.
“But what am I supposed to do with all this information?”
“What information?”
“That you’re thinking of leaving your wife, and that you’re having affairs, and
that it’s all no big deal. Except, that I bet Angela wouldn’t think it’s no big deal, and I bet
Mom wouldn’t either, and Jess wouldn’t either.”
Stephen shrugs. Collin bets that he could start screaming at him, right here in the
middle of CVS, and he wouldn’t even bat an eyelash.
“Look,” Stephen says, “you’re just my brother, and we’re just having a
conversation.”
“Well, I don’t want to know all that,” Collin says.
“Okay,” Stephen says, and he looks back down at his phone.
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It’s another half an hour before they’re finished scanning all the photos. When
they get home, Collin parks behind a beat-up Ford that looks like it belongs a couple of
neighborhoods over. Stephen exits the car first and walks to the house without waiting for
Collin to finish zipping his coat.
Collin notices that Stephen abandoned his phone in the cup holder, the screen
illuminated with new messages – but Collin turns the device off without reading them.
He wants nothing to do with it. He wants nothing to do with any of it.
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Chapter Thirteen
When Maddie’s mom encouraged Aaron to stick around for dinner at a Mexican
restaurant, Maddie’s kicks under the table proved an insufficient counterweight. She now
wonders whether she could have done more to stop the day’s progression in its tracks, but
she tries not to agonize over it all that much.
The waitress approaches and asks if they need more time. Even though Maddie
knows she wants the burrito with fajitas (as close as she’ll get to a rib eye steak), she
nearly says that she’d like a few more minutes, just for an excuse to stare at the menu and
avoid conversation. However, her brother interjects immediately to say, “No, we’re
good,” and before long the waitress has left, menus in tow.
Luckily, nobody besides Jess seems to have noticed that Maddie ordered meat,
but her mother quickly jumps into another line of inquiry that’s just as undesirable: “So,
Maddie, what have you been doing for work?”
“Well, right now I’m fun-employed,” Maddie says. “But, just the other day, I saw
that the library on campus is hiring, so I might try to do that.”
Her mom nods, and Maddie takes a sip of her water. But then Stephen, of course,
asks, “How long have you been fun-employed?”
Maddie can sense Aaron about to intervene on her behalf so she almost speaks
over her brother as he reaches the end of his question: “Couple of months.” Aaron
deflates beside her.
“That stinks,” Stephen says.
She could leave it at that, but she feels Collin’s gaze. Madeleine doesn’t care too
much what he thinks, especially since she has a strong suspicion that he told Jess about
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her pregnancy, because of Jess’s off-handed remark earlier. But, then again, it could’ve
just been Jess’s poor attempt at a joke… Regardless, she finds herself clarifying.
“It’s really fine,” she says. “I didn’t get laid off or anything, I’d just saved up
enough money to take it easy for a bit. A bunch of our friends all moved into a house
together, and the rent’s dirt cheap – less than a hundred bucks a month.”
“That’s cool,” Jess says.
“They have communal meals,” Collin says.
“Does your landlord know how many people you have living there?” their mom
says.
“No,” Madeleine says with a laugh. She takes a sip of her water.
“So what happens when your landlord evicts you?” Stephen says.
“She has no reason to,” Maddie says, taking another sip. “We get the rent in on
time and we make it easy enough for her to look the other way.”
“But she could,” Stephen says. “The second you get on her bad side, she could.”
“Theoretically, yes, Stephen, that is a possibility,” Maddie says.
“So what do you do when that happens?” Stephen asks.
Maddie nudges Aaron, circumventing his next attempt to intervene.
“Well, then I’ll come move in with you, Stephen,” Maddie says, “since it seems
like you’ll be so glad to have me.”
That shuts Stephen up. She takes another sip of her water. Her glass is half-empty,
although nobody else in her family has touched theirs.
“Madeleine, don’t be rude,” her mom says. “You haven’t seen your brother in
how long?”
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“He started it,” Maddie says, with a shrug. The words replay in her mind with the
intonations of a bratty little kid.
“I don’t care who started it,” her mom says. “Your Mammy’s funeral is
tomorrow.”
They all pause to linger on this, and Maddie thinks back to that letter: I hope to
hear from you soon.
“It’s easy to forget, isn’t it?” Jess says. “You let your mind wander for a minute,
and it’s gone but…”
“But that doesn’t change anything,” their mom says, and Jess nods. “I can’t
believe we’re putting her in the ground tomorrow. I wish we had more time.”
Jess reaches across the table and puts her hand on their mother’s. Their mom’s
body seems to ease up, just a bit. Madeleine wonders whether she would’ve had the same
reaction, if Maddie were the one who’d reached across the table.
“She’s been in that morgue too long already, Mom,” Stephen says. “You wouldn’t
want to keep filling her up with chemicals, preserving her like Lenin or something.”
Maddie raises her eyebrows and looks toward her mom, who doesn’t really react.
“That’s not what she’s saying, Stephen,” Jess says, removing her hand from their
mom’s.
“You know, there might be something nice,” Collin says, “in knowing that her
body’s reunited with the earth.”
“Yeah,” Aaron says. “She’ll be at rest, after the funeral.”
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Rather than a nudge, Maddie pinches Aaron’s leg. He flinches, but places his
hand gently on Maddie’s thigh in retaliation. She grabs his wrist and removes his hand
slowly, trying not to draw attention to the interaction.
Her mom looks to Jess and says, “Do you think your father will be there?”
“I’m not sure,” Jess says.
“I talked to him yesterday, and he said he’d come,” Stephen says.
“I wish he would just stay home,” their mom says.
Maddie looks between her mother and her sister, who grimaces and nods in
understanding.
“You should just tell Dad you don’t want him there,” Maddie says. She feels
everyone stare at her, but she can’t tell what anyone’s thinking. “Or have Stephen tell
him,” she offers, and she looks to Collin for support. He nods, although Maddie’s pretty
sure that nobody except her notices.
“No, I couldn’t do that,” her mom says.
“It would just be a simple text,” Maddie says.
“It’s not simple at all, Maddie.”
“Why not?”
Jess replies on their mother’s behalf: “Because he feels entitled to come.” She
says it confidently and directly.
Maddie almost tells Jess that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but then
their mom says, “Jess is right. Mammy always liked your dad. She helped him get his
first job in real estate development after we were married, calling all around.”
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“Mammy helped him get into real estate development?” Jess says. “He’s never
mentioned that before.”
“Of course he wouldn’t acknowledge it,” their mom says. “But Mammy had
connections, since your grandfather worked in the city government.”
“Huh,” Jess says.
“Just because Mammy helped Dad get a job 35 years ago doesn’t mean he has to
come to the funeral tomorrow,” Madeleine says.
“I don’t think the point’s the job,” Aaron says.
“What the hell do you know about it?” Madeleine says.
“The point,” her mom says, “is that your dad’s going to come because Mammy
was always on his side – even through all the affairs. I don’t think she ever understood
why I didn’t just put up with him. He’s going to come tomorrow, to show his
appreciation.”
“But you can just tell him not to come,” Madeleine says.
“I don’t have any sway over what he does.”
“She’s your mom, though,” Maddie says.
“He doesn’t care, Madeleine.”
Maddie takes a sip from her water.
“It’s not like he’s some heartless monster,” Stephen says.
“Oh come on, Stephen,” Jess says, sitting forward in her seat.
Ordinarily, Maddie would have been the one to say something. She takes another
sip of water.
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“All I said was that he’s not a heartless monster,” Stephen says. “He’s a person.
Maybe he’s made mistakes, but—”
“There’s no ‘but,’” Jess says.
“Can we drop it?” their mom says. “I’m sorry I said anything about him.”
Jess slumps down into her chair, and Maddie looks at the large analog clock on
the other side of the room. The taller smiling cactus has only progressed from the five to
the six since she first looked, and the smaller one hasn’t moved at all, as far as she can
tell.
The waitress walks by then, and Maddie says, “Excuse me, can I get some more
water?”
“Sure thing,” the waitress says.
“Thirsty tonight, huh?” Aaron says.
“Oh, she always drinks a lot of water at restaurants,” Collin says.
Aaron looks at her, his eyebrows raised.
“Stop inserting yourself into the conversation,” Maddie whispers to him, as Jess
asks Collin how his photo project is coming along.
“I was invited, wasn’t I?” Aaron says. “Or did I just imagine that?”
Maddie’s mom glares at her across the table, and Maddie turns away from Aaron.
“—hard to get it done quickly, since I just want to look at all the photos,” Collin’s
saying.
“He spent over an hour at the scanner in CVS,” Stephen says.
“You could’ve taken over at any time,” Collin says.
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Stephen shrugs and pulls out his phone, turning the device slightly away from
their mom, toward the room. It’s a gesture Maddie recognizes.
“What’s this photo project, Collin?” Aaron says.
Maddie almost shoves him again, but hesitates, speculating as to why her usual
tactics aren’t working tonight. By the time she re-centers herself in the group’s
conversation, Collin’s midway through his explanation of the project (something about
Mammy’s funeral), and the moment has passed.
The waitress returns with the water, cutting off the conversation as she fills
Maddie’s glass. Before anybody has the chance to get back to what they were talking
about, Stephen says, “So Maddie, are you among the five percent of the population left
without health insurance?”
“Actually, something like 12 percent of people don’t have health insurance in this
country,” Jess says.
“I have a plan through the ACA marketplace,” Madeleine says.
“One of those worthless cheapo ones?” Stephen says.
“Haven’t had to test it out yet,” Maddie says.
“You might never get the chance,” Stephen says. “If Trump has his way, that is.”
“Yeah, if only Clinton was president and Maddie got to keep her worthless
cheapo plan,” Aaron says. “You know it started out as Romney Care right?”
“Aaron,” Madeleine says.
“What?” he says. “It’s true, I mean – Stephen, I’m not saying Clinton wouldn’t
have been better than Trump or any crap like that, but you do hear yourself, right?”
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“Let’s not get into this here,” their mom says, at the same time that Stephen, more
loudly, says, “The ACA might not have been perfect, but Clinton would have tried to
improve it.”
“You really buy that?” Aaron says. “You’re a smart guy, look at who funds the
goddamn party.”
“The testosterone in this room is through the roof,” Maddie says, and this seems
to deflate Aaron at least, but Stephen goes on: “It’s in the interest of healthcare and
insurance providers to make sure that the insurance system is viable.”
“This really is the election that never ends,” their mom says, and Jess laughs.
“We’re going to have to play that song, I suppose, the one that unites us all – what is it?”
“Oh, ‘Hello!’” Collin says. “I loved that SNL skit.”
“Right,” their mom says, and she begins to sing: “Hello from the other side… I
must have called a thousand times!”
Collin laughs and begins to clap. Aaron joins in, and the rest of the table gives a
few gentle and obligatory claps as well.
“That was great, Mrs. Ballard,” Aaron says.
“Joan,” Maddie’s mom says.
“Right, sorry – Joan,” Aaron says.
Aaron looks over at Maddie and says, “Did you know your mom was such a good
singer?”
“The world is full of surprises,” Maddie says.
“Maybe if you’d come to church more often you would’ve noticed,” Stephen
says.
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“Like you’re such a passionate Christian, Stephen,” Maddie says.
“I’m just saying, there’s a reason none of the rest of is surprised.”
“Lay off, Stephen,” Jess says.
“Yeah, she’s here now,” Collin says.
“Yeah,” Stephen says. “Thank goodness for that.”
“Hey, I’m a part of this family,” Madeleine mutters, and Aaron grabs her hand.
“What?” Stephen says.
“I said I’m a part of this family,” Madeleine says, louder this time.
“By blood,” Stephen says.
Their mom sets her water glass down on the table. “Enough,” she says, and the
table plunges into silence.
Maddie pulls her hand out of Aaron’s. “You know,” she says, “I could go my
whole life without ever seeing any of you again.” She rotates her glass in a small pool of
condensation on the table, and when nobody responds, she adds, “I have to use the
restroom.”
The legs of her chair screech against the floor as she pushes it out behind her.
Aaron follows her across the restaurant.
“You have no right,” Maddie says, without turning her head.
“Excuse me?”
“We fucked, Aaron, and you got me pregnant. That’s it. You’re not my boyfriend
or any crap like that.”
Maddie attempts to open the bathroom door, but it’s locked.
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“They really go hard with the theme,” Aaron says, nodding at the mural in the
hallway – a group of skeletons are playing small, stringed instruments in a street band,
and one of them uses a broken rib to strum.
“Don’t ignore me,” Maddie says.
“I’m not ignoring you. But I’m not totally clear on your point.”
“All I’m trying to say is, stop trying to… connect with them. I didn’t even want
you here. I made that pretty clear.”
“Look,” Aaron says. “Who’s going to follow you to the bathroom, if I leave?
Who’s going to hold your hand under the table, or defend you when you need it? Do you
really want to be alone with these people for another 24 hours?”
Maddie’s silent. A middle-aged woman exits the restroom and smiles at them.
Maddie catches the door, but Aaron stops her by placing a hand on her shoulder.
“Even if I’m not your boyfriend – even if I’m just your roommate – I’m better
than nothing,” he says.
Maddie turns her head. Aaron really needs to shave, she notices. His facial hair is
patchy, and it doesn’t suit him.
“I need some time to think,” she says, and she enters the restroom, closing the
door behind her.
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Chapter Fourteen
The lights are out in Jess’s room and she lies in bed, staring at the ceiling. Aaron
took the couch downstairs, so Maddie’s in Collin’s sleeping bag, on Jess’s floor. Jess has
a full bed, and there’s room for two – but first come, first serve, she reminds herself.
“Hey Maddie,” Jess says – though as the words come out, she reconsiders.
“Yeah?” Maddie says.
“Do you need anything?”
“I’m good.”
Jess closes her eyes and rolls over, facing the wall. Almost immediately, Sierra
and Morgan’s conversation echoes in her mind. She’s the only white person I’ve ever
really trusted.
“Well, tomorrow,” Maddie says – and Jess snaps back into reality – “I’m going to
need to borrow some more clothes.”
“I don’t really have too many extra dress clothes lying around,” Jess says. “You’ll
have to ask Mom.”
“Okay,” Maddie says. “I suppose I’ll have to wear a dress. I haven’t worn a dress
in ages.”
“Well, if you wanted to wear a pant suit instead you should have brought your
own clothes.”
“Look, to be completely honest, I wasn’t exactly planning to come.”
“Oh, wow, I’m glad you cleared that up,” Jess says, “as if the pink pajamas didn’t
already make it clear.”
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“I was coming to Columbus for – an errand – a doctor’s appointment.” There are
plenty of doctors in Athens, so Jess has a strong suspicion as to what type of doctor
Maddie needed to visit in Columbus – and she almost asks about it – but then Maddie
continues: “And – this morning – I found a letter Mammy sent me, that I hadn’t opened.”
“You kept in touch with Mammy?” Jess says.
“We were always close, growing up,” Madeleine says. “I felt bad, falling off the
face of the earth, just because I had issues with Mom and Dad.”
“You fell off the face of the earth for the rest of us though,” Jess says. “I mean,
Collin and I.”
“Mammy was different,” Maddie says. “I always figured she was at death’s door,
and what kind of person would I have been if I’d just stopped answering her letters? With
you and Collin… I don’t know.”
“I guess you and I were never really that close anyway,” Jess says.
“We were close,” Madeleine says, and Jess doesn’t reply. “Remember when we
used to walk to Huffman’s market?” Maddie adds. “We’d fill our bowls up with soft
serve, so much that we’d never finish them.”
Jess remembers sitting in the parking lot outside the market, heat radiating from
the pavement. Her fingers and mouth would get sticky, the dessert dribbling down her
shirt.
“I think I only ever finished mine once,” Jess says. “And I’m pretty sure it made
me sick.”
“Oh yeah,” Madeleine says. “I had to walk back into the store and ask to use their
phone, so I could get Mom to come pick us up.”
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Jess tries to remember more details, but she can’t.
“That was always fun, going to Huffman’s,” Jess says. “But it was when we were
little kids. The second you hit puberty, you were too busy trying to be all mature and cool
to deal with your little sister.” Jess can sense that Madeleine’s about to respond, but she
cuts her off. “So I guess it makes sense – that you never tried to contact me. Collin was
different though. He idolized you.”
Maddie doesn’t say anything, and they lie there in silence for about thirty
seconds.
“I wasn’t trying to make you feel guilty, or anything,” Jess says. “I’m not sure
why I started talking about this, anyway. You’re back now.”
“Back isn’t exactly the right word,” Maddie says. “I’ve never been in this house
before, and I don’t have a room. To top it off, I can’t seem to shake my dingus friend,
Aaron. He was really only supposed to stay for lunch.”
Jess laughs.
“What?” Maddie says.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anyone use the word ‘dingus’ before, that’s all.”
“Oh. I kind of like it. Dingus, dingus, dingus. Rolls off the tongue.”
“Dingus, dingus, dingus,” Jess says, and this time Maddie laughs. “But, no, Aaron
seems nice. He’s sweet.”
“I guess,” Maddie says.
“Is he…” Jess wants to ask if he’s the father, but of course she’s not supposed to
know that Maddie’s pregnant. She may have blown the secret earlier anyway, but in case
she didn’t – she doesn’t want to violate Collin’s trust now.
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“We’re really not together,” Maddie says.
“Seems like he wants to be,” Jess says.
“Oh, what tipped you off?” Maddie says. “Was it his never taking no for an
answer – or his acting like I’m his private property?”
“The way he was talking with Stephen at dinner, I’m surprised he believes in
private property.”
“Oh, he doesn’t believe in it. He can go on and on raging against private property,
patriarchy, the nuclear family. But in practice, he’s just another fucking bro. I don’t see
any reason to put up with him.”
Jess rolls over to look at Maddie, lying on the floor. She can only see her sister’s
outline.
“I don’t know, I mean – I agree with you politically, and it’s shitty that he doesn’t
practice what he preaches… But – I don’t know. It just seems like he really cares about
you, and… People grow and develop. We all – this society, it makes us into the worst
version of ourselves, and we make mistakes, but… that’s okay. Don’t you think that’s
okay?”
“You’re an anarchist?” Maddie says.
Jess pauses. She wonders if Maddie heard anything else she said.
“Well, I don’t know,” Jess says. “I haven’t met a lot of anarchists who can
actually articulate how to change things. But I think that trying to lead a life like you’re
trying to lead – it’s admirable.”
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Maddie laughs. “Trying is really the operative word,” she says. “Where I live isn’t
really the sort of place… Well, you just couldn’t raise a child there, for example. Of
course, established communes might—”
“Are you thinking of having a child?” Jess says.
Maddie pauses abruptly, and Jess worries that she interrupted her sister a bit too
conspicuously.
“Maybe one day,” Maddie says, and Jess’s body relaxes. “Maybe if I get out of
Athens, away from all the DIY punk kids, and find some folks who are actually serious
about the project of communal living. Maybe then.”
Jess’s eyes have adjusted to the dark a bit, and she can see Madeleine a little more
clearly. Her sleeping bag’s unzipped, and one of her knees sticks out slightly, onto the
floor.
“You always wanted to have kids,” Jess says.
“I don’t know about that. I’m not very maternal.”
“No, I remember talking to you about it once. You were probably thirteen, or
fourteen… Maybe even older than that, I don’t know. It was whenever Pluto was
demoted.”
“Pluto?” Madeleine says, sitting up in her sleeping bag.
“Yeah,” Jess says, “Because that’s how it came up. You were so defensive of
Pluto—”
“I was defensive of Pluto?”
“Yes!” Jess says. “After it was demoted to a dwarf planet, you said you’d name
your first child in its honor, and we talked about how the kid would get bullied all the
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time – but anyway, at the end of the conversation, you said you really wanted to be a
mom one day. You said you’d raise your kids different than how Mom and Dad raised us.
You wouldn’t take them to church every week, or force the subordination of women
down their throats, or any of that. And I said you’d be a good mom, even though, at the
time, I was among the devout myself.”
“I don’t really remember that,” Madeleine says.
“Oh,” Jess says.
She can even picture where the two of them were sitting. They were at the
playground by their old house, watching Collin on the swing set… After about half a
minute passes, Jess wonders whether there’s been some unspoken agreement to go to
sleep.
“Maddie?” Jess says.
“Yeah?”
“How do you reconcile this life you’re trying to lead, with where you came from
– with your access to all of Dad’s wealth? I mean, don’t you ever feel like it’s not your
struggle?”
“Well, I don’t really have access to Dad’s wealth anymore,” Maddie says.
“Yeah you do,” Jess says. “If you were ever in a tough spot, it would be no
trouble for him to pay your rent, give you money for food, bail you out of jail, or even
pay off thousands of dollars of debt.”
“I guess.”
“So how do you reconcile it?” Jess asks again.
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“Well, what’s the alternative?” Maddie asks. “Either I’m going to fight back and
lead my life the way I’m leading it, or I’m not. Maybe it’s not my struggle exactly, but
then again, it’s everyone’s.”
“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” Jess says.
“Sure. I’m not a huge fan of Marx, but sure.”
Again, Jess feels like she’ll never understand anarchy. But she decides not to get
into it now.
“Sometimes it just feels so complicated,” Jess says.
“How do you mean?” Maddie says.
Jess pauses.
“Well, for instance, I’m in this student group at school,” Jess says. “It’s called the
students’ union, and we’ve organized around a variety of issues in the past, but right now
we’re trying to build a campaign against a development deal that the university signed
onto, which would basically gentrify a neighboring community, and build luxury high
rises for students. And, at our meeting yesterday, I learned that the university would be
partnering with dad’s company for the deal.”
“Well shit,” Maddie says.
“I know. And – well, when my friend asked me if there was any relation between
me and him, I lied.”
“Why would you lie about that?”
“I don’t know,” Jess says. “I panicked. But of course my friends found out – I’m
in Dad’s profile picture on Facebook, and it’s not like Ballard Development Group is
trying to hide the name of its CEO.”
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“Have they confronted you about it?”
“No. Not yet.”
“Then just come clean, Jess.”
“I don’t think people will trust me anymore, in the group,” Jess says.
“So earn the trust, then. Or, if they don’t want you in the group then that’s that. If
this is really about the struggle against corporate greed and racism, then there are more
ways to struggle than in this one organization.”
“You’re one to talk,” Jess says. “Your whole politics is about a particular
organizational affiliation, a set of friendships. You’re building a commune.”
“It’s a collective,” Madeleine says. “And it’s not an organization.”
They’re silent. After a minute or so, Jess rolls over again, and faces the wall. She
closes her eyes and tries to concentrate on her breathing. In and out, in and out… But the
campaign keeps flitting back into her mind, as does the funeral, as does seeing her father
at the funeral.
“Jess?” Maddie says.
“Yeah?”
“Even if we aren’t on exactly the same page about everything, it’s nice to know
that somebody else in the family is on my team,” Maddie says. “Generally, anyway.”
“Yeah,” Jess says. “I guess it is pretty nice.”
“You guess?” Maddie says, and Jess laughs.
“I’d just never thought about us as being on the same team before,” Jess says.
“But you’re right. We are, generally.”
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Maddie laughs this time, and then, after a pause, she asks, “Do you really think
I’d be a good mother?”
“I do,” Jess replies, and she realizes that she means it.
“Thanks,” Maddie says. “I don’t think I’d be half bad at it either.”
Silence drapes itself over the pair of them. Jess tries to match her breaths to
Maddie’s, just because – in and out, in and out. Soon, the world fades away, and Jess is
asleep.
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Part Three
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Chapter Fifteen
In her bedroom, Joan zips her daughter’s dress. It’s not a perfect fit, but it will do. She
wants to ask how it happened, that Maddie came all this way without a change of clothes
– wearing those filthy pink pajama pants. However, she should be happy that Maddie
came at all, and besides, this is surely a nicer dress than any that Maddie would have
chosen for herself.
Maddie walks to Joan’s dresser and looks in the mirror. Her expression is difficult
to read, but Joan reminds herself that even if Maddie doesn’t like the dress – even if she
hates it – she will have to accept it.
“It’ll do,” Maddie says, and Joan nods. Maddie stares at herself a moment longer
and then asks, “Shoes?”
“Of course,” Joan says, and she returns to her closet.
“No,” Maddie says, as Joan lifts a pair of high heels. “You’ve got to have another
pair.”
“They’re not very large heels, Madeleine,” Joan says.
“They’re still heels,” Maddie says. “If you don’t have another pair, I think I’ll just
stick to my tennis shoes.”
Joan sighs and lowers her arms.
“If you really came here for Mammy—”
“Of course I really came here for Mammy,” Maddie says. “What else do you
think I would’ve come for?”
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Joan returns the shoes to the closet, reminding herself that when Maddie acts out
it’s often best to disengage. Sure enough, after a moment, Maddie says, “I didn’t mean it
that way, Mom.”
“How did you mean it, Madeleine?” Joan says, her voice level.
“Look, I’ll wear the shoes if I have to, but if you have anything else that you’d
consider remotely passable, I’d really prefer that.”
Joan finds the pair she has in mind and says, “Try these. They’re a bit scuffed up,
but I doubt anyone will notice.”
“Thanks,” Maddie says. She sits on Joan’s bed to try them, though she doesn’t
bother to cross her legs.
Watching Maddie squeeze her foot into the shoe, Joan realizes why Maddie might
have conveniently ‘forgotten’ her own clothes.
“You know,” Joan says, “if you need money—”
“I don’t need money,” Maddie says.
“You don’t have to pretend, Madeleine,” Joan says. “If you need even just a little
bit of help, I would be happy—”
“I don’t need any help,” Maddie says. “Except maybe a little help fitting into
these shoes.”
“You may have changed since I last saw you, Maddie, but your feet surely
haven’t grown.”
“There,” Maddie says, as the heel cap slips over her foot. She moves on to the
second shoe.
“Well, you can keep this outfit anyway,” Joan says.
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“When am I going to wear this outfit again?” Maddie says.
“I don’t know, Maddie, on a date?”
“I don’t go on dates.”
“Whatever you want to call it then.”
“I don’t go on dates,” Maddie says. “By that name or any other.”
“Okay then,” Joan says.
After Maddie puts on the second shoe, she stands and begins walking to the door.
“Madeleine,” Joan says, and her daughter stops, looking at her expectantly. “I
know it would mean the world to Mammy that you’re here.”
“Thanks,” Maddie says. She fidgets with the sleeves of her dress and appears
poised to turn.
“I know you wrote to one another,” Joan says, and it’s the first time she’s ever
said anything about it, to anyone. She would often bring in Mammy’s mail, and sure
enough, every once in a while, there would be a letter addressed in Madeleine’s
handwriting. Mammy would never open the letters around her, and Joan never asked
about them. She always told herself that when Maddie was ready to come back into her
life, she would. And here she is.
“Just every couple of months,” Maddie says. “I never responded to her last letter.”
“You can’t feel guilty about that,” Joan says. “It’s not the end that matters, it’s…
You were her golden girl.”
Maddie smiles. It’s a slightly forced smile, perhaps, but that doesn’t necessarily
imply that her daughter doesn’t mean it.
“I have something for you,” Joan says.
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“I told you, I don’t need anything,” Maddie says.
“It’s not from me,” Joan says, and she walks to her dresser to open Mammy’s
lock-box. The wood smells like her, and Joan imagines Mammy, sitting at her vanity
bench…
She hadn’t considered what to give to Maddie – in fact, she hadn’t considered
giving Maddie anything, as wrong as that sounds. But when she sees her mother’s
slightly yellowed pearl earrings, she can picture them, so easily, on Maddie.
“These are perfect,” Joan says, more to herself than to her daughter.
“That’s really not necessary,” Maddie says, standing now at Joan’s side.
“They’re not from me,” Joan repeats, and after a moment’s hesitation, Maddie
takes the earrings from her palm, their hands touching for a moment.
Joan watches as Madeleine puts in the earrings, and then she looks her daughter
up and down.
“Oh Madeleine,” Joan says, “you – Mammy would think you look so beautiful.”
Her daughter laughs. “I haven’t been called beautiful in a minute,” she says.
Joan isn’t sure what to make of that. Perhaps lesbians don’t call each other
beautiful – but then, it doesn’t seem like Maddie is necessarily all that committed to
lesbianism anymore, carting around this Aaron character. Joan hopes, for just a moment,
that he passes out of Maddie’s life as quickly as everyone else has.
Maddie eyes herself in the mirror one more time.
“Thank you for these,” Maddie says, touching her hand gently to the pearls.
“Don’t thank me,” Joan says.
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She almost goes on to say how nice it is to have Maddie home but she figures
some things are left better unsaid. And then it hits her, in a way that it didn’t before. Her
daughter is home.
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Chapter Sixteen
Collin, careful to avoid mucking up his shoes in the slush, makes his way across the
parking lot, the poster under his arm.
The lobby of the funeral home is empty, so he walks toward the viewing room
and peers through the windows on either side of the closed, ornate wooden doors to see a
casket. A slideshow with pictures of Mammy plays on the television.
Collin imagines the chairs and the couch filled with people, others standing in the
corners, still others standing over Mammy. But right now the room is empty. It is well lit
and calm, probably warm. It’s the perfect atmosphere for a funeral… but why should
Collin be calm, warm, or quiet? His grandmother is lying there dead. He turns around and
figures he’ll wait in his car until the rest of his family arrives – but a short, middle-aged
woman with jet-black hair appears in the center of the lobby, and Collin jumps.
“Hello, sir,” she says, her voice quiet. “I thought I heard someone arrive. Is the
rest of your family here as well?”
“No,” Collin says. “I’m the only one here so far.”
He dislikes this lady’s hushed tone, and he resents that he’s just adjusted the
volume of his own voice to match hers. They were all talking like this yesterday morning,
when he and his mom were in to drop off the pictures for the slideshow. It’s as if these
funeral home people think everybody’s too stupid to realize that this is simply how they
talk to everyone, all day long. It’s a business model, not some sort of special kindness.
“If you follow me this way,” the woman says, “I can show you the room, and you
can set up any memorabilia you might have.”
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They enter the viewing room. Somber piano music plays in the background –
Collin thinks he recognizes it, although this kind of music all sounds basically the same.
“Make yourself comfortable,” the woman says. “There are refreshments in the
lobby.”
“Thanks,” Collin says, but as she’s about to leave, he remembers the poster. “Oh,
do you happen to have a small display stand?” he asks.
“Of course,” she says. “I’ll be right back with that.”
She closes the door behind her.
Alone, Collin’s eyes drift absentmindedly toward Mammy. From the back, she
looks exactly like he remembers, and he hears that voicemail playing, again, in his mind:
I just haven’t heard from you in a while… Collin approaches her.
When he gets close to the body, he sees that her skin is like powdered plastic,
stretched across her bones, and the hollows under her cheeks have vanished. Suddenly, he
can’t imagine his grandmother’s living voice anymore – he can imagine nothing, in fact,
but this disfigured corpse. He wonders why on earth people do this, fill the deceased with
chemicals and dress them up pretty.
The whole thing reminds Collin of that passage in the Alan Watts book he read in
his contemporary philosophy class. He struggles to remember the wording exactly, but he
wrote it in his little notebook. He digs it out of his pocket and flips about forty pages
back, to October. “If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do
not understand it… To ‘have’ running water you must let go of it and let it run.”
Exactly. Mammy’s corporeal substance is still there (the withered uterus, which
once held his mother; the brain, which until so recently held thought) but her form has
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changed entirely, and the effort to alter Mammy’s substance – to make her appear less
dead, to make it appear as though her form has gone unchanged – that effort has
perverted both form and substance, such that Mammy is now a porcelain doll, a
grotesque, a bucket of water no longer running but called a river all the same.
Collin reads over the Alan Watts passage a couple more times, and he finds
himself, for some reason, growing angry – but before he can interrogate this feeling, the
door opens, and he hurriedly shoves his journal back into his pocket.
“Will this do, or did you have something larger in mind?” the woman says, so
quietly, of course, that Collin can hardly hear.
“Sure, that’s fine,” Collin says. “That will do.”
Once she’s left the room, Collin looks down at the stand and realizes that this too
– with its dark wood and its gold hinges – is perfectly selected to contribute to that calm,
somber atmosphere which everything about this place is designed to facilitate. That sense
of anger resurfaces: he shouldn’t be supposed to feel any certain way, he should just be
allowed to feel.
He opens the stand and sets it on the coffee table. After placing the poster in the
stand, Collin realizes that, actually, the stand is pretty small. The poster is unstable in it.
A glance around the room confirms what Collin already knows – there’s really no
place else to put the poster. He should have asked for an easel, or at least looked at the
stand before saying that it would be fine.
He shakes his head and carries the poster to the other side of the room where he
sets it on the windowsill, leaning it against the glass. It looks a little less strange there
anyway. Looking it over, Collin notices that he accidentally layered two of the photos
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wrong – a corner of sky is blocking baby Stephen in Mammy’s arms. He bites his lower
lip but tells himself that nobody is going to notice.
Collin sits on the couch, and looks at his watch: 9:35. His family was supposed to
arrive between 9:15 and 9:30, and guests will begin arriving as early as 10. He has no
idea what’s taking his family so long – he was supposed to be the late one, after all, since
he had to pick up the poster. But he’s wholly unsurprised. Everybody else is all so
wrapped up in their own little worlds that it doesn’t seem like any of them have even
been thinking about Mammy or this funeral the whole time they’ve been together.
They’ve all been acting, in fact, like Mammy’s dying is something that happens every
other week. Don’t they realize that she’s never coming back? Shouldn’t that be more
important than their individual problems, at least momentarily?
Collin catches sight of the body again. He should’ve sat somewhere else,
somewhere without a direct line of sight to the casket.
He removes his little book from his pocket, wanting to write some single sentence
to capture this experience. He looks over the past few pages for inspiration: “How strange
that we move through the world choosing slivers of reality to reject or ignore.” And
before that: “Mom singing ‘Hello’ at the Mexican restaurant reminded everyone, I think,
of why we’re here.” And then Collin’s sad attempt at profundity: “The snow fell not only
on the roofs and the cars but over their minds.” And then: “‘You’re like a real person
now’ –Madeleine.” Collin gets chills, although he isn’t sure why.
He figures he’ll just free-write. He’s generally resistant to corrupting the notebook
with anything terribly longwinded, but his note about the snow is a good reminder that
just because something is short and pretty doesn’t mean it’s actually meaningful.
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“I’m alone with Mammy in the funeral home, because of course I am,” Collin
begins.
He writes for what feels like a long time, and once he becomes too aware of the
fact that it’s been a long time, he sighs, and carries his book into the foyer for a cookie.
The clock in the hall reads 9:50. Everything he just wrote was spot-on.
He sets his journal on the counter in order to lift the plastic lid off the platter of
cookies. He takes one and bites into it. A few crumbs spill onto the floor – Collin sighs
and bends over to clean up, scooping the crumbs into his hand.
“Oh my, you haven’t already managed to make a mess, have you Collin?” his
mom says, a few feet away. Collin jerks his head around to see the rest of his family,
Aaron in tow, walking through the foyer.
“Already?” Collin says. “I’ve been here for twenty minutes.”
“Guess whose fault that is,” Stephen says, and Collin looks instinctively to
Madeleine, who rolls her eyes to the ceiling. Her dress is nice; she looks like she used to
in high school.
“It’s my fault,” Aaron says. “I didn’t have a suit.”
The button on Aaron’s black pants pulls tight against the fabric, trying to escape,
and the sleeves of his dress shirt stop an inch high.
“Stephen’s old suit?” Collin asks, and Aaron nods as Jess interjects, to nobody in
particular: “Well, it’s not really his fault – he wasn’t planning on coming originally.
Every one of us should have thought of it.”
“He’s not everyone’s responsibility,” Stephen says.
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Unsure of what to do with his handful of crumbs, Collin seizes this moment of
diverted attention and deposits them in his back pocket.
“Well he’s certainly not my responsibility,” Madeleine says. “He’s a fully grown
adult.”
“Oh, God,” their mom says. Everyone turns their head to her, and then follows her
eyes to the viewing room. She takes a single step forward, and then walks toward the
door.
“Do you think she wants to be alone?” Jess says.
“We should go with her,” Stephen says.
Jess nods and follows her brother. Collin almost joins them, but he notices that
Maddie remains firmly planted in place, and he pauses.
“You okay?” Aaron asks Maddie.
“I’m feeling a little sick,” Maddie says.
“It’s never too late to back out,” Aaron says.
“Literally sick, Aaron,” Maddie says. “I think I need to throw up. Do you know
where the bathroom is?”
Collin wonders if it’s morning sickness – but then he realizes that Maddie’s
question was directed at him, and he says, “I’m not sure.”
Maddie sighs and turns away from the viewing room to wander down the hall.
Aaron follows her at first, but she mutters something at him that Collin doesn’t catch and
he stops in his tracks.
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“Every once in a while I would really like to use sexist language to describe your
sister,” Aaron says, approaching Collin, “but I am once again going to be the better
person and refrain.”
Collin looks Aaron over: his scruffy, blonde, unkempt neck-beard, his gauged
ears – though at least his gauges are black, to fit the occasion.
“I’m gonna go in there with my family,” Collin says, taking the last bite of his
cookie. He steps forward, but Aaron taps his shoulder.
“Hey, can you wait with me until Maddie gets back?” Aaron says, “I don’t want
to just stand here, but I don’t think I should go in there without her, so…”
“Sure.”
They stand in silence for a moment, and Collin picks up another cookie.
“It made me nervous the first few times it happened,” Aaron says. “The morning
sickness, I mean. But I looked it up, and apparently it’s a sign that the placenta is
developing well.”
“That’s great,” Collin says.
“And, did you know, in some cultures they actually eat the placenta when the
baby is born?” Aaron says.
“Oh,” Collin says, but he’s pretty sure that’s just a thing Kim Kardashian did,
rather than some non-Western cultural phenomenon.
“I don’t think I’d want to do that,” Aaron says. “It’s a little gross – I mean it’s
cannibalism. But maybe. It would be kind of cool. Doubt I’ll get to this time though.”
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“Why not?” Collin says. He wonders about Aaron’s emphasis on ‘this time,’ as if
Maddie would refuse to share her first placenta – but maybe her second would be
different.
“Well, she’s been thinking about an abortion,” Aaron says. “But she’s entirely
unpredictable, so that’s why I let myself get excited about the placenta – not excited
about eating it, just about… it’s healthy development. I really think we could do it if she
wanted to. Raise the kid, I mean.”
Collin meets Aaron’s eyes. For some reason it hadn’t occurred to him that Maddie
might not keep the baby.
“Do you know why she doesn’t want to keep it?” Collin says.
“I don’t know,” Aaron says. “I guess she doesn’t think we have the ability to raise
a kid right now. And that makes sense to me, but I really think that, as the collective,
we’d be able to do it. Sylvia and Marsha – I’ve already talked with them about it. Some
of the others might be a harder sell, but – isn’t that the whole point?”
“The whole point?” Collin says.
“Of the collective. The point is to do things collectively.”
Collin pictures the mess of that house – the pile of papers on the table by the door;
the chair piled so high with clothes that you could hardly tell there was a chair
underneath; the stack of dishes in the sink.
“I don’t know,” Collin says.
“I always make breakfast on Sundays,” Aaron says. “I’m reliable.”
“I’m sure you are,” Collin says. He takes another cookie, but realizes he doesn’t
actually want another. He breaks it in half and hands the larger part to Aaron.
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“Of course, it’s not up to me, what happens,” Aaron says, but there’s the slightest
accent on the final phrase that makes it sound more like a question than anything. Collin
wonders whether Aaron expects him to respond as such.
“Yeah,” Collin says. “It’s up to Maddie.”
“After all, it was only my sperm,” Aaron says, taking a bite from his cookie.
“That’s what Maddie always says. There’s not – that doesn’t mean anything.”
“Right.”
Down the hall, Maddie exits the bathroom. Aaron looks like he’s about to say
something else on the subject of her pregnancy, but Collin interrupts him. “You like the
cookie?”
“What?” Aaron says, chewing. “Oh, yeah, yeah, of course I do.”
“Why are you still out here?” Maddie says, and Aaron jerks his head around.
“We were just having a snack,” Collin says.
Maddie shakes her head slightly. “That’s weird,” she says.
“Us having a snack is weird?” Aaron says.
“Together?” Maddie says. “Yeah.”
She’s about to say something else, but Aaron cuts her off: “Your ears are
pierced?”
Maddie reaches for her earrings – pearls, faded such that they have a slight,
yellowish hue that Collin thinks brings out the hint of gold in his sister’s eyes.
“I guess,” Maddie says.
“What do you mean, you guess?” Aaron says.
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“Well I used to wear earrings a lot,” Maddie says, “but I haven’t in a couple
years, so I thought the holes might have closed up – though these went right in.”
Again, Maddie looks like she has more to say, but Aaron is fixated: “Why are you
wearing them anyway – I mean, the dress wasn’t enough for your mom?”
“You don’t like them?” Maddie says.
“They’re a little over the top,” Aaron says.
“They’re Mammy’s,” Madeleine says. “Mom gave them to me, and – I don’t
know. I sort of like them. I remember her wearing them.”
That shuts Aaron up.
Collin’s mom hasn’t given him any of Mammy’s things. Apparently his presence
is less valuable, since it’s more consistent – what a twisted logic that is. Of course, it’s
not like he needs any of her things, anyway.
“Now, come on,” Maddie says, and the three of them enter the viewing room.
Jess, Stephen, and their mom stand perfectly still in front of the casket. Jess’s arm
is around their mom’s waist. After a brief hesitation, Maddie walks up to join them, and
Aaron follows, leaving Collin standing by the door.
He has no desire to approach the coffin again; Mammy’s face remains practically
seared onto the insides of his eyelids. But if his family were photographed right now,
Collin would be missing, replaced by some skinny punk in an under-sized suit, who it
seems unlikely any of them will even remember a year from now. Collin joins the group.
“Well,” his mom says, “we’re all here. Does anyone have any last words? Maybe
we should say a little prayer? I know none of you really believe…”
“We can say a prayer,” Jess says.
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“Okay,” their mom says, and she thinks on it for a moment. The door opens then,
however, and Don and Isabelle enter the room, Don using a walker.
Collin can never remember exactly how he’s related to these people. He’s not
even sure whether Don or Isabelle’s their blood relative. All he really knows is that
they’re a little racist, and they’re avid outdoor shuffle-board players. Every time he sees
them they have new stories from this or that tournament.
“They’re early,” his mom says.
“Only by a few minutes,” Jess says.
Their mom offers a gentle, somber wave, and walks across the room to greet the
first arrivals.
“Oh, sweetie, how are you holding up?” Isabelle says, hugging their mom.
Collin can’t quite make out his mother’s response.
“Is that your poster?” Jess says, nodding at the window.
“Yeah,” Collin says.
“Why is it on the windowsill like that?” Stephen says.
“I—there was no good place to put it.”
“They don’t have an easel or anything?” Stephen says.
“You can go ask if you want.”
Stephen simply shrugs, and Jess says, “Let’s go see it.”
Madeleine and Aaron stay behind as the three of them walk across the room.
“This is so sweet,” Jess says, after examining the poster for about thirty seconds.
“I love the pictures where she’s young. She looks just like Mom.”
Collin nods.
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“Did you cut me out of this picture with Mammy?” Stephen says, pointing to the
small corner of sky that covers the baby in Mammy’s arms.
Collin eyes the error for a moment, his muscles tense. “Not intentionally,” he
says.
“Huh,” Stephen says. “It was a cute picture.”
“Did you look this over before you had it printed?” Jess says.
Collin stayed awake until almost two thirty in the morning finishing the thing, not
that anyone thought to ask how he was coming or offer any help.
“Is there another problem?” Collin says.
“Oh,” Jess says. “No, it’s great. It’s really great.”
Stephen removes his phone from his pocket.
“Do you think I should say something to Dad, when he’s here?” Jess says.
Collin looks at his brother, but Stephen isn’t paying attention.
“It’s Mammy’s funeral,” Collin says.
“Not the right time, then?”
“What would you hope to gain anyway? I thought you didn’t think he would
change his mind.”
“It just feels like something I have to do. But you’re right, this isn’t the place.”
“What’s this?” Stephen says, returning his phone to his pocket.
“Who are you texting?” Collin asks, and Stephen cocks his eyebrow slightly, but
Collin pretends not to notice. He feels no obligation to their brotherly bond or whatever.
Don and Isabelle situate themselves on the couch a few yards away.
“We can’t imagine what you’re going through,” Isabelle says.
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“I can imagine plenty,” Don says.
“Don’t mind him, it’s his stroke,” Isabelle says.
“Don had a stroke?” Collin whispers.
“Mom didn’t tell you?” Jess says.
“No,” Collin says.
“I’m sure she did,” Jess says.
Collin fights the urge to roll his eyes – his sister’s always so sure he knows things
that he doesn’t, and she says it’s because he doesn’t pay attention, that he’s too in his
head. But even if that might be true sometimes, Collin thinks he listens enough to know
whether Don’s had a stroke.
“Apparently I’ve lost my filter,” Don says. “Though it’s hard to tell how much I
say because I’ve lost my filter, and how much I say because I know I’ve lost my filter.”
He chuckles to himself, and Collin cracks a smile too.
“I like Don,” Stephen says.
“Give him ten minutes,” Jess says. “He’ll be reciting lines straight from the
Trump playbook.”
“He’s old,” Stephen says. “He’s had a stroke. It isn’t exactly his fault.”
“Sure it is,” Jess says. “He wasn’t always old. He hasn’t always been recovering
from a stroke.”
“He’s recovering fine,” Isabelle says, and the three of them turn, but it becomes
immediately clear that she’s just responding to something their mother said.
“I’m knocking on death’s door, he just hasn’t answered yet,” Don says, and he
laughs again.
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“That’s not funny,” Isabelle says.
Another round of footsteps enters the room. It’s Collin’s older cousins from his
dad’s side, along with their children.
“Now the party’s getting started,” Don says.
Over the course of the next hour or so, folks trickle steadily in and out, and the
room becomes increasingly crowded. For some reason, Don and Isabelle never display
any intentions of leaving – at one point Collin’s mom asks him whether he thinks they’re
planning to stay the whole time, and Collin laughs, but as the day moves forward his
mother’s joke seems increasingly plausible. At first Collin is grateful for this – Don and
Isabelle are fairly low-stress people to interact with, and after mingling a bit with the
newcomers, Collin sits with them for about twenty minutes, the conversation bouncing
between Mammy on the one hand (“She always made the best banana cream pies,” Don
says, and Isabelle replies, “I don’t remember banana cream – what I remember is that
butterscotch pudding,” and Don says “Well I don’t remember any butterscotch”) and
shuffleboard on the other (“You won’t believe how Don lost us the tournament this
spring,” Isabelle says, and Don says, “Not this again – I didn’t lose us anything!” to
which Isabelle counters “You knocked the puck into the negative ten!” and Don says “I
got it in the eight – it was that Mexican, he knocked me into the negative ten. A lucky
shot, that’s all it was,” and Isabelle says, “Well, you gave him an easy shot”). When Don
reintroduces the shuffleboard story out of the blue a couple minutes later, this time with a
few more flowery descriptors of the Mexican man who apparently bested he and Isabelle,
Collin returns to his mingling.
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All the while, Collin keeps an eye on Aaron and Madeleine – they’re obviously
doing their best to keep to themselves, sticking to the corner, but distant family approach
them more than they do almost anybody else. At one point, Collin overhears his twelve
year old cousin once removed, Jimmy, say, “My mom always told me you were living in
a brothel,” after which Madeleine and Aaron exchange such a long, silent glance that any
casual observer would think Jimmy had struck the nail right on the head – but Aaron
eventually replies: “We live in a collective where we share the costs of living, and we
don’t believe in monogamy, so that’s probably where your mom got that idea.” As the
kid prepares to ask a follow-up question, Maddie cuts him off, simplifying the matter:
“We don’t live in a brothel.”
Jess, in contrast with Madeleine and Aaron, is far more successful at avoiding
extended conversation, apparently busying herself by chaperoning their mother, on whom
most of the attention is generally focused throughout their interactions with friends and
relatives. Collin’s sure their mother does appreciate Jess’s help, but he’s confident that’s
not why Jess is helping. It dawns on Collin that this whole thing is an exercise in
propriety; aside from the little kids and Don, everyone is putting on a performance. None
of his siblings seem to be making any pretensions that it’s anything else. Stephen,
generally so devoted to propriety, is for some reason the most poorly disguised of all of
them – whenever he gets caught in a conversation he reports, in just the correct tone, on
his successful legal career and his happy marriage, but whenever he has the chance, he
pulls his phone out of his pocket to text his mistress. Each and every one of his siblings
are like robots activated by the sound of condolences.
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But of course Collin is performing too. Through all his small talk, he’s developed
an elevator pitch of his life: “I don’t love living in the dorms, but my classes have been
really interesting and I’m grateful for the opportunity to pursue what I’m passionate
about.” Not too positive, not too negative, and, aside from the first clause, almost entirely
inaccurate. After reciting this line about twenty times, he resolves that the next time
someone asks how school’s going, he’s going to give an in-depth, honest answer. But
when the moment comes, he feels the smallness of the room, the closeness of his mother,
and he answers just as he has before: “I don’t love living in the dorms, but…” He carries
on in this way until his father enters the room, a small blonde woman at his side.
Collin instinctively scans the room for his mother; she stands with her friend from
her card group, but her eyes are locked on her ex-husband. Collin’s dad gives her a nod
and a pained smile, but Stephen stops he and the blonde woman before they can make
their way any further into the room.
“Well thanks for coming,” Collin tells the lady from church. “It was good talking
to you.”
She nods politely, and Collin makes a beeline toward Jess, who stands apart from
their mother for practically the first time that day. She’s talking with the only person of
color in the room, who Collin vaguely recognizes as Jess’s roommate.
“The NAACP and the Black Students’ Union have both agreed to co-sponsor it,”
his sister’s roommate says. “These are traditionally very liberal organizations, and they
have large bases of support on campus. It seems like all of a sudden, we’re talking about
200 or 300 people at this demonstration that we originally envisioned as only 40 or 50
folks. We really have an opportunity to shift the conversation here.”
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“Damn,” Jess says, as Collin situates himself in their group. “That’s amazing.”
“It’s months of patient organizing, of making connections with these other groups
and of gaining credibility, finally paying off.”
“Jess,” Collin says.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been more involved in the planning,” Jess says. “Y’all have
done some amazing work – I can’t believe how quickly things have come together.”
“Jess,” Collin says again.
“Just a second,” Jess says.
“Dad’s here,” Collin says. Jess’s friend glances at Collin, and Jess turns to the
room, searching the crowd. “He has some new woman with him,” Collin says.
“Oh my god,” Jess says. “I can’t believe he would do that.”
“Have you met her?”
“Of course Stephen’s with him right away. No I haven’t met her, why would I
have met her?”
“I don’t know. You live here. You have dinner with him sometimes,” Collin says.
“I don’t have dinner with him hardly ever,” Jess says.
“You used to right?” Collin says. “I mean, I guess it makes sense that you
wouldn’t want to spend much time around him these days.”
“Why’s that?” Jess says, and she stares him straight in the eyes. Collin’s not sure
what the look means, but he figures it’s best to skirt around the heart of the matter:
“You’ve just been busy,” he says. “Finishing up school.”
Jess nods and turns back to her friend, who avoids eye contact.
“Well, someone should go be with Mom,” Collin says.
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“Right,” Jess says. Meanwhile, Don, over on the couch, explains to a new
audience how he didn’t think that ‘damn Mexican’ had it in him.
“Don,” Jess says, and everyone by the couch looks over, silent. Jess lowers her
volume and continues: “I don’t think the fact that the guy was Mexican had anything to
do with his beating you in shuffleboard. Why is it relevant?”
Don chuckles, and looks back to his group. “Anyway,” he says, “if he hadn’t
gotten that shot just right we would’ve won big.”
“It was an easy shot to make,” Isabelle says. “You gave him an easy shot to
make!”
Collin looks at his sister. Her friend seems fidgety.
“I’ll go talk with Mom,” Collin says.
Jess doesn’t acknowledge him and, after a moment, he turns to cross the room. As
he makes his way toward his mother, however, his dad catches his gaze and waves him
over to he, his girlfriend, and Stephen.
“Collin,” his dad says, extending an arm for a hug. “Unfortunate circumstances,
of course, but it’s good to see you.”
“Good to see you too,” Collin says, and then, because his father is still looking at
him: “Thanks for coming.”
“This is Michelle,” his dad says.
“Oh. Nice to meet you, Michelle.”
“You too – I’ve heard so much about you,” Michelle says. “Of course, I’m sorry
to be meeting on this occasion – it sounds like your grandmother was a wonderful
woman.”
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“She got my dad started in real estate,” Collin says.
“He got himself started,” Stephen says.
“Your grandmother was certainly a big help,” their father says.
“It sounds like she had an incredible life,” Michelle says. “I mean, for a woman of
her time to do all that she did…”
“She was pretty inspiring,” Collin says.
“Say, how’s school going?” his dad says.
“Well,” Collin says, and he licks his lips. “I don’t love living in the dorms, but my
classes have been really interesting. Plus, I’m grateful for the opportunity to pursue what
I’m passionate about.”
“What’s that?” Michelle says.
Collin looks at her. “Writing,” he says.
“You should have told me your boy’s a writer, Victor!” Michelle says. “One of
my best friends is a writer. She’s even got a book published.”
“What’s the book?” Collin says.
“It’s called Never Have I Ever. It’s young adult.”
“Haven’t heard of it.”
“Well, she self-published, so that would make sense,” Michelle says. “But it’s on
Amazon. And I like it.”
“Is that the book you were talking about when you two were down in Florida last
month?” Stephen says. “Where the girl has amnesia and discovers she’s a vampire?”
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Michelle laughs and looks slightly embarrassed. “Yeah, that’s the one,” she says.
And then, to Collin: “It sounds dumb, I know, but it’s really got a lot going for it. My
friend, Stephanie, she spent years working—”
“How’s your mother doing?” his dad says.
Collin turns to his father and raises his eyebrows.
“Mom’s hanging in there,” Collin says.
“She’s spent so much of her time taking care of Mammy,” his dad says. “I’m sure
that makes it hard, the void of so much free time.”
“Maybe she’ll finally be able to get a full time job,” Collin says.
“Your mother?” his dad says. “She should be well on her way to never working
another day in her life.”
“She needs money, Dad,” Collin says.
“I don’t know,” Stephen says. “She’ll be able to sell Mammy’s place.”
“Sure, but—”
“Oh, is that Don and Isabelle there?” their dad says, and he steps toward the
couch to greet the pair of them. Michelle follows.
“Why do you always take his side?” Collin asks his brother.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re always on Dad’s side, even when he’s being a total jerk.”
“I’m not always on Dad’s side. And anyway, there aren’t any sides.”
Collin rolls his eyes, although he doesn’t know what to say next. He isn’t like
Madeleine – he doesn’t always have the perfect retort. Maybe it’s just because he hasn’t
had as much practice.
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“Did you know she got me my start in real estate?” his father tells Don and
Isabelle – but the whole group surrounding them, composed of maybe seven people,
listens on attentively. Collin gives his brother a pointed look, but Stephen doesn’t seem to
notice. Instead, he’s tuned in to their dad’s story. “I’ll never forget that phone call,” he
continues. “Joan and I were making dinner – a box of Pastaroni! We put some sautéed
veggies in it, but still it was Pastaroni – I mean we were dirt broke. And then the phone
rings. Mammy tells me she’s been asking around – which of course I didn’t even know
she’d been doing – and she tells me that the director of the city’s largest development
firm wants to meet with me. These are not entry level positions, mind you. I was so
nervous…”
“He just comes into a room and suddenly it’s his,” Collin says. “Like he’s the
only one with the map or something.”
“Why would you say that?” Stephen asks.
“I mean, I suppose you could do it too if you wanted,” Collin says. “If you
weren’t so preoccupied.”
“I could do what?”
“You could… do everything just exactly the way that you’re supposed to, to such
a degree that everybody’s mesmerized,” Collin says. Someone taps his shoulder then, and
he turns to see Maddie and Aaron.
“I didn’t know you could physically escape the corners,” Collin says, but
Madeleine doesn’t acknowledge the comment.
“Is that Dad’s girlfriend?” Madeleine asks.
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“I would assume so, but she wasn’t introduced to me with any sort of title.
Stephen?”
“Michelle,” Stephen says with a nod.
“Why on earth would he bring her here?”
“She’s an important part of his life,” Stephen says.
Madeleine gives him a side-eye glance and then says, “Did you talk to her,
Collin? What’s she like?”
“She’s pretty, sweet, and talkative,” Collin says. “That’s really all I got.”
“So she’s just like all the others,” Madeleine says.
“She’s her own person,” Stephen says.
“Sure,” Madeleine says. “But she’s playing the same role as all the others. In any
event, he’d better not let that woman anywhere near Mom.”
“Has Dad noticed you yet?” Collin says.
“No. Does he know I’m here, Stephen?”
“I didn’t tell him if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Do you want to go?” Aaron asks.
“No,” Madeleine says. “I want to talk to him.”
“Why?” Aaron says.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I guess because he doesn’t control me anymore, in any
capacity. I have no financial ties, no anything. And I want to know what it’s like to talk to
him when that’s the case. I think I’m going to go over there right now.”
She turns away from their group and, with Aaron trailing behind her, walks
toward the couch
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Maddie might be the only one of them, in this whole room, who just is who she is.
She doesn’t give a crap about acting the right way, or doing the right thing. No wonder
Madeleine is an outcast – he’ll have to remember to write that down: She just is who she
is, so no wonder she’s an outcast…
Instinctively, Collin reaches for his pocket, but his little book isn’t there. It occurs
to him suddenly that he set the book outside, on the counter by the snacks. He looks to
the door, and begins to move in that direction, when the silence around him draws his
attention. He snaps his head to the couch, where Madeleine stands, posture erect, around
a circle of relatives including Don and Isabelle, Jimmy, and their father. From the other
side of the room Jess and her friend stare on.
Collin figures it isn’t pressing that he retrieve his book.
“This will be interesting,” Stephen whispers, gesturing for Collin to follow him.
They walk closer to the couch, until they’re within a couple yards.
“Madeleine,” their father says. “I didn’t know you were in town.”
“Of course I am,” Maddie says. “It’s my grandmother’s funeral.”
“I was under the impression that you didn’t care for obligation.”
“I’m not here for obligation,” Maddie says. “Mammy and I remained close, Dad. I
kept in touch with those who were worth keeping in touch with.”
Collin thinks back to the last time he saw Madeleine, before this – it’s a memory
he’s always held fondly, right before Maddie’s final, big blow-out with their mom.
Maddie picked Collin up at his middle school and took him to a little Italian restaurant for
lunch. She ordered a glass of wine, and she let him share the glass when nobody was
looking. He doesn’t remember anymore what they talked about, but it felt like she was
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talking to him as a peer, telling him about her life in a way that made him feel like he
could say anything to her. But apparently he wasn’t worth keeping in touch with.
It’s not really like that, of course. He was in middle school, and Maddie wasn’t
speaking to his mother. She couldn’t have done much better. Plus, she’s probably lying
about having kept in touch with Mammy anyway.
“Yes, Mammy sure was a special one,” his dad says. “I was just telling these folks
how she helped me get my start in real estate development.”
Collin glances over to Jess – she stands perfectly still, staring ahead, and her
friend, meanwhile, bites at her nails.
“Humble today, then?” Maddie says. “Ordinarily, the story’s that you pulled
yourself up by your bootstraps.”
“Well, as with all good stories, there’s more than one way to tell it,” their father
says with a smile, and their audience laughs. A couple side conversations emerge on the
outer layers of the group. “So, how are you doing, Madeleine?” their dad asks.
“Well contrary to the rumors that Jimmy tells me have been circulating on your
side of the family, I’m not living in a brothel. So, in relative terms, I’m doing pretty well.
Although I do really wonder where everyone got that idea.”
Those side conversations that had begun to emerge abruptly quiet down. Collin
looks around the room, and the only conversations proceeding with any sort of apparent
normalcy feature participants he doesn’t recognize.
“Oh, you’re the Madeleine, the brothel Madeleine!” Don says. “Gee, I haven’t
seen you since you were this high.”
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“Hi Don, it’s great to see you,” Maddie says. She looks at their father with her
eyebrows raised. “How are you, Dad?”
Their mother slips through the door then, although Collin hadn’t noticed her
leave. Her eyes are red and her cheeks flushed.
Since she got here, it’s seemed liked she’s been a little overwhelmed, but Collin
wonders what it was that put her over the edge. She didn’t cry when she saw Mammy’s
body, or during any of the guests’ reminiscences…
“I’m fine, other than that I have a tendency to exaggerate things after a couple
glasses of scotch,” Collin’s dad says, provoking a couple small laughs from the
surrounding group. “And, of course, aside from the obvious. You know, I remember
picking you up at Mammy’s when you were little…”
Their mother walks past Collin and Stephen toward the circle by the couch. Collin
taps her shoulder, as his dad continues: “You would always talk right off the wall about
the time you’d had – playing in the backyard, visiting the library, making cardboard
forts…”
“Is everything okay, Mom?” Collin says.
“Fine,” she says, although she continues her beeline toward Collin’s father. Collin
follows her, breaking away from Stephen. Their mom appears poised for a confrontation
for just about the first time Collin can remember, and he wonders whether she’s going to
tear his dad to shreds for bringing this Michelle here.
“You’re sure you’re fine?” Collin says as they walk. “You look—”
“Yes, Collin,” his mom says. “I’m fine.”
“Okay.”
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They merge with the group, standing right beside Maddie and Aaron.
“She and your grandpa sure loved having you kids around,” Collin’s father says.
“Right,” Madeleine says. “We loved being around.”
“Joan,” their dad says, and he moves across the circle to hug her. “I’m so sorry for
your loss.”
“Thanks.” She pats her ex-husband on the back and frees herself from his
embrace. “I appreciate your coming. Do you think I could speak with—”
“Dad and I have just begun catching up, Mom,” Maddie says.
“Yes, I was just about to introduce her to someone, in fact,” their dad says.
“You mean your newer model?” Maddie says. “Sorry, but I’m not interested.”
Collin looks to Michelle, although it’s hard to read her expression. Her hands are
clasped in front of her, and she gazes down at them. Then he looks to his mother; she still
appears poised, on edge – Maddie doesn’t seem to have taken the words out of her
mouth.
“Victor,” Collin’s mother says.
“One second, Joan. Just because Madeleine isn’t interested in meeting my friend
doesn’t mean I’m not interested in meeting hers.”
Aaron extends his hand instantly, almost as if he’d been anxiously awaiting the
moment.
“I’m Aaron,” he says.
They shake hands. “Good to meet you, Aaron. Did you know Mammy?”
“Unfortunately no, sir, I didn’t.”
“Are you and my daughter serious?”
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Aaron starts to respond but Madeleine intervenes and says, “No, actually, we
aren’t together.”
“Well,” Collin’s mom says, “that’s actually just what I wanted to talk to you
about, Maddie, if we could step aside from the group here.”
Collin glances between his mother and his sister. He wonders what on earth his
mother could have to say to Madeleine that can’t wait.
“You wanted to talk about my not being in a relationship with Aaron?”
“This is the Madeleine, isn’t it?” Don asks Isabelle. “I thought she was a lesbian.”
Meanwhile, Collin’s mom says, “Yes, as a matter of fact, that’s exactly what I
wanted to talk about, so if we could simply—”
Suddenly, a possibility strikes Collin. He walks straight to the door, and out into
the lobby.
When he makes it over to the refreshments, not only is the cookie platter empty,
but his little journal isn’t there. He searches the ground, thinking that perhaps he knocked
it off the counter when he searched for the cookie crumbs; he fishes through his pockets
in case the book had previously disguised itself as his wallet or his keychain; he even
opens the clear, plastic lid over the empty cookie tray, but the journal isn’t there either.
After double-checking all the same places, he returns to the viewing room, where
his mother and sister continue to argue in front of just about everyone.
“Mom,” Collin says, approaching the group. “This really isn’t the place. If
Madeleine wants to talk to you about – well, she will.”
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“Madeleine is my daughter,” his mom says. She’s speaking almost too quietly,
even for a funeral, and her voice cracks. “If a conversation needs to be had, we will have
it. I would just appreciate if we could step into the hall.”
“Mom, anything you need to say to me, you can say in front of the group,”
Madeleine says.
“You should go with your mother,” Collin’s dad says.
“Maybe you should come too, Victor,” Collin’s mom says. “This does concern
you too.”
“My relationship with Aaron concerns Dad?” Madeleine says. “Mom, maybe you
should just take a deep breath, alright? This is a stressful day for all of us.”
Collin thinks about intervening into the conversation again, but it feels
impossible. It’s a bit like watching a car accident – one of those things you just can’t look
away from.
“As a matter of fact, it does concern your father, Madeleine,” Collin’s mom says.
“And it concerns this Michelle too, because I suppose she’s going to be your baby’s very
first step-grandma.”
Collin feels Madeleine’s eyes on him but he doesn’t look up to meet them.
“Really, Michelle,” their mom says, “it’s a special honor. By the time the baby
gets to step-grandma number five, numbers two and three will feel like a bit of a blur, I’m
sure, but number one… Well, you’ll always be number one.”
“I—” Michelle says, but Collin’s dad cuts her off.
“I’m sorry,” he says, “but who’s having a baby?”
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“Madeleine and Aaron here,” Collin’s mom says. “My only question is how soon
I should expect the wedding.”
“Maddie, you’re pregnant?” Stephen says, finally stepping into the circle.
“See, this can’t be the Madeleine,” Don tells Isabelle.
“Maybe the lesbian thing was a phase,” Isabelle says.
“Well, either way, they can’t raise the baby in a brothel,” Don says.
Collin looks beyond the group by the couch, surprised to see that several
independent conversations have managed to carry on at the outskirts of the room.
However, several others stare silently toward them. Collin tries to sneak away to stand
with Jess and her friend, but Madeleine grabs his arm, and hisses, “You’re not going
anywhere,” just as their mom says, “So, Madeleine, are we thinking summer?”
“Summer?” Maddie says.
“For the wedding, Madeleine,” their mom says. “Of course, if you think you’ll be
too far along by summer, then I’m sure our church can work you in much sooner,
especially considering the circumstances.”
“I don’t know if I’d want to get married in a church,” Aaron says, at the same
time as Madeleine says, “I thought you’d mellowed out, Mom.”
“Excuse me?” their mom says.
“You’ve just seemed so much more chill,” Maddie says,
“No matter how ‘chill’ I am, my daughter will not have a child out of wedlock.”
“Okay,” Maddie says. “So I won’t have a child.”
“Don’t you dare say that,” their mother says, almost whispering.
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“What’s she mean?” Jimmy asks his own mom, by the other end of the couch. “Is
she talking about an abortion?”
“Joan, it’s her decision,” Collin’s dad says.
“You stay the hell out of this,” Collin’s mom says, really snapping for the first
time that day. “My daughter does not have a child out of wedlock, and my daughter does
not murder her unborn baby. Look at that casket, Madeleine. Do you want another death
in the family this year?”
“That’s not fair at all,” Madeleine says, and while she doesn’t look to the casket,
Collin does.
Mammy has obviously not changed since Collin first arrived this morning, a
couple hours ago. All that’s gone on around her has not affected that smooth, powdered
porcelain skin, or her too-full cheeks. Her mouth remains spread in a thin line across her
face, not smiling and not frowning.
“My daughter is going to do exactly what women have done for thousands of
years,” Collin’s mom says. “She’s going to have a child, and she her husband are going
to raise that child together. Do I make myself clear?”
“Monogamy is actually a relatively recent cultural invention,” Aaron says.
“Shut up, Aaron,” Madeleine says, without taking her eyes off of her mother.
“You don’t control me, Mom.”
“No?” Collin’s mom says. “Well, as long as you live under my roof—” and she
stops, midsentence.
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She rotates her head, and looks across the room as, one by one, the guests avert
their eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says. “This is… this is completely inappropriate. We can talk
later, Madeleine.”
Before turning and exiting the room, Collin’s mom stares, for a moment, at her
own mother’s corpse. Then she digs through her purse and hands Collin his little journal.
Collin takes it, and slides it gently into his pocket. He turns his head, and walks straight
over to Jess and her friend, but Maddie follows him.
“Of all people,” she says as they walk, “I trusted you not to tell anybody.”
“I didn’t—” Collin starts to say.
“You told Jess, didn’t you?” Maddie says, and Collin stops in his tracks, halfway
between the couch and Jess’s group. Collin looks at Jess, unsure if she heard what
Madeleine said. Either way, Jess looks away and says something to her friend. Collin,
meanwhile, says nothing and looks to the ground. “And one way or another,” Madeleine
adds, “Mom found out today.”
“I just – I mentioned it in my journal, and I accidentally left the journal by the
refreshments table when you all came in. Nobody was supposed to read it.”
“It doesn’t matter what anybody was supposed to do—”
Aaron, having just reached the two of them, touches Maddie’s arm.
“No,” Maddie says. “Don’t try to calm me down, Aaron. Don’t treat me like your
property, and – Collin, you’ve shown me about as much respect. Don’t either of you tell
me to calm down.”
Collin stutters out a response: “I didn’t mean for—”
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“It doesn’t matter what you intended, Collin. You were careless with my
relationship with Mom, with my connection to this family, and with my autonomy – you
were careless with it – and if you really cared about anything except yourself—”
“Look, I’m sorry I mentioned you in that stupid journal,” Collin says, whispering.
“But I’m not the self-interested one here. All of you – you’re only worried about
yourselves, and you all expect me just to be some sort of – some sort of, I don’t know…
some sort of extension of you. You tell me you’re pregnant, Jess tells me she’s
organizing some campaign against Dad’s company, Stephen tells me he’s ending his
marriage to go be with his mistress, and yet none of you care to – I’m a whole person,
Madeleine, and – of all people, I expect you to recognize that.”
“I recognize that,” Madeleine says. “But do you see what you’re doing? You’re
making this about you, and right now, Collin, I think it’s allowed to be about me.”
“No,” Collin says. “Because it’s always about you. Every conversation we’ve had
this week, everything has been about you. When I’m with Jess, everything is about Jess,
and when I’m with Stephen, everything is about Stephen. But not one of you has even
listened to me long enough to – Do any of you know that I’m thinking about dropping out
of school? I tried to tell you, Madeleine, in Athens…”
“Look,” Maddie says, “if you’re not going to unambiguously apologize to me
then I frankly don’t care, Collin, if you drop out of school. It’s not that big of a deal.”
“Maddie—” Aaron says, but Maddie and Collin interrupt him simultaneously.
“Stop it, Aaron,” Maddie says, and Collin says, “You don’t care if I drop out?
That’s like me saying I don’t care about your pregnancy, or—”
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Madeleine jerks her head back in Collin’s direction and says, “That is not the
same thing. Not one bit.”
“Yes it is,” Collin says. “Because this is a family, and we’re supposed to care
about one another, but—”
“That sort of care has to be earned, Collin,” Madeleine says. “Just because you
and I share the same blood doesn’t mean I have to give a damn about your petty little
problems. If you aren’t even going to show enough respect to me to—”
“Okay, fine,” Collin says, “but if care has to be earned, then what business do you
have expecting any amount of care or consideration from me? Or from any of us? If care
has to be earned, then where the hell do you get off wearing those earrings as if you
somehow deserve them?”
“Mammy and I—” Madeleine says, but Collin interrupts her: “No. Even if you
really did keep in touch with Mammy, you renounced all of us to go party all the time in
some shit hole. You don’t deserve to walk around wearing those earrings, because you
were not a real granddaughter to Mammy by anything but blood.”
Maddie looks at him for a moment. She removes one of the earrings, then the
other. And she extends her hand.
“What?” Collin says.
“You take them, then,” Madeleine says. “If you really think I don’t deserve them,
then you take them.”
“Maddie—” Collin says.
“You heard me,” Madeleine says.
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Collin stares at her for a moment and then extends his hand to meet hers. Maddie
drops the earrings in his palm, and then she turns and walks away.
Aaron remains behind for half of a second, and it seems as though he’s
formulating a sentence, but then Maddie stops walking, turns to him, and gestures for him
to follow, so of course he does. They disappear into the lobby.
Collin feels like crying, but he doesn’t cry. It’s only when Jess taps his shoulder
that he realizes he’s been standing alone in that same spot for just a little too long.
Collin stares at Jess, and Jess stares back.
“I didn’t mean to tell anybody,” Collin says. “I didn’t mean to tell you, and I
didn’t mean for Mom to find out, and I didn’t – I shouldn’t have taken these – I shouldn’t
have taken these earrings.”
He opens his hand and stares down at them.
“She’ll cool off,” Jess says, but Collin doesn’t reply.
Finally, he says, “I don’t know how I’m gonna make it through this day.”
“I don’t know that any of us do,” Jess replies. “But we’re all going to do our
best.”
—
Joan stares at herself in the bathroom mirror. There are lines under her eyes, and her hair
has started to grey. She should return to the viewing room, but her mother is there, dead,
and her daughter is there, harboring death, and she should have waited, to say something
about the wedding. What if it was her own comment that pushed Madeleine over the
edge? What if Madeleine wasn’t even thinking about abortion until Joan intervened? She
wishes, for a moment, that she simply hadn’t found out – that her son hadn’t been just as
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careless as always, or that her daughter hadn’t told Collin in the first place. But what kind
of a wish is that? What kind of a wish is it, not to know about her daughter’s pregnancy?
About the grandchild, living in her daughter’s womb? And what kind of a mother is Joan,
that her own daughter would not even bother to tell her about something so significant?
Joan’s the kind of mother who intervenes – she’s the kind of mother who confronts her
daughter at her grandmother’s funeral. And perhaps Joan’s not the kind of mother who
listens. Perhaps she’s not the kind of mother who understands. Perhaps she’s not the kind
of mother—
The bathroom door opens, and one of Victor’s great-nieces wanders in. She’s so
small – less than four feet tall. Joan forces a smile, but the child averts her eyes, and
opens the bathroom stall.
Joan splashes some water on her face and looks back to the mirror. The lines on
her face, the grey hair – she needs to tell Maddie that her mother is there for her. That
even if there is no wedding, Maddie’s mom will be there for her to help her raise her
child, not just with money but with time. She needs to tell Madeleine that she will open
up her home to her daughter and to her daughter, that Joan will do everything she can to
make sure the baby is cared for. Because Joan knows that her daughter isn’t really like
this, not at heart. Maddie’s not the kind of woman who would seriously consider an
abortion. Joan can only imagine how lost her daughter must feel: she’s unemployed,
she’s carting around that boy, she can only afford such horrible clothes as those pink
pajama pants… Even if Madeleine chose this life, Joan bears responsibility for it. If a
child is lost, it is the parent’s responsibility to steer the child back onto the right track –
and with her daughter, Joan gave up. With Joan, Mammy would never have given up.
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Joan needs to tell Madeleine all this. She needs to apologize. So she leaves the
bathroom, and proceeds down the hall to the viewing room.
When she enters the lobby, however, she turns her head to see Madeleine and
Aaron on the other side of the glass doors, out in the cold. She freezes in place, because
she knows exactly what she’s about to see. And, sure enough, before Joan has the time to
think another thought, a cab pulls up. Madeleine and Aaron climb into the back seat. And
then, in another moment, the car is gone.
Joan looks toward the viewing room. Everyone is milling about, as though
nothing has just happened.
She turns, and she walks back to the bathroom.
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Chapter Seventeen
“How could you possibly say this is my fault?” Aaron says, but Madeleine doesn’t
respond. “You know I didn’t mean to tell Collin, Maddie,” he adds. She says nothing.
“Are you really going to give me the silent treatment? Seriously?”
Madeleine’s already said everything that she could, so she takes a deep breath and
glances back out the window: a warehouse, a billboard for a fireworks shop, and several
houses surrounded by wire fencing, one with an above-ground pool. They’re in the Land
of Commuters – not much to see.
So she returns her gaze to her lap. For the first time since leaving she becomes
aware that this is her mother’s dress, her mother’s tights, her mother’s shoes. Maddie
hates that she stole these clothes; she didn’t mean to, of course, but her mother will
probably assume Maddie took the clothes since she’s so desperate – her mom might even
pride herself on having given her daughter such a nice parting gift. In fact, all she actually
wanted were those earrings – momentarily, her chest tightens as she thinks about her
brother demanding them back. She wishes she’d just refused: looked into his scrunched
up face and told him to fuck off, told him he’s never meant anything to her… She tries to
imagine it, though she can’t quite picture Collin’s response.
She would never have worn them anyway – the earrings.
Aaron must’ve turned to a similar line of thought; he unbuttons Stephen’s dress
pants, and the moment that he does so, the two sides of the pants yank apart, revealing his
checkered boxers. “That’s better,” he says. And then, almost casually: “You know, you
will have to talk to me again at some point – I mean, at least because, it’s my child too.”
“It is not your child,” Maddie says, still looking down.
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“Whose is it then?” Aaron says.
“It’s not—” Maddie says. “It’s not anyone’s. It’s not my child, it’s not your child,
it’s nothing. Alright?”
“That baby you’re carrying around is just nothing?” Aaron says. “I wish you just
believed in us, that we could do it. That we, that the collective could—”
“Aaron, I’m starting to feel like you only support my ‘choice’ as long as it’s the
‘right’ one,” Maddie says.
“I support any choice you—”
“Then how come you keep acting like I haven’t decided?”
“I just want to make sure you’re considering—”
“I didn’t ask for this!” Maddie says, and she’s aware, somewhere, that she’s
shouting, but she doesn’t feel it. Still, she takes a sharp breath in and steadies her voice.
“I didn’t ask for this baby, and I didn’t ask to wind up in a fucking… slop house where
nobody even has their own bed, and—”
“You wanted to start the collective—”
She speaks over him: “—and I didn’t ask for you to insert yourself into my life,
and I didn’t even – I didn’t even ask for this life in the first place.”
“Maddie, we have to work within the conditions we’re given,” Aaron says, “but
we can still do beautiful things.”
“All I ever wanted from you,” Maddie says, “was a place to crash. I needed to get
out of a toxic relationship with two women who I loved but to whom I was just a… I
don’t know. An auxiliary, or something. I didn’t have a lot of places to go. You and
Mikey and James… Well, we all wanted to turn the house into a collective, but I thought
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that meant actually taking care of one another – not just snorting coke and getting wasted
and having sex. That’s not liberation to me.”
“It’s a work in progress,” Aaron says. “You’re jaded.”
“Maybe I am, but you’re just a fuck boy who somehow wound up surrounded by
anarchists and decided to go with the flow.”
Aaron starts to respond, but he cuts himself off as his phone starts buzzing,
loudly, in the cup holder. Maddie vaguely recognizes the phone number, but she can’t
place it exactly – it’s a Columbus area code.
Aaron glances at the screen and says, “Oh. Well, shit.”
He takes one hand off the wheel to reach for the phone, and Maddie worries that
she’s somehow managed to underestimate him once again.
“What?” she says.
“Collin asked for my number yesterday—”
“And you gave it to him?”
“Well it was sweet, he wanted to—”
“I don’t care if he’s ‘sweet,’ Aaron.”
Aaron shakes his head and accepts the call.
“Don’t you dare,” Maddie says, but it’s too late.
“Hello?” Aaron says.
“God damn it, Aaron, hang up,” Maddie says.
“Oh, Mr. Ballard,” Aaron says. “I’m afraid Madeleine’s unavailable to talk right
now… Yeah… No, we’re fine, we just— …Right, I— …Sure.”
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Maddie reaches over and rips the phone from Aaron’s hand. He swerves a bit as
he tries to cling to the phone, but soon enough he steadies himself.
“What the fuck?” he says, and Maddie almost hangs up the phone, half-inclined to
throw it out onto the road. However, she doesn’t want her father to think she’s running
away, even if that might have been her original impulse. She’s leaving, but she is not
running.
She takes a breath in, and raises the phone just close enough to her face that she
can hear her dad say, “Aaron, are you there?” She lowers the phone and hangs up. Even
though she knows it isn’t true, she’s instantly overwhelmed by the thought that she’s just
let her family win.
“That was not cool,” Aaron says.
They’re silent for a while: fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. The next time Aaron
speaks, it’s to say, “Some people just don’t get the memo that this is a freeway.” He
changes into the left lane to pass a minivan, although Maddie bets that Aaron’s already
been driving at least couple miles over the limit.
In the adjacent van, the girl in the passenger seat is turned all the way around to
talk to the kids in the back, who are laughing and playing some game – it’s hard to tell
exactly what, but it involves their repeatedly shoving themselves from one side of the
back seat to the other. The woman driving the van stares straight ahead, jaw clenched.
When Maddie’s closest to her, the woman looks over for just a second and meets her
eyes. Madeleine looks down.
Three or four more minutes pass in silence before Maddie says, “I don’t think I’ll
ever see any of them again. Not if I go through with the abortion.”
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Aaron looks ahead for a moment, not acknowledging her. Then, the words
escaping him slowly, he says, “You can’t think about your decision that way—”
“There is no decision, Aaron,” Maddie says.
“Right,” Aaron says. “I know. I just mean – you can’t think about the whole thing
this way – the abortion and your relationship with your family, these are separate issues.”
Maddie thinks of how strong her mother is. There was at least one point when she
was working three different part time jobs, taking care of the kids, and taking care of
Mammy. She went through so much to raise Madeleine and her siblings.
As if reading her mind, Aaron says, “It might be hard to accept, but – your mom
doesn’t love you for the person who you are.”
“Maybe,” Maddie says. “But I’m the one who walked away. And Jess and
Collin—”
Aaron reaches for her hand but she pulls it away, pretending not to notice –
though her nonchalance is betrayed as she’s suddenly unable to remember what she
intended to say. Aaron leaves his palm on the center console, open. After struggling to
remember her previous thought for a moment longer, Madeleine says, “I know you want
this, Aaron – this child. And I used to want it too – as recently as August of 2006.”
“You wanted to have a kid with me in 2006? You didn’t even—”
“Not with you Aaron, just in general.”
Aaron pauses. “What’s the significance of August, 2006?” he asks.
“That’s when Pluto was demoted. I resolved to name my first-born child Pluto, in
its honor. Maybe I still will. But now… What I’m trying to say is that now isn’t the time
for me.”
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Aaron nods, and Madeleine can tell he’s thinking carefully about what to say – his
brow is slightly scrunched, his lips are pursed. After five, maybe six seconds, he finally
gets it out: “You know Pluto’s the god of the underworld right?”
Once Madeleine realizes that she’s heard him correctly, her muscles relax. “I’m
talking about the planet,” she says. “Or, I mean, the dwarf-planet.”
“Sure, but the dwarf-planet was named after the god of the underworld, Pluto.
And, he was a child rapist.”
Maddie raises her eyebrows and says, “Oh. Well, I guess I won’t be naming my
first child after him, then.”
“I don’t know,” Aaron says. “It’s just a name. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
Maddie laughs.
“What?” Aaron says.
“It’s just a funny thing for you to act all guilty about,” Maddie says. “Tarnishing
Pluto’s reputation.”
“Well, I ruined your whole plan,” Aaron says.
Maddie looks at him, but, focused on the road, he doesn’t look back. She takes in
the soft curves of his face, the deep blue of his eyes, his patchy facial hair. He does care
about her, in his own way.
“I don’t love you, Aaron,” she says.
Aaron doesn’t say anything, and Maddie looks back out the window. In the
silence that follows, the whole world fades away. She briefly imagines that she is a child
who thinks she’s a grown up, running along the beach with her little brother trailing
behind her, and shouting with glee into the warmth of the day.
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Part Four
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Chapter Eighteen
Stephen’s mom turns off the radio. After she’s silent for a moment, Stephen says, “Yes?”
“I just can’t believe Madeleine left,” his mom says. “Mammy would have wanted
her to be there, for the – the whole funeral, the burial…”
“She was there for a while at least,” Stephen says. “With Mammy. She got to pay
her respects.”
“Except she didn’t pay her respects. She just made a scene, and then she left.”
Stephen doesn’t say this, but his mom contributed just as much to the making of
that ‘scene’ as Madeleine did. He allows himself to wish for a moment that he’d just
stayed in Orlando. But of course he had to come – he’s just grateful that Angela knows
him well enough to have booked him a flight home as soon as possible, without being
disrespectful.
“And what’s this about Collin dropping out of school?” his mom says. “Jess
mentioned that she heard him say something to that effect, but I can’t believe it – it
sounds to me as though he’s been enjoying his courses. I know he doesn’t like living in
the dorms but… Have you heard anything about it?”
“No,” Stephen says.
“Could you talk to him? He respects you. You’re his brother.”
“I’m not sure how much influence I have, but I can try,” Stephen says.
His mom nods, and pulls into the passenger drop off lane.
“Have I – is all of this my fault?” she says.
“What do you mean?” Stephen says, but when his mom doesn’t immediately
respond he offers: “Madeleine’s pregnancy is Madeleine’s fault. You’re a good mom.”
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“Do you really think that? I mean really, deep down in your heart, do you believe
that?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
His phone vibrates in his pocket. He knows it would be unwise to check it now –
but he can’t help but wonder what the message says. Lisa’s really missed him since he’s
been gone. The last time they saw each other was magical: standing in that creek, the
water lapping the sides of their ankles, their bodies pressed together…
“Thanks,” Stephen’s mom says, as she pulls into the passenger drop off lane.
“That really means a lot, Stephen.”
He looks over at her, and his emerging hard-on fades. His mom’s eyes are watery,
and she’s blinking. “I just feel like I’ve lost Madeleine,” she says. “She’s my daughter,
and I’ve lost her.”
“You haven’t lost her,” Stephen says.
His mom nods, and Stephen sits there. It doesn’t feel like the sort of moment in
which he should say anything else. After a few seconds pass in silence, Stephen can’t
help but take his phone out of his pocket.
Maybe I could pick you up from the airport – you could say they lost your
luggage, and you have to wait?
“Is that one of your women there?” his mom says, and Stephen looks up at her.
He returns his phone to his pocket.
“Did Collin—” he begins to say.
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“He didn’t need to. You’re your father’s son, and I know that. I always have. Of
course, it should go without saying, that the behavior you’re engaging in is one that I
find… deplorable. In addition to its general, moral depravity… it’s personally hurtful.”
Stephen pauses for a few seconds; he wishes he could just explain to her, and
have her understand – but he can’t. So instead he says, “I messed up, Mom. I’m going to
cut it off.”
“You know,” his mom says, ignoring his remark entirely, “after everything
happened in there, Victor and I chatted a bit. He even tried to call Madeleine for me, see
if maybe she would come back. He’s a good man, your father. I hate the spunky little
girls he brings with him everywhere, but he’s a good man. I can see that now.”
She smiles at Stephen, and he tries to think up even some little thing to say, but
then a man in a yellow vest taps on the window.
“Okay,” his mom says. “Give me a hug goodbye.”
Stephen does so. His mom rubs his back with both of her hands, and holds him
tightly.
“I’m so glad you could make it home,” she says.
“Me too. I love you.”
“I love you too, honey.” She pulls away from their embrace. “Don’t forget to call
sometimes. And I’ll see you soon, in just a couple of weeks.”
“Right,” Stephen says, but he’d forgotten about Christmas. He wonders vaguely if
he could cancel his flight, say he has too much work to catch up on. He hadn’t planned on
two trips home in December.
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The man in the yellow vest looks as if he’s prepared to tap on the window again,
so Stephen unbuckles his seatbelt and gets out of the car. He removes his suitcase from
the back seat, and waves goodbye to his mother.
Once he’s safely inside the airport, Stephen takes a breath to clear his head and
then pulls out his phone.
“What would you want to do together?” he types. After reviewing the message, he
adds a winky face onto the end.
He taps send.
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Chapter Nineteen
Jess steps outside the student center; about sixty people cluster on the sidewalk. The
group is smaller than she’d imagined it would be, but it’s not even noon yet, and the bulk
of people arrive a few minutes late to these things.
She doesn’t see any of her close friends, but she nods at a couple of acquaintances
– at least one or two of them seem to look at her with a bit of resentment. She wonders
how far the word’s spread about her father.
Dozens of cardboard signs sit on a table toward the center of the grouping, and
she selects hers: ‘This city is not for sale!’ She flips it over to see whether anything’s
written on the other side, and there’s not. As she’s looking at the blank cardboard,
someone grabs her shoulder.
“Hey,” Sierra says, her voice serious. “I need to talk to you for a second.”
Jess has a feeling that she knows what this is going to be about. She’d planned to
initiate a conversation with her friends about her father before the protest, but even
though her mom claimed to be fine after the funeral, Jess decided she’d better stay home
and keep her company. Then, when Jess made her way back to campus this morning, her
friends weren’t home. She would have said something if she’d had a chance – although
she could have made more of an effort, too.
“Sure, let’s talk,” Jess says, and Sierra look like she’s about to jump into it right
then, in front of everyone, so Jess quickly adds, “Should we get out of the crowd? It’s
hard to hear.”
Sierra shrugs and says, “Alright.”
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Jess follows Sierra down the staircase on the side of the student center. They
pause on a landing that overlooks the frozen pond down the hill.
“So,” Sierra says. Jess can’t decide whether to cut her off or not – come clean,
before Sierra has the chance to accuse her of anything – but she feels paralyzed, and
Sierra continues to speak. “I’m sorry you’ve been out of the loop, but there’s been a bit of
a change of plans. Originally, we were just going to march to the board of trustees
meeting and hold a rally outside, but I’ve been talking with the campaign’s coordinating
committee, and, in addition to the rally, we want to send a delegation of about ten
students from the various groups inside to disrupt the meeting.”
Jess takes a breath and says, “Oh.”
“Anybody’s allowed to sit in on the meetings,” Sierra says. “And the march
should reach the building just as the meeting is about to start, at one p.m., so we’ll send
the delegation in then. The second they bring the meeting to order, the delegation will
start chanting and march to the front of the room, after which we’ll have three or four
speakers share statements and present Jaylin’s presentation.”
Jess nods, and just as her initial wave of concern recedes another arrives: Why is
Sierra taking the time to tell this to her, in particular?
“I know it’s last minute, but it’s a really good idea, isn’t it? We’ll get so much
more news coverage this way – think of it as a publicity stunt, a chance to really get our
message out there in a coordinated way.”
Sierra pauses, and Jess can feel a question coming her way, but she needs time to
think. Yesterday, after the big blow out with Madeleine, Jess stood with her father in
front of Mammy’s casket, and he spoke to Mammy. He said how grateful he was to have
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known someone as strong-willed as her, someone with ‘such care and conviction.’ He
even teared up. Jess had figured those grandiose speeches he’d made to their extended
family members were all for show – the ones about how Mammy helped him start his
career, about what a great woman she was. But now she thinks he must have meant every
word.
“Isn’t there a pretty big chance of arrest with something like this?” Jess says,
stalling.
“There’s a police liaison,” Sierra says. “The risk shouldn’t be very high though.
The cops always give us a warning or two.”
“Not always,” Jess says. “Remember that protest against tuition hikes a couple
years back? They arrested Kyle and Megan out of the blue afterward, for marching in the
street.”
“Jess, this has been thought through,” Sierra says. “It’s up to you not to do
anything you’re uncomfortable with, but I do have an ask for you.”
“What’s that?” Jess says, because there isn’t anything else to say.
“We want you to speak for the students’ union, inside the meeting,” Sierra says.
“Again, I’m sorry that this is so last minute. We were going to ask Hazel to do it, but she
has the flu, and I know that, ideally, you would’ve had a lot more time to think over what
you’re going to say, and process, and everything – but don’t you think it would just be
perfect?”
Jess takes a breath and then says, “Because of my dad?”
“Right,” Sierra replies, as though it’s just casual conversation. “You, of all
people, will be face to face with the board of trustees, telling them to pull out of this
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development deal. I mean, the deal with Ballard is so atrocious that even a Ballard is
taking action to stop it. That wouldn’t be the focus of your speech, of course, but – you
know what I mean.”
Jess looks out at the pond, but all she can think about is her mother’s face when
her mom finally walked back into the viewing room. Most people had already left, since
there was just an hour left – only Don and Isabelle, Jess’s brothers, and a couple other
stragglers remained. Her mom looked around the room in a sort of daze, like she was
hardly aware of what she was seeing. And later in the afternoon, when they buried
Mammy, Jess’s mom simply stared out toward the horizon, where the sun was beginning
to set. She was expressionless, eyes glassed over, while that machine lowered the casket
into the ground. Jess doesn’t blame Madeleine, of course, but her mother still didn’t
deserve that feeling. She might have some backward ideas, but she’s not a bad person.
And their father—
“I’m not – I don’t want to pressure you,” Sierra says.
Jess struggles with how to respond but, after about five or six seconds of silence,
she says, “I wish I could just change the fact that he’s my dad.”
“Nobody’s asking you to, Jess,” Sierra says. “In fact, we can use it to our
advantage.”
“It’s not something you can just…” Jess says. “It’s my family.”
“Well,” Sierra says, speaking much more slowly now, “I understand that there’s a
lot riding on this for you… But think about how long we’ve been organizing for a day
like this. I mean, today could really change things for us. And by us I don’t just mean you
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and me, or the students’ union – I mean every working class, Black person in
Franklinville. Jaylin, all of her neighbors – it’s their livelihoods, Jess.”
“I have my own—” Jess says, but she cuts herself off.
“That’s bullshit,” Sierra says.
“No, I didn’t mean… I just – it’s my family. Can’t you understand that?”
Sierra shrugs. “I need to make sure Denzel doesn’t have any questions about the
route for the march,” she says.
“Denzel’s leading the march? From the NAACP?”
“Yeah,” Sierra says.
“That’s smart,” Jess says, and Sierra rolls her eyes. She turns to leave, and soon
Jess is alone on the step.
She looks across the pond, attempting to clear her head. She takes in a sharp
breath and spins her sign a couple of times in her hands before walking toward the top of
the student center.
The crowd has practically tripled in size. There must be at least two hundred
people here. Already, this is one of the largest demonstrations she’s seen on campus in a
while, and there’s still time for it grow. She wants to make herself helpful, find
something to do, but instead she thinks, for the fourth of fifth time this week, about that
night at her dad’s beach house, smoking pot. She tries to replace this thought, replace it
with the thought of Jaylin, and her neighbors, but she can’t fully escape that back porch.
There’s a clatter toward the center of the group – it’s Denzel, making his way
onto one of the chairs.
“Okay,” he calls into the megaphone, but it’s not working. He fiddles with it.
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The argument that Jess and her father had that night at the beach house was
horrible, and he was so condescending. Jess was so angry that she could hardly even look
him in the eyes. But the second things cooled off, they had such a great time. And then,
even though they’d just been at each other’s throats, he said that thing about how proud
he was of her – because she sticks to her convictions, and she tries to make the world a
better place. That’s the same word – ‘conviction’ – that he used about Mammy yesterday,
as she lay there dead in that floral shirt that Jess selected. Jess wishes she had a shirt like
that. It always used to make Mammy look so joyful.
“Testing?” Denzel says, and the megaphone starts working halfway through the
word, screeching as it turns on. The crowd quiets down.
Denzel gives an awkward laugh and says, “How’s everybody doing?” There are a
few cheers. “Are we angry?” Denzel says, and everybody screams back.
“Hell yeah!” calls a woman a few feet away from Jess.
“Great!” Denzel says, “We should be angry! Because this is whose city?”
“Our city!” a few folks call back from the crowd.
“Whose city?” Denzel says.
“Our city!” shouts a wider group
“Whose city?”
“Our city!” Pretty much everyone is participating now, although there are a few
exceptions, Jess included.
“And these are whose streets?”
“Our streets!”
“Whose streets?”
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“Our streets!”
Jess remembers walking home with Sierra in mid-September, after the group’s
first protest against the development deal. They were talking about this chant, and Sierra
said something like, “Raising that question, and providing the response, unequivocally
and unapologetically, that these streets are our streets – that’s at the heart of this
campaign.”
The thought doesn’t linger; Jess’s mind turns to Mammy again, in that floral shirt,
and to her father, standing over the casket.
“Whose streets?” Denzel calls.
“Our streets,” Jess shouts back.
Once the chant dies down, Jess scans the crowd; Sierra’s talking with Rebecca,
the co-president of the Black Student Union. Jess makes her way to her friend, through
the crowd.
When she reaches Sierra and Rebecca, they’re in the middle of a frenzied
dialogue.
“Look, if you’re freaking out about it then you can back out,” Sierra says. “You
don’t have to go inside.”
“I’m not backing out,” Rebecca says. “I just wish we had some guarantee that this
isn’t going to get us all thrown in jail for the night, or slapped with legal fees, or
brutalized by bunch of white supremacist pigs.”
“There are no guarantees,” Sierra says. “We’re doing our best to minimize the
risk, but there’s always going to be at least a moderate amount of risk anytime a bunch of
Black students put their bodies in front of the cops.”
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“Hey,” Jess says.
“Hey, just a second, Jess,” Sierra says.
“Right,” Rebecca says. “I just feel like a bit more contingency planning would
have been good.”
“Sure,” Sierra says. “But we can’t think through every possible scenario, and
we’ve gone through—”
“Sierra,” Jess says.
“Just a second,” Sierra says.
“I just wanted to say that I’m in,” Jess says. “If you still want me.”
She feels Rebecca’s eyes on her.
“Of course, the police are much less likely to antagonize me since I’m white,”
Jess says. “I’m just speaking to my own decision, not trying to inform yours or anybody
else’s.”
“That’s not why I’m looking at you,” Rebecca says. “I’m looking at you because
I’m still not sure I agree with making you any sort of face of this movement.”
“It’s a publicity stunt, Rebecca,” Sierra says. “That’s it. She’s not the face of the
movement by any means.”
“Okay,” Denzel calls from the center of the group. “Are you ready to march?”
There’s a cheer from the crowd.
“Great!” Denzel says. “Let’s go show the administration what we’re capable of,
and the power that we have! Because this is whose city?”
“Our city!”
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Denzel hops off the metal chair, and positions himself in the front of the group.
“And these are whose streets?” he shouts into the megaphone, before stepping into the
road.
“Our streets!” the crowd replies.
Jess follows the group, lifting her sign into the air. She tries to avoid the image of
her mother’s face during the burial, the image of her father by the casket, and the image
of Maddie’s relentless, fierce expression as she tore into Collin. But these images
continue to resurface. I frankly don’t care, Collin, if you drop out of school… She
attempts to center herself in the moment, to scream, to let herself be angry.
“Whose streets?” Denzel yells through the megaphone.
“Our streets!” Jess yells in return – but she can’t help but wonder if her face looks
like Maddie’s did.
She reminds herself that she loves this feeling: this feeling of being a part of
something – a militant mass of people, moving through the streets, shouting in unison and
claiming power over their own destinies.
This is what conviction really looks like, she thinks.
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Chapter Twenty
Collin flexes his fingers repeatedly against his steering wheel, hoping the movement will
warm them up. He has such poor circulation – he’s just like his mom that way. He
wonders if the car heater’s broken or something, since he’s already been on the road a
little while. He flexes his fingers again.
He still isn’t sure about this plan – he texted Aaron about it this morning to see
whether he thought it was a good idea, but Aaron never responded. And when he asked
Jess about it, as she was getting ready to go back to campus, she hardly gave him the time
of day.
But this is the right thing. This has to be the right thing. He checks his coat pocket
for about the fifth time to make sure he has the earrings – and sure enough, they’re still
there. He sighs and tries to calm down by breathing in for eight counts, holding for four,
breathing out for eight…
He doesn’t know what came over him – even if everything else was justified, he
shouldn’t have taken the earrings. He knew it was the wrong thing to do when he did it,
but she demanded it of him – demanded that he take them. But he shouldn’t have taken
them, he—
He breathes in for eight counts, holds for four, breathes in for eight… He can
make this right. He’s going to make this right.
—
Maddie zips her suitcase, sort of surprised that all of her clothes fit. She lifts it, and it
isn’t even that heavy. Of course, there are the boxes in the basement, from when she
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moved out of her last place, but she’s leaving them behind for now. After slinging her
sleeping bag over her shoulder, she’s ready to go.
As she plods down the stairs, Sylvia says, “I don’t know how far 90 bucks is
going to get us, Maddie.”
She stops in place, directly beside the banner proclaiming that “A Woman’s Place
is in the Violent Insurrection of the State,” and she looks at her friend. Sylvia stands next
to the door; the last rays of daylight pass through the window and illuminate a few locks
of her hair, which have slipped from her sloppy bun.
“Sylvie, you can’t seriously be backing out now, can you?” Maddie says.
“I’m not backing out, exactly,” Syvlia says. “I’m just expressing a concern.”
“Well why would you wait until now to express a concern? The bus leaves in half
an hour.”
“I don’t know, maybe we should just take another day and think it over.”
Madeleine knew this was coming but she wishes it could’ve happened a couple of
hours ago, or, better yet, waited until they were already on their way to Chicago.
“We talked about this last night,” Maddie says. “We have a plan. All we need to
do now is stick to it.”
“But we haven’t even told anybody. I mean, don’t you think Marsha or Aaron—”
“Fuck Aaron,” Maddie says. She feels a little bad, since he’s been shut up in his
room all day moping around and getting high, but her guilt passes quickly. When Sylvia
says “Fuck Aaron” in return, Maddie grins.
“But,” Sylvia continues, “the others then. Don’t you think they deserve to know at
least? We were trying to build a life together.”
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“Look how well that worked out, Sylvia,” Maddie says. She shakes her head and
hurries down the next few steps.
“I’m just saying,” Sylvia says.
“What?” Maddie says, pausing now on the second stair from the bottom.
“I don’t know,” Sylvia says.
“Just say it, Sylvia.”
“Well, we don’t have to stick to every decision we make at two in the morning
while we’re drunk,” Sylvia says. “I mean this money we’re about to blow – you need this
money for the abortion, and it’s not even enough for that—”
“Weren’t you telling me about – what’s that organization?”
“Women Have Options, but if we’re not in Ohio—”
“There’s probably something similar in Illinois,” Maddie says. “Besides, what we
don’t spend on bus tickets we’ll mostly keep. It’s not like DJ and her friends are going to
be charging us rent at this squat house, and you’re a pretty good thief. I’ve seen you in
action.”
Maddie descends the final two steps and walks to her friend. She sets her bags
beside Sylvia and places her hands on Sylvia’s arms.
“This will be legit, Sylvie,” Maddie says. “These folks are claiming space, and
they aren’t going to let anyone get in their way – not property owners, not the cops.
They’re trying to start hosting free meals there too, for the neighborhood. This isn’t just
punk shows and rich college kids.”
Sylvia nods, but still hesitates.
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Kington!!251!
“And besides,” Maddie adds, “I need this, Sylvie. A clean break. You don’t have
to come with me, but—”
“I’m coming with you, Maddie, if you’re going.”
Maddie nods and lowers her hands. “Okay then,” she says. “We’d better head
over to the bus stop in that case.”
She reaches for her bag, and then she remembers something in the basement – at
first she dismisses it and lifts her bag off the ground, but then she sets the bag back down.
“One second,” she says, and she heads for the basement door. She catches herself
taking an exaggeratedly large breath before opening it, a bit she and Sylvia came up with
a while back. Sylvia laughs from the foyer, but it isn’t really that funny. Mikey stored a
bunch of his furniture down here when all the others moved in, and he never tended to
any of it after the basement flooded in the spring. The smell of mold is worse now than
ever.
Maddie does her best to ignore it as she scans the workbench for the box she’s
thinking of. Once she locates it, she rips the tape off and starts digging through the
contents, until she finds a stack of about fifteen letters bound together, each one of them
featuring that distinctive, sprawling handwriting, put to paper with a fountain pen. She
unzips her jacket and forces the stack into the inside pocket. It hardly fits, but it’ll do.
She pauses there, for just a moment. Although she knows it’s silly, she thinks
about the words from Mammy’s letters pressing against her, and she imagines the ink
slowly leeching into her bloodstream, and coursing through her veins.
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Kington!!252!
Right as she aligns her zipper, there’s a knock on the front door upstairs. Maddie
freezes in place, and Sylvia calls, “How much you want to bet that it’s really a solicitor
this time?”
Maddie doesn’t respond. Instead, she zips her coat and makes her way slowly
across the stone floor, as she searches for voices upstairs.
She doesn’t know what she’ll say. She’s not sure if she’s sorry or not, and she’s
not sure whether, even if she is sorry, she should apologize. It’s a question she’d hoped to
avoid altogether, but now she feels like she should prepare something… a few words
anyway. ‘You matter to me,’ maybe. Yes, that says it all. It’s not like they’ll ever be close
like they used to be, when they were kids – and after everything, Maddie wouldn’t even
want that. Still, he should know that at least. ‘You matter to me.’
But then she hears Sylvia’s bellowing voice proclaim, “I’m sorry, we’re a bunch
of anarchists. I’m voting for the Green Party, and you’ll be hard pressed to get any of the
rest of these folks out to the polls at all.”
After another moment, the door closes, and Collin/not-Collin is gone. But maybe
he will try to come. Maybe he’ll arrive tomorrow, or the next day only to find her
missing, her absence unexplained. She considers writing up a note, or even just telling
one of her roommates to pass along her message – You matter to me. She resolves to go
up to Marsha’s room and tell her, but as she makes her way up the basement staircase,
she realizes that this train of thought is irrational. Collin has no reason whatsoever to
come here. Besides, she shouldn’t even be thinking about that right now. She’s finally
going to get out of this town, and she should be celebrating that. She’s been here for eight
years, and almost all of her relationships have either crumbled or been entirely hollow.
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Kington!!253!
But this is a new leaf for her. Chicago. Chicago, Illinois – she’s never lived outside the
state before. And things – people – are going to be different in Chicago.
Still, as she reaches the basement door – even though she knows that her brother
is in Columbus and that her roommates have surely polished off Aaron’s egg-bake by
now – she finds herself unable to shake the feeling that she will walk upstairs to heat
pouring out of the oven, to Collin standing in the foyer, waiting to greet her. When she
takes a deep breath, however, the smell of mold proves overpowering enough to convince
her that it is, in fact, a different day.
She pushes open the door.
