Authors: Lydia Cooper
I sit on the end of the many-leafed table near Stephen. His left elbow is propped on the table between us and he turns away from me to talk to a cousin who wears braces and has zits the size of gumballs. They talk about SAT prep courses, a Kings of Leon concert, and Super Mario.
If I even wanted to talk to one of my many relatives, what topics of conversation would I offer? Somehow I doubt any of them would have many opinions to offer on medieval play cycles, or power-to-weight ratios in pre-1970s muscle cars.
My father is across the table and a few seats to my right. He eats silently. Knife and fork slicing turkey into small, bite-sized pieces. Arranging each forkful, bite of turkey, dab of mashed potato, single green bean. In between each bite he takes a sip of red wine. He and my mother are the only wine drinkers. Uncle Randy is on his fourth Coors.
My mother sits at the other end of the table. She gesticulates, her jaw moving, her eyes wide, laughing and chattering like a marionette with a hyperactive puppet master. She touches the arms and shoulders of her sisters-in-law, her mother, her father. They touch her in return. They lean toward each other. Their stories veer towards the hagiographic. Remember that time Joe drove dad’s car into a ditch, oh my God, and Randy had to give him rides everywhere, and they ended up having such a good time, all that riding around town together, when Randy’s pickup broke down they went and bought that Chevy
together
? And remember that time you opened that lemonade stand and I said to Harry, I said, she’s going to be an
entrepreneur
!
My father gets up and comes back to the table with the bottle of wine. He sees me watching him and raises his eyebrows, tipping the bottle in my direction.
I shake my head and take another bite of turkey.
Stephen smiles at something his pink-and-white skinned cousin says and shifts in his seat, brushing hair out of his eyes. He lays his arm back down on the table. His elbow touches my hand. He doesn’t notice. I bite hard on my tongue and put my hand in my lap and don’t say
fuck
.
Uncle Randy gives a great bellow of laughter.
We all jump a little and look over at him.
My cousin Jeff is protesting. Laughing, but protesting. No way, he is saying. That pot he smoked in high school was the only pot he’s ever smoked. Swear to God. Where’s Aunt Cynthia? She can vouch for him, Christ.
My mother flushes like a hothouse flower unfurling after too long in the cold. She laughs. “We see through you, big guy. We see
right
through you.”
“No way! I’ve always been a straight arrow. A goddamn straight arrow.”
“Oh, please.”
“Come
on
, Aunt Cynthia! I’m telling the truth. You’d think
you’d
believe me!”
A sudden silence.
The cousin next to Stephen turns from watching Jeff’s protestations of innocence to stare at Stephen.
Jeff looks at my mom and blushes. Uncle Randy looks at my mom, then at my dad.
I look across at my father.
He is looking at his wine glass. He does not look up.
Beside me, Stephen bites his lower lip and looks down at his plate. The rims of his ears are dark red.
I clear my throat. “Of course she believes you.”
Eyes swivel to my face, confusion printed on their foreheads. I feel my father lift his gaze from his glass.
I say, “As you so aptly point out, she would recognize symptoms of pretty much any serious drug use. Between my anti-psych meds and my older brother’s recreational experimentation, I doubt my brother and I have left a single mind-altering substance untested.” I give Jeff a cheek-aching grin. “Although before you base your entire defense on my mother’s familiarity with crazies and drug addicts, you might want to remember that she’s also more familiar with brilliant academics and artists than with total fucking
bores
.”
I toss my napkin on top of my half-eaten turkey and push back my chair.
“Lovely meal,” I say. “Lovelier conversation. A delight, as always.”
I walk out of the dining room, out of the house.
An overcast snowy night. My socks leave dark patches in the snow. The cold aches in my bones. I go out onto the empty street. Tire ruts carved into gray snow. Salt grit piled by the sidewalks. A few chimneys breathe thin pale streams of smoke into the ironclad sky. I walk up the empty road. Icy snow packs in my socks. I take off my socks and leave them lying in the street. My jeans cuffs drag heavy against my ankles.
Time passes.
Later the sky darkens to pewter and shadows stretch dark over the silent suburb. Streetlights glow greenish and alien. I walk back to my grandparents’ house. When I get close I notice one of the cars in the driveway is idling, brake lights red in the darkness. The car is a minivan. My mother’s car.
Frozen trees creak in the dark and unseen telephone wires cry plainsongs with inhuman voices. I wade through ankle-high wet snow up the driveway and put my hand on the front passenger’s side door. The windowpane is tinted and I can’t see inside in the dark. I open the door.
My father, sitting in the driver’s seat with his hands resting on the steering wheel, jerks his head up from the headrest.
“Jesus Christ.”
“Nope. It’s just me.”
I climb inside and pull the door shut. The car radio is playing soft classical music, one of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. The car smells like sour fruit and burnt rubber, the wine on my father’s breath and the old heating unit in the car.
I put my hands under my thighs and stretch out my feet toward the vent near the footrest. My toes are the color of raw salmon. The bones feel like they will burn through the skin.
“Are you still doing that?”
I look over at him.
He lifts his hand from the steering wheel and points. My feet.
“The masochism.”
When Dave took me diving into the basement of an unconstructed house, he told our parents it was my idea, that I had jumped into the icy sludge and he had rescued me. It was maybe, technically, a lie but not a consequential one. I never noticed heat or cold like ordinary people and would often go outside forgetting a coat or shoes in the winter. Dave’s lie didn’t upset me, but ever since then my parents have labored under the misapprehension that I have masochistic tendencies. I hate inaccuracy. But I also hate repeating myself. People are morons.
I roll my eyes but don’t answer him.
My father scratches his chin. His thumbnail rasps against a silvery haze across his jaw.
“What are you doing out here?”
He doesn’t say anything for a long time and I think that he won’t answer at all but then he says, “Not being there.”
“Are you going to get divorced?”
He lifts his head from the seat again and turns to look at me. Our reflections in the front windshield waver, merge.
“It disgusts me,” he says. “Your masochism. And also your ‘insightful’ comments that are really just puerile jibes intended to rile rather than communicate.”
I look away from our reflections and at his face. The faint glow from the headlights turns his glasses lenses white.
“You wear those juvenile T-shirts, you run like a maniac. Every time I see you I see pain. And every other word out of your mouth is fuck. Nothing about you is beautiful or gracious. You are hard, judgmental, uncompromising, needlessly cruel. You are verbally sadistic to your mother who has done nothing but love you. You ignore the only family member who truly dotes on you — and I thank God for it. I would hide Stephen from you if you didn’t do such a comprehensive job avoiding him. You’re like a human cancer in my family.”
He leans back and breaths through his nose. His papery eyelids slide down.
I sit and we listen to violins chirruping, trumpets caroling. Silhouettes pass to and fro behind the warmly lit living room curtains, the picture window acting like a shadowbox in the night. We are voyeurs of civilization.
I could tell him that Dave is almost as fucked up as I am. I chew my lower lip. The coppery taste of blood in my mouth. I wipe my sleeve over my mouth and frown and wonder if I live a life strung precariously between self-inflicted pain and the word fuck.
“Every time I see you,” he says, and I look over at him in surprise. “Every time I look out my office window and see you crossing campus, or when I — when I walk by your classroom when you’re teaching — ”
I squint, stunned that he knows my teaching schedule, let alone that he has ever ventured forth from his aerie to seek me in my den of graduate student iniquity.
“ — When Bob Telushkin or, or any of the other faculty talk about you — and by God, they talk about you — when I see you at the dinner table — ”
White curds of dry spit cling to the corners of his mouth. He stops talking and wipes his thumb and forefinger across the edges of his lips.
I swallow.
He spreads his hand against the wheel. “Of all my children,” he says, and his voice has the hushed and tremulous quality of a choirboy in the confessional, “when I look at you, I see the worst parts of me, my pride, my inability to say the words, the words I need to say to the people I wish, the people I wish that I could love. I see my lack of, of kindness. I see my hauteur, my intellect thrown up like a bulwark against laughter, humility, pain. You have so flamboyantly perfected my own weaknesses. That’s what it is, what is so terrible about you. Do you know what it is? Your perfection. Your mother told me something tonight.”
He waits but I don’t say anything.
“She told me that I should say something to you. As if I could fix you. As if because of our shared — personality flaws, as if perhaps you would — listen to me.”
I laugh. The sound is harsh.
He flinches and the loose skin over his neck contracts as he swallows. “But how can I,” he says to his hands pressed against the steering wheel. “How could she think that I — how can I fix you? I — God help me — I love you the way you are. What a terrible cliché. And so inadequate. I hate being around you and I miss you, I miss you every day now that you’re not living at home.”
I look out the window again at the snow-grayed ground, the pitch-dark sky. Neither of my parents knows much about Dave’s manic behavior, sexual exploits, midnight calls to Stephen asking for money. They don’t know that I make a conscious decision every morning not to take a knife to the university and peel the skin off the faces of the assholes in my office. That the decision drives me running down miles of road until my energy is spent on something other than mutilation. They fear us, they are ashamed of us, and they love us in almost equal measure, but they don’t know anything about us. We are two creatures they made together but whose genetic material is more diseased than any ingredient used in our making. We are their Abel and Cain, the flawed, weak and murderous, the wasted flesh. Stephen is their Seth, and like the biblical Seth, he remains largely overlooked but will be, if anyone is, their salvation.
“You’re not like me,” I say. “I mean, you’re a total bastard to Mom sometimes, but overall you’re decent. Moral. You’re nothing like me.”
“I don’t need to hear this.” His voice sounds thin, flat, exhaustion stripping all tonal variation.
“And besides, it’s a little creepy that you watch my class.”
He doesn’t say anything. When I look over at him, his eyes are closed again and his hands rest on his lap.
“You deserve better than me.”
He says without opening his eyes, “If I deserved better than you, Michaela, I would
have
better. Parents deserve the children they raise.”
“No one deserves us.”
His cheek twitches. He opens his eyes but does not turn his head. His lips press together. He has heard the plural pronoun.
More to distract him from contemplation of the word than for any conscious reason, I hear myself say, “I thought I died. Remember when I had that seizure? I totally thought I had died and come back to life for, like, I don’t know, a couple weeks at least.” I smile and look at the vague eyeless reflection in the windowpane. “I used to believe in that shit, in reincarnation, or baptism, the resurrection of the damned into new life. I wanted to change so much. God, if I could change, I would. I don’t fucking want to be like this. Every morning I lie in bed and pretend that this is the day, that I’m going to wake up normal. And the first thing I always imagine doing is giving Mom a hug. Always. I don’t know why it’s her, but it is. And I imagine that I’m, you know, hugging her, and I look over and there you are smiling at me, and, I don’t know, proud of me and shit. It’s the stupidest fucking thing to think about and I do it every day.”
His head turns slowly, ponderously, toward me.
The loose skin by his mouth folds back as his lips part. His teeth are yellowed from years of coffee and illicit cigars. He looks both strange and familiar, an expression dawning on his face until his eyes, the wrinkles, the darkness in them, a hope-lit wasteland, a darkling paradise, looks like the photographic negative of my own face.
I shut my eyes briefly.
When I open them, the world has not imploded in the frenzied glory of Armageddon.
My palms leave damp prints on the car door handle when I press it open and climb out. The night air bites at my lungs.
We drive home the next day. I sit with the side of my face pressed against the cold window glass until we arrive back in Akron, Ohio.
“Are you going to stay here tonight?”
I look at my mom. She is trying not to sound happy or sad. I don’t know which emotion she is feeling.
“No.”
“But, well, okay but just — just be sure and lock your doors. I don’t like you being alone in that neighborhood.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not.” She sounds frustrated. She looks over at my father, but he’s already asleep on the sofa, the newspaper layered like crushed moth wings over his chest. “When will Aidan get back?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m not his babysitter. Oddly enough.”
My mother doesn’t think that’s funny.
Rain falls in gentle gusts, pockmarks the dirty snow lying piled against curbs. Lamplight glistens yellowish against the icy surface of the snowbanks and the slick streets. I duck my head against a sleeting rain that stings my face and neck and jog up the stairs. They thud hollowly under me. I open the door and the apartment is warm and light.
A metal folding chair sits in the middle of the kitchen, facing an easel with a stretched canvas on it. On the counter behind the easel are a half-eaten apple, a can opener, a soup can, and a bottle of milk arranged on an upturned Reiter’s dairy crate. My broken reading lamp has been removed from my room and it sits behind the dairy crate casting strange shadows, dark and downward slanted, across the fruit and kitchen utensils.
A toilet flushes and then Aidan comes into the kitchen. He stops when he sees me.
“Hey. You’re back.”
I don’t say that the same is obviously true of him. He smiles a little, distracted but like he’s happy to see me, and doesn’t say anything about the stuff in the kitchen or the fact that he has stolen my lamp. He is carrying a yellow phone directory, and he pulls a pocketknife out of his pants pockets and flicks the blade open. He rips the blade through the phonebook’s spine with a clean, practiced slice. Loose translucent newsprint pages flutter free. He folds up the knife blade against his thigh and puts it back in his pocket. Then he squirts globs of paint on one flat section of the phonebook. With a Popsicle stick he drips paint thinner onto the globs of paint and swirls them together.
He sets the phonebook on the metal chair and dabs the brush into paint and, with violent strokes, he slashes out the shapes of the brown-fleshed apple, the half-empty jug of milk, the can opener, the rusty can of Campbell’s tomato soup, empty, rolled on its side. His hand is as neatly vicious with a paintbrush as with a knife blade.
I watch him paint for a while. Then I edge behind him and get to the fridge. I pull out a can of Sprite and pop the tab. The soda is cold and tingles against the roof of my mouth.
I look at the canvas and see that the off-white paint he used to sketch the objects was not an outline of the still-life, like I’d thought, but the shadows. He is dabbing ochre paint onto the canvas, and emerging from the gray-white shapes is the photographically precise image of the speckled and aging yellow apple.
“That milk is going to go bad.”
He doesn’t seem to hear me. He raises a shoulder to rub his jaw, eyes fastened to the canvas.
After a while I wander back to my bedroom. I get my laptop and go into the living room. I sit on the couch, balance the computer on my lap, and check my email, and then I download some iTunes.
When I finish the Sprite I get up and go into the kitchen. The linoleum is covered in dried paint, flecks of amber, ochre, sienna, bronze, puce, chartreuse. My feet crackle on the shell of dried color.
The still life leans against the sink cabinet. Its canvas surface glistens with wet paint. He is sitting on the metal folding chair now with a large sketchpad on his knees and his hand is moving lazily. I assume that he’s wasting time, waiting for the paint on the canvas to dry so that he can start another layer.
But when I go behind him I see that he is sketching with a charcoal pencil, the slowly emerging lines forming a woman’s face. The face has a strange expression, eyes stretched wide, lips slightly parted, as if yearning achingly for something just out of reach. It looks like my face but the expression is one I’ve never seen in the mirror.
I crumple the Sprite can and toss it in the recycle bin. I go into the living room.
“What?” he says. “No one’s allowed to look at you?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“Trust me,” he says. “I do that plenty.”
I can’t decide if that’s funny enough to smile or not. I turn on the TV and flip through channels to find a PBS documentary on cheetahs. I’ve always liked cheetahs. I like watching them move, oil through water.
“How was your Thanksgiving?”
“It was charming,” I say. “Idyllic, really. Charles Dickens called to ask if he could write us up as the sequel to his
A Christmas Carol
, but he decided in the end our family holiday was too sweet to be believable to the general public.”
He laughs. I can hear the scrape of the charcoal across his paper so I know he hasn’t stopped sketching.
“How about yours?”
“About the same.”
I stretch my arms behind my head and yawn.
“To be fair,” I say, “my family’s okay. It’s not their fault I’m an asshole.”
“You’re not an asshole.”
There’s a short silence.
“Well,” I say. “I’m no picnic.”
His hand stops moving. He looks up at me. “Don’t do that. I know what I’m talking about, okay? It’s not like you own majority shares of the asshole market.”
The heat of his eyes makes me uncomfortable. I turn back to the PBS show. I watch the big orange cats snaking through long grass.
“Sad isn’t the same as evil,” I say.
Aidan slams the sketchbook on the counter.
I jump.
He walks into his bedroom. The door bangs shut. The windowpane rattles.
Then the door opens and he comes back out.
“You think you’re the only one,” he says.
I turn around and stare at him.
He’s standing in his paint-stained shirt with his arms clenched around his chest. “You think you’re the only one who hates people. Well, I hate them, too. And yes, I fantasize about dousing them in paint thinner and lighting a cigarette. I
hate
people.”
The apartment is silent except for the sound of his ragged breathing and the quiet tinny British voice telling us to notice how the female cheetah has spotted her prey.
He sucks in a breath and looks down at the floorboards.
“Well,” I say. “Happy Turkey Day to you, too.”
The skin under his left eye twitches.
“So, what happened? You want to talk about it?”
He takes a breath, almost tentatively, like someone who’s afraid of inhaling smoke. Then his arms unfold, and he comes into the living room and sits down on the couch and leans his head back. He pulls his legs up onto the couch. Brown and yellow flecks splatter his jeans legs. The bruises on the inside of his arm are also brownish-yellow.
“Let me see,” I say. “Your sister with the big fucking house was pretty civil to me, considering what I said to her. I don’t see her pulling any Addams family shit. Your father owns a used car lot, so yeah, he’s probably kind of a douche, but I doubt he’s Genghis Khan. My guess is you had a great big family dinner and everyone had a great time and no one went with you to Harvest Home afterwards?”
His face eases, the muscles going slack.
“Really? I was right?” I grin. “What do you know. I’m getting pretty good at this relating-to-people shit, you think?”
The tragic tilt to his eyebrows, the softness around his mouth. His expression is an artist’s caricature that draws out the secrets inside a person and transforms them into some primary-colored, obnoxiously obvious distortion: Aidan’s face is a caricature of innocence. And I understand suddenly. He is not crazy. He is sane, he is ordinary, he is kind. He is not — cannot possibly be — a killer.
And, honestly, there has never been any real evidence that he is the arsonist-killer. I suppose I have known from the time I saw his neat block-print handwriting on the legal pad, so different from the handwriting on the pink message slip. But I didn’t think about it. I didn’t think about what it meant.
I feel the emptiness of infinite space inside my skin. I never realized how much I wanted him to be the killer. It would have made sense. A mathematically precise equation. And also — and also it would mean that he was like me, that there was someone else with that need to slice skin, to extract suffering. I would not be so alone. But Aidan’s not a killer. He’s just a decent kid with an autistic sister and a dead mom.
I feel so stupid.
“Look,” I say, and my voice sounds alien, sad. “See, I hate everyone, regardless of race, gender, creed, or orientation. I hate good people, like you, I hate bad people, like Hitler, and I hate ordinary shitheads like your old man and your sister. Hate has nothing to do with love, for me. You see the difference between us? The subtle distinction?”
He turns suddenly and reaches out his hand.
I stop talking. My eyes skitter sideways, watching his fingers track in slow-motion.
“No, don’t.” It comes out a whisper. “
Please
.”
His fingers, cold, callus-ridged, brush the back of my hand where it rests on my knee. And then he slides his fingers around mine and grips tight.
I swallow, choking on a gag, and close my eyes.
There is a long silence.
And then I say, “I think I’m going to hurl.” I make it to the kitchen sink before vomiting sugary bile.