Ruby turned on the TV and the first thing we saw was the title screen for
It’s a Wonderful Life
. We looked at each other like
Yeah, uh-huh, sure
, and we ate cheese and crackers for dinner and watched that movie and we didn’t have to talk because we knew what the other was thinking—this was one of those you-don’t-have-to-say-it, I-suffer-like-you-suffer moments and our brains were calm and still, just lying there in our heads and our mother was also calm and still, just lying there in that box.
All three of us, I thought, all three of us are orphans.
7
I just write the soap opera and that’s all and that’s enough
, I told Harriet.
This was the afternoon she’d called to say I needed to meet her in Union Square so she could introduce me to Werner at his reading. I could have given a thousand reasons why I didn’t want to go (that I had no interest in being whatever she thought a
real writer
was, that I hated poetry, that I hated when people enjoyed or pretended to enjoy poetry, that being around Harriet gave me the same tangled feeling I had while watching television shows about sharks) but it wouldn’t have mattered—when Harriet made a decision, she would practically burn down a forest to make sure it happened.
You’re wasting your good years
, she said.
All that time you’ve spent writing for other people, you could be putting that energy into your own work. Tell your husband you’re quitting, that you need a year to write for yourself. You know he’ll be fine with it.
She’d somehow read the story of mine that had been published many years ago in a literary journal a professor at Barnard had submitted it to without my permission, and she tracked down my email to say she was an editor and interested in my novel, as if everyone had one. I told her I didn’t have one and didn’t want one, that I was a staff writer for a soap opera, but Harriet is the kind of person who believes you can frighten genius out of a person and be thanked for finding it.
How could that possibly ever be enough for you? You’re a real writer, not a soap opera writer.
How was I supposed to feel about this? Because I was, in fact, a soap opera writer, and I was paid to do this and people followed the stories as if they were truth and those exaggerated lives were more real to some than anything actually real, so much so that whole magazines were devoted to this collective imagination. It had started as an in-between job, just a writer’s assistant, but when one of the producers impulsively fired half the staff, I was promoted and I began to enjoy how nothing was recognizable or familiar about the love triangles, rectangles, and octagons, the operatic scream-crying, the scorned lovers, double homicides, sudden, rare illnesses, demonic curses, and all brands of revenge. Ruby had always described it best:
It’s how we outsource rage.
I don’t want to feel literary
, I told Harriet.
I just want to feel useful.
Listen, you’ll thank me for this later, believe me. I really do think that meeting Werner will be good for you. He always knows the right thing to say to a writer just starting out.
Harriet, I’m not starting anything. I don’t want to write a book.
I’m sure that will change
, she said, and I wanted to say that it wouldn’t but she said,
I’ll see you at six-thirty
, and I am not the kind of person who can put myself between a person and her wants.
In Harriet’s introduction she said something about how Werner’s poetry was the invention of a radical loneliness, a reinvention of life as we know it, and that was ridiculous, I knew, but who wouldn’t want life to be reinvented? I thought everyone would like that very much. Werner’s work was taught in universities, anthologized, published in magazines, and even reviewed in newspapers. Novelists and filmmakers cited him as a major influence and Mother even told me his poems made her cry for the first time in years, but I’d only read a poem or two and didn’t even try to try to like it.
Once the reading was done, Harriet beelined to Werner, my wrist in her hand. She gave Werner a quick appraisal of the reading as he shrugged and said something lost to the din of the crowd.
This is Elyria. She’s writing a very impressive novel
.
Well, if it’s impressive in its unfinished state it must be doubly impressive upon completion.
His accent—half-German, half-Kiwi—sounded like it belonged to some long-past century.
I’m certain it will be
, Harriet said just as someone else caught her attention, and she was lost to a churn of people. Werner looked at me like he was waiting on some kind of explanation.
I’m not writing a novel
, I said.
I don’t like novels.
It’s for the best
, Werner said.
Misery begins in publishing.
And I am not what a person would call outspoken and I’m not even much of a speaker, according to some, and I don’t know if it was because of how old and harmless Werner seemed or because I recognized something in him that gave me an odd comfort, but I spoke with a strange confidence, even a kind of arrogance, as if I was picking up arrogance from Werner like radio waves.
Well, that’s a funny thing to say after all that publishing has gotten you, isn’t it?
Is it?
I don’t know.
Maybe misery begins everywhere
, he said.
Behind me I could hear Harriet talking about Werner’s brilliance. In front of me I could see Werner not even giving a shit.
I’d still rather be back in New Zealand away from this concrete wasps’ nest. People in large quantities are terrible.
The fluorescents buzzed. The people buzzed.
I’ve always wanted to go to New Zealand
, I said (then thought, I have?).
Well, if you do, you’ll have a place to stay. I have an extra room on the farm.
Oh
, I said, and the crowd parted us, left me with this idea.
Later that night, drinking gin with all of Harriet’s people in her office, I asked Werner if he’d meant it, if he was really offering me a place to stay or if he was just being nice.
I’m not nice
, he said,
and I don’t pretend to be. I have an extra room. I’m not much good for company, but the room is yours if you want. You can tend the garden and we’ll call it even.
And though he sounded sincere I still suspected that this was one of those things a person says on impulse and then aggressively defends to mask the mistake.
Blank eyed, he scrawled an address on a bit of paper.
8
Only two cars and fifteen minutes passed before someone stopped, a black truck driven by a sun-wrinkled lady wearing a straw hat.
Into town?
she asked, and I took this as a chance to not make a decision, to just agree.
While we drove she asked me about myself and I found it impossible to answer anything honestly. She asked what had brought me to New Zealand and I said that my husband had. She asked me what my husband did and I said he was a farmer.
Well, he wants to be a farmer
, I said.
That’s why he’s here.
Everything grows here
, the old woman said proudly.
All sorts of plants and other things. Do you have children?
I laughed by accident, the kind of laugh that didn’t say you thought something was funny.
No.
Well, my goodness. I suppose women really are putting off having children these days. You ought to get to it. I only bring it up because there is no joy in life greater than an empty house. Don’t let the other women fool you with this empty-nest-syndrome stuff. Life gets better once the kids are out and the sooner you have them the sooner they can leave.
Ah. Okay
, I said.
What’s even better is finally being a widow.
The woman started laughing and laughing and laughing so much I felt like I had to laugh, too, so I did and then I realized we were laughing at how her husband was dead, which really didn’t seem so funny, and I think we realized that at the same time, and we both stopped laughing and there was that deeply quiet moment after two people have laughed too much and we let that quiet moment stay for the rest of the drive. During that silence I thought of that night when my husband and I were having one of the arguments about the way we argue and I went into the kitchen to get a glass of water but instead picked up a knife because I was thinking about stabbing myself in the face—not actually considering stabbing myself in the face, but thinking that it would be a physical expression of how I felt—and I picked up a chef’s knife, our heavy good one that I used for everything from cutting soft fruit to impaling pumpkins and I looked at it, laughed a noiseless laugh, put the chef’s knife down, poured myself a glass of water, and drank it fast, until I choked a little, and I went back to arguing with my husband and he didn’t know about my face-stabbing thoughts and it made me even angrier that he didn’t know about my face-stabbing thoughts, that he couldn’t just intuit these things, look into my eyes and know that the way he spoke to me was a plain waste of our life—but here in the car with the widowed stranger I didn’t have to feel any of those feelings anymore because I had left my husband and our arguments and my chef’s knife and I had come to this country where I could laugh, so gently, gently laugh at things that were actually not funny.
9
There was that night that my husband had looked at me like he wasn’t sure if we knew each other or not, like we had met at a party years ago and now that we’d come across each other in the cereal aisle, he couldn’t quite remember who I was. This look probably had something to do with the fact that I was crying and he hadn’t seen me do that since the afternoon we met and that one time on our honeymoon. But this wasn’t like that—this was six-thirty on a weeknight, aisles packed with clicking heels and crumpled suits.
He said,
Wheaties?
, and I opened my mouth to say it didn’t matter, but had started sobbing instead.
Elly … what are you doing? Elly … Elyria …
He stood close, shielding me from other people’s eyes, and I was happy he didn’t try to touch me because that would have made it worse.
Elyria…?
It’s just—nothing—I just—I think I’m tired
.
You’re tired?
Isn’t that okay? Am I not a person? Can’t I be tired?
I was talking through my teeth and everyone around us was silent.
Let’s just go home
, he said, so we left with no groceries and he made us box pasta with jar sauce and we didn’t speak and I got into bed even though it was barely eight and my husband sat beside the bed like he was well and I was ill and I began to feel that way—my illness became truer and truer, grew large, filled the room, filled my body, filled my recent and deeper past. When had I become so ill? Had I always been this way?
Whatever it is, you can tell me, you know?
The wisp-thin crack in the ceiling reminded me of bones and spines and the way they give up, eventually, and what happens to a body when it gives in to time—Better not say anything about that, I thought; I rolled to face the wall because I did not care for the here or the now and I wondered whether we were who we thought we were, if we were actually married or just in a continuous situation with each other and I wondered if my want to get up and leave him was an indigenous want, something I had birthed, or whether this want was foreign, a splinter, something to pry out.
But I couldn’t talk about any of that, so I rolled back to him and said,
Tell me again.
And he said,
Oh, is that what this is all about?
And I said,
I don’t know.
It was true I had this need every autumn, reliable as dried leaves.
She was wearing a light blue shirt
, he said.
She was holding a paper coffee cup. She put the cup down on my desk, put her bag on the chair beside my desk, opened the bag, and took out the papers. She handed them to me. She asked me to check over them.
Do you remember her shoes?
The red ones. The same red sneakers she always wore.
And her hair? Did she have it up?
It was down and uncombed. It was in her face a little. She looked tired. She looked out the window behind my desk while she spoke. We didn’t make eye contact. She told me she would come get the papers tomorrow.
But she must have known that she wouldn’t come get the papers tomorrow, unless she hadn’t yet decided about tomorrow, and if she had really said she was coming to get the papers tomorrow maybe that meant the whole thing had been an accident, or did it mean she had acted on some fleeting thought that wasn’t what she really believed, or did it mean nothing? I have never really stopped thinking of how the smartest person I knew had, after much thought, decided that life was not worth it—that she’d be better off not living—and how was I supposed to live after that?
After some time my husband reached over to hold my hand, which reminded me that at least there was this, at least we still had hands that remembered how to love each other, two bone-and-flesh flaps that hadn’t complicated their simple love by speaking or thinking or being disappointed or having memories. They just held and were held and that is all. Oh, to be a hand.
Do you want to talk about her now?
And he knew I meant his mother, that it was his turn to try to get near the loss that he couldn’t get away from, those thoughts that came back each autumn just to die for him again, to remind him of what had happened, of how it felt.
Once she didn’t pick me up at school and I walked home and when I got there it was dark and she hadn’t made dinner but she said,
You’re late for dinner
, which I thought was funny because I was nine and didn’t realize how sick she was. I told her I had walked home from school and she asked why my dad hadn’t picked me up, and I said,
I don’t have a dad, remember?
And she said,
Oh, that’s right
, and I asked her why she was on the floor, and she told me she was tired, that she was too tired to get up.