“How is she,” I asked my mother.
“Oh, a little brittle,” my mother said. I could hear the clink of ice, a gin and tonic I guessed, almost seven, a weeknight, would be her second. “And sad of course, but that’s normal, that’s only natural. You know we were talking, yesterday—the day before yesterday?—and I was telling her—” is where I stopped listening. My friend, you’ll remember her, Laura, thinks my parents like each other and this may also be true, but mostly they are just drunk enough not to be bothered.
* * *
—
I met Laura in graduate school, where I also met my husband. They were dating when I met them, Laura and my husband. My ex-husband. That’s not true. I did meet both Laura and my ex-husband in graduate school, but they weren’t dating. That would be a better story. I am often thinking of the better story because the actual story is so often boring. We were in the same cohort, and we became friends, the three of us. I was dating a professor at the time. Sleeping with. That sounds like a good story but it’s not, it’s been told too many times. He had a beard and a jacket with those elbow patches. I wish I were joking. Made good martinis, had hollow cheeks, explains the beard, hated his ex-wife. All pretty standard.
After grad school, my husband and I ended up in the same city. That makes it sound accidental. Actually I couldn’t get a job and the city where my husband, future then ex now, was moving because he could and did was also a city where I had some family. The city was Lincoln, Nebraska, I don’t know why I’m being so cagey. I mentioned this to my future then ex now and he said, “Come,” he said, “we’ll split a two-bedroom,” he said, “Do you even know how cheap rent is in Lincoln,” and I said, “Actually yes I do my uncle lives there.” We’d all gone to grad school straight out of undergrad so even five years later we were still pretty young. The reason I couldn’t get a job was I hadn’t finished my dissertation. Still haven’t. Anyway so I moved. That was when we started dating, me and the future then ex now. Not that it matters. Laura got a fellowship in Michigan and we moved to Lincoln and we fell in love. Who falls in love in Lincoln.
* * *
—
Laura met her husband in Mississippi. After grad school she got a fellowship in Michigan and after the fellowship in Michigan there were two years in Arkansas and then a spot opened up in Mississippi, Oxford, Ole Miss. Not an academic, the husband, but he ran a bookstore, managed it, was well read, which we cared about then, whether someone had read the same books we had, and which I try to, have to, care less about now. Hadn’t gone to college though, which made Laura’s choice unusual. Exotic, even. How she told me, breathless, on the phone, that he’d worked in construction, and not just during the summer for extra money between semesters but as a job, full-time, for years. They met and were married in nine months. And then some time passed and Laura’s contract was up and she got a new job, tenure track, in California, and her husband, his name was Dylan, he didn’t want to leave. Laura moved in with my parents right after she filed the paperwork.
What I care about—what I try to care about—now. A sense of humor. Kindness, whatever that is. Knowing who the good teachers are, knowing how to get my kid into their classes. I did have a kid, eventually. A baby who is now a kid. Not with my ex. Not with anyone. I mean, not with anyone who’s still around.
* * *
—
So Laura got divorced and moved in with my parents and after a while I went down to visit. We went for a hike in Griffith Park. The winter and the first half of that spring it had rained, really rained, for the first time in years. Thunderstorms taking drivers on the 405 by surprise. Record snowpack in the Sierras. This was June and people were skiing. In Griffith Park the bloom had peaked in March but wildflowers were still sprouting, an embarrassment of petals, yellow and burnt sienna and ripe purple, pale green stalks. The top layer of earth was a soft powder, a light brown so anonymous and uniform as to appear, in memory, colorless, and Laura talked and I listened. I walked ahead of Laura because I am by nature a competitive person and also because Laura was talking and so slightly out of breath. She talked about Dylan. I’d only met him once, at the wedding, their courtship had been so rushed and then also their marriage.
Dylan had been raised by his aunt and uncle. His mother had died in childbirth or just after—an infection contracted at the hospital, not as rare as you’d think—and his father, devastated, had driven from Belzoni, Mississippi, to Salina, Kansas, the baby in a drawer liberated from the bedroom dresser, and knocked on his dead wife’s sister’s door. At least, Laura said, this was how she imagined it. The father driving the eleven hours straight, though of course he must have stopped for gas, to feed the baby. The drawer part was true, Dylan had told her that, said the aunt and uncle still had it, though this didn’t make sense to Laura, wouldn’t Dylan’s father have needed the drawer, back home. But Dylan had shrugged, said probably he’d been too ashamed to ask for it back. Didn’t spend the night, had a cup of coffee then he was back on the road. Dylan swore his father hadn’t called ahead, hadn’t asked his sister-in-law and her husband whether they wanted to take the baby, take him. Laura had asked and Dylan had shaken his head, back and forth, his head drooping so that Laura could see the bald spot, a perfect circle, like a timid monk’s tonsure, blooming at the tip of his skull. I loved that bald spot, Laura said, that soft underbelly he carried at the top of his head.
We were drinking whiskey, Laura said, and it was late. All I did in Mississippi, Laura said, was drink whiskey. Summer nights, we’d drive out into the country, start with beer, Budweiser, nothing fancy, then a beer and a shot, the beer going down easy, like water, the condensation on the bottle being the real point, how cool it was against my hands, my neck, you know out in the country even the bars didn’t have air-conditioning, just ceiling fans, if your skin was dry you could barely feel the breeze. The whole state was like a proof of concept for the idea of sweating. By the time he got to this part of the story we were drinking whiskey straight. We’d known each other a few weeks then and he wasn’t trying to seduce me, he didn’t need to, for one, we fucked the night we met—the word fucked here standing in for Laura’s anger, I stumbled as she said it, small rocks on the path coming loose under my feet as it came snapping out of her mouth—but also it wasn’t the story you’d tell if you were trying to get a woman to sleep with you. It was the story you’d tell after, when you’d decided you wanted to sleep with her again, and again after that, maybe wanted to keep sleeping with her for a while, but also you were a man and so you couldn’t come right out and say it because telling people what you want makes you weak. That, Laura interrupted herself, I actually believe. Telling people what you want, speaking desire, and I could hear the air quotes in her voice, the ones she used when she slipped into grad-school vernacular. It’s like telling people how to hurt you, handing them instructions. I think, Laura said, the fact that women are better at asking for what they want, that we have to be otherwise we’ll never get it, and even then, even asking, mostly we don’t, I think this is why we’re stronger than men, in general. But anyway, Laura said, what Dylan said was after his mother died there was a funeral, and at the funeral his aunt asked if they, if we, needed any help and my father said we would be fine. My father, Dylan said, was a man of few words. Probably he was still in shock and didn’t know it, that’s what my aunt said. So six months went by and every week or so my aunt would call my father to check in on us and every week my father would say we were doing just fine, thanks for asking. And then one week my aunt called and my father didn’t pick up, the phone just rang and rang and the next day he was at my aunt’s house, we both were, him in a suit looking sheepish and me in the drawer, overheated. They thought I had a temperature but I was just swaddled too tightly. My aunt thinks he had a breakdown. I think he came to his senses. I think, Laura said, that’s the night I fell in love with him. If he’d asked me to marry him that night I would have said yes. It wasn’t the story itself but how he told it. No anger in him, just sorrow. Sorrow not for himself but for his father, how scared he must have been. His father was dead by the time Dylan moved back to Mississippi. It wasn’t forgiveness in his voice. Laura shook her head. It was more, it was beyond, it was like—like forgiveness was something he could turn around and look at, like that’s how far in the past it was, like that’s how still it was for him, how sure. And I thought that was beautiful. It was a religious feeling I had, sitting across from him, like I was in the presence of something holy. And I don’t think I was wrong, but I do think I saw him for a moment and thought I’d seen him whole, only that’s not how it works, is it. The whole is the whole, the moment can’t stand in for it.