After she left I looked at my phone for a while. By looked I mean stared, stared specifically at the phone number I wasn’t entirely sure was still Laura’s. Two visits ago my mother had mentioned that Laura had stopped by, that she was pregnant, that her third husband seemed like a keeper, a little younger than her, devoted, doted on her, which sounded nice enough for Laura, not everyone is as immediately repulsed by tenderness as I am. It was the fact that she was pregnant, it created what a more optimistic woman might have called possibility. All my friends—all the people I knew by name and saw on purpose more than twice a month—were moms. Laura was going to be a mom. Perhaps she could, by the transitive property of moms really having very few options when it came to socializing, again be my friend. My own mother had offered to give me Laura’s number, and I had said, No, thanks, I already have it, and since then I had been staring at the number, on and off, and wondering whether in fact I did and, if I did, whether I should do something about it.
Maybe five minutes of staring, of turning the phone’s screen on and off, of not calling, and then I checked on my son. Sober I walk more softly and he was asleep when I opened the door and still asleep as I approached his bed and leaned over his supine body and kissed him on the forehead. In the living room I turned on the TV. I checked my phone. When I worry about my son of course I worry about him dying, but when I have convinced myself that he is still breathing, that his pupils do not look jaundiced, that the lump that forms on his forehead when he bumps his head cannot also be concealing a tumor, what I worry about is how he’ll end up. I mean the possibility that he’ll end up like me. Not that I’m so horrible, just that I know I can do a great, an excellent, a perfect—I mean, my parents were fine. They weren’t amazing but certainly they did not encourage me to hate myself. They did not tell me to seek out men who were controlling and cruel, they did not suggest this is what I deserved. And if there was, during my formative years, a certain cultural consensus about what women wanted and how men should go about giving it to them, well, many others of my generation were smart enough to be skeptical of it. What I’m saying is that my life, like the lives of most people, lacks an origin story. I mean one with any explanatory power. Which means that my son could turn out any way and for any reason or for no reason at all. I’m not sure if it’s irony but here it is, at last I’ve found the thing I do want to control, and of course I can’t.
When I bought the house I did so in part because I had a romantic notion about the turn my life might take in such a town, so small and dead-ended. I imagined myself working at a diner, a diner frequented by truckers. I imagined one of them, kindhearted, modifying his routes so he could see me more often. Never staying longer than the time it took to drink two cups of coffee and eat a grilled cheese, but nevertheless, an understanding growing between us. I imagined myself in a long dress, in a backyard, hanging my sheets out to dry on a clothesline. Shielding my eyes from the sun. Instead I pay a woman to care for my son while I work as a legal secretary. All my skirts hit just below the knee. To clean these clothes, I use a washing machine and a dryer, both located in the basement. In the short story I read, the protagonist has a son, a son whom he leaves, with his wife, on the Eastern Seaboard. The author, the jeans-wearer, had a number of children. They are scattered about the country with the women who bore them. And though yes, it is true that the author never got sober, perhaps all this time I have been wrong about the story’s protagonist, the man who runs out of road. Because he hasn’t, not really. I mean, he can drive into the ocean. He can always decide to turn around.
WORKS (NOT) CITED
This manuscript emerged in part from an engagement with and in some cases refers elliptically to the following texts, television shows, films, web series, works of art, songs, e-mail newsletters, and podcasts: Speedboat and Pitch Dark, Renata Adler; Phantom Thread, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson; Hotel Chevalier, directed by Wes Anderson; Unmastered, Katherine Angel; Frasier, Seasons 1–11, created by David Angell, Peter Casey, and David Lee; Fish Tank, directed by Andrea Arnold; Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper, directed by Olivier Assayas; All Grown Up, Jami Attenberg; Rocky, directed by John G. Avildsen; John, Annie Baker; Cassandra at the Wedding, Dorothy Baker; Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin; The Big Blue, directed by Luc Besson; Out of This World, created by John Boni and Bob Booker; Horace and Pete, written and directed by Louis C.K., especially Episode 3, starring Laurie Metcalf; The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro; “The Glass Essay,” Anne Carson; “Fresno’s Ugly Divide,” a multi-part series published by The Atlantic and written by Rachel Cassandra, Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou, Briana Flin, Alexandria Fuller, Margaret Katcher, Mary Newman, and Reis Thebault, graduate students at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism; Husbands and Minnie and Moskowitz, written and directed by John Cassavetes; The Handmaiden, directed by Park Chan-wook; Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell; “Reading the Tarot,” an e-mail newsletter written by Jessa Crispin; In the Last Analysis, Amanda Cross; Outline and Transit, Rachel Cusk; the e-mail newsletter associated with “The Small Bow,” a website created by A. J. Daulerio and illustrated by Edith Zimmerman; The Possession, Annie Ernaux (trans. Anna Moschovakis); reporting in The New Yorker on Harvey Weinstein by Ronan Farrow; Veronica, Mary Gaitskill; The Babysitter at Rest, Jen George; The End of the Novel of Love, Vivian Gornick; Call Me by Your Name, directed by Luca Guadagnino; I Love Dick, created by Sarah Gubbins and Jill Soloway, especially Episode 5, “A Short History of Weird Girls,” written by Annie Baker, Chris Kraus, and Heidi Schreck; The Piano Teacher, directed by Michael Haneke; L.A. Confidential, directed by Curtis Hanson; Writing a Woman’s Life, Carolyn G. Heilbrun; “Invictus,” William Ernest Henley; How Should a Person Be?, Sheila Heti; “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” bell hooks; Three Times, directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien; In a Lonely Place, Dorothy B. Hughes; Negroland, Margo Jefferson; Moonstruck, directed by Norman Jewison; The Folded Clock, Heidi Julavits; The First Bad Man, Miranda July; reporting in The New York Times about workplace sexual harassment led by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey; Big Little Lies, created by David E. Kelley; I Love Dick, Chris Kraus; The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950–1962, edited by Karen V. Kukil; Suite for Barbara Loden, Nathalie Léger; August: Osage County, Tracy Letts; The Widening Spell of the Leaves, Larry Levis; Margaret, directed by Kenneth Lonergan; Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado; Shame, directed by Steve McQueen; The Collected Stories, Leonard Michaels; The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm; The English Patient, directed by Anthony Minghella; “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey; Blank Check with Griffin and David, hosted by Griffin Newman and David Sims, especially the December 23, 2018, episode on Aquaman, directed by James Wan; And Now We Have Everything, Meaghan O’Connell; The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje; New Collected Poems, George Oppen; Meaning a Life, Mary Oppen; Where Should We Begin?, Season 1, hosted by Esther Perel; Parallel Lives, Phyllis Rose; Mating, Norman Rush; Goodfellas and Casino, directed by Martin Scorsese; The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald; “Push,” written by Matt Serletic and Rob Thomas, performed by Matchbox Twenty; Secretary, directed by Steven Shainberg; The West Wing, Seasons 1–3, created by Aaron Sorkin; “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” Amia Srinivasan, London Review of Books, Vol 40, No. 6, March 22, 2018; Want and When the Saints, Lynn Steger Strong; Antígona González, Sara Uribe (trans. John Pluecker); Jane the Virgin, created by Jennie Snyder Urman; “On Pandering,” an essay by Claire Vaye Watkins given as a lecture during the 2015 Tin House Summer Workshop and reprinted in the 2015 Winter Issue of Tin House magazine; Basic Instinct, directed by Paul Verhoeven; Fleabag, created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge; “Ventimiglia,” Joanna Walsh; Mad Men, Seasons 6–7, created by Matthew Weiner, especially Season 6, Episode 7, “Man with a Plan,” starring Linda Cardellini; Drive, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn; “Burn This,” Lanford Wilson; Heroines, Kate Zambreno; Sour Heart, Jenny Zhang.