Chapter 9
On Sunday, James asked if we could spend the morning in town. “I’m getting cabin fever,” he said, opening the windows. The sky was patched in yellow-gray clouds, the sun leaking feebly through.
“You can go out.”
“But I want to go with you. I’d really like a day together before I go back to the city.”
Had it been that long already? By my hip, Silver snored. “Can she come?”
“Um, no,” James said. “It’s town.”
“Don’t you think she’d enjoy town?”
“Katie, what’s up with you? She won’t enjoy town. She’s a cat.”
“Just a little while longer.” The idea of getting dressed and going to town was extraordinarily unappealing.
I didn’t want to walk down Holme’s gray and gaping streets while avoiding eye contact with its townspeople.
I belonged here, in bed, with Silver. I buried my face into her fur and drew a deep breath.
She smelled pleasantly funky, like old bedding and briny water.
“Come on,” James said. Silver whined, and my eyes flooded with light. He picked her up and held tight to her wriggling body. “Please. I haven’t been back in forever.”
He sounded deflated. I thought back to my birthday dinner at the Georgian restaurant, his excitement about taking me here. The giddiness I experienced back then felt so far away, fake. Before I could stop myself, I said, “Okay.”
James smiled. There it was, flicker of that old feeling. A piece sliced from his joy, mine to hold for a while. I was relieved. James was good. James made me very happy.
—
The local art museum was newly open after a renovation.
Tickets were free for under twenty-fives, but I forgot my ID, so James paid for two adult entries.
The building was sparse and elegant, large windows suffusing the halls in white sunshine.
Heels clicked against stone flooring. Somewhere in another room, a child was being scolded out of a tantrum. I hoped Silver wasn’t lonely.
“Look. That’s a Teresa Tanaki-Smith.” James pointed to a large bronze sculpture in the middle of the room. “She’s a local.”
I approached the artwork. What I initially thought was a misshapen tube was really a fish. The fish’s body was rough and pockmarked. It balanced on one delicate fin, gaping at the ceiling with beady eyes and a wide, open mouth. I took a step back. It was so sad and so clearly doomed.
James turned to look at me, because I’d begun to cry. “What’s wrong?”
I thrust my hand out to comfort the fish. James caught it. Gently, he said, “You can’t do that.” I twisted and backed out of the room.
“What’s wrong?” James followed me. “Was it the fish?”
“It’s terrible.”
“She’s very good at depicting suffering, isn’t she?” said James. “A bit too good.”
I wiped my cheeks and shook my head. I didn’t know feeling upset was the correct response. “I don’t get it.”
“I just meant that the fish is suffering. It’s trying to inhale, but it can’t.”
I felt violated. The fish’s ugly face burned in my head. I could hear it breathing, a raspy huhhhhhh that filled me with desperation. “Why would you put something in the world just to make it suffer?”
“Maybe in her next installation, she’ll throw the fish back into the sea,” James said.
“Don’t be stupid,” I said. James made a shushing noise.
I registered that my voice had grown shrill.
“I hate it.” Across the hallway, a few heads turned.
Indignation made me self-possessed, and I marched in the opposite direction.
I couldn’t yet identify the source of my conviction, but whatever it was, it was powerful.
“Do you want to go to another room?” James appeared behind me. “Talk to me.”
I continued to pace.
“Katie.” James’s hand pressed my shoulder. “Do you want to go?”
We found a bench outside. The breeze wafted over the stench of a nearby trash bin.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It made me feel so sad.”
“Just sad?”
“And guilty, I guess, for leaving it there. I don’t know. I know I’m being difficult.”
“Yes, well.” He looked away. “Something’s on your mind.”
A pebble pressed into my thigh. I brushed it off the bench.
“It feels like I’m missing something,” James said. “Like, maybe your feelings toward me have changed.”
I lifted my head in surprise. Wasn’t it obvious how much I needed him? James noted my silence and saved me from filling it. “You feel distant, is what I mean. I keep trying to reach you, but it’s not working, and I don’t know what to do.”
“It’s not you,” I said. “It’s this town. I want to go back.”
“Okay. Back to New York?”
“No,” I replied. “I don’t know, I don’t know where.
” I thought of the fish. Part of me had a compulsion to look at the fish again, while the other part was desperate to extinguish the desire to do so.
And then I recognized the specific tenor and physical manifestation of the latter feeling: a need to shake my head over and over so as to shake off the particular guilt that overcame me when I was reminded of my mother.
“I think,” I said, then stopped. It was tiring to resist so much. “I think I miss my mother.”
“Ah.” James paused. “You still haven’t spoken?”
“I called. She didn’t pick up.”
“What? When?”
“A couple days ago.”
“Oh, Katie.” James put his arm around my neck. Gently he stroked my hair. A few minutes passed until finally he asked, his voice quiet, “Will you please tell me what happened with her?”
It wasn’t the first time he’d asked, but something was different about the way he did so now. Already his eyes were downcast, like he was prepared to be denied. If I denied him this time, I understood, he would not ask again.
I thought about how inconsolable my mother was when she discovered I’d discussed her with my high school counselor.
It’s not right, she said. It’s like you’ve cut me, that’s how it feels.
I thought also of the beeping phone line.
Eight before it went to voicemail. She usually never let it go past two.
What was left between us had already been cut straight through.
So, in spite of myself, I began to explain to James what had happened in the beginning of my senior year in college. I was going to drop out, or at least take a leave of absence. My grades were bad, and I had no plans, no desires. Even Lou told me to go home for a while.
Revisiting the details of that semester made my hands damp.
My hands were perpetually clammy that September, a month trapped in a heatwave, the city like a rag that never dried.
Things that never bothered me before drove me to rage: the shock of metal hitting belly when my subway fare didn’t go through, flyers for God slipped into my purse.
I developed a strange inability to hear people, their speech refusing to translate into meaning in my brain.
Envy toward my classmates, effortlessly pious about things I failed to care about—internships, theses, graduation—transformed at any instant into fury whenever they said something banal, although it was worse when they were intelligent or impressive.
I learned that these people possessed a drive to do something great, something that would propel them far away from where they came, or else closer to where they naturally belonged.
But it was becoming clear to me that I was only good at home.
When I told my mother in a rash declaration that I was quitting school, she didn’t try to stop me. To my relief, she bought me a plane ticket. I arrived at dinnertime with a backpack of clothes, sweating, hungrier than I’d been in months. The air smelled familiar. Crushed leaves, wet gravel.
My mother looked small. She made a show of having dinner with me.
I could tell she was unwell, because she’d stopped painting entirely.
Learning that I’d stopped, too, cheered her temporarily.
When she reached to hug me, I could feel her bones.
Her thinness had always saddened me, but distance had made her strange, and now it caused me to recoil.
I could not stand to be close to her and smell her breath, unfamiliar and powerful and, I thought with pain in my heart, bad; I could not stand to have her kiss me. I remembered why I’d wanted to leave.
My mother did not ask about school, nor my desire to drop out.
Each time the conversation lulled, she recited memories from my childhood.
“Do you remember,” she said, “when I’d braid your hair and you’d try to sit as still as possible, even when you sneezed?
” Or: “Do you remember the way we used to sleep together? The way you’d wet the bed if you were alone?
” Of course I remembered. They were the same stories she always told.
Still, she asked me anyway, just to hear me say yes.
Her eyes softened with a particular relief each time, like an object she’d been trying to catch had finally landed safely in her hands.
After a week, I grew tired of hearing the stories of my childhood and became filled with an even more acute sense of grief than before.
I felt myself rotting gently in the middle of nowhere, going no place, a piece of fallen fruit waiting to be reclaimed by the soil.
When I spoke about my classes or the city, she closed off.
“You’ve never cared about this kind of thing,” she said.
“I don’t care about them,” I said. “But they’re a part of my life.”
“Your life.” She laughed, the tip of her tongue clinging to her front teeth, the word sharp and hard in her mouth. I felt embarrassed then, for being precious about it, my life. From then on, I would not be able to take it seriously. “Am I not a part of your life?”