Читать книгу A Meaning For Wife - Mark Yakich - Страница 7

2.

After the usual snafus with luggage at O’Hare, you and your son are standing on a curb. It’s Friday rush hour and a logjam. Your father is making the pickup. In the old days when you visited home after many months, he’d come inside and meet you right off the plane at the gate; but now security and fear have turned everything into curbside pickup. This would be fine if he or Mom had a cell phone. Their car is a dull beige sedan and always gets camouflaged in the pack, especially on this gray evening; this is going to be a real hunt.

Owen is motioning and moaning in the direction of a very large man with a muzzled dog. “Just a sec, hon,” you say, looking for something to distract him. From your shirt pocket you hand him a crumpled boarding pass, “Go for it.” He may eat it but, like sitting too close to the TV, you can allow it once in a while. Just don’t let these things become habits.

Habits. Six months ago you decided to break a few of them. To do things differently than before, to forge new patterns. It was kind of your own personal addition to the famous Kübler-Ross stages of grief. You started with small things—brushing teeth with the left hand, changing shampoo, drinking green tea instead of coffee. If you started with the small things, you figured at some point you could change the big things. Move to a new apartment, for example.

None of it did much for your mental state, so you made a modification to your new stage of grief—don’t break patterns, instead break things. One night you scooped Owen out of his bed, stuffed him tenderly into the car seat, and started driving. You didn’t know where you were headed exactly, just somewhere remote. The bayous. Owen wouldn’t settle down in his seat; he knew something was up. He kept wiggling and making mouth-fart noises, something cute you’d taught him long ago, which your wife hadn’t approved of and which was now nerve-wracking.

You turned on some classical music and rolled down the windows. The hot spring winds replaced the air conditioning and after ten minutes the boy fell back asleep. But you couldn’t wait to get to the bayou. The next turn-off would have to do. Down an unlit one-lane road to nowhere, you began throwing them out the window, one by one, yelling Goodbye and Good Luck! Fuck you, Good China! Fuck you Beijing, fuck you Shanghai! You expected each dish and glass to sound with a violent crash. But of course they didn’t. You were driving too fast and by the time they hit the ground the sound was carried backward. No pleasure even in breaking shit. And now you’d have nothing to eat on tomorrow, having donated the regular dishes to the Salvation Army weeks earlier. Alas, you weren’t very good at grief six months ago and you’re not much better at it now. You have a lot to learn, as your mother said periodically to you as a child. Of course you always knew there was sarcasm in that statement, but now you believe there’s an earnest reminder in there as well.

It only takes an hour and a few more papery things for Owen to chew on, including inserts from your magazine, to find the right beige vehicle. You make a mental note to ask the pediatrician about this paper eating—what’s the name for the disease, picca?

Dad greets you with a smile and a handshake and gives Owen a little pat. “Hello there, little man.” You pile into the car just ahead of a police car blaring its sirens.

The ride home will be forty-five minutes, if you’re lucky. You could really use a nap, a coffee, and a shot of bourbon, in that order.

“What classes are you teaching this fall?”

Dad always asks the same question, and you’re not sure if he ever hears the answer. If he asks other questions, they’re not really questions—they’re excuses for him to talk about the latest paranoia sweeping the country or the world. A few years back, before Owen, when you and your wife took a vacation to Europe, he continually warned you about Algerian muggers in Paris. Don’t go out at night, those terrorists will take your passport and you’ll never be able to come back. Last year it was red grapes from Chile purposefully laced with salmonella.

“I said, what are you teaching this fall?”

“Sorry, I’m a bit wiped out. Research Methods, Senior English, and The Novel.”

“How do you teach novels on the computer?”

Dad has never really understood your job as a teacher in a virtual high school. You don’t blame him. Sometimes you think the job is ridiculous, too, teaching English online to mostly home-schoolers and prisoners. But when you dropped out of the doctoral program with only a master’s, you knew a college teaching gig was out of the question. And you could never go back to a cube in an office, unless the job came with a suicide clause.

After an involved explanation of email, websites, and blog-ging, you notice that Owen is asleep again. Is he getting too much sleep? Is he depressed? Is that possible for a two-year-old?

Fortunately, Dad is an extreme introvert and won’t say much for the rest of the ride home. You do wish you could talk to him about real things. In the twenty years since you left home, only coming back for holiday visits, he has never phoned you. You have called home and Mom has called you. But not once has Dad called you, independent of your mother, not even after your wife died.

You figure it’s just his way. Your parents have always been eccentric, though not in a way that’s really ever interested you. They may have believed in holistic medicine, acupuncture, and vitamin supplements long before such things gained mainstream popularity, particularly in the Midwest, but as they’ve aged they’ve gotten increasingly judgmental and seem to have strong, if not vehement, opinions about everything. The last time you called home, for example, your mother kept going on and on about how there’s a cure for cancer but the American Medical Association keeps it under wraps. As gently as you could you tried to interject that that would require an impossible conspiracy between thousands of doctors, medical schools, drug companies, as well as every branch of government. But she argued that it was possible, and that’s when Dad added If they can cover up Roswell, they can cover up anything. Your parents aren’t total conspiracy-heads, however. They do believe we walked on the moon, if only because your father worked for the Ray-theon Corporation and led the engineering team that developed Apollo 13’s guidance system.

You’re almost home when Dad says, “When’s this reunion of yours?”

“Some people are meeting at the football game tonight, but the actual event is tomorrow night.” You tell him this, but you’re still undecided about going. Part of you believes that Owen has been long overdue for a visit to grandma and grandpa’s and the reunion was simply a good excuse for a visit. Maybe you should move back to Chicagoland, to be closer to them and your sister. None of them seems overly eager to visit you in New Orleans. Dad would fly, but Mom hasn’t been on a plane since she was thirty. You’ve suggested the train, but she says it’s too expensive. They’ve threatened to drive a few times but her office manager job always seems to get in the way. Too busy—that OGO conference I have to organize is a bear, Dr. Janis wants all these transcripts by Monday, I have all the fellowship applicants to review, etc. It is plain to you that she knows more about the lives of her boss and office mates than she does about your life, which is probably as much your fault as hers.

You walk in the front door, Mom hugs you and Owen, and you’re genuinely glad to see her. She has dinner almost prepared. When you visit, she usually makes one of your favorites. Tonight it’s homemade macaroni and cheese, garlic bread, string beans, cucumber and tomato salad, and chocolate pudding pie. It’s nice to feel something resembling normality. You set Owen down in the family room, next to a box filled with toys they keep for him and your sister’s four-year-old, Pearl. Mom says she’d love to play with Owen while you unpack. Owen is not so sure but you figure he’s got to get to know her.

Unpacking uses up only a few minutes, but you take your time afterwards. You are happy to have a moment alone. Sitting on the toilet in the bathroom you and your sister used to share, you look over at the four-foot tall stack of your mother’s astrology magazines. Might as well pull one of them out and begin reading; it could be a while. After a couple of minutes reading, something feels funny. You flip to the front cover. The magazine’s date is February 1986.

You remember the year well. It was a few days before your sixteenth birthday when Mom first told you about your father’s schizophrenia. She had to; she’d pulled you out of a track meet to go pick him up at his office. He was being fired. On the half-hour car ride, she told you the story, or part of it, beginning with a diagnosis more than ten years earlier. You were more shocked by the secrecy than the actual news; you would realize your mistake in the following months. Things changed: Dad underwent expensive and ineffective homeopathic treatments (your parents forgoing traditional medicine after his suicidal reaction to lithium in the early 1970s) believing that a food allergy was making him hear voices; Mom went back to work after sixteen years, as a secretary in another suburb an hour away; and, you and your sister retreated to separate caves.

1986. At first you thought Why him? Then Why me? And finally just plain Why? It took you a while to figure it out—in college or in your early twenties somewhere—to realize that some kind of terrible thing—mental illness, cancer, starvation, war, genocide, dentures, etc.—happens to everyone if they only live long enough. Until you were sixteen, you were simply in a kind of “non-trauma window,” as The Professor calls it.

One more quick glance at your sign’s astrological forecast. This one for February 23, 1986: “It’s another good day at work. The comments about you are uplifting. Don’t be afraid to put your creative self out there in front of everybody.” Whatever. You leave the bathroom despite failing to empty your bowels.

Owen and Mom have moved to the kitchen. He is standing on a rickety-looking stool, stirring the macaroni and cheese. He has a big smile on his face and so does your mother. She tells him how his daddy used to be a good helper in the kitchen. You do remember once cooking a piece of steak using every spice in the house and that it was mighty tasty, but you can’t remember taking part in any other cooking as a kid. That was always Mom’s job until, well, things changed.

Owen finishes his project by dropping the spoon into the pot. It sinks slowly and beautifully. Your father comes in the kitchen. Owen suddenly lunges for you to hold him. Typical stranger anxiety. Your father reaches into a cupboard and says to Owen, “Do you want some pop?” You don’t want to cause a fuss, so you let Owen have half a glass.

“Do want some red wine?” Dad says.

This is a recent development. Your father’s father was an unacknowledged alcoholic and your mother never let booze in the house while you were growing up, except for your high school graduation party. But last year your father heard about the antioxidant properties of red wine and so now he has a glass or two at dinner. Grateful for something to take the edge off, you accept his offer.

The table gets set and dinner goes pretty well. There’s the usual squabbling between your parents about his using too much salt, her not wanting ice cubes in her water, etc. These little reruns don’t faze you anymore. Owen is the center of attention anyway. He landscapes his food on the table and then applies it to his face, trying a bit of everything. You aren’t that hungry for some reason.

As you’re getting up to help clear the table, Dad throws out a new piece of information, “Did you hear that they’re outlawing vitamin C in Canada and that it could happen here?

“I don’t think they can do that, Dad.”

“Oh yes they can,” Mom chimes in. “I read it on Alternet. Just because it’s not being reported by the mainstream media doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.”

“It’s not a medication,” you say, “that’d be like banning garlic.”

In the background Owen seems to be enjoying this debate, clapping every few seconds.

“Garlic,” Dad says, “has incredible antioxidant powers.”

You resist the urge to bring up his mania two summers ago—twenty cloves of raw garlic per day. Somehow Mom put up with three months of it. Somehow Dad’s stomach survived.

When you and Owen climb the stairs to your old bedroom, which smells of mothballs and old clothes, you recall part of the problem with coming home: the house itself. Growing up you felt comfortable in this place. And you especially liked your bedroom, arranging and rearranging your furniture every six months or so, imagining one day you’d be an architect. The house was a newly built four-bedroom colonial when your parents bought it, moving back to the Midwest from Boston when you were five. The whole subdivision was new, built on grade-A farmland—you can still remember picking clover-like weeds, hundreds of them, from the backyard so that your parents could lay the sod stacked like firewood in the driveway. But the house is now more than thirty years old, and to say that it’s a pigsty doesn’t due justice to either “pig” or “sty.” Although you remember vividly the intense picking-up and cleaning sessions the night before Thanksgiving and Christmas, you don’t recall the house being this bad. In all these years Mom and Dad have never thrown or given anything away. It’s 2200-square feet of cat-scratched furniture packed into rooms, closets jammed with hundreds of thrift-store shirts, blouses, sweaters, pants, jackets, and skirts on cheap metal hangers, and assorted piles of papers, household junk, and baubles.

Your mother comes in with fresh linens and begins making up the bed. As he does at home, Owen starts pulling books from the large bookshelf against the far wall. He has become quite skilled: the books, some of them tomes, barely miss his toes.

“Ma, where are my yearbooks?”

“Your what,” she says, “I haven’t touched a thing.”

“Yearbooks—I’ve always kept them right here,” you say pointing to the bottom of the bookshelf. “This corner. Should be at least two or three of them.”

She shrugs.

“Dad—”

“Oh don’t bother to ask, he doesn’t know where anything is.”

“You two in a fight?”

“No,” she says, and then after a moment, “I wanted him to pick up my blouses at the cleaner’s today. And, for once in his life, pick up the house, vacuum. He didn’t do a damn thing as usual.”

You shrug.

“Come downstairs after Owen goes to bed. Goodnight, sweetie,” she says, and gives the little guy a tight squeeze.

After getting him into his pajamas, you read him one of his favorite books. It is about an elephant and a mouse who fall in love against the wishes of their families, and it only takes eight or nine reads before he looks sleepy. You’re about to do the final tuck-in when he puts his hand in his mouth twice, which is the sign that he’s hungry. But then he pulls at his ears. It could be one of the ear infections he’s prone to.

“Do your ears hurt?”

He covers his ears and then throws up his hands. “Eeeeet.”

“What’s wrong with your ears?”

“Eeeeet,” he says and sticks a hand in his mouth.

“We just ate.”

One more time with the sign.

Back downstairs. Your father is watching TV and your mother has already fallen asleep in an arm chair with a stack of old newspapers on her lap. Most likely she’s been clipping coupons.

You remember why your wife never liked coming here. The last time the three of you visited, the guest room reeked so intensely of cat urine that it was difficult to sleep. And then back home, days after the trip, the smell of the house lingered on your clothes, Owen’s toys, even your bodies. No, Little Ma’s colon cancer notwithstanding, you don’t blame your wife for the six to one ratio of visits to her parents versus visits to yours.

Looking around the room, you realize you can make your peace with the cluttered house and the pack-rat mania; it’s the refrigerators that you can’t bear to open. There are three of them. One is in the kitchen and two are in the garage. One of the garage refrigerators is the old kitchen refrigerator that died but is “perfect for storing canned vegetables and dry goods” and the other was your grandmother’s and is packed to the gills. In the olden days when you wanted, say, a glass of orange juice, you asked Mom if they had any, or you asked your wife to get it for you. She didn’t mind and you knew she secretly enjoyed seeing what kinds of moldy fruits, green meats, soft cheeses gone hard, and funky condiments she’d find. One Christmas Eve she held out a bottle of something you couldn’t identify and said, “I didn’t think soy sauce could actually curdle.” You’ve not looked in the refrigerator since she died.

You set down Owen on the kitchen floor. “Open the fridge, honey, and get the milk.”

“Meeelk,” he says.

“Yes, in the fridge. I’m in desperate need.”

“Not dursty.”

“I am.”

“Cha-cha.”

“Okay, you can have some. It’s in the fridge, too.”

As soon as he opens the door, you expect a load of condiments or overloaded plates or containers to come crashing down all around his feet. Broken glass, ketchup, pickles, and rancid food smells.

But nothing happens. Owen just stands there. “Cha-cha.”

You peer in over his shoulder. The refrigerator is relatively clean. You step back to get a look, thinking that they might have bought a new one.

“Cha-cha.”

“Sorry, looks like they’re all out.”

“Cha-cha!”

“Yes, yes, I know.” You scoop him up and give him the tickle treatment. A classic move of distraction. Instead of giggling he’s pulling at his ears again. Suddenly you see them. Fleas in his hair. “For chrissake’s,” you say aloud.

“Keees?”

“Christ,” you say, but there’s no time to explain. You take him back upstairs. “It’s into the bathtub for you, mister.”

After a good scrub and rechecking the bed for bugs, you get him to sleep without trouble. Now it’s time: you find the yearbooks behind other books on the bottom shelf.

The first thing you do is look for a clue as to who sent you a mysterious email a couple of weeks ago: How have you been? Hopefully shitty. See, its come to my attention that I never got to kick your ass. I know your coming to the reunion, so don’t try to deny it. Never forget The Single Finger. The note, signed U R FUCT, came from an email address you could only trace to somewhere in the Chicago area. Why did you ever bother to post your email address? For some reason you are more concerned with this person’s inability to use the apostrophe than his (or her?) beating you up. Although you never had many enemies in school or even now, you still scan the pages for any reference to “The Single Finger” in the handwriting of the people who signed your yearbook.

No luck. But you do find your entry in the “senior summaries.” Goal: “To become a private investigator in Hawaii and to own a Ferrari.” Jesus. Favorite teacher: “Mrs. Steffen.” What? You remember hating her for making you write a paper on Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” What was the point, you told her, of reading this poem about the beach—if you want to experience the beach, wouldn’t it be better simply to go to the beach? Your favorite memory: “Prom with LW and cross-country championship junior year.” You glance over old classmates’ summaries; under a name you recognize as a guy who ODed in college you read his goal: “To succeed.”

You flip a few pages and find your senior photo. Major nerd. Does somebody want to smash your face for being a nerd? Then looking at the other headshots, you conclude that everyone is a nerd. The 80’s was a decade of nerdism—even the cool kids were nerds. But today everyone, including the nerds, is cool. You turn the pages and quickly realize there are a lot of faces you don’t want to ever see again. Dicks and bitches. Of the latter, though, you have to admit looking at some of their photos now does trigger the memory of innumerable masturbation sessions. There were those times, even after college, when you weren’t dating anyone—you’d pull out the yearbook and imagine alternate lives with girls who you had crushes on in high school. It was beyond pathetic but it filled in the outline of loneliness.

You find the photos of the small clique of friends you had. At times a close group—advanced placement class takers but also dope-smokers and band members and cheerleaders. You remember an excerpt from Carmen’s valedictorian speech word for word: We should all be very proud of ourselves and our accomplishments given that it is hard to soar like eagles when we were led by a turkey. The eagle was a reference to your school’s mascot and the turkey was a reference to the principal. Carmen was probably the only student whose parents had to have a conference with the principal after their child graduated. But her parents didn’t mind. In fact none of your parents would have minded. Since your class had been in elementary school, parents had talked about how special all of you were. They even differentiated you from siblings a year or two older or younger. You heard your mother once tell another mother on the phone, “He’s going to do something spectacular in the sciences, don’t ask me what, yes, I simply know it, biology, I think.” You could picture the mother on the other end of the line nodding her head into the phone. Sadly, you did nothing in the sciences and the only biology you have is a tiny grasp of the workings of your colon because you were diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome three years ago.

“Class of ‘88,” your mother says, startling you, “you were special.” You didn’t even notice her come in—and since when is she a mind reader?

“Were special?” you say.

“Still are.”

You suppose she is right, but not for the old reasons.

“Your sister’s class was smart, but they didn’t have the same ambition as yours.”

“Do you remember when you tried to get me into gifted?”

“That program was a joke,” she says. “You were gifted, you just didn’t test well.”

You debate about whether or not to tell her, and then you just say it, “I intentionally screwed up the test.”

“What are you talking about? I had them give it to you twice.”

“I screwed up the second one too.”

“What?”

“I know you wanted me to be gifted, but I didn’t want to be gifted.”

“But you were gifted.”

You note the past tense but don’t say anything. Then you wonder if you want Owen to be gifted. Then another thought which you voice aloud: “What if Owen turns out to be retarded?”

She assures you that he’s normal and bright and perfect.

“But will he test well?” you say.

She smiles now, thinking that you’re kidding.

“Oh, look,” she says, and points at a group photo of the pom-pom squad. “Isn’t that Lane?”

“It’s Julia.”

“Really?”

“Lane was on the tennis team, Julia was in poms.”

“I could never keep your harem straight.”

“It wasn’t a harem, Mom.”

“Well, there certainly were a lot of girls.”

“They were just friends, except for Lane.”

“I didn’t like her very much.”

“I know,” you say and then add, “in the end I didn’t like her either.”

“Carmen—she would have been a better first girlfriend for you.”

This is probably true, except for the fact that you could never get yourself to be attracted to her.

“What’s she doing now?”

You tell her you don’t know and that, in fact, you’ve lost contact with everyone—Julia, Lane, Carmen, Rick—from your old clique.

“Did you ever go to your high school reunions?” you ask.

“I don’t think they had any. You forget my high school was in a small farm town. Only twenty-five in my graduating class. Besides, I never would have had time to go back. We drove past the building once when we visited your grandmother years ago. Or I guess we drove past the spot where the building once was. Torn down, now a bank or something. It’ll be interesting, though, for you to go tomorrow. There is one thing I’d like to know. Was it you or your sister who put the bullet hole in the Buick?”

“Elizabeth,” you say. “She didn’t put it there, I mean, the car apparently got hit one of those times she drove into the city with her friends to go clubbing.”

“I figured as much,” Mom says.

“You’re not upset?”

“That was a long time ago, water under the bride and all.”

You note her malapropism, a habit which over the years you’ve found more and more endearing. Your favorite is when she says Variety is the price of life.

“I’ll leave you to it here,” she says. “I’ve got laundry and stuff to do downstairs before your sister and George arrive tomorrow for brunch.”

As soon as she leaves, you go digging into the desk for the photo of you and the harem—Julia, Lane, and Carmen. The Polaroid is a pseudo ménage à quatre—you are all fully clothed, wrapped up as in a game of Twister—but for some reason you don’t want your mother ever to see it.

Before you even get into the second drawer, you find a small notebook and some scraps of paper with your father’s handwriting. Some are dated within the last year.

You first found similar scraps of paper while you were home from college one summer. Rummaging around your bedroom, trying to find a t-shirt or sock or something, you came upon pages of legal pad paper that had been shoved, hastily it appeared, underneath a stack of books. The scribblings were so bizarre that some of the passages stuck in your mind verbatim, and then one day they seemed to vanish from your mind without you’re noticing they’d vanished. But now, here are what look to be fairly new scribblings:

B put herself and others permanently in my head. Invasion of privacy is one huge issue. This is what I have to put up with.

Martha was a friend 7 times. Never married with her. No sex together. Martha was in Africa 7 times. And had to carry water 8 miles each morning. Had to live on the cusp of starvation. She had a son, same as now. She always tried to befriend those who came for help.

5 times I was on Atlantis.

Billy Bob Thorton - joined 12/9/06 Ozzie Osborn - joined Mike Nichols - ? Angelina Jolia Unga = “boiling over” Mr. Magic = me

Had 7 children, 3 stillborn (wife ate too much beef)

B had me clubbed to almost death 3 times this morning (12/13/06). And also whipped 80 lashes in my sleep. I was groggy again. But I broke B’s noise with a mind bolt of energy.

I have been black 6 times.

Your stomach sinks and a pang of unidentifiable emotion runs the length of you. You’d assumed that he had stopped writing crazy notes. Your mother hasn’t mentioned any others since those you showed her years ago. Your head pounds with thought in every direction. You sink to the floor in a daze.

You find her ironing in the basement. “Look at these,” you say, handing her the papers.

“Yes,” Mom says, “I’ve seen others like that.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know.”

“Recently?”

“I don’t know,” she says, “I used to find them among the magazines in the copper tub near the fireplace. They were redundant so I stopped noticing them.”

They may be redundant but they may also be sign of a psychological break. Or at least that’s what you imagine, based mainly on nine months of reruns of crime scene TV shows; your attempt to beat insomnia. So while your mother continues to iron unperturbed, you go searching the house for more notes. An hour of Easter-egg hunting yields two small memo notebooks and an assortment of scribbled-on receipts, used envelopes, and post-it notes. You wonder if these coincide with the wine drinking.

When you display the evidence to your mother, she seems only a little concerned. “What about the voices?” you ask.

“I don’t know,” she says, cleaning the downstairs toilet. “Maybe he hears a few.”

It’s not the voices that trouble you exactly; it’s what they might tell him. You remind her of the time he tried to transfer money from their savings account to some quasi-religious organization in Montana. The plan only failed because he got one of the digits in the bank’s routing number wrong.

She acknowledges that the scraps could be a potential problem. You feel like you should do something.

“Whatever you do,” she says, “don’t take the papers with you. Put them back where you found them, so that he doesn’t know we’ve seen them.”

“Fine,” you say, “but I’m making copies.”

“If you want,” she says, wrapping the toilet brush in a plastic bag.

“Do you have any change?”

“Check my purse.”

It’s difficult finding a copy machine in the middle of the night, but finally at a convenience store attached to a gas station you manage to copy, at a quarter per page, twenty or thirty pages of material. You pull the car back into your parents’ driveway feeling better that you’ve done something. It’s almost one a.m. and you’re completely exhausted. At least you have the scribblings—you can analyze them later or take them to The Professor for his advice.

You open the front door and notice there’s still a light on in the kitchen. Mom is sitting at the table with a cup of tea. You sit down more out of guilt for not having visited home in so long than out of any desire to talk.

“How’s Owen taking it?”

You’re surprised it took this long for her to ask, though you thought she’d ask how you were taking it. You’d like to tell her fine or just dandy. No, you’d really like to tell her that when one has a young child, one moves through Kübler-Ross a little differently than others: Denial is fairly easy and lasts about five minutes; Anger seems to be a continual stage that comes in unpredictable waves; Bargaining doesn’t make any sense (how do you bargain with a dead woman?); and, Depression, though tempting, has to be skipped altogether, because if one doesn’t get out of bed, it’s not as if one’s toddler is going feed himself breakfast, pack a well-balanced snack, and then navigate morning traffic to half-day daycare. As for Acceptance, the alleged final stage, one is still not sure what that might be; acceptance of what—the cliché that death is a natural part of life? It was only too natural that one’s wife died because of a camouflaged tree nut. You want to tell your mother all of this. But it’s too late and you don’t have the energy for a drawn-out conversation. So after an extended meaningful pause, you say, “Honestly, Mom, I don’t think it really matters. Owen’s not even two, and soon enough he won’t remember her at all.”

“Certainly he’ll remember his mother.”

“What for?”

She stares at you blankly, or what you take to be blankly, and then the word itself blankly runs again and again through your head until finally she gets up from the table, turns off the kitchen light, and marches up the stairs to bed. You sit there for some time in the dark, with your head down on the table. As usual you contemplate suicide. As usual it seems like too much trouble.