by
Martin Riker
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Why did she like me? Not an irrelevant question, because the certainty that she liked me, and that other cool people I’ve known have liked me, has been my only reliable evidence, through the years, that I must be an interesting person. When my feelings about myself take a bad turn, this is the one proof that even my deepest insecurities can’t controvert. Cool people aren’t idiots, after all. You can’t fool them into liking you. If they like you, then something about you must be at least a little bit likable.
It was senior year, those exciting few days before the semester gets going, when everyone’s back but nothing’s started. I was supposed to meet her at a party that night, but she took the bus and came over to my place early. I’d moved off campus, to the old house with the big back porch next to the gas station. You could sit on the porch and watch, over the wall, the round sign rotating on its pole. She simply showed up. She’d been in Brazil all summer, staying with family. She’d wanted to take an ethnomusicology class but it hadn’t worked out, so instead she’d gone around on her own, meeting musicians, having adventures, every bit of which she was ready to recount for me. We talked in the kitchen for a while before she took out a bag of shriveled-up psychedelic mushrooms, which she wanted us to eat. It was the first time anyone ever offered me any drug other than pot, and I think I was a little bit flattered, just as I’d felt flattered freshmen year when someone first offered me pot. That I, Abby, could be mistaken for a person you simply offer pot to.
lol
I’ve always hated feeling that I have power. I like responsibility, but I hate the power that comes with it.
What the hell is wrong with me?
At some point Jason came out with beers and sat next to me. He drank beer now, which was disappointing. Then again, so did I. It was disappointing that both of us now drank beer. In high school, not drinking had felt special, like you were making a statement about the clichéd expectations of American youth. In college, beer was just beer. There were different statements to make. After some chitchat, I asked about his engineering classes, a topic we’d somehow avoided over the previous days, perhaps intuiting that it would lead to nothing good. I brought up the story about his dad.
“Aren’t you worried your life will end up being just sort of normal and boring?” I said. I could hear how presumptuous this sounded, but at the time it seemed important to say.
Jason looked surprised. “As opposed to what?”
Maybe something you actually care about? I wanted to say. Maybe something you ever once expressed interest in the entire time we were friends?
“I always thought you’d pursue music,” I said.
There are ways I could improve myself, but I am also capable. I am not powerless. I am not my past.
I am not the product of other people, not Maggie, or Evelyn, or Ed. I made myself and, if I choose to, I can change. I can imagine myself differently. I can make the imagination real. Who said that? Maybe I did. Not every phrase in my brain belongs to someone else.
Having a child doesn’t make you better than other people, but it did make me better than myself. It made me less self-absorbed, if only because I was suddenly absorbed with Ali. Being absorbed with someone other than yourself must be better than being absorbed with only yourself, but it’s still just one other person, and what needs to happen, what I think is supposed to happen in the progress to becoming a better human is that being a wife to Ed and a mom to Ali is not an end but part of a process, to train me for greater things. Finding yourself no longer alone at the center of your moral universe is only admirable if it helps you imagine committing yourself in other ways, to other things, other than yourself. That seems right. That is the person I want to be. God, I hope I remember this in the morning.
“You never responded to Michigan,” he said.
“I said no to Michigan,” she said.
“You didn’t,” he said.
“Well,” she said. “No. I don’t want to go to Michigan for vacation.”
“Where do you want to go?” he said.
“You need a want, Miles,” she said. “You brought it up, so you should know where we’re going. I should be hearing why where you want to go is right.”
“You don’t want to be with someone like that,” he said.
“Someone who knows what he wants?” she said. She gripped the glass, watching the foam recede into her last inch of beer.
“Wanting to go isn’t a want?” he said.
She sat with that a moment before saying, “We’ll go to Texas,” as if they’d been discussing Texas as an option all along. “West Texas for two weeks.”
this is so brutal. horrible relationship
“Are we having a fight?” he said.
It came out like a burp. But if it was going to get asked, he was glad he’d managed to ask it before she did. If they were, that is. Having a fight.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Then why did you ask it?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said again, officially giving up any advantage he’d gained by demonstrating he had no idea what to do with it.
“Well, then think about it,” said his wife, “and get back to me.”
oh god
“Okay, well,” she said, stopping the chair again with her foot, “when you say it like that, I start filling in blanks. I know it’s not that you don’t know, or don’t think so; it’s that you don’t want to tell me what you actually think. Or you think you’ve already told me, and you’re trying to make me work it out on my own. So. I start trying to think of things you might know but wouldn’t want to say. I look at something like what you just asked, about quitting your job, the way you’re letting it hang there in the air between us, and I start thinking things like maybe it’s a threat. Like maybe you’re saying that if I can’t figure out some way to appease your chronic insecurity, you’ll come home one afternoon with your tie all loosened and your job all gone. Is that what you’re saying?”
urggh
“How could you not know?” she said.
He shrugged.
“Fuck that,” she said. “Tell me.”
In truth, he’d wanted to talk it through with her since the problem first came to his attention. His wife was an expert at coring the layers of Miles’s anxiety for nuggets of relevant truth. She saw him faster than he could see himself, which was how she’d managed to be right from the start—he was scared of her—and also why he hadn’t realized it until now.
When she did speak, Miles’s wife was careful. She was attentive to what she said, how she said it, and why, making her pauses more loaded, her half of the conversation more compelling, and her criticisms more devastating. Miles was messy by comparison, but he preferred to think of it as a strategy. It wasn’t that he was incapable of getting it together; he was messy because carefulness in communication made him uneasy. It was too tactical, too close to dishonesty. It was a technique for people who were unwilling to confront the consequences of their true feelings. When Miles wasn’t ready to reveal something, he’d made a practice of forcing himself anyway, at least when he could remember to, and he almost always felt better after doing so. Whatever the aftermath, he’d done what he could. The weight was lifted. A burden shared is a burden halved. Having it out beat holding it in.