by
Dana Spiotta
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“I’m turning fifty, and it is just now dawning on me that I have limited time,” Nash said. “No kidding. I always felt my life was circumscribed, but I believed it was because of me, because of the choices I made. Now I realize—and only now, I am ashamed to say—that my life is circumscribed by definition. We are all circumscribed by the finite terms, you know? There is a whole world of things I missed out on and will never experience. Whatever I have done, there is an endless amount I have not done. Do you know what that tells me?”
Henry shook his head.
“It tells me it is not meant to be this all-encompassing journey. It is not meant to be catholic or encyclopedic. By now I have carved some grooves in this life. A few. What I need to do is hunker down and make those grooves deep and indelible. Not the time to dig new ones, you know?”
He didn’t want to protect her, or her to restore his youth. Nothing like that. He didn’t exactly know what he wanted. Yes he did—he wanted to be close to her, closer than anyone else. She was awkward and impatient. Too sensitive. She wore the wrong, unflattering clothes, had yet to inhabit herself convincingly. She seemed to have no ambivalence, and endless energy—anything he mentioned she would read practically overnight. She was combative, judgmental, angry. She utterly dazzled him. What a complicated mess of a woman she was, and how desperate he found himself feeling about her.
So here, on his fiftieth birthday, he was giddy with his crush on her, lying in bed with a lazy erection and longing for her. This was a pleasure in itself, just to lie in bed and long for someone. He felt ridiculous, happy, foolish.
It was okay, really, because Josh was her age and that was the way it should be. And Josh was smarter than he thought. Any nagging feelings of doubt, any issues he had with Josh’s character or intentions were not based on anything articulable or objective. He knew his bad feelings came from a little jealousy. The truth was, Nash also felt relieved. He didn’t even mind, too much, when she stopped coming in altogether. He knew that time would make all his twinges fade and eventually go. He knew this because he’d had to let go of things before, as everyone did. It was sad to admit it, but forgetting was a slow, gradual liberation. But knowing this about himself also proved that at some level you don’t completely forget the things you endure. They just fade until it almost seems as though they happened to someone else.
She sat for a while on a rock at the edge of the road. She stopped crying. Then she thought: It never happened. She would never speak of it, or let herself think of it, ever. She was quite certain that you could change your past, change the facts, by will alone. Only memory makes it real. So eliminate the memory. And if it was also true that there were occasions when she couldn’t control where her mind went—a dream, a cold sweat at an unexpected moment, an odor that would suddenly betray her—time would improve it. Time lessens everything—the good things you desperately want to remember, and the awful things you need to forget. Eventually all will be equally faint. This was one thing her second life had taught her about how humans endure.
It was at this point—and not later, when the meeting with Bobby at their agreed-upon rendezvous point didn’t happen—that she began to inhabit her new life as her only life.
Every morning she got up at five. She went to the diner and got ready for the breakfast rush. It was over by eight thirty, and then they would have a long cigarette break and get ready for the lunch rush at eleven thirty. They were busy, which made the time pass quickly. At two she would be exhausted and nearly done with her work. Ready for another cigarette, a change of clothes, and then a beer or a Seven & Seven. The girls all drank Seven & Seven or Canadian Club and Coke.
The next day they would show up, laughing about hangovers and throat clearing behind their fists over cigarettes and coffee. They stacked scratched yellow molded-plastic glasses for water. They refilled ketchup bottles and saltshakers. The quarters and dimes added up to a surprising amount of money. She liked the midmorning coffee break: one lit cigarette after another, and endless cups of weak coffee from thick mugs with permanent stains in the bottoms. It took three packets of sugar and two containers of half-and-half for the coffee to taste of anything. They wiped old, sticky syrup from plastic dispensers with wet cotton rags. They swept the floor and sprayed Windex on the Formica counter (Formica is a decorative laminate made of paper and melamine resin—she couldn’t help but hear Bobby’s voice. But it pleased her that she remembered), then there was yet another cigarette break, and a round of cleaning plastic menus until they signed out at three. Sometimes in the heat of the rush they would move within inches of each other—reach and duck at the exact right moment without saying a word. She felt an adrenaline lift getting it done when five things needed to be done all at once. Being able to do this in the face of chaos gave her a tangible confidence she hadn’t felt before. It was satisfying—a confidence that she wore in her hips.
Anyone can start a new life, even in a small town. Everyone moves so much these days. You get a divorce, you move and start over. Try it. See how little people ask about you. See how little people listen. Or, more precisely, think about how little you really know about the people you know. Where they were born, for instance. Have you met their parents? Or siblings? There was a time, maybe, when just being new in a town made you seem suspect. Because you were suspect—people didn’t have any way to verify you were who you said you were. And why did you have to leave where you came from? But there is a long history (seldom spoken of in the gloriously amnesiac everyday) in America, and in a democracy, of starting over. It was almost an imperative, wasn’t it? America was founded, of course, by people who invented new lives, who wanted nothing more than to jettison the weight of all that history, all that burden and all that memory of Europe. That was one form of freedom. Freedom from memory and history and accounting. Even if an endless series of beginnings tended to reduce everything to shallow repetition and eliminate any possibility of profound experience, it certainly served her, at this moment, in this place.
She told people she had to go back East and take care of her ailing mother. She had five hundred dollars saved, and by spring she finally reached the West Coast. She would get an airtight ID, and she would be safer in a big city. She moved randomly from place to place on the outskirts of L.A. These were the days of pale-beneath-the-tan partying, roller skates and halter tops. And harder, meaner drugs. It was as if someone had taken the aura of the counterculture and extracted every decent aspiration. What was left was the easy liberation of sex and drugs. Was this a function of Southern California, or was every place as weary as this now? Surely the sunshine and beach made the boardwalk a magnet for every marginal person in America. Southern California was full of off-the-grid illegals: draft dodgers, ex-cons, undocumented workers. It was exactly what she wanted. Here she could disappear into the everyday. She could stay far from the rads.
She drank beer and smoked pot all the time. She walked on the beach and had short relationships with men who lived off her.
i like this a lot
August kept a clean apartment. He owned a nice stereo and a new, large TV. He didn’t seem to care one way or another about who was president. He wanted her around all the time. She settled into cooking for him and the daily repetitions of an ordinary life. Laundry. Cleaning. Shopping. Why shouldn’t she enjoy being taken care of a little? The character of those first years as Louise was a swift and steady decrease in possibilities. But wasn’t that true of everyone? As time went by, wasn’t every life a kind of narrowing, a steady relinquishing of possibilities?
I shrugged. I didn’t know where this was going. I don’t have much patience for her these days. I want her to stay out of my way, ask no questions. She doesn’t understand that this is just the way it goes for mothers and sons in these years. It’s not her, it is just the not-her of her that I want, I want nothing from her except for her not to ask me things or stand in my doorway with a pale, sad look on her face, clutching at her sweater sleeves.
“So, how did you find this neo-Luddite bootlegger group?” Nash asked.
“On their website,” Josh said and then smiled widely at Nash.
“Naturally,” Nash said, “on their neo-Luddite website.”
“There are actually quite a few of those. They are finally not really antitech. They are kind of tech fetishists in a way. When you think about it.”
heh