What else is left for me to come right out with other than a simple list of everything blood has turned out to be no thicker than—viz., both parents, an ex-spouse, my daughter and her selectively unhappy brother? Father was a spuddy little fellow uncolored by anything in life. My room had always had too low a ceiling. Even as an eighth-grader I could reach up and tape things right onto it—full-color reproductions of rotundas, identical posters of a generously threatening night sky—without resorting to a ladder or even a stepstool. I developed my friendlessness into a comfortingly grand and clanging thing. Year after year felt pinched in from durations already nipped clean from infinity. College, university–whatever you insist on calling it: I carried the chapter summaries around in my thoughts, memorized unpardonable slang, and by my middle twenties had jumped at the first chance to see to it that a couple of kids were brought into this world, a couple of people to mingle with later on in the sweet by-and-by. I was willing to sit through the lullabies, the growth spurts, the blue streaks and curt reversals of adolescence if it meant company, companionship, just a little further down the road. I wasn’t about to rush anybody. But from here on out let me talk about myself as if I’m a person no longer even around. The man’s wife had a temper, but there were cute little crinkles in it. Her frame was jointed in ways that made any dress reaching just below the knees hang just a little bit dentedly. Her body hallowed itself and soon overbore his own. The marriage had an extramarital feel. She was soon saying he was a drag on her verve, but she had a way of phasing you out of her affections that left you feeling still front and center, still active in her finagling of a day already filling up. The first of the babies came into the world with either of them barely lifting a finger. The second, a boy, was even quicker about it. The divorce was still in its earliest accelerations when he decided to move out. Turning his life around took little more effort than getting himself faced away from her. Days in his new apartment were striped with different types of quiet. Then his ex-wife died excitingly in a neighborhood grinddown, and the kids were now his. In the daughter he of course watched for signs of thievery, listened for fibs. Before he left for work in the morning, he’d take note of the positions on shelves of any things of his a kid could fit into the shallow pockets of a dress-code skort and feel sure she could find a buyer for. Little of her mother ever got voiced in her at all, she was claggy and undirected, and her brother was already scissoring off what little floss had begun its cocoa-brown advance on his arms. When the two reached their teens and began belittling him fancily and originally behind his back, he never once pretended he hadn’t overheard. His patience was equal parts point-blank paternal spite and something less lineal but phantomly indulgent. He could already foresee eventual once-a-week restaurant dinners (“My treat”) with each of these kids, kids with less and less physically cross-referencing about them already. He foresaw himself saying, on the sidewalk outside the restaurant (after a meal capped, no doubt, with some wish-fulfilling, otherworldly fudgified dessert), “If you’re not doing anything now,” and then, on the way to his place, stopping at a store for whatever the kid might want later on for a snack, whatever people still ate in place of having to keep up their fraction of the talk—stickily salted peanuts, chocolate all-sorts set out with the mirage of no bottom to the box. The daughter turned out to be the first to age. Age was just the first of the new round of impieties, but she must have thought she was doing him a favor. Then he later heard that the two of them one day met for lunch in a restaurant. Every other account of that meal has them banging their knees together under the table, licking things off each other’s teeth. The man later passed his heart off on some woman acrumble in some other pairing (there was often a chancy spatter to her speech when she brought up the other man). All her life (so she guessed), she had needed somebody to see by—somebody to show her how some things stood and how other things were possibly quite loose if you were suddenly of a mind to reach. She’d had the apartment on her own for only a couple of weeks now. The rooms were spaced out and yet stayed connected—another nice touch.
Recommended Reading: A History of Present Illness, by Anna DeForest; See What I See, by Greg Gerke; Summertime in the Emergency Room, by David Nutt; First Love and My Phantoms, by Gwendoline Riley; Math Class, by Kelly Krumrie; Quartet in Autumn, by Barbara Pym; and The Long-Winded Lady, by Maeve Brennan
