Susan is giving her body to other people. Happily, generously, despite the depletion. She offers herself to an unending cycle of tiny mouths, to the fingers that want to grab her hair and pullhard, to the cries in the night. All of it is worth it for her daughter’s shy smile, her son’s loose, infectious laugh. To see them touching each other’s faces, babbling back and forth with great seriousness, known and unknown to her. Theirs is a world that demands her completely, that makes her feel not like a new character, but like she is borderless. She is simply matter and limbs and voice that exists in service to them. They move so quickly between need and satisfaction, terror and wonder. It hardly leaves time to think about what she has lost.
But she allows herself this: for a half hour every day, she watches her show. She gives over to a world that does not involve her children, nostalgia, and cold comfort. In her exhaustion, the grandiose stories sweep her away. Scenes she never saw shock and delight her; moments that felt frantic and disjointed while filming appear smooth and satisfying. The six-month delay between filming and airing allows her to observe herself like never before. The woman on the screen is uncanny. Margie is another person, drifting in and out of her consciousness. Lines are remembered entirely, or half remembered, or completely forgotten. Her son breastfeeds as she watches herself throw back a martini. As Margie covers up a bruise under her eye, her daughter claws at her face. Did she film these scenes, or was it someone else, a not-mother that she used to be? After a while, she begins to enjoy the collapse of it all—the before and after; the fervid, fearless Margie and soft, aching Susan; Orson and Ali and Richard and Glen and Nancy;her babbling, beautiful babies and this house and California—all of it coexisting for thirty blessed minutes. It feels like coming home to herself.
Then one day Margie is gone. No one in Cedardale can find her; it is rumored that she fled to Argentina with cash and secrets. That she may have been murdered.Is that the best you could do?she thinks bitterly toward Flowers. Eventually, people stop mentioning her. The town, vacant of herself, becomes strange, as mysterious to Susan as to any other fan. It is like witnessing a world in which she has died. The other characters’ lives twist onward.
She misses them every day.
Orson, more than all of them. How he improves with every episode! His timing funnier, his face more handsome, his scenes more moving. He can make her belly laugh even when her body is drained from lifting and feeding and burping and swaying.He’s going to be famous, she thinks, and the thought makes her feel small and sad, because she won’t be with him when it happens.I should give him a call.
“Come back,” Orson says. His voice is surreal comfort. “No one has forgotten you.”
Her children are both sleeping, hands touching each other, nine months old.
How?
They need her milk, her arms, her voice singing and playing, her face making faces they can mirror, her pushing them in the fresh afternoon air, her mantra to them:You can be anyone you want to be.But doesn’t it ring hollow against the new narrowness of her world? Isn’t it her duty to show them; to astonish them with her own powers of transformation, to demonstrate that it is possible to do all things, be all things?
“What about Flowers?”
“I’ll talk to him.”
In Orson’s voice is a new authority, a certainty of his position. He has become indispensable.
She knows from the flutter in her chest, the familiar intoxicating hope, that if the call comes, she is in great danger of saying yes.
“I can’t bring them.”
“Why not?”
Why not?She looks at the soft, folded faces of her children.
“Come on, Susie. Resurrection is always possible.”
2011
“You think the world is going to end when you lose your sister, but the truth is, it doesn’t.”
Sebastian watches Aunt Sadie bite into a free burger—her postshift perk. On a Wednesday night, Sully’s American Bar and Grille is a dead zone. The televisions blaring out Red Sox games are hung so high up that the five remaining customers have to crane their heads back in order to gape at the leaps and dives of their familiar saints: Jacoby, Beltré, Big Papi. Their faith is unwavering.
“Jesus, Sadie, she’s not dead,” he says. Though it kind of feels like she is.
It’s hard to believe Lola is still gone. Even after he moved out and they more or less stopped speaking to each other, he always sensed her proximity. At least he could imagine where she was or what she was doing at any given time. Now he has no map of her terrain. Online she is tagged in photographs with so many strangers, and it overwhelms him, her belonging to these fairy-tale people.
He looks again at the message on his phone, written in a manner that he might have mistaken for stream of consciousness if he had not known Lola, who hasn’t texted him about anything in six months, who analyzes everything to the point of death.
Lola
Yo yo
Hope everything is good with you !
I have a favour to ask…
Would you mind (pretty please)
going to my room and sending me
… my driver’s license
