“Or here’s another idea, why don’t we each take one? It will be like a science experiment.”
“Susie.”
“Or we could each takehalf of each. Very biblical.”
“Christ’s sake, Susie, don’t be hysterical.”
“The only question iswhich half.”
He clears his throat in a way that she hates, a deep hacking sound. How can anyone clear their throat at a time like this? It is as though he can’t understand the stakes of the conversation; she is talking about her life.
“Look at me,” she commands.
She can feel his mind at work, trying to find some logic, some solution that will bend things to his favor.
“I can see you’re bored,” he says. “I understand that.” He puts a hand on her back and leads her to the living room. She can’t be too loud in here. The children are overhead. He sits on the couch and asks: “I just want to know where this is coming from.”
She sits at the far end, resisting the tranquilizer of his voice. “I don’t want our children to look at me and think I’m a nobody.”
“How could they possibly think that, Susie?”
“Because I gave up everything for them. For us.”
In spite of herself, the anger is leaking away. He opens his arms and calls for her to crawl into him, and she caves to the ease of it. For a minute she lies with her head on his chest, opening to his rise and fall, diffusing in the old familiar ways.
He will never leave her.
“Look. I know youthinkthe only thing you will ever love is acting. I know it’s wonderful for you. But you know—and I know—this job could be snatched away at any moment. And then whose salary do we need to rely on? I don’t want the kids growing up feeling lost or unsafe. Feeling like they don’t know where home is.”
She sits back away from him, covers her face with her hand.Oh God, she thinks.He is going to make me choose.Here with them or there, alone. She hates him, she hates his logic, she hates his concern for the children, hates that her desires are extraneous to the world that he is continuing to depict as the only world—
“Suze, I’ve been making some big sacrifices to get ahead. Frankly, people respect me now in the department. I can’t just throw that away. And nowhere, nowhere is going to pay me better. So, please. Please. For me. I just know if you put your mind to it, there will be all kinds of things you can do around here. You just have to be open to them.”
He is reaching for her hand and tucking her hair behind her ear, and she feels the force of his belief in this world where she can be happy and small. She’s so tired, and her arms are so sore from carrying the twins.
Stand up for yourself, Margie says.Fight.
She lifts her face.
“Al, I have been open. I have been so open that sometimes, I stop feeling myself entirely. But I am telling you this is what I want. And whether you like it or not, I’m going.”
Her husband pulls back, speechless. Their house, their accoutrements scattered over the floor, their children murmuring static through the monitor. And yet somehow, she is insisting on herself as a separate being.
Al stands up. His face is caving into childish frustration. It is awfulto stop herself from comforting him, to hold herself hard and apart while he becomes fourteen again and unable to stop a woman from leaving his house. Here is the boy who awoke to find himself sisterless, denied the power to bargain, stripped of any choice.He is not a child, though, she reminds herself.He is only choosing to be hurt. He could choose me instead.
“Do what you want, Susie,” he says. “But don’t pretend it’s for the kids.”
In the end, he will see he is wrong. For them, for herself, she will not give up on her life.
2012
On a hot June morning, Al boards a flight to see his daughter.
In the three years of her degree, she never suggested he visit. Always, Al had interpreted this as characteristically kind; in the years since Susan died, his fear of flying had developed physical symptoms. On an unfortunate family trip to Yellowstone, he’d retched so violently on the plane that they’d returned over three miserable days in an aging rental car. It was easy to believe the shroud over Viola’s English life was a by-product of her thoughtfulness, her self-sufficiency. Though the distance was at times painful, he could understand her desire to pursue something authentic. Wasn’t their New England just a facsimile of this truer, older one? Here she might find originals of all the towns that surrounded their own; primary sources and ideas that had bastardized into Americana. But when she failed to come home for Christmas, he began to worry.
If this was the beginning of a disappearing act, she was carrying it out in a typically Viola-esque way. No drama, no grand pronouncements. Only quiet, competent intent. Perhaps she was not running toward something, but away from it. Perhaps the something was him.
Don’t catastrophize, Tillie said.Kids make decisions that have nothing to do with you.
