Something american
Zack Rybak
The therapist says hysteric and I’m thinking fifties housewife, though she corrects me later, says that the whole hysteria thing was a nineteenth- and not a twentieth-century gig at all really, but nonetheless I’m sitting there and thinking housewife, which in a lot of ways seems dead right, just fucking eaten by boredom, and I can’t help but laugh because us angsty, middle-class whiteboys today, full of this deep-seated terror of having already not ever even existed, have become the stir-crazy housewives of our grandfather’s generation, but then again maybe that’s giving us too much credit because for the most part we can’t even drag ass to do dishes or laundry, and so no question why they were all speedfreaks, how easy it’d be for me to be one too, only not speed, nothing keyed-up, something that’ll have me smiling at dust motes caught in a corner of light, a matter of time more likely than not, I imagine, years later, when all of this was for naught, the about-face I’d hoped for having never arrived. She says if my future is that foreclosed, then I might as well wash my hands of it. If only it were that simple. At least she’s not like that CBT asshole, all change your thoughts which’ll change your behavior which’ll change your feelings, not treating this like a high school auditorium or cubicle-poster positive-attitude pep talk, pain commodified, there’s an answer for that, but now I sound like the denim-jacketed, patch-happy punks, all on Zoloft anyway so a lot of good being out of the system has done them when they’ve now ended up as miserable as the nine-to-fives.
My guess is her eventual move will be to blame the parents, their you-can-do-anything speeches, and what an imposition that must’ve been. But no, that’s not it at all I realize as she goes to her bookshelf and takes down a thick paperback, riffles straight to the page she’s looking for and hands it over. “Maybe,” she says, “like Berryman, you have no inner resources.” Life, friends, is boring. And I have to agree but what good does that do me to know that someone else, decades before I was born, was bored and sad too. Let alone when, sure enough, I get home and look him up and he was a drunk who killed himself, like my father’s father. She seems to have made her point, now if only I could know where I’m supposed to go from here.
* * *
Bossman’s yelling again about tune-up turnaround time and how we need to stop ordering shit that isn’t paid in full but I’m still in that room with her, seated off-center, those crossed legs in my periphery, an abstract, deep-textured painting hung opposite me, the walls otherwise an open field cultivating a surreal throwback to childhood sleepovers where I’d stare at the ceiling and talk for hours to whoever was there in the dark too. She barely spoke while I ran my mouth but I’m not thinking about what I said, barely remember. I’m thinking about her.
Eventually I looked at her, kept looking, and she asked, “What do you want from this?”
I didn’t have an answer. Bossman mutters as he walks past me, back to his office, and I drop a drivechain in the wash tank. But now I know: I want to see her how she sees me.
* * *
I tell her about sleeping late, about how my father jokes it’s because I have nothing to get up for, and then about how true it is that I have nothing to get up for.
“Work, then, is not something to get up for.”
“No.”
She tells me how Hendrix only ever knew who he was when he was with his guitar or no, not quite, only ever knew that he was when he was with his guitar, how he’d hide away at parties and play unplugged, and not to front as aloof or shy, but because that’s all there was for him. I say that makes sense and she asks what makes sense about it and I say I don’t know.
What I imagine most is already being done with it all, through it all, years from now, washed up and old, looking back.
“There’s something American in that.”
To mourn a past which hasn’t happened yet. She doesn’t write much down, but she writes this down.
While I wait in my car, parked in the lot where I assume she parks too, I read the Saul Bellow novel she gave me a few days ago, Seize the Day. She was looking for a different one, something involving Rain King in the title, but said this one would do just as well. After a few pages I get restless and look ahead for the sentences she’s underlined, blue ink, seems purposeful, cleaner, and when I get restless reading through what’s underlined I turn to the end and work backward from there, and then it’s clear again she knows me, clear again she sees me, when the last thing underlined is I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Yes. That’s it. And I toss the novel up onto the dash and continue to wait.
The sun’s almost set, only an eyelash over the mountains, when she walks out and through the now near-vacant lot toward an Audi. She doesn’t make that kind of money so either no kids or a fat-cat husband, maybe she takes off the ring when she works. My brother likes to say he knows when he wants to do something because he can feel it in his legs, none of that subtle stomachdread, none of that autumn-dusk unease, and I can feel it in my legs so I turn the key and the engine turns over.
I follow her onto the interstate and soon enough out toward the suburbs, gaining elevation over the city, some soft vertigo from the height, keeping my distance as if that matters, we’ve been alone long enough now that she should’ve noticed. Finally we’re at a cul-de-sac so I park at the corner and watch into which garage her headlights turn. Rich neighborhood but not gated, probably half-vacant a decade ago with foreclosures, probably fifty-fifty on alarm systems. I turn around and drive back into the city. I’ll give it an hour or two, eat a slow dinner at the casino with the deadeyed locals, those total fucking burnouts on one side and the stillrouged tourists on the other.
* * *
She lies on the sectional, golden cocktail on the coffee table, the tumbler sweating a ring into the wood. A dog sleeps beside her, a large mutt of some sort, maybe some lab in there, breathes and dreams gently. She looks older.
* * *
She’s writing more down today, wants to know why I decided to see a therapist, why or how I even ended up in that CBTasshole’s office. And I want at first to tell her that I wanted an
ADHD diagnosis, that I wanted to score Adderall, but yet I know that’s never what it was all about.
“I wasn’t that happy.”
“Most people aren’t.”
So being unhappy isn’t enough. That doesn’t answer why, doesn’t answer her question at all really, and she asks again.
“I wanted to be happy.” And this seems closer but still not quite right, a half-click away from whatever truly brought me here. “I wanted to know how to be happy.” I long and I want.
“Or,” she says.
“Or if I could be.” * * *
In that same spot, same position on the sectional, television coloring the room, she scrolls through pages and pages of movies, too fast to even read: the premium networks, HBO and Showtime, then on to Netflix.
She tosses aside the remote, sips her drink, stands, walks over to a chock-full bookshelf and runs her forefinger along the spines, head tilted to the side in order to read the titles, and I try to hold all these movements in my mind, already attempting to play them back over and over. Imagine my finger gliding smoothly along those books. But of this too she tires and she downs her drink, turns off the television, the lights, and goes upstairs, calling the dog behind her. Jasper. Let’s go, Jasper.
A large floor-to-ceiling window on the second floor lights up but I can’t see anything, can only guess that she’ll wash the makeup from her face, brush her teeth, trade contacts for glasses, this perfected routine which makes sleep so easy.
* * *
To want and not know what it is one wants, that’s the condition we’re born into, that’s how these things begin, and then how quickly it becomes knowing what we want. Two types of people in this world, those who know what they want and those who know how to get it. Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop / But there is no water. How close she is. “T.S. Eliot,” she says, when she’s done reading, another stuck-up prick I couldn’t stand or understand back in high school, but with her voice there’s something else to the words. She’s telling me it’s the poets who know what it is to feel orphaned, empty: interior, skull, night, kid walks the bottom of a lakebed. But I’m not the only lonely one here.
“Which is to say I’m lonely?” she asks.
I turn away from the wall and that painting she’s always asking me to look at, its design becoming less of a mess and more geometrical the longer I’ve stared, and I look at her instead and nod, yes.
“And what does my loneliness look like?”
“Cocktail and a couch, tired dog supplying the room a second pulse, too bored to even choose a movie or a book to be further bored by.” She clicks her pen, and then again, and again, slow metronome. “There’s something American in that,” I say.
“Yes, yes there is.”
She’s not quite sure and I want her to be sure, want to name the dog, say Jasper.
“And your nights,” she says, “what do your nights look like?” Pen back to the pad, daring, knowing that even this is still about me.
“You mean what’s my loneliness look like?”
“If that’s what you’d rather answer.”
Like looking through a window, but I say, “Same, minus the cocktail, minus the dog.”
Jasper’s a joke of a guard dog, a few barks then all wag, even sat for the Milkbones. He’s back sleeping under the one tree in the yard by the time I find the spare key under a flowerpot, the flowers long dried-up. My hand’s a little shaky as I unlock the backdoor, heartbeat up in my throat, that feeling in my legs again. Life, friends, is boring. At one remove from the thing itself.
The house is first-snow quiet and my depth perception has gone haywire, too aware of distance, each room like entering an evacuated auditorium. I walk through the kitchen, tidy enough, dishes soaking in tepid water, a couple bottles of Blanton’s on the countertop, seems like the drink she’s chosen for years. I open cupboards until I find the tumblers and take one down, uncork the Blanton’s and pour. And in the living room I settle onto the sectional, bourbon in hand, half reclined on the chaise, reflected in the television. I labor. The first sip burns, second sip is smooth. Who does she miss in these moments, who has she lost?
I leave the glass half-full, set in that well-worn water ring, and go upstairs to her bedroom. I draw aside the curtains, lighting up the room, and look out toward the city below, lines of cars backed up on the interstate, inbound to punch the timeclock.
The first drawer I slide open is all underwear, prude and common cotton, white and gray tones, but as I rummage through thongs show up and finally some lace. Next drawer bras and bikini tops, then tees and jeans, the usual.
Her bedside table is stacked with books, a weathered copy of Life Studies, Robert Lowell, almost every page dog-eared, All about me / were the works of my Grandfather’s hands and barely legible next to it: what we hold, intimacy. My grandfather’s hands held a rifle in Korea, then held my father, and before they could hold me those hands strung up a rope in the garage, kick, fall. Below Lowell a
brand-new copy of Lacan’s Écrits, almost unopened, bookmark on page six, and the only underline: in language our message comes to us from the Other. No wonder she lives alone with the dog. Not a message but our message, so far outside us.
I place the books back where they were and open the drawer, pack of condoms inside and a black, hardcover journal. She’s suggested I keep a dream journal, that they’re trying to tell us something. Pages and pages of writing, unlined so her sentences often slant and curve downward. Only one recent entry: July.
I’m young, unfamiliar living room, Jacob’s an actor in some new movie, lot of cold, overcast desert, like home, but the movie doesn’t end with him and I’m upset because I need to know what happened to him, then it’s years later and I call him and he says he’ll be right there to explain. I wait but he never arrives or I wake up before he does.
So the bourbon-sipping night owl I watch channel-surf is just a cover. This is what her loneliness looks like.
My phone vibrates and it’s loud enough to make me flinch. Bossman wants me in early to catch up on repairs. Everything’s so far away, it’s someone else who has to head into the shop and start wrenching, but it’s also someone else who is here, right now, reading this journal, not me.
The glass of bourbon I leave where I left it, out on the coffee table, for her, right where it belongs, but everything else is the way it was and I lock the door behind me.
* * *
I can’t get out of my car and go into work yet, Bossman’ll know, known me for too long, he’ll see her instead of me, her bourbon in my body, my body in her house, her dream in my head, or he’ll know nothing which’ll be worse, like a glazed fucking customer who’s never seen me before, business as usual, stressed about the
wife or money, asks me to come in early then says I’m costing him too much in overtime, always how we doing this morning and always the same answer, but do I ever ask him, and will he notice if I ask today, will he hear her asking and want to know where I’ve gone and will I be back. What we hold, it’s right there for anyone to see.
I tell her about my grandfather since he’s on my mind now, tell her how unsettling it is, someone does the things they’re supposed to do for sixty years, good husband, good father, finally enough money, and still not want to see it through, still ready for it all to be over with, and that it seems when you get old enough you welcome it. Yes, there are plenty who don’t want to let go, who never even consider how easy it’d be, but I know nothing about them. They aren’t my people.
I want and don’t want. Each day, it’s both.
Bicycle grease covers my hands, maybe she’s glancing at them over her pad and pen, and so I hide them in my pockets.
“How young were you when you learned about this?”
“Not too young.” As if my father had just been waiting until I was old enough to process the idea of offing yourself, been waiting to say this is who we come from—this is yours now.
“Even though you never met, do you ever dream about him?”
“Lately, sometimes, I’m a kid watching some movie that he’s in but the movie ends without showing what happens to him.” She stops writing. “Then I’m older, I’ve called and asked him to come over, maybe it’s still about the movie, and then I’m waiting for him. But I always wake up before he arrives.”
She closes her notepad and begins clicking her pen, rhythmic again.
“Maybe a feeling you understand,” I say. She shakes her head. “No,” she says, “that’s a feeling you don’t understand, a feeling that’s not yours.”
But I do understand, that waiting for arrival, someone on their way. A slow slip west.
“Ours,” I say. But there is no water. It’s clear now.
Calm, cold. She sees I’m nothing.
“Look at yourself, kid.”
And I know I’m never going to see her again. Weak-gripped thoughts like waking: run, run, I love, get away, what was I doing, a feeling not yours, not who he was, that he was, how close she is, kick, fall, what we hold, our message, my message, what’s she telling me, what’s there to know, the bottom of a lakebed, something American, Life, friends, if I could be, I shouldn’t’ve.