In the Middle of All This (6 page)

“So she's no good at soccer,” Lauren said. “It's no big deal.”

“No kidding,” he said.

But it was also how Sarah was with the trainer bike and the trainer roller skates she'd asked for and gotten in the summer—she tried them once and then refused to have anything further to do with them. I'm going to be the oldest girl in the world who can't ride a bike, she'd declared. They could never tell whether she just couldn't do much of anything, or she
wouldn't
. Across the field she ran, her arms flapping and her knees knocking into each other. When the whistle blew, Martin felt only relief that the game was over. Once, Lazlo had been out watching his goddaughter play, and Martin told him he was worried about Sarah's development. For a moment Lazlo had watched her silently, then he turned and ran his eyes over Martin. “You know, Marty,” he said. “I bet you weren't terribly athletic yourself.”

Lauren touched his hand.

“You're letting it get to you,” she said.

At the Wal-Mart afterward Lauren let Max and Sarah ride the fifty-cent spaceship while Martin ran in and bought a new cassette for the answering machine. Once home he lifted out the cassette with Elizabeth's message and put it in the accordion file folder with the printed copies of all the e-mails she'd sent him in the last year and all the Internet research he'd done for her and all the info and receipts and tickets for the London trips past and future. Then he went outside and raked while Sarah climbed around the plastic slide set and inside Max sedated himself with television and Lauren cleaned the house. When he was sick of raking leaves, he climbed the breezeway stairs and stood the rake in the garage and walked into the kitchen and took up the phone.

He dialed the work number first because that was where his mother always was. She couldn't escape it, and often it seemed to him she didn't want to—it was the only thing she could trust to be unending.

“Yeah,” she said.

“It's me,” he said.

“Hello, me. I see you found my hiding place.”

“Elizabeth left a message last night.”

He swore he could feel her tighten before she even said anything. “And?”

“I don't know. She was having a miserable week.” He took a breath. He tried to tell her what Elizabeth had said. Then he said, “Of course Richard was probably at one of his Epiphany things, and that couldn't have helped—”

“She should just move back here,” his mother said.

“Well, whatever. I think we need a plan.”

“You're not serious,” his mother said. “She doesn't want to have any plan from us. She's so good at tending to herself. All that alternative junk she does—”

“You are
so
judgmental,” he said.

“Me, judgmental? Me judgmental!” He heard her voice climbing and choking. “How about the fact that she blames me for all of this? If it wasn't how I raised her, it was how I fed her. If it wasn't how I fed her, it was what I took when I was pregnant with her. Don't you call me judgmental—”

“She said that to you?”

“She says that to me every time I talk to her.
Every time
. She says it helps her to let everything out whenever she feels it.”

“Oh,” he said. He sighed. “So what do you think?”

“What do I think?” his mother said. “Why should it matter what I think? You know what I think. It's too … too … it's just too impossible. Richard's never there. She's doing only unconventional stuff. I think it's very …” She was groping for words. “Very desperate, I guess. What do you think?” she said.

He shook his head, as if she could see him. “I think there are more sides to this than we'll ever know.”

“Well, no kidding. There's the other line. Was there anything else?”

“How's Dad?” he remembered to ask, his father's own slow-moving, late-in-life cancer like a kind of overdue bill Martin too easily continued to allow to slip his mind.

“Still with the prostate. I'll talk to you soon.”

“Love you,” he said.

“Love you,” she said.

It was an exchange he had stolen from Lauren's talks with her mother.

“So what did she say?” Lauren asked.

He told her.

“I love the idea of
life
in the middle of all this,” she said.

He stared at her.

“I can't help it. I do.”

“What about Richard?” he said.

“You sound just like your mother.”

His face crimsoned, and he gnashed his lip to keep from screaming at her.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “It's just… remember how everyone thought their yoga group was a cult, and you had to keep telling them that at least Elizabeth and Richard weren't selling off all their stuff, at least they were still materialistic. It took your family a long time to come around to the fact those guys weren't brainwashed. Now it's the one thing that's saving her.”

“I just don't think this idea is very realistic.” He was sorry as soon as he'd said it.

“Realistic? What's realism got to do with it?” She went to the fridge and brought out a brick of cheddar cheese and unwrapped it and started chopping it angrily in narrow strips. “Cheese gum!” she shouted into the living room. Max came running, and from upstairs they could hear the race of Sarah's footsteps. “We'll talk about it later,” she said.

She had to call him. She didn't want to, but after whatever she'd left on the machine last night, she had better. What to say? What to say? By the time she got to the end of wherever she was going, nothing would be left unsaid. It would all be out in the open and shrunken to corpuscles of grief and self-pity. Maybe she shouldn't be allowed to call anyone anymore. Maybe that's what this was all about, taking her privileges one by one. Was she so tender that one appointment could crush her so? Hadn't she learned anything? She switched on the computer and entered e-mail.

“Send me the cassette,” she wrote him. “Then we'll talk.”

She hit
SEND
. He wouldn't get it for another day—he refused to have e-mail at home—but she liked how relatively immediate it was and how she needn't risk getting his voice on the phone and having to go further than she wanted.

She had new mail. Her mother. Martha. Her oldest nephew. People tapping away at her from all over, tapping their little words of encouragement and companionship. Tap, tap, tapping. Once Martha's son had had each child from his entire first-grade class send her a get-well card, and it had made her feel as if she'd already died. Not yet, she thought. Not yet. At first she'd saved the cards, with their bright crayon drawings and smiling faces and stick figures and their endlessly repeated song: Get well, feel better, get well. Finally she bundled them neatly and tossed them.

She didn't like flowers either, and she couldn't bear the smell of champagne.

But she felt great.

Only if she really rooted around inside herself, looking for it, could she find it and know it and understand it. But if she refused to understand, was that merely the mercy of denial, or the thin, impossible chord to wellness?

“Martin.” She tapped him another e-mail. “This sucks, sucks, sucks. Oh baby, it sucks.”

She hit
DELETE
and watched it evaporate.

“Those notes I saw you taking during discussion.” Annka wagged her pen at him. “Do you do anything with them?”

“All the time,” he said. He'd only gone to the board twice, for a total often minutes, in a seventy-five-minute class. “I try to create minilectures from the issues they raise. I try to meet them on their own points of engagement.”

“I see.” She squinted her eyes and offered him what someone who was drunk might have termed a smile. “Could I get a copy of one of those ‘minilecture' notes sometime?”

“Of course,” he said.

“I mean, if it's no bother.”

“No bother at all.”

She looked at him as they sat in the empty classroom, all the students long gone. He felt as if he was being kept after. She just looked at him.

“I guess I'd better get going,” he said.

“That's fine.”

He packed up his briefcase while she sat there. What did she think behind those glasses, those blank but narrow eyes, under the dark brown sweater set, in that however-the-fuck-old-she-was body? Sometimes he wanted to shake her and shout
I know, I know!
about how she had fought their hire, how she hated them. But you weren't allowed to do that. You weren't even allowed to accost her in the hall and say quietly, Look, I understand you didn't want us here and you don't want us here and you'll never want us here and you have to do what you have to do but we would like it to be—what?—civil, respectful, restrained, fair? Or could he say, Look, we're going to humiliate you before you humiliate us, eviscerate you before you eviscerate us. God, he wanted to tell this blank face, this empty face, this wicked face, At least now I know what the fuck you do with all your time. He snapped the briefcase shut.

“See you.” He tried to smile easily at her. “Thanks for coming.”

“That's fine,” she said.

In his office his hands still trembled. Fear made no sense here, there was so much else to fear. He tried not to think of it. But what was the point of serenity? What was the point of calm? He picked up the phone.

“How was it?” Lauren said, not even bothering to ask who was calling.

“She just sits there.” He tried to stop himself, knowing how fatigued she was by his review and how the process awaited her, too. “And then afterward she interrogates me. Do I ever use any other models? Do I ever use any approach besides observer-participant? Do I ever give substantial lectures? Do I ever do anything with the notes I take? Do I wipe myself after I take a shit? Jesus!”

“David Lazlo is leaving Cindy,” she said.

“What?”

“I stupidly called Mary again about getting someone into one of his courses for the spring, but it turns out he's not teaching, because he's got somebody out in Kansas and he's taking the spring off to be with her.”

“Wow.”

“It's been going on for months.”

“I thought all that crap he pulled with you was harmless. I thought Cindy was the one who made him tolerable,” he said. “Why is everybody falling apart? It wasn't like this in Atlanta.”

“Sure it was. We just didn't know about it.” Max squealed happily into the phone. “Anyway, Max has a low fever and is on Motrin. Not too listless. Sarah's at Grace's. I'll get her around five. Should we bring you anything?”

“No, not with the fever.” He had a bowl of soup waiting for him in the department's fridge, then he taught from six-thirty to nine, then he walked home. “I'll be fine.”

“Okay.”

He hung up. David Lazlo was a force of nature, all right. Martin feared, envied, and loathed him all at once. Fuck him, he thought. Just fuck him. He clicked on his e-mail. Buddies from graduate school sending their rants from Oregon, New York, Arizona: funds cut, classes underenrolled, tenure tracks dissolved, colleagues knitting nooses in their honor. Elizabeth wanting the cassette back. Martha telling him what kind of computer to buy for Sarah. “I'll call you soon,” he wrote Elizabeth.

From four to five his freshman advisees wandered in to review next semester's selections. It was hard for him to believe that he could be allowed to think about next semester, all that time eaten away, all that time survived. When the last of their unprepared faces had left, his head felt punched in from gazing at the computer and trying to determine which course after which course had any empty seats left while the little sons and daughters of bitches had just sat there without any plans or predilections at all, willing him to choose their futures. Outside his window the sun sank. There were still two and a half hours of disengaged and disinterested students to face. At least it made him hold off on his drinking. He felt a little delirious.

He was just getting up to go warm his bowl of soup when the door opened. Instinctively, he shrank from it. The children came giggling in in their pink and green overcoats, followed by Lauren with her arms full of Tupperware.

“I thought…,” he said, plucking up Max and squeezing him, setting him down and hugging Sarah, who seemed torn between looking at him raptly and ignoring him altogether.

“Well,” Lauren smiled, “we were going out anyway.” She set on his desk containers of rice, chicken, and broccoli. Always at least one antioxidant.

“Thank you so much,” he said.

“All right, children. Daddy has to work.”

She began to herd them back through the door; they were being ridiculously cheerful and well behaved. He just wanted to hold them all. But he had to work.

“Good-bye,” he called, his eyes glazing, all that weepy sentimentality lurking just below the surface. If he ever let it out, he'd need a bucket and a mop. “I love you,” he said.

“Love you,” Max called over his shoulder.

“Bye, Daddy,” Sarah said.

The door shut behind them. They were gone.

He looked at all the Tupperware set on his desk. Whenever it was his turn with the children, he never did this. The fact was, Lauren had been nursing him on and off since Elizabeth's diagnosis had seemed to bury him in his own self-pity and fatalism. At first he could not will himself out of bed, and she took the children each morning until one of them
had
to go to work, and he could not remember what he said in class, he couldn't bear to talk on the phone to anyone except Elizabeth, he couldn't bear to do anything except scour the medical books and the Internet for her. In his obsession to do something—anything—when everyone told him there was nothing to be done, he'd taken Lauren for granted. All gone. She was gone. She had taken the children. He had an hour in the darkening boxcar of an office until he had to teach. He was weepy, just weepy. He just loved her. He just loved them. He couldn't make all that love mean anything, because he couldn't express it satisfactorily. Beneath the complaint and the trauma they made him happy and glad and full. Why couldn't he say it, say it all, say it the right way? He swatted at his face. Had to eat. Had to warm the nice food, teach the nice class, walk the nice walk home, kiss her once so primly on the lips because she'd be exhausted as well from the day with Max and the evening with the two of them, and then he'd go and pour the wine and they'd sit on the sofa while he dumbly watched the sports channel or she'd sit in the kitchen catching up on Sunday's news and at eleven or eleven-fifteen, after two glasses for her and three or four glasses for him, they'd trudge upstairs, check on the children, slide into their pajamas, brush their teeth, floss, turn out the light, turn once groggily to each other and kiss a last perfunctory or sometimes tender kiss, and drop into sleep. And he'd never say it. He'd never express it. Today would become another missed day in a year of missed days, of climbing out of bed into the daily slog, of projecting energy into the void, of the endless
tick
against the endless
tock
, when he couldn't say, when he hadn't said, when he needed to say, how much he felt her.