Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

He’s convinced everything is going to be completely fine, but he refuses to acknowledge that we have to make it fine, that weddings don’t plan themselves and people—and babies—are going to show up expecting things and you can’t just—like, bury yourself in your dissertation and expect that when you surface everything’s going to have been taken care of for you.”

It was one of the reasons Helen meant so much to her—a person telling her, simply, whether she needed them or not, I’m around.

her mother has always treated shoddy telephonic connections as personal failures and, too, abides by the faulty logic that yelling at a person with bad service will make any difference whatsoever.

More than welcome, it occurs to her, rings as far less welcoming than a simple welcome, but she doesn’t make any moves to sound more convivial.

There were still periods of real joy then that popped up like gophers from the ground, moments when she looked down at Ben and fell in love with the world on his behalf, for all it had to offer him.

the more closely you looked at things, the more you found them wanting.

“It’s okay” was the sentence she said to Ben most frequently, murmured incantation, it’s okay it’s okay it’s okay, as much to herself as to him; sometimes when he was sleeping and she was alone in the house she’d say it, too, like how she’d taken to swaying her hips even when he wasn’t in her arms.

She never wanted her son to look into her eyes and see what she’d just seen in her mother’s, that distance, that coldness, that could-have-been-anyone strangeness; she never wanted her son to feel the way she felt at the moment, an itchy, angry aloneness that persisted despite the fact that she was inches from him, a hallway away from Mark, the only two people in the world she’d figured out how to love.

talk of the Grimes children has lessened significantly since the girls forayed, despite their parents’ egregious wealth, into—from what Julia can tell—perfectly mediocre adulthoods, decent schools and fleeting interests and the same fumbling indecision as everyone else.

We weren’t that much older than my girls are now; isn’t that unreal? And I think I’d rather Lila be like you back then, rather than like me back then. Less rigid, more fearless.”

Nothing scared her more than seeing people who knew exactly what they wanted from life and knew how to go about getting it.

“Don’t you have someone like that?” “Of course,” she says distantly, feeling like she’d felt in grade school, lying to fit in, Of course I’ve kissed a boy, Of course I have a dad. But she doesn’t have someone like that, and never did, save for those few months twenty years ago.

Mark wearing his earth-to-Julia face, smiling like she’s just done something incredibly adorable, and she wonders what it would feel like instead to do something totally insane, throw a plate at his head or hold one of the lit taper candles to the base of his throat, wreak havoc in this ornate dining room.

And this hurts her more than anything, because it’s not how she’s ever seen it; she has never, in fact, felt in control of anything, least of all her feelings, and she hates the vantage point she’s seeing herself from now, a woman who everyone rearranges themselves around, a woman who makes everything worse. But they are no longer thirty years old; she can no longer demand that he pull over so she can stomp home alone; her life is theirs now.

some big favor. It’s the least you can do.” He’s not over it. Despite everything that’s been said, everything they’ve agreed not to say; despite their affection for each other, the kindness they’ve shown each other, the salient fact of all the time that’s elapsed, the fact that so much of that time has gone by without either one of them giving it a second thought; despite the dinner parties and the weekends spent making each other laugh while they did tedious projects like cleaning the basement and the nights when they fell asleep together in unflattering pajamas in front of Frasier reruns, despite Alma.

really, that will match what he’s given her. How long, she wonders, have they been this fragile?

She’d once feared being close to him but now they don’t know how not to be together, even when they want to be apart; this is perhaps different, she sees now, than what she’s always mistaken for intimacy; they have spent so much time, now, in the impenetrable haze of intuition and misunderstanding and willful blindness that is a long marriage, that she can’t remember what it’s like to be anywhere else.

Marriage in the aftermath of an affair: she hadn’t known it was possible to feel so shitty; she could never have predicted that she could physically hurt because she was so sad, or that her own sadness would be secondary to Mark’s.

She missed Helen fiercely most days, would have loved nothing more than to discuss, over Muscadet, how it felt to be married to someone who sort of hated you.

wet particles of meanness flying invisibly through the air.

She should tell him what he means to her, that that’s the reason she is the way she is, the reason she does all the things she does, some half-baked back-door bragging defense, I just love my kids too much!, but it’s true, to a degree. She should enumerate all the times he’s saved her without even realizing it, all the times he made her happy when nobody else could; she should tell him how sorry she is for abandoning him at Serenity Smiles that afternoon, and for all the other times she’s abandoned him since then whether she was aware of it or not.

having graduated, apparently, from the silent treatment and passive aggression that characterized the tension of their earliest days to something more mature, or possibly just something that requires less energy, brisk, functional communication, smiles as necessary to save face. She’s been waiting for some kind of a return to form, any cooling off at all, but at the end of each day she’s surprised anew to realize that Mark seems as upset with her as he had been a week ago. She cannot quite assess whether the needle on her own scale has drifted down at all.

She can see on his face that he immediately regrets saying it. One of those can’t-take-it-backably mean moments in a marriage, a blip of incorrigible cruelty.

she has lost track of who, exactly, is allowed to be the angriest overall, but she is content in the moment, given everything, for it to be her.

There was a safety in that kind of knowing, the confidence in the particulars of your circumstances, that stretch of childhood before the broader world fully showed itself and threw everything else into relief, that spell before other people slipped in and made you realize how weird your own life was. They simply were the way they were:

well—it’s both pathetic and involuntary, this desire to please her mother—but

If Julia’s had trouble loving at all, her daughter loves too easily; it seems unequivocally clear that the former is worse, but it makes her nervous, seeing Alma exposing her heart like this to someone with such a grisly track record for emotional injury.

a new neighborhood, a new school with new people and a new narrative at home: her mother had stopped, without preamble or any further explanation, referring to her father at all. She’d also started dating, a questionable roster of men who’d appear like library books, to be returned a few weeks later.

tween-aged half sisters are deeply bottle-tanned and glued to their phones and radiating unpleasantness; camped out by the crudités like they are, they could easily be putting curses on everyone by way of the baby carrots.

The house felt more festive when he was there; he compensated for his lackluster culinary abilities by cooking with copious amounts of garlic, so the kitchen always smelled good, and was warm, and he’d play music for them, the Velvet Underground and the Talking Heads—bands that would later inure Julia to the too-cool men she dated after college, men who viewed a woman with good musical taste as a statistical anomaly—until

a barometer for her mother’s moods, for the directions the moods were headed in and at what speed they were traveling and to what degree they were being amplified by the ingestion of nicotine or alcohol or sometimes just sugar,

“I reached a point of diminishing returns,” she says. “It starts to become clear that the other person doesn’t care after the ninety-seventh time they show utterly no interest in whatever it is you’re telling them.”

Perhaps she’ll be murdered tonight, she thinks idly; perhaps all of this has been leading not to a wedding but to something much larger, a much simpler end, really, compared to everything that has preceded it. She’s had much too much to drink.

“I didn’t want to be around someone who was trying to make herself want me there,” Anita says.

You’re my mother, ninety percent is being there regardless of whether your kids want you around.

she has spent years making sure they know what they mean to her, telling them without telling them that she may not understand her feelings about most things, but that she knows, like nothing else, how she feels about them.

here she is, beside him, very much alive, and this in itself feels extraordinary, that some things—this thing, and very probably other things—might possibly be too far in the past to hurt them anymore.

our lives are so—ours. Is it always such a bad thing, having our own things? My intention is to not have secrets from you, but it— We’ve been together for almost thirty years; shouldn’t we trust each other enough by now?”

it is perhaps the kindest thing anyone has ever said to her; it is, perhaps, the most generous thing Mark has ever done, trusting her, after everything. Perhaps it is possible—could her mother be right?—for things to happen and be gotten over.

She’s not sure what to make of him, this man who wears blousy short-sleeved button-downs and touches her mother’s elbow as he passes her, like a reminder that she still exists and someone loves her.

it feels more—she does know her mother; she knew her so well for so long—like an act of loyalty to Julia, not passing on to anyone else that dark time in their shared history.

“Our kids are always, one day, going to progress beyond our understanding; don’t you think?”

He cares for her in the generous, compliant way you’re supposed to care for the people a person you love cares for, the way she has come to tolerate Brady Grimes, the way she’s grown fond of Sunny.

a mutual obsession with the woman in the third-floor apartment across the street who had a full set of inflatable pool furniture in her living room instead of a regular sofa and chairs.

They used to dance in the kitchen for the length of full albums, The Supremes A’ Go-Go and Runaround Sue and Hunky Dory; her mother would come home and Julia would be able to feel something good in the air she brought with her from outside,

her mother’s collarbones would smell like sweat and sugar and something else, something she’d never find again.

They’d stopped doing this together at some point, but she couldn’t remember which time was the last time; she kept doing it herself for a while, after they’d gone their separate ways, and she has always wondered—she will always wonder—if her mother did the same.

They don’t happen very often, but moments like these of sensory recognition are some of the most potent she’s ever lived, the transportive effect of a whiff of perfume or pencil shavings. The Russos’ house smells just like it used to, buttered toast and wood varnish and damp fresh air, the close collegial quality of somewhere lived in and well loved, and it hits her tangibly. She loved this house like a person, so much more than her own home.

basket. It had struck her back then so forcefully, how lived in it was, the inhabitedness of it, but her own foyer has been similarly trod on now, filled with its own clutter,

All stuff, only stuff, but evidence nonetheless of life, the clunky but functional life that’s improbably hers.