Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

Hers has not been a life lived under the threat of too many ghosts; there’s only a small handful of people whom she has truly hoped to never encounter again,

impelling her close enough to see the pair of drugstore cheaters propped on top of the woman’s head.

It can be hard to tell, in the suburbs, whether an eccentrically clad woman carrying around a single organic cabbage is nomadic or expensively disheveled.

This was, she recalls, what being with Helen was like, constantly seeing your same old life from brand-new angles, finding dull spots that needed buffing or shiny ones you hadn’t noticed:

Conversing with her is a mechanical act requiring the constant ability to shift gears, to backpedal or follow inane segues or catapult from the real world to a fictional one without stopping to refuel.

The power dynamic in their household is not unlike that of a years-long hostage crisis.

She feels, too, unbelievably tired, stymied by gravity; so much of motherhood has, for her, been this particular feeling, abject disbelief that she’s not only expected but obligated to do one more thing.

They are a family whose clock is always slightly askew, affections misplaced and offenses outsized. But it’s better, she thinks—please, God, it must be better—than the complete absence thereof.

There must be some marital sixth sense that induces one party—unknowingly wronged—to suddenly behave with excess integrity, effectively increasing the guilt of the wrongdoer. It makes her nervous.

she has grown comfortable dwelling in her own ludicrous minutiae.

The Suburbs, mecca for successful adults with incomprehensible job titles and their disillusioned stay-at-home spouses, oak trees and opulence and artfully disguised despair.

She wasn’t sleeping; her internal monologue had taken on a caffeinated, nervy quality, the unpunctuated warbling of a crackpot, and she was aware—in her rare interactions with fellow adults—that her external monologue might be exhibiting some of the same mania.

Parenthood was a persistent cruelty, a constant, simultaneous desire to be together and apart.

Marriage was trying; marriage was burying the hatchet. But they had not buried any of their hatchets; instead she’d covered the hatchets with an assortment of decorative hand towels and they were both pretending that the hatchets didn’t exist.

“There’s nothing harder,” Helen said, “than being someone’s mom.”

“The key, I found,” Helen said, “is waiting to cry until after they go to bed.” “Yeah, don’t worry, I cry then too,” Julia said, and Helen laughed again.

Julia’s was not remotely an unmanageable life in the logistical sense but she often felt like someone had unrolled a large and debilitatingly heavy rug on top of her.

Another thought she thought frequently, maniacally, indignantly: it wasn’t always like this! She rationalized that of course this could be said for anything, for everything, and she acknowledged as well that she, to some degree, had always been the way that she was—dubious, avoidant—but she had not always felt as ill at ease in the world as she did at present.

She wasn’t exactly sure how any of it worked, but she was fairly certain that you were not allowed to dislike your husband because he was a good dad. You were supposed to want that; she knew this. You were supposed to want everything for your kid and the dregs for yourself.

“Now’s not the best time,” she’d said to him, ambiguous enough that it could mean I’m not ovulating at this precise moment or Let’s wait until I’m not such a fucking nutjob.

whatever it is he wants, rescue, or joy, full-throated parental acceptance. There has always been a schism, for her, between what she wants to do as a mother and what she actually does; she has never quite trusted her instincts, never quite been able to venture into territory that feels too soft or tender.

Perhaps foresight is overrated. Perhaps there are a hundred thousand ways to make a decision but those ways lead to only a handful of outcomes.

“You know you’re allowed to be having a hard time, right?” Helen asked softly. “I don’t care if you have one kid or ten. It’s very, very hard, what you’re doing. What I was doing. And you can’t account for it in any mathematical way.”

“We want our lives to be better than not so bad,” she said.

agamic

“It’s such a fucking cliché. I miss him in theory and then I resent him when he’s actually around.”

Goodwill: the ammo of the congenial. This has always been a point of contention between them; Mark likes others easily and Julia barely at all.

Coming from Helen, somehow, these statements never sounded judgmental. They came across as basic troubleshooting, problem solving, even if you had yet to identify things as troublesome or problematic.

Rich people, too, had a knack for making romance out of historic hardship; she supposed it was easier to cinematize the past when you had the right set dressing.

she realized Helen was simply doing to the story what she’d done with her own, colorizing it, making it palatable for human consumption. Perhaps this had less to do with wealth and more with perspective, the ability to take your own narrative and polish it up, make it more digestible.

“You can’t bank all of your happiness on a single person. That’s a recipe for insanity on all fronts.”

there’s something about her family’s anticipating her bad behavior that makes her want to behave badly.

she also didn’t ask for details, because she didn’t want to know and because he had the courtesy to not ask her anything, either. It seemed to her they were both missing something that most people had.

He was stroking her in that gentle, thoughtful, slightly-too-slow way adopted by men who liked to talk about how they were feminists.

And the less you looked at yourself, she found, the harder it became to start doing it again.

“Everything okay?” Ben asks, and she can’t say Nothing is, because she is trying, trying, trying; because she has to try. “Let me take you shopping,” she says.

Major events could have the effect of throwing your loneliness into stark relief.

And we’d just like to know that there’s more than just—us. I’d like for my kid to know it’s got—people.” It does a mix of things to her, this line, her kid saying my kid, and the sudden awareness that she herself doesn’t exactly fill the bustling shoes of a grandma. Myriad new ways to let down her kid and, now, his.

“You’re saying no without actually saying no,” he says. “Which is emotionally manipulative, for the record.”

“You’re constantly worrying about things that aren’t your business, but they’re never the things you actually want your mom to worry about; it’s always—like, things we’re perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves. You assert yourself then, when we don’t need you; and then when we actually need you you’re too busy worrying about the stupid other stuff to be there for us.”

When we actually need you you’re too busy.

I love you this much because I was so afraid I wasn’t going to be able to love you, but that doesn’t make it count any less.

It was manic, sometimes, how much she enjoyed Helen’s company, embarrassing in its spilling-over uncontrollability.

but seeing Helen at the grocery had reminded her of the fact that she’s always felt her most important internalizations—fear, or jealousy, or love—like a fist around her gut.

Helen could counsel her on everything, because everything was Helen’s specialty; Helen had a way of making everything feel less terrible.

brahmin,

She wondered if this was what it would look like, the moment she fucked everything up, ruined her life, destroyed her marriage: dead leaves and melting snow, the squeak of a nearby squirrel, and her little boy, sullied by her carelessness.

Helen, too, liked when people fit neatly into boxes, and she liked to keep them inside of those boxes whether they remained the right boxes or not.

few instances of oblivious pleasure.

“You just seem,” Helen said carefully, “pretty hell-bent on destruction, from what I can see.”