Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

she remembers to be terrified for her daughter, terrified in all the usual ways one must be terrified when raising a young woman, all the ways the world will try to make her vulnerable, try to stymie her and slight her, to take away what’s hers.

Something that has always astounded her, particularly since her children were born, is how truly, consistently bad the universe is at time management; instead of meting out crises at manageable intervals it seems to deposit them in erratically spaced piles, like the salt trucks in the winter, each pile containing a rainbow of miscellaneous emergencies.

she knew, from those first early hours of Ben’s life, that he was unparalleled, that nobody would ever mean the precise amount to her that he did.

it was the kind of love that was incalculable in the first place, that was impervious to quantification, that didn’t know more or less but simply was.

she wants Alma to know an abundance of love, all the love in the world. But there are days she wishes that her daughter better understood the tenuousness of it, wishes she could conceptualize the possibility of losing it;

But nothing of substance, nothing about how to actually live, about how to move easily through the world or fall in love or have confidence in her abilities, nothing about how to stay upright, when there are so many forces conspiring to knock her down.

Her whole family makes fun of her efforts to ameliorate problems with carbohydrates and togetherness;

“I surmise. I know enough. And I’ve decided I don’t want to know anything more.”

“I stopped being worried something like this would happen,” he said. “I was worried it would when I first met you; for months I was worried I wouldn’t—that I wasn’t—that you’d need something different, or convince yourself that you needed something different, or do something just for the sake of doing something without thinking about how it would affect me.”

“I think part of me was trying to give you an out.” It suddenly made sense to her, that of course this had been her intention, and it seemed so wildly pathetic now, so childish and transparent. She’d been trying to push him away, doing whatever she could to make him unable to forgive her.

And it would be less painful for her, too, to know that he wasn’t leaving her just because of who she was by default.

This was what she’d been waiting for all along, the inevitable door closing, and she wondered if she hadn’t perhaps been trying to accelerate the process by doing what she’d done.

“I decide what I deserve. Okay? You aren’t some kind of vigilante here, Julia. I signed up for this. So did you. If you’ve decided you want out, you’re doing that of your own volition.”

You could get used to not having someone in your life but you could never completely stop wanting them there.

“She has your voice,” Mark said as they were drifting off. “It’s the strangest thing. She opens her mouth and you come out.”

She would come to realize that this was how many people had gotten what they had in life: by lying a little bit, and pretending to be better than they were.

She had a tendency, she knew, to turn people into her enemies before they’d actually had a chance to wrong her, just for the sake of cleanliness.

extant,

Surmountable things, problems that with the slightest exertion of energy could be solved, but problems too that aggregately amounted to a low-level current of mild despair.

“Have a good night,” she said, then, again—the curse of contemporary womanhood: this effusive tendency toward both guilt and gratitude—“Thanks, Mark.”

“but…” And he trailed off, half-smiling at her in that goofy expectant way of men, like look at this bare-minimum thing I just did; look, look! acknowledge it!

And when you fell for someone, she realized—she had never fallen like this before—you started to fall for yourself a little bit too. Everything became funnier and more interesting once she vocalized it to him.

She was distrustful, generally, of happiness, any amount, any sort. And she was suspicious of anyone who told her she’d know something when she saw it. She had not ever experienced certitude when it came to inarticulable feelings: love, for instance, or orgasms.

she avoided the pursuit thereof for the same reasons that she’d never tried hard drugs, because she didn’t want to be disappointed or get addicted.

folderol.

because he’s supposed to know this; he of all people is supposed to know: that she isn’t a bad person, just occasionally bad at being a person.

Julia had not taken much with her from her early life, but she had learned, by example, that it was easier to get mad at someone than to tell them you were scared.

A great deal more confident than you did way back when.” “Really?” “In spades. Your posture’s even improved. You’ve hit your stride, it seems to me.” She considers her spine. “It’s all an act.” Helen laughs. “Well, sure. I mean you finally learned that it’s all an act. You figured out how to play along like the rest of us.”

Once you started making major life decisions, she realized, you came to see how dangerously easy it could be, their inherent magnitude somehow dwarfing their seriousness.

“Ben said you were good at things like this.” “Things like—?” Sunny shrugs. “Giving rides.” What does it mean, she wonders, to be good at giving rides? Not what it used to.

They are a family with a capacity for forgetting, or at least pretending to forget; they are a family with an inherited lineage of willful blindness.

“It’s a kind of willed optimism, I think. Which can look a lot like—well, delusion.”

lassitude

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.

Anita would have, in another world, in a highbrow comedy series, been a rich eccentric, but she wasn’t rich, and she wasn’t, when it came down to it, all that eccentric either, just wanting, and creative about how she filled in the gaps.

“Nobody,” her mother said, “is entitled to anything.” She pondered the word entitled. Her mother brought the glass to her lips and held it there, not drinking, her eyes squinted. “We don’t deserve anything. You understand? It doesn’t matter what we do or how good we think we’re being or if we feel like we’ve earned some kind of—of—medal. Nothing’s certain. Nobody’s a guarantee.”

Her mother had many infuriating traits, but this was arguably the most infuriating one, and indeed the most hurtful, her ability to dismiss Julia with a handful of words, to reduce her to nonexistence simply because she felt like it.

She has always vacillated between feeling things too deeply and not feeling them at all, so she learned, at a young age, how to steel herself; she could stop herself from feeling, she found, if she tried hard enough.