Liars

by Sarah Manguso

I pitied men for having to stay the same all their lives, for missing out on this consuming rage.

That love that parents describe as greater than other loves is a one-way love like the love you feel for a crush you cannot even look at, cannot even breathe near. I’d felt this sort of love fully when I was eleven, and fairly consistently for the past thirty-odd years since then. With the child, I felt it again, an all-consuming love that asks nothing of its object, but it was different this time, because I could express it freely and inhabit it totally, shamelessly.

That kitty, that tiny thing, had made me a mother. Because of that fact, I loved her in a way I loved no one else.

A woman lives in the same house for fourteen years. She pulls her old car into the driveway, bumping over the root-warped ground. The garage door hiccups its way up the tracks until it’s just high enough to drive under. She could be almost asleep, so familiar is this end-of-day routine. Some days she frowns at a piece of trash that’s found its way onto the lawn. Some days the undercarriage scrapes against the pavement warped by tree roots. Soon the cracks will have to be sealed. Then one Friday in November she drives home and instead of the house there’s an empty lot, the grass knee-high, a chain-link fence, and sun-faded signs warning against trespassing. She clicks the garage door opener and nothing happens because there’s no garage, no driveway, no building. Almost everyone she knows says it’s an extremely common thing, that lots of houses disappear like that, and she should just move on, stop talking about it, and find a new one. After all, it’s partly her own fault for choosing one of those disappearing houses. She should have known; after all, she’d lived in it for fourteen years.

John had taught me a lesson that felt indelible: that there are no assurances. That anyone might do anything to anyone.