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In the long second between the lift coming to a halt and the doors opening, Agnes looks at her and finds that she wants to tell her something. Wants to hold on to her arms and tell her that sometimes she worries she’s never felt anything but a blanketing sense of dread.
“Well, sure,” Stephanie says, equably enough, “but there’s things you want and things you want, aren’t there? I mean, there’s things you have to do to stay alive and then any space you have left over to make staying alive feel bearable, you know?”
You haven’t asked—one woman to another—how my day went. Her companion looks at her—I imagined just the same as always, to be frank.
The evening struggles, darkness borne down heavy and replete. The rain falls, the night continues—black horizon and the pull of what’s beneath.
Mies van der Rohe said architecture was the will of an epoch translated into space, whereas Carmichael appeared to believe that architecture was the panic of a slightly different epoch translated into a different sort of space.
She is prone to treasuring her most trivial items, ticket stubs from the ferry, old water bills, books she didn’t really like. This is never so much in the belief that they’ll one day come in handy as that the act of throwing them out will somehow trigger their long-withheld purpose, a sudden and obvious use revealing itself only as she watches the item fall from her hands.
They had asked Irene around after more than a week of sustained texting during which Irene had at one point found herself typing I basically think the one job you have as a parent is to give your kid a childhood they don’t have to recover from and then wondering why on earth she was saying this to someone she barely knew.
“Isn’t it funny,” Stephanie muses, “the way that everything’s fucked but still patched up enough to let you get to work?”
It feels, Agnes can’t help thinking, like the kind of day when a person might quite easily start throwing their breakfast about. The kind of morning when someone might snap.
Because sometimes I think that allowing someone to bully us and pit us against each other while maintaining the financial upper hand isn’t the healthiest way for three sisters to relate to one another. And I think that in fact it is probably the key to a lot of our issues. I don’t know.” I think the key to a lot of our issues, Irene wanted to say, is that we just don’t like one another very much.
“I don’t think,” Agnes now said, slowly and with the slightest inkling of a frown between the dark brows that were so like their father’s, “that you can fix however many years of him playing us off against one another by just having a little three-way chat and hoping he feels our combined wrath, or whatever. You know?” And here she looked to Irene, the first indication so far that she cared about Irene’s opinion. “I mean, we are what we are by now, aren’t we?”
At what point, she wanted to say, do we stop being the direct product of our parents? At what point does it start being our fault?
The scrape of her sister like nails down a blackboard, somehow engineered to always be pissing her off.
Jude is standing in the doorway looking the way Jude tends to look: kind of hot and kind of like they’ve been airlifted in from another genre of TV show.
She had snuck into the nursery and imagined smothering her in the throwaway fashion young girls often picture great acts of terrible violence.
Sisterhood, she thinks, is a trap. You all get stuck in certain roles forever.
It is an accepted belief that things fall apart. The question of whether the falling apart is necessary is separate and usually secondary.
It was always going to turn out this way, spoken like a charm against pain, against memory.
“I thought we were social workers.” “We’re whatever anyone needs to be able to blame for everything.”
It is easy, Jude has always reflected, to love a difficult woman. Easy to become the solid place around which she gathers herself, all her insecurities and rages and vendettas, the mooring from which she hangs. Irene is a fucking nightmare, and lovable for it.
I don’t think it’s possible to hate someone you don’t also fundamentally love.
If Agnes did scream, as Stephanie claims she did—as Jude also seemed to think she had when they came over to ask if she was OK—then it would have been because of this. Not the hands or the fright of a stranger who apparently knew her mother but the thought of her mother’s face held up to her own.
She can’t explain it, except to say that the thought of looking like someone seems only a prelude to the thought of acting like them. How long, if you really resemble a person, can you stop yourself from falling in step with them? How long until it turns out you are where they were hiding all along?
The moon, emerging in flashes between heavy banks of cloud, grows vast and appears to turn on its side. Tipped downward like something snared by the tides and dragged into closer orbit, it winks in and out of existence, great eye of an animal caught in a net.
A washing in, or a blurring together. One can picture the sea and the floundering remains of the city as less distinct, a bleeding in of lines once drawn in washable ink.
People twist, bed down, pack their ears, and dream of lobsters black with roe outside their windows. Wide waters, sloe-black and dense with detritus: glass beads and tin cans and the bodies of cormorants, sugar packets and plastic spoons and shopping trolleys and the heads and tails of creatures blown off course and drowned for want of salt.
Agnes registers a curious sense of grief for her previous solitude, how easy it was to move through spaces as a single entity compared to the strange, hulling loneliness of waiting for someone with whom you arrived as a pair.
It is easier, in some ways, to be single. Easy to move with the freedom of something untangled, bound for whatever brief destiny it likes.
Hard to tell how high up they must be, despite logically knowing how far they just climbed.
Strange to think how seldom she has seen the top of their building from the ground, how often the high points of the city are obscured, lost to low clouds and the murk of constant downpour. A skyline incomplete without its crowning layer, a head snicked off at the neck.
I could be good with just this, she thinks in answer to a question she herself has asked. If I could have this, I don’t think it would matter if things had been different or we’d had a different world or more to hope for. I could be happy here.
It’s still hard, though, all this pushing forward. Sometimes I think hope is a far less satisfying feeling than despair.
The point, of course, being the whole bright dailiness of agony, the way Icarus in the Brueghel painting could crash to earth as little but a background detail while the bland spool of life went on in the foreground, the plowman at his plow and the fabric of the day untouched, uninterrupted.
Any minute now, any second, I could crash this whole day into the wall.
She sighs, drains her glass, and registers a painful stab of longing for Irene. Her sister, always resisting her steadiness, yet simultaneously demanding of it. Her sister, always reliably in need of an older sibling, reliably grudging about that need. Agnes, too, of course, although that’s different. Harder, somehow, to know what she is to her, or ever has been.
The problem with love, of course, is that it frequently asks too much of unlovable people. It can be hard, on even the best of days, to compel oneself to be selfless and patient and undemanding or even halfway reasonable when one is not given to any of those behaviors. But these are nonetheless the qualities that love demands.
How do you think people who can’t afford these fucking psychodramas get from one day to the next?
The greater part of adulthood, Isla has always felt, lies in the acceptance of oneself as a fundamentally lone ranger, a person adept enough at changing a bulb and making a sandwich to get along more or less without help. One can work at this kind of independence, come to it in stages or all at once, but however much one perfects the art of paying taxes and otherwise keeping afloat, the fullness of adulthood can never be realized until a parent is beyond one’s reach. One might, at any time, sever ties and release a mother or father, might maintain such a rift for the rest of their natural
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Any horror story could be said to work in two pieces: the fear of being wholly alone and of realizing that one has company.
If silent prayer is untrustworthy then what does that say about the God you’re praying to?
The rescue is the point, or at least the idea that reversal is still imminent. There is little the imagination can do with an ending that is already assured.
Love, then, as something she should have clued into, a fact against which she’s been willingly blind. We love people before we notice we love them, but the act of naming the love makes it different, drags it out into different light.
(Family of four in domestic landslide, neighbors assured it won’t happen to them),
I’m scared, she imagines herself saying, that my house is going to fall down the hill with me inside it. I’m scared of the water in the basement. I’m scared that, if I were my wife, I would have left me, too.
Sometimes, she said, without adding how often, without adding that sometimes she pictured her mother spreading across her like lichen, like something resembling skin.
It’s hard enough to live, she sometimes feels, without also having to think about it.
Hard enough, amid panic and boredom and drastically shortened horizons, to simply treat a person nicely, put your hands into their hair until they shiver, until they push their face into your chest.
Perhaps God is all of that and kissing afterward, kissing most of all, sore-mouthed and messy, half asleep and trying to remember if you locked the door and if you need to set your phone alarm for seven. Perhaps God is all of that and an apology.
The problem, of course, is that there’s always something, and it can be easier on occasion to ignore it and take your partner back to bed.
She was supposed to be fairly protected, up in this higher point of the city, safe in her affluence, in her house that still sits on solid ground. It is hard to climb out of that assumption and to know what she ought to do next.
