Private Rites

by Julia Armfield

Why does it always need to be so oppositional? Why do you enjoy it being so fucking hard?

Jude tends to talk about family the way one might refer to the temporary closure of a favored restaurant: a shame, but hardly something to get worked up about.

One could bury one’s dead, once upon a time, and now it is impossible. Hardly something to be grieved in itself but still a lessening, a fact consigned to history along with almost everything else.

Well, people won’t often kill you.

How, she wondered, was one supposed to grieve an absence when that absence was familiar? What, she wondered, was grief without a clear departure to regret?

The concept of looking after her father was never something with which she managed to reckon—her father a figure she saw predominantly as impervious, a structure much like those on which he spent the majority of his time, unaffected by weather or external stressors.

He liked, Agnes knew, to push you to excel and then to cut you down when you did so.

first time you lose a parent, a part of you gets trapped there, trapped less in the moment of grief than in the knowledge of the end of childhood, the inevitable dwindling of the days.

When my mother died, she is more careful not to say, I became aware of the limits of things, of the fact of my own ending.

rhapsodize

Nettled,

money her father insisted on splitting between them just after his heart attack, the way he had contacted each of them separately as if hoping they wouldn’t confer. It had been huge money, money enough to carry with it the possibility of ease, of improvement, and it had been almost impossible to know what to do. The problem, of course, has always been her father, the sense of him shattered across her—first broken and then embedded.

The problem has always been the way her father treated her mother, that he loved her and then ceased to love her, the way this withdrawal caused her first to unravel and finally to die. The problem has always been the way he left them alone in the house for long periods, the way he spoke to his daughters, the way he pitted one against the other—left each to struggle for a love they should have known they couldn’t earn. The problem has always been squaring one fact with another, her father’s great ease and easy cruelty.

People allow therapy to work when they want it to, but the point of the process is seldom the end result.

People like to feel that they’re working on something, to feel exonerated by the simple fact of self-reflection. I know I can do better, one woman has been known to say to her on average seven times per session. No one ever gives me credit for the fact that I’m aware.

Enough to just be us, she said, despite everything, though this of course turned out to be untrue.

It felt good to know she had sorted a situation that didn’t need constant checking, though now she feels like perhaps she should have kept a closer eye.

Your mother did something very selfish, Isla—she remembers this statement without warning, without any sense of how or why—it’s worth your knowing how selfish she’s been. They weren’t allowed to attend their mother’s funeral, though she doesn’t recall what they did that day or whether anybody stayed with them.

thought about the way some people know how to say your name better than others, say it like a fist rapped smart against a door.

The evening struggles, darkness borne down heavy and replete. The rain falls, the night continues—black horizon and the pull of what’s beneath.

Jude huffs a laugh, squeezes her for a moment and then releases. An unspoken thought between them: the essential fact of Irene as a creature akin to a hermit crab, whose outer shell seems ostensibly tough but is only the home to a very soft animal, and the secondary fact of Jude as the only person who really knows this.

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.

i don’t think i meant it the way you took it. you’re always hearing me talk and then slinging your own translation over the top.

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?

They are, as Jude reflects, a ship being mended as it sails, except that they aren’t really being mended and their sailing has become less a smooth progression and more the basic act of staying afloat. It’s been a strange period, desperation like something overturned and spreading everywhere.

the advisory sign someone from management tacked up a year or so previously: Do not overstep professional boundaries. Do not become emotionally involved. Do practice empathy within stated guidelines. Do not make promises you can’t keep.

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. Lovable because she asks consistently to be loved, a desire that streams from her spiteful, sparkling face, from the way she kisses, from the way she’ll sometimes jerk awake at night and stare around in panic. She expresses a constant desire to be better—tries hopelessly to cook, tries to let go of grudges—yet Jude loves the specific truth of what she is prior to trying as much as the fact that she always tries again.

has his father’s stance, whatever that’s supposed to mean. But Agnes has no interest in looking like her mother, no interest in the idea of commonality, any quirks or expressions or features they might have shared. Looking like her father is, frankly, bad enough. She can’t quite articulate the discomfort at the root of all this, the fact that it sometimes feels less like discomfort and more like out-and-out fear.

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?

tried to remember the sequence of a poem she’d wanted to quote to a patient earlier in the week, about Old Masters and suffering: how it takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along. 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.

You can never just climb down from something, Isla had once told her, you like to treasure up a grudge like something you’ve birthed and fed and sent to an expensive school.

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.

A house, at night, loses all its comfortable dimensions. In the dark, one might quite as easily be walking on the ceiling as the carpet. Windows recede; the knowledge of familiar corners grows less certain. One might come upon a room and find it twice as large, busy with right angles.

by rights,

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 lives, but death is irrevocable. Death, after all, puts an end to the argument, but it also prolongs the silence for good.

Any horror story could be said to work in two pieces: the fear of being wholly alone and of realizing that one has company.

A stupid thing, Irene thinks, to have allowed a silence to grow like this. Silence, which was once the whole point of her studies, now uncorked and spreading wet and sticky over everything it touches—

Small city, she has thought, bad times, hysterical fucking people.

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.

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. She has wondered, before now, whether thinking about God is part of this. Wondered whether endlessly circling the same topics, harping hopeless and uncertain on God and on silence and deep, drowning lack have simply functioned as ways to keep her unhappy, keep her tight in the grip of an answer she can’t help seeking.

There are, she has often felt, no answers to inheritance, to the slick black suckered thing that at once shoves you up and drags you inward. Inheritance, both in the sense of what is owned and what is embodied, the sense of herself as indistinct from the influence of those who came before.

Life, she understands, is a collapsing down, a succession of memories held not in sequence but together, occurring and recurring all at once.

“Do you think,” she says, “the problem was Dad, or did we just use it as an excuse for everything?”