My Absolute Darling

by Gabriel Tallent

She leaves parts of herself unnamed and unexamined, and then he will name them, and she will see herself clearly in his words and hate herself.

No one understands anyone else.

Grandpa’s eyes are crinkled with his pleasure. He can’t quit smiling. He sits raking his hand over his face, trying to quit because he knows that he looks like an idiot, and she can see he doesn’t want to spoil it for her by looking like that, but he can’t quit smiling and so sits pretending not to smile and looks down into his whiskey with his eyes squinting with pleasure.

“It is all meaningless,” he says, and she does not know why it would mean anything, or why you would look for meaning in it, and she does not understand why you would want it to be anything other than what it is, or why you would want it to be about you. It is just there, and that has always been enough for her.

She thinks, you are bound to make mistakes, and if you are unwilling to make mistakes, you will forever be held hostage at the beginning of a thing, you have to stop being afraid, Turtle. You have to get in the practice of being swift and deliberate, or one day, hesitation will fuck you.

She thinks, this is the part of him I hate most, the part that I revile, and I reached for it and it came easy.

He was wrong about names, though. Or half wrong. They mean something. It meant something when he called her sweetpea. That meant the world to her.

Nothing is as difficult as a sustained and unremitting contact with your own mind. She thinks, does it matter if it is difficult? It doesn’t matter. It is still better. Turtle Alveston, do you take this nothingness and this emptiness and this solitude? She thinks, do you take all these nights alone and will you have this and only this for the rest of your life?

No, she thinks. No, it cannot be that in the end of it all, I am like you. That cannot be. Those parts of you I turn from, I will turn from forever and I will not at the end of it find that I am like you.

And what if she came from somewhere that no one cared about her, and all of a sudden there’s Martin. What would you do, if you’d never had that in your life? If you were a child. You’d do a lot, she thinks. You’d put up with a lot. Just for that attention. Just to be close to that big, towering, sometimes generous, sometimes terrifying mind.

She wants in some way to quench her loneliness. She wants to lie here and be wrung clean of all personhood.

It feels as if she can hold still, can relax all vestiges of herself from her limbs. She will not spend long nights in contact with her own mind, she will not have to rise from this bed or admit how she came into it, she can do nothing and be nothing and there will be no pain.

Turtle holds the girl and she thinks, I will never let anything hurt you. The thought comes unbidden, and she knows it’s untrue. But she likes it, she likes that she could be such a person—and she thinks it again, suspending her own disbelief and putting her cheek to the girl’s hair and saying, “I will never let anything hurt you.”

and holding her, she thinks, this is a thing I can take care of, and if I couldn’t show the girl any love, I could show her care, I can do that much, maybe. I am not like him, and I can take care of things and can take care of her, too, maybe, even if I don’t know if it’s real and even if I don’t mean it more than that, I can salvage something maybe by just doing that, by just caring for the bitch.

Turtle thinks, pull the trigger. She can imagine no other way forward. She thinks, pull the trigger. But if you do not pull the trigger, walk back up that creek and in through the door and take possession of your mind, because your inaction is killing you. She sits looking out at the beach, and she thinks, I want to survive this.

She thinks, we have never been all right and we aren’t ever going to be all right. She thinks, I don’t even know what all right would look like. I don’t know what that would mean. At his best, we are more than all right. At his best he rises above all of it and he is more than any of them. But there is something in him. A flaw that poisons all the rest. What is going to happen to us.

It feels like Anna is lying to her, because how can Anna, who has seen Turtle’s life, how can she say that things will work out? The truth is that things do not work out, that there are no solutions, and you can go a year, a whole year, and be no better, no more healed, maybe even worse, be so skittish that if you’re walking down the street with Anna, and if someone opens a car door and gets out and slams the door you turn around, honest-to-god ready to kill them, turn around so fast that Anna, who knows what is happening, cannot even open her mouth in time and then you’re standing there, crying, and there’s some guy in a leather jacket and a fedora getting out of his Volkswagen Rabbit staring at you like, is this girl all right? and you want to be like, this girl is not all right, this girl will never be all right.

Turtle cries harder because she just wants to have a plot of good earth where she can grow things, where she can dig out the weeds and let peas tangle up her lattices and let squash grow huge and sprawling, and it isn’t working. Other people can do it, so why not her? The deer. The raccoons. The ravens, the starlings, the earwigs, the banana slugs, and the roots itching their way up through the planter bottoms. She doesn’t want to be fighting a losing battle against everything here, against everything, and she hates herself, hates the whiny, ineffective person she has become, hates how wounded she is, deeply and terribly wounded, and how long that road home is going to be.