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“It’s OK for me to know this. I still love you even though you’re like this. We’re all like this. We’re all broken from growing up in this museum, Jenny.”
She remembered a term she learned in a linguistics class for the way a word stops making sense if you stare at it for too long: semantic evacuation. That was what it felt like for Jenny. The world no longer had coherence.
Every day, she would wake up and think about her past, and every day she would squirm in the mortification of who she had been even before—thoughts she’d had and decisions she’d made. Every day she was new, and yesterday, whenever yesterday was, she’d been an idiot. And then so on the next day and the day after that. This, too, people call depression.
It took less than a day for Jenny to understand that she had been so dumb this whole time. She’d known the money corrupted her; she’d known the money had been the condition that created her torture. She was defined by this knowledge. Now, here was her chance. The money was finally truly gone. Maybe this was a blessing. She waited there, in the dark, to feel it: to feel what it might be like for a curse to lift.
In the dark of the tunnel to Manhattan she saw her face reflected back to her. This was who she was. She was friendless. She had no emotional connection to anyone. She had no prospects. She had rejected everything given to her so that by the time she realized how valuable it all was it was gone.
There was no life there. There were only children and middle-aged people, all on a steady treadmill of routine and anxiety about routine, routine and anxiety about routine. There was no chance, no serendipity, no magical night, no arthouse movie theater, no youthful energy. There was no eating out after eight at night! How could there be serendipity if you were home by eight? What it does to the soul when you only see children and middle-aged people.
She wasn’t a horrible person (she told herself). She loved Dale, yes, but love wasn’t the only metric she thought a person should consider. She grew up with too many siblings and parents who loved each other just fine. What she wanted was security.
as she dipped her toes into adult waters, she’d been finding herself crushed by the possible terrible outcomes of living this close to the margins.
She would never work for a living, she knew that. But she had hoped she would travel and engage in the world. But then Carl was kidnapped, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to make plans for a very long time. It took her too long to realize it would be never.
She would have had children that she could prioritize—ones she could actually raise, instead of viewing them the way she viewed her actual children, which was as constant, potential threats to her husband’s fragile psyche.
No, worse. She had thought she would have children who maybe resembled her a little more in their grit and energy. She had thought she would have children that she maybe thought more highly of. How she’d watch her three children flailing as they aimed to find meaning in a life where they didn’t have to work for anything.
Carl was still distracted—catatonic, even. Ike picked him up for work every day, and drove him home. Carl wouldn’t leave his office. Even after the trial, he was like a person stuffed inside a person, and Ruth was starting to forget who he had been in the first place, then if he had been in the first place.
There has never been, in the history of all human interaction, a way for a woman to explain effectively that she’s calm when a man has suggested she isn’t.
“I am trying to figure out, Mom, exactly how I ended up so fucked up. How I became rudderless. How I both failed to bond with my family of origin and to individuate from them.”
Ruth’s children were the veal, she suddenly understood. They were raised to be fattened, but never to reach a full and thriving adulthood. They’d arrived at the doorstep of life, unable to walk. Ruth used to hate them for this—hate them in a way you can only hate them because you love them—but now she saw how inevitable it was. Worse, now she saw that she was the author of their incompetence.
Ruth thought about that for a second. “You know, they say that when a man dies, his widow goes on to live many more years. But when a woman dies, her husband has a year left in him tops.” Arthur shook his head. “She’s his mother.” “I’ve been trying to explain that to them both for years,” Ruth replied, and the two of them laughed like the old friends they were.
She realized as she drove over the bridge that the answer to all of this would not come from her children. They just weren’t equipped. It was too late for them to learn how to be. The answer would come from Ruth. Who else?
What a strange world chemistry is, how the very creations of protection can also cause so much damage.
This estate—it was negative space. It was the space in between movement, the space in between growth, the space in between something nice, the space in between a home.
“One day, we will have to talk about why you didn’t think I should know any of this.” “I didn’t want to scare you.” “That’s not what marriage is, Nathan. It’s not like what your parents do, where your mother protects him from having to be a person in the world. That’s not partnership.”
He had reached the part of the emergency where he could finally exist as himself. He spent most of his life trying to warn the world that destruction was imminent, that the fail-safes were gone, that the walls were flimsy. And here, when he was faced with what was absolutely and incontrovertibly an emergency—one that no one could argue with—this is when the world finally started making sense to him. The anxiety and fear were the only things that were real to him; they were the only things that never abandoned him.
“Do you understand that I spend my whole life doing things that will make me able to function as a normal person for you? Do you understand that?”
This was all he had ever wanted, to be held within the confines of an arbitrary rigidity, sure he could find happiness within the strictures.
He was realizing now that the drugs and sex were not to service lust but in service to danger—how he had been reenacting his father’s near-death experience for his entire life, trying to make sense of it, trying to have some Freudian wisdom about who he was and where he came from, and the eternal question of the Fletcher family, which was this: What would they have been like if this had never happened to them?
They drove in silence, and in the quiet space between them, the bond they always had forged even tighter—a chemical alliance, borne of biology and shared experience. Jenny’s whole life, she thought that they had chosen each other, that it was a terrific kind of coincidence that they were both born into the insanity of this family. But they hadn’t chosen each other; they didn’t even have to choose each other. They had been chosen for each other, and now they lived in the kind of exquisite stuckness you can’t even opt out of.
“It’s not what you think it is,” Phyllis said. “It’s not judgment like on Earth. It’s understanding. It’s the ability to look at your life and find yourself justified.”
and he knew now that the only thing he ever had to apologize for was that he hadn’t recognized that the kidnapping was there to show him how every single other moment of his life, he was not being kidnapped. That there was danger and there was safety—neither of them are passive creatures—but he’d only ever acknowledged the danger. He hadn’t realized that the safety was aggressive, too. He hadn’t realized that for every single moment of his life that he was not in that basement, chained to a pipe like an animal, he was free like a king.
See? A terrible ending. There would be no growth, no revelation, no coming of age, no plastic hour brought to fruition. There would be no reckoning with all that happened or resolution. Their problems were solved, and there was no need for any of that now. But what are you going to do? That’s how rich people are.
they missed their opportunity to rise from their comfortable circumstances and become the real people that only true adversity and fear can make you into.
Maybe that was the real Long Island Compromise, that you can be successful on your own steam or you can be a basket case, and whichever you are is determined by the circumstances into which you were born. Your poverty will create a great drive in your children. Or your wealth will doom them into the veal that Jenny described at her science fair, people who are raised to never be able to support a life so that when they’re finally allowed to wander outside their cages for the first time on their way to their slaughter, they can’t even stand up on their own legs. But the people who rise to
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