Five Tuesdays in Winter

by Lily King

It was the first room I’d ever had that had nothing to do with my parents, their tastes, or their rules. I felt like Marlo Thomas on That Girl, a girl with her own apartment.

It was a skill of mine, splitting myself in half, pretending to be childish and oblivious while sifting through adult exchanges with the focus and discrimination of a forensic detective.

Last week a man had been looking for War and Peace, and when Mitchell explained that he was temporarily out of anything by Tolstoy, the man asked if he had it by anyone else. It was a terrible time for books.

It must have seemed slightly obscene back then, a woman of her age getting pregnant. I was such a deep inconvenience to them. That much was clear already, although not something I could have put in words. It was purely visceral, a confused shame lodged inside my gut, a sense that I had been terribly, terribly bad but not being able to recall what I’d done wrong.

And then we went downstairs and ate popcorn and her cheeks were flushed and her lips bright red and it was raining hard now outside and I knew Ed and Grant knew everything, and everything—everything—made me happy.

To wish your parents ill, to wish that they would never return, seems heavy from an adult perspective but it sat lightly on me that summer. A frivolous, whimsical wish that I knew would never come true.

Becca, though, I married. I don’t know how other people do it, not stay with the girl whose ankle socks made your stomach flip at age fourteen, whose wet hair smells like your past—the girl who was with you the very moment you were introduced to happiness.

Oda felt a racing in her body, an urgency that had no reason to exist now. She didn’t have to get up for work or make Hanne’s lunch or get her to her Saturday lessons or to church. She wondered how other people adjusted to vacations. It was such an unpleasant feeling, like gunning a car in neutral. It pulled her from the book she was reading. Her eyes could not take in the words.

Adults hid their pain, their fears, their failure, but adolescents hid their happiness, as if to reveal it would risk its loss.

Sweet was not a word we used in our family. Sweet was for suckers. Honesty, generosity, tenderness were not valued either. We had been raised to sharpen our tongues and defend ourselves to the death with them. We loved each other, we amused each other, but we were never unguarded, and we were never surprised by a sudden plunge of the knife.

I remember feeling happy among strangers, people I’d only known for a few weeks, which made me feel like things would be okay in my life after all.

On the way back to Vermont I thought about words and how, if you put a few of them in the right order, a three-minute story about a girl and her dog can get people to forget all the ways you’ve disappointed them.

No one will actually come out and say this nowadays, but women are at their best when they’re writing about men: their husbands, their fathers, their lost loves. It’s when they start writing about themselves that they become unreadable.”

They were always so excited about a fresh drink, but all the alcohol seemed to do to either of her parents was uncover how little they liked life or anything in it.

for wasn’t her need to write like her parents’ need to drink? A form of escape, a way to detach? And, like the alcohol, it weakened and often angered her, left her yearning for the kind of rare and extraordinary ability she’d never have.

Monotony, especially the unfamiliar monotony of being loved, was something she couldn’t seem to get comfortable with.