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two people who emanated more love than it seemed like the universe would sanction.
But she wondered how they would handle his less visible shortcomings: his crippling anxiety, his bouts of severe depression, the way that sometimes she came into a room and didn’t recognize him, saw only a man-child with such a despondent expression that she began to question every single happy moment they’d had together.
Once, early on in their relationship, he had looked at her desperately and asked her, How can we make this stop happening? And it had broken her heart because he had been so hopeful that she had an answer,
talking to their girlfriends about how they’d had dreams since age eleven of sitting in the garage with the car turned on because it seemed like the most humane way to go
There was no shock when she took his hand, no cinematic burst of static electricity, but there was a pleasant warmth, the gentle pressure of his fingers around hers. The lightning-quick pulse beneath the thin skin of his wrist; her hand fitting neatly into someone else’s hand.
and she was, a direct quote, very active in her sons’ lives. For Jonah, this translated to I am never taking in some fucked-up kid in a hooded Stewie Griffin sweatshirt,
It seemed irreconcilably fucked up to him that he could be regarded as something to be “managed” simply because he’d been born to a mother who couldn’t handle having a kid and adopted by people who would quickly get annihilated by a viaduct.
“I have two young children.” “Once you get to know him I know you’ll love him.” “I already love him,” she snapped. “I fucking gave birth to him.”
This afternoon had made her aware of a brand-new failure, her failure to act and the fact that she hadn’t been aware—shouldn’t she have known?—that a person she’d brought into the world was struggling so much to exist in it.
You forgot this,” he said, refusing to meet her eyes. She reached out, the flush in her cheeks matching the one spreading across Jonah’s face, and took the cracked green mug.
Marilyn worried about those three, but she almost never worried about Violet. And this, she saw, was a huge oversight, a great disservice to her daughter.
David, so open and credulous and respectful. She could have killed him.
how silly it was to think that he had any idea what it was like to be her, day after day after day.
“I’m not sure,” she said, breathing hard, holding her glass so tightly that she worried it might break. “You’ve never yelled at me before.” “I’m not yelling,” he said, which was true.
“I’m not fun anymore,” she said. “I’m not— There’s nothing exciting happening, ever, and I’m just—I’m just this vessel. I barely exist.”
because it was nice to be worried about occasionally;
He heard his grandmother laugh for the first time and he decided, sitting in the dining room of their big weird house, that he liked her.
And then there was Grace, who had an apartment that looked like the room where Nosferatu kept his victims.
“We’re not earthly?” he asked. “Me and the girls?” “The girls and I,” she corrected. “No. You’re ethereal. My intangible everything.”
“Don’t worry,” Wyatt said conspiratorially. “We won’t tell anyone about you.” Jonah looked over to her and she could see, past the smirk on his face, that of course the remark had wounded him.
At the sound of Wyatt’s voice she leapt efficiently into panic mode. Was this what she got for opening her home to the boy: peril for her own children? She pushed past Matt, steeling herself for whatever was transpiring in the playroom, hoping that her latent mammalian strength would kick in, whatever it was that helped people save their kids from being crushed by cars. But in the playroom, Jonah was upside-down in a handstand, a slight outward bend in his elbows, legs splayed in splits, and Wyatt was regarding him with bald admiration. “Mama, look,” he said. She paused to get her bearings.
...more
What was going on with her? To articulate it seemed damning somehow; to vocalize it was to give permanence to what she hoped wouldn’t last.
The thing that nobody warned you about adulthood was the number of decisions you’d have to make, the number of times you’d have to depend on an unreliable gut to point you in the right direction, the number of times you’d still feel like an eight-year-old, waiting for your parents to step in and save you from peril.
The girls rarely approached him about anything before they approached their mother, and he’d never taken it personally: he went to Marilyn first for everything too.
“I am currently being introduced to a brand-new human being,” Gillian said, and Liza understood why her father had liked her. “The gratitude’s all mine.”
Grace was growing more and more anomalous by the day, a twenty-three-year-old non-Amish virgin who had never had a real boyfriend.
They were both equally, aggressively sanguine about the imperfections of their union, which meant that someone, somewhere, someday probably had to accept Grace.
He loved Marilyn more, he was pretty certain, than anyone had ever loved another person. It almost suffocated him sometimes.
But he loved Marilyn more. He’d accepted this early on. Each one of his children was a singular, baffling miracle, a joy, an utter delight. But they came from Marilyn;
when in fact the universe had allowed him to be with his best friend, his partner in all things, for over forty years?
children. She’d given up so much and so little when she agreed to marry him, but he had been so fixated on having her that he had rarely stopped to consider what it would mean for her to allow herself to be had. This was how he saw it: getting her, winning. It wasn’t fair. She deserved more.
She actually sounded sorry, but he just rested his head against the window, staying silent, because he was sick of telling people that he was willing to settle for their shitty behavior.
She wanted to tell her husband that she missed him a lot, but that she missed herself even more.
But then Wyatt had come along, and his arrival was accompanied by a new darkness, and she couldn’t, at the time, justify abandoning another child.
actually insane
She was softer since Grace was born and Liza snuggled against the pillow of her belly.
So they did. She remembered feeling her parents on either side of her, remembered the cool antiseptic smell of her dad and the powdery sweetness of her mom, and she remembered thinking that it wouldn’t be possible to feel safer than that.
She was hard to love and exceptionally easy to worry about and it was an exhausting combination. He felt unexpected tears in his eyes.
Because, the truth was, since the viaduct, he had never felt legitimately tied to another person, a parent or a sibling or a girlfriend. He had never, since then, felt like he couldn’t be returned at a moment’s notice.
There was a fullness in her chest. Perhaps Wendy didn’t hate her as much as she’d always assumed. IVY MARILYN EISENBERG, on the certificate she’d just tucked back into its resting place in Wendy’s desk, just above the date.
The best thing about the cold was the comfort that came from escaping it.
He’d done everything he was supposed to. He’d always done everything he was supposed to, especially tonight, especially when there was another woman in his car and he’d played his Marilyn card; he’d chosen Marilyn over everything else, like always, and so what the hell did he have to feel bad about?
okay king not about what you're supposed to do!! that's bare minimum!!!!!!!!
“You don’t understand why I haven’t felt able to talk to you lately? You’re like a ghost, Marilyn. You’re the one shutting me out. You’re the one who refuses to acknowledge that anything’s happening. And you’re such a fucking martyr that even if you did admit that, all we’d hear about is how hard things are for you.”
ummmm..........
No wonder she’d been crying. No wonder she kept secret cigarettes more than five years after she’d quit. No wonder she’d relegated him to the living room. He was a child. His wife was married to a child.
But what they weren’t denying was their closeness, the fact that David had actively chosen to spend hours and hours of his limited time with another woman, to confide in someone else his worries and observations.
This necessary reminder, so often forgotten, that they existed beyond their children.
And it was weird, she thought, feeling adult and aware, how a thing so terrible as losing someone could yield goodness in the ones who were left.
But Jonah was a salient reminder of the contrast: her excess with his have-nots. She felt sick to her stomach.
It wasn’t Jonah’s fault. She knew that. He hadn’t asked to exist. And he’d done nothing wrong, nothing at all except for being, and she could acknowledge candidly that it wasn’t so much the boy she resisted as it was all that he represented, and all that he threatened to unravel, but acknowledging that didn’t make a bit of difference.
Jonah must’ve looked hurt—he was hurt; he wasn’t the fucking Unabomber; he hadn’t fucking asked for any of this—because
“I’ll be right across the hall,” Matt said, and Jonah took a second to stew in the gall of these people, their acting like he was not only an inconvenience but a sketchy Stranger-Danger predator too.
