The Book of other People Part 7

Her problem was the kiss. She could not define the moral status of the kiss. If she kissed him, thought Nigora, then maybe she would not want to venture into the unambiguously immoral; she would no longer be tempted by the temptations of his flesh.

Since she thought that the kiss might be her cure, she tended to believe that a kiss was innocent. It was just on the right side of morality.

Nigora was not convinced of the soul's immortality. Laziz was convinced; but she was not. And since she was not convinced, she was also unsure of his belief in crime and punishment. Without the threat of punishment or the promise of reward, her actions were oddly depleted. They existed only for her.

In this way, Nigora was a libertine.

All Nigora's temptations were now refracted through the immortal. Her body's immortal longings were her anxiety, her worry. They seemed more important than the possibility of her soul's immortal life.

And yet, and yet. How much pleasure could her body procure, she wondered? If they slept together, she would not give Yaha pleasure; when he remembered her, she worried, he would remember her only with amus.e.m.e.nt, with pity. Her memory of pa.s.sion would be his memory of the laughable.

At what point, she wondered, could she act out of character? When would she have the courage?

Her life was all Laziz: they could not contemplate themselves without each other. It was Laziz / Nigora; Nigora / Laziz; and Laziz bored her.

Laziz wore a baseball cap st.i.tched with a Big Apple badge pinned to its peak. He wore khaki chinos with ironed-in pleating, like a curtain, around the crotch. Below the raised hem of these trousers, which did not reach his shoes, two sports socks were visible. These socks came in trios - three identical roll-mops - tightly in a plastic wrapper. He bought them from a kiosk in Downtown, which arranged its wares neatly outside on an ironing board. He wore a taupe and tucked-in polo neck, which in the language of the fashion magazines unread by Nigora would have been called unforgiving unforgiving. On the fuzzy back-ledge of Laziz's taxi were three miniature rubber dogs, with dislocated and nodding heads. There was a bulldog, a Scotch terrier and a (miniature) miniature Schnauzer.

Nigora had a theory of romantic comedy. It might, perhaps, have helped Laziz to know this theory. It might have helped him in his own thoughts and theories of marriage. But he did not know her theory.

Every plot in the movies (thought Nigora) was the same. She knew the plots. There was the life-changing moment. Then the meet-cute. Then the discovery of an obstruction to happiness. Then the decision to embark on a particular strategy. The test, or tests. The sudden reversal of the obstruction. And finally the happy ending.

These were the plots: but there was another way of describing the plots.

Every plot was about morality: it was the opposition of adultery and marriage; it was saying that there was always a choice to be made between s.e.x and love. Every hero or heroine believed they could not have the two together. And yet this opposition would always be resolved in the coercive paradise of the finale, where s.e.x and love were revealed to be identical.

Nigora was unconvinced by this. For she was not sentimental. However much they tempted her, and moved her, she could not believe in the fantasy of the endings. She still, after all, had some pride.

According to Nigora, romantic comedy was the most morally complex of all the filmic genres. It dramatised the essential moral problem of everybody's life. It represented the gap between desire and fulfilment.

This was the theory she developed as she lay beside her husband; as he caressed the curve of her forehead; as his hands went up and down the floral print of her acrylic night-gown. The flora were daisies, they were cornflowers. Nigorajonim Nigorajonim, he said. Nigorajonim Nigorajonim. He told his wife that he loved her. And she told him that she loved him; and she was lying, thought Nigora. She was lying to her Lazizjon.

And yet: Nigora was not lying, not quite.

There was a secret to Laziz's moustache. It was a private joke between him and Nigora. The joke was that Laziz's moustache was not real. From time to time, Laziz applied this drooping line of glutinous plastic to his upper lip. Before he went out, Nigora would take polaroids of him: as he saluted, glaring at the camera; as he leered and pouted like a matinee idol. They loved these photographs. They showed them to their closest friends, as they drank a coffee, with jagged squares of milk chocolate. And no one else found Laziz's moustache funny. It was not, perhaps, that they found it positively unfunny; it was just that they could not see its humour. This humour was reserved for the privacy of Laziz and his Nigora.

The night before they left Uzbekistan, in 2002, Nigora met her friend Faizullo in the park. There was a man selling candyfloss, and a man selling bananas. They held hands and kissed as if they were in love. In this way, Nigora hoped she might not be endangering her friend. They would simply resemble an everyday, humdrum affair. It was nothing to do with alliances, or politics. They sat on a climbing-frame printed with blurred reproductions of Daffy Duck, and Bugs Bunny, and talked about the other singers in the opera house, maliciously. Faizullo was an opera singer. This was Nigora's implicit way of talking about their friendship. And then they walked away and Nigora kissed him on the cheek, lightly, absent-mindedly - as though she were about to see him again in the morning.

Yes, Nigora knew about suffering.

That was the last time she saw him. And, unbeknown to Nigora, she had stayed in Faizullo's memory accompanied by a pigeon, which had drifted behind her as she turned to say goodbye.

Three years later, Faizullo had disappeared. It was rumoured that he had been killed; then it was rumoured he had been imprisoned. And Nigora did not know which of these she preferred: for, although her instinct clung to the life of Faizullo, she also could not allow herself the pain of imagining Faizullo with a number st.i.tched on his breast, ragged, like a raffle ticket.

On her last morning in Uzbekistan, Nigora had seen a pregnant dachshund being driven in the front seat of a hatchback, which Nigora first saw through the car-window beside her and then through the rear window behind her, as she twisted round, entranced.

Nigora could not worry about the humans; the humans were too much for her. But she could worry about the dogs instead. For the dogs were innocent. The dogs were the genuine bystanders; they had nothing to do with revolutions, or beliefs.

If Nigora were asked about the suffering in her own marriage, she would not have been able to talk about it. All her suffering was elsewhere - in the realm of remembered facts.

There was a sn.o.bbishness in her suffering, a reserve. It would not countenance comparison.

And yet, and yet: Laziz would go down underneath the covers, in the nights. And he would say to her, 'Never leave me, never leave me.' And how could she? she would reply. Everything she loved was Laziz. And he would say to her, 'Never leave me, never leave me.' Or he would say, 'Tell me I'm not ugly.' For Laziz believed that he was ugly; he believed that he was the ugliest and weakest child. And Nigora, sadly, continued to rea.s.sure him; she kissed the galumph of his nose, the crooked line of his mouth, and she said to him, 'You're not ugly. Of course you're not. I love you, you're beautiful,' until Laziz managed to calm down.

The coverlet had been given to her by her grandmother. And underneath the coverlet she felt safe.

She did not believe in her own suffering, Nigora. All her ideas of suffering were reserved for the gone, the missing, the dead.

Somewhere, everywhere, a girl is taking her clothes off. This much was true. Nigora could agree with this. But something else, she thought, was also true. Somewhere, everywhere, a girl was being raped. And the question was: how far away? How far away did something have to happen before it stopped being your responsibility? How far away did a rape need to be? Two streets? A country? A separate universe?

In this rational hysteria lived Nigora, who loved her husband, Laziz - a taxi driver and former businessman. She loved him, and wanted to leave him.

Some Day-time Dialogue between Nigora and Laziz L When you're young you can go anywhere but when you're old you can't go everywhere. It's true.N It's true.L It's true? It's true. Yes. Did I tell you this joke about the rake?N The rake, no.L Two men are walking down a road.N OK.L And there's a rake in between them.N That's it? It isn't funny.L No, it isn't funny, is it? This guy told me it and he laughed so I thought it must be funny.N It isn't funny.

On the sofa which they had bought after a year in their new country, Nigora and Laziz watched The Philadelphia Story The Philadelphia Story. Or: Nigora watched, and Laziz slept beside her, his head back, his mouth open. This film was dubbed into Russian, with one male and ba.s.s actor doing all the voices. And this made her sad; it created a gap between Nigora and the storyline.

As Nigora watched this film again, she considered that its plot was all about timing: everything had got out of kilter, and yet somehow things would restore themselves. Timing would be restored. Because the couple who move apart are still the same couple. The beauty (thought Nigora) of The Philadelphia Story The Philadelphia Story is the fact that the film is about Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, and yet all along it looks like it is about Katherine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart. But Jimmy Stewart is just there to prove a sad truth of timing: that the affair one is having is never the affair one is having. There is always someone else. is the fact that the film is about Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, and yet all along it looks like it is about Katherine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart. But Jimmy Stewart is just there to prove a sad truth of timing: that the affair one is having is never the affair one is having. There is always someone else.

The cake she had bought lay crumbling on its paper box in front of them.

She stroked Laziz under his rough chin. She gently extricated his moustache from its precarious angle on his upper lip. Happy anniversary Happy anniversary, she said, gently, to herself.

Laziz would be picturesque, and she would be distressed. That was the image of their marriage.

She was not sure if the vocabulary for everything really existed. She was not convinced by everyone's a.s.sumption of linguistic comprehensiveness. The feeling she got, for instance, when watching The Philadelphia Story The Philadelphia Story, was not quite sadness; it was not quite melancholy. It was more to do with a sensation of size, of overwhelming size.

More and more, she was beginning to believe that feelings were not complicated. They were not split into infinite const.i.tuent elements. Instead, often, the words were not all there. For Nigora was pragmatic. She had no time for souls with soul soul. No, Nigora did not believe in the indefinable. She believed that everything had a definition, if only the words could be found.

She remembered her father coming into the empty kitchen, letting his keys splay on the table. She remembered him biting the cap off a biro, as he made notes on a pile of ma.n.u.script. She remembered the first boy she ever slept with, Shuhrat, who used to swim while she lay and read on the gra.s.s by the river. He got out and lay beside her. She remembered his arms, the hair springing awry as it dried. But now she could not quite remember his face. She remembered his eyes were brown, but she could not remember his eyes. She only remembered that she knew they were brown.

And she missed her mother. In this new city, where Laziz was her one companion, she wanted to be home again. She wanted to be there in the kitchen, with her mother talking. And her father, as she talked, would pluck a stray hair from the base of her neck. There was a bowl of sweets on the kitchen table, underneath a tablecloth.

Nigora was a minor character.

She remembered writing her initials on the condensation in the car window, as her father drove her to piano lessons. She remembered the letters leaking downwards, obeying the line of gravity.

In the Gardens of Sunderland Cafe - renamed from its original Gardens of Allah, after Sunderland had been victorious in the 1973 FA Cup Final - Yaha made notes. For Yaha was not just a footballer. He had also received a university education. According to Yaha, in this world there were three ordinary systems of government: and he had invented a fourth, in which 'virtue was always rewarded'. This was his ideal republic; its const.i.tution formed his constant study, his refuge, his repose.

Nigora considered Yaha, and gave up. She stroked the hairs on the back of Laziz's hands. Where could she go? Everywhere she went, there was her marriage.

The thing about you, her mother used to say, is that you never act out of character. You have no originality.

But Nigora knew this was not true. Because she was going to act out of character. She was going (thought Nigora) to be herself be herself. And yet: how could she? How could she?

Judge Gladys Parks-Schultz

Heidi Julavits

On the final dusk of her life, Judge Gladys Parks-Schultz sits in a green velvet armchair reading - or rather not reading - a dull nautical mystery called Trouble Astern Trouble Astern. Her chair faces a large window overlooking a long driveway lined with oaks. Beyond the furthest oak she can see the ocean and, riding the horizon, a house-lit island.

Behind her is a closed door.

From this vantage point, we cannot see Glad Parks-Schultz. She is blocked from view by her throne-like chair. Glad Parks-Schultz's name suggests she is as dull as her mystery, an insincerely cheery woman compactly a.s.sembled, her bland orb face stacked directly atop her middle like a snowman's. Her name suggests a curt and stilted manner. We see her barking monotone pleasantries, scaring children unintentionally. There is no sense arguing with this perception, even if there is only a little truth to it. We cannot see Glad Parks-Schultz, we can only hear her name in our heads, and her name has carved a lumpen shape for her there.

Glad Parks-Schultz tries repeatedly to lose herself in her mystery - a love affair, a sailing trip, a cabin, a knife - but cannot. Following the spat over the Christmas ham ('How can you serve ham ham?' her daughter had asked, a fair question; Sylvia was a vegetarian, something her mother had willfully forgotten), Glad Parks-Schultz finds herself in a familiarly pinched humor, her Holidays Gone Wrong mood. To go with this mood she plays in her head images from another Christmas, images from f.a.n.n.y and Alexander f.a.n.n.y and Alexander, the only Bergman movie Glad has ever seen, and then only because Sylvia, a film major minoring in psychology and thus a self-appointed Bergman connoisseur, gave it to her as a Christmas present last year ('This is more your speed,' Sylvia had said, not uncritically). Fine if it was. Glad preferred her cultural enrichment free of anguish.

Outside her window (in which only she can see her faint reflection), the tree-lined drive extends to a distant point. It is the trick of perspective, thinks Glad Parks-Schultz, whose face, in the half-reflection in this dying-light time of day, appears longer and thinner than it might to anyone actually seeing her. Glad Parks-Schultz splays her book over her lap (only twenty more pages to go), giving up on the cowardly pair of lovers who have sailed and anch.o.r.ed in a cove, who have rowed their dinghy to the secluded beach, who are sneaking through the woods to a cabin to kill the woman's husband with a knife. Why the husband is alone in the cabin is itself a bunch of self-reflexive foolery - he is a writer putting the final touches on a mystery book. She wants to ask the husband about this book - not the book he's writing, but the book he's in. What kind of mystery, she would ask him, makes you wait until the very end for a dead person? She is a district judge. She is not interested in crimes before they happen. She detests the why why of most novels, which is the reason she sticks to mysteries. There is no emotional worrying of the of most novels, which is the reason she sticks to mysteries. There is no emotional worrying of the why why in mysteries - she cheated on him; he wanted her money - there is only the outcome, and the intricately explained in mysteries - she cheated on him; he wanted her money - there is only the outcome, and the intricately explained how how.

Meanwhile, Glad waits impatiently for Sylvia and her college boyfriend, her son Rod and his college girlfriend, all of whom she has banished from her house in a fit of ham pique, to return from the beach.

But once these people (her children and their temporary beloveds) are out of her sight she feels unseen, and not terribly easy as a result of it. Better to be loathed on a major holiday. Better to feel hated and alive. She is a stern district judge despised for her imperviousness to human context, to bad-luck stories. ('No Glad-Handing Parks-Schultz'.) The first snowflake of the season tumbles past the window. Glad huffs. She brushes the spine of Trouble Astern Trouble Astern and prays for an escape from her tedious self. She'll take any old diversion from this green velvet armchair - her mother's favorite armchair, the upholstery warted with burn marks during her mother's final days smoking in this very chair, and prays for an escape from her tedious self. She'll take any old diversion from this green velvet armchair - her mother's favorite armchair, the upholstery warted with burn marks during her mother's final days smoking in this very chair, dying dying in this very chair. She wants to be free of this Holiday Gone Wrong mood, this overheated pair of woolly mukluks. in this very chair. She wants to be free of this Holiday Gone Wrong mood, this overheated pair of woolly mukluks.

This is where, Glad thinks, if I were, say, a less cooperative character in the relentlessly trouble-free Trouble Astern Trouble Astern, I would set the writer-husband's peg-leg afire (were he to possess a peg-leg), I would crush the whiny lover's head with a winch handle. If impulsive violence isn't part of my character, I could instead (as is the annoying tendency of the characters in Trouble Astern Trouble Astern) flash backward to some baldly moral exemplar from my childhood. I could allow myself to be sucked backward and molecularly rea.s.sembled as a younger, sweeter person, available to be efficiently known by others via some traumatic event involving - preferably - my mother. This is the way of the world, Glad knows. She hears it from the lawyers every week. Mothers are, in some soupy way, to blame for every act of criminality.

Glad rubs at the spine as if it were some tinny magic lamp, promising instantaneous transport to an enthralling past. For the purposes of heightening the intrigue at this particular moment she thinks of this enthralling past as Her Secret Life. Everything has a secret life these days - birds, bees, alphabets, armoires, the characters in Trouble Astern Trouble Astern - and Glad feels quite comfortable in claiming one for herself as well, even if she's not entirely clear on what const.i.tutes a secret exactly. If she's never spoken of it, is it a secret, even if the content isn't particularly combustible? After all, it's not that she failed to tell this 'secret' on purpose (to deceive, protect, gain financial or emotional advantage, whatever); really it existed as a part of her past person that was inextricable from her current person, and so to know her was to know this about her. - and Glad feels quite comfortable in claiming one for herself as well, even if she's not entirely clear on what const.i.tutes a secret exactly. If she's never spoken of it, is it a secret, even if the content isn't particularly combustible? After all, it's not that she failed to tell this 'secret' on purpose (to deceive, protect, gain financial or emotional advantage, whatever); really it existed as a part of her past person that was inextricable from her current person, and so to know her was to know this about her.

Or so she'd a.s.sumed. During the ham incident, when Sylvia had unfairly accused Glad of not knowing her not knowing her (didn't Sylvia know that Glad's way of knowing was what looked like not knowing?), she had then gone on to say something that was, perhaps, true. She had claimed that Glad (didn't Sylvia know that Glad's way of knowing was what looked like not knowing?), she had then gone on to say something that was, perhaps, true. She had claimed that Glad refused to be known refused to be known. I don't know anything about you, Sylvia said, and I've known you for twenty years. I don't know why you are the way you are.

A person needs a reason to be herself ? thought Glad. But instead she said - fair enough fair enough. This is her measured, judicially minded parry to every little trauma Sylvia kicks her way. Fair enough Fair enough.

Glad looks at the falling snowflakes, thicker now, ghosting the branches of the oaks. The green velvet p.r.i.c.kles the backs of her arms. She squirms uncomfortably, then settles down to concentrate, closing her eyes and straining her face muscles. Pushing her brain backward is like trying to nag a boulder uphill with a feather. She begins with something easy. Where was she when she heard the explosion? She was hiding from her mother behind one of the oaks lining the drive, fingering the bark as she is now fingering her book. The scientist's house next door, unseen behind a wall of arbor vitae, emitted a cloud of white smoke. The slate tiles from the garage roof scattered through the air like shot from a rifle, growing larger and larger as they spun towards her. A late-blooming sense of self-preservation drove her behind a tree trunk, into the front of which, a second later, two tiles thunked themselves with the sickening sound of axe-heads. Her mother emerged from the house. She noted her sunflowers, decapitated by a low-flying tile. She spied a speck of Glad's dress, protruding from behind the impaled oak.

Get in here and finish your chowder, she said angrily. Or did she? Glad honestly couldn't remember. She was only sure that her mother treated her as if she were to blame for the accident, as if Glad's availability to be freakishly killed had caused the neighbor's house to explode.

(She can imagine Sylvia asking at this point: why really really did the house explode? And was anybody killed? But this is not the secret. Or rather these questions, the inevitability of Sylvia's literal-minded questions, discourage her from sharing this secret past of hers. Not to blame Sylvia and her pointless redirects. But to moderately blame Sylvia. Yes, indeed. If Sylvia's searching for the did the house explode? And was anybody killed? But this is not the secret. Or rather these questions, the inevitability of Sylvia's literal-minded questions, discourage her from sharing this secret past of hers. Not to blame Sylvia and her pointless redirects. But to moderately blame Sylvia. Yes, indeed. If Sylvia's searching for the why why, the why Glad is the way she is, why Sylvia has never been permitted to know her in a way that feels satisfactory to her, Sylvia must in part take responsibility.) But returning to the flashback. Her own mother, Glad remembers, steered her into the house. Glad felt invigorated by proximity to annihilation, her head lighter for having nearly been detached, airborne - and then her mother's total inability to accurately read Glad's emotional state made her remember (she actually remembered remembering) an incident with her piano teacher who had quit the previous year.

(Your piano teacher, Sylvia would say skeptically, implying that, after a near-death experience and an explosion, some actual lesson might be extracted.) But soon she was remembering inside of a reminiscence (this was another reason why she'd never revealed her secret life to anyone, such an aimless tributary it was), feeling quite viscerally beneath the hands of her mother the touch of her old piano teacher, Mr Phillips. Something about Mr Phillips's sleazy availability, especially as he hovered over the keyboard with his chin practically brushing her sort-of b.r.e.a.s.t.s as she clunked her way through 'Greensleeves', appealed to her. Or not his availability - his stupidity. He was so certain that she was a hapless, naive girl of what - twelve? eleven? - that he could nearly brush her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and she wouldn't notice. That he could caress her elbow as she mutilated 'Good King Wenceslas' and she would read his attentions as teacherly.

It was a sweetly vile arrangement, everyone more or less content to behave dishonestly, until Mr Phillips came late one day, so late that Glad convinced herself that he was not coming. And thus she allowed Harold Blunt to kiss her by her back door, the door Mr Phillips used because he was a back-door sort of man. She often kissed Harold Blunt because Harold Blunt was such a far-flung outcast that no one would ever believe him if he claimed to be kissing Glad Parks practically daily. On this day that she was kissing Harold Blunt, Harold Blunt had been chasing her with a water balloon. He cornered her by her back door and, balloon held threateningly over her head, clamped his lips over hers. When Mr Phillips found her kissing Harold Blunt, he stared at her as an adulterer might stare at his cuckolding mistress. She averted her eyes, but even so it was as if every belittling, superior thought she'd ever had about the man was broadcast over the neighborhood loudspeaker. He knew he'd been had. Harold Blunt responded by smashing the water balloon on Glad's head and running away. Glad stared at Mr Phillips through her raining-down bangs. He hardened to her in a matter of mere seconds; she was no innocent, she was just another 'Greensleeves'-mangling trollop who'd made a fool of him.

As the balloon water dripped into her eyes, she was reminded (a reminiscence inside a reminiscence inside a reminiscence) of another moment in her life, although in fact this moment was in her then-future, so how could she have 'remembered' forward from the past? Confusing, and yet this was how it happened, or rather this was how this past of hers existed existed. As an ever-shifting matrix of falsely interconnected selves. Somehow as a twelve- or eleven-year-old she remembered being sixteen, she remembered riding in the back of a rental car driven by her parents, rain sheeting down the windshield, too much for the the hairpin wipers. Their Bermuda vacation had 'turned', as her father phrased it - a hurricane loomed, the three of them had colds, her mother, an incessant liar who lied about things that shouldn't be lied about, was 'in her element', i.e. raucously miserable. When miserable she told stories that Glad herself knew to be untrue because they had happened, or rather hadn't hadn't happened, to her. At this moment she was telling Glad about the time she and Glad had taken the ferry to the Vineyard and Glad had tried to jump overboard. 'You loved to self-destruct in a crowd,' her mother said, forgetting that Glad had climbed atop the railing in an attempt to rescue an old lady's escaped parakeet, clinging to a porthole bolt. She'd lost her footing and slipped safely back to the deck, but not before knocking the parakeet from its perch and sending it hurtling to its death in the wake below. When the old lady approached them worriedly for a report, her mother patted the old lady's forearm and said, 'He flew away, dear.' happened, to her. At this moment she was telling Glad about the time she and Glad had taken the ferry to the Vineyard and Glad had tried to jump overboard. 'You loved to self-destruct in a crowd,' her mother said, forgetting that Glad had climbed atop the railing in an attempt to rescue an old lady's escaped parakeet, clinging to a porthole bolt. She'd lost her footing and slipped safely back to the deck, but not before knocking the parakeet from its perch and sending it hurtling to its death in the wake below. When the old lady approached them worriedly for a report, her mother patted the old lady's forearm and said, 'He flew away, dear.'

From that moment on the boat (which was, technically, an anecdote inside a reminiscence inside a reminiscence inside a reminiscence), she recalled a time when, at nine, her mother calmly watched her fall out of an apple tree; at ten, when she ran over a baby vole with her bicycle, and her mother, who was poisoning voles by the thousands in her vegetable garden, called her a murderer; at twelve, when she meticulously sliced her own thumb open with a penknife and bled over her mother's silk party dress, hanging on the bedroom hook. The pattern was unrepeatable, and thus more dangerously ineffable than a single memory. The sensation felt like spinning too fast on a merry-go-round. Each fraction of a second her eyes focused on a new face in a crowd. Within seconds the face was gone, whisked to a blur, replaced by another face that would just as soon be lost.

Glad clutches her book, feeling rather sick. She finds herself recalling incidents that are technically impossible to recall, looking up from her changing table as a weeks-old infant, a miserable ball of heat and squirm observing the haggard look on her mother's face, then gradually moving forward again, each memory chain-linked only by this: all involved her mother. This is why she doesn't put much stock in so-called secrets, or the meaningfulness of untold recollections that become, in their airtight echo chambers, the supposed stuff of secrets. They are only a way to become retrospectively enraged at somebody else so that your own adult weaknesses can be tidily excused.

But even more alarming is this: the woman who appears as her mother in these memories begins to morph into a woman resembling Sylvia - thinner and more likeably imperious, but Sylvia nonetheless. And she, Glad, is nowhere to be found. Yes, a corner of the red dress she was wearing the day of the explosion protrudes from behind the tree; possibly she can even see her transparent reflection in the rainy Bermuda car window. But she is not an active partic.i.p.ant in these recalled scenarios with the unnerving mother / Sylvia composite, she is not a person at all. She is just a psychic recorder, an eye attached to a woundable spirit.

The lights between the oaks snap on, illuminating the drive like a smuggler's runway, startling her. She is alone, isn't she? Who turned on the lights? Then Glad remembers the timer she'd had the caretaker install after her brother - a drunk - drove into a tree after dinner and blamed the dark rather than the umpteen gla.s.ses of wine he'd consumed. When inebriated, her brother took to confessing amped-up, profanity- and s.e.x-laced versions of his childhood to a painting of their mother. The painting featured their mother as a gimlet-eyed sixteen-year-old girl, one finger encased by a bulky signet ring, both hands resting over a prop book splayed in her lap.

This painting stares at Glad from the wall to her left. The prop book's spine features a single rectangle of black; the t.i.tle, though indicated by a line of white-painted switchbacks, remains maddeningly indiscernible. At just the right distance, she'd always believed, the letters would coalesce and she would be able to read the t.i.tle. As a child she'd stood in front of the painting and stepped forward and backward, forward and backward, adjusting her position by fractions of inches, but no matter - the switchbacks failed to signify. What was this book her mother held for eternity? Why did it matter? Why did she need to know?

Her old frustration disentangles itself from the painting and redirects itself full-forcedly at the absent Sylvia - Sylvia whose shadow she thinks she's spotted skittering between the oaks. She wishes Sylvia would come back, if only to tell her that her 'need to know' was as pointless as Glad's need to know the t.i.tle of the book in the painting. It would reveal nothing. And, what's worse, Glad's memories are not only opaque and meaningless, they are ultimately more boring than Trouble Astern Trouble Astern, in which (Glad flips skimmingly ahead) people are still still failing to die. Glad is half tempted to kill someone herself. failing to die. Glad is half tempted to kill someone herself.

Why not? The sky has purpled behind the oak trees, the island indicated only by the faraway blinking of disembodied lights. The kids are still not home, and when they do return, Glad expects they will be drunk or high. It is the perfect time for a murder. She recalls the time when she'd been grounded for half the summer for dropping one of her mother's diamond studs down a heater vent. She decided to run away with her best friend, and the two had canoed to a nearby island, pitched a tent, tried to build a campfire, and settled down to sleep before realizing that they were cut out for neither campfire-building nor tent-sleeping. At 3 am Glad's friend deposited her on the beach across from her driveway. Glad expected to be met by her angry parents, but instead the beach was spookily quiet. She walked down the drive, growing increasingly panicked by the property's creaking emptiness. She picked up a rock and c.o.c.ked it overhead, planning to strike whatever bear / moose / murderer might try to attack her on the way to the house. Lamplight from the study spread like a white carpet over the lawn. Someone was awake. Her mother, no doubt.

Still terrified, she c.o.c.ked the rock overhead as she opened the front door, blood thudding in her ears. She couldn't pinpoint her nervousness; was she still in danger? Or was she the source of danger? She walked through a blue room, then a hall, then to the closed door of the study. She put her hand on the k.n.o.b. Once she opened the door, there was no going back. She knew this.

She turned the k.n.o.b. The door opened soundlessly. From above the high back of the armchair covered in green velvet, she could see the graying head of a woman. Glad tiptoed closer, the shadow of her arm extending across the face of her mother in the painting, then rounding the corner like a snake. The woman in the chair did not move. Glad thought she could hear the sound of snoring. How pitiful, she thought. What kind of sad old woman falls asleep at night in her reading chair? What kind of person would so willingly lose control of herself like that? Angrily, Glad raised the rock higher above her head; a sense that she is acting n.o.bly energizes her arm, causing the muscles to tingle. She is saving this person from her own pitiful dreamy tendencies. This is not an act of murder. This is a mercy killing. Just before the rock strikes the woman's temple, she looks into the window. The last thing Judge Gladys Parks-Schultz sees before she dies is the translucent reflection of her own sleeping face, her hands folded peacefully on top of a book whose t.i.tle is inscrutable.

Puppy

George Saunders

Twice already Marie had pointed out the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect field of corn, because the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect field of corn put her in mind of a haunted house - not a haunted house she had ever actually seen but the mythical one that sometimes appeared in her mind (with adjacent graveyard and cat on a fence) whenever she saw the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect etc., etc., and she wanted to make sure that, if the kids had a corresponding mythical haunted house that appeared in their minds whenever they saw the brilliance of the etc., etc., it would come up now, so that they could all experience it together, like friends, like college friends on a road trip, sans pot, ha ha ha!

But no. When she, a third time, said, 'Wow, guys, check that out,' Abbie said, 'OK, Mom, we get it, it's corn,' and Josh said, 'Not now, Mom, I'm Leavening my Loaves,' which was fine with her; she had no problem with that, n.o.ble Baker being preferable to Bra Stuffer, the game he'd asked for.

Well, who could say? Maybe they didn't even have any mythical vignettes in their heads. Or maybe the mythical vignettes they had in their heads were totally different from the ones she had in her head. Which was the beauty of it, because, after all, they were their own little people! You were just a caretaker. They didn't have to feel what you you felt; they just had to be supported in feeling what felt; they just had to be supported in feeling what they they felt. felt.

Still, wow, that cornfield was such a cla.s.sic.

'Whenever I see a field like that, guys?' she said. 'I somehow think of a haunted house!'

'Slicing Knife! Slicing Knife!' Josh shouted. 'You nimrod machine! I chose that!'

Speaking of Halloween, she remembered last year, when their cornstalk column had tipped their shopping cart over. Gosh, how they'd laughed at that! Oh, family laughter was golden; she'd had none of that in her childhood, Dad being so dour and Mom so ashamed. If Mom and Dad's cart had tipped, Dad would have given the cart a despairing kick and Mom would have stridden purposefully away to reapply her lipstick, distancing herself from Dad, while she, Marie, would have nervously taken that horrid plastic Army man she'd named Brady into her mouth.

Well, in this family laughter was encouraged! Last night, when Josh had goosed her with his Game Boy, she'd shot a spray of toothpaste across the mirror and they'd all cracked up, rolling around on the floor with Goochie, and Josh had said, such nostalgia in his voice, 'Mom, remember when Goochie was a puppy?' Which was when Abbie had burst into tears, because, being only five, she had no memory of Goochie as a puppy.

Hence this Family Mission. And as far as Robert? Oh, G.o.d bless Robert! There was a man. He would have no problem whatsoever with this Family Mission. She loved the way he had of saying 'Ho HO!' whenever she brought home something new and unexpected.

'Ho HO!' Robert had said, coming home to find the iguana. 'Ho HO!' he had said, coming home to find the ferret trying to get into the iguana cage. 'We appear to be the happy operators of a menagerie!'

She loved him for his playfulness - you could bring home a hippo you'd put on a credit card (both the ferret and the iguana had gone on credit cards) and he'd just say 'Ho HO!' and ask what the creature ate and what hours it slept and what the heck they were going to name the little b.u.g.g.e.r.

In the back seat, Josh made the git-git-git git-git-git sound he always made when his Baker was in Baking Mode, trying to get his Loaves into the oven while fighting off various Hungry Denizens, such as a Fox with a distended stomach; such as a fey Robin that would improbably carry the Loaf away, speared on its beak, whenever it had succeeded in dropping a Clonking Rock on your Baker - all of which Marie had learned over the summer by studying the n.o.ble Baker manual while Josh was asleep. sound he always made when his Baker was in Baking Mode, trying to get his Loaves into the oven while fighting off various Hungry Denizens, such as a Fox with a distended stomach; such as a fey Robin that would improbably carry the Loaf away, speared on its beak, whenever it had succeeded in dropping a Clonking Rock on your Baker - all of which Marie had learned over the summer by studying the n.o.ble Baker manual while Josh was asleep.

And it had helped, it really had. Josh was less withdrawn lately, and when she came up behind him now while he was playing and said, like, 'Wow, honey, I didn't know you could do Pumpernickel,' or 'Sweetie, try Serrated Blade, it cuts quicker. Try it while doing Latch the Window,' he would reach back with his non-controlling hand and swat at her affectionately, and yesterday they'd shared a good laugh when he'd accidentally knocked off her gla.s.ses.

So her mother could go right ahead and claim that she was spoiling the kids. These were not spoiled kids. These were well-loved well-loved kids. At least she'd never left one of them standing in a blizzard for two hours after a junior-high dance. At least she'd never drunkenly snapped at one of them, 'I hardly consider you college material.' At least she'd never locked one of them in a closet (a closet!) while entertaining a literal ditchdigger in the parlor. kids. At least she'd never left one of them standing in a blizzard for two hours after a junior-high dance. At least she'd never drunkenly snapped at one of them, 'I hardly consider you college material.' At least she'd never locked one of them in a closet (a closet!) while entertaining a literal ditchdigger in the parlor.

Oh, G.o.d, what a beautiful world! The autumn colors, that glinting river, that lead-colored cloud pointing down like a rounded arrow at that half-remodeled McDonald's standing above I-90 like a castle.

This time would be different, she was sure of it. The kids would care for this pet themselves, since a puppy wasn't scaly and didn't bite. ('Ho HO!' Robert had said the first time the iguana bit him. 'I see you have an opinion on the matter!') Thank you, Lord, she thought, as the Lexus flew through the cornfield. You have given me so much: struggles and the strength to overcome them; grace, and new chances every day to spread that grace around. And in her mind she sang out, as she sometimes did when feeling that the world was good and she had at last found her place in it, 'Ho HO, ho HO!'