The Local News (39 page)

I went back to Fairfield for my ten-year reunion. This was not a common occurrence, me returning for any reason. For years I happily spent orphan Thanksgivings with friends who passed platters of marshmallowy sweet potatoes and shared in jokes with their aging parents about the time Aunt Fern pulled her dentures out on the pork roast. Colleagues welcomed me to their feminist seders, where ladies in earnestly batiked blouses set out a cup for Miriam next to the one for Elijah.

The longer I stayed away, the more the very idea of home felt otherworldly, like a place I’d made up in a fit of fantasy
(and there’d been three dogs and also a boy …
)
.
Only my mom remained in Fair-field. She and my father had quietly separated and then divorced while I was at Brown, my father relocating, strangely, to Atlanta and, even more strangely, making a second family with a woman
named Dolly and their twin girls. Save the irregular phone calls from one of them—my mother reporting on the latest missing, found, or dead child in the tri-state area, my dad ineffectively shushing his squealing girls—it was so easy to let memories of Fair-field recede. Home became only that which was right here in front of me: my apartment, with my overstuffed bookshelves, my claw-foot tub, my exposed dark wood beams spanning the length of the ceilings. Oh, how I loved those dark wood beams, loved my whole neighborhood, in fact. It had become fashionable of late to dislike my area of D.C. for its touristy gentrification, its well-trodden restaurant row, its traffic congestion, its overpriced, brightly painted row houses, but I remained unbendingly enamored—the defensive, reactionary loyalty of the refugee.

Months before the reunion, the onslaught of Lola Pepper calls had begun. She’d waged a similar campaign before the five-year reunion, my phone ringing at odd hours, her chirpy voice on the other end jarring and anachronistic, wanting to play “remember when” about events I could barely recall and conversations I suspected she may have had with other people.
Remember when we tried to dye your hair red? Remember that time the Ouija board said I’d have six kids?
That we hadn’t once spoken in the intervening years was never mentioned. That we hadn’t left Franklin High as friends or even acquaintances also remained unsaid. Lola’s capacity for only the good and the light was still unfailing. She issued a simple, plaintive “Aren’t you coming back for the reunion?” at the end of each call. It had been easy to beg off then. I was lingering in Providence after graduation, living in a rickety Victorian with six roommates. I was broke, I told her. I was in the middle of trying to find a job. There was no way I was coming home.

But there was something more disarming in the recent bout of calls, a new chord of exhaustion tingeing Lola’s voice. I listened as
she held her hand over the receiver to speak in a singsong voice to a small child. She had a two-year-old, she told me, making jokes about wanting to nip Lacey’s bottle with whiskey at bedtime. I recognized the desperate rasp of sleeplessness. “Don’t you want to see everyone?” she asked, and “Aren’t you the slightest bit curious?” I told her, honestly, “No” and “Not really.”

I felt bad about the pauses that followed, though Lola, even with the vague wistfulness she evoked, had little staying power. Thoughts of her quickly faded after I hung up, easily replaced by the wheezing sounds of the Metro bus on the street below or the yeasty late-afternoon smell of the Ethiopian restaurant down the block.

But there was also the matter of Gene, the man I had been dating for nearly two years, who unfailingly rubbed the achy balls of my feet before bed, who was as consumed with his obscure job as a Smithsonian nineteenth-century archivist as I was with my obscure job analyzing data about sediment transport in estuarine systems, who quietly collected early daguerreotype portraits and hung them above his bed, his dining room table, in the nook beside his coat closet, who had an acute sensitivity to gluten that eliminated pizza, cereal, pasta, bread, soy sauce, and pastries from his diet, turning restaurants and grocery stores into gauntlets, but which I grudgingly appreciated for the singular way it revealed him to be high-maintenance, the one tear in his otherwise unflappable veneer.

Gene loved me and, as was the general consensus among our friends, wanted to marry me. He’d been talking for months now about me letting my lease lapse at the end of the year and moving in with him to his three-bedroom place in Dupont Circle. There were no ultimatums or even direct entreaties—those weren’t Gene’s style-but rather a low-level, ongoing conversation about the L-shaped desk he’d seen online that we could share in the study and how nice it would be not to have to schlep a change of clothes and toothbrush
across town on the Metro anymore. Sometimes it was fun to talk about the king-sized bed we would get or where on his countertop I would put my Kitchenaid mixer.

Except I hadn’t agreed yet, because other times the thought of each day waking and eating my granola and changing out of my pajamas and taking my birth control pill beneath the gaze of the dead-eyed, high-collared families of the 1800s made the blood rush from my face and throb at the base of my neck. There were nights when I sat at Gene’s dining room table, enjoying a perfectly nice glass of wine after another of his meticulously cooked meals (lamb with mint yogurt sauce, a side of honeyed green beans), and I would grow keenly aware of all the eyes upon me. It made me prickly and petulant, awakening in me terrible urges like the one to take my closed fist and smash the nearest piece of dinnerware.

I liked my life with Gene. At times I liked it very much. In the evenings we read on my couch or his, our toes touching on the footrest. We kept a running list of words we found compelling tacked up on his refrigerator.
Étouffée,
he’d recently added after a Cajun diner.
Ague,
I added after listening to a friend’s tales of his Peace Corps years. We told funny stories at parties—there was the one about us getting lost on our road trip in Vermont, the one about the yappy stray terrier we rescued for a week.

But this was how I’d always been, whether with Martin, the willowy philosophy major who I’d dated most of my junior year at Brown, or Stan, the architect and casual pot dealer who made my toes curl just from touching my wrist during my first six months in D.C.—finite in my capacity for tolerating simple day-to-day contact. I could handle it just fine, all the way up to the point that I couldn’t anymore, as if I existed on a tether, and not a particularly long one, finding myself able to wander only so far into the territory of another human being before snapping back into myself.

Gene overheard several of the calls with Lola, at least my end of cagey evasions, and was perplexed as to why I wouldn’t want to go home, why I wouldn’t want to take him home. This, to him, was how things worked. You fell in love, you met each other’s families, you moved in together, you …

We’d already weekended with his parents a handful of times, in a beach house in Virginia, in New York City, where we visited MoMA and the Trade Center site and Chelsea galleries. All of it was fine and exhausting and hard the way other people’s families always were, especially in their small, easy intimacies: Gene holding his mom by the elbow, steering her along the crowded Fifth Avenue sidewalks; his dad patting Gene’s belly, making a quick joke of
You working on a paunch there, son?

Gene knew about my family, about Danny, but only in the most general and newspaper-headline of ways. I had a brother who’d been killed, just like our friend Lisbeth had a father who was gay, just like our other friend Jonathan had survived a teenage bout of leukemia. Gene had learned early on not to probe, the same way I learned that wine made him snore and the soles of his feet were painfully ticklish.

But the topic of the reunion drizzled into our conversations regularly enough that I knew it had come to matter to him, to mean something. “I bet you’re the only one in your class who can say she saw the head of the Senate Appropriations Committee at happy hour,” he said over Cheerios, his hair still tousled from bed. He sent e-mails about it in the middle of work with links to the African American History Museum in Detroit, writing simply, “This looks interesting.” I recognized here the need for concession. I was the limiting factor of the relationship. I was the
no
. And I was not an idiot. Even the most patient and imperturbable of people, which Gene could easily lay claim to being, had only so much capacity for
evasion and sulk. He was a good man, and Fairfield, in that it was time-limited and at the very least a known entity, was the easiest—the only—yes of which I was capable.

My mother was still in the old house. Over the years it’d taken on a greenhouse scent of dirt and incubation from her constant presence. She gave a “tour” when we arrived. “Here’s the living room,” she told Gene facilely, cracking her gum as we walked. She always chewed gum at the start of visits, a show of trying to quit smoking, though the years of smoke still perfumed the air, especially when a curtain was riffled or a door swung quickly open. I could see that she had just cleaned; vacuum trails divided the carpet into fresh rows. She was dressed in a skirt and blouse, and her hair was parted neatly and combed flatly across her head. But there was a cabbagey wrinkle to her shirt collar, and her outsized dress loafers slid easily off her heels like flip-flops.

Gene’s mother wore pressed pants and cropped silk jackets; at the beach, a sarong in complementary color to her swimsuit. If Gene now noticed my mother’s unshaved legs or the dry-skin flakes in her laugh lines, he gave no indication. He smiled his usual affable smile, even though I knew he was feeling peaked from the flight. He’d been excited about the trip, and in a rare unguarded moment ate a few stray pretzels from the airline’s snack mix. Even though he’d stopped almost immediately, sheepishly handing me the small foil bag, I could see it now in his pale face and the tiny beads of sweat over his top lip.

I fished out the pewter paperweight from my bag, a replica of the Washington Monument, purchased last-minute at the airport gift shop along with my bottled water and the
New York Times.

“Ooh,” my mother said, weighing it in one hand, almost doing a series of mini-curls.

“It’s a paperweight,” I said dumbly, embarrassed by it now.

“I’m surprised they let you on the plane with this,” she said, holding it like a spear, lurching playfully toward Gene as if she were going to stab him. He acted fearful in return, arms up. She went on about how much she loved the paperweight, and her effusiveness only increased my embarrassment. She went on too about how she’d always loved
Smithsonian
magazine as a child. It was the first place, she told Gene, she’d seen photographs of a woman’s breasts. She laughed at her own confession, a strange, birdlike noise. Gene laughed too, correcting her gently: he worked at the museum, not the magazine.

“Oh, oh,” she said, bringing her hand to her chest and giggling. She was nervous, I could tell. I’d never brought a man home before. I hadn’t seen her in close to three years. Her face was rounder now, with traces of an emerging double chin. Weight gain was a side effect of all her meds, the cocktail of sedatives and antidepressants and antianxieties she’d been on for years.

“And how’s your job?” she asked me, shepherding us into the kitchen. Condensation dotted the stove and countertop from a recent wipe-down. The air smelled of the bracing remnants of cleanser.

“Good,” I said. “It’s going really well.” I loved my job. I loved being a research analyst. I loved puzzling through data and looking for patterns. I loved making sense of what appeared to be a mess of random numbers. I loved it that I had known absolutely nothing about sediment distribution or erosion and accretion or hydro -dynamic models when I’d begun at my environmental consulting firm, but I’d soldiered through to figure out what the heck was going on and was able to talk shop now with colleagues who’d been in the
field for years. It was hard to explain any of it to laypeople, though, especially to my mother. She had a particular way of twiddling her fingers and nodding before I even spoke, smiling at Gene and playing with the rattan on the back of the kitchen chair, that suggested the combination of eagerness and absence of which she seemed uniquely capable. It made the tips of my ears burn.

“I’m still on mud,” I said. This my standard line about sediment transport models.

“Mud is good,” she said. My mother and I smiled at each other.

Moments unfolded, followed by more unfolding moments. Gene put a hand on the small of my back. Eventually she announced, “Let’s eat.” She’d carefully cubed pineapples and watermelon and bananas, having called three times in the previous week trying to figure out what Gene could eat.

At the table she talked about her most recent volunteer work, the girl who’d gone missing from Western Michigan University while walking home from the library. My mother was helping the family set up a listserv to coordinate search efforts and helping with a Web site, findjacqueline.com. I scanned the fruit plate for dog hair. Oliver and Poppy were both dead. Only an arthritic Olivia was left, following us stiffly through the house. Gene kept leaning from the table to scratch her beneath the collar.

My mother said that Jacqueline’s boyfriend had received a nonsensical text message from an unknown number at 4 a.m., eight hours after she was last seen. Cryptologists had been analyzing it for any sort of code.

“You mean cryptographers,” I said, and she smiled uncompre-hendingly. I knew she thought we’d said the same word. I had a particular dislike for these conversations, not just because they were ghoulish and rubbernecky—I understood the appeal of ghoulish and rubbernecky, was still drawn to coverage of school shootings or
tsunamis or terrorist attacks—but rather because she didn’t know to be embarrassed by her excitement.

Gene asked about search-and-rescue operations and her HTML background. They could’ve been talking about migratory patterns of midwestern birds or the benefits of regular lubrication for car engines, from the mild set to his face. Same when she dragged out the dreaded scrapbooks, all the clippings and letters and police reports, the file cabinet distilled into book form. When I tried to object, both shushed me, Gene while smiling. He was always smiling at me.