Real Life(37)

He found her in her chair, her eyes open, her body gone stiff, gone tight. The doctor said she’d had a stroke. Something out of the blue. His mother had worked in a hotel on a golf course for ten years. But then, a while back, she had developed a tremor and for long periods of time thereafter she was locked up and couldn’t move. That’s what Wallace thought was happening to her. On the day he found her, her cup was still full of melting ice—the blue kind she liked from the hotel; she had a friend who brought her a new bag every couple of weeks—which was how Wallace knew she hadn’t been gone long. But that was years ago now, the summer before he left for the Midwest, for graduate school and a new life. What had she been looking for, all those days she’d spent in the chair, is a question he thinks of often. But for some questions there are no answers. When asked, Why don’t you drink? Wallace almost tells this story. But he does not. He says something else, something like, Oh, you know. One of those nonsense phrases meant to buffer the silence native to any exchange between people.

It is of his mother that he thinks today when he smells the beer in the air. Like a haunting. He has not thought of her in a long time. When he does, it’s always the good things he remembers: how she would let him stay home from school if his stomach hurt, and how she’d spend the day with him, make him soup and let him watch cartoons; how he looked up and caught her watching him, not with pride exactly, but with fondness, with love. The rare moments when she was not shouting at him from the other room to come and tie her shoes for her, or when she wasn’t telling him that he was stupid, when she wasn’t bellowing in a register and at a volume that made her words indistinct and indecipherable to him, when she wasn’t striking him across the mouth, or forcing him to wash under his arms and between his legs in front of her, in front of company, when she wasn’t subjecting him to the innumerable dark hairs of her anger and her fear and her mistrust—then she could be, in those small moments, good to him. It is why he does not trust memory. Memory sifts. Memory lifts. Memory makes due with what it is given. Memory is not about facts. Memory is an inconsistent measurement of the pain in one’s life. But he thinks of her. She falls out of the scent of beer, and he shuts his bedroom door because he cannot bear it.

There is not much time before the dinner thing anyway.

Wallace surveys the contents of the freezer. Some chicken breast, ground beef, fish, a variety of frozen vegetables, a pizza, some ice trays. The cold feels good on his face, which is still a little flushed from tennis and from the walk along the lake back to the apartment. His friends, and their friends, seldom eat meat. There are typically many different vegetable dishes at their dinners, many different casseroles of beans and pasta and cheeses and long green stalks and quinoa and peas and nuts and jams and berries and grains. Once, early in his time here, he made a dish of Swedish meatballs, like his aunts had made for gatherings. Dark meat and onion and pepper and garlic and rich sauce made from scratch, cinnamon and cumin and vinegar and hickory and brown sugar, all in a Nordic-themed serving dish he’d purchased at a thrift store. He stood on the front porch just out of the rain, balancing the warm dish on his arms, trying to smile through his nerves. In those days, Yngve and Cole and Lukas lived together in a house just outside downtown, in one of the few residential neighborhoods that remained, the way they do in some college towns, where the barrier between the city and what used to be the town out of which the city emerged turns hazy and porous, and it is possible, if you stand on one street and look down it, to see the progression of time. The shutters, the porches, the white columns, broad windows, porch swings, lemonade on the banisters or tea slowly steeping on wicker tables, homes that in another time contained families, but that now contain the mismatched furniture and chipped dishes that have come to signify their lives, they who have freshly emerged from undergrad or grad school, their adulthood as wet as new moths’ wings. When the door swung open, it was not one of his friends, but a girl Yngve was sort of interested in seeing at the time, tall and brunette, from Arizona or some other dry place beneath notice. She took one look at the meatballs and wrinkled her nose. Then asked him if he was lost, or needed something.

Yngve explained it all later, with an arm wrapped around Wallace’s neck, laughing in his ear. “Sorry, sorry,” he said. “But, you know, she’s, like, vegan, so . . .” Wallace tried not to look disappointed when he collected his dish of uneaten meatballs at the end of the night, tried not to think of the money he’d spent and the time in his kitchen, wiping sweat, toweling brown stains off his hands, trying to get it exactly right, trying to make the sauce perfect for them—and the little dish, he’d been so proud of the little dish, red with white reindeer leaping. Not Swedish or anything, but close, on a theme, he had hoped.

Since that time, Wallace has been careful to avoid bringing meat to these things. He typically brings crackers or another form of fiber because his friends are all full of shit and need cleaning out from time to time, all that cellulose from their vegetables. That is, on the few occasions when he has actually been invited to dinner with his friends. It seems to him now that they do not invite him along as much because he is in the habit of telling them no, or staying for only a little while, until the meal has just ended and they’re all feeling good and talking quietly about the things they did the last time they were all together, things that do not include Wallace because he was not there or left early. It’s in those moments that he experiences most acutely the feeling of his own estrangement from these people he calls his friends. Their shining eyes and wet mouths and their greasy fingers working at each other’s knees, a pantomime of intimacy, a cult of happiness, a cult of friendship.