Trust Exercise(58)

“Oh, this and that,” Karen said, smiling to show that she didn’t feel that this question came too late to be polite and that it might not even be sincere. “I’ve mostly worked as an office manager, personal assistant, personal organizer, stuff like that—you probably never knew it in high school but I’m highly organized.” Their shared laughter came right on cue. Just as she’d imagined, Karen told Sarah about her recent trip to Vietnam with her brother, in this way illustrating her carefree and well-funded life.

“Oh my God, your brother!” Sarah said, exulting in the fact that she remembered this person’s existence. “How is he? What is he doing?”

Karen answered Sarah’s questions in the same way she’d speak of her brother to any random stranger, citing all the most expected, least remarkable facts, that might belong to anyone. Single, lived here in LA, worked in corporate law. Karen’s brother, with whom she shared a face, and many other less visible things. Karen knew that Sarah couldn’t even pretend to find these unrevealing facts about Karen’s brother to be exactly what she’d expected, or the last things she’d expected. Karen’s brother had been so far beneath Sarah’s notice, back in the past, that Sarah struggled now to fit him in the picture, and even seemed to think Karen would marvel at the sound of his name. “Kevin, Kevin, Kevin, oh my God,” Sarah harped, as if Karen’s brother’s name were a piece of obscure trivia. “I remember … oh my God! He had this razor-blade necklace he thought was so cool, do you remember that thing?” Did Karen remember it? Did Karen remember every granule of the childhood landscape she shared with her brother, in which the razor-blade necklace, believe it or not, was not such a major landmark? Still, Karen nodded and smiled as if she and Sarah were keeping pace down Kevin Memory Lane, as if the razor-blade necklace turned and gleamed enormously above them like the sun.

How many rooms house the past? In their hometown, space came cheap. Even poor people’s houses were flabby with space; they were just cheaply made. The apartment Sarah shared with her mother, Karen and Kevin’s house that they shared with their mother, were crappy structures full of water bugs and mold, faucet handles and doorknobs that fell off, windows and doors that wouldn’t open or wouldn’t stay shut, but they were never cramped, there was always space, dank space, more than you could decently fill. Karen and Kevin, before and after their parents’ divorce, always had their own rooms: enormous rooms with low, stained ceilings, dirty matted shag carpet, accordion-style closet doors that had come off their tracks, sliding windows in aluminum frames that stuck and shrieked and developed a weird, whitish rust, like salt deposits, that came off on your hands. One room like that was bad enough, but two was killing. All through their childhood Karen and Kevin had continually migrated into one room or the other, they resisted each having a room of their own, they understood in their bodies, if not in their minds, that two bodies in one room defeats the room, but one body in one room is defeated. And so each kept sneaking into the other one’s room—sneaking, because throughout their childhood there was always someone holding the opinion that they shouldn’t share a room, whether stating it directly or not. Before the divorce, it was their father and grandmother who held this opinion. After the divorce, their mother for a while had a boyfriend who held this opinion. In high school, it was Sarah who held this opinion—not consciously, because Sarah did not even know that Karen frequently shared the same room with her brother. It was just that Sarah would have found it bizarre that Karen, in a house with four bedrooms and three inhabitants, might share a room with her brother. And so Karen and Kevin, for the sake of not seeming bizarre to Sarah, withdrew to their two separate rooms. Kevin, Karen understood, had shared Karen’s grim determination not to spook such a friend-prize as Sarah. It was possible that Kevin—twelve the year Karen met Sarah, still requiring “husky” jeans, soft and pale and pudgy and awkward and unappealingly bashful—felt that grim determination even more. Kevin gawped at Sarah from behind the doorframes. It was possible that Kevin had purchased the laughable razor blade on a chain, with saved allowance, from the head shop in the mall, in the hopes of winning Sarah’s approval.

So, yes, in Sarah’s version of Karen’s childhood, Kevin barely existed, while in Karen’s and Kevin’s versions of their childhood, Sarah loomed. Sarah had impressed herself by remembering Kevin, while Karen knew it was too much to hope Kevin might forget Sarah. When Karen booked her current trip to LA, she deliberately failed to tell her brother that she was coming this particular day to intersect Sarah on Sarah’s book tour. She didn’t trust him not to want to come along. She didn’t trust him not to challenge her vision of Sarah, which was the product of so much analytical labor, with his own vision which was sealed in the amber of a childhood crush. But at least Kevin had a vision of Sarah, unlike Sarah’s nonvision of him, in which her drunken recollection of his name was another of the unexpected things that had happened to her. “Kevin! Oh my God. So did you guys move to LA together? That’s so sweet. I remember you guys were so close.” Yes, they were, but no, she didn’t. She remembered no such thing. Karen, ordering Sarah a third daiquiri, smiled again.

“We were both living here for a while, and I really enjoyed it. But now I’m back home.”

It took Sarah a moment. “You mean our hometown?”