Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(15)
Once, Jacob considered buying a brooch for Julia. He had wandered into a store on Connecticut Avenue—the kind of place that sells salad bowls turned from reclaimed wood, and salad tongs with horn handles. He wasn’t looking to buy anything, and there was no upcoming occasion for which a gift would have been appropriate. His lunch date had texted that she was stuck behind a garbage truck, he hadn’t thought to bring along a book or newspaper, and every chair in Starbucks was occupied by someone who would finish his thinning life before finishing his thinly veiled memoir, leaving Jacob no place to go deep into his very thin phone.
“Is that one nice?” he asked the woman on the other side of the case. “Dumb question.”
“I love it,” she said.
“Right, of course you do.”
“I don’t like that,” she said, pointing at a bracelet in the case.
“It’s a brooch, right?”
“It is. A silver cast of an actual twig. One-of-a-kind.”
“And those are opals?”
“They are.”
He walked to another section, pretended to examine an inlaid cutting board, then returned to the brooch. “It’s nice, though, right? I can’t tell if it looks costumey.”
“Not at all,” she said, taking it from the case and putting it on a velvet-lined tray.
“Maybe,” Jacob said, not picking it up.
Was it nice? It was risky. Did people wear brooches? Was it cornily figurative? Would it end up in a jewelry box, never to be seen again until it was bequeathed as an heirloom to one of the boys’ brides so that she could put it in a jewelry box until it was one day passed down again? Was seven hundred fifty dollars an appropriate price for such a thing? It wasn’t the money that concerned him, it was the risk of getting it wrong, the embarrassment of trying and failing—an extended limb is far easier to break than a bent one. After lunch, Jacob went back to the store.
“Sorry if I’m being ridiculous,” he said, returning to the woman who had been helping him, “but would you mind putting it on?”
She took it back out of the case and pinned it to her sweater.
“And it’s not heavy? It doesn’t pull on the fabric?”
“It’s quite light.”
“Is it fancy?”
“You could wear it with a dress, or on a jacket, or sweater.”
“And you would be happy if someone gave it to you?”
Distance begets distance, but if the distance is nothing, what is its origin? There was no transgression, no cruelty, not even indifference. The original distance was closeness: the inability to overcome the shame of subterranean needs that no longer had a home aboveground.
give me your cum
then you can have my cock
Only in the privacy of her own mind could Julia wonder what her own home would look like. What she would gain, and what she would lose. Could she live without seeing the kids every morning and evening? And what if she were to admit that she could? In six and a half million minutes, she would have to. No one judges a mother for letting her children go to college. Letting go wasn’t the crime. The crime was choosing to let go.
you don’t deserve to get f*cked in the ass
If she built a new life for herself, so would Jacob. He would remarry. Men do. They get over it, and get on with it. Every time. It was easy to imagine him marrying the first person he dated. He deserved someone who didn’t build imaginary homes for one. He didn’t deserve Julia, but he deserved better than Julia. He deserved someone who stretched upon waking, rather than recoiled. Someone who didn’t sniff food before eating it. Someone who didn’t see pets as burdens, who had a pet name for him, and made jokes in front of friends about how much she liked being f*cked by him. Some new, unclogged pipeline to a new person, and even if it were doomed to ultimately fail, at least the failure would be preceded by happiness.
now you deserve to get f*cked in the ass
She needed a day off. She would have loved the feeling of not knowing how to fill the time, of wandering without a destination in Rock Creek Park, of actually savoring a meal of the kind of food that her kids would never tolerate, and reading something longer and of more substance than a sidebar about how better to organize emotions or spices. But one of her clients needed help selecting door hardware. Of course it had to be a Saturday, because when else could someone who was able to afford bespoke hardware have time to sample it? And of course no one needs help to look at door hardware, but Mark and Jennifer were unusually helpless when it came to negotiating their incompatible lacks of taste, and a doorknob was exactly unimportant and symbolic enough to require mediation.
Compounding Julia’s irritation was the fact that Mark and Jennifer were the parents of one of Sam’s friends, and thought of Jacob and Julia as their friends, and wanted to have a coffee after to “catch up.” Julia liked them and, insofar as she could muster enthusiasm for extrafamilial relations, considered them friends. But she couldn’t muster much. At least not until she could catch up with herself.
Someone needed to invent a way to be close to people without having to see them, or talk to them on the phone, or write (or read) letters, or e-mails, or texts. Was it only mothers who understood the preciousness of time? That there was none of it, ever? And you can’t just have coffee, even and especially not with people you rarely see, because it takes half an hour to reach the café (if you’re lucky), and half an hour to return home (if you’re lucky again), not to mention the twenty-minute tax you pay just to get out the door, and a quick coffee ends up being forty-five minutes in the Olympic scenario. And there was the horrible rigmarole at Hebrew school that morning, and the Israelis were coming in less than two weeks, and the bar mitzvah was saying its goodbyes in the ICU, and while it’s entirely possible to get help, help feels bad, help shames. One can order groceries online and have them delivered, but that feels like a failure, an abdication of motherly duty—motherly privilege. Driving farther to the store with good produce, selecting the avocado that will be perfectly ripe at its moment of use, making sure it doesn’t get crushed in the grocery bag and that the grocery bag doesn’t get crushed in the cart…it’s a mother’s job. Not job, but joy. What if she could accomplish the job but not the joy?