The Entire Predicament Read online

  Sometimes if you’re at a stoplight and you and the car in front of you both have your turn signals on, it’s interesting to watch the car’s blinker and listen to your own, and notice how they ease in and out of sync. It’s mind-boggling and soothing at once. In fact, both of them, when they were sitting with separate cats, equated it somehow with what it was like to lie in bed next to each other, each masturbating, which they did routinely as well, although neither of them mentioned this equation.

  About a year later, Carol got transferred, so they had to move several states over.Walker was supposed to make sure the movers got everything right and meet her there, in the new place she’d picked out. After the moving was complete, they were watching television and Carol said, “When will the cats get here?”

  Walker said, “Good idea. I’ll get some tomorrow. I miss sitting here with the cats.”

  It turned out Walker didn’t believe in moving cats. He said it wasn’t fair to uproot them. He said it was also unfair to just leave them, not fair to the cats, who were domestic and couldn’t be counted on to reassimilate into the natural order if abandoned, and could also cause a traffic collision. He’d shot them and buried them in the old backyard.

  This was shocking; shocking enough that it shocked Carol, who generally wrinkled her nose at gore on television, or furrowed her eyebrows at the evening news, but made little more of it. Walker, certainly, didn’t do it to be shocking, but he did it. Carol’s face had both wrinkled and furrowed when he told her, and he said, “What? What? Are you mad?” but she didn’t say anything. She thought about saying something, and she thought enough to have the conversation out in her mind. It was one she didn’t like, and she didn’t want to have it.

  She thought about it enough to see this aspect of him having been there all along, a wide and latent layer that had surfaced, states away, as if a memory he didn’t even remember had lifted itself and started walking around when she wasn’t looking. When she sat in her chair watching television and glanced at him as he sat on the couch watching television, she did it quickly—glanced in a flash to make sure that, indeed, their eyes were facing the same direction, and that he sat as he sat—and then she thought about the image of him sitting there as she watched the television. She kept her arms on the arms of her armchair, and thought about how he was sitting with both hands on his Pepsi, which was in its cozy, between his thighs. She started thinking there was a problem with the way they watched television, but of course it was more than that. I mean, suppose Carol and Walker had a thoroughly admirable relationship, whatever kind it is that everyone wants, instead of whatever kind of relationship they had. Like more books and less television, or hikes in the forest, or soul-dumping conversations into the night. I don’t see it saving them from the cats. They’re there or they’re not, and you know it or don’t. You can’t be too careful, and you can’t be careful enough.

  And I’m not saying she was a cat, specifically, but about a year later, Carol got transferred again. “I don’t want to move,” she told her boss.“We’re really settled here, and we’d really like to stay,” she said. “I don’t want to uproot.”

  Who Buried the Baby

  The wind blew with such direct force that the porch swing rode up sideways and wrenched back, scraping the rail several times a minute, and my great-aunt Stacy was worried. She waited for a pause and then rushed to unhook it. The swing fell and the chain smacked her ankle in its horrible funny-bone place. She hopped to the open doorway and crouched on the threshold to rub it. In the premature dusk that comes with such weather, shadows fell as if with a bang. With so much movement in the air, only substantial items like houses and clouds were throwing shadows, cutouts incongruously still, as if sucked there by vacuums in the earth.

  There was a lot of suspense.

  Soon it was actually dusk, then night through which it rained like nuts, then morning. Stacy had stayed balanced in the doorway for a long time, watching the rain, but then gone to bed. That’s what she was doing.

  She didn’t tell me the story at any particular time, nor did anyone else. I grew up knowing it. Even Stacy didn’t begin to know the plot until later, the next day, when she was told her three-month-old baby had been found dead.Two teenage girls a town over had been running around in a field, fools in the rain, and stumbled over the infant where she’d been buried in a depression so shallow a foot stuck out. The girls pulled the baby from the mud and ran with it back to the house. The house, which belonged to the family of one of the girls, stood at the edge of the field with its porch light glowing, like a gate to the rest of the world.

  I don’t know what this has done to the girls.

  One girl was spending the night with the other—you know that kind of terrific thirteen-year-old night, when you’re so cute you hop out of the bed you’re sharing because it’s a sleepover, out of your fluffy covers and into the rain, flailing your arms with the kind of energy that when you have it when you’re older, you’ll remember how you used to have it any old time it was called for. The field was wide and bumpy, and the girls, carrying the flopping baby, stumbled over clods of earth when before they’d tumbled like they meant it. In fact, it was the girl who was usually quieter who carried the baby. The other girl dashed ahead and back like a romping dog. She dashed ahead as if looking for a way to clear the way, wishing there was brush and a machete so she could do some good, and dashed back wishing she were taller and could shield them from the rain and the lightning should it strike them like the bumbling targets they’d become in the field in which they’d been targets all along, but not felt it.

  By the time they got to the house the baby was clean of dirt except for its nostrils. One girl opened the baby’s mouth with her fingers and then said, “Should I pick its nose?” and the other girl said, “I’m scared you’ll push it in farther.”This happened on the porch of the house of the noisier girl’s family.

  I know the story the way some adopted kids, for instance, never suffer a moment of finding out. They don’t know who told them, but they know, and when it comes up in conversation, their understanding of the details goes corroborated or corrected as often or not as those of any memory. Mostly it came up over dinner. So-and-so found out such and such, please pass that, thank you.

  I also know about the family gathering for the occasion. Stacy says they flocked, so I have imagined my fat and skinny relatives zooming through the sky in Vs like geese with suitcases dangling, and waddling into the living room of the now-suburban farmhouse where Stacy still lives because time passes, cities encroach, and when you’re stuck you’re stuck. They fly in through bright skies but when they arrive it is still raining, so they waddle in wet and place their suitcases in a line by the fire, wringing their hair and dumping water from their hats onto the braided rug. They take turns holding Stacy’s hand, talking on the phone, carrying bowls of hot muffins from the kitchen. They’re on rotation, and remain as interchangeable as geese, their clothes variations on a theme of wet and luscious in color.This goes on.The relatives swap spots on the furniture and trade duties. Stacy sits on the edge of the blue wingback. Someone sits on the ottoman and holds her hand. They keep passing her hand from hand to hand.

  Several years later, Stacy is no longer under suspicion, but no one else is, either. Not the girls from the field, or the husband who was out of town, or anyone. Everyone in the flock, by this time, several years later, has already been under suspicion, and equally so. While under suspicion, that person’s role shifted, and then the suspicion shifted, and that person went back to the post at the phone, the post with reporters, the post in the kitchen, the post with the policeman with the notepad, the post with a neighbor, the post that gets groceries. They devise tasks for one another. They decide to track down the killer. They write letters. They go to scenes of the crime, and scenes that at various times are possibly scenes of an aspect of the crime.They talk to the girls, and the husband, and Stacy, and this leads them to talk to other people. They drive places and ta
lk to people. They tell newspaper reporters that they talked to people. They tell the police. By the time I was born, several of the gaggle were dead, a couple were in jail for tax evasion, the rest were scattered back where they’d flown in from, and in fact I have met none in any way that makes one more memorable than another. Still, under each person’s breath, whether the breath is in my face, memory, or imagination, there’s a current that says, “Justice, justice, we want justice,” catchy as the child’s rhyme it has become, and still I haven’t caught it.

  In fact, in my life, I have to think hard for something to add when I’m gathered with a group of friends, eating and drinking, being unattached adults, and there’s a roundtable about our funny families:“I have a crazy cousin who wraps his fingers with electrical tape because he’s afraid of electrons.” “I have a cousin who got sent home from Europe for anorexia.” “I wish I could go to Europe.”

  I want to join in the conversation, to be one of the girls, and I think: I wish I had a crazy cousin.Then I think, by golly, Aunt Stacy will do.

  It’s been so long. She keeps sending letters all over the place. It’s become normal. It’s my normal life, this extravagant circumstance nearby. If she finds out who buried her baby, everyone will say she lived a life worth living. If she dies first, they’ll say two lives wasted. And this logic troubles me, when I think of it, because for one thing, it does not sound like justice either way. For another, I am sure I like justice, at its heart. I’m sure it would be great to have it, for Stacy to have it. I believe, however, that once you have gone through the gate that makes you sure that indeed you, of all people, because of your life, ought to have it, ought to have justice, because someone has buried your baby, and everyone can see that’s no justice—you know for sure, it’s obvious, no justice there with the burying of that baby—at this point, with you knowing you ought to have some, justice spies you from across the plains and shimmies toward you from that great distance and does a taunting school-yard dance in front of you, like a flashy bully or a Salome. Everyone goes limp in such a presence. Stacy goes limp. I go limp.This justice character, I do not like.

  At my house, you go to the end of the backyard and out a gate. Pine needles cover the forest floor, like magic because all the foliage visible is deciduous, but not magic. Of course, this is because the pine trees reach above the others, and their needles fall from stories high. I remember first figuring this out, as a kid. I’d thought maybe wind had blown pine needles in from elsewhere, the way some beaches are laden with shells when down a mile or so there are none. I remember when first figuring this out, I was standing in a forest in a little clearing with pine needles, noticing that in my years of futzing around in the forest, this was the first time I hadn’t felt a desire to take a broom and tidy up. I thought, what a great idea, pine needles, and looked up to acknowledge the gift.The pleasure I felt in finding the logic, that the needles came from above the nearest canopy, was momentary. After that, I felt sad.

  One time I was on the poetry committee in junior high school, and a kid handed in a poem called “The Mysteries of Life,” and as a main example he’d written that no one knows why birds fly in a V. Everyone liked the poem. I said, “But people know why birds fly in a V, don’t they?” Then everyone was mad at me, and, in fact, I understood. I was mad at myself for a moment—not for having criticized the poem, but for ruining everyone’s surety that they’d felt moved. Then I got defensive. I said, “Well jeez, for that matter, I don’t know why I walk upright.”

  I’ve been trained from birth, or at least kindergarten, to track my favorite things.This requires devising a category and laying claim. We picked favorite foods and colors. We made books about favorites, with illustrations. Later, as schoolkids, we forced it on one another, and we had to declare our favorite rock bands. We wore tee-shirts about our favorites and collected cutouts from magazines. We began to lie. We chose to have the same favorites, for coincidence. Look: we’re both wearing kneesocks, we’re twins, we’re made for each other. Or we condescended while pretending to be super-accepting. You like ice cream. Well, I’m partial to grapefruit myself, so you can see I’m unique, I’ve acquired a taste. Or chocolate, who doesn’t like chocolate? Well, I like this particular kind of Belgian chocolate we have flown in . . .

  I do not know when I stopped knowing what my real favorite was. I do know that I continue to tell myself what is my favorite, and that I always regret my choice. I believe that the result of being told we might choose created the ability to choose, and that all choices result in a lucky or unlucky lie. Still, it is difficult for me to sustain a sense of pleasure unless, upon feeling pleasure, I assign a favorite to it. You are my favorite person, which is good because you’re licking me there.This is my favorite route to work, which is good, because I took the time to take it.

  This is my favorite weather: wind so high in the trees I know it’s there only because I can see it. Down here it is still. I look up, and concentrate. I try to feel the feathered edge of it. Down here it is still.There is a lot of suspense.

  My great-aunt Stacy is old, weak, and dying. She has written me a letter. She wants me to run an errand that involves driving up the Smoky Mountains and talking to a person there who might have buried her baby. I’m thinking, this is not a family business, because it doesn’t and never did make any money. Her letter says it’s about justice. She says it’s about justice for her buried baby and soon it will be justice for her as well. I’m thinking, what are you saying here, that you have to die to have justice be for you, or are you trying to be self-deprecating to win my resolve? I’m thinking, jeez, Stacy, didn’t anyone ever say your baby would want you to move on and have a happy life, or did they say that and you said, Fuck off, she was just a baby and now she’s dead and she doesn’t want squat.

  She has drawn me a map. It’s a terrific-looking map, drawn on fibrous paper with a felt-tip pen that bled a lot. It looks like a treasure map, and I appreciate the map.

  If I go I could go because I appreciate the map as I might appreciate being given a business that makes money. If I go I could go because she’s not dead yet and I’m a nice person, and I think I might be her favorite. If I go I could go because something might happen. Something will happen anyway, but if I go something will also happen, but different.

  One time, at a dinner party roundtable, one of my nice adult friends asked me what I thought. She remembered from the other dinner party roundtable that someone had buried that baby in my life. I remembered why I tried not to mention it. I thought, Oh shit, I forgot, and I mentioned it. So all of a sudden I wondered what I thought, because she asked, and I noticed I’d thought, overall, really, not much. I went through a period of time thinking, back when I was thirteen, the age of the girls.When I turned thirteen, I thought, I’m going through a gate, because I am now the age those girls were, and remain to me.The baby that had been flopping in my life since I was born had, at that point, only just appeared in theirs, years and years before.

  I looked around the dinner party roundtable. There were my friends, these grown-up girls, four of them. One of them I’d been in love with for a long time without mentioning it. Another I liked well enough and had sex with when we were both lonely and giddy at the same time. Another I thought was the smartest person I’d ever met who felt like hanging out with me. Another was a great cook and hobbyist.

  We are all adults. I do not want them to look at me and think of a flopping baby. I do not want them to look at me and suddenly remember that they weren’t thinking of a baby flopping around in my past. I hope it surprised those girls later that they didn’t think much about the baby, once it was buried again. Every so often, the noisier girl says to the quieter girl, Remember that baby? And the quieter girl says, Yeah. I hope they don’t picture themselves sparring with a Salome in a school yard. I hope they don’t think a couple girls can’t run around in a field in the rain.

  I don’t know if I like Stacy. I find myself afraid that at some point, after th
ey were cleared of suspicion, Stacy called the girls on the telephone and asked them for details so she could follow up. I don’t know if there is anything to like about Stacy, unless you agree with her about justice, which I don’t. In fact, I think agreeing with Stacy about justice is a bit of grabbing for straws. You could like grabbing for straws. I think Stacy must like grabbing for straws, and just keeps getting short ones. I think I would prefer a roll in the hay but the whole thing makes me giddy. Perhaps what you can’t resist is all right. I like Stacy all right.

  Where is the husband now, where are the girls grown, where was the baby when Aunt Stacy was unhooking the swing in the wind and nursing her ankle?

  The husband was out West, visiting family, when the baby was found. He flew back with the rest of them, but he wouldn’t go into the house. He stayed in a motel for a while. He and Stacy had a big fight about it. She wanted him to go back into the house, but he didn’t want to go into the house. He said, “Stacy, you cannot make me go into that house.” He said it was his baby, too. He bought a house out West and went there.