Oh, thanks, she said, like I really want to be like everyone else, Elyria, you’re totally missing the point. I’m talking about free will—and she went on for a long while making multitiered arguments about free will and the possibility that none of us had it. I was sixteen or seventeen and didn’t have the kind of brain that Ruby had and this was becoming increasingly obvious, that my brain couldn’t absorb as much as her brain could, that I couldn’t expound with her about free will, that I was making a C in French and failing algebra and she had mastered both those classes during weekends one summer, and now here we were, she a teenage adult and me a teenage child and she wanted to talk about free will and I didn’t have anything to say.
This was probably the moment she turned from my sister to an orphan again, and maybe I understood this then or maybe I understood this some weeks or years later, but Ruby and I were no longer two children together in an alternate universe, equally mystified by our parents and the whole world — we were now in separate alternate universes and from then on we only had rare moments where it seemed, for a second, there was some sense between us. Like that afternoon I admitted to her I’d come to Barnard so I could see her more often, and that other night when I talked her off — and I don’t want to say ledge, but it was a ledge, of sorts, a metaphorical ledge — that night I talked her off a metaphorical ledge before her college graduation because she hated how it had taken her all four years to complete a triple major — but those sweet and connected moments between us became increasingly rare, or else I have forgotten some or many of those moments, which is probably true because memories are so often made by one hand and deleted by the other, and living is a long churn of making and deleting and we all forget so much of what we could be remembering, and part of the deal with remembering those connected moments with Ruby was that they usually came with a more difficult memory, like the one from that Christmas — it must have been the one just after that Thanksgiving when we smoked on the swings. There was an evening that the three of us were somehow all sitting in the breakfast room drinking hot cocoa as if imitating some more wholesome family and even Mother had been doing a pretty good job at playing the part of the mother (she’d made the cocoa, had wrapped a present or two, and sincerely told Ruby she had missed her) but then she somehow dropped or threw her cup of cocoa and the spill seemed to inspire something in her, so she wordlessly pushed a box of ornaments from the table and left the room. Ruby and I swept up the shattered shards and sopped up the warm, dark mess and smiled at each other over this warm, dark mess but much later that night, when we found Mother shouting, Open me! Open me!, from inside a large cardboard box she’d taped up from the inside, we were all done with being amused, so we didn’t smile at all. I’m the child of a child, I thought, and I may have said that to Ruby and she may have laughed, or maybe I didn’t speak that thought at all. Eventually Mother got quiet and began snoring and we didn’t bother to open that box because we knew how much she hated to be woken up.
Ruby turned on the TV and the first thing we saw was the title screen for It’s a Wonderful Life. We looked at each other like Yeah, uh-huh, sure, and we ate cheese and crackers for dinner and watched that movie and we didn’t have to talk because we knew what the other was thinking — this was one of those you-don’t-have-to-say-it, I-suffer-like-you-suffer moments and our brains were calm and still, just lying there in our heads and our mother was also calm and still, just lying there in that box.
All three of us, I thought, all three of us are orphans.
7
I just write the soap opera and that’s all and that’s enough, I told Harriet.
This was the afternoon she’d called to say I needed to meet her in Union Square so she could introduce me to Werner at his reading. I could have given a thousand reasons why I didn’t want to go (that I had no interest in being whatever she thought a real writer was, that I hated poetry, that I hated when people enjoyed or pretended to enjoy poetry, that being around Harriet gave me the same tangled feeling I had while watching television shows about sharks) but it wouldn’t have mattered — when Harriet made a decision, she would practically burn down a forest to make sure it happened.
You’re wasting your good years, she said. All that time you’ve spent writing for other people, you could be putting that energy into your own work. Tell your husband you’re quitting, that you need a year to write for yourself. You know he’ll be fine with it.
She’d somehow read the story of mine that had been published many years ago in a literary journal a professor at Barnard had submitted it to without my permission, and she tracked down my email to say she was an editor and interested in my novel, as if everyone had one. I told her I didn’t have one and didn’t want one, that I was a staff writer for a soap opera, but Harriet is the kind of person who believes you can frighten genius out of a person and be thanked for finding it.
How could that possibly ever be enough for you? You’re a real writer, not a soap opera writer.
How was I supposed to feel about this? Because I was, in fact, a soap opera writer, and I was paid to do this and people followed the stories as if they were truth and those exaggerated lives were more real to some than anything actually real, so much so that whole magazines were devoted to this collective imagination. It had started as an in-between job, just a writer’s assistant, but when one of the producers impulsively fired half the staff, I was promoted and I began to enjoy how nothing was recognizable or familiar about the love triangles, rectangles, and octagons, the operatic scream-crying, the scorned lovers, double homicides, sudden, rare illnesses, demonic curses, and all brands of revenge. Ruby had always described it best: It’s how we outsource rage.
I don’t want to feel literary, I told Harriet. I just want to feel useful.
Listen, you’ll thank me for this later, believe me. I really do think that meeting Werner will be good for you. He always knows the right thing to say to a writer just starting out.
Harriet, I’m not starting anything. I don’t want to write a book.
I’m sure that will change, she said, and I wanted to say that it wouldn’t but she said, I’ll see you at six-thirty, and I am not the kind of person who can put myself between a person and her wants.
In Harriet’s introduction she said something about how Werner’s poetry was the invention of a radical loneliness, a reinvention of life as we know it, and that was ridiculous, I knew, but who wouldn’t want life to be reinvented? I thought everyone would like that very much. Werner’s work was taught in universities, anthologized, published in magazines, and even reviewed in newspapers. Novelists and filmmakers cited him as a major influence and Mother even told me his poems made her cry for the first time in years, but I’d only read a poem or two and didn’t even try to try to like it.
Once the reading was done, Harriet beelined to Werner, my wrist in her hand. She gave Werner a quick appraisal of the reading as he shrugged and said something lost to the din of the crowd.