Dear Susan,
I’m sorry, although I don’t really know what I’m apologizing for. That doesn’t mean I don’t think I’ve let you down somehow, because I have the feeling I did, I just am not sure how. If I seemed funny after the movie last week, maybe it was because I was a little drunk & tired and wasn’t sure exactly what was going on. But I know I don’t like this not talking, business-relationship thing, and I’m guessing you don’t either, so one way or another we should see a little more of each other.
So far so good. I went to gnaw on the pen when I noticed it had been heavily gnawed on already. It took some serious biting to make those kind of marks in hard plastic, I knew from experience. Were they Bobby’s? Nancy’s? Sam’s? It was hard to tell, in this house, where one of them ended and the next began, so uniform was the overall effect. I imagined they would all be embarrassed to know that I was using their Federal Government pen and gag paper.
I wish I could describe the way I’m feeling lately. Something like going to church when you’re Jewish. Or eating dog food. Things don’t seem to fit. There are things I feel I ought to be doing instead of this, but I don’t know what they are. Maybe I’m a little old to be having this problem. Whatever, I keep doing it, because it’s new and different, even though I’m kind of repulsed.
That was all wrong, “repulsed.” Might she think I was talking about her? I paused a moment and realized that I might as well have been, though she didn’t repulse me, not in the vernacular sense, anyway, the sick-to-one’s-stomach sense. It was more like an empirical repulsion, the repulsion of two magnets aligned with like poles facing. Maybe all that was necessary to make the magnets do what they were supposed to was flip one around. Me. But I couldn’t. Did I want her in that way? Did I want a new girlfriend? I suppose I did. Those people who said they didn’t want a relationship right now because they had just come off a bad one were lying. They wanted one even more than before.
I gnawed on the pen after alclass="underline" we were family. Here I was thinking about Susan, about us. It all seemed too much to expect, love, success. Happiness. I had none of them right now and would gladly settle for just one. The bottom of the page read: Two. One to change the lightbulb and the other to change it back.
“Hi.”
It was Samantha, standing in my doorway, wearing pajamas with pieces of watermelon printed on them. “Hi,” I said, whispered actually, to avoid waking Bobby and Nancy. “Did I wake you up when I came back?”
“No.” She stepped in, carefully, as if into a flower bed, and shut the door behind her. “I never sleep.”
“Never?”
“Almost never.” She pointed to the end of the bed. “Can I sit there?”
“Sure,” I said, curling my legs up under me. She climbed on and sat cross-legged next to the fallen towels. I thought she had some piece to speak, but she didn’t speak it, so I said, “What do you do? When you’re awake?”
She shrugged. “Think. Make up people. Sometimes I read books. Grandpa gave me a little flashlight. Before he died.”
“Do you miss him?”
“Sort of.” She looked up suddenly. “He’s your daddy.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you sad?”
“Sure.”
She looked away, toward the blank black window, and sighed. “What are you doing?”
“Writing a letter.”
She leaned forward. “Can I see?”
“No. It’s private.”
“To your girlfriend,” she told me flatly, obviously bored with the idea already.
“Not exactly.” I twirled the pen in my hand for a few seconds. “Samantha, how are things around here? Is your dad okay? Your mom?”
“They’re okay. I’m getting a sister.”
I hadn’t known they knew the sex. “What is her name going to be?”
“I’m going to call her Mariette.”
“Ah.” As with Bobby, I was running out of conversation topics. What do you say to a six-year-old? I began to get anxious that Bobby would find her here, and read something sinister or perverted into our meeting.
“Can I come visit you and Uncle Pierce?” she said. She unfolded the washcloth and put it on her head, not in a silly way but reverentially, like an old lady in church. “Maybe over school vacation. Maybe for Christmas.”
This jolted me. Christmas! With my brother, at home! Not to mention Thanksgiving, Labor Day. Holidays with Pierce and Mom, opening her gifts, holding them up to her inscrutable eyes. “Sure,” I said. “Any time.”
“How about soon, before school?”
“Well, I have to draw cartoons. And you’d have to ask your mom and dad…”
She took off the washcloth and dropped it on the pile. “Yeah, yeah,” she said, and slid off the bed. I felt jilted, as if by a lover.
“Goodnight,” I said weakly.
She turned, ran back, stretched out to me and gave me a kiss. “Sleepy dreams,” she said, and hurried out the door.
* * *
In the morning everybody ate cold cereal. The options were dumbfounding: every sugar-rich concoction under the sun, each represented by a jolly mascot. I ate the cereal formerly known as Super Sugar Crisp, which in this enlightened age had become Super Golden Crisp, its public image transformed from cheesy harbinger of tooth decay to precious Incan artifact. My mouth ached, but I scooped out every last drop of cloying milk. Looking around the table, I could see the same expression of awe on everyone’s face; it was the only moment of unqualified joy I had witnessed under this roof.
My letter was finished, sealed and stamped, thanks to a booklet of self-adhesive American flags I’d found in the kitchen drawer; I left some change for the postage, feeling I’d taken enough already. Now the letter was in the pocket of my jeans, awaiting a mailbox.
After breakfast, I thanked Nancy. She nodded gravely, her eyes still luminous from the sugar high. I kissed Sam on the cheek and she accepted with grace. “Tell Uncle Pierce hi,” she said.
“You bet.”
“Tell him I love him!” This was irony, something I’d never before heard from Sam, but which seemed to fit. Nancy and Bobby didn’t recognize it as such. Expressions of unease overpowered their faces.
“I will,” I said.
Bobby drove me back to the hotel. He was strangely chatty. I wondered if he was always like this mornings, before the day defeated him. “Too bad you can’t come to the plant. I ought to show you around sometime.”
In fact, there was no reason I couldn’t go, except that I hadn’t been asked. “That would be great.”
“Show you the sterile radiating units, they’re something else. Had to order them special from Switzerland. And the shredder, which actually is called the homogenizing refuse deintegrator, but we call it the shredder.”
“Yikes.”
“Oh, it’s all perfectly airtight, perfectly clean. Smells like a doctor’s office in there, no kidding.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“Like a trip to the doctor’s,” he said, apparently to himself. We were silent for a while.