The Family Unit and Other Fantasies (4 page)

Now he felt the cold touch of fear. Wouldn’t the doctor have left a message
himself
if it were nothing? Wouldn’t he feel that leaving bad news on a machine was too blunt, too callous, and, most of all, too cowardly? Of course, Barry thought—and his fingers trembled so much he had to struggle to put the phone away.

Then, suddenly, uncharacteristically, he caught himself. Why was he jumping to conclusions? Calm down, he thought, see it clearly. There were other opinions to get, other tests to take. Hadn’t his cousin contracted something bad and survived? Mightn’t he improve his diet, eat more greens, add more exercise? All was not lost; there were things he still could do.

Bolstered by this unique bucking up of himself, he started to take the few steps left toward home to return the call. He turned the final corner, his heart beating more from weird—to him impressive—hope than panic.

His building was gone.

All that was left was a giant hole in the ground, as wide and deep as the building itself had been. The residences to the right and left remained; it was as if the one between had simply been pulled out, as cleanly and completely as a tooth from a person’s mouth.

Barry went to the edge and looked in, looked hundreds of feet down to a floor of solid earth, looked into the emptiness. Then he looked back up and stared without fear straight into the raging sun.

He had no doubt what was about to happen to him.

“But why would they be
here
?” Alan asked, trying to keep his voice calm.

“I don’t know,” Annabelle, his wife, replied. “The government put them here.”

“But it happened a long way from here. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“I didn’t say that it did.”

There would be no settling the issue, Alan knew, partly because Annabelle didn’t know the answer and partly because she didn’t care. If two survivors of a hurricane half a country away—almost the whole country, really—had been resettled in their town ninety miles north of New York, then that’s what had happened, and that’s all there was to it.

“The government doesn’t know what it’s doing,” she said. “That’s obvious, isn’t it? So why would this make any more sense than anything else they do?”

Alan shrugged; she had him there. That wasn’t the point, anyway, not to Anna: it was the fact of the couple’s suffering, and the fact that it could be eased and that they might help ease it. Alan didn’t believe these were facts, but he didn’t say. He just let Anna go on, establishing the basis for what she was suggesting they do.

“We have empty rooms. I can move my sewing stuff out of the den. Or you can move your toy theatres. It just seems criminal that two people who’ve been through so much should have to stay in a trailer park, and for God knows how long.”

Now there was more that Alan didn’t say. Like, for instance, that he’d never liked having the trailer park across the two-lane highway from their house, had wondered why it was there, if this was what their notoriously high property taxes were going toward. (And no one was fooled by its smiling daisy logo and its title: “The New Day Flexible Life Center.” It was a trailer park!) He distrusted the people who lived in it, that was really it—he didn’t believe that most of them were actually in the dire straits they professed to be. He wasn’t a blamer, he considered himself compassionate; there was just something about other people’s pain that immediately made him doubt its existence, and the more pain, the more doubt. This man and woman had been suddenly upended, their home destroyed, their lives in a place ended perhaps forever, and so inevitably he felt the whole thing must be a fraud—especially since it had happened so far away and they were now here.
And
because Annabelle wanted the people to temporarily move in with them. But he said none of this.

A year before, he would not have been so discreet. In those days—that is to say, in the twenty years of their marriage leading up to a year ago—he would have railed, scoffed, put his foot down, and Anna would have politely endured it and then backed down or compromised in a way that pleased him more than her, for he was always more negatively “invested” in his argument than she was positively in hers. But that was before Anna got cancer and things changed.

The suspicion and petulance that characterized much of Alan’s conversations had been all along, it turned out, a kind of voodoo, a way to ward off the pain he saw in others and dreaded experiencing himself, even the pain involved in considering their pain. It was a form of subservience to pain, abject weakness before it. So when pain visited him, as it was always going to anyway, no matter what he did, visited Annabelle and so him, he had to switch tactics; now he did and did not question anything Annabelle wanted, as an equally ineffective way to keep the cancer, and thus the pain from returning. This was what closed his mouth or changed what he said—though it could not change what he thought, the pattern of suspicion being too well established within him not to manifest someplace.

“You’re being awfully quiet,” Anna said, surprised.

Anna, on the other hand, had responded to circumstances differently. Before her diagnosis and treatment (it was breast cancer, she was forty-eight, the radiation was over now, she’d been clean for six months, no hair loss), she had been more open to and less frightened of life than her husband. In the time since, she had shown signs of passivity and depression. The hurricane couple’s appearance in town had brought back—even increased—her old intrepidness. She felt a new and invigorating alliance with them because they also suffered, felt they deserved all the help they could get. And since she was still here on Earth, she was here to help. Others in town had merely had them to dinner; Anna was willing to complete the permits to move the couple. This was its own mystical trade-off—help for health—but whatever its motive it tested Alan’s own superstitions and his new vow of silence. So far, he had passed.

“I wasn’t being quiet. I was just thinking,” he said, and this at least
was true.

“And?” she said, apparently eager to get going with her plan.

“I—” And here he swallowed a hundred objections, questions, and jokes, effectively ending his sentence as it began. He placed a hand on Anna’s hand, which was still as elegant and pale as the day they met, though he hadn’t noticed until a year ago. “Sure. Whatever you want.”

When he met the couple, he was no more convinced of their veracity—less so, if that were possible. The Lynches were white, and hadn’t most of the hurricane survivors been black? That was the first thing. Secondly, they both dressed as if they had stepped out of a photograph from the 1930s or something—the dust bowl, the Oakies, the WPA, or whatever: denim shirt and jeans with rolled-up cuffs for the man, a simple sleeveless gingham dress for the woman. And even though they were probably in Alan and Annabelle’s mid to late forties age range, they looked twenty years older, with leathery skin tanned to a perilous crisp and rings beneath their eyes so deep they seemed to have been whittled out of wood.

The man in particular, Sam Lynch—and it was such an all-American name, wasn’t it, appropriate to that earlier decade; too right, Alan thought, too clever—had a sculpted look, six feet tall and
sinewy
, that was the word, with the skin of his forearms stretched so tight that his veins had a protruding and snake-like look, phallic, if you must know, and his ropey neck was the same way. It bothered Alan to look at him: basic man, penile all over, and unembarrassed about it; show-offy, he would have said, if he had said anything to Annabelle.

The woman, on the other hand, Dorothy, was less resilient looking, with lank brown hair, crepey upper arms, her breasts already the “dugs” of the elderly, her facial features hangdog and hopeless, as if she had given up expecting to be remembered. It all seemed an imitation: iconic images of the Depression-era man and woman, wax figures in a diorama of America’s most miserable. Alan couldn’t stop these thoughts; they were piling up in his head like planes on a runway, for they couldn’t fly out of his mouth.

All he allowed himself to say to them was, “Welcome to our home.”

And Anna seemed so glad they were there, clasping both of their hands in her own and then hanging onto and swinging them a little, girlish in her happiness. She even seemed to choke back a tear or two, and the sight made Alan place a fond and gentling hand on her back, cynicism falling from the holes in his head like sifted flour.

“You can have the downstairs bedroom,” she said. “Alan’s moved his toy theatres.”

Alan winced a little, hearing this. His hobby—and Annabelle couldn’t have children and they didn’t want to adopt, so yes, they both had hobbies, hers were sewing and dollhouses—suddenly seemed erudite and even effeminate before this couple of careworn, indomitable, apparently exiled Americans. Even the house itself seemed excessive and elitist (and it was only two storeys and they had earned it; owning a hardware store wasn’t easy, especially these days, with chains taking over, even upstate, just look at the Drugall’s and Super Buy ‘n’ Fly in town). But who were the Lynches to complain? Hadn’t they been plucked out of a government-issued trailer, and before that, supposedly, from the drink?

And they weren’t complaining. They were very grateful.

“Thank you so much,” Dorothy said with a Midwestern or southern twang that sounded to Alan like American speech before it had been flattened by TV. Then, with dry, cracked lips, she placed a short, abashed, but clearly sincere kiss on Annabelle’s cheek.

For his part, Sam performed a physical gesture so difficult Alan wasn’t sure he’d ever seen it done before. He winked with
feeling
, as a taciturn way of giving thanks. Winks were usually—weren’t they always—a form of snideness or flirtation. To wink with
feeling
—and slowly enough to reveal the veins in Sam’s eyelids that were once again reminders of hardship and erections—that took talent. Alan, of course, didn’t share this reaction, only reflexively—and it was a mistake, and he knew it the second before he did it, not after, before—winked back.
This
wink, of course, was a normal one and so completely inappropriate. It seemed to cast a pall over the kitchen in which they all stood before Annabelle saved the day by saying, “Well. You’ll want to get moved in.”

Minutes later, Alan couldn’t help but peek in to see their belongings, whatever they had left of them: a few bundles wrapped up in old newspaper and tied with what seemed baling wire were sitting in an orderly line near the bed of the spare bedroom, placed so as to be as unobtrusive as possible—placed respectfully, that was it,
too
respectfully. In his and Annabelle’s bedroom, Alan had piled his little theatres modelled on Broadway houses less carefully: a stage punctured here, a balcony bent there. (And don’t ask him why he’d started building them; he’d barely seen a play in his life. Maybe they were dream-like expressions of his critical nature, temples in his religion of judgment; Alan wouldn’t have been the one to say.)

When Alan walked in, he saw Annabelle standing by their window, looking out absently at the backyard. Soon after her surgery, he would sometimes catch her standing like this, hugging herself, her arms crossed with her fingers in her armpits, one palm covering the place where the lump in her breast had been removed. She looked weirdly Napoleonic, he thought, perhaps as a way to stop the heartbreak he felt in seeing it. He didn’t know how to touch her himself in those days, didn’t want to offend or cause harm but also didn’t want to seem too squeamish, either: again, pain’s dithering supplicant. Today he was pleased that her arms were crossed normally, her hands at her opposite elbows. So he crept up behind her and fully embraced her, as if he could magically keep the rest of her from slipping away as one piece already had.

She placed her head back against his chest, perhaps casting her own spell but in any case breaking his. “I’m so glad,” she said, “that they’re here.”

To keep himself quiet, Alan concentrated on smelling her hair, taking in deep inhales that he imagined filled his mind with her scent, freshening and obscuring his bad thoughts. “Me too.”

That night, Anna made a veritable feast, the kind of food the two rarely if ever had and certainly never had at home. It was a meal of “classics”: pork chops, mashed potatoes, peas, what Alan thought Anna thought the Lynches would have eaten before all was lost. It was delicious, Alan had to admit, almost exotic after so much pasta and broiled chicken. He even delayed taking in a second hefty bite when Sam started saying grace, something no one had ever done beneath their roof before. Annabelle listened with a curious and appreciative smile, so Alan let it go then quickly dug back into the juicy meat, which he had painted with potato.