The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (27 page)

Finally, between heaving breaths, Bea spoke.

“I want to watch Zoot Suit Henderson.”

He told her she could watch whatever she wanted. He stood, relieved, moved toward the TV, but she grabbed his arm. He sat down again. Her cries, at last, were remitting. She wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands. Her breath puttered.

She said, “I need a new shirt.”

“I know it's been rough,” he whispered, leaning close to her. “We tried. Your mother's a good woman, but it just wasn't meant to be. I know you're scared.”

And what did Bea do? She shocked him once more. She laughed. A quiet, sniffling, head-shaking laugh. It went on longer than he thought possible. Then she ran her hands through her hair, fluffed it, shook it out, performing this motion with a glamour he'd never seen, with chic, disinterested poise, like a model in a photo shoot. Her hands returned to her lap. The glamour was gone. Very quietly she said, “My mother has a below-average IQ.”

What could he say?

“Not true.”

But it was—it was!

“She's petty,” Bea went on. “She's cheap. She's got a crush on that janitor, Demeter or whatever his name is, the freaky guy with the long hair and the kazoo.”

“Dimitri.”

“Except supposedly it's from Asia so it's not a kazoo but an ‘instrument of spiritual enlightenment.' I know why you pulled the plug. I don't blame you. I mean, you're not perfect. Lord no. But you're a good person. I believe you are. Does that surprise you? I think it might.”

He never cried. Not when she was born. Not when he wasn't made partner. Not when he found Dimitri's long black hair on his own pillow, not when the smell of musk oil permeated his sheets, not when he kept smelling that musk even after the sheets had been washed, after they'd been replaced. Not when his mother died forever and always and on Thanksgiving Day. Not when he was married at sunset to the love of his life, not when happiness penetrated him so fully he was sure he'd never be free of the sensation, not when he kissed her and kissed her and would never never never stop. Not when he stopped.

He didn't cry now either. But, for the first time in years, his eyes got glassy.

“It's not the divorce,” Bea said. “That's not why I cried.”

“Then why?” That his voice was the same—that the wetness in his eyes did not affect it came as a tremendous relief.

“Adults think we're all so messed up when our parents split, but we can handle more than you imagine. Victoria Grassley has insane nutso Nazi parents who smash dishes and, like, frame
crimes
on each other. You know the King Solomon thing you told me? The baby he threatens to cut in two? Victoria's parents would
do that.
And she's fine! No one knows. Everyone's always like, ‘Oh what can we do for you? How are you holding up?' Girls are strong. I don't know about boys. Boys fix everything by giving each other wedgies or whatever, but girls are stronger than anyone guesses. I'm glad you're divorcing. I am. It gives me more freedom and I don't have to listen to you fight. That's pretty much awesome.”

“Awesome?”

He wanted to believe everything she said. He did believe. He didn't. He saw a flash of doubt on her face.

“You sure?” he said. “Awesome?”

“Mom spent my clothing budget. She bought herself a bathrobe with a holster for a remote control. She ‘exhausted' the budget so now I can't get my debate shirt. You'll get me a shirt, right? I can't compete without it. Mister Fritz is a freak about dress code.”

“Why were you crying, Bea?”

She rubbed her bloodshot eyes.

She said, “Cheryl Cloister hates me. She makes the rules. If I had a party here, you know what would happen? No one would come. I want a party here. I want a stereo. No one would come.”

“That can't be true, honey.”

“Cheryl is the devil.”

“Oh.”

“She controls everyone. Maybe Molly and Jane would come,
maybe,
but it's doubtful. And who wants to hang out with Molly and Jane anyway?”

“But what about the old gang? Lane and Petra? What about that girl with the glasses? What's her name? She was always a nice kid. We can make a list. You might be surprised by who's on your side.”

“I want Cheryl,” she said simply.

“Let's work on it,” he said. “One step at a time.”

She said, “Also I want tampons. Mom thinks they make you lose your virginity but they don't. It's like she was raised in
Little House on the Prairie
. She wants me to use
hay
or something.”

She was trying to shock him now—she'd exposed herself and wanted him to pay for it. He gave her forty bucks every month for her hygiene products. There was no need to tell him about tampons.

“Buy whatever you like,” he said.

“Tampons?”

She wanted him to say it. There was a meanness in her face he could not escape.

“Tampons,” he said. He found the wetness in his eyes was now in his throat.

“God, are you
crying
?”

“No.”

So he said it again,
tampons,
to prove he wasn't crying, even though he was. He was crying, but the strangeness of the word,
tampon
, the taboo of it, its weirdness, that was bigger than the tears, weirder than the tears, and so would defeat the tears. She seemed to sense this and said it again herself. Then she left to wash her hair.

 

W
hile she was gone, he put the magazine with the bleached-blond boy on the arm of the sofa. Should he hold off a little, wait, play it cooler? But his instinct told him he needed to come on strong. His instinct turned out to be pretty good.

Bea shrieked with delight when she saw the magazine. She launched into a long monologue about how Christian, the bleached-blond boy on the cover, was obviously superior to the raven-haired BJ, who'd lived part of his childhood in a van and whose current romantic involvement with a woman called “Calico” defied anyone's understanding. Christian and BJ started Roger Ranger when they were in high school, but they sucked until Jon-Jon became their drummer. Byron knew better than to ask questions or make any sounds. He listened. Christian was the handsomest. Jon-Jon was the nicest. BJ was sort of handsome, Bea was saying, but he didn't care about the fans. And Roger Ranger's fans were the most devoted, the most deserving! It wasn't right. Christian, for example, would never be rude to fans. And Jon-Jon always signed autographs and posed for photographs even when he was in a hurry. BJ and Calico could fall off the face of the earth for all Bea cared. But that song he wrote, the one about the missing girl, the girl who's gone to pieces? It killed her, it moved her to death, it was like nothing else she'd ever heard, ever, and she had to give him credit for that. Byron, it was true, tuned out a little as she talked. He didn't take in the full meaning of her words but rather their frantic, lovestruck, rageful charm.

He made dinner while she paged through the magazine. The plan was going so well—so much better than he'd possibly hoped. But what would happen after he'd exhausted the list? Then what? He told himself he'd figure it out. He was building momentum. They ate pasta and green beans. Bea used a great deal of garlic powder and salt on everything, and she chewed with her mouth open. He decided to wait until things were more solid between them before pointing that out. After dinner, all on his own, he did something that seemed to genuinely please Bea: he served her a container of chocolate pudding with a single gummy worm sticking out of it. “Oh,” she cried ecstatically, “that's disgusting!”

He felt a hope in his body he hadn't felt since the day he'd met Shirley. Except this hope was simpler than that, so much more obvious.

An hour later, he heard Leonora's name. Bea was sprawled on the couch in her flaming-dice pajamas; Byron was sweeping the floor. The word, her name, flew past him.
Leonora
. He turned. On the television the newscaster wore his gravest face. The word
MISSING
floated next to his head. Then someone switched a switch and her face, Leonora's, was fixed on the screen. Her smile was demure, patient—the same as in the coffee shop.
Leonora
, the newscaster repeated. Byron couldn't exhale.

“Huh.” Bea squinted at the TV. “Don't know her.”

He couldn't exhale so he tried to inhale, but that didn't work either. He dropped the broom. He fell onto the couch next to his daughter.

“Probably a prostitute,” Bea said.

The newscaster told them what Byron already knew. He described her snow boots, the color of her shirt and coat and eyes and hair.

“Maybe a prostitute,” Bea said. “You can never tell. Girls are currency.”

He made a hideous noise he couldn't account for, a cross between a cough and a moan and an
oh God
, and at the same time his heart bashed his windpipe, so that it was impossible to speak, to offer an explanation for this sound. “Poor Daddy,” Bea sighed, and leaned her shoulder into him. “Don't worry—nobody will take me.” Her body gave off startling heat. He couldn't respond—there was nothing to say and no apparatus with which to say it. The softness of his daughter's flannel pajamas. The citrus notes of her shampoo. Her long hair, damp at its ends. Without thinking he took her hand. She let him. Her hand was warm, fidgety, impossibly soft; it was like a small animal. He held it. They kept their eyes on the television. Any minute she would pull it away. They listened. Any minute. The newscaster relayed the details, which were few. Then he turned to another camera. He announced that a famous gymnast had come from Russia to teach the lucky kindergartners of P.S. 34 how to turn somersaults. On the screen, little boys and girls tucked their heads between their knees and rolled. The clip ended. The newscaster shuffled his papers, cleared his throat, and moved on.

THE SWEET RELIEF OF MISSING CHILDREN

Sarah Braunstein

READING GROUP GUIDE

AN INTERVIEW WITH SARAH BRAUNSTEIN

Oftentimes the way a story came to a writer is just as interesting as the story itself. In the spirit of our often-mysterious inspiration, where did the idea for
The Sweet Relief of Missing Children
come from?

Inspiration came from lots of places: Jim Goldberg's photographs of child runaways; a conversation I overheard about a family who perished at a train crossing; an image from
Life
magazine of a gorgeously disheveled girl standing barefoot on the street in New York City in 1969 (this hung over my desk as I was writing). All of these were important.

But the most important inspiration?
Law & Order
.
CSI
.
Gone Baby Gone
. Natalee Holloway. By which I mean the ever-present depiction of missing/dead girls in art and media. I think I felt compelled to really enter the mind of a child in a moment of extreme crisis. A girl on the brink of horror. I wanted to fully render her consciousness—to document an exacting, complicated experience of the child's (perhaps split) consciousness. I wanted to find both pain and grace, even relief, within her.

In the novel, a child named Leonora is abducted. In the first chapter, the reader learns that she'll disappear, though her fate is not revealed until the end. The book intermittently visits her point of view: we are with her during her decision to “help” a couple on the street who ask for directions; we are with her during her capture, her containment in the backseat of a car, and, later, in a basement rec room, as she waits, wondering what will happen to her, and experiences a sudden revelation.

Am I sick? What on earth would compel a person to visit a child in such a moment? What macabre, inhumane, sadistic impulse drove me?

It was painful to write these scenes (which, I should say, constitute a small part of the novel). It was difficult to stay so close to the terror of a character I loved. But I felt I had to—I felt compelled to write these scenes in careful, close, patient detail. By and large, we hear about lots of missing girls, but it seems to me we seldom see a complex depiction of their consciousness.

Missing, brutalized, and dead girls are everywhere: on network TV, in endless movies, in an abundance of novels in which the child is a helpless victim, a springboard for plot. A missing girl is usually a mechanism by which a man can prove his worth by saving her.

On crime shows, hard-boiled murder investigators scrutinize pretty, half-naked corpses. And we watch with extreme sustained attention (notable in this ADHD-inflected culture) real-life stories about girls like JonBenét Ramsey and Elizabeth Smart.

So I wondered: what art has been willing to access the consciousness of the missing girl at the precise moment of threat and horror? Threatened girls are everywhere in the media, but I felt like I hadn't seen a movie or read a book that bore full witness to their subjectivity—that even granted them a subjectivity. So I set out to write a story about a girl who, despite terrible circumstances, finds her own brand of transcendence.

I found it interesting that you wanted to write from a child's point of view about being abducted/missing, but, like you said, it actually turns out to be a very small part of the novel. The rest comprises other characters who are “missing” in a different way—they may have been separated from their childhoods or physical homes, but it is a decision that they make on their own, unlike Leonora. How did the marriage of these two concepts of “missing” come about? Did you begin writing about Leonora but found your thoughts invaded by these other “lost” characters? Who were the first and last characters?

Yes, Leonora's story is a small part of the novel, and yet hers was the story that most rattled my imagination, and so fueled the writing of the book. I first saw Leonora through another character's eyes. Pax has run away, has “abducted” himself from an impoverished life and struggling mother. He changed his name, got on a bus, and took off. No one, to his knowledge anyway, ever looked for him. When he arrived in New York City and saw Leonora's face on missing-person posters, he became fascinated. Like her, he was missing, but no one was searching for him. He was unwanted. Despite an absence of love, being missing was a form of possibility for Pax. His life could happen anywhere; he had no obligation to anyone; he found an ecstatic freedom. Meanwhile, Leonora's loved ones publicly demonstrate their love; concern for her is everywhere; and yet her absence is empty of possibility, of future.

Once I became aware of this tension, I wanted to explore other versions of going missing. One character is abducted. One character flees to escape trauma. One character cannot escape, longs to escape, and so finds a way to reproduce the experience of being “missing” though illicit sex. One character resists running away until a moment when her familial duties have been fulfilled. It began with Pax, and from there, I tried to depict other kinds of (self) abduction. But I certainly didn't sit down to write about abduction and escape. These themes emerged slowly, over time. In my experience, books teach us what they're about, and not the other way around.

I like the idea of these slightly overlapping vignettes, told about different characters over different decades. The structure reminded me of the ocean, with waves crashing in and receding, all one murky sea, which in the end expels Leonora, gleaming, a discarded shell on the sand for the reader to take home and mull over. How does a writer begin to address so many decades and characters, weaving them together just enough while leaving threads for the reader to speculate about in the end?

I took it scene by scene, moment by moment. I didn't discover the architecture of the book until late in the process, when I found linkages between each section. I wrote Sam's section first, then Paul's, then Pax's—not initially realizing Paul/Pax were the same person! Essentially, I wrote it as a series of novellas; I knew they would connect, had a vague notion about how they'd connect, but as I composed I pretended each was its own hermetic world. This helped me stay grounded in each particular reality. Then, after I had a draft, I was able to see connections, to rearrange, and to write new scenes that bridged disparate parts. I still can't believe it came together as it did. Sometimes it seems like sheer luck that it happened once, and utterly un-re-creatable. I hope to do it again.

Did your master's degree in social work contribute in any way to the thrust of the novel or the characters' insights?

Yes, for sure. I read lots of psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Melanie Klein, Winnicott) in graduate school, and I thought a lot about the psychological defenses guiding my characters' behaviors. The working title of the novel was “Split,” in part because “split” means to leave, to run away—“let's split this joint”—but also because, in psychoanalytic theory, the concept of splitting means disavowing unwanted parts, splitting the self, which is what many of my characters are doing. I wanted to look at their different ways of “splitting”—at their varying, sometimes bizarre, methods of escaping some part of themselves.

I worked as a therapist during the period I was writing the book, and as a therapist I learned to listen to my clients . . . to listen in a more full-hearted, radical way than I was used to doing. To sit in mysteries. To tolerate the experience of “not-knowing.” A client is telling his story, and you don't know where it's going, or what it means, not yet, and there's this patience and curiosity you have to access in yourself, which is hard! Patience and curiosity don't often go together, at least not for me.

As a writer, I think you have to do the exact same thing: listen carefully to characters, tolerate not-knowing. The novel, like therapeutic treatment, will take wrong turns, will sometimes go off course. There will be misunderstandings, empathic failures, uncomfortable insights. Writers, like therapists, need to listen to these mistakes, learn from them, wait, watch. Then create some kind of new reality.

What's the worst and best advice you've ever gotten about writing a novel?

Here's the best advice: I once was at a reading given by Salvatore Scibona, who published his astonishing novel
The End
after working on it for ten years. Someone in the audience asked how much of the first draft remained in the final. How many of its original sentences survived the chopping block? He said not a single sentence from the first draft appeared in the published manuscript. The audience (lots of writers) shifted uncomfortably. But then he said something I found heartening: Just because that old work didn't make it into the final draft doesn't mean it didn't deeply inform the final draft. It was all necessary. That first draft, he said, is like a chicken carcass. You don't see the carcass in the soup on the table—but its flavor is everywhere.

I love this chicken carcass idea. It's helping me write my second novel.

What's your favorite thing that people tell you about
Sweet Relief
?

First and foremost, my favorite thing people tell me is that they read it. I always feel slightly astonished, bewildered. “You read my book? Really? Thank you!” I think I've made some people uncomfortable by lavishing weird gratitude on them when they mention simply reading it. But so few people read books, let alone nonlinear, creepy-ish ones like mine. I've heard from many readers that it feels “unflinching.” That word comes up a lot, and I admit it makes me proud. I wanted not to flinch. I did, of course, often flinch: I put off writing hard scenes. I tinkered with sentences rather than forging ahead. I did all those things you do to skirt the real work. Because it's hard to look straight at certain things that happen in the book. But I tried, in the end, to look at them directly and honestly, without sentimentalizing. And if the effect is one of unflichingness, if I've given the impression of being willing to go to painful places without apology, without resorting to a soft-focus treatment, I'm pleased. Also it makes me happy when people tell me it's funny. There are funny parts, I think, and I hope the sadness doesn't clobber them.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. What do you think of Pax's decision at the end of the novel? Do you think his actions will actually bring Leonora's family closure?

2. Discuss the title
The Sweet Relief of Missing Children
. Whose relief does the title refer to? The children's? The parents'?

3. Why does Paul want a new name? What does a new name symbolize? How is his quest for a new name linked with his mother's identity? When he becomes Pax, is he transformed?

4. What role does Leonora play in the novel? How does her story frame the lives of the other characters? Leonora is clearly a missing child referred to in the title—who or what are the other characters missing?

5. Why do you think Sam marries Judith? Is his decision connected to his mother's death?

6. Compare Grace and Judith. What does the novel suggest about mother-daughter relationships?

7. Many of the decisions the characters make are selfish or difficult to understand. Do they remain sympathetic? Braunstein has said that she worked as a therapist while writing this novel. How might that experience have influenced the way her characters are portrayed?

8. A central theme of the novel is the thin boundary between innocence and experience, childhood and adulthood. What are some examples of this dichotomy?

9. What is the role of the family throughout the novel? What does the novel reveal about the evolving nature of family?