Renata ♥ Mark: chapters 3 and 4

Trophies

My sister, Paige (she was pregnant by that point, though neither of us knew yet) had demanded to see photos of Mark soon after our first date. She took one look at him and dismissed him as a ‘jock’. “I bet he still brags about that touchdown he scored in senior year,” she said, the sugar cookie she’d just taken a bite from tumbling down her chin into her lap. We were at our mother’s old house; Mom had hanged herself on the back porch six months prior and bequeathed the house to Paige and me, via a scrawled note stuck on the refrigerator. Sometimes we went there together to hang out and eat Mom’s slowly-staling christmas cookies and laugh at each other; Paige already owned an apartment in Syracuse and I wanted to sell the place, which I planned to do as soon as I got my shit together. 

“What, do you think he still has some sort of football trophy in his apartment?” I asked, smiling. 

Paige nodded, covering her mouth as she took another bite. 

I watched her chew it, affecting a face of disgust. “Lay off the cookies.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Renata, you’re such a cunt.”

“What? There’s only a few left.”

“Hurry up and sell this place.” That shut me up.

I was thinking of Paige’s remarks two months later, while Mark drove me upstate to see his parents. I’d already gotten familiar with his apartment and its distinct lack of high-school detritus, but I had to imagine his parents kept a shrine to his achievements somewhere prominent. An unironic “best player” pin, some sort of sports-related metallic object given only to the very best, most athletic of players, all in a suspended closet at face-height with glass doors. And although my instinct was to find it cringeworthy, all the same, the image prompted me to reach across to Mark’s hand on the transmission shift and place my palm above it, warmly, like a wife would do in a film. Mark smiled at me and turned his hand around to clasp mine more directly. It felt clammy; I could sense he was nervous, despite being all grins and excitable snack runs when we stopped for gas in fentanyl towns. 

The house was the kind you see in the background of a Malick movie, behind the dancing camera — vinyl siding, a flag faded to the exact shade of a five-day-old bruise, a deep green lawn kept uniformly short. Gerald and Linda Halloran greeted me at the door with the specific, practiced warmth of people who had rehearsed liking whoever their son brought home, regardless of who that turned out to be. I have never trusted spontaneous affection, like a pleasant smell masking a more dangerous scent. 

Gerald poured himself a bourbon before Linda got out the charcuterie (a lamely sliced salami, pre-chopped Mexican-infused cheddar, and a sleeve of Ritz), and then another while he and Linda showed me the Mark-memorobilia cabinet I’d predicted, and a third somewhere during a long story about a boat he'd sold years ago that nobody at the table had ever seen, and at no point did anyone's face so much as twinge. Linda refilled the bread basket at almost the exact moment Gerald refilled his glass, an old married choreography, each of them managing a different kind of hunger in the room without acknowledging the other's. When his hand shook slightly setting down the gravy boat, sending a thin brown apostrophe across the tablecloth, Linda was already reaching for a napkin before it landed, saying something about the table being uneven, always had been, this house, older than any of them, and the conversation simply reformed around the spill the way a creek reforms around a landslide.

I watched all of it the way I watch anything I intend to pore over later. Nobody at that table had discussed, was discussing, or appeared to have any intention of ever discussing, what I understood by dessert to be the actual subject of the meal. There was a whole grammar to it:  the redirect, the specific way Linda said "Gerald" that functioned less as a name than a gentle nudge. This was a family that had built, over what I guessed to be several decades, an entire infrastructure around not noticing an issue, an infrastructure so stolid and ensnared in the environs it seemed to have always been. 

I had three glasses of the wine that Linda refilled before they emptied, and some cold, comparative part of me measured myself against Gerald to establish my own reasonableness. I was the least of anyone's problems (Mark had two beers the entire night, each of them he left with a frustrating half-inch of liquid at the bottom of the bottle). I told a story about a client complaint I'd defused at work, sanded down the moments where I’d ranted at a colleague so intently they had no response –  just widened eyes – and watched Linda's face do the specific thing mothers' faces do when they've decided you'll do fine.

Once, when Gerald started the boat story a second time, verbatim, I saw Mark's jaw tighten in a way I recognized, because I'd felt my own jaw do the same thing in a conference room eight months earlier. He opened his mouth. I watched him decide, in real time, against whatever he'd been about to say, and reach instead for the salt, and shake it onto his salad with force. I’ll go to my grave wondering what it was Mark had inside him at that moment, what was upon that tongue of his that he decided to hold. 

Driving home that night, headlights illuminating a stretch of shitty freeway that had found us on the way up, I thought about what I'd watched all evening and I felt, against every instinct I would have predicted in myself, some comfort. I understood, how you understand a system once you've watched it run for a few hours, that this was not a family that fixed things. They simply got quieter about them, moment by moment, inch by inch, until the thing in question had been reduced to background murmur that constituted ambient sound. I thought, watching Mark's hands steady on the wheel, it was the single most reassuring thing I had learned about my future.

Crowned

I was standing in a Syracuse hospital corridor holding a canvas bag of things some baby app told Paige she'd need:  a phone charger, a specific brand of chapstick, a going-home outfit for a person who did not yet exist, adult diapers. Meanwhile, Paige's boyfriend Cody, nine years her junior, paced a four-foot stretch of linoleum like something recently released from a smaller enclosure.The inherent time marker that the baby posed – nine months – reminded me I still hadn’t sold Mom’s house. 

Cody was twenty-four, worked nineteen hours on a good week at the Home Depot by the good KFC, and had told me, unprompted, that he was "in this for real" with Paige, a phrase that struck me as the kind of thing a person says specifically because some other, truer thought is standing directly behind it. I did not doubt that he believed it at that moment. I doubted, privately, with the specific bitter confidence I reserved for things I'd already decided, that the statement would age poorly over a decade, when this soon-to-be-real child entered middle school. Cody wore a lanyard from a job he wasn't currently at and he kept touching his own face, which was spotted in acne, which likely made it worse. Paige had told me he’d mostly cum on her leg when they fucked in the abandoned beer garden of the bistro at which they’d met; nonetheless, some of his sperm – so motile, so young – found its way to her eggs. 

Our father arrived at 10:40am in an Abercrombie blazer, for a labor that the OB estimated would run past two in the morning. I understood before he'd finished crossing the waiting room that this appearance had an expiration time built into it. He shook my hand (actually shook it, a full transactional pump, the handshake of someone once told a firm grip analogized strength and masculinity) and bent to kiss Paige's forehead with the professional tenderness of a mourner laying a wreath. "You'll keep me posted," he said, to both of us and neither of us, already checking his watch in a gesture he’d rehearsed. He had a Homeowners' Association meeting, he explained, that he was already going to be late for, and you couldn't attend virtually for variance votes. Paige, between contractions, caught my eye over his shoulder, and once the elevator doors closed on him we laughed, really laughed, the kind that hurts a little and sounds hoarse on exhale, which you only get with one other person on earth who observed the same climate pattern of a childhood as you. 

Mark came by before things got serious, carrying a duffel bag of snacks and flavored ice chips, and offered to stay. He meant it in a way that made something in my chest do an unfamiliar thing — knowing if it had been me on that table, Mark was exactly the kind of man who would have held my leg and not flinched and not thought about himself, and that this recognition arrived as a fact I hadn't asked for and now had to store somewhere. Paige didn't want him in the room, though. She wanted me, and she wanted Cody, wide-eyed and pale and useless and hers, and so Mark kissed my temple and told me to text him and left. I watched him go with something that might have been disappointment on Cody's behalf, but really on my own.

As the night passed, the OB – a serious East-Asian woman whose name I don’t recall – used surgical scissors to cut the flesh between Paige’s anus and vulva. She made a series of statements as to its necessity which did little to minimize Paige’s whinny-like screams. I winced, too, watching Paige lose control of her bowels mid-contraction with a total, animal lack of self-consciousness I found more unsettling than the blood, because Paige had spent her whole life curating what people got to see of her, same as me, and here was proof that under enough pressure the curation simply stopped mattering. Cody held her hand and said "you're doing so good" nine or ten times in a row (from an angle where the violence was largely out of sight to him), as if he were practicing a new language. He did not look away from her face once, even when she screamed something at him that – whilst largely incomprehensible – was obviously very personal and very hostile.  

And then the baby was out, and everyone in the room went quiet like the moment after someone shoots a single bullet in the air, and Paige — sweating, torn, covered in viscera  — looked at the thing they set on her chest and made a sound I had never once heard my sister make in all the years I'd known her, something with no satire or irony in it at all. Cody, twenty-four-year-old part-time Cody with the lanyard from a job he wasn't at, put his hand on the baby's back like he'd been doing it his whole life and started weeping like a moron. 

I stood against the wall with the canvas bag still over my shoulder and watched the two of them undergo something biological that I couldn’t understand, with a small, cold drop somewhere below my sternum, in my coiled guts. Not because I didn't like babies, want children, or imagine them in my life. But whatever had just passed between Paige and Cody and the alien being on Paige's chest, my nephew, had happened without negotiation or performance, without either of them checking to see if it was happening correctly. I could not, turning it over every way I knew how, imagine a version of myself arriving at anything, ever, with such pure animalism.