Still Life

I remember telling her that the best part of the book was all the stuff that went on in their heads and she said that was how it was in real life, too. Thinking about it now, that’s probably true, but I must have appeared doubtful because she emphasized it, saying that’s how it was with her. The most interesting things she kept in her head. I met my dad’s eyes and he beat me to saying it out loud. Saying that we could hardly imagine what it must be like inside her head, then. Our lips curled in our silent chuckle at her expense, our shared joke that pushed her outside. And as our eyes sparkled, hers filled with hurt. And I looked away as she swallowed the lump in her throat, not knowing how to say we were just kidding around, why did she always have to take things so personally? He said it with an arm around her shoulders, I think, and I broke the silence by talking about how good the meal had been.

She got over it, blinking away her hurt feelings, perhaps hoping we hadn’t noticed, perhaps embarrassed at being overemotional, perhaps not. We passed our plates to the middle and she scraped all the odds and ends onto the top plate, piling the silverware, the crumpled napkins. My brother excused himself silently, leaving empty handed and oblivious. I picked up what I could carry: my glass and the salsa jar. Don’t bother keeping it, she said. There wasn’t enough left. He told me to wash it out and put it in the recycling. She told me not to bother, to just throw it away. He huffed at her, scowling his bushy, dark eyebrows as I walked out of the room.

I laughed, [i]you’re going to give me a split personality[/i], I said. I never knew which one to listen to. This time, I went to the sink, but if it had been peanut butter, I might have obeyed her instead. The salsa happily abandoned the jar for the journey down the sink drain. It was calming the way the water spilled over my hands, the spices filling my nose. Behind me, my father bent over and grunted. For a moment, his reflection in the window above the sink made it appear that he was having a heart attack. I turned abruptly, but he was just picking up some scrap on the floor. The grunt was just his back reminding him of his age.

My mother came in carrying the plates and chattering in such a way that I began to think I had imagined her mood just ten minutes before. She put the plates down next to the sink, thanked me in advance for putting them in the dishwasher, and kissed my forehead goodnight. I scraped the leftovers into the trash while my father ate ice cream out of the container. New York Super Fudge Chunk. The fullness of his mouth placed the burden of conversation on me, so I turned on the television to drown out our silence. He set his spoon on the counter, and quickly forgot about it, as he returned the box to the freezer.

On the way up the stairs to bed, he stopped, standing awkwardly and watching the commercial on the television. With his short attention span, he never had any patience for commercials. But he stood there, shifting his weight and breathing heavily, sounding like when you take a deep breath right before you say something hard to spit out. Like, to explain why neither was wearing their wedding rings. I held my breath in exchange for his heavy ones and leaned in, thinking he might whisper it. I tried not to look right at him, to let him get up his nerve. And I tried not to look too busy, so he wouldn’t lose it. But in the end, I must have done the balancing wrong because all he said was goodnight and disappeared up the stairs just as the commercials were ending and the show came back on.

That summer, it seemed like we were always missing what the other wanted to say. We did too much hiding the truth, too much guessing wrong. They couldn’t tell when I was joking. Like when my brother teased me for sleeping late and I snapped that I was sick of taking his crap and dad said [i]heyheyhey[/i] to calm me down when I wasn’t really riled up to begin with. And when I pretended to be offended that she had given me more paper napkins than anyone else at the table, they looked ready to diffuse an argument. And I resented having to mumble, [i]I was kidding[/i].

We were no longer fluent in the language of each other, missing the meaning hidden in a tone of voice. Perhaps time apart had dulled our perceptions. It was no longer a simple thing to eat dinner together without a crisis, or at least the feeling that one was inevitable, coming at any moment and avoidable only if you stayed on your toes. We were a painting of ourselves from ten years before. Before we had gone out into the world and learned the things that don't make polite dinner conversation. And now we were sitting here trying to fill our old shoes, trying to stay in character.

And I wonder now if her hurt eyes were my imagination as well as his arm around her that I thought was meant to soothe. I wonder if his heavy breathing and awkward standing were as much in my head as his keeling over with a heart attack. But I hadn’t imagined their swollen fingers. Twenty-five years of wearing those bands, their fingers had grown used to them, grown fatter and darker around them, leaving pale, sore indents where there used to be gold. And I might have imagined the sound of the guest bed creaking at two in the morning, but I had not imagined her red-rimmed eyes and broken voice saying, [i]we’ve just hit a rough patch[/i]. That wasn’t in my head because, for once, she had said it straight out.