The Point of Vanishing (9 page)

Mom broke into tears on the television. She was talking about my winning the Rockefeller, the fellowship that would send me to Italy for the next year. “You were just so confident. You just knew an interview was coming. You just knew.” She was openly crying, waving the camera away. “Turn that thing off,” she said. “Turn it off!” Dad, on the other chaise lounge on the back porch, held up my term bill for the camera. “Do you see what this is? Can you zoom on this? It says balance, zero. Congratulations! We made it. And congratulations on the Rockefeller! When you return from the year in Italy, maybe you'll apply for a Rhodes!”

No one in the room flinched. We had entered the realm of famous names now: Harvard, Rockefeller, Rhodes. And why not? We had all worked hard. We had all done our part. We had earned it. We, the Jews of Newburgh and Brookline, had arrived. Everyone was clapping, looking towards me. The video had ended.

I stood up, gave my brother a public hug. He was so large his embrace surrounded me like the shade of an enormous tree. I wanted to stay there as long as I could, to hide inside it, to emerge as someone other than the boy in the video.
Why had we all been unable to do this? Just to hold each other? To feel our pain against each other's arms?

“Thank you,” I said, stepping back.

“Congratulations,” he said.

The red, white, and blue OPEN flag hung limp in the windless cold. The building looked less like a restaurant than a hunting camp—a brown cabin with two windows you couldn't see in, a screen door probably salvaged from somebody's back porch. The parking lot was empty. I considered walking back to the car, but the handwritten sign in the window advertised HOT PIZZA—steam waves rising from a sideways triangle—and I wasn't ready to return to the house. It was about a week before Christmas, and Nat had finally come to plow. I didn't know how long it'd be before I made it to town again, and I wanted to hear someone talk to me and to hear myself talk back. It was something to stock up on, like soup or frozen pizza, something I'd be able to replay in my mind at night by the fire, remembering how it felt. It would be a tether back to other people, something I could pull on when I felt myself floating too far away.

In the checkout line at the C&C, I'd been mesmerized by the cashier. Her eyes spiky with eyeliner, the crisp curls of her tightly permed hair, the swaying of her mustard yellow sleeves as her surprisingly well-manicured nails rang up the items, her eyes flicking between the price and the keys on the register, then down to the next item on the belt. We made no small talk. She said what the total came to and I paid. Only the conveyor belt was between us, and the wonder was different than the wonder of seeing a snail up close—it was more specific, more familiar. It made me aware of my hands. I was looking at one of my own kind. The oval shape of her face, the almond shape of her eyes.
The questions in my mind
—Where did she grow up? Who did she love?
—sent a current through me that didn't happen in the woods. They were questions I knew, questions a person could have asked me. Coming back into the parking lot, I'd felt a relief akin to the relief of coming out of a hospital. I could feel the diagnosis as I opened the car door, as I loaded my bag of groceries into the backseat:
still human.

But I wanted to get a second opinion before returning to the house. I wanted to hear myself say something. To check on how the silence I'd been learning in the woods would turn into sound. More and more, as I snowshoed through the trees, as I sat by the woodstove at night, I felt something inside myself expanding, growing clear. That feeling I'd known as a boy at camp often spread through my chest, even beyond my chest, beyond my body, until there was no division between me and the land. But beyond the hills, where would that feeling lead? Could it fit into rooms and conversations? Not just into the stilted pauses on the phone with Matt but into something meaningful, something that had its own form? Could I carry it with other people—so that I'd stay grounded, in the most literal sense, so that I wouldn't lose myself again?

Inside the café, there was murky darkness. It took my eyes a moment to adjust. Two black tables sat beside the window, another two against the wall. There were no customers. I was just taking this in, relieved no one would look at me as I ate, when a woman shot out from the kitchen. “Well, hello. A good afternoon to you!” She unloaded a menu into my hand, her voice trailing behind her. “Table by the window?”

She moved with the electric jumpiness of a cartoon. “Right, let me tell you the specials of the house.” She set a glass of water on the table, brushed the stringy gray hair from her shoulder with girlish flair. There was a hole in her wool sweater where the shoulder seam had pulled apart. Her voice was pitched for a
party of eight. “We have Cornish pasties. A specialty. You're familiar with shepherd's pie?”

I unzipped my jacket.

“Right, then, a pasty is smaller. Filled with meat and onions and potatoes. All rolled in a nice pie and crimped on the side.” Her eyes pulsed with over-determined focus, as though fighting against whatever hardship the rest of her had been through. Her accent—I wasn't imagining it—was British.

“You don't have pizza by the slice, do you?”

“We do have pizza! Bella,” she called to the kitchen, her eyes still on me, “put the pizza oven on!”

“Yes, Mother!” a voice cried back.

“Now what kind would you like?”

I ordered a small cheese pizza and a Coke, which felt like a tremendous indulgence. It would come to $6.25, including tax.

“Very good,” the woman said. “Bella,” she called. “Do come out and say hello!” It was as though I had come calling and presented my card. The kitchen door swung open and a very tall girl with sparkling silver hair came out.

“Do take that off.”

The girl reached up to her head. “I forgot,” she said. She pulled the wig from her head, revealing a lush tangle of blonde hair. It was clear she had preferred the wig.

“This is Bella, my daughter,” the woman said.

I said hello.

The girl, who was probably six feet tall and no more than seventeen years old, curtsied theatrically, flashing a fake smile at her mother. Her body was ungainly, unformed, it seemed, by movies, by magazines, by any sense of the shape she was supposed to fit into, her hips up to her ears. But her face had the startling beauty of a Renaissance madonna.

“And I'm Linda,” the woman said, extending her hand. Her grip was shockingly strong. “Your pizza shouldn't be long.”

The room settled back into subterranean murk. I took off my jacket. I was relieved by the proprietress and her daughter—they seemed almost as peripheral to the town as I was. No gossipy waitress interviewing me about my doings in these parts. No short-order cook giving me the stink eye through his window. This café was just what I needed. To see people without the threat of being seen. To be able to sit somewhere public without having to situate myself in any public way. It was like a scrimmage, a dry run. Being with people without being with too many people.

Besides, it was pleasant to be sitting somewhere that wasn't the house—to be out on the town. And it was doubly pleasant to be somewhere communal that was quiet. In the C&C, I struggled not to be overwhelmed by the top 40 radio station playing from the market's overhead speakers. At the house there was no reason to dim my hearing. There was no sound that wasn't useful. I wanted to hear the fire—to know from the wind-rush and the popping if it was burning too hot—and to hear the birds—for their song and their company—and to hear anything, even if it was just a squirrel, that was approaching in the woods. My hearing had never been more acute or more necessary. But at the entrance to the C&C, when Elton John surrounded me between the sets of automatic doors, I felt as though a carnival ride were whisking me off the ground. I clutched the chilled handle of the shopping cart, did my best to keep a measured pace into the frozen foods, but inside me a roller coaster filled with teenagers sped and plunged, their hair flying straight up in the wind.
LA
,
la
,
la
,
la
,
la
,
LA!
“Crocodile Rock” bounced beneath the Elio's pizza boxes, making the freckled girl on the pink package of ice cream cones smile, loosening up the Jolly Green Giant in his green singlet of leaves. It bounced under the very tile of the aisles, and I didn't understand how the slowly trolling matrons in housecoats weren't all
feeling it too. I avoided their eyes, tried to behave as though I was in a library, but as the song ended, and the prospect of quiet marketing returned, there was Whitney Houston, desperate to dance with somebody—
with SomeBody WHO
,
SomeBody WHO
—and the wild-eyed cartoon rabbits and neon-colored birds on the cereal boxes looked as though they wanted to jump down from their cardboard warrens and nests and twirl with her down the aisle. The music was sugar in my veins. I caught myself tapping my thumbs on the shopping cart, smiling like a madman. Plus, there were the jingles and commercials sweeping off the boxes and jars as I walked past—
Choosey Moms Choose Jif
,
Have a Coke and a Smile
,
Help Yourself to Stouffer's Pizza.
Each product seemed designed for customers who couldn't see very well, the words and colors like the orange semaphores used to guide a plane. It all fizzed together to make me feel like I was traveling through a parallel land, something like Oz, only more familiar because it was the America I'd grown up with. Swiss Miss, Aunt Jemima, Count Chocula, the Sun Maid! They were all garishly reassuring—welcoming me back to their version of reality, which I was still invited to as long as I had a bit of cash. When I made it back to the house, a party would still be buzzing inside me. As I unpacked the groceries, Elton John and Whitney Houston would come tumbling back out, as though from a music box, down to which lyrics had carried me through which aisles. The Stouffer's pizza was still broadcasting:
Oh lawdy mama
,
those Friday nights
,
when Suzie wore her dresses tight.
The box of Life cereal: with
somebody WHO
,
somebody WHO.
The food somehow contained the songs, which themselves contained a map of my progress through the store. My senses were so open, my attention so available, that I'd absorbed it all without trying. Maybe my brain was still adapting, joining my vision and hearing together, somehow making everything easier to remember. Or maybe I was just starved for stimulation. Or
maybe some primal instinct for map making, for orientation, had returned.

Anyway, it was pleasant now just to sit in the restaurant's quiet. After some harried discussion from the kitchen I couldn't quite decipher, the tall girl came back with my glass of Coke. She set it down on the table. She hovered. To be so close to another person without words felt dangerous.

“You go to the regional high school?” I said.

“Mom homeschools me.
Homeschools
, that's a verb. We run the gamut. Even biology, which I loathe, but I suppose cells are people too. Or something like that. Our curriculum is really quite comprehensive.”

“It sounds it.”

“Yesterday, for instance, I was reading about zygotes. Do you know about zygotes? Do people walk down the street with thoughts of zygotes running through their heads? I certainly hope not. But I wonder. What if I'm the only one walking down the street with thoughts of zygotes? You know? Wouldn't that be peculiar?”

I considered. “Or with thoughts about those thoughts.”

Her eyes brightened. “Yes, exactly! Which probably makes me more peculiar still!”

“Or maybe just the opposite.”

“Maybe. Would you like to see me juggle? I've been practicing.”

She ran off to the kitchen. I took a long sip from my Coke. It was strangely exhilarating to be talking with another human being—and at such speed. I was doing well! It felt like playing a sport—the movement, the unpredictability. The way each response depended on the last, the way you carried each other forward, the way the words had a direction but could swoop and shift, like birds playing in the air. I'd forgotten the thrill. Did
people really do this all the time—minute after minute, hour after hour?

I told myself to be careful. She was so young. Which was reason enough. Besides, I knew from my years on the road my propensity for shifting my attention to a woman, letting my reflection in her eyes stand in for what I was searching for, tending to her wounds so I could run from my own. It was a bad song on repeat after my return from Italy. It happened in New Mexico with Ani, then in Arizona with Jillian, then in Montana with Melissa. Thinking myself a kind, genuinely interested fellow, I heard their stories and then had their ankles around my ears. And then I left. With an earnest good-bye, with an explanation about needing to go on searching, but what did it matter? Their letters, which I'd receive months later back in Boston, made a collection.
The walk along the river ... the hike through the canyon … the rain … the sun.… why are you so guarded? … you give with one hand
,
take away with the other ... no
,
I understand perfectly what you were saying
,
what you were saying is that you're an asshole.
Which is part of why I'd come to Vermont and moved into solitude, so I couldn't hurt or hide in anyone, so I couldn't go on stalling with some disposable version of myself. Whatever I was going to find, however I was going to get my bearings, I didn't want it to be in relation to anything that wasn't permanent—I didn't want it to be
relative.
I needed to find something that couldn't be taken away and that I couldn't leave.

She was wearing her silver wig. All hips and elbows and overeagerness. It almost made me feel safe—she was so young. “I'll just start with three, but I can work my way up to five.” The beanbags started flying.

“Bella!”

“I must away,” she said, setting the beanbags on the table as though I might want to try them for myself. They were made of
blue denim and patches from a red bandanna. I didn't touch them. I knew from my nights by the woodstove how dangerous even the most basic fantasies could be. The space inside me was too large, the stage in my mind too vacant. The images would get away from me and start following their own currents, just like dreams.

The mother burst through the swinging door. I realized I'd been holding one of the beanbags and hurriedly put it back on the table. She scooped them up, deposited them in her apron, and set down the pizza. The steam rose luxuriously off the cheese.

“Buon appetito!” she said.

A negative space of fireworks was beginning in my mouth.

“I hope she didn't juggle your ear off.”

“Not at all.”

“She's really a very intelligent girl. She just lacks company.” She rested her hand on the back of the chair opposite me.

“Understandable.”

“Right, well.”

She wasn't returning to the kitchen. She was contemplating the chair. To my surprise, I kind of wanted her to sit—but I didn't want to want her to sit, didn't want to trade stories of how we came to be in this town, didn't want to reassure her about her daughter and begin some sideways seduction, didn't want to get involved.