The Portable Veblen: Shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016. Elizabeth McKenzie

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      Linus, her stepfather, answered. “Hello?”

      “Oh, hi, Linus, morning! Can I talk to Mom?”

      “She’s asleep, dear. I’d say try in another few hours.”

      “Just wake her up!”

      “Well, she had a hard night. Had a reaction to the dye on a new set of towels we brought home. She’s been flat out since yesterday afternoon.”

      “That’s sad. But I need to talk to her,” Veblen said, grinding some coffee.

      “I’m afraid to go in there, you know how she gets. I’ll open the door a crack and whisper.”

      Veblen heard the phone moving through space, then her mother’s cramped voice issuing from her big, despotic head obviously at an angle on a bolster. She was never at her best in the morning.

      “Veblen, is something wrong?”

      “No, not at all.”

      Out the window, young moths flitted from the tips of the juniper. A large black beetle gnawed the side of the organ pipe cactus, carving a dwelling of just the right size in the winter shade.

      “What is it?” asked her mother.

      “A squirrel just came to the window and looked in at me.”

      “Why is that so exciting?”

      “It held out its paw. It made direct contact with me.”

      “I thought you were over that. Dear god. Do Linus and I need to come down and intervene?”

      Melanie C. Duffy, Veblen’s mother, was avid at intervening, and had intervened with resolve in Veblen’s life at all points, and was especially prone to anxiety about Veblen’s physical and mental health and apt to intervene over that on a daily basis.

      “Oh, forget it. Maybe it was trying to see my ring.”

      “What ring? I’m trembling.”

      Veblen blurted: “Paul asked me to marry him.”

      Silence.

      “Mom?”

      “Why did you tell me about the squirrel first?”

      She found herself in earnest search of an answer, before snapping out of her childhood habit of full accountability.

      “Because you like to know everything.” She pulled her favorite mugs from the cupboard, wondering when Paul would get back.

      “It’s very odd you told me about the squirrel first. I haven’t even met this man.”

      “I know, that’s why I’m calling. When can we come up?”

      “You said at Christmas it was nothing special.”

      “No, I didn’t. I just didn’t want to talk about it yet.”

      “Didn’t you have any sense of wanting my input?” And such an ironic question it was, for there had already been so much input, so much.

      “Of course. That’s the point.” She held the phone tenderly, as if it were an actual part of her mother.

      “I feel excluded from the most important decision of your life.”

      “No, Mom, I’m calling you first thing because you’re the most important person to me.”

      There followed a silence, for her mother tended to freeze up and ignore compliments and love, and court instead all the miffs and tiffs she could gather round, in a perpetual powwow of pity.

      “Well. Did you say yes for all the right reasons?”

      The coffeemaker gurgled and hissed, a tired old friend doing its best. “I think so.”

      “Marriage is not the point of a woman’s life. Do you understand that?”

      “By now.”

      “Do you love him?”

      “I do, actually.”

      “Is everything between you, good, sexually?”

      “Mom, please! Boundaries or whatever.”

      “Don’t say boundaries like every teenage twerp on TV.”

      It bothered Veblen’s mother that most people were lazy and had given up original thought a long time ago, stealing stale phrases from the media like magpies. Fair enough. The problem was that her mother always overstated her points, ruining her credibility. Veblen had learned to seek out supporting evidence to give her mother’s unique worldview some muscle, and in this case she’d found it in the writings of the wonderful William James: “We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct.”

      “Okay, Mom. That’s private. Better?”

      “Yes. It’s very important, and it’s also important to avoid hackneyed phrases, especially snide ones, which sound very déclassé.”

      Veblen pressed on. “We have things in common with his family and they seem really nice.”

      “A nice family counts for a lot, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. What do you tell him about me?”

      She could hear her mother scratch her scalp, raking dead skin under her nails. “Good stuff. You’re hard to sum up. That’s why we have to meet.”

      “I don’t know, Veblen. Nobody likes me when they meet me.”

      Veblen replied faithfully, “No, not true.”

      “Historically it’s quite true. Especially doctors. Doctors abhor me because I don’t kowtow to them.”

      “He won’t be your doctor, he’ll be your son-in-law.”

      “I’ve never met a doctor who didn’t wear the mantle of the doctor everywhere.”

      Veblen shook her head. “But he’s in research, it’s different.”

      From bracing them in defense since girlhood, her guts were robust, her tolerance for adversity high. By clearly emphasizing all that was lacking in others, by mapping and raising to an art form the catalog of their flaws, Veblen’s mother had inversely punched out a template for an ideal human being, and it was the unspoken assumption that Veblen would aspire to this template with all her might.

      “It’s very interesting that you’ve chosen to marry a physician,” her mother noted, with the overly crisp diction she employed when feeling cornered.

      “There are a lot of physicians in the world,” Veblen said.

      “We’re СКАЧАТЬ