Losing It. Emma Rathbone

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СКАЧАТЬ was talking about my sister. Vivienne. Remember Vivienne?”

      I paused. Three memories came flooding back: Vivienne presenting to me, with quite a lot of fanfare, a framed seashell on some kind of burlap background, and not knowing how I should react; Vivienne getting her hand caught in a glass vase, her fingers squished in its neck like a squid as she developed a fine sheen of perspiration on her forehead; Vivienne’s head tilted back thoughtfully against a stone fireplace. Vivienne. Weird, distant Vivienne.

      “Oh yeah,” I said. “How is she?”

      “She’s fine. She’s still in North Carolina.”

      “Really?”

      My father never talked about his family, or his childhood in the South. His father was an alcoholic, he had a sister who died. A car accident. And that was it. When I pictured his upbringing, which wasn’t often, I always imagined a series of sturdy, tired, old people standing next to an overgrown pickup. We’d only ever spent holidays with my mother’s side of the family—all the cousins and aunts were hers.

      He muffled the phone. “What?” he yelled. He came back. “Your mother wants to talk to you.”

      “Where in North Carolina?”

      “Where I grew up, outside Durham.”

      “And, I mean, what is she doing?”

      “She’s fine. She works. She’s got a business painting scenes on plates.”

      “Excuse me?”

      “A business. Painting scenes. On plates. She’s actually pretty good.”

      “She paints plates?”

      My father sighed. “It would be nice for the two of you to reconnect.”

      I wasn’t sure where this came from. He’d never cared before if I spent time with his relatives.

      “Like, dinner plates? Does she make a living that way?”

      “Hi, Julia.” It was my mom.

      “Hi, Mom.”

      “How are things?”

      “Fine,” I said. “I heard about your plan.”

      She cleared her throat. “Yes!”

      “Dad said you needed to work out some stuff?”

      “Yes, well, no, this isn’t … We’re fine.”

      My parents had been married for a long time. They’d started their own business together, an online retailer called the Trading Post where they sold used saddles, a niche they’d managed to corner, and that drew on my mom’s know-how from her riding days when she’d been Collin County’s regional gold medal eventing champion. They’d always been dismissive of each other in a way I’d taken for granted and sort of admired. I thought that’s the way it was with married adults; you ignored each other all the time in a brassy, warm way. It occurred to me now that maybe it hadn’t been so warm.

      “I overheard,” my mom said. “You’re thinking of spending the summer with your aunt?”

      “That was just something Dad said.”

      “Well, it might be nice.”

      “Yeah, well.”

      “Have you seen her plates?”

      “No,” I said. “When would I have done that? Why would I have? I don’t even understand what they are.”

      “She’s pretty good at it.”

      “Yeah, well. No. Nope. I’m not going there. There’s no way I’m doing that.”

      One month later I drove down a thin driveway, gravel popping beneath the tires, toward a house with white columns in the distance. All around stretched raggedy green fields, shiny in the late-day heat. I looked at the piece of paper on which I’d written Vivienne’s address: 2705 Three Notched Lane. I had no idea if I was going toward the right place. It had been a while since I’d seen a turnoff, much less a mailbox with an address on it. I passed a large twisted weeping willow. I passed a slumping wire fence. The house, bright in the sun, was on a gentle swell, and behind it was a dark line of trees.

      It was only after I’d gotten off the phone with my dad and adjusted to the idea of not being able to go home that the idea of Durham began to take shape. I looked it up and saw that it was a midsize city with a lively downtown area and a historic-district repaving project, and that’s when the idea began to take shape. Scrolling through the stock pictures on the tourism part of the website, I saw one of a man and woman laughing at a candlelit dinner. Another showed a couple wearing bright T-shirts and lounging in each other’s arms and staring at a hot-air balloon in the sky.

      I thought, This is where I’m going to lose my virginity. It would be like going to another country; I would be completely anonymous. I could do whatever I wanted, and it wouldn’t be attached to the chain of small failures I’d managed to accrue in Arlington, where I might run into Jessica and Kidman, or in Arizona. I could go to a bar, meet someone off the Internet, join some kind of singles-outing group, whatever. I could be one of these people, walking hand in hand in the sun next to a glass building in a revitalized business district with refurbished cobblestones. I didn’t even care that the graceless plan formulating in my head—of just getting it over with, in some anonymous encounter—was so far from how I’d always thought it was going to be, because I was so desperate to get rid of the albatross around my neck. The new plan also had the added incentive of basically being my only option.

      I continued slowly along the driveway. A humid breeze came through the windows. It had been a sticky seven-hour drive that included two wrong turns and lunch at a shopping complex where elevator music stood in the air like pond water. Northern Virginia had been a three-lane highway lined with sound walls, which opened up into strip malls, churches, thrift shops, and gun stores as I got farther south. Then it was pretty, sloping fields, and pastures and farms; small towns with deserted streets and mansions set back from the road and fruit stands and dark, closed-down shop fronts. The way got narrower as I approached Durham, and for forty minutes I trailed a truck with two haunted-looking horses inside.

      I tried to bring up all my memories of Aunt Viv. I kept thinking of us playing the card game Spit in our kitchen in Texas. I must have been ten or eleven years old. I thought of our hands whirring over the table, over ever-building and eroding piles. Viv is wearing a cotton shirt and she has an air of quiet superiority over her. But I don’t mind, because the companionship I felt with her was like being the sidekick to someone immensely capable. I remembered walking slowly through the backyard—she must have been visiting for the summer—and she’s pointing out what different plants are called, satisfied by my interest, a soft tower of facts. The feeling I had about her at the time was that she knew a lot of secrets. That there was a funny helix at the center of everything and she was the only one who was aware of it, and she would convey this with an amused side-glance that only you were meant to be in on.

      I pulled up, got out of the car, slammed the door, and stretched. I looked around. A hot, wide, creaking day. There was the echo of faraway hammering. In the distance on each side were the trees and fences of other properties. The house was weather-beaten red brick, СКАЧАТЬ