The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [15]
I couldn’t think what a man like that would want up at a Jewish picnic field at night.
This was Murphy, walking away from me. I would formally meet him in a week, and not by accident. He was already canvassing Jewish families, probably had been for months, or even longer. Canvassing might not be the word for what he was doing. Cornering, manipulating, extracting. There is no precise word for this work. There can’t be. In the end our language is no match for what this man did.
6
That evening we got to work on Esther’s welcome-home dinner. We cooked in silence. This was us at our best, stew building, salad making, sweating, and braising. We cleaned as we went and we bussed each other’s dishes. Maneuvering around each other with polite touches on the arm. Claire and I were suited for joint tasks, parallel play. We were proud of how well we got along in the kitchen, when married couples were supposed to drive each other to violence while assembling a sandwich. Harmony came easily for us, and it was perhaps our most salient statistic, the least problematic of our virtues.
When Esther returned, we didn’t know it at first. She slipped quietly into the house and went to her room. The bus must have dropped her off, but we heard no greeting when she came in and our little welcome home ceremony never happened. Claire was putting some laundry away as I was setting the table when I heard her yell, “Oh my god, you’re back!”
A blast of one-sided chatter filled the air. Countered by the return fire of Esther’s silence. I saw no reason to intrude on their reunion. I waited at the table as Claire’s voice muddied into nothing against some part of Esther. This would have indicated the hugging and nuzzling, the probably exaggerated joy. I could picture Esther half squirming away, too embarrassed to openly enjoy the affection of her mother, but not cold enough to flee it entirely. I was bracing for her ambivalence to mature into a more liberal hostility.
“Esther’s home!” Claire shouted.
I held my ground.
Esther’s allergy to ceremony was predicted by all the guides we’d half read about teenagers. We saw it coming, then put our heads in our own asses. We were warned, but still we insisted on basic politeness as part of some dim instinct we had to remain in control. Esther abhorred all the functional vocal prompts one bleated in order to stabilize the basic encounters, to keep them from capsizing into awkward fits of milling and hovering. Hello and good-bye and thank you to strangers; good morning and how are you. These phrases were insane to her. She would pick the simplest rituals, the most basic behavior that people keep in their back pockets and whip out without a fuss, and wage dark war against them, scorning us mightily for caring about the exchange of niceties.
“What have you learned, Samuel, when you’ve asked me how I am?” she sniped once.
“Maybe I’ve learned … how you are?”
“Right,” she nodded. “And you can’t tell that by looking at me? Is that really your best way to find out what you need to know?”
“Sweetie, talking to you isn’t just about gathering information.”
“Apparently not, because you don’t remember a single thing I say. Your gathering mechanism is fucked.”
Had Esther just said mechanism?
She seemed in her element during these conversations, glowing with the power she had over me, as if I should enjoy it, too.
I’d parry with oily fathery lameries. “Doesn’t it feel better to say things to people?”
“Feel better? It feels like shit. It feels entirely like the worst kind of shit.”
Little did she goddamn know.
“Okay, darling, I’m sorry.”
And thus a rhetorical marvel was engineered: I apologized to Esther, regularly, for her refusal to be queried on her well-being. I regularly failed to mount cogent justifications for any of the human practices. They turned out to be indefensible to her. In the end I was a poor spokesman for life among people. Such were the victories of language in the home.
After they’d snuggled and debriefed, Esther trailed Claire out of her room. Esther looked heavily guarded,