The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [127]
“No, it’s strengthening, I think. Forgiving him means you don’t need him to help you be you anymore,” Dana said, or something along those lines, and I remember feeling uncomfortably, almost painfully, hot, down there on the floor, silent on my side, in the dark on her white shag rug, angry again, certain that she, too, was in on whatever conspiracy was afoot of people who knew what I was thinking and wanted to make me admit I didn’t understand myself at all. And then, on cue, Dana asked from the dark (though it looked like one of her dolls speaking), “Now you’re mad at me, too, aren’t you?”
I could say so little, couldn’t say why I was crying, why I loved Dana more than anyone I’d ever known, why I only felt truly myself when I was with her. But at least I knew it, and my hand was already up above me, squeezing hers on the bed as I coughed on my tears.
Desperate to be unique and desperate to be joined to someone else; desperate to be free of my father, of influence, of expectations, of limitations, and yet desperate to be contained and defined, known and understood; desperate to be lauded for my distinctiveness and loved for my similarity. I was desperate to be like my sister and loved by my sister, who had somewhere found the secret to originality.
Those mystifying dolls under the bed, lit from the hall like stage actresses, dressed in incongruous outfits—stewardess skirts and pillboxes, Regency high-waisted drawing-room dresses, military fatigues, cheerleader sweaters and kilts, tiaras and ermine robes—they, all of them, were enacting some scene from inside Dana’s head. They, all of them, were aspects of her, all abandoned under the bed the day she no longer needed them to sort out who she was.
So much of Shakespeare is about being at a loss for identity, being lost somewhere without the self-defining security of home and community, lost in a shipwreck, confused with a long-lost twin, stripped of familiar power, taken for a thief, taken for the opposite gender, taken for a pauper, believing oneself an orphan. But Dana had somehow settled all that on her own. I knew she would never be at a loss, no matter what life’s drama did to her. Dana was never an article of stupid faith for me. She was my only undeniable fact.
I drove to her apartment to face what I had done.
47
I POUNDED ON THEIR DOOR, out of breath, hoarse. It was unlatched and swung open on my first blow. I ran in, ready to gulp down whatever pills she’d taken, ready to join her, ready to fall on her body, ready, I promise, to die for my mistakes. I swear it: I look back at that moment and I see no hesitation or posing in what I meant to do. I deserved to die and I meant to die.
“Arthur Rex,” Dana clucked, as if at a naughty boy.
I slumped down onto the floor at the sight of her and Petra sitting on the couch, sipping hot drinks, Maria on his back between them, a two-woman tummy rub in progress. His head hung backward and upside down over the front of the couch, the tips of his ears almost touching the floor. Our mother was in the kitchen. I shook and hyperventilated and gagged, laughing and crying and shouting. My nose ran uncontrollably, and I asked half questions that everyone ignored, and I ended on my knees, trying to hug Dana’s legs. “Don’t do that.” She kicked me away gently but firmly, like a dog humping her shin. I couldn’t stop shivering. “Go warm up in the bathroom. Come back when you can listen.”
I stood for several minutes under the warming lamp, looking in the vanity mirror, trying to recognize myself or anything of what was happening. I didn’t move until I heard impatient scratching on the door. I opened it and followed Maria back into the living room.
I stood before them and heard it all recited back to me from a different narrator’s view. When I winced and turned my eyes to the carpet, Dana said, without any humor at all, “Look at me when I’m speaking to you, please.” She had