1.
Your father calls you train wreck, as in, HEY, wake up, train wreck, bud, you’re falling asleep—beady, bootblack eyes narrowed on you from the Hemingway chair in the basement.
Your mother is memorizing two-letter words, your baby boy squeezing the dog’s fur, and gentle, gentle, your wife is saying, practice gentle on the giraffe.
I don’t very well like the taste of rubber, says Paul Hollywood––suaven, yeasty fellow in a collar on TV.
Your son likes rubber. Rubber rings––Rings of strength, your father grrs through a bruxistic mouth––and rubber carrot and rubber giraffe. Très lashy, Miss Giraffe, with mists of peony-pink blush girling her moue.
It’s universal, your father says. All kids know what to do with Sophie.
2.
Enough. Enough hiding out with your parents in the Midwest, a pandemic stopover charted by your wife. Enough constant monitoring of your blood sugar, blood alcohol level, blood relations; enough taking blood from noun to adjective. Enough being stuffed with the quarantine menu of pantrified stuff: Cameron’s Coffee, canned olives, canned mushrooms, Pace salsa, Hint of Lime, Srir-ranch-a, dino-nuggets, chicken snausages, 2%.
Velvet Moon or Morbific Midnight, a deep red your wife dislikes but drank at dinner.
Dinner was chicken from the Osseo Meat Mart. You’d requested a vacuum pack of kielbasas to take with you to Greenfield when you were ready-Freddie-steady enough for your own home. When your wife felt safe leaving you around your son, no grandparents on backup. Wasn’t that the point of counting grams of protein, up-and-at-’em-Adam-Anting? But nothing was enough. You were at dinner, but not really, and your son was gumming Sophie while your mother was asking how friends in Greenfield were faring.
You took the phone from the slant pocket of your sweats to read messages. Susan sent something, you said. Here you were, finally eating. Couldn’t get out of your email. You’d been waiting to hear back from an agent. Any agent. Couldn’t X out and find your texts. Susan, you said, pawing at your phone, struggling to form a sentence (your wife had called you incoherent), searching for more words like searching for a jar of white pepper in the museum of your parents’ spice cabinet, where Emeril still bammed on five blends.
Bloodrush to your cheeks as you nodded, leaned, bent over, fighting with your phone.
—
Goodnight, Outlook. Goodnight, Safari. Goodnight, Twitter. Goodnight Pink Cloud. Up-swipe, up-swipe, like reading to your son: goodnight Joe Rogan and James Altucher and Bill Simmons and Ryen Russillo. Big books guy, Russillo.
Susan, your mother said, gently, sipping her glass of milk.
No more! You put the phone face down on the table next to a paper napkin printed with ursinia: five suppers straight, you’d been using it as a fork-rest.
You feeling okay, bud? your mother asked, and soon you were gainsaying, focused, pulling butterflied chicken through a bleed of barbecue sauce.
3.
Enriching the dough makes it quite finnicky, you hear.
Think of yourself as enriched, at least en route to enriched, tender with eggs and butter, becoming a definite pleasure.
So you are taking the proactive stance. Closing your eyes, seeing a gentle version of yourself. Four and twenty promises baked in a pie. Quoit, quoin you know for Scrabble. You are imagining yourself a warm can of 7Up, rolling over an extramundane green lawn. You are a dominant ingredient in conflict. Yes, you do hate sugar but even there a story peeps through.
The sweet of acetone on your breath—You reek so bad I bury my face in the pillow, your wife said, between practicing French on her phone. D’habitude, je me réveille à quatres heures. Mint alcohol.
Aperitif of mouthwash, swallowed or spat. What does your blood do with the molecules?
On TV, under the tent, pistachio-green fridges hinge open like hours. Proofing drawers, oiled joints, a montage: squid ink loaf, activated charcoal, moldy toadstool boule, entablature of crust on a popover.
4.
You will be happy to be in Greenfield, even if Jim’s is closed, the ploughman’s plate is gone, The Garden has become a lazaret, and campus is closed, all those anger surveys from the ’70s mildewing, some south somewhere in W. E. B. Du Bois Library. You will be happy, even if your wife is snide about the baleful cabinets in the cramped kitchen, the particleboard shelves that chunk off like biscuit dough.
How do you still love her? No more! When will you take that step, say it?
This afternoon, jogging, you recited the serenity prayer as she railed at you for not reading, not reading novels, horror novels, when you said you were ready to sell out, write something popular. If no one bit, toss in the towel. Fuck it, you thought, have fun.
You were running together under I-94, on a plank bridge three miles from where your mother was watching your son. The babies on the bus go wah-wah-wah, she’d been singing, twisting her fists, as you’d hopped off the porch, all laced up.
A warm day with an apricot sky, day where it takes no guts to run. On one side of the plank bridge, a murky trickle marries the lakes; on the other, boulders spray-painted, in grape-soda purple, She was your teenage dream.
5.
God didn’t give you the ingredients to become a Baked Alaska, your sponsor likes to say. He made you the Baked Alaska and gave you the torch.
6.
Your father’s rough hand on your shoulder—so he has gotten up from his chair. He is a former gym teacher scarred by a Catholic-school childhood. Now, whistle hung up, he’s the Eeyore equerry of his quarantine-clan, foregoing the hard stuff in your honor.
You insist the left side of your face into the tweed armrest. No, you don’t read, you think: you take books off the shelf.
Stringy breath escapes your lips. The pillow-hummingbird peck-pecks. Your father heavies a sigh. Picture the giant eye of a needle. Picture a paperback fragile as rough-puff on your nightstand. Everything decocts to:
a) How perishable are the riches of this world.
b) Bit stodgy. ’s a shame.
7.
Running together, you noticed. The love-lacked look scored your wife’s face as she forced herself forward, as she plumped her chest and pretended to be Miss Perfect Health, as though she hadn’t been touting the ennobling art of starvation herself for a decade.
Of course you asked what was wrong.
What’s on your mind, you said, another version of the same question, like how on the baking show, contestants made two flavors of madeleines, lavender and matcha, beating the wearying tick of time.
What’s wrong? you asked.
Nothing.
Guts?
Poems.
New?
Sure.
Auto-da-fé.
Millefeuille.
A quarter-mile of one word-answers.
Then, running on Dunkirk, passing a prefab graveyard, your wife stopped. Her eyes were on a headstone engraved with a bow for ROBIN CARRILLO, and she was breathing shallow breaths, hands on her waist, and, yes, wow, how many times these last few weeks had you pinched the curve of her ass, the curve that kissed the back of her thigh, the same number of times she resisted? You’d had enough of her yet still you were domestical, civilized as a Bakewell tart, and there was that zymotic thing between you.
Who wants to be buried in Maple Grove? she said. Brides in Pink, Widows in Red.
You quirked an eyebrow. A tent post advertised $25 lawn mows.
She was reading a history of pink—as in the color—and did you know? Here was the—no, wait. She pinched at her waist and cricked her neck.
I want to live aflame, she said, I’m moving toward it, in that direction, it being the light, trying to be the light. It’s not that I need to be enlightened. Reading, Lent. I need to do something with my enlightenment. But maybe we should stay put. A little longer. You know? How are you feeling? Would you want to stay? Would it help? . . . with recovery? With . . . doing the steps?
The cars turning into Wal-Mart weren’t turning out. Full drive-thru at White Castle, windows postered with fries and gold-brown fish fillets. You saw your wife gag on the thought of fryer oil.
The world stopped. I’m not the one who needs help, you screamed at the clench of her ass.
I’m sure they’d love if we stayed, you said. Bonus time with their grandson.
You wore a scratchy, gruel-gray wool cap, and when you started running again you pretended it was a knit pandemic mask and pulled it over your face.
8.
Was she so much better than you, back at pre-pregnancy weight, reading novels to the baby boy, doing stupid phone French on mute while nursing? She showered first, and when you got out there she was, engorged and sighing on the bed as she relaxed into the latch.
You put on sweats. She was mumbling over his head.
Un.
Homme.
Et.
Une.
Femme.
Mangent.
Les.
Pizzas.
Your parents never ordered pizza. It had been a Tombstone childhood. Jack’s, maybe DiGiorno’s. And now it was: Do we need to go to the store? Can we get by?
Your first Sunday in town, your father plunked venison sausage patties in a pool of black beans, slid on a Pam-fried egg, a steaming heap of dirty minute rice. Your wife had the right idea: she pawned the meat off on you.
Delicious, she’d said, gaping at you. Thanks very much.
Eat up, your father’d said. Who’s it? Plato? The best stomachs don’t reject all food?
I’m going to hang with my parents, you said. Need anything?
She shook her head, patted the baby’s round loaf of a bottom.
9.
All this time, you had a good heart. Still stiff from the run, you went down to the paved trapezoid below the deck, where your dad grilled. He kept two sunchairs there, on either side of the Weber, a lemonade table.
You sat down next to your father. His eyes were red-washed from briquette smoke and Busch.
Avert the danger that has not yet come, you heard on a reflection podcast, and if you could inspirit yourself enough to not foul up God’s plan, you could tell your father that you:
a) You wanted to divorce your wife because
b) You were afraid of becoming him—drunkstuck, out-of-luck, end-of-the-line motherfuck. Could you say what you really wanted? A twenty-four pack of not becoming your father. You wanted to do the things you fell in love with, whatever they were, wrung free of booze.
The sky above the swamp beyond the fence hemming in the backyard was cinnamon-smudged and Minnesota pure; flushed, frowning, your father matched.
I’m tired, he said, his voice silty. Getting too old for this. Fixing the printer, edging the lawn. This whole house just for us? Me and your mom are going to kill each other in all this. He shook his head. I’m tired, he repeated, but I’m exhausted just watching you two. You three. But you two. See the way you two’re just running in place. All your big accomplishments, your articles. I mean, it’s great, but you’re going nowhere.
Behind him, a full moon was about to make its entrance. It would be practically falling into the high school on the other side of the cul-de-sac. Suddenly you were sure you could not look at your father without weeping. This man: tied for top source of resentment in your life. This man, who loaned you these sweats, elastic snapped like an old bone.
He stood up like a rusted machine and walked over to the grill. He lifted the corner of its cover, enough for you to see a picture frame face-down on the grate.
That’s right. You had been busy. Cleaning your spiritual house. Emptying walls.
“Give me a hand,” he said, nostrils flaring. He nodded to the tongs on the lemonade table.
You were afraid, but also you were Baked Alaska. You were auto-da-fé. Your sponsor weighed three-hundred pounds and, with the laugh of a blackjack dealer, liked to cackle: What aren’t you afraid of?
Your father was facing the house, the windows to the basement, where in a few hours everyone would be watching bread week. When you were through at the barbecue, you hung up the tongs on a hook on the grill by their little suede loop.
10.
The Renegade. Your wife said cars that color—alligator green—used to be everywhere. She was a chaos of dogmatic ideas. She liked color, identifying trends, and grapefruit seltzer.
It was after dinner, then, and she suggested the walk without mentioning how you’d already walked—run—and called your entire life plan into question. Little do you know, you thought, feeling gleefully iconoclastic. Every day you were thirty-eight, thirty-eight, thirty-eight.
A Lab padded by wearing visor-style sunglasses.
Scottie Pippin, your wife said, when you knew she meant Horace Grant.
You did not correct her; you did not laugh. She had not mentioned how spacey you were at dinner, so this was a medium-polite walk. No, you could not get to the messages on your phone—you were fumbling, thumby, lost at the table—and maybe she hadn’t noticed, but of course she had, sitting next to you, hypothesis hacking. Alcohol? Not eating enough? Not eating right? Too much ginger ale? Too many carbs? Is your body secreting ethanol? What is wrong with you? She was a hawk always hunting, and you were a mouse or a thermal updraft. The sky was nursing the same cinnamon sunset. Your parents were with the baby boy. The night had wound itself tight around you, squeezing out fragments of the day, and you thought about how, running past the townhomes across from Sam’s Club, your wife was saying that in black-and-white movies all the men were actually wearing light pink shirts. Pale pink shows up soft white on film. Red: sumptuous black. If you wore black, the camera recorded it as muted, rainy.
You got as far as the trailhead, where ENJOY YOUR WALK was bubblegummed in sidewalk chalk. Already, your neck was tired of holding up your chin. You were slipping out of your body, heart a hummingbird. And, thank Paul Hollywood, your dog was not cooperating.
Let’s go back, your wife said, a strongbox of disappointment.
Yes. You felt ill.
11.
Each of the past twenty-two nights, you’d watched the show with your parents, and each of those nights your wife and your mother were the first ones in the basement. John Wayne on one wall, a waxen walleye from a fishing trip to the Boundary Waters on another, carpet spongy with years of flooding. Drinking cheap red wine, kissing baby feet, queuing up the bakers.
What week is it this week? you said.
Bread week, bread week, bread week. That’s where you were the ninety-eighth night of the year, the eighty-ninth train wreck, the sixty-eighth day without a drink, when you realized everything had to change. These were numbers in your notebook. Like the virus, changing every minute.
One second, you said. Don’t pause.
12.
At first you thought you could tell your father.
I need to be better than you.
Then you realized step four was step four to you and only you. It shaped your whole sobriety, but it was only a page written with disappearing ink dissolving in white wine.
You could explain the resentments you harbored. You could divorce your wife. You could be the minotaur in a labyrinth of judgments.
Instead, you stood at the top of the stairs, listening to a country song play through the walls. You heard a can kiss. La bière est ouvert. (French trivia, your wife has thrice told you: bière is also the action of putting a corpse in a coffin.) Your father was in the garage.
You went out to the deck. Darkness had nearly arrived, bloodying the Morello sun. Down, down to the trapezoid bricks. You stood by the grill, felt vigilish, rough. You lifted off the domed cover. Bits of chicken flesh blackened the rack.
Then you remembered your father’s stash out back. It felt nice, padding through the yard to a night rhythm, almost stanzaic. You were sober, sleepy, a fainéant, yes, a changeable man.
You went to the shed, a red hut shaped like an upside-down U. When were you last in here for any good? Inside, above a sawhorse, two pheasants mounted on the wall pointed at each other with their ensiform tails. The wrench-set smell, the honey-roasted cashews.
Your father’s mini-fridge here was stocked, you knew, but you were not tempted. And that was the freedom of progress. The fridge looked soft and blobby, an appliance in a cartoon. There were six cans of Busch in there on their sides and, when you lifted the flap over the freezer compartment, there was the picture frame. Latticed with char marks.
You pulled out the frame and studied your wedding photo. The youthful chubbiness in your wife’s bare arms, her dangly earrings, the lace and roses braided in her hair. And you. This was your body. What a baby you were. Eight years younger and hideous in a flaming red suit.
JoAnna Novak’s debut memoir, Contradiction Days, will be published by Catapult in 2022. Her short story collection, Meaningful Work, won the 2020 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest and will be published by FC2 this fall. Her third book of poetry, New Life, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2021. The author of the novel I Must Have You, she is a co-founder of the literary journal and chapbook publisher, Tammy.