Want, стр. 22
It was slippery linguistic manipulation, trying to find words but none of them quite working, love me love me, not like that, just stop it. We love you, let us love you, until it feels like every word holds its opposite inside it too. At least with hate you know what you are getting. Love like that, you forget sometimes it’s not love, that it’s empty, all words and performance, and still sometimes you grab at it, thinking maybe it will give what love’s supposed to give.
I think now that if I met them on the street I would find them completely fine and bland, just people. I would find them stunted and a little sad. They wouldn’t make me angry. It’s only because they are the place where the word “love” was built for me that I feel such fury toward them, that each time I get too close, I get so mad.
At the airport my mom cries but no one talks about her crying. She picks up the baby and my father holds the four-year-old and I stand separate with the car seats and the stroller and our bags. I strap the car seats in my dad’s Range Rover and my dad loads the bags and stroller in the back. He places the four-year-old into her seat, then asks if I can help him with the buckles, and my mother, having not let go of the baby since she saw us, settles her into the seat. We say as little as we can without ever stopping talking the whole half an hour that we’re in the car together. They ask the children all the questions. I jump in to clarify or to restate the questions to the baby when she doesn’t answer. I sit between them in their car seats and I hold tight to each of their hands and stare hard at the horizon—flat green marshland and rows of scrub trees, tall thin palm trees—so I don’t puke or accidentally say something that I don’t mean or scream.
We spend a week not really talking. Every night, when I can’t sleep, I read Henry Green, Party Going—1939, a fog has fallen and a group of wealthy people meant to go on an excursion are trapped in a hotel together; an elderly aunt might be dying and there’s drinking; a young woman takes a bath; the hotel staff pulls down the gates of the hotel and locks them, so that none of the people outside can get in.
The kids swim in the pool and at the beach and I go for long runs in the sand before they wake up. I run the same stretches of beach I’ve run my whole life, barefoot; I get blood blisters on the first couple of days, on my big toes and the balls of my feet, and I pop them and they harden over and the pain goes away. The water’s warm and I take off my shirt and shorts and there are hardly any waves. My parents go to work each day. In the morning, before leaving, dressed in her suit, wearing the lotion that she’s always worn to match her perfume, that I could smell three thousand miles away, my mom lays out cereals and fruit and bread and makes me a cup of coffee. She dotes on us. She’s bought every food I’ve ever mentioned that the children might like: cheese and chicken, avocado, fig bars. The temperature inside the house is perfectly controlled.
We drop my mom at work so we can have her car to drive around, to go to the zoo, to get lunch. Three of the five days that we’re there I drive my mom’s car past Sasha’s. Once, when the kids are both asleep and I’m just drained enough by the sun and weary, I almost pull into Sasha’s parents’ driveway before I remember she’s not there.
I hardly shower the whole time we’re there and stay salty all day, traipsing sand over my father’s perfect floors while he stays quiet, mostly, wincing as our girls climb on the couch that I know no one sits on most of the time. He sits, usually with the TV on, while the children choose their cereal, while my mom makes dinner at night, while we all work not to fight.
I love Florida and I hate it. It’s warm here even though it’s still wet and cold in New York, and the beach goes on for miles with almost no one there. The stretch I run each morning is my favorite stretch of beach, my favorite stretch of land, maybe, in the world, so gorgeous and familiar, elemental to me; it’s a thrill to share it with my girls. Every other part of this place, though, makes me anxious; my parents talking makes my body clench and I feel the children’s bodies clench because mine is. They get worn out from the sun and throw tantrums. They can tell I’m not quite steady and they cling to me all day, crawl into bed with me at night.
I keep thinking I’ll ask my parents for money. I think vaguely, when I said yes to coming, that this was why. I keep thinking: Their house is so big, and our older daughter keeps asking why they have so many bathrooms. It’s lots of open space, dark wood, and blues and whites. They’ve gotten better over years at being wealthy. Neither of them grew up with money, but now they hire the right people to teach them how to spend what they have.
I was twenty-one when I told them that I did not want their fucking money. I was just out of college, stupid, privileged. What I was saying was I dare you. Try to find some way to love