“You know, you do have a lisp!”
“Sorry?”
“The barest lisp. I never thought about it before.” Estrin pointed at the magazine, cross-legged on the bed. “This poem. It sounds amazingly like you.”
“You don’t say?” Farrell took the Fortnight and read down the page:
TWO VOICES
You go to church, love,
but your speech swells with a salacious underbelly,
fingering, dirty; your man the heretic
dislikes naming parts of the body.
On the whole he sounds abnormally polite.
Your suggestions are guttural, up in my ear;
your man’s, sibilant—
he has the barest lisp,
which no one seems to notice
but me. Your questions pitch in major,
his in minor key.
Your invitations reach, grip,
and pull me in, hands wrapping the back of my neck;
your man’s drift off, smoke from a chimney,
the Mournes sinking to mist.
In the arches of your chest,
vowels echo in the big Protestant sanctuary
of a good living congregation.
Yet for all your man’s haranguing,
the preaching of the unconverted,
emphasis with wine so spit flies,
his i’s remain diffident, e’s whispered secrets
between pews at Mass.
Your consonants dig in,
the heels of heavy boots;
his are light-footed
and leave no print.
You will explain the difference
as between confidence and uncertainty.
For me the difference is shape:
you aim straight out.
So much of your man dips back in again—
he talks while he inhales.
He curves forward and withdraws,
to pierce himself with s’s,
corkscrew. Most of all you want to know
why I care—shape? I lie by an arrow.
I curl by a spiral prick.
I ask which is better designed
to uncork me.
Roisin St. Clair, 1988
“Don’t see it.” He tossed it on the spread.
“Right. You’re the one who hears his voice on the radio and ‘feels nothing.’ I guess you feel nothing when you read about it, too.”
“I don’t think about myself as much as you do. I’m not interested.”
“Who’s Roisin St. Clair?”
“Haven’t a clue,” said Farrell. And that was the truth.
Estrin kept a regular regimen: alternate days she weight-trained; on the others, she ran ten miles. She was allowed one day off a week she did not always take.
There were variations. While in top form she could average a 6:35 mile, her time would inch up or down and served as an interesting barometer: slower, she could be sure of getting a cold, or she was depressed. Estrin was rarely certain when she was depressed and had to check her watch, just as some people will to confirm it’s nighttime when others can simply notice it’s dark.
Lately her time was slow.
Further, while the amount of weight she pressed would edge up through the season, with those inexplicable spurts and plateaus characteristic to the sport, her speed and form varied a fair bit: the rapidity with which she brisked from one station to another, the crispness of her pull, the grace with which the slabs of iron rose and fell on the Multigym. These daily differences gave each workout a color, her life an emotional profile—the bench press was her analyst’s couch.
Over the years, the nature of the regimen had also varied. Some winters she’d swim, mix in wind surfing or sculling, but that there was a regimen of some kind, and a vigorous, even fanatic one, had not changed since her early teens. As a result, even when she’d first gotten her period it was irregular and rare, and since fifteen she’d taken a progesterone supplement to menstruate.
Like Farrell, she was not a team player. She would never enter organized marathons, weight competitions, or swim meets. She would not even play doubles tennis. And while she preferred racket sports to the drearier lap and clang of more isolated disciplines, she could never rely on squash because she could never rely on another person.
It had been almost four years now since Estrin had been back to the States, and one of the ugly revelations of that last visit had been the athletic revolution overtaking her country, obsession with fitness now demoted from an element of personal to national character. Estrin ran in Philadelphia to find a splatter of purple joggers suddenly underfoot, like droppings. Worse yet, a gaggle of female weight lifters in pink tights had roosted in her local gym, so unsettling the atmosphere that she switched to swimming that season, before she hopped a plane for Israel and left the whole unpleasantness behind altogether.
For back when she was thirteen, Estrin had been looping the football field when the rest of the junior high was bingeing fish fingers. She began weight-training at twenty with her first motorbike, needing upper body strength to control the machine. She’d been the only woman in her university weight room, and the men were resentful. It took months to win them over, until, eyeing her diligence from a station away, they granted her a grudging respect—the boys even seemed a bit proud of her by the time she left. The point being, she had not picked up weights from admiring Cher plug Jack La Lanne. Then, Estrin figured this happened to eccentrics in the States all the time: suddenly the entire country is playing Go, wearing your Kenyan kikoi, collecting Fiesta ware; you and your innocent, solitary interest in kayaking is suddenly engulfed by 250 million people doing nothing else. You’re on your yearly trip down the Colorado, but this summer there are collisions with slick, expensive shells, problems with campsites. So do you quit? Do you allow these nouveau kayakers to crowd you out of a hobby you’ve nurtured since you were ten? That was America: it would swallow you. Because how could an obscure thirty-two-year-old traveler point to an entire country and claim, “You don’t understand! They’re imitating me!”
So Estrin decided this was one more test. Tolerantly, she would allow her culture to borrow her fixations, confident that in the long run it would give them back. She would wait the country out, sharing, in her maturity, her weight rooms with the girls who read magazines. Sooner or later an article would tell them to do something else and she’d have the place to herself again.
For Estrin could not afford to give up athletics out of any transitory rebellion. She did not know quite why she worked her body so hard, but she did know sport was a linchpin of sorts, and if it was ever pulled, every discipline in her life would collapse.
Because Estrin might have quit men, countries, and her entire family, but never a ten-mile run. Once tied, the battered gray shoes took over. Sometimes the shoes ran ahead. Though inside she might feel tired, a separate energy burned from underneath her. It seems she was blessed or burdened with a body that would exhaust itself well after Estrin herself; the body would overtake and outlast her. Aging to herself by the day, it mocked her in the mirror with its sleekness and impatience. Sacked out with a whiskey late at night, she would puzzle at the withers twitching her lap. For while Estrin felt the immanent approach of some interior end point, the dumb animal was romping mindlessly on. She wondered what it would be like in the years to come, trapped in this horsy, quick, restless creature, dragged from corner to corner like a surly aunt on holiday, taken touring the town when she would rather stay by the fire and drink.
However, much as she might relate to her own body as a pet, it was a beloved pet, and continent to continent she depended upon its constancy, its recognizable Braille rippling under her fingertips, its bravery in bad weather, and whatever it was that took over the knotted shoes and would not relinquish until the gate closed back behind them over an hour later, she suspected this was the real Estrin Lancaster, what Farrell would claim you had no business having a relationship to because it was you. Estrin might have her bad days, or even bad whole countries, but as long as the animal did not falter, finished its course, and never skipped a station in the weight room, the stars did not realign, the earth might tremble but never shook her off the planet altogether. Estrin would accuse herself of petty vanity if it weren’t something more reverential, even more religious than that, for an eclipse of her calves would surely plunge her into black, heathen despair.
“I suppose raising a barbell or two is one of the few things you’ve actually accomplished.” Dial tone.
Estrin turned red, rammed a musty towel in her pack, remembered shampoo. This was the story now: baiting hostility sandwiched with florid romance, neither of which seemed true. Last week he’d given her a book on the Soviet Union. She was not sure which of them he was trying to punish.
Estrin had chosen two hours in the gym over an increasingly rare dinner with that man. He understood perfectly well why she couldn’t skip weights, and that was what made him so angry: how dare any girl be as inflexible as he was.
Today there was something curiously unpersuasive about her preparations.
Likewise, when she marched through reception, dressed brusquely, and pocketed her locker key down the hall, Estrin felt papery. She had the nagging feeling of having forgotten something; though she’d dutifully remembered soap, socks, ID, she seemed to have forgotten why she was here.
Ordinarily the Queen’s weight room felt homey, though it would hardly strike strangers so: neon glaring from two stories high. Rubber tiles flapped on corners, paint chipped from free weights. Handles were missing on the Multigym, and there were never enough cotter pins. Much equipment was jury-rigged, bars bent, benches propped with two-by-fours. The aluminum mirror made you look fat. Men threaded aimlessly between dilapidated stations with no urgency or routine. As weight rooms went, this one was not serious. But Estrin enjoyed the atmosphere here, haggard and outmoded, for since the Green Door, she was refining a taste for the second-rate.
The mumble was marked with staccato clicks and clangs, sentences with excessive punctuation; barbells pounded the floor as the overambitious couldn’t quite make the press. Usually Estrin found this funny. Tonight it jangled her nerves.
Officiously, Estrin adjusted the sit-ups board to maximum tilt. She hooked her toes under the padded rod and rested her fingers ever so lightly on her temples, to begin fifty fast, tight tucks. With sit-ups, prefer speed to repetition, and never let up tension until the conclusion of the set.
But when Estrin rose to her knees, her bluff was called: her eyes widened; the curl slowed, her elbows trembled. When had this ever been so difficult? Ludicrous; she began every workout this way, three times a week, and she’d been at this tilt for a month now. Estrin coaxed herself with normalcy, This is what you are, this is what you always do, without this you are someone else, this is important, and while all she got back was So? Why? Be someone else, then; I’m not sure this is important, she did rouse herself through forty-nine.
Forty-nine. Estrin looked around her, surprised. Why was the room still upside down? Her toes lost their grip, and she slid toward the floor.
No major lapse. Forty-nine, fifty, big deal—but that was the point. How hard could it have been to do one more? And very well, it didn’t make any muscular difference, except Estrin Lancaster was a stickler, and if she went for fifty she did fifty, not one shy.
So the next set, more onerous than the first, she did fifty—a nervous fifty, a hysterical fifty; and on the third determined to do fifty-one.
She did not. It was fifty and again the stop, so when she clambered off by the aluminum, she glimpsed the bloated image of a complete stranger.
Estrin shambled to the Multigym with her head at a tilt. There was an explanation. Adjust a few screws in the head, old girl, a bit of tinkering and you’re right as rain. But she slipped the pin in at 24 kilos, feeling a complete fake, and again the first shoulder press was rude. The weight rose with no enthusiasm and would even have mocked her if the nature of the Multigym had not been essentially stoic.
Beautifully, exquisitely stoic; Estrin had always admired the venerable contraption. She liked to picture it square and mute in this room after hours, austere in the darkness, comfortable in quiet, with no need to lift itself. Masses of metal, like rock, exude a great stillness despite how you might force them to move, and Estrin felt she was violating the eloquence of the iron today by provoking it to squeal absurdly up and down.
At the station next to her, a scrawny student was wrenching at the seated cable row with far more kilos than he could handle, not exercising his lats at all but his lower back. A sorry performance at which Estrin would ordinarily crack a private smile, but tonight she glowered. Turkeys did not understand the first principle of lifting: Form over Weight. In fact, Estrin had often tried to work this paternoster into a wisdom of wider applications. That it was better to do small things well than big things badly was too mundane, for the insight was grander than that: Form over Weight—maybe best left alone, majestic in its obscurity.
However, during the next two exercises she watched her own form crumble. Over the bench press, the bar wobbled. Her preacher’s curls were stingy. And the evidence was clear. Ordinarily by now, her veins would have risen, her arms hanging short like a gorilla’s; her wrists would have pumped with blood until her watchband cut circulation to her hand, her skin taut as the rubber of a water baby. But tonight her watch was perfectly comfortable. The veins, if anything, had crawled back to the bone. Her skin was white and dry.
It was not until the wide-grip pull-downs, though, that Estrin began to confess this was not simply an off day. Help me, she implored, and to whom? Oh nuts, I am not halfway through. She kneeled on the mat and crossed her ankles behind her, exhaling as she pulled the bar to the back of her neck, but while she had always rather relished the implicit supplication of the position, in the past she had knelt and bowed her head to grace, to power, to concentration, to excellence, to lifting more and more weight with all the more impeccable form, to the Great Protestant God of Dissatisfaction, tonight she was Catholic, confessional: Forgive me, Father, for I have sacrificed, for nothing. Hours and hours I have entered this room to spend the precious energy of my life for nothing. To raise iron and not children or standards or even roof beams, metal which will fall back to the floor when I am gone. Father, I run for nothing. I run toward nothing. I have only understood flight, I have never run to anyone’s arms. Father, sometimes I’m sick and still won’t stop running, and I shit myself. Farrell did, too, but he was trying to stop people from murdering each other, and I shit myself for nothing. I have caught myself on, Father, as they say in Belfast. I lift weight without mass.
The iron bullion clanged back to the stack from three feet up the cable. The entire room paused in its reverberation and turned to the American. She was still on her knees, rubbing her hands; the bar swayed crazily over her head. They watched as one of their regulars stumbled to her feet. Usually Estrin tossed her damp hair from her face and bounded from the room with a salute, joking about having earned her pint. Tonight she looked down. She scuffled. Wasn’t the wee Yank, someone commented, a bit poorly?
The cap was off the Bush before the coat was off her back.
“When you pick up that glass, what are you reaching for?” Estrin had once asked Farrell. “Peace? Excitement? Death?”
“Effect,” he considered. “Of what kind? Well, that hardly matters.”
So in its expression of nonspecific desire, drinking was almost abstract. It struck her that the cult of alcohol was not all bad. Its belief in resort was still a faith of sorts. Estrin poured another short. Convinced there was no comfort, she wouldn’t bother.
Distractedly, Estrin crumbled soda bread. The loaf was stale, and somehow this cinched finishing the whole hunk. Eating the bread made her feel bad. That was the idea.
Estrin moved on to the raspberry preserve, scooping it out by the fingerful, toward the bottom of the jar having some difficulty with her knuckles jamming around the neck; she licked them clean. The more reasonable approach to these foods would have been to spread the raspberry on the bread, but that would have been civilized indulgence and this was abuse.
Though in a small kitchen, Estrin pipped from counter to sink like a dried pea in a Lambeg drum. She killed the Horlicks malt powder, but scrounged little else—dry muesli; the plain flour took considerable swill. Trouble was, no fudge brownies lurked in her cabinets. In groceries, Estrin blinkered past butter icing to carrots. So she poked at treacle and hoisin sauce straight from the tins, the combination gratifyingly horrific. Until finally she remembered the Stilton cowering in the hydrator.
Unwrapped, the cheese wafted and drove Estrin back: an ambivalent food. There was something repulsive about Stilton—its rind of festering blue-green and weak pink, so redolent of decay; its smooth, rich meat so sickly sweet, but veined with corruption, edibly spoiled. Stilton is insoluble, opaque. She could never eat enough of the cheese because she didn’t understand it. She sliced it surgically with a sharp knife into thin specimens, laboratory slides. Every slab disturbed her more than the last, which ensured she cut the next. There was something wrong with Stilton and there was something wrong with a taste for it and there was something wrong with Estrin, so Stilton was the ideal food. Bridging liking and not-liking, the flavor suggested revulsion was a form of appeal. She finished the cheese.
Estrin opened the refrigerator three more times. A piece of lemon pickle gave her acid indigestion. She was still hungry. She would stay hungry, too. Standing at the sink spooning malted milk was like trying to fill one hole by filling another, so that every time she looked at the hole she wanted plugged, it was as empty as before. What’s interesting is that knowing full well that the malted milk was landing in the wrong hole did not stop her from shoveling it in anyway, because when afflicted with this gnawing emptiness, you have to do something, even if it is wrong.
Confused, Estrin wandered to the living room. It was hopelessly early, only seven o’clock. The kitchen safari had taken, maybe, twenty minutes. While she could limp through a light dinner with Farrell from 8 p.m. to closing, it was possible to consume three or four thousand calories in a quarter of an hour. How much your whole life was, as Farrell would say, trappings.
Likewise sex, the nitty-gritty, took less than five minutes, as Estrin noted with a glance at her watch when she was through. You could keep most of your clothes on, unzip, get the job done, buckle your belt, and there you were. For women, there wasn’t even anything to wipe up. But this time, not even bothering to recline on the sofa but remaining upright in an uncomfortable chair, Estrin admitted as she never had exactly that sex by yourself did not always feel good. In fact, masturbating tonight had much the same quality as the Stilton, the like–not like, the little badness. Under the unflattering overhead light, she pictured herself slouched in the untidy room with paint cans, jeans binding her thighs, her stomach bloated with whiskey and muesli and lemon pickle. Though she’d read often enough you can “satisfy yourself best,” her fingers felt ignorant. The orgasm was boring and laborious.
While relieved it was over, with the nagging twinges of renewed tension Estrin suspected it was not. She only halfheartedly tugged at the jeans. Estrin often experienced lust as pain, only to be met with pain—grasping down again, she felt no pleasure. Scratching was more satisfying than masturbating tonight, defrosting the freezer would have been more fun. This time at least she came more quickly, but the orgasm was worse, heavy, hesitant, a shudder. It did not round up nicely but stuttered off, unpronounced. Promptly, the itch grew more insistent than before, so it was no use pulling up her jeans again; doggedly, Estrin went back to it, with annoyance, only wanting the twist between her legs to go away.
It was after the fourth time that Estrin realized she had a problem, for while to come this many times in an evening was not unusual for her, in company or by herself, to still feel this randy after was. Launching dutifully into number five, she found both that she didn’t have any choice and that another go would only make the urgency worse. She pressed her crown to the chairback until it hurt. Her knuckles chafed on her zipper. Her socks flopped off her feet, comically, but ugly-comic. She slouched lower, and coming was stupider, slower, a squirm, a turn in her chair. Six. She counted orgasms like sets, first with perverse fascination, later with increasing terror, as six only went to seven, ever less full, ever more demanding when it was done. Her buttocks ridged from the seat; the taste of whiskey in her mouth turned rancid. Soda bread, Horlicks, and raspberry rose. Estrin crawled up and splashed some water on her face, but it dried quickly and left the skin tight. The chair was waiting.
Estrin came twenty-five times. By the end she wept, arced so far off the seat her knees hit the carpet. Please, please don’t make me, please no more, please—Finally the gullet could swallow no more, for the last climax was one or two spasms, a little gag.
Estrin stood, shaking; her head was light, her clothes damp, her skin blotchy. Her right hand ached, and her genitals were swelling. Incredibly, deep inside the sore, abused flaps the tingle tugged again, petulant, unsatisfied. Estrin hung her arms, a haggard mother who would finally let the child cry. Worst of all, she checked her watch to find the entire erotic nightmare had consumed only an hour and a half. It had at least exhausted her, so breaking three records in one evening, she faltered up to bed at 8:45.
The next morning, Estrin tried to act normal, and nearly carried it off except for a few telltale flaws, the kind by which an astute dealer can detect a forgery. Reading the paper, she had to keep going back to the beginning of the article to remember what country it was about. In Safeway, while one jar of jam, a single package of biscuits were routine indulgences, Estrin looked down to find several foreign products in her care, even losing track of her cart in baked goods because she didn’t recognize the lemon Swiss roll, iced fruit buns, and Madeira cake as groceries she had chosen. Oh, it wasn’t like being someone else entirely; the basket was piled with the usual four pounds of carrots, two cabbages, and whiting fillets, but instead of one drab allotment of petits beurres, there appeared chocolate oatmeal mini-flips, Walker’s thick-cut shortbread, and bourbon creams. The world had not turned on its ear, but there seemed to be a tiny hole in the universe through which these alien packages were streaming.
She returned to collect her laundry. She stood for several minutes waiting for Estrin to stuff it in a duffel and strap it to the bike. Estrin didn’t. She shrugged and went downstairs to cut wainscoting for the dining room, hoping Estrin would show up to tend to the clothes before the cleanerette closed. Sawing the baseboard, she would ordinarily have drawn straight forty-five-degree guidelines, but today she only eyed them, resulting in cockeyed corners of a sort that signaled, according to Estrin herself, that you shouldn’t lend her money or ride in her car.
At 4:00, in her most magnificent impersonation of the day, she bounded upstairs in a performance virtually indistinguishable from Estrin Lancaster getting ready to run.
Though the blue and the green shorts were both clean, she insisted on rooting through the entire pile of dirty laundry for the red ones. She paused with an irregular shiver between tying her left and right shoes.
The weather was nippy but dry; nothing to complain about. The first few strides, her molars clacked. Her feet went plop, plop, plop, not pet, pet, pet. She concentrated on not reading the An Phoblacht mural one more time, and consequently read every word.
Over and over, five miles uphill, and why? Here she was, always switching countries, how was it that wherever she went she re-created what she had before, one more ten-mile course? Change itself became the same old change, newness got old; even the erratic became pattern. There is no such thing as perfect randomness, she remembered that from math. Randomness is an abstract ideal to which you can only imperfectly aspire, for in her determination to do nothing and live nowhere, she always fell shy; as an absolute, too, no rule asserted a more ruthless order than chaos.
Her shoes splatted; her fingers fisted; her side stitched. The only part of Estrin that was really running was her nose.
Suddenly, outside the cage of the Felons, the plop, plop, plop went quiet. She looked at the fence and the view did not shift. Fence. Estrin looked at her shoes. Suede slick, stripes torn, heels rounded, toes worn to sock, the pair would have constituted a remarkable monument to perseverance had they not been deathly still.
Estrin felt calm. She had not, in fact, decided to stop. She had stopped, which is different. She read a poster for Diary of a Hunger Striker at Conway Mill. Well, well, she thought, almost cheerfully. Soon the sky would fall, pigs fly, and the law of gravity be repealed. Orbits and the behavior of molecules in a gas were no longer reliable. Your pet would bite. Maybe that explained the self-appointed apocalyptics on street corners: they had risen to do what they had always done, until one day they had not: the end was near.
Estrin wandered back through Milltown cemetery, humming. Protestant vandals had recently attacked Republican headstones with a sledgehammer; crosses were toppled, a statue of Mary dethroned; the big black honor roll of the County Antrim Memorial was cracked. Impressive work, she thought, big rocks. But the destruction did not make her angry or sad. It had happened. Estrin kept humming.
Back down the Falls, the letters I, R, and A did not form an army. All of West Belfast floated before her in pieces—soldiers stalking backward, children throwing stones, quotes from Wolfe Tone bobbed separately past like balloons. The afternoon felt festive, like schooldays ended early from a sudden snow, a presidential assassination. She had reached for a little knob in her own life and turned it off.
Because what made this woman’s to-and-froing possible was that Estrin herself was immovable. She had not changed her hairstyle since she was ten. She would not have dinner with you because it was Thursday, and that meant the weight room. Philadelphia to Bangkok, she always brushed her teeth beginning with the right back molar. In theaters she sat in the very front or the very back, always on the aisle, the better to get out. If you had not been to the movies with her before, she would reliably subject you to her theories about where you placed yourself in a crowd: Estrin didn’t understand people who sat in the middle. She wrote letters on narrow-ruled notepads, and it didn’t matter if none of these details cohered neatly into Traits—the important thing was that she would never walk into a stationery anywhere on earth and pick up wide-rule paper over narrow without having suffered a brain seizure. A tiny, stubborn bump on a big planet, with no profession, no family so’s you’d notice, no national allegiance, Estrin was only conceivable for being a homebody, staunch, cranky, conservative, and for two days in a row now she had been winking out like a badly screwed in light bulb.
So Estrin walked into her living room as if a new acquaintance had invited her in for tea. It was only 5:00, with extra time now to do her Russian exercises before work, but Estrin picked up the grammar with the polite disinterest of a guest paging while her hostess put the kettle on. She flipped it open to the last chapter she’d memorized. None of the words looked familiar. Though technically studious, in fact she’d been losing vocabulary by the day. Estrin would pick up a karandash on the weekend to find by Monday it was merely a pencil.
Estrin was poor at languages and had slyly sought countries where English sufficed. This time, for more foreignness, farther afield than ever, she would relinquish the very words in her mouth. If that terrified her, so be it—harder, farther, longer—the shadow of the lamp pull crossed the dialogue, a raised whip. Farrell’s A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union glared from the table, a beautiful hardback of well-produced photographs at which she had barely glanced. But it was a nice present. Wasn’t it?
The grammar dropped. Her hands felt alien to her thighs, her body a jalopy pieced from different cars. The half-trimmed baseboards, half-refinished furniture, and half-plastered ceiling no longer exuded the atmosphere of projects that would be finished. Photos of far, far too many men leered from the wall.
Where is my mother? And has my mother ever dissolved in the middle of her own house? Mother, do you ever lose your way from the kitchen to the foyer? Mother, I am unmoored, I have come too far! Like the afternoon when she was three years old: Estrin looked about her, having adventured past her stoop, chin raised to the wind, patent leather braving down the pavement, and suddenly did not recognize the neighborhood. At least at three she had cried, and a kind old man had called the police; they had driven her back up the street in a squad car asking, patiently, as she wept, “Is it this house? This one?” Finally, though the whole world had grown strange and even that last house looked foreign, as it would evermore, slightly crooked, ajar, her mother shouted from the porch and tumbled to the car. But when Estrin got lost at thirty-two there was no flag of an apron, and across the Atlantic her mother would die without a daughter. Estrin was not even disoriented down the block but in her own living room; there was no kindly old man, only a not-boyfriend who couldn’t tell the difference between an emotion and a model airplane; the British Army crouching down her street with SLRs had replaced the friendly Philadelphia police, and she could not cry. She could not marshal nearly so focused a sensation as loneliness or fright.
Estrin discovered she was standing, for she no longer felt related enough to her furniture to sit in it. For once time had passed quickly; she would have to hustle to be on time for work. Necessity is a kind of solace; however haphazardly, Estrin fit herself together again and stood at the door in her leather jacket, with her keys, her helmet, though with that vaguely unwholesome air of the repaired. She glanced behind her before killing the light; like the manse in Philadelphia, 133 would never look the same again, an architectural changeling. Likewise, outside, the countryside looked arbitrary. Estrin had no idea what she was doing in Northern Ireland. Eventually this happened everywhere, and more than men or wanderlust explained why she had to leave.
Maybe you’ve seen it now: both had lost their mothers. Farrell because his had held out, refusing to give him anything until she got everything, until she got more than he had or was. Farrell had offered, too, had sat before her as if on the other end of a seesaw; feet dangling, he had never weighed enough for her. He could not remember a single time she was pleased—chess was trivial, though she would cluck when he lost; good grades were only to be expected; his Christmas presents were squandered money or too cheap. With choices of failure and lesser failure, disapproval and disapproval in the extreme, he had found an eerie freedom—how little difference if he curled with Talisker. Long ago he’d climbed down from her teeter-totter, leaving her, arms crossed, still waiting for his spindly soul to lift her off the ground.
Maybe that accounted for her nagging efforts to feed him when he went home—and how ironic, all that chopping and baking, when in any of the important ways she had starved him to death. Besides, he was uncomfortably reminded of Hansel being fattened up. For what? Or if the feeding was not ulterior, it was at least guilty—and should that parade of apple tarts be apology, he turned desserts down flat: he did not accept.
Estrin, however, had a fine mother. Ruth Lancaster had cut the sections of her daughter’s grapefruit. She had hugged the girl tight even as she felt the child stiffen like overwrought metal in her hands. Estrin left those arms behind because she could not afford the comfort. Her mother’s generosity was too easy. It wasn’t fair to be loved for nothing. There were people like Farrell out there working so hard to be held, and here Estrin had come into her embrace with all the injustice with which others inherit mansions, swimming pools, mink. Estrin traveled the world to prove she was worthy of what was given her without leaving the house.
And so, exactly, this was duplicated with their mothers inside. Estrin would never brave enough tortured countries, win enough strangers, press enough weight, cut a perfect enough corner at 85, keep a fine enough figure, or fire a sufficient quiver of exotic stories over wine. Farrell would never lose enough sleep, deliver enough useless lectures, leave enough women, dispose of enough gelignite. And so long as they could never win themselves, they would never win each other, for you cannot earn what is free.