Menomonee Falls
Side by side and alone in the quiet of failing daylight, the two felt much like the last survivors of some slow apocalypse. Behind them stood the house, a small and opulent monstrosity that strove for elegance through the trappings of larger, more expensive mansions. The pair felt the emptiness of the house behind them, could perceive the vacant windows gazing down at their backs. All was silence and motionlessness.
They sat so close that their knees touched now and then, only when their knowledge and awareness of the situation faltered and allowed them to relax like two friends, or even two strangers. Histories can cause distances greater than ignorance or fear, and this pairing knew this now with an acuteness that bred pain as much as any knife wound.
Yet earlier that day they had not known the truth which so readily glutted itself on their silence now. Rather, they imagined that the stretch of history and passage of time would allow them a conversational experience if greater than almost any before them, then at least pleasant and meaningless. After all, both reasoned, enough time has passed between us that surely the open wounds of our dissolution have closed, and the venom has run its course through us and left us pure once more.
Time would prove them wrong, though in the market each had felt their own unaccountable pull towards the other.
Bright lights had washed Annie in a bleaching luminosity that made her wish for the dimness of the outside’s foundering dawn. Home for the first time after six years of absence, she found herself alone in her house, her parents gone for the weekend on a trip planned before her own itinerary had finalized. She had awakened early and finished off the last box of cereal and, finding nothing more to eat, had set out to the supermarket to gather enough provisions to last the weekend.
Likewise Raymond had found himself home for the first time in nearly half a decade to bury his cousin, killed in a car wreck earlier in the week. Unable to endure the solemness of his childhood home, wreathed as it was with the vestments of mourning, he rented a room at a local motel and was foraging for ready-to-eat foods that he could use as a means to further justify his absence at the funereal house.
Seven years previous the two had walked these aisles together, hands pressed, fingers laced. They had been shopping for a picnic, the last they would take together, though neither of them knew it at the time. Now they were there by happenstance, and had actually crossed one another’s path twice before without realizing it.
At the baker’s counter, though, they both paused to see if the bagels had come out yet, and there, able to linger and better observe their surroundings, they finally had the opportunity to remember one another.
They began by saying the others’ name, smiling widely, perhaps too widely, and embracing only with their arms. They pulled back, laughing at the magnitude of the coincidence, brushing aside all thoughts of improbability and allowing themselves to simply marvel. Mechanically, instantaneously, they felt the draw toward conversation.
“What brings you back to this old town?” Ray said, still smiling, unsure now of its integrity and sincerity.
Annie threw her hands in the air, keenly and uncomfortably aware of the way her body and mind reverted to stereotypes as a means of dictating her actions. “Oh, you know, just visiting my parents, saying hi to some old friends who never got out.”
“Right, right,” Ray said, unable to conceive of a world in which that repetition could be construed as anything less than hostile. He was, like her, painfully aware of the fabricated fiction they seemed to be existing in. Yet, they both still remained primed for conversation, eager, though unsure of how, to talk about their lives like two adults.
“Yourself?”
“Oh, you know, same reason,” Despite his impulse toward talking, it didn’t seem right to him, to tell her about his cousin. She has been gone from my life for so long, he thought to himself, why bring her back in with that.
But it was more complex, he knew, than just that. It was something else, something basic and primal. The time for her to care about his pain had passed. The moment for her to share in his experience had gone with the passage of time. She had no right, he thought to himself, to know the tragedy of my life now. Yet still he felt the pull, the urge to continue talking to her, an urge he could not place on a spectrum of reason. He simply wanted to prove he could, though he never thought if he ought to.
Anne nodded her head and said, “Cool, cool,” while wondering where the need for repetition came from. He had set the tone with his assertion of the rightness of her reason for being home. Now she followed because there was no other remaining precedent for their encounter. “So are you staying with your parents, or…”
“No, no, I am at a hotel. I didn’t want to put them out, you know? Hence the shitty food.” He nodded into his hand basket filled with microwavable semi-food. Inside he flinched at having sworn, though he knew it had never bothered her before.
“Oh, well, if you want you can always come over to my parents’ place for dinner one of these nights.” She offered without knowing why. The politeness, the social contract of not turning away someone who you know and could offer some kindness to. All of these might have informed her decision. Or else it was just habit bred by film or television. Yet though she knew not where it came from, she still slight anticipated his assent and had some vague hope for a pleasant evening shared with him. Their schism had occurred so long ago, and she wanted so badly to know that she was above holding on to past grievances.
Ray shook his head, but not too firmly, and smiled at her. “No, no, thank you, though. That is really kind of you.”
“Well, how about drinks then,” she said, allowing for the subtle scaling back of the offer to give her a clean conscience when they eventually parted ways without saying another word to one another. There was a pang of regret in this thought, however, born of disillusionment over the fading chance to prove their maturity.
But Ray saw the reduction of the offer as a doubling down of intent and desire, and his own politeness and curiosity forced him to consent to her request. “Sure,” he said with a smile he didn’t fully feel and a sinking sensation he could not place nor control. Even still, he said with what he assumed was sincerity, “I would love to.”
And so they found themselves on the back porch of her family’s suburban home, nestled on the edge of farmland, the two environments meeting as uncomfortably as the disentangled lovers, long estranged and vacant of speech. They had found, upon meeting and swapping banal facts about one another, that there was no engine, no drive to continue speaking.
In the house their conversation had been hushed, shallow and superficial, seemingly sustained only to fill the void created by the walls around them. Outside, however, there was nothing to live up to, no walls to disappoint with silence. Neither had said anything of any consequence in some time. Their anticipation of adult, matured conversation with their long ago partner had faded, replaced by a pang of some rising emotion neither could place.
Raymond continued to conceal the fact that he was in town to bury his cousin, a man who Anne had met once or twice, if his memory served him well. He could not find the energy, even in the uncomfortable silence, to bring this topic to her attention. Nor could she bring herself to tell him about the dark spot on the x-ray, the subtle threat of cancer that had brought her home so that she might prepare her parents in person for the news when it finally came.
She examined her own motives for this deception and found that it had nothing to do with what he had earned or what she felt he needed to know. It all came down to her control over information and the way it would make people perceive her. She didn’t want Ray to think he had to reconnect with her, or atone for anything. She did not want his pity or his sympathy or his company. Whereas before she had wanted to see where they had ended up in life, now she only wanted to extend him this courtesy moment together, and to watch him walk away so she might tackle this beast with the kinship of those she truly cared about.
In the distance a cow let out a low, unenthusiastic moo, and was greeted by silence. No other animal in the pasture stirred, but in time a bass rumble made its way over the hills, and a train gave a long, distance whistle blow as it made its way through the empty countryside. Both sounds came as though they were a call and response, though neither spoken in the same tongue, nor uttered for the same reason. Just a passing coincidence, a chance pairing from all of the chaotic possibilities. Neither cow nor train gained from the experience, though both shared it.
Anne and Ray looked at one another, smiling, neither upset nor happy, annoyed or engaged. They sat, simply existing, sharing space, speaking in two languages, their words weighted with the meaning and context that only their own minds could create and only their own selves could acknowledge. Each of them knew this was meaningless, and each of them was at peace with the inconsequential banality of anything they could say or do, though that something still lived beneath the surface, rumbling distantly like the roar of the train or the baying of the cow.
Now each of them felt it fully, knew it wholly. It was not the pang of lingering longing, or the bile of rage and reclaimed indignation. It was the void, the emptiness of knowing that this person had taken you as far as you could go, had shown you all they had, and that now they were to you as a broken car to a stranded motorist; objectless, stagnant – a monument to a failure neither repairable nor worth revisiting.
(Title by Kathleen O’Connor, originally published June 30, 2011)