Jenny

In the background you can hear the radio. It sits comfortably on the shelf underneath the family pictures, the first thing she ever bought with her own money. The pictures of her grandmother, her mother and her cousins are all propped against the wall behind the dresser. They can’t be arranged chronologically, each twenty years or more apart. There is no logic in family history. It cracks open and closes again, incorporeal but present, ever strong.

And now he is here to claim his birthright she thinks. Now he’s one of us and one of them. He holds in his hands two pieces of soft plastic, round and hollow in the middle. He presses the button with the sound of a teapot, the whistling railway, the pressure cooker. She inhales the smoke, looking outside the window at the calm, suburban street which has nothing in particular happening in it but always something trivially important; she exhales slowly and the smoke breaks the glass like a curving wave splashing against the rock; she turns around to look at him the way she would turn around to look if someone was calling her name. He doesn’t look back; he’s consumed in trying to glue something together again and again. She has to smile, this is the time to smile and look without needing to speak, before anything real happens, before he becomes something more like her. She still can’t believe it happened. This is something so big, so important she never thought she was capable of doing; it’s an achievement, a feat. Did her mother feel this? Is it like this for everyone?

She picks up a few pieces of orange peel from the floor, the remnants of breakfast, evidence of her fixation on health. It’s all she really wants for him; to be here completely without being hindered. She still can’t understand him. He stops and looks at her, questioningly. ‘What is it?’ she says. ‘Did you get bored?’ He moves the pieces around and shows them to her. ‘You want to eat?’ He mumbles something incomprehensible, something still incomplete enough it could mean anything. He points his finger at the gap between the two plastic buns. She thinks she understands. ‘Just imagine it, Andy. Imagine it. It’s not real’. He sits there motionless, still staring at her fixedly, almost without blinking. She stamps the cigarette out on the earthenware ashtray painted for her in mauve and silver lines. I really have to quit she thinks, but she doesn’t want to. It’s more than a habit, this inhaling and exhaling; it’s a continuous flux, an ebb and flow in her daily routine, something calming like the trickling sound of the fountain coming from the television. She likes it because it’s tacky and peaceful, like a Mediterranean sunset sinking in a motionless sea. It’s been years since she’s been away, years since she’s been to a different country where the words are swallow songs and the hills and mountains are bare and limestone green.

She remembers the last time she swam in translucent waters, the last time she felt light and inconsequential, spreading her arms and legs and lying on the surface watching the sky. She misses that part of her youth, the ritual holiday, the soft certainties of a house, a job, a dog; she misses the nights of coming home, getting out of work clothes, sitting in front of the television or reading a book until someone called and suggested a party or a trip into town. She even misses the family life, however disjointed and painful; however blank and expressionless; however weak. He gesticulates. He moves everything around repetitively, perhaps so he can understand it better, perhaps because it’s the only thing he can do. He is the best reason to stop herself from blinking, she thinks. He is purpose, meaning, change. He laughs and there is nothing else she needs.